Backwardness and the quest for civilization: Early Soviet Central Asia in comparative perspective

Slavic Review

Volumn 65, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 231-251

  Khalid, Adeeb ^a  

^a CARLETON COLLEGE   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33744979257     PISSN: 00376779     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1134/S0026261706020196     Document Type: Article

References (117)

1. Nathaniel Knight, "Grigor'ev in Orenburg, 1851-1862: Russian Orientalism in the Service of Empire?" Slavic Review 59, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 97. Knight is speaking specifically of the critique of orientalism first presented by Edward Said, but to the extent that Said's work underpins a great deal of postcolonial critique, Knight's suspicion extends to the latter as well.
2. Other recent treatments of tsarist rule over Central Asia find little use for postcolonial literature in understanding the dynamics: see, for instance, Daniel Brower, Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire (London, 2003),
3. or Robert Crews, "Allies in God's Command: Muslim Communities and the State in Imperial Russia" (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1999).
4. For an example of the sustained use of postcolonial literature to study tsarist Central Asia, see Jeffery Frank Sahadeo, "Creating a Russian Colonial Community: City, Nation, and Empire in Tashkent, 1865-1923" (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2000).
5. Douglas T. Northrop, Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (Ithaca, 2004), 22.
6. While Northrop makes the colonial case most explicitly, a number of other scholars have seen early Soviet Central Asia through the prism of postcolonial studies; see Paula Michaels, Curative Powers: Medicine and Empire in Stalin's Central Asia (Pittsburgh, 2003);
7. or Cassandra Cavanaugh, "Backwardness and Biology: Medicine and Power in Russian and Soviet Central Asia, 1868-1934" (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2001).
8. One might also note parenthetically the curiosity that there has been little interest in the economic relationship between Central Asia and the Soviet state, which is where the colonial argument is the easiest to make. Soviet economic planning turned the whole region into a gigantic cotton plantation in order for the USSR to achieve "cotton independence." The bulk of the cotton harvest was shipped to Russia, where it was processed, and the finished goods were then sent back to Central Asia. No comprehensive study of the Soviet cotton complex exists, but see J. Michael Thurman, "The 'Command-Administrative System' in Cotton Farming in Uzbekistan 1920s to Present" (Papers on Inner Asia 32, Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, Bloomington, Indiana, 1999). Scholars who invoke postcolonial studies in the study of Central Asia have been much more interested in the cultural work of Soviet power, a much sexier topic than the history of cotton.
9. Here I am entirely sympathetic to the misgivings aired by I. Gerasimov et al., "V poiskakh novoi imperskoi istorii," in I. Gerasimov et al., eds., Novaia imperskaia istoriia postsovetskogo prostranstva: Sbornik statei (Kazan, 2004), 24.
10. The work most often quoted in this regard is Michael W. Doyle, Empires (Ithaca, 1986).
11. For definitions devised specifically to include the Soviet Union among empires, see Ronald Grigor Suny, "The Empire Strikes Out: Imperial Russia, 'National' Identity, and Theories of Empire," in Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin, eds., A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (New York, 2001), 25;
12. and Alexander J. Motyl, Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires (New York, 2001).
13. Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, 1999);
14. Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago, 2004);
15. Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, 2001);
16. Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843 (Chicago, 1997).
17. This argument is also made by Peter Blitstein in this issue and by Yuri Slezkine, "Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Socialism," Russian Review 59, no. 2 (April 2000): 227-34.
18. Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930 (Stanford, 1997), describes how French ambitions of transforming West Africans subsided when it was discovered that this would require more than the construction of railways. Colonial authorities might have proscribed individual customs or traditions, but that seldom amounted to the intrusive state regulation we see in the mobilizational states of the twentieth century.
19. Perhaps the most celebrated case of such a proscription in postcolonial literature is that of sati, the practice of cremating widows with their deceased husbands among some groups in India; see Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley, 1998).
