Soviet Central Asia Research Articles

Islamic Media in Soviet Central Asia

This paper takes stock of “Islamic media” in the ussr by reviewing the kinds of sources that are available for the study of Islam in the Soviet Union, and, more importantly, exploring how social historians can use them. What follows is a detailed discussion of three genres of materials: anti-religious propaganda; correspondence of the official organizations engaged with Islam; and what, for convenience’s sake, I will term Islamic samizdat (popular religious literature and the few available autobiographies of ‘ulama).

Emptying lakes, filling up seas: hydroelectric dams and the ambivalences of development in late Soviet Central Asia

ABSTRACTIn the late Soviet Union, large-scale projects such as the Toktogul Dam in the Kyrgyz Soviet Republic were promoted as emblems of the Soviet model of development in Asia. While Central Asian politicians and intellectuals usually tuned in to the enthusiasm, the construction also revealed different opinions about the precise direction and goals of Soviet development. Large-scale investments became focal points of political and intellectual debates; they not only helped bind the periphery closer to the Soviet centre, but also revealed the different economic, political and cultural priorities of the regional, republican and union-wide actors. The construction of dams and reservoirs eventually triggered conflicts between the republics and laid the foundation for an anti-colonial critique of the late Soviet state.

Of Saints, Shrines, and Tractors: Untangling the Meaning of Islam in Soviet Central Asia

Abstract In this article I suggest that in the Soviet period Central Asians cultivated and conceptualized Islam as an episteme. They did this by reaching beyond alienating (and often ephemeral) categories offered to them by the state. I argue that the constitution of an Islamic culture was made possible, among other things, by Central Asians’ encounters with the past, most notably with what they perceived as an Islamic past. We observe the curious phenomenon of Central Asians’ continuous interaction with the Islamic historical sites that escaped the bulldozers of the Soviet campaigns of religious repression. For some, encounters with the past might be accidental. For many others, the exploration of the past represented a purposive, self-conscious, and reiterated emotional act. I show that Central Asians in the Soviet period—even if at school they were taught little about, and were usually offered a distorted vision of, the Islamic history of their region—were still able to access their past through the surviving architectural presence of Islam. Monumental sites, however, were not enough for Muslims to understand the past and use it to construct their own identity. Such artifacts acquired meaning through an interpretive framework provided by Sufi narratives about saints and their miracles. Therefore, shrines represented for Central Asia a collective memory space, i.e., a place in which the past was preserved for mobilization in the present through narrative.

What to Name the Children? Oral Histories of Ethnically Mixed Families in Soviet Kazakhstan and Tajikistan

What to Name the Children? Oral Histories of Ethnically Mixed Families in Soviet Kazakhstan and Tajikistan Adrienne L. Edgar (bio) When Rustam Iskandarov’s son was born in 1984, Rustam, a man of mixed Tajik and Russian descent living in Tajikistan, thought carefully about what to name him. It was important that the child’s first name match the other parts of his name, Rustam explained. A Russian first name would not go well with a Tajik patronynic and surname, and the “wrong” first name could cause lifelong social problems for the boy. Ultimately, Rustam and his wife (a woman of mixed Tajik-Tatar descent) chose the name Timur for their son. Rustam explained their reasoning: “My main concern was to make sure that he would have an easier life. Because, for example, his patronymic is Rustamovich, and his last name is Iskandarov. All right, let’s say I were to give him the name Vasilii, for instance: how does Vasilii Rustamovich sound?1 That’s why I picked a neutral name like Timur. Timur is a common name here and in Russia. So, Timur Rustamovich is a synthesis and a more agreeable combination.”2 Rustam’s story illustrates the challenges faced by ethnically mixed couples in Soviet Central Asia as they chose names for their children. In every society, personal names signal individual identity and reflect community values, while also serving as “powerful determinants of inclusion and exclusion.”3 In multiethnic societies, a first name can be an important signal of the future identity and community the parents envision for their child. Bestowing a name, moreover, is a low-cost yet clear way of declaring one’s desired ethnic [End Page 269] affiliation. Unlike acquiring a new language or adopting new customs, which require a certain investment of time and energy, naming is easy and free.4 For mixed families, however, this decision was far from clear-cut; should the child have a name from the mother’s culture or the father’s? From both or from neither? What if the parents themselves were ethnically mixed, as in Rustam’s case? Among mixed families in Central Asia, whether a child was given a Turkic or Persian name, a Muslim name of Arabic origin, a Russian name, or some other sort of name revealed something of the parents’ preferences and allegiances. Yet mixed families were signaling more than just ethnic and religious identity in the names they chose for their children. In this article, I draw on oral history interviews to investigate the process of choosing names for children in Soviet-era mixed families in order to gain insight into the motivations for bestowing particular names and the experiences of the people who bear these names.5 Oral history is virtually the only source available for understanding how the process of naming worked in the past, since few people document their reasons for this decision. The process of choosing a name for a child, moreover, is so fraught with significance that it is often indelibly stamped in the memory of the parents, making it a particularly fruitful area of inquiry for the oral historian.6 This article is part of a broader project using oral history to investigate mixed marriages and ethnic identity in the late Soviet period. The research is based on more than 80 in-depth interviews conducted in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan with men and women of different ages and from a variety of regional, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. All the interviewees were participants (or former participants) in ethnically mixed marriages or the offspring of such marriages. These marriages came in a variety of different mixtures: Kazakh-Russian, Kazakh-Tatar, Russian-Tajik, Uzbek-Tajik, Russian-Korean, Kazakh-Korean, Russian-Armenian, and a number of others. I chose Kazakhstan and Tajikistan as the primary venues for this research because these two former Soviet republics represent opposing poles on the [End Page 270] spectrum of ethnicity and nationality in Soviet Central Asia. Kazakhstan, with its extremely diverse population and high rates of interethnic interaction, offered fertile ground for ethnic mixing. Tajikistan, more socially and religiously conservative and ostensibly more ethnically homogenous (even though “Tajik” as a nationality formed only in...

