Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire

7. Lal Salaams: Ghadar and the Bolshevik Muhajirin

194 THE BOLSHEVIK MUHAJIRIN A special appeal was sent out in December 1917, just after the Russian Revolution: Muslims of the East! Persians, Turks, Arabs, and Indians! All you whose lives and property, whose freedom and homelands were for centuries merchandise for trade by rapacious European plunderers! All you whose countries the robbers who began the war now want to divide among themselves! . . . Lose no time in throwing off the ancient oppressors of your homelands. Permit them no longer to plunder your native lands. You yourselves must be the masters in your own land. You yourselves must build your life as you see fit. You have this right, because your fate is in your own hands. . . . Muslims of Russia! Muslims of the East! In the task of regenerating the world we look to you for sympathy and support. In 1920, as the revolutionary regime strove to institutionalize its power, a Caucasian Turk gave a speech at a Bolshevik meeting in the central Asian city of Merv: Oh working Mohammedans! The Soviet Government has been formed to free you all. In future you shall breathe in peace. Are you aware that your fellow labourers in other parts of the world are being cruelly and shamelessly strangled in cold blood by the British—the greatest enemy of Islam? The British government is the same which has enslaved 70 millions of Moslems in India, which rules Egypt with fire and sword, which has wiped out Tripoli and dismembered the Turkish Empire. 7 Lal Salaams Ghadar and the Bolshevik Muhajirin ghadar and the bolshevik muhajirin 195 And what could listeners do about this? he asked rhetorically. Well, for a start, one might win over the Indian sepoys. He closed with this exhortation: “Long live the working classes! Long live the Soviet and Lenin! Long live Islam and the true followers of Islam!” As had been the case in wartime between the Germans, Ottomans, PanIslamists , Ghadarites, and other assorted Indian national revolutionaries, now after the war Bolsheviks and Pan-Islamists identified each other as important allies in the struggle against Western imperialism, especially as manifest in its most advanced form, British capitalism. Those Indians still enmeshed in the revolutionary network abroad found themselves more often than not in a zone of overlap, in which they seem to have seamlessly spliced together some of the compatible threads from both sides. A secret memorandum in December 1919 on “Defensive measures proposed for dealing with Bolshevism” made this judgment: There is no possible doubt that enemy agencies in Europe of various sorts—Germans, CUP, Egyptian Committee and seditious Indians—are working hard to write and to cause us every trouble in the East. There are two great sources of trouble. One is Islamic feeling to be played upon. The climax may be intended to come when the dismemberment of Turkey is announced . The other is Bolshevism. The military fortunes of which, though uncertain , are improving, and which is making extra ordinary efforts to dominate Central Asia and to penetrate to India. The geographical coincidence of the Muslim world and the Oppressed Peoples of the East also created convenient opportunities for rhetorical transference. A report summarizing this “serious menace” centered the Soviet policy for the East upon India as the linchpin of anti-British strategy, with Turkestan, Bokhara, Khiva, and Afghanistan counted in its sphere of influence, and adjacent states serving as corridors of propaganda. The central Asia/Transcaucasus region had long been crucial for both Russian and British strategy in the never-ending Great Game of balance-of-power politics around the edges of the Ottoman Empire. It was no different now that the players had changed, especially as, even more than access to India, access to oil was becoming an ever more important factor. The Baku conference of 1920 was touted as the follow-up to the Second Congress of the Third International at which the national-colonial question had been elaborated in the famous interchange between Lenin and Roy. Delegates from throughout west, central, south, and east Asia converged in a massive gathering in the “vanguard” oil-refining center, where the majority-Muslim industrial workforce had just a few months earlier proclaimed the new Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic. During the course of this mobilization, Soviet rhetoric explicitly called upon Muslims as such to play a role in the world revolution. The other tactical component in the “liberation of Asia” to be directed from Tashkent...