Cinema, Nation, and Empire in Uzbekistan, 1919–1937

CINEMA, NATION, AND EMPIRE IN UZBEKISTAN, 1919–1937

CINEMA, NATION, AND EMPIRE IN UZBEKISTAN, 1919–1937

Cloé Drieu

Translated by Adrian Morfee

Indiana University Press

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Originally Published as:

Fictions nationales. Cinéma, empire et nation en Ouzbékistan (1919–1937)

© Éditions Karthala – Paris, 2013

English Language translation:

© 2018 by Indiana University Press

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No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Drieu, Cloé, author. | Morfee, Adrian, translator.

Title: Cinema, nation, and empire in Uzbekistan, 1919-1937 / Cloé Drieu ; translated by Adrian Morfee.

Other titles: Fictions nationales. English

Description: Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press, [2018] | Revised and expanded from the original French. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018019384 (print) | LCCN 2018025311 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253037855 (e-book) | ISBN 9780253037831 (cl : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253037848 (pb : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures—Uzbekistan. | Communism and motion pictures—Uzbekistan. | Motion pictures—Social aspects—Uzbekistan. | Nationalism and communism—Uzbekistan.

Classification: LCC PN1993.5.U9 (ebook) | LCC PN1993.5.U9 D7513 2018 (print) | DDC 791.4309587—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018019384

123452221201918

To my daughter Ellie

Contents

Note on Transcriptions

Prologue

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part 1: Decolonizing Central Asia: Film Structures and Representations (1919–27)

Part 1 Introduction: Turkestan Prior to the Birth of the Soviet Union: Revolts and Colonial Revolution

1Cultural Autonomy and the Nation (1919–24)

2Revolutionary Exoticism and the Colonial Imaginary: Cinema and Entertainment (1924–27)

Part 2: Cultural Revolution and Its Paradoxes: Nation, Modernity, and Empire (1927–31)

Part 2 Introduction: Cinematographic Cultural Revolution

3The National Cinematographic Sphere

4Uzbek Film and the Shift toward Imperial Domination

Part 3: The Paradoxes of the Nationalities Policy: Nationalism versus Internationalism (1931–37)

Part 3 Introduction: Working as an Uzbek Artist under Stalin: Ambivalence, Resistance, and Nationalism

5The Nationalist Cinematographic Imaginary: Subjugating Class to Nation

6The Empire of the Proletariat: Subjugating Nation to Class

Conclusion

Appendix

Glossary

Notes

Sources and Selected Bibliography

Index

Note on Transcriptions

THE SOURCES USED for this work are predominantly Russian but also include works in Turki (Uzbek), which used four different writing systems over the twentieth century: Arabic script until 1929 (with the reform in the mid-1920s advocating that long vowels be indicated), Latin script (1929–40), Cyrillic script until 1993, and since then, Latin script once again. Diacritics have not been used for the transliteration system for simplicity.

The following concordances have been used for Cyrillic alphabets (Russian and Uzbek):

The following have been used for the Latin alphabet (Uzbek 1927–40):

And these have been used for the Arabic alphabet (Uzbek until 1929):

The most frequently used names are transcribed in their habitual form. The letter j is used for the dj sound—for instance, in Khojaev (Khodjaev), Jadid (djadid), and Andijan (Andidjan).

Prologue

PUBLIC READINGS WITH magic lantern images were held at Tashkent gymnasium and then at the public library. Among the measures taken to enable indigenous men of learning to discover modern science, the most spectacular trials with electricity were held on several occasions in the gymnasium, producing a great impression on the Muslim scholars of Tashkent. Afterward brochures were produced and translated by the editors of the Tuzemnaia Gazeta and read out for the auditors. One of these readings in Samarkand met with particular success and was described by an eyewitness in the following terms:

At eight in the evening on March 18, 1901, at the height of the Muslim festival of Kurban Bayramı, for the very first time, in the Shir Dor madrasa, a reading took place accompanied by obscure images, organized by the Samarkand Public Reading Circle.¹ And now, fifteen hours after this reading, I still cannot clearly picture what this evening was—I cannot speak calmly of what I witnessed for the first time in my life, for I am still under the influence of the enchanting nature of the evening in question. Yes, the strength and clarity of the images made this an essentially extraordinary event in our Russian life, and even more so in the monotonous lives of the natives of Samarkand. I am convinced that since the days of Tamerlane and Ulugh Beg, the madrasas of Registan have never seen such a large number of spectators within their walls as there were yesterday to be found in the Shir Dor madrasa.

