A Peace to End all Peace (62 page)

Taking advantage of the Emir’s unpopularity, the Red Army intervened. In the summer of 1920 the Red Army attacked again, and Russian troops under the command of Mikhail Frunze bombarded Bukhara. As the Young Bukharans launched an uprising in the city, the Red Army, with its airplanes and armored vehicles, moved forward on 2 September, bringing Bukhara’s medieval regime to an end; the library, containing possibly the greatest collection of Moslem manuscripts in the world, went up in flames.

The Emir, alerted by a telephone call to his palace, fled, along with his harems and three wagon-loads of gold and precious stones from his treasury. A story was told later that, at points along the way, he left one or another of his favorite dancing boys, in the hopes of diverting and thus slowing his pursuers. His initial stopping point was the hill country of the east. From there he sought, and found, sanctuary across the frontier in Afghanistan.

After capturing the city of Bukhara, Soviet Russia recognized the absolute independence of a Bukharan People’s Republic; but the recognition was in form only. Frunze’s troops remained, and imposed requisitions on the country. Soviet interference in Bukhara’s affairs pointed toward its eventual incorporation into Soviet Russia. Leaders of the Young Bukhara movement resisted the trend toward Russian control and attempted to assert their independence.

In the hills of eastern Bukhara, Basmachi groups loyal to the Emir began to harass the Russian conquerors. As yet no real links had been forged between the various Basmachi groups; nonetheless the Basmachis posed a challenge to Soviet rule that, even by the end of 1921, the Red Army had been unable to crush.

IV

Enver Pasha reached Bukhara on 8 November 1921, entrusted by the Russians with a role in the pacification of Turkestan.

As he approached the city through gardens of fruit trees, melons, grapevines, roses, poppies, and tobacco plants, he entered the Eden of his pan-Turkish ideology: the historic homeland of the Turkish peoples. Surrounded by eight miles of high crenellated stone walls, with 11 gates and 181 watch-towers, centuries-old Bukhara was an architectural embodiment of the Moslem past in which he gloried. Once the holiest city of Central Asia, its 360 mosques reflected his faith—a faith shared by its inhabitants, whose men lived their religion and whose women wore the veil. The men of Bukhara wore turbans and the traditional striped robes called
khalats
, while Enver arrived with his European-cut military tunic; but between him and them there was a bond of brotherhood.

Enver’s affinities extended even to the new government of Bukhara. The Young Bukhara Party was not dissimilar to the Young Turks whom Enver had led in Constantinople; and reformist leaders like Zeki Velidi Togan of Bashkiria had congregated there. When Enver left the city, only three days after entering it, he took with him the key figures in the government: its Chairman, and its Commissars of War and Interior. The story he told the Russians was that they were going hunting. In fact they made their way to the hill country of eastern Bukhara, where Enver made contact with partisans of the Emir. There, appointed commander-in-chief by the Emir, he assumed the leadership of the Basmachi war for independence from Russia.

With the support both of the Emir and of the Young Bukhara leaders, he was in a position to bring all factions together. His envoys sought out Basmachi bands throughout Turkestan to unify them under his banner. His proclaimed goal was the creation of an independent Moslem state in Central Asia. As always he stressed the unity of the Moslem peoples. His strong Islamic message won him the support of the mullahs, who rallied strongly to his cause, and of his important neighbor, the Moslem Emir of Afghanistan.

However Enver’s personal weaknesses reasserted themselves. He was a vain, strutting man who loved uniforms, medals, and titles. For use in stamping official documents, he ordered a golden seal that described him as “Commander-in-Chief of all the Armies of Islam, Son-in-Law of the Caliph and Representative of the Prophet.”
¹⁷
Soon he was calling himself Emir of Turkestan, a practice not conducive to good relations with the Emir whose cause he served. At some point in the first half of 1922, the Emir of Bukhara broke off relations with him, depriving him of troops and much-needed financial support. The Emir of Afghanistan also failed to march to his aid.

