Abstract
Reviewed by: Olena Palko, University of East Anglia, UK
For some time, the study of the Soviet Union has been restricted by a dominant ‘top-down approach’ that pays little attention to the complex local-level developments in the border Soviet republics. The demise of the Soviet Union brought about a major shift in studying the nation-building processes in the region. The emergence of independent republics and the opening of state archives in 1991 challenged the mainstream approach to discussing the Soviet nationality policy as a deliberate and premeditated effort of centralized Russification. The revisionist school in Western historiography introduced the approach, according to which the Soviet state itself had greatly contributed to the emergence and the consolidation of national identities of the numerous peoples of the Soviet Union. In his book, Grigol Ubiria uses this revisionist approach and argues that both the Kazakh and Uzbek nations emerged as a result of the policy actions of the 1920s to 1930s. At the same time, however, Ubiria challenges the dominant revisionist view on the active role of local native elites in the nation-building projects, stating that these nations were artificial constructs of the Soviet nation-makers.
Ubiria offers a comprehensive study of the nation-building projects in Soviet Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. In the first half of the book, an overview of theories of nationalism is presented and key concepts are defined. The author places his discussion within the theoretical literature on nationalism, stressing the role of states in nation-building processes. In the second part of the book, the historical framework for a study of Soviet nation-building projects in Central Asia is provided. The author examines major political developments and identity formations in the region from ancient times until 1917 so as to show that pre-Soviet Kazakhs and Uzbeks did not possess any national collective identities and loyalties, neither did they constitute solid territorial units. The third part of the book focuses primarily on the period of the 1920s–1930s, examining the successful endeavours of the Soviet central leadership, which resulted in the creation of the Kazakh and Uzbek nations and national republics.
The discussion of the nation-building projects in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan starts with the national-territorial delimitation of Central Asia in 1924–36. Ubiria argues that the process of delimitation in the region was based on ethnographic and economic considerations. Thus, he supports those revisionist historians who questioned the previously mainstream divide-and-rule explanation. The delimitation project, as shown in the study, exposed the Soviet geopolitical aims in the region (using Terry Martin’s ‘Piedmont principle’ to explain targeting the ethnic minorities and the new leaders in Afghanistan); the decreasing role of Muslim national communists; and inherent contradictions of parallel Soviet nation-building projects in the region (as shown through the conflicting cases of the Soviet Tajik and Uzbek republics). The territorial delimitation, as Ubiria shows, was followed by political ‘imagining’ of titular nations. In line with the contention that pre-Soviet Kazakhs and Uzbeks did not possess any form of national collective identity, Ubiria explains that it was the Soviet officials, who made the local indigenous population groups believe that they were the members of a certain ethnonational community.
In examining the process of institutionalizing Kazakh and Uzbek national identities, Ubiria closely follows the analysis of the role of the first all-Union census of 1926 in instilling national identities, undertaken by Francine Hirsch in her Empire of Nations (2005). The ‘substance’ to those recently ‘imagined communities’ was provided by the korenizatsiia campaign, discussed in the book as the interrelation of three courses of policy actions – administrative, educational and linguistic – and cultural korenizatsiia. Ubiria corroborates Hirsch’s conclusions that the korenizatsiia policies were a part of the all-Union modernization programme, which envisaged organizing ‘backward borderland peoples’ into fully-fledged Western-style nations. Ubiria uses Lenin’s three-stage scheme: rastsvet-sblizhenie-sliianie (blooming-rapprochement-fusion) to examine the evolution of the Soviet nationality and cultural policies. This approach resembles Hirsch’s ‘double assimilation’ concept, according to which national identification was developed within a more fundamental loyalty to the Soviet state. The comparison between earlier Soviet theories and the contemporary revisionist views on the subject allows Ubiria to make an interesting observation that the Western revisionist scholars do not so much invalidate the top-down divide-and-rule theory as reinforce the standard Soviet official and scholarly views (101).
Overall, Ubiria’s book is an interesting and comprehensive study of the implementation of the Soviet nationalities policy in Central Asia. Although it is in line with other recent studies on the subject, the book offers some alternative insights into the process of nation-building in Soviet Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. It presents case studies which enhance our understanding of the Soviet nationalities policy in the 1920s–1930s and could be effectively used for a comparative study of the Soviet nation-building projects, implemented in different Soviet republics. In general, the book will be useful for everybody who is interested in the Soviet history, nationalism and nation-building in the Soviet and post-Soviet era.