[15]
1900–1950: CENTRAL AND EASTERN INNER EURASIA

BEYOND THE HEARTLAND

Understanding the history of the Soviet heartland is vital if we are to make sense of the histories of other parts of Inner Eurasia in the twentieth century, because the storms that blew so fiercely through the Inner Eurasian heartlands in the first half of the twentieth century also battered Central and Eastern Inner Eurasia. And that is because the Soviet Union ended up controlling all of Inner Eurasia, directly or indirectly. Siberia, the Kazakh steppes, and Transoxiana were all parts of the Russian Empire and then of the new Soviet Empire. But after the collapse of the Qing in 1911, Mongolia also drifted into the Soviet orbit, and Xinjiang, though legally independent and ruled by local warlords, came under increasing Soviet economic, military, and political influence until 1949, when those ties were abruptly severed after the arrival of the Chinese People's Army.

Most of these regions underwent bewildering and traumatic political, economic, and cultural changes, as the revolutionary storms in the heartlands of Inner Eurasia shook all parts of Inner Eurasia. But beyond the heartland, industrialization proper had limited impact before the second half of the twentieth century.

CENTRAL INNER EURASIA: KAZAKHSTAN AND TRANSOXIANA

1900–1917

Before World War I, Russia's grip on Kazakhstan and Central Asia seemed secure. There was some revolutionary activity in 1905, but mainly amongst Russian intellectuals and workers in the larger cities such as Tashkent.

In the years after the 1905 revolutions, Muslim intellectuals made several attempts to forge new ethnic, religious, and even national identities in Turkic-speaking parts of the empire. In August 1905, a “Union of the Muslims in Russia” was founded near Nizhnii Novgorod. Like many similar organizations, it would split into a liberal wing and a more radical and pro-socialist wing. Between 1905 and 1907 newspapers and journals in Turkic languages proliferated. More than 30 appeared in the Tatar language (published in Kazan, Orenburg, Astrakhan, Uralsk, Orenburg, Ufa, and St. Petersburg), 13 in Azeri, and two in Persian (both published in Baku), as well as three in Crimean Tatar, including Ismail Bey Gasprinskii's well-known Jadidist periodical, The Interpreter. A Jadidist periodical also appeared in Transoxiana.1 Volga Tatars played a disproportionate role in attempts to forge modern Muslim and Turkic identities, because they had been part of the empire since the sixteenth century and had long acted as economic, cultural, and political intermediaries between Russia and the empire's growing number of Muslims and Turkic speakers. Since the foundation of the University of Kazan’ in 1804, Kazan’ had become a major center for the study of Muslim culture.

In Transoxiana, partly through Gasprinskii's influence, several Muslim intellectuals took up the idea of a pan-Turkic identity for Muslims in the Russian Empire. Gasprinskii himself was a modernizer, sympathetic to the Kadets and familiar with Russian culture. His liberal nationalism was influenced by the Russian Slavophiles and Pan-Slavists, but also by the Turkish “Young Ottoman” movement. He tried to combine religious and linguistic identities into a supra-national identity for all Turkic speakers in the empire.² But such projects would be wrecked by government censorship and the linguistic, religious, and cultural divisions between different Turkic-speaking communities.

Gasprinskii made more headway with his proposals for the creation of “new method” (usul-i-jadid) or “Jadidist” Muslim schools that would use modern syllabic scripts to teach subjects such as history and science alongside the Qur'an. Several Jadidist newspapers appeared after 1905, as revolution encouraged hopes for Central Asian independence, but most would eventually be closed by Russian censors. In Tashkent, one of Gasprinskii's supporters founded Central Asia's first Jadidist school, with the goal of building a large network of schools offering a modern Islamic education. The first successful Jadidist school in semi-independent Bukhara was opened by Tatars in 1907, in the home of a local merchant.³ But Jadidist ideas alienated traditional Muslims who were committed to traditional forms of education in madrasas. For many conservatives, the very idea of “progress” was antithetical.⁴ Russian officials also feared that Jadidist schools would incubate dangerous new forms of Turkic nationalism. The political passivity of traditional Muslim schools during the 1905 revolution and the activism of many Jadidists confirmed these suspicions. By 1917, there were about 184 Jadidist schools in Central Asia and Semirechie.⁵

World War I had little immediate impact in Kazakhstan and Transoxiana, as the Russian government did not recruit from Muslim regions. In 1915, however, the government introduced a special tax to compensate for the region's freedom from military recruitment, and began to requisition animals at artificially low prices. Then, in June 1916, it ordered the recruitment of almost 400,000 Central Asians for non-combat duties. This measure ignited the revolt that many had expected since Russia first conquered Transoxiana in the 1860s.

Demonstrations began in Khodzhent and Samarkand and soon spread throughout Transoxiana. In the Ferghana valley, they took the form of a holy war against the Russian infidel. In Semirechie, thousands may have died in clashes between local Kyrgyz and recently arrived Russian migrants. By the end of August, Russian troops had re-established control, and many Kyrgyz had fled across the mountains to China.

Almost 3,000 Russians died in these clashes, mostly in Semirechie, and about 10,000 farms were destroyed.⁶ Turkic losses were far higher, most dying during the long Kyrgyz retreat into China.⁷ The Central Asian uprising was over by the end of 1916, but it had shown both the limits of Russian control and the difficulties of forming a broad Turkic opposition movement.

1917–1924: REVOLUTION AND CIVIL WAR

News of the Tsar's abdication in March 1917 provoked uprisings in major towns in Central Asia, mainly among the local Russian populations. Immediately after the revolution in Petrograd, a form of dual power appeared in Tashkent. A Committee was set up to support the Provisional Government, while workers in the Tashkent railroad repair shops formed a Soviet, and soldiers formed a Soviet of Soldiers. In Bukhara, local Jadidists appealed to the Provisional Government for help in modernizing Bukharan society, but in April the emir expelled the reformers after violent anti-reform demonstrations.

At first, the Provisional Government seemed sympathetic to demands for regional autonomy. It stopped mobilizing Central Asians for the war effort, and amnestied those involved in the 1916 uprising. In April, it created a Turkestan Committee that included some Central Asian and Kazakh leaders.8 Meanwhile, in March, the Tashkent Soviet arrested the last Governor-General of Turkestan, Kuropatkin. In May, an All-Russian Muslim Congress, sponsored mainly by Tatars and consisting mostly of Russian-educated Muslim intellectuals, met in Moscow and demanded regional autonomy for Central Asian nations. Jadidist groups formed a “Muslim Central Council of Turkestan,” while conservative Muslim groups organized a “Union of the Clergy.”

In the Kazakh steppes, a small Westernizing intelligentsia had emerged, inspired by the writings of Ch. Valikhanov in the late nineteenth century. In July 1917, Kazakh intellectuals formed the Alash Orda movement in Orenburg. In December, the Alash Orda party announced the formation of an autonomous Kazakh region. However, in the Kazakh steppes, there was by now a significant population of Russian and Cossack migrants, and Kazakhs were already in a minority in some regions. During the Civil War, anti-Bolshevik Cossacks from Orenburg and Semirechie would seize control of much of Kazakhstan.

In Transoxiana, there were fewer Russian settlers, probably no more than 400,000.⁹ Yet deep divisions between progressive Jadidists and religious conservatives prevented the creation of a unified Muslim movement for regional autonomy. In May 1917, nationalist Muslims demanded national autonomy, the adoption of sharia law, and the replacement of cotton crops with grains.¹⁰ A central Muslim council was elected, dominated by Jadidists, but it had little impact on a still largely illiterate population.

After the October Revolution and during the Civil War, the region's many ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and religious differences generated cross-cutting conflicts of extraordinary complexity.

In Kazakhstan, soon after the October Revolution pro-Bolshevik forces occupied major cities including Orenburg, Semipalatinsk, and Verny (Alma-Aty). But they were soon expelled by local Cossacks. The seizure of power in Orenburg under a Cossack leader, Dutov, cut Russian links to Central Asia through the Orenburg railway until late 1919, and the trans-Caspian railway links through Ashkhabad were severed in mid-1918 by the creation of a Turkmen Socialist Revolutionary Republic supported by Britain, which survived until early 1920.¹¹ The severing of economic links with Russia demonstrated the increasing economic vulnerability of Central Asia, as a result of increasing cotton production and declining production of basic foodstuffs, and threatened major towns such as Tashkent with famine.

In January 1918, leaders of the Kazakh Alash Orda movement formed an anti-Bolshevik government under the leadership of Ali Khan Bukeikhanov, and in alliance with Cossacks from Orenburg. Now based at Semipalatinsk (Semei), Alash Orda claimed to rule much of Kazakhstan, but in reality, small local forces battled for control region by region. By the middle of 1918, the Alash Orda government faced both Red and White armies, but its brief period of rule is remembered today as the first period of Kazakh independence in the modern era.¹² At the end of 1919, Bolshevik forces under Mikhail Frunze (who grew up in Central Asia) defeated forces under the Orenburg Cossack leader Dutov, and Dutov's forces began a long retreat through northern Kazakhstan to Semirechie and Xinjiang.¹³ Red army units took control of most of Kazakhstan, and early in 1920, the Alash Orda recognized the Bolshevik government. In August 1920 a Kyrgyz (Kazakh) Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was created.

In Transoxiana, the Tashkent Soviet seized power in November 1917. It was dominated by Russians and anti-Bolshevik socialists, and offered merely token representation to the Muslim population. Early in December members of the Turkestan Muslim Central Council, meeting in Kokand, proclaimed the creation of an autonomous Turkestan. But in February 1918, troops from the Tashkent Soviet captured Kokand and massacred several thousand of its inhabitants. Islamic opposition movements went underground, forming the beginnings of the Basmachi (“bandits”) movement, which, in various forms, would resist Bolshevik power until 1923, and would flare up again in the 1920s and the 1930s.¹⁴ The Basmachi soon formed an Islamic army with many local cells, similar to those that had resisted Russian conquest in the Caucasus. But it lacked unity, being made up of a diverse coalition of anti-Bolshevik forces, Turkic nationalists, and local warlords. Soviet attacks on Russian settlers in Ferghana prompted the formation of a local Russian peasant army which briefly allied with the Basmachi to create another short-lived Ferghana government in 1919.¹⁵

In Bukhara and Khiva there were few Russian settlers, apart from the Russian garrison in Khiva. When this left in January 1918, local Turkmen, led by Junayd Khan, deposed the Khivan Khan, Isfendiar. In Bukhara, an organization of radicalized Jadidists known as “Young Bukhara” sought the help of Soviet forces from Tashkent to overthrow the emir. In February 1918, troops from Tashkent took Bukhara and looted it as they had looted Kokand. But in Bukhara their actions provoked a successful uprising; they were expelled from the city, and many Russians and Jadidists were killed. The emir of Bukhara attacked the young Bukharan movement, destroyed railway lines to block a Russian invasion, and tried to secure arms and other military supplies from Persia and Afghanistan. Bukhara became effectively independent until it was reconquered by Soviet forces in September 1920 and the emir, Alim Khan, was forced to flee.¹⁶ In what is now Turkmenistan, a group of educated Turkmen held a Turkmen Congress in Ashkhabad in late 1917. In February 1918, they started to form a Turkmen army and created a Provisional Government of Transcaspia that would briefly seek British military assistance.