Enver’s revolt scored some initial successes. He launched a daring raid on the city of Bukhara which unnerved his opponents. But the extent of his successes remains a subject of dispute. According to some accounts, he came to control most of the territory of Bukhara. According to others, Enver was merely one of a number of chiefs, who led a band of no more than 3,000 followers (out of an estimated 16,000 Basmachis roaming the country).
¹⁸
What is clear is that, however effective or ineffective, his activities were a cause of deep concern to the Kremlin.

In the late spring of 1922, Enver wrote to the government of Soviet Russia asking it to withdraw Russian troops and to recognize the independence of his Moslem state in Turkestan. In return he offered peace and friendship. Moscow refused his offer.

The Red Army, assisted by the secret police, launched a campaign of pacification in the summer of 1922. In this they were aided by Enver’s weaknesses. As a general he continued to be God’s gift to the other side. As a politician, he was equally maladroit: he alienated the other Basmachi leaders, many of whom turned against him. By midsummer, the Russians had reduced his following to a tiny band of fugitives.

Russian agents and patrols searched the narrow mountain ravines for traces of him, and eventually tracked him down to his lair in the hills, where Red Army troops quietly surrounded his forces. Before dawn on 4 August 1922, the Soviet soldiers attacked. Enver’s men were cut down.

There are several accounts of how Enver died.
¹⁹
According to the most persuasive of them, when the Russians attacked he gripped his pocket Koran and, as always, charged straight ahead. Later his decapitated body was found on the field of battle. His Koran was taken from his lifeless fingers and was filed in the archives of the Soviet secret police.

V

Soviet Russia’s liquidation of the last of the Turkish independence movements in Central Asia completed the process by which the Bolshevik authorities revealed that they would not keep their promise to allow non-Russian peoples to secede from Russian rule. It was now evident that they intended to retain the empire and the frontiers achieved by the czars.

Sir Percy Cox, who had recently returned to London from the Middle East, told the Cabinet in the summer of 1920 that the Bolsheviks would hold to the old Russian imperial frontier—but that they were not anxious to send their armies across it in search of new conquests.
²⁰
Winston Churchill was conspicuous among those in London who believed that Cox was wrong; but events at the time shed little light on the matter one way or the other. Certainly the Kremlin was active in subverting the British Empire in the Middle East, but there is as little agreement today as there was during the Lloyd George administration as to the long-run intentions with which the Kremlin did so.

Enver Pasha’s postwar adventures did, however, shed light on a number of other issues that British officials had raised during and just after the First World War about the opposition they faced in the Middle East. British officials had conceived of Enver as the sinister and potent figure who sustained Mustapha Kemal in his opposition to the Allies; but events had shown that Enver and Kemal were deadly rivals, and that it was Kemal—not Enver—who commanded the more powerful following within Turkey, and who therefore could obtain arms from Soviet Russia. British officials had also pictured Enver as a creature of the German military machine, but, while he could call on personal friends like von Seeckt for favors, in his Russian years he acted entirely on his own; and as Enver fought his last campaign in 1922, von Seeckt’s new German army was secretly working with the Bolsheviks, not with Enver.

For years Enver had threatened Britain and Russia with a pan-Turk uprising, but when he finally issued his call to revolt there was no appreciable response to it. Even within the guerrilla bands that he led, the Moslem religion rather than feelings of Turkishness provided the unifying bond. Pan-Islam, about which British officials continued to write with alarm, was also revealed as an empty slogan by the Bukharan campaign: the clannish peoples of the Middle East were not given to wider loyalties, and not one Moslem land—not even friendly Afghanistan—marched to Enver’s aid. It was true that in various parts of Turkestan, Moslem natives reacted against Russian settlers, even as in Palestine Moslems reacted against Jewish settlers, but each group of Moslems responded locally and only for itself: throughout the Middle East, Moslems were acting alike rather than acting together.

When Enver journeyed to Moscow, the British view was that he and his new Russian associates were elements of a long-standing political combination, and that they would work toward the same political goals. In fact their goals were far apart. Enver and the Bolsheviks tried to use each other, but neither succeeded. The Bolsheviks proved adept at swiftly picking up anyone they thought might do them good—and at quickly discarding them when their usefulness was at an end. London continually misunderstood, and interpreted as long-term combinations, these emphemeral tactical alliances into which the Kremlin entered with such cynical ease. It might have amused Enver, in the last minutes before his head was cut off by the Russians, to know that British Intelligence had marked him down as Moscow’s man.

