Central Asia in World History

by Peter B. Golden

  The newly conquered and annexed peoples were designated inorodtsy (aliens), subjects but not citizens of Russia. Tsarist policy retained Islamic Sharî‘ah and customary law, ‘Adat—as long as they did not contravene government policies. In the General Governorate of Turkestan, with its long history of urban Islam, the government continued its policy of benign neglect in religious affairs. Nonetheless, revolts against Russian rule began to occur after 1885—usually under Sûfî leadership. In the General Governorate of the Steppe, however, the state financed and attempted to manage Muslim institutions. While trying to make the nomads reliable taxpayers and encouraging their settlement, the government steadily encroached on their best pasturages. It opened these “state” lands to agricultural colonists, mainly Cossacks, Russians, and Ukrainians, but also groups from Xinjiang: the Taranchi and Chinese Muslims. Mass colonization began in the 1890s. Between 1896 and 1916, more than one million colonists took one-fifth of the land. By 1914, Russians constituted 30 to 40 percent of the population of Kazakhstan. Turkestan received some 336,000 settlers in 1916 alone.

  As the worldwide demand for cotton grew, Turkestan with its long history of cotton cultivation became “a huge cotton plantation for Russia.”12 By 1912, it produced 64 percent of Russian cotton. Central Asia’s increasingly one-crop economy made it dependent on global price fluctuations. Industrialization forced traditional craftsmen and artisans into unequal competition with machine-made goods. The grip of the tsarist government tightened with Central Asia’s growing economic importance. The railroads brought the global economy directly to Central Asia, stimulating urban growth. Tashkent grew from 120,000 inhabitants in 1877 (according to Eugene Schuyler) to 234,000 in the Russian census of 1910.13 Foreign observers credited the Russians with providing more security than had previously been known. Expanding contacts with Russia and modernizing Muslims (the Volga Tatars) were recasting Central Asia’s cultural and intellectual world. Traditional leaders who had not adjusted to the new order faded.

  Reform and renewal in Central Asia was part of a larger Muslim revival and reaction to the threat of Europe. It advanced through several stages, religious and cultural renewal, educational reform, and finally the emergence of national consciousness: nationalism. There were different currents of change. The Salafiyya movement (Arabic salaf, “forefather”) stressed a return to the values and practices of the early Muslims—often interpreted as a fundamentalist rejection of all innovations. Others argued that Muslims would have to acquire modern technology and fashion a culture that could both accommodate traditional religious and social values while at the same time fully function in the industrial world. That meant a modern, secular education. In Central Asia, as elsewhere in the Muslim world, schools had been religious in orientation.

  In Turkestan, von Kaufman’s policy of benign neglect hoped that an ignored Muslim educational system would simply disappear. A few bilingual schools for resident Russians and the indigenous peoples were opened in 1876 and largely shunned by Muslims, wary of their intentions. By 1894, 95 percent of the students of the 90 bilingual schools were Russians. Among the Tatars and the Kazakhs who already had direct contact with modernizing ideas flowing from Russia, the situation was different. In the 1850s, a few schools for Kazakhs had opened, in part to lessen previously encouraged Islamic influences from the Tatars. In 1870, the government founded Russo-Tatar schools, emphasizing secular education. This coincided with reform movements initiated by the Tatars themselves.

  The Tatars valued education highly and had an extensive religious school system attached to their mosques where imâms (prayer leaders) taught boys reading, the Qur’ân, the tenets of Islam, Arabic, Persian, and arithmetic. Girls might acquire some learning from the imâm’s wife. The roots of reform went deep, going back to Gabdennasïr (‘Abd al-Nasr) al-Kursavî, who urged Muslims to study the Qur’ân and use their own judgment to create new interpretations to meet modern challenges. The educator and reformer Shihâbaddîn Marjânî argued that becoming more modern would bring Muslims closer to the Islam of the forefathers.

