Backwardness and the Quest for Civilization: Early Soviet Central Asia in Comparative

Perspective
Author(s): Adeeb Khalid
Source: Slavic Review, Vol. 65, No. 2 (Summer, 2006), pp. 231-251
Published by: The American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies
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 FORUM

Backwardness and the Quest for Civilization:

Early Soviet Central Asia in Comparative Perspective

Adeeb Khalid

Empire has shown up in curious ways in the post-Soviet historiography

of Russia. Historians of tsarist Russia, a polity that actually called itself an
empire, have been quite suspicious of the analytical work of postcolonial
critique. Although some marvelously sophisticated works have appeared,
there remains a general wariness that such comparative perspectives may
dilute the historical specificity of the Russian case. In the words of one
scholar, such concepts "should be applied with caution, if at all, to the
Russian context." ' Scholars of the early Soviet period, on the other hand,
less constrained by the conventions or limitations of a long historio-
graphical tradition, have been more enthusiastic in their search for new
theoretical perspectives. This search for broader horizons has led them to
the shores of postcolonial discourse. The experience of a small number of
European overseas empires (the British, French, and Dutch) of the nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries has become the key to understand-
ing the nature of the transformation Central Asia experienced in the early
Soviet period. The case has been put forth most eloquently by Douglas
Northrop. "The USSR," he writes, "like its Tsarist predecessor, was a colo-
nial empire. Power in the Soviet Union was expressed across lines of hier-
archy and difference that created at least theoretically distinct centers

Various versions of this paper were presented at the annual meetings of the Middle East
Studies Association (San Francisco, 2001) and the American Association for the Advance-
ment of Slavic Studies (Toronto, 2003), as well as at seminars at the University of Califor-
nia at Santa Barbara and Princeton University. I would like to thank audiences at all these
venues for their probing questions; answering them has made this a better paper. I have
also benefited from the insightful comments of Sergei Abashin, Laura Adams, Peter Blit-
stein, Adrienne Edgar, Howard Eissenstat, Parna Sengupta, two anonymous referees for
Slavic Review, and Diane Koenker, its editor. The responsibility for the views expressed
here is, of course, mine alone.
1. Nathaniel Knight, "Grigor'evin Orenburg, 1851-1862: Russian Orientalism in the
Service of Empire?" Slavic Review 59, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 97. Knight is speaking specific-
ally of the critique of orientalism first presented by Edward Said, but to the extent that
Said's work underpins a great deal of postcolonial critique, Knight's suspicion extends to
the latter as well. Other recent treatments of tsarist rule over Central Asia find little use for
postcolonial literature in understanding the dynamics: see, for instance, Daniel Brower,
Turkestanand the Fate of the Russian Empire (London, 2003), or Robert Crews, '"Alliesin
God's Command: Muslim Communities and the State in Imperial Russia" (PhD diss.,
Princeton University, 1999). For an example of the sustained use of postcolonial literature
to study tsarist Central Asia, see Jeffery Frank Sahadeo, "Creating a Russian Colonial Com-
munity: City, Nation, and Empire in Tashkent, 1865-1923" (PhD diss., University of Illi-
nois at Urbana-Champaign, 2000).
SlavicReview65, no. 2 (Summer 2006)
232 Slavic Review

(metropoles) and peripheries (colonies). . . . [While] it may not have

been a classic overseas empire like that of the British or Dutch, the USSR
did have a somewhat comparable political, economic, and military struc-
ture; a parallel cultural agenda; and similarly liminal colonial elites."2
To the historian of Central Asia, this appears to be a world turned up-
side down. My own research on Central Asia across the revolutionary di-
vide leads me to opposite conclusions. I argue that while tsarist Central
Asia was indeed directly comparable to other colonies of modern Euro-
pean empires, early Soviet Central Asia cannot be understood as a case
of colonialism. In terms of both the scope and the nature of state action,
the Soviet remaking of Central Asia makes sense only as the work of a dif-
ferent kind of modern polity, the activist, interventionist, mobilizational
state that seeks to sculpt its citizenry in an ideal image. The differences be-
tween these colonial empires and modern mobilizational states are sub-
stantial and confusing the two leads to a fundamental misunderstanding
of modern history.3
Empires have been ubiquitous in human history, and they have varied
greatly in their nature. A truly universal definition, equally applicable to
all cases, is impossible to achieve,4 although there has been no shortage
of attempts to arrive at one.5 What the Soviet Union is compared to by
the "postcolonial school" of Soviet history, however, is a peculiar kind of
empire-the modern overseas colonial empires of Britain, France, and
the Netherlands in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Put very
crudely, these empires were based on the perpetuation of difference be-
tween rulers and the ruled, which foreclosed the possibility of the acqui-

2. Douglas T. Northrop, VeiledEmpire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (Ithaca,
2004), 22. While Northrop makes the colonial case most explicitly, a number of other
scholars have seen early Soviet Central Asia through the prism of postcolonial studies; see
Paula Michaels, Curative Powers: Medicine and Empire in Stalin's Central Asia (Pittsburgh,
2003); or Cassandra Cavanaugh, "Backwardnessand Biology: Medicine and Power in Rus-
sian and Soviet Central Asia, 1868-1934" (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2001).
3. One might also note parenthetically the curiosity that there has been little interest
in the economic relationship between Central Asia and the Soviet state, which is where the
colonial argument is the easiest to make. Soviet economic planning turned the whole re-
gion into a gigantic cotton plantation in order for the USSR to achieve "cotton indepen-
dence." The bulk of the cotton harvest was shipped to Russia, where it was processed, and
the finished goods were then sent back to Central Asia. No comprehensive study of the So-
viet cotton complex exists, but see J. Michael Thurman, "The 'Command-Administrative
System' in Cotton Farming in Uzbekistan 1920s to Present" (Papers on Inner Asia 32, Re-
search Institute for Inner Asian Studies, Bloomington, Indiana, 1999). Scholars who in-
voke postcolonial studies in the study of Central Asia have been much more interested in
the cultural work of Soviet power, a much sexier topic than the history of cotton.
4. Here I am entirely sympathetic to the misgivings aired by I. Gerasimov et al., 'V
poiskakh novoi imperskoi istorii," in I. Gerasimov et al., eds., Novaia imperskaiaistoriia
postsovetskogo prostranstva: Sbornik statei (Kazan, 2004), 24.
5. The work most often quoted in this regard is Michael W. Doyle, Empires (Ithaca,
1986). For definitions devised specifically to include the Soviet Union among empires, see
Ronald Grigor Suny, "The Empire Strikes Out: Imperial Russia, 'National' Identity, and
Theories of Empire," in Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin, eds., A Stateof Nations:Em-
pire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (New York, 2001), 25; and Alexander
J. Motyl, Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires (New York, 2001).
Early Soviet Central Asia in Comparative Perspective 233

