[15]
         1—A EURASIAN MOVEMENT. THE MONGOL IDEA.

        The survival of a "tag" weans often that the hackneyed words bequeathing the wisdom of an aged generalisation preserve the essence of a persistent truth. And never has this proved more true than in the old “tag" “Scratch a Russian and you find a Tartar”. That peculiar social phenomenon, the Russian civilisation of the Imperial Romanoffs, was very effectively "scratched" in the years 1917-1819. The static and inorganic, body compounded of and copied from German baronage. French bureaucracy, and English commercialism collapsed in irreparable ruin. And in the corridors of Tsarskoe Selo — that Baltic shadow of the Trianon — appeared the ominous figure of Lenin, with the face which might have been drawn by a 16th-century Persian miniaturist of some quick, ruthless, grinning, Tatar rider. So when three years ago I was in Russia it seemed to me not without significance that, while the spring thaws of the Neva were flooding the library of the German-founded Academy of Science, the streets of Moscow were ringing with the joyless chant of Kirghiz and Bashkir students marching with purposeless fixed tread beneath the blood-red banners of the Revolution.
        The process of Europeanizing Russia which had continued for over 1,000 years had failed. The Slavic States set up by Varangian (Northmen) adventurers and vitalized by the culture of Byzantine Christianity managed to rise again from the great Tatar immersion of the Middle Ages. When the Byzantine spring was found dry, the Muscovite Tsars turned to the Baltic for German inspiration, German methods, a German framework. And that old anachronism, the Romanoff Empire, Cæsarian in conception, German in form, and Byzantine-Levantine in spirit, had to borrow even, from the Radical-Nationalism of the West, the aborted idea of Pan-Slavism, which managed to comprehend behind a facade of racial romanticism the Cæsarian idea of autocratic paternalism, the expansionist ambitions of the modem industrial states of the 19th century, and the old Byzantine tradition of Balkan hegemony. Need is the only possible justification for aggressive expansion, and economic Russia had no need to expand. Her need was to develop.

         RAW MATERIAL.
        And so, Pan-Slavism, bred in the hot air of the St. Petersburg salons, evaporated when the strong wind of Asia blew the windows in. The Bolshevists grasped that Russia’s need was development and not expansion. Trotsky at Brest-Litovsk was not a coward, but a realist. During the period 1917-1919 the European territories — the pompous conquests of 200 years — were cut away. The essentials — a door on the Baltic, ice-free access to the White Sea — were retained. Similarly, the cementing of Turkish friendship by the cession of. Caucasian frontier districts — the sterile fruits of six Russo-Turkish wars — was an intelligent move, significant of the new approach to Russia's problems.
        What remained was Russia, the forest and the plain — the “taiga” and the “steppe” — the bed of the old Sarmatian Sea, stretching from Scandinavia to the Altai — the land of darkness—about which Ancients could never decide where Europe ended and Asia began — Eurasia. A vast undeveloped country inhabited by under-developed men is raw material ready to the hands of Georgians, the. condottieri of Asiatic history; of Armenians, the middlemen and dragomans of a dozen Asiatic Empire-builders; of Tatars, the killers of all ages; and of the Eastern Jew, the returned Yiddish emigrant, a new phenomenon in politics — Tatar in blood of the Khazar stock, vindictive with the sense of long oppressions, red-hot with the mob emotions and hammered hard with the scarred materialism of the Chicago alums.
        The defeat of the Soviet troops before Warsaw marked the end of any possibility that the new rulers of Russia would attempt to continue the traditional policy of Peter the Great. An accident consummated a tendency which any way must have been inevitable after the fall of the Romanoffs and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The Bolshevists, weak as they were, consolidated the essentials: laid their hands on the oil of the Caucasus and the Armenian and Georgian lands — the only human reservoir of brain within the Soviet Union. The Trans-Siberian railway and Vladivostok (“Ruler of the East”) were theirs again. And most significantly they redressed their losses in the West by the virtual absorption of Mongolia — where natural conditions may tend to evolve the best motor-soldiers as in the past they have evolved the finest horse-soldiers. Here the Soviets have struck shrewder blows at Buddhism — the dead hand on Mongolian manhood for 400 years — than they have in Russia at Byzantine Christianity. And the awakening and fertilization of Mongolian youth which will follow the break-up of monastic life may well bear a big surprise in the coming generation.
        The new Eurasian conception of Russia's political destiny — in replacement of the old pan-Slavist conception — at first a fantasy of aristocratic “intellectuals” like Trubetskoy and Sviatopolk Mirsky and the dream of an unknown Lenin — loomed effectually upon the horizon ofpracticable theories with the emergence of the Union of Soviet Republics from the chaos of the Civil War. The conception was a terse revenge upon the realities of the moment, Brest-Litovsk, the Blockade and the repulse from Europe. It offered something to the latent nationalism of the Russian military classes, old and new, who had rallied to Russia, and not to the Communist International, in the Civil and the Polish Wars. It met the growing weight of Asia in a State amputated of its most European territories by a compliment to the Asiatic spirit, and it blended conveniently with the revolutionary policy of the Communist Party, directed towards rousing the “tolling masses" of Asia against the “colonial Imperialism" ok the European Powers.

