Review of Adeeb Khalid 'Making Uzbekistan'

Making Uzbekistan. Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR by Adeeb Khalid (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), xix + 415 pp. Price HB $39.95 EAN: 9780801454097 I can still remember the moment when I encountered Adeeb Khalid s first book, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform. Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998 – reviewed by Paul Bergne in JIS 11/1 [2000]: 101-104). It was a second-hand copy in Blackwells, Oxford, with extensive pencil annotations. I was in the first year of my D.Phil research on Russian colonial rule in Central Asia, and floundering for want of any decent historiography. Fifteen years ago the standard references in Central Asian history were still outdated Sovietological texts – the series on the non-Russian peoples of the USSR published by the Hoover Institution, for instance - which unconsciously shared and reproduced Soviet categories and assumptions, notably that these same nationalities were primordial, eternal and self-explanatory. As I leafed through this battered paperback (which I still own), I sensed with mounting excitement that this was something in a completely different category from all my reading to date – this was a historian who had worked in the Uzbekistan State Archives in Tashkent, who was a master of sources in Turkic and Persian as well as Russian, who was bringing the same standards of theoretical and methodological sophistication that existed in South Asian or Middle Eastern History to the backwater of Central Asia. Although ) didn t realise it at the time, Khalid was one of the first generation of western scholars, most of them on North American Ph.D. programmes, who gained access to post-Soviet archives during the USSR s collapse and through the early to mid-90s. Many of them chose to take advantage of the new possibilities of working in Tashkent, Almaty, Kazan or Ufa to write about the nonRussian peoples of the empire, both in its Tsarist and Soviet incarnations, producing what we now call the )mperial Turn in Russian history. Khalid s book was the pioneer of this trend – and it remains one of the best, a classic in a field with a rather short history of decent scholarship. This book is the sequel – Khalid s magnum opus, on which he has worked for almost twenty years. It arrives in a field that is now richly populated, in large part thanks to the efforts of Khalid and other members of the generation that graduated with him, to be read alongside Terry Martin s The Affirmative Action Empire (2001), Shoshana Keller s To Moscow, not Mecca (2001), Arne (augen s The Establishment of National Republics in Soviet Central Asia (2003), Adrienne Edgar s Tribal Nation. The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan (2004), Douglas Northrop s Veiled Empire (2 , Francine (irsch s Empire of Nations (2006), Marianne Kamp s The New Woman in Uzbekistan and Paul Bergne s The Birth of Tajikistan (2007), amongst others. There is widespread recognition now among historians (if not, alas, in the media or among political scientists, as Khalid notes on p.13) that the new states, borders and national identities that emerged in Soviet Central Asia in the 1920s and 1930s were not the result of malicious gerrymandering by Moscow designed to divide and rule through deliberately fostering ethnic divisions. Research in the local archives and periodical press, as well as in the party archive in Moscow (RGASPI), has revealed that the Soviet Central Asian nationalities were constructed on the basis of indigenous national projects from before 1917, as well as (to a debatable extent) late Tsarist ethnographic and orientalist knowledge, while the complex national borders and allocation of territory came about as a result of the interpretation of census and economic data, and of horse-trading and lobbying by local party structures, and were not simply imposed from Moscow. Khalid s book plugs an Uzbekistan-shaped hole in this historiography (Northrop and Kamp both focus on the hujum or campaign against Islam and the seclusion of women from the late 1920s, rather than on the formation of Uzbekistan per se). As Khalid writes p. Uzbekistan was the key Central Asian Republic … The other republics were all defined against Uzbekistan , and while this might be stretching the point slightly, it is certainly true that all four of the other Central Asian republics shared a border with the Uzbek SSR, and had areas where they contested territory, if not always identity. It is also true that the Uzbek SSR had much the most developed and powerful Communist Party in the whole of Central Asia, with a much higher proportion of indigenous cadres than any of the other new states. This would be crucial to the success of the Uzbek nation-building project – and it is these cadres who are the focus of Khalid s book - in their pre-revolutionary incarnation as dissident intellectuals criticising their own society; in an uneasy alliance with the Soviet state in the early 1920s, which allowed them to impose some of their ideas and act as cultural brokers; and as the victims of that state as it grew stronger and more confident in Central Asia by the late 1920s. Khalid has been severely criticised by Devin DeWeese for his focus here and in his first book on a small and unrepresentative group of self-defined reformers to explain the social, political and cultural changes among the Muslims of the Russian empire and the USSR in the 19th and early 20th centuries. DeWeese accuses him of neglecting the bulk of Muslim society and its everyday ideas and religious practices and of making a series of value-judgements in favour of the reformers. Khalid is unapologetic and mounts a robust defence of his approach (pp.11-12), writing that ) do not claim that the modernists ) study were the embodiment or the sole voice of their society p. , and asserting that the criticisms made by DeWeese, Paolo Sartori and others are prompted by a sense that colonized intellectuals and the sources they produce are somehow inauthentic . )f this seems like a straw man ) don t think either of these scholars would recognize Khalid s description of their work , he does make a good case for seeking to understand the Jadids and their writings on their own terms - firstly because he manages to communicate the fascination he finds in them so well, far more than this reader would have thought possible, given how earnest and humourless the writings of reformers usually are; and secondly because, however unrepresentative they were, they and their ideas would play a crucial role in the early years of Soviet rule in Central Asia, and in the making of Uzbekistan. As Khalid acknowledges, much of his description of the pre-revolutionary period (pp.27 – 55) draws on his first book, and serves to set the scene and establish the Jadids as an intellectual and social grouping with particular ideas about reforming their society and religion, partly in response to Russian colonialism, but above all in Khalid s account because of Ottoman intellectual influences (many of them had been educated in Istanbul). His account of the revolution in Turkestan - where at first Bolshevik power was synonymous with settler colonialism - and in Bukhara – where it first allowed the Amir to repress the Young Bukharan reformists, and then saw them assume power for the first time – builds on the excellent earlier work of Marco Buttino and Vladimir Genis, but with much more extensive use of Bukharan sources (pp.117 – . Khalid argues that the Bukharan People s Republic, while existing under the aegis of Soviet power, was primarily anti-colonial and nationalist in inspiration. While after its dissolution in 1923 many of the Young Bukharans would be marginalised (notably Abd ur-Rauf Fitrat, the intellectual to whose work Khalid devotes more attention than any other), others went on to play a key role in creating Uzbekistan as a Turkicspeaking Greater Bukhara – most notably Faizullah Khojaev (pp.276-7). While Khalid makes extensive use of archival material from RGASPI and elsewhere to trace the mechanics of the territorial division or razmezhevanie that produced Uzbekistan s borders in 1924, he is more interested in the non-Soviet ideological underpinnings of this process. Making Uzbekistan often reads like a collective biography of several generations of Uzbek intellectuals, allowing us to trace the evolution of their thoughts on the nation, Islam, revolution, gender and much else, alongside their political and artistic careers, which almost without exception ended in execution by the Soviet State. Khalid shows that the creation of the Uzbek SSR in 1924 from territory that had formerly been part of the Turkestan GovernorGeneralship and the Emirate of Bukhara, whilst its final stages took place within the framework of the Communist Party and Soviet rule, can only be properly understood as the culmination of an indigenous national project – Chaghatayism – which began as a confessional identity The Muslims of Turkestan before 9 , and which became increasingly ethnicised during the heady years of the revolution, which opened up new possibilities to Central Asian intellectuals (pp.14- . Chaghatayism harked back to a golden age of Timurid rule in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when poetry and prose in literary Chaghatai Turkic flourished at the courts of Samarkand and Herat. It involved a conscious rejection of much of Central Asia s literary heritage, which was in Persian, and associated with the supposedly corrupt and feeble rule of the Amirs of Bukhara, and the adoption of the ethnonym Uzbek