Empire and Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands 9781501736148

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EMPIRE AND BELONGING IN THE EURASIAN BORDERLANDS

EMPIRE AND BELONGING IN THE EURASIAN BORDERLANDS

Edited by Krista A. Goff and Lewis H. Siegelbaum

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London

Subventions from Michigan State University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Miami made pos­si­ble this publication and are gratefully acknowledged. Copyright © 2019 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress​.­cornell​.­edu. First published 2019 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Goff, Krista A., editor. | Siegelbaum, Lewis H.,  editor. Title: Empire and belonging in the Eurasian borderlands/   edited by Krista A. Goff and Lewis H. Siegelbaum. Description: Ithaca [New York] : Cornell University Press,   2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018043394 (print) | LCCN 2018045311  (ebook) | ISBN 9781501736148 (pdf ) | ISBN 9781501736155 (epub/mobi) | ISBN 9781501736131 | ISBN 9781501736131 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Minorities—­Government policy—­Soviet  Union. | Soviet Union—­Ethnic relations—­History. | Minorities—­Government policy—­Russia. | Russia—­ Ethnic relations—­History. | Minorities—­Government policy—­Turkey. | Turkey—­Ethnic relations—­History. Classification: LCC JN6520.M5 (ebook) | LCC JN6520.M5   E89 2019 (print) | DDC 323.147/0904—­dc23 LC rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2018043394

Co nte nts

Preface  vii List of Illustrations  ix

Introduction: Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands Krista A. Goff and Lewis H. Siegelbaum1 1. ​Making Minorities in the Eurasian Borderlands: A Comparative Perspective from the Rus­sian and Ottoman Empires Janet Klein17 Part One: Negations of Belonging  33

2. ​Bloody Belonging: Writing Transcaspia into the Rus­sian Empire Ian W. Campbell35 3. ​The Armenian Genocide of 1915: Lineaments of a Comparative History Norman M. Naimark48 4. ​“Do You Want Me to Exterminate All of Them or Just the Ones Who Oppose Us?”: The 1916 Revolt in Semirech′e Matthew J. Payne65 5. ​“What Are They ­Doing? ­After All, ­ We’re Not Germans”: Expulsion, Belonging, and Postwar Experience in the Caucasus Claire P. Kaiser80

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Part Two: Belonging via Standardization  95

6. ​Developing a Soviet Armenian Nation: Refugees and Resettlement in the Early Soviet South Caucasus Jo Laycock97 7. ​Reforming the Language of Our Nation: Dictionaries, Identity, and the Tatar Lexical Revolution, 1900–1970 Daniel E. Schafer112 8. ​Speaking Soviet with an Armenian Accent: Literacy, Language Ideology, and Belonging in Early Soviet Armenia Jeremy Johnson129 Part Three: Belonging and Mythmaking  145

9. ​Making a Home for the Soviet ­People: World War II and the Origins of the Sovetskii Narod Anna Whittington147 10. ​Dismantling “Georgia’s Spiritual Mission”: Sacral Ethnocentrism, Cosmopolitan Nationalism, and Primordial Awakenings at the Soviet Collapse Stephen H. Rapp Jr.162 11. ​New Borders, New Belongings in Central Asia: Competing Visions and the Decoupling of the Soviet Union Jeremy Smith182 Conclusion Ronald Grigor Suny199 Notes  207 Contributors  261 Index  263

P r e fac e

This volume on the production of affinities and antipathies within the empires and nations on e­ ither side of the Russian-­ Turkish border extending eastward into Central Asia originated as a conference to honor the work of Ronald Grigor Suny, the William H. Sewell Jr. Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Michigan, emeritus professor of po­liti­cal science and history at the University of Chicago, and se­nior researcher at the National Research University—­Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg, Rus­sia. The conference, held on October 7–8, 2016 at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, brought together Ron’s students, his colleagues, and his friends who, in many cases, tended to be in all three categories. Suffused with love for the man who inspired the event, the conference focused on the serious topics of “nationalism, revolution, and genocide,” provoking discussions that ­were lively and occasionally heated. But they did not necessarily cohere. In assuming editorial responsibilities, we recognized that the majority of the papers addressed—in one way or another—­how supervening state authorities related to the dif­fer­ent ­peoples inhabiting the Eurasian borderlands and how they related to each other or, in other words, what belonging meant in this part of the world in the modern era, and why and how it was inculcated in some circumstances and denied in ­others. To round out the collection, we recruited contributions from an additional five scholars whose work complemented this theme and asked Ron to write the conclusion. We suggested from one draft to the next that the authors familiarize themselves with one another’s contributions and the result, we are convinced, is a thought-­provoking volume relevant to scholars of Eurasia and other regions. We are indebted to the following ­people who ­either contributed papers to or served as discussants at “Ronfest”: Golfo Alexopoulos, Marc Baer, Stephen Bittner, David Brandenberger, Nicholas Breyfogle, Geoff Eley, Joshua First, Fatma Müge Göçek, Yoshiko Herrera and Helen Cho, Matthew Lenoe, Peter Linebaugh, Douglas Northrop, Susan Pattie, Joshua Sanborn, Alexander Semyonov, William Sewell, Anoush Suni, Kiril Tomoff, Erik van Ree, and vii

vi i i P re face

Rwei-­Ren Wu. We also are deeply grateful to Val Kivelson who came up with the idea for the conference, helped or­ga­nize it, and raised funds for it as well as for the publication of this book; to the masterful cartographer Bill Nelson for constructing the two maps; to the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress for fellowships that allowed Krista to focus on completing this book; to the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Miami for supporting Krista’s leave at the Kennan Institute and Kluge Center; and to the Department of History at Michigan State University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Miami for their generosity in helping to offset the cost of the book’s publication.

I l lu s tr at i o n s

Figures Figure 8.1. Handwritten letter from refugee boy reprinted in The Rec­ord of the Save the ­Children Fund134 Figure 8.2. Diagram of ­women’s reproductive organs with new Soviet terms 142 Figure 9.1. Izvestiia, July 6, 1935 148 Figure 9.2. “Soviet ­people” in Pravda and Izvestiia, 1925–1991 152 Figure 9.3. “­Enemy of the ­People,” “class ­enemy,” “Soviet ­people,” 1918–1953153 Figure 10.1. Icon of Saint Ilia Chavchavadze brandishing the cross of Saint Nino 164 Figure 10.2. Georgian postage stamps (2002) commemorating the “first Eu­ro­pean” 168 Figure 10.3. Georgia—­Europe started ­here 170 Figure 10.4. Medieval fresco of King Davit II, Gelati 174 Figure 10.5. “King of kings ║ Giorgi son of Dimitri ║ Sword of the Messiah”176 Figures 10.6a and 10.6b. Two modern images of the hero-­k ing Vakhtang Gorgasali 180

Maps Map 1. Late Imperial Russian Central Asia Map 2. Soviet South Caucasus—Republic of Turkey, late 1920s

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EMPIRE AND BELONGING IN THE EURASIAN BORDERLANDS

Introduction Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands: Interrogating Empire and Nation Krista A. Goff and Lewis H. Siegelbaum

Preoccupied with the question of belonging, imperial officials have relied on a variety of approaches to enforce their authority over subordinated p­ eoples and territories, including assimilation and acculturation, rule through difference, del­e­ga­tion, and eradication. Valerie Kivelson and Ronald Suny interpret this challenge—­“ruling variegated populations”—as a definitional component of empires.1 At the same time, nations also often rule “variegated populations” and engage in “imperial” practices such as the physical destruction, deportation, and forced assimilation of ­peoples even while striving for national homogeneity.2 What then are the differences between imperial and national ways of inculcating a sense of belonging and enforcing its limits? The overlap in the management of differentiated populations raises another question: How does belonging function in a nation as compared with its function in an empire? This might seem like an odd question given the massive historiography devoted to demonstrating the differences between empires and nations.3 Empires according to standard definitions are about hierarchy, differentiation, and subordination;4 nations, meanwhile, are characterized by competing impulses of horizontality, standardization, and equality.5 The relationship between nations and empires is also frequently rendered as fraught. Whereas in nationalist discourse the nation is primordial and predates any empires that have attempted to suppress or rule it, scholars have emphasized the 1

2 I ntroduct ion

creation of nations within and sometimes thanks to empires as well as the role of nationalism in imperial destruction.6 This volume builds on debates about national and imperial frameworks of analy­sis in the Eurasian borderlands of the Rus­sian/Ottoman empires and Soviet/Turkish states extending to the east and north into Central Asia and Tatarstan. It approaches this vast region as an indeterminate one, intertwined po­liti­cally, ethno-­culturally, demographically, and other­wise, rather than as a space divided by hard geopo­liti­cal borders. In so d­ oing, it engages with an evolving historiography interested in the transnational networks and circularity of influence, governance, ideas, p­ eoples, and economies among the Rus­sian and Ottoman Empires. Much of this work focuses on Jadids and other elites, but it has also considered the experiences of Circassians, Crimean Tatars, and other Muslims who fled to the Ottoman Empire, and the “butchers and bakers, craftsmen and students” who traveled through Istanbul Sufi lodges while on the hajj to Mecca.7 Yet another lit­er­a­ture focuses on the two world wars, shifting po­liti­cal borders and affiliations, and associated catastrophes (and their aftermaths) visited on the ethnically defined populations situated in ­these contested borderlands. Identified some years ago as “bloodlands,” ­these regions more recently and more capaciously have been termed a “shatterzone of empires.”8 Central authorities tend to constitute the main historical agents in such works, although lower level intermediaries, fighting forces, and interethnic jostling receive some attention as well.9 Not ignoring imperial and state authorities, the contributors to our book also turn their attention to the voices and experiences of teachers, linguists, humanitarian officials, refugees, deportees, soldiers, nomads, and t­ hose left ­behind when ­others are taken away, pushed out, or killed in the multiethnic, bounded—­and yet entangled—­political spaces of the Rus­sian and Ottoman Empires from the late nineteenth c­ entury through World War I, and thereafter, the Soviet Union up through its dissolution. This radical expansion of historical personae demonstrates how a broad range of antipathies and affiliations among mutually constituted ­peoples ­were enacted (often in circumstances of heightened insecurity and even existential threat). By attending to ­these actors, by taking seriously their subjectivities, our authors shed new light on the emotional component of imperial and national proj­ects. ­These two large Eurasian formations—­and their successor states—­were in touch with one another for so long and in such complicated and significant ways that how they structured relationships with their constituent ­peoples produced examples or models that the other was bound to consider, adopt, or other­wise take into account. Most obviously, state officials worried about losing control over subjugated territories and populations especially when the other side appeared



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to be a better fit or offer a better deal. Belonging thus emerges as a complicated process—­not simply mandated or imposed but also inculcated, in certain circumstances negotiated, and in ­others, flatly denied. While focused on the Eurasian region, this volume offers comparisons with and insights into other parts of the world where national and imperial belongings ­were generated and negated. Repre­sen­ta­tions of conquered p­ eoples and the wars that subordinated them had their individual particularities, but, as Ian Campbell indicates in his contribution, the way Rus­sians depicted Tekke Turkmen bore striking similarities with how defeated Native Americans, Algerians, and the inhabitants of the northwestern frontier of British India ­were mythologized by U.S., French, and British imperialists. Beyond conquest, the forced sedentarization and dispossession of the conquered Kirgiz discussed by Matthew Payne in some ways resembled pro­cesses and violence imposed, for example, on Plains Indians. As Payne shows, Rus­sian peasant colonists’ attitudes ­toward Kirgiz also mimicked the blatant racism of other white settler communities. The most extensive comparisons in our volume concern the Armenian Genocide, the subject of Norman Naimark’s essay. Each instance of genocide has had its specificities, its long and short histories. Naimark analyzes the Armenian Genocide as a prototype that can help us understand commonalities across genocides and ultimately further attempts to anticipate and interdict them. In this volume we speak of borderlands rather than borders not only to highlight the frequent shifts in the drawing of lines by respective imperial and state authorities, but to emphasize the ways that ethnic, national, and imperial identities formed and reformed in relation to each other. Geographic, topographic, and economic circumstances—­ mountains and valleys, steppe grasslands, proximity to or remoteness from maritime and land-­based commercial routes—­also helped s­ haped t­ hese identities. Borderlands or, as Charles Maier recently noted, “frontiers at the edge of an expanding empire w ­ ere thus zonal, not linear—­more regions of cultural and ethnic osmosis than firm barriers.”10 Empire is the most contentious term in our title, particularly in relation to the Soviet Union. The preponderance of specialists now view the Soviet Union as having comprised an empire, an anti-­imperialist state that nonetheless exhibited imperial qualities. In earlier iterations, the Soviet Union was a prison filled with primordial nations that would one day realize their destiny as in­de­ pen­dent nation-­states. It was an empire dominated by Rus­sians who perpetuated old imperial hierachies, exposing the emptiness and artificiality of Soviet nationhood and brotherly love.11 In 1993, Ronald Suny intervened in this lit­ er­at­ ure to recast the USSR in a dif­fer­ent role. To Suny, the Soviet Union was

4 I ntroduct ion

still an empire, but it was one that had fostered nations and in so d­ oing brought about its own demise.12 In a Soviet Union where empire and nation co-­existed and mutually reinforced one another for so long, Mikhail Gorbachev’s radical attempt to redefine Soviet politics and society snapped the ties that bound Soviet nations to the larger proj­ect. Not all have seen it this way.13 In relation to Soviet Central Asia, scholars have debated not only the nature of imperial rule, but w ­ hether the category of empire is at all applicable. As Adeeb Khalid writes, “Colonialism indeed lies at the center of debate in the post-­Soviet historiography of Central Asia.”14 In this region, tsarist rule came late and was characterized by significant differentiation between metropole and periphery. In what was then known as Turkestan, it was further marked by a colonial form of imperialism more similar in many ways to western overseas colonies than to the rest of the empire.15 Several scholars have extended colonial (and postcolonial) theorizing to the Soviet era.16 In his study of Soviet unveiling campaigns in Uzbekistan, for example, Douglas Northrop places early Soviet Central Asia in conversation with Eu­ro­pean overseas colonialism. He identifies a paradox in the unveiling campaign; Soviet authorities “expressed colonial power” and “applied cultural coercion to reinscribe colonial differences,” while si­mul­ta­neously battling the legacy of tsarist colonialism. Northrop further juxtaposes Soviet authorities’ integrative and “civilizing” policies with the differentiated approach of British officials in India.17 Adeeb Khalid, meanwhile, has been more skeptical about the saliency of empire and colonialism as categories of analy­sis in early Soviet Central Asia. He has argued that the USSR embodied a “dif­fer­ent kind of modern polity, the activist, interventionist, mobilizational state that seeks to sculpt its citizenry in an ideal image.” To Khalid, Soviet officials’ modernizing cultural agenda was more akin to the Republic of Turkey than to British India.18 ­Others similarly suggest that the Turkish comparison is key for understanding the character of nationhood and empire in the Soviet context. Adrienne Edgar, for example, draws parallels with Kemalist Turkey—­but also Iran and Afghanistan—in the early Soviet design and enactment of emancipation politics in Central Asia. She finds that, at least in this realm, the Soviet authorities aimed to “create a modern, homogeneous, and mobilized population” and acted as representatives of a nation-­state rather than a colonial empire. But, as with Northrop, she leaves room for thinking about the Soviet Union as an empire in “broad terms” and, more specifically, as a colonial empire—­with Central Asia more akin to Eu­ro­pean colonies in the M ­ iddle East and North Africa—­when it comes to the dynamic that developed in reaction to this emancipatory agenda.19 Ultimately, Edgar concludes that the Soviet Union “was



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neither an empire nor a unitary state but had features of both.”20 This ambivalent approach to Soviet colonialism remains the norm in the field, according to Moritz Florin. While he proposes that the foreignness of the Soviet system to the indigenous majority most clearly links it to colonial paradigms, he also concludes that recent scholarship, “remind[s] us of the futility of any attempt to accept or deny unequivocally the colonial nature of Soviet rule in Central Asia.”21 Our contributors’ attention to Anatolia, the Caucasus, Tatarstan, and Central Asia enables us to include an additional dimension of belonging and its contestation, namely, how Eu­rope figured not just as a physical presence but as an ­imagined one. The idea of Eu­rope provided a standard by which ­people judged their own and ­others’ be­hav­ior. As imperial expansion came to define the Eu­ro­pean civilizational world, elites on the edge of that sphere—in both the Ottoman and Rus­sian Empires—­considered their imperial pursuits to be qualifying components of their Eu­ro­pe­anness. This influence extended into multiple sociocultural and po­liti­cal spheres as Eu­ro­pean standards and practices permeated both the arts and sciences (including military “science” as practiced ­either on another Eu­ro­pean country or indigenous ­peoples far from Eu­rope). Even when nationalist-­tinged reactions or ­later Soviet claims of superiority complicated identification with Eu­rope, the implicit standard remained Eu­ro­pean for many ­people. Large state formations generally encompass smaller delineations of p­ eoples and territories defined in religious, national, ethnic, geographic, class, or other terms, producing many possibilities for belonging. Some of ­these can be mutually reinforcing, some antagonistic, and some generative of new affinities. What made belongings in the Eurasian borderlands of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries even more complicated w ­ ere the revolutions that disrupted old loyalties and produced new ones, often creating fateful divisions among families and generations. Working both sides of the revolutionary divide, several chapters in this book track corresponding shifts in affinities. In the Soviet context, for example, class functioned as a newly ascribed—­and in the case of the working class, privileged—­identification that could enable ­people to escape from anterior and less advantageous associations. Belongings and exclusions multiplied even further as collectivities developed their own internal divisions, but also built connections across categories and scales. Once considered part of the “Eastern Question” and subjected to Eu­ro­ pe­ans’ Orientalist gaze, the ­peoples on ­either side of the Rus­sian/Soviet and Ottoman/Turkish borders are shown to have had their own longings and identifications. Their capacity to push back against but also selectively absorb

6 I ntroduct ion

imperial and national initiatives is part of what makes them complicated subjects of belonging. It turns out that in compiling a collection of essays about belonging in Eurasia, we have produced a book that privileges its negative aspects and consequences. Although unintentional, this finding perhaps should not be surprising. That minority populations and categories w ­ ere produced, suppressed, and excised is well-­known. Further, the so-­called dark side of empires and nations has attracted increasing attention in recent years. What this book emphasizes are the ways that belongings ­were mutable, durable, and ­shaped across revolutionary divides, geopo­liti­cal borders, and po­liti­cal configurations. Careful not to assume an a priori dichotomy, the authors interrogate the mutual shaping of empire and nation, indeed, the ways one inscribed itself in the other. They note the per­sis­tence and frequency of coercive mea­sures that imposed belonging or denied it to populations deemed incon­ve­nient or incapable of fitting in. To label such techniques imperial even when enacted in the national context draws attention to overlapping features of ­these phenomena, but at the same time can obscure one of the most essential characteristics of nations and nationhood. Nations must take owner­ship of their own be­hav­iors, irrespective of w ­ hether they emerged from disintegrating empires or enjoyed autonomy and power within them. The prominence of vio­lence (or at least conflict) in relation to how t­ hese empires and nations handled ­matters of belonging reflects the volume’s temporal par­ameters—­from the late 1870s to the early 1990s. This period starts well before Eric Hobsbawm’s “short twentieth ­century,” including as it does, predatory claims to Ottoman lands and revolutionary upheaval. Had we included essays on earlier eras, they undoubtedly would have stressed greater autonomy among borderland inhabitants, looser borders, and dif­fer­ent ways of conceptualizing and managing ethno-­confessional differences in ­those spaces. As for the terminal date, it remains to be seen what ­will happen to the nation-­state option that emerged from the Soviet Union’s breakup given per­ sis­tent neo-­imperial predation and rival ethno-­national territorial claims. Turning to the chapters themselves, part of the pro­cess of producing minorities, as Janet Klein underscores in chapter 1, was to conceptualize difference in new ways. Diversity of ethnicity, language, and religion, accommodated in earlier centuries by the granting (or ac­cep­tance) of autonomous institutions, did not entail formalization of minority status. That came fatefully in the nineteenth ­century with a more modern conception of the state and international relations. We have placed Klein’s chapter first b­ ecause it prefigures in so many ways the double-­sidedness of imperial and national belongings analyzed in vir-



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tually all the other chapters. Klein, for instance, follows Eric Weitz in tracing how the discourse of minorities lent itself to intricate and contradictory connections between minority protection and forced deportation, becoming, as Weitz puts it, “two sides of the same coin . . . ​an entirely new way of conceiving of politics focused on discrete populations and the ideal of national homogeneity u ­ nder the state.”22 Before vio­lence could be done to a p­ eople, they had to be identified as such and their loyalties questioned. Klein defines this as “minoritization.” The protections offered and sought from abroad could serve, especially in times of war, to increase antipathy t­ oward now-­suspect ­peoples. Klein’s chapter is animated by a desire for historians to be more conscious of the historicity of the terms they use. As she points out, both the Ottoman and Rus­sian Empires had their own specificities in how they came to identify and administer constituent ­peoples as minorities, but both empires’ population politics w ­ ere driven by greater anxiety about w ­ hether t­ hose p­ eoples belonged. The “growing concern on the part of Rus­sian authorities with loyalty and threat, and sorting out which groups could ultimately be incorporated (i.e., assimilated) into the Rus­sian nation-­in-­the-­making” had its parallel among the Young Turks. As Rus­sian and Turkish nationalisms intensified along with international tensions, so did the “markedness” of the “marked citizens,” a term of Gyanendra Pandey’s invention that Klein recommends for adoption in ­these contexts. Klein concludes by noting that the new states erected on the ruins of ­these empires defined themselves—­and therefore their constituent “ele­ments”—­differently: the Soviet Union’s state of nations versus Republican Turkey’s nation-­state. Yet minoritization persisted in both cases with nontitular ­peoples pressured, on pain of assimilation, expulsion, or other forms of vio­lence to accommodate to the pro­cesses of national consolidation via standardization and mythmaking. The chapters in part 1 build on Klein’s theorizing of minoritization by tackling the negation of belonging, the ways in which a variety of actors—­ national and imperial officials, military officers and soldiers, and colonizing settlers—­have deci­ded that o ­ thers do not belong to “their” nation, empire, republic, or territory and enacted t­ hese exclusionary visions through mass killing, genocide, terror, erasure, and forced deportation. Although ­these acts of vio­lence and excision are distinguished by their extremity, they do not stand alone but rather exist in a continuum of other practices. As the chapters in this section show, groups, identifications, and categories have been constructed, counted, reified, and ascribed not only to build communities and belongings but also to determine who is formally and informally excluded from ­those collectivities and through ­those exclusions further define and sustain the “in”

8 I ntroduct ion

group. The stories that perpetrators tell are an integral part of the pro­cesses of elimination and erasure. Targeted ­peoples are conceptualized as dangerous and incompatible with the nation or the empire, and very often conflated with ­enemy ­others at the same time that they are constructed as enemies themselves. And, contrary to some expectations or ste­reo­types of the Eurasian region and its vari­ous po­liti­cal formations, the impetus for and enactment of elimination has been multinodal rather than emanating only from the center.23 This is the case not only for the implementation of policy but for the generation of ­those policies and practices. Ian W. Campbell (chapter 2) first turns our attention to the conquest of the Tekke Turkmen and the seizure of their lands by the Rus­sian Empire in the late nineteenth c­ entury. Placing Tekkes in a comparative global context, Campbell theorizes the discourses that enabled their conquest and brutalization by Rus­sian soldiers and, more passively, the Rus­sian public. Tekkes ­were conceptualized as a dangerous, potentially treasonous borderland force whose superhuman strength and indifference to normal h ­ uman suffering demanded that the Rus­sians be “bold” and decisive in their attack. Yet this was not a genocidal offensive wherein the Rus­sians sought to eliminate Tekke Turkmen in ­whole, or even in part, as a ­people. Rather, they sought to “punish rather than exterminate, to shape events in a direction conducive to maintaining unequal multiethnic rule on the borderlands.” Indeed, ­there was a place reserved in the empire for Tekkes who submitted and accepted the “mercy descended to them from the tsar and his agents.” T ­ hose who did not belong w ­ ere the ones whose elimination was required to teach the remaining Tekke this lesson, and ­those who refused to accept the tsar’s grace by submitting to the empire. This enactment of vio­lence helped the empire to expand, but it was also an act of self-­definition. ­After a series of military setbacks, Rus­sian tsarist officers and o ­ thers hoped that this victory over “Asiatics” would fortify the Rus­sian Empire’s place in Eu­ro­pean civilization. Whereas Campbell explores the physical and conceptual vio­lence of the Tekkes’ conquest and mass murder, Norman  M. Naimark (chapter  3) and Matthew J. Payne (chapter 4) tackle that practice of excision that aspires to or results in the elimination of a ­people through mass killing and other practices—­genocide. The applicability of this specific crime to Rus­sian and Soviet history is open to debate. In the early modern and imperial periods, vari­ous ­peoples experienced massacres; the destruction of nomadic, mountain, and other lifestyles and economies incompatible with imperial prerogatives; pogroms; forced resettlements and expulsions; ethnic cleansing; and other forms of vio­lence. Yet the crime of genocide is rarely applied to ­these



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periods of Rus­sian history, and many books and articles where you would expect to see a discussion or conceptualization of genocide or genocidal vio­ lence remain awkwardly s­ ilent on the ­matter.24 Robert Geraci, one of the few scholars who takes on this question, identifies genocidal “ideas” and “fantasies” in imperial Rus­sia, but also notes that “genocidal impulses or fantasies are certainly not tantamount to crimes.” Were there also cases of genocidal violence and erasure in this political space?25 He locates the most convincing case for genocide in the Jewish experience, finding that it would “seem to constitute genocide according to [Raphael] Lemkin’s definition.”26 The question of genocide in the Soviet context has played out more contentiously. On the one side are t­ hose who adopt a more capacious definition of genocide dependent on Lemkin’s original vision, and, on the other, ­those who believe that genocide is a specific ­legal crime defined by rigorous par­ ameters. In the latter’s view, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, massacres, po­liti­cal purges, and other forms of mass killing and cultural destruction are distinct crimes that do not need the label of genocide in order to be condemned. In his book on the Armenian Genocide, for example, Ronald Suny argues that genocide “might more accurately be referred to as ‘ethnocide’ ” b­ ecause “Genocide is not the murder of ­people but the murder of a ­people.”27 The 1932–33 famine in Ukraine during collectivization has sparked perhaps the most developed arguments in this debate, but viewing this case in conjunction with simultaneous famines in the Volga region, North Caucasus, and Kazakhstan (where a greater proportion of the population died) complicates the argument that Soviet government actions resulted in or w ­ ere crafted to achieve the extermination of the Ukrainian ­people as a ­people.28 Naimark and Payne analyze incidents of mass killing carried out in neighboring Eurasian empires—­Ottoman and Russian—­that would soon be replaced by the modern Turkish state and Soviet Union. World War I occupies a par­ tic­u­lar role h ­ ere as it harbored an explosive quality that helped to destroy imperial forms of belonging and radicalize relationships and be­hav­iors that culminated in mass murder in the broader region. As Naimark shows, the Armenian Genocide is a good example of how historical events extend beyond imperially and nationally bounded narratives in this region. Rus­sia certainly played a role in this story as the empire positioned itself as a po­liti­cal, conceptual, and military threat to Ottoman sovereignty in the eastern borderlands. The Ottoman Armenians’ close proximity to the Rus­sian Empire (including Rus­sian Armenians), as well as Rus­sian incursions into the region and Ottoman Armenians’ appeals to the international community, increased the threat perception among Ottoman authorities and contributed to the gradual

10 I ntroduct ion

construction of the Armenian p­ eople as an ungrateful and disloyal ­enemy “other” in the Ottoman Empire. The vio­lence of the genocide also extended into the Rus­sian Caucasus as the mass flow of Armenian refugees and, ­later, Rus­sian imperial collapse disrupted the region’s already sensitive demographic, po­liti­cal, and social balance. In chapter 3, Naimark is preoccupied with one of the most disturbing and key aspects of mass murder: What accounts for the devolution into extreme—­ and often intimate—­vio­lence?29 He sees this as a question of “bloodlust,” which he explains as “the welling up of murderous be­hav­ior on the part of the perpetrators, unleashed, in virtually all cases, by po­liti­cal leaderships, yet prompting normal men and ­women to pursue their victims beyond what has been ordered or is necessary.” In the case of the Armenian Genocide, he recognizes what Suny has termed “affective disposition,” but also “cold and brutal calculation” that leads him to the disturbing conclusion that “­under certain circumstances, h ­ uman beings, all h ­ uman beings, are capable of horrible acts against their fellows.” Payne’s contribution in chapter 4 intersects significantly with Naimark’s in its attempt to unravel and understand the gratuitous and excessive degeneration to mass killing and torture in the Semirech’e region of colonial Turkestan during and ­after the 1916 rebellion. Yet again, the question of belonging is at the heart of this narrative as Kirgiz, government representatives, and Rus­ sian settlers jockeyed over the lands and bodies of the native inorodtsy Kirgiz population.30 Who had a legitimate attachment or belonging to the land and to the tsar? For Payne, what happened in Semirech’e was similarly “triggered” by war, but also reflected a par­tic­u­lar form of vio­lence found in other settler colonial socie­ties. Governmental and settler interests, actions, and aims diverged from one another in this borderland region. Throughout the suppression of the rebellion, the imperial government continued to view Kirgiz through an imperial lens. They belonged to and had utility for the empire and thus the state sought to cure them of their rebellious ways in a punitive rather than exterminatory manner. Not dissimilar to their treatment of Tekkes, imperial authorities pursued, in Payne’s words, “devastating collective punishment but not genocide.” ­These imperial agents, however, ­were blind to the “emerging civil war ethos” among the peasant colonists and in collaborating with them to suppress the Kirgiz ­people ultimately “empowered génocidaires and enslavers.” As the imperial state crumbled, settlers, garrison troops, and Cossacks who had been armed to put down the rebellion seized control of the emergent soviets in the region and used this newfound power to abuse and kill the local Turkestani



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population ­until the Bolshevik leadership in Moscow reasserted control and, once again, reshaped the local landscape of vio­lence and belonging. The final chapter from this grouping on excision (chapter 5) comes from Claire P. Kaiser, who explores a dif­fer­ent type of expulsion, one that resulted in massive displacement, trauma, and sociocultural disruption but not the mass death and killing that marked the previous chapters. Kaiser is interested specifically in Operation Volna, the post–­World War II forced exile of accused Dashnaks; Turkish citizens, stateless Turks, and former Turkish subjects with Soviet citizenship; as well as Greek subjects, stateless Greeks, and former Greek subjects with Soviet citizenship from the South Caucasus. ­These ­peoples ­were deported into the interior of the Soviet Union not for perceived or real war­ time betrayals, but b­ ecause their “type” no longer belonged in a once multiethnic borderland region that was increasingly homogenizing ­under the aegis of Soviet nation-­building. As with other contributors, Kaiser delves into the interconnectedness of the Ottoman/Turkish and Rus­sian/Soviet experiences. For several years, Georgian and other Soviet authorities pursued deportation as a means to cleanse the Soviet-­Turkish border region of nationalities stereotyped as threats to Soviet state security. ­These populations w ­ ere essentialized in ways that made them suspect and potentially disloyal, showing that the securitized physical border between the two states continued to be a conceptually insecure space and that state policies continuously reinforced the primordialization of nationalities and identifications in the USSR. As in other cases explicated in this volume, Kaiser finds that local agents went “above and beyond” what the center demanded of them. Local, titular officials played an outsized role in deportations as they lobbied for, embraced, and helped to enact and sustain ­these expulsions and cleansings of the republican populations. The chapters in part 2 cluster around the theme of standardization. Pro­ cesses of standardization figure as significant features of late nineteenth and early twentieth-­century cultural and economic history. Let us recall that international recognition of the Greenwich meridian marking both zero degrees longitude and Greenwich Mean Time date from an international convention held in Washington, D.C., in 1884. Inspired by technological advances in telegraphy and both nautical and railroad transportation, the convention was one of many to standardize hitherto local and protean practices. Successive congresses held in Paris between 1881 and 1900 a­ dopted standard units in electrical current (ohm, volt, ampere, joule, e­ tc.).31 Additional standardization efforts bore fruit at the national level. The founding in 1901 of the National Bureau of Standards by an act of the United States Congress followed German

12 I ntroduct ion

and British examples. Soon, Frederick Winslow Taylor was promoting the standardization of workplace procedures with his princi­ples of scientific management (or, as it became more popularly known, Taylorism), and within a few years, Henry Ford would be promoting the interchangeability of parts as an essential ele­ment of assembly-­line production.32 Refugee policy might seem an odd application of standardization princi­ ples, but, as Jo Laycock shows in chapter 6, it provided the “common ground between the approaches of the Soviet Union and ‘western’ international organ­ izations” to such burning issues as how to deal with displacement, resettlement, and national belonging. Focusing on Soviet Armenia, she reveals a rather surprising degree of cooperation between Soviet and international institutions based on shared “sedentarist” thinking. Among international personnel, Fridtjof Nansen, the first High Commissioner for Refugees of the League of Nations, developed perhaps the most ambitious of resettlement schemes, inspired by visions of scientific farming communities and, as Laycock notes, “premised on standardization, predictability, and the erasure of individual agency or preference.” ­These desiderata dovetailed with Soviet-­initiated efforts to colonize the steppe with displaced populations as well as its broader nationality policy. That policy—­well-­known from the work of Terry Martin, Francine Hirsch, and ­others—­promoted indigenization (korenizatsiia) with its implicit acknowl­ edgment and endorsement of national rootedness.33 But since their displacement from the eastern Anatolian provinces during World War I, Armenians embodied uprootedness. What­ever reservations or hostility that clerics, Dashnak nationalists, and o ­ thers might have borne, the Sovietization of what had been briefly in­de­pen­dent Armenia and the resettlement of tens of thousands of Armenians realized both Moscow’s agenda and that of the international organ­izations that provided badly needed logistical and financial support. At the same time though, a consolidated Armenia made the presence of non-­Armenians—­the variously described “Muslims,” “Tatars,” “Tiurks,” and “Turks”—­less appealing for a variety of local representatives. Laycock stresses that Soviet authorities did not explic­itly countenance expulsion, but w ­ hether ­those minority populations r­ eally “belonged” to and would be accommodated in the newly defined national territory remained an open question. Laycock builds on Nick Baron and Peter Gatrell’s understanding of how nations emerged from within formerly Imperial Rus­sian territory and Benjamin White’s similar approach to formerly Ottoman lands. The key point h ­ ere is that in transforming displaced ­peoples into settled communities, refugee authorities could recodify them according to standards of their own choosing. Standardization may not have been motivated by imperial ambitions; its



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objective may have been (and apparently was for Nansen) greater legibility to simplify and reduce the costs associated with gargantuan humanitarian tasks. But intentional or not, its enhancement of national territorial identification emanated from supranational impulses. Both Daniel E. Schafer (chapter 7) and Jeremy Johnson (chapter 8) analyze in fascinating ways the standardization of national languages and cultures, respectively, in Tatarstan and Armenia. Since Benedict Anderson’s groundbreaking and often-­cited work, historians of national proj­ects have emphasized the importance of linguistic codification in promoting national identifications and cohesion.34 Schafer reminds us that dictionaries play an essential role in this pro­cess, acting like scythes cutting through thickets of regional variants, antiquated words, and unlicensed importations of foreign terms. What makes the cases taken up by Johnson and Schafer comparatively rich are the multiplicity of options for spelling and orthography and their associated po­liti­cal implications. Johnson demonstrates that choices about linguistic standards pitted Soviet Armenian authorities who favored a simplified version of the unique Armenian script against international aid workers who “exoticized” it as “ancient and primitive.” Curricula ­were similarly contested. The conflation of linguistic and po­liti­cal standards thus haunted discourses of literacy and belonging. Some of ­these issues may have been “soft-­line,” as Terry Martin has dubbed the party’s delineation of second-­order ­matters and associated bureaucracies, but for teachers, literacy activists, and t­ hose they taught, much was at stake.35 What made “speaking Soviet”—­which Johnson defines as “the production of state-­sanctioned language”—so complicated, ­were the contradictory implications of adopting new vocabularies often based on standard international roots. On the one hand, distancing Armenians from older terms demarcated them as Soviet; on the other hand, it made the new mandated language less intelligible to the masses. Speaking Soviet also meant becoming familiar with and more comfortable using scientific terms that came to define literacy. In citing the intriguing example of an article from an early Soviet Armenian ­women’s magazine on reproductive organs, Johnson illuminates how notions of citizenship and civic participation ­were inscribed onto ­women’s bodies. The language of the Tatars inhabiting the M ­ iddle Volga-­Ural region underwent several dif­fer­ent revolutions in the twentieth ­century. Schafer’s fascinating tour of the landscape entails both the succession of orthographic regimes (from Arabic to Latin and then to Cyrillic) and the radical shifts in word content that progressively reduced the proportion of Arabic and Persian entries in ­favor of Rus­sian and international ones. Each iteration, Schafer argues, is indicative of the politics of the moment, w ­ hether the Jadidism of the early

14 I ntroduct ion

years of the ­century, the Cultural Revolution of the late 1920s, or the Rus­ sianizing policies of the late 1930s. Each would have major implications for the mutual intelligibility and cultural affinities between Tatars and other Turkic-­speaking ­peoples of the Soviet Union, Anatolian Turks, and Tatars in the diaspora. Each, couched in terms of standardization and modernity, was represented as an improvement on its pre­de­ces­sor, and each alienated a new segment of the population from Tatar literacy. Yet another means of inculcating a sense of belonging within both nations and empires has been termed “mythification,” the construction of narratives based on the attribution of heroic qualities (addressed in the chapters of part 3). As Pierre Nora’s foundational if controversial works have demonstrated, both space and time figure importantly in such narratives.36 The (home)land, often rendered in sacred terms and full of what Nora called “lieux de mémoire,” aroused feelings of love and protectiveness, its violation by an ­enemy inspiring acts of patriotism. In the case of the Soviet Union—­but also, the United States, for another example—­spaciousness was impor­tant to the myth of national/imperial destiny. With it, came geological and climatic variety that encouraged imaginings of universality.37 As for time, both nations and empires have mythologized ancient if not primordial origins, but whereas empires have tended to stress continuity (as in dynastic inheritance), nations often incorporate into curricular education and ceremonial occasions narratives of rupture and reconstruction or recovery.38 Heroes and martyrs ­were essential as models and sources of inspiration. They could be ancient, as in epic narrative poems (byliny) about knights-­errant (bogatyri) that originated orally among eastern Slavs, or quite recent, indeed, con­temporary. Lavr Kornilov, he of the “Affair” of 1917, was one such late imperial hero. Born in Central Asia to a Siberian Cossack ­father and a Kazakh (or, in other versions, Kalmyk) m ­ other, he served in the Russo-­Japanese War, along the empire’s southeastern borders with Af­ghan­i­stan and China, and then in World War I. His capture by the Austrians in 1915 precipitated a daring escape and return by foot to Rus­sia, where he received a hero’s welcome. In the revolutionary conditions of 1917, he cut a strange figure—­emphasizing his demo­cratic origins on the one hand, but surrounding himself on the other with his own bodyguard of Tekke Turkmen (descendants of ­those slaughtered by Rus­sian soldiers in 1881, as described by Ian Campbell) who, “dressed in scarlet robes, . . . ​called him their ‘­Great Boyar.’ ”39 Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii describe Kornilov and Lenin as objects of dueling cults reflective of the increasing polarization of 1917. ­After the October Revolution, the fledgling Soviet state promoted cultlike veneration of ­labor, the proletariat, science, and deceased revolutionaries, but only ­after Len-



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in’s death in 1924 would his life and works obtain cult status. The relationship of the Lenin and Stalin cults was synergistic—­the latter fed off the former via the mythification of their personal relations.40 Anna Whittington (chapter 9) demonstrates, though, that all the while a dif­fer­ent subject for mythmaking, also born of the October Revolution, was taking shape—­a collective subject that received its baptism on July 6, 1935, when Nikolai Bukharin, editor of Izvestiia, extolled in that newspaper “the Soviet ­people.” This construct was the most capacious within the Soviet lexicon. It dwarfed the proletariat on the one hand, and the “enemies of the p­ eople” on the other. It was, Whittington argues, both national and imperial; it asserted equality and social cohesion even as, in the context of “per­sis­tent inequalities,” it emphasized diversity. As prospects for war increased, homogenization played a larger role in the mythical unity of purpose; so too did the cooption of patriotic figures from the Rus­sian imperial past. But, as Whittington stresses, the acid test came with the war itself, and, despite the shock of initial defeats and the horrors of occupation, displacement, and deprivation, “the Soviet ­people”—­both as a construct and a real­ity—­survived and, it would seem, helped the disparate ­peoples (narody) of the USSR identify with its war effort. What the war did, among other t­hings, was to displace millions of evacuees from the western borderlands and capital cities to the interior of the country, including Siberia and the Central Asian republics.41 In the pro­cess, European-­influenced practices and prac­ti­tion­ers could displace indigenous personnel, consequently heightening tensions between them. Whittington’s analy­sis of the ways that the myth of the Soviet ­people during the war diverged from p­ eoples’ realities is essential to any account of how the war’s legacy not only sustained but also haunted the Soviet proj­ect. What­ever the degree of divergence was in this case, Stephen H. Rapp Jr. (chapter 10) demonstrates that it pales in comparison with the relationship between Zviad Gamsakhurdia’s highly charged version of Georgia’s history and what can be in­de­pen­dently verified about that nation’s past. It would not do, however, to simply dismiss Gamsakhurdia’s fanciful repre­sen­ta­tion as the ravings of a nationalist historian bent on distorting Georgia’s past for po­liti­cal purposes. The collapse of Soviet authority, and with it the long-­dominant myths of the Soviet ­people and the friendship of the ­peoples, created an opportunity and a felt need among nationally minded intellectuals to invent new national ideas or revive old ones.42 In Rapp’s assessment, Gamsakhurdia’s 1990 “mission” statement is a particularly striking example of the grammar of national mythmaking. Its equation of longevity with legitimacy, identification of Georgia as the original Eu­ro­pean nation and the “Caucasian race” as the genus from which sprang other national species, and assertion of the country’s

16 I ntroduct ion

divine (­Mother of God) origins—­all this is familiar as the stock-­in-­trade of nineteenth-­century national mythmakers. So too, unfortunately, is the “clash of civilizations” motif pitting Georgia as the redoubtable Christian outpost against a series of threatening Muslim neighbors, which also has con­temporary resonance. Contesting Ernest Renan’s dictum about the necessity of a nation forgetting many t­ hings, Benedict Anderson remarked that what “can not be ‘remembered,’ must be narrated.”43 Both Anna Whittington’s and Stephen Rapp’s contributions suggest that mythmaking consists of constructing narratives that connect the past to the pres­ent in ways that suture over incon­ve­nient or disruptive ele­ments. But what happens when, as in the case taken up by Jeremy Smith (chapter 11), the state or empire to which nations have belonged suddenly ceases to exist? Smith addresses not ­those nations roiled by popu­lar mobilization for greater sovereignty or outright in­de­pen­dence, but, appropriate to the purpose of this volume, the five Central Asian republics that had in­de­ pen­dence thrust upon them. ­There, as he points out, several possibilities existed for new post-­Soviet belongings: the maintenance of a subordinate relationship with Rus­sia; a regional bloc unto itself; a broader Turkic-­Iranian space; and/or affinities based on Islam. “In the event,” he writes, “none of ­these prevailed, and national belonging came to predominate.” How and why did this come to pass? One of Smith’s insights is that in many re­spects Union republics already ­were acting as in­de­pen­dent entities before the formal breakup of the Soviet Union in December 1991. He also notes that Central Asian po­liti­cal leaders w ­ ere not shy about asserting their own republics’ territorial integrity and economic interests during the fluid months before and ­after formal in­de­pen­dence. Yet a third ­factor was the implosion of Communist Party power in the Rus­sian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and Rus­ sia’s subsequent unpredictability. Ultimately, the pro­cess Smith analyzes as “decoupling” depended on contingencies that we may still be too close to discern. But, as he observes citing Suny, we would do well not to underestimate the emotional power of nationalism especially in the wake of a country to which nobody any longer belonged. What this book offers then are discrete and in-­depth soundings of the nature and limitations of belonging within two empires that competed for loyalties, collapsed in war and revolution, and w ­ ere replaced by states that inculcated and demanded new modes of belonging. We hope that taken together, ­these soundings inspire new thinking about the complicated relationship between imperial and national belongings not only in the Eurasian borderlands but in other contested territories.

Ch a p ter  1

Making Minorities in the Eurasian Borderlands A Comparative Perspective from the Rus­sian and Ottoman Empires Janet Klein

Work on the “minority question” is not new. Academic interest in the question began in the armistice period, following World War I, when the concept of minority was turned into a ­legal category in international law.1 However, in over a c­ entury of academic work on minorities, the overwhelming tendency has been for scholars (and the general public) to take the concept of minority for granted, to fail to interrogate its origins, to apply the term ahistorically to periods in the past when ­there was no such concept of minority, and thus to produce a large body of works on “minorities” that is historiographically problematic and theoretically unhelpful. What is at stake h ­ ere? Drawing on the work I have been engaged in over the past de­cade in trying to understand minorityhood and the pro­cess of minoritization, I argue that differences often described as national, ethnic, religious, or racial become especially dangerous to par­tic­u­lar communities when viewed through the lens of minorityhood and majorityhood. It is not just “difference”—­even when that difference is acknowledged to be historically and socially constructed—on its own that is most significant when analyzing movements against groups that came to be known as “minorities.” Rather, it is the minority designation itself and the pro­cess through which p­ eople came to be constructed as minorities that represent a unique brand of repression and mass vio­lence. This kind of repression and mass vio­lence was tied to the minority designation when minorities—­now conceived of as such—­came to be regarded 17

18

C h apte r  1

as threats to the territorial integrity and sovereignty of “the nation” and to the ­imagined privilege and power of the dominant (named) group, now envisioned as the “majority,” or the real citizen.2 In this chapter, I investigate the historiographical treatment of minorities in the late Ottoman and late imperial Rus­sian periods. My exploration of the lit­er­a­ture is by no means exhaustive, but it has been helpful for me to step outside of my two areas of focus thus far—­late Ottoman and post-­Ottoman works on minorities, and more general theoretical studies on minorities—to work on a neighboring imperial system, and enrich my own understanding of the historiographical prob­lems I have identified in lit­er­a­ture on Ottoman “minorities.” However, for readers of this volume I hope to introduce some new ways of thinking about the periods during which ­these empires transitioned to new po­liti­cal forms during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A focus on “minorities”—­and specifically rethinking how we have treated the concept—­might help us to better understand ­these transitions. I also hope that by comparing the lit­er­a­ture on “minorities” in both imperial settings, I might encourage a broader conversation within and among scholars of both fields on modern constructions of peoplehood, “national” belonging, and vio­lence.

