Making Uzbekistan

Front matter

MAKING UZBEKISTAN

Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR

ADEEB KHALID

Contents

List of Maps Acknowledgments Technical Note Abbreviations

Introduction oan ouprpwne m Bb bE ©

. Nationalizing the Revolution . The Muslim Republic of Bukhara . The Long Road to Soviet Power

Epilogue

Glossary Bibliography of Primary Sources Index

Maps

. Central Asia on the eve of the national-territorial delimitation

. Central Asia after the national-territorial delimitation . Uzbekistan as Greater Bukhara

- Uzbekistan as it would appear if Tajik demands had been upheld in 1929

Acknowledgments

In the decade and a half that this book has taken to research, I have accumulated many, many debts to people and institutions. I acquired that most precious commodity, time away from teaching, thanks to support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Councils for International Education, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. A Distinguished Visiting Scholar award from the John W. Kluge Center for Scholars at the Library of Congress provided six idyllic months of work in 2010-11. The book has taken longer to complete than I had led the granting agencies to believe it would. I thank them all for their patience and hope that the final product has been worth the wait.

I thank the Poullada family for the invitation to present the Leon B. Poullada Memorial Lecture Series at Princeton University in October 2010. Those lectures allowed me to think through the overall structure of the book. A brief séjour de recherches at the Fondation des Sciences de 1 Homme in Paris in June 2010 enabled fruitful interaction with French colleagues and allowed me to work with the papers of Mustafa Cho'qoy. I am also grateful for comments and questions from the numerous audiences that have listened to presentations of material from this project. No presentation was more fruitful than the one I gave to the Berkeley Russian history kruzhok in March 2012. Comments from participants helped break a logjam in my thoughts and set me on the path to the final draft of this book.

Some material in chapter 4 originally appeared in “Central Asia between the Ottoman and the Soviet Worlds,” Kritika 12, no. 2 (2011): 451-76. Chapter 12 xi xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS includes material that first appeared in Russian in “Rozhdenie natsii,” Neprikosnovennyi zapas, no. 78 (2011): 34—46.

Over the years, I have benefitted immensely from help, encouragement, advice, and support offered by many friends and colleagues. I am particularly grateful to those who shared precious and hard-to-get source materials with me. Shoshana Keller gave me her notes from the Communist Party archives in Tashkent, where she was able to work in 1991-92 and which have remained closed to foreign scholars ever since. All citations marked “AAP RUz” in chapter 11 are thanks to her. That chapter would look very different without her gift. Stephane Dudoignon, in addition to thought-provoking conversations and wonderful hospitality all along, also gave me a digitized copy of the complete set of Shu '‘la-yi inqilāb, the Persian-language journal from Samarqand. The kindnesses Sherali aka Turdiyev extended to me in Tashkent included providing copies of two typescripts that Laziz Azizzoda wrote “for the drawer” in his retirement. It is my great sorrow that Sherali aka did not live to see the completion of this book. Rinat Shigabdinov, Elyor Turaqulov (Musabaev), and Ergash aka Umarov provided help and multiple kindnesses in Uzbekistan. Akram Khabibullaev has been a friend and a guide throughout the project and helped me in numerous ways. Bruce Grant went above and beyond the call of friendship and read a penultimate draft of the whole manuscript. Shahzad Bashir listened to incessant monologues about this project and gave sage advice all the way through. This book would have been the poorer without the help and support of Sergei Abashin, Laura Adams, Mounira Azzout, Bakhtyar Babadjanov, Michael David-Fox, Cloé Drieu, Adrienne Edgar, Gero Fedtke, Vincent Fourniau, Vladimir Genis, Numanjon Ghafarov, Fran Hirsch, Peter Holquist, Marianne Kamp, Emin Lelić, Terry Martin, Chris Murphy, Doug Northrop, Madeleine Reeves, Jeff Sahadeo, Paolo Sartori, Paul Stronski, Barno opa Umarova, Franz Wennberg, and Tomohiko Uyama. Volker Adam, Mayhill Fowler, and Artemy Kalinovsky provided bibliographical help and copies of important materials. Colleagues at Carleton College aided and abetted me in various ways for long years; special thanks go to Scott Carpenter (who gave insightful comments on a chapter), Susannah Ottaway, and David Tompkins.