  A Crimean Tatar journalist, reformer, and social activist, Ismâ’îl Bey Gaspïralï (Russian: Gasprinskii), promoted the Usûl-i Jadîd (new method) schools, a reaction to traditional rote learning. The new method consisted of using a phonetic rather than the traditional syllabic system to teach reading. More radically, he separated the schools from the mosque-madrasa complex and used specially trained teachers for the primary schools. Girls had their own schools. Instruction was systematized with appropriate textbooks for each grade. Gaspïralï’s newspaper, Terjümân (Translator), which appeared in 1883, advocated cultural reform and the unity of the Turkic peoples. Jadîdism, underway in Kazan by the 1880s, came to Turkestan in the following decade.

  These modest reforms provoked vicious attacks from adherents of the usûl-i qadîm (old method), who feared that they would lead to assimilation and apostasy. The government, uncertain of Jadidism’s political goals, neither supported nor actively opposed the new schools. Ultimately, wealthy Tatar merchants provided funding. Tatar interest in education was reflected in a literacy rate (20.4 percent) that surpassed that of the Russians (18.3 percent).

  By the eve of World War I, there were some 5000 Jadid schools in the Russian Empire. The tsarist government, wary of Jadidism among Tatars, viewed it as an antidote to “Muslim fanaticism” in Bukhara. The amîr suppressed the Jadidist Yâsh Bukhârâliqlar (Young Bukharans) in 1910 and many fled to the Ottoman Empire, including Abdurrauf Fitrat, later one of the revolutionary intellectual luminaries of Uzbekistan. The key theme of the movement was that Muslims would remain powerless as long as they did not possess modern knowledge.

  The Jadidist educational and cultural reforms were the necessary precursors to national movements. Modern national identities build on notions of a shared language, culture, and territory. Most settled Central Asians thought of their birthplace and its immediate environs as their homeland. Nomadic populations most strongly identified with clan and tribe. Many Muslims still saw their primary identity in religious terms. The Tatars and Kazakhs, geographically closest to the Russians, were the first to begin to perceive themselves as distinct national entities. The Tatar Qayyûm Nâsïrî and the Kazakh Ibrâhîm Altïnsarin pioneered national languages, crucial to the development of national movements.

  Defeat in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05) sparked the revolution of 1905 in Russia. The war demonstrated that a modernized non-European people could defeat a European power, encouraging revolutionary movements in the Ottoman Empire and Iran, which had been losing land to Russia for more than a century. The weakened tsarist autocracy briefly opened up political life, permitting a representative assembly, the Duma. Four Dumas, which included Muslim participation, met between 1906 and 1914, but were unable to overcome tsarist resistance to reform. Nonetheless, participation had an impact on the modernizing intellectuals in Bukhara. If representative government could be achieved in autocratic Russia, then similar reforms in Bukhara were conceivable. The Muslims of the empire held a series of congresses to formulate a united program of action to press their political demands. They broke into factions. The Ittifâq al-Muslimîn (Union of Muslims) called for freedom of religion, regional autonomy, and a liberal, constitutional monarchy, like the Russian Constitutional Party (Kadets) with whom they were allied. On the left, the Tangchïlar, men associated with the Tatar newspaper, Tang (Dawn), favored a non-Marxist democratic socialism. On the right were the traditional religious conservatives who had the tacit support of the tsarist government.

  The strains of World War I (1914-18) broke the Russian empire. A major revolt erupted in July 1916 in Central Asia, provoked by the conscription of local peoples into labor battalions. It reflected the long-simmering anger over colonial policies, especially the influx of Russian settlers who took the best land. The government responded with harsh reprisals and armed bands of settlers engaged in massacres. Some 200,000 Central Asians perished. The February Revolution of 19
17 toppled the tsar and brought a moderate, democratically inclined but fragile Provisional Government to power. The Communists (Bolsheviks) exploited Prime Minister Alexander F. Kerenskii’s unwillingness to pull Russia out of the war and the deteriorating domestic situation to stage the October 1917 Revolution. Civil war followed, complicated by foreign intervention. The Bolsheviks won, retaining much of the old empire.

