Despite Cultures: Early Soviet Rule in Tajikistan

Central Eurasia in Context

by Botakoz Kassymbekova

Despite Cultures examines the strategies and realities of the Soviet state-building project in Tajikistan during the 1920s and 1930s. Based on extensive archival research, Botakoz Kassymbekova analyzes the tactics of Soviet officials at the center and periphery that produced, imitated, and improvised governance in this Soviet southern borderland and in Central Asia more generally. She shows how the tools of violence, intimidation, and coercion were employed by Muslim and European Soviet officials alike to implement Soviet versions of modernization and industrialization.
    In a region marked by ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity, the Soviet plan was to recognize these differences while subsuming them within the conglomerate of official Soviet culture. As Kassymbekova reveals, the local ruling system was built upon an intricate network of individuals, whose stated loyalty to communism was monitored through a chain of command that stretched from Moscow through Tashkent to Dushanbe/Stalinabad. The system was tenuously based on individual leaders who struggled to decipher the language of Bolshevism and maintain power through violent repression.
 

Genres: History, Soviet Union, Nonfiction, Soviet History

296 pages, Paperback

Published October 11, 2016

About the author

Botakoz Kassymbekova is an assistant professor in modern history, specializing in Russian and Soviet history, at the University of Basel in Switzerland.

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

A look at the early years of Soviet rule in Tajikistan, and the issues faced with instituting the Bolshevik rule into the region. Kassymbekova shows that it was a serious challenge in such a remote region, where news from Moscow could take weeks to arrive, and had to be transported by camel in some cases. Efforts to convert the local way of life into the Bolshevik way was thus very difficult, and a reluctance of both locals to work towards that, and Europeans to settle in and help, did not make it easy. That said it also shows that several of the challenges faced were similar to those faced across the Soviet Union: collectivization, purges, local corruption, and so on. Worth reading to get an idea of a more remote part of the Soviet Union though, and important to the growing literature about Soviet Central Asia.