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Abstract
This article is concerned with the creation, by the Russian colonial administration, Russian researchers and photographers/artists, of a corpus of ‘historical monuments’ of Samarkand in the first decades after the conquest of the city. It uses travelogues, administrative reports, memoirs, the periodical press and artistic productions to determine the mechanism of selection of representative monuments, defined as the ‘cultural heritage’ of Russian Turkestan and, indirectly, of the Russian Empire. The internal logic of ‘patrimonialization’, initiated from above and ideologically engaged, becomes more obvious when it is juxtaposed against native understandings of the significance of monuments, European practices, and the political projects of the Russian Empire.
Acknowledgements
The author expresses sincere thanks to the first readers and critics of this study, Sergei Abashin, Boris Chukhovich, Alexander Morrison, Claude Rapin and Vera Tolz, and also to Ian Campbell, who translated this paper, and to the two anonymous reviewers.
Funding
This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (FNS) [grant PA00P1_142085].
Notes
1. The understanding of ‘collective memory’ was first formulated by Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945) between 1925 and 1945. See, e.g., Halbwachs (1925); Marcel and Mucchielli (1999).
2. More details on patrimonialization in a colonial situation in Central Asia will be given in my habilitation thesis, which will be defended in 2015.
3. Citations are from the French translation (Riegl 1984).
4. It is notable that the first use, by Aubin-Louis Millin (1759–1818), of the term ‘historical monuments’ can be dated to 1790 (Chastel 1986, 424).
5. See also the Memory at War project in the Department of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge, UK (http://www.memoryatwar.org/).
6. On different readings of the term in the Francophone and Anglophone traditions, see Jadé (2009, 29–32).
7. For the most relevant examples of interactions between colonial Occidental and Russian elites and ‘exchange of colonial experience’, see the invention of the image of Russian Turkestan in the national and international exhibitions of the 1860s–1870s, especially through V.V. Vereshchagin (1842–1904) and A.P. Fedchenko (1844–1873), in Gorshenina (2009b). On the creation of the Turkestanskii sbornik (Turkestan Collection) by V.I. Mezhov (1830–1894), see Gorshenina (2007, 2011). On the discussions of the building of the Transcaspian Railway, see Gorshenina (2013). About these ‘exchanges’ in the Caucasus, see also Bobrovnikov 2010.
8. See the detailed description of mazars (like the complex of Shahi-i Zinda, holy for its Sufi shrines), mosques, and madrasas which occupies the majority of Abu Tahir Khwaja Samarqandi's Samariya (Viatkin 1898, 73–122).
9. Castilian ambassador Roy Gonzalez de Clavijo (2005 [1928], 109–111, 144, 149) stressed that Timur constantly embellished his capital to reinforce the greatness of his state, but his very detailed narrative relating to the Ak-Saray Palace (e.g., ‘We saw indeed here so many apartments and separate chambers, all of which were adorned in tile work of blue and gold with many other colors, that it would take long to describe them here, and all was so marvelously wrought that even the craftsmen of Paris, who are so noted for their skill, would hold that which is done here to be of very fine workmanship’) does not mention this inscription. Some of Timur's chroniclers, such as Niẓām-al-Din ’Ali Shāmi (d. before 814/1411–12) expressed this idea without quoting the formula. This epigraphic slogan is also absent from the detailed study of the Ak-Saray by Masson and Pugachenkova (1953). In a later work, Pugachenkova (1976, 104 [quotation]) mentions it as once existing but no longer preserved; she does not give a reference. It seems that her work is the unique support for the existence of this saying, but most authors present this statement as established fact. For a recent mention independent of Uzbek works or travel guides, see Marozzi (2006 [2004], 33).
10. Waqf, one of the key elements of Islamic law, relies upon various types of donations (most often land) and is inalienable property, given by its owners for religious or charitable needs to the religious community under defined conditions; income from the use of waqf property, free of taxes, was directed towards the material maintenance of Muslim religious institutions.
11. Thus, Khoroshkhin (1876, 193) wrote about the impossibility of learning, from the Muslims who had invited him, the precise dates of construction of the madrasas of the Registan, which were approximately dated as built 200–500 years prior. According to N. Khanykov (1843, 5), attempts to define precise dates ran up against the absence of official documents or their inaccessibility for foreigners, and also against the scarcity of information in private documents.
12. See in particular the observation of Abu Tahir Khwaja Samarqandi, author of the Samariya: ‘Samarkand is an ancient city, located in the fifth climate, and is at the edge of the civilized world. Hostile tribes settled around Samarkand; therefore this city is a place subject to changes, and is now in ruins. The signs which the author of Qandiya indicates for identification of the mazars of this city are now lost, and gravestones have disappeared from the mazars’ (Viatkin 1898, 63).