The theater was formed by the large, square courtyard of the madrasa, paved with marble slabs and surrounded by two-story buildings with numerous balconies and arcades in the Moorish style, entirely covered with magnificent ceramic tiles dating from the days of Tamerlane, which have remained unaltered for centuries. The screen for the obscure images was lit by the powerful light of an acetylene lamp, recently received by the Public Reading Circle, and carefully positioned so that the images on the screen were visible from any point in the theater.

There was a reading, for the first time, of Tolstoy’s work What Men Live By in a good translation into the Sart tongue.² The reading was given by the young mullah Mahmud. It was not easy for him that evening to win the well-deserved honors that normally go to the first reader. He read from 7:30 until 9:30, during which time he left his place to others about five times in order to recover his strength. He read so loud, as only a mullah with healthy lungs can do, calling with his voice that resounded like a bell summoning his countless faithful to prayer! And despite all that, the size of such an open-air theater; the acoustic conditions, which were ill-suited to a reading; and the almost unbearable hubbub of several thousand excited spectators were so disagreeable for the reader that the powerful and expressive declamation pouring forth from his lips all but died on reaching the back rows of those present. The spectators were all on the parapets and balconies and in all probability could not properly hear the reader bawling out at the top of his lungs. A final reward, comprised of a miraculous spectacle of flying birds, was out of sight for those sitting lower down.

How many and numerous were the people? It can be worked out based on the surface area, which was about 850 square meters.³ It was entirely filled by children (at the front) and adults standing or sitting behind them. It may be said without exaggeration that there were at least 4000 people there, and about 5,000 counting those on the balconies. As may be expected, most of the public were Muslims from the towns, indigenous Jews, Persians, Russians, and Armenians.

Admittance to the reading was free. . . . Before the reading began, V. Medinskii [the military governor general] congratulated the indigenous Mohammedans on this day of festival and suggested raising a cheer to the long life of the emperor and sovereign. He hoped the natives would appreciate the true worth of this public reading held for them and that they would be as attentive to the readings as they were currently being. These words from the leader of the province were welcomed with long and deafening hurrahs from the crowd of several thousand people. An hour before the reading began, the Zerabulavskii Battalion wind band . . . played on Registan Square and then in the theater itself. The band may not have been complete, but what an incredible and joyous spirit was awakened among this countless and beturbaned public by the powerful, enchanting, and divine sounds of our Russian music resonating within the ancestral walls of Shir Dor!

On leaving this gathering, General V. Medinskii expressed his thanks to the organizers of this public reading, who were members of the Circle . . ., for having successfully put on this first reading for natives, even though it had been difficult to set up this innovative undertaking. His Excellency also thanked the Shir Dor madrasa principal teacher (mudarris), Isa Khoja, a respectable and pleasant scholar, for the support he had lent the circle and for his administrative adroitness during the reading.

As natives, had they understand what mullah Mahmud had read to them? Had they understood what was being illustrated in so spectacular and lively a manner by the views of the Karelin workshops, based on paintings by Ge?⁴ Had they understood what men live by? Judging by the sustained attention and interest with which the hundreds of natives sitting at the front had listened and watched, enraptured, I believe that they had understood and recognized what our great philosophical author was telling them with such simplicity and artistic skill.

However, the influence of the religious institutes (ishans), which were powerful and of long date, and the instruction received by natives in their schools (maktab and madrasa) were not propitious for the future development of our Sarts. Modern Muslim education does not prepare the natives or predispose them to seeking a closer understanding of a culture that is foreign to them (Ostroumov 1908, 200–205).⁵

Acknowledgments

THIS BOOK IS based on research presented in November 2008 at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales. It was supervised by Jean Radvanyi, without whose help it would never have been completed. It was initially published in French by Karthala in 2013. I wish to extend all my gratitude to Stéphane A. Dudoignon, who answered all my requests for help and whose many remarks and criticisms helped me develop my ideas. Special thanks go to Stéphane Vibert for his infallible replies, frequent insights, updates, and help putting ideas into perspective—all of great help in completing this work. I wish to thank the members of the examining panel for all their comments and criticisms that I have sought to incorporate: Alain Blum, whose support and observations have helped improve this work; Nathalie Clayer, thanks to whom this work was published in the Meydan/Karthala collection launched by the Centre d’études turques, ottomanes, balkaniques et centrasiatiques; last, and especially, François Georgeon for all his support. I also wish to express my gratitude to Martine Godet, head of the Iconothèque russe et soviétique at L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales for her friendship and continual encouragement. Adeed Khalid’s numerous comments and remarks have also contributed much to this work, as has the kindly support of Marc Ferro. I wish to thank all of them here.

