The article is focused on a problem of the role of European prisoners of war interned in the concentration camps of Turkestan during the First World War, in the events of the Civil war in Central Asia. The problem considered in the article has not yet been researched in historiography. Both the materials of Soviet documents and the memoirs of participants in those events in English, French and German were used as sources. The problem of the place of prisoners of war in the recent history of Central Asia was considered both in the context of the regional events of the civil war and in the international context. The sources published in the collections, as well as documents from the archives of the Russian State Archive of War and Peace. The main type of sources in the process of writing the article were the memoirs of foreign prisoners of war, as well as eyewitnesses to the events of those days. In this case, the corpus of narrative sources allowed in the process of disclosing the problem to fill a number of gaps associated with the formality and informative paucity of documentary sources.