Enver’s adventures—had British Intelligence known the full story of them at the time—would have shown the British that they were mistaken in their several views of who was in charge of Bolshevik Russia. A prevalent British view was that the Bolsheviks were run from Berlin by the German generals; but when Enver arrived in Berlin in 1919 he found that the German army was out of touch with Russia and took no interest in the new rulers of the Kremlin. It was Enver who suggested that the German army might profit from establishing a relationship with the Bolshevik regime, not vice versa; and it was a suggestion that von Seeckt did not begin to implement until 1921.

Indeed what Enver found was that Lenin and his colleagues were men who set their own agenda: that, above all, is where British Intelligence officers were wrong about them. The men in the Kremlin were engaged in giving orders, not in taking them. They were not arms of somebody else’s conspiracies; when it came to conspiracies, they wove their own. Winston Churchill, who had correctly observed as much, then spoiled his analysis by going on to claim that the Soviet leaders were neither Russian nor pro-Russian. Along with so many other British fantasies about the forces at work against them in the Middle East, it was a theory that ought to have died with Enver Pasha at Bukhara.

I

Russia, then, troubled after the war by the appearance of independence movements in Moslem Asia on her southern frontier, crushed them, and while doing so defined herself by charting her future relationship with the non-Russian peoples of what had once been the empire of the czars. So far as she was able, she would bring them under the rule of the Russian state—a policy formally adopted on 30 December 1922, when the First Congress of Soviets of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics approved the formation of the Soviet Union.

France, too, was troubled after the war by the appearance of independence movements in the areas of the Moslem Middle East she sought to control, and crushed them, as seen earlier, in 1920. Clemenceau had wanted to preserve France’s position as a power in Europe, and had always pictured the pursuit of overseas empire as a dangerous distraction; but his successors, by invading Syria, defined France’s role in postwar world politics in other, more ambitious and less realistic, terms. France’s occupation of Syria and Lebanon was formally validated by a League of Nations Mandate on 24 July 1922.

At the outset of the First World War, the three Allies had agreed to partition the postwar Middle East between them; but, in the postwar years, having lost unity of purpose, each went its own way in overcoming postwar disturbances in Moslem Asia, and each defined its own vision of its political destiny in doing so. Each followed its own road to 1922—for Britain’s position in her sphere in the Middle East, like Russia’s and France’s, was formally embodied in documents promulgated in that year.

Of the three Allies, Britain faced the most widespread challenges across the face of the Middle East after the war. She met the challenges while in the grip of an economic crisis and at a time of profound social and political change at home. Middle Eastern policy on the road to 1922 was to severely test Britain’s most colorful and creative politicians, Lloyd George and Churchill. For, as a result of the postwar troubles recounted earlier, everywhere from Egypt to Afghanistan, Britain’s Middle East policy was in tatters—just as Winston Churchill had said all along that it would be—in the face of native resistance, communal strife, and local disorders.

II

Ever since the end of the war, Churchill—inside the government—had been the most severe critic of the Prime Minister’s Middle Eastern policy, warning that peacetime Britain did not have the troops and that Parliament would refuse to spend the money to coerce the Middle East. He argued that Britain should therefore settle for terms that the Turks were willing to accept. On 25 October 1919 he presciently expressed concern that Greece might ruin herself in her Smyrna venture, and that Britain’s alliance with France might be injured by a French invasion of Syria with hordes of Algerian troops. He worried about the Italians “disturbing the Turkish World” and about “the Jews, whom we are pledged to introduce into Palestine and who take it for granted that the local population will be cleared out to suit their convenience.” Arguing that Allied policy in the Middle East ought to be completely reversed, he urged that the Ottoman Empire be restored to its prewar frontiers and suggested that the European powers renounce their claims to Syria, Palestine, and other such territories. “Instead of dividing up the Empire into separate territorial spheres of exploitation,” he argued, “we should combine to preserve the integrity of the Turkish Empire as it existed before the war but should subject that Empire to a strict form of international control…”
¹