Historiographical Concerns surrounding “Peoplehood” in Works on the Ottoman Empire and Imperial Rus­sia I frame my more specific interest in how nondominant ethnic and religious groups in each empire came to be considered as “minorities” (to the extent that they did) by the scholarly community against the backdrop of what appears to be a somewhat parallel historiographical shift in both bodies of lit­er­a­ture. ­Here, we follow an interest in documenting the oppression of non-­Muslim groups in the Ottoman Empire and non-­Russian (Orthodox) groups in the Rus­sian Empire to a movement among scholars to approach the topic with more complexity and to shed light on much more nuanced dynamics among subjects of each empire. While the trend has been larger than Ottoman and Rus­sian historiography, each of t­hese historiographies has specific concerns that scholars have wished to challenge. In the Ottoman context, researchers have confronted the long-­standing (Orientalist) image of an empire of Muslim Turks who w ­ ere bent on converting or oppressively ruling over non-­Muslims (and in some lit­er­a­ture, non-­



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Turkish Muslims) in an empire driven by conquest and exploitation. Strife between Muslim and non-­Muslim communities was not historicized but taken as a given. For many readers (especially the newer generation of Ottomanists), this depiction of Muslim–­non-­Muslim (and even Turkish–­non-­Turkish) dynamics might seem bizarre and even foreign; this is b­ ecause in the past ­couple of de­cades Ottomanists have been so successful in overturning the myth of the “terrible Turk” by focusing instead on how the Ottomans welcomed the Jews expelled from Spain in the late fifteenth ­century, how dif­fer­ ent religious (and ethnic) communities enjoyed positive and mutually beneficial interactions, and how instrumental non-­Muslims and non-­Turks w ­ ere in building and sustaining Ottoman systems of governance. Although this corrective was welcomed, it also lacked some nuance, for in its aim to overturn Orientalist tropes it ended up providing a rosier picture than warranted, which did not properly historicize strife when it did occur. In the past de­cade, Ottomanists have engaged in serious efforts to further nuance state-­society relations and interactions between dif­fer­ent religious and ethnic communities, and we now find a very rich body of works that provides us with a much more complex understanding of how dif­fer­ent groups interacted historically and the contexts in which relations changed.3 Despite ­these major strides, however, I argue that it is essential for us to critically reconsider our use of the term “minority,” to see minorityhood as historically and socially constructed as we recognize nationhood to be, and to understand the specific links between them. ­Doing so ­will be one more step in better understanding the violent dynamics between the state (or state-­affiliated elites) and dif­fer­ent groups of Ottoman ethnic and religious communities in the last de­cades of the empire’s existence. Lit­er­a­ture on imperial Rus­sia has under­gone a similar historiographical shift in the past ­couple of de­cades. During the Soviet era, most works “reflected the general biases of the time.” As Francine Hirsch notes, “Many portrayed the non-­Russian nationalities as the hapless victims of ‘Soviet-­Russian’ rule, as inmates of the Soviet ‘prison of p­ eoples,’ and as nonparticipants in the revolution.”4 With the breakup of the Soviet Union, scholars began to rethink Soviet nationality policies and to debate ­whether the Soviets had created nationalities/nations and ­whether or not Soviet policies w ­ ere “progressive” with regard to the dif­fer­ent non-­Russian groups the Soviets ruled over.5 Scholars also began to reconsider the Rus­sian imperial era, asking similar questions about Rus­sian rule and the extent to which non-­Russian/non-­Orthodox groups ­were treated as imperial subjects. In addition to joining the wider scholarly community in rethinking larger questions about empire—­and particularly the extent to which empires can “think” like nation-­states—­and with

20

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an interest in overturning myths of “primordial hatreds,” scholars of imperial Rus­sia began to explore the roots of the “nationality question.” They also began to rethink the ways in which non-­Russians ­were incorporated into the Rus­sian Empire by focusing in par­tic­u­lar on what came to be known in vari­ ous works as “Rus­sia’s Orient.”6 Debates on Russian-­Muslim relations have proliferated in the past c­ ouple of de­cades. On one side of the debate lie works such as For Prophet and Tsar by Robert Crews, which sees imperial Rus­sia as less “Rus­sian” and more inclusive of its Muslim population than previously depicted, and illustrates the ways that the empire’s Muslims participated in and sustained the imperial proj­ ect.7 On the other side are the findings of scholars such as Elena Campbell and Mustafa Tuna, who suggest that, contrary to what Crews argued, the Rus­ sian state and Orthodox elites ­were sometimes ambivalent and more often hostile to inner-­Asian Muslims, as they began to perceive t­ hese groups as an existential threat to tsarist rule, especially in the second half of the nineteenth ­century. T ­ hese researchers paint a picture of a much grimmer real­ity surrounding the imperial incorporation of Muslim subjects than Crews does.8 Other scholars maintain that other non-­Orthodox ­peoples—­particularly Poles and Jews, but also Lithuanians, Latvians, and Baltic Germans—­were also sidelined and viewed with suspicion in the late tsarist period.9 As in Ottoman historiography, much richer and more nuanced approaches to questions surrounding relations between and among groups (including new questions themselves) have proliferated. Yet the category of “minority” remains unexplored in terms of its construction and the pro­cess through which certain groups became minoritized, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

“Minorityhood” in the Ottoman Empire In lit­er­a­ture on the Ottoman Empire, it has been taken for granted that nondominant (i.e., non-­Turkish/non-­Muslim) groups ­were “minorities” long before the concept emerged in the mid-­nineteenth ­century. Scores of (often other­wise excellent) studies of Ottoman history casually refer to ­these groups—in par­tic­u­lar non-­Muslims—as minorities. Even in works on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the term is used without problematizing or historicizing the concept, and without addressing the consequences of how the minoritization pro­cess affected ­these minorities-­in-­ the-­making. In the Ottoman context, scholars have frequently viewed non-­ Muslims, in par­tic­u­lar, as minorities, b­ ecause they tend to approach the question of identity through the lens of the millet system and also b­ ecause



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they apply post–­World War I concepts of minorities to the Ottoman past. But, as Derya Bayır points out, “The millet order was not a minority protection system in the modern sense, but an orga­nizational structure for dealing with non-­Muslim diversity within a plural society. Thus, to picture Ottoman society along the lines of Muslim versus non-­Muslim or majority versus minority dichotomies is too simplistic and is in fact loaded with po­liti­cal agendas which are a by-­product of ­later developments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”10 This is not to suggest that non-­Muslims w ­ ere not subordinated, for indeed they ­were, in certain contexts. But this is ­because they ­were not Muslim and did not share the religion of the dynastic ­house­hold, not ­because they ­were a minority.11 Before the sixteenth-­century conquests of the Islamic heartlands and eastern Anatolia, non-­Muslims composed a significant portion of the Ottoman population, and even ­after the incorporation of such vast largely Muslim regions, non-­Muslims continued to be numerically superior in some parts in which they lived. What­ever the case, they ­were not a “minority,” ­because that concept, and all it came to entail, was not yet in play. This was not only true for the Ottoman context. ­After all, the term “minority” itself has a history. It emerged in the mid-­nineteenth ­century initially in reference to religious groups that ­were “distinguished by common ties of descent, physical appearance, language, culture or religion, in virtue of which they feel or are regarded as dif­fer­ent from the majority of the population in a society.”12 Although the concept soon came to identify numerically inferior “national” and “ethnic” groups, Ben White points out that “it is not surprising that religious minorities w ­ ere identified first: before the emergence of secular nationalism, the po­liti­cally salient form of identity was religious.” He further suggests that, even ­here, “religious minorities ­were not identified as minorities ­until quite recently (c. 1850). Previously, it was their status as subordinate religious groups that was impor­tant. Only when modern states appeared did the numerical inferiority of ­these groups become more salient than the religious cleavages separating them from the majority.”13 In Eu­rope, as Laura Robson shows, t­ here ­were three contexts in which the concept of national “minorities” emerged: “Marxists proposing the formulation of some kind of Habsburg federalist system, international Jewish organ­izations advocating for specific collective Jewish rights and repre­sen­ta­tion in eastern Eu­rope, and new international organ­izations promoting pacifist and reformist agendas.”14 It was not ­until ­after World War I, though, that “minority” became an active term in international law as part of the Paris peace settlement. By this time, the “nationality princi­ple”—­the idea that “a p­ eople” should have its own state—­was not just a po­liti­cal ideal but was becoming enshrined in international law. The question now surrounded what to do with t­hose groups that w ­ ere not the

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“majority” associated with the new states as the maps changed. Should “minorities” be moved across borders or should they have rights within the new states that incorporated them now as “minorities?” As Eric Weitz points out, forced deportations and minority protections “­were, and are, two sides of the same coin . . . ​an entirely new way of conceiving of politics focused on discrete populations and the ideal of national homogeneity ­under the state.”15 Mark Mazower rightly notes that “the tensions created by the dream of national purification lay at the heart of inter-­war Eu­ro­pean politics,”16 but Weitz reminds us that this was de­cades in the making, indeed with roots dating back to the Vienna system of the early nineteenth c­ entury. While protections for nondominant religious groups had been enshrined in treaties even before the Treaty of Vienna of 1815, it was never thought that t­ hese groups should sustain their own sovereignty, or even be converted (i.e., through “civilizing missions”) to the religion of the dominant group. The London Protocol of 1830, however, “marked the first time that the powers clearly linked a specific population and sovereignty—­that is, the Greek state considered as representative of the Greek ­people.” But still, “the London Protocol affirmed the multi-­ethnic and multi-­confessional character of Greece and the Ottoman Empire. The recognition of an in­de­pen­dent Greece thus stood on the cusp of two worlds—­the one of population diversity, the other of population homogeneity.”17 For our purposes ­here, it was the Congress of Berlin of 1878 and the Berlin West Africa Conference of 1884–85 that represent the moments when the concept of majority and minority would be defined in ethnic and national terms, with devastating consequences for “minority” populations around the world. As Weitz puts it, “Depending on the category to which they ­were assigned, populations could be protected, deported, or civilized.”18 With the postwar settlements and the creation of the League of Nations, minorities continued “to serve as a site for western Eu­ro­pean intervention and a reminder of the limitations of sovereignty in territories labeled less civilized—­just as they had in the nineteenth-­century ‘capitulations’ regime,” as Robson notes.19 ­Whether in the late nineteenth ­century or ­after World War I, minorityhood, as it came to be associated with an existential threat to the nation and foreign intervention, would become disastrous for ­those who ­were viewed as minorities, or who—­claiming the term for themselves—­pressed for minority rights, as that language developed following the war. A critical site for the emergence of the Paris system was the borderlands of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Eu­rope, where the Rus­sian, German, Habsburg, and Ottoman Empires’ territories met.20 Both geo­g raph­i­cally and temporally, “Armenians and Jews stood at the nodal points of the emerging system.” For Weitz, “by their very existence, they posed most acutely all of



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the issues of sovereignty and rights. Both groups lived dispersed over large territories; both looked to the ­Great Powers as lifelines of support. Articles 44 and 61 [of the Treaty of Berlin] made their protection a constituent ele­ment of the international system, not the cause of an individual state, but in fact it entangled them in the vicissitudes of ­Great Power politics—­protection and rights, as well as forced deportations and genocide.”21 I suggest that we see the period in the de­cades before the post–­World War I treaties as a period during which par­tic­u­lar groups suffered vio­lence at the hands of the state and also at the hands of nonstate groups envisioned as being (at least mostly) part of the dominant group not ­because of age-­old confessional rivalries but ­because they ­were caught up in the politics that constituted the pro­cess through which majorities and minorities ­were in the making, and all that entailed. This “minoritization” pro­cess took shape even before the terms “minority” and “majority” came into play in the Ottoman Empire (and also in the Rus­sian Empire, as we s­ hall see presently).22 And Armenians did indeed find themselves at the “nodal point” of this transformation in the Ottoman Empire.23 Armenians and their compatriots in the Ottoman Empire experienced the same kinds of shifts ­toward modern statecraft and the transition to governments defined as “national” and based on citizenship and representative government as ­others did around the world. ­These concepts and practices ­were impor­tant, no m ­ atter how imperfectly they w ­ ere applied, b­ ecause at least theoretically t­hese changes meant that states and their citizens had to decide whom the states represented and how, above all in a period when borderlands ­were being demarcated. The ­people within and across new borders came to be viewed (from the perspective of the central government and also other citizens) in terms of their loyalty or the level of threat they posed (as groups) to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the state. The new concepts of “peoplehood” that resulted from t­ hese transformations ­were intimately connected to imperialism and international rivalries and treaties, as mentioned above. In the Ottoman context, the G ­ reat Powers saw Armenians in par­tic­u­lar as minorities who—as Christians—­needed to be protected by them. Eastern Anatolia— an impor­tant borderland between imperial powers—­became a major arena of strug­gle in ­these shifts as vio­lence in the region was on the rise, and some Armenians began to ask the ­Great Powers for reforms that would benefit their community.24 This was an opportunity for the G ­ reat Powers to further intervene in the internal affairs of the Ottoman Empire, and Ottoman officials and a number of citizens on the ground increasingly viewed the Armenian community as a w ­ hole with suspicion. ­After the Russo-­Ottoman War of 1878, the Treaty of San Stefano required the Ottoman government “to carry into effect, without further delay, the

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improvements and reforms demanded by local requirements in the provinces inhabited by Armenians, and to guarantee their security from Kurds and Circassians.” But b­ ecause Eu­ro­pe­ans ­were afraid that Rus­sians might gain too much influence in Ottoman lands, they urged a modification of the treaty, which transformed Article 16 to a version that seemed less potent, but specifically noted that Eu­ro­pe­ans would be the ones to oversee the reforms in Article 61 of the Treaty of Berlin.25 With this and ­later reform packages (notably ­those of 1895 and 1914), the Armenian community—­once known as the “loyal millet”—­was now viewed as suspect and as a menace to Ottoman sovereignty and territorial integrity, as eastern Anatolia now became known as the “Armenian provinces” to the ­Great Powers. This designation resulted in a spiral of vio­lence and fear: repression against Armenian communities r­ ose, which led to increased demands by Armenians for protection, which led in turn to the central Ottoman government and Armenians’ own neighbors increasingly seeing them only in terms of the threats they posed to what was gradually becoming the Ottoman “nation.” Armenians ­were becoming excluded from that nation-­in-­the-­making. Historiographically speaking, t­ here are numerous rich accounts about how Ottoman officials and also some locals constructed Armenians as a “national” threat, and ­these studies together walk their readers through the vari­ous ingredients that came into play in this pro­cess. The Young Turks’ demographic-­ engineering politics and nationalist educational and cultural policies as well as economic incentives combined with myths of threat,26 which propelled locals into genocidal vio­lence, according to recent research.27 As nuanced as ­these individual accounts are, however, in none of them do we find the concept of “minority” historicized. This, I think, is essential for rounding out our understanding of the vio­lence that the state and some locals unleashed on the Ottoman Armenian community in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which culminated in the genocide of 1915–16. I suggest that we view ­these events from a fresh a­ ngle—­the pro­cess of minoritization. ­Doing so, I propose, serves to complement and flesh out the insightful and rich theoretical contributions and detailed accounts provided by authors cited h ­ ere and ­others.

“Minorities” in Rus­sian History and Historiography Just as Ottomanists have tended to proj­ect modern and postimperial constructions of peoplehood—­here minorities—­onto the past when the concept of “minority” was non­ex­is­tent, so have Rus­sianists, albeit (in my reading) to a slightly lesser extent. Moreover, Rus­sianists too—­even in the richest and



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most nuanced works—­seldom problematize the term “minority,” much less explain what they mean by using it. For example, we have Robert Geraci’s “Rus­sia: Minorities and Empire,” a very helpful work that guides the reader through several centuries of relations between imperial regimes and nondominant subject groups (mostly non-­Russian and non-­Orthodox), historicizes ­these relationships, and points to the ways in which they w ­ ere complex, non-­unidirectional, and contingent. In spite of this, as the title of his piece indicates, he refers to all ­these groups as “minorities” without defining how or why he uses this term and without indicating when or how “minority” became an operative concept in imperial Rus­sia. Thus, he does not explain how the specific features embedded in “minorityhood” affected the dif­fer­ ent groups ­under discussion when they did actually begin to experience the distinct pro­cess of minoritization in the nineteenth ­century.28 Geraci’s contribution is not unique in this regard, even among other equally nuanced studies of the period.29 Works on Ottoman history have viewed non-­Muslims (and non-­Turks) through the institution of the millet system and from the perspective of postwar definitions of the past, which has awkwardly brought the “minority” concept ahistorically into the picture. Studies on imperial Rus­sia similarly pick up with the l­ater “prison of the p­ eoples” image—­whether in accepting or rejecting the notion—or sometimes conflate the term “inorodtsy” with “minority.”30 The histories of the “nationality question” and of the development and application of the term “inorodtsy” to certain groups are undoubtedly part of the larger story of the minoritization of par­tic­u­lar non-­Russian and non-­ Orthodox groups in the empire, but to call all the multiple non-­Russian/non-­ Orthodox groups in the empire “minorities,” particularly for periods before the term existed to describe nonruling religious or ethnic groups, deprives the pro­cess of minoritization that par­tic­u­lar groups underwent of its specificity. As in the Ottoman case, the Rus­sian Empire also came, over the course of several centuries, to include numerous ethnolinguistic and religious groups in its area of rule. Also as in the Ottoman case, the terms ­under which dif­fer­ ent regions or dif­fer­ent groups ­were incorporated changed over time and ­were not uniform; Rus­sian officials w ­ ere interested in security and stability, and not necessarily in the religion or ethnicity of its subjects, albeit with some caveats. As Andreas Kappeler puts it, “It is true that the majority of the empire’s elite, the hereditary nobility, the bureaucracy, the officers and the rich landowners, ­were Rus­sian and Orthodox [before the modern era]. However, the elite also accepted non-­Russians, at first Muslim Tatars, then Protestant Baltic Germans and Finlanders, Catholic Poles and numerous foreigners.”31 Non-­ Russians ­were needed to fill administrative roles and also in the armed forces,

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particularly as the empire sought to modernize both the bureaucracy and the military, but with few exceptions usually at the lower levels, Jews and Muslims ­were not allowed into the bureaucracy, despite their educational qualifications.32 However, vari­ous non-­Russian and non-­Orthodox elites did gain status and privilege as their lands ­were incorporated into the empire. In short, imperial officials “sought to give ­people, or at least their elites, sufficient stake in the empire to ensure loyalty while maintaining the hierarchy necessary to preserve privileges and provide the sense of ‘imperial destiny’ and grandeur that connected the emperor and his elite servitors.”33 For their part, quite a few elites from nondominant groups continued to see their fortunes as bound up with ­those of the empire at large into the latter part of the nineteenth ­century, in some cases ­until the end of the tsarist period. With this in mind one might say that imperial practices of incorporation saw some level of success among a broad range of elite subjects. Not all elites, then, w ­ ere Rus­sian and Orthodox, and it can also be said that in certain periods some of the Rus­sian peasantry was the most miserably oppressed, their Rus­sianness notwithstanding.34 However, the core conflation of Rus­sianness and Orthodoxy with the power to rule would remain, and would serve—­albeit in a new guise—as a key feature of modern visions of peoplehood. As in the Ottoman case, the ­later part of the nineteenth ­century marks a distinctive turning point. As was true across the border and in empires around the world, liberal ideas of rights and citizenship pervaded the intellectual sphere. As Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper put it, “In the context of empire, ideas of natu­ral rights and social contract opened up a new question: who constituted the p­ eople? Would citizenship be ‘national’—­focused on a ­people who represented themselves as a single linguistic, cultural, and territorial community—or would it be ‘imperial,’ embracing diverse ­peoples who constituted the population of a state? Or could participation in state institutions create a national community, at least in parts of the empire? . . . ​Just what rights and what degree of belonging adhered to p­ eople of dif­fer­ent origins and living in dif­fer­ent parts of an empire remained a burning question,”35 in the Rus­ sian and Ottoman Empires, and o ­ thers as well. T ­ hese questions gained specific urgency as imperial elites amped up efforts to secure their borders from external threats; they began to identify “internal threats” too—­peoples who might not be loyal to the nation-­in-­the-­making, as it was, even when t­ hese “perils” ­were more ­imagined than real. It is worth emphasizing that ­these ­people ­were perceived in terms of groups and not as individuals. Rus­sians began to map, classify, categorize, and attempt to “reform” and manage the population (i.e., engaging in population politics), focusing now



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more than ever on ethnic and religious groups as potential threats to the empire, as did ­others around the world, but the pro­cess in the Rus­sian Empire had its own specificity. A significant step in this modern direction was the classification of certain groups of subjects as inorodtsy, a l­egal category using a “colloquial label meaning literally ‘­people of other stock.’ ”36 But as John Slocum points out, this l­egal designation for “a clearly enumerated and delimited set of ­peoples not subject to the general laws of the empire” also came to refer “often in a pejorative sense . . . ​to all of the empire’s non-­Russian inhabitants.” While the “­legal classification of inorodtsy expanded to include the tsar’s newest subjects in Turkestan and the Far East,” the informal usages of the term came to dominate and surfaced more frequently “in the context of polemics directed against Rus­sia’s increasingly restive national minorities, and was used to refer to all non-­Russians, w ­ hether legally classified as inorodtsy or not.”37 What is significant h ­ ere is that the concept changed over time, and that the shifts in its usage came to reflect a growing concern on the part of Rus­sian authorities with loyalty and threat, and sorting out which groups could ultimately be incorporated (i.e., assimilated) into the Rus­sian nation-­in-­the-­ making. As Matthew J. Payne asks in chapter 4 in this volume, “Did natives belong to the civic community of imperial subjects or w ­ ere they an alien and mutinous presence in the empire’s borderlands to be marginalized and excised?”38 The transformation in both ­legal and informal definitions of who was included in the term is instructive as well. The term was initially meant to designate nomadic or seminomadic Siberians, but just over a de­cade ­later, Jews ­were included in the designation “despite the fact that Jews w ­ ere a sedentary p­ eople and inhabited a Eu­ro­pean, rather than an Asian milieu.”39 Muslims would also be added to the designation. Slocum suggests that this was a status that designated an “alien” ­people, and that it came to “signify a permanent, immutable category of difference.”40 By the early twentieth c­ entury, the term was “used as a synonym for linguistically defined ‘national minorities,’ ”41 but it is particularly the ele­ment of threat that is significant in the shift in its meaning. As Slocum suggests, the “inorodtsy also represented a fundamental threat, real or ­imagined, to the security of the Rus­sian state and the Rus­sian ­people.”42 The idea that ­whole religious or ethnic groups posed a threat to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the state was acted on through the practice of new social disciplines that arose to map, quantify, and assess ­whole groups. As Peter Holquist shows, “In Rus­sia, as throughout Eu­rope, the nineteenth ­century witnessed the rise of population politics and the disciplines and technologies predicated on it.”43 Anthropology and race studies arose in this context,44 and statistics played a major role in the military’s efforts to “excise and

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expunge ­those segments typed as somehow ‘harmful’ or ‘unreliable.’ ”45 Military textbooks wrote that “an ideal population is a monoethnic population, with one language,” and as statisticians “disaggregated the ‘population’ into its component ‘ele­ments,’ they increasingly ascribed qualitative traits to each. Unsurprisingly, Rus­sians w ­ ere deemed patriotic and loyal; Jews w ­ ere described as unpatriotic, greedy, and selfish, Poles and Muslims, as alien and unreliable.”46 It was in the context of modernizing reforms—­particularly in the po­liti­cal arena—­and disappointment with the extent and outcome of t­ hose reforms that the “nationality” question came into sharper focus, both in the Ottoman Empire and in late tsarist Rus­sia. However, each society used slightly dif­fer­ent language to discuss t­ hese reforms and the p­ eople affected (or disaffected) by them. Weitz’s insight about Armenians and Jews being the “nodal points” of the emerging international system based on sovereignty and rights (cited above) may be relevant again ­here, this time for the Rus­sian context. In the Ottoman Empire the Armenians stood as one of many minorities-­in-­the-­ making, but ended up being the “minority extraordinaire,” while in late imperial Rus­sia the Jews’ story is the one most illustrative of this pro­cess. As Kappeler notes, “In the first half of the nineteenth c­ entury neither government policy nor the attitude of the population possessed the character of a determined, ideological or racist hatred of Jews. Both harsh discrimination and the development of Rus­sian anti-­Semitism ­were to take place in the second half of the c­ entury.”47 Indeed, “by the end of the nineteenth ­century, the Jewish Question stood at the center of discussion [about nationality], and the Jews became the most impor­tant object . . . ​of nationalities policy.”48 Rus­sian attempts to integrate Jews had been uneven and often discriminatory before the nineteenth c­ entury, but it was in the context of liberalization and reform on an empire-­wide level starting in the mid-­nineteenth ­century that the question of Jewish belonging shifted gears. Reforms oriented ­toward vari­ous ethnic and estate groups proceeded throughout the late nineteenth ­century and w ­ ere sometimes uneven and contradictory. For the Jews, however, the era of reforms would prove particularly dangerous. On the one hand, the lifting of certain restrictions on their mobility and economic activities led to their social mobilization, which some used to join revolutionary movements and to attempt to assimilate into Rus­sian society. On the other hand, both activities—­combined—­would result not only in a harsh reaction from above, but in vio­lence at the hands of Rus­sian urban lower classes and Ukrainian peasants, who carried out pogroms against Jews ­after the assassination of the tsar in 1881 by a group that included a w ­ oman of Jewish origin.49 As Kappeler writes, “Ancient prejudices to the effect that Jews exploited the eastern Slav lower classes had once again been confirmed. Since the latter had to be pro-



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tected against Jews, the policy of progressive emancipation became obsolete. Rus­sian policymakers no longer pursued the aims of integration, equality and assimilation, but of exclusion of and discrimination against the Jews.”50 Jews ­were increasingly seen as “the embodiment of the cap­i­tal­ist exploiter, who, ­after the pro­cess of industrialization, would also seize po­liti­cal power” and conspirators who w ­ ere ­after global economic and po­liti­cal power, a view that spread ­after the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” was concocted in 1895 by tsarist secret police.51 As in the Armenian case in the Ottoman Empire, “socially mobilized Jews now turned to the national and revolutionary movement” upon the failure of reforms and the unwillingness of imperial officials to curb vio­lence against them.52 This only amplified the sentiment of non-­Jews that the Jews w ­ ere out to do in Rus­sia and Rus­sians, and that they w ­ ere a dangerous menace to the empire. Rhe­toric surrounding loyalty and threat to the empire expanded in new directions with electoral politics a­ fter the Manifesto of October  17, 1905 allowed for a new State Duma. As Charles Steinwedel suggests, “The tsar’s concession of an elected legislative body . . . ​made more urgent the task of cultivating loyalty. . . . ​Po­liti­cal actors interpreted the Duma as a forum for the expression of the ‘­people’s ­will’ even if popu­lar sovereignty remained elusive. In this context, the loyalties expressed in elections took on considerable importance.”53 While ­there ­were attempts to make loyalty more inclusive of non-­Russian groups, the concepts of loyalty and threat became increasingly identified ethnically,54 and Jews ­were deemed particularly suspect.55 Even when Russification programs ­were somewhat sidelined in ­favor of promoting patriotism and nationalism for all subjects/citizens of the empire, the focus increasingly turned to the trope of the e­ nemy alien within, particularly with the outbreak of World War I. Germans, Poles, and Muslims suffered enormously from being placed in this category,56 but the image of the Jewish ­enemy alien who undermined the security of the empire from within became perhaps the most enduring one.

Minoritization and “Marked Citizens” The ways that states, nonstate groups, and individuals responded and contributed to shifting conceptions of what I call “peoplehood” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had their own specificity. The same holds true for the ways Ottomanists and Rus­sianists have attempted to sort out t­ hese issues. Nevertheless, ­there are, as described above, some overarching concerns and connections. It is in t­ hese common threads that I propose we consider the

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pro­cess of minoritization as a useful analytical tool for understanding larger practices of vio­lence and discrimination against par­tic­u­lar groups that l­ater came to be officially understood as minorities. Even before “minority” emerged as a category in international law at the end of World War I and before nondominant or nontitular groups ­were officially or informally recognized as minorities, ­these groups underwent a pro­cess of minoritization. I find Gyanendra Pandey’s work on the construction of minorities, and particularly his notion of the “marked citizen,” an especially useful theoretical contribution from which both Ottomanists and Rus­sianists might benefit and from which scholars interested in comparing imperial dynamics across empires might locate some crucial intersections. As both empires grappled with questions surrounding citizenship, rights, and national identity, even before World War I, the overarching question confronted by state elites and the population at large was: “Whose country is this anyway?”57 New social disciplines made it pos­si­ble to see socie­ties not just as a ­whole, but as segmented parts. Both the government and “the parts” began to consider how “the parts” fit into the nation-­in-­the-­making as well as how “the parts” related to one another. Developments in population statistics made it pos­si­ble to count the population and to divide it into ­these parts, but it was not just the numerical proportion of a par­tic­u­lar “part” relative to the larger population that made it a minority. Rather, it was the extent to which this group was ­imagined to be a threat to the ­whole or, more specifically, to the sovereignty of the dominant/titular group and to the territorial integrity of the state. Thus, not all numerically inferior groups came to be minoritized in the same way. Some, more than ­others, came to have hyphenated identities and became what Pandey calls “marked citizens,” who lived “­under the sign of the question mark.” The “enabling conditions for such question marks,” Pandey writes, surrounded two par­tic­u­lar tasks that confronted “the advocates of a natu­ral national identity. The first [was] to establish the oneness of the ­people claimed as a nation. The second [was] to find the appropriate po­liti­cal arrangement to make room for ­those who [did] not naturally fit into the unified, undifferentiated nation.”58 Elites determined that the appropriate po­liti­ cal arrangement in both empires was to attempt to create a unified, loyal population through deportation, “civilization”/assimilation, mass murder, or other repressive mea­sures against ­those “marked citizens.” In both empires, as questions of citizenship, rights, and belonging ­were being worked out, members of many dif­fer­ent ethnolinguistic and religious groups also participated in this pro­cess; it was not simply a top-­down movement. Armenians, Kurds, Arabs, Greeks, Jews, Albanians, and o ­ thers joined Turks in working to create an overarching and inclusive brand of Ottoman



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patriotism and citizenship to which they could all belong. Jews, Georgians, Tatars, Armenians, Poles, and o ­ thers joined Rus­sians in d­ oing the same across the border. But one ­thing that Muslim Turks and Orthodox Rus­sians did not have to do in their respective imperial contexts was to demonstrate their loyalty—­the burden of which fell on the minorities-­in-­the-­making. A ­ fter all, as Pandey points out, “the test of loyalty is in fact required for ­those who are not real, natu­ral citizens” (i.e., “marked citizens”).59 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (and indeed beyond), it was Muslim Turks in the Ottoman Empire and Orthodox Rus­sians across the border who became the “we” that needed no articulation.60 Just as minorities are constructed, so are majorities; the new social disciplines (mapping, statistics, ethnography, e­ tc.) that counted and classified “minority” groups also contributed to the making of Turks and Rus­sians as majorities both in the late imperial period and a­ fter, in Turkey and in the Soviet Union, respectively. ­ hese pro­cesses ­were not exactly the same on ­either side of the border, but T they did share common features, as mentioned above. A key difference was that the Soviet ideal was to make a state of nations, rather than a nation-­state that would be identified in both name and practice with one group—­Muslim Turks. As Holquist puts it, it is clear that “the intensity and extent of vio­lence as technique varied greatly, and the par­tic­u­lar categories of persecution did shift. Yet the Soviet state proved remarkably consistent in operation with a par­tic­u­ lar template of population politics, a template suggesting that certain ‘ele­ ments’ could be identified within the population and that the population’s general well-­being required e­ ither the removal or extermination of harmful ele­ments.”61 But even ­here, the Rus­sian/Orthodox ele­ment continued to be the “unmarked” citizen. Indeed, as Yuri Slezkine suggests, in the early Soviet period Rus­sian territory itself “was ‘unmarked’ and, in effect, consisted of ­those whose lands that had not been claimed by the non-­Russians known as ‘nationals [natsionaly].’ ”62 In Turkey, most of the Armenian population had been murdered or deported, and Kurds became the new “minority extraordinaire.” And Turkish territory also became “unmarked,” but in a dif­fer­ent way. All of Turkey was supposed to be composed of Turks, but “the East” became the euphemism for Kurdistan, and what­ever was not “the East” was unmarked.

Ch a p ter  2

Bloody Belonging Writing Transcaspia into the Rus­sian Empire Ian W. Campbell

No date in the history of the Rus­sian conquest of Central Asia captured the public’s imagination quite like January 12, 1881. On that day, the culmination of a months-­long, bloody, and well-­publicized campaign, troops ­under the leadership of Mikhail Dmitrievich Skobelev stormed and captured Geok-­Tepe, stronghold of the Tekke Turkmen of the Akhal oasis, killing thousands more defenders during their panicked flight to the surrounding sands. This was the moment that, most famously, inspired Dostoevsky to dream of a new ­f uture and destiny for Rus­sia, strong in Asia as it could never be in Eu­rope.1 More concretely, it was a turning point in the last stage of the Rus­sian Empire’s southward expansion in Central Asia. Their fortress taken, the Tekkes’ lands entered the newly formed Transcaspian oblast, which would reach its ultimate borders in 1885. As often as Dostoevsky is cited now, official histories of the Akhal-­Tekke campaign and campaign memoirs reveal much more about the cultural terrain on which the Tekkes entered the Rus­sian Empire. Such sources shed light on the most startling aspect of the campaign, a level of vio­lence without pre­ce­dent in the previous de­cades of the conquest of Central Asia, and the relationship between that vio­lence and the f­ uture of Transcaspia within the empire. The stories that empires and their agents tell about conquest ­matter. They are rarely told in unison, or open to a single unambiguous interpretation, but told often enough that they leave indelible traces and set the terms of discussion 35

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long ­after.2 Cultural critic Richard Slotkin has exhaustively documented the far-­reaching influence of a myth of the American frontier in which backward or savage racial outsiders ­were justly the objects of redemptive vio­lence.3 By contrast, historian Benjamin Brower has observed the slippages whereby the aureole surrounding Abdelkader’s re­sis­tance to the French conquest of Algeria rendered the entire history of that conquest “a good war.”4 In the case of the Rus­sian Empire it is the conquest of the Caucasus that has been, nigh exclusively, the subject of such analy­sis. Susan Layton, while emphasizing the ambiguity and potentially disruptive character of Rus­sian lit­er­at­ure concerned with empire, notes a strain of popu­lar lit­er­a­ture glorifying unambiguously in the conquest and “civilization” of the Caucasus.5 Other scholars have seen the relationship between lit­er­at­ ure and imperial power more straightforwardly than Layton does, arguing that themes and styles arising in writing on the borderlands ­were vital to the formation of a sense of Rus­sianness, or to the legitimation of the autocracy.6 Yet Central Asia featured infrequently in the high culture of the tsarist era. N. N. Karazin’s novels ­were popu­lar in their time, but have fallen out of the literary canon; V. V. Vereshchagin’s haunting and ambivalent paintings depicting the Turkestan campaigns stand as a lone well-­ known exception.7 Scholars have only recently begun treating seriously the abundant textual legacy we do have for the region—­memoirs, histories, and travelogues.8 The men who took Geok-­Tepe and slaughtered its defenders told a par­tic­ u­lar kind of story about why they had done that and why it mattered. They told it in articles destined for specialist military journals and stand-­alone monographs, both of which served as the source material for popu­lar accounts. It was a story whose contradictions and tensions ­were ultimately productive for the ­future of imperial rule in Transcaspia. In contrast to Dostoevsky’s geopolitics, ­these writers saw Rus­sia as clearly a Eu­ro­pean power that had followed an appropriate script for colonial warfare against “Asiatic” opponents.9 The conquest, and particularly the day of the storm, had been a ­matter of purposeful exemplary vio­lence. On one hand, tsarist observers wrote that they had hit the Tekkes so hard on January 12 that they had permanently torn them out of their natu­ral brutality, impudence, and in­de­pen­dence, compelling their submission for generations to come. On the other hand, the same authors took ­g reat pains to minimize the Tekkes’ suffering during the siege and storm. Moreover, as tsarist observers wrote it, the finality of the storm allowed them to immediately proceed to a new phase of relations with the Tekkes. In their accounts, the be­hav­ior of the occupying soldiers was characterized by extreme mercy and charity t­ oward the vanquished as soon as the danger had passed. Within hours of their slaughter the Tekkes thus became, in the tsarist imagi-



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nary, unlikely recipients of what Bruce Grant has called the “gift of empire.”10 When outside the bounds of the empire, the Tekkes’ low position on a global ethnic and racial hierarchy was said to justify and excuse their merciless punishment. Once they w ­ ere a part of the empire, the rhe­toric of charity inscribed them in a new hierarchy, one in which mercy descended to them from the tsar and his agents. If they rejected this mercy once inside the empire, this latter narrative established a new script by which they might be punished and brought back into the fold. The drama unfolded to the south and east of the Caspian Sea, in a region largely congruent with modern-­day Turkmenistan. Mainly desert, with a few oases, it was populated by several Turkmen tribes, the largest of which w ­ ere the Yomuds, who lived further to the north and west and had more previous contact with Rus­sians, and the Tekkes, who inhabited the deserts farther south and east, and the Akhal and Merv oases.11 They lived by pastoral and semisedentary nomadism, a small amount of oasis-­based agriculture, and most notoriously by alaman: raids on caravans and neighboring tribes for goods and slaves.12 Such raids made them a constant source of trou­ble for neighboring sedentary powers (especially Persia) that sought to assert hegemony over them, or simply to protect their own subjects and property.13 Transcaspia was distant even from the early tsarist conquests of Turkestan. Through the 1860s, the formal Rus­sian presence in the region was limited to the naval station at Ashur-­ ade, meant to control the activity of pirates on the Caspian. A turning point came in 1869, ­after the conquest of Bukhara, with the founding of the city of Krasnovodsk (present-­day Turkmenbashi, on the Caspian coast), which “became the base for the movement of Rus­sian troops east into Turkestan.”14 Though the force based at Krasnovodsk carried out increasingly deep reconnaissance for the next several years, t­ here was nothing foreordained about moving forward. Many Yomuds became subjects of the empire (and victims of a massacre notorious in its own right) with the conquest of Khiva in 1873. The year 1874 witnessed the creation of a Transcaspian “military department” (voennyi otdel) encompassing the Caspian coast and the valley of the Atrek River, consolidating the tsarist presence in the west.15 But the same year, Minister of War Dmitrii Alekseevich Miliutin rejected proposals from the viceroy of the Caucasus, ­Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolaevich, to strengthen this influence further by advancing east.16 Soviet scholars have tended to see 1876 as a decisive moment in the conquest; ­after tsarist authorities had been spooked into action by rumors of the Tekkes becoming Persian subjects, further forward movement was inevitable.17 Yet the incursions made ­under the ineffectual leadership of Nikolai Pavlovich Lomakin in 1877 and

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1878 neither gained much ground nor had much influence on the Tekkes’ be­ hav­ior; they gained him only the disapproval of officers who thirsted for a more decisive approach. A larger expedition directed at Geok-­Tepe in 1879 proved ill-­starred and poorly led. Its ailing commander, Ivan Davidovich Lazarev, died soon ­after assuming command, placing responsibility back in the hands of the hapless Lomakin, whose attempt to storm the fortress with exhausted troops and without the benefit of reconnaissance ended in humiliating defeat in August of that year.18 Such a bloody and unexpected repulse demanded an immediate riposte. Early in 1880, St. Petersburg was the scene of meetings to plan a second expedition. The resources it was granted show how badly official Petersburg was stung by the defeat. It was supplied “luxuriously,” as no other Central Asian expedition had been.19 Its commander was the celebrated Skobelev, a veteran of earlier Central Asian campaigns, darling of the Pan-­Slav movement, and one who enjoyed a heroic public reputation in the aftermath of the Russo-­ Turkish War.20 Skobelev arrived at the east coast of the Caspian in May, and thereafter his force of about 4,500 men, with an impressive amount of artillery, moved methodically through the sands, sparing neither expense nor moral scruple to obtain the food and transit supplies it required.21 On December 23, with Skobelev’s force having been joined at his personal request by a column from Turkestan led by Aleksei Nikolaevich Kuropatkin, the siege began, with approximately 40,000 Tekkes concentrated inside the fortress walls. Repeated Tekke sorties failed to break the siege, and on January 12, a­ fter artillery preparation and the detonation of mines beneath a section of fortress wall, three storm columns breached the fortress and took control of it by the after­noon.22 Combined infantry and cavalry forces pursued the fleeing defenders approximately ten miles into the sands, only being compelled to return to the fortress by exhaustion and nightfall. During the pursuit alone, Skobelev reported, his men had killed about 8,000 Tekkes, both men and w ­ omen (oboego pola).23 The total carnage included t­hese dead and another 6,500 buried within the fortress.24 Kuropatkin’s expeditions to take the major settlement of Ashkhabad and obtain the submission of t­ hose Tekkes who had fled met with ­little further re­ sis­tance. By May the Akhal oasis and the land surrounding it had been added to what was now called the Transcaspian oblast, and Skobelev left the region for a new assignment. He died a year ­later, ­under mysterious circumstances. Such are the basic facts of the storm and slaughter at Geok-­Tepe. That Skobelev led it to such a sadistic climax, outside what had been the norm in the earlier phases of the conquest of Turkestan, surely had something to do with his personal proclivities. Kuropatkin, for one, rec­ords numerous atrocities u ­ nder



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Skobelev’s command during the Fergana campaigns of 1875–76.25 But deliberate maneuvering t­ oward a single climactic b­ attle was also the result of received ideas about “Asiatic” warfare generally and about the Turkmen in par­tic­u­lar.26 Colonial military vio­lence in the late nineteenth ­century was everywhere, as the historian Kim A. Wagner notes, “based on deeply encoded assumptions concerning the inherent difference of local opponents,” and tsarist officers in Central Asia partook in ­these ideologies no less deeply than their British and French counter­parts.27 They envisioned theaters of colonial warfare as spaces where morale and appearances ­were of tremendous importance; the par­tic­u­ lar geography of tsarist expansion meant that they frequently associated this general view with par­tic­u­lar racialized views of Asia and “Asiatics.” A single step back or failure in such a theater might spoil the impression of unbeatable superiority necessary to maintain order and peace.28 By the time of Skobelev’s campaign, tsarist officers could cite numerous pre­ce­dents from their own experiences of colonial war as well as from the experiences of ­brother officers in other Eu­ro­pean empires that seemed to prove this was so. One particularly famous example of such thinking was the memorandum of the foreign minister Aleksandr Mikhailovich Gorchakov in 1864 in defense of the Rus­sian advance into Turkestan. It was necessary to move forward in response to frontier raids ­because “it is a peculiarity of Asiatics to re­spect nothing but vis­ i­ble and palpable force.”29 The Rus­sian Empire’s diplomats and warriors frequently sparred over the correct course of action to take in Central Asia, but on this basic point Kuropatkin and Nikolai Ivanovich Grodekov, tireless chroniclers of the conquest of Turkestan, agreed: In Asia, only strength worked.30 False starts had only emboldened the e­ nemy and dragged out the conquest.31 But the reverse was also true, since successful conquests held the uncommitted or recently conquered in thrall.32 Reasoning from t­ hese general princi­ples, Kuropatkin and Grodekov w ­ ere particularly appalled by tsarist actions in the buildup to Skobelev’s expedition. Lomakin’s numerous failures—­his indecisive maneuvering in 1877 and 1878, and especially his humiliating repulse in 1879—­had shattered, they believed, the “spell” in which Rus­sians had previously held the Turkmen and other Central Asians.33 The immediate effects w ­ ere clear and disturbing for a patriotic officer. Rumors flew around bazaars, while the Tekkes boasted of their invincibility and raided even more than they had before.34 The necessary remedy for such a prob­lem was readily available in the official mind, and in Skobelev the second expedition had a commander unusually willing to administer it. The latter was fond of quoting a princi­ple he attributed to Benjamin Disraeli that, in Rus­sian translation, expressed the necessity of not only seizing “Asiatics” by the scruff of the neck but also conquering their imagination.35 Hence his

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insistence on a frankly ludicrous amount of artillery in proportion to the task facing him, his emphasis on using subterranean mines to demolish a section of the fortress wall, and his obsession with racking up as many ­enemy casualties as pos­si­ble.36 All ­were meant to show the Rus­sian Empire and the Rus­sian warrior emphatically on the front foot again, their prestige unquestioned and impossible to challenge, the impression of the day indelible. It had much in common with what Benjamin Madley, writing on the colonization of California, has termed “pedagogic killing”: vio­lence that would teach resisters not to mount further challenges to colonial rule.37 But if t­ hese ideas could have had a place in any colonial theater, and in fact drew on earlier tsarist experiences of colonial warfare, received wisdom also suggested that the Tekkes might be particularly incorrigible. (The closest parallels to t­hese ideas in tsarist ethnography are in descriptions of the Chechens, another p­ eople believed to pres­ent prob­lems that only extreme vio­lence could solve.)38 Tekkes w ­ ere believed to particularly love freedom, and to submit to o ­ thers only in cases of extreme need. Outsiders, therefore, could only hope to win their submission u ­ nder threat of force.39 The lifestyle of mutual raiding to which they ­were accustomed, and which some argued was even determined by their environmental and po­liti­cal circumstances, left them deaf to any other language. Their mobility, in­de­pen­dence, and stubborn re­sis­tance to Persian attempts to compel better be­hav­ior suggested the importance of holding them in “constant fear, and not temporary fear,” and of maximizing the effect of victory when the opportunity presented itself.40 Participants in the campaign invoked such views explic­itly. In his unpublished memoirs, Kuropatkin wrote of the siege and storm of Geok-­Tepe that, normally, the idea of fortress warfare was to capture the fortress; its garrison could be permitted to surrender. In Transcaspia it was dif­fer­ent: “At Geok-­Tepe the fortress itself had no significance. What was impor­tant was that in it a significant part of the population was taking shelter. Therefore it was impor­tant not to let the Tekkes out of the fortress, so as to, having taken it, do away with them with one blow. If they abandoned the fortress they could have taken shelter in the sands, which would have forced numerous difficult movements through the desert in order to take their herds with the goal of bringing them to submission.”41 All “Asiatics,” as tsarist officers saw the m ­ atter, respected bold strength and ­were prepared to exploit any sign of weakness. Tekkes, though, needed a particularly strong hand to achieve the desired effect. When they reflected on the events of January 12, tsarist officers felt confident that they had done what they came to do. They had struck the decisive blow necessary to take their revenge for 1879 and hold Transcaspia in awed submis-



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sion for the foreseeable f­ uture. Grodekov’s four-­volume history (written with Kuropatkin’s input) is the official account of the conquest, and his triumphalist view of the storm merits par­tic­ul­ ar attention: “In the w ­ hole oasis . . . ​­there was the most complete peace. ­After January 12, not a single shot more was heard. They trusted Rus­sian power. The destruction [pogrom] during the storm was so strong that its impression w ­ ill long remain indelible.”42 Certainly, this was how Skobelev himself had wanted to frame the encounter: as a single moment bringing e­ ither total victory or total defeat, with retreat unthinkable.43 The idea filtered into official correspondence and humbler accounts of the campaign too, even into ­those not composed by immediate participants.44 Neither Skobelev nor Kaufman believed it necessary to do anything special for the Turkmen who had aided the invading army, since the strong impression produced by the storm would sufficiently hold them back from protesting their poor treatment.45 For other officers, the pursuit and destruction had been “necessary,” since only a defeat that truly induced horror would “tear out from their memory, at the roots, the previous year’s success during their clash with us.”46 This having been done, in the common understanding of colonial warfare, submission was inevitable. So too was the ultimate fall of Merv, which had evidently been “morally conquered” the same day and simply awaited its formal attachment to the empire.47 In short, when K. M. Fedotov retrospectively framed the day of the storm as the critical turning point in “establishing Rus­sian civil order [grazhdanstvennost’]” in Transcaspia, turning it from an infertile desert into a “flourishing” part of the empire, he drew on a long triumphalist tradition.48 Kuropatkin was particularly avid in gathering evidence that this had been the case, during a wide-­ranging and controversial c­ areer that took him back to Transcaspia as its governor between 1890 and 1898, and then again to Turkestan for a brief stint as governor-­general to put down the Central Asian revolt of 1916. His memoirs, composed ­after the Bolshevik Revolution, reflect the durability of the narrative whereby the actions of January 12 had, by their very extremity, transformed the historical trajectory of the region. While he had been governor of Transcaspia, he reflected, he had not needed to take any par­tic­u­lar mea­sures to maintain peace and security b­ ecause “the storm of Geok-­Tepe on January 12, 1881, was still fresh in the memory of the Turkmen population, and the might of Rus­sians seemed immea­sur­able to them.”49 When he permitted himself to reflect specifically on his experiences at Geok-­ Tepe, he made still more grandiose claims. By one blow, the Tekkes’ re­sis­tance had been broken, and since then, down to 1917, they had behaved very loyally ­toward the tsarist government.50 As the world he had known collapsed, Kuropatkin reassured himself that t­ here was a moment in which he and his comrades had brought lasting order to a wild place by force of arms.

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The prob­lem with this narrative of a final, decisive victory whose effects resounded for de­cades was that the men who concocted it knew that they w ­ ere deluding themselves. Skobelev’s ­orders in the days and weeks following the storm do not suggest that he sincerely believed he was moving his forces through safe country. Rather, his correspondence with Kuropatkin’s pacification force expresses a mélange of concern about the risks the latter was taking and concern about why he was not writing more frequently.51 When he needed to perform and wanted to follow in the footsteps of his conquering pre­de­ces­sors, Skobelev was happy to theatrically discard his weapons and entrust himself to recently conquered locals; when he had more skin in the game, his true feelings became clear.52 Nor did the Merv narrative survive contact with real­ity. To be sure, tsarist agents cited the pre­ce­dent of the massacre when persuading the Merv Tekkes to submit peacefully. As Mahsud Alikhanov-­ Avarskii, a Caucasian Muslim in tsarist ser­vice, claimed to have said before an assembly in Merv, “You are accustomed to have business with the weak Persians and, despite the still fresh lesson of Geok-­Tepe, have unfortunately forgotten that the Rus­sians are not Persians.”53 But such threats ­were only necessary ­because the impression the storm produced had quickly faded, or Transcaspia’s new administrators had failed to make appropriate use of it.54 Far from being indelible, the shock produced by the massacre had to be carefully cultivated and nurtured; ­there was nothing inevitable about the Tekkes’ be­hav­ior in the subsequent months and years. Fi­nally, even Grodekov—­a man whose brutality endeared him to Skobelev—­let it slip that the spell of vio­lence was not permanent, but needed constantly to be replenished with blood.55 Lamenting Lomakin’s early failures and the damaging rumors that spread in their aftermath, he griped that this had only happened b­ ecause Central Asians had not felt the tsar’s strong hand for too long: “The generation of natives that grew up ­under Rus­sian rule, having gotten accustomed to our weak sides from its early years and not having experienced itself, in practice, our strength, frivolously gave in to any active influence hostile to us.”56 ­Either extreme vio­ lence permanently pacified a country or it lasted about fifteen years, a­ fter which the new subjects might become as unruly and disobedient as they had been before. This was the uncomfortable and untenable real­ity ­behind the bluster. So it was not just public outcry or po­liti­cal opprobrium that led tsarist officers to seek parallel accounts of what had happened on January 12, although t­ hose ­were also impor­tant ­factors.57 It was their real consciousness that they did not and could not have produced peaceful imperial subjects in one day, no ­matter how spectacularly they cut them down. Hence, they might be waging counterinsurgency before long. In chapter 4 of this volume, Matthew J. Payne dis-



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cusses Kuropatkin’s “imperial” approach to suppressing the Central Asian revolt of 1916, an approach that sought to punish rather than exterminate, to shape events in a direction conducive to maintaining unequal multiethnic rule on the borderlands. A similar approach was at play in Transcaspia, and this informed the kind of stories soldiers and officials told themselves about the massacre. Ultimately, two distinct counternarratives emerged. One minimized or silenced the horror of what had occurred by drawing attention to mitigating circumstances. The other, more pernicious yet, positioned surviving Tekkes as grateful recipients of Rus­sian mercy within mere hours of the storm. To maintain imperial rule ­after the conquest demanded a myth of belonging built on something more sound than pedagogical vio­lence; the mercy narrative provided it. The most straightforward argument in ­favor of circumstances mitigating brutality was that it had all been a m ­ atter of military necessity. Skobelev set the tone for his expedition by excusing any alleged excesses that had taken place ­under Lomakin’s command, presenting them as justified by the “severe demands of war” and sanctified by ample pre­ce­dent: German treatment of Pa­ri­sian civilians in 1870–71 and Rus­sian actions at Plevna during the Russo-­ Turkish War.58 In this he aligned himself not only with Eu­rope’s harshest martial code, that of the German Empire, but with the established tsarist wisdom about colonial warfare.59 Mikhail Grigor’evich Cherniaev, formerly the hero of Tashkent, criticized the massacre of the Yomuds during the Khivan campaign from his new bully pulpit, the newspaper Russkii mir, precisely ­because “it was not justified even by necessity, which sometimes compels the weak to run to inhumane mea­sures against the strong.”60 So massacres could be justified u ­ nder par­tic­ul­ar circumstances. Such circumstances, tsarist officers argued, existed at Geok-­Tepe. The besieging Rus­sians had offered them the option of moving their families out of harm’s way, not “wish[ing] to kill ­women and c­ hildren,” but the Tekkes had arrogantly refused to do so.61 The press swallowed this argument ­wholesale. ­Under the circumstances, “in the godforsaken [glukhaia] steppe, among a warlike p­ eople . . . ​and commanding a small force, exhausted from l­abor and b­ attle,” a massacre was the only pos­ si­ble resolution to the prob­lems Skobelev faced.62 They had committed a massacre, but could not reasonably have been expected to do differently. Lurid accounts of Tekke brutality ­toward slaves, captives, and vanquished enemies would have left readers in l­ittle doubt that a weak, tired force fighting in Transcaspia would have been in constant fear for its survival. This is a rhetorical mode reminiscent of what historian Peter Silver calls the “anti-­Indian sublime” in the North American case.63 Details of be­hav­ior calculated to shock a metropolitan audience featured in writing about the Tekkes and other

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Turkmen tribes before, during, and ­after the conquest. Such writing appeared in both thick and popu­lar journals and was collected, like narratives about the Akhal-­Tekke campaigns, in the Turkestanskii sbornik (Turkestan Collection), a collection of published work on Turkestan in 591 volumes that serves as a reasonable approximation of the “official mind” in tsarist Central Asia. The list of crimes attributed to Tekkes in t­ hese tales was long and lurid. As written, Tekkes ­were not only slavers, but kept their unfortunate captives (including some Rus­sian soldiers) in an especially high degree of hunger and pain.64 When they killed their enemies, they both mutilated the corpses and salved their own wounds with the subcutaneous fat of the deceased.65 Most galling of all w ­ ere the ­trials of the Rus­sian cannoneer Agafon Nikitin, captured during the siege Skobelev directed. Nikitin was described as having stoically and heroically refused, u ­ nder torture, the Tekkes’ demands to teach them how to operate a captured Rus­sian artillery piece; his frustrated captors ultimately beheaded him.66 The Skobelev campaign thus obtained its martyr. In death, Nikitin became a symbol of the modest and stoic heroism of the common Rus­sian soldier in Transcaspia.67 But if Nikitin stood in for all Rus­sian soldiers, then any soldier might equally well have been in his place. The torture he experienced was the suffering of the entire force, and they ­were in this view justified in venting their anger and taking their revenge on January 12.68 Benjamin Brower takes a dif­fer­ent approach to the sublime, but one just as closely connected to extreme manifestations of cruelty and just as pres­ent in repre­sen­ta­tions of the Skobelev campaign. For Brower, the French in Algeria created “a specific imaginary construction of the Sahara—as both a place of extremes (including extreme vio­lence) and . . . ​a place of nostalgic escape.”69 Such extremes featured prominently in tsarist writing on the Transcaspian campaigns. Lomakin’s effort of 1879 had been characterized by “frightful heat, lack of w ­ ater, and illness.”70 1880 was better, thanks to what was usually depicted as Skobelev’s logistical genius, but still featured tiring passages through difficult country, with Kuropatkin’s Turkestan force performing par­tic­u­lar feats of endurance.71 The especially exhaustive details that Grodekov gives of Skobelev’s logistical work, among their other rhetorical functions, illustrated how much effort was necessary for an unaccustomed Eu­ro­pean to overcome the “thirst, severe heat, and lack of food” with which he met while campaigning in Transcaspia.72 Tekkes, according to their tsarist observers, had adapted to such an environment, and their be­hav­ior reached similar, at times literally inhuman, extremes. They could bear thirst, hunger, and physical pain calmly and stoically. One doctor reported that an el­derly w ­ oman, her femur shattered from a



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wound, gave no indication that she was in discomfort, and reacted indifferently to the news that the wound was fatal.73 Men faced down the certain death of capital punishment without vis­i­ble fear.74 Such fatalism rendered acts of foolhardy courage ordinary. One observer repeatedly referenced the “fanatic[ally]” brave be­hav­ior of individual Tekkes u ­ nder fire during the last 75 days of the siege. A common cliché about their be­hav­ior during attempted sorties was that it had been “like lava,” an inexorable and unthinking movement forward.76 On the northwestern frontier of British India, historian Elizabeth Kolsky has described the creation of the ­legal category of the fanatic, so irredeemably unruly and backward that they ­were held to require “disciplinary methods that unleashed the terror of empire.”77 With their propensity for brutal torture and their blinkered devotion to the hopeless cause of defending their fortress, Tekkes fit a similar formula—if, indeed, they even registered pain in the way that Rus­sian soldiers did. What­ever had happened to them on January 12 and during the weeks leading up to it was, when all the mitigating circumstances w ­ ere considered together, richly deserved, contextually appropriate, and not as bad as it seemed. Moreover, participants and official historians wrote that tsarist soldiers had treated the Tekkes with consummate kindness a­ fter the storm. The frequency with which this theme emerges stands in stark contrast to its implausibility. In the m ­ iddle of the pursuit, a staff captain wrote to Kuropatkin asking for specific instructions not to “slaughter” (kolot’) the ­women and ­children who approached him, but return them to the safety of the camp.78 This is not the be­hav­ior of a man who was aware of a master plan to show mercy to survivors, as Skobelev would l­ ater frame it.79 In fact, Skobelev permitted his troops to ransack survivors’ possessions for two days ­after the fortress fell.80 Yet while forcible dispossession and cleanup operations occurred in the background, tsarist officers brought the mercy story to the fore. Soldiers, so they wrote, had done much more than not kill unarmed survivors; they had provided them with food and shelter, since with the b­ attle over they w ­ ere no longer enemies, but only unfortunates.81 Some had gone even further, caring for orphaned ­children and marrying w ­ idows.82 In this, they followed the lead of their chief, Skobelev, said to have literally plucked a Tekke girl from ­under the hooves of his ­horse, brought her back to camp, and ultimately given her over to the countess Miliutina for care and education.83 To be sure, Skobelev ascribed importance to returning survivors to the fortress and providing for them, but he arrived at this through the logic of counterinsurgency: t­ hese w ­ ere necessary mea­sures to ensure that armed warriors would return to surrender.84 But his practical plans ­were made to mean something very dif­fer­ent. As one observer put it, it was in this sort of be­hav­ior that the true strength of the empire lay:

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in the ability of the s­ imple, kind Rus­sian soldier “to conquer not only a country but the hearts of its inhabitants, even such brave and warlike ones as the hearts of our new fellow citizens [sograzhdan] in the Akhal-­Tekke oasis.”85 Such be­hav­ior stood in stark contrast, as the conquerors wrote it, to the careless be­hav­ior of the dead husbands and f­ athers for whom they now stepped in. By fleeing, they had “abandoned to the whims of fate several thousand ­women and ­children.”86 Nor had they let their dependents leave when Skobelev had graciously offered them the opportunity; reading between the lines and the multiple texts, they had tried to avoid danger while leaving their dependents in the line of fire.87 Their mercy also compared favorably to that of the former masters of the region. Grodekov crowed that the survivors had been well cared for despite the fact that they themselves expected, “according to Oriental custom,” to be slaughtered.88 Even in an extreme moment, the Rus­ sian conquerors proved better masters of ­house­hold and country than t­ hose they had replaced. T ­ hose who had survived the ordeal to become part of the Rus­sian Empire had, it seemed, much to be grateful for. Over time, the sanitized version of the story triumphed. Alexander Morrison has noted the reticence of official historians like Grodekov to name the precise number of Turkmen dead, and indeed the museum set up at Geok-­ Tepe station on the Central Asian Railway in 1899 more than halved this figure, from 14,500 of both sexes to “over 6,000.”89 As governor of Transcaspia in 1897, Kuropatkin had dreamed up the museum and was able to direct resources to it from his more privileged post as minister of war a­ fter 1898.90 It was much in the typical mode of war memorials in the Rus­sian Empire, as Aaron J. Cohen describes it: meant to “explain the history of the monarchical state, demonstrate its power, and legitimize its rule.”91 In their brief time at the station, passengers could receive a canned lesson about the triumph of Rus­sian arms: they could thrill to the sight of au­then­tic weaponry and uniforms from the campaign, learn the names of the heroes of the storm, and buy a short pamphlet by a participant in the campaign teaching them more about it.92 They could meet a living memorial to Rus­sian heroism, the museum’s watchman, Maksim Sasaev, a retired corporal who had participated in the Skobelev campaign with distinction.93 In this w ­ hole display, Morrison correctly notes, “the Turkmen w ­ ere almost completely invisible, except as an ­enemy whose ill-­defined savagery had enabled t­ hese displays of Rus­sian heroism, and as piles of indistinguishable corpses.”94 This silencing joined existing ideas about Tekkes receiving help from Rus­sians from the very day of the conquest to produce an impression useful to maintaining tsarist rule in the recently conquered borderland: a vague and unspecified bad t­hing had hap-



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pened, but the soldiers who did it had been heroic, and both the Tekkes and the empire had benefited from the results of their sacrifice. More than a c­ entury has passed, but this second mode of writing the events of January 12—­minimizing the body count, excusing the actions of the tsarist army, and drawing attention away from the massacre and ­toward the ­f uture it enabled, persists in the historiography. The successors of the Rus­sian Empire in Transcaspia did not see it as unambiguously positive, but acknowledged it as their pre­de­ces­sor, so in their versions the Tekkes’ entry to the Rus­sian Empire at what­ever gruesome cost was justified by creating the conditions for them to belong to its successors. In the 1960s the dean of Soviet historians of Central Asia, N. A. Khalfin, framing Central Asia’s entry to the Rus­sian Empire as a pro­cess of “inclusion” (prisoedinenie) rather than conquest, described Geok-­Tepe as a conflict in which “both sides bore large losses.”95 Soviet Turkmenistani historians w ­ ere much more forthright about the disproportionate carnage, but still, in difficult po­liti­cal circumstances, could only frame it as the high price that was paid for Turkmenistan to have the opportunity to “join the revolutionary strug­gle of all the oppressed ­peoples of the Rus­sian Empire” and enjoy the benefits of the October Revolution.96 Rus­sian nationalist historiography since 1991 is, in a sense, the opposite side of this coin. E. A. Glushchenko, directing his history of the Rus­sian Empire at the “slanderers of Rus­sia” in the new republics who have dared to assert the existence of negative aspects, gives a blow-­by-­blow account of the Skobelev campaign, but with no explanation or justification; within his framework, t­ here is simply no need, since the end result of the conquest was to open “new possibilities” before a benighted region stuck in the ­Middle Ages.97 Even in in­de­pen­dent Turkmenistan, the massacre has become connected with Akhal-­Tekke domination of the country’s po­liti­cal life, the personality cults of its post-­Soviet leaders, and hence presented as a step ­toward the pres­ent “Golden Age of the Turkmen.”98 Any interpretation of January  12, it seems, is permissible, as long as it pres­ents the Tekkes as becoming part of something greater than what they had been when in­de­pen­dent. Despite their stated ideas about the efficacy of an exemplary massacre, it was tsarist writers’ attempt to mitigate and minimize their actions that had the longest-­lasting influence on perceptions of the Transcaspian desert’s place in the Eurasian po­liti­cal space.

