Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History

A conspicuous feature of Central Eurasian studies is that this region is a contact zone between Russian and Oriental (especially Islamic) studies. During the [End Page 332] Soviet period, however, it was largely divided into modern studies dominated by a small number of Russianists and Sovietologists, on the one hand, and premodern history studied by Orientologists, on the other. Some scholars, most notably Alexandre Bennigsen and Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, studied subjects related to Islam in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, but even they had to rely mainly upon Russian and Turkish sources, using only some Tatar and other local works to which they had limited access.² An exception was Edward Allworth, who studied literary and intellectual history using Uzbek sources quite extensively.³ In Japan, two scholars trained in Turkish and Islamic history, Yamauchi Masayuki and Komatsu Hisao, pioneered the study of modern Muslim Central Eurasia: Yamauchi, like Bennigsen, wrote about Mirsaid Sultangaliev, while Komatsu initiated the research on Jadidism based on Persian and Turkic sources.⁴ It is important to note that after Mano Eiji and other specialists in medieval history criticized the older generations for their overreliance on Chinese sources in the 1970s, it became a motto for Japanese historians to study Central Asia “from within,” using local sources.⁵ Komatsu put this principle directly into practice in his study of Jadidism.

Ethnic problems during perestroika and the emergence of independent states in Central Asia and the Caucasus after the fall of the Soviet Union greatly attracted the attention of Western and Japanese scholars and students. A new generation of researchers emerged, benefiting from the opportunities to conduct research in (former) Soviet Central Eurasia, something that had been almost impossible before. At the same time, in the first half of the 1990s, a number of specialists in Russian and Middle Eastern studies wrote about contemporary Central Eurasia, often without sufficient knowledge of this region. Their collaboration with a small number of Central Eurasian specialists was superficial. Some Middle Eastern specialists even called Central Asia a “new Middle East,” as if Muslim identity could integrate the two regions without reference to their totally different experiences of modernity for more than a century. [End Page 333]

The situation changed essentially in the mid-1990s. In an institutional respect, Central Eurasian specialists, irrespective of being first trained in Russian or Oriental studies, united to establish an independent field of study. In the West, in addition to the European Society for Central Asian Studies (ESCAS) established in 1985, an annual Workshop on Central Asian Studies began to be held at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1996; this was transformed into the Central Eurasian Studies Society (CESS) in 2000. In Japan, various institutions began to carry out research projects on Central Asia or Central Eurasia, and among others the Central Asia Research Network at the University of Tokyo, within the framework of the Islamic Area Studies Project (1997–2002), served as a nationwide research hub. Later, in 2004, the Japan Association for Central Asian Studies was established.

In terms of the contents of research, interactions between Russian and Oriental/Islamic studies produced especially innovative results in studies of the Russian Empire. The collective volume Russia’s Orient, published in 1997, was truly epoch-making.⁶ While the primary methodological aim of the volume was to introduce the approaches of colonial studies and cultural anthropology into the research of the Russian Empire, the authors of the chapters, analyzing “inherently unequal” (xvii) encounters between colonizers and colonized, eventually deconstructed the fixed schema of binary relations between oppressors and oppressed (a “prison of nations” model) in two ways. First, they found an enormous diversity among the empire’s peoples, including the Russians who occasionally “went native”; and second, they discovered multifaceted attitudes of colonized peoples to the empire, ranging from resistance to accommodation. Significantly enough, it was scholars versed in Oriental language sources (Adeeb Khalid, Jo-Ann Gross, Edward Lazzerini), not apologists of Russian imperialism, who revealed that Central Eurasian intellectuals often referred to Russia in a positive light as a way of reinforcing their modernist ideas or criticisms of the old local regimes. A year later, Khalid published his monograph, where he convincingly argued that Jadidism in Turkestan was a product of the habitus and cultural capital that were transformed under Russian rule.⁷ I myself analyzed the worldview of Kazakh intellectuals at the crossroads of nomadic, Islamic, and Russian cultures, emphasizing that the deployment of Russian (European) culture for their own modernization and development represented a far more important [End Page 334] task for them than resistance.⁸ Later, Komatsu, closely examining texts written by Islamic (traditional and modernist) intellectuals, revealed that they used the concept of Dār al-Islām (the land of Islam) both to legitimize Russian rule and to pursue a Muslim autonomy in Turkestan.⁹