20. Mark Beissinger, "Demise of an Empire-State: Identity, Legitimacy, and the Deconstruction of Soviet Politics," in Crawford Young, ed,, The Rising Tide of Cultural Pluralism: The Nation-State at Bay? (Madison, 1993);
21. Mark Beissinger, "The Persisting Ambiguity of Empire," Post-Soviet Affairs 11, no. 2 (April-June 1995): 149-84.
22. These two categories of observers were not mutually exclusive, of course, although most of the scholarly literature was produced by the first group. See Sir Olaf Caroe, Soviet Empire: The Turks of Central Asia and Stalinism (London, 1954);
23. Walter Kolarz, Russia and Her Colonies (London, 1952);
24. Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, The Decline of an Empire: The Soviet Socialist Republics in Revolt, trans. Martin Sokolinsky and Henry A. La Farge (New York, 1979);
25. and Robert Conquest, ed., The Last Empire: Nationality and the Soviet Future (Stanford, 1986).
26. For an attempt to see the two transformations in comparative perspective, see Carter V. Findley, The Turks in World History (New York, 2005).
27. I have emphasized the interconnections between intellectual currents in the two empires in much of my work to date; see also A. Holly Shissler, Between Two Empires: Ahmet Aǧaoǧlu and the New Turkey (London, 2003),
28. and Volker Adam, Rußlandmuslime in Istanbul am Vorabend des Ersten Welkrieges (Frankfurt am Main, 2002).
29. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, 1993), 16-27.
30. In different contexts, different colonial regimes held out the possibility that individual natives (the évolués in French West Africa or British colonial subjects resident in Britain, for example) could come to be considered full "citizens," but this possibility was never opened up to natives as a group. In the British case, race came to be a significant marker distinguishing colonial subjects from one another. See Radhika Viyas Mongia, "Race, Nationality, Mobility: A History of the Passport," Public Culture 11 (1999): 527-56. Colonies of settlement eventually acquired self-government (dominion status) well before decolonization swept the rest of the empire.
31. Seymour Becker, Russia's Protectorates in Central Asia: Bukhara and khiva, 1865-1924 (Cambridge, Mass., 1968).
32. On the traditionalizing impact of Russian rule in Bukhara, see Adeeb Khalid, "Society and Politics in Bukhara, 1868-1920," Central Asian Survey 19, nos. 3-4 (2000): 367-96.
33. Adeeb Khalid, The Politics Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley, 1998), chap. 2.
34. Brower, Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire.
35. I. V. Stalin, "Nashi zadachi na Vostoke," Pravda, 2 March 1919.
36. Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca, 2001), 126-32.
37. Following the usage coined by Sheila Fitzpatrick, the Anglophone historiography of the USSR uses the term cultural revolution for a very specific campaign by the party to seize control of cultural and scientific institutions between 1929 and 1932. See Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Cultural Revolution as Class War," in Sheila Fitzpatrick, ed., Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-1931 (Bloomington, 1978), 8-40.
38. Soviet leaders used the term in a much more expansive sense; without invoking this broader understanding of the term, it is impossible to understand developments of the early Soviet period. See Michael David-Fox, "What Is Cultural Revolution?" Russian Review 58, no. 2 (April 1999): 181-201;
39. Michael David-Fox, Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks (Ithaca, 1997);
40. Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, 2005), chap. 5.
41. This sense of cultural revolution was superbly captured by René Fülöp-Miller, The Mind and Face of Bolshevism: An Examination of Cultural Life in Soviet Russia, trans. F. S. Flint and D. F. Tait (London, 1927).
42. Governor-General P. I. Mishchenko to Minister of War, 4 March 1909, Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Respubliki Uzbekistan, f I-2, op. 2, d. 369, 1. 7ob. This "top secret" memorandum is largely a meditation on the thinness of Russian rule in Turkestan, and this flight of fancy aside, is full of the usual complaints about the lack of financial and personnel resources that prevented Russian rule being established on firmer footing.