Ch a p ter  3

The Armenian Genocide of 1915 Lineaments of a Comparative History Norman M. Naimark

The purpose of this chapter is to locate the Armenian Genocide in the history and historiography of genocide by comparing it to other cases over time and space. The idea is to identify ­those ele­ments of the Armenian Genocide that are common to genocidal pro­cesses as a w ­ hole and ­those that might be considered par­tic­u­lar to the Armenian events. This kind of exercise helps historicize the Armenian Genocide in the longue durée of the history of genocide and makes it clear that mass killing of the sort experienced by the Armenians in 1915–16 is part and parcel of h ­ uman history, rather than standing outside the historical experience. Moreover, the causal ­factors in the Armenian case become clearer in light of comparison with other genocides, just as an understanding of the Armenian Genocide helps us come to terms with the sources, the dynamics, and the consequences of other genocides. This essay is based on a series of under­lying propositions about the character of genocide that should be made explicit at the beginning. ­These propositions are not uncontroversial and have been argued in the lit­er­a­ture in a variety of contexts. Each of them requires a long and systematic explanation. But for the sake of getting to the subject at hand, let me simply enumerate them and briefly justify them as necessary background for what is to follow. 1. Genocide has occurred throughout history, from the very beginnings of the social organ­ization of ­human communities ­until the pres­ent.1 48

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This history can and should be broken down into general periods that reflect the stages of the development of state and society over the millennia. Thus genocide in the ancient world should be distinguished from settler genocide or modern genocide, and from genocide in our own post–­Cold War world. ­These and other periods in the history of genocide share certain characteristics regarding the kind and extent of vio­lence, the purposes and intent of ­those committing it, and the par­tic­ u­lar ways groups of victims (and genocide, by definition, is always carried out against groups) are identified. Though many characteristics of each period are distinct from the other periods, genocidal episodes over the course of ­human history bear a remarkable similarity to one another. 2. Genocide has occurred in vari­ous parts of the world and in dif­fer­ent types of civilizations and cultures. We w ­ ill never know all the genocides that have taken place in the past. A typical example of an “anonymous” genocide is that of the elimination of the Selkʹnam ­people, “a nomadic tribe of unknown origin” that lived in Tierra del Fuego, an archipelago at the southernmost tip of the South American continent.2 In an all too familiar scenario, at the end of the nineteenth c­ entury, gold prospectors and sheep ranchers coveted the Selkʹnam’s land, massacred them in large numbers, and reduced their population from approximately four thousand to about three hundred. Sometimes ­there are no rec­ords remaining of the elimination of p­ eoples, and even historical memory of past atrocities dis­appears. Sometimes genocidal events in history simply escape our gaze. 3. The definition of genocide developed by the Polish-­Jewish international ­lawyer Raphael Lemkin in the 1930s and 1940s and codified in the December  1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, is a useful one, especially as adumbrated since the 1990s by the decisions of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugo­slavia (1993–2017), the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (1994–2015), and the International Criminal Court (2002 to the pres­ent). The definition of genocide in the 1948 convention centers on “acts committed with intent to destroy, in w ­ hole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” However, as I have argued elsewhere, this definition could and should be expanded to include attacks on social and po­liti­cal groups, an idea that was prevalent in Lemkin’s conception of genocide in the 1930s and early 1940s.3 4. Some scholars suggest that the term genocide has lost serious analytical meaning b­ ecause of its overly politicized use by victim groups of the most variable character. It is surely the case that the term genocide

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has been subject to “a wave of misuse and rhetorical abuse.”4 Some scholars would prefer what they suggest are more precise terms, like ethnicide, democide, politicide, sociocide, or even genderocide.5 Despite the sometimes lengthy arguments about terminology in the scholarly and jurisprudential lit­er­a­ture, Lemkin’s definition of genocide works and works well when rigorously applied, buttressed by the 1948 UN Convention’s language, to events past and pres­ent. Comparative reflection on the Armenian Genocide helps us understand both the specifics of the Armenian situation and other cases of genocide in ­human history.6 By identifying both commonalities and differences in vari­ous episodes of genocide, one can gain a better grasp on the complex pro­cesses of causation and execution. This in turn allows us to think about how to anticipate genocidal situations and seek their interdiction.

Balance of the Contingent and the Longue Durée In many recent studies of the Armenian Genocide—to name only a few, t­ hose of Ronald Grigor Suny, Donald Bloxham, Taner Akçam, Raymond Kévorkian, and Fatma Müge Göçek (on Armenian Genocide denial)—­the difficult prob­lem of finding the right balance between immediate and long-­term ­causes of the 1915–16 Armenian Genocide is central to their analyses.7 Göçek’s history of denial, interestingly, begins its story with the French Revolution, while Bloxham starts his history with the development of the Eastern Question in the mid-­nineteenth ­century. Suny begins his analy­sis with the prob­lems of empire and nation in the late nineteenth ­century, and Kévorkian and Akçam focus on the Young Turk movement and its ideological and orga­nizational development in the late Ottoman period. All would agree that it takes a finely crafted interweaving of long-­term historical trends with an analy­sis of immediate causation to understand when and how the members of “the most favored millet,” the Armenian Orthodox Apostolic Church, became a group targeted for elimination, along with their Catholic and Protestant brethren. The breakdown of the millet system in the mid-­nineteenth ­century, which had protected the Armenians (along with Orthodox Greeks, Jews, and o ­ thers) within their subservient community, was the product in good mea­sure of the introduction of a westernized ­legal system known as Tanzimat and the introduction of modernizing reforms within the Ottoman Empire. The “vanguard” of the modernizers took part in the Young Turk movement, which challenged the traditional values of the empire, including the millet system, and seized

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control of the destiny of the empire in the 1908 Young Turk Revolution. In their view, to use Kévorkian’s words, the genocide “was conceived as a necessary condition for the construction of a Turkish nation state—­the supreme objective of the Young Turks.”8 Yet the Armenian Genocide did not have to happen. By the time it did, though, as Suny has written, it was overdetermined.9 Genocide is, above all, a pro­cess that does not have an easily delineated beginning or end. Like most historical pro­cesses it is deeply embedded in a concrete contextual landscape. If one compares the Armenian Genocide to other genocides over time, one notes a similar set of prob­lems in trying to separate immediate ­causes from long-­term trends. Take, for example, the Rwandan Genocide, which seemed to explode out of nowhere in a frenzy of killing in Rwanda in 1994, sparked by the mysterious downing of an airplane carry­ing moderate Hutu president Juvénal Habyarimana on April 6, 1994.10 Hutu militias used this event to unleash a campaign of terror and mass murder against the Tutsi and moderate Hutu. Over one hundred days, from April 7, 1994, to mid-­July of the same year, about 800,000 ­people ­were killed, or some 8,000 per day. But, as a number of studies of the Rwandan events demonstrate, the fratricidal killing between Hutu and Tutsi that characterized so much of the history of the G ­ reat Lakes region since in­de­pen­dence in the early 1960s needs to be thought of as a single narrative with a number of complex and intersecting stories, including the 1994 Rwandan Genocide.11 The precipitating ­factors in the case of the Armenian Genocide seem to have been the vortex of events surrounding the outbreak of World War I, which ­will be considered ­later in the essay. As a pro­cess, t­ here are rarely moments when genocide “begins” and “concludes.” Frequently, the killing reaches a crescendo and then fades away. The Rwandan Genocide, for example, ended gradually in Rwanda with the victory of the Tutsi leader Paul Kagame and his Rwandan Patriotic Front. But massacres spread into bordering eastern Congo, where Hutu militias continued to murder Tutsis, and armed Tutsi groups, supported by the Rwandan military, attacked and killed Hutu refugees. The Armenian Genocide also spilled over the borders into the Rus­sian Empire in 1915–16, with Ottoman Turks (and Muslim ­peoples of the Caucasus) continuing to attack Armenians in a variety of situations, and armed Armenian groups episodically taking revenge on the local Muslim population. Armenian refugees fled into the Caucasus, many of them ­dying of starvation and exposure; o ­ thers found relief in the newly formed Soviet Union and played an impor­tant role in the making of Soviet Armenia.12 Some genocides can continue over several centuries (e.g., the San p­ eople in South Africa), or several de­cades (e.g., the Mayans in Guatemala); some take place within a few weeks (the genocide in Srebrenica during the Bosnian War

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is a good example). In many of t­ hese cases, t­ here is a long prehistory of antagonism and rivalry that explodes during a genocidal situation. The fratricidal mass killings of the World War II period between Muslims, Croats, and Serbs certainly influenced the eruption of vio­lence in Bosnia during the 1990s. Massacres of Armenians by Turks, Kurds, and muhacirs (Muslim refugees from the Balkans) in the 1890s and at the beginning of the twentieth ­century set the stage for the genocide of 1915–16. Hitler’s passing of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, the persecution of the Jews in the late 1930s, and Reichskristallnacht (the Night of the Broken Glass), November 18–19, 1938, unquestionably served as impor­tant preliminaries in the development of the Holocaust, if not constituting genocide itself.

The Prob­lem of Cumulative Radicalization Almost all genocides are perpetrated at the behest of po­liti­cal leaderships and are not spontaneous eruptions of mass killing. Therefore, it is essential to focus on the motives, intentions, and actions of po­liti­cal leaders in order to understand the character of genocide. In the case of the Armenian Genocide, this means the Young Turk leadership, especially the CUP (Committee on Union and Pro­g ress) triumvirate of Minister of Interior Talaat Pasha, Minister of War Enver Pasha, and Minister of the Navy Djemal Pasha. The primary instrument they used to attack and destroy the Armenians was the Secret Organ­ization (Teşkilat-­ı Mahsusa), which was headed by the CUP leader Dr. Bahaeddin Şakir and manned by a motley assemblage of party faithful, recently released criminals from Ottoman prisons, and muhacir adventurers, who w ­ ere Muslim expellees predominantly from the Balkans and Caucasus. How did the Young Turks evolve from a modernizing, in some cases even liberal, progressive, and pro-­Armenian group of Turkish army officers and military doctors, into a fiercely nationalist group ready to murder hundreds of thousands of Armenians? ­There are no easy answers to this question. In his work on the Holocaust, Hans Mommsen provides us with the useful concept of “cumulative radicalization,” also applied by Donald Bloxham in his exploration of the dynamics between perpetrators and victims in genocidal situations as they become increasingly antagonistic over time.13 Quite simply, Turkish-­Armenian relations became worse and worse, as Young Turk resentments ­were fueled by the partly successful Armenian appeals to outside powers to intervene with the Porte on their behalf, first at the Congress of Berlin (1878) and fi­nally on the eve of World War I, with the Armenian Reform Package. Armenians’ attempts to defend themselves with arms, especially the

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Armenian seizure of the Ottoman bank in Istanbul in August 1896 and the uprising in Van in April 1915, enraged the Young Turk leadership and aroused Turkish nationalist feelings. As many scholars point out, the Armenians also ended up the victims of the deep sense of national humiliation and bitterness endured by the Young Turks at the defeat of the imperial army by small Christian nations and the loss of the Ottoman Empire’s Balkan possessions during the Balkan Wars of 1912–13.14 Mommsen’s theory of “cumulative radicalization” was originally developed to explain the ways that the German bureaucracy and its multiple centers of power contributed to the Holocaust by initiating the persecution and killing of Jews without direct ­orders from Hitler. ­Those who perpetrated the mass murder w ­ ere not restrained by the Nazi system, thus encouraging ­others to do the same. The Armenian Genocide demonstrated many signs of a similar spontaneous radicalization, as have other genocides, from the elimination of the California Indians to the killing in the communes of Maoist China during the G ­ reat Leap Forward.15 In all t­ hese cases and ­others, the initiatives of local leaders ­were frequently crucial to the level and intensity of the killing. The pro­cesses of cumulative radicalization in genocide include what can only be called a kind of bloodlust, meaning the welling up of murderous be­ hav­ior on the part of the perpetrators, unleashed, in virtually all cases, by po­ liti­cal leaderships, yet prompting normal men and ­women to pursue their victims beyond what has been ordered or is necessary. Sometimes this operates in a more or less or­ga­nized fashion, what is called in the Nazi historiography “working ­toward the Führer,” meaning that German officials anticipated Hitler’s desires that the Jews should be killed and enthusiastically exceeded their duties in ­doing so.16 This happened, somewhat differently in the Armenian case, where some local leaders interpreted the condemnation and deportation of Armenians as a license to murder them all, while ­others ­were much more restrained. In Diyarbakır, Der Zor, and elsewhere around the empire, sympathetic officials w ­ ere able to offer the Armenians some mea­sure of sanctuary, but the Young Turk leadership quickly replaced them with militant killers. In his history of the Armenian Genocide, Suny suggests that emotionally generated anger, hatred, and resentment on the part of the Young Turk leaders—­what he signifies as their “affective disposition”—­were the sources of their growing bloodlust.17 Yet we also can find cold and brutal calculation on their part. Talaat’s famous statement to Ambassador Henry Morgenthau about murdering the Armenians reflected just that: “The hatred between the Turks and the Armenians is now so intense that we have got to finish with them. If we ­don’t, they ­will plan their revenge.” And elsewhere: “No Armenian . . . ​ can be our friend a­ fter what we have done to them.”18

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The radicalization of Young Turk aims in 1915 and 1916—­from forced deportation to mass killing—­also happened without central direction in a more or less spontaneous fashion, where the CUP’s injunctions against the Armenians led some particularly murderous bands of Turks, Kurds, and ­others, sometimes as part of the Special Organ­ization units, sometimes not, to take it upon themselves to brutalize, rape, and kill Armenians who had been deported or interned. ­Here one is reminded of the Hutu Power groups that led rampages of killing with machetes in hand, prompted by increasingly insistent radio broadcasts about alleged Tutsi perfidy. In Indonesia in 1965, the government and army retaliated against a supposedly communist-­led coup attempt, unleashing a frenzy of killing of alleged communists on the part of local groups that feared the communists’ ultimate aims but had no evidence of supposed traitorous be­hav­ior.19 The settling of local scores having ­little to do with larger issues of genocide are sometimes played out in ­these paroxysms of killing, ­whether in Indonesia, Rwanda, or the Ottoman Empire.20 Part of the dynamics of cumulative radicalization is that mass killing spreads from one targeted group to o ­ thers. The pro­cesses involved in the Armenian Genocide w ­ ere clearly related to the genocide of Assyrians and Pontic Greeks that accompanied the Armenian killing. The Nazi elimination of the Jews was intertwined with genocidal campaigns against Sinti and Roma, Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, and even the German handicapped, though the latter two campaigns ­were cut short by intervening ­factors of economic and po­liti­ cal necessity. Mass killing becomes normalized and spreads remarkably easily; one sees this as well in the communist genocides in the Soviet Union during the 1930s, in Mao’s ­Great Leap Forward in 1958–59, and in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, 1975–79. In both the Cambodian and Soviet cases, the accusations and accompanying killing spread from one ethnic (or national) group to another and from one alleged group of class enemies to another.21

The Meaning of War War has every­thing to do with genocide. This was true in ancient times, with the Athenians’ elaborate rationale for the destruction of Melos and the Melians, described by Thucydides in The History of the Peloponnesian War, and the Romans’ elimination of Carthage and the slaughter of the Cartha­g inians during the Third Punic War (149–146 BCE). This was also the case in 1904–8 in German Southwest Africa (Namibia), where German army forces ­under the command of General Lothar von Trotha engaged in a counterinsurgency campaign against the Herero and Nama p­ eoples that seamlessly morphed into

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genocide; more recently in Cambodia, where the United States bombing associated with the Vietnam War contributed greatly to the radicalization of the Khmer Rouge; in Guatemala, where government militias engaged in a civil war against alleged communist insurgents, using the opportunity to destroy Mayan highlanders; and in Yugo­slavia, where the Serb war against Bosnian Muslims for control of alleged Serbian territory served as a cover for genocide in Srebrenica.22 The Holocaust was unleashed as part of World War II in the east. Although some killing of the Jews began immediately ­after the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, it was r­ eally only ­after the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the removal of any remaining restraints on Hitler with the declaration of war on the United States in December 1941, that the “final solution” of the Jewish Question became the unambiguous objective of Nazi policy. The influence of the outbreak of World War I on the Armenian Genocide is also apparent. One could posit a completely dif­fer­ent history of the Armenians if, for example, the Ottoman Empire had remained neutral in the war, or had fought on the side of the Entente instead of the Central Powers. But the Ottoman Empire did indeed become a belligerent in the war against the Rus­sians, the British, and the French in November 1914, and the war contributed to genocide in a number of ways. First of all, as mentioned earlier, the disastrous defeat of Turkish forces at Sarıkamış in December 1914–­January 1915, and the Allied offensive at Gallipoli in April 1915 threatened the Ottomans with catastrophe, which in turn radicalized their views of both the threat and real­ ity of alleged Armenian treachery. That the Armenians ­were located in the border regions between the ­enemy Rus­sian Empire and the homeland meant that the insecurity of t­ hese regions would rouse suspicions on the part of the Ottoman government. Moreover, the war gave the Young Turk leaders the opportunity to centralize the po­liti­cal system of the country, shutting down the parliament and placing information and communications ­under the strict control of the government.23 Word got out about the mass murder of the Armenians, but not ­because the Ottoman government did not try to keep the news from the outside world. The Nazis also tried to hide the existence of the death camps and tried to destroy the evidence of the mass murder of the Jews and o ­ thers by incinerating their bodies in ovens built at the camps. They did this as well at sites of mass shooting, like Babi Yar on the outskirts of Kyiv, where they tried to cover up the mass murder of nearly 100,000 p­ eople, mostly Jews, by burning their bodies in huge pyres doused with incendiaries.24 War habituates its participants to killing and to obeying ­orders. Regular Ottoman army soldiers ­were involved in the deportations and killing of

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Armenians, just as Wehrmacht soldiers, as has been demonstrated in the lit­ er­at­ure, participated in the mass killing of Jews.25 But more often than not, paramilitary groups, like the SS in Germany, the Special Organ­ization in the Ottoman Empire, the NKVD troops in the Soviet Union, or the vari­ous nationalist militias in Yugo­slavia, frequently ended up d­ oing the greatest damage to h ­ uman beings in genocidal situations. It is impor­tant to reiterate that genocide is supervised by the po­liti­cal leadership of the vari­ous states involved and that the paramilitaries, though often appearing to act as autonomous agents, usually are or could be controlled by their respective state apparatuses. From ancient times to the pres­ent, we can see that war also provides a strategic argument for the mass elimination of ­peoples. The Mongols routinely engaged in genocidal campaigns within the context of their war plans carried out across the Eurasian land space. Whole ­peoples w ­ ere eliminated if their leaders resisted, and it was impor­tant for the Mongols that other potential enemies knew about it so that they would chose the path of subservience.26 The Young Turks accused the Armenians (and Assyrians) of collaboration with the Rus­sian e­ nemy at the onset of World War I. The government’s arguments for deporting them and the Greeks w ­ ere founded on the strategic vulnerability of their respective population centers, for the Armenians in eastern Anatolia, adjacent to the Rus­sian front, and for the Greeks, the Aegean coast, easily accessible for a potential British invasion. The Nazi argument about the role of the Jews in supporting the enemies of the Third Reich—­Bolshevism and world capitalism—­derived not from any geo­graph­i­cal concentration of Jews in a specific territory but rather from Nazi anti-­Semitic ideology. Nevertheless, the heavy concentration of Jews in the heart of what Hitler thought of as German Lebensraum was not incidental to their murderous treatment.27 The Nazis also took seriously the accusation that world Jewry conspired in their overthrow: thus Hitler’s vow in his infamous Reichstag speech of January 1939 that if the Jews started a new world war, they would pay with their obliteration.28 Hitler, Goebbels, and ­others frequently made reference to that vow during the course of the war.

“Othering” and Dehumanization The Armenian Genocide, like all genocides, teaches lessons about the potential dangers of “othering,” the social-­psychological pro­cess of identifying out-­ groups in society as dif­fer­ent and as inferior in vari­ous ways. The traditional Ottoman millet system, which viewed the Armenians as a religious community inherently inferior to the community of followers of Islam, nevertheless

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provided a structure of stability and security to the Armenians, as long as they adhered to the formal and informal rules of the system as a subordinate p­ eople. Attempts to modernize Ottoman politics and society in the nineteenth ­century ended the protection of the millet system, but, in the main, did not alter the popu­lar perception of the Armenians as dif­fer­ent and inferior. The fearsome massacres of Armenians in Zeytun, Sason, and elsewhere in the provinces in 1894–96 (100,000 to 300,000 Armenians ­were killed), and in Adana in 1909 (17,000 Armenians died), only intensified the sense that the Armenians stood aside from the mainstream of the Ottoman population. Armenian complaints about the massacres also increased Turkish resentment against alleged Armenian insolence, and promoted ste­reo­types of Armenians as ungrateful and disloyal malcontents, troublemakers, and traitors.29 During the period leading up to World War I, nationalists circulated pamphlets that characterized the Armenians as “parasitical worms” and “vipers,” which destroyed the healthy bodies of strong and innocent Turks.30 During the 1915–16 genocide, the persecution and brutalization of Armenians in the pro­cess of forced deportation and death marches accelerated their dehumanization in the eyes of their persecutors. The hungrier and more disease-­ridden the deported masses of Armenians became, the more their warders treated them like animals or worse, beating, taunting, and sometimes murdering them at ­will. One is reminded of Joseph Goebbels’s visit to the Łódź ghetto in October 1939, where he expressed his disgust at the sight of the sub-­ human Jews, living in filth, hunger, and squalor, which ­were the very conditions the Nazis imposed on them. Goebbels wrote: “­These are no longer ­people, they are animals. This is therefore not a humanitarian but a surgical task. One must make incisions, extremely radical ones.”31 The dehumanization of the “other”—­whether in Rwanda, where the Hutu used the word inyenzi, cockroaches, to talk about their Tutsi victims, or in Bosnia, where the Serb perpetrators referred to the Muslims as “Turks,” indicating their supposed racial and cultural inferiority, or Darfur, where the mostly Arabic Janjaweed raiders routinely demeaned their agriculturalist victims as black African slaves—­seems built into genocide. Scabrous animal and insect images pervade the history of victimization in genocide. One can go as far back as the Spanish conquest of the Amer­ic­ as to see the beginnings of a racialist view of the inferiority of the “other.”32 Irene Silverblatt writes: “From the sixteenth c­ entury through the mid-­seventeenth ­century, Spain was in the vanguard of the modern world, installing cutting-­edge bureaucracies and race-­ thinking designs—­along with civilizing missions—in its widely dispersed colonies.”33 The noted opponent of the brutal mistreatment of the Indians, Bartolomé de Las Casas, won the disputation in Spain with his opponent, Juan

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Ginés de Sepúlveda, who claimed that the Indians w ­ ere inherently inferior creatures, more like animals, and therefore incapable of being ­human beings, even if converted.34 But the practice in the Amer­i­cas throughout most of the sixteenth c­ entury continued to reflect Sepúlveda’s racist views, as did virtually all the cases of settler genocide against indigenous p­ eoples from that time forward. The earlier massacres by Crusaders of the so-­called Saracen inhabitants of the Near East at the end of the eleventh ­century, culminating in the sanguinary taking of Jerusalem in 1099, and the related papal campaigns of mass murder against the Cathars (sometimes called Albigensians) in southern France at the end of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth centuries ­were founded primarily on the dehumanization of religious groups, not on “racialist” considerations.

Economic Motivations An understanding of the Armenian Genocide, and many ­others, involves strong, sometimes overwhelming economic motives on the part of perpetrators. Armenian property and wealth, much overestimated in any case by the Turkish authorities, was nevertheless confiscated by the government and used ostensibly for the purposes of prosecuting the war. In the localities, Armenian properties ­were also sequestered supposedly for government purposes, the importance of which, writes Kévorkian, “can hardly be exaggerated.”35 However, local authorities and sometimes common citizens also seized what they could from the Armenians, or bought property, furniture, and animals at exploitative rates, since the Armenians w ­ ere desperate to take what­ever of their wealth they could with them. Much like the Jews in Nazi Germany, the Armenians ­were squeezed, extorted, and stolen from by their oppressors at e­ very stage of their eventual elimination. In his work on Nazi motivations and the Holocaust, Adam Tooze demonstrated the importance of economic motivations in the murder of the Jews, which w ­ ere as wide-­ranging as bud­get considerations of the Wehrmacht’s military-­economic staff and planning priorities of the Reich Ministry of Food all the way to ­simple avarice of average Germans in the Reich and in the occupied territories.36 A number of historians have indicated that the Holocaust could not have been carried out without the active collaboration of tens of thousands of East Eu­ro­pe­ans, many of whom ­were motivated by the hope of economic gain. The Jews’ neighbors seized their domiciles, businesses, and property as they ­were forced into ghettoes, sent off to concentration camps, or shot in nearby forests and fields. “The acquisitive and the ruthless,” writes Timothy Snyder, “came to the fore.”37 Just

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as many East Eu­ro­pe­ans participated in the Holocaust in one fashion or another for economic gain, Kurds and muhacirs of a variety of national origins used and accelerated the Armenian Genocide through their lust for property and land. Tzvetan Todorov writes about the Spanish in the Amer­i­cas in the first half of the sixteenth c­ entury, “If the word genocide has ever been applied accurately to a case, this is it.” He estimates that the Spanish w ­ ere responsible for the death of 70 million indigenous p­ eople (out of 80 million) in this period.38 We know that the majority of the Indians w ­ ere killed by the diseases (“microbe shock”) originally introduced to the Amer­i­cas by the Spanish invaders. But it is also true that the Indians w ­ ere made more vulnerable to disease by the terrible conditions of ­labor that they ­were forced to endure in the mines and fields of the Spanish. Separated from their families and their traditional way of life, the Indians literally withered away u ­ nder the conditions of forced ­labor imposed by the Spanish, not to mention the brutality and killing of the conquest itself. Why did the Spanish engage in such mass brutality and genocide? Most con­temporary observers noted the reason was fortune hunting. One wrote about Peru: “­Every day they did nothing ­else but think about the gold and silver and riches of the Indies of Peru. They w ­ ere like a man in desperation, crazy, mad, out of their minds with greed for gold and silver.”39 As in the case of the Indians in the Amer­i­cas, it is hard to know how many Armenians ­were killed at the hands of Turks, Kurds, and ­others, and how many died of hunger, disease, and exposure prompted by fearsome marches across the desert to Der Zor or Ras al-­Ayn. T ­ here are similar prob­lems in understanding how many victims of Stalin’s genocides and of Mao’s ­Great Leap Forward resulted from the direct application of vio­lence against the victims, or from hunger, exposure, and disease. Economic motivations, like ­those in the Spanish conquests, ­were clearly at the heart of settler genocides, w ­ hether in the case of the elimination of the Tasmanian Aborigines in the 1820s and 1830s or of discrete North American Indian tribes over the course of the nineteenth c­ entury. A similar history has been written about the elimination of the Cape San ­people (“Bushmen”) of South Africa, where, from the ­middle of the seventeenth ­century, when the Dutch-­sponsored Trekboer settlers of the South African frontier began to kill the San natives in a confrontation over land, to the late nineteenth ­century, when the British more or less finished the job with their deadly missionary settlements.40 ­There was an impor­tant high point of genocidal activity, what one historian calls the “genocidal moment,” over the last three de­cades of the eigh­teenth ­century, when large Trekboer killing commandos systematically eliminated a larger percentage of the San population.41

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In all t­ hese cases of settler genocide, land was at the heart of the intent to kill and eliminate indigenous ­peoples. The California gold rush in 1848, the coming of California statehood in 1850, and the attendant rapid growth of San Francisco and environs w ­ ere deadly for the Yuki tribe in Round Valley in Mendocino County, as ranchers and herdsmen seized Indian lands in order to meet the nearby market for food. Token re­sis­tance from the Yuki ended in their massacre and confinement to a reservation, where they easily fell prey to disease, not to mention the ongoing raids of the white posses. The Tasmanian Aborigines met a similar fate, when in 1822 the British tariff act greatly reduced the costs of importing Australian wool. By midcentury, sheep-­farming districts in Australia produced half of Britain’s demand for raw wool.42 Tasmania’s extensive grasslands proved to be an enormous boon for settler sheepherders. Once again, token re­sis­tance on the part of indigenous hunter-­gatherer ­peoples only enraged the white population, who insisted on their rights to the land, ostensibly unused by the natives and bereft of industry and civilization. The elimination of the Tasmanian Aborigines was the result. ­Those who did not perish at the hands of armed posses ­were finished off in their confinement ­under the supposed care of missionaries on Flinders Island, where they died of disease and malnutrition.

Gender: Rape and Forced Marriage In the earliest cases of genocide, t­ hose averred to in the Old Testament, in Thucydides’s “Melian Dialogue,” and in the Roman destruction of Carthage, the perpetrators frequently spared ­women and ­children, so that they would be taken into the home economies of the victors as concubines and servants, the young boys sometimes raised as warriors in the dominant society. This practice was famously continued by the Mongols, who developed elaborate rituals for dividing up the ­women and girls of the eliminated foes.43 Rape was also a normal part of Mongol warfare, ­whether in Khwarezmia (Persia) in the south or in Hungary in the west. W ­ omen w ­ ere also sometimes eliminated with the men and c­ hildren, as part of the Mongol repertoire of vio­lence. Rape is equally common to many modern genocidal attacks: on the Bosniaks in the early 1990s, the Tutsi in Rwanda, and the Fur, Zaghawa, and Masalit p­ eoples of Darfur. In Eastern Congo—­especially in Northern and Southern Kivu bordering Rwanda—­rape accompanied genocidal attacks into the early twenty-­ first ­century with startling frequency. The prevalence of rape of Tutsi w ­ omen by Hutu attackers in Rwanda led to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda’s judgment (in Prosecutor v. Akayesu) that rape should be considered

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integral to genocide, rather than as a crime against humanity, which was the original innovation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugo­slavia.44 In Bosnia and in Rwanda, “rape ­houses” ­were set up where Muslim and Tutsi ­women and girls w ­ ere forced to endure all kinds of perverse humiliations, in addition to molestation, rape, and sometimes murder. The SS set up bordellos using Jewish w ­ omen and girls in towns and cities for the purposes of “servicing” army soldiers and close to concentration camps for local guards and police helpers. Though the rape of Jewish ­women by German Wehrmacht soldiers and officers was less common than in other cases of genocide ­because of the prohibition on having sex with Jewish w ­ omen (known as Rassenschande, or racial defilement), it nevertheless occurred with remarkable frequency, along with the humiliation of Jewish ­women and rape-­murder.45 It is fair to say that from the beginning of written history, genocide has frequently been as much about the humiliation, brutalization, and exploitation of the victims’ w ­ omen and girls, as about the elimination of targeted populations. ­There is an impor­tant story to be told about the tens of thousands of ­women and ­children forcibly seized and converted by Kurdish, Turkish, and Arabic assailants during the Armenian Genocide of 1915–16. In order to save their lives, many Armenian w ­ omen and c­ hildren w ­ ere forced to change their names, convert to Islam, and accommodate to their new circumstances. In early 1917, Namik Bey completed a tour of Sivas, noting “­There was not a single Turkish ­house in the vilayet [province] of Sivas that was not holding young girls who had been wrested from their parents as well as property belonging to the Armenians.”46 When Armenian soldiers returned to Cilicia with the French occupation in November 1919, as part of the Sykes–­Picot secret agreement on Allied zones of influence in Anatolia, they saw to the restoration of Armenian properties and businesses. According to most reports, the Armenians treated the Turks none too g­ ently, exacting revenge when they could.47 Their attempts to “recover” the converted Armenian ­women and ­children frequently failed (how frequently it is hard to know), since many had adjusted to their new circumstances and did not want to resume their previous identities. The fascinating recent history of the revelations by Turks of their Armenian backgrounds has led to greater interest in the story of Armenians who w ­ ere spared, in one fashion or another, the fate of deportation and death that was endured by their families. The story of the survival of the Armenians reflects yet another commonality in genocide. ­Those perpetrators who wish to eliminate a p­ eople, “as such,” to use the language of the genocide convention, seldom succeed. A striking number of Jews w ­ ere able to survive Nazi Germany in Germany

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itself, not to mention in hiding in Eastern Eu­rope. ­There are still Yuki Indians on the reservation in Round Valley. Many groups of Aborigines have survived intact in Australia proper, though the Tasmanian Aborigines have dis­appeared altogether, except for in mixed-­race families. The San p­ eople of South Africa survives ­today, but only b­ ecause of immigration from neighboring territories that w ­ ere not in the hands of the Trekboers or the British.

Empire and Elimination The Armenian Genocide of 1915–16 took place in the Ottoman Empire, which prompts the question of w ­ hether the distinct power hierarchies and complex relationships between ethnic groups, religious communities, and nationalities in empires serve as stimulants for genocide. Valerie Kivelson and Ronald Suny argue in Rus­sia’s Empires (2017) that empires “do not aspire to homogeneous rule over integrated populations, but rather to rule through deliberate construction and maintenance of difference and distinction.” In other words, the ideal type of empire would promote belonging and stability, which was also generally the case for the Ottoman Empire in the period of its growth and dynamism, from the fifteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. But Kivelson and Suny also note that “in extremis, empires have ordered eradication through genocide or deportation.”48 At the end of the nineteenth c­ entury, the decline of the millet system, the development of the Young Turk movement, and the rise of nationalist thinking among the Young Turks, but also among Armenian po­liti­cal leaders, severed many, though far from all, of the “invisible threads” that tied the Armenian community to the Ottoman Empire.49 The uneasy stability that resulted from “inequitable treatment, hierarchical relations, and unequal rule” shattered, as the Young Turk leadership perceived that the Armenians had broken the rules of submission and loyalty.50 The Rus­sian Empire underwent an analogous pro­cess in relation to its subject ­peoples. Certainly ­after the Revolution of 1905, the sense of belonging to a common entity rapidly dissipated; nationalist groups gained traction among growing numbers of their own populations; and the tsarist regime itself was increasingly influenced by Rus­sian nationalism and prone to engaging in programs of Russification. Still, the phenomenon of “national indifference,” described in the recent historiography of the Habsburg Empire, appropriately captures the mood of a substantial portion of the Rus­sian Empire’s subject ­peoples, even in disputed borderlands.51 But, as it did throughout Eu­rope, the vio­lence and hostility that was aroused between nations during World War I accelerated the concomitant pro­cesses of imperial breakdown and increased

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solidarity within the imperial ruling nation (or nations). In the case of the Ottoman Empire and the Young Turks, as we know, this pro­cess turned extremely violent when it came to the deportation and murder of Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians. In the Rus­sian Empire, the autocracy’s relations with Germans and Jews, among ­others, grew fraught with tension and suspicion, in some cases resulting in pogroms against and the forced deportation of Jews and Germans and outright fighting with the Poles. The Muslims of Kars and Batumi w ­ ere deported, as ­were Crimean Tatars.52 Matthew Payne shows in this volume that the Rus­sian imperial authorities and their allies in Semirech’e savagely attacked and murdered hundreds of thousands of local nomads who had risen in an anticolonial revolt. Kyrgyz historians call this genocide.53 At the same time that repressions against the subject ­peoples of the empire accelerated during the war, national solidarity and claims of a “sacred u ­ nion” 54 grew among the dominant Rus­sian population. Overseas empires also have a history of vio­lence, genocide, and forced displacement. The Spanish Empire in the seventeenth ­century represents a prominent example of the application of vio­lence in an imperial context. This was also the case for settler genocides in the British, French, and German overseas empires in the centuries that followed, ­whether in the Antipodes, against aboriginal ­peoples, in the Amer­i­cas, against native Indians, or in Africa and Southeast Asia, against indigenous tribes and kingdoms. Colonial vio­lence and genocide emanated from virtually ­every overseas imperial power, including the United States, though at the same time, as demonstrated by the lit­er­a­ture on empires, native elites ­were frequently co-­opted into imperial systems, educated, and given impor­tant leadership roles in the development of the colonies. The Mongols did the same, absorbing local rulers and nobilities, as well as artisans and military experts into their expanding Eurasian empire. Although the Romans destroyed Carthage and the population of Carthage—as Fernand Braudel wrote, the Mediterranean was not big enough for both Rome and Carthage—­they also absorbed the talent and innovations of their subjects as a way to bolster the economy, communications, and po­liti­cal attributes of the Imperium romanum.55 The Armenian Genocide serves as a con­ve­nient prototype for genocide over the millennia. It contains aspects, several of which have been discussed in this essay, that appear in virtually all other genocides that have occurred in ­human history: the balance between long-­term and contingent ­causes, the prob­lem of “cumulative radicalization,” the importance of war, the prevalence of “othering” and dehumanization, the significance of economic motivations, the targeted victimization of w ­ omen, and the par­tic­u­lar character of empires. The

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very complexity of the Armenian Genocide—­that it did not have to happen and that it contained within itself significant cumulative and long-­term dimensions as well as highly contingent ones—­reflects the overall history of genocide, where causation is unusually difficult to sort out. Of course, brutality is built into genocide; the objective of murdering all or part of a group of ­human beings is inherently violent. But one is also struck in the Armenian Genocide and o ­ thers by the gratuitous vio­lence inflicted on the victims, especially on w ­ omen and ­children. In the Armenian Genocide, just as in all genocides, the level of torture, physical abuse, fearsome beatings, and maiming suggests that the victims are being forced to pay for their crime of allegedly being dif­fer­ent. The lessons of genocide—­the Armenian Genocide or any other—­are terrifying; ­under certain circumstances, ­human beings, all ­human beings, are capable of horrible acts against their fellows.

Ch a p ter  4

“Do You Want Me to Exterminate All of Them or Just the Ones Who Oppose Us?” The 1916 Revolt in Semirech’e Matthew J. Payne

The Colonial Administration and the Rus­sian state have responded to disorders with planned and systematic terror, intolerable not only for a civilized Eu­ro­pean state but even an oriental despotism. It w ­ ill be very difficult for us to talk about Turkish savagery in Armenia, about German savagery in Belgium, when the world has never seen the likes of what has occurred in the mountains of Semirech’e.

Alexander Kerensky, ­future leader of revolutionary Rus­sia, thundered out this denunciation of tsarist colonialism at a closed session of the Duma in the wake of the rebellion against the June 1916 decree subjecting the Muslims of Turkestan and the Steppe Territory to forced ­labor at the front. For Kerensky to compare the tsarist colonial administration with the notorious war­time brutality of Rus­sia’s enemies amounted to an unpre­ ce­dented attack on the empire’s moral standing. But Kerensky was a ­lawyer, and a good one; he focused on the appalling impunity with which Rus­sia’s colonial officials stripped their Muslim subjects of rights, unilaterally changed conscription law, imposed draconian martial law on a civilian population, expropriated property, summarily executed suspects, and drove natives from their lands without even the faintest pretense of legality. Turkestan’s and the Steppe’s natives, ­after all, w ­ ere juridical subjects of a Eu­ro­pean Empire, not as he would stress, some autocratic despotism like Rus­sia’s own protectorates of Bukhara and Khiva. In an hours-­long speech, he methodically built a case against tsarist colonial abuse worthy of a g­ reat litigator. The accusation must have seemed plausible enough to other Duma delegates, only one of whom r­ ose to defend, very provisionally, the government’s actions. Most speakers agreed with Kerensky that the rebellion and its suppression was an atavism of barbarism unfit for a modern Eu­ro­pean state.1

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That consensus was wrong. Events in Turkestan and on the steppe ­were not a throwback to the conquest of Central Asia half a c­ entury earlier but driven by dynamics of imperial modernization and the exigencies of total war. While some aspects of the pacification in 1916 echoed that conquest, it played out within the matrix of a new settler colonialism that dispossessed and marginalized native Turkestanis in new ways. At the heart of the conflict in 1916 was a question of belonging: Did the lands and bodies of native Turkestanis belong to the imperial government to dispose of as it saw fit? Did natives belong to the civic community of imperial subjects or w ­ ere they an alien and mutinous presence in the empire’s borderlands to be marginalized and excised? The imperial government confronted the 1916 rebellion in a manner that implied its Turkestani subjects’ lands, goods, and very bodies belonged to it. At the same time, however, the tsar’s viceroy in Semirech’e allowed Rus­sian frontier society to reject, violently, coexisting with colonialized natives. The suppression of the 1916 revolt was not just the last of the Rus­sian Empire’s colonial wars of conquest; it was the first volley in the civil wars that would rip that empire apart.2 In fact, h ­ ere in Turkestan the authority of the imperial government collapsed well in advance of tsarism’s crisis in February of 1917. Triggered by the tsarist government’s ill-­advised decision to conscript previously exempt Central Asian natives, the scope of the rebellion was massive. As Joern Happel points out, between 100,000 and 200,000 nomads died fighting a modern army armed only with pikes and sabers, most as refugees fleeing the tsar’s punitive detachments. Perhaps as many as a quarter million refugees reached China only to suffer from hunger, deprivation, disease, and predation.3 Among Rus­sians, 2,325 ­were killed and another 1,384 ­were reported missing—­the vast majority of t­hese being civilians (only 99 soldiers and 4 officers died in suppressing the revolt, another 138 soldiers ­were missing in action). To put this number in perspective, only 2,376 Rus­sians had died during the conquest of Turkestan from 1860 to 1881. The rebels completely wiped out 61 Rus­sian settlements and nearly destroyed another 32; they also tore up train tracks, cut telegraph wires, burned bridges, trampled crops, and drove off c­ attle in vast quantities. The natives, in turn, w ­ ere machine-­gunned, despoiled of their herds, and driven from their lands.4 But the fury of the rebels and the vengeance of the government did not play out equally across Turkestan. Kerensky’s focus on the “mountains of Semirech’e” is particularly appropriate for his indictment—­this northeastern province of Turkestan was the epicenter of vio­lence. Although the rebellion began in the oasis towns of Turkestan among its “Sarts” (the settled Uzbek and Tajik peasants) as labor draft riots, and was most long-­lived in the dogged



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guerrilla conflict of the northern central Kazakh steppes, it reached its crescendo in Semirech’e.5 ­Here “Kirgiz” nomads launched a merciless guerrilla war on Rus­sian power and its wards, recent peasant colonists.6 The vast mass of the rebellion’s victims, both Rus­sian and native, was concentrated in just this one province. As Edward Sokol points out, 94  ­percent of the Rus­sians killed in the rebellion ­were killed ­here.7 The rebels murdered Rus­sian colonists working in the fields, stole their ­cattle, burned their settlements, raped and kidnapped ­women, and also took old p­ eople and c­ hildren as hostages. Only the Rus­sians’ panicked flight to strongpoints such as Przheval’sk and Pishpek saved any Rus­sian civilians from this vio­lence.8 As the smoke of burning colonists’ farms r­ ose over the valleys of Semirech’e, nearly half of the Rus­sian colony’s settlements had been devastated. The revenge against the rebels in Semirech’e directed by the newly appointed governor-­general of Turkestan, A.  I. Kuropatkin (the former minister of war and an old Turkestan hand), would prove even more devastating as he targeted the Kirgiz for collective punishment. As Marco Buttino remarks, “Deprived of succor and driven from their territory, the Kirgiz tribes w ­ ere fated to be converted into a half-­starved, ­people strewn to the winds.”9 Buttino’s observation is apposite as nearly a third of Turkestan’s nomads would dis­appear between 1917 and 1920, victims of Rus­sian settlers who took advantage of the revolutionary vio­lence and the Civil War to exact vengeance for the 1916 rebellion.10 Kerensky’s critique put the onus for this vio­lence squarely on tsarist colonial rule, a critique fully mirrored in accounts of con­temporary witnesses. Early Soviet scholarship concurred and viewed ­these events as axiomatic of tsarist colonial oppression. Nor did it spare the colonists for their “great-­power chauvinism”—as much a charge of naked racism as was available in the Bolshevik lexicon at the time. This line of interpretation, however, changed ­after World War II. Class-­war themes ­were highlighted over tsarist colonial oppression—­which was seen as “progressive” since it predestined the region’s natives to be Soviet citizens. Antisettler attacks w ­ ere recoded from a heroic ­people’s war against “kulak” oppressors to backward, reactionary movements that marred the other­wise progressive, anticolonial thrust of the 1916 rebellion. This was a neat trick—­the evident fact of interethnic slaughter and communal vio­lence was blamed on a few class enemies, not the ­actual communities.11 Rather surprisingly, as Alexander Morrison has pointed out, this tendentious interpretation has dominated the post-­Soviet Rus­sian historiography as well—­when the rebellion is explained at all. Many accounts pass over the revolt’s cost in silence, lowball the number of casualties, or attempt to put the onus of the carnage on the refugees for fleeing the imperial armies.12 For the postcolonial national historiographies of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan

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the rebellion is a war for national liberation, and its suppression is genocidal. The year 1916 represents nothing less than, in the words of one Kazakh historian, “the apogee of the strug­gle for the liberation of the Kazakh ­people.”13 For Kyrgyz scholars crafting their own postcolonial narrative, the suppression of the 1916 rebellion is called the “Urkun,” or “expulsion,” and has obtained the iconic status of the Holodomor for the Ukrainians or the Armenian Genocide as an instance of national martyrdom.14 The equation of the vio­lence in Turkestan with Ukraine’s tragedy, let alone Armenia’s, seems like special pleading, but as Norman M. Naimark reminds us in chapter 3 of this volume, genocidal vio­lence comes in a variety of forms and the Kyrgyz Urkun certainly fits some of t­ hese variations. The equation is especially justified when discussion turns to Semirech’e. While not explic­itly aiming for ethnic extermination, Rus­sian forces did engage in unpre­ce­dented mass killing and ethnic cleansing in an imperial borderland. From one perspective, ­these actions might be considered a particularly violent but other­wise typical response of tsarism to native re­sis­tance.15 From another, it could be seen as a planned effort to once-­and-­for-­all solve the “settlement question” through dispossession and mass murder.16 Contemporaries certainly noted the unsettling similarities between what occurred in Semirech’e and the Armenian Genocide. Kerensky, as noted, made the comparison explic­itly. So did Arnold Toynbee, who, when commissioned by the British government to write a history of the Armenian Genocide, compared its scope to the massacres in Central Asia and decried the indifference of the “­g reat public in the West” to the latter, ­because it was committed by an allied government against an “Asiatic” ­people.17 Examining the validity of the comparison is greatly aided by turning to a scholar well-­versed in revolution, war, and vio­lence in both the Ottoman and Rus­sian Empires, Ronald Grigor Suny. Suny cautions that the history of vio­lence in imperial borderlands, especially in war­time, is messy, and understanding only comes with slogging through that mess.18 Specifically, he rejects ahistorical generalizations based on teleological categories such as “the strug­gle for national liberation” and emphasizes the destabilizing effects of “imperial modernization” on borderlands’ po­liti­cal stability. But for Suny it is war, particularly the total war of the G ­ reat War, which makes the unthinkable actionable. Mark Levene, who discusses Semirech’e in his study of modern genocide—­and terms it “genocide, or something not far removed from it”—­agrees with Suny that the structural ­factors of imperial subordination and dispossession w ­ ere not enough to spark mass murder. For that, the ­Great War would prove decisive.19 Suny’s first point, of contextualizing borderland populations as imperial subjects, rather than nations, is well taken. To tsarist ministers, the most impor­



