Basmachi: Insurgency, Faith, and the Making of Soviet Central Asia

In the winter of 1918, Soviet guns burned the old Silk Road city of Kokand, and a war began that would take thirteen years to end. The Basmachi rebels would be remembered by the victors as bandits and by exiles as patriots. They were neither, and both.This is the full story of the insurgency that tested Bolshevik power in Central Asia, from the cotton fields of Fergana to the mountains of Eastern Bukhara and the sands of the Karakum. It follows the Lokai horseman Ibrahim Bek, who never learned to read and held a mountain kingdom against the Red Army. It follows the exiled Ottoman minister Enver Pasha, whose bid to raise an army of Islam ended in the hills of Baljuvan. It follows Frunze, the Soviet commander who learned that bread, bazaars, and mosques could win what cavalry could not.Here too are the Jadid reformers who allied with Moscow and died in its purges, the emir who ruled from exile for twenty years, and the borders drawn in 1924 that still divide the region. It is a story of hunger, faith, empire, and memory, told in the narrative tradition of the best popular history.