The study of Soviet central Asia today

Abstract

Soviet Central Asia, with its indigenous Muslim population of some twenty-five million, was originally just as much a part of the Muslim East of the caliphates as the Middle East, which it adjoins geographically and with which it has considerable cultural affinities. Like the Middle East, too, its political and administrative structure has been radically changed as the result of great power involvement, albeit with widely differing consequences, of which the principal is that while the states of the Middle East no longer recognize or are subject to the imperial fiat of the great powers in whose hands their destinies once lay the Ottoman Empire, Britain, Russia and France the five Soviet Socialist republics of Central Asia remain under the so far undisputed prescriptive authority of the Soviet government. This situation has enabled that government to plan and operate, without any external interference and only limited internal opposition, administrative, social, cultural and economic reforms which, in their scale and uniformity, have exceeded anything yet attempted in the Middle East. It would be reasonable to suppose that the progress of these reforms in a region bordering not only on the Middle East but on South Asia and on China would engage the constant attention of all specialists interested in the developing countries of Asia. In fact, however, there is no evidence of any such attention being paid to the region by any university or learned society in Britain. The Hayter Sub-committee convened in 1960 was concerned, like the Scarbrough Commission before it, with practical arrangements in the universities for the study of past and present developments in Asia and Africa, and in the U.S.S.R.; but while its report contained positive recommendations for the creation in the universities of 'Area Study Centres' in respect of the Middle East, South and South-east Asia and the Far East, there was no provision for or even mention of Central Asia. The primary object of the present article is to draw attention to the many respects in which current developments in Soviet Central Asia should be regarded as of outstanding interest and importance. But before embarking on this it will be useful to consider how it is that the constantly changing and in many ways unique situation there has so far remained outside the purview of university disciplines and research. In an article entitled 'What goes on in Soviet Central Asia', published in the February 1971 issue of the Journal of the Royal Central Asian Society (subsequently renamed 'The Royal Society for Asian Affairs'), I put forward two possible reasons for this curious lacuna: the belief that the study of Soviet Central Asia would tend to be political rather than scholastic and would thus attract too few or the wrong type of student; and the fact that orientalists, who generally take little account of the press and modern literature of eastern countries, might