Keenly aware of the purposes served by Britain’s Middle Eastern strategy during the nineteenth century, Churchill maintained that a similar strategy should be adopted by the Lloyd George government. “We ought to come to terms with Mustapha Kemal and arrive at a good peace with Turkey,” he argued, in a memorandum to the Cabinet on 23 November 1920, so as to stop estranging “powerful, durable and necessary Turkish and Mohammedan forces. We should thus re-create that Turkish barrier to Russian ambitions which has always been of the utmost importance to us.”
²

In a letter to the Prime Minister written shortly thereafter, Churchill underlined his deep resentment at being obliged as War Minister to ask Parliament for vast sums to subdue the Middle East when it was only Lloyd George’s “vendetta against the Turks” that made the expenditure necessary. He wrote that “We seem to be becoming the most Anti Turk & the most pro-Bolshevik power in the world: whereas in my judgement we ought to be the exact opposite.” Pointing out that it was only because of the support of the Conservative Party that the government remained in office, he reminded the Prime Minister that the Conservatives were associated with the traditional nineteenth-century policy of supporting Turkey against Russia.

Moving from domestic to foreign policy, Churchill wrote his most broadly reasoned criticism of British Middle Eastern policy some twelve days later in a memorandum to the Cabinet maintaining that “The unfortunate course of affairs has led to our being simultaneously out of sympathy with all the four Powers exercising local influence” in the Middle East: Russians, Greeks, Turks, and Arabs. A successful policy would consist rather in “dividing up the local Powers so that if we have some opponents we have also at any rate some friends. This is what we have always done in the whole of our past history. When Russia was our enemy the Turk was our friend: when Turkey was our enemy Russia was our friend.”
⁴
According to Churchill’s analysis, Lenin’s Russia would not, and King Constantine’s Greece could not, help Britain to achieve her goals; the only practicable course, he argued, was to ally with Turks and Arabs.

Sir Henry Wilson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, noted approvingly in his diary that Churchill had “written a good paper for the Cabinet showing that we are now hated by the Bolsheviks, Turks, Greeks, & Arabs & this
must
be bad policy & that we ought to make friends with Turks & Arabs & enemies with Bolsheviks & ignore Greeks. This has been my view all along.”
⁵

On an administrative level, Churchill charged (as had Sir Mark Sykes in the early days of the world war) that Britain’s Middle Eastern policy was rendered incoherent by the number of government departments running their separate territories and operations. This impeded progress toward curbing costs, he repeatedly told the Cabinet Finance Committee. On 31 December 1920, at Churchill’s suggestion, the Cabinet decided to set up a special Middle East Department within the Colonial Office to be in charge of the troubled mandated territories, Palestine (including Transjordan), and Iraq.

Lord Milner, the Colonial Secretary, in failing health and spirits, was unwilling to assume such heavy new responsibilities and promptly resigned from the government. On 1 January 1921, Lloyd George offered the Colonial Ministry to Churchill who, after some hesitation, agreed to accept it. It was arranged that Milner should hand over the ministry on 7 February; but Churchill immediately began involving himself in Middle East departmental arrangements and affairs.

Churchill at once began trying to expand the powers of his new ministry, seeking military as well as full civil powers and attempting to bring all of Arabia within the ambit of his department. He also expressed decided views about the future of Egypt. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, protested repeatedly at Churchill’s encroachments on his perogatives. Curzon complained that “Winston…wants to grab everything in his new Dept & to be a sort of Asiatic Foreign Secretary.”
⁶
A War Office official claimed that Churchill’s idea was to set up “a sort of War Office of his own.”
⁷

The Prime Minister, at Churchill’s suggestion, appointed a special interdepartmental committee under the chairmanship of Sir James Masterson Smith (a career official who had served under Churchill) to consider—and, Churchill hoped, to expand—the powers of the Colonial Office’s new Middle East Department.

Churchill, who no longer spoke of restoring the Ottoman Empire, approached his new responsibilities with an open mind and with an evident desire to obtain guidance from the government’s ablest officials in a program aimed at cutting costs while trying to keep commitments.