         “STORM OVER ASIA.”
        The spirit which the new Eurasianism comprehends is best illustrated in the Russian film Storm over Asia, which, whatever one may think of its political implications, is an artistic and a spiritual masterpiece. In Storm over Asia the industrial proletariat of Leningrad, the impressionable loungers of the Tiflis garden-cinemas, or the slow-thinking Kirghiz and hard-headed Cossacks of Semirechinsk, are shown the story of a Mongol shepherd-boy. He is robbed by the Buddhist bonzes, swindled by American fur-dealers, and then, after being severely man-handled by White Russian soldiers, he is discovered to be a descendant of Jenghiz, and is set up by a “ White ” general as a puppet prince in Urga. Finally, he rouses the people, and inone of those lightning Mongol cavalry charges sweeps away the White troops. Such briefly is the story. The appeal is double-barrelled — to the community or sympathy of the Russian and Asiatic workers, and, more subtly, to the traditional military “superiority-complex" of the Central Asian peasants — the descendants of Janghiz.
        All political movements create, or adopt, andmodify, a suitable philosophic and scientificbackground. The Englishman Houston Stewart Chamberlain gave to the Germans the “blond” background of Pan-Teutonism. That odd and able Jew, Arminius Vambéry, set Magyar aristocrats and ambitious Turkish officers upon the bleak road of Pan-Turanianism. And it has tailed to Professor Nikolai Marr, the son of a Fifeshire landscape-gardener to a Georgian prince, to set down for the Georgians, Armenians, Yiddishes, and Tartars of the Politbureau, the scientific and philosophical, the philological and anthropological bases Eurasianism. Nikolai Marr had already made an international name as an archaeologist, a philologist, and a historian before he applied his amazing energies and his encyclopaedic knowledge to the formulation of the “Japhetic Theory"— and became incidentally first President of the Academy of Science of U.S.S.R. Here is not the place to approach the confused, the obscure, and the fascinating disorder of the Professor’s ever-changing formulas ; but as a generalisation it may be said that he attempts to trace the origin of all culture to a group of peoples remotely connected with each other and including most of the primitive stocks living and extinct, among whom may be mentioned the Picts, the Basques, the Berbers, the Georgians, and the Dravidians. The political implications of the "Japhetic Theory,” as indicated in Aptekar’s paper, “The Japhetic Theory of N. Marr and Marxian Ideals,” are the community of being of the submerged “Japhetic” peoples as opposed to the dominant “Indo-Europeans” and the identity of interest of these submerged peoples — “the toiling masses ” —  in opposition to Western "colonial Imperialism.”
        Such, then, is the Eurasian movement — something new and obscure, unformed and potential. In it the baser materialism of the American slums blends with the natural atheism of the Turanian mind, which represents the most stark and unimaginative of human mass-outlooks ; yet it is tempered with the forlorn and sacrificial sentiment of the Russian and the flippant-wise poetry of the Georgian. It will bring forth something new and original, as different from the old and organic humanity of Europe and of Islam as is the newly smelted culture of America. Whether we have to combat this new something or whether we may react to it and upon it, it is best that we should try to understand it.

    [17]     II-FANATICS IN CONFLICT. AMANULLAH’S FALL.
        The fundamental problem of the modern world is the adjustment of the mind and the emotions of men to the changing physical conditions of the new mechanistic age. Social organization has not proceeded so rapidly as industrial development, and where conditions of life have been static and the human mind has lacked plasticity, there the processes of transformation and adaptation nave been characterized by the most violent shocks.

