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Tajikistan
Impact of the Civil War
An acute food shortage struck Turkestan in 1918-19, the result
of the civil war, scarcities of grain caused by communist cotton-cultivation
and price-setting policies, and the Tashkent Soviet's disinclination
to provide famine relief to indigenous Central Asians. No authoritative
estimate of famine deaths is available, but Central Asian nationalists
put the number above 1 million.
In the fall of 1919, the collapse of the anti-Bolshevik White
Army in western Siberia enabled General Mikhail Frunze to lead
Red Army forces into Central Asia and gradually occupy the entire
region. In 1920 the Red Army occupied Bukhoro and drove out the
amir, declaring an independent people's republic but remaining
as an occupation force. Turkestan, including the northern part
of present-day Tajikistan, was officially incorporated into the
Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic in 1921.
By 1921 the Russian communists had won the Russian Civil War
and established the first Soviet republics in Azerbaijan, Armenia,
Belorussia (present-day Belarus), Georgia, and Ukraine. At this
point, the communists reduced the party's token Central Asian
leadership to figurehead positions and expelled a large number
of the Central Asian rank and file. In 1922 the Communist Party
of Bukhoro was incorporated into the Russian Communist Party,
which soon became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).
Thereafter, most major government offices in Bukhoro were filled
by appointees sent from Moscow, many of them Tatars, and many
Central Asians were purged from the party and the government.
In 1924 Bukhoro was converted from a people's republic to a Soviet
socialist republic.
Data as of March 1996
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