Rural Dynamics and Peasant Resistance in Southern Kyrgyzstan, 1929-1930
BENJAMIN H
RésuméDynamiques rurales et résistance paysanne dans le sud du Kirghizstan, 1929-1930Cet article traite des dynamiques sociale et économique qui sous-tendent la lutte des partisans anti-soviétiques (basmači) et les violentes protestations contre la collectivisation à la charnière des années1929-1930. Cette étude se fonde essentiellement sur les archives de Moscou, Biškek et Oš (Kirghizstan) ; elle s’arrête dans un premier temps sur la politique soviétique menée en Asie centrale au cours des cinq années qui ont précédé le Grand Tournant stalinien et qui ont précipité les crises de 1929-1930 dans le sud du Kirghizstan. Dans un deuxième temps, elle décrit les caractéristiques géographiques, sociales et économiques de cette région à la fin des années 1920, facteurs qui ont déterminé la nature, l’intensité et les objectifs de la résistance rurale. Enfin, elle analyse en détail plusieurs cas de protestation paysanne, révélant leurs causes, leurs dynamiques et leurs effets. Il montre que la collectivisation a certes déclenché les explosions de violence mais que la résistance était déjà conditionnée par les tensions latentes à l’égard de la politique soviétique de réforme agraire, de la « cotonisation », du marché, des transformations sociales et de la religion. De plus, ces manifestations, dans une grande mesure n’étaient pas concertées et venaient en réponse aux actions de certains responsables. Les basmači, vaguement associés à des partisans qui n’avaient pas d’intérêt à voir s’établir un ordre soviétique, tiraient occasionnellement profit des troubles paysans sans pour autant les inspirer ni les diriger. L’État a fini par reprendre le contrôle en mettant un terme par la force à la résistance populaire, en isolant les basmači et en encourageant par divers moyens la population à rester paisible.
https://static.openedition.org/journals/images/favicon.png
5The article is divided into five sections. The first three discuss the socio-economic and political context for the resistance. They demonstrate that, while the Soviet state’s policies were universally unpopular, these policies had different consequences for different segments of the population. In the last two sections, the article examines acts of resistance both before and after the November plenum. To avoid mischaracterization, the article will only look at acts of “active” resistance : mass demonstrations, assault of murder of state personnel, destruction of state establishments, and so forth. The article finds that the resistance initially varied in its form, timing, and intensity according to the nature of the economic and social impact of state policies on the local population in different areas of the region. Later, the resistance took on a generalized form as a large contingent of the population in various localities took part in the resistance. The article attempts to explain this shift in the conclusion.

“Cottonization” and its effects, 1925-1928

Southern Kyrgyzstan, 1925-1929

The Cotton Zone

13The cotton zone of Osh okrug was the most densely populated part of the Kyrgyz territory. It was located in the low-lying areas of the Ferghana valley assigned to the Kyrgyz autonomy during the national delimitation of 1924, comprising Aravan-Buria and the lower reaches of Bazar-Kurgan and Jalalabad districts as well as smaller swaths of Kyzyl-Kiia and Uzgen district. According to official sources, the population in these areas was overwhelmingly agrarian and included many Uzbeks. Sedentary agriculture had predominated in these areas before the Russian conquest in the mid-nineteenth century, but cotton, not grain, made up a growing portion of the region’s agricultural production from 1921 on.

36 “Kishlak” referred to an older, usually Uzbek, village in the documentation of the Kyrgyz party org (...)

37 TsGA PD KR, f. 10, op. 2, d. 192, l. 157-158 (Vainer, letter to Zelenskii, 22.12.1927).

[T]hose subject to confiscations are putting up the stiffest resistance. Concealment of land (by splitting it up or by blatantly hiding it) is the norm. [And] this is happening mostly with large amounts of land. The confiscation work (ushchemlenie) has been completed in one kishlak (Iangy Suzak). Thirty-four households have been assessed for confiscations. One means of resistance is to increase the number of household members and [thereby] to hide sharecroppers.

The Grain Zone

The Stock-Raising Zone

20Osh okrug’s stock-raising zone lay in the mountains and foothills around the Ferghana basin. It comprised Ketmen-Tiube, Kurgart, Batken, Kapchigai, Alai-Gul’cha, and Siuliukta districts as well as the mountainous parts of Kyzyl-Kiia, Naukat, Uzgen and Kyzyl-Jar districts. These areas were far less densely populated than the Ferghana basin, and their inhabitants, almost exclusively ethnic Kyrgyz, were generally pastoralists who engaged in field cultivation only as a secondary economic activity. Until the sedentarization campaigns of 1931-1934, most of these pastoralists migrated for several months of the year to high mountain pastures (known as jailoo), leaving their villages mostly empty. The region produced livestock, which was sold at the bazaars of low-lying towns such as Kara-Suu, Osh, Uzgen, Jalalabad and various cities in Uzbekistan through the early 1930s.