43. Khalid, Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform.
44. The "nation" (millat) had always been a central feature of Jadid thought, although the way the Jadids imagined their nation was in flux until 1917, when an ethnic understanding of it rapidly displaced all others. After that, Jadidism became primarily a nationalist project. See Adeeb Khalid, "Nationalizing the Revolution: The Transformation of Jadidism, 1917-1920," in Suny and Martin, eds., A State of Nations, 156-59.
45. For detailed accounts of the conflicts of 1917, see Khalid, Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform, chap. 8;
46. R. Eisener, "Bukhara v 1917 godu," Vostok, 1994, no. 4:131-44 and no. 5:75-92;
47. V. L. Genis, "Bor'ba vokrug reform v Bukhare: 1917 god," Voprosy istorii, 2001, no. 11-12:18-37.
48. [Abdurauf] Fitrat, "'Tadrij'ga qorshu," Tong, no. 3 (15 May 1920): 78-80.
49. I have made this point at greater length in Khalid, "Nationalizing the Revolution," 153-56.
50. A serious study of early Soviet theater remains to be undertaken. The clearest evidence of the burst of energy in the realm of theater lies in the newspapers of the time.
51. William Fierman, Language Planning and National Development: The Uzbek Experience (Berlin, 1991);
52. B. S. Asimova, Iazykovoe stroitel'tvo v Tadzhikistane, 1920-1940 gg. (Dushanbe, 1982).
53. 1921 yil yonvorida bo'lgan birinchi o'lka o'zbek til va imlo qurultoyining chiqorgan qarorlari (Tashkent, 1922), 22-23.
54. On Latinization in the USSR, see Ingeborg Baldauf, Schriftreform und Schriftwechsel bei den muslimischen Russland- und Sowjettürken (1850-1937): Ein Symptom ideengeschichtlicher und kulturpolitischer Entwicklungen (Budapest, 1993);
55. Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, chap. 5;
56. Michael G. Smith, Language and Power in the Creation of the USSR, 1917-1953 (Berlin, 1998), chap. 6;
57. Adrienne Edgar, Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan (Princeton, 2004), 139-43.
58. On Central Asian debates over the position of women, see Marianne R. Kamp, The New Woman in Central Asia: Islam, the Soviet Project, and the Unveiling of Uzbek Women (Seattle, forthcoming).
59. This and the following four paragraphs represent, in very condensed form, the first results of an ongoing research project on the transformation of Central Asia in the early Soviet period. I have cited existing literature, but otherwise made no attempt at comprehensive citation of all archival sources.
60. The text of Ikramov's speech can be found in Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial'no-politicheskoi istorii, f. 62, op. 2, d. 734, 11. 47-55.
61. See, in general, Shoshana Keller, To Moscow, not Mecca: The Soviet Campaign against Islam in Central Asia, 1917-1941 (Westport, Conn., 2001). As Keller points out, many of the relevant archives are still closed to researchers, and much still remains to be learned about these campaigns.
62. Kamp, New Woman in Central Asia, chaps. 6-8.
63. Northrop, Veiled Empire.
64. Here I differ from Gregory Massell, The Surrogate Proletariat: Moslem Women and Revolutionary Strategies in Soviet Central Asia, 1919-1929 (Princeton, 1974),
65. and Northrop, Veiled Empire, who both see the hujum as the beginning of serious intervention in society.
66. The impact of collectivization on Central Asia has attracted surprisingly little attention. On Uzbekistan, see Rustambek Shamsutdinov, O'zbekistonda sovetlarning quloqlashtirish siyosati va uning fojeali oqibatlari (Tashkent, 2001);
67. Rustambek Shamsutdinov, Qishloq fojeasi: Jamoalashtirish, quloqlashtirish, surgun (Tashkent, 2003);
68. on Kazakhstan, Niccolò Pianciola, "Famine in the Steppe: The Collectivization of Agriculture and the Kazak Herdsmen, 1928-1934," Cahiers du monde russe 45, no. 1-2 (2004): 137-92.
