Soviet population transfers and interethnic relations in Tajikistan: assessing the concept of ethnicity

Abstract

This article explores a key event in the recent history of Central Asia: the 1950s Soviet policy of forced transfers of highlanders down to cotton kolkhozes in the Ferghana Valley. From both a historical and sociological perspective, the article analyses how the displaced population was received in the areas of destination. It sheds light on the concept of ethnicity, in the sense that these transfers were most often analysed in ethnic terms. This approach does not allow for the perception of a complex range of identities based on a nation, a region, a lineage, a religion or a language. The concept of ethnicity seems therefore limited to explain the social dynamics of nation-state formation in a region where identity appears to be multiple, changing and constantly renegotiated.

Keywords:

• identity
• ethnicity
• lineage
• population transfers
• Ferghana
• Tajikistan

Acknowledgements

Early drafts of this paper were presented at the conference ‘History, politics and culture of identities in Central Asia’ organized by the French Institute for Central Asian Studies (IFEAC) in the Arabaev University, Bishkek on 2–3 May 2007, and at the conference ‘Tajikistan: Birth and Rebirth’ in St Antony's College, Oxford on 13–14 October 2009.

Notes

For instance the 270-kilometre Great Ferghana Canal was built in the 1930s by 170,000 prisoners and labourers.

Field research was conducted during several visits in the Ferghana Valley with the financial support of the French Ministry of Education and Research and the French Institute for Central Asian Studies (IFEAC). Interviews were conducted directly in Russian and Tajik or through translators in Uzbek.

Between 1925 and 1960, the irrigated land of Tajikistan increased from 105,000 to 390,000 hectares and the annual production of raw cotton from 8400 to nearly 400,000 tons (Asimov 1974, pp. 179–181).

At that time, the Tajik autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) was included in the Uzbek SSR. It became a fully fledged republic of the Soviet Union in 1929. On that occasion, the district of Khujand (Rus. Khodzhentskii okrug), future province of Leninabad, was incorporated into the Tajik SSR (Asimov 1974, pp. 108–110).

All the referenced historians who reported on this period described this first wave of relocations as voluntary, in contrast to the next waves, which were more coercive. As relevantly noted by the anonymous reviewer, I would like to emphasize that in many cases the Soviet regime presented facts as voluntary but they actually often involved more compulsion than the authorities admitted.

The names of towns, districts and provinces changed several times during the twentieth century. In this article, we use the name and spelling of the referred period (the Soviet form for the 1950s and the Tajik form for present time). Corresponding transcriptions are listed in Appendix 1. Proper nouns referenced in the Webster's Desk Encyclopedia (2003 edition) are written in their anglicized form.

The mountains of Tajikistan often hosted populations fleeing repression in the lowlands. Let us mention for instance the 1916 uprising against Russian conscription and the Basmachi rebellion that followed the repression of the Kokand autonomy (November 1917– February 1918). It took several years for Soviet power to overcome the Basmachi movement, who found refuge in the mountains of Garm and Kulyab.

The list of interviewed people is presented in Appendix 2.

The district of Matcha was created in Soviet times under the name Madrushkat, and the village of Matcha was its administrative centre. However the inhabitants of the region named it by its historical name Matcha (Mastchoh in Tajik), a name that we will therefore use in this article.

The literature is silent on the choice of these two kolkhozes. Most likely the prosecutor, a native from Yarm, who was informed of the collective transfer, decided to spare his relatives the terrible conditions of a resettlement in the arid Dal'verzin steppe.

It should however be noted that approximately 500 families were allowed to remain in order to look after these ghost villages (Bushkov 1995, p. 105). They played a key role not only in maintaining the public facilities that would be used for the summering of cattle but also in looking after the cemeteries and holy places.

The movement of the rural population was actually under a strict control. In order to limit rural exodus, Moscow required all kolkhoz workers to leave their identity papers at the kolkhoz administration (Radvanyi 2000, p. 71). Without these documents, they could not travel, much less return to a forbidden area such as Matcha.

For instance during the fourth five-year plan, out of the 2772 households who were transferred from Garm and Leninabad regions to the Vakhsh Valley, 450 families, including some from Matcha, eventually moved back to their native villages and reintegrated into their former kolkhozes without serious incident (Abulkhaev 1988, pp. 156–157).

The authorities justified their decision to transfer the district of Matcha in economic terms. In 1953, the district produced milk, meat and wool for a total of 4.5 million roubles. In 1958, the first cotton harvest in the district of New Matcha represented an income of 43 million roubles (Abulkhaev 1988, p. 207).

The population of Matcha represented 80% of all displaced people of the province of Leninabad and nearly a third of them at the national level. However they were not the last ones to experience a coercive mass transfer. On 27 February 1970, the executive committee of the province of Leninabad ordered the resettlement of all the inhabitants of the Yagnob Valley, an affluent of the Zeravshan River, on the pretext that the area was seismic. More than 3000 people were transferred in three successive waves (1970, 1974 and 1975) in the cotton districts of Zafarabad and New Matcha and in the region of Dushanbe (Gunâ 2003, p. 167).

The Matcha people were never officially compensated by the government and their native district remains among the poorest in the country. Roads and public buildings, which date back to the 1930s and were abandoned for 30 years, are today in an extremely poor state (personal observations in March 2000).

These solidarity networks have been studied extensively in Tajikistan by Bushkov (1991), who uses the term avlod, and in Afghanistan by Roy (1991), who refers to the qawm.

The presence of a sedentary population in the upper Zeravshan Valley is attested by ancient sources. For instance Babur mentions the village of Obburdon when travelling through the region in the early sixteenth century (reported by Bushkov 1995, p. 65).

Initially this rule of continuity of the male line sought to avoid the splitting of the family properties (agricultural lands and pastures). Until the beginning of the twentieth century, the plots were almost intact, especially as demographic growth was limited by bad health conditions (Bushkov 1991, pp. 74–76).

Although the Zeravshan Valley flows westwards to the region of Samarkand, the Mastchohi lived closer to the urban centres of the Ferghana Valley that they could reach in a few walking days. Historically, the upper Zeravshan Valley had developed strong social and economic ties with the western part of the Ferghana Valley (Tursunov 1991, p. 51).

For an excellent analysis of the agropastoral economy of Central Asian highlands, see Cariou (2003).

In the middle of the nineteenth century there were no less than 12 such fortresses on this limited territory (Tursunov 1991, p. 44).

Expression borrowed from Roy (2000, pp. 8–10).

This dichotomy can be traced back to Meinecke's typology of nationalisms, distinguishing the Staatsnation from the Kulturnation. Meinecke argued that there is a difference between nations that are based primarily on some joint experience of cultural heritage and nations that are based primarily on the unifying force of a common political history and constitution. Therefore the Staatsnation is based on a form of social contract, while the Kulturnation is described as an ethnic community in which inclusion is based on descent (Reeskens and Hooghe 2010, p. 581).

This process of ethnic homogenization was intended by Moscow to ‘modernize backward peoples’ (Hirsch 2000, pp. 208–209).

During the first years, the kolkhozes had no funds to pay their staff. Up until 1963 salaries were given only in kind, irregularly and unequally, depending on the resources of each kolkhoz.

During the celebration of a wedding or a circumcision, families from the whole neighbourhood would gather and mix regardless of their ethnicity. All speeches delivered to the newlyweds or parents would be delivered in either Uzbek or in Tajik (personal observations of the author in Yangiabad between 1999 and 2008).