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Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR
In Making Uzbekistan, Adeeb Khalid chronicles the tumultuous history of Central Asia in the age of the Russian revolution. Traumatic upheavals--war, economic collapse, famine--transformed local society and brought new groups to positions of power and authority in Central Asia, just as the new revolutionary state began to create new institutions that redefined the nature of power in the region. This was also a time of hope and ambition in which local actors seized upon the opportunity presented by the revolution to reshape their society. As the intertwined passions of nation and revolution reconfigured the imaginations of Central Asia's intellectuals, the region was remade into national republics, of which Uzbekistan was of central importance.
Making use of archival sources from Uzbekistan and Russia as well as the Uzbek- and Tajik-language press and belles lettres of the period, Khalid provides the first coherent account of the political history of the 1920s in Uzbekistan. He explores the complex interaction between Uzbek intellectuals, local Bolsheviks, and Moscow to sketch out the flux of the situation in early-Soviet Central Asia. His focus on the Uzbek intelligentsia allows him to recast our understanding of Soviet nationalities policies. Uzbekistan, he argues, was not a creation of Soviet policies, but a project of the Muslim intelligentsia that emerged in the Soviet context through the interstices of the complex politics of the period. The energies unleashed by the revolution also made possible the golden age of modern culture, as authors experimented with new literary forms and the modern Uzbek language took shape. Making Uzbekistan introduces key texts from this period and argues that what the decade witnessed was nothing short of a cultural revolution.
Making use of archival sources from Uzbekistan and Russia as well as the Uzbek- and Tajik-language press and belles lettres of the period, Khalid provides the first coherent account of the political history of the 1920s in Uzbekistan. He explores the complex interaction between Uzbek intellectuals, local Bolsheviks, and Moscow to sketch out the flux of the situation in early-Soviet Central Asia. His focus on the Uzbek intelligentsia allows him to recast our understanding of Soviet nationalities policies. Uzbekistan, he argues, was not a creation of Soviet policies, but a project of the Muslim intelligentsia that emerged in the Soviet context through the interstices of the complex politics of the period. The energies unleashed by the revolution also made possible the golden age of modern culture, as authors experimented with new literary forms and the modern Uzbek language took shape. Making Uzbekistan introduces key texts from this period and argues that what the decade witnessed was nothing short of a cultural revolution.
444 pages, Hardcover
First published December 15, 2015
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
March 3, 2019
Making Uzbekistan was a great read about an overlooked corner of the world, and I learned a lot from it. Especially fascinating to me was the 'Turkicization' of settled Central Asian national identity, and how the tradition of Persian language and culture in the region got consigned to a mountainous rump state. The discussion of Central Asian goals independent of and within the context of the Soviet Union assigned local intelligentsia a sense of agency not usually ascribed to them elsewhere.
I would have preferred if the book was a more chronological narrative- for me, to read about events in Bukhara from 1917 to 1921 and then shift to Tashkent in 1918 made it harder to get a general sense of chronology of events. It's an understandable decision, but "As will be discussed in Ch. 6" takes me out of things when i'm still plodding along on chapter three.
A far more understandable thing I also found unfortunate was that so many sources were in foreign languages- While it is unavoidable, it means a lot of the interesting-sounding source materials are locked away to the English reader. In that sense, we should be very grateful to Mr. Khalid for illuminating as much as he has. Speaking of illumination, though, and a much more avoidable problem, this book has an enormous amount of foreign words (typically relating to Islam) in otherwise English sentences, often with no attempt to explain them at all. I suppose a high degree of familiarity with the subject is presumed of the audience, but I would have appreciated an easy-to-understand glossary, or perhaps a bit more localization into English wouldn't have been amiss.
I would have preferred if the book was a more chronological narrative- for me, to read about events in Bukhara from 1917 to 1921 and then shift to Tashkent in 1918 made it harder to get a general sense of chronology of events. It's an understandable decision, but "As will be discussed in Ch. 6" takes me out of things when i'm still plodding along on chapter three.