In late 1919, these many conflicts would be resolved by the arrival of Red Army troops under Mikhail Frunze. In principle, the Bolsheviks were committed to some degree of Central Asian autonomy. As early as 1918, the Party announced the formation of a Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in Central Asia, in a move that gained them support from some local nationalists and modernizers, such as the Tatar Sultan Galiev, who worked with the Bolshevik Commissariat of Nationalities. Galiev was a Tatar nationalist but had given important support to the Bolsheviks during the Civil War, both in defending Kazan’ against White forces and in bringing Bashkir nationalists over to the Bolsheviks. Though close to Stalin, the Soviet Commissar for Nationalities, Galiev would be arrested in 1923, when it became clear that he hoped to create a genuinely independent Muslim Communist Party ruling an independent Muslim Turkestan. In October 1919, Lenin created a Turkestan Commission or Turkkommissia to manage Central Asia. Aware of Russia's traditional insensitivity towards the local population, the Turkkommissia was ordered to include more Muslim representatives. This was a foretaste of the policy of “nativization” or korenizatsiya, which would shape many aspects of Soviet policy in the 1920s.

Frunze's army established order in most of Central Asia. By February 1920, the Basmachi movement seemed to have been crushed, and some Basmachi units were incorporated into the Red Army. British troops were forced out of Turkmenistan in July 1919, and by February 1920 it was in the hands of the Red Army. In January 1920, Soviet forces took Khiva and established a Khorezmian People's Soviet Republic dominated, formally, by members of the Young Khivan group. A year later, the nationalist “Young Khivans” were replaced by a more compliant Jadidist government. In Bukhara, after the expulsion of the emir in September 1920, a People's Republic of Bukhara was formed, under a Young Bukharan movement dominated by Jadidists. Its leader, Faizullah Khojaev, would eventually become the leader of an independent Uzbekistan.

Opposition to Soviet rule flared up in a revived Basmachi movement. A new leader, Kurbashi Shir Muhammad, appeared in 1920 and by September 1920 his forces controlled most rural areas of Ferghana, before he was defeated by Soviet troops in September 1921. In early 1922, the Basmachi insurgency revived once more after the arrival of the former Turkish Minister of War, Enver Pasha, a former “Young Turk” and Ottoman army officer, who hoped to build a Turkic nation reaching from Anatolia into Southern Russia and Central Asia. Sent by the Bolsheviks to help crush the Basmachi revolt, he switched sides, and rallied Basmachi forces in Tajikistan and Ferghana. But after several victories against the Red Army, he was defeated and killed in August 1922. The Bashkir nationalist intellectual Zeki Validov Togan, a former student of the historian Bartol'd, who had been a member of the Jadidist Young Bukharan government, also joined the Basmachi. But they had no major successes after Enver Pasha's death, though smaller units survived in Khorezmia, Ferghana, and within the Bukhara Republic. The failures of the Basmachi movement reflected its generally conservative outlook, and its many political and ethnic divisions. Like the White armies during the Civil War, the Basmachi movement was united primarily by opposition to the Bolsheviks.

1924–1930: THE ESTABLISHMENT OF SOVIET CENTRAL ASIA

By 1924, the Soviet government had re-established the heartland's control over Kazakhstan and Transoxiana. It reorganized the entire region in what is often known as the “national delimitation” (natsionalno-gosudarstvennoe razmezhevanie). This was based on the nationalist assumption that territorial states should coincide roughly with ethnicity, using Stalin's definition of a nation as “a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life and psychological make-up, manifested in a common culture.”17 Though the government mobilized scholars to determine the region's ethnic make-up, the result was bound to be arbitrary. In 1926 there were almost 200 possible ethnic names in use in Central Asia, and that number had to be whittled down to less than 10.¹⁸

By designating particular ethnic groups as the dominant peoples in new territorial states and “Autonomous Regions,” the Soviet government unwittingly planted the seeds of modern nationalisms. The Uzbek and Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republics or SSRs were formed in 1924. The Uzbek SSR was formed from the remnants of the republics of Bukhara and Khiva and the former Turkestan republic. In 1929, the Tajik SSR was created out of regions that had previously been part of the Uzbek SSR. In 1936, the Kazakh SSR was created from what had been known since 1925 as the Kyrgyz (Kazakh) Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. The densely populated, ethnically diverse, and culturally conservative Ferghana region was split up between Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan, creating one of the most artificial and contentious borders in the region.

Though the national delimitation was based, in theory, on careful ethnographic and linguistic studies by Soviet scholars, as well as negotiations with local populations, the new borders were inevitably artificial in a region with multiple, overlapping ethnic identities, powerful clan and tribal structures, and no experience of modern territorial states. As the great Russian scholar Bartol'd once wrote,

When you ask a Turkistani what is his identity, he will answer that he is, first of all, a “Muslim,” then an inhabitant of such or such city or village …, or if he is a nomad, member of such or such tribe.¹⁹

However, over the next 60 years, new forms of loyalty and new political networks would congeal around the new national republics, giving them many of the political, economic, and cultural attributes of modern nation-states. The process began soon after the establishment of new borders, as members of the new titular nationalities embraced the new nations enthusiastically, and began, on occasions, to discriminate against minorities stranded on the wrong side of the new borders. In Central Asia, as in many former colonies in other parts of the world, modern nation-states were products rather than survivors of imperialism.²⁰

The real goals of Soviet nationalities policy in the region remain unclear, and they were probably unclear even to Soviet leaders. Were the new states intended to prevent the emergence of a broader Turkestani nationalism? Were they designed to enhance Soviet control by deliberately generating ethnic rivalries that would cast Moscow in the role of mediator rather than imperial overlord? Was it perhaps no accident that the new borders left many ethnic groups on the wrong side, such as the largely Tajik population of Uzbekistan's first capital, Samarkand?

In the 1920s, under the policy of korenizatsiya (“enrooting” or “nativization”), the Soviet government and Communist Party recruited increasing numbers of the Muslim population until, by 1930, members of the local nationality made up a majority of those in the upper administration.²¹ Like Soviet nationalities policy in general, the policy of korenizatsiya was based on the assumption that nationalism could be used to generate support for socialism among non-Russian populations. Most non-Russian Party members in Central Asia came from the region's tiny educated class, and many were Jadidists, deeply committed to the idea of a modernized Islam and willing to work towards that goal with a modernizing Soviet government. At first, korenizatsiya seemed tolerant of Muslim practices. Waqf endowment lands were returned to mosques and Muslim schools were reopened.

After 1924, however, modernization began to trump korenizatsiya. Polygamy was banned, and many traditional courts and schools were closed. The government began to support the “emancipation” of Muslim women, in the conviction, as one Soviet writer put it in 1927, that no group on earth was “more ignorant, more downtrodden and enslaved” than the women of Transoxiana.²² However, mass unveilings in 1926 and 1927 shocked the sensibilities of Muslims from all classes and undermined some of the positive responses to korenizatsiya. After 1927, the Soviet government began to persecute Islam along with other organized religious traditions, including Christianity. It confiscated the property of madrasas and mosques, closed religious institutions, limited pilgrimages, and persecuted the Muslim ulama. Between 1921 and 1941, the total number of mosques in the Soviet Union fell from 26,000 to just 1,000.²³

In the long run, these anti-Muslim campaigns may have helped generate a stronger sense of cultural identity in Central Asia by heightening the sense of cultural differences. Soviet cultural policies that conflicted with Muslim tradition also undermined the project of korenizatsiya, as many leading communists from local nationalities opposed them. Such conflicts showed that, however carefully managed from the center, local nationalism could undermine, as well as support, the project of building socialism beyond the Soviet Union's Russian heartland.

Soviet economic policy was dominated even in the 1920s by the economic needs of the heartland. And in Central Asia this meant reviving cotton production to supply the textile factories of the heartland. During the Civil War, irrigation systems had broken down and commercial ties had snapped, so peasants began once again to plant food crops in place of cotton. Returning to cotton meant displacing food crops, but already, by 1927, the area under cotton was larger than in 1914, and the area under grains was smaller.²⁴

1930–1950

After 1929, Soviet policy in Kazakhstan and Transoxiana was dominated by the politics of the center and the mobilizational demands of the Soviet industrialization drive. Policy was controlled through the Party, and Russian became the main language of government and administration throughout Central Asia. Arabic script was replaced, officially, by a Latin script, and then, in 1940, by a Cyrillic script, which isolated Central Asian intellectuals from Muslim societies outside the Soviet Union. While the government was committed to the new titular nationalities created in the 1920s, it largely abandoned the policy of korenizatsiya. Purges of many of the national communists who had been so prominent in the 1920s began in 1928. In the 1930s, historiography began to stress the leading role of Russian people, and the distinctive national historiographies that had begun to emerge in the 1920s were abandoned. Such policies gave the Soviet central government a firmer political grip on Central Asia. But they did not bring cultural homogeneity; nor did they bring industrialization, as Soviet planners treated most regions away from the heartland primarily as sources of raw materials, land, and labor.

Soviet planners saw the Kazakh steppes, like the Pontic steppes, as a potential source of both agricultural produce and minerals. Collectivization was almost as devastating for Kazakh farmers as for nomads. Both peasants and herders slaughtered their livestock to avoid their expropriation or simply because they couldn't feed them once fodder grains had been confiscated. Many pastoralists fled to Xinjiang, and huge numbers died in collectivization famines as murderous as those in Ukraine and Russia. The Kazakh livestock population declined by up to 80 percent (livestock numbers would take 30 years to recover), and the human population by almost 40 percent, from 3.6 million in 1926 to 2.2 million in 1939.25 Many Kazakhs fled to Xinjiang, where OGPU (secret police) troops sent to support the Xinjiang warlord Sheng Shicai caught up with them in 1934, forcing many to trek further east, to the Kansu–Qinhai border with China.²⁶ They were replaced by new arrivals, many settled forcibly as a result of dekulakization and the relocation of peoples in the 1930s. The Akmolinsk (Astana) region, for example, was settled by large numbers of exiled Volga Germans and Chechens, many of them in special agricultural labor camps. By the late 1940s, a third of Kazakhstan's inhabitants were exiles (“special settlers”) or former kulaks.²⁷ Few Kazakhs now lived a traditional nomadic life.

