Basmachi

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Historic flag? Basmachi flag, 1921-1924

Basmatschi (also Basmatschen or Basmachi ) was formed from the Turkic root bosmoq ("to suppress") and the suffix for habitual actions chi and means "bandits", "robbers". The Basmachi were Central Asian insurgents who rose against general mobilization in Turkestan in World War I in 1916 and fought against the Bolsheviks until the mid-1920s .

history

The general mobilization of 1916 was the first break with the Edict of Tolerance and the associated policy of non-meddling by Russian colonial officials in local affairs after the Catholic reforms in the 18th century .

The tsarist troops acted against the resistance with extreme violence and nipped the uprising in the bud. Many Turkmens , Uzbeks and Kyrgyz fled across the Persian , Afghan or Chinese borders as a result.

Since the riots of 1916 and the first appearance of organized supra-local resistance against the colonial administration, the word basmachi came into wider use. In fact, however, the Central Asian rebels were mostly partisans . On horseback, they raided colonial administrative buildings, railway stations or army supply stores.

During the October Revolution of 1917, the Basmachi initially fought as allies of the Bolsheviks for their cultural self-determination and national independence. Due to the incompatible political goals, however, an irreconcilable hostility developed very quickly between the social-revolutionary Bolsheviks and the Basmachi. After the Alash Orda state was broken up, numerous Kazakh and Kyrgyz nationalists also joined the Basmachi movement.

In the civil war from 1919 to 1924, communist actors and actors loyal to the Bolsheviks now adopted the colonial designation and called their opponents Basmachi in the civil war. However, in contrast to their predecessors before the First World War, the leaders of the rebels were politically ambitious resistance fighters with concrete ideas about state structure and state tasks. Rebels from all sorts of social contexts fought in their ranks. They were farmers, descendants of members of the pre-colonial state apparatus, nomads or local fighters ( pahlawon ). They were ethnically and religiously heterogeneous.

Their opponents - communists, Russian settlers, social revolutionaries, military men sent from Russia - fought against them with the same partisan-like means. They, too, were ethnically and religiously heterogeneous, but fought not with the aim of regional or political independence, but of an alliance with Soviet Russia .

By 1920, large parts of Central Asia withdrew from Soviet rule, although strong Red Army units were operating there. The centers of resistance were the areas around Ferghana , Khiva and Bukhara . There Enver Pasha attempted to win the Basmachi movement for the Pan-Turkish idea and with their help to establish a new caliphate based in Samarkand . Although Enver Pasha found enthusiastic supporters, he did not succeed in organizing the Basmachi resistance groups, which operated separately, militarily. On August 4, 1922, the Basmachi unit he commanded was captured by the Red Army near Dushanbe and destroyed.

Due to the massive deployment of the Red Army, the armed uprising of the Basmachi turned into a gang war by the mid-1920s. The mobile, mostly mounted Basmachi units were difficult to capture in the steppe and in the mountains with military and police operations. Occasionally they were able to move across the borders to Afghanistan, Persia or China.

Disagreements about the goal of political independence, personal rivalries between the regional leaders and, above all, the lack of foreign aid for the rebels ultimately led to the end of the resistance movement. Now the Bolsheviks and those who sided with them had achieved hegemony over history. The Basmachi, not only the active rebels but also their families, fled in large numbers to northern Afghanistan and northwest China , where Bukharian, Khorezmi, Turkestan as well as Kazakh and Kyrgyz Muslims were able to live largely independently.

With increasing social isolation, the last Basmachi were also wiped out in the mid-1930s.

The Basmae as a figure

The properties that were ascribed to the Basmachi had been established since the Russian colonial era and have hardly changed. In the literature of Soviet historians, the colonial ideas of bandits and highwaymen were not only massively trivialized, but further distorted.

The Basmachi were in a sense the contemporary audience in countless books, films such as The Thirteen (USSR in 1937, directed by Mikhail Romm ) and newspapers as perpetrators of violence, religious fanatic enemies of women , meuchelmordende cretins presented so. The fact that many rebels were indeed given local posts when an agreement was reached with the Soviets and were accepted into the Red Army is silent on these accounts.

The Turkish-language name Basmatschi came back to life in the 1980s after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, alongside the now-common Arabic name mujahideen for Islamic nationalist resistance fighters in Central Asia.

Well-known Basmachi

literature

  • Marco Buttino: Ethnicité et politique dans la guerre civile: à propos du “basmačestvo” au Fergana , in: Cahiers du monde russe et sovietique 38 (1997), volumes 1–2, pp. 195–222.
  • Olaf Caroe : Soviet Empire: The Turks of Central Asia and Stalinism , London: Macmillan, 1967 2 .
  • Mustafa Chokay: The Basmachi Movement in Turkestan , in: The Asiatic Review 24 (1928).
  • Glenda Fraser: Basmachi , in: Central Asian Survey 6 (1987), No. 1, pp. 1-73, No. 2, pp. 7-42.
  • Б. В. Лунин (BW Lunin): Басмачество Tashkent, 1984.
  • Alexander Marshall: Turkfront: Frunze and the Development of Soviet Counter-insurgency in Central Asia , in: Tom Everett-Heath (Ed.): Central Asia. Aspects of Transition , London: Routledge Shorton, 2003; ISBN 0-7007-0956-8 (Ln.), ISBN 0-7007-0957-6 (Pb.).
  • Fazal-ur-Rahim Khan Marwat: The Basmachi movement in Soviet Central Asia: A study in political development . Emjay Books International, Peshawar 1985.
  • Яков Нальский (Jakob Nalski): В горах Восточной Бухары: Повесть по воспоминаниям сотрудников КГБ , Dushanbe, 1984.
  • Martha B. Olcott: The Basmachi or Freemen's Revolt in Turkestan 1918-24. In: Soviet Studies, Vol. 33, No. 3 , July 1981, pp. 352-369.
  • HB Paksoy: The Basmachi movement from within: An account of Zeki Velidi Togan , in: Nationalities Papers, Vol. 23, No. 2, June 1995, pp. 373-399. Available here. Available here for free.
  • Х. Турсунов ( Ch.Tursunow ): Восстание 1916 Года в Средней Азии и Казахстане , Tashkent, 1962.