Basmachi movement
바스마치 운동
The collective name for the Muslim armed resistance to Russian and Soviet rule in Central Asia—Turkestan, Bukhara and Khiva—from 1918 into the early 1930s. “Basmachi” is Uzbek for “raiders” or “bandits”, and Soviet historiography branded the movement an anti-Soviet, counter-revolutionary, bourgeois-nationalist one. Rooted in the anti-conscription revolt of 1916, it took off in Fergana after the Kokand massacre of 1918; the English-language source considers it to have ended by 1934.
In depth
Under Russian rule the Fergana Valley had been turned into a major cotton-growing region, multiplying indebted farmers and a landless rural proletariat, and the conscription of Muslims in 1916 set off the Central Asian revolt. When the Red Army destroyed the Kokand Autonomy in February 1918 and massacred as many as 25,000 people, the Kokand militia chief Ergash took up arms as self-styled “Supreme Leader of the Islamic Army”. As nationalisations and the loss of grain imports brought famine, recruits poured in, and Basmachi bands under kurbashi (commanders) such as Madamin Bek seized large parts of the Fergana Valley and much of Turkestan. After the Emir of Bukhara was driven out in 1920, eastern Bukhara became the new centre: Ibrahim Bek of the Lakai tribe led the tribes in the name of Emir Said Alim Khan, and in 1922 most of eastern Bukhara, from Hisor to the western Pamirs, was in Basmachi hands. Enver Pasha, the former Ottoman minister sent by the Soviets in November 1921, went over to the Basmachi and tried to take command in pursuit of a pan-Turkic and pan-Islamic state, but the leaders were hostile to him and he was killed in August 1922. In Khiva and the Turkmen lands Junaid Khan fought a war of his own.
The Soviet authorities combined overwhelming force with concessions. They reinstated sharia law and restored Koran schools and waqf (religious endowment) lands, created a volunteer militia of Muslim peasants, the “Red Sticks”, and an estimated 15–25 per cent of Soviet troops in the region were Muslim. The main bands in Fergana were beaten in early 1923, and by the autumn of 1926 the Basmachi had been largely crushed across Central Asia. Ibrahim Bek, who had withdrawn to Afghanistan, invaded again on the back of resistance to collectivisation but was captured and shot in 1931. The official Soviet account dates the end of the movement as an organised force to 1931–1932, and the last large group was destroyed in the Karakum desert in 1933. Assessments diverge sharply. After the Soviet collapse the Central Asian states recast the movement as a national liberation struggle, and the Uzbek historian Rajabov treated it as one current with the Kokand Autonomy and the Jadids, while Alexander Morrison of Oxford counters that the Fergana Basmachi had no clear political aims. The English-language source judges that it was neither a national liberation movement nor a nationalist one but a temporary tribal alliance aimed at removing Russian rule.