-
8. “Under a Soviet Roof”: City, Country, and Center,1918–1923
- Indiana University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
8. “Under a Soviet Roof”: City, Country, and Center, 1918–1923 Former tsarist officials, adventurists, and kulaks, in the name of the class struggle, have effected the most preposterous schemes upon the local population. . . . This continuation of colonial politics has led directly to the enslavement of the native poor; until this ceases the local population will not come around to supporting soviet power by themselves, but will act in their own interests. In power alongside these colonial elements are the native exploiting elites who instead of helping the laboring masses in terms of national-cultural and class self-determination, practice intense exploitation of them, bringing all the traditions of feudal methods of oppression: bribery, thefts, and personal terror, all “under a soviet roof.”1 This summer 1920 analysis by the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party revealed continuing frustration at Tashkent Russians’ ability to maintain imperial privileges even as Bolshevik representatives from Moscow purged and arrested hundreds for “colonialist attitudes” (kolonizatorstvo) and sought to elevate non-elite Central Asians to positions of power.2 During 1918–23, violent confrontations in the soviets, streets, and villages of Tashkent and Turkestan unfolded over conflicts between center and periphery and colonizers and colonized. Tensions also worked along other axes, particularly an urban versus rural one. The desperate search for food and basic supplies catalyzed a bewildering and complex array of micro-constituencies outside of state control. As did the revolution, the civil war era in Turkestan unfolded according to its own dynamic. Communist and imperialist ideologies mixed with scarcity and isolation on the one hand and a legacy of interdependencies “Under a Soviet Roof” 209 fostered by colonial society on the other. Central as well as local officials strained to assert their authority and to build foundations for a new state underneath the “soviet roof” that succeeded imperial Russia. A multifaceted struggle, against a backdrop of intricate relationships on the ground, modifies contemporary historiographical views, which portray an eventually triumphant center seeking balance, and a degree of tolerance, as it struggled against parochial Russian and Central Asian regionalists and masses polarized along ethnic lines.3 Central Bolsheviks held their own imperial stereotypes and prejudices. Local Russians and Central Asians sought compromise as well as conflict. Power and violence nonetheless characterized the period, highlighted by the struggle for food. In the end, the main mission of central Bolshevik emissaries was less about ethnic equality and other features of modern socialist progress, and more about restoring a cotton economy to restart idling factories in central Russia. 1917–1918: A Distant Center Tashkent Russian frustration with the center had grown as food shortages worsened in early 1917. Unable to procure food elsewhere in the empire, Turkestan residents saw central army purchasing agents and wholesale traders outbidding local buyers and provision committees, then delivering the scant supplies to the front or major cities in European Russia.4 Central buyers flooded the region following the decision of the Petrograd Provisional Government not to include Turkestan in its grain monopoly.5 Competition, driving up prices, persuaded many farmers to grow food instead of cotton, which was still subject to fixed prices. Cotton production declined by 36 percent in 1917.6 Drought, however, prevented any rise in food supplies. Turkkom head Nalivkin’s pleas for more deliveries to combat an “inescapable famine” in Turkestan were met with silence; by August 1917 grain was not even reaching Petrograd.7 Tashkent soviet leaders, despite pleading for greater assistance from the new Bolshevik government, doubted that the center would prove a reliable ally. On November 20, 1917, as the Turkestan congress of soviets debated excluding the local population from political power, V. I. Lenin issued a proclamation “To All Muslim Toilers of Russia and the East.” The proclamation urged Muslims of Soviet Russia to lead the colonized populations of Asia in overthrowing European colonial rule.8 Lenin saw the Muslim poor, not Russian workers, as the new vanguard force in Central Asia. The blockade that separated central Russia from Turkestan made supporting this vision difficult, however. Lenin and [44.220.251.57] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 08:19 GMT) Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent 210 I. V. Stalin, the head of the People’s Commissariat on Nationality Affairs (Narkomnats), wavered as to whether to endorse the Russian-worker-led Tashkent soviet or the Kokand autonomy as a successor to the Provisional Government. The latter had appealed to the center to dissolve the “chauvinist” soviet as per Lenin’s policy favoring self...