Uzbekistan rehabilitated Basmachs: now they became fighters for the national independence

Gennady Charodeyev

They say that Mirziyoyev thought for a long time, requested archival materials, carefully studied them before making such a decision. After all, he was born in the Soviet Union, studied in a Soviet school, where he was "drilled" into the naked that the Basmachi are enemies of the new life and socialism. Shavkat Miromonovich probably remembers from history textbooks that the last detachments of the Basmachi abandoned armed confrontation with the Soviet regime only in 1942.

The word "basmach" comes from the Uzbek "basma" - an armed raid. The ideological basis of Basmachism was Pan-Turkism and Pan-Islamism.

The time of the beginning of Basmachism is usually considered to be February 1918, when the Red Army finally defeated the self-proclaimed Turkestan autonomy, which covered the lands of present-day Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

The raiders were especially active in the Fergana Valley and adjacent areas, in the Samarkand and Sardarya regions, in Khiva, Eastern Bukhara and the Krasnovodsk region. The Basmachi detachments were divided into small (up to a hundred people) and large, uniting several thousand militants.

Basmachi tactics were typical of guerrilla warfare in mountainous and desert areas: the insurgent Islamists tried to avoid clashes with the numerous and well-armed units of the Red Army. The emphasis was on organizing ambushes and dashing cavalry raids. People were slaughtered at night. As a rule, the basmachi basing points were organized in hard-to-reach places. Local residents provided them with intelligence information.

The Supreme Court of Uzbekistan rehabilitated one of the leaders of the Basmach movement in the first decades of Soviet power - Kurbashi Ibragim-bek "Lokaysky" (Chakabaev). His troops made regular raids on cities and villages, rivers of blood of innocent people were shed. Everyone who "sold out" to Moscow was executed.

Ibrahim-bek proclaimed an armed struggle for the return of the deposed emir of Bukhara to the throne. The Soviets believed that he planned to create an independent Uzbek-Tajik state in the north-east of Afghanistan.

In 1931, the Kurbashi tried to unite the remaining Basmachi detachments under his command and again attack the territories controlled by the Red Army. In the battle at the crossing of the Kofarnikhon River, Ibrahim-bek was captured by a special detachment of the OGPU under the command of Commissar Mukum Sultanov. It was handed over by local volunteers.

Under escort, a 42-year-old bandit was taken to Tashkent, tried and on August 31, 1931 sentenced to capital punishment - execution. Immediately after the announcement, the sentence to Chakabaev was carried out. His accomplices were also punished, more than half of whom (about 70 people) were seized by the Afghan authorities and handed over to the Chekists. Almost all of them received long or life terms of high security prison sentences, and 25 key persons in Ibrahim-bek's "retinue" were sentenced by the court and shot.

“It is obvious that leaders with great potential, scientists, writers, doctors, teachers were repressed. They were the best representatives of our people. A totalitarian regime does not need smart people who would open the eyes of the nation and strengthen its self-consciousness. They were only guilty of being great, ”said Uzbek President Mirziyoyev.

The head of state is also convinced that earlier the Uzbek authorities approached history selectively, covering those places that they like, hiding those sides that the people do not like.

Now, according to Shavkat Mirziyoyev, justice has triumphed. The honest names of 115 ancestors who fought for the national independence of Uzbekistan have been restored and were not rehabilitated. How many more are there? It is necessary to continue the noble work aimed at restoring the honor and dignity of patriots, the head of state said.

It is interesting that the revision of the Basmachi cases was carried out in secret, without public or expert discussion. Then information was leaked to the media that the files received from the archives of the OGPU did not contain any valuable information. There are not even interrogation protocols or transcripts.