My research was made possible thanks to the financial support of the Institut Français d’Études sur l’Asie Centrale and the encouragement of its former director, Rémy Dor. I also thank Bayram Balci and all the team at the institute, including Kirill, Muhabat, and Umid, for their help with trips to Central Asia and my research. I also extend my warmest thanks to Ulugbek Mansurov for having answered my requests for bibliographical information so rapidly. This work would not have been possible without the cooperation of the directors of the Uzbekistan National State Archives and the director of the Art Academy; the reading room staff, Sarofat F. Muminzhanova and Marhamat S. Turakhojaeva; and all the archivists. The research was initially conceived as a comparative analysis of the cinema in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Iran during the interwar period, but lack of time meant it finally focused solely on Uzbekistan. The work nevertheless benefited from several months spent researching in Teheran, partially financed by the Institut Français de Recherche en Iran.

Many historians have helped me develop my ideas, including Naim Karimov, Boris Golender, Shirinbek, and researchers at the Institut d’histoire. Many people have participated directly or indirectly in my research as it progressed and in the writing of this book, including the Ismailov family (Tursun Oi opa, Abdurakhim aka, Adolat, Bobur, Saodat), Dilbar Rashidova and Uchkun Nazarov, Olia and Margarita, Anaita Khudonazar (whom I met at the Cinema Museum engrossed by Alisher Navo’i), Ömer Akakça, Agnès Devictor, Xavier Bougarel, Jean-Claude Penrad, Gilles Dorronsoro, Jean During, Philippe Tarabella, Samuel Frydman, Hamid Khezri, and many other friends and researchers. I wish to thank all of them here. Last, I would like to thank my family, and especially my father for his support and encouragement.

CINEMA, NATION, AND EMPIRE IN UZBEKISTAN, 1919–1937

Introduction

WHILE MAGIC LANTERNS might well have been used in the imperial period for spectacular representations of Russian culture in the majestic setting of Registan Square, this work focuses on the magic lantern’s direct descendant—cinema, and, more specifically, on the fiction films produced from the ashes of the defunct Russian Empire in Central Asia twenty or so years later. Nikolai Ostroumov’s description, quoted in the prologue, suggests numerous parallels between the imperial period and the first phase of Stalinism in Central Asia: grandiloquent cultural events held in imposing architectural sites; the appropriation of places emblematic of the eminence of a bygone era, when spreading Russian culture—in particular, literature—generating a feeling of pride and a degree of condescension; the massive scale of the performance and the public targeted; the receptivity to and fascination even with images; the promotion of new techniques and the use of music to accompany the projection of images; the support needed from local elites; and, finally, the need to retranscribe cultural representations. One major point of difference between the two periods relates, however, to the policies of integration and modernization, as suggested in Nikolai Ostroumov’s conclusion, in which he underlines that the public were ill-prepared for seeking a closer understanding of a culture that is foreign to them. (Ostroumov 1908, 200). This idea provides one of the narrative threads running through this work: What rationales underlie this cultural rapprochement? How did these rationales transpire? And exactly what reactions, ranging from acceptance and adherence to tension and resistance, did they provoke?

Still, this work does not concentrate solely on cultures. The research presented here, by linking filmic representations to their context of production and reception, draws extensively on analysis of political, economic, and social practices, all of which were undergoing profound changes at that time. More generally, this work provides an interpretation of the nationalist phenomenon in the imperial interlude of the 1920s and 1930s in Central Asia, looking more specifically at Uzbekistan. At this time, two great, singular historical trajectories—in schematic terms, a European, Russian, and proletarian trajectory and an Uzbek and nationalist trajectory—were overlapping and sometimes weaving in and out in step with the succeeding phases of violence and peace. This interweaving brought about a lasting and symbolic refounding of common destinies and helps us understand how these two ideological matrices, both of which were indispensable to the coherence of a zone of such great diversity, coexisted and evolved over time via the interplay of local/national and global/Soviet scales. Analysis of the autonomy or heteronomy of the political and sociocultural fields in the Soviet system brings out the opportunities for negotiation, compromise, and arrangement. And, ultimately, such an analysis illuminates the scope that existed for initiative, invention, imagination—or, more simply, political accommodation—as employed by the various political and cultural actors operating beyond the coercive measures and fundamental structural violence of the state, nation, and societies. Cinema provides a useful way to explore all these processes and apprehend their complexity.

