Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic

Reform in Bukhara was led by the Young Bukharans, who drew on pan-Turkism, the Jadid reform movement and Bolshevik communism. When Fyodor Kolesov marched on Bukhara at their request in March 1918, the emir, according to a Russian source, killed the Bolshevik delegation and incited a holy war in which thousands of Russians were killed and many Young Bukharans executed. On 3 August 1920 the Bolsheviks and the Young Bukharans agreed to act together; on the 16th the Fourth Congress of the Bukharan Communist Party, meeting in Chardzhou, resolved to overthrow the emir, and on the 25th the Politburo of the Russian Communist Party confirmed the orders. On the night of the 28th, as Chardzhou rose, Mikhail Frunze’s Red Army attacked. Heavy guns including 152-mm fortress pieces were brought close to the walls and 12,000 shells fired, and on the 31st the emir fled with 1,000 men to Dushanbe in eastern Bukhara. When the city fell on 2 September the emir’s citadel, the Ark, lay in ruins from shelling and air attack, and hundreds of civilians had been killed. An All-Bukharan Revolutionary Committee under Mukhitdinov was formed on 14 September, and the republic was proclaimed on 8 October.

In Soviet terminology the republic was a “revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry”, a transitional stage on the way to a Socialist Soviet Republic. Its constitution of 25 September 1921, unlike the Russian constitution of 1918, allowed private ownership of land and the means of production and gave non-proletarians the vote (except the emir’s relatives, former officials and large landowners), and Article 26 laid down that no law could contradict the fundamental principles of Islam. The aksakal system, in which villages chose their own representatives, was kept. Uzbek became the state language in place of Persian, the language of the elite, and the education nazir Abdurauf Fitrat sent many students to European universities, especially in Germany. The flag added a crescent to the hammer and sickle. Party membership swelled to 14,000 two weeks after the proclamation but was cut to 1,000 by 1922 through repeated expulsions. In 1922 most of eastern Bukhara was held by the Basmachi, and from 1923 Moscow, with Stalin among the accusers, charged the Bukharan government with “bourgeois nationalism” and purged the government and party wholesale. The republic, 182,000 square kilometres in area with more than 2.2 million people, was divided in 1924: the west went to the Uzbek SSR (the south bank of the Amu Darya to the Turkmen SSR) and the east to the Tajik Autonomous Republic. Khodzhayev, despite his Jadid background, became the first leader of the Uzbek SSR, but was purged and executed in the 1930s.