Soviet Union Creates Mega-Turkestan in Central Asia and Sinkiang

Is this plausible


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Baby Kata

Banned
Probably requires a couple of conditions, not sure how to make them plausible

1. Kemal's Turkey utterly crushed by the Greeks, Western Allies, Kurds, and Armenians, to the point where the Turks can have whatever imposed on them with no ability to resist.
2. China too weak to respond if the Soviets invade Sinkiang. (This was probably true IRL)
3. Stalin willing to ethnically cleanse/uproot tens of millions of people. (This was definitely true IRL, and please don't mistake it's inclusion in this post as an endorsement of ethnic cleansing, which it is not.)

The basic idea is that Stalin would have conquered Sinkiang from China in the early 1920s, and then merged it with all of the Soviet Central Asian republics to create a "Soviet Republic of Turkestan", with its capital in Samarcand. Of course, this area had large Tajik, Chinese, Russian, and Jewish populations who had no interest in being Turkic.

That's where the Turks of Asia Minor come in. If Kemal had been utterly crushed, it is entirely probable that Greece, Armenia, Assyria, and Kurdistan would have divided Asia Minor amongst themselves, and attempted to ethnically cleanse the Turks, like in the Balkans. Stalin could have arranged with them to move all the Turks (about 11-12 million, some would obviously die in a forced relocation like this, let's say 10 million lived and made it to Central Asia) to this new Soviet Russia.

Stalin could have then attempted to create a "Turkestani" identity amongst all the various Turkic peoples in this Mega-Turkestan, akin to a "Yugoslav" or "Indian" identity out of the many South Slavic groups and South Asian groups.

Do you think it would have worked?

What would this state be like, demographically?

Here's a map of the idea.

hOp0Ix6.png
 
Had a Mega-Turkestan happened in such a manner. It would be interesting to see it embrace some socialist form of pan-Turanism whose potentially irredentist ambitions of considering themselves successors to the Mongol Empire (considering all territory the Mongols and Turkic peoples, etc conquered or inhabited as their own via some megalomaniac leader or few) is largely contained by the Soviets / Russia and resurgent China, with the possible exception of Afghanistan in the Soviet invasion (and potentially Pakistan). India and Iran would both likely feel threatened by a Mega-Turkestan

On the other hand there is the possibility that a number of Turkestanis would seek to switch sides during WW2 and if unsuccessful end up with a worse fate than the OTL Crimean Tartars and the repatriated Eastern European Nazi collaborators.

Curious to see how much of a threat this Mega-Turkestan could be to surrounding neighbors, even if they end up having no such ambitions of ieighbors.
 
Mega Turkestan wouldn't include all of the Sinkiang province, as the eastern part is overwhelmingly Han. There would be a partition.
 
This is very unlikely. Stalin favored a deliberate policy of differentiating between the various Turkic peoples of the USSR in order to inhibit the growth of pan-Turkism, which he saw as ideologically dangerous. Thus, the Turkestan ASSR was broken up early--and even when it existed it did not include Kazakhstan (which, confusingly, was then called the Kirgizistan ASSR). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkestan_Autonomous_Soviet_Socialist_Republic

Moreover, while the USSR did exercise considerable influence in Xinjiang and intervened there militarily more than once, it was more interested in having "friendly" governments there than in incorporating the area into the USSR, which would unnecessarily outrage China and its friends. In general Stalin was reluctant to incorporate new Asian territories that had never been part of the Russian Empire into the USSR (except for Tuva); in the case of Mongolia, as I have noted, there was more support for its joining the USSR from the Mongol side than from the Soviets. https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...-never-annexed-mongolia.461908/#post-18443067
 
The absolute worst-case scenario for Turkey in the aftermath of the First World War would have involved, at most, that country losing Thrace, Constantinople and the Straits, and the Zone of Smyrna to Greece, Armenia achieving Wilsonian borders, and perhaps the Kurds receiving an independent state. That is to say, things certainly could have gone worse for Turkey, but a full partition of that country likely was always implausible.
 
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