A far more understandable thing I also found unfortunate was that so many sources were in foreign languages- While it is unavoidable, it means a lot of the interesting-sounding source materials are locked away to the English reader. In that sense, we should be very grateful to Mr. Khalid for illuminating as much as he has. Speaking of illumination, though, and a much more avoidable problem, this book has an enormous amount of foreign words (typically relating to Islam) in otherwise English sentences, often with no attempt to explain them at all. I suppose a high degree of familiarity with the subject is presumed of the audience, but I would have appreciated an easy-to-understand glossary, or perhaps a bit more localization into English wouldn't have been amiss.
July 15, 2021
Khalid is one of the preeminent scholars on Soviet Central Asia, and this book does not disappoint. He does a great job of showing how the Bolsheviks first gained power in Turkestan (as Uzbekistan was part of) and then consolidated their control in the region, leading to the delineation and establishment of Uzbekistan, and subsequently Tajikistan.
November 4, 2022
Замечательное исследование, многоуровневое, с отличными источниками, ясно обозначающее, в чём автор оспаривает существующую историографию и отчего это важно. Перевод также представляется удачным, плюс хорошие иллюстрации (несколько скверно напечатанные).
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January 4, 2025You know an academic text is hitting when you spend more time on Wikipedia than reading
August 27, 2024
Un trabajo muy denso que requiere de cierta base previa en cuanto a conocimientos respecto a la región. Sin embargo es tan sumamente detallista y extenso que da una radiografía perfecta del movimiento jadidista: de sus vaivenes ideológicos, de sus adherencias políticas coyunturales, o de la evolución de los miembros de esta corriente de pensamiento mezclándose (o no) progresivamente con un socialismo que acabó por devorarlos.
March 12, 2026
What is today Uzbekistan was once a Soviet Republic of the USSR and experienced the same revolution on its own terms. The former Tsarist Empire was a vast landmass of hundreds of ethnic and religious minorities who spoke various languages, so to have a historiographical account of the revolution focused entirely within European Russia (Moscow, Petrograd, and the Don Territory) would be an inconsiderate historiographical model. As John Reed wrote in the preface to his account of the revolution, “the reader must realize that what took place in Petrograd was almost exactly duplicated, with greater or lesser intensity, at different intervals of time, all over Russia.”
Khalid lays out several important historical distinctions when presenting the 1917 Revolution in what would later become Uzbekistan. Uzbekistan did not come into existence until 1924 and this was not only due to the revolution but also to the “triumph of a national project of Central Asian Muslim intellectuals (Jadids) who had come to see themselves as Uzbek.” This national project was coordinated with the new Soviet state that had their own international project that found common ground with this intelligentsia but clashed at many points, the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan was their synthesis. The Jadids up to 1917 were a cultural movement within the cities of Bukhara and Tashkent which strove on the one hand to modernize their society and on the other to maintain an authentic cultural identity that, during the end of the age of empires, was spawning a new nationalism. Class warfare was abstract for them despite guilds falling out of favor, and both artisans and craftsmen becoming further alienated in the production process due to the rise of merchant capitalism in Central Asia.
Russian Empire referred to their Central Asian colonial holdings as Turkestan. Several important events took place that gave the peoples of Turkestan reason to revolt. In 1916 the Russian state ended the exemption of citizens of Turkestan from being drafted into World War One causing the people to revolt. This resulted in a short-lived civil war with Russian settlers and the Russian military pitted against the mostly nomadic Turkic populations that strained relations between the two populations for decades to come.
In March of 1917, while the Soviets were organizing in Petrograd and Moscow, the Jadids were organizing massive protests in Tashkent with crowds of up to thirty thousand men. As Khalid noted “Nothing like these crowds had ever been seen in Central Asia outside of wartime.” Public meetings were organized in local mosques in the major cities of what was still considered Turkestan and committees were formed to function as local government organs. On April 16, 1917 a national congress was held with all of the elected committees to elect twelve delegates to attend the All-Russian Muslim Congress in Moscow, voted on a National Central Council to act as an executive body within Turkestan, and pushed to make Turkestan autonomous in the new Russia. Despite the many currents of opinion of those attended the national congress, Khalid makes it clear that the February Revolution had clearly given new life to the formerly colonized peoples of Turkestan and that they took it upon themselves to act in the name of revolution.