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tant fact about the natives of Turkestan (and the adjacent Steppe Region) was that they w ­ ere inorodtsy (“internal aliens”) and thereby inhabited a zone of ­legal exclusion from the rights and responsibilities of other imperial subjects. The category of inorodtsy, originally applied to vari­ous “Eastern” nonfarming hunting and herding p­ eoples in 1822, was expanded to its Jews in 1835 (similarly seen as “nonfarming”) and was explic­itly tied to an idea of “radical civilizational difference from the Rus­sians themselves.”20 The inorodtsy, unlike other subjects, w ­ ere disenfranchised from po­liti­cal participation, denied full religious rights, and, generally, suffered social prejudice. Moreover, Central Asian inorodtsy, especially the Kirgiz, w ­ ere increasingly marginalized precisely in the years when other inorodtsy positions ­were improving in the wake of the 1905 Revolution. The Muslim inorodtsy of Turkestan and the Kazakh steppe, for instance, w ­ ere stripped of Duma repre­sen­ta­tion following the “Stolypin Coup” of June 1907, while the Kirgiz inorodtsy ­were increasingly denied meaningful property rights. John Slocum argues that a­ fter 1905 the term increasingly came to be associated ethnically as “alien” and “non-­Russian” rather than simply a juridical category, which degraded inorodtsy status not only legally but socially. As the term evolved from an estate (soslovie) to a juridical category it was often used in a pejorative sense and, as he points out, “the idea of immutable difference clung to the term.”21 If the Ottoman Empire was engaged in a pro­cess of “minoritization,” as Janet Klein argues, the Rus­ sian Empire, especially in its Central Asian colonies, was involved in a similar pro­cess, which might have been called “inorodetsization.”22 The June 1916 l­abor draft crystallized this civic degradation. ­After all, the one “advantage” of being a Central Asian inorodets—­and one prized in the midst of the war’s carnage—­was the exemption from military conscription.23 This “advantage,” however, actually represented another civic disability since the state viewed inorodtsy as too primitive and potentially disloyal to serve as soldiers.24 For the government, not conscripting inorodtsy was simply an act of expediency and when that calculation changed, as with the looming manpower shortage in 1916, so did the government’s actions.25 At least some inorodtsy intellectuals recognized the draft exemption denied inorodtsy full citizenship rights and actually lobbied for military conscription.26 The June 25 imperial decree ordering the conscription of all the empire’s undrafted inorodtsy (the vast majority in Turkestan and the Steppe province), however, did no such ­thing—­they w ­ ere mobilized only as forced laborers and received none of the rights and privileges that soldiers and their families enjoyed. Indeed, thousands upon thousands of t­ hese l­abor conscripts would die in appalling conditions as the state denied them even soldiers’ rations or clothing. The forced ­labor drafts clarified that the inorodtsy lacked any rights or “privileges”

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the government was bound to re­spect. As Morrison notes, rather dryly, “If ­there was such a ­thing as Rus­sian citizenship, they ­were clearly excluded from it.”27 Indeed, one Muslim Duma deputy bitterly complained in response to Kerensky’s speech that “the laws ­weren’t written for the inorodtsy.”28 If being an inorodets already marked one as a second-­class subject, to be a Kirgiz pushed one into a realm of economic and social precarity. T ­ here was an open debate among tsarist officials on w ­ hether or not Kirgiz inorodtsy could or should be assimilated into Rus­sian norms, but no disagreement on the social backwardness and the impracticality of governing them as regular subjects.29 In the case of the Kirgiz, their chief disability was a lack of property rights. ­Under the Steppe Statute of 1891, Kirgiz did not own “their” land, the state did; when it opted to use “its” land for other purposes, say, Slavic peasant colonization, the Kirgiz ­were powerless to resist.30 As Steven Sabol points out, the Kirgiz’s special disability ­here is comparable to the United States’ treatment of the Plains Indians as land confiscations w ­ ere used to encourage “backwards” tribesmen to sedentarize and assimilate to the dominant cultural values, ­either Rus­sian or American.31 Prior to 1916 about 1.3 million Rus­sian and Ukrainian peasants migrated to Kirgiz lands where they ­were granted 45 million desiatins of land (roughly 121 million acres).32 The government, largely supported by the Duma, took ­these lands with ­little concern for the Kirgiz. As Kuropatkin noted to the tsar, this absence of Kirgiz property rights in contrast to the region’s other inorodtsy was the main grievance incubating the rebellion: “The Kirgiz population,” he wrote “consisting of 2,615,00 souls, is relatively powerless in its utilization of the land.”33 ­These land expropriations speak to a broader issue that Suny identified as a dangerous stressor for ethnic vio­lence—­imperial modernization. The influx of settlers into Semirech’e was linked to a radical, reformist vision of the Rus­ sian Empire, a vision in which the nomads ­were seen as a hindrance. H ­ ere, ­after all, existed a large reserve of arable land available to alleviate peasant land hunger but Kirgiz, rather than Rus­sian nobles, ­were using it.34 Although Rus­sian colonial expansion had long come at the expense of Eurasia’s nomads, Stolypin’s “­Great Rus­sia” program represented a new and radically exclusionary imperial identity—­a Russification of the borderlands.35 Whereas “Russification” (obrusenie) is primarily associated with imposing Rus­sian culture in other borderlands, east of the Urals it connoted the importation of ­actual Rus­ sians.36 In the Steppe Territory and Turkestan, Stolypin pushed a sort of “manifest destiny” for Rus­sian colonization with the newly empowered Resettlement Agency (Pereselencheskoe upravlenie) as his principal instrument.37 This was not simply a vision for alleviating peasant land hunger, but also for modernizing what he considered “backward” nomads. For him, and his minister



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of agriculture, A. V. Krivoshein, expropriating the Kirgiz would stimulate their taking up farming and assimilating to Rus­sian values. In Krivoshein’s words, “Every­one wins from the ­g reat flow of Rus­sian settlers to the Steppe Territory: the settlers, the Kazakhs [kirgizy], the power of the Rus­sian state [russkaia gosudarstvennost’], and the steppe itself.”38 In practice, the Resettlement Agency was notoriously lawless and corrupt in the steppe and Kuropatkin identified its brutal methods as a principal cause of the rebellion.39 It unleashed a land rush that was unusually concentrated. The vast bulk of Turkestan’s colonists settled in Semirech’e; in 1916 the province accounted for 192 of the region’s 228 peasant colonies. In its Przheval’sk county alone, 53,576 ­house­holds ­were settled between 1907 and 1914, composing 41 settlements.40 From 1897 to 1916 the settler population tripled and reached 295,000 against 667,000 natives, mostly Kirgiz.41 Semirech’e was targeted by Resettlement Agency officials for po­liti­cal, agricultural, and what might be called so­cio­log­ic­ al reasons. In the first case, tsarist colonial authorities, fearing destabilization, w ­ ere reluctant to displace any Sarts from the densely populated lands to south. Agriculturally, unlike the irrigated oases lands, Semirech’e was quite amenable to dry-­farming techniques practiced by Rus­sian peasants. And so­cio­log­ic­ ally, Semirech’e was occupied by nomads. A widespread belief developed among metropolitan administrators, in contrast to local colonial authorities, that the province’s nomads had vast “excesses” of land due to their allegedly wasteful pastoral practices. However, any notion that “excess” lands ­were available for settlement was chimerical and the government’s understanding of the settlement zone was profoundly flawed. As transhumant pastoralists, the Kirgiz used t­ hese lands as meadows, wetlands and irrigated orchards, hayfields and permanent winter encampments.42 Colonization required expropriation on a g­ rand scale. By 1913, nearly twelve million acres had been taken from the natives—­which was more than half of all available agricultural land.43 Semirech’e, not unlike Algeria (which was undergoing “Eu­ro­pe­anization” in t­ hese years), became not simply a colony of the Rus­sian Empire, but a settler colony.44 And, as with Algeria and other Eu­ro­ pean settler colonies, this pro­cess was accompanied by dispossession, displacement, and ethnic vio­lence.45 The colonists on t­ hese pilfered lands proudly took owner­ship as they, unlike the Kirgiz inorodtsy, “belonged” to the tsar. As they told local administrators: “The land is the Tsar’s and we are the Tsar’s p­ eople.” Morrison argues that in Turkestan the more general imperial policy of identifying the “Rus­ sians” (meaning, in fact, Orthodox Slavic peasants) as the state-­bearing p­ eople with privileges and civic inclusion denied to the natives was explicit. And Rus­sian plebeian colonists, both urban and rural (like the “poor Whites” and

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Pied-­Noirs of other Eu­ro­pean settlement frontiers), asserted their sense of privilege, especially amid the deprivations of the ­Great War.46 Colonial officials hardly concurred. They saw the colonists as poor farmers, mutinous subjects, and a disruptive ele­ment. One Okhrana captain noted, “­After the agrarian disturbances in Eu­ro­pean Rus­sia the very worst ele­ment—­unruly, l­ittle disposed to hard work, weak in their own economic instincts—as a mass rushed to the peripheries, including Semirech’e, to receive f­ree land.”47 And indeed, the colonists w ­ ere a disputatious lot who constantly pushed to procure, by hook or by crook, more Kirgiz lands. For instance, most of the colonists had not even migrated legally; t­hese so-­called samovol’tsy (self-­willed) simply migrated to the province and demanded land from local authorities, who generally, if reluctantly, accommodated them.48 Lynching, beatings, murders, and near riots over the control of land was a constant feature of the last few prewar years. T ­ hese colonists hardly fit Krivoshein’s conception of kulturträger.49 No less a personage than Senator K. K. Pahlen, who conducted an exhaustive study of imperial governance in Turkestan in 1908, warned that the Resettlement Agency had condoned a dangerous contempt for Kirgiz rights that risked an explosion against imperial power. The senator was ignored.50 Not only ­were the Kirgiz pushed off their lands, but they ­were reduced to a newly minted helot class for the colonists. H ­ ere the situation in Semirech’e would mirror other settler colonies such as South Africa and Algeria, as the former possessors of the lands w ­ ere reduced to exploited farm laborers. Travelers to Semirech’e w ­ ere shocked to see Rus­sian peasants sitting around while Kirgiz farmhands built their h ­ ouses, farmed their fields, and tended their flocks: “The colonist already reckoned himself a baron and no longer a peasant.”51 As another Okhrana officer observed, “The new settlers look upon the Kirgiz as animals and treat them accordingly. During my travels through the territory I heard them called by no other term save ‘dogs.’ ”52 Even colonization boosters deplored the exclusion of the colonized Kirgiz as ­human. One pamphleteer noted of the colonists, “Near and far they plough up Kirgiz land, and in justification they say ‘the Kirgiz are dogs; the land is not theirs but the state’s; we are state peasants.”53 ­Here the colonists not only made a claim to the land but excluded the Kirgiz from the very category of humanity—­a far more radical position than the government’s evolutionary view of the nomads as simply “backward.” Governor-­General Kuropatkin, the man who would ­later both arm ­these colonists and empower them as virtual génocidaires, understood the horrifying logic of Rus­sia’s imperial modernization proj­ect in Semirech’e. He confessed, if only to his diary that “to be precise, over the past forty years, we have had an unspoken agreement to



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erase from the face of the earth affable, good-­natured, naive, but still savage tribes (and that is our responsibility as well).”54 But the colonial condition alone was not enough to trigger mass murder in the summer of 1916; war did that.55 Like the mass deportations of Jews and Germans in Rus­sia’s western borderlands, the suppression of the revolt allowed imperial authorities to “nationalize” a strategic borderland.56 As Kerensky correctly argued, it was the tsarist government itself that radicalized the borderlands with its oppressive conscription order. The ­labor mobilization as originally ordered (all males between nineteen and forty-­three) was so massive (250,000 for the Steppe Territory and 240,000 from Turkestan), it would have required 18 ­percent of adult male workers to be shipped off to the front—­a disastrous level for a pastoral economy.57 While the final levy was smaller than this (Kuropatkin recognized that such a number would cripple Turkestan’s economy), conscripts ­were pulled disproportionately from pastoral populations to preserve the cotton harvest.58 Semirech’e alone was to provide 60,000 recruits—­after having provided hundreds of thousands of ­horses and ­cattle and im­mense quantities of cash in taxes and “donations.” As one rebel told an assembly of his fellow clansmen, “the Rus­sians took from the Kirgiz our land and now take away our c­ hildren, who ­will die in the war and then we ­will be left with no land and no ­children.”59 Propelled by ­these outrages, the radicalized Kirgiz of Semirech’e unleashed their murderous fury on the colonists. Daniel Brower explains t­ hese tactics as a sort of atavism of ancient warfare: “An alien ­people had overrun their land and had to be expelled, by the means that Inner Asian nomadic wars had long employed—­the destruction of settlements, the capture of their ­women, the massacre of the old and young. The outsiders would flee, and the Kyrgyz would once again rule the Tian-­Shan mountains.”60 ­These methods, however, ­were soon to be used a­ fter the revolution by partisans, Basmachis and punitive detachments of the Reds and the Whites across the vast imperial spaces of the former Rus­sian Empire. This war of terror was very modern indeed. Unfortunately for the Kirgiz of Semirech’e, however, they ­were far more ill-­equipped to launch a war of terror on civilians than was the empire. As Kuropatkin informed Minister of the Interior A. K. Protopopov before taking up his post, “Long experience in Turkestan has led me to the conclusion that the main princi­ple of the government in regard to the natives o ­ ught to be: clarity and steadfastness in our requirements, firmness coupled with justice, and paternal concern. It should be added that they fear and re­spect us. They can love us l­ater.”61 Kuropatkin’s punitive detachments not only engaged the rebels, but ­were ordered to seek out encampments, seize livestock, summarily

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execute suspects in field courts-­martial, and drive the Kirgiz into the mountains to starve them. The army’s contempt for Kirgiz lives is illustrated by a tele­g ram sent to headquarters with a query on the disposition of prisoners, “Do you want me to exterminate all of them or just the ones who oppose us?”62 The leaders of the punitive detachments ­were quite boastful of their tactics, and the local official newspaper, the Semirechenskaia gazeta, openly reported that “troops have been ordered not to give the ­enemy any mercy.”63 Despite ­later claims from the military that no civilians w ­ ere targeted, hostages murdered, or ­women and ­children starved, a war of annihilation was waged indiscriminately on the Kirgiz. Far worse than even the punitive detachments, however, was Kuropatkin’s unleashing of the peasant colonists. From the very beginning of the rebellion, the colonists had been armed and formed into local druzhinas, or militias, by local authorities. ­These formations ran wild and lynched Kirgiz, including peaceful encampments, with impunity.64 The colonist militia was connected to the very worst massacres in Semirech’e in the summer of 1916. In Belovodsk, for instance, a peasant mob hacked 517 peaceful Kirgiz to death with axes, pitchforks, and staves—­often ritually mutilating the bodies. Although the Okhrana authorities did not believe their cover story that the Kirgiz had all died while “trying to escape,” the colonists w ­ ere ­later acquitted of the murders on precisely ­those grounds by the local prosecutor’s office.65 Kuropatkin ­later visited Belovodsk and noted that “the brutal reprisals served a purpose, as it prevented Kirgiz planning to join the mutiny from ­doing so.”66 In other words, the colonial authorities licensed this vigilantism, tolerating ethnic terrorism in order to Russify a strategic borderland. By September ­g reat masses of Kirgiz, rebel or loyal, had been driven into the deserts and mountains in an epochal Central Asian “Trail of Tears,” the Urkun. What livestock they drove with them died off in the harsh mountain conditions. Soon ­after, the refugees also began to die of cold, hunger, and disease; a traveler who walked this trail in the summer of 1917 remarked that for three hundred versty (about two hundred miles) he followed the route easily by marking the bones of animals and the corpses on the side of trail.67 This vast refugee movement cleared the fertile valleys of natives, but also allowed for new and even more grandiose plans to be contemplated to solve the Kirgiz “prob­lem.” Col­o­nel Ivanov-­Rinov, the new military governor of Fergana noted that the pacification left most of the nomads impoverished and desperate. He considered that American-­style Indian reservations at least had the virtue of “irreversible cruel expediency, calculation [planomerno] and speed,” thus leaving the land to “a stronger and more civilized ­people.”68 Kuropatkin very much agreed. He wrote in his diary that “every­one is ponder-



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ing how to rearrange t­ hings in Semirech’e, how to reestablish peaceful life in this rich region, how Rus­sians can live peacefully with Kirgiz. I have come to the conclusion that it is necessary to separate ­these nationalities in the long term where pos­si­ble.”69 By mid-­October he had already held a conference with his colonial officials to deport nearly 37,355 Kirgiz ­house­holds or about 190,000 individuals into Naryn’, a wasteland then populated by only 9,325 h ­ ouse­holds.70 The deportations particularly targeted, in Kuropatkin’s words, t­ hose areas where “Rus­sian blood had flowed.” ­These areas—­all of Przheval’sk county as well as large portions of Verny and Dzharkent counties in Semirech’e province—­were to be given over to Cossacks and Rus­sian colonization. In Przheval’sk county alone, this meant displacing more than 120,000 nomads in ­favor of 43,000 Rus­sians.71 In fact, most of t­hese Kirgiz had already been driven out and forbidden to return. A government count ordered by Kuropatkin reveals a Semirech’e ethnically decimated, with the Kirgiz population down from 27 ­percent to 58 ­percent in five of the province’s six counties.72 As Levene observed, war­time radicalization was hardly limited to the Turks or Rus­sians. The tsarist actions in Semirech’e w ­ ere mirrored by France’s near simultaneous suppression of rebellion on the Upper Volta, which may have resulted in the slaughter of as many as 300,000 natives. H ­ ere, as in Semirech’e, scorched-­earth tactics ­were used to displace ­whole ­peoples and induce devastating famine: “In the case of Upper Volta and Semirechye it seems to have been developed with a quite conscious intent to destroy the life-­support systems of the rebels for good.”73 This is not a bad way to think about tsarism’s actions in Semirech’e—­devastating collective punishment but not genocide. Kuropatkin’s methods ­were brutal, but he intended them to be punitive, not exterminatory.74 In his mind the expelled nomads still very much belonged to and in the empire. Unlike the technocrats at the Resettlement Agency who viewed expropriating the nomads’ land as the first step in settling, and, eventually, assimilating the Kirgiz to Rus­sian norms, Kuropatkin looked on colonial governance from the perspective of what was useful for the empire. His was not the radical “­Great Rus­sian” view of a Stolypin but an imperial approach. And in that imperial view, the Kirgiz had utility: “The Kirgiz is a born herder and a nomad. In this we must see his power—­that over an enormous territory in Central Asia herding and pastoralism is suitable. The same Kirgiz is a born cavalry trooper. We must use this ability as well.”75 As he wrote to the tsar, “I am sure that the Kirgiz can be accustomed to a new life. . . . ​As nomads and h ­ orse breeders they ­will be more useful to Rus­sia than as poor 76 farmers.” Kerensky for all his criticism of the colonial administration in Turkestan, shared Kuropatkin’s imperial framework. Kerensky criticized the tsar’s colonial administration as hidebound, inefficient, and corrupt but not

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the idea of empire. ­After the February Revolution, Kerensky would try to resettle the Kirgiz refugees and integrate them into a new citizenship structure of a republican Rus­sia.77 While old colonial hands like Kuropatkin or radical politicians like Kerensky might see the Kirgiz as belonging to Rus­sia, they w ­ ere out of touch with the emerging civil war ethos among the peasant colonists in Semirech’e. Kuropatkin, always the military man, had not only dispossessed the rebel clans but envisioned new peasant settlements as an armed, “forward base” for the expansion of Rus­sian power into China, Persia, and Af­ghan­i­stan.78 Semirech’e was to be a new Cossack Line, but manned by militarized peasants rather than Cossacks.79 To execute this plan, Kuropatkin distributed 14,000 Berdan r­ ifles to the settlers.80 Once armed, the settlers became a potent military force, not least against unarmed Kirgiz, whom they barred from returning. A ­ fter the revolution, both the Tashkent Soviet and the Provisional Government’s Semirech’e Committee tried to disarm the settlers, but neither held any authority in the province. The Semirech’e colonists constructed a “settler socialism” built on exclusion and subordination, not on republican ideals of equality.81 The Semirech’e colonists w ­ ere hardly alone among Turkestan’s Eu­ro­pe­ans, urban and rural, who rejected the Provisional Government’s new civic order for its far-­off colony. As Kerensky had wanted, the republic abolished all ­legal distinctions based on estate, religion, sex, and ethnicity, while granting the vote to all adults over the age of twenty.82 It also abolished the l­abor draft and granted an amnesty for the rebels of 1916.83 Turkestan’s settler society, however, quickly undermined ­these efforts. The revolutionary organs that emerged in the wake of the revolution—­the plebeian soviets and the bourgeois “committees of public safety”—­refused any but token native participation or to give natives equal access to resources such as arms and ration cards. Moreover, ­after the arrest and recall of Governor-­General Kuropatkin on March 31, the Provisional Government’s delegated authority, the Turkestan Commission, proved completely incapable of asserting its authority over t­ hese local organs. In fact, Adeeb Khalid argues that a­ fter Kuropatkin’s departure, Turkestan was effectively autonomous from the center ­until the arrival of Mikhail Frunze’s troops in October of 1919.84 While decried as “anarchy,” real power lay with the institutions that had suppressed the 1916 rebellion: the garrison troops, especially in Tashkent, the peasant colonists’ villages, and the undermanned Cossack stanitsy. While all would come to their own interpretations for the meaning of revolutionary freedom—­often coming into conflict with the ­others for resources and power—­ all three would impose far more draconian conditions of subordination on native Turkestanis than even the tsarist colonial authorities. Khalid explains



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the essence of the situation: “By the autumn of 1917, Turkestan was the scene of full-­blown ethnic vio­lence in which the Eu­ro­pe­ans had all the guns.”85 Of course, the tsarist government had seen to that not only by arming the settlers but by conscripting Central Asians as laborers, not fighting men who would take their weapons home with them as the imperial armies melted away. ­These po­liti­cal dynamics first became clear in Semirech’e and soon migrated outward from t­ here. Throughout 1917 Semirech’e became a scandal not only in Tashkent, but in Petrograd as a sort of “bleeding Semirech’e”—­a forerunner of the violent civil war. Returning refugees w ­ ere murdered with impunity, their herds stolen, and their kin driven into the mountains (again) as famine took hold in Turkestan.86 Well-­armed deserters from the Tashkent garrison returned to their home villages and or­ga­nized predatory “hunts” of Kirgiz, especially of t­ hose refugees brave enough to attempt to return to their confiscated lands. ­Under the slogan “all power to the localities” ­these tactics ­were replicated throughout Turkestan as peasant colonists imposed “extraordinary taxes” and confiscations on their own nomads.87 While this vio­lence was far less extensive than the carnage of 1916, it was more inflaming as Turkestani natives insisted the government stop the vio­lence. In fact, the first (and very shocking) mass demonstration to occur in Tashkent happened on August 9 as tens of thousands of peaceful Muslim protesters crossed into the Eu­ro­pean town and complained to the Turkestan Commission that its impotence was “­because the blood flowing in Semirech’e is Muslim blood and Turkic blood.”88 The October Revolution did not improve the situation in Semirech’e—­how could it? The men who made up the Tashkent Soviet of Soldiers and Workers’ deputies ­were not the plebeian masses of the Petrograd Soviet, but rather the colonial army that had suppressed the 1916 Rebellion. Now, instead of sending punitive detachments out to despoil rebel clans, they sent out Soviet procurement detachments to do the same ­thing to all natives.89 Rather tellingly, the Tashkent Soviet refused to seat representatives of the impeccably plebeian native-­quarter soviets, often led by former l­abor draftees, and also would not countenance the enrollment of Muslim troops into the Red Army.90 Tashkent had, at any rate, l­ittle or no authority over the village soviets of Semirech’e, which enslaved the Kirgiz they did not expel, by distributing them to settler h ­ ouse­holds for fieldwork and decreeing the death penalty for any who resisted.91 Nazarov noted that the peasant colonists had set themselves up as a new class of “exploiters”: “Every­thing was done by the Kirgiz: they worked in the fields, tended the ­cattle, hauled the coal and charcoal and so on. Sometimes even they rented back their own land from the settlers—­ land that had been taken from them by the former Government and granted

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to colonists from Rus­sia.”92 Kuropatkin, in short, had empowered génocidaires and enslavers. In the end, the methods pioneered in Semirech’e in 1916 ­were applied by this “proletarian” dictatorship to all of Muslim Turkestan. The revolution did not liberate native Turkestanis from colonial oppression, but instead put them in a new category of civic exclusion as “nonproletarians.” As a terrible famine gripped Turkestan throughout 1918 and 1919, the new Soviet government directed its procurement brigades primarily to the native countryside and denied even urban, plebeian Turkestanis the right to a ration. The Kirgiz nomads ­were hardest hit and local soviets ruthlessly plundered them. In the nomadic county of Aulie-­Ata, in Syr-­Darya province outside Tashkent, nearly half of its 300,000 Kirgiz nomads had starved to death by the first anniversary of the revolution; rather than providing food aid for the starving survivors, the local soviet imposed an extraordinary tax of five million rubles on them.93 Tens of thousands of starving nomads made their way to Tashkent where they died begging for food—­the soviet banished the beggars to the native quarter so their corpses would not infect Eu­ro­pe­ans with disease. Such callous cruelty was common. I. I. Tobolin, the head of the Tashkent Soviet, told Turar Ryskulov, the Muslim communist tasked with saving the starving, “The Kirgiz, eco­nom­ ically weak according to Marxist princi­ples, w ­ ill die out anyway. This is why it is more impor­tant to assign available funds not to the strug­gle against famine but to the military fronts.”94 Ryskulov, who would ­later become Turkestan’s leading native communist, noted with bitterness that the same officers who commanded requisition squads had previously led punitive detachments in Semirech’e.95 The results of their handi­work ­were similar; from 1916 to 1920 nearly two million of Turkestan’s seven million died, the vast majority of them natives, particularly nomads.96 Ryskulov, for one, saw ­little difference in the rule of imperial governors-­general or Soviet commissars. As he ­later complained to Lenin, “In Turkestan . . . ​­there was no October Revolution. The Rus­sians took power and that was the end of it; in the place of some governor sits a worker, and that is all.”97 Fortunately for the region’s natives, Lenin agreed and the arrival of Frunze’s army in late 1919 led to a fundamental re­orientation of government policy. By then, of course, the “proletarian” dictatorship had excluded native Turkestanis as a ­matter of ideological rigidity for two years and sparked the intractable Basmachi revolt of 1918 to 1924, which seriously threatened Soviet control of the region. Lenin, at least, understood the need to fundamentally clean ­house and instituted a series of mea­sures to fully enfranchise former inorodtsy and end discrimination in the distribution and procurement of food. ­There was even a decolonization of sorts as 30,000 recent peasant colonists in Semirech’e



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(many of them having arrived ­after 1916) found it was their turn to be dispossessed as “kulak colonizers.”98 But the aftermath of the rebellion lingered on even longer as the last refugees from 1916 only returned to what was now Soviet Kirgizia in 1924.99 Back in December of 1916, Kerensky had decried the suppression of the 1916 rebellion as an atrocity writ large: “We understand now, gentlemen, that ­these Rus­sian administrators, who rule in the name of a ­great Eu­ro­pean country, are no better and no worse than Bukharan or Turkish satraps, who have not as yet such perfect means to destroy a population.”100 Kerensky was right to denounce the suppression of the 1916 revolt as despotic and barbaric but his characterization of it as an anachronism, a premodern tyranny armed with machine guns, was profoundly wrong. Over the next years, the policies of violently excising populations on ethnic or class grounds from the right to their lands and livelihood, would become the norm, not some historical atavism. That vio­lence was supported by new, modern conceptions of empire that radically transformed older colonial categories, such as inorodtsy and peasant settlement, into a virulent settler colonialism that justified the inhumane treatment of ethnic Kirgiz. The tragedy of Kerensky’s denunciation is that the atrocities of 1916 in Semirech’e ­were not the past, they ­were a prelude.

Ch a p ter  5

“What Are They D ­ oing? A ­ fter All, ­We’re Not Germans” Expulsion, Belonging, and Postwar Experience in the Caucasus Claire P. Kaiser

Extensive expulsion campaigns w ­ ere carried out across the southern Caucasus in the years between the end of World War II and Stalin’s death in 1953.1 While the ­wholesale deportation of Chechen, Ingush, Karachai, and Balkar “punished ­peoples” in 1943–44 has become perhaps the paradigmatic example of Stalinist deportation due to nationality, ­later expulsions from the southern Caucasus garner almost no attention outside of highly local contexts.2 ­These campaigns w ­ ere not driven by a desire to punish war­time deeds, and thus differed fundamentally from concurrent expulsion campaigns elsewhere in the USSR. Rather, borderland belonging in the greater Caucasus—­not long before a common feature of this entangled, multiethnic outpost of empire—­proved increasingly incompatible with the homogenizing ambitions of Soviet nation-­building. Expulsion represents one of the most radical tools available to empires and nations alike to define territories and refine populations.3 As the Soviet state shifted its focus from class enemies to suspect national groups in the mid-1930s, expulsion operations expanded from piecemeal border-­cleansing efforts to the ­wholesale removal of entire nationalities to Central Asia and Siberia. This pro­ cess has been portrayed by scholars as a retreat from the “ethnophilia” of the 1920s, as ethnic cleansing, and as genocide, in each case emphasizing the perceived liability of minority, non-­Russian populations.4

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Yet while t­ hese explanations tell a compelling story at the macro level, the view from Georgia looks rather dif­fer­ent. In the Soviet Union, what I call excisional institutions of nation-­building (e.g., expulsions, population exchange, ethnic cleansing, and genocide) borrowed extensively from an imperial repertoire. Excisional institutions of nation-­building worked alongside their productive counter­parts, such as elaborating census categories, writing national histories, defining territories, and reaching out to diasporas—­tools both endowed by Soviet nationality policy and in some cases extending beyond it.5 In this chapter, I use the case of postwar expulsions from Georgia to show how a Soviet tool of imperial population management could just as much be an instrument of nation-­building and national homogenization at the local level. In other words, by expelling minorities, Georgian authorities enacted imperial prerogatives ­toward national goals—­and the republic’s population likewise answered in national idioms. In the pro­cess, a new hierarchy of markers of belonging emerged that combined prewar categories of “disloyalty” with nationalizing aims. Scholars of the Soviet Union tend to use the all-­encompassing term “deportation” in lieu of the official Soviet terms “expulsion” or “special settlement” (vyselenie or spetsposelenie) to refer to the practice of forcibly moving large groups from their places of residence to Central Asia or Siberia as a punitive or preventive mea­sure.6 Lewis  H. Siegelbaum and Leslie Page Moch note the semantic distinction between expulsions, which emphasize removing a population from a par­tic­u­lar area, and deportations, which focus on the destination.7 The distinction between ­these terms is indeed subtle, but impor­ tant differences remain with regard to scope and intent. I refer to ­these postwar acts as expulsions not only to preserve the a­ ctual nomenclature used to describe t­ hese actions in the event, but also to highlight the fundamental cleansing aspect of the operations. Such operations did not merely seek to empty a par­tic­u­lar territory of its inhabitants for purposes of border security or economic development; rather, expulsion operations sought to reshape, through permanent excision, the territory’s population. This permits us to more precisely ask: expelled by whom, t­ oward what end? And to what extent did the architects, executors, expelled, and remaining populations understand expulsion through the lens of the nation, even if defined other­wise? By the postwar era, the terrain of the modern Caucasus had been reshaped through expulsion, flight, resettlement, and emigration for at least a ­century. From the mukhadzhirstvo of the 1860s–1870s, which expelled Circassians on the Black Sea coast to the Ottoman Empire, to the influx of refugees in the Armenian Genocide’s aftermath as detailed by Jo Laycock in this volume

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(chapter 6), and from the emigration of Georgia’s social demo­cratic leadership to “national operations” during the G ­ reat Terror, population management through expulsion, resettlement, and even execution w ­ ere familiar practices in the public consciousness.8 Earlier episodes of expulsion and resettlement, such as the resettlement of Georgian and Armenian populations to Persia during Shah Abbas’s reign in the sixteenth c­ entury, likewise retained impor­tant symbolic value in Georgian national narratives in the twentieth ­century. Moreover, the Stalin-­era Caucasus provides a peculiar po­liti­cal environment for examining expulsion campaigns. Despite Georgia’s small population and peripheral territory, Georgians and ­others from the Caucasus played an outsized role in Union-­level affairs at this time. Former Georgian first secretary (1931–38) Lavrenty Beria’s promotion to lead the All-­Union NKVD following his tenure overseeing collectivization and the Terror in Georgia and the South Caucasus strengthened impor­tant networks “between the Caucasus and the Kremlin” that s­ haped the contours of expulsion campaigns.9 The roles played by Kandid Charkviani, who served as first secretary of Georgia from 1938 to 1952, and Akaki Mgeladze, a Stalin protégé who ran Abkhazia in the 1940s and replaced Charkviani as first secretary in 1952, in postwar expulsion campaigns illustrate the growing conflict between Stalin’s and Beria’s patronage networks vis-­à-­vis Georgia.10 Moreover, Beria, Charkviani, Mgeladze, and even Stalin himself took proactive roles not only in expulsion campaigns but also in Georgian nation-­building proj­ects such as consolidating census and linguistic categories, converting minority languages into Georgian orthography, writing a national history, promoting a national epic, making claims on “historic” territories and populations, and more.11 The blurred space between the Caucasus and the Kremlin meant that expulsions ­were interpreted by contemporaries not as Soviet (read: Rus­sian) attacks against minority populations, but rather as Georgian efforts to further reduce the role of non-­Georgians in the republic. Postwar expulsions built on Soviet practices honed during the prewar and war­time eras in the Caucasus and throughout the Union. Yet an impor­tant shift in intent seems to have occurred as the Red Army pushed through Eu­ rope in the spring of 1944: border-­cleansing operations resumed in Georgia—­a republic distant from the front and not occupied during the war. In May 1944, Georgian first secretary Charkviani and Georgian Council of Ministers chairman Valerian Bakradze calculated that 77,500 ­people (14,860 families) from the Meskhetian region’s (Akhaltsikhe, Adigeni, Aspindza, and Akhalkalaki districts) “Turkish population” w ­ ere subject to resettlement. At that time, Charkviani and Bakradze planned for resettlement within Georgia, to a vari-



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ety of locales in the eastern parts of the republic more distant from the Turkish border. In June, Charkviani, Bakradze, and NKVD head Avksenti Rapava extended their planning to include Bogdanov district and Ajaria ASSR (Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic). Rather than simply surveying the “Turkish” population, ­these plans included Turks, Kurds, and “Khemshils” (Muslim Armenians) and or­ga­nized a “special resettlement” of 86,000 ­people (16,630 ­house­holds).12 By July 1944, Beria recommended resettling “Turks, Kurds, and Khemshins” away from the border regions, and a July 31 GKO (State Defense Committee) resolution no. 6279 ordered the expulsion of t­hese groups by the NKVD to the Kazakh, Kirgiz, and Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republics (SSRs). The GKO order authorized the expulsion of 45,516 p­ eople, which the Georgian CC (Central Committee) expanded with a resolution on August 9 to include Ajaria in the operation. Nikolai Fedorovich Bugai and A. M. Gonov emphasize that the July 31 resolution drew purely on information provided by Georgian NKVD chief Rapava. Between November 15 and 18, 1944, NKVD forces deported 91,095 p­ eople from the Akhaltsikhe, Adigeni, Aspindza, and Bogdanov districts and the Ajarian ASSR to the Uzbek, Kazakh, and Kirgiz SSRs. The Georgian NKVD subsequently established a more strictly controlled border regime along the Turkish border.13 With the freeing of lands in the Turkish border region, Charkviani and Bakradze recommended resettling “Georgian populations” to ­these newly available lands from other, land-­poor regions of Georgia with the (ostensible) hope that the resettled kolkhozniki could improve agricultural output in the border region. Georgian and Armenian populations already residing in the area would remain in place.14 The Meskhetian expulsion was the last in a series of ­wholesale operations from the Caucasus and Black Sea region that took place in 1943 and 1944.15 However, unlike the North Caucasian campaigns, the Meskhetian expulsions look more like efforts to cleanse frontier zones than attempts to punish real or suspected collaboration with Germans or re­sis­tance to Soviet rule. The concurrent pursuit of ­these aims beginning in late 1944 suggests a shift to postwar expulsion practices, applied to punish si­mul­ta­neously: groups in newly acquired territories who, due to war­time deeds or past citizenship, w ­ ere assumed by Soviet authorities to be unable to join the Soviet collective; and groups in territories that did not see German or Romanian occupation yet whose diversity and past citizenship made the Caucasus borderland potentially vulnerable, particularly at the dawn of the Cold War. The postwar incorporation of new territories into the Soviet Union and solidification of “­people’s democracies” in Eastern Eu­rope entailed ambitious campaigns of population transfer and expulsion.16 Following the expulsion of

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alleged Ukrainian nationalists, accomplices, and their families to Central Asia and Siberia in 1947–48 and Operation Vesna (May 1948), which expelled nearly 50,000 Lithuanians to Central Asia, expulsion campaigns spread to new regions in 1949. Operation Priboi, between January and March 1949, expelled 87,000 alleged kulaks, bandits, nationalists, accomplices, and their families from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.17 In April 1949, 40,850 ­people ­were expelled from Moldova for suspected collaboration with fascist occupiers, work in German or Romanian police units, participation in illegal religious sects, former White Guard membership, kulak or landowner status, or trading.18 Such policies not only aimed to displace from the Soviet body politic through expulsion ­those individuals who allegedly collaborated with German or Romanian occupation regimes, but also to territorially consolidate ethnic groups in this historically multiethnic region of imperial borderlands.19 The “thrice occupied” territories of Eastern Eu­rope saw expulsions of titular nationalities for supposed actions undertaken in the prewar, war­time, and postwar period as well as for social statuses deemed incompatible with membership in the Soviet collective.20 Territories in the Caucasus untouched by German troops likewise experienced large expulsion operations in the early postwar era as Cold War alignments formed. Failed Soviet attempts to shape the po­liti­cal and territorial environment beyond the Caucasus left a perceived geopo­liti­cal encirclement of the Black and Caspian Sea regions in their wake. Such Soviet attempts included: claiming territorial concessions from Turkey on behalf of Armenia and Georgia in 1945–46; supporting the ­People’s Republic of (Ira­nian) Azerbaijan and the Communist Tudeh party as the joint Allied occupation of Iran wound down in 1946; and seeing a Communist Greece emerge from civil war (1946– 49).21 While Greece and Turkey would not join NATO (est. April 1949) u ­ ntil 1952, and Soviet attempts to support Ira­nian communists continued sporadically through the 1970s, by the late 1940s, the lines of the Cold War had been clearly drawn in the broader Caucasus region. War—or the perceived threat of it—­“has every­thing to do with genocide,” as Norman M. Naimark makes clear in this volume (chapter 3). The sense among Soviet leaders that the same country that had defeated fascism’s march through Eu­rope immediately faced threats from without and within presented new opportunities to target familiar borderland “enemies” from the prewar era, but also permitted enterprising local actors to pursue proj­ects of national homogenization (without g­ oing so far as genocide). In this context, by the spring of 1949, plans ­were ­under way for a new expulsion operation in the larger Black Sea and Caucasus region to “cleanse” the area of po­liti­cally unreliable minority populations.22



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On May 29, 1949, a top secret Council of Ministers resolution signed by Stalin and Council executive secretary M. Pomaznev instructed local and republic Ministries of State Security (MGB) to “expel” (vyselit’) “Dashnaks; Turkish citizens, stateless Turks, and former Turkish citizens who have Soviet citizenship; Greek subjects, stateless Greeks, and former Greek subjects who have Soviet citizenship” from the Georgian, Azerbaijan, and Armenian SSRs and the Black Sea coast. The destinations, by group, w ­ ere Dashnaks to Altai krai (RSFSR [Rus­sian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic]); Turks to Tomsk oblast (RSFSR); and Greeks to Iuzhno-­K azakhstan and Dzhambul oblasts in Kazakh SSR.23 The deportation of Ira­ni­ans occurred through a separate yet related operation. The order for expulsion framed the targeted populations by subjecthood, citizenship, or po­liti­cal orientation rather than by nationality. Yet Greeks, Turks, and Ira­ni­ans fit within the official list of national minorities (diaspora nationalities) devised for the 1939 All-­Union Census of the Population.24 The Dashnak label, while an accusation uniquely applicable to Armenians (the Dashnaktsutiun, or Armenian Revolutionary Federation, led in­de­pen­dent Armenia from 1918 to 1920 and continued to exist in diaspora communities thereafter), entailed an explicit ideological content that supposedly distinguished nationalist Dashnaks from loyal Soviet Armenians. The Georgian MGB began preparing for Operation Volna in late March and calculated 7,242 families subject to deportation. Rukhadze and the procurator approved each individual h ­ ouse­hold’s “eviction.” On June 7, 1949—­a week prior to the operation—­First Secretary Charkviani and Council of Ministers chairman Chkhubianishvili wrote to Stalin about their plans to resettle kolkhozniki from other districts of Georgia to the tea, citrus, and tobacco plantations in Abkhazia and Ajaria inhabited by “Greeks and Turks” slated for expulsion. To replace the estimated 3,700 Greek and Turk families, Charkviani and Chkhubianishvili expected to resettle around 14,000 ­people from land-­ poor districts and requested funds from central institutions to facilitate the effort.25 The USSR Council of Ministers, via Stalin and Pomaznev, passed a resolution approving this effort shortly thereafter, which also indicated that property of the special settlers would be transferred to the newly resettled kolkhozniki.26 The operation began in urban areas (Tbilisi, Sukhumi, Batumi, Poti, Kutaisi, and Gagra) at 3:00 a.m. and in more provincial areas at 4:00 a.m. on June 14, 1949. Expellees had been loaded onto trains bound for Central Asia and Siberia by midnight on June 15. In total, 7,220 ­house­holds (31,606 ­people) ­were expelled in this operation.27 While the number of Turks and Dashnaks subject to expulsion was higher than the number deported, the Georgian MGB

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expelled more Greeks than initially planned. The most significant change occurred in Abkhazia, where some additional families and relatives of the deportees “voluntarily” joined the evicted. This required a l­ater operation that resulted in the expulsion of an additional 1,074 h ­ ouse­holds (5,099 ­people), consisting overwhelmingly of Greeks.28 In total, across the entire Georgian SSR, Operation Volna expelled 8,294 h ­ ouse­holds (36,705 p­ eople), including: 845 Turk ­house­holds (2,548 ­people); 6,769 Greek h ­ ouse­holds (31,386 ­people); and 680 Dashnak ­house­holds (2,771 p­ eople). A total of 1,484 wagons in 25 troop trains transported them to their destinations in Central Asia and Siberia.29 According to Major General V. Kakuchaia of the Georgian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), Operation Volna contributed to a total expulsion from Georgia in 1949–50 of 9,923 ­house­holds (43,344 p­ eople).30 The expulsion of Ira­ni­ans occurred in a subsequent operation not directed by Stalin and Pomaznev’s order. In October 1949, Charkviani wrote to Stalin regarding the 1,670 h ­ ouse­holds (ca. 5,600 p­ eople) with current or former Ira­ nian citizenship, regardless of ­whether members ­were Soviet citizens. He recommended resettlement for approximately 4,500 of this group. According to Charkviani, many in this population maintained ties and correspondence with contacts in Iran, practiced speculation and other anti-­Soviet activities, and ­those residing in border regions presented a threat to state security due to the potential for espionage among them.31 While Ira­nian citizenship provided the grounds for deportation, by nationality this contingent was more diverse: of the approximately 5,600 Ira­nian citizens in Georgia, most ­were Armenian or Azerbaijani by nationality (2,128 and 1,506, respectively). Smaller nationalities included Ira­ni­ans, Jews, and Assyrians.32 The correlation between Charkviani’s October proposal and the Ira­nian totals in the comprehensive 1949–50 list suggests that his proposal was carried out sometime between late 1949 and 1950. The 1949 operations reached throughout the southern Caucasus. The initial plan for the entire Volna operation, as estimated by the USSR minister of state security S. Kruglov, anticipated expelling a total of 12,500 ­house­holds from the Caucasus and Black Sea coast.33 The ­actual number expelled exceeded the plan, and the largest number of expulsions took place from Georgia: Odessa, Nikolaevskii, Kherson, and Izmail oblasts (Ukrainian SSR) Krasnodar krai Azerbaijan SSR

476 ­people (mostly Greeks) 5,233 p­ eople (164 Dashnaks, 4,396 Greeks, 673 Turks) 3,058 p­ eople (323 Greeks, 1,045 Dashnaks, 1,690 Turks)34



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12,000 ­people (likely Dashnaks and Turks)35 36,705 ­people

The 1949 operations ­were neither ­wholesale expulsions of entire groups nor efforts to empty entire swaths of territory of its inhabitants. Still—or perhaps, as a result—­the meaning and intent of the expulsions was less clear for ­those populations affected than concurrent operations in Eastern Eu­rope or in prewar campaigns. Expellees, f­ amily and friends left b­ ehind, former neighbors, and newly resettled Georgians from other parts of the republic revealed in memoirs, official reporting, and letters of grievance how they understood the reasons for expulsion, constructed their autobiographical narratives when engaging with the state, and made claims for return and lost property. Republic and local organs had been preparing for Operation Volna since at least March 1949. Oral history interviews conducted among Greek expellees suggest that at least some Greeks with close ties to the Party had limited knowledge of an impending operation, but that for the majority of respondents, their expulsion came as a complete surprise.36 Arpenik Aleksanian, a young Tbilisi native who was Armenian by nationality, recorded in her diary that her ­father heard rumors around town on June 13 that “Greeks and Ajarians” ­were to be expelled and that someone asked about “our Greeks.”37 When an MGB captain arrived at their home ­later that day and informed the Aleksanians that they w ­ ere to be expelled from the city as former Turkish citizens, Aleksanian noted, “None of us could understand that shock.”38 The captain gave the ­family members thirty minutes to collect their belongings. Nonna Erifriadi, a young Greek resident of Batumi, recalled that on June 13, she went to a friend Ioakimidi’s home to borrow a book and found it in complete disarray. Upon surveying the situation, “with difficulty I realized that the expulsion was prepared for all Pontic Greeks. Returning home, I told ­father every­thing.”39 Nonna and her ­father surmised that rumors about expulsion of Greeks prob­ably only applied to ­those Greeks with foreign citizenship, such as Ioakimidi.40 Neither Aleksanian nor Erifriadi strug­gled to comprehend the possibility of another’s expulsion, yet both girls failed to understand why their own families—as Armenian and Greek Soviet citizens—­ultimately fell u ­ nder the rubric of this operation. Some remained unaware of the reason for their expulsion long a­ fter they arrived in Kazakhstan or Siberia. Levon Nikolaevich Matinov claimed he only learned that he had been sent to Altai krai as an “active Dashnak-­nationalist” a year ­after the operation took place (May 1950).41 In an earlier petition from December 1949, Matinov described how he and his ­family, “together with

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other Armenians ­were expelled from Tbilisi by administrative order to Altai krai in permanent exile,”42 which suggests that ­until he learned of his “active Dashnak” charges, Matinov could have believed that his expulsion was due to a national, rather than a po­liti­cal category. Similarly, Il’ia Semenovich Bidzhamov, an Assyrian born in the Ottoman Empire who obtained Soviet citizenship in 1923 ­after fleeing to the Rus­sian Empire in 1915, as of December 1949 did not know the reason for his ­family’s expulsion to Tomsk oblast from Tbilisi.43 Bidzhamov perhaps suspected his expulsion was related to his “Turkish” origins ­because he emphasized his refugee background and enthusiasm for Soviet citizenship in his petitions as a means to correct this biographical liability. Matinov’s initial interpretation focused on nationality rather than citizenship and, subsequently, attempted to refute ideological charges. Confusion also existed among expellees regarding ­whether their expulsion was due to who they ­were (by nationality or citizenship) or what they allegedly had done (namely, participated in anti-­Soviet groups or maintained ties to Turkey). Autobiographical statements provide contradictory accounts. As she and her ­family arrived in Avlabari to embark, Aleksanian observed that nearby they had gathered “nearly all the Armenians of Tbilisi, and ­there are even more Armenians in Tbilisi than Georgians.”44 Upon further reflection during the journey, she wondered: We could not understand just why they expel us, what we had done wrong. If they expel such honest p­ eople, why did they leave b­ ehind all the gamblers, speculators, thieves, and robbers? They did not expel a single Georgian with us. Why did they expel us? If they expel us for being born in Turkey, as former Turkish subjects, then in fact they, my parents, fled from Turkey at the time of the Armenian massacres [rezni] in 1915. And Papa left Turkey in 1912 in search of work. They obtained Soviet citizenship in 1924. T ­ hey’ve been in Tbilisi for 25 years already and are considered Soviet citizens, enjoy all the same rights as every­one has since 1936.45 Aleksanian correctly deduced that her parents’ former Turkish citizenship provided the grounds for expulsion, yet she conveyed her experiences as a more broadly Armenian prob­lem. Not all Armenians in Tbilisi had fled the Ottoman Empire in 1915, yet in Aleksanian’s mind, the city’s entire Armenian population appeared subject to expulsion in this operation. With his similar refugee background, Bidzhamov thanked the “wise Lenin-­Stalin national demo­cratic policy” for granting him and his wife Soviet citizenship and saving them from “the wild and barbaric national oppression and persecution at the hands of Turkish powers in the First Imperialist War.”46 Again, if former



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Turkish citizenship was the crime, lavishly demonstrating commitment to Soviet authorities and laws seemed a logical strategy for appeal. Aleksanian did not mention Dashnak-­nationalist charges in her diary. For Solomon Vartanovich Postoian and his f­ amily, who ­were expelled to Altai krai from Tbilisi, the Dashnak issue proved central. For t­hese charges, Georgian MGB officials relied on testimony and accusations from 1938, in which a group of witnesses in Nar-­Baiazet, Armenian SSR, claimed Postoian was an active member in local Dashnak party activities—an accusation Postoian denied in petitions to Georgian authorities.47 His son, Migran Solomonovich Postoian, emphasized his own ser­vice in the ­Great Patriotic War as a way to distance himself from Dashnak charges made against his ­father.48 Matinov likewise denied any involvement with the Dashnak party, claiming “I was never a member of this party, that is, neither an active nor passive Dashnak. And as for nationalism, is it forbidden to love one’s long-­suffering ­people? . . . ​­After all, I was born in and lived in Georgia, which is just as close to me as Armenia.”49 Residents of Tbilisi surveyed by Georgian MGB officials in the immediate aftermath of the operation depicted more confident portrayals of the reasons for expulsion. The Tbilisi operation primarily targeted alleged Dashnaks, and that is why the report focuses on Armenians. Writing to Charkviani on June 16, 1949, MGB chief Rukhadze observed that “the vast majority treats this event as a mea­sure to cleanse the frontier region of the country of a dubious ele­ ment in connection with the coming war in the near f­ uture.” Yet he warned that, while “in most cases, the action to expel is regarded as extremely necessary in ­today’s international situation . . . ​among a known part of the Georgian population, such a necessity is construed with clearly nationalistic positions.”50 So-­called characteristic responses from workers and members of the intelligent­sia emphasized the coming war and the role of non-­Georgians in the republic. Shalva Jikia, a radio committee worker, remarked, “I was convinced that war w ­ ill break out this summer. No won­der they continuously send trains of troops to the Turkish-­Iranian borders.” S. I. Chikovani, a member of the Georgian Writers’ Union, went further, noting, “The action is correct and useful, but it created such a mood in the masses as if ­there would soon be war.” While ­these observations tended t­ oward the practical, other interviewees aimed more directly at the targeted populations. Vasili Kakauridze, an engineer, commended the action “to purge Georgia completely of dubious ele­ ments. Among Georgians they scarcely find ­those who would not commend this action.” Konstantine Ninua, of the Acad­emy of Sciences, meanwhile proclaimed, “Fi­nally, the city is released from the Armenians. . . . ​The only pity is that the action is partial and the issue of unburdening Georgia is not brought

