Jadid Movement: Central Asia's Reform Generation

On 15 January 1914, a Samarkand audience paid to watch a rich man's son help rob his own father's house. By the end of the evening the father was dead, knifed in the struggle, and the lesson hung in the air like smoke: this is what happens to a boy nobody bothered to educate. The play was Padarkush ("The Patricide"), written by the Samarkand scholar Mahmudkhoja Behbudiy. According to the history kept by Samarkand's regional drama theatre, which still dates its own founding to that night, tickets had sold out two days ahead and three to four hundred people were turned away at the door. Six weeks later, on 27 February 1914, Abdulla Avloniy's Turon troupe opened in Tashkent with the same play, at the Kolizey (Colosseum) hall.

That's the Jadid movement in one scene. A small group of Muslim reformers in Russian-ruled Turkestan and the Emirate of Bukhara decided that their society's problem wasn't foreign rule alone, it was ignorance, and they reached for every modern tool they could find to fix it: schools, newspapers, printing presses, and a stage. Most of them were dead by the end of 1938. Today the state builds museums in their honour. This is how that happened, and where you can still find them.

What was actually on stage

Padarkush is short and blunt. A wealthy man (called simply the Boy, the Uzbek word for a rich man) is visited by two advisers. A religious teacher, the Domla, urges him to put his son through proper schooling; a second visitor, an educated man with a Russian-school background, goes further and argues for modern subjects and even study abroad. The father waves them both off. Money is enough, he thinks. The son, Toshmurod, drifts into bad company, and the robbery follows.

It isn't subtle, and it wasn't meant to be. Behbudiy wrote it in 1911 and got it into print in 1913, and Uzbek scholars today still call it the first drama written in the region in either Turkic or Persian. Getting it past the censor took some cunning. Uzbek literary historians report that it was cleared by the censorship office in Tiflis (Tbilisi) with a cover line dedicating it to the anniversary of the Battle of Borodino, 1812's great patriotic set piece, which was being loudly celebrated across the empire in 1912.

"New method" meant a new way to learn the alphabet

The name comes from usul-i jadid, "the new method". In practice it began as a change in how children learned to read.

In the old maktab, pupils memorised texts, often in Arabic or Persian they didn't understand, and learned letters by reciting their names in sequence. Reading came slowly, if at all. The reformed schools taught the sounds of the letters, so a child could sound out a word the way we teach phonics now, and they added arithmetic, geography, history and the child's own language to the timetable, with desks, a blackboard, a fixed curriculum and exams. The model came from Ismail Gasprinski, a Crimean Tatar publisher, and reached Turkestan through Tatar teachers and printed textbooks. By the early 1900s, reformers like Munavvar Qori in Tashkent were running their own new-method schools.

Why did something as dull as a spelling method become political? Because it cut out the middleman. A child who read within months didn't need years at a traditional teacher's feet, and a public that read newspapers could be argued with and organised. The conservative ulama understood that perfectly well, which is why the schools had a much harder time in the emir's Bukhara than in Russian-run Tashkent or Samarkand.

Behbudiy: a mufti with a printing press

Behbudiy was born in Samarkand in 1875 and trained as a religious jurist. He's the reformer as institution-builder: he opened a new-method school near Samarkand in the early 1900s, wrote textbooks and maps for them, and in 1913 launched both a newspaper, Samarqand, and a weekly magazine, Oyna ("The Mirror"), which ran until 1915. Oyna argued that a Muslim who wanted to protect his faith had to know the modern world, including Russian and a European language.

He was not an anti-Russian firebrand. For most of his career Behbudiy's method was to work inside the imperial system, petition it, and use the space it allowed. That's one reason the story of his death stings. In the spring of 1919, travelling towards Qarshi, then part of the Emirate of Bukhara, he was seized by the emir's men and killed. The commonly given date is 25 March 1919, though details of where exactly and how are told differently in different accounts. The emir's government saw the reformers, correctly, as a threat to the whole order described in our piece on how law and courts worked under the emirs.

Fitrat and the Bukharan argument

If Behbudiy was the builder, Abdurauf Fitrat was the polemicist. Born in Bukhara in 1886, he studied in Istanbul from 1909 and published there, in Persian, a book usually known as Munozara ("The Debate"): a fictional argument between a Bukharan teacher and a European visitor, in which the European comes off better and the reader is meant to be embarrassed about it. The book circulated back home and was translated into Russian.

His interests kept widening. He wrote plays, poetry and history; he worked on Uzbek grammar and spelling; he wrote about the Shashmaqom, Bukhara's classical music, including a 1927 treatise on Uzbek classical music and its history. In 1926 he became, by the Uzbek account, the country's first professor. Bukhara's maqom musicians still work inside a tradition he helped describe.

1917 to 1924: the years they almost ran things

The revolution of February 1917 looked, briefly, like the opening the Jadids had been waiting for. In November 1917 Muslim leaders in Kokand declared a Turkestan Autonomy, a government that claimed the region within a new, democratic Russia. It lasted about three months. In February 1918 Soviet forces, with armed units of the Armenian Dashnak party, stormed Kokand; the old city burned and thousands of people were killed. Death-toll estimates vary too widely to pick one. What's not disputed is the effect: the massacre fed the Basmachi insurgency for years afterwards, and it's covered from another direction in our history of the Kokand khanate.

