Soviet Orientalism Research Articles

İLYA PAVLOVİÇ PETRUŞEVSKİY, HORASAN’DA SERBEDARLAR HAREKETİ

One of the prominent representatives of Soviet Orientalism Prof. Dr. Ilya Pavlovich Petrushevsky (1898-1977) is known for his studies on the medieval history of Azerbaijan, Central Asia and Iran, especially the development process and characteristics of Eastern feudalism. He has more than a hundred scientific works published during his lifetime. One of the author's well-known works is the paper " The Sarbedar Movement in Khorasan", published in the XIV volume of the series "Scientific Works of the Institute of Oriental Studies of Academy of Sciences of USSR" in Moscow in 1956. The corresponding work was translated from Russian into Persian by Karim Keshavarz and published in Tehran in 1972 as a separate book. In view of the importance of the topic, we considered it necessary to translate the mentioned work of Petrushevsky from Russian into Turkish.The Sarbedar movement, which began in the village of Bashtin in the Bayhak district of the Khorasan region in 1336-1337, soon led to the creation of the Sarbedar state with its center in Sabzavar. This state, which existed between 1337 and 1386, left its mark on history due to the role it played in the political life of Iran, as well as the reforms and practices that it carried out in the social sphere. Petrushevsky, a Marxist historian, studying the Sarbedar movement, mainly tried to pay attention to the socio-economic factors that provoked this process, the class conflict and the struggle for power of various social groups among the Sarbedars, and programmatic differences between them. Keywords: History of Iran, Khorasan, Shiism, Sarbedars.

Soviet Atlantis: the Harappan Civilization in Soviet Oriental Studies in the 1920s and 1950s (to the 100th Anniversary of the Discovery of the Indus Valley Civilization)

In the 1920s, intensive excavations were carried out in the Indus Valley. The formed the foundation for the study of the Harappan (Indus Valley) civilization. Information about the progress of the work also reached the USSR, but for a long time Soviet orientalists could only state the importance of excavations, unable to independently interpret their results. In the late 1930s, interest in the fate of the Harappan civilization in Soviet science increased sharply due to the aggressive policy of Germany. Soviet orientalists saw certain parallels between the actions of Germany and the Aryans, who invaded India and destroyed the Dravidian culture of Harappa in the eyes of Soviet orientalists. The Academy of Sciences of the USSR and the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR allocated funds for the purchase of three articles by the Czechoslovak scientist B. Hrozny, with description of decipherment of Harappan inscriptions. This decipherment would provide the key to understanding the sense of the inscriptions and postulating “correct” conclusions. World Oriental studies did not accept the conclusions of B. Hrozny, but in the USSR his work found active support. It was the active introduction into the scientific circulation of these excavations in the Indus Valley that led to the final inclusion of India and China in the sphere of research on the history of the Ancient Orient. Interest in the conclusions of Hrozny was largely fueled by the independence of India (1947) and the proclamation of the republic (1950). In this regard, V. V. Struve is making a decisive attempt, based on the secondary interpretation of the excavations’ data of J. Marshall and E. Mackay, as well as a critical analysis of B. Hrozny’s approach to decipherment of Harappan inscriptions, to reconstruct the social type of the Harappan civilization, equalizing it typologically with the already known societies of the Ancient Orient. Struve’s conclusions are not based on the interpretation of the sources themselves, but on typological comparisons, that is, on conclusions made earlier about civilizations of the Middle East on the basis of the “correct” — class — approach, which in themselves were largely erroneous. By the mid-1950s the rhetoric of works on the history of the Harappan civilization is significantly softened. The main driver of interest in Soviet oriental studies of the 1920s — 1950s to the history of the Harappan civilization were changes in the situation in the world before and after World War II. Soviet orientalists created their own Harappa as an ideal ancient society, associating it in certain aspects with the USSR.