sition of universal civilization by the native. Modern mobilizational states,

on the other hand, have tended to homogenize populations in order to
attain universal goals. Citizens of such states have borne enormous bur-
dens of responsibility and obligation and have experienced transforma-
tions more massive than anything wrought by colonial empires. Colonial
conquest transformed colonized societies, but colonial empires seldom
used state power to transform societies, cultures, or individuals in the way
attempted by the Soviet state. The British Raj in India, for instance, mapped
out the country's geography and its natural resources; its classificatory ap-
paratus reified caste and communal categories, and the economic rela-
tions it imposed vis-a-vis the metropole had a drastic effect on the lives of
all the inhabitants of India.6 Nevertheless, it did not aspire to the micro-
management of society, such as promising or enforcing universal educa-
tion; it preferred dealing with "martial races" to conscription; it left agrar-
ian power in the hands of notables rather than embarking on significant
land reform. The wholesale uprooting of local life in the name of bring-
ing the natives up to a universal standard, to force them to overcome their
own backwardness, to bring them into the orbit of politics-these were
not things colonial authorities concerned themselves with.7 Modern mo-
bilizational states have instead sought to cut through layers of intermedi-
aries and to deal directly with their citizens, and they have had no com-
punction about destroying traditions.
In what follows, I develop this argument by placing early Soviet Cen-
tral Asia in two different comparative perspectives. First, I compare it
with tsarist Central Asia, to show how Central Asia's relation to the center
changed across the revolutionary years of 1917-1920. Second, I compare
the transformations of the first two decades of Soviet rule to those that
took place in the same years in another nascent mobilizational state, the
Turkish Republic. The comparisons will, I hope, clarify the differences be-
tween two distinctive kinds of polity and lead to other fruitful questions:
Where does empire end and other forms of nonrepresentative or author-
itarian polity begin? When can empire fruitfully be used in thinking about
the forms of political inequality in the twentieth century? What are the
specificities of colonial difference?
6. Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Prince-
ton, 1999); Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chi-
cago, 2004); Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India
(Princeton, 2001); Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of
British India, 1765-1843 (Chicago, 1997).
7. This argument is also made by Peter Blitstein in this issue and by Yuri Slezkine,
"Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Socialism," Russian Review 59, no. 2 (April 2000):
227-34. Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and
WestAfrica, 1895-1930 (Stanford, 1997), describes how French ambitions of transforming
West Africans subsided when it was discovered that this would require more than the con-
struction of railways.Colonial authorities might have proscribed individual customs or tra-
ditions, but that seldom amounted to the intrusive state regulation we see in the mobi-
lizational states of the twentieth century. Perhaps the most celebrated case of such a
proscription in postcolonial literature is that of sati, the practice of cremating widows with
their deceased husbands among some groups in India; see Lata Mani, ContentiousTradi-
tions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley, 1998).
234 Slavic Review

The Politics of Comparison

The choice of comparative perspective is never an arbitrary decision, but
one fraught with all sorts of politics. The subjective dimension of the com-
parison, as Mark Beissinger has pointed out, is always significant.8 While
the Soviet Union existed, most foreign observers generally accepted its
claim to being a multiethnic state. The term Soviet empire was used exten-
sively, but usually to describe the Soviet Union's domination of eastern Eu-
rope (Mongolia was usually forgotten). Those who described the Soviet
Union itself as an empire tended to come from the political right or
were exiles from or advocates of various non-Russian nationalities.9 This
changed during the last years of the Soviet Union, when all sorts of oppo-
sition groups used the vocabulary of empire to discredit the existing or-
der, and in the years since the Soviet collapse, the use of a postcolonial cri-
tique of sorts has allowed new states in the post-Soviet space to distance
themselves from the Soviet past. The Republic of Turkey, on the other
hand, defined itself as the very opposite of the empire it succeeded, and
that self-definition has never seriously been questioned.
Nevertheless, the parallels between the Soviet and the Turkish cases
are striking. Both the Soviet and the Kemalist regimes originated from the
same phenomenon, the collapse of the European imperial order in the
flames of World War I. Both emerged in warfare that prolonged the dev-
astation of World War I and were profoundly marked by it. Both pursued
shock modernization programs that involved mass mobilization, nation
and state building, political centralization, as well as attempts at radical in-
terventions in the realms of society and culture, featuring state-led cam-
paigns for the "emancipation" of women, spreading literacy, the elabora-
tion of new literary languages, and secularization. Finally, both regimes
produced an official historiography that shared many elements: a glorious
foundational moment and a larger-than-life founding figure; leadership
by a group with clearly defined goals, to which the founders remained un-
waveringly loyal; and a clear break from the past, so that all connections
to the old regime were downplayed.
These two official historiographies located themselves in different
narratives-of class and nation-and were therefore quite hostile to
comparison with each other. The Soviet narrative has collapsed, but the
new historiographies that have replaced it in the former Soviet Union
have equally little interest in comparative study. The Kemalist narrative

8. MarkBeissinger,"Demiseof an Empire-State:Identity,Legitimacy,and the De-

construction of Soviet Politics," in Crawford Young, ed., The Rising Tide of CulturalPlural-
ism: TheNation-Stateat Bay? (Madison, 1993); Mark Beissinger, "The Persisting Ambiguity
of Empire," Post-SovietAffairs 11, no. 2 (April-June 1995): 149-84.
9. These two categories of observers were not mutually exclusive, of course, although
most of the scholarly literature was produced by the first group. See Sir Olaf Caroe, Soviet
Empire:The Turksof CentralAsia and Stalinism (London, 1954); Walter Kolarz, Russia and
Her Colonies(London, 1952); Helene Carrere d'Encausse, TheDecline of an Empire:The So-
viet SocialistRepublicsin Revolt, trans. Martin Sokolinsky and Henry A. La Farge (New York,
1979); and Robert Conquest, ed., TheLastEmpire:Nationalityand theSovietFuture(Stanford,
1986).
EarlySovietCentralAsia in ComparativePerspective 235

still reigns supreme in public life, monopolizing school textbooks and ur-
ban spaces alike, but it has come under sustained assault in academic dis-
course. As far as Soviet Central Asia is concerned, disciplinary divisions
further complicate the situation. Much of the work on Central Asia has
been generated in the field of Russian history, where the scholars who
have done admirable archival work remain largely oblivious to develop-
ments in Turkey. Scholars working on Turkey are seldom interested in
Soviet developments, and in any case, few have the linguistic skills to ap-
proach Soviet history with any degree of substance. The result is that par-
allel developments are seldom recognized as such.'0 In the literature, for
instance, secularization in Turkey is treated very differently from secular-
ization in Soviet Central Asia.
For the study of Central Asia, the Turkish case is pertinent for one
other important reason. Central Asian intellectuals were closely con-
nected to intellectual currents in late-Ottoman society. Some of them had
been educated in Istanbul, and many more saw the attempts by the Otto-
man state to reshape itself as models to be followed." The interconnec-
tions between Ottoman and Central Asian intellectual milieux are too
often glossed (and hence dismissed) simply as "pan-Islamism" or "pan-
Turkism." As I argue below, the transformation of cultural and national
identities in early Soviet Central Asia was not the work of the party-state
alone. Local cultural elites radicalized by the revolution played a signifi-
cant, if not alwaysdominant, role. The cultural history of early Soviet Cen-
tral Asia simply makes no sense without accounting for local discourses of
modernity that predated the revolution and that were intimately con-
nected to Ottoman ones. The Kemalists, in their turn, were also radical-
ized heirs to the same late-Ottoman debates.
One last point is worth making. In comparing the USSR to European
colonial empires, the new postcolonial literature does nothing to question
the Eurocentric framework within which Russian history has been under-
stood since at least the eighteenth century. The comparison to the na-
scent national state in Anatolia extends the horizons of Russian history
in a new direction. This is not a move to exoticize the Soviet Union, to de-
clare it "non-European," but rather to see with greater clarity the ideo-
logical work of "Europe," "civilization," and "modernity" in twentieth-
century history. "Europe," we find, still casts a long shadow over our
subject, but it is now the object of our actors' desire rather than an un-
problematic actor in its own right.

Turkestan as a Russian Colony

Partha Chatterjee has argued that one hallmark of a modern colonial re-
gime of power is the rule of colonial difference, whereby "natives" are ex-
10. For an attempt to see the two transformationsin comparativeperspective,see
Carter V Findley, The Turksin WorldHistory (New York, 2005).
11. I have emphasized the interconnections between intellectual currents in the two
empires in much of my work to date; see also A. Holly Shissler, BetweenTwoEmpires:Ahmet
Agaoglu and theNew Turkey(London, 2003), and Volker Adam, RuJ3landmuslime in Istanbul
am VorabenddesErstenWeltkrieges(Frankfurt am Main, 2002).
236 Slavic Review

