Khujand massacre

The Khujand massacre took place in February 1918 in connection with the October Revolution . In Tashkent a local soviet had been formed in Petrograd before the October Revolution ; most of its Bolshevik officials were descendants of Russian settlers and Russian soldiers. The Soviet in Tashkent wanted to prevent the indigenous population from participating in the regional government, including those from the region around Khujand, who had formed their own autonomous government in December 1917 and called for the autonomy of the Turkestan province and the protection of the local Russian minority.

On February 14, the Soviet mobilized the local garrison of the former tsarist army in Tashkent, as well as soldiers from the Orenburg region and armed workers' militias, to smash the provisional government in Khujand. After four days of sieging the old town of Khujand, they broke through the fortress walls and began killing the residents. An estimated 14,000 Muslim residents lost their lives, many of them to machine gun fire. The city was looted and set on fire. The Tashkent Soviet requisitioned the food supplies after the massacre, and the subsequent famine probably claimed another 900,000 victims among the region's population. A mass exodus across the border with China was the result.

literature

• Stephen Kotkin: Stalin: Paradoxes of Power. New York 2014, ISBN 978-0-14-102794-4 . 253-255