On writing Soviet History of Central Asia: frameworks, challenges, prospects

ABSTRACT

The article reviews major frameworks for re-evaluating Soviet Central Asian history in anglophone scholarship after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It tackles recent popular concepts such as ‘modernity’, ‘development’ and ‘modernization’ for analysing the Soviet past in the region. It questions the analytical value of the terms as well as their ability to capture the complexity of social, political and economic changes that Central Asia underwent in the course of seven decades between the October Revolution and the dissolution of the USSR. The article furthermore provides an overview of novel themes and approaches in the field and suggests themes for further research.

KEYWORDS:

• Soviet Central Asia
• modernity
• colonialism
• revisionism
• historiography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Soviet Kazakh and Kyrgyz histories were written by Leningrad and Moscow ‘specialists’, and local historians were not allowed to conduct research and write independently (Bustanov 2015, 18; Kudaibergenova 2017, 94–101).

2 Two such projects are the Volkswagenstiftung-funded ‘From Kolkhoz to Jama‘at: The Revivals of Rural Islam in the USSR, and After: An Interregional Comparative Study (1950s–2000s)’ and the Vienna-based ‘Seeing Like an Archive: Documents and Forms of Governance in Islamic Central Asia’, funded by the Austrian Science Fund (https://www.oeaw.ac.at/en/iran/research/cultural-and-social-history-modern/seeing-like-an-archive) (Sartori and Abdurasulov 2020; Sartori and Shablei 2015; Babadjanov and Sartori 2018; Sartori and Babajanov 2019).

3 For an overview of Cold War scholarship, see Myer (2002); for the all-Union approach, see Martin (2001), Brown (2001) and Hirsch (2005). Niccolo Pianciola’s transregional approach is also part of the attempt to analyse the Soviet system generally, while focusing on economic and social history of the region (Pianciola 2014, 2016a).

4 For example, see several issues of Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, including 16(2) (2015) and 17(3) (2016).

5 According to Terry Martin, the Stalinist bureaucracy was divided into ‘soft-’ and ‘hard-’ line institutions.

 

Soft-line institutions dealt openly with the Soviet public and their job was to present the regime’s policies in as attractive a light as possible. Typical soft-line tasks were receiving petitions and petitioners, correcting excesses [peregiby], restoring rights, bestowing awards, providing a forum for mass participation in elections and soviets. Hard-line institutions, on the other hand, specialized in maintaining Bolshevik vigilance and insuring the implementation and preservation of core Bolshevik policies and values. Typical hard-line activities would be unmasking enemies, promoting vigilance, receiving denunciations, arresting and deporting enemies. Above all, terror. (Martin 1999, 114)

 

6 See https://thecessblog.com/new-books/. The list is by no means exhaustive, and we added several monographs published prior to 2008, but it is representative of the state of the field.

7 One of the very few exceptions to this is Frank (2019). Ironically, native actors receive relatively scant attention even when they had been either instrumental to or resisting the implementation of Soviet policies. For example, most studies of the collectivization famine in Kazakhstan seek to revise the role of Moscow-appointed figures, such as Goloshchekin, rather than to examine the responses of indigenous actors at both the elite and grassroots levels.

8 The rights of the remaining settlers to land ownership were already restored in 1922, but it took a few more years for the government to compensate the previously dispossessed settlers (Martin 2001, 61; Malabaev 1969, 279).

9 ‘Materialy k sostavleniiu piatiletnego plana razvitiia narodnogo khoziaistva Kirgizskoi ASSR na 1928–1932 gg.’, TsGA KR, f. 99, op. 2, d. 7, l. 51–51 ob.

10 Stenograficheskii otchet 1 uchreditel’nogo s’ezda Sovetov KAO, 27 marta 1925 g., TsGA KR f.20, op.1, d. 15, l. 22.

11 ‘Obzor politicheskogo sostoianiia SSSR za fevral’ 1927 g. (po dannym Ob’edinennogo gosudarstvennogo politicheskogo upravleniia)’, http://istmat.info/node/25626.

12 ‘Materialy k sostavleniiu piatiletnego plana razvitiia narodnog khoziaistva Kirgizskoi ASSR na 1928–1932 gg’, TsGA KR, f. 99, op. 2, d. 7; l. 6 ob.

13 GARF, f. 1235, op. 16a, d. 212, l. 23, cited in Chebotareva (2013, 17).

14 Pianciola’s comparison with China is a welcome exception. Rather than comparing Soviet Muslims with other Muslims, Pianciola effectively compares man-made famines in the pastoral regions across Eurasia (Pianciola 2016b; Geyer and Fitzpatrick 2009).

15 Anne Applebaum discusses this tendency for the case of Ukraine (Applebaum 2018).

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Funding

The authors reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.