Volga-Ural Muslims and Crimean Tatars in revolution

The All-Russian Muslim Congress in Moscow, 1917: federation or cultural autonomy?

Organised Muslim politics in Russia began with the 1905 revolution. That August a Muslim congress in Nizhny Novgorod founded the first Muslim party, Ittifaq al-Muslimin (Union of the Muslims of Russia). Dominated by Volga Tatar intellectuals and strongly influenced by Jadidism, the Islamic reform movement, it followed a liberal constitutional line close to the Constitutional Democrats. Its leaders entered the State Duma in 1906 and formed a Muslim faction in all four Dumas. Sadri Maksudi, a lawyer from Kazan, sat in the Second and Third Dumas, and in a 1909 speech the Kadet leader Pavel Milyukov rebuked the Right: "Deputy Maksudov, a Muslim and a Tatar, tells you, 'I feel Russian, I am Russian!', and you answer that you will not give him what he needs to love Russia." After the February Revolution the Russian Provisional Government declared all citizens equal, and on 1–11 May 1917 the All-Russian Muslim Congress met in Moscow. More than 900 delegates came from the Caucasus, Crimea, the Kazakh steppe, the Lithuanian Tatars, central Russia and Siberia, Turkestan, Bukhara and Khiva; 300 of them were clergy and 112 were women. Ayaz Ishaki, Zaki Validi, Mammad Amin Rasulzade and Musa Bigiev attended, and so did a young teacher, Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev. Every party and left-wing faction sent representatives except the Bolsheviks. 1 2 3 4

The fiercest question was the shape of the new Russian state. The Volga-Ural Tatar delegates wanted a single religious autonomy and a common representative body for all Russia's Muslims, together with national-cultural autonomy granted to nations rather than territories, for carving out a territory did not suit Tatars scattered from the Volga to Siberia. Leaders of the North Caucasian mountaineers stressed territorial autonomy to protect their traditions and lands, and the Azerbaijanis, moving from religious autonomy to broad regional self-government, sought to turn Russia into a federal republic. The federal scheme proposed by Rasulzade carried by 446 votes to 271. The resolution declared that "the form of state best suited to Russia is a democratic republic organised on a national-territorial-federative basis", added that nations without a definite territory should enjoy national-cultural self-determination, and called for a central Muslim institution with legislative powers over religious and cultural affairs. Other resolutions were radical too: the eight-hour day and a ban on child labour, and, by majority vote, bans on polygamy and bride price and the right of women to vote and to dress as they chose. A protest petition with 226 signatures was handed to the presidium. For the first time a mufti was elected rather than appointed by the Tsar, and a woman, Mukhlisa Bubi, was elected one of the six qadis. 2

On 11 May the congress founded the All-Russian Muslim Council. Thirty members were elected, and its twelve-member executive committee was chaired by Ahmed Tsalikov. The Council asked the Russian Provisional Government to deal only with it on all Muslim matters, and in early July it even put forward Muslim candidates for ministerial posts to Prime Minister Georgy Lvov, without result. During Kornilov's march in August its envoys went out to the mountaineer soldiers of the "Savage Division" and persuaded them to stop. Yet the organisation was weak. Tsalikov complained that never even three quarters of the Council's thirty-odd delegates had gathered, and that of the twelve executive members only four or five actually worked. The centre of gravity shifted to the regions. On 22 July 1917 in Kazan a joint session of three All-Russian Muslim congresses, general, military and clerical, proclaimed the "national-cultural autonomy of the Muslims of European Russia and Siberia" and set up a national parliament and a national administration with departments of education, finance and religion, all headed by Sadri Maksudi. This plan to unite all dispersed Muslims as one national community without a territory would after October rapidly turn into plans for a territorial state. 2 5

The Idel-Ural State and the "Trans-Bulak Republic", 1917–1918

The Millet Mejlis, the national assembly of the Turko-Tatar Muslims of Inner Russia and Siberia, opened in Ufa in early December 1917 (20 November Old Style) and sat into late January 1918. In January 1918 Sadri Maksudi was elected chairman of the national administration, the Milli Idare, and the Mejlis laid down a procedure for founding a Volga-Ural state, Idel-Ural in Tatar, entrusting an eight-member commission with a draft constitution, the borders and the economy. The borders were bitterly contested. A state including all Tatars, Chuvash and Mari would have been 44 per cent Muslim; one made of the whole of Kazan and Ufa provinces and parts of Perm, Orenburg, Samara and Simbirsk, 51 per cent; one adding all of Samara province and the Bukey Horde, only 29 per cent. The Turkist faction wanted a "Greater Idel-Ural" reaching Samara and Astrakhan, with an outlet via the Caspian to the Caucasus, Iran and Turkestan. Whether the Bashkirs were part of the "Tatar nation" was also disputed. Bashkir sources relate that when most delegates at the Menzelinsk district Muslim congress in January 1918 leaned towards Bashkir autonomy, the Mejlis hurriedly telegraphed that the Bashkirs had already joined the state and so won the vote back. 6 7 3 8

