Irina Viktorovna Erofeeva (1953–2020)

Irina Viktorovna Erofeeva, who died on 22 November 2020, was part of a great generation of Kazakhstani scholars who were trained within the Soviet academy but produced their finest work in independent Kazakhstan. Together with her frequent collaborators Nurbolat Masanov (1954–2006) and Zhuldyzbek Abylkhozhin, she navigated the difficult years of transition in the 1990s with honour and credit; the end of the decade saw the first edition of her masterpiece, a biography of Abu'l-Khayr Khan, which has been frequently reprinted and is now a classic of Kazakhstani historiography (Erofeeva 2007).

Born in Ust’-Kamenogorsk in 1953 to a family descended from noble exiles and Old Believers, Irina Viktorovna graduated in history from what was then the Ust-Kamenogorsk pedagogical institute (now D. Amonzholov East Kazakhstan State University) in 1976. In 1979 she defended her kandidat thesis at the Choqan Valikhanov Institute of History and Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences of the Kazakh SSR – the title was ‘Kazakhstan in the Second Half of the Eighteenth and the First Third of the Nineteenth Century in the Works of Russian Scholars and Travellers’, sources that would remain important for much of her later work (Uskenbay 2020, 145). In particular she made a study of the great Siberian oblastnik and kraeved Grigorii Potanin, of whose pioneering collections of Qazaq folklore and oral narratives she would make very imaginative use.

The area that Erofeeva made her own was the complex relations between Qazaq Chinggisid elites and the Russian state from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. In Soviet historiography these groups and individuals were caricatured as greedy ‘exploiters’, and the ultimate ‘peaceful union’ of the Qazaqs with Russia was seen as both inevitable and desirable (Bodger 1980). From the 1990s this was countered by a strident and equally bogus nationalist narrative which exaggerated the unitary nature of a supposed ‘Qazaq Khanate’ and understood relations with the Russian empire entirely in terms of colonial oppression, while the eighteenth-century Qazaq Khans were either elevated as improbable paragons of political and military virtue (Ablai) or in the case of Abu’l-Khayr condemned as traitors who had sold out to the Russians. Irina Viktorovna’s biography went a long way towards rehabilitating Abu’l-Khayr both as a shrewd political operator who saw his relationship with Russia as a mutually beneficial alliance rather than as a submission, and as a successful military commander who inflicted a series of crushing defeats on the Junghars, who were the Qazaqs’ main enemy at the time (Erofeeva 2007). While she was unable to decisively alter the public discourse surrounding Abu’l-Khayr (he was pointedly omitted from the rolling multimedia displays of imaginary Khanal portraits during the celebrations of the 550th anniversary of the Qazaq khanate in 2015), the scholarly verdict on him is now very different from what it was. This is also thanks to her superb edition of the diary, reports and correspondence of Kutlu-Muhammad Tevkelev, the Tatar envoy who negotiated Abu’l-Khayr’s agreement with Russia in 1731 (Erofeeva 2005).

