Rebellion Against the Colonial Foundations of Tsarist Autocracy
National Liberation Uprising
The uprising we are interested in took on a religious guise; however, this did not significantly affect the nature of the uprising. The rebels fought against colonial oppression for national freedom, not for the religion of Islam. It is worth noting that the insurgents did not harm Russian peasants who practiced a different religion. They attacked the tsarist military personnel, seeing in them the enforcers of colonial power, not because they were Russian and adhered to the Christian faith.
Thus, the uprising in question, which encompassed a significant part of the Fergana Valley and to some extent the Semirechye and Syr-Darya regions, was primarily directed against the colonial foundations of tsarist autocracy. Its driving force consisted of Uzbek, Kyrgyz, and Tajik working masses. This uprising had a national liberation character.
Despite the fact that the uprising ended in defeat, it had great political significance. The uprising dealt a significant blow to tsarist colonial power in Turkestan and undermined its foundations.
High-ranking representatives of the tsarist autocracy felt fear and tried to strengthen their positions here, thus attempting to avert the further escalation of the workers' struggle for freedom, but unsuccessfully.
The brutal measures to suppress the uprising of 1898, on the contrary, contributed to the growth of hatred among the workers towards the tsarist power and its satraps, pushing them towards a more decisive struggle against the exploiters.
With the onset of the proletarian period of the liberation movement from the late 1890s in Central Asia, including Kyrgyzstan, revolutionary ideas began to penetrate. Political exiled social democrats, labor migrants who participated in anti-feudal uprisings of peasants from central provinces, representatives of progressive student movements, soldiers, and other revolutionarily inclined individuals played a significant role in their dissemination.
In Turkestan, there was an objective socio-political ground for the penetration of revolutionary ideas. The historical fates of the peoples of Turkestan and Russia were similar. The working Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Turkmen, and Kazakhs, like Russian workers and labor peasants, languished under the yoke of tsarist power, capitalists, landlords, and other exploiters. They were disenfranchised, endured humiliations and insults from the exploiters. Both Russian laborers and the working people of Turkestan hated the tsarist and local oppressors. They had common social and political interests. The working masses of Turkestan and Russia simultaneously, and later jointly, fought against tsarist autocracy. The national liberation struggle of the peoples of Central Asia increasingly converged and later merged into a single stream with the revolutionary movement of Russian workers and peasants. This was not hindered by the tsarist colonial policy, which tried to set the peoples of Russia and Turkestan against each other, inciting interethnic hostility and conflict, thereby nullifying the liberation struggle of the workers and saving the autocracy. All this contributed to the penetration of revolutionary ideas, their acceptance by the population, and the development of the liberation struggle in the region.
There were colossal difficulties and obstacles on the path of penetrating revolutionary ideas into Turkestan, related to the economic, political, and cultural backwardness of the region, the dominance of patriarchal-feudal relations, the extreme scarcity and weak organization of the local proletariat, the almost universal illiteracy of the population, their ignorance or almost ignorance of the Russian language, the colonial regime, the brutal persecution of revolutionaries, strict censorship, police regime, religious and national prejudices, etc. However, nothing and no one could turn the wheel of history back or halt the penetration of revolutionary ideas into Turkestan, including Kyrgyzstan.
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