Roger Haydon shepherded the manuscript through review and production with great felicity. It was a great pleasure to work with him to turn this seemingly never-ending project into a book. Not the least of Roger’s achievement was finding excellent readers for the manuscript, whose comments were immensely helpful in finalizing the argument. Bill Nelson drew the fine maps for this book. Susan Barnett, Karen Laun, and Emily Powers made the production process a joy to experience.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xiii

Carleton College has been a great place to work all these years. A large faculty development grant in 2000-2001 made the initial foray into the archives possible. Since then, the college has been very generous in granting leaves and supporting research travel. I am delighted to acknowledge the contribution of the Jane and Raphael Bernstein Chair in Asian Studies and History to my research. The Institute of History of the Uzbekistan Academy of Sciences hosted me in 2000-2001, and IFEAC, the French Institute of Central Asian Studies, provided a wonderfully collegial environment. I would also like to express my gratitude to the staffs of the institutions where I did the bulk my research: the Central State Archives of Uzbekistan, the Rare Books Section of the Alisher Navoiy National Library of Uzbekistan and the Beruni Institute of Oriental Studies in Tashkent; the State Archive of the Russian Federation, Russian State Archive for Sociopolitical History, and the Russian State Library in Moscow; the Library of Congress in Washington, DC; the British Library in London; and Atatiirk Kitapligi in Istanbul. The Slavic Reference Service at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign provided answers to numerous questions with great effect. Many thanks also to the interlibrary loan staff at the Laurence McKinley Gould Library at Carleton College and to Brad Schaffner, the College Librarian, for their help.

The greatest debts are owed, of course, to those who suffered the most from this project, namely my immediate family. Leila was not even born when I embarked on this book, so she has never known her father not to be preoccupied with it. She is quite happy that the end is in sight. Haroun bore the rigors of silly apartment no. 4 with good grace and has come of age with this book. I am relieved that I have finished it before he finishes university. Cheryl has been the lodestar of my life since we met. Without her love and support, none of this would have taken place. My debt to her cannot be expressed in words.

Technical Note

Nomenclature

This book explores a period when ethnic and national designations and selfascriptions were in great flux. I have tried to use, to the extent possible, the nomenclature of the period itself rather than projecting current designations back into time. Until 1917, the most common designation for the population discussed here was “Muslims of Turkestan.” The adjective “Muslim” in this book pertains to the population. It does not indicate a particular commitment to Islamic propriety or politics. The Muslim intellectuals discussed in this book took positions that stretched from the reform of Islam to its rejection. I also use, interchangeably, the terms indigenous and native to describe the Muslim population that I discuss. The “natives” were counterpoised, most often, to “Europeans,” the settlers who arrived in the wake of the Russian conquest. They were predominantly Russians (until 1917 the term included those we would call Ukrainians now), but they also included Poles, Germans, Ashkenazi Jews, and members of other nationalities from the European part of the empire. In everyday practice, these newcomers (prishlye) found much in common with each other and distinguished themselves clearly from the natives. I have used “Europeans” to describe the newcomers as a whole, although I also use “Russian” as a rough synonym in places. This usage is a useful reminder that “Europe” and “Europeans” are not eternally fixed signifiers, but that their meaning shifts over time and place.

Central Asia was the meeting place of two linguistic traditions, the Turkic and the Persian. Turkic was counterpoised to Persian but internally differentiated

XV xvi TECHNICAL NOTE into a number of dialects that had become distinct languages by the early twentieth century. The term Uzbek was in common use for the contemporary literary Turkic language of Transoxiana before the revolution, and I use it so. On the contrary, as I show in chapter 9, the term Tajik was never used before 1924 for the Persian language spoken in Central Asia, which was referred to as Persian (farst). This is the term I use for the period before the creation of Tajikistan. Until 1925, the Russian term Kirgiz denoted peoples who called themselves Kazakh and Kyrgyz. Depending on the context, I have translated Kirgiz either as “Kazakh and Kyrgyz” or as “Kazakh.” Thus the first Kazakh autonomous republic created in 1920 was called Kirgizskaia respublika (or Kirrespublika). I have translated that name as the Kazakh Republic.