to replace the myriad different terms previously used to describe the settled peoples of Central Asia, the most common of which was Sart . While at first it was closely associated with Islamic reformism, some Jadids would later turn away from Islam altogether, most notably Fitrat – Khalid s analysis of atheism in Fitrat s writings of 9 -4 (pp.240 – 253) is a tour de force of close reading and analysis, although it is not clear how far these works really influenced or reflected the developing Soviet campaign against Islam in Central Asia, given that Fitrat was in exile in Moscow at this time. Throughout the book we alternate between accounts of Communist party politics and close readings of novels, poetry, plays, agitprop and literary criticism (usually highly politicised) that appeared in the Turkic- (and in some cases Persian and Russian) language press in the febrile atmosphere of the revolutionary period and the early 1920s. The complementary contrast between these two approaches is seen clearly in Chapter The Long Road to Soviet Power and Chapter A Revolution of the Mind . )n the former Khalid explores the world of the Communist Party, its priorities and policies – cotton, korenizatsiya (indigenisation), the indoctrination of Central Asian youth and the fraught process of recruiting party cadres. In the latter Khalid takes us deep into the cultural and intellectual revolution that happened alongside this – the novels and poetry of Cholpon, Abdullah Qadiri, Shakirjan Rahimi and many others. Some of these figures were pre-revolutionary Jadids, others belonged to a generation that came of age after 1917, but between them they introduced a wealth of new literary forms and themes that fully justify Khalid s description of the decade and a half after 9 as a golden age of culture in Central Asia. Khalid s discussions of their writings are vivid, careful and sympathetic, and he is extraordinarily alive to the personal and political relationships that linked different politicians, authors and artists, as well as the rivalries that often divided them. The connection between these developments in the cultural sphere and the political initiatives taken by the party is not always clear however – Khalid notes that much of this intellectual ferment had little to do with Soviet priorities, and its nationalist and anti-colonial tone seems simply to have escaped official notice because it was published in Uzbek – not until 1927, in a process Khalid describes as The Assault pp. – 362) was the vernacular-language press and publishing industry brought firmly to heel, with often fatal consequences for those who had contributed to it in those heady early years. Khalid s final chapter Towards a Soviet Order pp. – 389) takes on an elegiac quality, as the various heroes of the book are rounded up, exiled or forced out of public life, and in most cases executed in 1937 or before, their writings (with the notable exception of Qadiri s novel Bygone Days) suppressed and forgotten until after the Soviet collapse. Khalid gives a sense of a civilization lost – not that of pre-revolutionary Turkestan and Bukhara, which the Jadids and the first Soviet generation of Uzbek intellectuals had played a prominent part in destroying themselves – but the burst of political and cultural creativity that emerged in the hiatus between the collapse of the old order, and the final establishment of Soviet power. Khalid s obvious admiration for the Jadids translates into a distinct lack of sympathy or interest in their much more numerous opponents. As he frequently acknowledges, the Jadids were a small and unrepresentative group within the Turkestani and Bukharan intelligentsia, which was generally quite conservative, or at least less fascinated by the idea of the nation and with different notions of religious reform. In the only more or less free political contest between the two groups, the elections to the Tashkent city duma in 1917, the conservative Ulama Jamiyati trounced the Jadid Shura-yi Islam. It was their alliance with the Soviet State that allowed the Jadids to take power and impose their vision of reform on an unwilling populace – and which also allowed them take an often ruthless revenge on their enemies. We get occasional hints of this in Khalid s narrative - when he describes the Young Bukharans forcing senior officials who had served under the Amir being forced to sweep the streets, clean latrines and dig their own graves before being executed (p.135) – but the viewpoint of what Khalid generally describes as the traditionalist ulama gets very short shrift. (e writes that this is because of the silence of the sources p. 9 , but certainly the work of Paolo Sartori, Allen Frank, Ashirbek Muminov and Bakhtiyar Babajanov suggests that it is not impossible to recapture their views and responses. Equally, another, less