The Russian Revolution in Turkestan Through the Eyes of an Eyewitness: “Red”-“White” Memoirs of Alexander Gzovsky

Abstract

The memoirs of the publicist and writer Alexander Gzovsky, a participant in the revolutionary events in Turkestan, are centred around several dramatic events that took place in Central Asia in late 1917 and early 1918: the fall of tsarism and the coming to power of the Turkestan Committee of the Provisional Government, the defeat of the Turkestan Committee of the Provisional Government and the coming to power of the Bolsheviks, the proclamation of Turkestan (Kokand) autonomy and its liquidation by the Bolsheviks and, finally, the Bolshevik, the so-called Kolesov campaign in Bukhara in March 1918. The “Social Revolution in Turkestan (memoirs)”, written from Bolshevik positions and published on the territory of Soviet Belarus in 1919 and “Crescent and Red Star (Turkestan memoirs)”, written by A. Gzovsky from anti-Bolshevik positions after emigrating to Poland in 1922 in Polish. The source-research value of Gzovsky's writings lies in the fact that they contain diametrically opposite assessments of events, which provides a comprehensive view of the political situation in Turkestan and broadens the existing understanding in historical science of what happened there in 1917–1918, in particular: what were the political discourses of the Muslim organizations of Turkestan; what place Turkestan occupied in the discourses of all-Russian political parties; what was the “Turkestan agenda” in the All-Russian Muslim movement; can the “circuits of Kokand autonomy” be discovered before the creation of the Bolshevik government in Tashkent; what guided the Bolsheviks in Turkestan: class or national consciousness?