Those who tried to put the plan into practice were the Second All-Russian Muslim Military Congress, held in Kazan from 8 January to 3 March 1918, and its executive, the Harbi Shuro (military council). The congress resolved to create, within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, an Idel-Ural state made up of the whole of Ufa province and parts of Kazan, Simbirsk, Samara, Orenburg, Perm and Vyatka provinces. But it split over whether to accept the Constituent Assembly or the soviets, and the Harbi Shuro leaned towards proclaiming a soviet rather than a parliamentary republic. Russian-language sources see the project's basic weakness in the fact that Tatars then had almost no representation in the soviets or the national party organisations, and that Tatar workers and peasants were barely self-organised. When a joint meeting of Kazan's Muslim organisations decided on 26 February to proclaim the state and posters went up the next day, the Kazan Soviet of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies declared martial law on 28 February and arrested the leaders of the military congress and the Harbi Shuro. Released that evening, they moved their sessions across the Bulak stream into the Tatar quarter, and there on 1 March proclaimed Idel-Ural an autonomous state within Soviet Russia. Soviet historiography called it the "Trans-Bulak Republic" (Zabulachnaya respublika). In reality it controlled only parts of Kazan and Ufa. 7 6

The Trans-Bulak government had its own council of people's commissars and a revolutionary staff that raised armed squads, and announced in its newspaper that it recognised the soviets and would cooperate with any organisation that supported Idel-Ural. The Soviet government chose another path. On 22 March the People's Commissariat for Nationalities issued its decision on a "Tatar-Bashkir Soviet Republic" as the soviet alternative to Idel-Ural, and Sultan-Galiev and Mullanur Vakhitov fought the national organisations. On 24 March a decree signed by Joseph Stalin and Vakhitov dissolved the Harbi Shuro. On 27 March Red Army soldiers cordoned off the Tatar quarter of Kazan and the city soviet gave the Trans-Bulak revolutionary staff an ultimatum to hand over all its weapons and supplies. Shots rang out when it expired, but the "Trans-Bulak army" surrendered without serious fighting, and on 28 March the members of its council and staff were arrested. Kazan Red Guards, a detachment of sailors sent from Moscow at Vakhitov's request and an armed band of the Vaisov sect took part. In April the National Council was dissolved and its property confiscated, and on 1 May the Milli Idare and all its institutions were banned. Some deputies formed a "Little Mejlis" that carried on in areas free of the Bolsheviks, and in July, with the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion, the national administration was partly restored, but this changed nothing in substance. At the end of 1918 the remnants of the Harbi Shuro's troops joined Kolchak's army as the 16th Tatar Regiment. Maksudi fled to Finland, stayed in Tampere, and in 1919 pleaded the political rights of the peoples of Idel-Ural at the Paris Peace Conference, without result. 7 9 6 10

From the Muslim Socialist Committee to the Muslim Commissariat: Vakhitov and Sultan-Galiev

There were Tatar revolutionaries on the side that brought Idel-Ural down, too. Between February and April 1917 Muslim Socialist Committees appeared in several cities, the best known in Kazan. Mensheviks, Bolsheviks, SRs and anarchists sat side by side, but all distinguished between Russians and Muslims, in this region the Tatars and Bashkirs; they understood socialism in connection with the Islamic ummah, put land reform in their programme, and were fiercely hostile to clergy and landowners. Their leader, Mullanur Vakhitov, born in 1885, had studied at the St Petersburg Polytechnic and the law faculty of the Psychoneurological Institute, where he met Mikhail Frunze among others and organised a circle of Muslim students. He ran anti-war and revolutionary propaganda through the committee's newspaper Qızıl Bayraq (Red Banner), helped establish Soviet power in Kazan in October as a member of the city's Military Revolutionary Committee, and was elected to the Constituent Assembly. Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, a Tatar teacher from Ufa province, met Vakhitov in Kazan in July 1917, set up the committee with him and joined the Bolsheviks in November. Answering charges of betrayal in December, he wrote: "I go to them not from sycophancy but from love for my people. Only they stopped the war; only they are striving to place the fate of the nationalities in their own hands." After October the committee formed Red Guard detachments against the Harbi Shuro. Soviet historians later judged it not a truly proletarian but a petty-bourgeois organisation. 11 12 9 4 13

In early December 1917 (20 November Old Style) the Sovnarkom issued its appeal "To all the toiling Muslims of Russia and the East". The All-Russian Muslim Council, whose paper had written ten days earlier that "Bolshevism must die a natural death through social isolation", now swung to conditional support: "Never has any European government spoken to Muslims in such language." Tsalikov met Stalin, People's Commissar for Nationalities, and promised loyalty if Muslims were guaranteed the right to order their own lives; Stalin proposed a commissariat for Muslim affairs that would include representatives of the major Muslim peoples. But when the Commissariat for the Muslim Affairs of Inner Russia (Muskom) was set up under the People's Commissariat for Nationalities on 17 January 1918, it was headed not by Tsalikov but by Vakhitov, on Lenin's advice. Sultan-Galiev joined it as the representative of the Russian Communist Party, with the Ottoman communist Mustafa Suphi as his secretary. Muskom had sections for labour, agriculture, industry, education, the press, finance, justice, the army and culture, and in June 1918 a Central Muslim Military Collegium was formed with Sultan-Galiev as chairman. The All-Russian Muslim Council, meanwhile, split over Stalin's offer. When the Millet Mejlis recalled its Volga representatives the Council effectively collapsed, and in May 1918 a decision abolishing it, signed by Stalin and Vakhitov, transferred its property to Muskom. 5 14 4 15

