Turkkomissiya

The commission was created on 12 February 1919 with the Georgian Bolshevik Shalva Eliava as chairman. But Turkestan was cut off from central Russia by the Civil War front, the routes were held by Kolchak’s Whites, and so the commission stopped in Samara and then Orenburg and suspended its work during Kolchak’s offensive. After the Turkestan Front was formed in August 1919 and the Red Army won its victories in Turkestan, the commission took up its work in earnest from October, charged with leading the party. Valerian Kuibyshev served from October 1919 to August 1920 as deputy chairman for Turkestan affairs of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, the Sovnarkom and the Bolshevik Central Committee and as a member of the Turkestan Front’s Revolutionary Military Council. On its initiative the provincial divisions of the Turkestan republic and their Soviet organs were restored at the end of 1919; it took a direct part in founding the Communist Party of Turkestan in January 1920, and in March it re-established the Turkestan Sovnarkom under Jānis Rudzutaks. Between February and December 1920 the Turkkomissiya alone received 614 wagons of goods for the economy, while Turkestan sent cotton, wool and fruit to the centre. When the Young Khivans and Turkmen chiefs asked for help, the commission sanctioned a military expedition and sent its envoy Skalov, who brought about the khan’s abdication in February 1920.

The commission and the regional committee of the Communist Party of Turkestan fought both the “great-power chauvinism” of the settlers and nationalist tendencies within the party. The Muslim Bureau led by Turar Ryskulov demanded that the Turkestan Soviet Republic be renamed a “Turkic Republic” and the Communist Party of Turkestan a “Turkic Communist Party”, that non-Muslim Red Army units be withdrawn and that an army be formed of natives alone. In its “Regulation on the autonomy of Turkestan” of 8 March 1920 the Bolshevik Central Committee reaffirmed the party’s name and Turkestan’s status as an “autonomous republic of the RSFSR”, reserving defence, foreign relations, railways, posts and finance to the federal government. A delegation including Ryskulov that went to Moscow in May was rebuffed as contrary to the party’s nationalities policy, and in July the Turkestan Bureau of the Bolshevik Central Committee was set up. The commission was dissolved in August 1920, and in September the Ninth Congress of Soviets of Turkestan condemned the “national deviationists” and adopted a new constitution.