Here's the uncomfortable bit. After Kokand, many Jadids concluded that the Bolsheviks were the only force strong enough to break the emir, and they joined them. Young Bukharans backed the Red Army's attack on Bukhara in September 1920, which ended the emirate (the long run-up is in our Emirate of Bukhara history). In the Bukharan People's Soviet Republic that followed, Fayzulla Khodjaev headed the government and Fitrat held ministerial posts. For a few years, Jadids were writing the laws, running the schools and redesigning the alphabet, work you can follow in the story of how Uzbek changed scripts three times.

It didn't last. The 1924 national delimitation carved Central Asia into Soviet republics, including Uzbekistan, and the Bukharan republic was folded into it. Moscow increasingly treated the Jadids as suspect "bourgeois nationalists". Many were pushed out of office in the later 1920s. Some left for good; Usmon Khodjaev, who had been among the leaders of the Bukharan republic, ended up in exile in Turkey.

4 October 1938

The end came in the Great Terror. Fitrat was arrested in 1937, held and interrogated for over a year, and sentenced by the military collegium of the USSR Supreme Court. On 4 October 1938 he was shot in Tashkent on the same day as the novelist Abdulla Qodiriy and the poet Cho'lpon, the three writers most Uzbeks would name first if you asked them about the period. Fayzulla Khodjaev had already been tried in Moscow and shot that March.

The scale is hard to take in from names alone. The Shahidlar Xotirasi foundation, cited on the official tourism portal, puts arrests in September 1937 alone at about 10,700, with 3,613 death sentences. Many of those shot in Tashkent were buried at the execution ground in what's now the Yunusobod district, and the memorial park and museum stand on that site today. The number of intellectuals shot there is often given as 507; we couldn't trace that figure to a primary document, so treat it as a commonly cited estimate.

Rehabilitation came in two stages. Some victims were legally cleared during Khrushchev's thaw (Cho'lpon in 1956), but the books stayed off the shelves: publishing Fitrat, Cho'lpon or Qodiriy freely had to wait for glasnost in the late 1980s.

From suspects to national founders

Since 1991 the Jadids have moved steadily to the centre of Uzbekistan's official story, and under President Mirziyoyev that shift has turned into a full programme: conferences, a state media project, school lessons, a multimedia exhibition called "Jadidlar. Turkistonga maktublar" ("Letters to Turkestan") at Tashkent City Mall from July 2024, and a dedicated state museum. The president has described today's Uzbekistan as the realisation of the Jadids' dreams of freedom.

Our take, and it's an opinion: the official version is kinder than the history. It leans hard on the schools and the martyrdom and goes quiet on 1918 to 1924, when many Jadids chose to work with the Bolsheviks, cheered the fall of the emir and sat in Soviet governments. They weren't naive and they weren't saints. They were people with a clear idea of what their society needed, making bad bets in a terrible decade. If you want the sharper version, Adeeb Khalid's Making Uzbekistan (Cornell University Press, 2015) is the standard English-language history and doesn't flatter anyone.

Where you can see Jadid traces today

None of this is on the standard Silk Road checklist. Here's what we could confirm (last checked: September 2026).

Tashkent: the Shahidlar Xotirasi memorial and museum

The State Museum in Memory of Victims of Repression sits in the memorial park on Amir Temur Street, next to the TV tower. It opened in 2002 and fills 960 square metres across three halls, with sections running from the Russian conquest through the Jadid movement, collectivisation in 1930 to 1936, the 1937 to 1938 purges and post-independence commemoration. Hours are Tuesday to Sunday, 9:00 to 17:00, closed Mondays, per the official tourism portal. The portal doesn't list a current ticket price, so bring some cash. It pairs naturally with the conquest story in our piece on how Russia took Turkestan. Uzbekistan marks 31 August as its day of remembrance for victims of repression.

Bukhara: Fitrat's house and the museum being built

Bukhara has a small Fitrat house museum, set up in 1996, plus a park and a monument named after him. The better-known stop is the Fayzulla Khodjaev house museum, a restored merchant's home that shows the kind of wealthy household several Jadids came out of.

The big one isn't open yet. A presidential decision of 30 May 2024, reported by Gazeta.uz, created a State Museum of Jadid Heritage in the Hovli Poyon complex at 13 Khoja Gulrez Street, run by the Art and Culture Development Foundation. In September 2025 The Art Newspaper reported that the Paris-based architect Lina Ghotmeh would convert the former home of Usmon Khodjaev, beside Lyabi-Hauz, into a Jadids' Legacy Museum due in 2027. The two reports appear to describe the same project; opening dates in Uzbekistan slip, so don't plan a trip around it. If you're staying near the Lyabi-Hauz pool, though, it's a two-minute look at the building site.

Samarkand: Behbudiy's house and the play

Behbudiy's city does have a site of its own: the Mahmudkhoja Behbudiy House-Museum (the brick facade in the photo at the top of this page), run as part of the Samarkand State Museum-Reserve. iTicket lists tickets from 27,500 to 38,500 som including its 10% booking fee (expect the top rate as a foreign adult); confirm at the door, as museum-reserve prices change (last checked: September 2026). The other living trace is the play. Padarkush is revived regularly by Uzbek companies (the State Satire Theatre staged it at Tashkent State University of Oriental Studies in January 2022). Performances are in Uzbek and aren't surtitled, so check the programme and go knowing the plot. You now know how it ends.