This work originated in an earlier research project that led me to study Kazakh New Wave cinema. This phenomenon, which ran from the late 1980s to the 2000s, coincided with the transformations brought about by perestroika, for which it was a form of catharsis. The New Wave flouted all taboos, thereby marking the final twist in the Soviet ideological adventure. For the first time in the history of Soviet cinema, Kazakhstan found itself center stage, with its filmmakers acquiring genuine renown in the Soviet Union and being feted abroad. Rashid Nugmanov’s The Needle, combining cinema and protest in the milieu of rock music, attracted thirteen million viewers in 1989 (Pruner 1992, 795; Zemlianukhin 1994, 174), while Darejan Omirbaev’s films, deeply inspired by François Truffaut, Robert Bresson, and Andrei Tarkovsky, were screened at the Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard section, winning praise from Jean-Luc Godard. This New Wave—the label used by Kazakh filmmakers was a deliberate reference to the French movement—benefited from a set of circumstances that were favorable to cinematographic experimentation. The filmmakers could express themselves freely while profiting from what was still a relatively well-endowed production system. Banks and companies were willing to invest, believing easy money was to be made; they were convinced the film business would continue to be as lucrative as it had been during the Soviet period. However, the world of film faced new constraints during this phase of rapid liberalization—this time, they were economic rather than political. I was able to witness the effects of economic shortfalls firsthand when I spent several months on set for the entire shoot of Darejan Omirbaev’s fourth film, The Road (2001), in a coproduction with France. This experience—during which I performed diverse roles as production assistant, translator, and set photographer—allowed me to see how the various spheres involved in film production (in this instance, an international production) interacted and fit together. It also enabled me to understand how Kazakh studios were organized and recognize the recurrent sources of discontent: managers who had trained in other backgrounds (often civil engineering); slow, malfunctioning authorities; the state of decay of the distribution network; the degradation of film theaters and the uses to which they were put (often being abandoned or serving as warehouses); the incoherence of producing films not destined for a local public; and certain filmmakers’ dismay or forced professional conversion. The economic and ideological system of Soviet film production had disintegrated.

Kazakh cinema had provided me with an insight into the tail end of a cinematographic adventure. It led me to wonder how cinema in this region had gotten started and how the saga of the film industry in Central Asia as a whole had originated. The choice of place was soon made, for the first local experiments in cinematography were conducted on the territory of Soviet Uzbekistan, created in 1924. The first studio was set up for the khan of Khiva by Khudoibergan Devanov (1878–1940). Larger ones were founded in the early 1920s as proper business ventures to produce and distribute films, first in Tashkent (in the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic), and then in Bukhara (in the Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic). Uzbekistan, from 1924 onward, together with, to a lesser extent, Tajikistan, as of 1929, were the only two republics in Central Asia to generate an early national cinematographic elite: Suleyman Khojaev (1892–1937) and Nabi Ganiev (1904–54) in Uzbekistan, and Kamil Yarmatov (1903–78) in Tajikistan.¹ They all made their first, silent films between 1931 and 1936. Even though, as of 1928, other cities in Central Asia (such as Alma-Ata and Ashkhabad) had subsidiaries of Vostokkino, the suprastate film production structure (Chomentowski 2009), the first national Kirghiz, Turkmen, and Kazakh filmmakers only started working after the Second World War. And so, unlike the other Central Asian republics, present-day Uzbekistan is the only country to have had an early national cinematographic elite producing full-length fiction films during the crucial and troubled interwar period.

