Russian Turkestan’s Mal-Treatment by Stalin

[johnkarls]

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Russian Turkestan’s Mal-Treatment by Stalin - Why Aren’t Al Jazerra and Al Qaida Livid???


During Benazir Bhutto’s lengthy survey of the Islamic World (pp. 81-156 of “Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West”), there is a discussion of recent events in most of the “stans” created from Russian Turkestan (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, etc.).

As discussed at greater length in the preceding essay on Chinese Turkestan, an incredibly large area of Central Asia sprawling across much of the old Soviet Union and post-1949 China comprises a population that is religiously Islamic and ethnically Turkish.

For anyone who has read several good biographies of Stalin and/or the works of the great Soviet dissidents (e.g., Alexander Solzhenitsyn), Russian Turkestan is a fascinating place.

One reason is that it was used as an atomic testing ground by Soviet Russia – discussed at greater length in the preceding essay on Chinese Turkestan.

But it was mal-treated by Stalin long before the atomic age!!!

To set the stage, we must look at two things.

First, the Soviet gulags (though largely located in Siberia) had been established by Lenin immediately after the Revolution with an initial capability of killing EVERY YEAR 7 million enemies of the Revolution!!! (I have forgotten whether Lenin gave first priority to eliminating the Aristocracy or the Intelligentsia).

As Party Secretary General from 1922 and prevailing over Leon Trotsky for complete control after the death of Lenin in 1924, Stalin began employing the Gulags for killing his own personal enemies (and their offspring whom he also feared) at the rate of 7 million people/year right through 1953 when he died.

And his enemies were legion when he tried to collectivize Russian farming in the 1930’s. Indeed, about 1938 there was a famous census that was taken. Despite widespread knowledge of how many people had disappeared into the Gulags, it was still thought that the Russian population was about 180 million. The census ascertained that the population was only 130 million – Stalin had killed 50 million more people than the conventional wisdom had thought possible!!!

Because Russian collectivization was failing and the farmers who were not killed were hoarding what little they produced for themselves, the urban populations were starving.

So being the great “central planner” Stalin ascertained that the Kazakh region of Russian Turkestan was an incredibly fertile but sparsely-populated area that only needed rudimentary irrigation to be capable of feeding the entire Soviet Union – and that, according to his calculations, it would only take 15 million farmers to produce the required food there to feed the Russian urban population!!!

So Stalin immediately designated 10 million Russian urban dwellers to go to the Kazakh area of Russian Turkestan and become farmers overnight!!!

Why only 10 million???

The second item for “setting the stage.”

Most of the world remembers how the Ottoman Turks butchered and raped their Armenian population following World War I, causing a tremendous Armenian Diaspora covering not only the Soviet Republic of Armenia but also tremendous influxes of Armenians into Russia, Ukraine, Soviet Georgia, the United States, etc.

But what most of the world never knew was that the Ottoman Turks also butchered and raped Greeks – the original inhabitants of their capital, Constantinople (aka, Istanbul)!!!

Most of the world thinks of the Greek Empire as the Byzantine Empire. And forgets about how, after the Ottoman Turks captured most of the Arab Empire about 1300, they continued to push against the Greek/Byzantine Empire which lasted 1,000 years following the fall of Rome.

Taking the Greek capital of Constantinople in the process!!! (Athens historically was never a very large city and was still a small provincial outpost of about 10,000 in 1900 under the Ottoman Empire, which is why it is today such a huge disappointment for most tourists.)

Constantinople’s Greek population continued to live there until the Ottoman Turks raped and butchered their Armenian population in the 1920’s forcing them to leave. Which is when the Turks also raped and butchered their 5 million Constantinople/Istanbul Greeks, forcing them to leave.

Greece closed its borders and would not accept the 5 million Constantinople/Istanbul Greeks.

So they fled in the other direction into Soviet Georgia, which was where Stalin had been born and raised.

So when Stalin needed farmers for the Kazakh region of Russian Turkestan in the 1930’s, he remembered the 5 million Constantinople/Istanbul Greeks that had fled into Soviet Georgia in the 1920’s and had all of them transported to the Kazakh region of Russian Turkestan to become farmers.

The Constantinople/Istanbul Greeks kept largely to themselves in their own communities in Kazakhstan, maintaining their Greek Orthodoxy, customs, etc., on a clandestine basis.

Many of them, following Glasnost, emigrated to Greece, where they are treated as second-class citizens because of their thick Russian accents.

*****

Benazir Bhutto’s “Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West” provides a survey of the various “stans” but never mentions that they were part of Russian Turkestan (much less part of Turkestan which was divided by the Russians and Chinese).

And never mentions its maltreatment by Stalin.

So why not???

And why aren’t Al Jazeera and Al Qaida livid at the Russians???

Probably because of the well-known ruthlessness of Russian policy in the Middle East during the Cold War era that “harming a hair on the head” of any Russian will mean that you and your 72 closest friends and relatives will be dead within 24 hours – which only had to be employed once by the Russians and that was 50 years ago.