“Fighting for the Russian Cause”: The Imperial Colonisation of Turkestan

Abstract

This article considers the political vision and imperial administration projects related to tasks and objectives of the Russian colonisation of Turkestan in the second half of the nineteenth – early twentieth centuries. The author singles out categories of colonists and their objectives and discusses the difficulties behind the realisation of the imperial settlement project. Special attention is paid to the methods used to realise the development of conquered Turkestan, which combined the use of religious differences in population administration (the concept of “confessional state” by P. Werth) and emerging and expanding national discourse. Earlier studies closely examined the stages and numbers of the resettlement movement to Turkestan but did not consider how the imperial and Turkestan administration perceived the realisation of the region’s development. The research describes the points of view of imperial officials, supervisors, and inspectors of the resettlement processes to Turkestan and the adaptation of the imperial agents. The author refers to unpublished materials (recordkeeping, narrative, etc.) from the funds of the Central State Archive of the Republic of Uzbekistan, introduced into scholarly circulation for the first time. They make it possible to show the difficulties faced by Russia in realising its colonisation strategies in Turkestan, different assessments of colonists’ potential, and problems which were the subject of departmental correspondence of the Turkestan civil authorities. The author concludes that there was a considerable discrepancy between the political objectives and tasks of the Russian settler movement in Turkestan defined by imperial administration and the implementation of the project connected with the social-economic and cultural adaptation of Orthodox settlers in the region. The analysis of documents makes it possible to reconstruct the complex problems of the imperial project of the use of religious and national identity as a cultural basis of the civilizing mission in Turkestan.