  The Central Asian leadership tended to see political issues in national or ethno-religious terms. Many favored some kind of relationship with Russia, calling for either a distinct Muslim voice in government or various forms of autonomy. The Provisional Government willingly granted Muslims individual rights, but balked at the notion of group rights or a federal solution of this type. The Muslims themselves were divided by region and national groupings. The Kazakhs founded the Alash Orda political party in March 1917 to defend those who felt threatened by Russian colonization and Tatar cultural influence. During the civil war, they initially favored the anti-communist White forces and then switched to the Bolsheviks in November, 1919. The Bashkirs, fearful of Tatar domination in the Idel-Ural (Volga-Ural) republic that Tatar Communists were proposing, opted for their own Autonomous Bashkir Republic. The Turkestan Muslim political groups tended to be in tune with the Kadets and the Provisional Government, although smaller socialist groups also existed. The creation of a common program was probably impossible given the differences in language and local culture of the Muslim peoples. Many of the Russians in the Central Asian cities were largely socialist of one kind or another in their political orientation. They tended to view the local Muslims as political and ethnic enemies.

  A particular Muslim Communist perspective emerged during the Civil War. The Tatar Bolshevik, Mirsaid Sultan Galiev, a schoolteacher turned revolutionary, viewing Russia’s Muslims as a distinct people, argued that all Muslims (and indeed all non-Europeans) were, in effect, an oppressed people, the equivalent of the oppressed workers and peasants of European societies. Hence, class warfare was for the Muslim East the struggle of an oppressed Muslim people against the European imperialist-colonialist forces. He further argued that the victory of socialism among Russia’s Muslims would be a springboard for revolution throughout the colonial world. Many Jadidists accepted this idea and joined the Bolsheviks. In 1918 Bolshevik rule came to Central Asia, creating the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, which overcame local and anti-Bolshevik White Guard challenges in 1919. Many local Bolsheviks still harbored ethnic prejudices. Moscow had to force them to make a place for indigenous Muslim Communists. In the Kazakh steppes the years of turmoil produced a massive famine in which as many as a million people may have died.

  By 1923, the Bolsheviks consolidated control in Central Asia. The Basmachi, rural resistance bands, continued well into the decade. Between 1920 and 1924, the Kazakh, Turkmen, and Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republics were created. Following this National Delimitation of the Central Asian Republics, Bukhara and Khiva were formally brought into the Soviet Union in 1924, as part of the Uzbek SSR. The name “Turkestan” had to be removed. Although “Turkestanians” shared a common history, religion (Islam), and literary languages (Chaghatay and Persian/Tajik), the fundamentals for a modern sense of nationhood, the notion of “Turkestan” had too many Pan-Turkic associations. The creation of smaller “Soviet republics” with a strong Turkic character was a concession to the indigenous reformers and Jadidists, giving them space in which to develop Turkic cultures—under Soviet guidance. In 1929, the Tajik SSR was carved out of the Uzbek SSR, and in 1936 Kyrgyzstan, previously an autonomous province and then an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, became the Kirgiz SSR.

  The shaping of new republics and nations, encompassing somewhat less than 14 million Central Asians, largely took place during the Soviet New Economic Policy (NEP, 1921-28), which reintroduced elements of free enterprise in an effort to deal with famine and the shortage of goods. Previously, Central Asian states had centered on a dynasty rather than a “nationality.” The USSR created nation-states, shaping borders to suit its own governing purposes. Every nationality was to have its own territory. The first casualties of this policy were the national communists such as Mirsaid Sultan Galiev, whose ideas were considered contrary to Marxist “principles of proletarian unity,” which viewed the working class as a single unit, undivided by ethnic or religious differences. Sultan Galiev was twice arrested and is presumed to have perished in the Soviet Gulag, the system of penal labor camps in which political dissidents and criminals were imprisoned.

  This 1977 Soviet poster and its smiling woman proudly proclaim: “Cotton is our happiness.” In reality, Central Asia was largely transformed into a one-crop (cotton) plantation by the Soviet government. The overuse of fertilizers poisoned the soil and caused horrific birth defects to appear in some areas. Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Hoover Political Poster Collection, RU/SU 2257.12

  The Soviet government then tailored nationalities for the national republics. Few Central Asians, other than modernizers, had a sense of “nationality.” The region’s complex ethnic structure made the problem even more daunting. All of the Soviet national “delimitations” were arbitrary political decisions, rationalized by ethnographic and linguistic studies. In this regard, Soviet policy must be viewed as a massive—and largely successful—project of social and ethnic engineering. Language became one of the critical markers of Soviet identity.14 As a consequence, the origins of the modern languages of the region, their formation, affiliations, and connections have become issues with important political consequences.