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to a logical end, insofar as a significant Armenian population still remains in Georgia.” The poet D. A. Gachechiladze likewise anticipated that “­under vari­ ous pretexts nearly all non-­Georgians ­will gradually be expelled from Georgia.” Furthermore, the part of the Armenian population that was willing to comment on the operation regarded it as “oppression” of Armenians and looked ­toward a variety of historical parallels and ethnic ste­reo­types in their attempts to make sense of the events. Aram Nikitich Ter’ian, a se­nior scholar at the Acad­emy of Sciences Institute of Minerals observed, “I remember that the Mensheviks wanted to unburden Tiflis of Armenians, but even they did not take practical steps in that direction.” And Georgii Iakovlevich Chakhalian, a worker at Tbilisi Sapurtrest, questioned the reasons ­behind the action against Tbilisi’s Armenians with the all-­important war­time reference, asking “What are they d­ oing? ­After all, w ­ e’re not Germans.” Like the Georgian Tbilisi residents quoted above, the “characteristic” Armenian respondents framed the Tbilisi expulsions as unambiguous national offenses against Armenians simply for being Armenian. The term “Dashnak” does not appear anywhere in Rukhadze’s report, even though Dashnaks and Turkish citizens w ­ ere the stated objects of the operation.51 With time, expellees and their families came to realize the scope of the charges against them as well as ways to appeal to authorities for amnesty, return to their places of origin, and return of property (or compensation for loss thereof ). Immediately following the operation, the Georgian MGB began to receive petitions regarding the expellees and requests to return to their places of residence in Georgia.52 The petition campaign increased significantly a­ fter 1953, as waves of amnesties swept the Union. Among the Volna special settlers, the Greek Soviet citizens deported from Abkhazia lobbied most actively for the right to return and for property compensation. Greek petitioners viewed the 1949 operations as a prob­lem specific to Abkhazia and as part of a broader trend of alleged “Georgification” of the autonomous republic initiated by Beria and continued by Mgeladze—­charges that mirrored precisely ­those made by Abkhaz petitioners about the same period. For example, in a 1955 petition to Council of Ministers chairman Bulganin, Dmitri Khristoforovich Mistakidi highlighted what he viewed to be the spurious circumstances of the “voluntary” expulsion of Greek Soviet citizens from Abkhazia during Operation Volna. For Mistakidi, this violation of rights had deeper under­ pinnings: “The entire five-­year period of work of the racist Mgeladze prior to our expulsion, characterized by inhumane oppression, discrimination, and other crimes, took on clear signs of genocide, with brutal chauvinism, carried out not only in relation to Greeks, but also in general. The preparatory five-­year ‘work’ of Mgeladze had its apotheosis in the events of June 14–



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21, 1949.”53 Mistakidi distinguished between “local powers,” who allegedly sought to incite fear among Greeks, and Georgian neighbors who other­wise lived alongside Greek populations without incident. Yet the influence of such “savage nationalists”—­even if in the minority among local Georgians—­ proved instrumental in how some Greeks comprehended their overall treatment in Abkhazia as well as the Volna operation specifically. As was the case with other petitioners, memoirists, and eyewitnesses, Greek petitioners interpreted the Volna expulsion as an explicit attack on Greeks as Greeks, made most clear by the expulsion of Soviet citizen and foreign citizen alike, even if this departed from the purported ideological and security imperative of the operation. Such grievances w ­ ere sufficient to garner the attention and involvement of Union-­level authorities by 1955.54 New Georgian first secretary Vasil Mzhavanadze acknowledged that over five thousand Greek “volunteers” had been illegally expelled from Abkhazia to Central Asia, yet he initially suggested that it would be best for the “Greeks to remain where they currently reside,” that is, in Central Asia. Following a Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) investigation, the Georgian CC began a complicated pro­cess of return and compensation the following year.55 Similar suggestions by Georgian CC officials in 1957 to prevent the return of Meskhetians (on the grounds that their previous places of residence had since been occupied and that they likely still had relatives with ties to Turkey) proved more successful.56 By then, the death of Georgia’s most famous son and impending de-­Stalinization campaign would cause residents of Georgia to further redefine the official and lived contours of national belonging vis-­à-­vis the Soviet proj­ect.57 The 1949 operations ­were not the only expulsion campaigns in the postwar Caucasus. Only two years l­ater, an additional 11,200 p­ eople ­were expelled from Georgia as “­enemy ele­ments” during the so-­called Mingrelian affair, an effort orchestrated by Stalin to cripple Beria’s robust patronage network in Georgia.58 Their alleged offenses included: ties to émigré Georgians; ties to Ajarian or Azerbaijani émigrés; suspected smugglers, border crossers, and accomplices with ties to Turkish intelligence ser­vices; recent “reemigrants” to Georgia from France, Iran, and China; and prisoners of war who allegedly collaborated with German forces by serving in the Georgian National Legion.59 Many, though not all of ­these expellees ­were Georgian by nationality, albeit with alleged activities that placed them, for a time, outside the bounds of the Georgian collective as defined by Stalin and republic leadership. Between 1949 and 1951, at least 54,544 ­people w ­ ere expelled from Georgia to Central Asia and Siberia. This number comprises approximately 14 ­percent

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of Polian’s total estimated 380,000–400,000 postwar “internal forced migrations.”60 Considering that in the 1939 and 1959 All-­Union Censuses the population of the Georgian SSR made up approximately 2 ­percent of the USSR’s total population, a 14 ­percent share of the postwar deportation total for this two-­year win­dow alone is quite disproportionate.61 The expulsion of up to 80,000 Armenians from the Armenian SSR in the same period pres­ents a related picture (with less than 1 ­percent of the USSR’s population but 20 ­percent of postwar internal forced migrations), though perhaps half of that number ­were recent “repatriates” who had emigrated from Eu­rope, the M ­ iddle East, and elsewhere beginning in 1946 to build their national “homeland.”62 In Georgia, purported ties with (geopo­liti­cally) western-­leaning Turkey, Greece, and Iran or the Armenian nationalist diaspora overrode Soviet citizenship, ser­vice in the Red Army, Party membership, or other key markers of belonging in the Soviet collective.63 This was true in both the 1949 and 1951 operations. Unlike the 95,000 Meskhetians, who remained in Central Asia for the duration of the Soviet experiment, expellees from the 1949 and 1951 operations w ­ ere permitted to return relatively shortly thereafter, though not without logistical and ­legal difficulty. In many cases, Georgian residents ­were already resettled into expellees’ homes, and gaining compensation for lost property remained difficult. Expulsions as a Soviet practice required close collaboration between central decision-­making authorities in Moscow and local implementers at the republic and district levels to carry out the operations. Preparations and planning for the Meskhetian and Volna operations show the impor­tant roles played by actors within Georgia, from First Secretary Charkviani and Abkhaz Obkom head Mgeladze to the provincial MGB agent or border guard. In the case of Georgia, distinguishing between central and local agency is complicated by the overarching role of Beria, his continued influence in Georgia, and the mechanism of his police apparatus in facilitating expulsion operations. As a result, postwar operations in Georgia remain intimately linked to cadre politics and power strug­gles in Georgia and in Moscow between the end of the war and 1953. Even with an influential center, local actors still went above and beyond what was asked of them by Moscow in expulsion operations, as demonstrated by the expansion of the Meskhetian operation, the excess Greek “volunteers,” the expulsion of Ira­ni­ans, and ­later reluctance to allow Greeks and Meskhetians to return to Georgia despite their ­legal ability to do so. Whereas comparable operations elsewhere acquired a Rus­sian versus non-­ Russian tinge, in Georgia the division fell broadly between Georgians and non-­ Georgians, with l­ittle to no reference in memoirs, intelligence reporting, or



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letters of grievance against “Rus­sian” interference or machinations. The “Rus­ sians” in this case ­were Georgians at the center and at the republic level. Indeed, with a muddled distinction between center and periphery in Stalin-­era Georgia, the same person could embody the imperial official and the nation-­builder due to the deep permeation of the patron-­client networks of Stalin, Beria, and Charkviani. In her study of cleansing operations in the Polish-­Ukrainian borderlands in 1935, Kate Brown observes, somewhat surprisingly, that “Kresy dwellers interpreted the vio­lence of mass deportations as a sign not of the state’s power but of its weakness,” due not only to the porousness of the border in practice but also the memory of Rus­sian imperial borderland cleansing that was followed shortly by the loss of the territory, the war, and the state altogether.64 In the postwar Caucasus, on the other hand, some locals interpreted the expulsions as a sign of increasing Georgian strength. Expulsion and its aftermath provided impor­tant reference points for all involved to make sense of ­these policies within the evolving discourse of this transitional period. While officially framing the objects of expulsion policies as enemies from without and within, ­these familiar categories targeted not actions and affiliations from the most recent war (World War II), but rather resurrected, in a belated fashion, fights against lingering po­liti­cal foes from the imperial and revolutionary eras. This (not so) con­ve­niently coincided with an unfolding Cold War climate in which Turkey, Iran, and Greece w ­ ere increasingly aligned against Soviet interests in the broader Caucasus region, inviting a type of “Soviet xenophobia,” or absolutizing of cross-­border ethnic ties among “nationalities of foreign governments” similar to that seen during the 1937–38 national operations.65 The resuscitation of prewar categories of disloyalty found new significance as the lines of the Cold War ­were drawn along Georgia’s borders. Yet in practice, the experience of expulsion caused ­those affected to comprehend and explain ­these pro­cesses through ethnic lenses rather than the aforementioned official, po­liti­cal categories. Expulsion from Tbilisi as a suspected Dashnak or former Turkish subject meant expulsion as an Armenian from the perspective of both the deportees and local residents. Though wholly fabricated, revelations of a Mingrelian nationalist group had some basis in recent history and could likewise appear at least plausible to a homogenizing Georgian populace for whom subnational identities remained palpable.66 This larger ethnic consolidation effort entailed expelling Muslim Meskhetians due to purported diaspora nationality ties to Turkey; Greeks, Turks, and Ira­ni­ans not only for diaspora nationality status but also for experiences living outside Rus­sian or Soviet control, signaled by recent repatriation or former citizenship status; and

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Armenian “Dashnaks” and Georgian “­enemy ele­ments” whose alleged po­liti­ cal deeds and affiliations made the expelled incompatible with membership in the increasingly homogenizing yet still diverse Soviet collective in Georgia. Expulsions ­were the darker mechanisms in a wider pro­cess in late Stalin-­ era Georgia motivated by nation-­building aspirations among key local actors, and interpreted as such by affected populations. When considered alongside concurrent Georgian territorial irredentist efforts, consolidation of official Georgian nationality and linguistic categories, codification of a national history, and official and popu­lar outreach campaigns to diaspora communities in Azerbaijan and Iran, expulsions look less like a center-­driven Cold War security imperative than a more local effort to shape the contours of belonging among Soviet Georgia’s citizenry. Expulsions in the postwar period reinforced central geopo­liti­cal concerns while si­mul­ta­neously endeavoring to refine and consolidate the republic’s Georgian population—­a long-­term Soviet goal embraced and adapted by enterprising nation-­builders in Tbilisi and beyond.

Ch a p ter  6

Developing a Soviet Armenian Nation Refugees and Resettlement in the Early Soviet South Caucasus Jo Laycock

In the de­cade leading up to the centenary of 2015, academic research on the Armenian Genocide moved beyond a long-­ standing quest to c­ ounter Turkish denial and t­oward the development of more nuanced perspectives.1 Central to this pro­cess was the contextualization of the genocide in broader histories of imperial collapse and nation-­building in Eu­ro­pean “peripheries.”2 At the same time, new research emphasizing World War I as a watershed in the history of humanitarianism drew attention to the aftermaths of the genocide, in par­tic­u­lar to the ways in which the relief and resettlement of Armenian refugees intersected with the reconfiguration of former imperial territories. Existing scholarship on the refugee crisis that followed in the wake of the Armenian Genocide has focused on the M ­ iddle Eastern regions of the former 3 Ottoman Empire. This chapter shifts the focus to the Ottoman/Rus­sian borderlands of the South Caucasus, where from 1915 to 1921 complex dynamics of interethnic vio­lence and prolonged episodes of population displacement unfolded, the aftermaths of which resonate to this day. Between 1914 and 1920, the South Caucasus became home to between 300,000 and 500,000 displaced Armenians.4 The creation of the Soviet Republic of Armenia in the South Caucasus in December 1920 brought some stability to the region but did ­little to ease the refugee crisis. This chapter examines how, during the first years of the 1920s, 97

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a site of crisis came to be transformed into a potential locus of Armenian belonging, a national home not only for the Armenians who had arrived in the region during the war, but also for the Armenian refugees who remained dispersed across the M ­ iddle East and beyond in the Genocide’s aftermath. In conjunction with the promotion of Armenian language and culture through policies of korenizatsiia and the redefinition of national borders, the resettlement of refugees played a central role in the Soviet nation-­building proj­ect in Armenia and the South Caucasus. The chapter focuses particularly on the evolution of the ill-­fated “Nansen” resettlement schemes, so-­called ­because the League of Nations first High Commissioner for Refugees, Fridtjof Nansen, became their chief advocate.5 On its establishment in 1921, the League of Nations High Commission for Refugees was responsible only for Rus­sian refugees displaced in the aftermath of the revolution. Over the next few years, however, it had become increasingly concerned with the fate of Armenians displaced by genocide and unable to return to their homes. In 1924, the “Nansen Passport,” which provided stateless refugees with travel documents, was extended to ­these Armenians. Alongside this development, Nansen began cooperation with the Soviet Union in the planning of schemes to allow thousands of displaced Armenians to permanently resettle on reclaimed agricultural land in the Soviet Republic of Armenia. Despite the ultimate failure of the Nansen schemes, paying attention to them is worthwhile ­because they provide an opportunity to connect histories of the Soviet South Caucasus, which for the most part remain isolated and focused on “national” narratives, with transnational histories of the interwar world, in par­tic­u­lar the emergence of a new, international “refugee regime.” Examining the evolution of the schemes also provides insights into the ways that, during the interwar period, responses to displacement and the impetus to “territorialize” populations transgressed the bound­aries between the Soviet world and “the west.” Through the Nansen schemes, the resettlement of refugees became entangled with the Soviet nation-­building proj­ect, demonstrating a perhaps unexpected degree of common ground between the approaches of the Soviet Union and “western” international organ­izations to resettlement and national belonging during the interwar period.

Vio­lence and Displacement on the Caucasus Front 1914–1921 The Ottoman Third Army launched its first major offensive against the Rus­ sian Caucasus Army on December 22, 1914, suffering a catastrophic defeat at

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Sarıkamış in early 1915. In the months that followed, the Rus­sians pushed west, occupying swathes of Ottoman territory.6 In April 1915, an Armenian uprising in the city of Van exacerbated existing interethnic tensions and amplified long-­standing Ottoman concerns of Armenian disloyalty. As Ronald Grigor Suny has explained, “Fear and a profound sense of insecurity compounded by defeats in the winter of 1915 and the threats from Allied forces had combined into a toxic perception of all Armenians as an internal subversive force allied to the Rus­sians.”7 Soon afterward the sporadic ethnic vio­lence of the early months of the war was replaced by a systematic program of deportations and massacres intended to remove the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire in its entirety.8 The flight of refugees on the Caucasus front began in 1914. By December, 20,000 ­people had arrived in Yerevan.9 The advent of orchestrated massacres and deportations of Armenians in May 1915, as well as the Rus­sian retreat from Van in the summer, led to flight on a massive scale. By December 1915, the American consul at Tiflis reported that t­ here w ­ ere 170,000 refugees in the Caucasus “not counting ­those not accessible in Turkish Armenia and Persia.”10 Over the next six years, complex patterns of displacement and resettlement unfolded. For example, in summer 1916, 25,000 refugees returned to the Van region from the Caucasus only to flee once again in the face of a renewed Turkish advance in April 1918, this time into Persia and ultimately as far as Mesopotamia.11 They would eventually be “repatriated” to Soviet Armenia in 1922. Across the Rus­sian Empire, a variety of imperial, local, and international agencies came to the aid of ­those displaced by the war and its consequences. The improvised responses of the early months evolved into more systematic provision, culminating in the creation of the Special Council for Refugees (Osoboe soveshchanie po ustroistvu bezhentsev) in September  1915.12 A dedicated agency was created to address the refugee situation in the Caucasus and the territories ­under Rus­sian occupation in Eastern Anatolia and Persia.13 The Union of Towns, the Tatiana Committee, and the Rus­sian Red Cross all played a role in the relief effort. Armenians across the Rus­sian Empire also provided assistance through the Church and Fraternal Aid organ­izations. Armenian responses within the Caucasus ranged from the provision of food and shelter in villages close to the front to the creation of the Armenian Central Council in Tiflis.14 As Peter Gatrell has demonstrated, the experience of “refugeedom” and the organ­ization of relief by par­tic­u­lar national groups often proved to be a crucible for articulations of claims for national rights and territories.15 The Rus­sian revolutions transformed the situation on the Caucasus front. Rus­sian forces withdrew, and from 1918 Ottoman forces gradually reoccupied

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the eastern provinces, advancing beyond the prewar imperial borders. In the vacuum left by the collapse of Rus­sian imperial power in the South Caucasus an in­de­pen­dent Republic of Armenia was established on May 28, 1918, its government dominated by the nationalist Dashnak party (the Armenian Revolutionary Federation).16 It confronted dire circumstances. In the face of the Ottoman advance, more Armenian refugees had fled their homes in the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire and the former Rus­sian territories of Kars and Ardahan. This swelled the number of refugees within the territory of the new republic and soon both the refugees and the local population faced famine and epidemic disease.17 The surrender of the Ottoman Empire at the end of October 1918 brought some respite. The territory of the new republic expanded ­toward the prewar borders of the Rus­sian Empire, British troops arrived in late 1918, and vital food supplies from the American Relief Administration began to arrive in April 1919. This relative easing of material conditions did not, however, bring peace or lasting stability. Conflicts with Georgia over the border regions of Lori and Akhalkalak, and with Azerbaijan over the regions of Karabakh, Zangezur, and Nakhichevan emerged, causing new episodes of displacement. The activities of Armenian forces in Zangezur in par­tic­u­lar led to the violent displacement of the local Azeri population. Within the borders of the new republic conflicts rapidly emerged between the Armenians and the local Muslim “Tatar” population.18 In October 1919 the British representative Oliver Wardrop reported that Armenians had destroyed “60 Muslim villages in Novo Bayazid, Alexandropol and Erivan.”19 In some cases, displaced Armenians w ­ ere settled in the villages that t­hese populations had fled. Richard Hovannisian reports that Armenian refugees from the Muş and Sason regions of the Ottoman Empire expelled the population of the Daralagiaz region and settled 15,000 refugees in their place.20 He suggests that the government’s encouragement of refugees to ­settle in “abandoned” Muslim villages in 1920 had “not only economic but also clear po­liti­cal implications.”21 Thus the Armenian case echoed broader patterns of postwar nation-­building, which entailed not only identifying ­those who did “belong” in a par­tic­u­lar territory but also expelling, with varying degrees of vio­lence, t­ hose who did not. At the same time, the government also began to make plans for the repatriation of displaced Armenians. In the aftermath of Ottoman surrender it seemed pos­si­ble, or even likely, that refugees sheltering within the republic would be able to return to their former homes. In summer 1919, a­ fter the republic’s bound­aries expanded to encompass Kars and other regions that had previously been occupied by the Ottoman armies, refugees began to return

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to t­ hese areas. Hopes for refugee repatriation went beyond the borders of the Armenian Republic. In summer 1920, the Treaty of Sèvres raised hopes of the creation of an Armenian homeland incorporating both the new republic and regions of the former Ottoman Empire that had been home to Armenians. However, hopes of refugee repatriations to the promised new Armenia proved to be short-­lived. When Turkish nationalist forces advanced again in autumn 1920, another wave of refugees fled, t­hose from Kars and Alexandropol (Gyumri) t­ oward Lori, then in Georgia, and ­others through Persia and Azerbaijan, and ultimately to the North Caucasus.22

Sovietization and the Refugee Crisis By November 6, 1920, Turkish nationalist forces had occupied Alexandropol and threatened Yerevan. Caught between “the Bolshevik hammer and the Turkish anvil,” the Armenian government resigned and by December 2, an Armenian Revkom government assumed power.23 In the short term, Sovietization did ­little to ease the refugee crisis, the upheaval instead disrupting existing structures for relief. Oliver Baldwin, a British observer, presented a grim picture of Yerevan, describing a cinema used as a kind of “work­house into which w ­ ere driven all ­those men, ­women and ­children who ­were at death’s door,” with no food, medical treatment, or sanitation.24 At first, Soviet power was imposed on Armenia in an abrupt and sometimes brutal manner, prompting much resentment among the population. In February, the Dashnaks staged an uprising, briefly taking power in Yerevan before defeat by the Red Army. The leaders of the revolt fled south to Zangezur and then to Persia.25 A new Soviet leadership, led by Alexander Miasnikyan, was established and the more moderate plan of the New Economic Policy introduced to Armenia. In Lenin’s “letter to the Caucasian Communists,” he acknowledged that the situation warranted an altered path ­toward socialism in the region.26 Although not the focus of the letter, part of what made the South Caucasus (and especially Armenia) dif­fer­ent ­were the aftermaths of the genocide and mass displacement. Any attempts at social and economic transformation had to first engage with the fact that somewhere between a third and half of the region’s population ­were refugees.27 By mid-1918, the Bolsheviks had consolidated preexisting imperial and voluntary agencies for the relief and resettlement of the displaced in the Rus­sian Empire in the hands of the new Central Collegium for Prisoners of War and Refugees (Tsentroplenbezh). By the time Soviet power was established in

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Armenia this agency had been reor­ga­nized and renamed Tsentrevak, with its work increasingly focused on the repatriation of refugees to their former homes beyond the Soviet Union.28 By September  1920, the regional branch, Kavevak, was grappling with the prob­lem of the repatriation of the 130,000 Armenian refugees in the North Caucasus. By April 1921, it was preparing for the arrival of around 400,000 more refugees who had fled the Turkish nationalist advance of autumn 1920. Repatriation was placed on hold, not least ­because of the difficult circumstances within Armenia.29 The establishment of Soviet power in a context of mass displacement was by no means unique, but the situation in the South Caucasus differed from that in other regions of the former Rus­sian Empire. Unlike, for example, the Polish and Latvian refugee populations in the western borderlands, Armenian refugees in the South Caucasus could not be repatriated beyond Soviet borders.30 Rather than the logistics of moving refugees out of the country, chief among the prob­lems of the new Soviet government ­were the feeding, sheltering, and housing of a refugee population with ­little choice other than to remain within the bound­aries of the Soviet Union. A ­ fter six years of conflict and upheaval, this population faced hunger, poverty, and housing shortages. Given ­these circumstances, the Soviet authorities facilitated the return of international agencies that had withdrawn in the lead-up to Sovietization. American Near East Relief cared for around thirty thousand c­ hildren in the former Rus­sian barracks in Alexandropol.31 The British Lord Mayor’s Fund (LMF) on a much smaller scale established orphanages, feeding stations, and “industries” for refugees.32 While the work of the international relief agencies addressed the issue of emergency relief, especially among ­children, longer-­term issues arose regarding resettlement of the wider refugee population. Many of ­those who had fled the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire had now been resident in the South Caucasus for several years, though some had been displaced many times. Some had already been h ­ oused by the imperial administration or the government of the First Republic, as described above. Some had settled as w ­ hole villages, for example, ­those from Sason who settled in Ashnak and Ujan; ­others ­were dispersed among the local population.33 The resettlement of the remaining refugees proved challenging, complicating the wider prob­lems of land re­distribution and the reconstruction of agriculture.34 The new Soviet authorities took pride in having ended “the nightmare of the past,” ethnic conflict. In a speech on the fourth anniversary of the Soviet Republic of Armenia, Sargis Lukashin, president of the Council of P ­ eople’s Commissars, claimed that “the Tatar refugees persecuted by the Dashnak government and the Armenian refugees of Van, persecuted by the Turkish pa-

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shas, are working hand in hand t­ oday, not only in the same village but often in the same courtyard, to restore their economic wellbeing in Soviet Armenia.”35 In real­ity, the aftermaths of the vio­lence and displacement of the war lingered, not only in Soviet Armenia but across the South Caucasus. In many cases, diverse communities of the prewar period could not be reconstituted in a straightforward way, prompting complex patterns of local and regional resettlement. For example, in March 1923 it was agreed that a group of “Muslim” refugees from the Yerevan region who had resettled in Azerbaijan in 1920 should be resettled once again, as they ­were unable to live alongside the Armenians in the community they had moved into. The homes they vacated would be allocated to Armenian refugees from neighboring settlements that had been destroyed.36

Refugees, Resettlement, and Development Sovietization had at least brought some stability to the Armenians of the South Caucasus, but beyond Soviet borders thousands of other Armenian refugees remained in a precarious position. The rise of the Turkish nationalists made it clear that t­ hese refugees would not be able to return to their former homes, causing a shift in perceptions of Soviet Armenia among the refugees and the variety of relief agencies and diaspora organ­izations that claimed to speak for them. At the same time, the Soviet authorities began to take an active interest in ­these refugee populations and facilitate their resettlement within Soviet Armenian borders. The final part of this chapter focuses on the evolution of the joint League of Nations/Soviet schemes to resettle fifty thousand of t­ hese refugees in Soviet Armenia. Though they would never come to fruition, the development of ­these ­g rand schemes demonstrates how the resolution of a transnational “refugee prob­lem” became entangled with both the Soviet Armenian nation-­building proj­ect and the economic and agricultural development of a “peripheral” region of the Soviet Union. Barely a year ­after Sovietization, small-­scale resettlements from Turkey, Mesopotamia, and Persia began. In the winter of 1921–22, Armenian refugees, many originally from the Van region of the Ottoman Empire, began to arrive from Ba’quba (Iraq) following the closure of a British refugee camp. Their arrival was facilitated by lobbying from the Lord Mayor’s Fund, the local Armenian Community in Baghdad, and the diaspora organ­ization, the Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU).37 The logistics of resettlement w ­ ere rarely straightforward. In the case of Ba’quba, the pro­cess was almost brought to a halt when the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs objected to the British practice

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of sending refugees in winter.38 Ultimately, the British government reluctantly contributed financially to assist the LMF with their “establishment.” By 1925, the League of Nations (henceforth, the League) reported 13,539 refugees resettled in Armenia from Turkey, Mesopotamia, Persia, and Greece.39 The signing of the Lausanne Treaty in July 1923 and the subsequent foundation of the Turkish Republic redefined the nature of the Armenian “refugee prob­lem.” Since 1915 mobilization on the part of Armenian refugees had provided a forum for the articulation of multiple claims and contestations about the f­uture of Armenians as a nation.40 The Treaty of Lausanne made no mention of the creation of the in­de­pen­dent Armenia or even an Armenian mandate promised a few years earlier at Sèvres. It was now clearer than ever that displaced Armenians would not be able to return to their former homes. ­Under t­ hese circumstances, sectors of the diaspora that had pinned their hopes on return to an Armenian nation in the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire began to look more favorably on the Soviet Armenian Republic as a place for displaced Armenians to “belong.” The situation came to a head in summer 1923, when the Greek-­Turkish population exchanges provided for in the Lausanne Treaty made the situation of Armenian refugees in Greece untenable. The Greek government explained to the League that it “cannot, though it would gladly do so, continue to assist several thousand necessitous Armenian refugees, in view of the g­ reat difficulty it finds in providing relief for refugees of the Greek race.”41 Following t­ hese developments, the question of finding homes for displaced Armenians assumed a new urgency. The Nansen Passport scheme was extended to Armenian refugees to allow them to travel and resettle in other states. At the same time, the League of Nations High Commission for Refugees and the Armenian National Del­e­ga­tion (a kind of western Armenian government-­in-­exile based in Paris, closely allied with the AGBU) began to consider the development of schemes for the large-­scale resettlement of Armenian refugees in Soviet Armenia.42 In August 1923 the Armenian National Del­e­ga­tion wrote to the League detailing a plan to s­ ettle fifty thousand refugees in the Soviet Union on newly irrigated land “in the plain of Sardarabad near Erivan, the plans for which have been drawn up by a detachment of 70 engineers and overseers u ­ nder the o ­ rders of Mr. Zavlichin, the eminent director of the Transcaucasian Hydraulic Ser­ vices.”43 ­These plans had their origins in the era of the in­de­pen­dent Armenian Republic, which, despite its dire economic circumstances, began to plan for the reconstruction and development of the region through hydroelectricity and irrigation programs.44 It was envisioned that this work would be funded

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by a loan from a Eu­ro­pean state that would be repaid using the surplus eventually produced from the refugee plots. The Soviet Union was not at this time a member of the League; nonetheless, Nansen and the High Commission for Refugees ­were prepared to take the Soviet proposal seriously. By the mid-1920s, as Mark Mazower has observed, “pragmatism and accommodation” rather than hostility governed the relationship between the Soviet Union and the League.45 Furthermore, pre­ ce­dents for Soviet cooperation with international organ­izations and relief agencies had already been set, for example, by the American Relief Administration’s provision of famine relief in 1921 and, in Soviet Armenia, the ongoing work of American Near East Relief in caring for orphans and refugees.46 Nansen himself had a pre-­existing relationship with Georgii Chicherin, the commissar for foreign affairs of the Soviet Union, as well as previous experience of working with the USSR on prisoner-­of-­war exchanges, famine relief, and some small-­scale repatriations of Rus­sian refugees. In any case, the High Commission for Refugees had limited options and resources. In the face of the growing unwillingness of “host” states like Greece to care for large numbers of displaced Armenians, the potential of Soviet settlement could not easily be ignored. Between 1923 and 1926, elaborate plans ­were developed by Soviet hydraulic engineers which the League’s technical experts then scrutinized.47 The League launched a series of commissions to investigate the schemes and in summer 1925 Nansen himself visited Armenia to assess their viability. His conclusion was that the original Soviet proposals for the resettlement of fifty thousand refugees in four regions (the Sardarabad Plain, the Kirr districts, the Kara Su and the Zangibasar “swamps”) would take more time and resources than ­were available. He therefore suggested that they focus initially on providing for fifteen thousand refugees from Greece and Constantinople who ­were said to be in urgent need of resettlement in the Kara Su and Zangibasar regions.48 By 1926, the League had effectively abandoned its support for the schemes, not ­because of any explic­itly stated ideological objections, but ­because of the unwillingness of any of the Eu­ro­pean states to provide the anticipated loan to Soviet Armenia.49 This enthusiasm for settlement in the Soviet Union was newfound and representative of the broader shift in how some sectors of the diaspora at least understood the Soviet Republic.50 Cooperation with the AGBU and the Armenian National Del­e­ga­tion in the development of the Nansen schemes should be understood as part of wider efforts by the Soviet authorities to establish links with the Armenian diaspora. T ­ hese efforts had commenced in 1921 with

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the creation of the Hayastani Ognut‘yan Komite (HOK, Armenian Relief Committee). The foundation of the HOK opened a channel through which diaspora resources could be directed into the republic. This ranged from large-­ scale infrastructural work carried out by the AGBU, to smaller-­scale undertakings by compatriotic u ­ nions, groups of Armenians from par­tic­u­lar towns or villages in the former Ottoman Empire.51 Discussions between the Armenian National Del­e­ga­tion and Soviet representatives regarding resettlement ­were underway during 1922. Early the next year, during the Lausanne negotiations, Chicherin had made a formal statement of the intention to resettle a “considerable” number of Armenian refugees in the Soviet Union.52 In March 1923 more detailed plans w ­ ere being considered in Moscow by the Commissariats for Agriculture and Foreign Affairs and an Armenian Emigration Committee. It made provision for the settlement of 200,000 Armenians over four years, to be funded by “international organ­izations.” Only 15,000 of ­these refugees however, would be settled in the Transcaucasian Federation, the ­others on available land across Rus­sia and Central Asia.53 This plan appears to have had ­little appeal for the diaspora, which seems to have prompted its scaling down and refocusing on the Armenian Republic. Considering the difficulties already faced by Soviet Armenia, this offer perhaps seems surprising. However, when placed in the wider context of Soviet resettlement policies, the Armenian schemes seem less unusual. As Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Leslie Page Moch have noted, although the tsarist, Soviet and post-­Soviet iterations of state power “carried a distinct and evolving approach to how and where ­people should move,” practices could be retained or reemerge in l­ater periods.54 ­There ­were historical pre­ce­dents of understanding resettlement as a means of “developing” the Caucasus. The settlement of German Protestants in 1817, for example, was intended to bring agricultural expertise to the region. Even the sectarian groups from within the Rus­sian Empire (Molokans and Dukhobors) who arrived in the region mostly as exiles ­were, by the midcentury, recognized as “laudable Rus­sian colonists.”55 By the end of the c­ entury an increased emphasis on “rational” resettlement had come to the fore within the Rus­sian Empire, with the intention of maximizing the development of natu­ral resources and more effectively “civilizing” peripheral regions.56 The new imperial Resettlement Administration, which led ­these developments focused most of its attention on larger-­scale resettlements in Asiatic Rus­sia. However, Transcaucasia was not entirely neglected. For example, in 1913, Aleksandr Krivoshein, head of the Main Administration of Land Management and Agriculture (Glavnoe Upravlenie zemleustoistva i zemledeliia), traveled to Transcaucasia to assess options for the f­ uture irrigation and colonization of the Mugan Steppe (Azerbaijan).57 Such approaches,

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which linked settlement and development, resonated into the Soviet period. In 1922, Goskolonit, the Institute of Scientific Research on Colonization, was created. Two years ­later, a Colonization Committee was established with more ambitious mandates for resettlement u ­ nder the auspices of the Council of ­Labor and Defense. The Nansen schemes recalled late imperial settlement planning in that they ­were explic­itly designed not simply to provide a permanent home for refugees, but to transform the landscape to make the most efficient use of Armenia’s natu­ral resources. A ­ fter all, in a context such as the Soviet South Caucasus, where the only industrial development had occurred in a few urban centers, the revival of agriculture was an essential first step in the building of socialism. In 1922, land cultivation was only at 29 ­percent of its prewar levels and finding ways to rapidly accelerate development was a priority for the new Soviet authorities.58 In the minds of the staff of the League of Nations High Commission for Refugees too, refugee resettlement and agricultural development ­were already connected. The schemes they had developed to or­ga­nize the resettlement of t­ hose who arrived in Greece from Turkey during the population exchanges of 1923 ­were intended to enable refugees to contribute to economic growth by reclaiming land and improving crop rotation, and the Greek Refugee Settlement Commission helped by investing in infrastructure such as roads and schools.59 In the published account of his 1925 investigative visit to Armenia, Armenia and the Near East, Nansen describes explaining the Greek scheme to Armenian officials.60 Yet the planning of large-­scale irrigation schemes had a wider significance than its potential role in increasing agricultural production. If realized, the Nansen schemes would be a power­ful demonstration of the transformative power of the Soviet state, vis­i­ble not only to the local population but also, through the involvement of the League and the Armenian diaspora, to the wider world.61 Planned resettlement provided a means to impose order on the chaotic real­ity of the Soviet Armenian countryside, to create national territorial stability and integrity in a region still characterized by ethnic diversity and mobility. Furthermore, in a region where the delimitation of national borders had proved difficult to achieve, it surely was not insignificant that the Nansen schemes ­were planned for the very edge of the Armenian Republic and therefore had the potential to stabilize the new, and still contentious, border with Turkey.62 The aims of the Nansen schemes also resonated with the princi­ples of Soviet nationalities policy in the 1920s, which frequently encompassed the consolidation of national groups within clearly defined territories through resettlement as well as the cultural, social, and linguistic dimensions of korenizatsiia as

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discussed in Jeremy Johnson’s contribution in this volume (chapter 8).63 The ethnic diversity that characterized the South Caucasus was not easy to reconcile with the territorialized vision of nationality that underpinned the structure of the USSR. The territories that constituted the Soviet Republic of Armenia ­after 1921 had become, over the course of the nineteenth c­ entury, demographically speaking, “more Armenian.”64 The incorporation of the Persian Khanates of Erivan and Nakhichevan into the Rus­sian Empire in 1828 and the addition of the Ottoman provinces of Kars, Ardahan, and Batumi ­after 1878 ­were all followed by the movement of tens of thousands of Armenians from Anatolia and Persia into the new Rus­sian imperial territories.65 This resettlement of Armenians did not represent a ­wholehearted Rus­sian imperial endorsement of the Armenian national cause. As Stephen Riegg has demonstrated, attitudes to Armenians fluctuated over the course of the nineteenth ­century and ­were determined by wider imperial and domestic agendas.66 Nonetheless, as a result of the resettlement of Armenians from the Ottoman and Persian Empires into the new Caucasian territories of the Rus­ sian Empire (and, to a lesser degree, of the movement of Muslim populations of the region in the opposite direction) by the end of the nineteenth ­century, the Yerevan guberniia had an overall majority Armenian population.67 As described previously, the events of the war and the following years had further shifted the demographic balance.68 The Nansen schemes, to an extent, continued ­these trends. Encouraging displaced refugees to resettle in Soviet Armenia presented the territory, to audiences both within and beyond the Soviet Union, as an unambiguously Armenian space. It went unmentioned that some of the regions in which it was anticipated that Armenians would s­ ettle had previously also been home to Muslim “Tatar” populations. However, ­there ­were limits to the nationalizing ambitions of the scheme. The resettlement of Armenians in t­hese regions was, to a large extent, driven by practical demands—­the urgent need for the reconstruction of agriculture and the need to make use of abandoned land. The large-­scale resettlement of Armenians was not envisaged as a pro­cess of “exchange” in which non-­Armenian minorities would be expelled. What is then most striking about the planning of the Nansen schemes is the way that it demonstrates the intersection between Soviet and “western” thinking regarding the relationship between territory and population. The Greek-­Turkish population exchanges had shifted the limits of acceptable ways for states to achieve the ideal of homogeneity, normalizing the practice of ­wholesale transfer of populations as an acceptable solution to refugee and minority “prob­lems.”69 The approach of the League, the diaspora, and the Soviet Union to the resettlement of Armenian refugees was underpinned by

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what Liisa Malkki describes as “sedentarist” thinking.70 From this perspective, refugees, as p­ eople “out of place,” w ­ ere thought not only to be the source of tangible social prob­lems such as crime and disease. More fundamentally, their presence was felt to disrupt the natu­ral or even moral order of t­ hings. Agricultural settlement schemes therefore had a power­ful appeal, not only ­because of their economic potential but ­because they “re-­placed” refugees, restoring a link between land and p­ eople, meta­phor­ically rooting them in national soil. This was the ideal. However, the gap between theory and practice proved to be large. While the negotiations around the Nansen schemes ­were still u ­ nder way, in 1925, the resettlement of nearly five thousand Armenian refugees from Greece began. Far from the careful planning of the Nansen schemes, this immediately ran into prob­lems as the number of arrivals sent from Greece was much higher than the Soviet Armenian authorities had anticipated. In the aftermath, Nansen’s assistant Vidkun Quisling reported from Yerevan that two thousand of ­these refugees remained in a camp at Davalu, fifty kilo­meters outside Yerevan, close to the border with Turkey.71 It was hoped that the next spring they would be “established” in four reconstructed villages and assigned half a hectare of land per head to cultivate cotton. Still, he was also able to report that some of the refugees had successfully moved to Yerevan and opened around fifty shops and cafés. He concluded that it was generally admitted in Soviet Armenia that refugees ­were a “precious acquisition” for the republic.72 ­After 1926, when the League abandoned its backing of the schemes due to lack of international funding, Nansen continued to work to raise funds to resettle smaller numbers. The ideal of centrally planned, “scientific” schemes gave way to piecemeal resettlement and the AGBU became the main facilitator of resettlement, with groups from France, Greece, and Bulgaria arriving ­until the mid-1930s.73 The AGBU also sponsored some infrastructure proj­ ects, most significantly the construction of the village of Nubarashen, but by the mid-1930s cooperation had ground to a halt.74 Nonetheless, impor­tant pre­ce­dents had been set: Soviet Armenia had been reframed by the diaspora and by international advocates of the Armenian cause as a place where displaced Armenians could belong. The Soviet Armenian authorities meanwhile had come to see Armenians beyond the borders of the Soviet Union as an impor­tant resource for the development of the Soviet Republic and, in the aftermath of World War II, would return to the proj­ect of repatriation on a much larger scale. As Claire P. Kaiser’s contribution to this volume (chapter 5) demonstrates, this time resettlement would be accompanied by renewed waves of expulsion of ­those deemed no longer to “belong” in the region.75

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Conclusions The mass displacement of Armenians from eastern Anatolia and northwestern Persia into the South Caucasus remains a lesser-­known dimension of the Armenian Genocide. Nonetheless, the complex patterns of displacement that unfolded across the region between 1914 and 1925 had a profound effect on the reshaping of the Ottoman/Rus­sian borderlands in the aftermath of imperial collapse. As Nick Baron and Peter Gatrell have shown, experiences of displacement played an impor­tant role in both state formation and the construction of national identities in the territories of the former Rus­sian Empire.76 More recently, Benjamin Thomas White has demonstrated that related pro­cesses w ­ ere at work in the former Ottoman world, where responses to displacement helped consolidate and extend the reach of the state in liminal regions.77 Soviet Armenia was ­shaped in many ways by the aftermaths of genocide and mass displacement. The resettlement of refugees was one of the ways in which the new Soviet Republic was defined and developed. Internal, regional, and international resettlement pro­cesses all contributed to making a diverse imperial space more “national.” Proj­ects like the Nansen schemes, even if they never came to fruition, helped reinscribe the territory as a place where Armenians who had never before set foot could “belong.” The development of ­these schemes also provides a vivid example of the ways that attempts to modernize or “develop” Armenia, in the words of Suny, “evolved step-­by-­step with the building of an Armenian nation.”78 There are however some impor­tant caveats. Resettlement was never an exclusively “national” proj­ect, but was guided and limited by central Soviet priorities, with the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs acting as the gatekeepers of what, or who, was permissible, not least by channeling negotiations through its preexisting relationships with international actors such as Fridtjof Nansen. The consensus among League circles, the Soviet Union, and diasporic actors was never complete. For example, in accordance with Soviet nationalities policy, the compact resettlement of Armenians outside of Soviet Armenia was acceptable or in some cases preferable. While diasporic actors and ­those associated with the League consistently expressed a preference for settlement within the territory of Soviet Armenia, they did not always get their own way. As Armenia was part of the Transcaucasian Federation from the end of 1922, resettlement also had to fit regional priorities; some international actors reconciled themselves to this remarkably easily. In 1926 Harold Buxton, the leader of the LMF and frequent adviser to the League, described

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his support for the Soviet system: without it, he mused, the Caucasus was likely to become another “Balkan cockpit.”79 This chapter has recounted the effects of displacement in the South Caucasus from the perspectives of the states and institutions that responded to displacement. It is thus a top-­down story. The voices of the displaced are notoriously difficult to trace, especially in the rec­ords of proj­ects like the Nansen schemes, which w ­ ere premised on standardization, predictability, and the erasure of individual agency or preference. The challenge remains then to find ways and means to engage with the traces of the voices of the displaced in order to understand more fully the ways in which personal experiences of belonging ­were transformed in the aftermath of war, genocide, and displacement.

Ch a p ter  7

Reforming the Language of Our Nation Dictionaries, Identity, and the Tatar Lexical Revolution, 1900–1970 Daniel E. Schafer

In 1911 a unique reference work appeared in Ufa, a city in the eastern reaches of Eu­ro­pean Rus­sia and a center of cultural and po­liti­cal activity for Muslims throughout the Volga-­Ural region. Entitled simply “Dictionary” (Lȯgat’), the work listed hundreds of Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish words with definitions in the local Turkic vernacular.1 As the author Sălimgărăĭ Janturin (1864–1926) explained, he had undertaken this im­mense proj­ect b­ ecause many ­people wanted to read lit­er­a­ture “in the Türki language” but w ­ ere frustrated by the vast number of incomprehensible words and expressions. Janturin omitted the many words of Eu­ro­pean origin that had entered “our lit­er­a­ture,” but promised that with God’s help he would soon pres­ent them in a supplemental work.2 Janturin was not a lexicographer by training or profession. A descendant of Kazakh khans and a member of Rus­sia’s noble estate, he was a leader of the Muslim liberal movement, a participant in Muslim congresses during the revolution of 1905–7, a deputy from Ufa province in the first State Duma, and an advocate for regional autonomy for the Turkic p­ eoples of the Rus­sian Empire. During a state-­enforced hiatus from po­liti­cal life as punishment for having signed the Vyborg manifesto in July 1906, Janturin turned his attention to charitable and educational work. He and his wife w ­ ere founding donors of the Galiya high school in Ufa, on whose board of trustees Janturin served as president.3 This c­ areer places Janturin in a movement of educators, writers, professionals, and po­liti­cal activists among Rus­ 11 2

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sia’s Muslim p­ eoples—­frequently described in the lit­er­a­ture as Jadids—­who ­were committed to the modernization of their community’s cultural and social life.4 Janturin’s dictionary not only furthered the education of Galiya students and other aspiring readers, but advanced the development, standardization, and modernization of the language of his nation, or rather “our nation” (millătemez), as he calls it in his introduction. One in­ter­est­ing feature of the era is that the precise par­ameters of the “nation” w ­ ere in dispute, even as reformers drew close connections between language and national identity and announced their devotion to the nation. Figures like Janturin gravitated ­toward a secularized Muslim identity; depending on the writer, this might include all Muslim p­ eoples of the empire, or only Turkic speakers among the Muslims, or a more regional or local national identity.5 Janturin did not name his nation in his dictionary, but he calls the language Türki, which is ancestral to modern written Tatar. Janturin deci­ded to focus his dictionary on difficult words that a reader poorly versed in foreign languages might not understand. By including only words with a taint of unfamiliarity or foreignness to speakers of the Turkic vernacular—­those from Arabic, Persian, Ottoman, and if he had had time, Eu­ro­pean languages—he was engaging in a boundary-­making exercise, determining which words belonged to the national language and which did not. Janturin acknowledges that the regional Turkic literary language had grown distant from the common spoken tongue and pres­ents his work as a helpful aid for the novice reader. Of course, when looked at from the perspective of the vernacular, he had compiled a list of words that did not belong. The field of lexicography has long existed in tension between describing language as it is and prescribing how it ­ought to be. ­Whether a lexicographer leans in one direction or the other has a g­ reat bearing on what sort of work ­will result. Moreover, no dictionary can possibly contain e­ very word and usage found in a language. Not e­ very utterance is written down, nor are all writings public and available to the lexicographer. Dictionary publishers have their own concerns about length, cost, and marketability. Lexicographers must decide what to include from dialects, jargons, and technical fields. While dictionaries may appear to be objective descriptions of social realities, on closer look we recognize them as cultural artifacts in their own right, ­shaped by myriad choices, perceptions, and agendas. In this sense they are similar to other purportedly objective instruments of knowledge that embody the agendas and perceptions of their creators and can serve as instruments of control: statistical reports, censuses, maps, passports, and fingerprinting systems.6 In like manner, modern scholarship almost universally recognizes nations and national identity not as fixed and essential phenomena, but as ongoing fields

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of discourse, construction, reconstruction, and negotiation. Ele­ments of national identity might be ancient, or they could be recent inventions s­ haped by ethnic activists and state institutions.7 This chapter ­will explore the nexus of dictionary and nationhood, examining how Tatar dictionaries written since the late nineteenth c­ entury embody specific choices about which words to include and exclude, decisions that are also cultural and po­liti­cal statements about the par­ameters of the Tatar nation. Just as censuses define who belongs to a national or ethnic group, dictionaries prescribe which words and formulations belong to the national literary language—­and which do not. For ­those who pursued Tatar lexicography, dictionaries w ­ ere never just reference works but statements about the vari­ous worlds (Rus­sian, Soviet, Islamic, Central Asian, Eu­ro­pean) to which Tatars could, should, or might belong. The Volga Tatar language is a particularly in­ter­est­ing case. Like other languages of historically Muslim nationalities of the Soviet Union, Tatar underwent a series of linguistic revolutions in the twentieth c­ entury, including reforms of Arabic-­script orthography, a shift from the Arabic script to the Latin alphabet in the 1920s, and the adoption of the Cyrillic alphabet in 1938. Less well-­known—­and a chief focus of this chapter—is the gradual replacement of Arabic and Persian vocabulary with Rus­sian and international words, a pro­ cess that began in the late nineteenth ­century and was substantially complete by the 1960s. The constant evolution of the Tatar written language from the late imperial period to the pres­ent has rendered many older texts completely unintelligible to modern Tatar readers, even when transliterated into the con­temporary Cyrillic alphabet. Any natu­ral language develops over time, but the changes experienced by Tatar between the mid-­nineteenth and mid-­ twentieth centuries w ­ ere truly extraordinary. To make sense of t­hese developments, we conceptualize written Tatar ­here not as a single language but as several—­each characterized by its own combination of alphabet, spelling conventions, and lexicon. Generally one variety of written Tatar evolved into the next, but sometimes two or more va­ri­e­ties coexisted for de­cades. Provisionally we may identify at least six forms of written Tatar used in the twentieth ­century: 1. Old Tatar—­Arabic script, fifteenth to early twentieth centuries 2. Kerăshen Tatar—­Cyrillic alphabet, nineteenth to early twentieth centuries 3. Late empire Tatar—­Arabic script, late nineteenth ­century to ca. 1918 4. Early Soviet Tatar—­reformed Arabic script, ca. 1918–28 5. Yangalif Tatar—­Latin alphabet, 1928–38 6. Cyrillic Tatar—­Cyrillic alphabet, 1938–­pres­ent

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Each of ­these languages, with the exception of Kerăshen, was presented by its advocates as the universal and standard written form of the Tatar language. Cyrillic-­based Kerăshen (“baptized”) Tatar was used exclusively by Christian Tatars and the missionaries who served them and was generally stigmatized by other Tatars as a legacy of Rus­sian colonialism and Orthodox missionary efforts. Volga Tatar has a long history as a collection of unwritten vernacular dialects. Over the centuries, the functions of written communication ­were served by a variety of literary languages (Arabic, Persian, Rus­sian, Chagatai, Ottoman) based on who was communicating with whom and for what purpose. From the fifteenth c­ entury down to the mid-1800s, literate Muslims of the Volga-­Ural region, ancestors of ­today’s Tatars and Bashkirs, tended to write in a style known to linguists as Old Tatar.8 Analogous in many ways to Ottoman Turkish, Old Tatar developed as a regional variant of Türki, a cosmopolitan literary language written in the Arabic script by sophisticates who freely used Arabic and Persian grammar and deployed thousands of Arabic and Persian words alongside the core Turkic vocabulary. Türki served as a lingua franca among Turkic ­peoples throughout Eurasia and existed in a variety of written dialects with porous bound­aries. A well-­educated writer of Old Tatar living in the Volga region might deploy words and grammar learned during study or residence in far-­off Istanbul or Bukhara that would mystify Tatar peasants in the village down the road. Old Tatar was used between Rus­ sian officials and Turkic subjects of the empire and for Eurasian diplomacy and was taught in select Rus­sian state schools. A teacher at one such school published the first Tatar alphabet book in 1778.9 Old Tatar survived as the primary form of written Tatar through the late 1800s and into the new ­century. A case in point is the Tatar poet Gabdulla Tukaĭ (1886–1913), a prodigy who was central to Tatar literary life in the years before World War I.10 Known t­oday as a pioneer of modern vernacular Tatar, Tukaĭ initially wrote in a sophisticated variant of Old Tatar. An analy­sis of one of his early works is telling. In early 1906 Tukaĭ translated a Social Demo­cratic pamphlet entitled “The War and the State Duma” from Rus­sian into Old Tatar for publication in the journal al-­Gasr al-­Jadid (The New ­Century) in Uralsk, Rus­sia.11 To a reader of ­today’s Tatar, this is a thoroughly exotic text. Tukaĭ freely deploys Ottoman vocabulary and Ottoman and Chagatai suffixes that ­were not part of the Tatar vernacular.12 Persian and especially Arabic loanwords dominate the text. A breakdown of unique words by language of origin gives the following: Arabic 50  ­percent, Turkic 38  ­percent, Persian 8  ­percent, Rus­sian 5 ­percent.13 The editors who published Tukaĭ’s article online a few years ago, recognizing the inscrutability of this text for twenty-­first-­century

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Tatars, elected to provide a complete translation into modern Tatar rather than simply a glossary of archaic words. A comparison of the opening passage of the two texts suggests the degree of difference: Old Tatar: Năchek Manjuriia sakhralarynda tup gȯreltelăre vă tăfănk patyrdyĭlary kăseleb, solykh gaḣed ideldekeni mȯshgyĭr’ Manifest gali chykdykyĭ kebi, tarikhlarda misle k/relmămesh ber kanly mȯkharăbăĭă niḣaiat’ vireldeki anglashyldy. Millionlarcha k/keslărdăn dăfgatăn ber nă/gy istirakhăt năfăse chykyb, dug″ry sămalără părvaz itde.14 Modern Tatar: Manjuriia sakhralarynda tup gȯreltelăre, myltyk shartlaulary tuktap, solykh iasalganyn beldergăn Manifest chygu belăn, tarikhlarda okhshashy k/relmăgăn ber kanly sugyshka chik kuelgany anglashyldy. Millionnarcha k/krăklărdăn kinăt ber’iuly chykkan răkhăt sulyshy tup-­tury k/klărgă k/tărelde.15 En­glish: As soon as the roar of artillery and bursts of ­rifles had ceased in the Manchurian wastelands and the manifesto announcing the peace treaty appeared, it became clear that a historically unpre­ce­dented and bloody war had come to an end. A sigh of relief suddenly arose from millions of breasts and ascended directly to the heavens. By the late nineteenth c­ entury, Old Tatar faced competition from a new written language based on the local Tatar vernacular. Many Tatar writers and intellectuals now sought a language that would be more demo­cratic, au­then­ tic, and modern, more accessible to the masses, spelled simply and phonetically, and uncluttered by foreign words and grammar. Tatar writers seeking a wider audience simplified and Tatarized their works, eschewing obscure Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman formulations in f­ avor of a more direct Tatar idiom. Tukaĭ for one shifted to the vernacular style soon a­ fter the translation described above. Another sample text, the introduction to Tukaĭ’s book National Lit­er­a­ ture Lessons in the School (1911), suggests the scope of his shift.16 Gone are the Ottoman and Chagatai words and grammatical forms that had permeated his 1906 translation; the portion of his vocabulary derived from Tatar and other native Turkic sources ­rose to 60 ­percent (versus 38 ­percent in the earlier text). Despite this re­orientation, Arabic words still composed 31 ­percent of the total, compelling the editors of a recent online version of the text to provide a glossary of Arabic terms for the benefit of modern readers. The proportion of Persian and Rus­sian words changed l­ittle, at 7 ­percent and 3 ­percent, respectively. Linguist Mirza Măkhm/tov estimates that 60–65 ­percent of the words in Tukaĭ’s works published in 1905–7 w ­ ere of Arabic and Persian origin, while this dropped to 25–30 ­percent in 1910–13.17 By compiling a dictionary of foreign loanwords around this time, Sălimgărăĭ Janturin hoped to

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bridge the gap between Old Tatar and the spoken vernacular, even as the latter emerged as a new literary language in its own right. Language and identity issues w ­ ere intertwined from the mid-­nineteenth ­century onward. Old Tatar was associated with intellectuals who valued a cosmopolitan identity with other Turks around the world. Volga-­Ural intellectuals who aspired to root themselves in the peasantry, or who saw their identity as local or regional rather than pan-­Turkic or pan-­Islamic, favored use of the local vernacular dialect. The writing of dictionaries and debates over language ­were closely associated with the articulation of a separate Tatar national identity within the wider Turkic, Islamic, Rus­sian, and Eu­ro­pean worlds. For a ­people existing at the intersection of t­ hese worlds, shaping language was a way to establish exactly where the Tatars belonged. ­These years saw a proliferation of Russian–­Tatar, Tatar–­Russian, and Tatar monolingual dictionaries, growing longer and more comprehensive as the de­cades progressed. Some ­were missionary works directed at the Christian Tatars who had ­adopted the Cyrillic alphabet.18 But most ­were grounded in the Arabic script used by the Muslim majority among the Tatars. A key figure was Kayum Nasyri (1825– 1902), whose pathbreaking Tatar grammars and dictionaries helped establish the modern Tatar literary language on the basis of the local Turkic vernacular.19 The fortunes of vernacular Tatar r­ ose and t­ hose of Old Tatar fell in proportion as Tatar book printing expanded a­ fter the 1860s and Tatar newspaper publication exploded ­after 1905, in vindication of Benedict Anderson’s hypothesis of the symbiotic relationship among printing, capitalism, and the development of written vernaculars.20 As a rule, manuscripts favored Old Tatar, while alphabet books and dictionaries favored vernacular Tatar. By the time of World War I, Tatar lexicography was a well-­established discipline, orthography and spelling in the Arabic script ­were becoming more standardized, and the new literary Tatar language—­vernacular-­based but with a continuing admixture of vocabulary from Arabic, Persian, and increasingly Russian—­was the basis of popu­lar secular education and the burgeoning Tatar periodical press and publishing industry. The establishment of Soviet power brought a new historical context. The Rus­sian Empire had sought to ensure the loyalty of its subjects through a variety of strategies, including estate status, force and vio­lence, religious confession, and, ­toward the end of the empire, nationality.21 The new Soviet state replaced the estate paradigm with social class, deployed force much more dramatically, and downplayed but still occasionally exploited religious identification. Even more than prerevolutionary imperial administrators, the found­ers of the Soviet state recognized the dangers of national or ethnic identities as well as their usefulness for administering the state and promoting its agendas.

