A Peace to End all Peace

by David Fromkin

  A month after the Baku congress, Enver returned to Berlin. He began to purchase arms—perhaps on his own behalf, for he hoped to return to Anatolia to push Kemal aside and assume command of the forces resisting the Allies. He still retained support among former C.U.P. militants, and he also controlled an organization on the Transcaucasian frontier; his hopes of returning to power within Turkey were not entirely unrealistic.

  Throwing its support behind Enver was an alternative with which Moscow could eventually threaten Mustapha Kemal, if and when it became necessary to do so; but for the moment the Bolsheviks had nothing for Enver to do.* As will be seen presently, it was to be a year before the Soviets found a mission on which to send him—a mission to Bukhara in turbulent Turkestan.

  Awaiting an assignment, Enver settled in Moscow in 1921 as a guest of the Soviet government. A picturesque figure in the streets of the Russian capital, he attracted attention by wearing an enormous tarboosh that offset his tiny stature. He became the social lion of Moscow, according to the American writer Louise Bryant, who lived next door to him for half a year and saw him every day. She wrote that he “certainly has charm, in spite of his very obvious opportunism,…cruelty…and lack of conscience.”13 She sensed that, despite all the lionizing, he was bored.14

  Enver’s star was on the wane in Moscow, because that of his rival—Mustapha Kemal—was on the rise. The working arrangement that the Kremlin arrived at with Mustapha Kemal’s Turkish Nationalist government allowed Soviet Russia to crush Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Kemal’s overt anti-communism—on 28 January 1921 Kemalists killed seventeen Turkish communist leaders by drowning them in the Black Sea—was not allowed by Lenin or Stalin to stand in the way of agreement. In entering into a series of interlocking pacts with the anti-communist nationalist Moslem leaders of Turkey, Persia, and Afghanistan, Moscow seemed to be traveling along the path marked out at the Baku congress: abandoning revolutionary goals in favor of pursuing traditional Russian objectives in the Great Game. The Soviets encouraged revolutionary Kemalist Turkey to enter into a pact of her own, in Moscow, with traditionalist Afghanistan, the purpose of which (as indicated in Article Two) was to join hands in opposing aggression and exploitation by the British Empire.

  In the summer of 1921 Mustapha Kemal won the first in a series of stunning successes against the British-backed Greek army. The tide was running with him and, in the autumn, the Soviets moved further toward alliance with him. Enver saw himself losing out to Kemal.

  In the summer of 1921, the Soviets, at Enver’s request, provided him with transportation to the Caucasus. Enver assured the Soviet Foreign Minister that he was not going there to work against Kemal, but broke his word. On arrival in Transcaucasia, he established himself in Batum, in Georgia, on the Turkish frontier. There he held a congress of supporters, and tried to cross into Turkey; but the Soviet authorities forcibly detained him. Enver’s continued presence on the Turkish frontier became an embarrassment to the Soviet leaders, who sent Enver away; either at their request or his, he was entrusted with a mission to Central Asia.

  In Central Asia, Moscow was attempting to complete its reconquest of the native Turkish-speaking Moslem populations, and asked Enver to help.

  Enver’s mission was contrary to everything for which he had stood in politics: his goal had been to liberate the Turkish-speaking peoples from Russian rule. The mission also ran contrary to what the Bolsheviks had preached before coming to power: they had claimed that they were in favor of allowing the non-Russian peoples of the Russian Empire freely to go their own way. Coming after the Russian reconquest of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, and after the unveiling of Moscow’s alliance with anti-communist leaders of Islam, the Soviet instructions to Enver raised the question of whether the Bolsheviks had subordinated, postponed, or even abandoned altogether the revolutionary ideals they had once espoused. Enver undoubtedly had his own views about this, but he hid them from his Bolshevik hosts as he set out for Bukhara in Central Asia.