The “archival revolution”—the extensive use of materials from the archives of former Soviet countries that became accessible beginning in the 1990s—once again demonstrated the crucial importance of Russian sources in Central Eurasian studies and enabled scholars not only to study governmental policy in detail but also to explore interactions between state and society through local institutions. Robert Crews, Naganawa Norihiro, and others successfully carried out research in this direction, combining Russian and Tatar sources.¹⁰ It should be noted, however, that their view on close interactions between state and society in the Volga–Ural region through such institutions as the Muslim Spiritual Assembly, zemstvos, and military conscription is not directly applicable to other regions, especially Central Asia, where these institutions were absent. Nevertheless, as Paolo Sartori and others (including myself) have demonstrated, Central Asian Muslims also actively appropriated imperial institutions (such as petitions) and discourses for their own ends.¹¹

Another challenging orientation that binds Russian and Oriental studies is the examination of transborder themes. Japanese historians—who have a strong tradition of studying Chinese, Manchu, and Mongolian sources—try to combine them with Russian, Turkic, and Persian sources to analyze Russo-Qing relations in Central Asia, as demonstrated by Noda Jin’s works.¹² Research on religion and politics across the southwestern borders of the [End Page 335] Russian Empire, although not necessarily based on non-Russian sources, has revealed the complexity of both imperial power projection beyond borders and the interactions with foreign subjects who share faiths with subjects of the Russian Empire (Naganawa on Muslim pilgrims and Paul Werth on the Armenian Church).¹³ The entangled history of the borderlands (especially the Caucasus) between the Russian and the Ottoman empires, involving interethnic and interstate clashes, has likewise become a hot topic of study recently.¹⁴

Overall, research on the history of Central Eurasia has contributed to elucidating the nature of the Russian Empire in much more complex and nuanced ways than some 20 years ago. It has revealed symbiotic and uneven relations between the center and periphery mixing paternalism, noninterference, and mutual distrust; strengths and weaknesses in Russian rule, reflecting the cultural attractiveness of Russia as a window to Europe, its recourse to military might, and its shaky grasp of local situations; the varied interests and strategies of local people in cooperating with and resisting imperial power, which often derived from power relations inside local societies; and transborder dynamics of imperial power that involved, among other things, military strategy and religious ties.

In the historical study of the Soviet Union, it is more difficult for Central Eurasian specialists to make a specific contribution because of the more standardized character of state (and party) institutions and the lack of freedom of speech, which made local language sources less relevant than in the tsarist period. Still, as Arne Haugen, Adrienne Lynn Edgar, Marianne Kamp, Chida Tetsuro, and others have elucidated, the agency of local actors was crucial in national-territorial delimitation, the construction of national republics, women’s emancipation, developmental projects, and so on.¹⁵ This [End Page 336] research complements the innovative but still heavily Moscow-centered views on the Soviet Union as an empire, such as Terry Martin’s thesis on the “affirmative action empire.” Ali İğmen, Timur Dadabaev, and others, drawing on oral history interviews, have described how Central Asians internalized Soviet values and norms while preserving or redefining their own culture and social relations; thus these authors demonstrate a resilience of Soviet values that spread across ethnic boundaries, whether they were initially imposed by force or voluntarily accepted.¹⁶ The relationship between Soviet and local cultures represented a fusion rather than symbiosis, and this seems to be a reason why Soviet nostalgia is even now strong not only in Russia but also in Central Asia: pride in the Soviet Union as a superpower and the sense of stability under Brezhnev were ingrained in the mind of a significant part of Central Asians and did not disappear with the end of the USSR.