In Transoxiana, too, the livestock population fell sharply, from 23 million to 9 million between 1929 and 1933.²⁸ The pressure to produce increasing amounts of cotton (Soviet planners described cotton as “white gold”) warped the region's economy even more than in the Tsarist period. Massive irrigation projects were launched, the largest of which were the “Great Ferghana canal,” built in 1939/40, and the Karakum canal, which was started in the 1950s and took two decades to complete. Most used forced labor, and all were designed to support cotton production. Central Asian economies became more dependent on cotton production than any societies since the collapse of the US Confederate States. In the 1930s, even most industrial development in the region was linked to cotton, with the building of textile mills and fertilizer factories. But industrialization in general was limited; in 1940, heavy industry accounted for no more than 13 percent of regional manufacturing output.²⁹

In the 1930s, the Basmachi movement revived in the Ferghana valley and Turkmenistan.³⁰ But never was Soviet control of the region seriously threatened. As Party discipline tightened throughout the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, the government lost interest in korenizatsiya. Russians played an increasing role within the Party, and many educated Central Asians who had worked with the Party, particularly those with Jadidist sympathies, were removed as nationalists during the purges of 1937–1938. They included Faizullah Khojaev, who had been the nominal leader of Soviet Uzbekistan since 1924.

Whether Central Asian or Slavic in origin, politicians in Central Asia survived through loyalty to the emerging Soviet-wide leadership group or nomenklatura, organized through the Communist Party. However, even in the 1930s, Party members of Central Asian origin continued to rely on traditional clan networks, which often survived within Soviet institutions such as collective farms.³¹ Clan networks survived particularly well in rural areas, because villages and collective farms often preserved traditional communal identities. As a Soviet ethnographer reported in the 1930s, “all kolkhoz members know their clan origins … even young children, when stating their name, add the name of their clan.”³²

World War II had a profound impact on Central Asia. Unlike the Tsarist government, the Soviet government recruited many Central Asian soldiers. It also dispatched almost 2 million wartime refugees to the region from other parts of the Soviet Union. As in the heartlands, the government made temporary wartime concessions to the population. More Muslims were recruited into leading positions, though they were often shadowed by Slavic subordinates, and discrimination against Islam was relaxed.

By forcing the Soviet government to move industries away from its western borderlands, the war accelerated industrialization in Kazakhstan and Transoxiana. Several hundred Soviet industrial enterprises were moved to Kazakhstan and Central Asia in 1941 and 1942.³³ As Nazi armies conquered the far west, the government began to invest in Central Asian hydroelectric power, light industry, coal mining, and metals industries. Most investment went to the region's most populous republic, Uzbekistan, where there was a massive increase in coal mining. But most textiles continued to be manufactured outside Central Asia, even if they used Central Asian cotton and sold their produce back to Central Asian consumers.

SIBERIA, 1900–1950

Siberia's history, too, was shaped largely by the center, though here, resistance to central control was weaker, because indigenous populations were small, divided, and weak. Contiguity, resource wealth, and political weakness all ensured a colonial relationship to the heartland.34 The nineteenth-century Siberian scholar Nikolai Yadrintsev captured the relationship in the title of his best known book, “Siberia as a Colony.” If Siberia and Russia had been separated by seas, like Britain and its colonial “neo-Europes” in North America and Australasia, Siberia might have emerged as an independent nation-state. But geography and the umbilical cord of the Trans-Siberian railroad tied Siberia too closely to the Russian heartland. The railway made it easier for the heartland to trade with Siberia, exploit its resources, transport exiles, administer, police, and control its vast territories, and defend it against Chinese or Japanese encroachment.

Migration to Siberia had accelerated before the revolution, with the building of the Trans-Siberian railway and the Stolypin land reforms. Many in the Tsarist government saw migration to Siberia or Central Asia as a partial solution to rising discontent in the overcrowded heartlands. Between 1906 and 1908, 600,000 people a year migrated to Siberia, Siberia's population rose from 6 million in 1893 to more than 10 million in 1913, the town population doubled, and so did the area of farmland. Most recent immigrants settled in western Siberia and stayed within reach of the railway line. Immigration and closer contacts with the heartland encouraged cultural and economic development. Siberia's first university was founded in Tomsk in 1888, and Siberian intellectuals such as Nikolai Yadrintsev began to cultivate a distinctive Siberian identity. Siberia's economy developed rapidly. By 1917, it was exporting 30 percent of its grain crop, as well as large amounts of coal and dairy products; by 1914, Siberian butter, transported in refrigerated trains, was exported all over the world.³⁵

Industry and manufacturing developed more slowly. The largest enterprises were the region's many gold mines and the Trans-Siberian railroad. But a small industrial proletariat began to emerge in mining regions and the larger towns, and it would play an important role in the revolutionary era. In 1905, there were strikes in cities along the railway line, often uniting workers and soldiers. Late in the year, troop mutinies along the Trans-Siberian line delayed the return of troops to a heartland collapsing into revolution. In 1912, the shooting of striking workers in the Lena gold fields triggered strikes throughout the empire.

World War I affected Siberia mainly through the recruitment of men and horses. Farms lost laborers, many of whom would be replaced by prisoners of war. By May 1915, there were more than 22,000 prisoners of war just in Tomsk province.³⁶ After the February revolution, Soviets appeared in most Siberian towns. Most Siberian Soviets were happy to work with the Provisional Government, there was widespread support for the Socialist Revolutionaries, and very little for the Bolsheviks. Siberian nationalists created an All-Siberian Regional Duma in Tomsk in May, and indigenous groups in Yakutia, Bashkiria, Buriatia, and elsewhere created local movements demanding autonomy. But class and ethnic differences and geographical dispersion ensured there would be no unified Siberian response to the revolutionary crisis, either among the indigenous population or among its Slavic and exile populations.

There was little sympathy for the October Revolution in Siberia. However, the Trans-Siberian railway ensured that Siberia would be drawn into the terrifying vortex of the Civil War. As we have seen, the first serious attacks on the Bolsheviks in 1918 were launched by the Czech Legion, whose units had taken over much of the Trans-Siberian railroad in May. Czech successes encouraged anti-Bolsheviks in Tomsk to form a Provisional Government of Autonomous Siberia in June 1918. Another anti-Bolshevik government formed in Samara on the Volga from former members of the Constituent Assembly, after Czech units had taken over the city. But, unlike the Tomsk government, the Samara “Committee of the Constituent Assembly” or “Komuch” was determined to hold Siberia within a revived Russian Empire. Emboldened by the successes of the Czech Legion, almost 20 other anti-Bolshevik governments would emerge in different parts of Siberia. Most were based on the railways, and several, such as that of Ataman G. M. Semenov in Transbaikalia, were led by Siberian Cossacks. Some of these warlord regimes were so brutal and created such chaos that they helped reconcile many Siberians to Soviet rule.

In 1918, Japanese forces landed in Vladivostok and invaded eastern Siberia. They were supported by smaller American forces hoping to contain Japanese ambitions in the region. In September, in Ufa, a gathering of oppositional forces announced the formation of a united anti-Bolshevik government, the Directorate, which soon moved to Omsk. On November 18, Admiral Kolchak, the Directorate's Minister of War, seized power. He was soon accepted as the leader of all anti-Bolshevik forces, whether based in South Russia, the Far North, the Baltic, or Siberia. Within a month, Siberian forces had captured Perm from the Bolsheviks, and began an advance on the Russian heartland. By June 1919, the advance had ground to a halt. A young Red commander, Mikhail Frunze, recaptured Ufa, and the White Siberian armies began to retreat. Uprisings broke out against Kolchak's government in much of Siberia. Bolshevik forces occupied Omsk in November 1919, as Kolchak and many of his troops headed east on the Trans-Siberian railroad. In Irkutsk, Kolchak was turned over to the Cheka by local Czech troops, who shot him in February 1920. It would take longer to defeat regional Cossack forces and persuade the Japanese and other Allied forces to withdraw from the Far East. Not until 1922 did the Bolsheviks take over Vladivostok.

In a region as vast as Siberia, there were really several distinct civil wars. There were even attempts to mobilize troops from the north. Ataman Semenov tried to mobilize all the Tungus, while a White commander, Bochkarev, mobilized dog-sled drivers on the Okhotsk coast.³⁷ In Yakutia, a region almost as large as European Russia, with a population of just one quarter of a million, there existed some basis for a genuine nationalist movement, seeded by the presence of political exiles. The Yakut outnumbered Russian settlers and many were well educated. News of the February revolution reached the 8,000 inhabitants of Yakutsk by telegraph, and a local “Committee of Public Safety” was formed, dominated by exiled socialists and Yakut nationalists. By October, the Committee was moderate and nationalist in its outlook, and had joined with a nationalist body, the Sakha aimakh (“Yakut Kindred”). The Committee rejected the Bolshevik coup and declared Yakutia independent after the Bolsheviks disbanded the Constituent Assembly. In July 1918, the Yakutsk government was overthrown by pro-Bolshevik troops from Irkutsk, who created a Soviet government that was itself overthrown 10 days later, when Irkutsk fell to the Czech Legion. In December 1919, a pro-Bolshevik uprising in Yakutsk set up a Soviet executive committee that sentenced several anti-Bolshevik leaders to death by firing squad.³⁸

In many regions, civil war led to social and economic collapse. In Omsk, the capital of the anti-Bolshevik government, inflation undermined the Kolchak ruble, making basic necessities, including clothing and fuel, unaffordable for most people, while a flood of refugees almost doubled the city's population from 300,000 to more than half a million. Many died of exposure and starvation.³⁹ The chaos of the Civil War years made peace of any kind welcome, particularly to the populations of Siberia's towns.

In the 1920s, the gap between Soviet dreams and realities was particularly wide in Siberia. It was widest of all amongst the region's indigenous populations, many of whom still lived by herding or traditional forms of foraging. The Soviet Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia, issued in November 1917, formally abolished the iasak or tribute system. However, the Civil War interrupted supplies of goods such as gunpowder and grain on which many native peoples were now dependent. By the end of the war, many indigenous Siberians were deeply impoverished, trapped painfully between a vanishing traditional past and a modern future that had not yet arrived.⁴⁰

In accordance with Soviet ideals of korenizatsiya, early Soviet legislation attempted to protect the rights and traditions of indigenous Siberian populations. In 1920, the Soviet government cancelled the debts of indigenous communities, and banned the sale of alcohol. Reforms in the early 1920s, inspired partly by the ideas of socialists who had lived in northern Siberia, allowed a revival of customary law. However, the ideals of korenizatsiya fitted uneasily with the Soviet commitment to modernization, and in 1926 the government banned customs such as clan vengeance and the payment of blood-money or bride-price, which it now described as “relics of the tribal way of life.”⁴¹

The government tried, with limited success, to create modern social and political structures in Siberia and to introduce modern forms of medicine and education. It attempted to establish Soviets, even in the Far North, where such institutions had little meaning. In the tundra, chiefs still had great authority, so that when a Nenets clan was made to elect a Soviet, its people immediately held a second, unofficial meeting which elected a prince.⁴² The government created several Siberian “Autonomous Regions,” but their borders made little sense locally, as they cut across traditional ethnic and linguistic borders and migration routes. In 1923, the government established the first schools for the indigenous population. In 1924, a Committee for the Assistance to the Peoples of the Northern Borderlands (or “Committee of the North”) was formed with the help of local socialist intellectuals such as V. G. Bogoraz, who hoped to preserve traditional ways of life while encouraging selective modernizing reforms. In 1925, 19 students from northern peoples were sent to study at Leningrad University, where a new “Institute of Peoples of the North” was established to study the languages and cultures of northern peoples.⁴³ But by the 1930s, any hopes of balancing past traditions with the demands of modernization would be swept away by the aggressive modernizing agendas of Stalinism.