Oriental studies education in Russia. Training of Mongolists at the beginning of the 20th century to 1920

The article is devoted one of the most difficult periods in the history of Russian and Soviet Oriental studies, including Mongolian studies - the transition from the science of the Russian Empire to the Soviet one. At this time there was a change in the entire system of scientific knowledge. The Orientalist institutions of the scientific and educational plan were faced with tasks radically different from the prerevolutionary ones. It was necessary to take a step away from the study of sources, language issues, ancient periods of the peoples of the East. In exchange for this refusal, a transition was made to the study of living Oriental languages and issues of socio-economic importance in line with the new Soviet methodology. The article, in contrast to Soviet historiography, argues for the point of view on the development of practical Mongolian studies in pre–revolutionary Russia, which had considerable experience in the program and institutions for the training of Mongolian practitioners. The main inspirer of practical Oriental studies was the Mongol scholar A.M. Pozdneev. He was the first director of the Oriental Institute in Vladivostok, and rector of the Practical Academy at the Society of Oriental Studies in St. Petersburg - educational institutions. There he trained future specialists in the modern East. Soviet Oriental institutes adopted this experience, adapting it to new conditions. In this regard, there was a reorganization of the Lazarev Institute in Moscow. On its basis, with a significant expansion of the curriculum programs, the Central Institute of Living Oriental Languages was established. And in St. Petersburg, using the experience of the Academy at the Society of Oriental Studies, the work of the Petrograd (Leningrad) organized the Institute of Living Oriental Languages.

NGOs and Neocolonialism in Postcolonial Literature: The Case of Central Asia

NGOs and neocolonialism are among the key concerns of postcolonial theorists, but their representation in postcolonial literature has received surprisingly little attention. This article examines the representation of NGOs and their impact on “developing” societies in postcolonial literature, specifically in two post-Soviet Russophone novels – Kazakhstani author Lilya Kalaus’s The Fund of Last Hope: A Post-Colonial Novel (2013) and Tajik author Eleonora Kasymova’s Tajik (2007). My analysis bridges research in literary studies and social sciences by complementing studies “from above” of the post-Soviet transition, and is intended to reveal how postcolonial societies, especially women, adopt, adapt, or resist the norms promoted by their countries’ NGOs. I argue that rather than taking a side or remaining passive objects in the power games of their nations, women writers use their personal insights into the workings of post-Soviet NGOs to expose the neocolonial tendencies in the agendas of each political player. Echoing Achille Mbembe’s notion of “mockery from within”, the authors satirise how local NGOs’ dependency on the West, and their inability to divorce themselves from Soviet influences, lead to their self-orientalising, contradictory and inefficient practices. Moreover, they reveal the complicity between foreign neocolonial forces, local corrupt elites and their subjects. Thus, Kalaus and Kasymova blur the oppressor/oppressed binaries and problematise the stereotypical anti-western critiques of NGOs in their countries. Furthermore, they point to the specificities of the Soviet colonial project and how its legacies are played out in the post-Soviet context. Much as the competing interests from Russia and the West, Soviet legacies, especially internalised Soviet Orientalism, exacerbate class divisions among women and lead to the depoliticisation of gender activism. By focusing on the understudied post-Soviet cultures through a postcolonial lens, the article widens our understanding of global neocolonial processes and their representation in literature more broadly.

The contribution of V. I. Filonenko to the development of Russian Oriental Studies: the Crimean stage

This article is dedicated to examination of pedagogical and scientific activity of the Russian and Soviet Oriental scholar of the XX century V. I. Filonenko. Having acquired excellent education in the field of Oriental Studies in St. Petersburg University, he devoted his entire life to the development of science, leaving behind a rich legacy. The goal of this research lies in systematization of the records on the Crimean stage of scholar’s activity (1915–1935), when he proved himself as a remarkable scientist and pedagogue, head of the oriental department in Crimean Pedagogical Institute, and deputy head of Tauride Society of History, Archeology and Ethnography that often dealt with Arabic, Iranian, and Turkic philology. Although several brief biographies of V. I. Filonenko, including such compiled by his colleagues, are widely known, there is yet no comprehensive research on his contribution to the development of Oriental Studies in Crimea. This article attempts to provide a briad picture of V. I. Filonenko's scientific and pedagogical activity in the field of Oriental Studies and preparation of specialists in Oriental Studies. The article employs autobiographical materials, correspondence of Filonenko with Academician Krachkovsky, as well as minutes of the session of Tauride Society of History, Archeology and Ethnography. The acquired results reveal the role of V. I. Filonenko in the development of Russian Oriental Studies.

