Uyghur Nation by David Brophy

Author:David Brophy [Brophy, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Asia, China, Russia & the Former Soviet Union, Central Asia, Political Science, History & Theory, Religion, Islam
ISBN: 9780674660373
Google: O5G-CwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Harvard UP
Published: 2016-04-04T22:26:44+00:00

The Three Uyghur Peoples

Up until this point, the Uyghurist framework had served the Taranchi Communists well—winning them a seat at the Comintern Congress—and they must have been reluctant to abandon it. Yet the implosion of the Revolutionary Union of Altishahri and Jungharian Workers was a major blow for the party members associated with it and left a legacy of suspicion among Soviet officials. There was now little prospect of the Communist Party of Turkistan or the Comintern endorsing a united-front collaboration between Taranchi or Kashgari Communists and non-party émigrés from Xinjiang. Only in Semireche, where the union’s membership consisted mostly of Russian-born Taranchis, was the Revolutionary Union permitted to keep functioning.14 As an organization, though, the Revolutionary Union was poorly suited to meet the needs of the local Taranchi peasantry. Given its Comintern origins, there remained a perception that the union had been exclusively tasked with revolutionary work in Xinjiang. Local agricultural organs viewed it as an organization of foreigners, who did not enjoy rights to the land, and the union could do little to assist its members through the process of land reform.

The Taranchis, Kashgaris, and Dungans still hardly registered in the administrative bodies of Soviet Turkistan, which left them no obvious alternative to working through the Revolutionary Union. Turkistan’s own Commissariat of Nationalities did not include them in its national-minority subdivisions, rendering them practically invisible from the state’s point of view. At the end of 1921, though, an opportunity presented itself when Abdullah Rozibaqiev was invited to Tashkent to take up a position in the Communist Party of Turkistan Central Committee’s sub-branch of national minorities.15 This party body took responsibility for political work among a diverse range of groups in Central Asia, and its divisions were not always defined in strictly national terms. It included sections for local, “Bukharan” Jews; Polish and Hungarian sections, comprising former POWs; a Tatar-Bashkir section, uniting a long-standing diaspora in Russian Turkistan; and also an Iranian-Azerbaijani section, continuing the Comintern Turkbiuro’s work among these émigrés. With Rozibaqiev’s arrival, Uyghur Communist sections and Uyghur Communist Youth organizations were added to this list.

These Uyghur sections were to be attached to party bodies throughout Soviet Turkistan and to recruit among Taranchis, Kashgaris, and Dungans. Initially the leadership of these sections was entrusted to the Uyghur Communist Section attached to the Semireche Provincial Committee. The sections still hoped to influence émigré politics elsewhere in Turkistan, and to this end Rozibaqiev lobbied for permission to create a Turkistan Regional Bureau (Kraibiuro) of Uyghur Communist Sections, to be based in Vernyi, that would pick up where the Revolutionary Union had left off and reach out to progressive circles in Xinjiang. The Regional Bureau of Uyghur Communist Sections was officially launched in March 1923. Having put Uyghur organizing work on a new footing, Abdullah Rozibaqiev proposed collapsing the Revolutionary Union into the Ploughman Union (Qoshchi), an organization catering to the needs of Soviet Turkistan’s poor peasants. At a conference of the Revolutionary Union in 1922, Rozibaqiev’s resolution passed, with only Qadir Haji speaking against it.

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