The Stalinist industrialization drive transformed the lives of all Siberians, sometimes in grotesque ways. Party leaders simply saw a historically created “contradiction” in the Far North, where they were determined to develop the region's “productive forces.” As one old Bolshevik (and ethnographer) put it: “Raising the tribes of almost Neolithic reindeer breeders and hunters to the level of world civilization – what a difficult and yet fascinating task it was!”⁴⁴ Collectivization and dekulakization forced government officials to seek out “exploiters” and “kulaks” among the indigenous peoples of the north, and their solutions became increasingly surrealistic.

[N]ew types of kulaks were discovered among fishermen, sea hunters, and small taiga herders. Grooms working for their brides, widows living with relatives, and poorer kinsmen provided with temporary reindeer herds became “hired labor,” and many heads of households became exploiters for being heads of households.⁴⁵

Compulsory education was resisted particularly fiercely, partly because children were needed to do work, and partly because the parents knew that education would alienate children from their families.⁴⁶ In the late 1930s the Committee of the North was eventually disbanded, and the ethnographic research into the cultures of the north which had underpinned much of its work was largely abandoned.

The government's determination to mobilize Siberia's rich resources at any cost ensured that in Siberia the logic of planning would diverge further from market realism than in any other part of the Soviet Union. Entire cities were built in regions that no capitalist investors would have seriously considered, and labor was expended with no regard for its economic or human cost during massive and costly attempts to develop the Far North.

Russia's forced development of its vast storehouse of energy, minerals, and raw materials in Asia meant that everyone was in the wrong place and doing the wrong things. Siberia's monocities [cities with one major employer] were in remote, hostile environments – an archipelago in the wilderness.⁴⁷

In the 1920s, Siberian peasants had generally prospered. Grain production rose faster, and Siberian peasants bought more agricultural machinery than in most of the Soviet Union.⁴⁸ But their prosperity made Siberian peasants easy targets once the government turned against the kulaks. It is no accident that in January 1928 Stalin traveled to Siberia to prove his claim that the peasantry were hoarding the resources needed to build socialism. As Stalin understood, increased grain production was forcing down the market price of grain, and discouraging the marketing of grain surpluses that the government needed to feed its towns and fund industrialization.

As the government began to squeeze wealthy peasants, 300,000 Siberian households were expropriated as kulaks in 1930–1932. Several hundred thousand peasants were deported to Siberia from European Russia, mostly to remote regions, where many were simply dumped and told to get on with it.⁴⁹ In the chaos of collectivization, attempts were made to collectivize fishing communities in Kamchatka and reindeer herders, such as the Ewenki Tungus, who lacked even a tribal level of organization. On the Lower Tunguska river, local groups of herders were assembled in a single “commune” and forced to pool their reindeer, traps, guns, and even domestic and household goods. Many fled. In 1937, 30 percent of the Yakut were still uncollectivized, and less than half of the reindeer herds in the Far North.⁵⁰ But the attempts at collectivization had ruined both herders and foragers, cutting the size of reindeer herds and leaving much good pasture and hunting land unused.

In the 1930s, GULAG became the main driver of economic mobilization in Siberia.⁵¹ The first Soviet labor camps were set up in the early 1920s, with the idea that criminals could be rehabilitated by doing socially useful labor. But they would end up as a way of mobilizing labor for tasks no free workers would undertake. In 1929, the government adopted a formal resolution “On the Utilization of the Labor of Criminal Prisoners,” which envisaged using forced labor to exploit remote regions. Most of the camps would be created in Siberia, and the largest of all the camp systems was Dalstroi, the Far North Construction Trust, based on Magadan on the Kolyma river in the Far East. From here, Dalstroi managed up to 130 camps extending over 3 million sq. kilometers, engaged mainly in gold mining, which generated much of the foreign currency used to buy foreign equipment.⁵² Labor camps transformed Siberia's human geography by settling more of its population in the Far North and north-east, away from the old population centers in western Siberia and along the Trans-Siberian railway.

During the 1930s, there was considerable investment in Siberian mining and industry even outside the camp system. In the 1930s new coal fields were discovered near Vorkuta in the Komi Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR), and near Karaganda in Kazakhstan, while the coal of the Kuzbass (Kuznetsk basin) began to be exploited more intensively. A vast chemical plant was established at Kemerovo in the Kuzbass, and a train-building plant at Nizhnii Tagil where the Demidovs had once manufactured iron. New railways were built even into the Arctic regions, mainly to transport timber and the products of mines, and the industrial metals mined from Norilsk; much of this work was done by slave labor.⁵³ Norilsk, founded in 1935 mainly to mine nickel, was the world's northernmost large city. Temperatures fell to -50°C in winter, and Arctic darkness persisted for almost half the year. Building houses on the permafrost was difficult and expensive; today apartment buildings are sinking as the permafrost melts beneath them.

Industry arrived in Siberia on a larger scale as a result of war. Japan's momentous decision not to declare war on the USSR despite intense German pressure to do so meant that Siberia did not become a front line, but could act, instead, as a reserve of troops, resources, and equipment. It became a crucial driver of the Soviet war effort after the relocation of factories eastwards in response to the Nazi invasion. Chemical plants from Ukraine were relocated to the Kuzbass, Omsk, and Tiumen’; Kharkov's vast tractor factories were producing tanks in the Altai region by early 1942.⁵⁴ New factories were also built, including blast furnaces in Magnitogorsk and new metal works at Cheliabinsk. A special body headed by the President of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and staffed with scientists and engineers was created to mobilize the resources of the Urals, western Siberia, and Kazakhstan for the war effort. With the loss of Ukraine, western Siberia also became a crucial supplier of food for the heartland. By the end of the war, regions east of the Urals produced more than half of all Soviet coal.

The Siberia of 1950 was very different from the Siberia of 1900. Its population had grown from 10 million in 1913 to 12.6 million in 1926 then to 22.4 million by 1959.⁵⁵ It had many more cities and, instead of just settling along the trakt and the Trans-Siberian railroad, many more people lived (not always by choice) in the Far North. Siberia also had many manufacturing and mining centers that were contributing significantly to the Soviet Union's fossil fuels economy.

THE FORMER CHINESE ZONE: MONGOLIA AND XINJIANG (WESTERN CENTRAL ASIA)

In 1900, Mongolia and Xinjiang both fell within the Chinese sphere of influence, but the Qing collapse in 1911 was followed by an increase in Russian and then Soviet influence.

MONGOLIA: 1900–1930

Though there was a Russian presence in Mongolia by 1900, Russian influence was limited before the 1920s by Tsarist decline, revolution, and civil war. After declaring independence in 1911, Mongolia found itself caught uneasily between two potential imperial powers, both of which were going through major crises.

At first, independence increased the power of traditional elites, both nobles and high lamas.56 According to rough estimates based on the 1918 census, there were 91 princely families or “noyon,” including 410 individuals (c.0.1 percent of the male population), while the lesser nobility accounted for 5.6 percent of society, serfs for 16.6 percent, and arats (strictly, the “albat,” or those liable for corvée service) for 26.2 percent. Lamas made up an astonishing 44.5 percent of the male population, though in reality only 15 percent lived in monasteries; the rest lived most of the time as ordinary householders.⁵⁷

Mongolian commoners – the “black” population, as opposed to the “white” population of taijis or nobles and the “yellow” population of monks – gained little from independence. Many remained in debt to Chinese creditors, whose rights were protected by the Mongolian ruling class, which used them as bankers. Meanwhile, taxes rose to pay for Mongolia's new army. The government was archaic. Cabinet meetings frequently degenerated into drunken brawls, and the Jebtsundamba Khutugtu himself was often drunk by noon.⁵⁸ Such behavior clashed with the modernizing goals of a small but increasingly influential class of intellectuals and army officers.

As Russia disintegrated after 1917, Mongolia briefly fell back into the orbit of Republican China, and in 1919, a Chinese warlord army ended Mongolian independence. Some nobles and religious leaders were not unhappy with the return of a colonialism that protected the traditional social and cultural order. By late 1919, Chinese troops controlled Khuriye, and Mongolian officials had to kowtow to the Chinese general, Hsü Shu-tseng. The Khutugtu publicly accepted subordination to the Republic of China on January 1, 1920, and the new Mongolian army was disbanded.

The reimposition of Chinese control and the Civil War in Russia prompted the formation of Mongolia's first revolutionary movement. Most of its members were commoners who, though loyal to Buddhism, resented traditional elite privileges. Whereas in the past Mongolia had looked to Tibet in religion, and to China in politics and commerce, Mongolia's small modernizing elite, like Central Asia's Jadidists, looked increasingly to Soviet Russia for protection and help in building a modern society. For its part, the young Soviet government was keen to see a pro-Soviet government in Mongolia that might provide a buffer against Japanese or Chinese expansion in eastern Siberia. But it was reluctant to alienate the new government in China.

The first revolutionary groups formed in Khuriye in 1919 (see Figure 15.1). They represented diverse ideologies and traditions, including some supporters of Bolshevism. Most were committed to national independence as well as to social and economic reform, though communist historiography has obscured the fact by exaggerating the role of future communists such as Sukhebaatur and his former deputy, Choibalsan. On June 15, 1920, at a secret meeting in Khuriye, two revolutionary groups merged to form the Mongolian People's Party, whose later incarnations would rule Mongolia for most of the twentieth century.

Figure 15.1 Photo of Sharav's painting of Ulaanbaatar (Urga/Khuriye) early in the twentieth century. Courtesy of Daniel C. Waugh.

At first the Party's aims and ideology were as confused as the coalition from which it emerged. The first clause of the new Party's manifesto read:

The aims of the People's Party of Outer Mongolia are to purge cruel enemies who are hostile to the Faith and the nation, to restore lost authority, loyally to protect and encourage state and church to protect our nationality, loyally to reform the internal administration, to plan fully for the well-being of the poor people, constantly to guard our own internal authority and to let people live free from suffering, neither oppressing nor being oppressed.⁵⁹

The Khutugtu gave his blessing to Party negotiations for Soviet aid with Comintern (“Communist International”) agents in Irkutsk. Though Party members were divided between nationalists and socialists, they drew up plans for a modernizing constitutional monarchy under the Khutugtu. Some members of the delegation traveled on to Moscow, where they met Lenin.