Orientalism poetics: story by Leonid Solovyov “The Nomad”

The article deals with the problem of orientalism in literature, narrowed to the question of Russian orientalism and its Soviet derivation. The names of Nikolai Karazin and Andrey Platonov are mentioned among Russian literary Orientalists. The researchers identify the differences between Soviet Orientalism and the Orientalism of the XIX century. The analytical paradigm presented in the article outlines the prospects for the scientific study of Uzbek impressions. Salir-Gul (1933) by Sigismund Krzyzanowski and Pavel Zaltzman's novel Central Asia in the Middle Ages (1930s). For the first time, the novel The nomad (Kochevye) by the Russian writer of the twentieth century Leonid Solovyov written in 1929 and published in 1932 is analyzed in detail. Appeal to the folklore, ceremonial, and ritual life of the peoples of Central Asia becomes one of the main techniques of Leonid Solovyov's Oriental poetics. Solovyov's narrator is not a traditional orientalist observer of an alien, and therefore exotic, picture of the world. In Solovyov's poetics, the subject of the story merges with its object and represents a single whole: Russian literature spoke in the voice of a stranger. The material of the article corresponds to the intentions outlined in modern postcolonial studies.

Strange Love: Parajanov and the Affects of Late Soviet (Inter)nationalisms

Drawing on the function of flatness, stasis, and simultaneity in Soviet Georgian-Armenian director Sergei Parajanov's films, this article focuses on Parajanov's reimagination of the revolutionary avant-garde cinematic language of sensuous thought as an anti-colonial aesthetic project that echoes non-aligned trajectories. Parajanov's films perform Soviet Orientalism in drag, upending the lyric dimensions of an ethno-nationalist cinema as he recasts formalist poetic cinematic aesthetics through the defamiliarization of a queer non-Russian subject. Drawing on affect theory from the early Soviet avant-garde to the work of Gilles Deleuze, I argue that the sensuous materiality of Parajanov's films, focalized around the animism of objects and the dynamism of the static tableau, resists the distinction between matter and spirit. In this way, I argue that he also rejects a vision of liberal agency as a defining critique of Soviet nationalist patriarchal hegemony by instead focusing on the ways in which the material sensuousness of the cinematic image can upend the teleological evolution and assimilation of national form into Soviet content. This article thus takes up his films, in particular Ashik Kerib (1988), to trace alternative forms of feeling international across the Soviet south.

З історії радянського сходознавства: нові архівні джерела з розвитку єгиптології в 1940–1960-ті рр.

З історії радянського сходознавства: нові архівні джерела з розвитку єгиптології в 1940–1960-ті рр.

Исламская пресса в раннесоветском Дагестане и журнал «Мусульмане Советского Востока»

An analysis of a number of articles in imperial and early Soviet newspapers and journals, including “Jaridat Dagistan”, shows that the theological discussion that existed in Dagestan in manuscript tradition for more than three hundred years migrated to some extent to new press. This applies to some issues of the theory of Islamic law (the problem of taqlid and ijtihad), as well as some practical legal issues in the field of worship (‘ibada) and in the sphere of social relations (mu’amala).In the late 1960’s in Tashkent, the journal “Muslims of the Soviet Orient” was founded, many issues of which were sent to Dagestan in Uzbek (in Arabic script) and in Arabic; various issues of this journal are currently being found in a number of private collections in Dagestan. In many articles the influence of the already established Soviet Oriental scholarly tradition is noticeable. Articles devoted to the theory and practice of Islamic law, to various issues of Muslim theology, are practically absent. An analysis of the articles of this journal and the “Jaridat Dagistan” shows that if the latter was formed and edited exclusively by Dagestani theologians and served as a platform for discussing theological issues, the journal “Muslims of the Soviet Orient” was a Soviet attempt to represent Muslims and showed how they were seen or wanted to be seen by Soviet authority.