The Grain Crisis : Requisitions and Confiscations, 1929

23The Kyrgyz obkom responded by imposing draconian measures to combat private grain trading and increasing quotas for grain requisitions from Osh okrug by 58 percent in July 1929. The state cooperative trade network, meanwhile, continued to degrade, and trade officials had to rely on stop-gap measures -- a combination of costly short-term incentives and outright coercion -- to ensure grain deliveries. Despite their best efforts, the okrug party organization soon found itself unable to prevent local authorities from openly circumventing the Soviet trade system. In an undated missive from the summer of 1929, the head of the okrug’s five-man committee on grain requisitions (khlebnaia piaterka), a former trade official and member of the okrug’s party bureau by the name of Chistiakov, issued a missive in which he inveighed against the issuance of grain-trading licenses by local officials :

55 OOGA, f. 1, op. 1, d. 255, l. 104 (Chistiakov, “Tsirkuliar,” undated).

In the bazaars and villages through all this the private trader (chastnik) is still working ; in plain view he pays excessively high prices, buys up grain and carts it off [...] More often than not, arrested wholesale buyers (skupshchiki) have permits from village soviets stating that the bearers are workers who have earned the grain, poor Uzbek peasants who have sown grain on the territory of Kyrgyzstan, or cotton-growers who are buying grain for their own consumption. With such permits, the struggle with unlawful grain-traders has become much more difficult [...] Any functionaries who are exposed to be giving out false, incorrect, or insufficiently inspected permits will be quickly arrested and prosecuted for abetting grain speculation.

24Village soviet officials, perhaps seeing an opportunity for profit with such high grain prices, perhaps fearing for their fellow villagers’ economic and even physical well-being, were openly defying the orders of party officials who sought to channel all available grain into the state trade network. With the grain delivery regime in chaos, little wonder that further deliveries from the grain zone failed to meet the rising demand.

Deportations and Rebellion, 1929

28While officials at the okrug level struggled to assert their control over the localities in the grain and cotton zones, they regarded the mountainous pastoral districts as a lawless back country. Most officials believed that governance was either entirely absent or corrupt to the point of complete ineffectiveness -- a view of the countryside widely held by Soviet officials throughout the Soviet Union. In rural, especially mountainous parts of Kyrgyzstan, however, these beliefs also included suspicion toward clan or tribal affinities. The pervasiveness of “clanno-tribal relations” (rodovo-plemennye otnosheniia), many observers believed, undermined Soviet state-building efforts. In a remote part of the mountainous Kyzyl-Jar district, a later OGPU report characterized Soviet institutions in these terms :

From 1924 to 1929 [...] the Soviet apparat in the region was not only weak. [...] This county (volost´) was famous for bribes, extortion, and so forth. Because the previous apparat was made up of one clan or another, no matter what the official’s class background was, he was under the complete control of the chief (rodonachal´nik) of his clan and carried out taxation and other state functions just as his chief instructed, as though the chief himself had hired the official, promoted him, and was giving the marching orders.

64 OOGA, f. 1, op. 1, d. 298, l. 15-16 (“Dokladnaia zapiska o politicheskom sostoianii v b. Chatkal´sk (...)

It should be noted that before 1929 in this district no Soviet social reforms have been carried out, and therefore the population only knew Soviet governance because representatives came to collect taxes and other dues. These too were subject to abuses and deficiencies in their practical implementation [...]

29In the view of Communist officials, clan or tribal ties undermined Soviet rule in the mountainous pastoral districts. As a result, the officials believed, these regions were lawless and inaccessible to Soviet influence. The following comes from a 1929 report by the Soviet official, Kalpaev, sent to oversee a “summer pastureland (jailoo) soviets” in Alai, an area in the Pamir Mountains south of Osh :

65 Ibid., d. 194a, l. 24-28 (Kalpaev, “Doklad o deiatel´nosti Alaiskogo Dzhailiaunogo soveta,” 1928/19 (...)

Few [Kyrgyz] are acquainted with Soviet construction. Obedience to local organs and authorities is completely absent. [...] Obedience to tribal elders (aksakaly), to former Islamic judges (kazi), to bais, and to [former Tsarist] county heads (volost´nye upraviteli) continues [...] The population understands nothing of [Soviet] revolutionary law (revoliutsionnaia zakonnost´); purchases and sales of girls, fights, and murders continue [...]

30This official likely stressed the weakness of Soviet institutions in order to emphasize the importance and difficulty of his own task, but this passage typifies the prevailing view among European Soviet officials of a lawless, frontier-like back country in the mountainous areas. In their view, the revolution and the reforms it engendered had passed these areas by. Extending the revolution to the mountains, therefore, remained a central goal of the Kyrgyz party organization throughout the late 1920s.