Doctoral Dissertations on Russia, the Soviet Union, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe Accepted by Universities in the United States and Canada, 2018

Doctoral Dissertations on Russia, the Soviet Union, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe Accepted by Universities in the United States and Canada, 2018

The Soviet Union as a ‘Feminist Colonialist?’ The Women’s Question in Early Soviet Central Asia

The Soviet Union as a colonial power in Central Asia decided to step up against the perceived traditional marginalisation of women. It intended to create an equal society for men and women, and treated women as important allies in the modernisation and the restructuration of traditional societies. However, in reality, while the Soviet initiatives contributed to the emancipation and empowerment of women on the surface, in the meantime they also served as a significant tool for the colonisation of Central Asia. The aim of the article is to shed light on this almost entirely overlooked process of the Soviet colonial power using the ideas of Marxist feminism to strengthen its power over the region, and to argue that this approach had contributed to the fact that the attempts of the Soviet Union aimed at the emancipation and empowerment of Central Asian women could only reach their declared objectives on the surface

Introduction

Introduction Jeff Sahadeo (bio) As I wandered Tashkent’s streets during my dissertation research in 1998, I would furtively peek into the windows of the city’s few remaining tsarist-era houses. I imagined, if I could be transported back a century, what I would ask the “average” Russian settlers who once occupied them. I had heard their voices sporadically in the archives, mediated through police reports and trial transcripts, or sometimes in letters, usually written by scribes. But what stories would they tell me, face-to-face, in their own words? I wanted to hear everyday experiences and encounters from their perspective, to understand their beliefs and feel their emotions. I wanted these people, whose movements and interactions appeared so important to my own story, to be agents in their own history. I hoped to comprehend their sometimes violent actions toward the local population. I resolved to move my next project forward in time, to interrogate my sources, to privilege their voices, experiences, and encounters, with all the opportunities and challenges that oral histories entailed.1 Adrienne Edgar, Ali İğmen, and Marianne Kamp reached similar conclusions after their successful first projects on early Soviet Central Asia. Their articles in this issue highlight how oral history interviews allow scholars of the Soviet Union access to intimate daily lives and thoughts, broadening our understanding of lived experience. We see Soviet citizens, not to mention the Soviet Union, as complicated. Each voice heard here betrays a thoughtful, considered balancing of lives, relationships, and beliefs with ideas, identities, and policies deriving from a state centered thousands of kilometers away. Each author finds their Central Asian subjects—Uzbeks remembering times of hardship, Kazakhs recounting the naming of their children, Kyrgyz recalling successful lives in Soviet theater—using their interviews to consider compromises between personal hopes and the realities that surrounded them, as [End Page 227] they dealt with spouses, parents, collective-farm administrators, and artistic directors, all within the terrain set down by an evolving Soviet regime. Oral histories have gained acceptance slowly, and somewhat begrudgingly, among historians of the Soviet Union. I recall substantial unease among my academic forebears, social historians who preferred the sanctity and ostensible reliability of the written word, during workshops and conferences in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Documents from aggregate statistics to press reports, instead of individual impressions recorded decades after the fact, were the path to understanding the nature of Soviet society. The 1990s witnessed a rush to the archives rather than, sadly, a rush to interview elderly Soviet citizens—for example, World War II veterans, few of whom are available to researchers today. Lived experience remained secondary to the desire to explore macrolevel controversies and expose the “truth” of the Soviet state.2 Hopes for such an achievement had faded by the time Donald Raleigh’s work on Soviet Baby Boomers demonstrated the value of oral history for an understanding of not only daily life but also mobility, Sovietness, and the relationship between the state and its citizens.3 His interviews added color to a time—the post-Stalin era—seen then as rather gray and dull by historians, as written sources of the time were filled with the formulaic and often apparently empty discourse of a now mature Soviet state. Color allowed us to see the nuance in the Soviet world, the absence as well as the presence of the state, the way citizens accommodated, adapted, and resisted words and policies from above. We understand motivations as well as outcomes, and how citizens place themselves within their society. We see the how as well as the why at the microlevel, and how it redounds upward. What led one Uzbek to start eating potatoes in the 1930s, and another to refuse them as haram, forbidden by Islam? Why did one mixed Russian-Kazakh family name their child Tat´iana instead of Akbota? What did that mean to them and their families, and what did that say about the power of belonging and ethnic and related hierarchies? How did one become a “star” in the Soviet Union through the fine arts? Decades later, how do these former actors consider Soviet values, as compared to those they...

