Kazakhstan: Ethnicity, Language and PowerBhavna DAVE

Bhavna DAVE, Kazakhstan: Ethnicity, Language and Power, London — New York : Routledge, 2007, 242 p. Bhavna Dave relies upon three different streams of scholarly enquiry (“the new Western historiography of the Soviet era, the postcolonial theory and the ethnographies of post-socialist transition,” p. 11) in order to analyze the evolution of Kazakh “national consciousness”, as embedded in pre-Soviet, Soviet and post-Soviet power relations. The question is explored principally in terms of the la..

Bhavna Dave, Kazakhstan

Bhavna Dave relies upon three different streams of scholarly enquiry (“the new Western historiography of the Soviet era, the postcolonial theory and the ethnographies of post-socialist transition,” p. 11) in order to analyze the evolution of Kazakh “national consciousness”, as embedded in pre-Soviet, Soviet and post-Soviet power relations. The question is explored principally in terms of the language policies adopted in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. In Dave’s words, “the crucial argumen..

Peasant settlers and the ‘civilizing mission’ in Russian Turkestan, 1865-1917

This article provides an introduction to one of the lesser-known examples of European settler colonialism, the settlement of European (mainly Russian and Ukrainian) peasants in Southern Central Asia (Turkestan) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It establishes the legal background and demographic impact of peasant settlement, and the role played by the state in organising and encouraging it. It explores official attitudes towards the settlers (which were often very negative), and their relations with the local Kazakh and Kyrgyz population. The article adopts a comparative framework, looking at Turkestan alongside Algeria and Southern Africa, and seeking to establish whether paradigms developed in the study of other settler societies (such as the ‘poor white’) are of any relevance in understanding Slavic peasant settlement in Turkestan. It concludes that there are many close parallels with European settlement in other regions with large indigenous populations, but that racial ideology played a much less important role in the Russian case compared to religious divisions and fears of cultural backsliding. This did not prevent relations between settlers and the ‘native’ population deteriorating markedly in the years before the First World War, resulting in large-scale rebellion in 1916

Stalinist spatial hierarchies : placing the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz in Soviet economic regionalization

Based on research in Russian and Kazakhstani archives, this article investigates connections between policies of peasant colonization, the sedentarization of pastoral nomadic peoples, and the economic regionalization of the USSR. After analysing debates from the 1920s, and limited sedentarization among Kazakhs and Kyrgyz during collectivization, the article argues that only by focusing on the economic regionalization of Central Asia, which placed the Kazakhs and the Kyrgyz in two different economic regions with dissimilar priorities, is it possible to explain the radically different outcomes of early Stalinist policies for similar pastoral peoples. The increased central control brought by the Stalinist Great Turn created a new spatial hierarchy directly connecting the bottom of the Soviet social and spatial pyramid, the livestock-breeding regions, to its top, the elite regime cities. The exclusion of the Kyrgyz ASSR from the massive livestock procurements that fed the Soviet political and industrial centres, and which led to the great famine in Kazakhstan (1931–33), can be explained by early Stalinist economic regionalization

Towards a transnational history of great leaps forward in pastoral Central Eurasia

he article places the great famine in Kazakhstan (1931-33) in the context of policies implemented by the Stalinist and Maoist governments towards Central Eurasian pastoral populations. After highlighting the factors that caused the famine in Ukraine, the article focuses on the specificities of the famine among the Kazakhs, and its regional distribution within Kazakhstan. It then analyses the role that the same factors could have played in other mainly pastoral regions, both during the 1930s (Kyrgyz ASSR, Outer Mongolia), and during Mao\u27s Great Leap Forward (Inner Mongolia, Tibet, Qinghai, Xinjiang). The article compares the different cases and investigates their transnational connections

Making sense of the Cultural Revolution in Xinjiang : cross-border narratives

On the basis of research in Kazakhstan and Russian state archives and of life story interviews of Qazaq and Uyghur migrants to Kazakhstan, the paper delves on memories of the Cultural Revolution in Xinjiang by Qazaq and Uyghur participants. The paper explores the creation of narratives of the violent events in Northern Xinjiang between 1966 and 1970, and the attempt made by former participants in framing them into the longer history of cross-border political, social, and cultural interactions between Xinjiang and Soviet Central Asia from the period of the Eastern Turkestan Republic, though the Great Leap Forward, to the closure of the formerly porous border between China and the USSR as a consequence of the Sino-Soviet split. The paper will argue that cross-border imaginaries fed by both previous continuous connection and recent sudden rupture in the Turkestan/Xinjiang borderland, in the context of the global decolonization drive, framed the hopes of the younger generation of Qazaq and Uyghur students who were at the forefront of the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution in Urumqi and in the Yili region