For an excellent overview of the political and administrative structure of the Soviet Union in the 1920s, see Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995), xix—xxili. Turkestan (and Uzbekistan until 1926) had a four-level administrative hierarchy that descended from oblast, through uezd and volost, to the village. The regionalization (raionirovanie) of 1926 brought in a three-level administrative structure consisting of okrug, raion, and village.

The Russian Empire used the Julian calendar. One of the modernizing reforms of the Bolsheviks was a switch to the Gregorian calendar on 1 February 1918. I have avoided using a double dating system and cited dates according to the calendar in use at the time of a given event or publication. For dates in early 1918, I have indicated the use of the Julian calendar by adding “o.s.” (old style) in parentheses after the date.

All web sites cited in the notes were current as of 1 January 2015.

Transliteration

Turkic languages appear in the notes according to their current orthographies. I have transliterated languages written in Cyrillic (Tatar and Kazakh) and used contemporary Latin orthographies for Turkish and the few citations in Azeri. Uzbek, the language of a large portion of the sources used in this book, has been written in at least six different orthographies in three different scripts in the twentieth century. Since this is a book on history, not philology, I have used a single system for transliterating all titles, regardless of the script of the original. Although the bulk of contemporary Uzbek publishing continues in Cyrillic, a standard Latin alphabet is also in widespread use. I have used this alphabet to transliterate all Uzbek names and titles in this book (including those that were published in the Latin script used between 1928 and 1940), with the singular exception of the term boy (wealthy), which I have rendered as bai in order to avoid visual confusion with the English word of the same spelling. For Persian

TECHNICAL NOTE xvii

(and “Tajik”) written in the Arabic script, I have used the International Journal of Middle East Studies system of transliteration, but have transliterated later Tajik texts from the Cyrillic. For Russian, I have used the Library of Congress transliteration without the diacritics, and have Anglicized a few commonly used terms by removing the terminal soft sign (for instance, for oblast or volost).

Names and Places

Surnames had just begun to appear in Central Asia in the period discussed here and not all individuals used them. Many authors were known by their pen names. I have referred to individuals as they were best known at the time (thus Munavvar qori, not Abdurashidxon o'g'li; Cho'lpon, not Sulaymon; but Behbudiy, not Mahmudxo'ja). In the 1920s, authors commonly used pseudonyms (sometimes for reasons of safety, sometimes not) or initials to sign their work. I have used the names as they appear in the byline of the work cited but added the author’s name in brackets where it could be ascertained. Indispensable in this regard was a key to pseudonyms of the period published by the poet Oltoy Bois Qoriyev in his old age. Oltoy, a participant in the literary life of the 1920s, was arrested in 1930 and spent many years in the Gulag before resuming literary work in the 1960s. See Bois Qoriyev, “Adabiy taxalluslar haqida,” O'zbek tili va adabiyoti, 1967, no. 1: 51-58. Authors’ names in footnotes are transliterated according to the rules of the language of the work cited. In my own voice, however, I invariably spell names according to the rules of the language a given person identified with.

Place names all over the former Soviet Union have changed multiple times over the course of the twentieth century. I have used the names that were current in the period discussed here. Where Russian forms of place names differed from their native versions (Alma Ata for Almaty, for example), I have consistently used the local forms transliterated from local languages, and not through the Russian (thus Khujand, not Khodzhent).

Abbreviations

AAP RUz GAFO GAgT GARF GASO IOR O'zFAShI RGASPI TNA TsGARUz f.

Arkhiv Apparata Prezidenta Respubliki Uzbekistan Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Ferganskoi oblasti Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv goroda Tashkent

Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Samarkandskoi oblasti

India Office Records

O'zbekiston Fanlar Akademiyasi Sharqshunoslik Instituti Rossiiskoi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial'no-politisheskoi istorii The National Archives (UK)

Tsentral’nyi Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Respubliki Uzbekistan fond (collection)

opis’ (register)

delo (file)

list, listy (folio)

obratnoe (obverse)

old style (to denote use of the Julian calendar in 1918)

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MAKING UZBEKISTAN