A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

242 A history of Inner Asia
Alim Khan’s despotic rule, however, dashed these hopes, for it fiercely
resisted the Young Bukharans’ efforts, especially once the latter group
had become bolder after the February 1917 revolution in St.Petersburg.
The despot’s rejection of reform was brutally demonstrated in the
summer of that year, when he ordered his henchmen to round up a
number of reformists and had them flogged; Ayni received 75 strokes,
and may have survived only because Russian troops, quartered in the
nearby railroad station enclave of Kagan, intervened and brought the
victims to an infirmary there. 6 The intervention failed to save Ayni’s
younger brother, however, who perished in the subsequent repression.
One can imagine the powerful effect this traumatic experience must
have left on Ayni’s psyche to the very end of his life.
The October Revolution occurred on the heels of the repression in
Bukhara, and the Jadids, as we have already stated, hailed it as they
would have hailed any Russian power that gave promise to rid them of
the emir and allow them to strive for a modernization and self-determination
of Turkestan.Their activities were now centered at Tashkent and
Samarkand, until such time as they could move back to Bukhara once
the Russian troops ousted the Emir.That time came, we have seen, in
September 1920.Significantly, Ayni did not join them but stayed in
Samarkand.This had a more than just logistical significance.Unlike
Fitrat, Khojaev, and the other former Young Bukharans, he stopped
short of actively participating in the political drama that was unfolding
in Central Asia, but mostly stayed within the cultural parameter of the
revolution.Moreover, he took the Bolshevik side, and followed this line
to the end of his life.This ensured not only his survival but his growing
prominence as a pampered favorite of the official cultural establishment
both in Moscow and in Central Asia.
We might thus be tempted to write Sadriddin Ayni off as a collaborator,
albeit a pardonable one.His case, however, is too complex and interesting,
and his literary and scholarly contributions too valuable, to justify
such a dismissal.On the literary level, his poems, short stories, and
novels, written either in Farsi or Turki, became a powerful tool for giving
these idioms – henceforward officially called Tajik and Uzbek – a firm
literary base and thus a weapon against the danger of Russification
(besides possessing an undeniable intrinsic value); this was compounded
by the newly created periodical press where he often participated as a
6 See the illustration no.36 in Kniga zhizni Sadriddina Ayni; The Book of Life of Sadriddin Aini (Dushanbe,
1978) (a photograph showing his lacerated back).