As part of Khalid’s larger effort in putting forward evidence that Central Asians played their own role in the revolution, he points out that the Russian Civil War had its own separate theater of action that was not a war of Russian outsiders versus neutral Muslims but rather the eruption of the contradictions that had been rupturing within Turkestan since the revolution. Khalid noted in response to previously written histories on the Russian Civil War in Turkestan, “As historians, we should rid ourselves of the phantom of Central Asian Muslim unity and look at Central Asia as an arena of multifaceted conflict.” The main actors in the civil war were the local Red Army units, the Jadids, and the Basmachi insurgents that fought against both the Bolsheviks and urban Muslims. The Basmachi were a rural, socially conservative paramilitary that ultimately alienated the urban populace regardless if they were Jadid or Bolshevik. In the backdrop of all of this was a severe famine that started in 1915 and did not end until 1920. About a quarter of the population either died or migrated to Iran, Afghanistan or Xinjiang in response to war and the lack of food.
Khalid’s book had the benefit of being written after the four books I have already analyzed but his book takes the best elements of each of the four books and utilizes them to narrate a history of the revolution. Like Reed, he captures and amplifies the voices and debates that were alive in the cities of Turkestan during the revolution. Like Carr, he made it a point to write a highly objective history of the revolution. Like Fitzpatrick, he writes of the revolution as following a series of sequences that ends during the Great Purges. Like Holquist, he recognizes that the violence of 1917 was occurring much earlier, had roots in separate events and continued throughout the revolution through different mediums. Picking up from where these four writers left off, Khalid sheds light on a region of the former Soviet Union whose role has often been ignored in histories of the revolution. Ultimately, Khalid points out that Russian Central Asia was not neutral towards the revolution and experienced it within its own set of conditions. He also took great pains to demonstrate that the people involved had their own voices, dreams, political projects, and took part in building institutions to realize their aspirations.
As historian Vijay Prashad wrote of the Non-Aligned Movement, “The Third World was not a place. It was a project.” This logic was already being followed by the Jadids well before the Non-Aligned Movement and they made Turkestan the practical reality of what were once the dreams of the colonized. Khalid makes it clear that the reformers in Turkestan had their own projects that were realized in the creation of the five new states and their various institutions; and that the revolution was every bit a Russian phenomenon as it was a Central Asian phenomenon.
Khalid lays out several important historical distinctions when presenting the 1917 Revolution in what would later become Uzbekistan. Uzbekistan did not come into existence until 1924 and this was not only due to the revolution but also to the “triumph of a national project of Central Asian Muslim intellectuals (Jadids) who had come to see themselves as Uzbek.” This national project was coordinated with the new Soviet state that had their own international project that found common ground with this intelligentsia but clashed at many points, the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan was their synthesis. The Jadids up to 1917 were a cultural movement within the cities of Bukhara and Tashkent which strove on the one hand to modernize their society and on the other to maintain an authentic cultural identity that, during the end of the age of empires, was spawning a new nationalism. Class warfare was abstract for them despite guilds falling out of favor, and both artisans and craftsmen becoming further alienated in the production process due to the rise of merchant capitalism in Central Asia.
Russian Empire referred to their Central Asian colonial holdings as Turkestan. Several important events took place that gave the peoples of Turkestan reason to revolt. In 1916 the Russian state ended the exemption of citizens of Turkestan from being drafted into World War One causing the people to revolt. This resulted in a short-lived civil war with Russian settlers and the Russian military pitted against the mostly nomadic Turkic populations that strained relations between the two populations for decades to come.