Meanwhile, the Russian Civil War had spilled over into Mongolia. Just half a year after they had arrived in Mongolia, Chinese forces were attacked by the White Russian adventurer and Buddhist Baron Ungern-Sternberg, a former lieutenant of the Siberian Cossack leader Ataman Semenov. Ungern-Sternberg's army of 900 men entered Mongolia in October 1920. Many Mongols, particularly from the nobility, joined Ungern-Sternberg's army, and the Khutugtu gave his blessing to the invasion, in the hope that it might remove the Chinese. In February 1921, Ungern-Sternberg's troops occupied Khuriye and the Khutugtu was enthroned once more as Mongolia's Holy Emperor. But the Russian adventurer's reign of terror soon alienated most Mongolians.⁶⁰

In November 1920, Sukhebaatur returned from Irkutsk to Kiakhta, and began preparations for a military takeover of Mongolia. His immediate target was the Chinese forces who had arrived in Kiakhta after being defeated by Ungern-Sternberg. In February 1921, Sukhebaatur was appointed commander of the 400 or so Mongol troops recruited from the region around Kiakhta. Between March 1 and 3, the first Congress of the Mongolian People's Party was held in Kiakhta. It formed a Provisional Government whose composition and goals reflected the influence of Soviet advisers.

Sukhebaatur turned out to be a fine partisan commander. With Soviet support, he got maximum use out of his tiny, poorly trained and ill-equipped army. In March 1921, the forces of the Mongolian Provisional Government crossed into Mongolia and seized Mongolian Kiakhta (Altan Bulak) from local Chinese troops. Its main strength at this point was that it had the support of members of the Fifth Red Army under Uborevich, with some 10,000 troops.⁶¹ For a few weeks, Mongolia had two governments, the Provisional Government in Kiakhta, and the Khutugtu in Khuriye. Their aims were now quite different, the Khutugtu hoping merely for a restoration of the situation before the Chinese invasion of 1919, while the new Provisional Government hoped to form a democratic government committed to modernization and social reform. In May 1921, some 10,000 Soviet troops from Uborevich's Fifth army (many of them Kalmyks) entered Mongolia, and on July 6, the Soviet and Mongolian armies entered Khuriye and expelled the forces of Ungern-Sternberg. The Khutugtu had attempted to prevent the entry of communist forces using a “dui,” a magical structure used to repel demons.⁶² But these traditional tactics failed, and on July 9, a new government was formed by the Mongolian People's Party, with an ex lama, D. Bodoo, as Premier and Sukhebaatur as Minister for War. The Khutugtu was retained as head of state, though stripped of his autocratic powers. On July 11, 1921, he was enthroned as ruler of Mongolia for the third time. That day, July 11, is still celebrated as Mongolian National Day.

The new ruling party was divided and weak. When it took power, one member remembered that, “At that time the party was only thirty or forty strong … and our army consisted of a few hundred exhausted partisans. We had only one party cell in the countryside.”⁶³ So violent were divisions between socialists and moderates that in 1922, Premier Bodoo was executed on charges of attempting to restore a traditional monarchy. Nevertheless, the Mongolian People's Party would consolidate its power and rule Mongolia for most of the twentieth century.

The Khutugtu died in May 1924, and Mongolia became the Mongolian People's Republic, a title that survived until 1992. Though major changes would not be introduced for several years, Mongolia was now ruled by a new elite, very different from the coalition of nobles and lamas who had ruled since the seventeenth century. In August 1924, the third Congress of the Party recommended a socialist path of development, established a new parliamentary body, the Khural (the word is related to quriltai, the name of the ancient Mongol elective assemblies), and changed the capital's name from Khuriye to Ulaanbaatar or “Red Hero.” Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was still keen not to antagonize China by interfering too directly in Mongolia, and by 1924 all Soviet troops had left.⁶⁴

Despite the government's radical pronouncements, social change was limited before the 1930s. Absent were almost all the accepted preconditions for socialism. There was no significant industrial proletariat and hardly any industry apart from a few small government-owned coal mines, the first of which had been established in 1906. Almost all skilled workers and experts came from Russia or China. In 1922, none of the 12 workers in the Nalaikha coal mines near Khuriye was Mongolian. Mongolia's urban population was tiny. As late as 1934, only 17 out of 242 delegates to the ninth Party Congress were industrial workers.⁶⁵ Nor was there a large Mongolian bourgeoisie or intelligentsia. Capitalism was represented by little more than Chinese and Mongolian petty traders and money lenders, a near destitute class of vagrants or impoverished herdspeople, and an intellectual class dominated by Buddhist monks and a few socialist radicals. Most of the literate had been educated in the traditions of Lamaism, which were of little help to a modernizing government. In 1924, to give just one illustration of these paradoxes, officials of the new Ministry of Education requested funds for traditional religious ceremonies to break a drought.⁶⁶

There were some reforms. Sukhebaatur insisted on abolishing the traditional punishment of leaving prisoners in a coffin-like box until they died. Particularly important for ordinary Mongolians was the ending of serfdom in 1922, the cancellation of debts to foreign firms, a reduction in the grazing privileges of ecclesiastical estates, and the regulation of interest rates.⁶⁷ However, the government was too weak to undertake reforms likely to provoke effective resistance, so in practice the old lay and clerical nobility retained much of their traditional authority until the late 1920s. They were, after all, the only group with any experience of rule, so many were elected to positions in the new government. Most continued to wear the traditional buttons of rank.⁶⁸

Slow change masked simmering conflicts. At the third Party Congress in August 1924, Danzan, one of the revolutionaries who had met Lenin in 1920, was denounced and executed as a right winger. On the other side, a Lamaist pamphlet described communists as

heretical creatures, who have licked the mouth of the gun and sworn that they would be willing to kill their lama, teacher, father or mother, who tread on the Zungdui and the Jadamba and other Buddhist scriptures, or pass them under the knickers of Russian women or under pictures of them giving birth, and who, once they have taken the oath and joined, immediately conceive evil thoughts and fail to respect the Buddhist faith.⁶⁹

When the Khutugtu died in 1924, high lamas immediately began to seek a new incarnation. An incarnation duly appeared in north Mongolia, but the government stalled on the emotive issue of a successor. In 1926 it issued a confused proclamation on the subject, giving theological rather than political reasons for not installing a successor.

The Jebtsundamba Khutugtus have deserved extremely well of our Mongol religion and state, and when it came to the Eighth Incarnation, he freed Mongolia from Chinese oppression and laid the foundation for it to become a state, cherishing and protecting it, and finally demonstrated the impermanence of this transitory world and passed away. And as there is a tradition that after the Eighth Incarnation he will not be reincarnated again, but thereafter will be reborn as the Great General Hanamand in the realm of Shambala [the traditional Buddhist paradise], there is no question of installing the subsequent, Ninth Incarnation. Nevertheless, many of his unenlightened disciples, with their fleshy eyes and stupid understanding, are unwilling to grasp this, so it is decreed that the Central Committee to be newly elected shall take charge of reporting this and clearing it up with the Dalai Lama.⁷⁰

Not until 1929 did the new government formally ban the discovery of new incarnations of the Khutugtu.

During the 1920s, several leaders attempted unsuccessfully to secure international recognition and negotiate trade relations with the USA, Japan, or China. Nevertheless, for a few years outside influences did count. In the late 1920s, less than 20 percent of Mongolian exports went to the Soviet Union, while most of the 1,700 shops in the country were run by Chinese (1,450) and a smaller number by Europeans, so that about 75 percent of retail trade was controlled by non-Soviet foreigners. Private trade was mainly in foreign hands and European companies, mainly German, set up small industrial enterprises. German companies designed the first typewriter adapted for Mongolian script, produced the first Mongolian atlas, and manufactured Mongolia's military medals.

There were signs that Mongolia might drift away from the Soviet Union both politically and commercially, and emerge as a liberal democracy. Its electoral system threatened the power of the old nobility; a national bank had been created, and a national currency; and there had appeared the first shoots of modern educational and medical systems. The stability of the 1920s allowed significant economic growth. Livestock numbers rose from almost 10 million in 1918 to about 24 million in 1930, while Mongolia's human population rose to more than 700,000 in 1930.⁷¹ Bawden comments that in 1928, “Mongolia was in fact making steady economic and social progress, not in the direction of communism, but along the divergent road of free enterprise.”⁷²

In 1928, there were few signs of the storm that was about to break. In 1927, the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party still included many nobles, lamas, and entrepreneurs, and was committed to gradual change.⁷³ At the seventh Party Congress, the Party Chairman, Dambadorj, insisted that

The elimination of private capital and the confiscation of the capital of the old feudal nobility and the jas of the lamaseries, are absolutely incompatible with the government's policies. The power of our party does not stretch to confronting the old feudal nobility, the rich and the lamas by any other policies than those in force at present.⁷⁴

MONGOLIA: 1930–1950

In 1929, Mongolia was finally caught up in the cyclone of Stalinist industrialization. Just under seven hundred years after Batu's armies conquered Rus’, Mongolia became, in all but name, a colony of Moscow.

In 1928, Dambadorj traveled to Moscow to try to persuade the Comintern that the Soviet Union's policies of aggressive industrialization were not appropriate in Mongolia. He failed. In September 1928 a Comintern delegation was sent to Ulaanbaatar and it began to align Mongolian government policy more closely with that of the Soviet Union.75 In 1929, under Soviet direction, Mongolia's government lurched violently to the left. The left turn began with a violent purge of Party members, including Dambadorj. Party numbers fell from 15,000 in 1928 to 12,000 in 1929, and then, after a massive influx of poorer herders (arads), rose to 42,000 members by 1932. By 1932, 80 percent of Party members were illiterate. A new revolutionary rhetoric attacked “cruel feudalists, shrewd lamas, greedy Chinese traders, and foreign capitalists and generals.”⁷⁶

Rupen argues that after 1928, “What had been a general and often imperfect correlation of Mongolian policies and procedures with Soviet ones became a meticulous and exact correspondence.”⁷⁷ As Soviet control increased, the rest of the world was shut out. The Soviet Union monopolized Mongolian foreign trade and non-Russian foreigners ceased to work in Mongolia.

In contrast to Central Asia, Soviet policies in Mongolia were shaped by strategic concerns rather than by interest in Mongolian resources. The Japanese invasion of Manchuria in September 1931 enhanced Mongolia's importance as a buffer state. In 1945, Stalin would argue, presumably with unconscious irony, that the Soviet Union needed an “independent” Mongolia, because “if a military power were to attack through Mongolia and cut the Trans-Siberian Railway, the USSR would be finished.”⁷⁸ In 1935, Soviet troops returned to Mongolia, and Mongolia became, in effect, a Soviet military region. Soviet military victories against Japanese forces at Khalkhyn Gol in eastern Mongolia in 1939, under Soviet marshals Zhukov and Konev, marked an important shift in the balance of power in this region and in the wider world. Defeated in Mongolia, Japanese expansionism now turned from Inner Eurasia towards the Pacific.