  III

  By the summer of 1920—a year before Enver was sent there—Bukhara was the last remaining bastion of Turkic independence in Central Asia. Occupying about 85,000 square miles on the right bank of the Oxus river, in the southeast corner of Russian Turkestan, back against the mountainous southern and eastern frontiers that run with Afghanistan and China, its population of roughly two and a half to three million raised it above the level of its sparsely populated Turkish neighbors. The structure of its Russian protectorate had melted away during the revolutions of 1917, and its emir, Abdul Said Mir Alim Khan, last of the Mangit line, reasserted the independence of Bukhara and the autocratic powers that had been exercised by his ancestors. The Soviets heard rumors of British complicity in the Emir’s defiance of their authority; and in fact British India did send a hundred camel loads of supplies to aid the emirate. Bolshevik Russia attacked Bukhara in 1918, but the Emir’s tiny army, officially numbered at 11,000 men, was able to win the brief war.

  At the time of the Bolshevik attack, Bukhara was still wealthy and well supplied. The emirate had always been known for the fertility of its oases, and its capital city—also called Bukhara—remained the most important trading town in Central Asia. In the city’s seven-mile honeycomb of covered bazaars, business (according to at least one traveler’s report) went on as usual.15 There was a lively traffic in the products of craftsmen, in precious metals, jewels, rugs, leather, silks, currencies, and all manner of food-stuffs. A center of the commerce in rare manuscripts and libraries in many oriental languages, Bukhara continued to be the principal book market in Central Asia.

  But after his victory over the Bolsheviks in 1918, the Emir brought this commercial prosperity to an end by cutting off all trade with Russia. At the same time he allowed irrigation projects to be discontinued. By the summer of 1920 Bukhara’s economic situation was grave and the country was unable to feed itself.16 Popular discontent and social strife erupted as a Young Bukhara movement (which was opposed to Soviet intervention) and a smaller Communist Party (which welcomed it) protested against the unenlightened policies and medieval ways of the ruler. The Emir, in some ways, had indeed brought back the Middle Ages. The twelfth-century Kalyan Minaret, or Tower of Death, from the top of which condemned criminals were thrown, was back in use. From his palaces, among his boy and girl harems, the Emir ruled in as arbitrary a way as had any of his ancestors.

  Taking advantage of the Emir’s unpopularity, the Red Army intervened. In the summer of 1920 the Red Army attacked again, and Russian troops under the command of Mikhail Frunze bombarded Bukhara. As the Young Bukharans launched an uprising in the city, the Red Army, with its airplanes and armored vehicles, moved forward on 2 September, bringing Bukhara’s medieval regime to an end; the library, containing possibly the greatest collection of Moslem manuscripts in the world, went up in flames.

  The Emir, alerted by a telephone call to his palace, fled, along with his harems and three wagon-loads of gold and precious stones from his treasury. A story was told later that, at points along the way, he left one or another of his favorite dancing boys, in the hopes of diverting and thus slowing his pursuers. His initial stopping point was the hill country of the east. From there he sought, and found, sanctuary across the frontier in Afghanistan.

  After capturing the city of Bukhara, Soviet Russia recognized the absolute independence of a Bukharan People’s Republic; but the recognition was in form only. Frunze’s troops remained, and imposed requisitions on the country. Soviet interference in Bukhara’s affairs pointed toward its eventual incorporation into Soviet Russia. Leaders of the Young Bukhara movement resisted the trend toward Russian control and attempted to assert their independence.

  In the hills of eastern Bukhara, Basmachi groups loyal to the Emir began to harass the Russian conquerors. As yet no real links had been forged between the various Basmachi groups; nonetheless the Basmachis posed a challenge to Soviet rule that, even by the end of 1921, the Red Army had been unable to crush.
/>   IV

  Enver Pasha reached Bukhara on 8 November 1921, entrusted by the Russians with a role in the pacification of Turkestan.

  As he approached the city through gardens of fruit trees, melons, grapevines, roses, poppies, and tobacco plants, he entered the Eden of his pan-Turkish ideology: the historic homeland of the Turkish peoples. Surrounded by eight miles of high crenellated stone walls, with 11 gates and 181 watch-towers, centuries-old Bukhara was an architectural embodiment of the Moslem past in which he gloried. Once the holiest city of Central Asia, its 360 mosques reflected his faith—a faith shared by its inhabitants, whose men lived their religion and whose women wore the veil. The men of Bukhara wore turbans and the traditional striped robes called khalats, while Enver arrived with his European-cut military tunic; but between him and them there was a bond of brotherhood.

  Enver’s affinities extended even to the new government of Bukhara. The Young Bukhara Party was not dissimilar to the Young Turks whom Enver had led in Constantinople; and reformist leaders like Zeki Velidi Togan of Bashkiria had congregated there. When Enver left the city, only three days after entering it, he took with him the key figures in the government: its Chairman, and its Commissars of War and Interior. The story he told the Russians was that they were going hunting. In fact they made their way to the hill country of eastern Bukhara, where Enver made contact with partisans of the Emir. There, appointed commander-in-chief by the Emir, he assumed the leadership of the Basmachi war for independence from Russia.

  With the support both of the Emir and of the Young Bukhara leaders, he was in a position to bring all factions together. His envoys sought out Basmachi bands throughout Turkestan to unify them under his banner. His proclaimed goal was the creation of an independent Moslem state in Central Asia. As always he stressed the unity of the Moslem peoples. His strong Islamic message won him the support of the mullahs, who rallied strongly to his cause, and of his important neighbor, the Moslem Emir of Afghanistan.

  However Enver’s personal weaknesses reasserted themselves. He was a vain, strutting man who loved uniforms, medals, and titles. For use in stamping official documents, he ordered a golden seal that described him as “Commander-in-Chief of all the Armies of Islam, Son-in-Law of the Caliph and Representative of the Prophet.”17 Soon he was calling himself Emir of Turkestan, a practice not conducive to good relations with the Emir whose cause he served. At some point in the first half of 1922, the Emir of Bukhara broke off relations with him, depriving him of troops and much-needed financial support. The Emir of Afghanistan also failed to march to his aid.

  Enver’s revolt scored some initial successes. He launched a daring raid on the city of Bukhara which unnerved his opponents. But the extent of his successes remains a subject of dispute. According to some accounts, he came to control most of the territory of Bukhara. According to others, Enver was merely one of a number of chiefs, who led a band of no more than 3,000 followers (out of an estimated 16,000 Basmachis roaming the country).18 What is clear is that, however effective or ineffective, his activities were a cause of deep concern to the Kremlin.

  In the late spring of 1922, Enver wrote to the government of Soviet Russia asking it to withdraw Russian troops and to recognize the independence of his Moslem state in Turkestan. In return he offered peace and friendship. Moscow refused his offer.

  The Red Army, assisted by the secret police, launched a campaign of pacification in the summer of 1922. In this they were aided by Enver’s weaknesses. As a general he continued to be God’s gift to the other side. As a politician, he was equally maladroit: he alienated the other Basmachi leaders, many of whom turned against him. By midsummer, the Russians had reduced his following to a tiny band of fugitives.

  Russian agents and patrols searched the narrow mountain ravines for traces of him, and eventually tracked him down to his lair in the hills, where Red Army troops quietly surrounded his forces. Before dawn on 4 August 1922, the Soviet soldiers attacked. Enver’s men were cut down.

  There are several accounts of how Enver died.19 According to the most persuasive of them, when the Russians attacked he gripped his pocket Koran and, as always, charged straight ahead. Later his decapitated body was found on the field of battle. His Koran was taken from his lifeless fingers and was filed in the archives of the Soviet secret police.

  V

  Soviet Russia’s liquidation of the last of the Turkish independence movements in Central Asia completed the process by which the Bolshevik authorities revealed that they would not keep their promise to allow non-Russian peoples to secede from Russian rule. It was now evident that they intended to retain the empire and the frontiers achieved by the czars.

