Russia’s hold on the region was always precarious, because its strength depended largely on forts and armies, not on commerce, history, language, or culture. Even though the khans had ruled despotically, sending armies to plunder neighboring kingdoms, extorting tolls and taxes, torturing and executing opponents, and maintaining a lucrative slave trade, at least they were local despots who spoke the language of their peoples and understood Islam and tradition. Russia was the invader, the colonial power. The lands of Central Asia were always on the borderlands of empire and their allegiance to the central power fragile and suspect.
Resentment against Russian rule rose during World War I. Cattle were requisitioned from herders in Semireche, food and cotton from Fergana. In 1916, the authorities began conscripting men into noncombatant labor battalions. An armed uprising that began in Tashkent was joined by Kazakhs and Kyrgyz, exasperated by the loss of their lands and heavy taxation. Although the intended targets were Russian military and government installations, roving bands on horseback attacked Russian colonists and burned their villages. Russian troops retaliated, razing Kazakh and Kyrgyz settlements, killing the inhabitants or forcing them to flee. In the middle of winter, an estimated 50,000 tried to escape over the Tian Shan to China, but many froze or starved to death on the journey.
In the turmoil that followed the Bolshevik Revolution, with civil war raging between the White and Red Armies from the Urals to the Far East, political leaders took advantage of the power vacuum and declared independent republics in Central Asia. Most revolts were short-lived and brutally suppressed by the Red Army. In early 1922, the charismatic Ottoman Turkish soldier Enver Pasha launched a “holy war” to establish a new pan-Turkic caliphate. The revolt attracted thousands of recruits, including bands of basmachi guerrillas. After a string of successes in which his army took Dushanbe and recaptured most of the former emirate of Bukhara (whose ruler, exiled in Afghanistan, was bankrolling the campaign), the self-styled “Commander in Chief of All the Armies of Islam” saw his support wane. The Bolsheviks adopted a carrot-and-stick strategy: Moscow cut taxes and returned confiscated land while sending 100,000 more troops to the region. Pasha died in August 1922, just nine months after his revolt began, reportedly cut down by Red Army machine guns while leading a suicidal cavalry charge.
Soviet Gerrymandering
When the Soviet cartographers sliced and diced Central Asia in the 1920s, someone must have said, “The Kyrgyz. Aren’t they all nomads? Let’s give them the mountains.”
Before the Soviet era, there were no national borders between the peoples of the region, and identity was defined by religion, family, clan, and place. The Soviets feared that such muddled loyalties could help Islamic, social, or political movements gain popular support, as Pasha’s rebellion had shown. Educated Central Asians and religious leaders still talked privately of a Greater Turkestan or a Central Asian caliphate. The Soviets attempted to counter pan-Islamic and pan-Turkic tendencies by constructing nationalities, giving each a defined territory with national borders, along with a ready-made history, language, culture, and ethnic profile. Your loyalty was no longer to your tribe, village, or faith, but to your nationality as a Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Turkmen, or Uzbek and to its Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR).
The Uzbek and Turkmen SSRs were created in 1924, the Tajik SSR in 1929. It took the Russians longer to sort out the Kazakhs and the Kyrgyz, who share similar physical features, traditions, and language. Indeed, in the nineteenth century, they were all referred to as Kyrgyz. As ethnographic research began to reveal differences, the mountain tribes became known as Kara-Kyrgyz (black Kyrgyz) to distinguish them from the steppe-dwelling Kazakhs, who were called simply Kyrgyz because “Kazakh” sounded too much like the name of another group, the Cossacks. Although the Russians seemed confused, the Kazakhs knew perfectly well who they were, and that they were not Kyrgyz. They were members of a tribe that was part of either the Great, Middle, or Little Horde, each of which had its own khan. In 1926, most of present-day Kyrgyzstan became the Kara-Kyrgyz Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) and a full Kyrgyz SSR in 1936. In the same year, the Kazakh SSR was formed. And so, through the miracle of Soviet ethnic engineering, the Kara-Kyrgyz were no longer black but true Kyrgyz, while the people who had been called Kyrgyz for over a century turned out to be Kazakhs after all.