Inside Mongolia, the left turn generated its own chaotic momentum. Early in 1930, the now dominant leftists in the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party introduced a hopelessly ambitious Five-Year Plan that relied on massive Soviet aid. The government began to expropriate the remnants of the traditional possessing classes. In Mongolia this was a more complex maneuver than in the Soviet Union, where the old elites had been expelled during the Civil War. Late in 1929, a commission headed by Choibalsan, the future dictator, began to expropriate the livestock of nobles. Over 2,000 noble households lost their property between 1929 and 1932. Their livestock was distributed to newly formed collective farms, where many animals soon perished, or to poorer herdsmen who were even less able to care for them. A future President, J. Sambuu, described being sent to Tsetserleg, the capital of Arkhangai aimak, west of Ulaanbaatar, and given 20 days to expropriate the nobility and set up collective farms. With local activists he spent an entire night drawing up a list of nobles, both lay and clerical, and listing their property. The next day the activists rode off in three groups, and by midday they claimed to have registered the assets (primarily livestock) of their targets and warned their former owners not to dispose of them. They then called meetings of the poorer herdsmen to explain that the property of the rich was to be used as the basis for new collective farms.

Then the government attacked the lamaseries. They were forbidden to own land, to loan money at interest, or to compel herdsmen to look after their herds. For the first time, they were subjected to taxation. Their animals were handed over to collective farms, where most perished. The decimation of lamasery herds ruined many poor herders who had earned a living by looking after them. Lamasery property was confiscated, including precious books, paintings and ceremonial masks, costumes, and objects. The attack soon turned on organized religion in general. An Anti-Buddhist League was formed, modeled on the Soviet League of Atheists, and began distributing anti-religious propaganda. Party activists, many of them confused or scared herdsmen only just recruited into the Party, destroyed stupas or desecrated Buddhist icons by gouging out their eyes.

In 1930, the eighth Congress decided to abolish all private property, even that of poor herdsmen. One herdsmen described the process as follows:

A man called Luvsantseren came to our sumum from the city to start the collective. He forced the sumum-people to set up a tent and gather there, and he kept us there for six days without food, and got at us to join the collective. Some two hundred herds-people were collectivized, and as directors of the collective there were chosen comrades who did not know black from white, and who ran around like sheep with the staggers.⁷⁹

Most herdsmen regarded the herds of the collectives as stolen property and refused to take possession of them, so the animals died. Livestock numbers fell from 24 million in 1930 to 16 million in 1932.⁸⁰ For a country whose wealth consisted mainly of livestock this was a catastrophe on the scale of a major war.

Violence fed on violence. The Party launched its own version of dekulakization, mechanically dividing herders into three classes: the poor, the middling, and the rich. It attacked the rich, and even some middle herdsmen, those with 20–100 khuv. (The khuv, a modern equivalent of the pre-revolutionary bod, was roughly equivalent to a horse, 7 sheep or 12 goats; before the revolution, the average wealth of herdsmen was about 40–45 khuv.)⁸¹ Middle herdsmen were subjected to exorbitant taxes and denied rights to pasture and water, while their children were denied schooling. Many slaughtered their animals so as to reclassify themselves as poor herdsmen. The government abolished private trade, which ensured a serious goods famine.

None of this made sense to herders. Armed resistance broke out, mainly in the center and west of the country. The government used Soviet troops to suppress revolts. In May 1932, the government used tanks and troops to crush rebellions in western Mongolia, with many hundreds of casualties. Though many rebels were former nobles or lamas, they enjoyed widespread support from ordinary herders, and even from local Party members. Some rebels emigrated to China, and some resistance leaders began to call for reintegration into China and the installation of a new Jebtsundamba Khutugtu. In 1930, 700 armed lamas from Tögsbuyant lamasery in Uvs aimak, near the Tuvan border, overthrew the local government administration and set up their own administration. They demanded the destruction of the communist government, and sought help from warlord armies in Xinjiang. In 1932 there was an even more serious revolt at the Bandid Gegeen lamasery in Khuvsugul in the north-west. It was suppressed with extraordinary barbarity on both sides; some prisoners had their hearts ritually torn out, while some were flayed alive.⁸²

By June 1932, as the Soviet Party began to fear it had overreached with collectivization in its heartland, the Mongolian Party was ordered to change course. International considerations may have played a role, as a weakened and chaotic Mongolia threatened the military security of Siberia. The Party was ordered to seek the support of lesser and middling lamas and herders, and there followed a breathing space lasting several years, which is known in official Mongolian historiography as the period of the “New Turn Policy.” Apart from demonstrating the extent of Soviet control over Mongolia, the chaos of the early 1930s had achieved little. Industrialization and collectivization would both be postponed in Mongolia until the 1950s.

The retreat of the mid-1930s went much further than in the Soviet Union. The official motto of the New Turn Policy was, “Raise high private initiative, and bring the private cattle-herding economy to a high level.”⁸³ The government offered financial help even to moderately wealthy herders, and disbanded some 800 collectives. It permitted 300 lamaseries to resume worship, and allowed a revival of traditional Tibetan medicine, for which, as yet, it could offer no modern alternative. Private retail trade was permitted. The government began to subsidize private household economies by paying for the digging of wells and the building of shelters for livestock. These measures, combined with subsidies from the USSR, helped revive traditional forms of rural production and commerce. Livestock numbers had risen to 22.6 million by 1935, almost returning to the level of 1930.⁸⁴

These more relaxed policies ended with the removal of the Prime Minister, Gendung, in 1936. Gendung was regarded as a supporter of Mongolian tradition, and lacked enthusiasm for industrialization. When the Choibalsan Cloth Combine was burnt down, he argued that there was no need to rebuild it as most Mongols could make felt on their own.⁸⁵ Marshal Choibalsan would soon have his revenge. In February 1936, Stalin insisted that the Russian-educated Choibalsan be made the new leader. He would rule Mongolia until his death in 1951.

As a child, Choibalsan had lived in a lamasery before running away and enrolling in a Russian–Mongolian translation school. As a translator in the early 1920s, he came to know Mongolia's first group of pro-Russian radicals, including Bodoo and Sukhebaatur. He fought alongside them during the wars to expel the Chinese armies and the forces of Ungern-Sternberg. Throughout his career, he worked closely with Russian advisers and officials. His appointment as Party leader was followed by a revival of class war and a local version of the Stalinist purges.

Stalin saw Mongolia's Buddhists as a potential fifth column in the event of a Chinese attack, and demanded a new assault on lamas and lamaseries. In October 1937, the first Soviet-style show trials took place, with 23 lamas as the main defendants. In the next 18 months most of Mongolia's 800 monasteries were destroyed, and several thousand high-ranking lamas were purged and executed.⁸⁶ Other groups were also attacked, including Mongolian Kazakhs and Buriats, and immigrants from Inner Mongolia, who were accused of sympathy for Japan. Early in 1939, under direct orders from Voroshilov, Choibalsan arrested those who had directed the purges. Of the eight members of the Party Presidium elected in 1934, two died before the purge, and most of the rest during the purges, leaving Choibalsan himself as the lone survivor.⁸⁷ In 1940, 3,000 new officials were appointed, creating an entirely new political elite, many of them Soviet-educated. Like the Soviet vydvizhentsy, they owed their elevation to the purges and to Choibalsan.

Despite these massive social, political, and ideological changes, Mongolia's industrial sector remained tiny, and geared primarily towards the processing of livestock products. There was, however, significant investment in education, and the numbers of students in public schools rose from 40 (in one school) in 1921 to 24,000 (in 331 schools) in 1940.⁸⁸ Literacy rates rose to about 20 percent by 1940, a National University was established in 1942, and in 1941 the government announced the introduction of a new Cyrillic alphabet to replace Mongolia's traditional Uighur script. Many younger students began to learn Russian, now the second language in schools, as part of a larger process of Russianization of Mongolian culture.

Though dependent for most of his career on advice from Moscow, after 1945 Choibalsan began to show signs of independence and even of nationalism. In 1950, he resisted proposals to join the Soviet Union. At his death, Mongolia was indeed transformed. But Mongolia's economy and society remained backward, lingering still in the anteroom to the world of fossil fuels. Furthermore, despite formal independence, Mongolia remained part of the Soviet Empire, which dictated most of the Mongolian government's major decisions.

XINJIANG: INDEPENDENCE AND WARLORD RULE, 1911–1949

For much of the early twentieth century, Xinjiang was the only part of Inner Eurasia beyond the direct control of the Soviet Empire. It provides, therefore, some hints as to what the history of Soviet Central Asia, and even Mongolia, might have looked like if these regions had escaped direct Soviet control. Nevertheless, in this period Xinjiang generally had closer economic and cultural relations with the Soviet Union than with China. Muslims in Xinjiang developed close relations with Soviet Central Asia, as did modernizers who were influenced by Jadidism. Xinjiang also exported cotton to the Soviet Union and imported Soviet manufactured goods. Particularly in the 1930s, when Soviet troops supported Xinjiang's warlord, Sheng Shicai, Xinjiang could reasonably be described as a Soviet “Protectorate.”89

After 1911, when Chinese control broke down, Xinjiang was ruled for almost 40 years by regional warlords. After 1944, Xinjiang was reincorporated within China, first under the Guomindang, and then, after 1949, under a re-formed Chinese Empire, now ruled by the Chinese Communist Party. For most of this period, as during most of the region's history, Xinjiang had closer ties with Inner Eurasia than with China.

Travelers in the 1920s needed passports to cross from China into Xinjiang. The English missionaries Mildred Cable and Francesca French described what the border crossing could mean in practice.

Passports, permits, local passes and innumerable formalities began to harass the traveller as he moved about, and many Chinese who only gained entrance to Turkestan with difficulty have never been able to secure a permit to leave it again. As the years passed, during which rebellion and revolution shook both China and its New Dominion, the frontier regulations were still further tightened, and caravans often had to spend ten days or more in the unspeakable inns of Hsing-hsing-hsia while messages were exchanged between the commandant of the garrison and the Governor at Urumchi, whose personal permission had to be secured for each individual to pass on.⁹⁰

In the 1920s, Xinjiang was ruled by a Chinese warlord, Yang Zenxin. Yang Zengxin had assumed power in Urumqi in 1911, when his boss, the former Qing governor, fled after the collapse of Qing power. At first, Yang Zenxin commanded just 2,000 Dungan troops from Kansu, but they made up the most powerful military force left in the region. Within a year, he had suppressed regional rebellions and secured control of most of Xinjiang.⁹¹ Though his rule was relatively stable, it was also violent, nepotistic, corrupt, and autocratic. He siphoned vast wealth from government monopolies into private bank accounts in Manila, and governed through networks of relatives, officials, and local headmen who used their positions to enrich themselves.

