The Russian Civil War

Another ephemeral pan-Turkic government, set up in Orenburg by intellectuals of the Alash-Orda party, was suppressed at about the same time. In any event, the Moslem population was fragmented. Nearly all the Kazakhs were nomads. In Turkestan the population was scattered among separate oases.

Tashkent had had another, smaller, front, to the northeast in Semirechie; the main town, Vernyi (Alma-Ata), was 500 miles from Tashkent, and Soviet power was threatened by the small Semirechie Cossack Host. The remains of Kolchak’s southern armies withdrew here, after a 350-mile desert march, when their Siberian line of retreat was cut in late 1919. In the following spring Soviet forces took the region; the White survivors fled over the border to China, where 12,000 were interned in terrible conditions. Dutov, the Orenburg ataman and one of the first to rise against Soviet power in 1917–1918, was killed there in February 1921.