The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan by Sarah Cameron

Reviewed by: The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan by Sarah Cameron Aminat Chokobaeva (bio) Sarah Cameron, The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2018). 277 pp., ills. Bibliography. Index. ISBN: 978-1-5017-3043-6. Compared to the Ukrainian famine, or Holodomor as it has become colloquially and academically known, the famine of 1930–1933 in Soviet Kazakhstan has attracted only modest scholarly attention since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Sarah Cameron's book is a significant and timely contribution to the historiography of Soviet Central Asia and the debates about the nature of Soviet modernization and nation-building in the national peripheries. Clearly structured and written in a highly accessible style, the book follows the unfolding of one of the worst famines in human history. Cameron opens the book with an overview of the nomadic economy before and during the agricultural colonization of the Kazakh Steppe, focusing particularly on the environmental conditions of the steppe and the ways in which nomads adapted to its arid climate. Cameron observes that the rapid increase in the human and livestock population of the steppe caused by the mass resettlement of Russian peasants led to the exhaustion of soil and water sources, putting considerable pressure on the resources available to Kazakhs. As greater stretches of land were transferred to new colonists, nomads began migrating shorter distances and grew more dependent on grain grown by the peasants. At the same time, the number of animals that individual nomadic groups could pasture dwindled. By 1907, the average nutrition levels of nearly half of the Kazakh population of the steppe fell below the norm. The combined turmoil of civil conflict and drought that enveloped the region between 1916 and 1920 foreshadowed the collectivization famine; although forced grain requisitions were the primary reason for the famine of 1917–1920, its scale and lethality were magnified by the drought. Chapter 2 details the first Soviet efforts to build socialism in the steppe by promoting the development of the modern Kazakh nation and implementing land reforms that transferred agricultural land from Cossacks and settlers to Kazakhs to encourage nomads to take up settled farming. The failure of these reforms, which resulted in a dramatic drop in grain production, exposed the tensions between the Soviet nationality policy and Soviet agricultural policy. Furthermore, it convinced Moscow that nomadism and the clan structure of Kazakh society were to blame for the reluctance of Kazakhs to abandon [End Page 299] their nomadic lifestyle. The closure of the New Economic Policy and the demand for grain to finance rapid industrialization in the second half of the 1920s spelled the end of expert thinking that saw nomadism as making the best possible use of the steppe resources. The beginning of "Little October" in Kazakhstan, examined in chapter 3, signaled an assault on the traditional Kazakh society. The authorities confiscated the wealthy Kazakh elites, in the process impoverishing their poor kin who depended on kinship networks for survival and protection. To mobilize support for unpopular policies and to shake loose the established and customary loyalties, the authorities recruited local Kazakhs to implement the campaign. The drought that struck northern Kazakhstan in 1928 further compounded the effects of dekulakization in the republic. The first signs of impending famine became apparent already in 1928 as Kazakhs were forced to give up their livestock or slaughter their animals to avoid confiscation, but as Cameron explains in chapter 4, Moscow prioritized grain production at the expense of pastoralism. Collectivization appeared to be the perfect solution to the issue of falling rates of grain collection as it would allow both settling the nomads and expanding the sown area by freeing up additional lands. The freed land would in turn be cultivated by agricultural settlers from European Russia. In practice, collectivization had disastrous implications for the nomadic economy; in addition to losing their livestock to collective farms, which were woefully underfunded and underprovided for–of the planned 318 million rubles only 12 million was allocated for collectivization–nomads were required to shoulder both meat and grain procurement quotas. As more Kazakhs slaughtered or sold their animals...