The "Regulations on the Tatar-Bashkir Soviet Republic" of March 1918, signed by Vakhitov, envisaged a soviet republic with roughly the borders of Idel-Ural, and in May Sultan-Galiev prepared its founding congress. The civil war buried the plan. Appointed extraordinary food commissar for the Volga in July, Vakhitov went to Kazan in August to raise troops against the Whites; when Komuch's People's Army took the city he was captured and executed on 19 August. Sultan-Galiev, who helped organise the defence of Kazan, took part in rooting out opponents after its recapture in September, and in April 1919, during Kolchak's spring offensive, was rushed to the Eastern Front to restore the morale of the Tatar 21st Division at Malmyzh. According to English-language sources he was instrumental in bringing Zaki Validi's Bashkirs over to the Bolsheviks, weakening Kolchak's army. On 10 July 1919 he signed Order No. 10 forbidding agitation against the Bashkir Republic and reprisals against the Bashkir people. At the Second All-Russian Congress of Communist Organisations of the Peoples of the East late that year he pressed for the revival of the Tatar-Bashkir republic, but the resolution passed only narrowly and every Bashkir communist opposed it. On 13 December 1919 the Politburo decided not to create the republic, to annul the decree of March 1918 and to forbid further agitation for it. 16 9 4 13

Bashkir autonomy and the Bashkir Army: from alliance with Dutov and Kolchak to the switch of sides

The Bashkir movement countered the Idel-Ural plan with a territory of its own. The Bashkir delegation to the May 1917 Muslim congress formed a Bashkir Regional Bureau in Moscow, which in June organised councils (shuros) in the rural districts. The first and second All-Bashkir Qurultays, held in Orenburg in July and in Ufa in August, set as their goal "a democratic republic on a national-territorial basis within a federal Russia", and a Bashkir Central Shuro was established in Orenburg. Its leading figure, Zaki Validi, born in 1890 in Kuzyanovo in Sterlitamak district, was a historian who had taught Turkic and Tatar history at the Qasimiya madrasa in Kazan, worked in the bureau supporting the Muslim Duma deputies in 1915–1917, joined the SR Party in 1917 and was elected to the Constituent Assembly from Ufa province. Russian-language sources cite research suggesting that before 1917 he acted as a Tatar intellectual and came forward more and more as a Bashkir figure as he rose to lead the Bashkir republic. On 28 November 1917 (15 November Old Style) the Central Shuro, in a resolution signed by its chairman Sharif Manatov, his deputy Validi and others, "declared the Bashkir territory of Orenburg, Ufa, Samara and Perm provinces an autonomous part of the Russian Republic". The Third (Constituent) Qurultay, held in Orenburg's Caravanserai from 21 December to 2 January 1918, approved this unanimously, set up a pre-parliament, the Kese Qurultay, of 22 members, one per 100,000 inhabitants, and a Bashkir government, and decided to create a Bashkir Army under Validi. This "Lesser Bashkiria" covered 79,560 square kilometres with 1.25 million people in nine cantons, and made Bashkir the sole official language. 17 8 18 19

In January 1918 Manatov met Lenin in Petrograd. Lenin told him, "We do not regard the Bashkir movement as counter-revolutionary or directed against us. We consider the national movements of the peoples of the East quite natural and very necessary", yet the Soviet government did not recognise the autonomy. After the Red Army took Orenburg at the end of January, the Central Shuro stayed in the city, claiming neutrality, but on the night of 15–16 February (3–4 February Old Style) the Orenburg Muslim Military Revolutionary Committee arrested seven members of the Bashkir government, Validi among them. Russian-language sources write that the arrests, based on a slander of collusion with Ataman Alexander Dutov, were approved only after the fact. On 26 February two hundred Bashkirs at the Orenburg peasant congress resolved to go hand in hand with the soviets provided territorial autonomy was not harmed, but tension did not ease. On 5 March the Orenburg provincial revolutionary committee telegraphed every Bashkir district that unless they disarmed within three days it would shoot the whole arrested regional council and sweep away suspect villages with artillery and machine guns, and two members of the Bashkir government were shot. On the night of 3–4 April Amir Karamyshev's Bashkir detachments, together with Cossacks, stormed the Orenburg prison and freed the members of the government, and on 7–8 April a secret meeting in Ufa decided on guerrilla war against the Bolsheviks. 8 17 20 18

