Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

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YOUNG BUKHARAN PARTY. This (initially secret) society of the proponents of Jadidism was founded in Bukhara in 1909 and drew its name (Yangi bukharalilar) from the reformist Young Turks of the Ottoman Empire. (Many of the Young Bukharans had, in fact, been educated in Turkey.) The left wing of the party, under Faizullah Khojaev, favored a political revolution; the center and right, under Mirza Abdul-kadir Mukhitdinov, were more interested in cultural reform.

In March 1918, the party tried, with the assistance of (chiefly Russian) Red Guards sent from Tashkent, to seize power in Bukhara, but they were driven from the city by forces loyal to the emir, Said-mir Mohammed Alim-khan. They took refuge in Tashkent, protected by local Bolsheviks, and only returned to Bukhara in May 1920, when the Red Army forced the emir to flee. Young Bukharans, sponsored by Moscow’s Turkestan Commission and the Bolsheviks’ Turkbiuro, then formed the first government of the Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic. Most members of the party subsequently joined the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), but this did not save them from extensive persecution, as “bourgeois nationalists,” during the purges of the 1930s.