with Russia. Territorial conflicts with neighboring Khiva and Kokand prevented formation of a united front against Russia’s encroachment in the mid-nineteenth century.
War from 1866 to 1868 ended with Russia’s occupation of the middle Zarafshan River valley, including Samarkand, and the grant of trading privileges to Russian merchants. The 1873 treaty opened the Amu Darya to Russian ships; pledged the emir to extradite fugitive Russians and abolish the slave trade; and ceded Samarkand, leaving Russia in control of the water supply of the lower Zarafshan, including that of the capital.
Bukhara as a Russian protectorate was slightly larger than Great Britain and Northern Ireland, with a population of two and a half to three million. Urban residents comprised 10 to 14 percent of the total; the largest town was the capital, with population of 70,000 to 100,000. The dominant ethnic group was the Uzbeks (55-60%), followed by the Tajiks (30%) and the Turkmen (5-10%). Bukhara was ruled by an hereditary autocratic emir. Muzaffar ad-Din (1860-1885) was succeeded by his son Abd al-Ahad (1885-1910) and the lat-ter’s son Alim (1910- 1920).
In reducing Bukhara to a wholly dependent but internally self-governing polity, Russia aimed to acquire a stable frontier in Central Asia, to prevent Britain alone from filling the political vacuum between the two empires, and to avoid the burdens of direct rule. This policy succeeded for half a century. After 1868 no emir contemplated using his army against his protector; in 1873 Britain and Russia recognized the Amu Darya as separating a Russian sphere of influence (Bukhara) from a British sphere (Afghanistan); and the emirs maintained sufficient domestic order.
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Russia’s impact increased over the years. In the mid-1880s Bukhara’s capital was connected by telegraph with Tashkent; a Russian political agency was established; and the Central Asian Railroad was built across the khanate. In the latter part of the 1880s three Russian urban enclaves, and a fourth at the turn of the century, were established; by the eve of World War I they contained from thirty-five to forty thousand civilians and soldiers. In 1895 the khanate was included in Russia’s customs frontier, and Russian troops and customs officials were stationed along the border with Afghanistan.
Russo-Bukharan trade increased sixfold from the coming of the railroad to 1913. Production of cotton, which represented three-fourths of the value of Bukhara’s exports to Russia, expanded two and a half times between the mid-1880s and the early 1890s, grew slowly thereafter, but doubled during World War I. Unlike Turkestan, the khanate remained self-sufficient in foodstuffs.
After the fall of the tsarist regime, Emir Alim resisted pressure for reforms from the Provisional Government and the Bukharan Djadids (moderniz-ers). With the Bolsheviks in control of the railroad, the Russian enclaves, and the water supply of his capital from December 1917, the emir maintained strained but correct relations with the Soviet government during the Russian civil war.
In the late summer of 1920 the Red Army overthrew Alim. A Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic, led by Djadids, was proclaimed. Russia renounced its former rights, privileges, and property in Bukhara, but controlled the latter’s military and economic affairs. The Djadids were purged in 1923, and the following year the Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic was divided along ethnic lines between the newly formed Uzbek and Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republics. See also: CENTRAL ASIA; KHIVA; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST; TURKMENISTAN AND TURKMEN; UZBEKISTAN AND UZBEKS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Becker, Seymour. (1968). Russia’s Protectorates in Central Asia: Bukhara and Khiva, 1865-1924. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
(1888-1938), old Bolshevik economist and theoretician who was ousted as a Rightist in 1929 and executed in 1938 for treason after a show trial.
The son of Moscow schoolteachers, raised in the spirit of the Russian intelligentsia, Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin was a broadly educated and humanist intellectual. Radicalized as a high school student during the 1905 Revolution, he was drawn to the Bolshevik faction, which he formally joined in 1906. He enrolled at Moscow University in 1907 to study economics, but academics took second place to party activity. He rose rapidly in the Moscow Bolshevik organization, was arrested several times, and in 1911 fled abroad, where he remained until 1917. These six years of emigration strengthened Bukharin’s internationalism; he matured as a Marxist theorist and writer and became known as a radical voice in the Bolshevik party. After a year in Germany, he went to Krakow in 1912 to meet Vladimir Lenin, who invited him to write for the party’s publications. Bukharin settled in Vienna, where he studied and drafted several theoretical works. Expelled to Switzerland at the beginning of World War I, he supported Lenin’s radical antiwar platform, continuing his activities in Scandinavia and then New York City.
When revolution broke out in Russia in early 1917, Bukharin hastened home. Arriving in May, he immediately took a leading role in the Moscow Bolshevik organization, which was dominated by young radicals. His militant stance brought him close to Lenin. In July 1917 he was elected a full member of the Central Committee, and in December he was appointed editor of the party newspaper, Pravda. Bukharin opposed the peace negotiations with the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk and headed the Left Communists who called for a revolutionary war against capitalism; later he also opposed Lenin’s view that state capitalism would be a step forward for Russia. In mid- 1918, ending his opposition, he resumed his party positions as the burgeoning civil war led to war communism and rebellion by the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. In 1919, when a five-man Politburo was formally established, Bukharin became one of three candidate members and also became deputy chairman of the newly established Comintern. Serving in various capacities during the civil war, Bukharin also published extensively: including Imperialism and World Economy (1918), the popularizing and militant ABC of Communism (1920, with Yevgeny Preobrazhen178
BUKHARIN, NIKOLAI IVANOVICH
sky); Economics of the Transition Period (1920), which celebrated the statization of the economy under War Communism but also began to explore how to build a socialist society after the revolution; and Historical Materialism (1921), a major analysis of Marxism in the twentieth century.
After Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy in 1921, debate swirled around the question of the relative importance that should be accorded industry and agriculture to achieve economic development within the framework of a socialist economy. Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition favored rapid industrialization at the expense of agriculture, in what Preobrazhensky termed “primitive socialist accumulation.” Bukharin, disavowing the illusions of War Communism, emphasized the need to find an evolutionary path to socialism based on a strong alliance with Russia’s peasant majority and invoked Lenin’s last writings to legitimize this position. He argued that forcibly appropriating agricultural surpluses would ultimately lead to the disintegration of agriculture because peasants would no longer have an incentive to produce. While agreeing that industrialization was absolutely critical for the construction of socialism, he favored a gradual approach. Bukharin’s path to socialism relied upon a growing consumer market, possible only if there were private merchants to contribute to the growth of domestic trade. He argued for policies that would produce balanced growth at a moderate tempo, speaking of growing into socialism through exchange.
In the mid-1920s Bukharin aligned himself with the Stalinist majority against the Left, becoming a full member of the Politburo in 1924, and played a major role in the government. He was the architect of the pro- peasant policies introduced in 1925 and urged peasants to “enrich yourselves,” a phrase that would later be used against him. As editor of Pravda and other party publications, and a member of the Institute of Red Professors, Bukharin moved easily in the world of NEP intellectuals and artists and authored government policies favoring artistic freedom. He became head of the Comintern in 1926 after the ouster of Grigory Zinoviev and saw the collapse of his policy of cooperation with the Chinese Nationalists. In the same period, Bukharin strongly attacked the Left Opposition and helped achieve its total ouster from power in the fall of 1927.
Bukharin supported the 1927 decision of the Fifteenth Party Congress to adopt a five-year plan for Soviet industrialization, but he and the gradualist
Communist leader Nikolai Bukharin in London, June 1931. © HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS
