Creating Soviet Central Asians
The Soviets proudly told the world about their constructive efforts to liberate the Central Asian peoples and help them “flower,” in the jargon of the 1920s. They built schools and trained teachers, wrote textbooks, defined separate languages, alphabets, and histories for each nation, created distinct “folk” music and dance traditions, and promoted national literatures and opera in the Western mold. Many of the people who did the real groundwork on these projects were Turkestanis who welcomed the chance to develop and modernize their societies even if they did not always accept communist ideology. The creation of Central Asian cultural institutions, however artificial, was not a matter of Russians imposing their will on resentful and helpless natives.
Summary
Soviet rule destroyed and re-built the political order of Central Asia, and much of the social order as well. The common experience of Marxism-Leninism gave a new basis of unity to Central Asians: Russian is still the lingua franca of the university-educated, and people from Astana to Termez shared cultural phenomena from TV shows and after-school clubs to memories of intense suffering under Stalin. These experiences have also left today’s Central Asian republics “a world apart” from other Muslim states [Khalid, 2007, p. 190]. This does not mean that “the Stans” have become stable nation-states, however. Internal fissures, between regions, rural and urban populations, and above all between ruling elites and ordinary citizens, are very deep. Some of the fissures seem to be coterminous with older tribal divisions, but how close the correspondence really is between pre- and post-Soviet “clans” is very murky. Tajikistan fell into a vicious civil war in the 1990s [Khalid, 2007, pp. 147–153] and the other states have decided that only dictatorship can hold them together. A common Soviet experience has not guaranteed harmony between former SSRs: sniping over borders and trade terms began shortly after the USSR’s collapse, and competition for water and food sources is increasing. The old khanates will not return, and the days of nomadic invader cascades re-shaping the entire region are long past, but the long-term influence of Soviet shock modernization is also impossible to predict.
The world, for good reason, is much more familiar with the destructive side of Soviet history, particularly during Stalin’s rule (1928–1953). The early Bolsheviks wanted to overturn all aspects of society within a few years. Their revolutionary zeal, combined with poor resources and severe disorganization, led to the brutal destruction of many people and social structures in Central Asia. The state outlawed Muslim courts, schools, and charitable institutions. The Communist Party’s secret police arrested, exiled, or killed many clergy and ordinary Muslims who resisted militant atheist propaganda [Keller, 2001]. Nomadic groups were forced to settle and collectivize their animals, at the cost of mass starvation and slaughter. Occupations that had also served as identity markers, such as “merchant” or “farmer,” were either outlawed or completely restructured according to communist definitions. There is an enormous amount that we do not know about how these constructive and destructive processes actually worked or what their long-term effects have been, but here are three “case studies” that illustrate key issues.
Nomadic tribes and Soviet nationhood
The Turkmen, Kazak, Kyrgyz and Kara-kalpak tribal confederacies presented fundamental challenges to the communist worldview. They did not recognize language, land and economic life as defining identity markers. Stalin’s insistence on imposing Marxist-Leninist class categories on all peoples of the USSR, not only “proletarian” and “bourgeois” but also “poor, middle, or rich peasant (kulak)” simply made no sense to people for whom genealogy was the prime determining factor. The extent of the chasm can be illustrated by the following: the whole point of the Bolshevik Revolution had been to give power and resources to poor workers at the expense of the rich bourgeoisie. In rural areas, which composed 90% of Turkmenistan, the state set up unions of poor peasants (called Koshchi in Russian) that were supposed to control and redistribute local resources. However, among Turkmen tribes, superior lineage had always correlated with greater wealth and power. The poor were in a real sense “foreign” to the rich, and thus automatically undeserving. Russian communists, however, regarded tribalism as a primitive custom to be wiped out as quickly as possible, and recognized only richer and poorer classes of Turkmen. So in 1928, several Turkmen village Communist Party cells were criticized by Russian superiors because the village poor were being specifically excluded. One outraged Turkmen communist responded “There is no information about the number of batraks [landless poor] in the village. No special meetings of the poor have been called, as the majority of batraks are Persians and Kurds,” [Edgar, p. 187]. The mutual incomprehension of goals and values was profound.
In the Kazak case, mutual incomprehension combined with Stalinist ideology had catastrophic consequences. Despite Slavic settlement during the Imperial period, most Kazaks were still nomads, which meant that their traditional clan and economic structures were largely intact, if under severe pressure. Mobile pastoralists who placed their clan leaders’ authority above that of the party, and therefore were not reliably obedient, had no place in Stalin’s dictatorship of the proletariat. More directly, under the First Five Year Plan (1928–1933) the state wanted to bring the steppes under intensive cultivation, which entailed collectivizing land and cattle and bringing in more Slavic settlers. During the collectivization frenzy of 1929–1930, Kazak tribes were forcibly settled without adequate resources for survival. They resisted by non-violent and violent means—migrating to the high mountains, slaughtering their cattle, and beating and sometimes killing Communist collectivizers. Food production was disrupted by the chaos, and masses of people began to starve. Complete data on the disaster are not available, but the current best guess is that 1.3 million Kazaks and 80% of their animals died within a few years due to this entirely man-made famine [Ohayon]. The Kazak population declined to the point that they were a minority within their own republic until the 1990s [Schatz, pp. 40–43, 54; Michaels, pp. 164–170; Olcott, 1981].