In March of 1917, while the Soviets were organizing in Petrograd and Moscow, the Jadids were organizing massive protests in Tashkent with crowds of up to thirty thousand men. As Khalid noted “Nothing like these crowds had ever been seen in Central Asia outside of wartime.” Public meetings were organized in local mosques in the major cities of what was still considered Turkestan and committees were formed to function as local government organs. On April 16, 1917 a national congress was held with all of the elected committees to elect twelve delegates to attend the All-Russian Muslim Congress in Moscow, voted on a National Central Council to act as an executive body within Turkestan, and pushed to make Turkestan autonomous in the new Russia. Despite the many currents of opinion of those attended the national congress, Khalid makes it clear that the February Revolution had clearly given new life to the formerly colonized peoples of Turkestan and that they took it upon themselves to act in the name of revolution.
As part of Khalid’s larger effort in putting forward evidence that Central Asians played their own role in the revolution, he points out that the Russian Civil War had its own separate theater of action that was not a war of Russian outsiders versus neutral Muslims but rather the eruption of the contradictions that had been rupturing within Turkestan since the revolution. Khalid noted in response to previously written histories on the Russian Civil War in Turkestan, “As historians, we should rid ourselves of the phantom of Central Asian Muslim unity and look at Central Asia as an arena of multifaceted conflict.” The main actors in the civil war were the local Red Army units, the Jadids, and the Basmachi insurgents that fought against both the Bolsheviks and urban Muslims. The Basmachi were a rural, socially conservative paramilitary that ultimately alienated the urban populace regardless if they were Jadid or Bolshevik. In the backdrop of all of this was a severe famine that started in 1915 and did not end until 1920. About a quarter of the population either died or migrated to Iran, Afghanistan or Xinjiang in response to war and the lack of food.
Khalid’s book had the benefit of being written after the four books I have already analyzed but his book takes the best elements of each of the four books and utilizes them to narrate a history of the revolution. Like Reed, he captures and amplifies the voices and debates that were alive in the cities of Turkestan during the revolution. Like Carr, he made it a point to write a highly objective history of the revolution. Like Fitzpatrick, he writes of the revolution as following a series of sequences that ends during the Great Purges. Like Holquist, he recognizes that the violence of 1917 was occurring much earlier, had roots in separate events and continued throughout the revolution through different mediums. Picking up from where these four writers left off, Khalid sheds light on a region of the former Soviet Union whose role has often been ignored in histories of the revolution. Ultimately, Khalid points out that Russian Central Asia was not neutral towards the revolution and experienced it within its own set of conditions. He also took great pains to demonstrate that the people involved had their own voices, dreams, political projects, and took part in building institutions to realize their aspirations.
As historian Vijay Prashad wrote of the Non-Aligned Movement, “The Third World was not a place. It was a project.” This logic was already being followed by the Jadids well before the Non-Aligned Movement and they made Turkestan the practical reality of what were once the dreams of the colonized. Khalid makes it clear that the reformers in Turkestan had their own projects that were realized in the creation of the five new states and their various institutions; and that the revolution was every bit a Russian phenomenon as it was a Central Asian phenomenon.
June 16, 2023
While in Uzbekistan I found myself unable to find books on local history. I found this one in Russian in neighboring Kazakhstan and almost did not buy it due to the seemingly limited scope. It would have been a big mistake.
This is a fascinating analysis, not only of the decades after 1917 in USSR and current Uzbekistan in particular, but also of the cultural currents, literature, social and political movements, writers, politicians, ideologies, wars, religion, just about everything in order to understand why things ended up the way we see them today.
The writing is also really good and accessible, in spite of being quite scientific. The book provides plenty of examples, quotes, and anecdotes, as well as analysis of larger phenomena. Overall a solid, solid work all around for anyone interested in the region.
This is a fascinating analysis, not only of the decades after 1917 in USSR and current Uzbekistan in particular, but also of the cultural currents, literature, social and political movements, writers, politicians, ideologies, wars, religion, just about everything in order to understand why things ended up the way we see them today.
The writing is also really good and accessible, in spite of being quite scientific. The book provides plenty of examples, quotes, and anecdotes, as well as analysis of larger phenomena. Overall a solid, solid work all around for anyone interested in the region.
March 4, 2026
Whew! A very comprehensive, scholarly dive into the development of Uzbek and Tajik culture during the early 20th century.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews