Jig-saw borders? Part three
The last two parts of this series looked at the apparent need for national delimitation in Soviet Central Asia and the ideological principles behind it. The third part will look at the year the process of redrawing Central Asian borders took place - 1924.
The early year 1924 saw the discussion of the national delimitation project within the Communist party structures of the Central Asian republics. The delegates of the Bukharan Communist Party noted that conditions in Central Asia were already adequate for the division of the region into a number of republics based on the “nationality principle”.
The Central Asiatic Bureau was charged with the elaboration of a comprehensive report on the proposed reform. The Bureau instructed Uzbek and Turkmen National Commissions to work out national delimitation schemes for their respective states and also created a special Commission on National Delimitation.
It proved tremendously difficult for these Commissions to decide upon clear criteria for mapping out the frontiers of the future states. Ethnic boundaries were “not always clearcut and in many places were mostly indeterminable” (Vaidyanath, 1967: p.170). There was much debate on the question of smaller ethnicities and in which of the new territorial formations they should be incorporated in.
The Politbureau adopted a decree on national delimitation of the republics of Central Asia on 12 June 1924. It decided to create a Turkmen Republic through carving out the Turkmen parts of the Turkestan ASSR and the Peoples Republics of Bukhara and Khorezm.
The second state formation should be an independent Uzbek Republic, formed by merging the Uzbek-inhabited areas of the Turkestan ASSR and the People’s Republic of Bukhara. The Khorezm Republic should be retained in its present from (without the Turkmen and Kazakh areas), a decision which obviously led to some degree of controversy afterwards.
The Kazakh-inhabited areas of the Turkestan ASSR were to be merged with the Kyrgyz (i.e. Kazakh) ASSR. Furthermore, the decree ordered that two autonomous oblasts - the Tajik AO and the Kara-Kyrgyz (i.e. Kyrgyz) AO - should be formed, the latter to be included into the RSFSR. These decisions were the fundament on which all subsequent work was based.
The Russian Communist Party instructed the Central Asiatic Bureau to complete the delimitation by the end of October 1924 and set up a Territorial Commission made up by representatives of the various nationalities of Central Asia. Beyond that, a propaganda campaign was launched, trying to persuade the various peoples of the necessity of the reform and so to secure their support. This led to an increasing national consciousness and did not only have positive effects, as “such deviations to nationalism began to assume an acute part form especially among the Uzbek and Kazakh party workers” (Vaidyanath, 1967: p.179).
After making minor modifications in the project, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee permitted the Turkestan ASSR to delimit its territory and decreed the dissolution of the multi-national state structures of Turkestan, Bukhara and Khorezm and the establishment of the aforementioned national republics and autonomous oblasts.
On 27 October 1924, the creation of the new entities was proclaimed and several provisional committees took over daily administration work of the new republics and autonomous oblasts. The status of the territorial entities which came to being in 1924 underwent modifications until 1936, when the national delimitation process came to an end. In 1925, the Tajik AO was upgraded to an ASSR and eventually gained the status of a constituent SSR on 15 October 1929.
The Kara-Kyrgyz AO was transformed into the Kyrgyz ASSR in 1926 and on 5 December 1936, it became an SSR, too. The Kazakh ASSR also gained full constituent status in 1936. The Kara-Kalpak AO was fully incorporated into the Uzbekistan SSR in 1936.
The next part will deal with problems that accompanied the process of national delimitation.
on November 1st, 2006 at 6:01 pm
Dear Ben,
Thank you for your interesting findings!
I would appreciate if you could advise me any websites, where i could find online materials of ‘The Turkestan Bureau’ and ‘Middle Asiatic Bureau.’ I would like to explore implications of the past delimitation process for the present water issues of Central Asia.
Thank you, Gulnara