A Bukharan Jadid and one of the founders of modern Uzbek literature and literary scholarship, the first Uzbek to hold the title of professor. A minister of the Bukharan People's Republic, he was executed in 1938.
Abdurauf Abdurahim o'g'li Fitrat was born in Bukhara in 1886 (some sources say 1885) into an educated family. After Bukhara's madrasas he studied in Istanbul in 1909–1913, where he wrote in Persian “The Debate” (Munozara), a dialogue between a European and a Bukharan teacher about new-method schools, the verse collection “The Cry” and “The Tale of an Indian Traveller” — sharp indictments of stagnation and ignorance in the Emirate of Bukhara. He became one of the intellectual leaders of the Young Bukharans.
Revolution, office and writing
After 1917 Fitrat founded the Chagatai Conversation society in Tashkent to reform the Uzbek language and spelling. When the emir fell in 1920 he served the Bukharan People's Soviet Republic as minister of foreign affairs and of education, and was instrumental in making Uzbek Bukhara's state language in 1921. Pushed out of politics in 1923, he devoted himself to scholarship and literature, writing the historical drama “Abulfayz Khan”, “Judgement Day” and “Satan's Revolt against God”, and studies of Uzbek literary history, prosody and music. In the late 1920s he became the first Uzbek scholar to be made professor. Arrested in 1937, he was shot in Tashkent on 4 October 1938 and rehabilitated in the early 1960s.
Remembrance
Independent Uzbekistan fully restored his legacy: he received the Alisher Navoi State Prize posthumously in 1991 and later the Order of Independence. For his 110th anniversary in 1996 a garden and memorial house-museum opened in Bukhara, along with a statue, and streets and schools in Tashkent and Bukhara bear his name. The Fitrat museum is a good place in Bukhara to discover the Jadid era.
Built eastward from the Caspian shore under General Mikhail Annenkov, the Trans-Caspian Railway reached Samarkand via Bukhara (Kagan) in 1888. Trains first crossed the Amu Darya on a wooden bridge; a permanent one was completed only in 1901. In 1898 the line was extended to Tashkent and Andijan, and the opening of the Tashkent–Orenburg railway in 1906 linked Central Asia directly with central Russia. The railway boosted cotton exports dramatically, and new settlements grew around stations such as Kagan and Khavast and in the Russian quarters of towns like Jizzakh. The old station buildings of Kagan and Samarkand recall the era.
On the night of 29 May 1898 some 1,500 armed men led by the Naqshbandi sheikh Muhammad Ali Madali, known as Dukchi Ishan, attacked the Russian army camp at Andijan. The rising fed on resentment of colonial rule, taxation and land policy, as well as on religious appeals. The troops quickly recovered and beat off the attack, and within days the revolt was crushed. Dukchi Ishan and other leaders were executed, many participants exiled and their villages punished. The episode pushed the authorities to tighten control over Muslim institutions in Turkestan.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries a reform movement took shape in Turkestan: the Jadids, advocates of usul-i jadid, the “new method”. Inspired by the Crimean Tatar educator Ismail Gasprinsky, Mahmudkhoja Behbudiy, Munavvar Qori, Abdulla Avloniy, Is'hoqxon Ibrat, Abdurauf Fitrat and others opened schools teaching literacy by the phonetic method and wrote textbooks. From 1906 Uzbek-language newspapers such as Taraqqiy and Khurshid appeared in Tashkent, and Behbudiy's play “The Patricide” (Padarkush), staged in 1914, launched a national theatre. The Jadids sought to renew society through education, the press and reform. Many were repressed in the 1920s–1930s; their legacy is being rediscovered today.
On 25 June (8 July) 1916, at the height of the First World War, Nicholas II decreed the conscription of Turkestani men aged 19 to 43 for labour behind the front. Issued at harvest time and enforced through unfair lists, the decree provoked mass unrest. In July there were protests in Khujand, Tashkent and towns of the Fergana Valley; in Jizzakh the rising turned into armed fighting and was crushed with great brutality by punitive detachments, which left the old town badly damaged. The revolt also spread across Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Tens of thousands of labourers were eventually sent to the front zone regardless.
After the October Revolution of 1917, power in Tashkent passed to a Bolshevik-led soviet that excluded the local Muslim majority. In response, the Fourth Extraordinary Congress of Turkestan Muslims, meeting in Kokand on 27 November 1917, proclaimed a Turkestan Autonomy within a Russian federation. Its government was led by Mukhamedzhan Tynyshpaev and then Mustafa Chokay, with Jadids among its members. In February 1918 Red Guard units sent from Tashkent stormed Kokand; much of the city was destroyed and thousands of civilians were killed. Short-lived as it was, the autonomy is seen as a milestone in the region's pursuit of national statehood.
After the Turkestan Autonomy was crushed, an armed movement against Soviet rule spread through the Fergana Valley from 1918. Soviet sources called it the Basmachi movement; Uzbek historians today more often describe it as a struggle for independence. It was led by local commanders, or kurbashi, such as Ergash, Madamin Bek and Shermuhammad Bek (Kurshermat). After 1920 the fighting shifted to Eastern Bukhara and the mountains of Kashkadarya and Surkhandarya, where Ibrahim Bek was a leading figure; the Ottoman general Enver Pasha joined in 1921–1922 and was killed in 1922. Large Red Army forces had largely suppressed the movement by the mid-1920s, though isolated bands held out into the early 1930s.