Soviet Orientalism across Borders: Documentary Film for the Turkish Republic

Soviet Orientalism across BordersDocumentary Film for the Turkish Republic Samuel J. Hirst (bio) In the early 1930s, Ankara’s requests for productions about Turkey created a dilemma for Soviet filmmakers.1 How could a single propaganda film satisfy two governments with conflicting ideologies? Moscow knew that Communists languished in Turkish jails, and the Turkish military had already blocked screenings of Sergei Eisenstein’s Bronenosets Potemkin (Battleship Potemkin).2 Yet Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) and many of his supporters sympathized with elements of the Soviet project, and their proposition was intriguing.3 Ultimately, film as a revolutionary tool brought representatives of the Turkish and Soviet states together, and their joint cinematographic endeavors help explain similarities in practices across state and ideological borders. A Bolshevik faith in the persuasiveness of scientific truth facilitated cooperation, for it suggested that objectivity could overcome subjective difference. When Boris Shumiatskii—head of the Soviet film industry for much of the decade—reviewed an early proposal for Soviet-Turkish cinema, he [End Page 35] argued that the creation of a common set of images would avoid “ideological concessions” for both sides. The trick, he claimed, was to produce a work that was “logical, true, and historically founded.”4 Shumiatskii echoed prominent members of the Soviet avant-garde who maintained that film was an artistic medium uniquely capable of documenting reality. Supraideological alliance led one enthusiastic Soviet reviewer to hail cinematographic cooperation as a world historical event. He alluded to the Tower of Babel and proclaimed the Soviet-Turkish venture evidence that national and ideological “boundedness” (ogranichennost´) could be breached.5 Shumiatskii and the reviewer both underestimated the challenge of making a Soviet representation of reality recognizable to their Turkish counterparts, but Shumiatskii’s logic is revealing. Turks who participated in these efforts also appreciated film’s capacity to be a documentary tool, and both sides hoped the camera could historicize Turkey—that is, simultaneously capture Turkey’s particularity and situate the country in a broader historical process. The latter was particularly important, for Soviets and Turks felt that Turkey had long been the subject of ahistorical orientalist fantasies. During a brief but intense moment, Soviet and Turkish elites negotiated how best to present an image of modern Turkey on the screen. Forgoing Istanbul’s alleyways, Sergei Iosifovich Iutkevich’s Ankara—Serdtse Turtsii (Ankara—The Heart of Turkey) celebrated the Republican capital and was released in Turkey and the Soviet Union in 1934. Novelty was in the title of Idet novaia Turtsiia (The New Turkey on the Move), which Esfir´ Il´inichna Shub worked on in 1934 and early 1935. Shub’s experience testifies to the difficulty of these projects, as she had long left the project by the time Ha-Ka Studio released the 1937 Türk İnkılâbında Terakki Hamleleri (Steps of Progress in the Turkish Revolution).6 She had complained when her producer, Halil Kamil, refused to let her film camel caravans and peasant women riding donkeys because they would inevitably be cut, but her plan for the film suggests she was perfectly ready to speak a language acceptable to Turkish censors.7 Her script promised “factory buildings stretching out” along the Golden Horn [End Page 36] as symbols of progress, “nothing like” the romanticized depictions left by the French writers Pierre Loti and Claude Farrère, whom she dismissed as retrograde.8 Industry was one of many themes recognizable to both Soviet and Turkish audiences, and finding shared symbols was not difficult. Iutkevich’s Ankara presented the hallmarks of modern times—not only factories but also what one reviewer called “the face of the new Turkey … institutes, the art of the youth, scientific laboratories, construction, new factories, new buildings, and hydroelectric plants.”9 In the discussions of these films, participants and viewers repeatedly staked claims to define interwar Turkey. Propaganda film was a favored instrument of contemporary states, but here representatives of two competing states employed the practice together. The sense of a shared foe evident in Shub’s reference to French novelists proved crucial in this collaboration. This episode offers a new perspective on what a line of distinguished historians has referred to as “Soviet modernity.”10 Soviets and Turks...

