Revolt in the Mountains: Fuzail Maksum and the Occupation of Garm, Spring 1929

Abstract

Military operations conducted by Afghan guerrilla forces in the spring of 1987 against Soviet troops inside the Soviet Union, to include the actual penetration of Soviet territorial boundaries by insurgent tactical units, must have been viewed by Soviet authorities with a sense of deja vu.1 The 9 April 1987 attack on Soviet border-guard positions in the republic of Tadzhikistan represented the first hostile crossing of the Soviet-Afghan border in the Tadzhikistan region in over fifty-six years (hostile in the Soviet view; one must not forget the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979). While the Soviets were able to defeat this incursion, the spectre of past insurgencies in the very same region a little over a half century ago must have played upon the psyche of not only senior Soviet officials, but anyone with a knowledge of Soviet history in Central Asia. The purpose of this study is to examine certain aspects of that history, concentrating upon an outbreak of armed insurgency that took place in the mountains of Tadzhikistan during the spring of 1929. The insurgents, headed by an influential Uzbeki tribal leader named Fuzail Maksum, represented a chronological extension of a larger anti-Soviet movement collectively known as the Basmachi, which from 1918 to 1933 challenged Soviet rule in Central Asia.2 The revolt against Soviet rule in the mountains of eastern Tadzhikistan during the spring of 1929 is not well documented in English language studies of Soviet Central Asia. Indeed, no complete study of the Basmachi revolt as a whole exists in any western language at all. But the lack of published material should not detract from the significance of Fuzail Maksur's insurgency or the Basmachi movement as a whole. The events that took place in Tadzhikistan in 1929 were as complex as any in Soviet history, weaving together a myriad