The Central Asian Revolt of 1916

A collapsing empire in the age of war and revolution

Alexander Morrison, Cloé Drieu, Aminat Chokobaeva, Alexander Morrison, Cloé Drieu, Aminat Chokobaeva

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781526129420
• eBook ISBN: 9781526129444
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

The 1916 Revolt was a key event in the history of Central Asia, and of the Russian Empire in the First World War. This volume is the first comprehensive re-assessment of its causes, course and consequences in English for over sixty years. It draws together a new generation of leading historians from North America, Japan, Europe, Russia and Central Asia, working with Russian archival sources, oral narratives, poetry and song in Kazakh and Kyrgyz. These illuminate in unprecedented detail the origins and causes of the revolt, and the immense human suffering which it entailed. They also situate the revolt in a global perspective as part of a chain of rebellions and disturbances that shook the world's empires, as they crumbled under the pressures of total war.

1

Why in Central Asia, why in 1916? The revolt as an interface of the Russian colonial crisis and the World War

Tomohiko Uyama

While a large number of researchers have studied the revolt of 1916 in Central Asia, they have not provided sufficient answers to two fundamental questions. Why did the uprisings take place almost exclusively in Central Asia, while the edict to mobilise labourers was issued also to indigenous peoples (inorodtsy) of other parts of the Russian Empire, namely Siberia, the Caucasus and Kalmykia? Why did it occur in the year of 1916, although, according to many researchers, its causes had been accumulated during many years of Russian rule? In order to answer these questions, it is important to examine specificities of administration in Russian Central Asia, social changes in this region during World War I and people’s perception of Russia’s situation in the war and relations with its adversaries. The last point is also related to international factors of the revolt.

The impact of the Imperial edict

Before directly answering the two fundamental questions, let us touch upon the evaluation of the impact of the Tsar’s edict issued on 25 June 1916, which is closely related to the timing of the revolt.

Many Soviet and post-Soviet historians have claimed that the main cause (prichina) of the 1916 revolt was tsarist colonial oppression, and the edict to mobilise labourers was only a trigger or occasional cause (povod).¹ We know, however, almost no document that would concretely and definitely prove that the main motive of the insurgents was anger against the tsarist authorities, which they had stored up for many years. The dissatisfaction of the Kyrgyz and Kazakhs in Semirech’e with the seizure of land, which proceeded at a rapid pace in the several years before 1916, can be considered one of the main reasons for the uprisings in this region,² but this explanation is untenable with regard to other centres of the revolt, such as Torghai and the western part of Transcaspia, where there were few Russian settlers. There is also little direct evidence that the revolt occurred due to the deteriorating economic situation and increasing colonial oppression during the war.

Who, in the first place, invented the distinction between the cause and the trigger of the revolt? Interestingly, this distinction was first formulated at an early stage of the revolt, at meetings of representatives of the district (uezd) administrations, commercial and industrial firms, and the Russian population of the cities of Ferghana province (oblast’), held under the chairmanship of the temporary acting military governor Pavel Ivanov at the end of July and the beginning of August 1916. Participants in the meetings expressed the opinion that the Imperial edict and the measures to carry it out “served only as a trigger for the riots observed in the province, and their very cause is more profound”, which lay in “the peculiarities of the natives and their fanaticism”. They alleged, “it is highly possible that there was pre-prepared external influence and propaganda based on religious and political grounds”.³ Thus, the distinction of the cause and the trigger was originally invented to shift responsibility for the occurrence of the revolt from the Government and the local administration to the “fanatical” population and external propaganda.

A little later, some officials distinguished the main and occasional causes for a more or less objective analysis of the uprisings in Semirech’e, where conflict over land had been serious already before the revolt. The acting military governor of Semirech’e province Alexei Alekseev wrote in his report to the Tsar dated 4 March 1917:

The reasons for the dissatisfaction of the local nomads have not been made exactly clear yet, but undoubtedly, one of the main reasons was the widespread colonization of Semirech’e by the Russian element [i.e., Russians] … The closest occasional cause for the riots was the misunderstood order to call the natives to work in the rear of the army.⁴

A similar view, although from the position of blaming the tsarist Government, was taken by one of the first Soviet researchers of the revolt of 1916, the Kazakh communist Turar Rysqulov. He wrote:

The mobilization of native workers for the rear work served only as a trigger for the revolt of the natives of Turkestan in 1916, and not its main cause. The most important reasons, … were precisely those deep economic and political contradictions that were created as a result of the unrestrained colonial exploitation of Turkestan by tsarism over the course of fifty years of its domination.⁵

It was this formula that took root in Soviet historiography, presumably because it corresponded to the Marxist approach attaching greater importance to socioeconomic roots of historical events than to their immediate causes or occasions. This formula is useful to some extent for understanding the uprisings in Semirech’e, but still it does not lose its original function to hush up the decisive importance of the call for rear work for the outbreak of the revolt.

As I argued elsewhere,⁶ the edict has to be considered essential in provoking the revolt. It was prepared hastily, without discussion in the State Duma and without consultation with the governors-general and governors. Moreover, the ambiguously worded edict to mobilise people “for the construction of defense structures and military communications in the area of the active army” without job descriptions provoked rumours about the fatal dangers of this labour, allegedly to be conducted under a hail of bullets. The absence of detailed instructions on the method and process of mobilisation left much room for unfairly manipulating the mobilisation process on the spot, which strengthened people’s discontent.