empted from the universalist claims of the ruling order. 2 Difference built
on essentialized categories of civilization, religion, or race structures the
political and social landscape of the colonial order so that the gap be-
tween the colonizer and the colonized cannot be bridged. The rule of
colonial difference also subverts self-proclaimed civilizing missions, for
natives cannot, in the end, achieve the civilization that legitimizes the em-
pire in its own eyes. Natives, as colonial subjects, can never become mod-
ern and acquire universal human attributes.,3
Colonial difference operated in Central Asia in a way it did nowhere
else in the Russian empire. The region was conquered very much in the
context of imperial competition with other European powers at a time
when imperial rule over "uncivilized" peoples was clearly seen as a hall-
mark of civilization. Turkestan was ruled under its own statute, with the
governor-general answerable only to the tsar. The region was under the
jurisdiction of the ministry of war, rather than internal affairs. The indig-
enous population was not incorporated into empirewide systems of social
classification; rather, the "natives" were left simply as inorodtsy, although
locally the term tuzemtsy (natives) was used to describe them. As inorodtsy,
the indigenous population was not subject to conscription. The Russian
presence itself was thin and Russian administrators remained wary of this
fact to the end. In general, the social and political distance between the
rulers and the ruled remained greater than anywhere else in the empire,
with the possible exception of Siberia and the north (where the indige-
nous population was much smaller and did not pose a demographic
threat to Russian dominance).
The Russian conquest changed a great deal in the lives of Central
Asians. They were incorporated into the broader imperial economy and
made subject to new regimes of power. But the Russian state had neither
the desire nor the capability to assimilate the indigenous population or
bring about radical cultural change. In Central Asia, many administrative
practices modeled on the colonial experience of other empires were put
into effect that tended to maintain-and heighten-colonial difference.
The protectorates of Bukhara and Khiva (a political status new to the Rus-
sian empire and modeled directly on the princely states of India) were left
with internal autonomy, which tended to have a traditionalizing influ-
ence.'4 In Turkestan, on the other hand, a two-tier system of administra-

12. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories
(Princeton, 1993), 16-27.
13. In different contexts, different colonial regimes held out the possibility that indi-
vidual natives (the ?volues in French West Africa or British colonial subjects resident in
Britain, for example) could come to be considered full "citizens,"but this possibility was
never opened up to natives as a group. In the British case, race came to be a significant
marker distinguishing colonial subjects from one another. See Radhika Viyas Mongia,
"Race, Nationality, Mobility: A History of the Passport," Public Culture11 (1999): 527-56.
Colonies of settlement eventually acquired self-government (dominion status) well before
decolonization swept the rest of the empire.
14. Seymour Becker, Russia's Protectorates in Central Asia: Bukhara and Khiva, 1865-
1924 (Cambridge, Mass., 1968). On the traditionalizing impact of Russian rule in Bukhara,
see Adeeb Khalid, "Society and Politics in Bukhara, 1868-1920," CentralAsian Survey 19,
nos. 3-4 (2000): 367-96.
Early Soviet Central Asia in Comparative Perspective 237

tion took shape, in which the lowest level of administration continued to

be staffed by local functionaries who worked in local languages. Judicial
affairs too remained largely in local hands. Among the settled population,
every county and every city neighborhood elected, indirectly, a judge
(qazi). The jurisdiction of the qazis was strictly defined by law: they could
sentence people to arrest for up to eighteen months or assess a fine of
up to 300 rubles, but they were not competent to hear cases involving doc-
uments written in Russian or cases involving non-Muslims, and their de-
cisions were subject to review by Russian circuit courts. Among the no-
madic population, native justice was provided by the biy, a tribal elder
who adjudicated according to customary law (adat), rather than "Islamic
law" (shariat). Needless to say, these administrative practices crystallized
the distinction between adat and shariat, just as they subtly altered the
status of qazi and biy. But the point is that the state recognized the na-
tive population as different and institutionalized that difference in legal
practice.15
The state was primarily concerned with the maintenance of law and
order, which would allow economic life to progress. Daniel Brower has
highlighted the continual debate between enlightened bureaucrats, who
sought to integrate Turkestan and its inhabitants into the empire on gen-
eral principles of rule, and mainly military personnel who emphasized the
region's peculiarities and argued for its exemption from empirewide in-
stitutions. The former argued for the extension of Russian grazhdanstven-
nost', civic spirit or civil order, into the region, which would make the na-
tive population into ordinary subjects of the empire and result in its
rapprochement (sblizhenie) to the Russians. The latter based their case on
the innate "fanaticism" of the natives and pleaded for the maintenance of
regulations specific to the region. The arguments for maintaining speci-
ficity (that is, colonial difference) won out, but even those who argued for
integrating Turkestan into the general structures of the empire had no
wish to intervene forcefully in local social or cultural life. 1

Social Revolution and the Conquest of Difference

This colonial difference was destroyed by the February revolution. The
Provisional Government declared all subjects of the Russian empire to be
free and equal citizens, regardless of sex, religion, or ethnicity, and gave
them all an equal right to vote. But it was the Bolsheviks, with their re-
lentlessly universalist project of social revolution, who set out to reinte-
grate Central Asia into the Russian state on a new basis.
Central Asia was important to the Bolsheviks both as a source for cot-
ton and as the gateway to "the East," where it was fated to ignite the colo-
nial revolution that would undermine the rule of the bourgeoisie in Eu-
rope and usher in the revolution that had failed to materialize in the
immediate aftermath of the October revolution. But ultimately, social rev-

15. Adeeb Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia
(Berkeley, 1998), chap. 2.
16. Brower, Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire.
238 Slavic Review

olution required no justification, for it led to a higher stage in the evolu-

tionary path that all humanity was destined to tread. The ends of Soviet
rule-the building of socialism and the achievement of a classless
utopia-were common to all Soviet citizens. Still, to the extent that the
Bolsheviks took the existence of ethnic ("national") difference as a given,
they also ended up facing the question of the relationship between the
universal and the national. What will different national groups look like
when they arrive at their final destination? Eventually, the answer was de-
ceptively simple: all groups will remain national in form but will acquire a
universal socialist content. Certain cultural features would remain, but
the future that beckoned humanity was universal. In the name of this uni-
versalism, the Soviet project aimed at the conquest of difference.
The national form would not remain unchanged in this process of so-
cial revolution. Curiously for devoted materialists, the Bolsheviks con-
strued backwardness in cultural as much as economic terms. Iosif Stalin,
writing in 1919 as people's commissar for nationalities affairs, thought the
most important tasks of Soviet power in "the East" were "to raise the cul-
tural level of [its] backward peoples, to build a broad system of schools
and educational institutions, and to conduct ... Soviet agitation, oral and
printed, in the language that is native to and understood by the sur-
rounding laboring population."'7 Much about the national cultural form
had to be transformed if backwardness were to be overcome. As Terry
Martin has shown, "backwardness" turned into an official category and
brought with it both stigma and possible rewards.'8 The achievement of
progress would usher in many specifically European cultural forms.
Uzbek peasants would eat with a knife and fork sitting at the table, wear
European clothing, and adopt "civilized" norms of social intercourse. The
Soviet project was one of cultural revolution.'I'
The agent of this revolution was to be the Soviet party-state, which
took upon itself the task of ushering humanity to its final destination.
Armed with a vision of the plasticity of human culture and, indeed, of hu-
man nature, the party-state was able and willing to use methods of mobi-
lization and coercion that its tsarist predecessor could scarcely have imag-
ined. In 1909, the governor-general, P. I. Mishchenko, had fantasized of

17. I. V. Stalin, "Nashi zadachi na Vostoke," Pravda, 2 March 1919.

18. Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet
Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca, 2001), 126-32.
19. Following the usage coined by Sheila Fitzpatrick, the Anglophone historiography
of the USSR uses the term cultural revolutionfor a very specific campaign by the party to
seize control of cultural and scientific institutions between 1929 and 1932. See Sheila Fitz-
patrick, "CulturalRevolution as Class War,"in Sheila Fitzpatrick, ed., CulturalRevolutionin
Russia, 1928-1931 (Bloomington, 1978), 8-40. Soviet leaders used the term in a much
more expansive sense; without invoking this broader understanding of the term, it is im-
possible to understand developments of the early Soviet period. See Michael David-Fox,
"What Is Cultural Revolution?" Russian Review 58, no. 2 (April 1999): 181-201; Michael
David-Fox, Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks (Ithaca, 1997);
Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union
(Ithaca, 2005), chap. 5. This sense of cultural revolution was superbly captured by Rene
Fiilop-Miller, The Mind and Face of Bolshevism: An Examination of Cultural Life in Soviet Rus-
sia, trans. F. S. Flint and D. F. Tait (London, 1927).
Early Soviet Central Asia in Comparative Perspective 239