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To participate in the Soviet enterprise, ­every citizen needed to belong to one of the Soviet nations and a national identity was assigned to each citizen via census enumeration and passport designation. The state ascribed national identity to republics and other administrative territories, promoted native-­language education, and fostered the creation of local ethnic elites to serve Soviet power. The ethnic elite of each Soviet nation was encouraged to develop and define its own culture and language, albeit within po­liti­cal and ideological limits whose contours constantly shifted. In accordance with the mantra “national in form, socialist in content,” lavish attention was focused on determining precise ethnographic, linguistic, and territorial bound­aries among nations and providing each p­ eople with a modernized, Sovietized language within which socialist content could be discussed.22 In such a context many prerevolutionary reformers elected to cooperate with the new state and its cultural agencies, hoping to further their own modernizing proj­ects.23 Already by 1918, Tatar publications w ­ ere experimenting with new versions of the Arabic script, eliminating some Arabic letters and adding new letters and diacritical marks to better reflect the vowels and pronunciation of spoken Tatar.24 Another innovation was “separated Arabic,” whereby letters w ­ ere printed with slight separation between them in order to accommodate increasing use of typewriters. ­These changes ­were formalized in the Tatar Republic with the yanga imlia (new script) reform of 1920, which remained the standard form of the language ­until the late 1920s. Similar orthographic reforms occurred in other Turkic republics of the Soviet Union around the same time and for similar reasons.25 Another topic among Turkic intellectuals in the 1920s was one that had vexed Janturin a de­cade earlier: the use of foreign loanwords. In the case of Turkmen, which was rarely written at all before the 1920s, this was mostly a forward-­looking question about the princi­ples by which the national vocabulary should be expanded.26 For ­those languages with a longer literary history, the question was also retroactive: should the language be purged of words and expressions already borrowed from Arabic, Persian, and other languages? For the Uzbek activist Abdulrauf Fitrat, cleansing the language of Arabic and Persian borrowings would assert the Turkic purity of the nation and establish its authenticity while at the same time unleashing the potential for Uzbek to devise its own neologisms and develop as a modern language in its own right.27 ­Others could argue, of course, that authenticity would be better served by maintaining the connection with the Islamicate past symbolized by Arabic and Persian vocabulary, though this argument made one vulnerable to a charge of pan-­Islamism. Instead, the case for preservation of Arabic and Persian words was usually made in class terms: words already assimilated by the working

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masses should be preserved while o ­ thers might be discarded if they impeded the acquisition of literacy by workers and peasants. A conference on terminology held in the Tatar capital of Kazan in September 1924 resolved to rely on Tatar’s own linguistic resources whenever pos­si­ble, to weed out Arabic and Persian terms that made lit­er­a­ture incomprehensible to the “toiling masses,” and to limit ­future borrowing to international terminology “shared by all leading Eu­ro­pean p­ eoples,” with individual Rus­sian words allowable only if all other sources provided inadequate.28 Among Tatar intellectuals favoring the removal of Arabic and Persian words, their preference was not to replace them with Rus­sian words per se, but to seek out words in international circulation that may or may not have been ­adopted by the Rus­sians as well. Suspicion of the Rus­sian language due to its association with tsarism and imperialism was po­liti­cally pos­si­ble in the mid-1920s, given Lenin’s well-­known argument that ­Great Rus­sian chauvinism was a greater danger than local nationalism.29 Linguists at the Tatar Republic’s Commissariat of Education in the 1920s and 1930s reportedly devised some six thousand new scientific, technical, po­ liti­cal, and social terms for the Tatar language, mostly from Turkic and international ele­ments.30 An impor­tant milestone was the Tatar–­Russian dictionary published in 1927 by Tatar philologist and pedagogue Mȯkhetdin Korbangaliev.31 As the final dictionary of Tatar based on the Arabic script, it marks a culmination of the orthographic reforms of the early Soviet era. Nearly e­ very word was spelled differently than it might have been fifteen years earlier in order to reflect con­ temporary Tatar pronunciation. Arabic words that previously appeared in their original spelling now had e­ very vowel spelled out; letters for specific Arabic phonemes not pres­ent in Tatar ­were dropped. This dictionary also marked a significant step in the lexical transformation of Tatar. An etymological analy­ sis shows that 62 ­percent of its words w ­ ere Tatar or other­wise Turkic in origin, with 18 ­percent from Arabic sources, 6 ­percent Persian, and 14 ­percent Rus­sian. Imagine someone using Korbangaliev’s 1927 dictionary to make sense of Tukaĭ’s 1906 article described above. This reader would succeed in finding only 53 ­percent of the words in Tukaĭ’s piece, suggesting a vast linguistic distance between the standard Tatar literary language ten years into the Soviet era and Old Tatar texts published for general audiences two de­cades earlier. A similar thought experiment involving Tukaĭ’s 1911 piece in “modern” Tatar is instructive. In this case, a reader using the 1927 dictionary would find 87 ­percent of the unique words in the essay, a much better yield but still insufficient for full understanding of the text.32 One must admit that the 1927 dictionary, at two hundred pages, was far from comprehensive and lacks many specialized and technical terms. Yet the words in Tukaĭ’s 1911 piece that are missing from

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the dictionary include many with s­ imple meanings (“desire,” “confusion,” “strength,” “request,” “unfortunately”), presumably excluded since they ­were Arabic or Persian words that ­were poorly attested in the Tatar vernacular of the day. The Old Tatar written canon, already mysterious to ordinary Tatars who had not mastered Arabic or Persian, was on its way to unintelligibility. As Tatar linguists, educators, and writers labored in the 1920s to perfect the reformed Arabic script, invent new Tatar terms, compile comprehensive dictionaries, and expand Tatar-­language publishing and education, a movement was afoot that would soon undermine many of their achievements—­the ­great campaign to convert Soviet writing systems to the Latin alphabet. This movement originated spontaneously among several dif­fer­ent Soviet nationalities in the early 1920s and achieved its first g­ reat success in Azerbaijan, where Latin replaced the Arabic script as the official alphabet for Azerbaijani in 1924. In a form of entrepreneurial “symbolic politics,” Azerbaijani activists and their allies lobbied throughout the country to place Latinization on the agenda of all the Soviet Turkic ­peoples. A major Turkological conference at Baku in early 1926 with representatives from Turkic p­ eoples across the USSR praised the Latinization proj­ect and encouraged its use as a universal model. Central Soviet authorities gave Latinization official backing in early 1927 and by mid-1928 all the Turkic republics had approved multiyear plans to design and deploy new Latin alphabets for their languages. With the advent of the Cultural Revolution in 1928, the deadline for implementation of Latinization was accelerated to the end of 1930. Latinization proved popu­lar among Turkic elites as an “indigenously sponsored proj­ect of cultural revolution” and a symbolic success for modernization during a de­cade when progressive reforms seemed to be stalled in many Muslim parts of the Soviet Union. Latinization served as a safe platform for pan-­Turkic sentiments and fraternity while officially serving Bolshevik goals of overcoming Eastern backwardness. The choice of Latin instead of Cyrillic was both a statement of international values and a veiled statement of hostility t­ oward Rus­sian culture.33 The Tatar cultural elite was divided on the question of Latinization, but most agreed with the novelist Galimjan Ibrahimov, who maintained that the reformed Arabic script was fully adequate and feared that a revolutionary switch to Latin would undermine publishing and literacy efforts in the Tatar Republic and create an opening for the Russification of Tatar culture.34 Despite his concerns, shortly ­after Moscow signaled its support for Latinization in early 1927, the Tatar Communist Party approved a plan to shift the entire language from the Arabic script to a Latin-­based alphabet known as Yangalif. In retrospect this was a poorly conceived and haphazardly implemented reform.35 What was intended to be a step forward for Tatar literacy had the

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opposite effect, as already literate p­ eople had to start over with the new alphabet. Shortages of Latin typewriters, typeface, and instructional materials meant that Tatar education and publishing w ­ ere sent into a tailspin. In a rare bright spot, Korbangaliev and his collaborators managed to issue a second edition of their 1927 dictionary using the Latin script in 1931.36 During the Cultural Revolution of 1928–32, the Soviet state deployed terror on a scale not seen since the Rus­sian civil war. Much of this vio­lence was associated with industrialization and collectivization, but an impor­tant component was the attack on members of Rus­sia’s prerevolutionary society whom the Soviet authorities now declared to be bourgeois enemies. In the borderlands, terror often had a national aspect. In 1929–30, a purge struck associates and colleagues of Mirsaid Sultan-­Galiev, a prominent Tatar communist who had fallen from Stalin’s ­favor and been arrested in 1923.37 Numerous highly placed Tatar po­liti­cal and intellectual figures ­were vilified, arrested, or imprisoned on charges of Sultangalievism, pan-­Turkism, pan-­Islamism, bourgeois Tatar nationalism, separatism, and other offenses. O ­ thers ­were purged in the early 1930s for association with another controversial Tatar figure, Garey Sagidullin. ­Those purged over the coming years included figures working in the newly dangerous sphere of culture, including some deeply involved in the fields of orthography and lexicography. Ibrahim Kuliev, one of Korbangaliev’s coauthors on the 1927 and 1931 dictionaries, was arrested in 1935 and perished in Karaganda the following year, though we do not know the specific charges he faced.38 Soviet terror disrupted the world of Tatar lexicography, even if Tatar dictionary makers ­were not a specific target. Moreover the fundamental re­ orientation of Soviet nationalities policy in late 1932 and early 1933 had fateful long-­term consequences for both Tatar lexicography and the nature of the Tatar language itself. In February 1933, an address by Soviet nationalities administrator Semën Dimanshtein to members of the nation’s top Latinization committee marked a new policy t­ oward the Rus­sian language, presented no longer as symbolic of tsarism and oppression, but as the language of revolution, Lenin, and Stalin. Marxist-­Leninist classics, Dimanshtein argued, must be translated with only the greatest accuracy into non-­Russian languages. He condemned the tendency of translators and lexicographers to seek native equivalents for both international words (proletariat, klass, sotsializm) and purely Rus­sian ones (sovet, piatiletka, kulak), signaling official sanction for Russification of non-­Russian languages.39 At a stroke, this close associate of Stalin set a new policy that would shape the basic vocabulary of written Tatar and other Soviet languages for de­cades to come. A few months ­later the Tatar Commissariat of Education linked Dimanshtein’s new lexicographical directives with

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the hunt for internal enemies: “The bourgeois nationalists, Sultangalievists, and Sagidullinists tried to keep the Tatar language in its old, rigid forms; they tried to preserve old Arabic and Persian terms not understood by the popu­lar masses; they revived dead words and used them to build new artificial terms; they tried to ignore the significance of the Rus­sian literary language for the development of the Tatar language; at the same time they strove ­towards internationalism, leaping over Soviet realities.”40 Meanwhile a movement emerged to replace the Latin script with Cyrillic, not only for Tatar but for all languages that had under­gone Latinization since the revolution. In contrast to the give-­and-­take that often characterized the Latinization movement, Cyrillization was closely associated with Stalinist top-­ down rule, a nationwide impulse t­ oward Russification, and a conscious effort to introduce varied orthographic conventions to the vari­ous Turkic languages in order to increase their mutual unintelligibility.41 It has been suggested that this new policy served to address some of the linguistic chaos introduced by Latinization into Tatar and other languages just a few years before, though order was slow to return.42 This chaos existed on many levels, not least in the realms of orthography and lexicography. Spelling of Tatar in the Arabic script was just becoming standardized at the turn of the ­century before facing major reforms in the 1920s, which in turn ­were soon supplanted by the Latin alphabet, itself abandoned just a de­cade ­later. The writing of dictionaries, which typically takes many years of careful and detailed work, simply could not keep up with the pace of change. The ­Great Purge of 1937–38, which destroyed much of the Tatar po­liti­cal and cultural elite, including nearly every­one who had been involved in language policy over the previous two de­cades, was close to a final blow.43 On the eve of World War II, Tatar lexicography was at a crossroads. Beginning in 1938 the Tatars had a new alphabet, but all their dictionaries w ­ ere designed for one of the two former outlawed alphabets. With the coming of purge, war, postwar reconstruction, and high Stalinism, serious lexicographical work was delayed for de­cades. ­After the death of Stalin in 1953 and the advent of de-­Stalinization, some major Tatar–­Russian and Russian–­Tatar dictionaries on the basis of the Cyrillic alphabet began to appear. One of the most impor­tant was the Tatar–­Russian dictionary published in 1966, which for many years was the most comprehensive dictionary of its type.44 The next two de­ cades saw gradual and cumulative work in Tatar lexicography, with publication of numerous thematic dictionaries, school editions, and longer explanatory dictionaries, including a three-­volume dictionary published in 1977–81 with usage examples drawn from Tatar lit­er­a­ture.45 ­These works established common orthographic conventions for Cyrillic Tatar and encouraged standardiza-

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tion of spelling and usage. The lexicographical work of the 1970s and 1980s coincides with development of a more self-­assertive historical self-­conception among the Tatar educated elite, an effort to renegotiate the terms of their membership in the larger polity on the basis of greater cultural autonomy and mutual re­spect between Rus­sians and non-­Russians.46 Despite the fine work of Tatar lexicographers in this period, their products bear unmistakable ideological features, required as they had been since the 1930s to promote and disseminate Soviet values. The usage examples in the 1966 dictionary include such phrases as “socialist competition,” “Communist and non-­party bloc,” “­under the leadership of the Communist Party,” “socialism is the first phase of communism,” and “trade ­unions are the school of communism.” More impor­tant is the way that postwar Tatar dictionaries reflected and promoted the massive vocabulary change that had long been ­under way in the Tatar lexicon. Many Arabic and Persian words that had been staples of Old Tatar and even modern Tatar in the 1910s and 1920s w ­ ere nowhere to be found in the dictionaries of the 1960s and l­ater de­cades, even as the presence of Rus­sian words had grown steadily. The Tatar–­Russian dictionary of 1966 provides a useful benchmark for assessing the state of the Tatar lexicon ­after a half ­century of Soviet power. This was a more comprehensive work than the 1927 dictionary, with some 35,700 single-­word entries compared to 10,600 in the earlier work.47 The number of words of all origins (Turkic, Arabic, Persian, Rus­sian) is larger in this work, though the proportions shifted significantly. In the relatively relaxed post-­Stalin atmosphere, the editors w ­ ere able to compile Arabic words without too much ideological trauma. Close to 1,500 Arabic words appear in the dictionary (over 3,700 counting forms with Turkic suffixes), including nearly 600 words common in older texts that the editors marked as “archaic” or “literary.” Overall, the number of words of Arabic origin, including suffixed forms, was double that of the 1927 dictionary. Despite this inclusiveness, we find that in some ways the lexicon represented by this dictionary had changed ­little since the late 1920s. If we return to our intrepid reader of Tukaĭ’s prerevolutionary texts, we find that this ­g iant work, the most comprehensive Tatar dictionary of the 1960s, performs only marginally better than Korbangaliev’s far shorter Tatar–­ Russian dictionary of 1927. Our reader would locate 90 ­percent of the words from Tukaĭ’s “modern” work of 1911 (up from 87 ­percent in the 1927 dictionary) and 59 ­percent of the words from Tukaĭ’s Old Tatar piece of 1906 (up from 53 ­percent). Texts written in Old Tatar clearly remained largely unrecoverable, even with a major reference work at hand. And the inability to find 10 ­percent of the words in Tukaĭ’s modernized and nonspecialized text points to significant linguistic distance between the written Tatar languages of the

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1910s and the 1960s. If we consider that our imaginary reader might be encountering Tukaĭ in the original Arabic script, rather than the Cyrillic alphabet of the 1966 dictionary, we are reminded that the task of comprehending ­these texts is even more daunting. Accumulating orthographic and lexical changes mean that Tatars born since the 1930s are largely unable to comprehend their prerevolutionary literary tradition without specialized training or effective and annotated translation into modern Cyrillic Tatar. Returning to the 1966 dictionary, we find a lexicon comprising 54 ­percent Tatar or other Turkic words, 11  ­percent Arabic, 4  ­percent Persian, and 32 ­percent Rus­sian.48 The impor­tant story h ­ ere is the vast expansion of Russian-­ based vocabulary. Close to one-­third of the “Tatar” words in this Tatar–­ Russian dictionary are actually Rus­sian, or Rus­sian words with Turkic suffixes. Comparing the 1927 and 1966 dictionaries, we find that the number of Arabic and Persian words had each doubled and Tatar/Turkic words had tripled, but the number of Rus­sian words had increased nearly eightfold. For better or worse, and what­ever the specific agendas of its compilers might have been, this snapshot shows how the Tatar language was officially presented in the mid1960s. Tamurbek Davletshin, a Tatar living in Germany in the 1970s, angrily described this flood of Rus­sian words as a state-­sponsored Russification strategy.49 Inclusion of Rus­sian in minority languages had been presented as a sign of pro­g ress and friendship of the ­peoples in official discourse since the 1930s, and lexicographers w ­ ere undoubtedly ­under ­g reat pressure on this score, especially in the Stalin years. At the same time, it is likely that the increased presence of Rus­sian in this dictionary also reflects a­ ctual usage of Rus­sian words in Tatar speech and writing as the result of widespread bilingualism among Tatars and their life experience in a Russian-­dominated social and po­ liti­cal environment. Yet the tale told by the vocabulary of the 1966 dictionary was not the only lexicological narrative available. In 1965 a dictionary appeared in Kazan bearing the weighty title “Arabic–­Tatar–­Russian Loanword Dictionary: Arabisms and Farsisms in the Language of Tatar Lit­er­a­ture.” It presented thousands of Arabic and Persian words and phrases that had once been commonplace in the Tatar literary language but had fallen into disuse. It provided spellings in the Cyrillic and Arabic alphabets (in Cyrillic alphabetical order) with definitions and usage examples from prerevolutionary Tatar lit­er­a­ture. The editors explained that ­g reat changes had occurred in the Tatar literary language over the previous thirty-­five to forty years as “a ­g reat number of formerly used Arabic-­Persian borrowings” had been supplanted by “Tatar, Rus­sian, and international words,” resulting in “significant difficulties” when reading older lit­er­a­ture.50 The three editors—­Kasim Khămzin, Mirza Măkhm/tov, and

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Gabbăs Săifullin—­all linguists and pedagogues of some note, had been working on this dictionary for up to a quarter ­century. Săifullin died in the early 1950s but his contribution was so substantial that his colleagues insisted his name appear on the title page, bracketed in the traditional black box. Although the editors framed the proj­ect in neutral and academic terms, their larger agenda was to preserve their nation’s cultural heritage. The Soviet period had seen major transformations in the Tatar language, including two changes of alphabet and revolutionary shifts in the Tatar lexicon away from Arabic and Persian and ­toward Rus­sian vocabulary. Săifullin and Khămzin, born in 1887 and 1895, respectively, and trained as teachers and scholars of the Tatar language, had seen ­every step of this pro­cess as it unfolded. The editors’ restrained comments on the creation of the dictionary provide some clues as to their experiences: “Preparation of material for the compilation of the pres­ent dictionary began in 1940 and on a small scale was completed in 1946; however due to vari­ous circumstances the publication of the dictionary was delayed.” It was only in 1957 that they received permission to complete and publish their work.51 The “vari­ous circumstances” doubtless included Săifullin’s detention in 1932–33 for anti-­Soviet agitation, perhaps related to alphabet or vocabulary questions, and Khămzin’s arrest in 1948 ­under Article 58, Section 11, of the Soviet penal code. Convicted for “nationalist agitation, slander of Soviet real­ ity and the VKP(b) [All-­Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)], and possession of nationalist lit­er­a­ture,” Khămzin was sentenced to ten years of corrective ­labor, much of which he had served before his rehabilitation in 1956. That Khămzin’s dictionary could receive official approval only a year l­ater may be due to his collaboration with Mirza Măkhm/tov, a relative straight arrow with an aviation and military background, apparently never arrested, who was then teaching Arabic at Kazan University and by 1958 would be appointed minister of education for the Tatar Republic, a position he held when the Arabic–­ Persian dictionary was published. More impor­ tant than Măkhm/tov’s biography or connections was the broader po­liti­cal context of de-­Stalinization and the reforms of Nikita Khrushchev, which permitted ­things that would have been impossible just a few years before. Khămzin passed away in 1976, but Măkhm/tov remained active at the highest levels of the Tatarstan educational apparatus through the 1990s (he died in 2008).52 Apparently trea­sured as a unique and symbolic link to the past, the dictionary was republished in the 1990s and in recent years has appeared online, minus the HTML-­unfriendly Arabic script spellings.53 Măkhm/tov wrote a new introduction for the 1993 edition, using the opportunity to speak bitterly about the purging of Arabic words from Tatar:

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Ignorant bureaucrats associated all that was Arabic with Islam, and not with the rich Muslim culture that exerted an enormous . . . ​influence in ancient times on the language of the Tatar ­people, the development of their culture, their writing system, book making, and education. . . . ​In the 1920s–30s, the national culture suffered a g­ reat loss: the alphabet was changed twice without the consent of the ­people, leaving the older generation illiterate in their native tongue, and the younger generation cut off from the rich lit­er­a­ture of the past. For many years religious lit­er­a­ ture was prohibited, lit­er­a­ture that the population reached out for thirstily, feeling a spiritual devastation ­after almost a ­century of persecution of the Muslim culture.54 The per­sis­tence of ­these scholars in the face of persecution reminds us of the highly politicized nature of lexicography in the Soviet years, the pushback that the center could receive from local ethnic elites, and the role played by many Tatar intellectuals from the 1920s onward as advocates for the reformed Arabic script, critics of Latinization, and defenders of Tatar culture from perceived and real enemies. How then can we gauge the scope, scale, and timing of the Tatar lexical revolution? Our comparison of the two Tukaĭ texts with the dictionaries of 1927 and 1966 confirms that ­there was a significant purge of Arabic and Persian vocabulary that rendered many prerevolutionary texts inaccessible to readers of ­today’s Tatar. Moreover, it seems likely that much of this cleaning out of the lexicon occurred before the 1930s. A careful comparison of the Khămzin–­ Măkhm/tov dictionary of mostly defunct prerevolutionary Arabic and Persian vocabulary with the Tatar–­Russian dictionary of 1966 provides one way of gauging the extent of the linguistic purge. By my count, the Khămzin–­ Măkhm/tov work includes 10,600 individual word entries and 837 multiword phrases. Leaving aside the phrases as well as a smattering of place names, we find 9,090 Arabic and Persian words that are not found in the 1966 Tatar–­ Russian dictionary, specifically 7,690 Arabic words, 1,089 Persian words, and 311 compounds of Arabic and Persian. While seeking to avoid a false precision, this provides a rough number of casualties in the war on Arabisms and Farsisms from the late nineteenth ­century to the pres­ent. One might object that both dictionaries are ideological proj­ects. Perhaps Khămzin and Măkhm/tov stacked their dictionary with words found in Arabic and Persian dictionaries but not actually used in Tatar? Their work does provide usage examples from prerevolutionary texts for about one-­third of the words in their dictionary, and the lexicon of Tukaĭ’s 1906 article includes many Arabic words for which Khămzin and Măkhm/tov lack such examples. In fact, the 1906 article

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includes several dozen Arabic words that the Khămzin–­Măkhm/tov volume lacks, suggesting a possibly broader scale for the lexical purge than our number of nearly 9,100 might suggest. On the other hand, it is also pos­si­ble that some additional Arabic or Persian words w ­ ere still being used in written or spoken Tatar in the 1960s—­perhaps recoverable by an ambitious researcher from old diaries or letters—­but ­were omitted from the 1966 dictionary for ideological reasons. As for the influx of Rus­sian words into Tatar, this phenomenon acquired a boost with the 1938 adoption of a Cyrillic Tatar alphabet containing all the letters used in Rus­sian, supplemented with six additional letters for Tatar sounds, permitting instant assimilation of Rus­sian words without the need to adjust their spelling. While the 1927 dictionary had included about 1,400 Rus­ sian words, the 1966 volume lists over 7,600—or more than 11,000 including Rus­sian words extended with Turkic suffixes. It bears noting that many of ­these words are originally not Rus­sian, but derive from other Eu­ro­pean languages and form part of the general international vocabulary, that many Tatar language reformers had seen the inclusion of international vocabulary as “progressive,” and that the influx of Rus­sian words into Tatar had begun on a small level centuries before 1917. This does not minimize the po­liti­cal and cultural salience of the Russification of Tatar, which in post-­Soviet Tatarstan is clearly evident even in spoken Tatar and is frequently cited as a major cultural prob­lem and a harmful legacy of the Soviet period.55 At the beginning of this essay we addressed the general linguistic and business decisions that face all lexicographers and their publishers, including the vari­ous dictionaries discussed ­here. In the case of dictionaries for the Tatars and by extension other minority nationalities of the Soviet Union, ­there are additional considerations. Tatar lexicographers had multiple and often conflicting agendas, some emerging from the Tatar cultural context or the larger Soviet and international Turkic world and ­others percolating down from Moscow: to improve literacy through orthographic and lexicological reform, to establish written Tatar as a regional Turkic language with its own characteristics, to purge words associated with religion and backwardness, to preserve words associated with Islamic civilization, to select an alphabet associated with modernity and civilization, to facilitate the “friendship of the ­peoples” and intercultural contact, to assist bilingualism and the learning of Rus­sian, to satisfy po­liti­cal overlords, and to preserve the integrity of the Tatar tongue. Several generations of Tatar lexicographers juggled t­ hese shifting imperatives as best they could, sometimes at ­g reat personal risk. Language reform among Tatars and other Turkic Muslim p­ eoples of the Rus­sian po­liti­cal space has striking similarities with the transformation of

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the Ottoman written language into modern Turkish.56 Turkey’s first president Mustafa Kemal Atatürk famously introduced the Latin alphabet in 1928 and promoted the replacement of Arabic and Persian words with Turkic or international variants, a reform so sweeping that ­today’s Turks view Ottoman as a foreign language largely unreadable without a dictionary. Atatürk’s reform is part of a longer pro­cess that resembles the story we have told h ­ ere. From the 1860s onward, Ottoman came u ­ nder fire from self-­consciously modernizing reformers as a language designed for multilingual elites, remote from the spoken vernacular, cluttered with arcane foreign vocabulary and grammar, and presented in a linguistically inadequate script. The remedies proposed for Ottoman resemble the Tatar case, although the exact timing and implementation differed: modification of the Arabic script to better reflect Turkish phonetics, removing Arabic and Persian words or grammatical forms, drawing new vocabulary from “our own” Turkic roots or international sources, and taking the radical step of Latinization. Mutual influence explains part of the overlap between the Ottoman and Rus­sian cases: u ­ ntil the 1920s Turkic intellectuals, writers, and po­liti­cal activists regularly crossed borders for reasons of education, pilgrimage, and exile, while their ideas circulated via books and newspapers.57 More importantly, language debates unfolded in parallel ­because of shared structural transformations from the nineteenth ­century onward: the move from an oral and manuscript tradition to printing, the development of mass literacy, the emergence of mass politics and revolutionary movements, the reform and collapse of old institutions, and intense discussions of identity and authenticity. Such developments prob­ably made the reform of Ottoman and Old Tatar inevitable, both the practical orthographic changes and the sweeping purges of “foreign” vocabulary in f­avor of words that truly “belonged.” The Turkish and Tatar language reforms began to diverge in the 1930s, as the authoritarian regime in each country charted its own course. Kemalist Turkey stabilized its new Latin alphabet and doubled down on the development of Turkic neologisms and nationalist historical narratives. Meanwhile, Tatar language reform in the Soviet Union was shunted for many de­cades down the path of Russification of both alphabet and vocabulary. In the end, once languages and dictionaries became a vital ­matter of state policy, it made a difference to whose empire one belonged.

Ch a p ter  8

Speaking Soviet with an Armenian Accent Literacy, Language Ideology, and Belonging in Early Soviet Armenia Jeremy Johnson

The Soviet Republic of Armenia was located along the southern border of the Soviet Union. Formed in the aftermath of the Armenian Genocide (1915–23) and a­ fter the collapse of the first in­de­pen­ dent Republic of Armenia (1918–20), early Soviet Armenia was a major site of humanitarian intervention, with international organ­izations like Near East Relief (NER), Save the C ­ hildren, Kvindelige Missions Arbejdere, and the Lord Mayor’s Fund operating camps, orphanages, and schools within its borders. Each organ­ization was guided by its own vision of civilization as it sought to save an “ancient” and “Eastern” Christian ­people (as well as their ancient language). Soviet reformers by contrast tried to “break the cake of custom” by creating citizens who ­were part of a larger international socialist proj­ect that rejected many of the traditions of the past.1 As Jo Laycock has shown in her contribution to this volume (chapter 6), humanitarian and Soviet actors did not always see eye to eye. Thus, refugees found themselves competing for resources controlled by state and nonstate actors in their new homeland. Multiple, opposing ideas about good citizenship circulated through the region, shaping the everyday experiences of Armenians, many of whom had been violently displaced from their homes in the Ottoman Empire during the Armenian Genocide. Soviet modernizers considered Armenians to be a “­people of the East,” which meant that Armenians ­were often seen through the same Orientalizing lenses as the national groups of Central Asia and subject 129

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to reforms built on Orientalist assumptions about the “backwardness” of the East (like the unveiling campaign). It also meant that the success of many of the early Soviet reforms in Armenia was mea­sured in comparison to other “­peoples of the East.” Furthermore, as a nation living both within and outside the Soviet Union, Armenians provoked anx­i­eties among state agents, who ­were conflicted about the utility of cross-­border connections and foreign ties.2 Soviet authorities benefited from the international aid that humanitarian actors in early Soviet Armenia received and attempted to promote the Soviet Armenian republic as a homeland, shape diaspora politics, and at times even encouraged the repatriation of Armenians to Armenia.3 However, individual ties abroad w ­ ere viewed as highly suspect and many Armenians w ­ ere punished and purged precisely for the connections that Soviet authorities considered beneficial to the larger international po­liti­cal proj­ect and the construction of a Soviet Armenian homeland. As with other diaspora populations in the Soviet Union, the po­liti­cal importance of international connections changed over time. However, in light of the mass displacement of the Armenian Genocide, the po­liti­cal power of the diaspora in multiple countries, and the impor­tant role played by Christian Armenians in Western narratives of international humanitarian intervention, Armenia’s position in the Soviet Union has always been unique.4 As Christian, “backward,” and displaced, Armenians ­were accommodated in par­tic­u­lar ways owing to both their liminal position in the geography of Soviet ­peoples and international efforts to ensure their survival. Over the course of the 1920s and 1930s the range of possibilities for good citizenship in Armenia shifted and contracted. In the first years of Soviet Armenia, Armenians learned to become good citizens by witnessing, adopting, and adapting language from a wide range of local authority figures, including international humanitarian actors and Soviet educators. As international actors left the region, often being forced to leave in the late 1920s, local Soviet educators increased their power in the republic by building and strengthening educational institutions and programs. Party officials made education mandatory for c­ hildren and launched multiple campaigns to eradicate illiteracy among adults. This educational push was interconnected with the development and promotion of a state-­standardized form of the Eastern Armenian language with a new Soviet orthography. Language standardization reduced the variability of language used in the public sphere and helped everyday citizens determine which language was approved by the state and which language good citizens should use. The Armenian language has historically played a complex and impor­tant role in the construction of ethnic and national identity both by groups identifying as Armenian and scholars (and ­others) trying to locate Armenianness.5

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Many major works of scholarship about nineteenth-­and twentieth-­century Armenian nationalisms and national identity ascribe agency to language and linguistic knowledge as key forces shaping not only the contours of the Armenian nation but also narratives of national survival.6 Discussions of language and linguistic identity are often po­liti­cally charged and this is particularly true in the Armenian case, where positions about language have been and currently are foregrounded in platforms of po­liti­cal and civic organ­izations. In con­temporary Armenia, debates about the possibility of undoing Soviet language reforms continue in the press and in scholarly journals.7 Soviet authorities ­were neither the first nor the last to co-­opt language into larger proj­ects of social, po­liti­cal, and economic change. Historian Claire Mouradian argues that the historical awareness of Armenian Soviet citizens of their own millennial literary heritage played an impor­tant role not only in the ways citizens reacted to linguistic interventions by the Soviet state but also in the way Soviet actors addressed Armenia as a unique case. For Mouradian, the trauma of the Genocide perpetuated a “quasi-­neurotic” obsession with narratives of survival. This obsession played a role in Soviet authorities’ ­legal accommodation of the Armenian language and the maintenance of the Armenian script across the history of the Soviet Union.8 ­Today, Armenia is often portrayed as an ethnically and linguistically homogeneous space.9 However, the linguistic and ethnic diversity of Armenia changed significantly across the twentieth c­ entury.10 Early Soviet Armenia included large national minority populations speaking numerous languages that did not always match with their nationality, including Armenian-­speaking Kurds, Russian-­speaking “Turks,”11 Armenian-­speaking Assyrians, and ­others. Armenians in Armenia spoke several dialects of Armenian as well as other regional languages.12 Some even spoke dialects that they themselves described as Armenian but w ­ ere unintelligible as such to Soviet language activists.13 Both international actors and Soviet authorities emphasized producing par­ tic­ul­ar types and styles of spoken and written language. International humanitarians considered the Armenian language and the Armenian script to be impor­tant aspects of the nation that needed to be preserved.14 Humanitarian actors often associated the Armenian language in general and the script specifically with a long Christian heritage. For humanitarian actors and international educators, Armenian subjects needed to speak and write Armenian in a par­tic­u­lar way that maintained links to their Christian heritage and the Armenian used by the church. During the 1920s, educational leaders, both humanitarian and Soviet, promoted interpretations of good citizenship that w ­ ere linked directly to notions of literacy and the ability to understand, use, and reproduce language marked by recognizable authority as ­either Christian or

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Soviet. Good citizens needed to produce language that could be differentiated by average Armenians from the language of the everyday and conform to the standards promoted by authorities. Citizens who adapted their speech and writing to t­hese standards gained access to impor­tant social, economic, and po­liti­cal resources. This chapter argues that over the course of the first two de­cades of Soviet rule, Armenians learned to speak Soviet, but with an Armenian accent that reflected the legacy of international humanitarian education and the par­tic­u­lar historical and linguistic circumstances of the Soviet Armenian nation-­building proj­ect.15

Humanitarian Interventions and the Language of Survival The Armenian Genocide prompted the mass migration and displacement of Armenians into the territory of the first Republic of Armenia. Many Armenians fled across the plains of Ararat, ending up in and around Yerevan. By the end of 1918, more than 300,000 displaced persons had flooded into in­de­ pen­dent Armenia, substantially increasing its population.16 The humanitarian crisis overwhelmed the fledgling state, and international relief from foreign governments and nongovernmental organ­izations played an impor­tant role in the survival of the population. While the primary aim of international actors was to provide material relief, ­there ­were also attempts to preserve and promote Christian civilization in the republic. In the displaced persons’ camps of in­de­pen­dent Armenia and early Soviet Armenia, international humanitarian actors from NER and Save the C ­ hildren operated educational programs and supported a limited number of schools teaching adult literacy.17 In ­these literacy programs, language was a site of intervention, and courses ­were designed to mold par­tic­u­lar kinds of ideal, Christian citizens. For example, their textbooks w ­ ere embedded with imperial and national values about traditions and Chris­tian­ity that ­were incommensurable with the ideals of the Soviet proj­ ect and the shifting Soviet multinational landscape. Nora Nercessian’s book The City of Orphans explores the tensions between Soviet reformers and American and Armenian Near East Relief workers in the Alexandropol/ Leninikan/Gyumri orphanage, which was home to more than 25,000 orphans displaced by the Genocide. The orphanage was established in 1919 on the grounds of a former Rus­sian imperial army base during the brief period of Armenia’s in­de­pen­dence.18 NER consolidated many regional orphanages that had operated between 1916 and 1920 to centralize their work with ­children. A ­ fter seizing power in Armenia in December 1920, Soviet au-

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thorities tried to redesign the camp’s educational and training courses to produce better Soviet citizens.19 In 1923 the Armenian commissar for enlightenment, Askanaz Mravyan, expressed his desire for the orphanage to train agrarian workers who ­were communally oriented and not “American in style.”20 When the orphanage’s leadership failed to follow his suggestions, Soviet authorities initially could do ­little to force their compliance. They valued the overall work and resources of NER b­ ecause at the time the Soviet state lacked the requisite local resources to supplant NER’s work in the orphanage. State officials also needed the foreign goods and cash that NER directed t­ oward regional authorities.21 In recognition of their subordinate position, Soviet authorities ultimately developed a more passive way to exert influence in the camp; they created secret communist boys’ organ­izations, or patkoms, to infiltrate the orphanages and hold clandestine eve­ning discussions of Soviet lit­er­ a­ture.22 Nercessian’s work shows the remarkable level of in­de­pen­dence that NER relief workers enjoyed in early Soviet Armenia and how they s­ haped orphans’ ideas about what it meant to be productive members of society. The educational leaders sought to imbue young Armenian refugees with Christian ethics and values.23 Though educational curricula ­were officially nonreligious, orphans prayed three times a day and a ­g iant church bell served as a central feature of the orphanage. Instructors, some of whom taught lessons directly from the Bible, also gave orphans ethical education with a wide range of Christian religious beliefs.24 Nercessian also details the severe physical punishments orphans experienced when they did not meet the demands of humanitarian workers, and how ­women’s bodies ­were policed by the humanitarians who objected to premarital sex and abortion on religious grounds.25 While local Soviet educational authorities nominally sought to change and control the camp’s educational curricula, most orphans ­were never exposed to significant amounts of Soviet citizenship training. Upon exiting the orphanage, many of them traveled to other Soviet Armenian communities and worked on farms and in factories, taking with them what they learned in the orphanage. In leaving the orphanage, humanitarian subjects became model citizens in the eyes of NER—­they ­were productive and in­de­pen­dent farmers, the products of reform and education.26 Many humanitarian actors also viewed Armenia and Armenians as in need of salvation and reform. The notion of saving Armenians extended to discussions of language. International humanitarians exoticized the Armenian script as ancient and primitive. Armenians in refugee camps both inside and outside the Soviet Union came into contact with Christian humanitarians who viewed the Armenian language as a language that must be preserved to save a starving,

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Figure 8.1. Handwritten letter from refugee boy reprinted in The Rec­ord of the Save the C ­ hildren Fund, April 15, 1922, p. 5.

ancient, and degraded Christian nation. Humanitarian actors, while sometimes working with resources provided by foreign governments, ­were usually working for nonstate organ­izations like NER. While many of ­these organ­ izations w ­ ere nonsectarian, their members would often promote Chris­tian­ity through education and they valued Armenians specifically b­ ecause they w ­ ere Christian subjects. As part of their efforts to “save” this backward and exotic Christian p­ eople, humanitarian educational programs often used pre-­Soviet Armenian orthography and privileged Western Armenian over Eastern. Publications of humanitarian organ­izations, in part designed to encourage further support from donor audiences, printed images of handwritten Armenian as a way to elevate Armenian civilization while si­mul­ta­neously othering and Orientalizing the population. For example, the Rec­ord of the Save the ­Children’s Fund published letters from Armenians in the refugee camps. One par­tic­u­lar letter appeared awkwardly inserted into the ­middle of a paragraph about locusts and plagues with the title “His Best Writing” (figure 8.1). The caption read, “This strange script is a portion of a letter of thanks written by an Armenian boy who had been helped by the Armenian Refugees (Lord Mayor’s) Fund.” The boy is never

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named and his letter remains untranslated in the text. The script itself is what the publication chose to emphasize.27 (The excerpt of the text printed in the journal is a letter thanking a Mr. Sarkis for a received letter.) Armenian refugees in Soviet Armenia often encountered humanitarian and missionary educators who saw their language and identity as directly connected to a Christian narrative ­until foreign-­run programs started to contract at the end of the 1920s. All foreign organ­izations ­were closed by 1933.28

Changing the Script: Soviet Language and Social Policies While some Christian humanitarians found it part of their religious mission to preserve the Armenian alphabet and old ways of spelling, Soviet authorities pursued a modification of the Armenian alphabet and an orthographic reform. In so d­ oing, they aimed to increase the accessibility of the written word and make written Armenian closer to the dialect of Eastern Armenian spoken in and around Yerevan before the Genocide and related refugee crisis.29 The choice of Eastern Armenian provided a continuum between the languages used by the in­de­pen­dent republic and the Soviet state. Soviet authorities implemented their first orthographic reform between 1922 and 1924, which changed the spellings of about 20–30 ­percent of words, removed graphemes and letters deemed to be redundant or confusing, and standardized spelling for foreign loanwords.30 The first orthographic reform was largely oriented around the concept of one letter, one sound. The spelling reform ignored many of the historical and etymological reasons for old spellings in ­favor of simplified forms. ­Silent letters w ­ ere removed from new spellings and some letters that w ­ ere seen as redundant w ­ ere removed entirely, including the ligature yev used as “and.”31 The shift to phonetic spelling was in line with other orthographic reforms elsewhere in the Soviet Union and early discussion of orthographic reform in Armenian was connected to the wider efforts to Latinize all languages of the Soviet Union.32 One of the arguments for purely phonetic spelling was that it would facilitate the transition to Latinization.33 While seemingly technical, the orthographic reform marked an early Soviet intervention in Armenia and set a sharp educative contrast to the language and literacy practices of humanitarian actors. However, the long and impor­ tant history of Armenian letters frustrated the Soviets’ desired outcomes. The ultimate decision to exclude Armenian from the broader Latinization campaign is disputed by Armenian historians of language, but most concur that national, Soviet, and humanitarian workers all recognized the importance

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of the alphabet in constructing an Armenian national identity. Soviet authorities used the alphabet to try and reach Armenians beyond the borders of Soviet Armenia.34 They promoted the reformed alphabet abroad, but it was not ­adopted in foreign Armenian communities largely b­ ecause leaders in the diaspora viewed it as an attempt to separate con­temporary Armenian from the language and spelling used by the Armenian Apostolic Church,35 the language and spelling that was also promoted by humanitarian educational actors. During the 1940s a second major orthographic reform occurred, designed to undo some of the changes of the first and bring modern Soviet orthography more in line with the orthography used by diaspora populations. The motivations for this change w ­ ere multiple, partially relating to the increased role of the Armenian Church in Armenian Soviet society during World War II and shifting ideas about Marrist linguistic theory.36 Additionally, the initial language reform proved difficult to assimilate even among state officials. Texts produced between 1920 and 1940 show that the authors strug­gled with the first orthographic change and regularly made ­mistakes b­ ecause they had learned to read and write in the old, pre-­Soviet orthography.37 Overall, both Armenian orthographic reforms ­were conservative by Soviet standards. In contrast to many “languages of the East,” Armenian did not undergo a script change and the orthographic changes of the early Soviet period did not create a comparably radical disconnect and textual-­material rupture from the print culture of the pre-­Soviet period. The Armenian orthographic changes did not render literate populations illiterate in the eyes of the state nor did they require mass reeducation for the adult population. The spelling reforms w ­ ere mostly quite regular and the reduction of graphemes did not prevent literate readers from easily understanding newly written forms (albeit, with lots of variation in spelling).38 The spread of literacy in the new orthography was primarily aimed at the Armenian population that could not already read and write. But the Armenian script was not reserved exclusively for Armenians. Armenian educators expanded the role of their script in the region by using it to develop an alphabet between 1922 and 1927 for Kurdish minority populations that had previously used Arabic script.39

Cultivating Belonging to Soviet Armenia through Language Given that Armenians ­were allowed to maintain their script (albeit in modified form) and did not experience the Latinization campaigns that many other “Eastern” non-­Russian ­peoples underwent, some state language reformers and

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activists sought a radical break in the everyday to reshape the terms and language of civic life and citizenship in Armenia.40 The translatability of the Soviet proj­ect depended in part on the ability of Soviet citizens to recognize words and ideas associated with Sovietization and Sovietness in Armenian contexts. Using new language and new orthography was one way citizens expressed belonging to the Soviet Armenian proj­ect. In a largely illiterate population, public readings of circulating materials also helped make socialist ideas about basic social categories and everyday life reforms intelligible. Among the preferred types of texts for public readings ­were dramatic scripts.41 The basic dialogue of scripts provided an easy way for party leaders to transmit values through the pro­cess of reading. The Soviet Armenian citizen was not only being ­shaped by discourses from above but also being constructed by the experience of the classroom from below. This method of information sharing also created bonds between literate and illiterate groups as citizens collectively learned about socialism through a pedagogy that emphasized oral transmission.42 The performative nature of texts that w ­ ere intended to be read aloud is evident in both their composition and the detailed instructions that sometimes accompanied them. Readers w ­ ere not the only target audience of the texts, as many texts w ­ ere designed for oral transmission. Performative texts spoke to multiple audiences, and performers played a ­g reat role in shaping the interpretation of the text. A dramatic pre­ sen­ta­tion in a factory reading room by a leader in the factory attracted a dif­ fer­ent response than would a reading aloud of the same text by a semiliterate farmer in a village library. Both acts circulated the text and its messages among dif­fer­ent audiences. However, individual reading in semipublic and private spaces could feasibly have a wider range of interpretation. The farther away from central state authorities the performative text was read, the greater the possibility for multiple interpretations. Armenian literacy activists w ­ ere aware of this possibility and gave reading rooms specific instructions about how to address misinterpretation and misunderstanding among smaller groups of illiterate and semiliterate students.43 Producing new forms of Soviet-­stylized language allowed access to better resources within party and governmental organ­izations. ­Children’s and ­women’s magazines regularly promoted the benefits of literacy and adopting Soviet language. In the Armenian ­children’s magazine Hoktemberik (­Little October) most issues featured literacy corners that promoted the learning of specific Soviet Armenian terms like koltntesowt‘yown (collective farm) and heghap‘oxowt‘yown (revolution) alongside images of cats and animals. Additionally, stories of success, such as a child helping a farmer solve an agrarian prob­ lem, usually included dialogue where the child performed new Soviet

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language.44 In Yerevan, the ­women’s sector regularly espoused in the pages of Hayastani Ashkhatavoruhi (Workerwoman of Armenia) the benefits of literacy and speaking well (in Soviet terms).45 Conversely, archival evidence shows that w ­ omen activists w ­ ere regularly fired for not being able to speak well and that using the terms of the Soviet proj­ect with authority was impor­tant for any paid party position.46 While Soviet authorities sought to fashion new modes of speaking, new vocabularies for daily life, and new forms of address and redress, they also sought to preserve the Armenian language and culture.47 Individual terms became sites for debating the merits of renationalization in the face of Soviet homogenization. Even the word for Soviet was debated and officially changed twice over the first two de­cades of Soviet rule. At first, the Council of ­People’s Commissars’ terminological committee, which included a range of party members, linguists, and other scholars, assigned core Soviet ideas, organ­ izations, and institutions historical Armenian translations or words derived from Armenian roots.48 For example, they approved older Armenian forms for words such as “revolution,” “Soviet,” “republic,” and “constitution.” Many of ­these terms w ­ ere then “internationalized” in the 1940s with most international forms derived from their Rus­sian equivalents.49 Soviet stylized language and new vocabularies meant that to access state discourses, citizens needed to learn how to speak Soviet. However, at the same time, Soviet authorities w ­ ere trying to reach as many ­people as pos­si­ble. ­These contradictory goals worked against each other as Soviet discourses w ­ ere necessarily alien but meant to be intelligible to the masses. The use of local registers for the implementation of education proj­ects meant that the initial terms of the Soviet proj­ect w ­ ere translated but also underwent a significant pro­cess of transduction, remaking of meanings across a landscape of varied circumstances. Activists working with educators in Armenia constantly complained about slippage and “mistranslation.”50 Vocabularies of reform needed to be legible to local illiterate and semiliterate populations. As such, educators and literacy activists w ­ ere advised to use “­simple language.”51 Reports about textbooks and magazines for reading rooms also noted the importance of s­ imple language for the spread of Soviet information in Armenia. But this s­ imple language did not always convey the intended meanings and ­those working with illiterate and semiliterate ­people expressed anx­i­eties about the possibility of dif­fer­ent kinds of interpretation. The politics of language and word choice ­were complicated by two seemingly contradictory goals of language reformers. One was to use language as a break from the past, to create new social forms through new language. The other was to use as much of the existent Armenian historical and cultural forms in language so messages could be easily interpreted by local populations.

