History and sources
Culture and History, Uzbekistan5 Comments
Thanks to Nik’s last post I decided to bring up the issue that is corrupting reports that come out of our region both now and in the past. This problem is the lack of authentic information. Today, nobody can say with any degree of certainty, how many people are below poverty line in Uzbekistan. Other examples abound. Not only that, we can’t even figure out in decent detail the past of our country, especially during the last 120-200 years. There are absolutely no, at least, mildly un-biased sources. Everything one can find about Uzbekistan before, during or after the Red Revolution in 1917 is either inclined towards the communists, the english, or the turks.
Let’s talk about the “basmach movement”. The interpretations are so controversial that one could label it both anti-communist, and therefore, beneficial; or radically panturkist, consequently, horrible for any further development of the region. The movement collided not only with the communists but with Jadidists. So what final judgement do we give to the people in the basmach movement? Well, we can’t because we know so little about it…
I guess the only side that had no reason to write biased records about Central Asia would be India. Indians have rather deep interest in the history of Central Asia, and Indian academics have a lot of research material in this field. Sadly, very little information about that is published on the internet.
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The same thing occured to me during my research around national delimitation. The most valuable book I could get hold of was written by an Indian scholar. Unfortunately, most of these books are long out of print and seem destined to be lost in the digital age.
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As a historian, I’m sceptical of arguments that say lack of information precludes any sort of conclusion being made about a historical event. I say this because information comes to light all the time. To wit, the famous saying: “When the facts change, I change my mind; what do you do?”
However, I agree that study of the basmachi movement has been coloured by biased records. The very name of the movement itself is indicative of the pro-Soviet spin put on that period – as I noted, use of the term qorbashi appears to have fallen into abeyance.
There are a lot of interesting aricles on basmachis tucked away in journals; I came across a whole stash recently, one of which focused upon the portrayal of the basmachis in Red Army magazines and newspapers. I shall post more anon.
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I disagree with the wording that the name “basmach” indicates pro-Soviet bias. The name comes from turkish or even uzbek language, rather than russian, as one might think. No doubt, it has been transformed to fit russian grammar rules, but the word itself wasn’t coined by the bolsheviks.
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True, it is likely the term basmachi existed before the so-called basmachi movement emerged, as the word does indicate Turkic origins e.g. in Uzbek the suffix ‘-chi’ is usually appended to a noun or verb to indicate a profession (e.g. o’qituvchi = teacher). Moreover, the Tsarist administrators may very well have been acquainted with the term in regard to bandits, brigands, thieves and common criminals.
Subsequently, the term the Soviets used was ‘basmachestvo’, but qorbashi (possibly also qorbachi) appears to have been the term used by the early basmachis themselves. But, as you pointed out Ali, very few sources on this period are purely objective, and as history tends to be written by the victors, basmachi (which, I still maintain, is a largely pejorative term) is the label that has stuck. For ease of reference, basmachi will probably continue to be used by historians – I have no quarrel with that.
But can we reduce the activities of the basmachis to plain, simple, common criminality, which is what the term basmachi suggests? Nowadays, we have enough trouble labelling the anti-occupation movement in Iraq: terrorists? rebels? guerrillas? revolutionaries? insurgents? resistance fighters? jihadis? Islamists? nationalists? etc. No-one would call them ‘brigands’.
I am by no means a post-modern deconstructionist who endlessly argues the toss over definitions, but I do think the label of basmachi as applied to the (largely) anti-Soviet forces of Central Asia in the 1920s and 1930s ignores the ideological forces driving these people. It is arguably a typical Soviet-ism to characterise motivated and organised groups of people to the level of mere ‘brigands’.
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