East Turkestan Revolutionary Party
Abdulkerim Abbas, a Uyghur revolutionary who served as the interior minister of the Second East Turkestan Republic (ETR), led the party as chairman of a seven-member central executive committee.
The ETRP emerged from the more moderate East Turkestan Revolutionary Youth League (ETRYL), a group of young, progressive-minded intellectuals who opposed the conservative faction of the ETR government.
The leadership was dominated by religious conservatives, who viewed the rebellion as a war of national liberation to restore the First East Turkestan Republic which had been founded exactly eleven years earlier.
[8] As such, the Soviets were careful not to openly support communists in the region during the time of the ETR, which would make their negotiation efforts with the Kuomintang appear disingenuous.
[9][10] The ETRP's origins can be traced to the East Turkestan Revolutionary Youth League (ETRYL), which was founded by disgruntled members of the ETR government.
[5] However, not all progressive leaders of the ETR were involved in the ETRYL's founding; most significantly, the pro-Soviet foreign minister Ehmetjan Qasim was preoccupied with peace negotiations with the Kuomintang.
[12] The ETRYL quickly gained support amongst Soviet- and Chinese-educated youth; in a matter of weeks, its membership ballooned to 14,000, spread over 27 counties of the Three Districts.
[13] At its onset, the ETRYL was not ideological; it advocated an ethnically inclusive form of civic nationalism and centered its platform on a narrow set of issues, chiefly opposition to the Kuomintang.
[14] Anwar Hanbaba, an ETRYL central committee member, described in his memoirs the then necessity of a vanguard party: In human societies of every epoch, the training of youths and the grooming of successors have been important matters, and the Three Districts Revolution was no different in this regard.
Abbas explained to Dong that the ETRP had been working closely with the Han Chinese–majority Communist League of Xinjiang headquartered in Dihua (Ürümqi), and that together they numbered in the tens-of-thousands.
However, Zhou also relayed the CCP central committee's opinion that the ETRP's name was "inappropriate" as it implied support for an independent East Turkestan.
The Soviet ministries of interior and state security wrote their own draft and submitted it to Mikhail Suslov, the head of the foreign policy department of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks).
"[14] The ETRP's founders felt that the ETRYL, as an above-ground organisation, was too moderate and hindered by the constant interference of the ETR's conservative leadership.
The foundation of an underground, strictly Marxist–Leninist organisation would therefore serve to guide future revolutionary action in a socialist direction, in contrast to the non-ideological, civic nationalist platform of the ETRYL.
[33] The ETRP's central executive committee (CEC) consisted of seven members: Abdulkerim Abbas, Seydulla Seypulla, Saifuddin Azizi, Asgat Iskhakov, Muhemmetimin Imin, Anwar Hanbaba, and Abdulla Zakir.