a network of schools that would "train the natives so that they would con-
sider themselves Russian citizens from their earliest years, give them in-
formation about Russian history, geography, etc., [as well as] create for
them economic conditions that would lead them to prosperity-and
taken as a whole, would bring home to the natives the necessity and bene-
fit of Russian dominion [and] make them equal Russian citizens."20 For
the Soviets, such goals were hopelessly modest. They sought nothing less
than the remaking of human nature.
The Bolshevik commitment to conquer difference also resonated with
local elites eager to transform their society in a modernist vein. Although
this was a complex group, for the sake of brevity I will refer to them sim-
ply as the Jadids. They had arisen as a self-conscious group espousing re-
form in the two decades before the collapse of the old order. Their reform
agenda was elaborated in the context of Muslim modernism and had
nothing to do with Marx or Marxism.21 The nation had to achieve
progress in order to survive and take its place in the world with dignity.22
The Jadid project, like most nationalisms, saw the problem as a dialec-
tic between modernity and authenticity: the nation had to be made
more modern and more authentic at the same time. This replicated
many orientalist conceits embedded in the colonial order, but it also sub-
verted them by claiming for the native the ability to achieve progress and
civilization.
Before 1917, theJadids had argued their case through exhorting their
compatriots to action. The February revolution opened up vast new pos-
sibilities for theJadids, but in the mobilizational politics of 1917, they dis-
covered that they could not convert their enthusiasm for change into po-
litical influence or votes.2' The nation, it turned out, did not care for their
vision of change. The result was not a retreat into moderation, but further
radicalization. The Russian revolution and the broader geopolitical trans-
formation of the world further convinced them of the futility of exhorta-
tion and gradualism as modalities of change. "Many among us," Abdurauf
Fitrat (1886-1938), a leading Jadid figure, wrote in 1920, "say, 'Rapid
change in methods of education, in language and orthography, or in the
position of women, is against public opinion [afkori umumiya] and creates
discord among Muslims.... We need to enter into [such reforms] gradu-

20. Governor-GeneralP. I. Mishchenko to Minister of War,4 March 1909, Tsen-

tral'nyigosudarstvennyiarkhivRespublikiUzbekistan,f. 1-2,op. 2, d. 369, 1.7ob. This "top
secret"memorandumis largelya meditationon the thinnessof Russianrule in Turkestan,
and this flight of fancyaside,is full of the usualcomplaintsabout the lack of financialand
personnel resourcesthat preventedRussianrule being establishedon firmerfooting.
21. Khalid, Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform.
22. The "nation"(millat) had alwaysbeen a central feature ofJadid thought, although
the way the Jadids imagined their nation was in flux until 1917, when an ethnic under-
standing of it rapidly displaced all others. After that, Jadidism became primarily a nation-
alist project. See Adeeb Khalid, "Nationalizing the Revolution: The Transformation of
Jadidism, 1917-1920," in Suny and Martin, eds., A Stateof Nations, 156-59.
23. For detailed accounts of the conflicts of 1917, see Khalid, Politics of Muslim Cul-
tural Reform,chap. 8; R. Eisener, "Bukharav 1917 godu," Vostok,1994, no. 4:131-44 and
no. 5:75-92; V L. Genis, "Bor'bavokrug reform v Bukhare: 1917 god," Voprosy istorii, 2001,
no. 11-12:18-37.
240 Slavic Review

ally.' [The problem is that] the thing called 'public opinion' does not ex-
ist among us. We have a general majority ["umum" ko 'pchilik], but it has no
opinion. ... There is not a thought, not a word that emerges from these
people's own minds. The thoughts that our majority has today are not its
own, but are only the thoughts of some imam or oxund [Sufi master].
[Given all this,] no good can come from gradualness."24
They came to be fascinated by the idea of the revolutionary transfor-
mation of society, although they saw revolution in national, not class
terms.25 They flocked into the new organs of power and threw their ener-
gies into a number of projects of cultural transformation. The nation had
to be dragged into the modern world, kicking and screaming if need be.
Change had to be radical, sudden, and imposed; and it was to be, above
all, a revolution of the mind. The masthead of the journal in which Fitrat
wrote carried the slogan, "No change can take hold until the mind is
changed" (Miya o 'zgarmaguncha boshqa o'zgarishlar negiz tutmas).
The enthusiasm of the revolution created a new surge of activity
among the Jadids, in which they opened many new schools and estab-
lished courses to train teachers to staff them. This continued all through
the difficult years of the civil war, and into the 1920s, with quite a bit of the
funding coming from soviets in the "old" cities. Local intellectuals also
poured their energies into the creation of a self-consciously modern and
"revolutionary" native culture. The theater exploded with activity, and
new poetry and journalism came into existence."2 This in turn gave new
urgency to questions of the reform of the written language, to bring it
closer to everyday speech, and of orthography. These are both questions
generic to a vast array of nationalist movements in central Europe, the
Middle East, and in the Russian empire and had long been on the agenda
of Central Asian Jadids. But it was in this period that they emerged with
particular clarity. The written language had been in flux for the previous
two decades, but now the process of reform began in earnest, as authors
coined new words and usages with the twin goals of making the language
more national and more modern. Although it was to go through a num-
ber of twists and turns over the next two decades, the process created
new written languages for Kyrgyz, Turkmen, and Karakalpak and codified
Uzbek and Tajik as modern languages.27 Language reform also involved
a reform of orthography, which became a major preoccupation of the
Jadids in the early 1920s. It too was discussed in terms of nation and prog-
ress. The young poet Botu (1904-1938) made the connection between
modernity and orthographic reform most vividly. At the first conference
called to discuss the issue, he took the fringe position of supporting Latin-

24. [Abdurauf] Fitrat, "'Tadrij'gaqorshu," Tong,no. 3 (15 May 1920): 78-80.

25. I have made this point at greater length in Khalid, "Nationalizing the Revolution,"
153-56.
26. A serious study of early Soviet theater remains to be undertaken. The clearest
evidence of the burst of energy in the realm of theater lies in the newspapers of the time.
27. William Fierman, Language Planning and National Development: The Uzbek Experi-
ence (Berlin, 1991); B. S. Asimova, Iazykovoe stroitel'stvo v Tadzhikistane, 1920-1940 gg.
(Dushanbe, 1982).
Early Soviet Central Asia in Comparative Perspective 241

ization. "The backwardness of a nation is the backwardness of its script,"

he argued. "If you are going to the railway station [presumably, to catch
the train of progress], you get there faster by car than on foot. The [Latin]
script speeds up progress in the same way."28 By 1927, Latinization was no
longer a fringe position, but an imminent possibility. The drive for Latin-
ization throughout the Soviet Union was spearheaded by Azeri intellectu-
als, who managed to channel the Soviet state's concerns about overcom-
ing backwardness into the question of orthographic reform. In 1928, all
Central Asian languages switched to the Latin script.2'9
The Jadids also took on the question of the place of women in society.
Since before the revolution, the Jadids had argued for changing the posi-
tion of women in local society. Using arguments from the Islamic tradition
itself, they had argued that the progress of Islam and the nation required
that women be educated and that they take an active part in public life.
After the revolution, the Jadids emerged as major proponents of chang-
ing women's position in Muslim society. Their main concerns were educa-
tion, child marriage, polygyny, and, increasingly, unveiling."' In all of this,
the Jadids were part of an uneasy collaboration with the Soviet regime. It
was the structures created by the new regime (state-funded schools, a
print sphere immune to market forces, new organs of political authority)
that had set both the limits and possibilities of Jadid activity in the early
1920s. But the Soviet regime had its own goals that had to be achieved
through a massive mobilization of the population. It spent a great deal
of energy on political education, sending out teams armed with posters,
newspapers, film, and theater, to propagate the new political message.
The population had to be mobilized by the new institutions, but it also
had to be taught new ways of thinking about politics. A network of Red
Teahouses, Red Yurts, and Red Corners sprang up at many points in the
region. These served as outlets for propaganda and showpieces for the
new order the Bolsheviks hoped to establish. The Soviets also created lo-
cal cadres who would be more ideologically reliable and trustworthy, and
whose vision of change would be less contaminated by prerevolutionary
notions of change. Ultimately, it was this class that displaced the Jadids
from public life and all too often consigned them to death during the
Terror.31