13. Cf. the description of V.V. Radlov (1880, 23), who visited Samarkand immediately after its capture by Russian troops: ‘When I entered Samarkand, the bazaar was mostly a heap of ashes and rubbish, over which stood great pillars of smoke; the streets were covered with a thick layer of clay dust, half an arshin, from destroyed buildings: with each step the horse made, a cloud of dust arose, filling our eyes, mouths, and noses, such that it was hard to breathe or see anything. The population, particularly the learned class, after its treachery, fearing Russian revenge, had scattered, and even the intact part of the bazaar was, on market days, almost completely empty.’ See also the more journalistic description of I.L. (n.d., 193), Morrison (2008, 21–24), and Azim Malikov's contribution to this issue.
14. A parallel with this situation can be seen in the history of the destruction of the Red Fort in Delhi in 1857, after which it was restored by the same British colonial administration.
15. The building of ‘new European cities’ immediately next to the traditional centres was one of the fundamental rules of the urbanistic program of modernization of the Russian administration in Turkestan (Beylié 1889, 120–121; Dobson 1890, 207–208; Nil'sen 1988; Sahadeo 2007, 5–8, 22–78; Morrison 2008, 21–28).
16. As an example of the strength of the symbolic significance of Samarkand, we remind the reader of an episode which was said to have preceded the capture of the city by the Russian army. The Amir of Bukhara, Sayyid Muzaffar (1819–1885, r. 1860–1885), who claimed he would prefer to lose his life rather than Samarkand, was more than certain that the Russian ‘unbelievers’ would never be able to occupy this city. The smallest hint of such a turn of events brought him to uncontrollable fits of rage; thus, on 1 May 1868, on the eve of the decisive battle at Chupan-Ata, the amir ordered the punishment of a dervish for foretelling the defeat of the Bukharan army, citing a dream in which the two minarets of Ulughbek's madrassas at the Registan allegedly collapsed (Bogdanov 1872, 429).
17. ‘Samarkand is the Moscow of Central Asia’ (Krestovskii 1887, 46).
18. According to Nabila Oulebsir (2004, 14, 19), although the first attempts to create an inventory of ‘monuments’ were undertaken in Algeria by the French architects Amable Ravoisié (between 1840–1842) and Charles Texier (beginning in 1846), the attempt at patrimonialization began to bring clear results only in the 1880s.
19. For the first 12 years of the Turkestan governor-generalship (1868–1879), over the course of which the main ‘restoration’ work was undertaken, the budget deficit was 67,123,204 roubles, with an income of 32,423,391 roubles and expenses of 99,546,595 roubles. The lion's share of the latter went to the support of the army and the maintenance of external borders (Kaufman 1885, 372, 377).
20. Already in 1868, with the occupation of the Samarkand citadel, all waqfs of mosques located on its territory ‘went over to the Treasury's disposal, not rousing any signs of open dissatisfaction’. After this followed the sequestration of the waqfs of Samarkand clergy on the territory of still-independent Bukhara in favour of the amir, who was forced to renounce his own waqfs on the territory of Samarkand occupied by Russian troops. This act spurred Kaufman to take a decision about levying the income ‘of waqfs abolished by Muzaffar-khan, about 10,000 rubles annually, to the Treasury’. Alongside this, the nachal'nik of the Zarafshan okrug, general Aleksandr K. Abramov (1836–86), received, in 1871, the right to ‘assign to the Treasury the remains of waqf income of various Muslim institutions, formed as a consequence of the reduction of expenditures of such institutions for various reasons, like for example the reduction of the number of students or teachers [circa 3000 roubles]’. Also, in 1873, a question was decided with ‘7000 desiatinas of inhabited waqf properties’, located ‘on the right bank of the Amu, within the present-day Amu-Darya otdel’, ‘belonging to the Khivan institutions of the left bank’. Despite the protests of the Khivan khan, Kaufman sequestered them in the Turkestan Treasury (Kaufman 1885, 247–249).
21. ‘O raskhodakh po restavrirovaniiu mecheti Gur-Emira, stoiashchei nad grobnitseiu Timura, v Samarkande, 27 aprelia 1870–7 ianvaria 1871. Kantseliariia general-gubernatora. Otdelenie khoziaistvennoe’, Tsentral'nyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Respubliki Uzbekistan/O'zbek Respublikasi Markaziy Davlat Arxivi, fond I-1, opis’ 20, delo 2892.
22. Local residents refused to participate in the destruction of the mazar, which was blown up on the second attempt in 1880, after a general layout of the building was taken and fotofiksatsii (pictures) were done; Russian soldiers and Cossacks collected, at the site of the explosion, 43 cubic metres of brick suitable for new building. On the former site of the mazar, an artillery powder magazine was built; the remains of the saint were moved to a new burial vault at Afrasiab (Veselovskii 1904, VII–VIII).
23. Kaufman (1885, 247) also writes of the organization of a ‘temporary prison for the natives’ in one of the madrasas ‘outside the city’.
24. It is tempting to imagine that this transformation also occurred to English travellers, who were well informed of the history of the Stone of Scone (or Stone of Destiny), used for the coronation of the monarchs of Scotland and, from 1296 until 1953, of the monarchs of England, Great Britain and the United Kingdom.
