ABSTRACT
The Russian Civil War witnessed a sudden upsurge of separatist and anarchist guerrilla movements in many parts of the old Tsarist Empire, but in few areas was one so pronounounced as in Central Asia, where groups of mounted raiders – Basmachi, to use the local term, meaning ‘bandit’1 – conducted a sporadic and violent struggle against the Soviet authorities for over ten years. During this period of violent civil unrest, the nascent Red Army was driven to collate and assess both its own civil war experience of high manoeuvrability (militarily and politically) and some of the practical experiences of its Tsarist predecessor to produce a formula that would enable the settlement of this territory. The methods of one man in particular – the future ‘Soviet Clausewitz’, M. V. Frunze, himself a son of settlers in Central Asia – provided the Reds with the key to achieving victory against their disorganised, yet elusive, foes.2 This was a key that would notably elude the Soviet Army over sixty years later when it found itself fighting a similar opponent in Afghanistan. The reason for the loss of this key may lie ironically with Frunze himself, whose lasting legacy to Soviet military art was that of the ‘Unified Military Doctrine’ – a doctrine of flexibility in his own day that came to exhibit increasing intellectual rigidity under later proponents.