Oral history is methodologically closely related to another discipline highly influential in Central Eurasian studies: cultural and social anthropology. The interests of anthropologists in Central Eurasia are too diverse to be summarized briefly, but it is remarkable that some of them have seriously tackled the question of what was/is Soviet and post-Soviet society, even as social scientists and historians tended to avoid it in reaction to a discredited Sovietology. This is because they had to confront a society that was modern yet dissimilar to both Western and Third-World societies. It still has Soviet-style institutions, practices, and concepts (especially in regards to ethnicity) or has been seriously affected by their disruption. To name only Japanese authors, Yoshida Setsuko, Fujimoto Toko, and Kikuta Haruka have studied the functions and transformations of kin networks after the demise of kolkhozes and sovkhozes in Kyrgyzstan, the significance of the experience of socialism in the post-Soviet Islamic revival in Kazakhstan, and the enduring influence of Soviet-style modernization on Muslim artisans in Uzbekistan, respectively.¹⁷ [End Page 337] They thereby provide critical insights into what Sovietness actually was and how it permeated into culturally diverse societies, setting initial conditions of the transformation of post-Soviet society and providing both positive and negative frames of reference for social behaviors, with significant regional variations.

Anthropological approaches have also proven useful in political and economic research. As far back as the 1990s, researchers became aware that social networks, which in Soviet times were used to gain privileged access to goods and services, became adapted to the need of raising lump sums of cash in an increasingly monetized economy.¹⁸ The importance of social networks for elite politics in authoritarian regimes should not be exaggerated in a simplistic manner, as the large literature on “clan politics” did without firm evidence, but it is nonetheless true that networks, together with money, do play a crucial role in mobilizing groups and individuals for political change, as was witnessed during the two “revolutions” in Kyrgyzstan.¹⁹ Research on these subjects can be useful for comparison with informal practices in the Russian economy and politics, as studied by Alena Ledeneva, Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, and others. I hope that further systematic comparative research will reveal in-depth correlations between formal and informal, all-union and regional practices, enabling us to understand the Soviet and post-Soviet orders in a more dynamic manner.

At this point, let us consider how Central Eurasian studies can be useful to comparative studies beyond the post-Soviet space. It is almost an axiom that area studies require comparison, because one can perceive characteristics of a region or a country only in relation to others. It is also a matter of common sense that comparison needs theoretical, disciplinary approaches, but here scholars encounter certain difficulties. Most theories in the social sciences are based on the experiences of developed countries, and they are therefore not always readily applicable to former socialist or Third World countries. Statistical analyses, so popular in the contemporary social sciences, are especially problematic in relation to undemocratic or underdeveloped [End Page 338] countries, because these countries often lack credible statistics, both currently and historically.

Therefore, comparative area studies require a combination of theoretical and empirical approaches, such as examining the applicability of findings in the research of one region to another, and jointly evaluating hypotheses based on data from various regions, including nonstatistical data. For such joint research, it is crucial for every member to learn about regions outside his/her specialty, because a gathering of scholars specializing in one region each can produce a situation of the “blind men and the elephant.” In this regard, specialists in so-called marginal or peripheral regions have advantages: specialists in East European studies usually know Western Europe better than West European specialists know Eastern Europe. Likewise, specialists in Central Eurasian studies usually know Russia better than Russianists know Central Eurasia.

We can also observe that specialists on regions with time-honored value systems, intellectual traditions, and dominant non-European languages, such as Chinese and Arabic, have relative difficulties in finding a common language with specialists on other regions. In this regard, Russian and Central Eurasian specialists, accustomed to refer to studies of other regions, may offer a more suitable space for bringing them together. It is for this reason that the Slavic–Eurasian Research Center at Hokkaido University has been taking the initiative in comparative area studies in recent years, carrying out such big projects as “Comparative Research on Major Regional Powers in Eurasia” (http://src-h.slav.hokudai.ac.jp/rp, 2008–13) and “Reshaping Japan’s Border Studies” (http://src-h.slav.hokudai.ac.jp/BorderStudies, 2009–14). The regional powers project was especially remarkable in terms of gathering specialists on Chinese, Indian, Turkish, Japanese, and former Soviet studies and in covering international relations, politics, the economy, history, society, and culture. I myself headed a research group on comparative imperial history.