Лазаревский институт восточных языков в контексте истории востоковедения

The article analyses the history of the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages, which was foundedin Moscow in 1815 and flourished for an entire century until 1917. The Lazarev Institute is recognized as oneof the most important institutional foundations of the Moscow School of Oriental Studies. The author goesinto the specifics of this educational establishment which initially was a private institution, a characteristic which explained its vitality and the emphasis it placed on seeking to meet the daily needs of the state apparatus, particularly of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The impact of the history of the Lazarev Instituteas deeply intertwined with the evolution of the Eastern (formerly Oriental) Studies as a discipline in Russiaat large. Political upheavals in Europe at the end of the XVIII – first half of the XIX century revived theinterest of the Russian educated society in all non-European, and especially Eastern affairs, which exerteda favorable influence on the development of the Russian school of Oriental Studies. Furthermore, at theturn of the XX century, the focus shifted substantially to the Middle East, to Caucasian, Central Asian Far Eastern matters. The Lazarev Institute, and the traditions it established, have left a profound footprint onRussian and Soviet Oriental Studies. These traditions were inherited in its turn by MGIMO University following its merger with the Institute of Oriental Studies – the successor of the Lazarev Institute. Oneof the current challenges for contemporary Eastern Studies as an academic discipline is that scientificknowledge is becoming increasingly complex qualitatively as the structure of scientific knowledge, with itsformer conceptual integrity, is clearly falling apart. The author argues that the notion of “Non-West” isfar broader and more complex than that of “the East”. Yet, Russian Oriental Studies, as an united systemof knowledge and understanding, has broken up and the focus is being diverted to dealing with specific,mainly pragmatic or purely local issues rather than considering this part of the world in its entirety. RussianOrientalists seem to have lost sight of the integrated problem field that united them a century ago, and have retreated to their respective “national corners”. The article advocates the need for an academic discussion onthe status, problems and prospects of Russian oriental studies, as well as the opportunities for cooperation with colleagues in the East and the West.

“A People Forgotten by History”: Soviet Studies of the Kurds

The Russian/Soviet experience raises complex general questions concerning orientalism, conceptual hegemony, and the politics of (post-)colonial knowledge. Russia was not an empire in Said's sense, and drew much of its orientalist categories from non-imperialist German sources; the Soviet Union was explicitly anti-imperialist, and was dedicated to the emancipation of subaltern classes and nationalities. Yet Soviet orientalism in part reproduced hegemonic categories of “bourgeois” knowledge, notably concerning language and national identity. This becomes especially clear in the case of Soviet studies of Kurdish, a language subaltern with respect to Persian, Arabic, and, increasingly, Turkish. In the 1920s and early 1930s, native scholars like Erebê Shemo, Qanatê Kurdo, and Heciyê Cindî pioneered the creation of both an alphabet and a literature in Kurdish and of scholarly linguistic studies. Their work was shaped (and encouraged) by Nikolaj Marr's rejection of the idea of genetic links between Indo-Persian languages, and of the reification of “national characters.” Marr's “japhetic” linguistics dovetailed with Stalin's nationality policies in the 1920s and 1930s; it is rightly rejected as unscientific, but it did have positive emancipatory effects. It criticized ethnocentric and racist assumptions in contemporary Indo-European linguistics, and emphasized the value of spoken subaltern vernaculars like Ossetian and Kurdish against hegemonic written languages like Sanskrit and Persian. It also had the paradoxical effect of both countering bourgeois nationalism and encouraging national consciousness. The article concludes with a discussion of how the Soviet experience may affect our view of the Gramscian concept of hegemony and of the linguistic turn in later postcolonial studies.

“Red Mecca”—The Communist University for Laborers of the East (KUTV): Iranian Scholars and Students in Moscow in the 1920s and 1930s

The Communist University for Laborers of the East (KUTV), established in Moscow in 1921 and closed in 1938, presents a unique experiment in Soviet Orientalism. KUTV was the first communist educational institution set up specifically for students from the Orient to study their own countries in their native languages through a Marxist lens. Its purpose was not only to train teachers and revolutionaries for work in their native countries but to bring about a paradigm shift in the study of the East. Orientalism was to be freed from the imperialist prejudices of the past by redistributing the tools of Orientalist scholarship to Orientals themselves and by emphasizing contemporary social and economic history over an idealized and nationalistic antiquity. Iranians made up a strong presence at KUTV among both students and teachers, some of whom returned to Iran to spread learning and revolution, while others remained in the Soviet Union as scholars of Iran, influencing the development of Soviet Orientalism and often serving simultaneously in the Soviet political apparatus. With their students, they produced research and compiled massive collections of reference materials that formed the foundation for future Soviet scholarship and foreign policy. By the second half of the 1920s, KUTV developed into one of the most important centers of Soviet Orientalism, spawning a parallel Research Institute (NIA) that offered graduate programs and published its own periodical, Revolutionary East. With its aim of empowering the oppressed while simultaneously projecting Soviet influence, its attempt to rise above nationalist conceptions while at times succumbing to them, and the repression of its faculty in the Stalinist purges, KUTV exhibits many of the contradictions of the Soviet project itself. Among other sources, this paper uses Soviet case files on Iranian students and teachers at KUTV to shed light on their motivations and backgrounds.

