The Turkestan ASSR, famine and NEP

On 30 April 1918 the Fifth Regional Congress of Soviets in Tashkent adopted the Regulation creating the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (Turkestan ASSR) within the RSFSR; in June the Turkestan Communist Party was also formalised. Moscow governed the region through its own plenipotentiary bodies (Turkkomissiya, Turkbyuro and others), and local communists opposed this: in March 1919 a Muslim Bureau was formed, headed by Turor Risqulov. In January 1920 Risqulov proposed renaming the republic the Turkic Republic and forming a separate Turkic party, but Lenin and Frunze opposed it and in summer he was recalled to Moscow. Severe famine struck the region in these years (the region had relied on grain from Russia, the civil war cut the routes, and farming was disrupted): relying on archive data the textbook says 1 million people died in the Fergana Valley in 1917–1923 and 200,000 in the Samarkand region, while grain was also taken from the region to the centre. The “war communism” policy of 1918–1920 (state seizure of industry, requisitioning, restrictions on the market, forced labour) deepened the economic crisis, so the Tenth Congress of the RCP(b) in March 1921 replaced requisitioning with a tax in kind: the New Economic Policy (NEP) began. In 1921–1922 the first stage of the land and water reform redistributed land, but it sharpened tension in the countryside.