        The War and the Russian revolution precipitated a chaotic culmination throughout the Middle East. With the liquidation of the White Armies — the spiritless and uninspired defenders of a collapsed and irreparable system — the new, raw and primitive, and the old, fixed and fanatic, forces of Asia found themselves in confused and desperate conflict. The Chicago-educated Yiddishers of Moscow, with their Lettish gunmen, their hard-bitten Baltic sailors, and their battalions of sheepish peasant boys, controlled the munitions and the railways. They dealt long with the revolt of the Kirghiz Nomads over the red sands along the Central Asian railway. The Bashkir peasant-bands in the forests of the Urals fought until half their population had been exterminated by famine and massacre. The lean, limber shepherds and reivers of Daghestan, like the tribesmen of the North-West Frontier, warred fiercely along their precipices and ravines down to the summer of 1922. In the cities of Central Asia, in Khokand and Tashkent, in Samarkand, Khiva and Bokhara, there were bombardments, street-fighting, massacres and executions, while drought and famine withered the garden-villages of the Zarafshan, and Cossack colonists and Kaizak natives raked and pillaged each others’ settlements over the wide pastures of Semirechinsk —“ The Seven Rivers " province.
        Political issues were confused. The fighting was a spontaneous reaction to the disappearance of ordered government over peoples the stages of whose cultures ranged from the nomad “ yurtas " of the Kirghiz to the stagnant courts of the " protected " rulers of Khiva and Bokhara and the mining camps of the Urals. Famous leaders of Basmaji (literally " robber,” really “ rebel ”) bands would one year be fighting the Bolshevists and the next year serving them as “colonels'” of partisan detachments; “Young” Bokharalis, one month serving as officials of the Cheka, would in another month become fugitive patriots raiding “Red” convoys in the passes of the Pamirs. Three main groups, however, appear and develop in varying degrees of influence and importance. There was the new Central Power in Moscow, weak at first, but by 1923 the dominating control over all the country from the Black Sea to the Altai — a restored Muscovite power with a new “Eurasian" complexion, with a spirit Mongol in its creed of universal war, ultra-modern in its methods of mechanical destruction, economic development, and anti-religious social reforms

         FLIGHT OF THE PRIESTS.
        Secondly, there was the force of Mohamedan fanaticism, lashed to fury by oppressions, and even more by blasphemous propaganda and wholesale confiscations of ecclesiastical property conducted by the Soviets. In the sacred cities of Islam, in the shrines of inner Asia, a hallowed and bigoted priesthood, whose word had been unchallenged for a thousand years, fled in outraged horror before motor-lorries filled with Lettish gunmen and Commissars — promoted from the ghettoes of Warsaw and the “ pensions ” of Zurich and Geneva.
        Thirdly, there was the new force of a Turkish nationalism in Turkestan. Fostered for a generation in the mild atmosphere of Kazan University among the cultured placid Tatars of the Volga, and expanding in the genteel committee-rooms of the commercial magnates of Baku, the force of Turkish nationalism within the Russian Empire had grown to stunted life through the years of the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the Turkish Revolution of 1908. The “ protected ” native potentates of Central Asia, major-generals of the Tsar, had frowned upon the new idea. And it had expired in Kazan, and been suppressed in Baku, before it flamed to life in the Central Asian cities as a rationalist interpretation by the more educated young Turkestanians of the fanatic fury of the mullahs and peasants against the Russian Bolshevists. The success of the Kemalish movement in Turkey and the strengthening of national feeling in Persia and Afghanistan give the movement added force. Then Enver Pasha appeared in Bokhara, and became, for a brief space of time, the picturesque, although ineffectual, leader of a movement to expel the Russians and set up an independent State of Turkestan. Thus, the curiously piquant situation arose that, while the Soviets were supporting the Kemalist movement in Anatolia, the entire Turkish-speaking population of Central Asia were in arms against the Soviet regime, under the leadership of the doomed and luckless paladin of the Pan-Turanian idea. The anti-Soviet revolt had ceased to be dangerous by the end of 1922, although the activities of the Basmaji bands continued to be troublesome until 1926, and have again, in the present year, revived.

