General without an army: who is Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev?

It was very difficult to reveal exactly what "Muslim Socialism" meant in Russia until February 1917. Because during the First World War, the number of Muslim workers in the Tatar regions of Russia was around 5 thousand. Therefore, except for relatively industrialized Baku, the proletariat, which was the main element of the socialist revolution in other Muslim regions of Russia, was still very weak.

In the October Revolution of 1917, there was no other Muslim group that fought with the Russian Bolsheviks except the Veysis Order, founded by Bahauddin Hamzin Vaisov in Kazan.

But in the first years of the Soviet regime, the fate of Islam in Russia was in the hands of a group of intellectuals of bourgeois origin, who were dispersed, whose relationship with socialism was complex, and who had not yet been able to get rid of their feelings of Jadid nationalism. The spokesman and most original thinker of this group was Mirsaid Sultangaliyev. Sultangaliyev, a Jadidist teacher by education, was the most populous Muslim communist in the Bolshevik party hierarchy until 1920.

Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev (13 July 1892 – 28 January 1940), also known as Mirza Sultan-Galiev, was a Tatar Bolshevik revolutionary who rose to prominence in the Russian Communist Party in the early 1920s. He was the architect of Muslim "national communism". His views were a direct threat to the policies of the Comintern; he was imprisoned briefly in 1923 and expelled from the Communist Party. He was rearrested in 1928 and imprisoned for six years. He was then arrested again in 1937 and executed in 1940 during the Stalin period.

Mirsaid Sultangaliyev was born on July 13, 1892, as the child of a Tatar teacher family in the village of Kırımsakal, located within the borders of today's Republic of Bashkortostan. After completing his primary education at the school in his village, he graduated from the Tatar Pedagogical Institute in Kazan. At that time, this school, where Sultangaliyev graduated, was one of the places where young, progressive Tatar intellectuals were most active. Sultangaliyev acquired his first Marxist ideas here and worked as a teacher for a while after graduation.

In his youth, he started working as a clerk in the Ufa City municipal library. Later, he wrote articles under different pseudonyms in the Russian newspaper "Ufimskiy Vestnik" (Ufa Reporter) and the Tatar Turkish newspaper "Tormus" published in Ufa. At the age of 19, Sultangaliyev joined the staff of "Musulmanskaya Gazeta" in Moscow, owned by Menshevik Ahmet Bey Galikov, and started writing various stories for the newspaper. In parallel, he also wrote articles in the newspaper "Russkiy Uchitel" (Russian Teacher) published in Moscow between 1911 and 1914, under the pseudonyms "Child of the People" and "Tatar Student".

Sultangaliyev later continued his activities as a writer in the magazine "Mir Islama" (Islamic World), one of the most influential Muslim magazines of the period. When the First World War began, Sultangaliyev went to Baku and continued to teach at the Baku Tatar School. Sultangaliyev, who developed solid relations with Azerbaijani intellectuals during his time in Baku, joined the Müsavatciler led by Mehmet Emin Resulzade and wrote articles in the newspaper "Kavkazskoe Slovo" (The Word of the Caucasus) under the signatures "Kölgebaş" and "Mirsaid". At the same time, he continued to publish his articles in newspapers such as "Söz", "Vakit", "Tormus", and "Tercüman", which were among the influential newspapers of the period.

Sultangaliyev was in Baku when the February Revolution took place and was invited to Moscow to serve as the secretary of the executive committee of the Russian Muslim Congress, which was established after the revolution. Sultangaliyev, who went to Kazan after the congress, joined the "Muslim Socialist Committee" there and soon became one of the two most important names of the committee, together with Molla Nur Vahidov. Sultangaliyev, who joined the ranks of the Communist Party in November 1917, was appointed as the second secretary at the People's Commissariat of Nations, where he developed close cooperation with Stalin. During the same period, he served as the editor-in-chief of "Jizn Natsionalnostey" (Life of Nations), the official publication of the People's Commissariat.

While the October Revolution was celebrated with enthusiasm throughout Russia, the central government implemented a number of measures to gain the sympathy of Muslims from the moment it took power. On November 24, 1917, a special call addressed to "all Muslim workers of Russia and the East" was published under the title "Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia" with the signatures of Lenin and Stalin. It is important to know the content of this call in order to understand the atmosphere that led Sultangaliyev and his friends to cooperate with the Bolsheviks:

“Muslims of Russia, Volga and Crimean Tatars, Kyrgyz and Sarts of Siberia and Turkestan, Turks, and Tatars of the trans-Caucasus, Chechens and Caucasian Mountaineers, you!...

You, whose mosques and places of worship have been destroyed, whose beliefs and traditions have been strangled by the Tsars and the destroyers of Russia!...

Your beliefs traditions, and national and cultural institutions are free and untouchable from now on.

Organize your national life freely and without interference. This is your right. Know that your rights, like the rights of all the peoples of Russia, will be protected by the entire power of the Revolution and its organs, the Soviets of deputies, workers, soldiers, and peasants.

Then support this revolution!...”

These "sympathetic" practices caused Russian Muslims, who were oppressed by the Tsarist regime, to become Communist Party members one by one. However, all this was not enough for Stalin. Stalin sought to Bolshevise the entire Muslim society. For this purpose, the Muslim People's Commissariat, which was established in January 1918, was given broad powers.

He connected the "Muslim Central Military Delegation", chaired by Sultangaliyev, to the Muslim People's Commissariat and gave all powers to Molla Nur Vahidov and Sultangaliyev. The general task given to the Commissariat was to politically awaken the Muslim masses and instill Bolshevik belief in them. However, Vahidov and Sultangaliyev added a completely different atmosphere to the commissariat and aimed to protect the interests of all Russian Muslims.