28. 1921yilyonvoridabo'lganbirinchio'lkao'zbek
tilva imloqurultoyining
chiqorgan
gqaror-
lari (Tashkent,1922), 22-23.
29. On Latinizationin the USSR,see IngeborgBaldauf,Schriftreform und Schriftwech-
sel bei den muslimischen Russland- und Sowjettiirken (1850-1937): Ein Symptom ideengeschicht-
licher und kulturpolitischer Entwicklungen (Budapest, 1993); Martin, Affirmative Action Empire,
chap. 5; Michael G. Smith, Language and Power in the Creation of the USSR, 1917-1953
(Berlin, 1998), chap. 6; Adrienne Edgar, Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan
(Princeton, 2004), 139-43.
30. On Central Asian debates over the position of women, see Marianne R. Kamp, The
New Woman in Central Asia: Islam, the Soviet Project, and the Unveiling of Uzbek Women (Seattle,
forthcoming).
31. This and the following four paragraphs represent, in very condensed form, the
first results of an ongoing research project on the transformation of Central Asia in the
242 Slavic Review

By 1926, the party-state felt secure enough in its power in the region
to transform the tempo of change and to launch an all-out assault on tra-
ditional society. The Jadids now came to be derided as "old intellectuals"
whose time was past. The parting of the ways came at the first Uzbek con-
ference of workers in the fields of culture and education in January 1926,
when Akmal Ikramov (1898-1938), the first secretary of the Communist
Party of Uzbekistan, denounced the Jadids as mouthpieces of the local
bourgeoisie, which, now that the party-state had taken Central Asia di-
rectly from feudalism to socialism, had become reactionary and had cast
its lot with English imperialism.32 No mercy could be shown such coun-
terrevolutionary agents of English imperialism, and theJadids were prised
out of their jobs and, over the next several years, arrested or executed.
The assault on traditional society was ferocious and destructive. It be-
gan with a "struggle against the old-style school," which began to be shut
down, first in the Tashkent region, where their number was smaller, and
then in the rest of the republic. The same fate befell the madrasas, insti-
tutions of higher Islamic learning, soon after. Their number had already
shrunk, driven partly by the economic crisis and partly by the hostile po-
litical environment. Now, in 1927, they too were systematically shut down
and their property confiscated. Qazi courts were similarly quickly sup-
pressed, and property belonging to religious endowments (waqf) was na-
tionalized. Along with schools and courts went the mosques. A few
mosques had been closed earlier in the decade and their buildings given
over to "socially useful" purposes, but the years between 1927 and 1929
saw a sustained campaign of closures and destruction directed against
them. The same fate awaited the ulama, religious scholars who were the
carriers of the learned tradition of Islam. They had long been reviled both
for being relics of a superstitious past that had now been superseded and
for being class enemies of the revolution and the oppressors of the toiling
masses. But by the time the antireligious campaign slowed down in 1932,
thousands of ulama had been arrested and sent off to atone for the sins of
their social origin in forced labor camps; many died or were killed; others
"fell silent." With old-method schools and madrasas closed, waqf property
confiscated and redistributed, and qazi courts abolished, the patterns
through which Islam had been transmitted in Central Asia were largely
destroyed.33
It was this path that led the party to the hujum, the outright assault on
the paranji, the heavy cotton robe that came down to the ankles, and the
chachvon, a veil of woven horsehair that completely covered the face, and
which together constituted the dress of modest women among the seden-
tary populations of the region. For both theJadids and the Bolsheviks, the
earlySovietperiod. I havecited existingliterature,but otherwisemade no attemptat com-
prehensivecitationof all archivalsources.
32. The text of Ikramov'sspeech can be found in Rossiiskiigosudarstvennyiarkhiv
sotsial'no-politicheskoi istorii, f. 62, op. 2, d. 734, 11.47-55.
33. See, in general, Shoshana Keller, To Moscow, not Mecca: The Soviet Campaign against
Islam in CentralAsia,1917-1941 (Westport, Conn., 2001). As Keller points out, many of the
relevant archives are still closed to researchers, and much still remains to be learned about
these campaigns.
Early Soviet Central Asia in Comparative Perspective 243

paranji-chachvon was a hazard to women's health, in addition to being

both the symbol and the means of their oppression and degradation. Dur-
ing the early 1920s, there were cases of women abandoning the veil and
appearing in public places (including the theater), but most women who
worked, and even those engaged in political work, continued to wear
the paranji and chachvon. The party established a women's section (the
Zhenotdel), which attracted numerous indigenous women, largely from
marginalized sections of society-girls who had run away from home,
women who had abandoned abusive husbands, and so on-but the re-
sults were meager.34 On 8 March 1927, international women's day and the
tenth anniversary of the beginning of the Russian revolution, the Zhenot-
del organized a series of mass meetings in which thousands of women cast
off their veils and, in many cases, burned them. The story of the hujum,
the violent reactions against women and the state that it provoked, and
its abandonment in the face of short-term failure has been ably told by
Douglas Northrop, who sees in it a clear case of colonialism.35 Yet, as
Adrienne Edgar points out, the hujum had little in common with the
practice of British or French colonial empires in the Muslim world. Al-
though the condemnation of Muslim gender norms played a central role
in the legitimation of the imperial order, the colonial rulers showed little
interest in wholesale transformation of those norms or of the social and
legal order in which they existed.
The hujum was the culmination of a decade-long effort to transform
society in which both the Soviets and the Jadids had participated.": To my
mind, the fact that the hujum failed to achieve its goals in the short term
(which it did) is less important than the fact that the campaign took place
at all. It was an indication of new kinds of power being deployed for the
bold aim of remaking society. The same aim underlay the next campaign
visited upon Central Asia, that of collectivization. We still need to learn a
great deal about collectivization, but there is no question that by 1938 the
economy of the region, and the lives and livelihoods of its inhabitants,
had been utterly transformed; and unlike the hujum, there could also be
no question that the campaign was successful in its aims.37

The Turkish Mirror

Parallels for the kind of transformation attempted by the Soviet state in
Central Asia are not to be found in the annals of European overseas em-

34. Kamp, New Woman in Central Asia, chaps. 6-8.

35. Northrop, VeiledEmpire.
36. Here I differ from Gregory Massell, The Surrogate Proletariat: Moslem Women and
Revolutionary Strategies in Soviet Central Asia, 1919-1929 (Princeton, 1974), and Northrop,
VeiledEmpire,who both see the hujum as the beginning of serious intervention in society.
37. The impact of collectivization on Central Asia has attracted surprisingly little at-
tention. On Uzbekistan, see Rustambek Shamsutdinov, O'zbekistonda sovetlarning quloqlash-
tirish siyosati va uningfojeali oqibatlari (Tashkent, 2001); Rustambek Shamsutdinov, Qishlog
fojeasi:Jamoalashtirish, quloqlashtirish, surgun (Tashkent, 2003); on Kazakhstan, Niccol6 Pi-
anciola, "Famine in the Steppe: The Collectivization of Agriculture and the Kazak Herds-
men, 1928-1934," Cahiersdu monderusse 45, no. 1-2 (2004): 137-92.
244 Slavic Review

pires. In the aftermath of World War II, Britain and France both gave pri-
ority to "colonial development" but this proved to be a brief phase, before
the expense involved made decolonization look much the better option.38
Interwar Japanese imperialism in Manchuria, underwritten by the rheto-
ric of a common cause against the global status quo (here, racial solidar-
ity and anticolonialism) and featuring considerable investment and the
modernization of infrastructure, represents a closer parallel.39 But the le-
gal fiction that bestowed sovereignty upon Manchuria makes this case
more relevant to the USSR's eastern European satellites after World War II
than to Central Asia, which remained an integral part of the Soviet state.
On the other hand, twentieth-century history is replete with cases of
states, equipped with modern means of mobilization and coercion, lead-
ing their populations on a forced march to progress and development.
The common good could only be achieved through the actions of the
state. The Kemalist revolution in Turkey was also a state-led cultural revo-
lution that reshaped the contours of local culture and identity quite as
thoroughly as in Central Asia. The Kemalist regime emerged out of the
mass mobilization of the population of Anatolia in the course of the "War
of Liberation," the military struggle to undo the terms of the Armistice.
Military mobilization created new structures of power, while military suc-
cess created an enormous storehouse of legitimacy for the new regime,
which it used over the next two decades to transform the country.40
The war was ostensibly fought to "liberate" the sultan from the captiv-
ity of the victorious forces, but no sooner had Anatolian forces taken Is-
tanbul than they abolished the Ottoman dynasty and replaced it with the
republic. The first transformations came in the political realm, as the
new regime moved to curtail the influence of Islam and its carriers from
the political realm. There was no outright assault on Islam, as happened
in the Soviet Union; instead, the state opted for laicism, the subjugation of
religion to the state. The new Turkish republic made all Islamic religious
activity subject to the supervision of a directorate of religious affairs,
whose task it was to regulate religious observance and education through-
out the country. Imams thus became government functionaries and
mosques came under the control of the state. The state acted against
other religious institutions, first banning Sufi lodges (tekke) in eastern
Anatolia in the aftermath of a Kurdish rebellion, then extending the ban
to the whole country, and outlawing religious garb from all places except
mosques. A new, uniform civil code, patterned on that of Switzerland, was

