The Basmachi Revolt was a decentralized Muslim insurgency against Soviet rule across Central Asia. Its roots lay in a 1916 revolt against wartime conscription, but the movement usually called Basmachi took shape only after the 1917 revolutions, and the major insurgency ran from about 1918 into the early 1930s. Fought by loosely allied local bands rather than a single army, it was worn down by a mix of Red Army pressure, amnesties and co-optation, intelligence and local alliances, economic and religious concessions, and later renewed coercion, and it was long remembered only through the label its enemies gave it.
Their enemies named them. "Basmachi" was a Soviet insult, a Turkic word for raider, pinned on the fighters to make a revolt look like banditry. Those it labeled mostly spurned it, naming themselves instead by faith and local loyalty. And when a former Ottoman war minister arrived to forge them into one great pan-Turkic army, the local commanders he came to lead trusted him least of all.