Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR

by Adeeb Khalid

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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Soviet Union, Soviet History, Russia, Asia, Islam

444 pages, Hardcover

First published December 15, 2015

Reviews

[Jolon · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Dimitrii Ivanov · Rating 5 out of 5]

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).

[Garrett]

You know an academic text is hitting when you spend more time on Wikipedia than reading

[Nacho Campos · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Ana-Maria Bujor · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.