Soviet "Afro-Asians" in UNESCO: Reorienting World History

This article highlights the activities of Soviet Central Asian intellectuals within the Soviet Committee for Solidarity with African and Asian Countries (SKSSAA). It focuses on the activities of the SKSSAA directly related to UNESCO. The article's main argument is that the SKSSAA activated the UNESCO East-West Project (1956–1966) with the specific aim to advance a historical agenda that posited the Afro-Asian Peoples' Solidarity at its center. When looking at the UNESCO Peoples' History of Asia project, this article examines the intermediary role of Soviet Central Asian intellectuals, and it suggests that their approach to history resonated with lived experiences of complex solidarities that often transcended the boundaries of states. While there were political reasons for the disintegration of the UNESCO History of Asia project, such as the Indo-Chinese border war, the UNESCO regimes of professionalization seriously undermined the imaginary landscapes that the Peoples' History of Asia project sought to sustain.

Film Hanaan (2011): Korea and Uzbekistan seen from a margin

Hanaan, an Uzbek and Korean co-production, is the debut film of a young Central Asian Korean director, Ruslan Pak, who wrote the script and directed its production. Pak is a fourth-generation descendant of Korean diaspora forcibly relocated by Stalin in 1937 to populate the Soviet Central Asian republics. In Hanaan, Pak portrays how the post-Soviet generation of Korean diaspora is coping with life in post-Soviet Uzbekistan that has built ethnic-based national identity since Independence. As the film shows, it is not easy for the protagonist Stas and his Korean friends to find their places in their imposed homeland. It is therefore not so surprising that they face many conflicts and challenges that reveal not only social problems in Uzbekistan, including drug issues and ethnic minority problems, but also difficulties in self-identification. Searching for an identity “at a margin” and “as a marginalized” is one of the central themes of this film. In this case which follows Stas’s (as well as the director’s) desperate journey to Hanaan or “the Land of Promise,” I will explore the present situation of the Korean diaspora in Uzbekistan and engage with the messages that the director attempts to convey through this film.

The USSR as a hydraulic society: Wittfogel, the Aral Sea and the (post-)Soviet state

Wittfogel’s Oriental Despotism is not only a scholarly exposition of the ‘hydraulic hypothesis’ but also a political polemic about Soviet ‘totalitarianism’. Wittfogel does not mention that these two themes are connected: the USSR itself may be construed as a hydraulic state, especially in the Central Asian periphery, where expansion of irrigation depended on and cemented the power of the apparatus. The environmental consequences famously include the regression of the Aral Sea. This article first explores irrigation in Soviet Central Asia: while there was a connection between the centralizing tendency of Soviet bureaucracy and water’s susceptibility to political control, environmental problems were exacerbated by relatively weak control from the centre and by material qualities of water which escaped control. I then draw on my ethnographic research in Aral’sk, Kazakhstan, to examine the role of hydraulic infrastructure in imagining the strong, centralized state. I take Wittfogel’s particular constellation of connections between water, infrastructure and power as a Cold War artefact, which I compare with accounts of Soviet hydraulic projects from inhabitants of the Aral region today. Finally, I examine post-Soviet projections of statehood through a recent dam which has restored part of the Aral and mixed local reactions to it. Hydraulic infrastructure may project centralized authority, but I show that readings of the relationship between the two depend on contextual factors.

