The Revolt of 1916 in Russian Central Asia

Resumen del libro

During the summer of 1916, approximately 270,000 Central Asians'Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Tajiks, Turkmen, and Uzbeks'perished at the hands of the Russian army in a revolt that began with resistance to the Tsars World War I draft. In addition to those killed outright, tens of thousands of men, women, and children died while trying to escape over treacherous mountain passes into China. Experts calculate that the Kyrgyz, who suffered most heavily, lost 40% of their total population.

This horrific incident was nearly lost to history. During the Soviet era, the massacre of 1916 became a taboo subject, hidden in sealed archives and banished from history books. Edward Dennis Sokols pioneering Revolt of 1916 in Russian Central Asia, published in 1954 and reissued now for the first time in decades, was for generations the only scholarly study of the massacre in any language. Drawing on early Soviet periodicals, including Krasnyi Arkhiv ( The Red Archive), Sokols wide-ranging and exhaustively researched work explores the Tsarist policies that led to Russian encroachment against the land and rights of the indigenous Central Asian people. It describes the corruption that permeated Russian colonial rule and argues that the uprising was no mere draft riot, but a revolt against Tsarist colonialism in all its dimensions: economic, political, religious, and national. Sokols masterpiece also traces the chain reaction between the uprising, the collapse of Tsarism, and the Bolshevik Revolution.