Adeeb Khalid Backwardness and the quest for civilization early Soviet Central Asia in comparative perspective

Backwardness and the Quest for Civilization: Early Soviet Central Asia in ComparativePerspectiveAuthor(s): Adeeb KhalidSource: Slavic Review, Vol. 65, No. 2 (Summer, 2006), pp. 231-251Published by: The American Association for the Advancement of Slavic StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4148591Accessed: 26/10/2010 06:00

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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 nineteenth 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 colonial 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'ev in Orenburg, 1851-1862: Russian Orientalism in the Service of Empire?" Slavic Review 59, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 97. Knight is speaking specifically 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, Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire (London, 2003), or Robert Crews, '"Allies in 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).

Slavic Review 65, 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 different kind of modern polity, the activist, interventionist, mobilizational state that seeks to sculpt its citizenry in an ideal image. The differences between these colonial empires and modern mobilizational states are substantial 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 between rulers and the ruled, which foreclosed the possibility of the acqui-

2. Douglas T. Northrop, Veiled Empire: 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, "Backwardness and 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 region 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 imperskaia istoriia 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 State of 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 transformations 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 education; 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 bringing 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 mobilizational 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 between 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 West Africa, 1895-1930 (Stanford, 1997), describes how French ambitions of transforming West Africans subsided when it was discovered that this would require more than the construction of railways. Colonial authorities might have proscribed individual customs or traditions, but that seldom amounted to the intrusive state regulation we see in the mobilizational 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, Contentious Tradi- 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 opposition groups used the vocabulary of empire to discredit the existing order, 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 elaboration 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. Mark Beissinger, "Demise of an Empire-State: Identity, Legitimacy, and the De- construction of Soviet Politics," in Crawford Young, ed., The Rising Tide of Cultural Plural- ism: The Nation-State at Bay? (Madison, 1993); Mark Beissinger, "The Persisting Ambiguity of Empire," Post-Soviet Affairs 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 Turks of Central Asia and Stalinism (London, 1954); Walter Kolarz, Russia and Her Colonies (London, 1952); Helene Carrere d'Encausse, The Decline of an Empire: The So- viet Socialist Republics in Revolt, trans. Martin Sokolinsky and Henry A. La Farge (New York, 1979); and Robert Conquest, ed., The LastEmpire: Nationality and the SovietFuture (Stanford, 1986).


still reigns supreme in public life, monopolizing school textbooks and ur- ban spaces alike, but it has come under sustained assault in academic discourse. 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 developments 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 parallel developments are seldom recognized as such.'0 In the literature, for instance, secularization in Turkey is treated very differently from secularization 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 interconnections 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 significant, if not always dominant, 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 radicalized 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 understood since at least the eighteenth century. The comparison to the nascent 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 regime of power is the rule of colonial difference, whereby "natives" are ex-

10. For an attempt to see the two transformations in comparative perspective, see Carter V Findley, The Turks in World History (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, Between Two Empires: Ahmet Agaoglu and the New Turkey (London, 2003), and Volker Adam, RuJ3landmuslime in Istanbul am Vorabend des Ersten Weltkrieges (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 between 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 modern 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 hallmark 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 indigenous 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 indigenous 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 influence.'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 Culture 11 (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," Central Asian Survey 19, nos. 3-4 (2000): 367-96.


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 documents 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 native 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 general principles of rule, and mainly military personnel who emphasized the

region's peculiarities and argued for its exemption from empirewide institutions. The former argued for the extension of Russian grazhdanstven- nost', civic spirit or civil order, into the region, which would make the native 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 specificity (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 colonial 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 social 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 cultural 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 human nature, the party-state was able and willing to use methods of mobilization and coercion that its tsarist predecessor could scarcely have imagined. 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 revolution for a very specific campaign by the party to seize control of cultural and scientific institutions between 1929 and 1932. See Sheila Fitz- patrick, "Cultural Revolution as Class War," in Sheila Fitzpatrick, ed., Cultural Revolution in 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 impossible 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).


a network of schools that would "train the natives so that they would con- sider themselves Russian citizens from their earliest years, give them information 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 reform 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 dialectic 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 possibilities for theJadids, but in the mobilizational politics of 1917, they discovered that they could not convert their enthusiasm for change into political 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 transformation 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-General P. I. Mishchenko to Minister of War, 4 March 1909, Tsen- tral'nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Respubliki Uzbekistan, f. 1-2, op. 2, d. 369, 1. 7ob. This "top secret" memorandum is largely a meditation on the thinness of Russian rule in Turkestan, and this flight of fancy aside, is full of the usual complaints about the lack of financial and personnel resources that prevented Russian rule being established on firmer footing.