At the end of May the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion allowed the Bashkir autonomous bodies to re-establish themselves in Chelyabinsk. On 1 June the government called for armed struggle and declared mobilisation, and in September a Separate Bashkir Corps of five regiments was formed. The Bashkir Army passed 10,000 men within five months and, under an agreement with the Provisional Siberian Government, came under the unified operational command of the Whites. Dutov backed the autonomy: "We Cossacks will also govern ourselves; of course you have every right to such government." In May at Kustanay the Bashkirs discussed joint struggle with the Alash Orda, and at Samara in August–September a "Federation of South-Eastern Muslim Regions" uniting Bashkiria, the Kazakhs and Central Asia was planned, but never realised. Komuch recognised Bashkir national-territorial autonomy by a treaty in September, and a Bashkir delegation helped found the Provisional All-Russian Government (the Ufa Directory) at the Ufa State Conference of 8–23 September. What turned the situation was the Omsk coup of November 1918. Alexander Kolchak's government refused to recognise national and regional autonomies and announced it would liquidate the Bashkir government and army; it abolished the Bashkir military council and corps staff and handed command of the Bashkir regiments to Dutov. In late November at Krasnaya Mechet the Bashkir government, representatives of the Alash Orda including Mustafa Shokay, Komuch figures including Victor Chernov and socialist-minded Cossack commanders agreed on an anti-Kolchak front, and in early December a plot was laid to arrest Dutov in Orenburg. Dutov got wind of it and escaped to loyal Cossack units, and the plot failed. 8 17 20 19

With nowhere left to turn, the Bashkir government opened talks with the Red Army. On 16 February 1919 it resolved that "without waiting for the end of negotiations, from 10 o'clock on 18 February it considers itself to have gone over to the side of Soviet power", and declared it would turn its arms "against the enemies of the revolution, freedom and national self-determination: Kolchak, Dutov and all world imperialists". Secret Order No. 70 the same day directed the Bashkir Army to change sides. On 20–21 February the First All-Bashkir Military Congress, with 92 delegates elected by the regiments, met in the village of Temyasovo. It approved the switch and set up a Provisional Bashkir Military Revolutionary Committee (Bashrevkom), with Validi as commissar for military affairs and deputy chairman. One commander told the congress: "Bashkirs have fought many times for their freedom, and each time Russian historians called it a rebellion. This latest attempt at self-determination is the 88th rebellion." The switch was not smooth. When the command of the Red 1st Army broke the terms of the transfer and carried out reprisals, some battalions and a cavalry regiment went back to Kolchak; some returned after being promised personal safety. Later two thousand former Bashkir soldiers joined the White emigration in the Far East. When Kolchak's spring offensive took Ufa in March, the Bashkir republic lay in the middle of the front. 8 20 19

Soviet autonomous republics: the Bashkir crisis of 1920 and the Tatar ASSR

On 20 March 1919 the "Agreement of the Central Soviet Power with the Bashkir Government on Soviet Autonomous Bashkiria" was signed in Moscow, on the Soviet side by Vladimir Lenin, Mikhail Vladimirsky as acting chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, and Stalin as Commissar for Nationalities, and on the Bashkir side by three men led by the head of the government, Mukhametkhan (Mstislav) Kulaev. Its sixteen articles provided that "the Autonomous Bashkir Soviet Republic is formed within the borders of Lesser Bashkiria and is a federal part of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic". It was the first national autonomous republic of Soviet Russia, and Russian-language sources stress that it was the only one created by treaty. As Kolchak's troops approached, the Bashrevkom was evacuated to Saransk from April to August and returned to Sterlitamak on 20 August; in October a "Bashkir Relief" was decreed for Bashkirs who had suffered from White violence. But over the implementation of autonomy and federal principles the Bashrevkom clashed at every turn with most members of the Bashkir regional party committee, the Bashkir Cheka and the military and food commissariats. On the night of 15–16 January 1920 the Bashrevkom arrested members of the Bashkir Cheka, and after this "January conflict" Validi became its chairman in February. On 12 March the Bashrevkom accused the centre of breaking the agreement and demanded the recall of Moscow's envoys who opposed Bashkir autonomy and an end to party interference in administration. Validi, who spent that winter in Moscow, opposed reviving the Tatar-Bashkir republic and proposed a Kirghiz (Kazakh)-Bashkir republic instead. 21 22 19 23

Moscow's answer was the decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Sovnarkom of 19 May 1920 "On the state structure of the Autonomous Soviet Bashkir Republic". The republic's organs were now to consist, under the constitution of the Russian republic, of local soviets, a Bashkir Central Executive Committee and a council of people's commissars, and Russian-language sources judge that the republic thereby effectively lost the political and economic sovereignty guaranteed by the agreement. On 16 June the first Bashrevkom, Validi included, resigned in a body. Validi left for Turkestan via Baku, and in September sent Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky and Alexei Rykov a letter denouncing the Bolsheviks' great-power policy. He went on to lead the Basmachi movement, a story told in Revolution and war in Central Asia. The decree and the Bashrevkom's resignation were among the causes of an anti-Bolshevik rising in three cantons, including Burzyan-Tangaur, and a new wave of revolt broke out in spring 1921. In July a First Congress of Soviets in Sterlitamak replaced the Bashrevkom with a Bashkir Central Executive Committee. The famine that followed took 650,000 people, 22 per cent of the republic's population. In June 1922 Lesser Bashkiria was merged with Ufa province into "Greater Bashkiria", of which Validi wrote in his memoirs: "They say Ufa province was joined to Bashkortostan, but in fact Bashkortostan was joined to Ufa province." 21 22 19 18 24