The Swedish explorer Sven Hedin described Yang Zengxin as the most absolute ruler on earth.⁹² He was famous for the brutality with which he treated his enemies. In 1916, during an official banquet, he suddenly left the room and returned with a soldier who was ordered to behead one of the guests. The same ritual occurred twice more, before Yang Zengxin sat down to enjoy a hearty meal. Some of his subordinates were even nastier. Ma Fu-hsing, or Ma Ti-tai, an illiterate Hui soldier whom Yang appointed as ruler of Kashgar for eight years, used punishments that would not have seemed out of place during the Mongol invasions. According to a White Russian resident, P. S. Nazarov, he regularly crucified and maimed his victims. Nazarov lived in Kashgar for four years, and frequently saw “bundles of men's amputated arms or feet nailed to the city gates, with notices stating whose members they were and why they were cut off. Sometimes the lawful owner of the arms or legs would be chained to the wall with them.”⁹³

Yang Zengxin saw threats to his power both in traditional Islam and in modern ideas and technologies. Though tolerant of Islam, he restricted missionary activity, the building of new mosques, and pilgrimages to Mecca. In the 1920s, he particularly feared the spread of new ideas from Soviet Central Asia. As a British official in Kashgar explained:

The ambitious young workman from Kashgar or Ili goes over to Russia to get a temporary job and at once finds himself in a land of unveiled women, railways, motor-cars, cinemas, and all that he believes to constitute the acme of modern civilisation.

Yang forced restaurants to put up signs saying, “no political discussions allowed.” He even closed most schools, except those attached to mosques.⁹⁴

Independent Xinjiang no longer enjoyed Chinese subsidies, and during the Soviet Civil War it could not even trade its cotton for manufactured goods from Soviet Central Asia. In the 1920s, Yang encouraged trade with Soviet Central Asia, and by 1928 that trade was worth 10 times as much as the trade with China. Railways pointed Xinjiang westwards. The Soviet rail network, in particular the rapidly advancing Turksib line, reduced transportation costs to Central Asia, at a time when trade with China was still carried by caravans that took three to four months to reach Urumqi from Tianjin.⁹⁵ In the 1920s, Chinese officials found it easier and faster to travel from Nanking to Urumqi via Vladivostok, along the Trans-Siberian and Turksib railroads, rather than through China and Kansu. These differences not only raised Soviet prestige in Xinjiang, they also gave the Soviet Union considerable influence over Xinjiang's official relations with China.⁹⁶

Yang resisted the building of paved roads to China, and instituted strict censorship of newspapers and the telegraph. Rumor had it that, though he allowed the telegraph, he personally kept the keys to the Urumqi telegraph office, “opening the door in the morning and locking it again each night.”⁹⁷ But he did introduce some modernizing reforms. He invested in improvements to irrigation, and built some new roads. However, he is best seen as the leader of an oppressive and corrupt rent-seeking elite network with no long-term vision for Xinjiang. This was traditional, self-interested mobilization, using some modern technology and a few modernizing elements.

Yang's real priorities are suggested by the fact that at the end of his rule, investment in building and communications accounted for 0.13 percent of the budget, while the military budget accounted for 72 percent.⁹⁸ His corruption generated such discontent that in 1926 he asked the missionaries Mildred Cable and Francesca French to take his son out of the province. Two years later, he was assassinated, appropriately, at a banquet, whose waiters turned out to be hired assassins.⁹⁹ Yang would enjoy a posthumous revenge when his eventual successor, Jin Shuren (1883–1941), had the leader of the coup against Yang executed.

Jin Shuren followed Yang's model as a ruler, though in the opinion of most historians, he was less able than his former boss. He held power for just five years, from 1928–1933, during which Xinjiang drifted into civil war, and further into the Soviet orbit.

Mildred Cable and Francesca French capture well the strange mixture of archaic traditions, chaos, and brutality of Xinjiang in these years. In one vignette of life in this period, they describe a theatrical entertainment they saw in the 1930s:

First of all two bullock carts appeared laden with roughly made stage properties and some simple scenery, and with the carts came thirty men dressed in shabby clothes. They walked with a light springy step and carried large wooden boxes slung from a pole between each two men. These boxes held their precious costumes – faded, ragged, embroidered dresses, elaborate tinsel headgear, flowing beards made from the soft white tail of the Tibetan yak, and the mock implements of war which take a large place in Chinese historic drama. … In a very short while after arrival the players and musicians appeared dressed for their parts, and the musicians’ band of cymbals, pipes, flutes and drums crashed out the most hideous din that mortal ears ever heard. The effect on the oasis dwellers was almost hypnotic. They had come in their bullock carts from every oasis within reach of the temple, and the crowd was composed of men and women, old and young, and children of every age.¹⁰⁰

The play went on for 18 hours with breaks for meals. Like most traditional theater, it was about warfare and politics, love and death.

Later in their trip, the missionaries would encounter the harsh realities of civil war. One evening, they asked for the hospitality of a local farming household, and were taken in.

As we sat round the brazier and ate fried dough-cakes together, there was the rap of a riding-whip on the outside door. Our host and his wife exchanged one anxious look, then he went to unbar the heavy gate. A moment later an officer of the brigand [Dungan] army strode in. “Measure out five bushels of wheat for my men,” he said, “and be quick about it.” “Your men have been here three times already, and have taken everything I have,” said the farmer. “Five bushels of wheat,” was the only answer. “Truly I have not got it,” said the old man. Out came the riding-whip, and the farmer's back was lashed with all the strength of the young soldier's arm. “How can I give you what I have not got?” our host said with quiet dignity. The blows rained again on the old man's head and shoulders, and, helpless to resist he went to the corn-bin which held the small supply of grain for the family food, opened the little hatch near the floor and swept out all the remaining wheat into the gaping mouth of the sack held open by the brigand officer's retainers. A moment later we heard the clattering hoofs of horses trotting swiftly toward a neighbouring farmstead. … Our host, without a word of anger or of complaint, took off his cotton coat and with his hand felt the weals on his neck and shoulders, then he came and joined our circle round the brazier again. Such is the patient endurance of men who have never seen human rights maintained, the cause of the poor vindicated, nor the rich and mighty brought under a law of equality.¹⁰¹

Peter Fleming, who traveled through Xinjiang in the time of Jin Shuren, wrote that the warlord displayed a “rapacity … insufficiently supported by administrative talent.”¹⁰² His rule was quite as corrupt and nepotistic as Yang Zengxin's, but his grip on the region was less secure. He promoted relatives to high office, and with their help managed profitable monopolies on trades such as gold, jade, and karakul wool. Chinese officials were reputed to control over 50 percent of commerce in the capital, Urumqi.¹⁰³

Unlike Yang, who cultivated elites from different religious and ethnic groups, Jin Shuren embarked on a policy of Sinicization that enraged Turkic leaders. He angered Torgut Mongols by executing their leader, the Tsetsen Puntsag Gegeen.¹⁰⁴ According to the British consul in Urumqi, Jin offered the Torgut leader a cup of tea, then led him out to a courtyard where, following traditional rules of etiquette, he was seated on a red carpet before an executioner shot him in the head.

The rebellion that touched the lives of Mildred Cable and Francesca French broke out in 1931, when Jin Shuren tried to end the semi-autonomous status of the khanate of Hami (Qumul). His action sparked a brutal, multi-sided six-year civil war that touched all parts of Xinjiang and drew in Soviet forces and Central Asian rebels. In November 1933, an “Eastern Turkestan Republic” was founded in the far west, which remains, to this day, a potent symbol for Uighur nationalists. The short-lived republic included both traditional and modernizing (or Jadidist) Islamist elements, but Forbes describes it as “the direct spiritual successor” of Ya'qub Beg's nineteenth-century emirate based on Kashgar.¹⁰⁵

The complex geography of the civil wars reflected the ancient divisions between Xinjiang's three main regions, the Tarim basin, Uighuristan, and Zungharia. The archaic nature of the wars is captured well in the following account by a Franco-Russian engineer. It describes an attack by the Dungan army of Ma Zhongying on the Chinese garrison at Hami on the night of July 3, 1931. Except for the presence of machine guns, the fighting is eerily reminiscent of Batu's attacks on the cities of Rus’.

Suddenly, to the beating of drums and the blowing of trumpets, the glacis [earth fortifications] swarmed with men rushing towards the high city wall. The front rank consisted of Chinese peasants (conscripts from Kansu) carrying scaling ladders, who were driven forward by Tungan soldiers armed with huge curved swords. The air was rent by the shrill battle cries of the Tungans and the yells of defiance of the defenders. In spite of a murderous fire, ladders were placed at different spots, and the rebels … began to climb up one after the other. Then the defenders discarded their firearms for pikes and axes, and hurtled down on the attackers heavy rocks, blazing tow soaked in oil and hand-grenades … Notwithstanding the stubborn defence, several scaling ladders were placed against the wall, and the Tungans clambered up one after another. Many were speared or pushed away, but as they fell on the ground others took their place. Then the cannonade ceased, and only the clash of steel, the cries of the wounded, and an occasional pistol shot could be heard as hand-to-hand fighting began on the wall itself … just when the place seemed to be doomed a machine gun, which up to this had been silent … suddenly came to life. Emplaced in a blockhouse flanking the wall, it opened fire, mowing down the assault, and the glacis was soon cleared except for heaps of corpses.¹⁰⁶

Military weakness forced Jin to ask for outside support. In 1931, Jin employed veteran White Russian soldiers to recapture Hami (Qumul). He also hired two Soviet biplanes with their pilots.

In September 1933, Jin Shuren fled to China through Siberia. The new de facto ruler of Xinjiang was Sheng Shicai, a Japanese-trained Chinese general, appointed by Jin Shuren in 1930 to head Xinjiang's army. He arrived from China after traveling through the Soviet Union. In 1934, the Soviet Union sent 7,000 GPU troops to support his rule and prevent a collapse that might invite an invasion from Manchuria, which Japanese forces had occupied in 1931. In January 1934, Soviet troops expelled the Hui (Muslim Chinese) armies of Ma Zhongying from the Urumqi region, and by 1937, with Soviet military and financial support, Sheng Shicai controlled most of Xinjiang.

Xinjiang now became an informal part of the Soviet Union's Inner Eurasian empire. In return for loans and military support, Sheng offered the Soviet Union concessions to mine gold, manganese, uranium, and tungsten, and even to prospect for oil. Soviet military, police, and economic and political advisers began to play such an important role in Xinjiang's government that the Swedish traveler Sven Hedin described the Soviet Consul-General, Apresov, as “more powerful than Sheng.”¹⁰⁷ Sheng adopted a Soviet-style nationalities policy that incorporated regional ethnic elites more effectively into his government. Under the influence of Soviet nationalities policy, he also officially recognized the ethnicity of “Uighur” for the first time in 1934. The term Uighur had first been used by Russian scholars who argued that those who lived in Xinjiang's northern oases were descendants of the ancient Turfan Uighur kingdom that had flourished under Chinggis Khan. Like Soviet nationalities’ policy in general, Sheng's recognition of Uighur nationhood was really an attempt to tame nationalism and co-opt the intellectuals who took nationhood seriously, in this case, Jadidist-influenced Chinese Muslims.¹⁰⁸

Sheng tolerated the Muslim establishment, allowed sharia law to function in many regions, and supported local clergy with government grants. In the late 1930s, Sheng introduced Soviet-style purges of dissidents as Stalin was removing Central Asian pan-Turkists and nationalists as enemies of the people. Sheng purged between 50,000 and 100,000 people.¹⁰⁹ In 1938 he traveled with his family to Moscow and joined the Soviet Communist Party.