38. Frederick Cooper, "Modernizing Colonialism and the Limits of Empire," in Craig
Calhoun, Frederick Cooper, and Kevin W. Moore, eds., Lessons ofEmpire: Imperial Histories
and American Power (New York, 2006).
39. Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern
(Lanham, Md., 2003).
40. The reforms described in this and the following paragraph are treated in a num-
ber of excellent surveys. Bernard Lewis, TheEmergenceof Modern Turkey(London, 1961),
still retains its importance and has been reissued several times. See also Erik J. Zflrcher,
Turkey: A Modern History, rev. ed. (London, 2004), and Hugh Poulton, Top Hat, Grey Wolf
and Crescent: Turkish Nationalism and the Turkish Republic (New York, 1997).
Early Soviet Central Asia in Comparative Perspective 245

introduced in 1926 to replace the existing welter of civil legislation that

had allowed members of different religious communities to live under the
civil law of their particular community. For Muslims, this had the effect of
abolishing the authority of the shariat over civil matters. Law courts that
functioned on the basis of the shariat were simply abolished and replaced
by state courts. Islam was to be nationalized: In 1933, the state decreed
that the call to prayer was to be in Turkish, and the Qur'an was translated
into Turkish for the first time. The common era calendar was adopted in
1925, and Sunday became the weekly holiday in 1934. Atatfirk's positivist
views of science (a product of his late-Ottoman upbringing) led him to in-
veigh against "primitive" folk practices, such as shrine visits (and, ulti-
mately, all religion), which, he thought, would have no place in the en-
lightened future. The Kemalist project always saw its foil as "religious
reaction" (dine irtica), and the forced secularization of national culture
continues to be the most tangible legacy of the Kemalist era.
The Kemalist regime also dealt with the dialectic between the modern
and the national, but it solved the problem with ruthless efficiency. Its
thinking came directly from late-Ottoman debates and was couched in
terms of "civilization," which Ottoman intellectuals had long used without
quotation marks. "Civilization," Atatiurk once noted during the campaign
to introduce the hat as mandatory headgear for men, "is a fearful fire
which consumes those who ignore it."41 The nation had to be led to civi-
lization, whether it liked it or not. As the nation came to be defined eth-
nically, the regime evoked the pre-Islamic past as the true repository of
authentic national values and saw the rejection of the Ottoman and Is-
lamic heritage as a "return" to the original values of the nation. As Deniz
Kandiyoti has noted, "The 'modern' was thus often justified as the more
'authentic' and discontinuity presented as continuity."42 It was Islam and
the Ottoman past that had intervened to distance the Turkish nation from
its authentic place in Europe. The republic now charged itself with undo-
ing the work of history and bringing the Turkish nation back to its right-
ful place.
This meant distancing the nation from Islam and the Ottoman past.
The usual nationalist concerns with language and orthography appeared
center stage on the state's agenda. The simplification of the written lan-
guage to bring it closer to everyday speech had been debated since at least
the 1870s, and partially achieved by the end of the old regime. Language
had also increasingly become entangled with questions of national au-
thenticity and progress.43 With the establishment of the republic, the

41. AndrewMango,Atatiirk(Woodstock,N.Y.,2000), 434.

42. Deniz Kandiyoti, "Identityand Its Discontents: Women and the Nation," in
PatrickWilliamsand LauraChrisman,eds., ColonialDiscourseand Post-Colonial
Theory:A
Reader(NewYork,1994), 379.
43. Ag^h Slrri Levend, TiirkDilinde Geliymeve SadelesmeEvreleri, 2d ed. (Ankara, 1960).
On the press of the late-Ottoman period, see Elizabeth Brown Frierson, "Unimagined
Communities: State, Press, and Gender in the Hamidian Era" (PhD diss., Princeton Uni-
versity, 1996); and Palmira Brummett, Image and Imperialism in the Ottoman Revolutionary
Press, 1908-1911 (Albany, 2000).
246 Slavic Review

question came to the fore. All through the 1920s, a sustained process of
change led to the purging of vocabulary and grammatical borrowings
from Arabic and Persian and to the creation of new terms. In the early
1930s, under the auspices of the quasi-official Turkish Language Society,
this process was taken to new extremes with the creation of pure Turkish
(Oztiirkfe) derived only from Turkic sources. Turkish was "Turkicized"
with the expulsion of words of alien origin and their replacement with ne-
ologisms coined from "authentic" Turkic sources. Although the excesses
of Oztfirk-e receded fairly quickly, the language reform succeeded not
only in bringing the written language closer to the spoken version but in
transforming both, so that the Turkish spoken today bears little resem-
blance to what it was on the eve of the republic.44
The debate over orthography also appeared in the public with new ur-
gency in the early republic. Critics charged that the Arabic script was in-
adequate for representing Turkish sounds and thus an obstacle to prog-
ress. There were many defenders of the old script, to be sure, including
the great Turkish-Jewish scholar Avram Galante, who pointed to Japan to
argue that orthography was not the sole reason for lack of progress or il-
literacy.45 But such cosmopolitan arguments stood little chance against
the passions of the spokesmen for the nation, who pushed through a new
Latin alphabet in record time in 1928, a few months after the Latinization
of Turkic languages was accomplished in the Soviet Union.46
Education and political mobilization occupied a central spot in the
Kemalist agenda. Education was the great hope for the future of the state
and the nation, and some considerable effort went into establishing a net-
work of (secular) elementary schools. All education was brought under
state supervision; religious schools were abolished, religious teaching re-
moved from the curriculum, and higher theological education was placed
under state authority. But the state went beyond that, to take on the mis-
sion of "training the people" (halk terbiyesi), which meant, among other
things, "the cultivation of the spirit in such a way that the thinking, feel-
ings, and desires of individuals will fully coincide with national ideals."47
In 1931, the state took over the existing Turkish Hearths (Turk Ocaklari),
which had been established during the Young Turk period as nationalist
clubs, turned them into People's Houses (Halkevleri), and charged them
with spreading political education and raising the cultural level of the
masses. The People's Houses were self-consciously modeled on national-
ist political education institutions of contemporary central Europe, but as

44. Geoffrey Lewis, Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success (Oxford, 1999).
45. Avram Galanti, Arabi Harfleri Terakkimize Mani Degildir (Istanbul, 1927). For ac-
counts of the debates in the early republic on the question of orthography, see Lewis, Turk-
ish Language Reform; Rekin Ertem, Elifbe'den Alfabe'ye: Tiirkiye'de Harf ve YazzMeselesi (Istan-
bul, 1991), 179-213, and Bilil N. Simsir, Tiurk YazzDevrimi(Ankara, 1992), 66-83.
46. The actual compilation of the Latin alphabet and its implementation took all of
three months in 1928 under the personal attention of Mustafa Kemal. Typically, the law
ushering in Latinization (Tilrk Harflerinin Kabulu ve Tatbiki HakkmndaKanun) spoke of
the adoption of "Turkish,"not Latin letters. The modern was by definition national.
47. Quoted by Sibel Bozdogan, Modernism and Nation-Building: Turkish Architectural
Culture in the Early Republic (Seattle, 2001), 94.
Early Soviet Central Asia in Comparative Perspective 247