Having settled on the place, I next needed to define the period. Several particularly significant dates cropped up both in the political sphere and in the world of film, enabling me to determine my chronological framework. The earliest of the films studied was produced in 1924. This year marked the ethnic and territorial delimitation that gave birth to Soviet Uzbekistan as well as the beginning of a new phase in cinematography. It coincided with the beginning of filming for the first full-length fiction film ever made in Central Asia (The Minaret of Death by Viacheslav Viskovskii). The date closing the study is just as significant, for 1937 corresponds, first, to a major technical shift with the first talking film made in Uzbekistan (The Oath by Aleksandr Usol’stev-Garf), Uzbekistan being late in comparison with other Soviet cinemas here.² Second, 1937 was the year of Stalinist terror, with a massive wave of arrests, deportations, and executions. In Uzbekistan, the 1937 moment marked the end of the revolutionary rationale.³ The main national architects of Soviet power disappeared, along with most of the intellectual elite, in what was a symbolic death but also an initial act of deconstruction containing within itself the basis for a new edifice. And so, in the field of film, 1937 not only marks the disappearance of a form of national cinematographic expression, it also provides a vision of the symbiotic relationship between totalitarian power and representations while bearing witness to the edification of a new Soviet so-called national culture.

Establishing a correlation between primordial sociopolitical events and the production of a cinematographic fictional narrative requires a global approach irreducible to any one specific domain, such as aesthetics or institutional history, for instance—and my overall experience on Uzbek film shoots was no doubt influential here, too. My approach is fairly similar to that of Howard Becker in Art Worlds (1982), though I insist more than Becker does on the role and place to be accorded to the state as a crucial actor imposing the rules of the political and artistic games. Film could thus, in reference to Marcel Mauss, be described as a total social fact, for all kinds of institutions are given expression at one and the same time, thereby representing human society in miniature (2004, 147). Film involves a chain of agents ranging from the most important to the most insignificant: the central or national bodies commissioning the film, extras, indigenous and nonindigenous artists, administrative staff, and, last, the public. And so, when analyzed in the context of its production and reception, film provides an exemplary cross-section of a system. First, it provides a vertical cross-section revealing the balance of political power—via censorship or the choice of subjects, for instance—and cultural or economic power relations—via funding and centralization—between the center and the periphery. This vertical cross-section entails looking primarily at institutional and economic history. Second, a longitudinal cross-section provides information about the relations between artists, political discourse, and public reception. Given this study’s short time frame of about fifteen years (1924–37), the vertical cross-section demonstrates the speed of change and provides precise information about the dynamics operating within the Soviet regime and the changes to its nature that were taking place. The longitudinal cross-section, placed within a longer time frame, sheds light on what was happening in political and cultural forms of nationalism. These two cross-sections, once correlated, provide two insights. First, they allow us to understand the logic at work within the Soviet empire, as a form of territorial expansion of the state and means of establishing direct and coercive control over Soviet subjects (exerted, in the case of cinema, via institutions and economics). Second, they reveal the hegemonic and ideological logic—as well as the tensions generated within it—operating as an informal means of persuasion and means of winning consent, and even as a tool of subjugation and indoctrination.

Issues at Stake in Analyzing the Interwar Period: Totalitarianism, Empire, and Nationalism

The aim of this work is not to provide a history of cinema in Uzbekistan—even though it does fill a gap in the history of national cinemas in the Soviet Union and the early experimentation with film in Muslim countries.⁴ Its purpose, rather, is to offer a cultural and sociopolitical history that brings out the breadth and depth of the radical, fundamental transformations affecting Uzbek society in the years following the First World War and the civil war with anti-Soviet basmachi movement to just before the Second World War.

Historiographical Debates

The analysis put forward here draws first on what is known as the totalitarian school, concentrating on the notion of ideocracy, according to which the central and all-powerful state is legitimized by its ideology and exerts absolute control over an atomized society. Equally, it draws on what is known as the revisionist school, which recognizes social groups’ capacity for agency, even though this may have been constrained to varying degrees by an internal rationale and the context of first-phase Stalinism.⁵ However, this book seeks to move beyond the binary nature of these debates, concentrating on the points where these two trajectories come together, examining their zones of autonomy and areas of negotiation. On the one hand is the state (and then the party-state) endeavoring to bring about the total political domestication and subjugation of society. On the other hand, is a diverse society retaining multiple mechanisms for defense, adaptation, and action. As agents of cohesion and means of its transmission and as thinking, acting, creative individuals endowed with a capacity to interpret and translate an ideological dogma that had not been entirely codified, filmmakers and the films they make have much to tell us about this interstitial zone between power and society. Films show us how the cultural and social fabric of hegemony (Bertrand 2008, 11) functions. They are a locus of power, revealing the local interactions through which domination is implemented, negotiated, and consolidated by a multifaceted ideology. This power, as this work explains, was not solely produced by the party and imposed from above; rather, it was a social and cultural coproduction, albeit one that was manufactured on unequal and asymmetric terms.⁶ This ideology, understood as both a conception of the world and a behavioral norm, took on various vernacular forms depending on the geographical area under consideration.

