Book Review: Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent, 1865-1923

As American forces struggle to bring democracy to Iraq after a “quick military victory,” historian Jeff Sahadeo’s tale of Russian colonialism sounds eerily familiar. It took the Russian Imperial Army only two days to defeat the Central Asian defenders of Tashkent in 1865. Mr. Sahadeo’s page-turning account of what happened afterward, however, reveals that there was nothing straightforward or simple about imperial Russia’s “civilizing mission” in Central Asia.

Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent is a welcome and important contribution to historical scholarship that has recently begun to re-examine how Russian and Soviet conquest and power are perceived. As Mr. Sahadeo’s book illustrates, the colonizers did not always agree on a single course of action or act according to a long-term grand strategy. Officials often faced challenges from within their own ethnic communities. The conquered people, on the other hand, did not passively stand on the sidelines. The various strategies of resistance and accommodation they employed also reflected their own heterogeneity.

Taking their cue from French and English colonial enterprises, Russian officials attempted to reconstruct the city’s urban space in a way that promoted the European identity of the Russian colonizing effort. This meant building a “Russian Tashkent” with wide Petersburg-style boulevards instead of the narrow, winding, and dark alleyways and mud huts of “Asian Tashkent,” located just across the Ankhor Canal. Tashkent’s Russian side boasted official buildings built in mode of Russia’s imperial capital, as well as monuments, public parks and gardens, and a library. New ceremonies celebrated the Russian presence and its military might, while Russian intellectuals in Tashkent engaged in the process of designing and defining a “modern” Tashkent society. An increasing number of teachers, scientists, and engineers in Tashkent established reading circles, scholarly societies, and newspapers in which they debated how best to create “a city of the future” in Central Asia.

The participants of these debates did not foresee the practical challenges of building the new city. For example, the lack of European building materials forced the growing Russian population to construct housing similar to that found in Asian Tashkent. The stench of the Russian military barracks induced officials to move them to the edge of Russian Tashkent, while the behavior of Russian soldiers within city limits was considered a “disruptive force.” When unflattering accounts of “Tashkenters” reached the imperial center and the West by the late 1860s, tsarist officials in St. Petersburg questioned the efficacy of the civilizing mission in Tashkent. Instead of bringing progress to the region, Tashkent Russians were “educating Central Asians in the practices of extortion, corruption, vice, and greed.” The arrival of poor Russians who opened up bars and brothels belied the image of Russians as culturally superior to the colonized locals.

Tsarist bureaucrats and Russian intellectuals in Tashkent also faced problems emanating from internal divisions and power struggles within their own ethnic community in Russian Tashkent. The instability brought by World War I and the 1917 Russian Revolution provided opportunities for the Russian women of Tashkent to take a greater role in their local communities. They established organizations to take care of local soldiers and refugees, and opened factories to help support their families. When women’s frustrations with inflation, food shortages, and local Central Asians’ perceived control of the market were ignored by Tashkent’s Russian male elites, Russian women initiated a food riot in February, 1916: around 2,000 women attacked Central Asian stores and stalls both in Russian and Asian Tashkent, inciting lower-class Russian men to join them.

Russian lower-class workers also struggled for imperial privileges and a say in local affairs. The construction and 1906 completion of the railroad connecting Orenburg and Tashkent precipitated a wave of peasants to Central Asia in search of work. Because central authorities had feared employing Central Asians on the railway, they offered high wages and land plots to attract Russian workers to Tashkent. Workers actively participated in strikes during the 1905 Revolution to express their views, and Cossacks often used violence to break up such meetings. Given the centrality of the railroad in transportation and food deliveries during food shortages, railway workers also played an important role during the wartime years of World War I and the 1917 Russian Revolution. From 1918-1923, before the Bolsheviks were able to gain full control of Tashkent, workers continued to form their own locus of power by organizing strikes and committees.

Despite the Russian stereotyping of Central Asians as “backward,” the colonized locals of Tashkent contributed to society while simultaneously contesting tsarist authority. The locals excelled in business and trade, dominating the marketplace. Central Asian healers who could treat diseases that frustrated Russian doctors induced Russians to cross over the Ankhor Canal. Locals were also instrumental in irrigating the city and providing water to Russian Tashkent. Above all, Russian officials needed local community leaders’ cooperation to guarantee the city’s stability and security. Mr. Sahadeo argues that, rather than being “collaborators,” as other scholars have called them, cooperative local leaders played the role of “mediators,” since such Central Asian elites “considered themselves simultaneously responsible to their own population and to Russian overseers.”

These Central Asian leaders, similar to Russian tsarist officials governing Tashkent, faced challenges from their co-ethnics, contradicting the perception of unity among the colonized. For example, in 1892 a Central Asian crowd attacked Muhammad Yaqub, Asian Tashkent’s chief administrator. He had allegedly reported that Central Asians were defying tsarist anti-cholera measures. Central Asians had resisted the regulations because they violated local cultural norms. This sparked the 1892 cholera riot, and the Russian response resulted in dozens of deaths.

Young Central Asian reformers called Jadids, or “new method thinkers,” represented another cleavage in Central Asian society. These reformers opened schools that adopted European pedagogical standards and sought to make Islam compatible with modern science and government. Because the Jadids sought the separation of state and religion, their activism represented a threat to entrenched Islamic clerical elites, who supported tsarist policies. Russian administrative and intellectual elites also had reason for concern, since the Jadids ultimately wanted to free their people from colonial rule. Many Central Asian reformers were killed in the aftermath of the 1917 Revolution, while those who survived died in Stalin’s purges in the 1930s.

Mr. Sahadeo’s book illuminates issues of identity and rule that remain relevant today. Russian policy-makers in the 1990s debated whether to embrace a Wstern identity or one that emphasized Russia’s unique position between Europe and Asia. This task was more difficult for over nine million Russian descendants of the colonialists and Soviet transplants who found themselves living in newly independent Central Asian states. Millions migrated to Russia, where they found a culture alien to the one they were born into. Some of them returned to Central Asia. Others, without the means to relocate to Russia, felt trapped in states in which they represented a disempowered minority population.

Central Asian attitudes toward their Russian communities have been similarly ambivalent and complex. The former Soviet capitals of Central Asia still resemble Russian cities, despite efforts to change the urban landscape with new monuments, street names, and commemorations. This is the case especially in Tashkent, where President Islam Karimov has embarked on a campaign to glorify Amir Temur (or Tamerlane) in the history of the Uzbeks. Language laws demoting the Russian language are forcing many educated Russian speakers to consider emigrating, though the Central Asian states cannot afford to lose any more of these skilled scientists, doctors, engineers, and teachers.

Through critical engagement of primary sources and nuanced analysis of tsarist and Soviet documents and newspapers, Mr. Sahadeo uncovers the previously underrepresented voices of Russian women, lower-class Russian workers, and Central Asians in Russian colonial society in Central Asia. As Mr. Sahadeo notes, violence and racism trumped both the imperial and Soviet rhetoric that boasted of bringing civilization and modernity to Central Asia. Even as Lenin called on the “Muslim toilers of the east” to unite, Central Asians were not considered equals, and military might served as the final arbiter against dissension in the ranks.

Yet, Mr. Sahadeo’s book is a testament to the weakness of force and violence. Almost 150 years after the Russian conquest of Central Asia, the effects are undeniable. Russian rule definitely changed Central Asian culture, just not in the way the Russians expected it to. It may be easy to conquer lands and depose leaders, but it is much more difficult to control the complex process by which military occupation changes a society’s culture.