The New Central Asia: The Creation of Nations (review)

Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 2006

Review of: Marco Buttino, La Rivoluzione Capovolta: L'Asia centrale tra il crollo dell'impero Zarista e la formazione dell'URSS [(Naples: L'Ancora del Mediterraneo, 2003); Adrienne Edgar, Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Vladimir Genis, Vitse-konsul Vvedenskii: Sluzhba v Persii i Bukharskom khanstve (1906-1920 gg.). Rossiiskaia diplomatiia v sud´bakh (Moscow: Sotsial'nopoliticheskaia mysl´, 2003); Arne Haugen, The Establishment of National Republics in Soviet Central Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Paula Michaels, Curative Powers: Medicine and Empire in Stalin’s Central Asia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003); and Douglas T. Northrop, Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).

2013

Focusing on Soviet culture and its social ramifications both during the Soviet period and in the post-Soviet era, this book addresses important themes associated with Sovietisation and socialisation in the Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. The book contains contributions from scholars in a variety of disciplines, and looks at topics that have been somewhat marginalised in contemporary studies of Central Asia, including education, anthropology, music, literature and poetry, film, history and state-identity construction, and social transformation. It examines how the Soviet legacy affected the development of the republics in Central Asia, and how it continues to affect the society, culture and polity of the region. Although each state in Central Asia has increasingly developed its own way, the book shows that the states have in varying degrees retained the influence of the Soviet past, or else are busily establishing new political identities in reaction to their Soviet legacy, and in doing so laying claim to, re-defining, and reinventing pre-Soviet and Soviet images and narratives. Throwing new light and presenting alternate points of view on the question of the Soviet legacy in the Soviet Central Asian successor states, the book is of interest to academics in the field of Russian and Central Asian Studies.

1990

Russian modernization opened a gate to other nationalities within the empire. Muslims of the Volga region faced the greatest experimental field of developments in Russian history. Modernization and nationalization were mainly carried out by the religious elites. Their main concern was to establish a Muslim identity. Establishing a civil society was not a primary issue for the Volga Muslims. Their primary concerns were their political and social independence through national and religious consciousness. Although they were in the same geographical area, Russians and Muslims under Russian rule faced different conditions during the process of modernization.

Review essay: Sergei Abashin, Sovetskii kishlak: Mezhdu kolonializmom i modernizatsiei (The Soviet Kishlak: Between Colonialism and Modernization). 720 pp. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2015. ISBN-13 978-5444802199. Botakoz Kassymbekova, Despite Cultures: Early Soviet Rule in Tajikistan. 272 pp. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016. ISBN-13 978-0822964193. $ 28.95. Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR. 414 pp. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015. ISBN-13 978-0801454097. $ 39.95.

The Sovietization of Eastern Europe. New Perspectives on the Postwar Period, 2008

The Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies

This article addresses the national policy of Soviet authorities in Uzbekistan in the 1920s and 1930s. It also studies the 'consolidation' of different tribes and ethnic groups in the process of establishing the national socialist republics and forming the 'socialist' nations and peoples within the framework of these states. The Soviet power considered the 'consolidation' of different tribes and ethnic groups as an important step in the construction of national socialist states. Certain tribes such as kipchaks, kurama, kongrats, mangits and others disappeared as a consequence of such consolidation. This article discusses how the national identification of 'socialist nations' was carried out by the introduction of 'socialist values' in the culture and life of local populations, different ethnic groups and tribes, which resulted in the dilution of self-identification as well.

Central Asian Survey, 2007

In Making Uzbekistan, Adeeb Khalid chronicles the tumultuous history of Central Asia in the age of the Russian revolution. Traumatic upheavals—war, economic collapse, famine—transformed local society and brought new groups to positions of power and authority in Central Asia, just as the new revolutionary state began to create new institutions that redefined the nature of power in the region. This was also a time of hope and ambition in which local actors seized upon the opportunity presented by the revolution to reshape their society. As the intertwined passions of nation and revolution reconfigured the imaginations of Central Asia's intellectuals, the region was remade into national republics, of which Uzbekistan was of central importance. Making use of archival sources from Uzbekistan and Russia as well as the Uzbek- and Tajik-language press and belles lettres of the period, Khalid provides the first coherent account of the political history of the 1920s in Uzbekistan. He explores the complex interaction between Uzbek intellectuals, local Bolsheviks, and Moscow to sketch out the flux of the situation in early-Soviet Central Asia. His focus on the Uzbek intelligentsia allows him to recast our understanding of Soviet nationalities policies. Uzbekistan, he argues, was not a creation of Soviet policies, but a project of the Muslim intelligentsia that emerged in the Soviet context through the interstices of the complex politics of the period. The energies unleashed by the revolution also made possible the golden age of modern culture, as authors experimented with new literary forms and the modern Uzbek language took shape. Making Uzbekistan introduces key texts from this period and argues that what the decade witnessed was nothing short of a cultural revolution.

XXX International Congress on Historiography and Source Studies of Asia and Africa, 2019

Cinematic Settlers. The Settler Colonial World in Film, 2020

The Revolutionary and Civil War period in Central Asia became a popular subject for novels and films in the USSR. Portraying Russians as the main agents of progress in Central Asia against the villainous Basmachi, bandits who resisted the new Soviet order. In the 1960s these stories developed into a hugely popular genre of film, the Soviet “Eastern” that was strongly influenced by American “Westerns,” with the Basmachi playing the role of American Indians, and Bolshevik commissars and soldiers the cowboys and cavalry. This paper will explore the extent to which Soviet Easterns reflect settler colonial narratives, and the degree to which the Bolshevik claim to be bringing enlightenment and progress to a backward region has commonalities with settler colonialism elsewhere. It will focus on Semirechie, the main Russian settler colony in southern Central Asia, and in particular the film Alye Maki Issyk-Kulya (The Scarlet Poppies of Issyk-Kul, Bolotbek Shamshiev, 1972) and the novel on which it was based, Alexander Sytin’s Kontrabandisty Tian’-Shanya (The Smugglers of the Tian-Shan, 1930). It argues that while Sytin’s writing certainly does touch on settler colonial themes, these are muted in the film, which is instead suffused with Kyrgyz national narratives and symbolism. (In the published version of this paper I made a foolish error in reversing the direction of the Turkestan-Xinjiang opium trade! This is here corrected, with an additional reference).