For their participation in the uprising against Khiva Khan in 1916, the Tolmets were hanged by General Galkin's punitive detachment of the Russian army.

　　The Tolmets were hanged by General Galkin's punitive detachment for their participation in the uprising against Khiva Khan in 1916.

　A photograph of the 1916 massacre of participants in the uprising against tsarism in the Samarkand region and the Russian punitive expeditionary force shows a gallows with corpses on it. This illustrates how the uprisings of the peoples of Central Asia and Kazakhstan that broke out in 1916 were brutally suppressed by the Russian military. The trigger for the uprising was a decree issued on June 25, 1916, by the Tsar of Russia to mobilize "foreigners" between the ages of 18 and 43 for logistical work. The rebels refused to obey the tsar's mobilization order, and in June 1916 armed clashes broke out between the rebels and the tsar's forces in Kokand, Andijan, and other districts. The insurgency reached its largest scale in the Zurgai region (Kazakhstan). Its leader was Aman Gerdi Imanov. The uprising was persistent and prolonged. The uprising was directed not only against the tsarist authorities, but also against local feudal lords and mullahs. The uprising was directed not only against the tsarist authorities, but also against the local feudal lords and mullahs. Punitive forces were deployed against the insurgents. Martial law was imposed. A court-martial was held. Whole awls and gallows were on their way. Hundreds were burned.

　A Kyrgyz official commission concluded that the massive repression of imperial Russia against the Kyrgyz uprising of 1916 was genocide; the commission's conclusion on August 15, 2016, was based on data retrieved from archives provided by the Russian and Chinese authorities.

　During World War I, Russia decided to conscript indigenous peoples of Central Asia as unarmed laborers to build trenches and fortifications. Many Kyrgyzstanis and Kazakhs openly rebelled against the Russian authorities; between 100,000 and 270,000 Kyrgyz were killed by the tsar's punishment battalions, and hundreds of thousands fled to the neighboring Chinese Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. 1916's deadly incident in Kyrgyzstan is undisclosed in Soviet textbooks. Meanwhile, a similar uprising in Kazakhstan was described as a revolt against the local feudal overlords and the Russian tsar, contributing to the Russian communists' victory in 1917.In April 2016, Sergei Naryshkin, speaker of the Russian lower house of parliament, denied genocide allegations about the uprising, saying that all countries had years ago and denied that they had suffered.