Once the Tatar-Bashkir republic was dropped in December 1919, the question passed to a separate Tatar autonomous republic. On 22 March 1920 Lenin received Burhan Mansurov and other Tatar communists in the Kremlin to discuss it. On 27 May a decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Sovnarkom proclaimed the "Autonomous Tatar Socialist Soviet Republic", which came into being on 25 June when the Kazan provincial executive committee handed all its powers to a provisional revolutionary committee. The committee fixed the borders by September, and a constituent congress of soviets on 26–27 September elected the Tatar Central Executive Committee and the first council of people's commissars. Menzelinsk district was also included in the Tatar republic at this time; the capital was Kazan. The constitution of the Russian republic allowed "autonomous regional unions" to join it on federal principles, and these took concrete form as the Volga German Labour Commune at the end of 1918, the Bashkir republic in March 1919, the Tatar republic in May 1920 and the Karelian Labour Commune and the Chuvash Autonomous Oblast in June 1920. The new Tatar republic soon faced the drought and famine of 1921, and in 1921–1922 needed more than 8 million poods of seed and 6 million poods of food from other regions. 16 25 26 21

The Qurultay, the Crimean People's Republic and the death of Noman Çelebicihan

In Crimea the Crimean Tatars were a minority: according to English-language sources, 42 per cent of the inhabitants were then Russians and 11 per cent Ukrainians. Yet thanks to a new elite formed by Ismail Gasprinski's newspaper Terciman, the Crimean Tatars were for a time the strongest political and cultural force on the peninsula. On 25 March 1917 an All-Crimean Muslim congress in Simferopol set up a Provisional Crimean Muslim Executive Committee and elected Noman Çelebicihan its chairman; he was also the first Crimean mufti chosen by delegates' vote rather than appointed by the Minister of the Interior. Born in 1885 in a village near Dzhankoy, Çelebicihan had studied law in Istanbul, where in 1909 he founded the secret society Vatan (Homeland) with Cafer Seydahmet and others. Seydahmet, born in 1889, published The Oppressed Crimean Tatar Nation in the Twentieth Century in Istanbul in 1911, studied at the Sorbonne in Paris to escape Russian demands for his arrest, and during the war trained as an officer and served as a junior officer. The committee took over education reform and religious and land administration, published the newspaper Millet (Nation) and tried to create units manned by Crimean Tatars. On 23 June Çelebicihan was arrested by the counter-intelligence of the Sevastopol fortress for anti-government agitation among Tatar soldiers, but was soon released after a protest bearing 5,000 signatures. The Tatar Party founded in July, called Milliy Firqa from 1919, adopted a programme of national-cultural autonomy in November, but the editor Asan Sabri Ayvazov recorded that there was also an unofficial programme for an independent republic under the protection of European powers. The party soon split into moderates and a left wing close to the Bolsheviks. 27 28 29 30 31 32

In October 1917 a meeting of Crimean Tatar organisations decided that the peninsula's future should be settled by a Qurultay. Delegates were elected on 30 November (17 November Old Style), and on 9 December (26 November Old Style) the Qurultay opened in the Khan's Palace at Bakhchysarai. Of its 76 delegates, elected in the five districts of Yalta, Simferopol, Feodosia, Yevpatoria and Perekop, four were women; Ayvazov was elected chairman. By 40 votes to 20 the Qurultay set up a five-member Directory as national government, with Çelebicihan as chairman and director of justice and Seydahmet in charge of foreign and military affairs. On 26 December (13 December Old Style) it approved the "Crimean Tatar Basic Laws" and proclaimed the Crimean People's (Democratic) Republic. In a speech before the opening Çelebicihan said: "Roses, lilies and tulips grow in Crimea, each with its own beauty and scent. These flowers are the Tatars, Russians, Armenians, Jews, Germans and others who live in Crimea. The Qurultay's aim is to gather them into a beautiful bouquet and found a truly civilised Switzerland in Crimea." The Crimean Tatars, he said, would act not as leaders but as initiators. The Directory and the Ukrainian Central Rada recognised each other. But the government's armed force amounted in practice to one cavalry (dragoon) regiment manned by Crimean Tatars, a few officer companies, and Ukrainian, Greek, Jewish, Armenian and Polish units. Pyotr Wrangel, then in Crimea, recalled that Seydahmet offered him command of the troops and that he refused, calling the government's politics "typical Kerenskyism". 29 27 33 30 34 28