Inquiry about the Soviet Union during the Cold War has been conducted largely along the lines of debate between the totalitarian and revisionist schools, which has also extensively shaped the methodology. Similar debates have not dominated in the same way the history of Central Asia, for which they are less relevant. Indeed, in the wake of recent historiography about the peasant world and Central Asia, for example, there is no longer any doubt that social bodies and peripheries were endowed with a capacity for agency, resistance, and action and that they partially negotiated the forms taken by their own submission. Nevertheless, during the brief and singular period between 1937 and 1941 in Uzbekistan, the concept of totalitarianism as a new form of power (see also Pomian 1995, 4−23) is an appropriate way to describe the nature of the Soviet regime. The interval following the extreme mass violence of the great Stalinist purges—which quite simply eliminated political and cultural elites enjoying what, within a dogmatic regime, amounted to a form of autonomous, dissenting thought—to the beginning of the Great Patriotic War was notable for several characteristics: the disappearance of all forms of public expression of dissent or protest; the culmination of the ideocracy and omnipotence of the state; the establishment of complete monopoly over public discourse, to be used exclusively to praise Russian and proletarian identity; and the emergence of a secular, sociopolitical religion, which did not just ask the people to assent to it but, in exchange for a promise of salvation, to place their faith in it and to believe. The frontier between state and civil society became blurred in this nondifferentiated political system. Although civil society did not wholly disappear, it seems to have been at least momentarily annihilated, having been reduced to univocality and no longer having its own means of expression. It was during this same period that the permanent state of exception, which, in Giorgio Agamben’s opinion, acts as the basis for modern totalitarianism, took on a particularly acute form, leading to the victory of what he calls legal civil war (2003, 11), with the physical elimination in 1937–38 of political adversaries and of entire categories of citizens who could not be integrated within the political system.

The need to grasp the nature of the Soviet state irrespective of its legal and constitutional forms—the terminology of a multinational federation being of little use in understanding how the system actually functioned (see below)—has led to the concept of empire, currently much in vogue, being taken up in the literature to characterize a set of power practices. Over the past few decades, this concept has clearly struck a chord in relation to the history of Central Asia and the crucial question of the relationship between the center and the periphery. But it has been used in a context at least as ideologically marked as the previously mentioned polarization between totalitarianism and revisionism. Until the 1990s, the deprecatory connotations associated with the term empire meant that it was applied to the Soviet Union to denounce and delegitimize a form of domination. However, this did not always yield an accurate understanding of the multiple processes and mechanisms of submission and reaction at work within the periphery—in this instance, Central Asia.⁷ Finally, the postulate of totalitarianism was reproduced in a new guise, with power being unilaterally imposed by a political center on a periphery now defined not solely in social but also in geographical terms, and where any reaction could only take the form of anti-Russian sentiment.⁸ Once again, we encounter the binary paradigm of resistance/collaboration, which is of little use in understanding the history of Stalinism, for it fails to apply to most situations, shedding light only on a few relatively rare circumstances. This postulate has continued to run through the historiography produced in the wake of the independence of the Central Asian republics and the nationalist reconstruction of history carried out by their academies of learning. As a result, the countries in question have partially elided the issue of initial involvement by their elites in Soviet construction during the interwar period and presented themselves primarily as victims, thereby continuing to project a notoriously anti-Russian stance most of the time.