79 Ibid., l. 107.

political tension in relation to the conduct of grain requisitions, the tax campaign, the bond-selling campaign (zaim), the displacement of grain cultivation [by cotton cultivation], the attack on the wealthy peasantry despite the weak development of the party organization (for a population of 480 thousand, only 1800 members before the purge, and after it a further reduction by 20 %), the weakness of local Soviet organs, the resilience of clan relations, the lack of a formed village group of supporters (kishlachnyi aktiv) and, without question, the lack of adequate propaganda work during the latest campaigns.

35Thus, at the very onset of Stalin’s Great Turn in November 1929, the Bolshevik administration in Osh okrug was already in crisis. Outnumbered and poorly coordinated over a sprawling territory, it had exhausted its administrative resources and antagonized large segments of the population just as the November plenum of the Central Committee signaled the introduction of forced collectivization.

Mass-Scale Collectivization and Resistance, January-March 1930

37Far from expressing the runaway optimism of sowing campaign officials, other observers had a more unsettling view of the collectivization drive in Osh okrug, which was even by Bolshevik standards absurdly optimistic and poorly managed. On 20 February, an official of the party’s Central Asia Bureau reported the following from Jalalabad :

85 RGASPI, f. 62, op. 2, d. 2258, l. 17.

The entire okrug is being collectivized. Five districts are officially collectivized, and six others are striving for mass-scale collectivization. The administration and leadership in the localities do not fit the tasks at hand. The plenipotentiaries have been very poorly vetted ; almost no one in the district knows what a kolkhoz is or how to organize one. The decision to collectivize fully was carried out by administrative fiat (apparatnym putem) in the district with very small groups of supporters in the villages. At the assembly [of future members of the kolkhoz] the directorate was decided beforehand and put to a vote as a formality. [...] Kolkhozes were explained to the masses thus : signing up for the kolkhoz is obligatory ; those who do not sign up will be deprived of water and government supplies, will have heavy tax burdens, and will be deported from [Kyrgyzstan]. Moreover, the cotton quotas have provoked popular discontent.

38Seen from the outside, even Soviet agents found the okrug officials’ relentless collectivization brash and ham-fisted, a characterization that would have dire consequences for the regional leadership just two weeks later.

95 Ibid., l. 29 (PP OGPU, “Zapiska po provodu,” 08.03.1930).

On the 7 March in Bazar-Kurgan district a crowd of about 400 demonstrated against collectivization, demanding that authorities dissolve the kolkhozes, not collectivize livestock and farm implements, and not unveil women. At the beginning of the demonstration, the crowd killed two activists (one of them a member of the raikom), wounded a militia officer, broke into the building of the district executive committee, dragging out and then beating up the chairman of the cotton association. The employees of [state] establishments and enterprises have fled their workplaces--the establishments are in danger of being looted.

103 Ibid., l. 29 (PP OGPU, “Zapiska...”).

The plenipotentiary of the GPU has been given orders to prepare to arrest the instigators and active participants (aktiv), to take a hard line, to show the population the counter-revolutionary nature of the demonstration, [and] in case of need, to use force of arms (primenit´ oruzhie).

Conclusion

50At the same time, however, the resistance also had specifically Soviet traits and was quite different from the uprising of 1916. In the first place, acts of resistance signified popular discontent at Soviet policies of the late 1920s, primarily the forced enrollments in the collective farms in grain- and cotton-producing areas. The popular slogans reported by the OGPU, however, also point to other grievances, among them the unveiling campaign, the closure of mosques and sharia courts, and the disenfranchisement of pre-revolutionary elites -- all explicitly Soviet initiatives. The resistance also explicitly targeted government institutions and personnel -- many of whom were indigenous Central Asians -- rather than the Slavic population as a whole. Instead, the Slavic population joined in the destruction of Soviet establishments, uniting with the indigenous rebels against a common enemy. Finally, accounts of the outbreak of violence in Osh okrug read very similarly to those of rebellions throughout the USSR in 1930-1931. This in no small part is due to the conventions of OGPU document production (deloproizvodstvo). It also suggests, however, that the rift between the party leadership and local society in Osh okrug was not significantly greater than it was in other areas of the Soviet Union : if the Bolsheviks were colonialists in southern Kyrgyzstan, so too were they in rural Riazan´ or Siberia.

51In southern Kyrgyzstan, the resistance evolved from disparate acts to collective action, representing the explosion of tensions that had been building among various segments of rural society over the preceding several years. A wide range of party policies had antagonized the diverse population of Osh okrug. In the grain- and cotton-producing areas, any easing of tensions between the Soviet regime and the rural society under NEP was reversed in 1927-28 by the Land and Water Reform, restrictions on trade, grain requisitions, unveiling campaign, and the closure of religious institutions. These measures prompted passive resistance (such as sabotage, concealment of property, and foot-dragging), but generally did not provoke violent acts. In the highlands, the campaign against “bai-manaps” in early 1929 led to the revival of the basmachi rebellion and a reprisal of the Civil War with continuity of methods and even personnel. With the onset of collectivization, the disparate groups of the okrug joined in a collective and widespread revolt which took the regime several months to quell.