The Crimean People's Republic lasted little more than a month. In mid-December the Bolsheviks took Sevastopol, headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet, and dissolved the city council. The Crimean government formed a United Crimean Headquarters on 19 December; in early January 1918 it seized the governor's residence, the "People's House", but left it the next day amid criticism, and Çelebicihan resigned in protest. He still tried to avert conflict, proposing on 10 January that the Qurultay create a commission to negotiate with the Bolsheviks. On 24 January (11 January Old Style) the Directory sent troops against Sevastopol to gain control of the whole peninsula; they were beaten in two days of fighting, and on 27 January forces backed by Sevastopol Red Guards and Black Sea Fleet sailors drove the Tatar units out of Simferopol. Seydahmet escaped to Kyiv; Çelebicihan was arrested and imprisoned in Sevastopol. On 23 February 1918 he was killed without trial by revolutionary sailors and his body was thrown into the Black Sea. His poem "Ant Etkenmen" (I Have Sworn) became the Crimean Tatar national anthem. By the end of January the Bolsheviks held the whole peninsula and dissolved the Qurultay and the Council of National Representatives. The first wave of Red Terror that followed fell chiefly on nobles and officers; Russian-language sources single out the Nemich family, who directed executions in Yevpatoria. 27 33 35 30 31

Changing regimes: from the Taurida Soviet Republic to White Crimea

On 10–12 February 1918 a conference of Crimean revolutionary committees (44 delegates, 27 of them Bolsheviks) declared itself an extraordinary congress of soviets and confirmed the dissolution of the Council of National Representatives and the Qurultay. On 19 and 21 March the Taurida Soviet Socialist Republic was proclaimed in Simferopol, with Anton Slutsky as chairman of its council of people's commissars; the Crimean Tatar revolutionary İsmail Firdevs was commissar for foreign and national affairs from 22 March. The congress approved grain requisitioning, by armed force if necessary, for the industrial regions and the army. But after Brest-Litovsk the troops of the Ukrainian People's Republic, with German help, pushed into the peninsula. Milliy Firqa rose at Alushta, and on 24 April near the village of Biyuk-Lambat a Crimean Tatar detachment captured and shot most of the Taurida government, Slutsky included. The republic was abolished on 30 April, and by 1 May three German infantry divisions and a cavalry brigade under General Robert Kosch occupied all of Crimea. Germany's eastern occupation as a whole is covered in Brest-Litovsk, and relations between Ukraine and Crimea in Ukraine's revolution and wars. 36 32 37

On 25 June 1918 a Crimean Regional Government was formed under German protection. Its prime minister, also minister of the interior and of war, was Maciej (Suleyman) Sulkiewicz, a Lipka Tatar lieutenant general of the Imperial Russian Army. In October 1917 he had been named to command of the 1st Muslim Corps that the Russian Provisional Government planned to form, but the corps never reached Crimea and was disarmed by the Austrians on the Romanian front. Seydahmet returned as foreign minister, a German colonist became minister of agriculture and a Lipka Tatar jurist minister of justice, while Ayvazov went as ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. The government's declaration proclaimed the peninsula's separate status and Crimean citizenship, made Russian, Crimean Tatar and German the state languages, and restored private property. But all its activity was controlled by the occupation command. A delegation to Berlin in July sought recognition of independence from Ukraine and loans, without success, and a secret memorandum from the Crimean Tatar Directory proposing a Crimean khanate under German and Turkish protection found no support either. Relations with Pavlo Skoropadskyi's Ukrainian Hetmanate soured from the start: Sulkiewicz bridled at a telegram in Ukrainian addressing him as "provincial starosta", and Kyiv blockaded Crimea. At talks in Kyiv in September–October Ukraine offered incorporation with the broadest autonomy and Crimea proposed a federal union, but no agreement was reached. Russian officials and officers who had fled to the peninsula shunned this pro-German, separatist government, and when Sulkiewicz, warned of the coming German withdrawal, asked for help in November, Anton Denikin refused for the same reasons. 38 39 37 40 31

On 15 November 1918 Sulkiewicz handed power to a second Crimean Regional Government under Solomon Krym, a Karaite and former Kadet chosen by the Crimean zemstvo. Seydahmet left for Istanbul; Sulkiewicz became chief of the general staff of the Azerbaijani army and was shot by the Bolsheviks in July 1920. Allied forces, mostly French and Greek, landed at the end of November but withdrew in April 1919 after the loss of Odessa, and that April the Red Army entered Simferopol. Lenin urged the Crimean Bolshevik Yuri Gaven to "avoid the earlier mistakes; the national question requires the most careful attitude". The Crimean Socialist Soviet Republic, proclaimed on 6 May, was headed by Lenin's brother Dmitry Ulyanov, with Pavel Dybenko as commissar for the army and navy and Alexandra Kollontai as commissar for propaganda. It called itself a territorial rather than a national entity, yet put five Crimean Tatars in its council of people's commissars, and an article in the name of Milliy Firqa claimed the party had been preparing the Tatar working masses to welcome the Bolsheviks for five or six months. On 18 June, however, Yakov Slashchov's Whites landed at Koktebel, and the Soviet government left the peninsula on 23–26 June. The Whites were hostile to the Crimean Tatar national movement. In August General Nikolai Schilling of the Armed Forces of South Russia dissolved the Crimean Tatar Directory, restored the tsarist-era Taurida Muslim Spiritual Board, arrested the Directory's leaders for separatism, alliance with Turkey and collaboration with the Bolsheviks, and closed Millet. The party went underground, and sympathy for the Bolsheviks grew among the population. The Whites held the peninsula until November 1920; Wrangel's last stand and the breach at Perekop are covered in The Civil War and Foreign Intervention. 38 39 41 42 32 40

