This issue showcases the work of three leading historians from Kazakhstan.Footnote1 Their essays, which cover the Russian imperial and Soviet periods, attest to the vibrancy of historical scholarship in Kazakhstan. Unfortunately, this fact is not as well-known as it should be. Scholarship from Central Asia remains underrepresented in the historical discipline as it is practiced in the West. There are many reasons for this neglect: In the United States, few libraries regularly collect materials from Central Asia, and it can be difficult to get access to key titles from the region, particularly those with small print runs. Important works from Central Asia are also rarely translated into English. This tendency is particularly evident when the piece is published in one of the vernacular languages of the region, as the industry of translating from these languages to English (and vice versa) is not well developed. Other factors, including a lingering Eurocentrism within the Russian and Soviet field, have also played a role in the marginalization of scholarship from Central Asia.
In light of these considerations, it is a particular pleasure to present these articles and make scholarship from the region known to a wider audience. It should be noted that all three pieces were translated from Russian. There is also an important Kazakh-language secondary literature in Kazakhstan. But given the challenges of orchestrating a translation, including the scarcity of qualified Kazakh-English translators, it was not possible to include Kazakh-language materials. The goal then with this issue is not to be perfectly representative of Kazakhstani historical scholarship as a whole. Rather, it is to shed light on aspects of the Russian and Soviet state’s long-running project to incorporate the Kazakh steppe and its peoples, as well as the consequences of these attempts for Kazakhstani society.
A discussion of these questions seems particularly timely in light of recent events: As I write this introduction, Kazakhstan is in turmoil after anti-government protests erupted in several cities in early January 2022. The country’s president Kassym-Jomart Tokayev asked a Russian-led military alliance to send troops to quell the unrest. Tokayev’s appeal to Russia has largely halted the protests. But it is likely to further inflame tensions with some sectors of Kazakhstani society who would prefer to see the country chart a more independent course. The articles in this issue provide important historical context on these events and debates. They remind us that Kazakhstan has a longer, deeper history with Russia than what dominates the headlines today, one that has encompassed engagement, mutual influence, and conflict.
Along the way, the issue also provides insight into the current state of historical scholarship in Kazakhstan and the historiographic problems, such as resistance or the “colonial” nature of Russian imperial or Soviet rule, that are of particular concern to Kazakhstani scholars. More broadly, the issue is one of the first in recent years in the journal to focus on Russian-language historical scholarship produced outside of Russia. All of the authors featured here hold academic positions at Kazakhstani universities. Collectively, their contributions remind us that “Russian Studies,” a term featured in the title of this journal, is pursued by a wide range of scholars publishing in Russian, many of whom live outside of Russia’s present-day boundaries.
The issue follows the question of the Kazakh steppe’s integration into the Russian empire and Soviet state from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. It opens with G. S. Sultangalieva’s article, “Tatar Officials in the Orenburg Governorate’s Chancellery,” which examines the role played by Tatar translators, interpreters and clerks during the Kazakh steppe’s incorporation into the Russian empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. As the Russian empire pushed south into the Kazakh steppe, it was dependent upon Tatars, who, like the Kazakhs, were Turkic-speakers, to establish contact with the leaders of the Kazakh hordes, or supra-tribal confederations, and further the Russian empire’s influence. As they gained the trust of Kazakh elites, Tatar officials came to serve as the Russian empire’s eyes and ears on the ground, relaying crucial information about Kazakh society and events on the steppe to officials in Orenburg and St. Petersburg. Sultangalieva finds that Tatar officials were motivated to work on the steppe in part due to a lack of career opportunities for them in the central governates of the empire. Many were eventually able to parlay their employment on the Kazakh steppe into great prosperity and rapid career rises.
Sultangalieva’s article speaks to a larger historiography on the Russian empire’s use of intermediaries.Footnote2 We see how the Russian empire’s weakness, relative to some of its peers, made it especially dependent upon the contributions of non-Russians, like the Tatar officials that are Sultangalieva’s focus. Her article also highlights two themes explored by the other authors in this issue, namely, the problems of governing the territory of the Kazakh steppe, a vast area with few natural borders or clear boundaries, and the changing nature of Kazakh society. As the authors in this issue explore, some shifts in Kazakh society were sparked by Russian and Soviet influence. However, they were not determined by them. Other factors also came to play a role in shaping Kazakh identities.
As Sultangalieva shows, in the second half of the eighteenth century, the Kazakh steppe was a contested, fluid space that was difficult for the Russian empire to control. By utilizing Tatar interlocutors, Russian imperial officials sought to gain information not only on the activities of the Kazakhs but on their relationships with other peoples and polities, including the Bashkirs, the Dzungar Khanate, and the Qing Empire. At times, Kazakh leaders succeeded in cleverly playing different powers off against one another. But Tatar officials, Sultangalieva argues, began to influence a “gradual change in the value orientation and behavior patterns of the Kazakh elite,” shaping Kazakhs’ loyalty to Russia.
The issue then moves to the nineteenth century, a period that is the backdrop for Pavel Shabley’s article, “A Kazakh Muftiate or the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly.” Shabley’s article examines the phenomenon of “public opinion” in the wake of the Russian empire’s Temporary Provision of 1868, which excluded Kazakhs of the steppe oblasts from the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly (OMSA) and transferred control over their Muslim institutions to military governors and civil authorities. Analyzing petitions to state authorities and newspaper sources from the period, Shabley finds that Kazakhs did not respond in a unified way to this shift. Some argued for the creation of a native Kazakh muftiate, or officially sanctioned religious institution, while others sought to return the steppe to the control of OMSA.
