page_title: Gustav Krist
section_title: Various escapes
hierarchical_section_title: Gustav Krist / Various escapes
caption_attribution_description: Early color photograph from Russia, created by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii as part of his work to document the Russian Empire from 1904 to 1916. Entrance to the Emir's palace in Bukhara.
context_page_description: Gustav Krist was an Austrian adventurer, prisoner-of-war, carpet-dealer and author.
  His accounts of unmonitored journeys, in a politically closed and tightly-controlled Russian, and then Soviet Central Asia, offer valuable historical testimonies of the still essentially Muslim region before Sovietization, and the conditions there of the Central Powers prisoners-of-war during and after the First World War.
context_section_description: In 1916 Krist escaped Katta-Kurgan to Tabriz in Persia, but was unable to return to Austria due to conditions in Kurdistan and British control of south Persia. En route he had been recaptured but jumped a prison-train and made his way via Merv, northern Afghanistan and Meshed to Tabriz. As Tabriz was a principal centre for Persian carpet production and trade there he began trading in wool and carpets around Persia for a native Iranian. Krist was captured in the Russian swoop on the German community in Tabriz which destroyed the German Club and German-owned PETAG (Persische Teppiche Aktien Gesellschaft) workshop and was taken to Julfa and then Baku.  
  Following Krasnovodsk, from where inmates were sent to bury 1,200 Turkish prisoners-of-war on an island south of Cheleken who had died of starvation and thirst, Krist was then sent to Fort Alexandovsky, an isolated penal-camp on the Caspian, where troublesome prisoners were concentrated. The conditions there were atrocious, and eventually, when it was closed down following Red Cross investigations, he was moved to Samarkand, where he was assigned work. After the Bolsheviks freed the prisoners of war, essentially opening the camp gates and stopping the issue of rations, Krist and others were left to fend for themselves and fell into establishing various wheeling-and-dealing industries.
  Krist also travelled with Red Cross delegations across Turkistan and in a bizarre episode entered the service of the Emir of Bukhara who was striving to re-establish his full independence in the collapse of the Russian Empire, and helped him set up a mint. This was subsequently wrecked when Krist was driven out of town by the conservative religious leaders. Krist was able to visit the town and the Ark Citadel before its destruction. Bukhara fell to the Soviets under Mikhail Frunze in September 1920 after four days' fighting which left much of the town in ruins. Krist mentions the construction by the emir, using Austrian engineers, of a secret base at Dushanbe in the Tadjikistan Mountains. This was also bombed from the air by the Soviets and Krist visited the ruins on a later visit to the area.
  The local soviet in Turkistan promised a train to take the ex-prisoners home in 1920 in return for aid in suppressing mutinous Bolshevik soldiers in Samarkand. Krist as an NCO led a force of Austrian POWs in disarming them, but after the Austrians had handed in their arms this agreement was reneged on. Krist was amongst those who were later condemned to death for counter-revolutionary activity. Luckily this was commuted to three-months imprisonment at the last minute leaving time to arrange a pardon. Krist and the remaining prisoners were repatriated late in 1921 through the Baltic States and Germany, having to cross a Russia suffering from famine and civil-war.
caption: Entrance to the Ark fortress
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