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Army with Kliment Voroshilov as his political
commissar. The long march from the north Cau-
casus to Poland in 1920 earned him great fame.
After the civil war, he became inspector of the
Red Army Cavalry (1924-37), an appointment
that gradually diminished in importance as
mechanized warfare became more widespread.
In 1935 he was promoted to the rank of mar-
shal, one of four in the Red Army at the time. A
strong supporter of
STALIN
, he sat on the special
military court that sentenced Marshal Mikhail
TUKHACHEVSKY
and other leading Red Army
commanders to death as part of the 1937 purge
that decimated the Soviet Union's officer corps.
After the German invasion of June 1941, he was
appointed commander of the southwestern front
with responsibility for the Ukraine and Bessara-
bia. His command was short-lived and disas-
trous, as he proved “bewildered” by the new
mechanized warfare, and he was dismissed only
a few months later, in September 1941. His close
relationship to Stalin protected him from the
more serious reprisals common at the time, and
he was reassigned to administrative tasks. He
never returned to active command but remained
commander in chief of various Caucasian fronts
until January 1943, when he was appointed
commander of the Red Army Cavalry. He was a
member of the Central Committee of the Com-
munist Party (1939-52), as well as a member of
the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the latter a
purely decorative position. He continued to con-
cern himself with horses and horse breeding. His
memoirs were published in Russia in 1959, and
as he grew older he became a symbol of a heroic
age of Soviet life that had passed.
of Bukhara begins with its inclusion into the
Uzbek state founded by Khan Sheybani after the
conquest of the Timurid domains in Transoxania
in 1500-1507. In 1555, Abdullah Khan trans-
ferred the seat of government from
SAMARKAND
to Bukhara, which became the capital of the
Bukhara Khanate that survived until the 20th
century. After a succession of internal feuds had
weakened its power, Bukhara was conquered in
1740 by Nadir Shah of Persia. Although Bukhara
regained its independence in 1754, it did not
recover its supremacy over areas like
KHOREZM
,
Merv, Badakhstan, Tashkent, and the Fergana
valley. The rulers of Bukhara, known by the title
of emir, ruled over a predominantly Uzbek pop-
ulation with an admixture of Sarts and Tadzhiks.
Within the framework of the Shariat and cus-
tomary law, they had almost unlimited power,
which they exercised with the support of Uzbek
tribal chieftains and the Muslim clergy. In the
mid-19th century, Bukhara became an object of
desire in the long-standing struggle between
Russian and British imperial interests. In 1866,
the Russian army inflicted a disastrous defeat on
the Bukharan army, leading to an 1868 treaty
that surrendered some of Bukhara's best lands,
including Samarkand, to Russia and established
a Russian protectorate over the Bukhara
khanate. A Russian political agent resided at
Kagan, eight miles from Bukhara, and slavery
was abolished, but otherwise Bukhara remained
aloof from the transformation of the Turkestan
area, especially around Tashkent, into a cotton-
growing colony of Russia. In 1920, a coalition of
Russians and local Communists, aided by the
Red Army, deposed the last emir and established
the Bukhara People's Soviet Republic on the ter-
ritory of the now dissolved Bukhara khanate.
Fierce resistance, led by
BASMACHI
guerrillas,
ensued, but after a ruthless campaign of pacifi-
cation that led to the destruction of over half of
the region's arable land and livestock, and of
hundreds of villages, the Communists estab-
lished control in 1924. The Bukhara khanate
was incorporated into the Soviet Union, and in
the 1930s it became part of the Uzbek Soviet
Bukhara
An ancient center of civilization in Central Asia
founded in the first century
A
.
D
., on an oasis on
the Zeravshan River, 270 miles to the southwest
of Tashkent. After its capture by the Arabs in
709, Bukhara became an important center of
medieval Islamic learning, subsequently ruled by
Persians, Turks, and Uzbeks. The modern history
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