Why did the revolt take place only in Central Asia? The situations in other regions

If the edict was one of the main causes of the revolt, then a question arises. Why did the revolt take place almost only in Central Asia, while the edict was issued also to peoples of many parts of the Russian Empire? Let us make a brief overview of the situations in other regions.

A part of the Kalmyks of Astrakhan province opposed or escaped mobilisation, but most people obeyed the order without resistance and went to serve as labourers in the rear, starting from 15 September. The Ministry of the Interior offered the Kalmyk Lama to take measures to widely explain the purposes of the Imperial decree, and gelungs (priests) were appointed to the working teams. Some Kalmyks even proposed to form a cavalry regiment on their own expense, but the governor rejected the offer, considering that they aimed at being transferred to the status of Cossacks and receiving land rights.⁷

Some Buryats in Southern Siberia moved to Mongolia to evade labour mobilisation, following earlier waves of migration to escape wartime economic hardships. There was no active resistance, however, and the first batch of workers was sent from early August 1916, although the bulk was mobilised, as in other regions, after 15 September. Overall, more than 20,000 Buryat labourers were sent to Arkhangelsk and the northwestern front with the help of noyons (notables) and Buddhist and Orthodox clergymen, and accompanied by lamas-healers and intellectuals, although a number of Buryat and other Siberian labourers later abandoned their workplaces because of bad working conditions in unfamiliar regions.⁸

In Yakutia, too, there was no active resistance, although many people fled to distant places to evade mobilisation. Soon the Government cancelled mobilisation at the request of the Lena Gold-Mining Company, which insisted that the mobilisation of Yakuts who supplied meat, oil and wood to mines would hinder gold production, and refused to provide steamboats to transport labourers.⁹

In the Caucasus, the Viceroy, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, requested Tsar Nicholas II by telegraph on 24 July to gather labourers only as volunteers, arguing that Muslims, seeing themselves capable of serving in the army, regarded the labour draft as a humiliation, and that there had already been unrest that could turn into disorder. The Tsar complied with the Grand Duke’s request and cancelled the compulsory mobilisation in the Caucasus.¹⁰ Prior to the cancellation, in the village of Aqsai in Dagestan, major skirmishes between the villagers mainly consisting of Kumyks and a punitive detachment took place in mid-July, although they opposed the requisition of horse-drawn carriages with coachmen, and did not directly stand against the call for rear work. Similar small incidents seem to have occurred in various parts of the North Caucasus.¹¹

The situation in Altai was no less turbulent. Altaians, like Kazakhs, believed that the Tsar was breaking the promise they were given when annexed to Russia that they would not be conscripted. There was also the lingering influence of the Burkhanist resistance movement that had culminated in 1904. At an assembly point for mobilised labourers, more than 1,000 people, armed with stones and sticks, refused the labour draft and tried to resist Russian officials and Cossacks. Later, however, the army took labourers by force.¹²

Thus, attempts to evade labour mobilisation were widespread, and there were some cases of local resistance, but nowhere other than Central Asia did massive and enduring uprisings occur. The Caucasus and Yakutia differed from Central Asia in that labour mobilisation was cancelled there. But considering that violent uprisings in a number of localities in Central Asia began soon after the notification of the edict, the later cancellation cannot explain the absence of large-scale revolts.

There can be some other hypothetical explanations about particular regions. Kalmyks and Buryats could be relatively familiar to works related to the Russian army because their co-ethnics served in the Don, Orenburg and Transbaikal Cossack Hosts. Muslims in the North Caucasus also had close relations with the Russian army through volunteer troops, and moreover, the authorities there were cautious about introducing new measures that could disturb social order, as the region had often experienced unrest since the nineteenth century. Here, however, I would like to pay attention to an institutional difference in administration between Central Asia and other regions.

An institutional problem: the lack of metrical books as a manifestation of distrust between the rulers and the ruled

In Central Asia, there were ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Maps and tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Editors’ introduction
• 1 Why in Central Asia, why in 1916? The revolt as an interface of the Russian colonial crisis and the World War
• 2 The exemption of peoples of Turkestan from universal military service as an antecedent to the 1916 revolt
• 3 The 1916 uprisings in Jizzakh: economic background and political rationales
• 4 The “virtual reality” of colonial Turkestan: how Russian officials viewed and represented the participation of the local population in the 1916 revolt
• 5 Fears, rumours, violence: the tsarist regime and the revolt of the nomads in Central Asia, 1916
• 6 When the nomads went to war: the uprising of 1916 in Semirech’e
• 7 Scales of violence: the 1916 Central Asian uprising in the context of wars and revolutions (1914–1923)
• 8 Violent acculturation: Alexei Kuropatkin, the Central Asian Revolt, and the long shadow of conquest
• 9 Refugees, resettlement and revolutionary violence in Semirech’e after the 1916 revolt
• 10 Links across time: Taranchis during the uprising of 1916 in Semirech’e and the “Atu” massacre of 1918
• 11 Making political rebellion “primitive”: the 1916 rebellion in the Kazakh steppe in long-term perspective (c. 1840–1930)
• 12 From rebels to refugees: memorialising the revolt of 1916 in oral poetry
• 13 A Qırghız verse narrative of rebellion and exile by Musa Chaghatay uulu
• 14 Domesticating 1916: the evolution of Amangeldi Imanov and the creation of a foundation myth for the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic (1916–1939)
• Select bibliography
• Index