David Hoffmann reminds us, such civilizing missions were commonplace

in interwar Europe.48
The activities of People's Houses included teaching peasants a cap-
pella singing, organizing "Western" style (alafranga) balls, and introduc-
ing the masses to classical music, theater, and sport. "Raising the Turkish
people to the level of contemporary civilization" was a major Kemalist
goal, and "Western" forms of culturedness and sociability were crucial to
the mission of the republic. One of the first reforms was the Hat Law of
1925, which abolished the fez (which Mahmud II had adopted a century
earlier as a modernizing gesture) and made the wearing of the brimmed
hat mandatory for men. For Kemal, this was essential to the cultural re-
orientation he desired. "Gentlemen," he told his party two years later, "it
was necessary to abolish the fez, which sat on our heads as a sign of igno-
rance, of fanaticism, of hatred to progress and civilisation, and to adopt in
its place the hat, the customary headdress of the whole civilised world."49
The same set of concerns put the question of women at the center of
the Kemalist project. This too was a debate that predated the establish-
ment of the regime, but which the Kemalist regime solved in a radical way.
The state's ideal of a modern woman was one who was unveiled and clad
in "Western" dress. The veil was never outlawed, but it was turned into a
sign of backwardness in ways that are starkly reminiscent of the Soviet de-
nunciation of the paranji. "The veil: this black robe of death," wrote Ali
Ridvan, a medical doctor, in 1935. "This black cloth which blocks all the
healthy rays of the sun and transmits only its heat is the enemy of health.
Its color and its unaesthetic shape are additional offenses to the sight.
When you add to all of these the face veil, which reminds one of the tor-
tures of the Inquisition, the creature suffering inside this elected prison
has to be the object less of our pity than our anger."'51 The new civil code
established that only civil weddings would be recognized as legal, banned
polygyny, established minimum ages for marriage for both men and
women, gave women the right to civil divorce, ended the Islamic freedom
of unilateral divorce for men, and equalized inheritance for sons and
daughters. Women's enfranchisement began with the right to vote in lo-
cal elections in 1930 and was made complete with the right to vote for and
be elected to the Grand National Assembly in 1934. This came along with
new modes of propriety, new notions of beauty (the first Turkish beauty
pageant took place in 1929),"' and new constructions of marriage (com-
panionate) and family (nuclear).52

48. David L. Hoffmann, Stalinist Values:The CulturalNorms of SovietModernity,1917-

1941 (Ithaca, 2003).
49. Mustafa Kemal, A SpeechDelivered by Ghazi Mustapha Kemal (Leipzig, 1929),
721-22.
50. Quoted by Bozdogan, Modernismand Nation-Building, 84.
51. A. Holly Shissler, "BeautyIs Nothing to Be Ashamed Of: Beauty Contests as Tools
of Women's Liberation in Early Republican Turkey,"ComparativeStudiesof SouthAsia, Africa
and theMiddleEast 24, no. 1 (2004): 107-22.
52. Alan Duben and Cem Behar, Istanbul Households:Marriage, Family, and Fertility,
1880-1940 (Cambridge, Eng., 1991), esp. chap. 7. The ambiguous legacy of Kemalist re-
forms for women has provoked a massive literature in recent years. For a useful overview,
248 Slavic Review

States and Revolutions

The Kemalist revolution has its roots in the transformations of the "lon-
gest century of the empire," the tortured history of Ottoman reform from
Kiudik Kaynarca on.53 Kemalism was a radicalized version of this project,
from which it differs primarily in the force and scope of the state's inter-
vention in society.54 The reforms of the 1920s and the 1930s were carried
out against the will of the majority of the people and involved substantial
amounts of violence. The agents of this change, which overturned exist-
ing patterns of life for millions of people, were radicalized political elites
wielding the power of the state as it had not been wielded before.
The focus on the state and its use by radicalized elites helps us ques-
tion the essential difference usually posited between the Central Asian
and Turkish cases: that the transformation of Anatolia was the work of
Turks, reshaping "their own" nation in the name of nationalism, while
Central Asia was reshaped by "foreign, outside" Bolsheviks motivated by
an internationalist ideology. But surely this belies a hopelessly naive view
of the Turkish nation, at the same time as it ignores the role the nation
played in the Soviet project.
To put it bluntly, the Turkish Republic created the Turkish nation.
Identity discourses among the Muslim population of the late-Ottoman
empire were in a state of flux. Even at the level of the intellectual elites,
the various discourses of solidarity-civic, ethnic, and confessional-
were intertwined. Moreover, the population of Anatolia was heteroge-
neous, with no great overlap between religion and language: Muslims

see Jenny White, "State Feminism, Modernization, and the Turkish Republican Woman,"
NWSAjournal 15, no. 3 (2003): 145-59. See also Deniz Kandiyoti, "Emancipated but Un-
liberated? Reflections on the Turkish Case," eminist Studies 13, no. 2 (1987): 317-38;
Ye?im Arat, "The Project of Modernity and Women in Turkey," in Sibel Bozdogan and
Regat Kasaba, eds., Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey (Seattle, 1997), 95-
112; and Zehra F. Arat, ed., Deconstructing Images of "The Turkish Woman" (London, 1998).
53. Ilber Ortayh, Imparatorlugin En En Uzun Yiizyilz(Istanbul, 1983). Throughout the
nineteenth century, the Ottoman state elites sought to centralize and modernize in order
to strengthen the state and to ward off its disintegration. The state intruded ever more
forcefully into the lives of its subjects as it sought to turn them into a citizenry that would
be easier to mobilize, organize, and govern. The Ottoman state faced many obstacles in
pursuing its goals, although much recent scholarship has emphasized the extent to which
this project succeeded, especially during the absolutist rule of Abdfilhamid II (1878-
1908). See in particular, Selim Deringil, The Well-ProtectedDomains: Ideology and the Legiti-
mation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876-1909 (London, 1998). In many ways, the Ot-
toman centralization appears similar to the Soviet project, but there are crucial differences
even apart from those of scope and thoroughness. The Ottoman state came to reinvent it-
self as a modern colonial empire, thus producing a new imaginary for classifying its sub-
jects and new forms of difference among them. See Ussama Makdisi, "Ottoman Oriental-
ism,"AmericanHistoricalReview 107, no. 3 (2002): 768-96; and Selim Deringil, "'They Live
in a State of Nomadism and Savagery': The Late Ottoman Empire and the Post-Colonial
Debate," Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, no. 2 (2003): 311-42.
54. Official Kemalist historiography posits a complete break from the Ottoman past,
but recent scholarship has pointed to continuities with increasing insistence. For a variety
of approaches, see Zfircher, Turkey; Michael Meeker, A Nation ofEmpire: The Ottoman Roots
of Turkish Modernity (Berkeley, 2002); and Taner Akgam, From Empire to Republic: Turkish Na-
tionalism and the Armenian Genocide (London, 2004)
Early Soviet Central Asia in Comparative Perspective 249

lived alongside Armenian and Orthodox Christians and Turkish, Kurdish,

Arabic, Greek, and Armenian were all spoken. The peninsula had also re-
ceived vast numbers of Muslim refugees of all ethnic backgrounds from
parts of the empire lost to Russia or to newly independent states in the
Balkans.55 Erik Jan Zurcher has shown how ethnic Turkish nationalism
was virtually absent from the political rhetoric of the Turkish "war of lib-
eration." Its political goals were defined on behalf of a community defined
in terms of millet ("nation," but lacking any explicit ethnic connotation),
din (faith), and vatan (homeland) -essentially a territorially circum-
scribed Muslim political nation.56 It was only after the Kemalists had con-
solidated power that they used the newfound powers of the state to re-
make society and identities and to turn the porous, multivalent identities
of Anatolia into a homogenous Turkish nation. The political needs of the
new state demanded that all particularistic claims-whether of ethnicity
or religion-be denied. In Atatfirk's words, "the people of Turkey, who
have established the Turkish state, are called the Turkish nation.""57The
Turkish nation, however, was to be defined in ethnic terms. Especially in
the 1930s, the Kemalist regime sponsored the elaboration of a new ethnic
Turkish identity, complete with an official history and myths of origin.58
This was accompanied by conscious policies of ethnic homogenization,
through squeezing out non-Muslims (through discrimination or outright
expulsion) and forcibly assimilating non-Turkish-speaking Muslims. The
resettlement of refugees and immigrants from former Ottoman lands, as
well as the relocation of the republic's own population through a process
of "internal colonization" (if kolonizasyonu) served to Turkify the popula-
tion.5" The primary victims of this process were, of course, the Kurds, who
discovered that they were really "mountain Turks," but in some ways the
disappearance of Bosnians, Albanians, Lazes, and Circassians into the
common Turkishness of Anatolia is even more telling.
The state also had a role in defining and crystallizing national identi-
ties in the Soviet Union as well. Yuri Slezkine has gone so far as to charac-
terize the 1920s as a period of "chronic ethnophilia" in the Soviet Union,
in which all manner of groups (even many that did not fit the official defi-