        NEW REPUBLICS.
        But the struggle for the rights of Turks and of Islam had not been without result, and the formidable resistance of the Mohamedan peoples — Bashkirs, Kirghiz, Uzbegs, and Turkomans — to the Soviet regime certainly directly influenced both the evolution of the " Eurasian " conception of the Soviet Union and the policy, outlined by Lenin and executed by Stalin, of developing the political structure or the Soviet Union on a national basis, Bashkir and Kirghiz " Republics ” were set up as autonomous regions of the Russian, S.S.R., while the newly created “ Republics " of Uzbegistan (formerly Turkestan) and Turkmenistan (Trans-Caspia) were “ admitted " to the Soviet Union on a basis of “ equal ” membership with Russia, the Ukraine, White Russia, and Trans-Caucasia.
        The development of this policy, limited as it was in effect, indicated a change of attitude of the official Communist mind since the year 1920, when Pravda had proclaimed that “the bearer of the dictatorship of the proletariat here (in Turkestan) can only be Russian.” The modifications of the soctal policy of the Bolshevists were no less significant than their concessions to political nationalism. The Moslem priesthood were conciliated by the restoration of some of the powers of the Shariat Courts and by the restoration of the Vakufs (ecclesiastical titles), while the agrarian reforms were watered down, and imposed only with formalised consent, by Fetva, of the clergy. Nevertheless, the elements of economic and social conflict persisted. The decline of cotton cultivation, the ruin of the intricate irrigation system of the Zarafshan, and the dislocation of trade had destroyed not only the prosperity of the numerous mercantile class of town-dwelling Sarts, but had reduced the well-to-do “dukhans" (peasant farmers) of the oases to misery and want, and had driven the nomad elements (Turkomans and Kirghiz-Kaizak) from stock-raising to brigandage. The general economic despair accentuated the friction, which always existed, between the Cossack colonists along the railways and the Musulman peasantry, and between the small Russian proletariat and the native masses in the towns. The Soviets attempted to strike an effective note by the spectacular development of industrial schemes — a method which has been applied with some success in Armenia and Georgia. But their big irrigation scheme in the valley of the Amu Darya ended in the waste of millions and a sensational official scandal, while the proposed construction of the Siberian-Tuskestan railway, which is to open up Eastern Turkestan and the Semirechinsk Province, appears to have made slow progress.
        Meanwhile the turn of events in Afghanistan had a profound effect on polities in the Central Asian cities. The principal Basmaji leaders, and also the Emir of Bokhara and his followers, had taken refuge in Herat and Kabul. And if these representatives of Mohamedan Conservatism had little sympathy for and received little sympathy from King Amanullah, the figure of the devoted reformer made a strong appeal not only to intellectual emigres like Mustapha Chokayef, but to the large numbers of young Uzbegs and Turkomans who formed the backbone of Soviet power in Turkestan. Organs of the Soviet Press— which on occasions can be surprisingly frank — have drawn attention to the fact that among Turkestan students (for instance in the Higher Pedagogical Institute at Samarkand) there were in existence groups of active agitators who were prepared “ to demand the right for Turkestan to develop independently on the lines followed by Afghanistan and Egypt.” Thus the Soviets have been brought to the realization that the widespread popularity and respect which Amanullah enjoyed in Turkestan was not due so much to his " anti-British ” attitude, advertised by themselves, as to the fact that he represented an Afghan personification of Mustapha Kemal, the defender and restorer of Turkish national power, and the symbol of the independence and progress of the Mohamedan peoples.
        It is becoming clear that in Central Asia, as in the Caucasus and in China, the Bolshevists find their conception of a “ Eurasian " hegemony, with its “class-struggle ” and anti-religious bases, sharply challenged by a Radical-Nationalism which seeks to follow the road of Turkey, if not of Japan. The position of the Bolshevists was therefore that, while they hoped that the political activities of Amanullah might be directed against the British in India, as the movement of Mustapha Kemal had been against the Western Powers, they found that the prestige of the Afghan King in Turkestan was more dangerous to them in actuality than the renown of Mustapha Kemal in Caucasian Azerbaijan and Daghestan; and this because, while Mustapha Kemal was a shrewd master of his policy who could “ call off his dogs,” the unfortunate Amanullah was but the child of turgid tendencies, which had neither clear form nor conscious direction.
        Amanullah fell a victim to those same forces of Moslem Conservatism which had fought desperately and ineffectively against the Bolshevists in Turkestan, and which in Eastern Turkey in 1924 and 1925 had been successfully repressed by Mustapha Kemal. Bacha-i-Saqao was the true type of Central Asian “Basmaji” (robber-rebel), and he numbered among his friends many of the tough chieftains who had harried the Soviets in Central Asia during the period 1919-1926. The power of the Soviets has been established throughout Central Asia, and the clerical-tribal reaction has swung to power in Afghanistan. With the fall of Amanullah the young forces of Radical-Nationalism in Inner Asia have been deprived of all representative leadership ; and Amanullah, with his many faults — standing as he did between Communist fanaticism and clerical fanaticism — was the only potentially constructive political force between the Caspian and the Indus.
        (Concluded.)
        The first article in this series appeared in The Times of yesterday.