25. See in particular the perception of Timur's significance for Russian history in the introduction to a description of Timurid Samarkand by a certain O.S. (1873, 31), which reflected the general moods of Turkestan society and, it would seem, the ideology of Kaufman's administration: ‘Present-day Samarkand attracts the traveller's attention most of all by the heaps of ruins lying among green gardens. Looking at them, your thoughts involuntarily turn to that far time, when it was the capital of an enormous kingdom. The brightest time of its existence relates to the reign of Timur, and in its ruins even now lives the memory of the great khan, as the most renowned of its rulers and the builder of its best adornments. For us, Russians, this connection with Timur gives him a special, exclusive significance because of the importance that Timur has for our history.’ I.M. Slutskii (1909), a specialist in cotton cultivation, echoes these sentiments: ‘Among the torches of truth, science, and moral principles, which lit up the whole world and came from the Orient, Tamerlane – the collector of the breadbasket of knowledge, the creator of the architecture which even now astonishes us in Samarkand, the tolerant owner of half of Asia, under the aegis of whom lived peacefully and harmoniously Christians, idol-worshippers, and Muslims, the patron of trade and industry, under whom in Samarkand gathered merchants from Peking, India, Genoa, Venice, the dread of brigands and robbers, who made the roads safe in all territories under his power, the creator of the only library of its type, the patron of architects, scholars, poets, industry, and peaceful citizens’.
26. The analysis of A. Erkinov (2008), which defines literary and musical activities in Khiva of that time as a ‘Timurid mannerism’, also speaks of the particular veneration of the memory of Tamerlane.
27. In particular, see mentions of this in the Baburnama of Zahir ud-din Muhammad Babur (ca. 1529), Ubaidullah-nama of Muhammad Amin Bukhari (ca. 1716), and Samariya of Abu-Tahir Khwaja (ca. 1830) (Viatkin 1896, 81; Viatkin 1896, 65–66, 129; Veselovskii 1904, 3–4; Sela 2007, 31).
28. For Voltaire, in his Essai sur les mœurs (chs. 60 and 88), Alexander's ‘universalism’ could not be compared with the exclusively destructive potential of Chingis Khan or Tamerlane, together with which, in Histoire de Russie, he set up a direct parallel between Alexander and Peter I (Briant 2012, 39–40).
29. For analysis of the discussion of the applicability of Said's theory of Orientalism to the Russian colonial experience, see Gorshenina (2009a); Morrison (2009); Tolz (2011); Bornet and Gorshenina (2014).
30. See in particular the observations of the traveller, prince Joseph Lubomirski (1874, 3): ‘Too distant from Saint Petersburg, and not yet sufficiently firmly annexed to the empire, Turkestan is not considered to be Russian soil by the Government of the Tsar. The Governor-General in Tashkent rules the province according to his personal ideas, or according to local needs, without taking into consideration the laws of the empire, and without any administrative or budgetary responsibility.’
31. The expedition consisted of B. Basin, I. Dzaniev, S. Dudin, P. Pokryshkin, S. Merzhnevskii, Fridolin, N. Shcherbina-Kramarenko and A. Shchusev.
32. At the very beginning of the commission's work, in 1895, Veselovskii was able to obtain the manuscript of Abu Tahir Khwaja Samarqandi's Samariya, concerning the city's antiquities (Veselovskii 1904, III), a Russian translation of which was published by Viatkin in 1898; the original version of the text was published in 1904, with Veselovskii's commentary.
33. He was the author of many ethnographical publications, e.g. Turkestanskii Sbornik, Vols. 566, 567, 568, 569.
34. To him belongs, in particular, the publication of the epigraphic documents of the mausoleum of Khwaja Ahmad Yasavi and ‘the gates of Timur’ (I thank B. Babajanov for this information).
35. See e.g. the description of the treasury of the Khivan khan by American journalist Januarius MacGahan (1844–?) in 1873. He reproduces exactly the image of the cave of Ali-Baba where, among numerous magnificent carpets, one came across heaps of arms (‘knights’ gloves with lilies’, richly decorated oriental guns, ‘Khorasan steel arms, Persian sabres and thick Afghani daggers in precious sheaths, decorated with precious stones’), together with the remarkable collection – ‘over 1000 objects’ – of Chinese and Russian porcelain stored in the harem (1874, 270–271).
36. These were Arif-Khwaja Arifkhojinov, Colonel Jura-bek, Muhyi al-din-Khwaja, Hakim Khwaja Ishanov, the brothers Sayyid Kari and Sayyid Karim Seid Azimbaev, Kutlu-Haidar Arslanov, Abdul-Qasym Khan Bakykhan, Bek-Quli Bek Jakkubekov, Allah-Quli Bek Jurabekov, A.A. Divaev, Ishan-Khwaja Mahmudkhojin, Mirza ‘Abdullah Issamuhammadov, Mullah ‘Alim ‘Abd al-Qasymov and Mullah Mujadut Akhtajamov. See the list of members at the end of each volume of Protokoly Turkestanskogo kruzhka liubitelei arkheologii (1896–1917).