Travels in Uzbekistan: Faizulla Khodjaev & the dilemma of leadership

On his return to Bukhara in 1912 he founded a newspaper, ‘The Holy Bukhara’ which preached the need for democracy, secular education and such other modern ideas that were sweeping the world of that time. It is said that the ulema whispered into the Bukhara Emir’s ears asking whether the Emir had now embraced Christian ideas such as these and the emir panicked and ordered the newspaper shut after just 13 issues. The political movement he had co-founded, the Jadid, which among other things wanted a separation of the State and Religion, split into a conservative faction ready for a long and patient attempt to persuade the Emir to modernize and a radical faction, of course led by Khodjaev which wanted immediate action.

By then it was 1917 and Russian revolution shook the world, so Khodjaev and his radicals presented a plan to the Bolsheviks proposing radical modernization. With Russia’s support the plans were again presented to the Emir who had no choice but to accept it.. It is said that the Emir , after accepting the plan, encouraged the ulema to use their  reach to the masses through Friday prayers and the madrasas to oppose it. This set up clashes in the streets of Bokharo between the Ulema and the radical faction of the Jadid. The Emir used this excuse to arrest the radical faction leaders.

This made Khodjaev and his team decide that they had no choice but to ask the Emir to go if Bokharo was to modernize. This coincided with Lenin’s announcement that all former Russian colonies were free to go their own way and could even ask for the help of the Red Army to unseat the traditional emirs who ruled all over Central Asia.

Khodjaev and friends, in a move that he was to judge to be a tragic mistake later on, took this offer at face value and invited the Red Army’s help in unseating the Emir. This of course took no time since the Russian army was not only overwhelmingly powerful compared to the Emir’s one  but also because many basic utilities in Bokharo at that time including the railway system was run by Russia.

Khodjaev and his Russian allies quickly despatched the Emir, renamed his party the Communist Party of Bokhara and in 1920, as the First Secretary was effectively the head of the People’s Republic of Bokaro.Khodjaev promptly got down to modernize his state, opening schools to impart secular education, side-lining the Ulema, separating the State’s functions from religion.

The first sign of trouble for Khodjaev was when he tried to alter Bokaro’s role as the cotton plantation of the Soviet system. He pushed for a larger allocation of land and resources to food crops, famously telling Stalin that people cant eat cotton. It is said that Stalin viewed this as an expression of nationalism which ran counter to the views of the Communists at that time.

Ominously, in the 1937 election to the Party posts, Khodjaev’s name was not proposed. The next year, he was summoned to Moscow and after a brief trial was condemned to death for his anti-people attitude. He was promptly executed and his mother, wife and two daughters were packed off to Siberia to do hard labour from which only one daughter survived.

Khodjaev’s struggle to modernize his country makes a poignant tale. He was swimming against the many strong tides of his day: the rise of Communism, the social structure of the Central Asian emirates of that time with a tightly coupled relationship between the ulema and the Emir, a country which was a single-crop ( cotton) commodity producer vulnerable to fluctuating prices, the Great Depression of 1929, the formation of the Soviet Union in 1924 and the consequent isolation from world markets.

After Uzbekistan was set free from the Soviet Union in the early 1990’s, Khodjaev has been posthumously rehabilitated. There is a university now named after him and his ancestral home is a museum.