Turkestan Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP B

(also Turkburo of the Central Committee of the RCP[B]), the plenipotentiary representative of the Central Committee of the RCP(B) in Turkestan from 1920 to 1922. The Turkburo was established in the summer of 1920 to improve the party’s ability to guide local party organizations and to strengthen these units ideologically and organizationally.

The Turkestan Bureau assumed certain functions of the Turkestan Commission of the Central Committee of the RCP(B), the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, and the Council of People’s Commissars. It directed the Amu Darya, Syr Darya, Semirech’e, and Fergana party organizations, and from February 1922 it also directed the Communist parties of Bukhara and Khorezm. The following members and representatives of the Central Committee of the RCP(B) were members of the bureau at various times: S. I. Gusev, L. M. Kaganovich, V. P. Nogin, la. Kh. Peters, and la. E. Rudzutak. From 1921 the local party organizations were represented in the Turkburo by K. S. Atabaev, A. R. Rakhimbaev, T. R. Ryskulov, N. T. Tiuriakulov, F. Khodzhaev, and others. The journal Kommunist was the organ of the bureau, and in December 1920 it became the organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Turkestan as well.

The bureau was guided in its work by the decisions of the RCP(B), by the suggestions of V. I. Lenin concerning Turkestan, and by the “Statement on Oblast Bureaus of the Central Committee of the RCP(B), ” which was published in Izvestiia TsK RKP(b) in October 1921. The Turkburo organized a congress of the Communist Party of Turkestan in September 1920, which consolidated the krai party organization and elected the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Turkestan.

The Turkburo was in constant contact with the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Turkestan, and it guided the Central Committee’s work. The bureau played an important role in strengthening party organizations in Turkestan, struggling against manifestations of great-power chauvinism and local bourgeois nationalism, purging national deviationists from party organizations, and educating party members and all working people of Turkestan in the spirit of proletarian internationalism. In strengthening the local party and soviet machinery, the bureau involved the masses in the building of socialism and mobilized them for the struggle against the counterrevolutionary Basmachi Revolt.

Together with the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Turkestan, the Turkestan Bureau supervised economic and cultural reforms in the area. In carrying out agitational work among the peasants, an important role was played by the statements of the bureau concerning land and water reform and the implementation of the reform in 1921 and 1922.

In May 1922 the Turkestan Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP(B) was replaced by the Middle Asian Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP(B).