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The orthographic reform was acknowledged as a break from religious institutions’ control over Armenian print culture. No longer would Armenian be spelled as it was in the gospels. The ancient alphabet of Armenia was modified to meet new modernizing demands of the Soviet Union and, in part, to improve the retention of literacy practices. Accompanying this break was a shift in the vocabularies of authority to new forms of language and pre­sen­ta­ tion as part of new forms of citizenship. The creation of new vocabularies meant that many of the terms of the Soviet proj­ect ­were at least initially alien to ­those who encountered them. Words shifted and changed across the early Soviet period as language builders sought to negotiate between historic forms and new ideas. The changes in language w ­ ere happening at a time when the population of Soviet Armenia was shifting from being largely illiterate to achieving mass literacy. Between 1922 and 1936, official statistics showed literacy in Armenia increasing from 11 ­percent to nearly 90 ­percent.52 State campaigns to eradicate illiteracy ­were impor­tant for the spread of new po­liti­cal, social, and cultural ideas through language. As part of the larger campaigns to eradicate illiteracy, Down with Illiteracy Socie­ties ­were established all over the Soviet Union.53 The establishment of the Down with Illiteracy Society in Soviet Armenia involved incorporating pre-­Soviet institutions associated with literacy while trying to minimize the influence of religious and humanitarian legacies. The society was designed to make its goals legible to Armenian literacy activists who ­were adjusting their own approaches to language and literacy education to reflect the ideological framings of Sovietization. Key ele­ments of the society—­cells, reading corners, and reading rooms—­were given new Armenian names and added to existing local structures when available. Reading curricula ­were adapted from a combination of available pieces of print material, pre-­Soviet and, at times, humanitarian texts alongside new Soviet texts. Print materials in Soviet Armenia ­were produced by both Soviet and non-­ Soviet actors.54 Early print socialism was ­shaped in part by the material constraints on what was available. Ideas about language and alphabets on the one hand and the value and scarcity of printed materials on the other s­ haped who got to read what and what was available for literacy activists to use in their classrooms. Many ­factors influenced the specific activities of the Down with Illiteracy Society in Armenia—­the translation, structures, key terms, and goals at a time when local populations, themselves interpreting and learning the key terms of the larger Soviet proj­ect, often ­shaped what Soviet authorities could do in a literacy classroom and how they could do it. In its attempt to spread literacy, the Down with Illiteracy Society often worked with local definitions or dialects of literacy. Literacy in a con­temporary

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context is often considered to be exclusively orthographic literacy. And while many activists in Soviet Armenia primarily deployed notions of literacy and illiteracy that w ­ ere orthographic, this was not always the case. When establishing reading rooms around Armenia, the members sought to find “the specific ele­ments inhibiting the elimination of illiteracy in Armenia and mea­sures to eliminate t­ hese obstacles.”55 The first step was to find illiterate and semiliterate ­people in the local soviets and determine what was preventing their literacy. The illiteracy of ­people between the ages of sixteen and thirty was of par­tic­u­lar concern. Individual regions established cells, and the cells opened reading corners and reading rooms. Soviet authorities often deployed the category of illiterate or half-­literate in a way that indicated not only an inability to read but po­liti­cal ignorance or lack of Soviet legibility as citizens. Po­liti­cal literacy was often conflated with orthographic literacy and authorities actively produced discourses of illiteracy as a way of critiquing the failure of citizens to participate in the Soviet proj­ect. The malleability of literacy and the commensurability of many types of illiteracy ­were key for the translation of the concept into Armenian contexts, where existing nationalizing literacy programs of the imperial and in­ de­pen­dence periods did not imbue the kinds of po­liti­cal knowledge and civic discourses that Soviet authorities wished to spread through literacy. The connections between language and literacy and the per­for­mance of good citizenship meant that to learn to become literate was to be able to produce sanctioned speech patterns and language that identified a citizen as Soviet. In 1926, the Down with Illiteracy Society asked leaders in Armenia to compose a list of the kinds of lit­er­a­ture they needed, specifically asking if Armenia had the capacity to meet the printing needs of the local socie­ties in terms of both printing presses that could produce materials in all of the local languages and financial resources. The society also asked for copies of locally produced brochures and pamphlets from the organ­ization.56 In response to this request, the Down with Illiteracy Society sent a list of materials in Armenian, Rus­sian, and Azeri/Turkish (in both the Arabic script and the Soviet Union’s New Turkish Alphabet). The list of Armenian publications did not survive in the archival rec­ord, but notes from regional heads of the society show that most of the materials requested w ­ ere already in use. In 1924, the Down with Illiteracy Society sought to rewrite the primers used in courses for illiterates (Graget) and semiliterates (Ashkhatank). For some, the materials ­were not “Soviet” enough. Several complaints from students in classes for semiliterates asked, “Where can we learn about Leninism and Lenin if it is not in the curriculum? How ­will we ever solve the prob­lems of po­liti­cal illiteracy if we ­don’t have books on Lenin in Armenian?”57 The range of ideological concerns re-

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flected in the letters to the Down with Illiteracy Society shows the extent to which citizens w ­ ere using the terms of the Soviet proj­ect to critique its shortcomings. Working within the modernizing proj­ect, Armenians sought to gain resources to be better Soviet citizens in Armenian contexts. Ronald Grigor Suny sees the crux of the prob­lem of translation of the Soviet proj­ect as the conflict between renationalization and the effects of communist modernization.58 In its attempts to create Soviet citizens, the Soviet Union created a discursive and dialectical space for the dialogic emergence of Soviet Armenian forms, many of which persist into the pres­ent. In the w ­ omen’s magazine Hayastani Ashkhatavoruhi, which was used as a primary text for many reading rooms in Armenia, an article was published in 1924, “In’ch piti pahi iren kiny’ amsakani jhamanak” (What should a w ­ oman do during her time of the month?). This article was specifically designed to shape the way ­women discussed their bodies and it introduced terms that allowed ­women to speak about their bodies in ways that w ­ ere marked as new, scientific, and Soviet. At the same time, the choice of terminology shows the negotiation and accommodation of the Armenian nation-­building proj­ect. The article included a variety of descriptive facts about menstruation as a normal event that happens in the lives of w ­ omen ­every three to four weeks for three days between the ages of eleven to thirteen and forty to forty-­five. The article was written in s­ imple language but with an emphasis on health, encouraging regular bathing and cleanliness.59 Its author is unknown, but it was likely one of the magazine’s staff members. The article encouraged w ­ omen to talk to their doctors about menstruation and the way to maintain one’s reproductive health while dismissing myths about the uncleanliness of menstruating ­women. It also mentions period huts and argues that w ­ omen in the mountains no longer need to visit them during menstruation. The article included a diagram of ­women’s reproductive organs, labeling the ovaries, fallopian tubes, and the uterus (figure 8.2).60 The words used in this diagram would not have been familiar to most ­women reading the magazine, as complaints from members of the ­Women’s Sector of the Communist Party indicated that most ­women did not know words for their reproductive organs or knew “unscientific” words. The promotion of ­these words and the suggestion that ­women through literacy could have domain over their own bodies was an impor­tant way for Soviet authorities to distinguish citizenship discourses for ­women from ­those of socially conservative international humanitarian actors.61 Figure 8.2 can also be read as part of the early efforts of Soviet actors to contruct regimes of public health and hygiene through biomedical propaganda. Paula Michaels, a historian who specializes in Central Asia, argues that Soviet authorities’ efforts to spread biomedical propaganda

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Figure 8.2. Diagram of ­women’s reproductive organs with new Soviet terms printed in Hayastani Ashakhatavoruhi, September 1924.

­ ere intimately linked to Soviet po­liti­cal and economic interventions and exw ploitation in non-­Russian space.62 However, in Armenia biomedical propaganda also served as a way to distinguish the modernization practices of Soviet authorities from t­ hose of Christian missionaries and other international humanitarian actors. Teachers in the ­Women’s Sector ­were advised to use the diagram and other forms of biomedical propaganda in their classes for semiliterates as well as in their classes for illiterate ­women. The words on the diagram ­were a mix of historic medical terms, and some but not all of them w ­ ere literal translations of Rus­sian terms. Learning ­these new terms was part of the overall pro­cess of becoming literate as a good Soviet Armenian w ­ oman citizen and reflect the linguistic hybridity of early Soviet Armenian citizenship regimes. Female bodies ­were literally inscribed with new meanings in the literacy classrooms, where knowing anatomy became a part of the citizen-­building literacy efforts. In turn, notions of literacy for ­women in Armenia ­were in part ­shaped by the ability to know information about one’s body as a w ­ oman and to reproduce that information as Soviet citizens.

Conclusion The new terms of the Soviet proj­ect ­shaped the experience of everyday citizenship. In Armenia the terms of the Soviet proj­ect ­were produced in concert with the near past. Instead of one clean radical break with the past, Armenians

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experienced a prolonged negotiation of Sovietization and its local terms. The recent work of Maike Lehmann has shown the ways in which Soviet Armenia demonstrates a kind of “Soviet hybrid,” one which incorporated national and socialist ele­ments. While hybrid forms of Sovietness existed elsewhere, Armenia’s unique geopo­liti­cal location and influential international diaspora allowed for more flexibility at the local level with the terms of the Soviet proj­ ect. Armenia’s hybridity was experienced by Soviet citizens as they expressed affective ties and belonging to the overall Soviet proj­ect and to their Armenian homeland. Lehmann describes this hybridity as “Apricot Socialism” and a post–­World War II phenomenon.63 And indeed the postwar period led to dif­ fer­ent trajectories of change, but it is also clear that the prewar accommodation of both national and socialist forms created the foundation for Armenia’s postwar Soviet trajectory. Through local interpretations of the Soviet proj­ect, Armenian citizens learned to speak Soviet with an Armenian accent, one of many accents across the multilingual landscape of Soviet revolutionary change. Ideas about Soviet modernity ­were inflected with the valences of reproduction and interpretation that meant that the terms of modernity w ­ ere never fixed.64 Discussions of Soviet modernity have always been multiple, in part ­because the translation of the terms of the Soviet proj­ect was never stable and, even in seemingly homogeneous cultural forms, the languages of socialism ­were being s­ haped dialogically by speakers with dif­fer­ent historical, po­liti­cal, and linguistic identities that ­were often in flux. Early Soviet Armenia, laying along the Soviet border and populated by refugees with the recent memory of genocide may not be exemplary of the general Soviet experience at the time; however, it is a useful case study for exploring the hybridity of Soviet experience and the ways in which language became an impor­tant site of contestation and reform in building a multinational Soviet state.

Ch a p ter  9

Making a Home for the Soviet ­People World War II and the Origins of the Sovetskii Narod Anna Whittington

In 1935, Nikolai Bukharin, a top-­ranking Bolshevik leader, published an article in Izvestiia celebrating the emergence of a unified Soviet ­people. He emphasized that, in the face of a growing fascist threat abroad, the country was increasingly unified along two critical lines: class and ethnicity. Together, Bukharin argued, “the unity of goals, unity of leadership, the unity of a planned economy, the colossal growth of a­ ctual connections—­ economic and cultural—­all of this leads to the unusual consolidation of ­peoples. . . . ​In this manner, a new real­ity is being raised up—­the heroic Soviet ­people.”1 The page layout (figure 9.1) underscored the emphasis on diversity. Along the left side of the page u ­ nder the headline, “­People of our country,” a series of portraits featured ­people in national dress representing a wide range of economic sectors. Works by the Ukrainian poet Maksym Ryl’s’kyi and Russian-­Jewish poet Iosif Utkin and a photo of Samarkand’s Shah­i Zinda mausoleum reminded readers of the country’s diverse geography. An essay by academic I. P. Pavlov declared the Soviet Union a homeland for all its citizens. ­There can be ­little doubt about intentionality: the layout clearly celebrated both the unity and diversity of the Soviet Union. The motifs are familiar to anyone versed in Soviet ideological writing, but Bukharin’s essay was one of the earliest explorations of the concept of the Soviet ­people (sovetskii narod). It represented a new articulation of the ever-­changing relationship between 147

Figure 9.1. Izvestiia, July 6, 1935, p. 3.



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nation and empire, a subject long discussed by scholars of Rus­sian and Soviet history.2 On one hand, the concept of the Soviet ­people stood at the heart of a civic, nationlike identity borne of the rhe­toric of equality and commonality. On the other hand, the repeated emphasis on the Soviet Union’s diversity testified, if unintentionally, to the Soviet Union’s imperial character, particularly in light of per­sis­tent inequalities between citizens. The civic identity embedded in the new concept of the Soviet p­ eople si­mul­ta­neously recognized individuals’ ethnicities and affirmed their belonging in a unified, Soviet collective. Leaders sought to harmonize ethnic and civic forms of belonging, particularly as the threat of war necessitated social cohesion. World War II accelerated this new articulation of Soviet identity. The anticipation of war, evident in the press from the mid-1930s, created the ideological necessity of a more unified society. This intensified ­after the Soviet Union entered the war, when conditions on the front and in the rear brought citizens together and implicitly fostered, if not always successfully, a sense of common community and belonging that extended beyond class and ethnicity. The concept of the Soviet p­ eople and citizens’ everyday experiences combined to promote an affective, civic identity. This identity, far from an empty ideological construct, was negotiated by leaders and citizens alike, shedding light on how World War II contributed to the formation of a distinctly Soviet identity.

Soviet ­Peoples, Soviet ­People: State Patriotism, Unity, and Identity before World War II Bukharin’s 1935 piece emphasized the Soviet Union’s unique, revolutionary approach to class and power. With the proletariat and collectivized peasantry at its helm, the Soviet p­ eople distinguished itself from both its historical antecedents and its contemporaries. This multiethnic collective, Bukharin declared, constituted a “heroic p­ eople”: “not slaves, not serfs, not hired slaves of capital. They are ‘young masters of the country,’ creators, organizers, p­ eople who fight with the ele­ments, with enemies—[they are] stubborn and per­sis­tent, used to breaking down all barriers, courageous, extraordinarily energetic, and [­people] who know how to bear scars and who know how to win.”3 According to Bukharin, this unique historical phenomenon bridged ethnic and class divides, unifying a diverse citizenry through devotion to the state and commitment to its princi­ples. Despite explicit attempts to disassociate the Soviet pres­ent from Rus­sia’s imperial past, the vision of a multiethnic and unified state that emerged in the

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1930s was not without historical pre­ce­dent. The Rus­sian Empire, itself led by a predominantly Rus­sian but nevertheless multiethnic nobility, offered limited opportunities for non-­Russians to participate in governance and civic life while retaining distinct linguistic, cultural, and religious identities. The military represented an especially cogent source of civic identity and provided perhaps the clearest opportunity for integration (albeit partial) of non-­Russian male subjects. This intensified ­after the 1874 decree mandating “universal” conscription, though many citizens ­were excluded from eligibility.4 More often, the imperial regime attempted to foster multiethnic loyalty by extending privileges ­toward favored groups (often at the expense of o ­ thers), a practice Valerie Kivelson and Ronald Grigor Suny have called “a trademark of empire.”5 Privileges took many forms across time and space. In the eigh­teenth ­century, Don Cossacks and Bashkirs ­were granted limited cultural and po­liti­cal autonomy in exchange for loyalty as a means of pacification. To hedge against Swedish influence in the G ­ rand Duchy of Finland, Alexander II granted special status to the Finnish language in 1863. Selective religious pluralism represented another source of multiethnic integration.6 Individuals, too, could benefit from special privileges, especially at times of imperial expansion. As Ian Campbell notes, the weakness of the state created opportunities for (Kazakh) intermediaries to enter imperial bureaucracies as purveyors of local knowledge, especially in the nineteenth c­ entury.7 The fledgling Soviet state fostered similar nodes of multiethnic loyalty through a more standardized approach to nationalities policy, particularly in its first two de­cades. In order to cultivate allegiance and enhance understanding of Marxist-­Leninist ideology, early policies promoted ethnic minorities through a quota-­based system (korenizatsiia, or indigenization) that guaranteed po­liti­cal repre­sen­ta­tion, native language education, and cultural development.8 Bukharin also drew explic­itly on the consensus that the October Revolution had established a new economic order, po­liti­cal system, and society. The canonical History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (“The Short Course”) declared that the revolution had “ushered in a new era in the history of mankind” and had “created the conditions for the development of Socialist construction.”9 Lit­er­a­ture and ideological discourses emphasized the revolution’s transformative effect on individuals, too. The “new Soviet person” (novyi sovetskii chelovek) had been freed from cap­it­ al­ist servitude to become a class-­ conscious, hardworking individual with a bright ­f uture ­under communism.10 In collaboration with local elites, leaders embarked on a broad agenda to transform society and individuals, focusing especially on l­ abor, education, and forging a modern, Soviet way of life. Schools taught native-­language literacy and introduced new values and princi­ples.11 Theater, film, and the arts ­were



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mobilized for similar purposes.12 Atheist activists worked to reduce the influence of religion.13 Collectivization and modernization transformed agricultural production and peasant life in the countryside.14 In cities, the opening of factories and industrial worksites forged a proletariat that included w ­ omen, peasants, and minorities previously excluded from the working class.15 Central Asian elites reformed w ­ omen’s dress and banned “feudal” practices like underage marriage and polygamy.16 Above all, ideology emphasized socialist values of collectivism over immoral, cap­it­ al­ist individualism.17 Yet despite reference to the collective, ideology rarely conceived of the entire body politic as such. Instead, ideological writing underscored division and spoke of citizens as members of social classes (“the working ­people,” “peasants,” “proletariat”) and individual ethnonational groups. Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 critically altered the ideological picture. With the looming fascist threat in Germany, the Soviet Union could not afford the divisive appearance of collectivization, class warfare, and korenizatsiia. State and party elites began to craft a more unifying ideology and shared identity that would bring together all citizens.18 It was in this context that the term “Soviet p­ eople” (sovetskii narod) began to circulate regularly. Though the term became a banal part of postwar ideological discourse, it was almost completely absent in the press before the mid-1930s. A nearly identical pattern of use in two central newspapers, Pravda and Izvestiia, suggests intention rather than coincidence (see figure 9.2). “Narod,” a collective noun of Slavic origin, offered a vague image of a unified collective, untainted by the ideological baggage and bourgeois connotations of the Latin-­derived “nation” (natsiia), which leaders understood as temporary. The Soviet ­people suggested a naturally amalgamated society that shared a common origin, i­magined kinship, a commitment to Marxist princi­ples, and a communist ­f uture.19 Prewar invocations of the Soviet p­ eople w ­ ere rooted in notions of state patriotism and a desire to form a stronger, affective bond to the state when war was imminent.20 The emergence of the term coincided with a broader emphasis on equality, unity, and common values. At the Seventeenth Party Congress (1934), Stalin asserted that the country was on the verge of becoming a classless society.21 The 1936 Constitution rhetorically symbolized this achievement by guaranteeing complete equality and establishing universal citizenship, at least in theory. The Short Course saw this as a “new stage of development,” marked by the “completion of the building of a Socialist society and the gradual transition to Communist society.”22 In 1936, state authorities published and distributed a draft constitution for citizens to read and offer feedback, a pro­cess that newspapers hailed as an integral part of the document’s connection to the populace.23 Millions attended

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Figure 9.2. “Soviet ­people” in Pravda and Izvestiia, 1925–1991. The term “sovetskii narod” (in Cyrillic, in quotation marks) was searched from January 1 to December 31 for each year. Numbers represent the number of pages in which the term appears for each publication. Thus, if the term was used multiple times on a single page, it is counted only once. The term counts both singular and plural in all cases. Although based on imperfect text recognition, data reflect approximate usage over time. Retrieved March 2017, from East View Information Ser­vices, dlib​.­eastview​.­com.

local meetings and sent letters to newspapers, the party, and the state. Letter-­ writers focused on their rights and responsibilities, a key point of interaction between state and citizen.24 Many ­adopted the language of citizenship to signal allegiance, exemplified in the words of a Jewish factory technician in Moscow: “­There can be no question about the fact that I, as a citizen of the world’s first socialist state, am happy at the mere thought that I am participating in the discussion of the draft of the G ­ reat Stalin Constitution of the USSR.”25 Collective farmers and factory workers, often in barely literate, misspelled Rus­ sian (and other languages), expressed pride as rights-­bearing citizens, even as they complained about the insufficient ­legal protections.26 Although letters should not be necessarily taken at face value, the passionate self-­identification as citizens should not be dismissed out of hand, particularly since criticism could expose letter-­writers to persecution. Their letters offer a glimpse into the state’s early success in cultivating civic identification, a sense of belonging that transcended geographic, class, and ethnic bound­aries and was rooted in participation—­here, through letter writing—in civic life.27 The specter of war amplified this emergent identity by uniting citizens against “enemies of the p­ eople,” a phrase that gained significant traction in the central press in the late 1930s, quickly overtaking the hitherto preferred “class ­enemy” (see figure 9.3). Bukharin’s 1935 piece, for instance, specifically described fascism as an existential threat to the Soviet ­people. By the late 1930s,



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1,600 Enemy of the People(s) Class Enemy

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Soviet People 800

400

52

50

19

48

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46

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44

19

42

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40

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36

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Figure 9.3. “­Enemy of the ­People” (vrag naroda), “class ­enemy” (klassovoi vrag), “Soviet p ­ eople” (sovetskii narod), 1918–1953. Data mea­sure the number of pages each term appears in Pravda and Izvestiia combined. Each term was searched in quotations and Cyrillic for each calendar year; references include singular and plural in all cases. Retrieved March 2017, from East View Information Ser­vices, dlib​.­eastview​.­com.

internal and external enemies alike w ­ ere painted in broad strokes as “fascists” who ­were plotting the country’s demise. In discussions of t­ rials of accused enemies, ultimately including Bukharin himself, newspapers described a shared fiery hatred as the Soviet p­ eople, “as one,” banded together to destroy all enemies.28 This rhe­toric explic­itly excluded enemies from the body politic and justified their brutal elimination, in which citizens w ­ ere expected to participate. Demonstrations of hatred, Serhy Yekelchyk notes, formed “a core component of ideal Soviet identity” and enabled the state to gauge popu­lar commitment to its goals.29 Military tensions heightened the sense of urgency and deepened the connection between World War II and the Soviet p­ eople. In the wake of growing tensions along the Soviet-­Japanese border in 1938 and the change from selective to universal conscription in 1939, the press hailed the military as a Soviet institution par excellence. A 1939 article in Istoricheskii zhurnal emphasized the connection between the Red Army and citizens: “The po­liti­cal and moral unity of our ­g reat country’s ­peoples [narody] is especially reflected in the Red Army. The Soviet p­ eople and its army are a single w ­ hole, unified by a single aspiration ­toward building communism, t­ oward defending hard-­won socialism. The Soviet p­ eople knows no higher duty than to protect the socialist fatherland [otechestvo].” The article also emphasized the public’s emotional bond to the military: “The Red Army is made strong by both the revolutionary enthusiasm of its soldiers, who are inspired with love for the motherland and by ideas of proletarian internationalism, and it is made strong by the fervent love of the entire Soviet p­ eople.”30 One soldier serving in 1939 recalled general feelings of pride despite vari­ous hardships: “We ­were soldiers of the first socialist

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state in the world, which still lacked a lot, and this state was striving to eliminate the predatory sharks of imperialism.”31 As war threatened, the state embarked on a series of homogenizing policies that further contributed to the nationlike qualities of the populace, constituting what Terry Martin describes as a “revised nationalities policy.”32 Purges, deportations, and expulsions of ­enemy ­peoples, particularly in 1937– 38 and during World War II, targeted specific minorities.33 Leaders used the threat of war to justify what scholars have described as a resurgence of Rus­ sian culture, history, and language. Though the state mandated native-­language education u ­ ntil 1958, it introduced mandatory study of Rus­sian in all schools beginning in 1938, in part to prepare non-­Russians for military ser­vice.34 To further facilitate Rus­sian proficiency in u ­ nion and autonomous republics, special state commissions replaced the Latin alphabets a­ dopted in the 1920s with modified Cyrillic scripts between 1936 and the early 1940s.35 Rus­sians had much to gain from t­ hese policies. By the late 1930s, the press regularly celebrated the Rus­sian ­people as the central figures of state and society. This was exemplified in a 1937 Pravda editorial, which opened by noting how citizens had “defended and strengthened their country.” The article then focused on pi­lots involved in a recent transarctic mission: “The echo of the heroic deeds, which reverberates from one end of the country to another, gives birth to new, modest, and noble heroes, the sons of the ­Great Rus­sian ­people.”36 Another editorial similarly alternated between the “heroic [bogatyrskii] power of the Soviet p­ eople” and the “glorious traditions of the Rus­sian p­ eople.”37 Casual slippage between Soviet and Rus­sian discourse highlighted Rus­sians’ privileged position, suggesting newly reemphasized imperial hierarchies. Despite limited space for non-­Russian heroes in local newspapers and the school curriculum, Rus­sians almost exclusively represented ethnically neutral citizens, and they played se­nior partner and older b­ rother to their non-­Russian counter­ parts.38 Previously cast-­aside imperial Rus­sian war heroes ­were recast as all-­union heroes, a shift David Brandenberger associates with a quest for a “usable past” that could draw citizens together as the country edged t­ oward war.39 Leaders rhetorically justified t­ hese homogenizing policies as a means of all-­ union integration. This was perhaps most evident in discussions of the Rus­ sian language, deemed the “second native language” and common property of all citizens. Rather than primarily associating the language with the Rus­ sian ­people, ideology emphasized its connections to Lenin, all-­union institutions, science, and culture and its importance in interethnic communication.40 The Soviet ­people similarly functioned as a rhetorical strategy that underscored common belonging to the state. All citizens, theoretically equal before the law,



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­ ere committed to building communism and defeating enemies at home and w abroad. This rhe­toric of inclusion, equality, and unity challenged but did not eliminate overtly imperial hierarchies among citizens. During the 1930s, this vision of unity remained largely theoretical; the real test would come when the Soviet Union entered World War II.

The Soviet ­People Tested: World War II and the Continuing Evolution of Soviet Identity Scholars have long focused on memories of and mythologies about World War II as a critical focal point in postwar identity.41 Far from being impor­tant primarily in retrospect, the experience of war itself contributed to the ongoing negotiation of Soviet identity and its bound­aries in ways that both destabilized and reified imperial hierarchies. As before the German invasion, the concept of the Soviet p­ eople remained firmly ingrained in state patriotism. The “Soviet ­people” comprised a mighty, united collective that could and did fight bravely against the invading e­ nemy, willing and able to make sacrifices for their country.42 ­These ideological formulations reflected and complemented war­ time conditions, which put citizens increasingly on the move, w ­ hether conscripted for ser­vice in the military, evacuated from occupied territories and relocated deep into the hinterlands, mobilized for work, or deported as a purported security risk.43 Citizens consequently came into unpre­ce­dented contact with both one another and the physical territory of their homeland, which si­mul­ta­neously confirmed and challenged the vision of a multiethnic, unified Soviet ­people. Newspapers painted a rosy picture of conflict-­free interethnic cooperation ­under the rubric “friendship of the ­peoples” (druzhba narodov), a phrase, like the Soviet ­people, that first regularly circulated in the mid-1930s. As in the Rus­ sian Empire, the military offered a particularly cogent source of interethnic integration.44 The press continued to describe the military as a quin­tes­sen­tial institution of the entire populace and frequently highlighted interethnic cooperation within its ranks.45 F. Voznyi, a navy captain, described the multiethnic crew aboard the Paris Commune battleship in a 1943 article in Pravda. At least twenty ethnicities “from dif­fer­ent corners of the country” w ­ ere united in love for the motherland and hatred ­toward the ­enemy and “felt themselves to be a ­family.” Voznyi highlighted native-­language conversations between Georgian and Azerbaijani commanding officers and young recruits and Rus­ sian crew members’ efforts to help ­others master Rus­sian.46 In another Pravda

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article, brigadier commissar S. Shatilov similarly recognized the study of Rus­ sian by non-­Russians, friendship between Rus­sian and Kazakh soldiers, and a mixed Kazakh and Uzbek reinforcement unit as typical examples of interethnic friendship.47 The home front also offered opportunities for citizens to interact. Central Asia, the Urals, and Siberia became sites of relative safety for an unpre­ce­dented evacuation of p­ eople and institutions. As Rebecca Manley notes, nearly 16.5 million citizens w ­ ere evacuated from the affected territories of eight republics, home to nearly 40 ­percent of the population.48 Evacuees, mostly from urban centers in the western borderlands, found themselves in cities and villages in the hinterlands, introducing them to local inhabitants, fellow evacuees, and unfamiliar regions.49 Upon arrival across Eurasia, many evacuees worked and lived alongside local residents. A diarist living outside Tashkent observed how evacuees changed the ­human landscape of the community in a May 1943 diary entry: “The population of the mahalla [neighborhood] doubled, and maybe tripled. Evacuees lived in e­ very home.”50 Her diary also illustrated how her social world expanded with the arrival of evacuees, as well as how localities ­were altered by their presence, from the increase in military personnel to the growing prominence of high heels. The routine cele­bration of cooperation and interaction reflected the positive propagandistic image of the Soviet ­people cultivated in the 1930s. Celebrated Kazakh poet Jambyl Jabaev’s Russian-­language poems ­were considered exemplary of Soviet patriotism. His most famous poem, “Leningrad, ­Children of Mine,” served as a model for letters of support penned by communities across the Soviet Union for citizens stuck in the Leningrad blockade.51 In a 1943 report, Liubov’ Balagurova, deputy head of the Propaganda and Agitation Division of the Kazakh Communist Party, highlighted gifts sent by the Kazakh ­people to Leningrad and the adoption of two thousand orphans from occupied territories and the front. She detailed several cases in par­tic­u­lar: a ­woman who a­ dopted an orphaned two-­month-­old Rus­sian baby who would grow up to be “an honored jigit” (a term used exclusively for a young Kazakh man), a Ukrainian boy who immediately attached himself to his prospective ­adopted ­mother when she arrived at the orphanage, and other cases of Kazakh and Tatar w ­ omen adopting Rus­sian and Belarusian c­ hildren.52 The Uzbek blacksmith Sh. Shamakhmudov, who ­adopted fifteen war orphans with his wife, inspired G’afur G’ulom’s “You are not an orphan” (Sen yetim emassan). The poem, originally in Uzbek, was translated into Rus­sian, published in Pravda in 1942, and inspired a 1964 movie.53 A January  1943 conference of Central Asian scholars, literary and cultural figures, and statesmen held in Tashkent celebrated unity against the fascist ­enemy.54



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Although it would be difficult to gauge the degree to which evacuation actually created meaningful cooperation across ethnic and geographic lines, ­there can be no doubt that personal interactions increased. A 1941 report from Ábdildá Tájibaev, secretary of Kazakhstan’s Soviet Writers’ Union, mused about how to take advantage of the talents and abilities of evacuated writers, poets, artists, and composers. He proposed forming agitation-­literary brigades to perform in any and all pos­si­ble per­for­mance spaces, including lecture halls, parks and gardens, and hospitals.55 Ukrainian writer Vasyl’ Sokil recalled that his evacuated theater collective grew to include performers and artists from other cities. With financial support from the Uzbek SSR, the expanded collective prepared popu­lar per­for­mances on patriotic and “anti-­Hitlerite” themes.56 ­Later, he summarized the general atmosphere: “At a time of g­ reat shocks, ­people [liudy] unite into a single pursuit. War proved this . . . ​one idea dominated: to fight the ­enemy. And writers one way or another coalesced ­under a single flag. War conditions simplified creative tasks and identified the main ideas: patriotism, heroism in ­battle and ­labor, hatred ­toward the ­enemy, and readiness to sacrifice oneself in the name of victory.”57 The dancer Maksim Gavrilov recalled the warm reception his evacuated Karelian dance troupe received from their “Kyrgyz ­brothers” and from injured Kazakh and Kyrgyz soldiers, expressing a sense of ­imagined kinship.58 ­Labor mobilization and recruitment also led to increased movement across Soviet space, which, as Wendy Goldman has noted, looked much like military conscription for noncombatants.59 The state devoted new energy ­toward featuring non-­Russians in the press and in propaganda initiatives, bringing greater visibility to ethnic minorities. Following the initial 1941 invasion, Pravda ran untranslated Ukrainian and Belarusian poems by Pavlo Tychyna and Iakub Kolas.60 The poems characterized the German invasion as an attack on “our home” and “motherland,” relying on ambiguous language to refer at once to invaded territory and the Soviet Union as a w ­ hole. Tychyna called for the Red Army to “go to b­ attle” to protect the “Soviet land” of “freedom and sunshine.”61 The following year, Pravda ran a full-­page “Letter to the Soldiers of the Uzbek ­People from Their Compatriots” in the original Uzbek.62 The symbolic publication of materials in original languages underscored the multilingual and multiethnic war effort. The unpre­ce­dented use of minority languages in the central press reflected the belief that native languages and motifs promoted patriotism and a sense of belonging to the state. In a 1943 speech to military propagandists, the head of state and politburo member Mikhail Kalinin stressed the importance of celebrating heroes of all ethnicities, including non-­Russian military officers: “Every­one, including Rus­sians, is proud of their ethnicity. . . . ​Go and foster

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in our p­ eople [liudi] Soviet patriotism, ethnic pride; remind e­ very soldier about the heroic traditions of his ­people, about its wonderful epics and lit­er­a­ture, about the g­ reat p­ eople, like commanders and military leaders, about the warriors for the liberation of the masses.”63 Reflecting the fear that a limited command of Rus­sian could prevent ideological integration, the military focused on recruiting propagandists who worked with recruits in native languages.64 Home-­front initiatives reflected similar goals of fostering patriotism and support for the war effort among non-­Russians. In Kazakhstan, for example, the state and party increased the number of lectures given by ideological workers in native languages.65 Propagandists focused on efforts t­oward w ­ omen and rural inhabitants, many of whom ­were heretofore seen as beyond the state’s ideological reach.66 Across the Soviet Union, schools w ­ ere impor­tant sites of patriotic education, as teachers and educators w ­ ere encouraged to raise the vigilance and patriotism of both pupils and their parents.67 Appeals to nationalist platforms in the South Caucasus helped secure popu­lar support for and participation in the Soviet occupation of Northern Iran and the potential occupation of eastern Turkey.68 The central press frequently featured contributions and messages from non-­ Russians. A half-­page spread in 1942 from the “Kazakh SSR to the front” reported on agricultural output and scientific research and included Jambyl’s poem, “Friendship of the P ­ eoples.”69 A similar report highlighted Tajik agri70 cultural output. In 1943, Pravda reported on Kazakh soldiers who helped liberate Leningrad, noting that they had performed traditional tea ceremonies, national dances and songs, and read lectures on Soviet Kazakhstan.71 Throughout 1943, Pravda and Izvestiia featured Russian-­language translations of letters to soldiers of vari­ous ethnicities, symbolically reminding readers of non-­Russian war contributions.72 Articles and memoirs conveyed the sense that bloodshed had forged inseparable bonds of brotherhood and friendship between soldiers of dif­fer­ent ethnicities.73 ­These vari­ous initiatives to appeal to and involve minorities pointed to consistent and sustained attempts to promote an inclusive, multiethnic war effort that coexisted alongside a more Russocentric “national Bolshevism,” as described by Brandenberger.74 War did more than confirm the vision of Soviet identity that leaders had promoted and celebrated for nearly a de­cade. It created conditions that challenged and altered discourses on identity and belonging, shaping the policies enacted and the language used to describe them. The challenges of war also forced leaders and citizens to reevaluate the bound­aries of civic belonging. This led to pragmatic changes that expanded Soviet identity into previously off-­limit realms, best illustrated in the relegalization of some religious groups, including the Rus­sian Orthodox Church and Islam.75 Agitators w ­ ere instructed



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to re­spect religious beliefs in an effort to devote all pos­si­ble resources to the war effort.76 The carefully cultivated image of a unified but diverse populace only told half the story. Interactions across ethnic and religious lines—in the military, in evacuation or deportation, or in worksites across the country—­catalyzed not only peaceful contact and cooperation but also conflict and friction, particularly ­under the extreme conditions of war. Interactions threw into relief implicit inequalities between citizens, and reports highlighted complications arising from interethnic contact and war­time hardships. As Manley notes, the state’s preference for evacuating the urban intelligent­sia over the rural peasantry reinforced hierarchies in the state’s approach to both p­ eople and places.77 Upon arrival in sites of resettlement, deportees confronted social stigma from local populations, even as deportation often intensified assimilation into all-­ union culture.78 Mobilized laborers, too, faced vastly unequal conditions. A 1943 report noted the recent arrival of a large group of unskilled Uzbek, Turkmen, and Tajik workers sent to work in the Udmurt ASSR. The report decried the poor living conditions, insufficient Rus­sian proficiency, and the limited propaganda and agitation work conducted in their native language, which led to bad work discipline and low production.79 Atheists expressed concerns about religion’s mobilizing power and the comparative weakness of Soviet ideology relative to religion’s emotional hold.80 More generally, extreme shortages and hardships left many citizens struggling to survive.81 Despite efforts to diversify, Rus­sians continued to play an outsized role in symbolic repre­sen­ta­tions of the Soviet ­people, demonstrating the hardiness of imperial hierarchies. Even as newspapers highlighted multiethnic contributions, Rus­sians ­were the “first among equals,” who guided non-­Russians into ­battle and t­ oward victory.82 Rus­sians’ undisputed position contributed to the ongoing underappreciation of non-­Russian contributions and suggested an in­ equality that persisted into and beyond World War II. This had par­tic­u­lar ramifications in the military. Although Stalin spoke in 1941 of all citizens fighting together, realities on the ground betrayed deep rifts within the ranks.83 Reflecting the implied superiority of Rus­sians across the press, a 1942 report indicated widespread attitudes of condescension from military leaders to their Georgian, Azeri, Dagestani, and Uzbek recruits.84 In his 1943 address to non-­ Russian propagandists, Kalinin condescendingly noted: “All ­peoples of the Soviet Union, even t­ hose who ­were previously considered very backward, now participate in the war.”85 Non-­Russian soldiers, he concluded, “consider—­and completely appropriately—­the Rus­sian ­people their older b­ rother,” an organ­ izing princi­ple for the “united military ­family.”86 Military leaders, po­liti­cal elites, and newspapers complained that insufficient command of Rus­sian hindered

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communication and threatened the efficacy of both propaganda and the military as a ­whole.87 As much as the state emphasized the multiethnic contribution to war, citizens had neither equal footing nor equal recognition. Communication, especially in the military, almost always took place in Rus­sian, placing the burden of integration onto non-­Russians. As Charles Shaw notes, military ser­vice enabled non-­Russian soldiers to adopt Russophone cultural identities. Non-­Russian ­women, particularly t­ hose working deep in the hinterland, often had considerably less access to Russophone culture and institutions, limiting their ability to make similar transformations.88 Despite official emphasis on the equality of all citizens, individuals had dif­fer­ent claims and experiences in accessing civic identity. ­ hether on the front or in the relative safety of the hinterland, citizens expeW rienced World War II as a cataclysmic period of rupture, instability, and hardship. To secure a broad base of multiethnic loyalty, the state demonstrated its commitment to ethnic minorities through increased prominence of non-­ Russians in central newspapers, native-­language propaganda and agitation, and appeals to religious minorities. ­These efforts offered evidence that ethnic and civic identities w ­ ere not only compatible but mutually constitutive, as ethnic pride was explic­itly seen as a potential source of patriotism. Even as official rhe­toric implied the compatibility of ­these identities, citizens did not bear equal claims on Soviet identity. The clear preference for the Rus­sian ­people, embodied in repeated reminders that Rus­sians ­were the “older ­brother” and the “first among equals” and in the reliance on the Rus­sian language, highlighted per­sis­tent imperial hierarchies. ­These extended beyond questions of ethnicity. Evacuation plans prioritized urban elites over rural peasants and skilled over unskilled workers. Military ser­vice afforded men more opportunities for integration than w ­ omen. As citizens interacted with one another and with state institutions, the country’s status as an empire was perpetually negotiated and constantly remade. At the same time, during World War II the Soviet Union began to function and be experienced as a nation more than ever before. Prewar policies created increased u ­ nionwide uniformity through the study of Rus­sian and a new pantheon of shared heroes. The invasion of a ­g iant swath of Soviet territory also altered the established relationship between center and periphery. Previously peripheral regions—­Central Asia and Siberia in particular—­became impor­tant sites of economic production and interethnic interaction, as citizens encountered one another in cities, villages, workplaces, and even their homes. The periphery consequently became a central site of the production and experi-



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ence of Soviet identity, as citizens became familiar with both one another and the country’s vast geography. The rhe­toric of the Soviet ­people melded ethnic and civic modes of identification to remind citizens of their common belonging to the state. Despite—­indeed, perhaps ­because of—­inflicting unpre­ce­dented destruction on Soviet territory and citizens, World War II paradoxically created a home for the Soviet p­ eople.

Ch a p ter  1 0

Dismantling “Georgia’s Spiritual Mission” Sacral Ethnocentrism, Cosmopolitan Nationalism, and Primordial Awakenings at the Soviet Collapse Stephen H. Rapp Jr.

In the words of Ronald Grigor Suny, “The national history is one of continuity, antiquity of origins, heroism and past greatness, martyrdom and sacrifice, victimization and overcoming of trauma. It is the story of the empowerment of the p­ eople, the realization of the ideals of popu­lar sovereignty.”1 In pursuit of their epic dreams, nation-­building elites typically deploy an ideological armada of ethnocentric privilege, victimization, and re­imagined pasts. The under­lying objective may be noble—­the strug­gle against imperial oppression looms large in this regard—­yet the deliberate resculpting of history for the benefit of a par­tic­u­lar ethnolinguistic ele­ment, to the detriment of ­others, actually erodes internal cohesion. Meanwhile, the self-­ anointed national vanguard trumpets its unique ge­ne­tic and emotional belonging to the national core. As a consequence, the sovereign nation is projected as the inviolable property of a specific intranational community. Such holds true not only for Georgia, one of the republics of southern Caucasia and the subject of this essay, but for nations everywhere on the globe. Zviad Gamsakhurdia was a leading contributor to the Georgian national narrative in the second half of the twentieth ­century. This Soviet dissident and then president of the Second Republic of Georgia was born in March 1939.2 His ­father, Konstantine, was a celebrated Georgian writer whose fame spread across the USSR. Konstantine’s most popu­lar works evoked Georgia’s rich medieval past, enshrined a distinctive non-­Slavic identity, and sanctified the 16 2

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Georgians’ supposed primordial nationhood. Konstantine’s historical novels Didostatis marjvena (Right [Hand] of a ­Great Master) and Davit aghmashenebeli (David the Builder) are masterpieces of twentieth-­century Georgian and Soviet lit­er­a­ture.3 While ­these works are artifacts of the official nationalism tolerated by Soviet authorities, their pages are replete with veiled criticisms of Soviet policies. Hand of a ­Great Master—as it is usually called in English—is set against the eleventh-­century backdrop of genuine tensions between the Byzantine Empire and the Bagratid kingdom of Georgia. One of its main characters, Shavleg Toxai(s)dze, lambasts Byzantine society: “Byzantium is the source of this evil. . . . ​Constantinople is a rotten city. Chiaberi and I learned a lot in the palace of the Caesar Basil. Blinding, burial alive, crucifixion, poisoning, cutting off both hands, assassination—­our Georgian kings ­were taught all this in the Byzantine Empire. . . . ​Constantinople is rotten to the core, a nest of dissipation, corruption and treachery.”4 Disaffected Soviet readers easily extended Shavleg’s reproach of Byzantium, Constantinople, and Byzantine elites to the USSR, Moscow, and the Communist Party, heirs to the “Third Rome.”5 Zviad Gamsakhurdia was indelibly marked by his ­father’s use of Georgian history as an instrument to expose Soviet abuses. Si­mul­ta­neously, Zviad’s privileged upbringing stoked a sense of invulnerability and Messianic purpose. The dissident activities of a scion of a well-­to-­do-­family quickly attracted Moscow’s attention. Already at the age of fifteen, Zviad and his companion Merab Kostava cofounded Gorgasliani, a nationalist youth group named for Georgian king Vakhtang Gorgasali (r. 447–522). Soon a­ fter, in 1956, Zviad was arrested for the first time. But he was not deterred from his nationalist mission. As a young man, Zviad openly converted to Georgian Orthodoxy and joined the council of the patriarchal church in Tbilisi. Nevertheless, Zviad was elected to the Soviet-­sanctioned Georgian Writers’ Union and secured a position at Tbilisi State University, where he taught American lit­er­a­ture. He was also a literary critic, a translator of Eu­ro­pean lit­er­at­ ure, and a self-­professed philologist. Zviad Gamsakhurdia’s re­sis­tance to Soviet power hardened when Eduard Shevardnadze was anointed chairman of the Georgian Communist Party in 1972. In this period, Gamsakhurdia produced a variety of samizdats, including the periodical Okros satsmisi (Golden Fleece) and Sakartvelos moambe (Georgian Herald). In 1974 he cofounded the Georgian Initiative Group for the Defense of H ­ uman Rights with Kostava and Valentina Pailodze, a choir leader who fought ecclesiastical corruption. Three years ­later, the Georgian branch of the Helsinki Watch Group was established by Gamsakhurdia, Kostava, and Viktor Rtskhiladze, a champion of the Meskhetian Turks deported by Stalin ­after World War II. This upsurge in activity led to the detainment of Kostava and Gamsakhurdia in spring 1977. Konstantine had passed away two years

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C h apte r  1 0 Figure 10.1. On this recent icon, Saint Ilia Chavchavadze brandishes the distinctive cross of Saint Nino and a scroll extolling “Language, Fatherland, Faith.” Image source: http://­www​.­orthodoxy​.­ge​/­galerea​/­ngigauri​/­ilia​ .­jpg.

before and was no longer able to shield his son. During the trial, Zviad confessed to subversive acts and declared his allegiance to the USSR on national tele­vi­sion. Public embarrassment did not end his censure of Soviet rule, however. In 1981 Gamsakhurdia was arrested for opposing Moscow’s suppression of the Georgian language. Having spent more than five years in a ­labor camp, he helped to found the Society of Saint Ilia the Righ­teous in 1987. This populist organ­ization celebrated the famous writer and national primogenitor Ilia Chavchavadze (d. 1907) who, with the society’s backing, was canonized by the renascent Georgian Church (see figure 10.1). The tragic massacre of unarmed citizens in Tbilisi on April 9, 1989, was a turning point in Georgian, Caucasian, and Soviet history.6 Troops u ­ nder the command of General Igor Rodionov had turned violently against a large anti-­ Soviet protest. Kostava assumed the leading role in anti-­Soviet protests, which si­mul­ta­neously appealed for Georgian unity as tensions flared in the autonomous regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Meanwhile, Georgian intellectuals answered academician Andrei Sakharov’s contention that Georgia was “a l­ittle empire” seeking to assimilate its minority p­ eoples, thus replicating the pro­cess in the USSR.7 As rivalry intensified between longtime comrades Kostava and Gamsakhurdia, Kostava perished in an automobile accident on October 13, 1989. Gamsakhurdia inherited the helm of the national liberation movement and joined the “Round T ­ able—­Independent Georgia” co­ali­tion (“Mrgvali magida—­tavisupali sakartvelo”). Seizing upon the April 9 butchery and the fresh memory of Kostava’s death, “Round ­Table” snatched victory in the October 1990 elections. Gamsakhurdia’s improbable ascent to the chairmanship of the Georgian Supreme Soviet came to fruition. ­Under Gamsakhurdia’s watch, the new government moved to dismantle Soviet structures and or­ga­nized an in­de­pen­dence referendum in March 1991.

