Paper short abstract:

The Central Asian “basmachestvo” was at once an anti-colonial Turkestani resistance, a nascent national movement of the Moslem Turkic peoples of the former Russian Empire, and a critical military and ideological challenge to the goals of the rapidly consolidating Bolshevik regime centered in Moscow.

Paper long abstract:

The Central Asian “basmachestvo,” as coined by the Bolsheviks, was at once an anti-colonial Turkestani resistance, a nascent national movement of the predominantly Moslem Turkic peoples of the former Russian Empire, and a critical military and ideological challenge to the aspirations of the rapidly consolidating Bolshevik regime centered in Moscow. Typically examined as a sideshow of the Russian Civil War, this paper connects Central Asian resistance to the broader Bashkir and Tatar opposition in the South Urals to visualize a second overlapping civil war in the former Russian Empire. Because it occurred along the civilizational seams of Central Eurasia, and amidst the enormous events of the First World War and the Russian Revolution, its significance has been overshadowed. This paper re-conceptualizes the armed resistance of emerging (predominantly) Turkic nations to Bolshevik rule from several perspectives. One of these is spatial, as reflected in the eventual delineation of Soviet military districts. A full military analysis must not discuss Central Asia in isolation but should consider the resistance in the context of a larger culturally interconnected theater that includes concurrent and strategically related warfare across the Kazakh steppe and the Middle Volga and South Urals regions during the Russian Civil War. This paper includes review of the political trends connecting Central Asian resistance to that of the Tatar and Bashkir populations of the Middle Volga and South Urals.