Soviet Orientalism and Nationalism in Central Asia: Aleksandr Semenov's Vision of Tajik National Identity

Russian Orientalists participated—often in a close but precarious relationship with the state—in the transformation of Central Asia from a tsarist colony into part of what Francine Hirsch has called an “Empire of Nations.” One of them was the former tsarist colonial clerk Aleksandr Semenov (1873–1958), who together with such prominent representatives of the region's Persian-speaking elites as Sadriddin Ayni or Bobojon Ghafurov, and with the support of his academic mentors, such as Vasilii Bartol'd and Sergei Ol'denburg, effectively—albeit somewhat reluctantly—lobbied for the official recognition of the Persian/Tajik language and of Tajikistani statehood. The study of their cooperation shows how Central Asian cultural heritage was researched and preserved, but also how it was reinvented in national terms and codified; and how these processes were negotiated between local intellectuals, scholars and the state.

Olga Chekhovich: Two Facets of a Soviet Academic

The essay focuses on the personality and work of Olga Dmitrievna Chekhovich (1912–1982), an eminent Soviet and Uzbekistani scholar of mediaeval history whose entire academic career was spent in Tashkent. Based upon on the documents of her personal archive I try to reconstruct Chekhovich’s two facets - a Communist Party propagandist and a scholar. In doing so, I argue that the two facets of Olga Chekhovich are not oppositional but rather complementary; insofar as, taken together, they constitute a holistic image of a Soviet Oriental Studies scholar in the particular social and political space. What we see as duplicity was in fact a consistent form of the scholar’s self-presentation both within the academic community and in the social milieu beyond it. It let the scholar safely stay within the confines of the social and political system, becoming an integral part of it; and at the same time shape her or his own social and intellectual space within which she or he could advance and defend her or his positions, opinions, and views. In the larger scheme of things, this case study lets us address the question of whether one can view the Soviet school of Oriental studies as ideologically uniform, isolationist, and conforming solely to the directives of the ‘center’. The overall picture appears even more complicated if we pay more attention to the contradictory nature of Oriental studies—the various currents and struggles, the movement of scholars between center and periphery, their familiarity with scholarly works produced in the West, as well as a certain degree of autonomy from ideology.

Rupture or Continuity? The Organizational Set-up of Russian and Soviet Oriental Studies before and after 1917

The article presents a systematic appraisal of the essential Russian- and English-language scholarship on Russian Oriental studies and particularly on Russia's Iranology. However, the main target of this article is to trace the discursive continuities and epistemological shifts which have existed in late imperial, Soviet and, partially, post-Soviet Russia's Oriental studies since the end of the nineteenth century. Drawing on the sources of the main Russian political, military and academic archives, the article offers an assessment of the question of rupture or continuity, which is based on a synthesis of the above-mentioned scholarship from an entirely new angle. Dealing with the seemingly overwhelming watershed of 1917, an analysis is provided that transcends the unhelpful continuity/change dichotomy, putting forward a new interpretation, which is informed by the Foucauldian conceptualization of the productive nature of the power/knowledge nexus.

Soviet Orientalism and the Creation of Central Asian Nations by Alfrid K. Bustanov (review)

Soviet Orientalism and the Creation of Central Asian Nations by Alfrid K. Bustanov (review)