The most striking thing I noticed in organizing the group was the extent to which historians of various empires have adopted similar approaches in their analyses. Many of us were eager to revise imperial history, distancing ourselves both from justifications of colonial rule and from treating empires merely as “prisons of nations.” We were likewise inclined to study lively interactions between imperial power and society, transborder projections of power, and the flows of ideas and people. Here I would like to mention four aspects of comparative imperial history that proved most interesting, ones to which historians of Central Eurasia have contributed or can contribute. [End Page 339]

First, as mentioned earlier, historians of the Russian Empire, especially its Muslim regions, have been studying varied attitudes among local people toward imperial rule, ranging from resistance to cooperation, and this viewpoint proved quite similar to Ronald Robinson’s theory of “collaboration” in the British Empire.²⁰ Historians of Russia did not know Robinson’s theory when they embarked on their study in the 1990s and the early 2000s, but their reading of Muslim intellectuals’ writings and Russian archival documents made them much more attentive to local circumstances, where imperial power heavily depended on local notables, intermediaries, religious institutions, and on the level of trust or distrust between colonizers and colonized, thus leading to a convergence of approaches in the study of the Russian and British empires.

Second, the history of Muslim Central Eurasia can profitably be placed in the framework of the history of interimperial relations. I myself am currently reexamining the history of the Great Game and have found that the maneuvering of small polities (the Kazakh Khanate, Ya‘qub Beg’s emirate, Shughnan) between empires sometimes played a significant role in the empires’ expansion or retreat. Still, in the final analysis, empires were interested in maintaining the international order of the great powers, and were usually prepared to abandon local collaborators in order to secure this aim. Naganawa’s research on the Hajj reveals that the Russian Empire found itself compelled to protect pilgrims despite the empire’s rhetoric of anti-pan-Islamism, because it competed with European empires for prestige in the eyes of Muslims.²¹ It simply could not afford to ignore or repress this important institution of Muslim religious life. With varied nuances, research of this kind testifies to the existence of a “competitive coexistence” of empires, a thesis presented by Yamamuro Shin’ichi, a prominent historian of the Japanese Empire.²²

Third, the distinction between land and maritime empires has to be reconsidered. On the one hand, we should avoid exaggerating this distinction in regard to the cultural distance between the center and the periphery and the interaction between imperial power and local society. Studies of Russian Central Asia and British India (e.g., by Alexander Morrison) in fact [End Page 340] show a number of similarities.²³ On the other hand, the collapse of land empires tends to be more painful than that of maritime empires, with the difficulty in delimiting the boundaries of new polities evoking irredentism, as demonstrated by Russia’s recent intervention in Ukraine and Hungary’s constant politicization of its relations with co-ethnics abroad.

Fourth, we have increasingly become aware that the comparative history of modern empires must include non-European empires. It is only natural to compare the Japanese or the Ottoman empires with their European counterparts in view of their close interactions, but I would like to emphasize the importance of including China.²⁴ The Chinese conquest of eastern Turkestan occurred roughly simultaneously with the Russian expansion into the Kazakh steppe, and the comparison of Russian and Chinese rule of Central Asia is an interesting and unexplored field of study. The fact that whereas the former Russian/Soviet Central Asia became independent in 1991, eastern Turkestan and Tibet remain within China cannot be simply explained by the difference in local nationalism. Independence movements in eastern Turkestan and Tibet in the 20th century were generally stronger than those in Soviet Central Asia. It seems that the strengthening of Chinese consciousness of statehood in reaction to the threat of encroachment by Japan and the West until the mid-20th century, the “lessons” China learned from the fall of the Soviet Union, and the lack of deep cultural interaction between the Chinese and Inner Asian peoples have all resulted in China’s insistence on keeping the unitary state by force, making for a stark contrast in the destinies of people on the two sides of the former Sino-Soviet border. I believe that Central Asian studies can contribute to elucidating the character of China as a modern empire and its comparison with the Soviet empire.