Nevertheless, with the opening of the archives and resultant new analyses that have emerged over the past ten years looking at the Soviet nationalities policy and the history of Soviet Central Asia in the interwar period, the concept of empire has been considered in a different and more neutral manner, as is the case in this book.⁹ Several historians specializing in the Soviet Union have put forward a definition of empire applied specifically to the Soviet case.¹⁰ These definitions are used here, supplemented by that provided by Maurice Duverger (1980, 7–21), as well as a return to the original, broad meaning of imperium, a command held by a person with supreme absolute power. Thus, empire is defined, in its Soviet version, as a state possessing a vast, multinational territory with centralized administration and communication, where the personalized and socialized power destroys the preexisting authorities and seeks to unilaterally and hierarchically impose a system that, though universal in intent, is rooted in national differentiation between cultures. Hence, the aim of this book is not to understand how the empire ended but rather to apprehend how it was formed. To this end, I deconstruct the mechanisms by which the empire came to establish its political, institutional, and economic dominance over the Uzbek periphery during the key interwar period and how the empire established its symbolic and hegemonic dominance as well. It is therefore necessary to emphasize that this periphery was endowed with genuine agency and retained its autonomy and to remember that subordination can also procure advantages (such as resources).

As for the paradigm of colonialism that has sometimes been used, it is not readily applicable to Soviet Central Asia, as, indeed, several authors have already argued—notably, Slezkine (2000) and Khalid (2006a).¹¹ There are at least three main reasons for this. First, even if many similarities exist—particularly in the domain of economics and demographics (Vichnevski 1995)—the nature of the Soviet state and the extent of its interventionism and policies for integration and socioeconomic modernization that were uniformly implemented throughout Soviet territory are more suggestive of a comparison with the policies of a state such as Kemalist Turkey than with those pursued by the French or British governments regarding their colonies (Khalid 2006a; Edgar 2006). Second, all Soviet subjects, irrespective of the republic they came from, enjoyed equal rights and were equal citizens of the same state, albeit of distinct nationality. The system was therefore not founded on radical racial alterity. Last, colonialism is underpinned by the supremacy of a people regarded as imperial and entrusted with a mission, and this is only partially analogous to the Soviet system, for proportionately the Russians were the main victims of their own system of domination.

Ultimately, though, what matters is not the term used to describe the Soviet Union but the description actually provided of a singular system of domination. And the concept of empire provides a useful account here of the dynamics driving the conquest of power over a newly Soviet space, making it possible to apprehend the whole process of subjugation of Central Asia over a relatively short time span. Equally, this concept of a system of state that generates difference helps reveal the internal, contradictory logics of hegemony at work and the process by which a Soviet unit was created through ethnic and national differentiation. This concept of empire enables us to bear in mind that several ideologies coexisted—including those borne aloft by nationalist movements in this instance—and in this it differs from the concept of totalitarianism (to return to it briefly), which is based solely on an integrated system that silences dissent and plural, contradictory ideas about the nature of the collective body. Totalitarianism and nationalism in the periphery are incompatible, and, over the long run, the facts show how persistent and vibrant the constructions of a shared heritage and imagined communities actually were (notably, in their cultural dimensions). These constructions were based on a process of heritagization, the capacity for resilience, and the force of inertia. So nationalism here acts as a prism through which to analyze what is at work in what Jean-François Bayard and Romain Bertrand (2006) have called the hegemonic imperial transactions being played out during the interwar period.

Promoting the Nation to Reconstruct the Empire

If we wish to appreciate the multiple facets of these transactions and how they occurred—the fait national—including the Soviet nationalities policy and vernacular nationalism, then we need to consider the pre-Soviet context in Central Asia, assessed in the light of the First World War and the defeat of the Ottoman Empire. We also need to bear in mind that the terms of the armistice instigated a rapprochement between pan-Islamism and anticolonialism, thereby further radicalizing the Muslim world (Khalid 2005, 217–18). Against the backdrop of the intensifying nationalist yearnings and the disappearance of the Ottoman and Habsburg empires, there was a fascination with the October Revolution and new Bolshevik regime and their accompanying discourse of anticolonial struggle and national liberation, which responded to the desire nourished by many Central Asian intellectuals for modernization, progress, and full-fledged citizenship (Khalid 2007a, 137, 141), even if for some of them the euphoria proved to be short-lived (Chokay 2001, vii). National slogans exerted undeniable political attraction, and the Bolsheviks would appear not to have counted solely on force and coercion (Hirsch 2005, 5).

Confronted with the intensifying nationalist demands, the national question—largely neglected in the theories of the great figures of Russian and European Marxism—began to take on greater importance in Bolshevik revolutionary strategy. The issue was addressed in the light of how it had initially been conceived by Stalin, who, at Lenin’s request, had summarized the theoretical debates about the nation that were dividing the European socialist movement.