  Uzbekistan, the most populous of the Soviet Central Asian republics, gave local intellectuals inclined towards Pan-Turkism a large, Turkic state of their own. Uzbek, however, would replace Türk or Türkî, terms that were current. They hinted at Pan-Turkism and Turkey, which was undergoing its own political and cultural revolutions, one closely observed by Central Asian Turkic intellectuals. The use of Uzbek to designate peoples who had not previously used this term for themselves, and the insistence on the Turkic character of a population that had a long history of bilingualism in Turkic and Persian-Tajik, was a means of winning over Jadidists and other reformers. The term Sart, denoting groupings of Tajik origin that had become Turkicized or various Turkic groups that had sedentarized, almost half of the population of Uzbekistan, disappeared as an identity in the 1926 census.

  All, regardless of their linguistic and other distinctive features, were now officially Uzbeks, for some an identity that did not come naturally. Uzbekistan contained Bukhara and Samarkand two cities whose populations were predominantly Tajik, albeit bilingual. Tajiks, a term used disparagingly by some Turkic-speakers for mountain peoples, many of whom were Shi’ites who spoke other Iranian tongues, as well as for Tajik-speakers, demanded their own republic. Some defined it in ways that would have shrunk Uzbekistan and made Tajikistan the largest Soviet Central Asian republic. Debates over this issue raged during the latter half of the 1920s. The Soviets exploited this ethnic rivalry to lessen the veiled but still Pan-Turkist aspirations of some Uzbek intellectuals.15

  In time, Soviet policies produced a distinct sense of national identity among the Uzbeks, Tajiks, and others. Older distinctions of clan and region survived in the factional groupings (often with an ideological veneer) that frequently competed for power in both Soviet and post-Soviet Central Asia. Tribal identity is still a factor in Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan and among some older Uzbeks. In Kazakhstan, Great, Middle, and Little Horde affiliations continue to shape competing political factions.

  Each new nationality required its own history, distinguishing it from its neighbors (often closely related peoples with shared histories) as well as its own literature, folklore, and, of course, language and alphabet. Politicians and scholars convened to sort out these questions and selected certain dialects as national literary languages, buttressing political needs with scholarly rationalizations. Most Turkic languages used the Arabic alphabet, which blurred the pronunciatio
n differences between them. Turkmen göz, Kazakh köz, and Tatar küz (eye) were written identically. Although orthographic reform was already part of pre-revolutionary modernizing projects, there were pressures to replace the Arabic script. It linked Soviet Muslims with Muslim populations in neighboring lands—a source of potential subversion. In 1927 and 1928, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Turkmen, Kazakh, and Qara Qalpaq adopted the Latin script. Turkey did the same in 1928. Tajik followed not long after. In the late 1930s, the Soviet government decided that Cyrillic should replace Latin, a process completed by 1942. Russian became a required subject in all non-Russian schools. The goal was the sblizhenie (bringing together) of the 126 different nationalities of the Soviet Union. Ultimately, this would produce their sliianie “(melding together”) into a new “Soviet Person” who would almost certainly be Russian speaking.

  The enormous strains of collectivization and sedentarization of the nomads, which ended private farming and private herds, completed by the late 1930s, transformed society, but at tremendous cost. In Kazakhstan perhaps one million people perished, as did millions in Ukraine. Purges killed off indigenous political leaders.

  The new Soviet culture was expressed in the local languages, but its contents were determined by Moscow. Russians, or other non-Central Asians, controlled the republic Communist Parties. Token representatives of the indigenous peoples received second or lower-ranking positions. Muslim schools were closed by the late 1920s and 1930s, along with Islamic courts and the Muslim Spiritual Assembly. Islam was portrayed as backward and, like Christianity, Judaism, and Buddhism, considered inimical to the atheistic ideology of the new state. “Militant atheism” was downplayed during World War II when the USSR was fighting for its existence. The government sought to rally Muslims by reviving a sovietized variant of the Muslim Spiritual Assembly in 1943. Several madrasas were opened. Its officials, like those of other officially recognized religions, were carefully monitored.