1933-34 Kumul Uprising: When Red and White Russians Fought Together against Muslims for China

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 20 – One of the challenges for those who want to give substance to Vladimir Putin’s insistence on a single stream of Russian history is the clash between the Reds and the Whites during the Russian Civil War, a clash that extended long after Reds proved victorious and the Whites largely fled abroad.

            But in an indication of just how far Russian writers are prepared to go to find something that confirms Putin’s vision of the past, Moscow commentator Timur Sagdiyev points to one case in which the Reds and the Whites cooperated during a little known operation to help China and suppress Muslims (russian7.ru/post/vosstanie-v-sinczyane-protiv-kogo-ob-2/).

            That took place in China’s Xinjiang province in 1933-34, then the site of conflicts between the local Muslim majority and Chinese rulers who were trying to hold onto power there and who were prepared to form alliances not only with the Soviet government in Moscow but also with White Russian units which had fled over the border a decade earlier.

            The history of that troubled region in a troubled time is extraordinarily complex. The most useful Russian survey is to be found in Dzhamil Gasanly’s 2015 volume Xinjiang in the Orbit of Soviet Policy (in Russian; Moscow: Flinta) on which Sagdiyev draws. The conflicts there at that time are not as important as the cooperation Gasanly and Sagdiyev point to.

            The two authors note that Chinese officials were quite prepared to cooperate with Russians Soviet and White in their fight with the Muslims and the Reds and the Whites despite all their differences were united in working with the Chinese to suppress the Muslims and did so from the last months of 1933 to the first of 1934.

            Beijing may be pleased to be reminded about the ways in which Russians helped the Chinese against Muslim challenges, although Muslims in Russia and in China are likely to be less so. But the Kremlin and its propagandists are certain to welcome an example albeit brief and obscure of Red-White cooperation that supports Putin’s notions.