69. Frederick Cooper, "Modernizing Colonialism and the Limits of Empire," in Craig Calhoun, Frederick Cooper, and Kevin W. Moore, eds., Lessons of Empire: Imperial Histories and American Power (New York, 2006).
70. Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham, Md., 2003).
71. The reforms described in this and the following paragraph are treated in a number of excellent surveys. Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (London, 1961), still retains its importance and has been reissued several times.
72. See also Erik J. Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, rev. ed. (London, 2004),
73. and Hugh Poulton, Top Hat, Grey Wolf and Crescent: Turkish Nationalism and the Turkish Republic (New York, 1997).
74. Andrew Mango, Atatürk (Woodstock, N.Y., 2000), 434.
75. Deniz Kandiyoti, "Identity and Its Discontents: Women and the Nation," in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds., Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (New York, 1994), 379.
76. Agâh Sirri Levend, Türk Dilinde Gelişme ve Sadeleşme Evreleri, 2d ed. (Ankara, 1960).
77. On the press of the late-Ottoman period, see Elizabeth Brown Frierson, "Unimagined Communities: State, Press, and Gender in the Hamidian Era" (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1996);
78. and Palmira Brummett, Image and Imperialism in the Ottoman Revolutionary Press, 1908-1911 (Albany, 2000).
79. Geoffrey Lewis, Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success (Oxford, 1999).
80. Avram Galanti, Arabî Harfleri Terakkimize Mâni Deǧildir (Istanbul, 1927).
81. For accounts of the debates in the early republic on the question of orthography, see Lewis, Turkish Language Reform;
82. Rekin Ertem, Elifbe'den Alfabe'ye: Türkiye'de Harf ve Yazι Meselesi (Istanbul, 1991), 179-213,
83. and Bilâl N. Şimşir, Türk Yazι Devrimi (Ankara, 1992), 66-83.
84. The actual compilation of the Latin alphabet and its implementation took all of three months in 1928 under the personal attention of Mustafa Kemal. Typically, the law ushering in Latinization (Türk Harflerinin Kabulu ve Tatbiki Hakkιnda Kanun) spoke of the adoption of "Turkish," not Latin letters. The modern was by definition national.
85. Quoted by Sibel Bozdoǧan, Modernism and Nation-Building: Turkish Architectural Culture in the Early Republic (Seattle, 2001), 94.
86. David L. Hoffmann, Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917-1941 (Ithaca, 2003).
87. Mustafa Kemal, A Speech Delivered by Ghazi Mustapha Kemal (Leipzig, 1929), 721-22.
88. Quoted by Bozdoǧan, Modernism and Nation-Building, 84.
89. A Holly Shissler, "Beauty Is Nothing to Be Ashamed Of: Beauty Contests as Tools of Women's Liberation in Early Republican Turkey," Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24, no. 1 (2004): 107-22.
90. Alan Duben and Cem Behar, Istanbul Households: Marriage, Family, and Fertility, 1880-1940 (Cambridge, Eng., 1991), esp. chap. 7.
91. The ambiguous legacy of Kemalist reforms for women has provoked a massive literature in recent years. For a useful overview, see Jenny White, "State Feminism, Modernization, and the Turkish Republican Woman," NWSA Journal 15, no. 3 (2003): 145-59.
92. See also Deniz Kandiyoti, "Emancipated but Unliberated? Reflections on the Turkish Case," Feminist Studies 13, no. 2 (1987): 317-38;
93. Yeşim Arat, "The Project of Modernity and Women in Turkey," in Sibel Bozdoǧan and Reşat Kasaba, eds., Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey (Seattle, 1997), 95-112;
94. and Zehra F. Arat, ed., Deconstructing Images of "The Turkish Woman" (London, 1998).