III

By 1921 the Government of India, under the influence of Gertrude Bell in Baghdad, had come over to the views of Cairo. India, like Cairo, now believed in protectorate rather than direct government, and supported the sons of King Hussein as Britain’s candidates for Arab leadership. This brought an end to the long civil war within British ranks and Churchill’s luck was that Britain’s Middle East old hands now spoke with one voice; unlike previous ministers, he would not be caught in an official crossfire.

Churchill drew on the resources of other ministries to recruit an experienced and well-balanced staff to deal with his new Middle Eastern responsibilities. In the interim, while his staff was being assembled, Churchill relied upon the information, advice, and professional guidance of Sir Arthur Hirtzel, Assistant Under-Secretary of State for India, a career official who had served in the India Office since 1894. Hirtzel declined Churchill’s offer to head the new Middle East Department; in his place he sent another career official, John Evelyn Shuckburgh, who had worked under him and who had served in the India Office since 1900. Hirtzel wrote to Churchill that Shuckburgh was “really first-rate—level headed, always cool, very accurate & unsparing of himself: his only fault perhaps a tendency to excessive caution.”
⁸

Churchill chose Hubert Winthrop Young of the Foreign Office to be Shuckburgh’s assistant. An army major during the war, Young had been in charge of transport and supplies for Feisal’s Arab forces. His appointment, and Shuckburgh’s, were endorsed in warm terms by the Masterson Smith committee. The committee found Shuckburgh to be “the best man” for the job and Young’s services to be “essential.”
⁹
The committee expressed strong reservations, however, about another appointment Churchill proposed to make: T. E. Lawrence, who was to be an adviser on Arab affairs. The committee cautioned Churchill that Lawrence was “not the kind of man to fit easily into any official machine.”
¹⁰

Lawrence indeed had earned a reputation for insubordination and for going over the heads of his official superiors to higher authorities. He was also the leading public critic of British policy toward the Arabs of Mesopotamia—a policy of which Churchill was now in charge. In the summer of 1920 Lawrence had written of Iraq in the
Sunday Times
that

Lawrence, a one-time junior officer in the Arab Bureau in Cairo, had by now become a celebrity, due to the efforts of an American named Lowell Thomas. Thomas, a 25-year-old fledgling showman from Ohio who until then had knocked about North America in search of fame, fortune, and adventure, had been working at a part-time job teaching public speaking at Princeton when, at the end of 1917, he raised enough money to go to England and then to send himself and a cameraman to the Middle East war front in search of a salable story with romance and local color. There he found Lawrence, wearing Arab robes, and decided to make him the hero of a colorful story he was about to write—a story about the Arab followers of Hussein and Feisal and the role they had played in the war against Turkey. The story was to form the basis of a show, in which—sacrificing truth to entertainment values—Thomas would picture Lawrence as the inspirer and leader of an Arab revolt that destroyed the Turkish Empire.

Thomas’s show was a lecture with photos. It was entitled
The Last Crusade
and Thomas opened it at the Century Theater in New York in March 1919, with the backing of the New York
Globe
. A few weeks later he moved it to the old Madison Square Garden, a vast auditorium in which to accommodate the crowds that Thomas hoped to attract. An English impresario then arranged to bring the show to London, where it played to the largest halls: the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden and the Albert Hall.

It was a masterpiece of ballyhoo and it set show business records. It played in London for six months and was seen there by perhaps a million people. Thomas then took the show on a road tour around the world. It made young Lowell Thomas rich and famous; and it converted “Lawrence of Arabia” into a world hero.
^*

Lawrence, though embarrassed by the crudeness of Thomas’s account, gloried in its bright glow. When
The Last Crusade
played in London, Lawrence frequently came up from Oxford to see it: Thomas’s wife spied him in the audience on at least five different occasions, causing him to “flush crimson, laugh in confusion, and hurry away.”
¹⁵

The public believed Thomas’s account; so that when Lawrence became an adviser to Winston Churchill, his appointment overshadowed all others. His reputation grew. He passed off his fantasies as history,
¹⁶
and, in the years to come, Lawrence was to claim far more credit for his share in Churchill’s achievements as Colonial Secretary than was his due.