In 2014 Irina Viktorovna published a comprehensive two-volume edition of correspondence between Qazaq Chingissids of the Junior and Middle Hordes and various organs of the Russian state (Erofeeva 2014). It is difficult to over-emphasize just what a fundamental work this is – meticulously edited, it is a magnificent and essential resource for anyone studying Russia’s steppe frontier from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. With the assistance of the late Timur Beisembiev (Morrison 2017), Irina Viktorovna was able to provide careful analysis of the Chaghatai and Persian originals of these letters and the various layers of translation they underwent into Russian. What this huge archive reveals is the essentially pragmatic nature of the relationship. From the eighteenth century onwards the balance of military and economic power in Eurasia was shifting decisively from nomadic to settled societies and states, from the steppe to the sown. This was demonstrated very clearly by the shattering defeat of the Junghars by Qing armies in the 1750s, which snuffed out the last significant attempt at creating a powerful nomadic confederation (Perdue 2005). In this climate Qazaq khans and other Chinggisid elites had to reach accommodations with their sedentary neighbours, whether China, Russia or (from the early nineteenth century) Khiva and Khoqand. Despite negotiating from a position of weakness, these diplomatic relationships offered Qazaq khans potential rewards: in the form of gifts and opportunities for trade, but also the possibility of exploiting the relationship with a powerful sedentary neighbour to consolidate their own authority over unruly nomadic elites (Erofeeva 1996). Both Abu’l-Khayr and Ablai Khan exploited these opportunities skilfully, though the latter had the additional advantage of being able to negotiate simultaneously with the Qing, with whom his relationship remained closer than that with Russia until the very end of his long reign (Noda and Onuma 2012). The voluminous correspondence generated by these relationships also reveals both the limits of the Russian Empire’s ability to impose its will on the steppe before the third decade of the nineteenth century, and the ultimate incompatibility of fluid and mobile steppe political norms with the bounded and exclusive ideas of sovereignty which prevailed in Orenburg, Omsk and St Petersburg. What becomes abundantly clear from Irina Viktorovna’s work is that neither ‘resistance’ nor ‘colonial oppression’ can capture the complexities of the Russian-Qazaq relationship.

The description that crops up most often in reminiscences of Irina Viktorovna is ‘fearless’. She was unflinching in her pursuit of historical truth, and had no patience with the sentimental mythologization of Qazaq history that owed more to the novels of Ilyas Esenberlin than to the work of professional historians – a critique made with particular force in a volume she edited with Abylkhozhin and Masanov (Masanov, Abylkhozhin, and Erofeeva 2007), which prompted some harsh responses from Kazakhstan’s official historical establishment (Uskenbay 2020, 148). At the same time she did not shy away from describing Russian expansion and rule in Central Asia as ‘colonial’, and dismissed the Soviet notion that Russian rule was a ‘lesser evil’. Most recently she had been working on Buddhism and Buddhist archaeological remains on the territory of Kazakhstan, a taboo topic for many nationalist scholars because of its association with the much-demonized Junghars. She was also an enthusiastic advocate of innovative methodologies derived from anthropology, and threw herself with enthusiasm into archaeological and cartographical work (Erofeeva 2011).

Her refusal to toe party lines meant that her scholarship did not always receive the recognition it should have had in Kazakhstan. For five years she was the director of the independent Qazaq Scientific Research Institute on Problems of the Cultural Heritage of Nomads in Almaty, founded by Nurbulat Masanov, where she achieved a great deal, most notably encouraging the study of the legacies of the GULag in Kazakhstan – but she was forced out under disgraceful circumstances a few years after Masanov’s death. She was never granted the title of professor by the Kazakhstani academic establishment, and chose not to apply for that of ‘Doktor Nauk’ (Uskenbay 2020, 149). However, she had a dedicated following amongst younger, more independent-minded scholars, and was widely regarded in Qazaq society as an authority on Chinggisid descent and the traditional ceremonies and social norms associated with it – a remarkable achievement for an ethnic Russian. She was also held in deep respect by her colleagues in Japan, North America, Europe and Russia, where her work was and remains a touchstone for all those working on the Qazaq steppe (Martin 2010, 2013, 2017; Pianciola and Sartori 2013). In my memory Irina Viktorovna will always appear as I last saw her, sitting in ‘Dublin’, her favourite Irish pub opposite the Central State Archive on Abai Avenue in Almaty, pint of Guinness in hand and one of her elegant, thin cigarettes at her lips. She will be greatly missed, but she leaves a remarkable legacy behind her – one that will continue to inspire and instruct scholars in Kazakhstan and elsewhere for many decades to come.

Acknowledgements

The author profoundly thanks Anatoly Khazanov, Zhanar Jampeissova, Virginia Martin, Isabelle Ohayon, Niccolò Pianciola, Gulmira Sultangalieva and Tomohiko Uyama for sharing their memories.