Allworth, Edward, ed. Central Asia: 130 Years of Russian Rule. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994, 3rd edition. Wide-ranging, if somewhat dated, collection of essays on topics from economics to literature.

Bregel, Yuri. An Historical Atlas of Central Asia.  Leiden: Brill, 2003. It’s expensive, but there’s no better collection of maps and historical text.

Buttino, Marco. “Politics in a Famine: Turkestan 1917–1921,” in Buttino, ed., In a Collapsing Empire: Underdevelopment, Ethnic Conflicts and Nationalisms in the Soviet Union (Milan: Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, 1993).

Edgar, Adrienne. Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.  A clear and fascinating study of Turkmenistan in the 1920s and 1930s.

Hirsch, Francine, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. Primarily about the work of ethnographers in the USSR as a whole, but includes detailed sections on the creation of Soviet Central Asia.

Kamp, Marianne. The New Woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, Modernity, and Unveiling under Communism. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2006. Uses oral histories to provide insiders’ views of women’s lives. Clear and accessible prose.

Keller, Shoshana. “Story, Time and Dependent Nationhood in the Uzbek History Curriculum,” Slavic Review Vol. 66, No. 2(Summer 2007): 257–277. Discusses the creation of a Soviet Uzbek historical narrative, focusing on the profound shift this caused in the Central Asian sense of historical time. For advanced students only.

Keller, S. “Going to School in Uzbekistan,” in Jeff Sahadeo and Russell Zanca, eds. Everyday Life in Central Asia. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007, pp. 248–265. Written for undergraduates, provides a brief historical survey of education throughout the Soviet period.

Keller, S. “Women, Gender and Women’s Education in Early Through Late Modern Central Asia,” Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures Vol. IV.  Leiden: Brill, 2006, pp. 291–296.

Keller, S. To Moscow, Not Mecca: The Soviet Campaign Against Islam in Central Asia, 1917-1941. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2001.

Khalid, Adeeb. Islam After Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Well-balanced study of the state of Islam in today’s Central Asia, based on local research instead of abstract political theory.

Khalid, A. The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Khalid, A. “Tashkent 1917: Revolutionary Politics in Muslim Turkestan,” Slavic Review Vol. 55, No. 2(1996): 270–296.

Martin, Terry. The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. A long study of the Soviet policy of “indigenization,” with sections on Turkestan. Very readable theoretical explanations.

Michaels, Paula. Curative Powers: Medicine and Empire in Stalin’s Central Asia. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003. The only study to examine public health in Kazakhstan.

Northrop, Douglas. Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. An overwhelmingly detailed look at the unveiling campaign.

Olcott, Martha Brill. The Kazakhs. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987. An accessible overview of Kazakh history, with a strong emphasis on the 19th and 20th centuries. No Kazakh-language sources used.

Slezkine, Yuri. “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review Vol. 53, No. 2. (Summer, 1994), pp. 414–452. Lively discussion of the development of Soviet nationality policy.

Sokol, Edward. The Revolt of 1916 in Russian Central Asia. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1954.  An early but still very useful book.