ABSTRACT
From the revolt of the Czech corps in May 1918 to the repulse of Generals Denikin and Yudenich in late October 1919, Soviet Russia was engaged in a lifeand-death struggle against its various enemies in the south, east, north, and west. During this period the Soviet government at Tashkent was fighting its own war of survival, for the most part in isolation from European Russia. By early June 1918 the Czech revolt embraced an area extending from Siberia along the northern periphery of the Kazakh Steppe and across the Volga River to Penza in the west. Coming just two months after Dutov’s Ural Cossacks had overthrown Soviet authority along the lower Ural and Emba rivers, the Czech revolt blocked all overland routes between Turkestan and the rest of Russia. Tashkenfs isolation from the center of Communist power was made complete on July 16 when an anti-Bolshevik government was established at Askhabad, thereby interrupting the land-and-water route via Krasnovodsk to Astrakhan. Organized opposition formed on a third front in September with the creation of a White army in Semirechie just north of the Ili River. Nor was all quiet behind the lines, for after the dispersal of the Kokand government in February 1918 an anti-Russian guerrilla movement had developed in Fergana, composed of bands calling themselves Basmachis. Of the three fronts across which Tashkent faced regular bodies of enemy troops, the Transcaspian was the most troubling for the greater part of the period 1918-1919. Askhabad’s forces were the closest to Tashkent; they alone would have to be defeated by Tashkent unassisted by any Soviet armies in the enemy’s rear, and they alone were in receipt of material assistance from the Allies, in this case Great Britain. The urgency of the threat from Transcaspia placed Bukhara right in the midst of the civil war, for Tashkent’s lines of communication, supply, and reinforcement to Chardjui, headquarters of the Transcaspian front, necessarily traversed the khanate. Chardjui itself, although a Russian enclave, was still technically Bukharan territory. Should the emir decide to throw in with the Askhabad regime and the
British, the Soviet troops at the front would be cut off from their base, and the war would be brought to Tashkent’s doorstep.
