The 1916 Uprisings in Jizzakh: Economic Background and Political Rationales

International audience ; The 1916 uprisings in Jizzakh: economic background and political rationalesIntroductionAndrei Shestakov, one of the main historians and ideologues who produced articles and in the 1930s published a collection of archival documents on the 1916 revolt in Jizzakh, wrote that: the events (sobytiia) that occurred in the second half of the year 1916, when the Russian empire was collapsing on different fronts of the war, have to be considered without, any doubt, as one of the key moments that paved the ground for the revolution of 1917. This became clear when one looks at the process and the characters of the event of 1916 in Central Asia, where large masses of peasants and half “proletarianized” urban artisans rose up against the tsarist power. Considered the “first mass colonial revolution of the nineteenth century”, the uprisings of 1916 were, according to Shestakov, “a national and democratic movement that however lacked leadership”. These quotations seem old enough to be forgotten, however they dominated and still dominate the mainstream of Soviet and some post- Soviet historiography, especially in Uzbekistan, all of which was produced under important political constraints, and which forged durable representations of the event. To question these representations of the revolt as “national” and “massive”, we propose to discuss in depth the causes, character and rationale of the revolt, by shedding a new light on the specific case of the district (uezd) of Jizzakh, considered unanimously by Soviet official historians –not without reason –as the place where both the violence of the riots and their repression reached their peak, as far as the sedentary areas of Turkestan were concerned. There were no accurate estimates of the casualties and losses, and we can only rely on the figure given by Mirzo Quqonboy Abdukholiqzoda Samarqandiy, according to what people said. He wrote that from 15,000 to 20,000 natives died in the district of Jizzakh alone, against eighty- three persons among the official ...