REVIEWS 369 Sabol, Steven. RussianColonization andtheGenesis ofKazak NationalConsciousness. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and New York, 2003. ix + 233 pp. Notes. Bibliography.Index. (47.50. THEprocessby which national identitiesdeveloped in WesternEurope is well known: in the nineteenth century, intellectualsbegan to seek those elements in their communities that made them distinct, in their culture, language, traditions and history. They would go on to educate an increasinglyliterate population and create a mass movement. That the minority peoples of the Russian empire would follow the same pattern should come as no surprise. Yetthesepeoples have receivedfartoo littleattentionfromWesternhistorians. Steven Sabol's study is a welcome addition to our understanding of the peoples of Central Asia. He surveyshow this process began, the particularly difficultcircumstances in which it developed and the tragic way in which it was interrupted.Kazakintellectualswere, afterall, both the productaswell as the enemies of the Russian colonization process. Educated to provide the Russians with needed skills, they realized with dismay the corrosive impact that the Russian presence, and ever increasingland confiscation,was having on the Kazak people. The traditional nomadic pastoral economy was becoming unviable, but as the Kazaks became increasingly sedentary, they were unable to prosper from farming, unlike their Russian neighbours, because the land they received was inadequate in size and quality. There emerged a group of 'self-proclaimednational leaders [who] sought to unify a disparatepopulation that they believed was threatenedwith extinction unless it could be "awakened"and invigoratedwith a new sense of selfand purpose' (p. i). They would, in short, have to reinvent the Kazak nation now that its nomadic identity and societywere disappearing. The core of Sabol's work is a study of the efforts of three outstanding members of the Kazak intelligentsia:Alikhan Bokeikhanov, a gifted scholar and a political activistand publicist,who founded Alash Orda, an embryonic political organization, and went on to become the presidentof the short-lived independent Kazak state in I9I8;Akhmet Baitursynov,who devised a thirtyfourletter Kazak alphabetbased on Arabic, and in I9I3 launched and edited Kazak,the most influential Kazak journal, which aimed to 'invent a single nation with a common past, united by language and traditions' (p. 84); and Mukhamedzhan Seralin, a journalist, author and poet who founded and editedAi qap,the firstKazaklanguagejournal in I9II. These men, and others like them, constantlypressed the theme that education and mass literacywas the firstand most urgent taskin creating a Kazak nation. Their effortswere, however, overtakenby events. The outbreakof war in I914 proved disastrous for the Kazaks. Vast numbers of livestockwere confiscatedfor the war effort, and taxes drastically increased. When, in i 9I6, the government extended conscriptionto centralAsia, it provokeda revoltthatwas brutallysuppressed. The February 19I7 revolution inspired great hope among the intelligentsia, but revealed deep divisions between them, on the issue of autonomy or independence for example. Bokeikhanov believed that the Kazaks were not ready for independence, lacking the experience and leaders necessary. But when the Bolsheviks seized power, there seemed no choice, and a Kazak 370 SEER, 82, 2, 2004 republicwas proclaimed. But, like Ukraine, they were tryingto put together a state before they had created the nation. Lackingarms, they could not create a viable army, and their survivaldepended on the White armieskeeping civil war at a distance.With the Red Armytriumphant,theirindependence quickly disappeared.The taskof nation building continued under Soviet rule,but was to be cruelly interrupted under Stalin's purges, when much of the Kazak intelligentsiawas exterminated. Everyhistorianis limited by availablesources,and Sabol acknowledgesthe limits to his. He depends heavily on the publications of the intelligentsia, archivesourcesbeing rathersparse.The unfortunatebut unavoidableresultis that there is little that can be said on how ordinaryKazaks were affected by their efforts. Sabol does, however, stress that the land question was the overriding issue to most Kazaks, and was far more important than political independence, and that the process of developing a national identity he describes was in its early stages. The language is lucid, though there is an assumptionof existingknowledge of the Russian empire in the period. A map would have been useful. This, however, remains a most worthy study that employs the availablesourceseffectivelyand eloquently. Department ofHistoy JOHN SWIFT StMartin'sCollege Steinberg,MarkD. Proletarian Imagination: Sel, Modernity andtheSacred inRussia, I9IO-I925. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, and London...