positive view of the alliance between Muslim intellectuals and the Soviet state so well described by Khalid is that the Jadids chose to ride the Soviet tiger for the sake of political power, and used it, often ruthlessly, to settle scores with their enemies. That they themselves ended up being devoured by it was probably seen by some of their victims as no more than just deserts. Khalid s relentless focus on the Jadids and their Chaghatayist national project also produces some distortions in his account of the revolutionary period in Central Asia, and of the Turkestan ASSR (1918 – 1924). It causes him to neglect the politics of the ulama , who were in many ways much more influential than (and not always distinguishable from) the Jadids until 1918. It also means that even when looking at revolutionary and Soviet politics, he plays down how much of this was taking place outside Jadid circles, and outside the Chaghatayist or proto-Uzbek national project. The exception is his chapter on Tajiks as a residual category pp. 9 – 315), although as the title suggests he considers the Tajiks to have been defined almost purely negatively against the dominant Uzbek Chaghatayist discourse; certainly the Tajik national idea emerged later in Soviet politics, but it was not purely a negative reaction to Uzbekness . As Khalid himself shows (pp.308Tajikness seems to have had a connection with ideas emerging from Russian orientalist scholarship, though he is very unwilling to admit that similar influences might have played a role in the Uzbek case, and is too dismissive of Vera Tolz s work on this theme p. . The Tajik national ideology rapidly evolved to be as elaborately constructed as the Uzbek one, though the emphasis was on the Persianate literary heritage rather than on Turkic Timurid rulers. Khalid has more difficulty with the prominent role played by Kazakhs, notably Turar Rysqulov, both in the Kokand autonomy of 1917-18, which Khalid describes as the first Experiment in Government for the Jadids (pp.72-7), and in the local party leadership of the Turkestan ASSR. Khalid s assumption is that the Kazakh intelligentsia in pre-revolutionary Turkestan had its own networks, its own debates, and its own passions that were separate from those of the sedentary population (p.45), and that the Kazakh Communists of the Turkestan ASSR were itching to join their ethnic compatriots in the Steppe region and create a Kazakh state - but this is a teleological reading which projects later Soviet national divisions back into the past (p.267-70). )n fact, as Khalid himself notes, Turkestan, of course, was the creation of Russian rule, but like so many other colonial entities, it had come to be meaningful as a node of identification p. – and this was particularly true for Turkestani Kazakhs such as Lapin or Tynyshpaev and Rysqulov, who did not want to give up their networks and power-base in the Turkestan ASSR, and above all did not want to give up Tashkent, which as Tomohiko Uyama has shown, they had long considered to be their political centre. In fact the Turkestani identity, whilst ultimately it lost out to Uzbekness and Tajikness, ought to be considered a serious alternative to both (and arguably one that would have had less poisonous modern consequences). Khalid does not ignore the Turkestani Kazakh communists, and indeed credits Rysqulov with being an important formulator of the anti-colonial ideology that would be so important to the Jadids in the early 1920s (pp.110 – 112), but he does not really consider the implications for his entirely Uzbek and Jadid-focused argument. For Making Uzbekistan to be a completely comprehensive account of how the Jadids and their particular national project triumphed in 1924 Khalid would have had to devote more attention to their opponents, to their victims, and to some of the roads not taken than he does here, as well as making a stronger case for the leverage their ideas had over party, state and society. However, understood as a collective biography of the Jadids and the first generation of Soviet Uzbek intellectuals, as an analysis of their writings, and as a contribution to the intellectual history of Central Asia and the Muslim World, it is a remarkable achievement. Khalid s close readings of Fitrat, Cholpon and other early Uzbek writers are always delicate and insightful, allowing historians like myself who do not share his linguistic abilities to get some sense of the richness and radicalism of their thought. His central argument – that the making of Uzbekistan came about through a temporary union between this group and the Soviet State, on the basis of ideas that were as much nationalist and anticolonial as they were communist – seems likely to stand the test of time. Alexander Morrison Nazarbayev University Journal of Islamic Studies (2017)