Crimea after November 1920: the Red Terror and the Crimean ASSR

On 11 November 1920 the Revolutionary Military Council of the Southern Front radioed Wrangel an offer of full pardon for all acts committed in the civil war to all who laid down their arms, with free departure abroad for those who wished. The next day Lenin telegraphed that he was "extremely surprised at the excessive leniency of the terms. If the enemy refuses them, they must not be repeated, and he must be dealt with mercilessly." After Wrangel's army sailed, the Red Army entered Simferopol on 13 November and held every town by the 17th. Prisoners numbered 52,100 according to a Soviet encyclopedia and 54,696 according to the Crimean historian Broshevan. On 16 November Felix Dzerzhinsky sent the head of the Southern Front's special department a ciphered telegram: "Take every measure so that not a single White Guard gets from Crimea to the mainland." The next day the revolutionary committee began the terror. A ban on leaving the peninsula, justified by the fight against epidemics, lasted until autumn 1921. Moscow sent Georgy Pyatakov, Rozaliya Zemlyachka and Béla Kun; Kun declared that "Crimea is a bottle from which not one counter-revolutionary will escape". Officers and officials who registered as ordered were shot, publicly hanged or drowned, and even the wounded were killed in hospitals. On 14 December 1920 the Crimean Bolshevik Yuri Gaven wrote to a member of the party Central Committee: "Here Béla Kun has turned into a genius of mass terror. I too am for mass terror, but we are also killing people who helped and hid our underground workers." 43

The number of victims is still sharply disputed. The historian Ratkovsky gives about 12,000; the Crimean historian Petrov at least 20,000 as a "provable" figure; the lowest estimate is 15,000. Sultan-Galiev, who toured Crimea in spring 1921, reported on the word of local officials that 20,000–25,000 of Wrangel's officers had been shot, up to 12,000 in Simferopol alone, and that rumour put the total at 70,000. The figure of 52,000–56,000 that circulated in the emigration as "official Soviet data" is considered greatly inflated by the historian Ganin. The writer Ivan Shmelyov and the historian Sergei Melgunov spoke of 120,000, and other contemporaries of up to 150,000, but in 2008 the Crimean historian Zarubin called 120,000 unrealistically high. A documentary study of White rule in Crimea counts 1,428 arrests and 281 executions. Views on responsibility also diverge. Most modern Russian historians see the terror as instigated by the Bolshevik centre, and Zarubin points out that command authority lay with Mikhail Frunze, who endorsed an award for Yefim Yevdokimov, head of the Southern Front's special department. Dzerzhinsky, by contrast, told the writer Veresaev in 1923 that "we sent comrades there with quite exceptional powers, but we never thought they would use them like that", blaming the men on the spot. Kun and Zemlyachka were recalled in January 1921, but their successors carried on the terror in milder form. Over the winter 8,000–10,000 people fled to the mountains and formed partisan bands. 43 13

The Crimean Tatar national movement tried to come to terms with the new regime. On 25 November 1920 the Milliy Firqa central committee wrote to the Crimean Revolutionary Committee calling Soviet Russia "the first and natural friend and ally of oppressed Islam", and asked for the party's legalisation, control of religious and educational affairs and waqfs, and permission to publish Millet; the regional party committee refused on 30 November. In December grain requisitioning was introduced. Veli İbraimov, a Crimean Tatar communist who had joined the Bolsheviks in 1918 and served in a Cheka special department on the Caucasian front in 1919–1920, and his supporters repeatedly asked that Crimea be declared a famine region and requisitioning stopped, but food exports, seed grain included, only grew. In March 1921 Moscow sent Sultan-Galiev to Crimea, to keep him away from other Muslim leaders during the Tenth Party Congress. In his report "On the situation in Crimea", written after six weeks there, he called "the excessively broad use of Red Terror" the "first and very great mistake", charged that workers and people sincerely willing to serve Soviet power had been stripped naked and shot in batches of dozens, and that the special departments, the Cheka and the naval special department each acted on its own with no division of powers. He warned that the southern districts, populated mainly by Tatars, were "literally starving". The report landed in Moscow "like a bomb", and in May a commission of the party Central Committee and the Sovnarkom came to Crimea and agreed with its conclusions. Its member Bulushev wrote to Stalin that "all power in Crimea consists of appointees with nothing in common with the local population; the peasants see Soviet power as an even greater exploiter than tsarism". 32 44 45 43 13

