All of us, and especially the people of the older generation, had to watch many films about the Basmachi, always exhibited in an extremely negative light. As a rule, they were contrasted with the bright images of the Red Army men, who were liberating themselves from centuries of oppression by the grateful peoples of the East.
After the collapse of the USSR, the situation changed, and in our time the Basmachis are no longer bandits deprived of a human image, but fighters for the independence of the republics of Central Asia. Who are these people - heroes or villains?
Push to the start of bloodshed
First of all, the Basmachis are members of armed groups that, during the period following the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917, waged a national liberation war (which is what they call it today) in the territory of the former Turkestan governor general. An image of their flag is presented above. The impetus for the war was the demarcation of this vast territory by the Bolsheviks into separate republics, which included the Turkmen, Tajik, Kazakh, Uzbek and Kyrgyz SSRs, as well as their attempts to eradicate the traditional religion of the local population - Islam.
As a result, the history of Central Asia was a continuous series of bloody clashes between government forces and rebel groups of indigenous people. Under the influence of the Muslim clergy, the political struggle was transferred to the plane of a holy religious war, than the people's leaders, or as it is now commonly called, field commanders, skillfully used it. This greatly complicated the struggle with Basmachi, which ended only in the early 30s, and in some areas lasted almost a decade.
Brutal enemies of Soviet power
The most active were the Basmach detachments in the Ferghana Valley and adjacent areas. The complexity of the fight against them was that, based in hard-to-reach mountain areas, they made regular raids on various settlements controlled by the Bolsheviks and, having killed the commissars, as well as all the supporters of Soviet power from the local population, disappeared without a trace.
As a rule, such raids were accompanied by incredible cruelty towards the victims. The Basmachi did this in order to intimidate both their compatriots and those who came to their land to establish rules that were alien to them. This was the reason for the creation of their extremely negative image in the minds of millions of people.
Defenseless Basmach victims
Statistics show that during the Civil War, the Basmachi killed a much larger number of local residents than the fighters and commanders of regular units of the Red Army sent to suppress them. The explanation for this is very simple - the civilian population, suspected of sympathy with the Bolsheviks, unlike the Red Army soldiers, could not organize any serious resistance to the attackers. Simple farmers (peasants), taken aback by night raids, were defenseless before the bloody arbitrariness created by their own compatriots.
Relapse of rebellion provoked by collectivization
Despite all the efforts made, the rebel forces could not resist the trained and well-armed units of the regular Red Army for a long time, and by 1926 their movement was broken in the main territory of the Central Asian republics. However, as history has shown, it was too early to triumph. Violent collectivization, carried out by the Bolsheviks throughout the country and including their republics, caused a strong surge of discontent among local residents. The Basmachi used this for their own purposes and, taking advantage of the mood of the masses, reassembled them under the banner of a holy war.
However, by this time, the Civil War, which had blazed before in most of the country, had ended long ago, and the government was able to deploy the necessary amount of forces to combat Basmachi. All the main gangs (a term that has spread today), the number of which sometimes reached several thousand people, were destroyed in a short time. The further struggle of the rebels against the establishment of Soviet power in the republics of Central Asia, although it was conducted until the beginning of the 40s, but lost its former scope and was episodic in nature.
Big names of past years
History has preserved the names of the most active leaders, or, as they were more often called, the leaders of the Basmach movement, such as Muetdin-bek, Zhanybek-kazy, Dzhunaid-khan, Madamin-bek and several others. It is characteristic that most of these people came from the lowest social strata. Some of them found themselves at the head of the rebel forces because of their religious fanaticism, others - for political reasons, but most simply decided to take advantage of favorable circumstances in order to escape from hopeless poverty.
It is very difficult to answer the question of whether they were heroes or villains, because these people went to battle for their national independence (this cannot be denied) and for freedom of religion. Another thing is that declaring the noble goals of their struggle, they shed a sea of innocent blood. However, not only they are alone.
Conclusion
As for the Basmachi films with which we started the conversation, many of them very objectively reflect the specifics of that era, and despite the obvious ideological tendentiousness, they can be called historical films. In addition, among them there are genuine masterpieces, such as, for example, “The White Sun of the Desert” - a film that has become truly cult.