Shabley’s work contributes to a larger debate about the relationship between the Russian empire and its Muslim populace. In his influential book, For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia, the historian Robert Crews argued that “Muslim men and women of the empire came to imagine the imperial state as a potential instrument of God’s will.”Footnote3 Shabley, by contrast, is reluctant to see Muslims’ petitions as evidence of such a unified world view. Rather, he argues, many appeals to Russian imperial officials were rooted in more pragmatic concerns. Tracing the personal networks of some petitioners, he shows how the question of religion became a means for some Kazakhs to bolster their own power and influence in their home communities.
Based upon Russian and Turkic-language sources, Shabley’s article is an example of some of the best multilingual research on the Russian and Soviet borderlands. It also continues some of the themes articulated in Sultangalieva’s article, such as the challenges of classifying and administering the peoples of the steppe. Kazakhs were pastoral nomads; they carried out seasonal migrations along predefined routes. But due in part to this nomadic way of life, Shabley finds, Kazakhs’ practice of Islam did not look like Islam as Russian imperial administrators understood it. Officials with OMSA struggled to control portions of the steppe where Kazakhs migrated long distances. Similarly, Shabley finds Kazakh society in flux during this period. Petitions, he argues, “became a form of civic protest” to Russian imperial authorities. But what he calls the “regional nonuniformity” of the Kazakh steppe, which included cleavages along clan lines, prevented Kazakhs from forming a unified position on the question of their religious administration.
The last article, T.K. Allaniiazov’s “Directives of the OGPU’s Semipalatinsk Operational Sector as a Source for Studies of the Armed Uprisings of Kazakhs during Collectivization,” brings the question of Russian and Soviet engagement into the early Soviet period. The backdrop for Allaniiazov’s article is the launch of forced collectivization in the Soviet Union in the winter of 1929-1930. In Kazakhstan, the program encompassed efforts to simultaneously sedentarize nomadic Kazakhs and forcibly resettle them into collective farms. By the winter of 1930-31, famine had broken out. The resultant crisis, the Kazakh famine of 1930-33, claimed the lives of at least 1.5 million people, approximately a quarter of the republic’s population.Footnote4 Other regions of the Soviet Union, including Ukraine and parts of the Russian heartland, also suffered grievously from famine during collectivization. But by the percentage of life lost, the Kazakh case ranks as the Soviet Union’s worst collectivization disaster.
Kazakhstani scholars have developed a significant body of scholarship on the Kazakh famine.Footnote5 But to date, little of this work has been translated into English. The English-language publication of Allaniiazov’s work here thus marks an important step forward in bringing knowledge of the Kazakh famine, a key event of the Stalinist period, to a broader audience. In this article, Allaniiazov, arguably the leading expert on popular rebellion in Kazakhstan during the collectivization period, analyzes secret police materials culled from Kazakhstani repositories as a source for the study of resistance. He also provides an important overview of the uprisings that occurred in Kazakhstan during the famine, including their basic features and causes. As his analysis reveals, Kazakhstan saw massive revolts during collectivization, which were some of the Soviet Union’s largest during this period. Allaniiazov’s work provides important information on the central role of the secret police in repressing these revolts and the weakness of Communist party and state institutions in the republic’s regions.
Though it focuses on a different historical period, the Soviet period, than the other two articles in this issue, Allaniiazov’s article returns to many of the same themes. We see that even as late as the 1930s parts of the steppe were not really under Moscow’s control. As pastoral nomads, Kazakhs regularly used flight as a means of seeking relief from unfavorable political conditions, and this strategy, which confounded secret police troops intent on halting population movement, became widespread during the turmoil of the famine years. Desperate to escape repression, Kazakhs fled to different districts or republics or even across the border to China.
Allaniiazov’s article also reminds us of the difficulty of drawing a neat distinction between state and society during this period. Communist party members featured in some of the uprisings against the Soviet state. Even the loyalty of some OGPU brigades came into question: On occasion, they gave key rebel leaders the time and cover that they needed to escape. The regime’s policies in Kazakhstan were “anti-national” in nature, Allaniiazov argues. But Allaniiazov, like Shabley, finds that Kazakhs were somewhat fractured in their responses, with regional differences playing a role in the timing and extent of popular revolt.
In closing, I invite you to read the three stimulating articles that follow. Each follows a distinct theme, ranging from the role of intermediaries to the management of Islam to attempts to halt popular rebellion. Together, they attest to the excellence of historical scholarship in Kazakhstan, while providing important insight into the nature of Russian imperial and Soviet rule over the Kazakh steppe.
Notes
1 The author would like to thank Liudmila Sharaya for her invaluable help with orchestrating the submissions to this issue. In addition, the author is grateful to Marysia Blackwood, Robert Kindler and Niccolò Pianciola for their suggestions on contributors to this forum.
2 On this issue in the Kazakh steppe, see, for instance, Ian W. Campbell, Knowledge and the Ends of Empire: Kazak Intermediaries and Russian Rule on the Steppe, 1731-1917 (Ithaca, 2017).
3 Robert D. Crews, For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia (Cambridge, MA, 2009), 20.
4 For further discussion of these statistics, see Sarah Cameron, The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan (Ithaca, 2018).
5 See, for instance, S. Abdairaeiymov, ed., Golod v Kazakhskoi stepi (Almaty, 1991); Zh. B. Abylkhozhin, M. Kozybaev, and M. B. Tatimov, “Kazakhstanskaia tragediia,” Voprosy istorii, no. 7 (1989): 53–71; Abylkhozhin, Traditsionnaia struktura Kazakhstana (Almaty, 1991); Talas Omarbekov, Zobalang (küshtep ŭzhumdastїrugha karsїlїq) (Almaty, 1994); and Omarbekov, 20–30 zhïldardaghï Qasaqstan qasĭretĭ (Almaty, 1997).