After the work of a plenipotentiary commission in Crimea from late May to late August 1921, the "Autonomous Crimean Socialist Soviet Republic" was created within the Russian republic on 18 October. Its territory was the Crimean peninsula with its seven districts of Dzhankoy, Yevpatoria, Kerch, Sevastopol, Simferopol, Feodosia and Yalta, and its first constitution, adopted on 10 November, made Crimean Tatar and Russian the state languages. The organ of the People's Commissariat for Nationalities wrote on 25 October that many had wanted Crimea to be a mere oblast, but that wide rights had been given to the native population in order to win the trust of the Crimean Tatar countryside, which had long been ruined materially and culturally. The Soviet authorities recognised the Crimean Tatars and Karaites as native peoples. Veli İbraimov became People's Commissar of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspection in November 1921. But the republic was born in famine. From autumn 1921 to spring 1923 about 100,000 people in Crimea, 15 per cent of the 1921 population, starved to death, some 76,000 of them Crimean Tatars. İbraimov himself estimated that 76,000 of 110,000 dead were Tatars, while English-language sources say more than 100,000 Crimean Tatars alone died. The famine and the Volga are covered in The Russian Famine of 1921–1922. The terror slowly died away, lasting until November 1921. 46 47 44 43 28

Assessment: national autonomy, Soviet federalism and what followed

The state envisioned by the Muslim movements of the Volga-Urals and Crimea in 1917 was a federal democratic republic built on national-territorial lines, with cultural autonomy for dispersed peoples. The Soviet regime promised the right of secession and national equality in its Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia and its appeal to the Muslims, but in practice it dissolved the national bodies of Idel-Ural, the Crimean Qurultay and the All-Russian Muslim Council, and put party-led Soviet autonomous republics in their place: Bashkiria (March 1919) by treaty, Tatarstan (May 1920) and Crimea (October 1921) by decree. In the Bashkir case a relationship founded on treaty was turned by the decree of May 1920 into one of decisions from above. The American historian Richard Pipes, in the title of a 1950 article, called the Bashkir republic "the first experiment in Soviet national policy", while the Bashkir historian Kulsharipov regards the Bashkurdistan of 1917–1919 as the Bashkir people's first independent state, and Crimean Tatars remember the Crimean People's Republic as the first democratic republic in the Islamic world. Soviet historiography classed these movements as bourgeois nationalism and presented the autonomous republics as the form in which the self-determination of the working masses was realised. In 1936 Stalin explained why the Bashkir and Tatar republics could not become union republics: "they are surrounded on all sides by Soviet republics and regions, and they have, strictly speaking, nowhere to secede to." 48 23 8 28 24 21

After the civil war the Soviet regime pursued korenizatsiya, the training of national cadres and the use of local languages in administration and education. On 10 October 1920 Stalin wrote in Pravda that all institutions in the border regions should be staffed by people who knew the customs and languages of the local population, and the policy was systematised at the party congresses of March 1921 and April 1923. In the 1930s six of the Crimean ASSR's twenty districts were Crimean Tatar national districts, and the share of Bashkirs among delegates to Bashkir congresses of soviets rose from 25.8 to 35 per cent between 1925 and 1935. But the protagonists of this period were removed one after another. Sultan-Galiev held that unless the colonial peoples united in a communist movement of their own, even the proletariat of the imperial core would go on exploiting the colonies after a revolution. In 1923 he was accused of nationalist, pan-Islamic and pan-Turkic deviation, arrested and expelled from the party; rearrested in 1928, he was shot in Moscow on 28 January 1940. "Sultangalievism" became a label for repressing Tatar, Bashkir and Crimean Tatar communists. Veli İbraimov, chairman of the Crimean Central Executive Committee from 1924, opposed plans for Jewish settlement in Crimea and was shot in 1928 on a murder charge; that same year 58 people were convicted in the Milliy Firqa case and 11 shot. Both men were rehabilitated in 1990. In Bashkiria, too, "Validovism" and "Sultangalievism" became pretexts for purges. 49 46 24 4 13 44 32

The meaning of these events is read differently by each side. From the Soviet standpoint the Bolsheviks recognised the national movements of the East, in Lenin's words, as "natural and necessary", and gave the Muslims of the former empire, for the first time, republics bearing their own names, mother-tongue schools and national cadres. The Bashkir Army's switch in 1919 shook Kolchak's rear, and Crimean Tatar communists sat in Crimea's 1919 government and its 1921 autonomous republic. From the standpoint of the national movements, Idel-Ural, Bashkurdistan and the Crimean People's Republic were all autonomous bodies with elected assemblies and constitutions, which the Bolsheviks dispersed by force and replaced with autonomy created from above. The Whites, for their part, could be no ally of the national movements, since they dissolved the Bashkir Army and the Crimean Tatar Directory in the name of a "Russia one and indivisible". Of the leaders of this period, Sadri Maksudi, Cafer Seydahmet and Zaki Validi ended their lives in Turkey as scholars or politicians, and the émigrés got Idel-Ural onto the United States' Cold War list of "Captive Nations". For those who sided with the Soviets, from Vakhitov to Sultan-Galiev and İbraimov, the road led from execution in the civil war to the purges of the 1920s and 1930s, and after the deportation of the entire Crimean Tatar people in 1944 the Crimean autonomous republic was itself reduced to an oblast the following year. 17 6 10 34 18 47 28