Turkestan - A Place of Exile for Political Prisoners
The penetration and spread of revolutionary ideas were facilitated by the friendly relations between the indigenous population and Russian labor migrants, which arose and developed through their everyday and long-term economic, domestic, and cultural interactions, despite the chauvinistic policies of the tsarist authorities and the nationalist actions of local exploiters. Moreover, the brutal oppressive policies of colonial authorities and local feudal lords, contrary to their desires, increasingly widened the gap between exploiters and the exploited, objectively contributing to a closer rapprochement and unification of the working people of Turkestan with Russian workers and peasants.
When discussing the penetration of revolutionary ideas into the region, it should not be overlooked that Turkestan was one of those remote, backward, and provincial outskirts of Russia where "unreliable people," i.e., political opponents of the tsarist autocracy—democratically inclined individuals, progressive elements of society, and revolutionaries—were typically exiled. At the same time, the tsarist authorities hoped that political exiles would be isolated from the working population and cut off from the central provinces and industrial regions, where the revolutionary struggle of Russian workers and peasants was emerging and developing. As expected, these hopes of the tsarism were not fulfilled; the tsarist authorities miscalculated.
As early as 1847, the great Ukrainian poet, friend of the oppressed peoples, and renowned rebel Taras Shevchenko was exiled to the Raime fortress at the mouth of the Syr Darya River, near the Aral Sea, where he boldly condemned the tsarist autocracy in his poems. Later, he was transferred to the Novo-Petrovsk fortress— the port of Alexandrov on the Mangyshlak Peninsula (now the city of Shevchenko). Taras Shevchenko soon entered into secret contact with the local working population and, to some extent, had a progressive influence on them. In 1879, a close friend of Karl Marx, the first translator of "Capital" into Russian, a member of the General Council of the First International, and a student and follower of N.G. Chernyshevsky—German Alexandrovich Lopatin—was exiled to the capital city of Turkestan, Tashkent. In the same Tashkent lived V.D. Koryushin, A.R. Bakharov, and some other revolutionaries who were exiled in 1895 from Kazan for participating in social-democratic circles. In 1895, M.F. Lagovsky, a revolutionary who had been imprisoned for 10 years in the Shlisselburg Fortress, was exiled to Przhevalsk from St. Petersburg.
Initially in Merke, and then in Pishpek, V.A. Kotov, who was exiled from St. Petersburg for revolutionary activities, lived there.
He was placed under intensified police surveillance. Around this time, political exiles were present in Turkestan, including A.S. Kocharovskaya, a participant in the social-democratic movement in Lithuania, who later became a prominent member of the Bolshevik party, and V.P. Mirkovsky, a member of one of the first social-democratic organizations in the country—the "Party of the Polish Working Class 'Proletariat'." In 1898, social-democrats S.I. Ivanov (Kryuchnik) and M. Leonov, who had previously belonged to Lenin's Union for the Liberation of the Working Class in St. Petersburg, were exiled here. By the beginning of our century, the influx of political exiles into Turkestan had somewhat increased.
Uprising Against the Colonial Foundations of Tsarist Autocracy