  Sir Percy Cox, who had recently returned to London from the Middle East, told the Cabinet in the summer of 1920 that the Bolsheviks would hold to the old Russian imperial frontier—but that they were not anxious to send their armies across it in search of new conquests.20 Winston Churchill was conspicuous among those in London who believed that Cox was wrong; but events at the time shed little light on the matter one way or the other. Certainly the Kremlin was active in subverting the British Empire in the Middle East, but there is as little agreement today as there was during the Lloyd George administration as to the long-run intentions with which the Kremlin did so.

  Enver Pasha’s postwar adventures did, however, shed light on a number of other issues that British officials had raised during and just after the First World War about the opposition they faced in the Middle East. British officials had conceived of Enver as the sinister and potent figure who sustained Mustapha Kemal in his opposition to the Allies; but events had shown that Enver and Kemal were deadly rivals, and that it was Kemal—not Enver—who commanded the more powerful following within Turkey, and who therefore could obtain arms from Soviet Russia. British officials had also pictured Enver as a creature of the German military machine, but, while he could call on personal friends like von Seeckt for favors, in his Russian years he acted entirely on his own; and as Enver fought his last campaign in 1922, von Seeckt’s new German army was secretly working with the Bolsheviks, not with Enver.

  For years Enver had threatened Britain and Russia with a pan-Turk uprising, but when he finally issued his call to revolt there was no appreciable response to it. Even within the guerrilla bands that he led, the Moslem religion rather than feelings of Turkishness provided the unifying bond. Pan-Islam, about which British officials continued to write with alarm, was also revealed as an empty slogan by the Bukharan campaign: the clannish peoples of the Middle East were not given to wider loyalties, and not one Moslem land—not even friendly Afghanistan—marched to Enver’s aid. It was true that in various parts of Turkestan, Moslem natives reacted against Russian settlers, even as in Palestine Moslems reacted against Jewish settlers, but each group of Moslems responded locally and only for itself: throughout the Middle East, Moslems were acting alike rather than acting together.

  When Enver journeyed to Moscow, the British view was that he and his new Russian associates were elements of a long-standing political combination, and that they would work toward the same political goals. In fact their goals were far apart. Enver and the Bolsheviks tried to use each other, but neither succeeded. The Bolsheviks proved adept at swiftly picking up anyone they thought might do them good—and at quickly discarding them when their usefulness was at an end. London continually misunderstood, and interpreted as long-term combinations, these emphemeral tactical alliances into which the Kremlin entered with such cynical ease. It might have amused Enver, in the last minutes before his head was cut off by the Russians, to know that British Intelligence had marked him down as Moscow’s man.

  Enver’s adventures—had British Intelligence known the full story of them at the time—would have shown the British that they were mistaken in their several views of who was in charge of Bolshevik Russia. A prevalent British view was that the Bolsheviks were run from Berlin by the German generals; but when Enver arrived in Berlin in 1919 he found th
at the German army was out of touch with Russia and took no interest in the new rulers of the Kremlin. It was Enver who suggested that the German army might profit from establishing a relationship with the Bolshevik regime, not vice versa; and it was a suggestion that von Seeckt did not begin to implement until 1921.

  Indeed what Enver found was that Lenin and his colleagues were men who set their own agenda: that, above all, is where British Intelligence officers were wrong about them. The men in the Kremlin were engaged in giving orders, not in taking them. They were not arms of somebody else’s conspiracies; when it came to conspiracies, they wove their own. Winston Churchill, who had correctly observed as much, then spoiled his analysis by going on to claim that the Soviet leaders were neither Russian nor pro-Russian. Along with so many other British fantasies about the forces at work against them in the Middle East, it was a theory that ought to have died with Enver Pasha at Bukhara.

  PART XII

  THE MIDDLE EASTERN SETTLEMENT OF 1922

  57

  WINSTON CHURCHILL TAKES CHARGE

  I

  Russia, then, troubled after the war by the appearance of independence movements in Moslem Asia on her southern frontier, crushed them, and while doing so defined herself by charting her future relationship with the non-Russian peoples of what had once been the empire of the czars. So far as she was able, she would bring them under the rule of the Russian state—a policy formally adopted on 30 December 1922, when the First Congress of Soviets of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics approved the formation of the Soviet Union.