While promoting new national loyalties, the Soviets realized that too much nationalism could be dangerous. In a parallel effort to solidify control, they shifted around ethnic groups to ensure that none was dominant in a specific area. Thousands of Central Asians were moved to other parts of the Soviet Union. Russian and Ukrainian farm workers and factory workers were settled in Central Asia, while Volga Germans, Chechens, Koreans, and other ethnicities were deported to the region. The policy of divide and rule, intended to suppress ethnic unrest and militant Islam, created artificial borders between ethnically mixed SSRs. The medieval cities of Samarkand and Bukhara, historically major centers of Tajik culture and with large ethnic Tajik populations, ended up in the Uzbek SSR. Osh was a classic case of ethnic gerrymandering. As the Central Asia scholar Madeleine Reeves points out, if the Soviets had drawn boundaries exclusively along national lines, the nomadic Kyrgyz would “end up with a Kyrgyz republic that had no cities of its own: a worrying prospect for a state preoccupied with thrusting ‘backward’ populations into Soviet modernity.”8 Their solution was to make Osh, with its predominantly Uzbek population of traders and arable farmers, the republic’s southern city.
Independence came suddenly to all Soviet republics. Unlike liberation struggles in Asia or Africa, there was no army emerging from the mountains or jungles to be cheered by flag-waving crowds, no government in exile, no heroes or martyrs to freedom. Citizens of each SSR suddenly found themselves citizens of an independent country. As the journalist Ahmed Rashid recalls, the five future Central Asian presidents who met at Ashkhabat in Turkmenistan on December 12, 1991, were reluctant to assume leadership of independent nations:
Four days earlier Boris Yeltsin, president of Russia, and the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus had signed a treaty dissolving the Soviet Union. The five republics were now suddenly independent but nobody had consulted the Central Asian leaders themselves. Angry, frustrated, fearful, feeling abandoned by their “mother Russia,” and terrified about the consequences, the leaders sat up all night to discuss their future. It was strange to see the heirs of conquerors of the world—Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, and Babur—so cowered. They were tied to Moscow in thousands of ways, from electricity grids to road, rail, and telephone networks. Central Asia had become a vast colony producing raw materials—cotton, wheat, metals, oil, and gas—for the Soviet industrial machine based in western Russia. They feared an economic and social collapse as Yeltsin cast them out of the empire. That night a deputy Turkmen foreign minister told me, “We are not celebrating—we are mourning our independence.”9
The next day, the leaders agreed to join Russia and other former SSRs in the newly formed Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). That was pretty much the last time they agreed on anything. Despite periodic summits and high-minded talk of regional integration, more issues divide than unite the Central Asian republics. They’ve disagreed over borders, trade and tariffs, water, gas and oil resources, environmental issues, religion, terrorism, and drug traffickers.
Achieving independence is one thing; creating national identity is another. At independence, ethnic Kazakhs were a minority (albeit the largest one) in Kazakhstan, making up about 41 percent of the population. At the same time, almost one quarter of Tajikistan’s population was ethnically Uzbek. With the possible exception of Turkmenistan, all republics have a rich, but potentially volatile, ethnic mix. The region, noted the New York Times, looked like “a medieval map” where power is defined by ethnicities and clans, not by borders. Former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski famously referred to Central Asia as “the Eurasian Balkans.”
The balkanization is illustrated by the Fergana Valley. Although most of the valley is in Uzbekistan, the northern panhandle of Tajikistan (Sughd province, with a population of over two million) juts into the valley, physically, economically, and culturally separated from the rest of the country by the Pamir Alay. Uzbekistan literally bisects southern Kyrgyzstan, the frontier zigzagging in and out of the foothills