Soviet Central Asia and the Preservation of History

Central Asia has one of the deepest and richest histories of any region on the planet. First settled some 6500 years ago by oasis-based farming communities, the deserts, steppe and mountains of Central Asia were subsequently home to many pastoral nomadic confederations, and also to large scale complex societies such as the Oxus Civilization and the Parthian and Kushan Empires. Central Asia also functioned as the major hub for trans-Eurasian trade and exchange networks during three distinct Silk Roads eras. Throughout much of the second millennium of the Common Era, then under the control of a succession of Turkic and Persian Islamic dynasties, already impressive trading cities such as Bukhara and Samarkand were further adorned with superb madrassas and mosques. Many of these suffered destruction at the hands of the Mongols in the 13th century, but Timur and his Timurid successors rebuilt the cities and added numerous impressive buildings during the late-14th and early-15th centuries. Further superb buildings were added to these cities by the Shaybanids during the 16th century, yet thereafter neglect by subsequent rulers, and the drying up of Silk Roads trade, meant that, by the mid-18th century when expansive Tsarist Russia began to incorporate these regions into its empire, many of the great pre- and post-Islamic buildings of Central Asia had fallen into ruin. This colonization of the region by the Russians, and its later incorporation into the Union of Society Socialist Republics in 1919, brought Central Asia to the attention of Russian and Soviet archaeologists and urban planners. It was these town planners and engineers who were eventually responsible for preserving many of the decaying monuments and historic urban cores of Central Asia, despite the often-challenging ideological constraints they were forced to work under. The paper focuses particularly on the effect of these preservation policy decisions in Uzbekistan, where the process has been best documented. It argues that Soviet authorities struggled constantly with ways of recognizing the need for historical preservation while at the same time creating a new society that had cast off the shackles of its ‘feudal past’.

Muslim Women in Soviet Central Asia

This study analyzes the Soviet Central Asia from a historical perspective to understand the impact of the Soviet regime on Muslim women’s lifestyles. It specifically focuses on the underlying reasons of laws and policies put into effect by the Soviet officials in the name of emancipating Muslim women in Central Asia. The main argument of the study is that even though the Soviet officials had a genuine intention for the emancipation of Central Asian women from the patriarchal structure both in the public and private spheres of life, the policies and their implementations were shaped in accordance with the basic motive of the regime to survive. In the first years of the Soviet regime, mostly ideological intentions shaped the women’s emancipation project.

THE MISSING TURKISH REVOLUTION: COMPARING VILLAGE-LEVEL CHANGE AND CONTINUITY IN REPUBLICAN TURKEY AND SOVIET CENTRAL ASIA, 1920–50

AbstractThe Kemalist leadership of early Republican Turkey attempted to transform the country's Muslim populace with a heavy emphasis on secularism, scientific rationalism, and nationalism. Several studies have examined the effects of this effort, or the “Turkish Revolution,” at the central and more recently provincial levels. This article uses first-hand accounts and statistical data to carry the analysis to the village level. It argues that the Kemalist reforms failed to reach rural Turkey, where more than 80 percent of the population lived. A comparison with sedentary Soviet Central Asia's rural transformation in the same period reveals ideology and the availability of resources as the underlying causes of this failure. Informed by a Marxist–Leninist emphasis on the necessity of transforming the “substructure” for revolutionary change, the Soviet state undermined existing authority structures in Central Asia's villages to facilitate the introduction of communist ideals among their Muslim inhabitants. Turkey's Kemalist leadership, on the other hand, preserved existing authority structures in villages and attempted to change culture first. However, they lacked and could not create the resources to implement this change.

Aleksandr Minkin: A pioneer of investigative journalism in Soviet Central Asia (1979–1991)

In the 1980s, Aleksandr Minkin was a young Russian journalist at the beginning of a brilliant career as a literary and theater critic. During his tours in Central Asia, he turned to investigative journalism, reporting on the unstable circumstances in Soviet peripheries, painting a picture for the Soviet public of the brutal side of Bolshevik modernization, such as cotton monoculture in Uzbekistan, the exploitation of peasants, the spread of deformities and disease in children due to the abuse of defoliants and pesticides in rural areas, widespread corruption, as well as the general social backwardness of the most remote areas of the USSR. In 1988, the magazine Ogonek published Minkin’s famous piece ‘khlopkorab’ (cotton slave) – denouncing for the first time in the Soviet press the exploitation of child labor in the cotton fields – as well as other articles revealing the use of dangerous Butifos defoliant, and the spread of illness in the republic. These articles caused a sensation and were at the center of a political debate during perestroika that both thrilled Soviet readers and frightened the Communist party. Minkin was viciously attacked by the official press and endured the surveillance of Soviet security authorities, as well as of foreign intelligence agencies. However, the campaign to discredit him could not cover the scandals up entirely, and Minkin became a symbol of free journalism, and a liberal intellectual figure in post–Soviet Russia, raising public awareness of social and environmental issues in Central Asia that had been officially hidden for decades.