95. Ilber Ortayli, Ιmparatorluǧun En Uzun Yüyzlι (Istanbul, 1983).
96. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Ottoman state elites sought to centralize and modernize in order to strengthen the state and to ward off its disintegration. The state intruded ever more forcefully into the lives of its subjects as it sought to turn them into a citizenry that would be easier to mobilize, organize, and govern. The Ottoman state faced many obstacles in pursuing its goals, although much recent scholarship has emphasized the extent to which this project succeeded, especially during the absolutist rule of Abdülhamid II (1878-1908). See in particular, Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876-1909 (London, 1998).
97. In many ways, the Ottoman centralization appears similar to the Soviet project, but there are crucial differences even apart from those of scope and thoroughness. The Ottoman state came to reinvent itself as a modern colonial empire, thus producing a new imaginary for classifying its subjects and new forms of difference among them. See Ussama Makdisi, "Ottoman Orientalism," American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (2002): 768-96;
98. and Selim Deringil, "'They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery': The Late Ottoman Empire and the Post-Colonial Debate," Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, no. 2 (2003): 311-42.
99. Official Kemalist historiography posits a complete break from the Ottoman past, but recent scholarship has pointed to continuities with increasing insistence. For a variety of approaches, see Zürcher, Turkey;
100. Michael Meeker, A Nation of Empire: The Ottoman Roots of Turkish Modernity (Berkeley, 2002);
101. and Taner Akçam, From Empire to Republic: Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide (London, 2004)
102. Kemal H. Karpat, Ottoman Population, 1830-1914 (Madison, 1985);
103. Justin McCarthy, Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821-1922 (Princeton, 1995), provides a highly charged polemical account that nevertheless contains useful correctives to the received wisdom on the Ottoman retreat from Europe.
104. Erik Jan Zürcher, "The Vocabulary of Muslim Nationalism," International Journal of the Sociology of Language, no. 137 (1999): 81-92;
105. see also Adeeb Khalid, "Ottoman 'Islamism' between the Ummet and the Nation," Archivum Ottomanicum 19 (2001): 197-211.
106. Quoted by Soner Çaǧaptay, "Crafting the Turkish Nation: Kemalism and Turkish Nationalism in the 1930s" (PhD diss., Yale University, 2003), 21-22, who provides an excellent discussion of the ethnicization of Turkish identity under Kemalism.
107. Büşra Ersanli-Behar, İtidar ve Tarih: Türkiye'de "Resmi Tarih" Tezinin Oluşumu (1929-1937) (Istanbul, 1992);
108. Etienne Copeaux, Espaces et temps de la nation turque: Analyse d'une historiographie nationaliste, 1931-1993 (Paris, 1997).
109. Çaǧaptay, "Crafting the Turkish Nation," chaps. 5-6;
110. see also Howard Eissenstat, "Metaphors of Race and Discourse of Nation: State Nationalism in the First Decades of the Turkish Republic," in Paul Spickard, ed., Race and Nation: Ethnic Systems in the Modern World (London, 2005), 239-56.
111. Yuri Slezkine, "The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism," Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 414-52.
112. This point has been made, with minor differences of emphasis, by a number of authors: Slezkine, "The USSR as a Communal Apartment";
113. Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, 1993);
114. Martin, Affirmative Action Empire;
115. and Hirsch, Empire of Nations.
116. Quoted in Adrienne Edgar, "Nationality Policy and National Identity: The Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic, 1924-1929," Journal of Central Asian Studies 1, no. 2 (1997): 2.
117. Hirsch, Empire of Nations, chap. 6. Even when, after the mid-1930s, Russians became the elder brothers of all other "fraternal Soviet peoples," and thus the recipients of saccharine praise for their role in leading all Soviet peoples to socialism and beyond, their primacy was rooted, not in any innate racial or ethnic supremacy, but rather in the fact of their having progressed further along the evolutionary path than all others in the union.