REVIEWS 573 Khalid, Adeeb. Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY and London, 2015. xix + 415 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. $39.95. Some twenty years ago, in his magnificent The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform (Berkeley, CA, 1998), Adeeb Khalid told the story — hitherto largely unknown to Western readers — of a group of Turkestani educational and religious modernizers, popularly known as the Jadids, who around the turn of the twentieth century undertook to introduce a wide-ranging programme of enlightenment, particularly through maktab and madrasah reform, into what at the time was one of the most under-developed regions of the tsarist empire. Tracing in fine-grained detail the various visions of modernity found in works by such figures as Behbudiy, Fitrat and Munavvar Qori, Khalid concluded his study by recounting how, following the events of 1917, the Jadids were able to align their reformist project with what would prove to be the very different modernizing agenda of the nascent Bolshevik regime. In its reference to a dazzling array of writings in both Russian, on the one hand, and Turkic and Persian, on the other, Khalid’s book remains to this day a foundational contribution towards the ongoing project to vivify Central Asian historical scholarship through the interdisciplinary cross-fertilization of Russian and Islamic studies; beautifully written, it remains also one of the few works in the field that I have repeatedly re-read for pleasure. In Making Uzbekistan, Khalid presents the long-awaited sequel to his earlier volume, picking up the story — after a brief prefatory overview (chapter 1, pp. 27–55) of pre-Revolutionary Jadidist reformism — where he previously left off in 1917: having concluded The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform with the alliance of Jadids and Russian Bolsheviks — an event here recounted in greater detail in chapter two (pp. 56–89) — he proceeds to trace the subsequent contours of this unlikely relationship. Initially, he shows, there existed a clear affinity of interest between both parties. By the mid 1920s, following the defeat of the Muslim Republic of Bukhara and the various other rival entities that had emerged amidst the post-imperial chaos (chapters 3 and 4, pp. 90–116 and 117–55), Soviet power in Central Asia was sufficiently well established (chapter 5, pp. 156–77) for the authorities to embark upon a fundamental restructuring of traditional forms of life, in what Khalid terms ‘[a] revolution of the mind’ (chapter 6, pp. 178–218). In this project the authorities found eager partners in the Jadidist intelligentsia, who were finally empowered to put in place those changes to the educational system (pp. 192–97), patriarchal gender relations (pp. 197–208) and a purportedly sclerotic religious establishment (chapter 7, pp. 219–56) for which they had been agitating for decades. Even as they savoured their successes, however, Muslim reformist intellectuals were beginning to SEER, 95, 3, JULY 2017 574 find themselves under pressure: by the late 1920s the Soviet project of social transformation had acquired dimensions more far-reaching than anything they themselves had advocated (chapter 11, pp. 342–62), and emergent doubts amongst the party leadership about the ideological correctness of non-Russian native cadres (chapter 10, pp. 316–41) would culminate in the 1930s with a purge of almost all the surviving Jadids of the 1917 generation (chapter 12, pp. 363–89). With The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform having contributed to a boom over the last two decades in Jadid-focused scholarship, much of the above story will already be broadly familiar to readers. Perhaps more original, and interesting, is a second narrative which Khalid recounts alongside the first. This is the story, alluded to in the book’s title, of the idea of Uzbekistan, whose appearance in its present form, Khalid suggests, was the result of discursive interaction between Jadidist and Bolshevik participants in the modernizing project. Whereas, prior to the revolution, the Jadids had initially focused their ambitions on reforming and revitalizing society in a Turkestan understood primarily as an Islamic confessional entity, exposure to the rhetoric of Bolshevism led them to reconceptualize Turkestan instead as a national, or ethnic one; and it...