Transgressing the Boundaries: The Migration of Uighurs into Soviet Central Asia After World War II

After World War II, suffering from a severe workforce shortage and unprecedented economic devastation, the Soviet Union encouraged the immigration of Chinese citizens from Xinjiang into Soviet Central Asia. Despite the arbitrary behavior of local authorities, the immigrants were successfully integrated into Soviet society. But after 1963, many of the Chinese “defectors” began to be considered a threat to national security, and the KGB (Committee of State Security) arrested a good number of them. I argue that the Sino-Soviet split affected the mentality and immigration policies of the Soviet Union, much like current relations between China and the Central Asian states shape the attitude of the latter toward new arrivals from China. This article is based on research in the Kyrgyz and Kazakh archives.

Critical Post-Functionalism in the Architecture of Late Soviet Central Asia

Relying on all but forgotten texts of architectural criticism from late Soviet Central Asia, the article explores the discursive strategies employed by architects, critics, and historians to justify the shift away from the rigid functionalism of the 1960s to the regionally sensitive architecture of the 1970s and the 1980s. Soviet architects and critics, alert to the Soviet government’s insistence on the primordial continuity of regional and ethnic architectural traditions, and to the need to incorporate them into the new socialist style of Central Asian architecture, used the ideological quest for national forms as a means of expressing their growing distrust of prefabricated functionalism and their opposition to a Central Asian version of the Stalinist style. This architectural criticism essentially shielded late Soviet architecture from ideological dogma, allowing for its impressive formal flexibility. By critically exploring two scholastic distinctions, first between the national form and the socialist content (or essence), and second between the national and the international in socialist architecture, this article reconstructs the unique intellectual conditions governing the architectural profession in the USSR where architects operated in a context characterized by the impossibility of private commissions, the quest for aesthetic objectivity, the rise of historic preservation, and the gradual transformation of controlled socialist nation-building into the violent nationalism of the 1990s.

Taxonomic notes on hexapogon irises (Iridaceae)

The taxonomic notes in this article are based on the result of an analysis of the protologues, relevant literature, and a study of herbarium specimens of Iris sect. Hexapogon. This section comprises species with bearded claw in both outer and inner segments of perianth. These are relatively poorly known psammophytes occurring mostly in the desert and semi-desert regions of some of the former Soviet Central Asian republics, as well as in Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan (Baluchistan). It is now generally accepted that I. sect. Hexapogon comprises two species, I. falcifolia and I. longiscapa. The present study has shown that this section contains only I. longiscapa. The name I. falcifolia is for the first time reduced to a synonym of I. longiscapa. A neotype for the name I. longiscapa and lectotypes for the names I. falcifolia and I. filifolia are designated. Notes are provided on the original material for all the three considered names.

Contested landscapes of Soviet Central Asia: an ethnoarchaeological case study from Kazakhstan

ABSTRACT A group of rectangular and circular enclosures in southwest Kazakhstan, originally thought to be prehistoric or early historical, has turned out to date from the 1950s and 1960s. They were built as livestock pens (kora) to protect rice paddies from free-grazing cattle. Rice cultivation had been introduced to the region east of the Aral Sea by deported ethnic Koreans from the Soviet Far East after the native pastoral nomadism had been destroyed by forced collectivisation in the early 1930s. This had resulted in the Great Famine of 1931–33, evidence for which is provided by refugees’ burials found on archaeological sites in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The case study illustrates an approach to the study of twentieth century contested landscapes using evidence from archaeology, ethnography, and oral history.

The Caspian Disputes: Nationalism and Nomadism in Early Soviet Central Asia

Immediately following the Russian Civil War, new Soviet authorities sought to resolve a series of conflicts involving the nomadic communities living along the north and eastern shores of the Caspian Sea. To the north, beyond the Ural River, nomads competed with Russian farmers for pasturage. Further south, around the Garabogazkol Lagoon, nomads from different tribes were engaged in a cycle of violence and recrimination. Communist party members, working alongside local elites, interpreted all these conflicts as disagreements between nations and proffered solutions congruent with this analysis. Peace agreements were written and signed, borders drawn, and national territorial jurisdictions extended and defended. In both areas conflict was not resolved and nomadic hardship was in fact exacerbated. The Caspian Disputes and their incomplete resolution contain lessons on the Soviet state's treatment of two minorities: non‐Russian nationalities and nomads. For the former, we see the limited utility of a European conception of nationalism applied to Soviet Central Asia. For the latter, we see what influenced and complicated the relationship between nomad and state before the collectivization campaign endowed that relationship with a brutal simplicity. This represents a step towards a more comprehensive understanding of how Soviet power treated nomads from its very inception.