Entre l’Europe, la Russie et l’Asie : la place de la Tachkent impériale telle qu’elle fut perçue par ses colons tsaristes

Les administrateurs tsaristes et les intellectuels qui arrivèrent peu de temps après la conquête de Tachkent en 1865 s’établirent dans de nouveaux « quartiers russes » censés servir d’exemple d’urbanisme moderne. La Tachkent russe devait être la vitrine d’une nation et d’un empire rénovés après les Grandes réformes et faire la démonstration de la supériorité des Russes dans la diffusion des idées européennes en Asie. Les Russes privilégiés de Tachkent durent faire face à la fois au scepticisme et à l’approbation de la Russie européenne, ainsi qu’aux défis inédits à relever face à la population locale. Les colons russes les plus pauvres estompaient la frontière entre colonisateurs et colonisés et portaient clairement préjudice à la nouvelle ville coloniale. Les administrateurs du tsar les accueillaient avec mépris car ils leur rappelaient avec un certain malaise combien la Russie avait encore de chemin à parcourir pour s’élever au rang de nation européenne et moderne. L'imbrication des problèmes de race, de genre ou de classe rendait de plus en plus confuse la définition de caractéristiques ethniques strictes. Au lieu de la consolider, l'effort colonial rendit plus confuse la place de la Russie entre Europe et Asie dans l’esprit des Russes de Tachkent aussi bien que dans ceux des Russes de Russie.Tsarist administrators and intellectuals arriving shortly after Tashkent’s 1865 conquest created a new “Russian section” to serve as an example of modern urban planning. Russian Tashkent would showcase a nation and empire renovated following the Great Reforms, and demonstrate the Russians’ superior qualities in peacefully spreading European ideas to Asian lands. Privileged Tashkent Russians faced scepticism as well as approbation from central Russia, as well as unforeseen challenges from the local population. Poor Russian settlers blurred the boundary between colonizer and colonized and ostensibly sullied the streets of the new colonial city. Tsarist administrators greeted their presence with scorn, as uncomfortable reminders that the Russian nation still had some distance to travel to acquire status as modern and European. Issues of gender, race, class, and religion became intertwined in an atmosphere of growing confusion over fixed ethnic characteristics. In the end, the colonial endeavour complicated instead of solidified Russia’s place between Europe and Asia in the minds of Tashkent and central Russians alike

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

Black snouts go home! migration and race in late Soviet Leningrad and Moscow

Over the last decades of the Soviet Union, darker-skinned or darker-haired Soviet southern or eastern migrants in Leningrad, Moscow, and other Slavic cities became the target of ra

Cholera and Colonialism in Central Asia: The Tashkent Riot of 1892

A cholera epidemic that swept through Central Asia in 1892 transformed visions and practices of empire in Tashkent. Tsarist officials hoped that recent medical advances would allow their new imperial possession to halt the disease‘s spread to Europe from Asia. Success would restore a sense of Russian scientific and medical dominance, shaken by the local population‘s superiority in curing water-borne diseases. Execution of anticholera measures, however, altered a colonial relationship, provoking unrest among the local population. Russian settlers joined soldiers in brutally repressing a cholera riot sparked by numerous attacks on Central Asian culture. The aftermath of the riot altered images and relationships of class as well as race, and marked the end of Russian efforts, and tsarist confidence, to attack the cholera bacterium in Islamic portions of Central Asia, as part of their "civilizing mission.