Thus Central Eurasian studies can boast a number of achievements and are full of potential, but if they still face the risk of marginalization, what measures can we devise to prevent such marginalization? Here I do not discuss the problems of recruiting young researchers and finding employment for them, as these are dependent on many circumstances beyond the competence of scholars. But I would like to write about two aspects of a larger research [End Page 341] strategy: one is how to increase the visibility of Central Eurasian studies to the larger research community, and the other addresses agendas for further research.

First, we have to—and are entitled to—demonstrate confidently that Central Eurasian studies is essential for understanding the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, which must be clear from what I have already written. Moreover, our knowledge and experience are useful for analyzing events and phenomena in other regions of the post-Soviet space and beyond, not least because there have been various cases of conflicts, failed democratization, and international political crises in our region. For example, having witnessed a backlash against democratization in Central Asia and other post-Soviet countries, we could easily predict that the euphoria of the Arab Spring would not last long. When the Kremlin declared illegitimate the Ukrainian government set up by the parliament after the 2014 revolution, we recalled right away that Moscow had been the first to express support for the provisional government of Kyrgyzstan that had established itself in an extraordinary way (by disbanding the parliament) after the 2010 revolution. The latter case shows clearly that the “illegitimacy” of the government in Ukraine, as a matter of principle, was not the prime motivation for Moscow’s intervention.

Second, while Central Eurasian studies have been successful in the past 20 years, it is time to consider further research agendas. Many of the path-breaking works with innovative approaches were published from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, and much scholarly energy in the last several years has been focused on the elaboration of more details based on primary sources. Especially in the history of the tsarist period, the research agenda set by Russia’s Orient—the elucidation of symbiotic interactions between imperial power and colonized society—has not basically changed, although there have been differences among researchers who see these interactions as harmonious (even based on the rule of law) and those who underline disharmony.²⁵

What new approaches should be encouraged? On the one hand, as political and intellectual history has been given considerable weight in the study of modern Central Eurasian history, it is time to pay more attention to other areas of study such as economic, legal, and social history—as do [End Page 342] Sartori, Beatrice Penati, Shioya Akifumi, Ekaterina Pravilova, and others.²⁶ This direction is absolutely necessary for the balanced development of Central Eurasian studies and the diversification of issues for comparative research, although researchers of these subjects sometimes get lost in details rather than working out theoretically new approaches.²⁷

On the other hand, we have to think about further research agendas in relation to Russian/Soviet/post-Soviet studies as a whole, and in this respect, the recent Russo-Ukrainian conflict and its repercussions in the post-Soviet space give us an opportunity to reconsider historical and contemporary issues in a new light. The research trend to emphasize harmonious interactions in the Russian Empire emerged in the 1990s, when many people expected contemporary Russia to become a “normal country” with difficult but more or less tolerant interethnic relations. The “affirmative action empire” and other theses on rational aspects of the Soviet Union appeared when people came to see it as an interesting “different culture” of the past. But after 20 years, Russia’s domestic policy and external behavior have diverged more and more from those of developed countries, while Soviet nostalgia is not disappearing, making it difficult to treat the USSR as a beautiful but dead past.

I do not advocate at all returning to the “prison of nations” model and the binary schema of oppressors and oppressed, seeing Russia and the Soviet Union as an “abnormal country,” projecting the aggressive image of the recent Russian behavior on the past. The research achievements of the past 20 years have been great, but maybe we have over-rationalized Russia and the Soviet Union a bit and overemphasized the harmonious power relationships there? After all, like that of other empires, the history of Russia and the Soviet Union is abundant in wars, conquests, violence, discrimination, and economic and social disasters. In a few years, we will observe anniversaries of a number of [End Page 343] tragic and dramatic events: the 150th anniversary of the conquest of Tashkent, the 100th anniversaries of the revolt of 1916 in Central Asia, the February and October revolutions with the subsequent Russian Civil War, the 80th anniversary of the Great Terror, and the 30th anniversary of the beginning of perestroika and the December events in Almaty.²⁸ I believe that by studying these and other topics, specialists on Central Eurasia and other former Soviet “peripheries” can play a key role in further innovation of the study of Russia and the Soviet Union as an empire, because, as Ronald Robinson has put it, a central mechanism of imperialism is located in colonies and peripheries.²⁹ [End Page 344]