55. Kemal H. Karpat, Ottoman Population, 1830-1914 (Madison, 1985); Justin

McCarthy, Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821-1922 (Princeton,
1995), provides a highly charged polemical account that nevertheless contains useful cor-
rectives to the received wisdom on the Ottoman retreat from Europe.
56. Erik Jan Zfircher, "The Vocabulary of Muslim Nationalism," InternationalJournal
of the Sociologyof Language, no. 137 (1999): 81-92; see also Adeeb Khalid, "Ottoman 'Is-
lamism' between the Ummet and the Nation," ArchivumOttomanicum19 (2001): 197-211.
57. Quoted by Soner (agaptay, "Craftingthe Turkish Nation: Kemalism and Turkish
Nationalism in the 1930s" (PhD diss., Yale University, 2003), 21-22, who provides an ex-
cellent discussion of the ethnicization of Turkish identity under Kemalism.
58. Biigra Ersanhl-Behar, lktidar ve Tarih: Tiirkiye'de "Resmi Tarih" Tezinin Olugumu
(1929-1937) (Istanbul, 1992); Etienne Copeaux, Espaces et temps de la nation turque: Analyse
d'une historiographie nationaliste, 1931-1993 (Paris, 1997).
59. (agaptay, "Craftingthe Turkish Nation," chaps. 5-6; see also Howard Eissenstat,
"Metaphors of Race and Discourse of Nation: State Nationalism in the First Decades of the
Turkish Republic," in Paul Spickard, ed., Race and Nation: Ethnic Systems in the Modern World
(London, 2005), 239-56.
250 Slavic Review

nition of nationality) received state recognition and support for the de-
velopment of "national" cultures.60 Catering to nations was seen in part as
a prophylactic measure to prevent the use of nationalism for opposition
to socialism,61 but it very quickly came to be seen as a necessary step in the
historical evolution of backward peoples, a step through which the Bol-
sheviks were obliged to help backward nations. As Mahmud Tumailov, a
communist official, wrote in 1927, "The Turkmen now find themselves in
the period of formation into a single nation [out of a profusion of tribes]
and this task, namely the task of turning them into a nation, has fallen to
the lot of the Communist Party."62 If the state plays such an active role
in creating national identities, can ethnic difference be made to bear the
primary burden of differentiating colonial empires from other kinds of
states?
Nor did the Soviet state's assertion of power fall neatly along ethnic
lines. The Soviet civilizing mission was not underpinned by the racial or
ethnic superiority of any one group, and Russians themselves had to be
transformed and modernized.63 Russian peasants, after all, also had their
way of life and their culture transformed, their religion assaulted, and
their modes of social intercourse civilized. The transformation of Central
Asia therefore cannot be read as an encounter between "Soviet" outsiders
and an authentic, indigenous population, or even simply between "state"
and "society." Central Asian societies in these years were riven with all sorts
of cleavages, and many groups found in the new state power suitable ways
of bringing about the change they sought to achieve in their society.
Moreover, the state actively intervened in society and created new cadres
that helped carry out its work. It is crucially important to remember that
the victim of the cultural revolution of the 1920s in Central Asia was not
this "people" or that "ethnic group," this social group or that, but tradi-
tional ways of life that both the Jadids and the Bolsheviks were hell-bent
on destroying. The fact that such indigenous agents of change were small
in number is of little consequence, compared to the enormity of the trans-
formation they wrought. Those who seek to revolutionize society are
scarcely its most typical representatives, nor are they ever the majority.
Both the Soviet and the Kemalist states sought to transform culture
and to reshape their citizenries in the light of ideas of history and civi-
lization. Both had, in other words, a civilizing mission. Does that alone put

60. Yuri Slezkine, "The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State
Promoted Ethnic Particularism,"Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 414-52.
61. This point has been made, with minor differences of emphasis, by a number of
authors: Slezkine, "The USSR as a Communal Apartment"; Ronald Grigor Suny, The Re-
vengeof thePast:Nationalism,Revolution,and the Collapseof theSovietUnion (Stanford, 1993);
Martin, AffirmativeActionEmpire;and Hirsch, Empireof Nations.
62. Quoted in Adrienne Edgar, "Nationality Policy and National Identity: The Turk-
men Soviet Socialist Republic, 1924-1929,"Journal of CentralAsianStudies1, no. 2 (1997): 2.
63. Hirsch, Empireof Nations, chap. 6. Even when, after the mid-1930s, Russians be-
came the elder brothers of all other "fraternal Soviet peoples," and thus the recipients of
saccharine praise for their role in leading all Soviet peoples to socialism and beyond, their
primacy was rooted, not in any innate racial or ethnic supremacy, but rather in the fact of
their having progressed further along the evolutionary path than all others in the union.
Early Soviet Central Asia in Comparative Perspective 251

them in the company of colonial empires? Colonial empires professed

such missions, but they seldom applied them to populations en masse.
The rule of colonial difference ensured that civilization was accessible to
only a select few colonial subjects, while the majority of the population re-
mained beyond the orbit of politics. Both the Soviet and the Kemalist
states had at their disposal the baggage, common to modern European
thought, of evolution, of backwardness and progress, of ethnic classifica-
tion of peoples, and, indeed, of orientalism. But it matters a great deal
whether that baggage is deployed to exclude people from politics or to
force their entry into it, whether it is used to assert inequalities or to
preach world revolution.
And if the profession of a civilizing mission turns the Soviet state into
a colonial empire, then surely so it does the Kemalist state. What is then
left of the utility of the label "colonial"? Is all exercise of power in the
modern world a case of "colonialism"? One does not have to subscribe to
the entire liberatory message of nationalist movements of the twentieth
century to find this proposition absurd. Anticolonial nationalisms, with
their hope of claiming for the colonized what the colonizer denied them,
defined the twentieth century for the vast majority of the planet's popula-
tion. The Soviet Union served for many as a source of inspiration, if not a
model. To turn them all into varieties of colonialism is not just to misun-
derstand the passions that defined the twentieth century; it is an ideolog-
ical move to foreclose all possibility of change in a universalist vein, be-
yond the confines of "tradition."
Comparability is not the same as identity, and to find parallels between
the Soviet and the Kemalist cases is not to equate them. The Kemalist pro-
ject was more pragmatic than the Bolshevik, and its ambitions to remake
society were likewise more circumscribed. The violence and terror that ac-
companied it were mild compared to the Stalinist Terror. Although the
Kemalist project transformed the legal and cultural parameters of society,
it left the economy largely untouched. State leadership of the economy
(devletfilik) was not the same as the abolition of private property in the So-
viet Union, and no substantial land reform took place during Atatiirk's
lifetime. Nevertheless, both projects dealt with the dialectic of the na-
tional and the universal and answered it in ways that were not dissimilar.
And they were both the result of the brutal exercise of state power over cit-
izens. Colonial rule was coercive and brutal, but surely that coerciveness
and brutality was far surpassed by the modern mobilizational states of the
twentieth century. The Soviet and Kemalist cases serve to remind us of
the central role states have played in shaping and reshaping life and cul-
ture in the twentieth century; they also serve to put colonial empire in its
place.