Over time, Sultangaliyev and Vahidov organized an independent "Muslim Communist Party" and were making plans to separate from Russia by establishing a large Tatar-Bashkir state in the Middle Volga region through the party.

In fact, Sultangaliyev did not claim to introduce a new doctrine. Without openly opposing the political lines of the Russian Bolsheviks, he was making some adjustments to the Lenin theses in tactical and strategic terms. His ideas were not at a level that would infuriate Stalin, at least at that time.

On March 8, 1918, Sultangaliyev and Molla Nur Vahidov convened the "Russian Muslim Workers' Conference" in Moscow, and at the conference, they decided to establish a "Muslim Socialist-Communist Party" independent of the Russian Communist Party.

The Bolsheviks were very worried about this attitude of Sultangaliyev and his friends because the behavior was nothing but a clear indicator of nationalism. The leadership of the new party, consisting of Sultangaliyev, Vahidov, and Mansurov, called on Muslims to dedicate themselves to a pure Muslim communist party and to refrain from joining the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik). Sultangaliyev, who was also the head of the "Muslim Central Military Delegation", was planning to spread the socialist revolution to Russian Muslim lands through the "Red Socialist Muslim Army", which was established under the management of local officers and whose number was approaching 50 thousand. Sultangaliyev and his friends in the Muslim People's Commissariat first aimed to spread communism to Muslims in Russia as they wished, and then to carry it to other Islamic geographies such as Iran and Turkey. For this, it was necessary to first establish a Muslim, Socialist, national state.

According to Sultangaliyev, the Tatar-Bashkir Socialist State to be established in the Volga-Ural region would spread the spark of revolution to the entire East.

The start of the civil war between the Bolsheviks and the counter-revolutionaries in 1918, which would devastate all of Russia, upset all the plans of Sultangaliyev and his friends. In the winter months of 1918, counter-revolutionaries reached the Volga Ural region. The civil war between the Reds and the Whites shattered the civil and military Muslim administration in the Tatar region, which emerged with the great efforts of Vahidov and his friends.

At a time when the Red Army had not yet won a decisive victory over the Whites, Stalin gathered the stuck Muslim Communists in Moscow, abolished the Muslim Central Commissariat, on which they had placed great hopes, and decided to merge the Muslim Socialist-Communist Party with the Russian Bolshevik Party. Instead of a united Muslim state, the Moscow government decided to establish two small republics named Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, which would not play an important role and were too weak to rebel against the center.

The Czechs, who captured Kazan in August 1919, first imprisoned Mullah Nur Vahidov and then shot him. The murder of Mullah Nur Vahidov and the prevention of the establishment of a socialist Muslim state that Sultangaliyev dreamed of was an invaluable victory for Stalin to prevent the danger posed by Muslim communists in the future.

Despite the centralization network spreading from Moscow and the "Cold War" and conflicts with Stalin from time to time, Sultangaliyev and his followers left their mark on the political and cultural life of the Tatar republic between 1920 and 1923. During these periods, they always held key positions in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Tatarstan and also in the state bureaucracy.

Sultangaliyev's desire to act "on his own" and his failure to heed the warnings of the Central Committee officials would eventually lead to the end of the conflict. During this period, at an open meeting of the Communist Party, Stalin had the following conversation with Sultangaliyev that would break all ties:

“My other friends in the party drew my attention to Comrade Sultangaliyev's Pan-Islamist and Pan-Turkist views. However, at that time, their ideological work did not have a criminal nature. However, the betrayal was documented when it was revealed that he was exchanging illegal letters with Muslim communist chiefs and planning to establish a secret organization to oppose the party's international policy.”

It was the beginning of the end for Sultangaliyev. Sultangaliyev, who attended the 4th Congress of the Communist Party in 1923, was arrested on charges such as being a bourgeois nationalist, operating against the Soviet national policy, and establishing connections in countries such as Turkey and Iran, after the heavy criticism and accusations made against him at the congress.

However, he was released from prison the same year for his contributions to the Bolshevik revolution. After this process, Sultangaliyev's activities began to develop in secret, difficult, and full of dangers. Until 1928, when he was arrested again, Sultangaliyev worked in various state publishing houses, especially "Gosizdat" in Moscow. Sultangaliyev, who was kept under intense surveillance between 1923 and 1928, engaged in secret organizational work to keep the Tatar communists together and regroup them. It is claimed that in these 5 years, he laid the foundations of a new theory and formed a secret counter-revolutionary organization. All this secret work did not go "unpunished" and Sultangaliyev was arrested again in 1928.

In 1929, Sultangaliyev was tried in Moscow sentenced to 10 years of forced labor, and sent to the Solovski camp on the White Sea coast to serve his sentence. There are two different claims regarding Sultangaliyev's death. According to the information provided by immigrant Tatars, Sultangaliyev was released in 1939, but he was banned from residing in the centers of Kazan and other republics. He also settled in the city of Kuybishev in the Novosibirsk region, but his trace was lost in 1940. Another claim is that Sultangaliyev was shot to death on January 28, 1940, in Lefortovo prison in Moscow, one of the most famous prisons in Russia. If we take both claims into consideration, Sultangaliyev has not been heard from again since 1940.

The main axis of Sultangaliyev's line of struggle was his attempt to interpret Marxism together with a Turkist-Turanian perspective and to derive a liberation prescription for Russian Muslims from this.

However, the emergence of different political tendencies among Russian Muslims of the period confronted Sultangaliyev with a reality that did not have a serious social base. There was a general, but he did not have an army to march behind the general. For this reason, the definition of "general without an army" used for Mirsaid Sultangaliyev is a two-word summary of his life...