In June 1938 the British consul in Xinjiang reported:

Soviet Russia has at last regained in full the influence Russia used to exercise in Imperial days, and which was temporarily lost, as a result of the Russian revolution, during the period 1917–31; Russian methods, Russian ideas and Russian trade predominate throughout the province; most of the important posts in the province are filled by Russophile officials (often Russian-trained and speaking Russian); and both provincial and local authorities frequently seek the advice and assistance of the Russian Consular establishment in the province, to which advice and assistance they attach great weight.¹¹⁰

But just as Xinjiang seemed to be falling into the Soviet Empire, ties with the Soviet Union were abruptly cut after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Soviet troops and experts left, Sheng cut off relations with the Soviet Communist Party, and trade with the Soviet Union collapsed. Severing ties with Soviet Central Asia was economically ruinous, particularly for the northern and western regions of Xinjiang, and particularly for Kazakh groups who had got used once again to migrating between Soviet and Chinese territory. Sheng also cut ties with the Chinese Communist Party, and executed Mao Zedong's younger brother, who was in Urumqi. He established relations with the Guomindang, who sent troops into Xinjiang. In 1943 Sheng turned on the Guomindang, in the hope of regaining Soviet support, but he received none, and Guomindang forces removed him from office in 1944.

Under the Guomindang, Xinjiang would once again become part of a larger Chinese polity, and Han migration to the region began once again. In August 1945, the Soviet Union signed a treaty surrendering control of most of Xinjiang to the Guomindang. From now on, the Soviet Union would stay clear of most of Xinjiang, though up until 1949, it supported a second East Turkestan Republic in the Ili region in the far west.

In 1949, Communist Chinese troops of the People's Liberation Army entered Xinjiang, the Guomindang commander surrendered, and so did the leaders of the East Turkestan Republic. After 1949, Xinjiang would be firmly incorporated within a revived Chinese Empire ruled, now, by the Chinese Communist Party. Sheng Shicai survived in exile with the Guomindang in Taiwan.

CONCLUSIONS: THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY IN EASTERN INNER EURASIA

Kazakhstan, Soviet Central Asia, Siberia, Mongolia, and Xinjiang were all shaped in different ways by the colossal changes taking place in the Soviet and Chinese heartlands. Xinjiang remained for the most part beyond the reach of both the Chinese and Soviet governments, though its warlords would become increasingly dependent on Soviet trade and even Soviet military forces, as China collapsed into civil war. In all the other regions of central and eastern Inner Eurasia, Soviet control was direct and non-negotiable, and it was managed primarily in the interests of the Soviet heartland. That meant that policies were directed by the industrial and strategic needs of the Soviet Union, which made little effort to industrialize outlying regions of its empire. Nor did it put much effort into changing the cultural traditions of these regions. And that explains why, despite Soviet attempts at cultural, social, and political reform, local ways of doing things often survived, particularly in Muslim and Buddhist regions. How much had survived would become clear only after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

NOTES

1 Kappeler, Russian Empire, 337–338.

² Bennigsen, “Islamic or Local Consciousness,” 176–177; on the Jadid movement see Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform.

³ Pierce, Russian Central Asia, 259; Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform, 121–123, 376; Bacon, Central Asians under Russian Rule, 114.

⁴ Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform, 108.

⁵ Bacon, Central Asians under Russian Rule, 115; Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform, 166, estimates that there may have been several hundred new-method schools by 1917.

⁶ Kappeler, Russian Empire, 352.

⁷ Pierce, Russian Central Asia, 293, 297.

⁸ Olcott, The Kazakhs, 131.

⁹ The following is based on Wheeler, Modern History of Soviet Central Asia, 103–105.

¹⁰ Rywkin, Moscow's Muslim Challenge, 19.

¹¹ Paul, Zentralasien, 394.

¹² Cummings, Understanding Central Asia, 37–38.

¹³ Forsyth, History of the Peoples of Siberia, 235.

¹⁴ This account based on Wheeler, Modern History of Soviet Central Asia, 108–110; on the economic roots of the Basmachi movement see Lorenz, “Economic Bases of the Basmachi Movement”; and see Broxup, “The Basmachi.”

¹⁵ Smith, “Non-Russians,” 497; Rywkin, Moscow's Muslim Challenge, 34.

¹⁶ Khalid, “Society and Politics in Bukhara.”

¹⁷ Millward, Eurasian Crossroads, 243–244.

¹⁸ Paul, Zentralasien, 402.

¹⁹ Cited from Cummings, Understanding Central Asia, 42.

²⁰ Cummings, Understanding Central Asia, 171; Smith, Red Nations, 76–80.

²¹ Martin, “An Affirmative-Action Empire,” 103; Smith, Red Nations, 84.

²² Fierman, Soviet Central Asia, 24.

²³ Smith, Red Nations, 104.

²⁴ Fierman, “The Soviet ‘Transformation’,” 18.

²⁵ Forbes, Warlords and Muslims, 156; Cummings, Kazakhstan, 15.

²⁶ Forbes, Warlords and Muslims, 156.

²⁷ Pohl, “The ‘Planet of One Hundred Languages’,” 239.

²⁸ Rywkin, Moscow's Muslim Challenge, 46.

²⁹ Fierman, “The Soviet ‘Transformation’,” 19.

³⁰ Fierman, “The Soviet ‘Transformation’,” 18.

³¹ Collins, Clan Politics, 87.

³² Collins, Clan Politics, 94–95.

³³ Fierman, “The Soviet ‘Transformation’,” 19.

³⁴ Thornton, “Regional Challenges,” 662.

³⁵ Hartley, Siberia, 172–174.

³⁶ Hartley, Siberia, 185.

³⁷ Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors, 131.

³⁸ Forsyth, History of the Peoples of Siberia, 254–255.

³⁹ Hartley, Siberia, 196–197.

⁴⁰ Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors, 131–132; Forsyth, History of the Peoples of Siberia, 242.

⁴¹ Forsyth, History of the Peoples of Siberia, 24.

⁴² Forsyth, History of the Peoples of Siberia, 248.

⁴³ Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors, 152; Forsyth, History of the Peoples of Siberia, 244–245.

⁴⁴ S. A. Ratner-Shternberg, cited in Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors, 150.

⁴⁵ Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors, 197–198.

⁴⁶ Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors, 236–241.

⁴⁷ Thornton, “Regional Challenges,” 665.

⁴⁸ Hughes, Stalin, Siberia and the Crisis of the New Economic Policy, 24; Hartley, Siberia, 202.

⁴⁹ Hartley, Siberia, 205–206.

⁵⁰ Forsyth, History of the Peoples of Siberia, 293–296.

⁵¹ Thornton, “Regional Challenges,” 662.

⁵² Thornton, “Regional Challenges,” 665.

⁵³ Lincoln, Conquest of a Continent, 352–354.

⁵⁴ Lincoln, Conquest of a Continent, 359.

⁵⁵ Hartley, Siberia, 219.

⁵⁶ On class distinctions in Qing Mongolia, see Atwood, Encyclopedia, 507–508; and Bawden, Modern History, 160.

⁵⁷ Cited from Sanders, Mongolia, 33; but see Atwood, Encyclopedia, 508.

⁵⁸ Rupen, How Mongolia is Really Ruled, 17–18.

⁵⁹ Cited in Bawden, Modern History, 209–210.

⁶⁰ Rupen, How Mongolia is Really Ruled, 24, makes this point; he adds that Ungern-Sternberg was fascinated by Damjintsuren and copied his “flamboyant and cruel ways.”

⁶¹ Rupen, How Mongolia is Really Ruled, 31–32.

⁶² Bawden, Modern History, 234.

⁶³ Bawden, Modern History, 231.

⁶⁴ Nakami, Batbayar, and Boldbaatar, “Mongolia,” 355–356.

⁶⁵ Bawden, Modern History, 246.

⁶⁶ Bawden, Modern History, 251.

⁶⁷ Sanders, Mongolia, 34.

⁶⁸ Bawden, Modern History, 256.

⁶⁹ Cited in Bawden, Modern History, 265.

⁷⁰ Bawden, Modern History, 262–263.

⁷¹ Atwood, Encyclopedia, 474.

⁷² Bawden, Modern History, 290–291.

⁷³ Bawden, Modern History, 290–291.

⁷⁴ Bawden, Modern History, 284.

⁷⁵ Nakami et al., “Mongolia,” 356–357.

⁷⁶ Atwood, Encyclopedia, 329–330; Bawden, Modern History, 249.

⁷⁷ Rupen, How Mongolia is Really Ruled, 38.

⁷⁸ Rupen, How Mongolia is Really Ruled, 45.

⁷⁹ Cited in Bawden, Modern History, 310.

⁸⁰ Bawden, Modern History, 311, and Atwood, Encyclopedia, 330.

⁸¹ Bawden, Modern History, 311.

⁸² Nakami et al., “Mongolia,” 358; Bawden, Modern History, 319–320.

⁸³ Bawden, Modern History, 351.

⁸⁴ Atwood, Encyclopedia, 405.

⁸⁵ Bawden, Modern History, 354.

⁸⁶ Nakami et al., “Mongolia,” 358.

⁸⁷ Atwood, Encyclopedia, 210.

⁸⁸ Atwood, Encyclopedia, 475.

⁸⁹ Paul, Zentralasien, 415.

⁹⁰ Cable and French, Gobi Desert, 134.

⁹¹ Forbes, Warlords and Muslims, 11.

⁹² Forbes, Warlords and Muslims, 14.

⁹³ Forbes, Warlords and Muslims, 15, 22.

⁹⁴ Forbes, Warlords and Muslims, 19.

⁹⁵ Millward, Eurasian Crossroads, 186.

⁹⁶ Forbes, Warlords and Muslims, 42.

⁹⁷ Qin, “Western China (Xinjiang),” 378–379; Forbes, Warlords and Muslims, 14.

⁹⁸ Millward, Eurasian Crossroads, 184; Forbes, Warlords and Muslims, 41.

⁹⁹ Forbes, Warlords and Muslims, 36.

¹⁰⁰ Cable and French, Gobi Desert, 29–30.

¹⁰¹ Cable and French, Gobi Desert, 250–251.

¹⁰² Millward, Eurasian Crossroads, 189.

¹⁰³ Forbes, Warlords and Muslims, 39–40.

¹⁰⁴ Forbes, Warlords and Muslims, 71.

¹⁰⁵ Forbes, Warlords and Muslims, 114. On the Eastern Turkestan Republic, Roberts, “Imagining Uyghurstan.”

¹⁰⁶ Forbes, Warlords and Muslims, 57.

¹⁰⁷ Forbes, Warlords and Muslims, 137.

¹⁰⁸ Millward, Eurasian Crossroads, 208, and see Brophy, Uyghur Nation.

¹⁰⁹ Millward, Eurasian Crossroads, 210, 247.

¹¹⁰ Forbes, Warlords and Muslims, 147.

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