1 Colonial Central Asia I – Central Asia and the Russian Empire The very title of this chapter asserts a view of the relationship between Central Asia and Russia that is not universally shared. ‘Russia did not have colonies’ is a common refrain, not just in Russophone, but in some English-language historiography. 1 The reasons cited vary, from the lack of a clear sea barrier, to the absence of any clear political distinction between metropole and colony in Russia, claims that Russian rule brought economic and civilizing benefits, assertions that racial distinctions were unimportant in Russia, or even that Russians are incapable of being racist. 2 The roots of these objections are to be found almost exclusively in the Soviet period – while Tsarist officials often claimed that their colonialism was more humane and civilized than that of Russia’s European rivals, Britain and France, they were perfectly comfortable with using the language of colonialism. Russia was a member of the International Colonial Institute, 3 and Russian authors and officials routinely described Central Asia as a colony, with open recognition that it bore a family resemblance to the colonies of the British and French in Asia and Africa. 4 In the Soviet period, however, ‘colonialism’ became an exclusively pejorative term: it was what the USSR’s enemies, the bourgeois powers, did in their colonies, a matrix of economic exploitation and cultural subordination that had nothing in common with Soviet practices. The USSR did not have colonies – its people were all citizens, and the inhabitants of its more ‘backward’ regions (for such notions of backwardness and civilization certainly did cross the revolutionary divide) were no longer colonial subjects, but part of a radical new nation-building experiment. 5 From the 1920s, when Soviet policies of ‘nativization’ (korenizatsiya) were at their most radical, until the mid-1940s, Soviet historians did indeed denounce Tsarist rule in Central Asia as ‘colonial’. After 1951, as the idea of the Russians as the ‘elder brother’ of the peoples of the USSR was consolidated, the 1 See S. V. Timchenko & V. Germanova on, respectively, modern Kazakh and modern Uzbek historiography, which make up appendices 1 & 2 of S. Abashin, D. Arapov and N. Bekmakhanova (ed.) Tsentral’naia Aziia v sostave Rossiiskoi Imperii (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2007), 338-381. 2 Most of these can be found in Evgenii Glushchenko, Rossiii v Srednei Azii. Zavoevaniia i preobrazovaniia (Moscow: Tsentropoligraf, 2010). He does not shy away from using the term ‘colonizers’ to describe the Russians in Central Asia, but argues that their role was entirely benign. 3 Ulrike Lindner ‘New forms of Knowledge Exchange Between Imperial Powers: The Development of the Institut Colonial International (ICI) Since the End of the Nineteenth Century’ in Imperial Co-operation and Transfer, 1870 – 1930. Empires and Encounters ed. Volker Barth and Roland Cvetkovski (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 67. 4 e.g. P. P. Semenov “Znachenie Rossii v kolonizatsionnom dvizhenii evropeiskikh narodov” Izvestiia Imperatorskogo Russkago Geograficheskago Obshchestva XXVIII (1892): 349-369; V. Voshchinin Ocherki novago Turkestana. Svet i teni Russkoi Kolonizatsii (St. Pb.: Tip. Tov. “Nash Vek”, 1914) 5 e.g. G. I. Safarov, Kolonial’naia Revoliutsiia. Opyt Turkestana (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1921); P. G. Galuzo, Turkestan-Koloniia, (Moscow: Izd. Komm. Un-ta Trudiashchikhsia Vostoka, 1929); A. Abdykalykova and A. Pankratova (ed.) Istoriia Kazakhskoi SSR s drevneishikh vremen do nashikh dnei (Alma-Ata: KazOgiz, 1943). This last work proved highly controversial, and Pankratova was attacked for being too critical of Russian colonialism – see further Harun Yilmaz “History writing as agitation and propaganda: the Kazakh history book of 1943,” Central Asian Survey, 31,4 (2012): 409- 423.