The Heritage of Soviet Oriental studies

Michael Kemper and Stephan Conermann, eds. The Heritage of Soviet Oriental Studies. Routledge Contemporary Russia and Europe Series, 25. London: Routledge, 2011. 352 pp. Index. $150.00, cloth.The present volume brings together twenty scholars from the West and the post-Soviet space with the goal of providing an integrating view on Soviet Oriental (p. 1). The latter is understood in the double sense of presenting these studies as a single discipline and relating them to the on-going discussion of Orientalism. Against the prevailing perception of Soviet Orientology as hopelessly isolated and ideologized, the editors and contributors to the volume argue that it fits rather well Edward Said's view of Western Orientalism as peculiar nexus of knowledge and power. At the same time, Soviet Oriental studies had a number of important peculiarities and legacies that make them a subject worthy of investigation. The volume is divided into two parts, of which the first, including nine articles, traces the evolution of Oriental and Islamic studies in Moscow and Leningrad/St. Petersburg. The seven articles of the second part of the volume examine Oriental studies in the republics of the former Soviet Union and two provincial centres of the Russian Federation.The objective set by the editors is quite timely: after Kritika broke new ground by organizing a discussion on pre-revolutionary Russian Orientalism ten years ago, it was only logical to ask similar questions about its Soviet successor. Although the volume focuses on the Soviet period, several articles briefly discuss pre- 1917 developments, while David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye' s piece is devoted entirely to the peculiarities of imperial Orientology. These included, among other things, the division of labour between the more academically oriented Oriental studies of St. Petersburg versus the more practical profile of the Kazan and the Moscow schools, the desire of the government to impose advisory functions upon Orientalist scholars and their resistance to this pressure in the name of scientific objectivity.The most important pre-revolutionary legacy was of course the Orientalists themselves. Similar to other bourgeois experts during the early Soviet decades, prerevolutionary Orientalist scholars went through hardships and travails, which are discussed by Mikhail Rodionov and several other contributors. Still, Soviet terror was mixed with opportunity, as Michael Kemper notes in the introductory chapter. In the context of Soviet policy, Orientalists were supposed to produce the ideologically correct historical narratives for the titular nationalities of the republics of the USSR. This phenomenon is discussed in detail in Aifa-Alua Auezova's chapter on Kazakh historiography of the 1 920 s and 1 930 s and receives some attention from other contributors to the second part of the volume.While Orientology had a special role in the Soviet nationality policy, the latter in rum influenced the Oriental scholars in a number of ways. First, there occurred a significant nativization of Oriental studies in comparison with the pre-1917 period. The number of indigenous scholars from the borderlands (traditionally high in Imperial Russia) became even higher under the Soviets. Second, nativization policies determined the distribution of centres of Oriental studies. Alongside Moscow and St. Petersburg/Leningrad, these were created in Tashkent, Baku, Tbilisi, Dushanbe, and Yerevan (which were all the capitals of Eastern union republics), but not in Kazan or Makhachkala (which were and continue to be the capitals of the autonomous Tatar and Dagestan republics within the RSFSR/Russian Federation), despite important prerevolutionary traditions and/or strong local initiative.The Soviet encounter with Islam was another major conditioning factor for the development of Soviet Oriental studies. In a highly interesting contribution, Vladimir Bobrovnikov addresses the relations between Soviet Orientology and anti-religious propaganda. …

The Soviet Discourse on the Origin and Class Character of Islam, 1923-1933

AbstractThe article examines the growing radicalization of the Marxist anti-Islamic discourse in the USSR as a case-study of "Soviet Orientalism". To which of Marx's five socio-economic formations should Muslim society be assigned? During the relatively pluralistic period of the New Economic Policy (1921-1927) Marxist scholars offered various answers. Many argued that Islam emerged from the trading community of Mecca and was trade-capitalist by nature (M. Reisner, E. Beliaev, L. Klimovich). Others held that Islam reflected the interests of the agriculturalists of Medina (M. Tomara), or of the Bedouin nomads (V. Ditiakin, S. Asfendiarov); and some even detected communist elements in Islam (Z. and D. Navshirvanov). All authors found support in the Qur'ān and works of Western Orientalists. By the late 1920s Marx' and Engels' scattered statements on Islam became central in the discourse, and in 1930 Liutsian Klimovich rejected the Qur'ān altogether by arguing that the book, as well as Muhammad himself, were mere inventions of later times. By the end of the Cultural Revolution (1929-1931) it was finally "established" that Islam was "feudal" in character, and critical studies of Islam became impossible for decades. The "feudal" interpretation legitimized the Soviet attack on Islam and Muslim societies at that time; but also many of the Marxist writers on Islam perished in Stalin's Terror. We suggest that the harsh polemics the authors directed against each other in the discourse contributed to their later repression. By lending itself to the interests of the totalitarian state, Soviet Marxist Islamology committed suicide—the ultimate form of "Orientalism".

Taming Russia's Wild East: The Central Asian historical-revolutionary film as Soviet Orientalism

(2003). Taming Russia's Wild East: The Central Asian historical-revolutionary film as Soviet Orientalism. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television: Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 259-270.