21. Khalid, Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform. 22. The "nation" (millat) had always been a central feature ofJadid thought, although

the way the Jadids imagined their nation was in flux until 1917, when an ethnic understanding of it rapidly displaced all others. After that, Jadidism became primarily a nationalist project. See Adeeb Khalid, "Nationalizing the Revolution: The Transformation of Jadidism, 1917-1920," in Suny and Martin, eds., A State of Nations, 156-59.

23. For detailed accounts of the conflicts of 1917, see Khalid, Politics of Muslim Cul- tural Reform, chap. 8; R. Eisener, "Bukhara v 1917 godu," Vostok, 1994, no. 4:131-44 and no. 5:75-92; V L. Genis, "Bor'ba vokrug 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 exist 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 transformation 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 established 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 number 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 progress. 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'ga qorshu," 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).


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 intellectuals, 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 position 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 changing women's position in Muslim society. Their main concerns were education, 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 local 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. 1921 yil yonvorida bo'lgan birinchi o'lka o'zbek til va imlo qurultoyining chiqorgan gqaror- lari (Tashkent, 1922), 22-23.

29. On Latinization in the USSR, see Ingeborg Baldauf, 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 traditional 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 conference 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, institutions of higher Islamic learning, soon after. Their number had already shrunk, driven partly by the economic crisis and partly by the hostile political 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 nationalized. 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

early Soviet period. I have cited existing literature, but otherwise made no attempt at comprehensive citation of all archival sources.

32. The text of Ikramov's speech can be found in Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv 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.


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 results 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, Veiled Empire. 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, Veiled Empire, 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 attention. On Uzbekistan, see Rustambek Shamsutdinov, O'zbekistonda sovetlarning quloqlashtirish 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," Cahiers du monde russe 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 rhetoric 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 revolution 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 success 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 throughout 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 number of excellent surveys. Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of 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).


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 civilization, 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. Andrew Mango, Atatiirk (Woodstock, N.Y., 2000), 434. 42. Deniz Kandiyoti, "Identity and Its Discontents: Women and the Nation," in

Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds., Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (New York, 1994), 379.

43. Ag^h Slrri Levend, TiirkDilinde Geliyme ve 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 progress. 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 network 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 mission 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 nationalist 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 Yazz Meselesi (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 Hakkmnda Kanun) 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.


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 establishment 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 local 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 Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917- 1941 (Ithaca, 2003).

49. Mustafa Kemal, A Speech Delivered by Ghazi Mustapha Kemal (Leipzig, 1929), 721-22.

50. Quoted by Bozdogan, Modernism and Nation-Building, 84. 51. A. Holly Shissler, "Beauty Is Nothing to Be Ashamed Of: Beauty Contests as Tools

of Women's Liberation in Early Republican Turkey," Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the MiddleEast 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 reforms 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 intervention 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," NWSA journal 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-Protected Domains: 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 itself as a modern colonial empire, thus producing a new imaginary for classifying its subjects and new forms of difference among them. See Ussama Makdisi, "Ottoman Oriental- ism," American Historical Review 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)


lived alongside Armenian and Orthodox Christians and Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic, Greek, and Armenian were all spoken. The peninsula had also received 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 liberation." 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 circumscribed Muslim political nation.56 It was only after the Kemalists had con- solidated power that they used the newfound powers of the state to remake 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.""57 The 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 population.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 identities 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 Sociology of Language, no. 137 (1999): 81-92; see also Adeeb Khalid, "Ottoman 'Is- lamism' between the Ummet and the Nation," Archivum Ottomanicum 19 (2001): 197-211.

57. Quoted by Soner (agaptay, "Crafting the Turkish Nation: Kemalism and Turkish Nationalism in the 1930s" (PhD diss., Yale University, 2003), 21-22, who provides an excellent 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, "Crafting the 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 traditional 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 transformation 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 civilization. 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- venge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, 1993); Martin, Affirmative Action Empire; and Hirsch, Empire of Nations.

62. Quoted in Adrienne Edgar, "Nationality Policy and National Identity: The Turk- men Soviet Socialist Republic, 1924-1929,"Journal of CentralAsian Studies 1, no. 2 (1997): 2.

63. Hirsch, Empire of Nations, chap. 6. Even when, after the mid-1930s, Russians became 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.


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 remained 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 classification 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 population. 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 project 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 national 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 citizens. 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 culture in the twentieth century; they also serve to put colonial empire in its

place.

Documents

Adeeb Khalid Backwardness and the quest for civilization early Soviet Central Asia in comparative perspective