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On the second anniversary of the April 9 bloodbath, in­de­pen­dence was formally declared from the USSR. A new Republic of Georgia was born, thus succeeding the sovereign state ruled by Georgian Mensheviks from 1918 to 1921. Parliament unanimously elected Gamsakhurdia to the newly created post of president. But euphoria soon gave way to division: po­liti­cal cleavages widened and Gamsakhurdia turned decisively against his opponents. In January 1992 Gamsakhurdia—by now forced into exile elsewhere in the Caucasus, eventually finding shelter with the infamous Chechen leader Dzhokhar Dudaev—­was stripped of power in a violent coup televised on CNN. The road was paved for Shevardnadze’s homecoming and the Zviadist insurgency. Gamsakhurdia returned to western Georgia, his ancestral homeland, and set up a shadow government in Zugdidi. The insurrection faltered and Gamsakhurdia died in murky circumstances on December 31, 1993. The year 1990 was crucial for the Georgian national proj­ect. As the USSR teetered on collapse, anti-­Soviet sentiment swelled and Gamsakhurdia emerged as Georgia’s de facto leader. It was Gamsakhurdia—­and not Givi Gumbaridze, first secretary of Georgia’s Communist Party—­who greeted international participants in the First Summer School of Kartvelian (Georgian) Studies sponsored by Tbilisi State University. The summer school was in many re­spects a po­liti­cal act; this was a con­spic­u­ous opportunity for Georgian intellectuals to exercise autonomy from Moscow and to celebrate Georgian nationhood. Meanwhile, government-­ sanctioned publishing ­ houses ­ were feverishly reprinting pamphlets and books from the pre-­Soviet phase of Georgian nationalism, including Iakob Gogebashvili’s 1912 Deda ena (­Mother Tongue), a sanctification of the Georgian language, and the works of Noe Zhordania, president of the first Georgian Republic (1918–21). It was in the volatile atmosphere of 1990 that Gamsakhurdia delivered a series of public speeches setting the tone for his short tenure as president. Perhaps the most influential was “Georgia’s Spiritual Mission” (Sakartvelos sulieri missia). This polemical address couched in scholarly adornments was presented at the Tbilisi Philharmonic House on May 2, 1990, and was published soon thereafter. An En­glish translation appeared in 1991.8 Despite its call for mobilization in the h ­ ere and now and the achievement of ­g reat ­things in the near ­f uture, the overwhelming emphasis of “Georgia’s Spiritual Mission” is premodern history. In this manner, the speech logically extends an approach nurtured by early Georgian nationalists in the nineteenth ­century ­under imperial Rus­sian rule. Already in its infancy, the Georgian national movement had seized upon the long history of Caucasia, prioritizing, reimagining, and sometimes fabricating decisive moments of that past for po­liti­cal expediency. Two premodern moments quickly emerged as vital cogs

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in the national story: the Christianization of the eastern Georgian crown in the fourth ­century and the medieval “Golden Age,” from the eleventh through the early thirteenth centuries, when Bagratid monarchs such as Davit II Aghmashenebeli (“the Builder”)9 and Tamar governed a pan-­Caucasian empire. Georgian patriots including Gamsakhurdia latched (and continue to latch) onto premodern history, with its pliability and emotional capacity, as a means to justify pres­ent positions and to articulate a blueprint for the ­f uture. ­Needless to say, such nationalists are not dispassionate professional historians pursuing the past in all its complexity through a critical and contextualized reading of received sources. (But this was a blurry line ­because several prominent Georgian nationalists, including Gamsakhurdia, w ­ ere academics). Instead, Gamsakhurdia’s meticulously ­shaped vision of Georgia’s history had a concrete ideological and emotional aim: to establish beyond any doubt the primeval credentials, the pres­ent and ­future existence, and the sacred function of the Georgian nation on the universal stage—­its “spiritual mission.” And while Gamsakhurdia conceded the Georgian nation’s multiethnic, cross-­cultural, and cosmopolitan matrix, he did so in a mea­sured way, putting it into the ser­vice of the nation. Gamsakhurdia ­wholeheartedly believed his formulation of Georgian history, what­ever its flaws and contradictions. He was motivated by his boundless love for Georgia, his emotional conviction that only ethnic Georgians should be full citizens of the Georgian nation, and his b­ itter hatred for the Soviet Union.10 At the core of Gamsakhurdia’s 1990 pronouncements are four immutable “truths” upon which Georgia’s timeless “spiritual mission” is predicated: The Georgian nation originated in remote antiquity and was one of the world’s first nations. It has lived a continuous, albeit victimized and underappreciated, existence ever since. Throughout its venerable history, the Georgian nation has been inherently Eu­ro­pean. Indeed, it is the quin­tes­sen­tial and foundational Eu­ro­pean nation. The Georgian nation has a special connection to the Christian God. This is another emblem of Georgia’s intrinsic Eu­ro­pe­anness. Georgians have a divine charge “to synthesize the Western and Oriental cultures, presenting them as an integral ­whole.”11 In the meantime, Gamsakhurdia positioned himself as a national prophet who would expound and lead the sacred mission to fulfill Georgia’s universal destiny. It is worth repeating that Gamsakhurdia’s vision is built upon well-­trodden ideas that had been articulated during the initial phases of Georgian national-

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ism. Many of t­ hese ideas, in turn, ultimately proceed from, or ­were inspired by, early modern understandings of ancient, late antique, and medieval history. For example, the first Georgian nationalists grappled with the question of Georgia’s belonging to “Eu­rope” or “Asia.” Such binary discussions continued throughout Soviet times; the depiction of Caucasia as a bridge between “Eu­rope” and “Asia” fit harmoniously within druzhba narodov, “Friendship of the P ­ eoples.” In many re­spects, this is an extension of debates that had taken place in the ­later Rus­sian Empire, the most immediate po­liti­cal and social context for the advent of Georgian nationalism.12 It should be emphasized that Georgia’s historical ties with Rus­sia ­were not something new in the nineteenth ­century, when the Georgian national movement matured. Links had already formed u ­ nder Queen Tamar (r. 1184–1213), whose first husband was Iurii Bogoliubskii, prince of Novgorod and son of ­Grand Prince Andrei Bogoliubskii of Vladimir-­Suzdal’. But lasting bonds crystallized only in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when the tsars dispatched several embassies to the fragmented but strategically vital Georgian lands.13 Competing interpretations about Georgia’s belonging to “East” or “West”— or some combination of the two—­were not a “bolt from the blue” ­under tsarist rule. Their oldest seeds ­were sown well before the age of Tamar, back in late antiquity, when Christian elites in the vari­ous Georgian lands pondered their relationship with the Christian Romano-­Byzantine Empire and Zoroastrian Iran. Such explorations ­were nonlinear, with plentiful starts, stops, and branches, not to mention shifting historical circumstances and contexts. ­Needless to say, “East” and “West” are notoriously blurry metageo­g raph­i­cal categories that proceed more from ethnocentric ideology than history.14 Significantly, the evolving issue of Georgia’s affiliation with “East” or “West” was not concocted ex nihilo by the first Georgian nationalists or introduced anew as a result of historical interactions with Rus­sia. Rather, they repackaged received ideas and actively contributed to debates occurring in the Rus­ sian Empire and, through it, central and western Eu­rope.15 Early Georgian nationalists prioritized premodern history and securely tethered their understanding of “East” and “West” to the real and perceived history of ­those earlier times.16 Georgia’s antiquity and survival across many centuries of turmoil and imperial intervention are striking. Yet ­because early phases of this history ­were enmeshed principally within the pan-­Caucasian, Ira­nian, and Anatolian experiences, nationalists have filtered and recast it so as to emphasize, exaggerate, and forge “Eu­ro­pean” connections. In large mea­sure, theirs was a sharp emotional and hostile reaction to the late imperial Rus­sian and especially Soviet formulations of Georgian history. The antiquity of Caucasia is not an

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Figure 10.2. Georgian postage stamps (2002) commemorating pirveli evropeli, the “first Eu­ro­pean.”

imperial Rus­sian or Soviet invention, though certain historiographical aspects have been and continue to be projected through imperial/Orientalist not to mention national lenses.17 The most sensational proof of Caucasia’s antiquity is the discovery, a­ fter Gamsakhurdia’s death, of the oldest hominids outside Africa. Excavated from ­under an ancient lava bed near Dmanisi in southern Georgia, ­these fossils have been reliably carbon-­dated to 1.8 million years ago. But Homo erectus georgicus was neither “Georgian” nor “Eu­ro­pean” despite its speedy integration into the post-­Gamsakhurdia national narrative (see figure 10.2).18 ­There is much more. Archaeologists have identified myriad Stone, Copper, and Bronze Age sites across Caucasia, remains that do not neatly correspond to modern ethnonational bound­aries.19 Starting in the eighth c­ entury BC, ­peoples in what would become western Georgia interacted with ancient Greek cities founded along the Black Sea coastline. Colchis/Egrisi became the stuff of legend: it was the faraway land—­from a Mediterranean perspective!—­where Jason and the Argonauts hunted the Golden Fleece. During the Iron Age, Achaemenid Persia gathered u ­ nder its hegemony p­ eoples inhabiting southern Caucasia. The vari­ous Armenians, Georgians, and Caucasian Albanians acquired their own historical voices with the invention of scripts for their respective languages at the turn of the fourth/fifth c­ entury AD.20 The earliest surviving specimens of Georgian writing, ecclesiastical inscriptions and a vita of the Armenian martyr Shushanik Mamikonean, derive from the fifth

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­century.21 A distinctive Georgian historiographical tradition was established by the sixth c­ entury. The straightforward definition of nation embraced by Georgian patriots is constructed around sharply drawn bound­aries: a unique p­ eople with a unique language, history, culture, society, and po­liti­cal aspirations, in a more or less fixed geo­g raph­i­cal space. All ­these are deemed to be inviolable national property. Nevertheless, Gamsakhurdia’s vision demonstrates greater complexity in its manipulation of a decontextualized Georgian past and in its emphasis of par­tic­u­lar aspects of its enduring—­but constantly evolving—­cosmopolitan and cross-­cultural condition. According to Gamsakhurdia, longevity is another irrefutable sign of a nation’s legitimacy. Georgia and the entire Caucasus region genuinely have a very long history, but Gamsakhurdia carries this fact to its most dramatic national conclusion: Georgia was one of the oldest nations anywhere on the planet. Predictably, Gamsakhurdia’s 1990 speech launches with a ferocious assault on Soviet “empire” and “dictatorship.”22 As part of their agenda to suppress ethnic minorities, Soviet imperialists had deliberately reformulated history so that the attainment of Georgian nationhood was pos­si­ble only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ­under the auspices of the waning Rus­sian Empire and especially the USSR.23 Notwithstanding its hostility to Soviet ideology, Gamsakhurdia’s national calculus shares many formulas with the scheme articulated by another infamous Georgian: the Bolshevik Ioseb Jughashvili (i.e., Stalin). Both agreed, for example, that a nation is a historically constituted entity characterized by a common language, territory, economy, and culture. However, Gamsakhurdia unequivocally rejects Stalin’s contention that “Georgia came on the scene as a nation only in the latter half of the nineteenth c­ entury, when the fall of serfdom and the growth of the economic life of the country, the development of means of communication and the rise of capitalism, introduced division of l­ abour between the vari­ous districts of Georgia, completely shattered the economic isolation of the principalities and bound them together as a single w ­ hole.”24 In Gamsakhurdia’s view, the Georgian nation—­under the ancient Greek designation for inland Georgia, Iberia—­was ancient, stable, and innately Eu­ ro­pe­an.25 Thrusting pre-­Soviet research on Georgian ethnogenesis in new nationalist directions, particularly works by Nikolai Marr, Ivane Javakhishvili, and Wilhelm von Humboldt, Gamsakhurdia affirms the entire southern Mediterranean basin, including Greece and Italy, to have been originally inhabited by “Iberians,” forefathers of modern-­day Georgians. The primordial homeland of ­these ancient Iberians—­whom Gamsakhurdia interchangeably calls “proto-­Iberians”—­stretched to Asia Minor, the Levant, and India.26 Drawing

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Figure 10.3. Georgia—­Europe started h ­ ere.

upon von Humboldt, Gamsakhurdia asserts the ubiquitous proto-­Iberians to have “had a single basic language with many dialectal branches.”27 Inculcating Marr’s hypotheses with new ideological vigor, Gamsakhurdia also visualizes a proto-­Iberian population for the entire expanse of ancient Asia Minor, thus bestowing modern Georgians with a moral claim upon what is now Turkey.28 Western Georgia had its own ancient connection with Anatolia: Gamsakhurdia identifies the Colchians as close relatives of the Pelasgians, Trojans, and Minoans.

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Eastern and western Georgians thus forged a (unified) nation earlier than the Greeks, whose civilization was raised upon a proto-­Iberian and hence Georgian foundation.29 In essence, Gamsakhurdia advocates for a Caucasian Athena, a Greek civilization stemming from the Caucasus and predicated upon the “Caucasian race.”30 Fortunately, the first volume of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena (1987), then newly published, was apparently unknown to Gamsakhurdia. Nevertheless, both figures deployed a curious cross-­cultural approach, propelled by ideological aims, so as to credit the foundation of Greek and hence Eu­ro­pean “civilization” by Georgians (Gamsakhurdia) or “black” Egyptians (Bernal). Bernal actually evokes Caucasia directly in the second volume of Black Athena: he alleges the existence of an Egyptian colony in Colchis.31 For his part, Gamsakhurdia does not indict modern Eu­ro­pe­ans as racist thieves of “[Western] civilization” since Georgians and Eu­ro­pe­ans embody the “Caucasian race.” Such notions have been perpetuated to the pres­ent day, consciously and unconsciously, by a wide spectrum of Georgian patriots and government officials. Thus, bolstered by the hominid discovery at Dmanisi, the Georgian Department of Tourism inaugurated a glitzy multimedia campaign in fall 2007 featuring the slogan “Eu­rope Started H ­ ere” (see figure 10.3).32 According to Gamsakhurdia, Georgia’s inherent Eu­ro­pe­anness is exemplified by its venerable status within Christendom. Once again Gamsakhurdia is not burdened by intrusive source criticism and historical contextualization. His loyalty is to the i­magined nation, not to the history of Georgia and Caucasia. Melding nineteenth-­century positivism, ethnocentrism, and nationalism, he ­wholeheartedly embraces the received medieval tradition of an apostolic mission to Georgian lands. According to the Georgian Life of the Kings, composed around 800, the apostle Andrew and Simon the Canaanite had visited the western territories of Apkhazeti and Egrisi.33 This apostolic claim has been upheld by the Georgian Church since the tenth/eleventh c­ entury if not earlier as a guarantor of its autocephaly. It has been used, moreover, to emphasize the unity of eastern and western Georgian lands. The claim was subsequently absorbed into the master national narrative. Gamsakhurdia’s ac­cep­tance of the story is not surprising given its prominent place in the master ecclesiastical narrative, which had congealed at the height of the medieval Georgian monarchy. In fact, The Life of the Kings is a sophisticated and multilayered narrative. It was intended to promote certain Georgian élites in par­tic­u­lar sociocultural frameworks, not an integrated nation on the global stage. The Life of the Kings is uniquely preserved in the medieval corpus Kartlis tskhovreba (K‛art‛lis c‛xovreba), the so-­called Georgian Chronicles. Like so many other ancient and medieval sources, Kartlis tskhovreba’s surviving manuscripts are relatively late.

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The oldest Georgian redaction derives from the late fifteenth c­ entury; the oldest overall manuscript is a copy of the medieval Armenian-­language adaptation from the late thirteenth/early ­fourteenth c­ entury. While Kartlis tskhovreba’s earliest components (ca. 800), including The Life of the Kings, preserve yet older traditions, they have been obscured by the comprehensive editing of the corpus on multiple occasions. Specialists have identified three major reeditions prior to Rus­sian rule. In this light, the apostolic activities conveyed in the extant Life of the Kings ­were prob­ably inserted by the archbishop Mroveli in the eleventh c­ entury as part of a program to Christianize the corpus and to mask enduring connections to the Ira­nian (and Islamic) world at a time of intensive “Byzantinization.” Like the tradition’s original ecclesiastical architects who, in the medieval age, traced the autocephaly of the Georgian Church to the moment of its inception, Gamsakhurdia stresses Georgia’s proselytization by the first-­called apostle Andrew and interprets this as a national act. Yet the tradition on which Gamsakhurdia’s claim is based is a complex historiographical palimpsest that was resculpted by many generations. ­There are other devices by which Gamsakhurdia seeks to authenticate Georgia’s ancient Christian credentials. He underscores the Georgians’ age-­ old veneration of Saint George, the Archangel Michael, and the ­Mother of God. With regard to the latter, Gamsakhurdia moves beyond the official stance of the Georgian Church and asserts “pagan” roots extending back to the ancient Mother-­Goddess. The Mother-­Goddess was manifested across many cultures. Gamsakhurdia singles out Artemis among the Greeks, Dali among the Svans of highland Georgia, and the Theotokos among lowland Christian Georgians. Gamsakhurdia then returns to the positivist Georgian master narrative: “When the Apostles cast lots to determine the country in which each should preach, Georgia fell to the M ­ other of God ­because the country was traditionally linked to the mission of the m ­ other of God, which is the same as that of the Holy Spirit.”34 Gamsakhurdia also conjures the fourth-­century illuminatrix of eastern Georgia, Saint Nino. The historical Nino secured the conversion of King Mirian in the 320s. According to the received Georgian tale preserved in The Conversion of Kartli (seventh ­century) and the dependent but embellished Life of Nino (ninth/tenth ­century), the foreign holy ­woman learned about the removal of Christ’s tunic to the eastern Georgian capital Mtskheta. Once again, Gamsakhurdia turns a blind eye to source criticism and unreservedly accepts the story of the tunic’s conveyance by two Jews from eastern Georgia who reportedly witnessed the Crucifixion. According to the extant Nino Cycle, which consists of numerous medieval layers, the sacred garment was buried in Mtskheta on the site of the ­f uture church of the “living pillar,” Sveti-­tskhoveli. Having

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nationalized the tale, Gamsakhurdia brushes aside the explicit ecclesiastical purpose of ­these narratives: their received base forms took shape in the seventh (not fourth) c­ entury when the Georgian Church sought to establish its autonomy vis-­à-­vis Armenia, which had asserted ecclesiastical hegemony over southern Caucasia. Gamsakhurdia and other patriots routinely portray Georgia as a Christian outpost surrounded by hostile enemies, especially Muslim Turks, Zoroastrian and Muslim Ira­ni­ans, and, ­later, atheist Soviets. The ideological line Gamsakhurdia initially draws between Islamic and Christian culture is finely resolved. In this context, he identifies the Georgian King Davit II Aghmashenebeli as the fabled Prester John.35 During the Crusades, legends about Prester John circulated throughout Eu­rope. He was i­magined as a power­ful Christian monarch governing a distant, beleaguered Christian realm. Gamsakhurdia accordingly links medieval Georgia to Christian Eu­rope and the Crusades. Davit Aghmashenebeli’s portrayal in contemporaneous Georgian sources is far more nuanced than Gamsakhurdia acknowledges (for one such visual source, see figure 10.4). The Bagratid Davit—­who ruled from 1089 ­until 1125—­ was a chief architect of the pan-­Caucasian empire based in Georgia and northern Armenia, and eventually stretching from the Caspian to the Black Seas. Davit consolidated the po­liti­cal unity of eastern and western Georgia first achieved ­under his pre­de­ces­sor Bagrat III (r. 1008–14). Meanwhile, the Georgian Church flourished as never before and was connected to the w ­ hole of Eastern Christendom through a cross-­continental monastic network. While contemporaneous Georgian monarchs, including Davit and his ­g reat grand­ daughter Tamar, prioritized Georgian (Chalcedonian/Orthodox) Chris­tian­ity, this was a period of remarkable cross-­cultural concord. Alongside tensions, mutually beneficial relationships transcended cultural and religious bound­ aries. It is true that the anonymous Life of King of Kings Davit attests recurrent raids by the Seljuq Turks and stresses the danger posed by nearby Islamic rulers. (The Byzantine emperor Romanos IV Diogenes had been captured at the ­Battle of Manzikert in 1071). As an attack on Georgia by the Seljuq Sultan Malikshāh is described: “Cities and villages w ­ ere demolished, churches w ­ ere cast down, ­houses collapsed and w ­ ere crushed, and became a tomb for their inhabitants.”36 But Davit’s fortunes shifted. As he assembled the first medieval empire integrating the better part of Caucasia, “he made the sultan tributary to himself and the king of the Greeks like a member of his h ­ ouse­hold. He overthrew the heathen and destroyed the barbarians; he made subjects of kings and slaves of rulers. The Arabs he put to flight, the Ishmaelites he plundered, and the Persians he ground to dust; their leaders he reduced to peasants.”37 The second named ruler is a fellow Orthodox Christian, the Byzantine emperor.

Figure 10.4. Medieval fresco of King Davit II, Gelati.

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Despite the Bagratids’ gravitation t­oward coreligionist Byzantium, its deliberate adaptation of Byzantine imperial imagery, and its self-­representation as a veritable Byzantium in the “East,” the Georgian enterprise moved to neutralize Constantinople’s interventions in the Caucasus.38 The sharing of religion, even in times of common threat, did not guarantee amiable relations. Thus, as more Christian Armenians ­were brought ­under Georgian rule, Davit summoned an ecclesiastical council—in imitation of the ecumenical councils convened by Romano-­Byzantine emperors—to scrutinize the non-­Chalcedonian christology prevalent among them.39 Yet miaphysite Armenians often thrived ­under Georgian rule. In the same vein, relations with Muslims inside and beyond the Georgian Empire w ­ ere often positive and mutually beneficial. About Davit’s son and successor, Demetre (r. 1125–56), the Islamic writer ibn al-­Azraq conveys: [Demetre] guaranteed to the Muslims [who lived in Tbilisi, the former capital of the Georgian monarchy retaken by Davit in 1122] every­thing they wished, according to the pact which is valid even t­ oday. In it [it is stipulated] that pigs should not be brought over to the Muslim side nor to the town, and that they should not be slaughtered ­there or in the market. He struck dirhams for them, on one side of which stood the names of the sultan and the caliph, and on the other side stood the names of God and the Prophet, on him be peace, [whereas] the king’s own now stood on a side of the dirham. It was cried in the town that [the king] permitted [to shed] the blood of him who harmed a Muslim. He granted to them the call to prayer, the prayers and the reading [of the Qur’ān] in public, and also guaranteed that on Fridays sermons and public prayers should be held and prayers be said from the pulpit for the caliph and the sultan, and for no one ­else. He also guaranteed that no Georgian or Armenian, or Jew, should enter the baths of Ismā‛īl in Tbilisi [Arab. Tiflis]. He assessed a Georgian at a rate of five dinars per year, a Jew at four dinars, and a Muslim at three dinars. He was extremely kind to the Muslims; he honored the scholars and sufis by respecting their rank [?] and [granting them] what they do not enjoy even among the Muslims.40 Georgian texts shed additional light on such tolerance. At the summit of his power, Davit II dispatched two d­ aughters to improve relations through “diplomatic” marriages. In 1112, Tamar, not to be confused with the ­later queen, was committed to Minūchihr III, the Muslim ruler of Shirwān in Azerbaijan. Four years l­ater, her s­ ister Kata arrived in Constantinople and wed the Christian Byzantine prince Alexios Bryennios Komnenos. Davit calculatingly sent

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Figure 10.5. “King of kings || Giorgi son of Dimitri || Sword of the Messiah.” Image credit: Classical Numismatic Group, https://­www​.­cngcoins​.­com​/­coin​.­aspx​?­coinid​=­98311.

his ­daughters to Shirwān and Byzantium “so that the two luminaries—­one in the East, the other in the West ­might be stars in the vault of heaven, reflecting the sunlike rays of their f­ather.”41 While in this instance “East” denotes the Islamic world and “West” the Christian Byzantine Empire, medieval Georgian sources often situated Christian Georgia within the “East” and Byzantium in the “West,” thus dividing Eastern Christendom between the two empires.42 Georgian associations with the dār al-­Islām, including Seljuq Turks, Ira­ni­ ans, and Arabs, transcended diplomacy. The economy of the Bagratid kingdom was oriented chiefly t­ oward Georgia’s Islamic neighbors. This is reflected in the coinage struck u ­ nder the Bagratids. While a few specimens are based on Byzantine examples, most w ­ ere designed according to Islamic type with the suppression of iconography and the use of Arabic. This practice is especially evident ­after Davit II’s defeat of the emirate of Tbilisi in 1122. A series of coins struck ­under Tamar thus pres­ents a simplified rendition of the Bagratid royal standard (based in turn upon the Romano-­Byzantine labarum, but through a Rus’ian intermediary) on the obverse and features Arabic text on the reverse:43 “The ­g reat Queen ║ Glory of the World and Faith ║ Tamar ­daughter of Giorgi ║ Champion of the Messiah ║ May God increase [her] victories.”44 Even more remarkable is a series in the name of Giorgi III (r. 1156– 84), Tamar’s ­father and pre­de­ces­sor (see figure 10.5). Its reverse similarly consists of Arabic text: “King of kings ║ Giorgi son of Dimitri ║ Sword of the Messiah.” The obverse is dominated by an image of Giorgi (unusual in Georgian and Islamic coinage), sitting cross-­legged, and wearing a Byzantine-­style crown surmounted with a Christian cross. His loose-­fitting trousers are Per-

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sian, and a falcon is perched on his arm.45 When it enhanced their position and image, Christian Bagratids acknowledged and exploited their cross-­cultural circumstances, even Islamic ones.46 Despite medieval Georgia’s complex and often advantageous relations with Muslims, Georgian nationalists confidently deploy the myth of the natu­ral, primordial, and religiously discrete “East” and “West,” the worlds of Islam and Chris­tian­ity. However, Georgia’s geopo­liti­cal position at the overlap of Turkey, Iran, and Iraq and the deep affinities of modern Caucasian culture with the Near and ­Middle East are not so easily concealed. Thus, at the finish of his 1990 per­for­mance Gamsakhurdia backtracks from a vision of essentialized and sharply divided Islamic and Christian “civilizations” and begrudgingly acknowledges Georgia’s long-­term ties beyond the Graceo-­Roman and Christian Mediterranean. From a cultural standpoint, Gamsakhurdia maintains that Georgia’s “spiritual mission” is to “synthesize” the two, “presenting them as an integral ­whole.”47 As proof of the sacral charge entrusted to the nation, Gamsakhurdia evokes the most famous work of Georgian lit­er­a­ture: the epic poem Vepkhistqaosani.48 The poem translated as The Knight in the Panther’s Skin is customarily ascribed to Shota Rustaveli, a con­temporary of Queen Tamar.49 Like prior Georgian intellectuals, Gamsakhurdia interprets Vepkhistqaosani as a bridge between “Occident” and “Orient”; but he invariably affords pre­ce­dence to the former ­because of his presumption of Georgia’s inherent Eu­ro­pe­anness. To be sure, the medieval poem sometimes echoes aspects of Mediterranean culture, particularly in its incorporation of neo-­Platonic ideals from Byzantium. ­These had permeated Georgian circles in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But when examined holistically, Vepkhistqaosani exudes a cosmopolitan and cross-­cultural outlook oriented chiefly t­oward the Ira­nian and Persianate world. Vepkhistqaosani conveys the tale of the reclusive knight Tariel and his rescue of Princess Nestan-­Darejan, his true love. Compelled to reenter society, Tariel relied on his newfound friendship with the knight Avtandil, who was equally smitten with the d­ aughter of the king of Arabia. Bound by unconditional loyalty, Tariel and Avtandil bested their opponents, including super­ natural devs, and won the hands of the two princesses. If approached from a Eu­ro­pean a­ ngle and quarantined from their Near and M ­ iddle Eastern frameworks, Vepkhistqaosani might be seen as a reflection of “feudal” medieval Eu­ ro­pean society. However, a contextualized reading of this sophisticated work demonstrates it to be written in the style of the Ira­nian epic, which at the time had been rejuvenated throughout Persianate territories and the broader dār al-­Islām. Although Gamsakhurdia concedes certain “Eastern” threads in

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Vepkhistqaosani, he subordinates ­these to their “Western” dimensions. To Gamsakhurdia’s mind, ancient proto-­Iberians had engineered the very concept of the “West,” and medieval Georgians would always constitute an integral part of the “West.” ­Here and elsewhere, Gamsakhurdia equates “Eu­rope” with “Christendom,” a tested nationalist, ethnocentric, and xenophobic tactic having no historical basis.50 Following in the footsteps of earlier patriots, Gamsakhurdia emphasizes Georgia’s august connections to the Graceo-­Roman and Christian Mediterranean, an image that also had po­liti­cal currency in the Rus­sian Empire and USSR. Unlike nineteenth-­century nationalists, however, he positions proto-­ Georgians as the originators and charter members of ­these entities. While Gamsakhurdia acknowledges Georgia’s location at the juncture of “East” and “West,” thus accounting for “Eastern” and “Western” strands in Georgian culture, he invariably subordinates “Eastern” (i.e., foreign) ele­ments to “Western” (i.e., inherently Georgian and Eu­ro­pean) ones even when cultural “synthesis” is said to have occurred. A panoramic vantage on Caucasia’s extensive prenational past reveals genuine historical connections to the Graeco-­Roman Mediterranean,51 but ­these have been acutely exaggerated and decontextualized by Georgian nationalists. This is not only a ­matter of embellishment but constitutes a deliberate neglect of non-­“European” threads. In real­ity, Caucasia’s principal sociocultural orientation was locked southward long before Rustaveli, already in the Iron Age, and persisted across late antiquity and throughout the medieval epoch. The vari­ous Georgian, Armenian, and Caucasian Albanian p­ eoples, not to mention highland pastoralist communities such as the Alans (cf. Ossetians), w ­ ere active members of the Ira­nian Commonwealth stretching from Central Asia to Caucasia and eastern Anatolia.52 The basic structure of sedentary Caucasian society paralleled Persia, Parthia, and Ērān; all ­were anchored by dynastic noble families. Iranian-­like notions of royal authority prevailed across Caucasia into the early medieval era. An Ira­nian onomasticon displayed even greater durability and was injected with renewed potency u ­ nder the Safavids. ­Until the dominance of Chris­tian­ity in the ­later fourth and fifth centuries AD, syncretic strains of Zoroastrianism composed the religious backbone of late antique Caucasia.53 Moreover, the Parthian and Sasanian conception of epic history, as reflected in the Islamic-­era Shāhnāma of Ferdowsī (d. 1020), was the chief historiographical model emulated by the first Georgian historians. Active in the sixth c­ entury, ­these writers w ­ ere Christians active in Christian environments. Instead of adopting biblical, Byzantine, and/or Graeco-­Roman frameworks, they elaborated Georgian and Caucasian history in the mold of the Ira­nian epic. This circumstance prevailed u ­ ntil the ascendancy of the “Byz-

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antinizing” Georgian Bagratids in the ninth c­ entury. Further, we must remember that the royal families of Caucasia that initially converted to Chris­tian­ity ­were descended from Parthian noble h ­ ouses. In eastern Georgia, or Kartli (Iberia), the Chosroids ­were related to the first Christianizing king Mirian (Mihrān), a Parthian Mihrānid who had migrated from northern Iran. Mirian rapidly acculturated in this new cultural environment. The Christian Chosroids governed from the fourth ­century ­until the Sasanians’ dissolution of the eastern Georgian crown t­ oward the end of the sixth c­ entury. ­There is no historical basis to classify the Christian Mirian as “Eu­ro­pean” or even “Roman”/“Byzantine.” Although Mirian had embraced Chris­tian­ity partly as a means to c­ ounter encroaching Sasanian authority, his feet remained firmly planted in the Ira­nian Commonwealth, a cross-­and multicultural enterprise that in the seventh ­century came to encompass more Christians than the Byzantine Empire itself.54 By means of a conclusion, let us return to King Vakhtang Gorgasali, for whom the young Gamsakhurdia and Kostava named their dissident group. Alongside Mirian and the Christian Bagratids Davit II and Tamar, Vakhtang (r. 447–522) is a popu­lar symbol of the antiquity, strength, and inviolable unity of the Georgian nation (see figure 10.6a-­b).55 Vakhtang’s majesty proceeds from the colorful Georgian epic history devoted to him, the anonymous The Life of Vakhtang whose received version was produced around 800. As presented, Vakhtang is a hero-­k ing par excellence governing a power­ful Christian state surrounded by hostile foes, including the Sasanian and Byzantine Empires. The Christian identity of Vakhtang and his realm has encouraged their study through a Byzantine lens. However, a critical reading of The Life of Vakhtang reveals that Vakhtang’s Christian kingdom was embedded foremost in the Ira­nian sociocultural world. As explic­itly acknowledged by the royal biographer, the names Vakhtang (cf. Vrϑangi and Vahrām/Bahrām < Vərəϑraɣna) and Gorgasali (< Dur az gorgasal, “flee the head of the wolf ”) are derived from the ­Middle Persian language. ­These are echoes of Caucasia’s durable Ira­nian onomasticon that reached well into the Bagratid regime. More profoundly, the pre­sen­ta­tion of the Christian Vakhtang is consistent with the Sasanian shāhan shāhs in the Ira­nian epic. Vakhtang is a hero-­k ing commanding a corps of champion warriors, bumberazis (< MPers. mumbāriz). He is enshrouded in sacral glory, the khwarrah (farnah) of Ira­nian kingship, though his glory emanates from the Christian God. ­There are many Georgian ele­ments too. Thus, Vakhtang declares his direct biological descent from the biblical Nimrod, who early Christian Georgians reformulated—in positive terms—as an Ira­nian, the first king to rule anywhere on the Earth, and the builder of the Tower of Babel.56 Vakhtang’s royal pedigree comprehends not only the

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Figure 10.6a and 10.6b. Two modern images of the hero-­king Vakhtang Gorgasali: statue outside the Metekhi church in Tbilisi (left); and on the cover of the c­ hildren’s book Vakhtang Gorgasali (Tbilisi: Palitra, 2011) in the series “­Great Georgians” (right).

legendary Nimrod but also the contemporaneous Sasanians. Indeed, early Georgian historians presented the Christian Chosroid dynasty as the displaced main line of the Sasanian h ­ ouse. The f­ amily name Khosroiani literally signifies ­those “descended from Khusrō,” the mythical eponymous ancestor of the Sasanians. The Life of Vakhtang positions its hero as the ultimate and most effective “mediator” (shuamdgomelobay) between the Ira­nian and Romano-­Byzantine empires.57 When tensions flared, Vakhtang mediated between the Byzantine basileus and Sasanian shāhan shāh, an action reportedly securing the return of Palestine to Constantinople’s control. Vakhtang’s portrayal as a cultural mediator in the space where empires and commonwealths converged and mixed is rarely appreciated. This was not some interstitial space between empires and cultural world but instead was a fertile cross-­cultural arena across the longue durée. Meanwhile, socially and culturally, Vakhtang and his fellow Kartvelians remained a fundamental part of the Ira­nian Commonwealth. But the realm’s Christian affiliation and its early royal conversion, in the first half of the fourth ­century, si­mul­ta­neously made it a charter member of the emergent Byzantine—or Eastern Christian—­Commonwealth.58 In crossroads like Caucasia, a decisive choice seldom had to be definitively made between one ­great cultural tradition or the other. Gamsakhurdia did not broach the topic of Vakhtang Gorgasali in his 1990 speech, a curious circumstance given Vakhtang’s prized status in the Georgian national venture, Vakhtang’s asserted role as cultural and imperial mediator, and the young Gamsakhurdia’s affection for this late antique king. Had he done so, the president-­to-be would have flaunted Vakhtang as a magnificent Chris-

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tian monarch ruling on the edge of Christendom u ­ nder relentless Zoroastrian and imperial Christian threat (cf. the Rus­sian Empire). Gamsakhurdia might have cast Vakhtang as a forerunner of his composite Prester John-­Davit II. Nationalist visions tend to be essentialist, teleological, ethnocentric, and decontextualized; such a depiction of Vakhtang would have been consistent with this approach. However, the image projected in premodern Georgian sources is far more sophisticated and is, of course, bound up in the times of the original authors and of subsequent scribes and editors. Their focus is specific elite groups, not the ­whole nation. At the same time, they pres­ent Georgia, and all Caucasia, as a socially integrated yet highly diverse area, and as a coherent, durable, and cosmopolitan zone of cross-­cultural encounter.59 This cross-­ cultural condition runs against the ethnocentric and xenophobic discourse of Gamsakhurdia who, as the USSR fell into decay, labored to authenticate Georgia’s qualifications as a primordial Eu­ro­pean nation charged with the “spiritual mission” of unifying “East” and “West.”

Ch a p ter  1 1

New Borders, New Belongings in Central Asia Competing Visions and the Decoupling of the Soviet Union Jeremy Smith

Locating the five Central Asian states and their inhabitants in relation to a broader region has never been straightforward. Incorporated relatively late into the Rus­sian Empire, Turkestan was seen by Rus­sian authorities as a backward periphery, subject to colonization by Eu­ro­ pe­ans and to brutal reprisals (described by Matthew J. Payne in chapter 4 of this volume). Consequently, its population could not be considered to belong to the Rus­sian Empire in the same way that its Eu­ro­pean ­peoples did. Up u ­ ntil at least the mid-1920s, they also did not belong to modern nations as understood in Eu­rope. The drive to nationhood was led by a small number of intellectuals, but only gathered momentum with the active intervention of the Soviet state.1 In the meantime, religion, language, tribe, clan, or region offered a range of alternative belongings, none of which was established as overriding. The Soviet promotion of five categories of nationhood for the Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Tajiks, Turkmen, and Uzbeks alongside secularism discouraged religious or regional identities. The latter was further deterred by a formal distinction between Kazakhstan and the other four republics, in the formula “Central Asia and Kazakhstan.” This distinction reflected the hybrid nature of Kazakhstan, which had been divided between the Steppe region in the north and Turkestan in the south in tsarist Rus­sia, with a large Slavic population and a more Eu­ro­pean character in the north of the republic.

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Nevertheless, the populations of Central Asia could claim to belong ­under a number of categories—­nation, region, religion, or Sovietness. The breakup of the Soviet Union, viewed h ­ ere as an extended pro­cess of “decoupling” rather than a one-­off event, provided the ultimate test of belonging. By that time the distinction between Kazakhstan and Central Asia had lost any real force, and in the Soviet Union’s last years, leaders of the five republics regularly held summits among themselves. In 1992, on the initiative of Kazakhstan’s president Nursultan Nazarbayev, they agreed to replace the old formula of Sredniaia Aziia i Kazakhstan with the unified Tsentral’naia Aziia covering all five (the difference is obscured in En­glish, where both terms are translated as “Central Asia”). While the expectation at the end of 1991 was that the Central Asian states would continue to belong primarily to the post-­Soviet space led by Rus­sia, the regional renaming suggested that Central Asia itself might be the focus of belonging. A broader Turkic or Turkic-­Iranian space was also a possibility, while a number of commentators expected a religious revival to create a new belonging in the Islamic world. In the event, none of t­ hese prevailed, and national belonging came to predominate. This chapter attempts to explain at least a part of this pro­cess, focusing on the failure to maintain a coherent post-­ Soviet space, which had been the subject of greatest expectation as the USSR unraveled. In spite of sporadic efforts to promote a Soviet identity (as documented by Anna Whittington in chapter  9 of this volume), the prevailing consensus among both scholars and former Soviet citizens is that identities ­were primarily national in the late Soviet period. As Rogers Brubaker has put it, “The Soviet state not only passively tolerated but actively institutionalized the existence of multiple nations and nationalities as fundamental constituents of the state and its citizenry.”2 At the same time, physical belonging to the Soviet Union was taken for granted. The borders between republics posed prob­lems in terms of the privileges enjoyed by dif­fer­ent nationalities on e­ ither side of a border, but they did not hamper communication or travel.3 On becoming state borders at the end of 1991, in most cases they ­were not expected to act as barriers to movement or trade e­ ither, but very rapidly that is exactly what they did. The new international borders did, therefore, generate new senses of belonging. The growing assertiveness of separateness before and a­ fter in­de­pen­dence came in spite of the apparently obvious advantages of retaining a single unified post-­Soviet space for ­these purposes. As Ronald Grigor Suny noted already in 1991, the republics w ­ ere mostly in a weak state eco­nom­ically and militarily, ­were internally divided, and lacked international support.4 ­Later this warning was born out in several former republics by economic crises that ­were worse

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than that in Rus­sia, and seemed to confirm that the Soviet republics would have been better off staying u ­ nder a unified state. This situation created a tension between on the one hand the aspiration for relative economic and military security, and on the other hand, the more emotive yearning to crown with state in­de­pen­dence the considerable latitude in issues of culture, language, and the infrastructural trappings of a nation-­state, which the republics had enjoyed even before perestroika allowed for the pursuit of separate economic and other policies.5 Am ­ iddle ground in t­ hese tensions was suggested by Valery Tishkov in 1997 and has more recently been reinforced by Serhii Plokhy’s detailed investigation of the last months of the Soviet Union:6 the key actors in deciding the fate of the USSR w ­ ere the po­liti­cal elites in each of the republics who made rational calculations based on their own best interests, primarily holding onto and expanding their personal power and wealth. ­These personal elite interests did not necessarily match up with what ­were the best interests of the republic as a w ­ hole (however that might be defined). While such an interpretation on its own is limited, it points to both the ways masses can put pressure on leaders and the illusory concept of “national interest” when this can be manipulated by elites (Tishkov’s emphasis is more on the latter, Plokhy’s on the former). This contribution seeks to illuminate ­these pro­cesses by treating the collapse of the Soviet Union not so much as a one-­off event, but as a pro­cess that was spread over several years. An impor­ tant finding from this perspective is that the choice on offer between remaining in a loose federation or enjoying state in­de­pen­dence within a closely-­knit Commonwealth was not based on such a g­ reat difference as might be presumed. It was only in the months and years ­after the Soviet collapse that the extent to which the post-­Soviet states had separated from each other became fully apparent. This pro­cess began in late 1990 and continued u ­ ntil at least 1995. It is seen as a “decoupling,” recalling the image of a train, where the Soviet, l­ater Rus­ sian, center is the engine. The carriages represent not so much the fourteen other republics as the issues that bind them to the center—­a ­legal system, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), the ruble, f­ ree trade, military security, shared history, and culture. In looking at Rus­sian realizations in 1995 as to how far even Central Asia had drifted from the Rus­sian orbit, we can imagine the engine driver turning around in dismay, to learn that ­after the hard effort of reaching the top of the hill, all of his carriages, one by one, have dropped off b­ ehind. One outcome of the events of December 1991 was the establishment of a mechanism for cooperation between most of the former republics in the form

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of the Commonwealth of In­de­pen­dent States (CIS). But in impor­tant ways this was just one step in a more drawn out pro­cess. On the one hand, the USSR had barely served as a single state for some time. Sovereignty had already been established not just at the level of Union Republics, but in smaller units of the Soviet Federation. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Georgia had declared full in­de­pen­dence. More dauntingly as far as the prospects for the Soviet Union ­were concerned, by the end of 1990 republics had begun to make bilateral agreements with each other, bypassing the Soviet center. The Rus­sian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and Ukraine signed a treaty establishing interstate relations on November 19, and the RSFSR and Kazakhstan followed suit two days ­later. Gorbachev’s decree banning such agreements did not prevent further treaties being signed.7 As Philip Hanson has shown, for much of 1990–91 each republic was pursuing its own separate economic policies, a dislocation that made the national question a cause of the economic crisis more than the other way around.8 In some instances, borders between republics had become a real­ity in terms of customs and other checks, while other borders (Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, among ­others) ­were the cause of violent conflicts. Republics w ­ ere routinely pursuing their own foreign relations while the ability of the Red Army and other security forces to act across the Union was severely hamstrung ­after the uproar that followed interventions in Georgia, Azerbaijan, Lithuania, and Latvia between April 1989 and January 1991.9 Thus, on the one hand, many of the features of state separation and in­ de­pen­dence had already been completed, or ­were well in pro­g ress, long before December  1991. On the other hand, the initial pronouncements and agreements of the CIS pointed to a continuing unity of purpose and action among at least ten of the former Soviet states, which took a further four years to decouple fully. The CIS was premised on a continued shared sense of belonging in the post-­Soviet space, but it quickly became clear that Central Asian leaders had entirely dif­fer­ent visions of the new order both from each other and from Rus­sian elites, who themselves ­were divided. Shifting policies and allegiances on the part of elites can be (and usually are) explained in terms of opportunist self-­interest, but such explanations are less convincing when it comes to the broader population. In the case of the five Central Asian republics, ­there is ­little discernible difference between elite and mainstream public attitudes ­toward the key issue of the day, in­de­pen­dence. At the local level, disputes over w ­ ater, land, or borders, especially in the border regions around the Ferghana Valley, often took national forms. But elsewhere nationalist mobilization was limited. According to Mark Beissinger’s database of demonstrations involving over one hundred ­people in the Soviet

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Union from 1987 to 1992, in four of the five Central Asian republics, ethnonationalist demonstrations outnumbered demonstrations calling for in­de­pen­ dence by an approximate ratio of 6:1 and 10:1, considerably higher than in most Soviet republics. In the fifth republic, Turkmenistan, not a single demonstration was recorded.10 Levels of demonstration, according to the same source, ­were extremely low compared to most other parts of the Soviet Union. The lack of vis­i­ble po­liti­ cal activism in f­avor of secession in Central Asia, together with formal support for the maintenance of the Soviet Union by Central Asian leaders, has led most commentators to conclude that Central Asia played no part in the dissolution, and that the five republics only became in­de­pen­dent once they had no choice. As Dmitry Trenin puts it, “Central Asia’s five republics . . . ​did not secede from the Soviet Union. It was the Union that imploded and abandoned them.”11 Similarly, Edward Walker comments: “Rather than ‘winning’ their in­ de­pen­dence, it would perhaps be closer to the truth to say that Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Belarus, and arguably even Rus­sia and Ukraine, had in­de­pen­dence forced on them.”12 This view was shared by at least some Western commentators at the time. As Martha Brill Olcott put it in 1992, “Few p­ eoples of the world have ever been forced to become in­de­pen­dent nations. Yet that is precisely what happened to the five Central Asian republics.”13 Such characterizations raise impor­tant questions not just over the pro­cess of the Soviet collapse, but also about the identity of the Central Asian post-­ Soviet states and their leaders. If in­de­pen­dence was involuntary or “forced,” then would this not pres­ent challenges to the way ­people felt that they belonged in the new states? Certainly, the Central Asian republics did not share in the pro­cesses of sustained large-­scale popu­lar mobilization seen in other republics. Ronald Grigor Suny notably omits the Central Asian republics from his summary of national mobilization during the perestroika years: “With the authorization from Gorbachev to express their frustrations and discontents, national intelligent­sias or­ga­nized around ethnic symbols to push for a liberating, eventually anti-­Communist, agenda. Once popu­lar nationalism overwhelmed the old Communist elites in Lithuania, Armenia, Estonia and Georgia, nationalism—or at least movements for republic sovereignty, ­either popu­lar or elite generated—­became irresistible forces.”14 But t­ hese pro­cesses ­were not entirely absent from Central Asia. As recent research has uncovered, from early 1989 onward a lively discourse in the Central Asian media and the emergence of movements like Tajikistan’s Ru ba Ru presented economic and social grievances in increasingly national terms along lines familiar from other parts of the USSR, albeit on a smaller scale.15 Over

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the short term, populations that had voted overwhelmingly in f­ avor of retaining the federal structure of the Soviet Union in the March 1991 referendum or­ga­nized by Mikhail Gorbachev w ­ ere happy to endorse in­de­pen­dence when ­later given the chance, and encouraged by their leaders to do so.16 In border regions, and especially among national minorities, the breakup created major difficulties and tensions, boiling over into vio­lence on occasion in the short term, and fueling some resentment at the USSR’s demise in the longer term.17 For the majority, however, politicians and populations that had appeared comfortable belonging to the Soviet Union for de­cades ­were, within less than a year, celebrating their separateness as a single nation-­state. By the summer of 1992, each of the Central Asian states was developing its own foreign and trade policies, as well as language, alphabet, and education laws that highlighted the separation.18 Closer examination reveals that the picture of passivity and conservatism in Central Asia in the course of 1991 was far from the case. In par­tic­u­lar, Kazakhstan’s leader Nursultan Nazarbayev was active not only in shaping the form of Mikhail Gorbachev’s plans for a renewed Soviet federation of republics but also in establishing certain key princi­ples for the successor states once the breakup occurred. The nature of the territory of the former Soviet Union was hotly debated without any consensus being achieved among the leaders of the post-­Soviet states. Newspaper reports consistently showed that expectations had been particularly high in Rus­sia that the borders of the new states would be fluid, both in the sense that they would be formally open to flows of trade and ­people and that Rus­sia would continue to be the main provider of security and the main focus of economic relations, at least when it came to Central Asia. Many in Rus­sia would go further and regard the location of the borders themselves as open to challenge on the basis of historic or ethnic claims. The leaders of the Central Asian states, especially t­ hose who quickly established strong and unchallenged leadership in Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, w ­ ere in a healthy position to advance alternative views. This they did, and w ­ ere not only able to challenge dominant Rus­sian visions of the post-­Soviet space but also to have some influence on international discourses of territorial integrity. The five Central Asian republics began to move actively to shape the ­future of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1990. Each of the Uzbek, Turkmen, Tajik, Kyrgyz, and Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republics declared its own sovereignty between June 20 and October 25, 1990. Equally significantly, they engaged in discussions with each other, culminating in an agreement to work more closely in cultural and po­liti­cal terms while maintaining the current separation into republics and respecting existing borders.19 All five Central Asian leaders

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reconfirmed their commitments on this as well as on supporting the continued existence of the Soviet Union throughout 1991, ­until at least December 6.20 Kazakhstan’s Nursultan Nazarbayev and Uzbekistan’s Islam Karimov w ­ ere the most active of ­these leaders in broader Soviet politics, and it was Nazarbayev who worked most closely with Gorbachev and with ­others in pushing alternative visions for the ­f uture of the Soviet space that would be to the benefit of the Central Asian republics. The leaderships of the five republics worked together, but the first message of this joint approach was that each republic was separate and should pursue its own policies. Thus, a Central Asian region was established on the basis of regular summits and agreements, but with no expectation that its members ­were bound to follow the same course. This established the tone for the last two years of the Soviet Union and the early post-­Soviet years. Kazakhstan was often in the lead, and all five republics tended to follow the same trajectories in the fields mentioned in the rest of this chapter. Differences of pace among Central Asian states are not elaborated ­here and ­there is more focus on Kazakhstan than o ­ thers, but given the similar trajectories, it is not unreasonable to see Kazakhstan in many ways as representative of the five Central Asian states ­after 1991. Nazarbayev was never simply supporting Gorbachev in his efforts to save the USSR. He differed in his approach to the new Union Treaty and sought to mold it to Kazakhstan’s advantage. He also continued to pursue bilateral relations, particularly with the RSFSR. At a summit in Almaty on August 16–17, 1991, Yeltsin and Nazarbayev affirmed their commitment to territorial integrity and respecting existing borders, thus looking forward to a pos­si­ble outcome where the states would separate.21 This was not always a straightforward relationship. A ­ fter Yeltsin’s press secretary Pavel Voshchanov issued a statement suggesting that, in the event of state separation, some borders may need to be revised, Nazarbayev accused him of following a path that could lead to the “possibility of inter-­republican war.”22 This spat was soon smoothed over, however, and was followed by the most comprehensive set of bilateral agreements to date between the RSFSR and Kazakhstan—­thirty in total, covering borders, security, the economy, and the rights of national minorities.23 The exclusion of the Central Asian leaders from the Belavezha meeting between the leaders of Rus­sia, Ukraine, and Belarus on December 8, 1991, led to a similar backlash and a similar backing down. The Central Asian leaders drafted their own proposals at meetings in Ashkhabad and Almaty on December 13 and 14, and successfully insisted on being included as founding members of the Commonwealth of In­de­pen­dent States that had been launched at Belavezha. The CIS was, in effect, refounded in Almaty on December 21, with the participation of and s­ haped by new input from Central Asia.24

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Thus, Nazarbayev was able to ensure three aims—­that the princi­ple of territorial integrity, maximum sovereignty, and borders open to trade could be preserved what­ever the fate of the USSR. While Nazarbayev was more active in pursuing discussions with both Rus­sia and the Soviet Union in pursuit of ­these aims, they ­were essentially shared by the leaders of the other Central Asian republics. Tajikistan’s po­liti­cal instability entailed a greater reliance on Rus­sian military support, as the republic slid into civil war. Authorities in Uzbekistan also felt threatened by the Islamic revival of the 1990s, even if the extent to which this translated into insurgent fundamentalism was greatly exaggerated. It was also, if anything, more dependent than Kazakhstan on its links with the Rus­sian economy. The more or less exclusive orientation of Uzbek agriculture to the production of cotton that was then pro­cessed in Rus­ sian textile plants explains Islam Karimov’s initial enthusiasm for the CIS, at least u ­ ntil alternative markets for cotton could be found.25 Although ­there was some variation in priorities, for all the republics the three aims could be achieved e­ ither within a framework of the continuation of the Soviet Union as a looser form of federation between sovereign states or through multilateral and bilateral agreements between newly in­de­pen­dent states. By forcefully discussing ­these three issues with both Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and playing both hands at once, Nazarbayev was keeping his options open but pursuing consistent ends. The Central Asian leaders’ preference was prob­ably for a loose federal Union, but the other option was not a bad one as long as certain key princi­ples could be embedded from the start. Nazarbayev could claim considerable success in the first of t­ hese aims, territorial integrity. His insistence was largely responsible for all the successor states signing on to the princi­ple of no border changes and, with the exception of the Armenia–­Azerbaijan conflict and Rus­sian encroachment in Georgia, this more or less held up ­until Rus­sia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. This may have had broader international significance. The shift in international discourses and law from the princi­ple of self-­determination to the princi­ple of territorial integrity occurred around this time, largely in response to the breakup of Yugo­slavia, which was already u ­ nder way. But the voluntary adoption of this princi­ple by the Soviet successor states also played an impor­tant role.26 From the perspective of the Central Asian states, the only significant area where agreement over borders was not achieved concerned the maritime borders of the Caspian Sea, an issue that remains unresolved to this day. The second aim, maximum sovereignty, was effectively made redundant by the emergence of fifteen in­de­pen­dent states. Some issues of sovereignty ­were still to be worked through, notably (a) the broad question of responsibility for security in the CIS states, most of which did not have the capability to defend

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themselves and ­were therefore ready to surrender this role to Rus­sia. Importantly, this became actualized in the case of Tajikistan; (b) the issue of nuclear weapons stationed in Ukraine and Kazakhstan; and (c) the status of the Baikonur space station in Kazakhstan, which, as with nuclear weapons, the new state did not have the resources to run effectively. The third aim, maintaining open borders and ­free trade, was the most fluid in ­these circumstances, and depended crucially on Rus­sia’s stand. Bobo Lo has observed that u ­ nder Yeltsin, Rus­sia paid l­ ittle attention in practice to the “near abroad” (i.e., the former Soviet states) vis-­à-­vis the high level of rhe­toric devoted to Rus­sia’s right to its sphere of influence; u ­ nder Putin and Medvedev the reverse was true—­the rhe­toric lessened but policy development became more active.27 With Rus­sia embroiled in its own internal conflicts, including the constitutional crisis of 1993 and the war with Chechnya, a space opened early on for the other post-­Soviet states to influence territorial arrangements and their own sovereign rule in ways that came as a surprise to Rus­sia. The key aims of the most impor­tant organ­ization of the former Soviet states, the CIS, ­were set out in Articles 4 and 5 of the December 1991 Belavezha accords: Article 4

The High Contracting Parties w ­ ill develop the equal and mutually advantageous cooperation of their ­peoples and states in the region of policy, economy, culture, public health, protection of environment, science, trade and, in humanitarian and other spheres, w ­ ill contribute to the broad exchange of data, and w ­ ill honestly and strictly observe mutual commitments. Article 5

The High Contracting Parties recognize and re­spect the territorial integrity of each other and the inviolability of the existing bound­aries within the framework of cooperation. They guarantee openness of bound­ aries, freedom of movement of citizens and transmission of information within the framework of cooperation. An outpouring of directives and agreements in January and February 1992 underpinned and gave binding substance to ­these aims, at least in theory.28 In 1996, Leonid Kuchma, by then president of the second most populous post-­Soviet state, Ukraine, had declared “the role of the CIS as a mechanism leading to a peaceful and demo­cratic resolution of all the prob­lems associated with the collapse of the USSR.”29 This formulation—­that the CIS was designed

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solely to manage the breakup of the Soviet Union rather than representing some form of continuing supranational unifying or coordinating body—­has frequently been repeated by social scientists in summing up the essence of the organ­ization.30 The failure of the CIS to achieve any significant high-­level agreement among its members adds weight to the suggestion that it had always been designed for a limited role. But it is an anachronism to suggest that Ukraine or any other CIS members viewed the organ­ization in ­these terms already in 1991. Leaving aside the question of the ­actual role of the CIS in coordinating activities of its members, a more compelling explanation for its weakness is not that t­ here was any consensus about the limited nature of the organ­ization, but rather that no consensus ever existed as to its nature, or indeed to the more fundamental prob­ lems regarding the organ­ization of the post-­Soviet space. For at least some in Rus­sia, it was a direct successor to the Soviet Union, an organ­ization that would allow Rus­sia to continue its leadership of the region, albeit within a looser structure than the USSR and with some states, notably the Baltics, outside of its realm altogether. For Nazarbayev, and initially Karimov, as has already been seen, it was to be primarily a trade organ­ization that would preserve the economic interdependence of the USSR. Kuchma’s belittling of the CIS came only ­after several years of disillusionment and disappointment with heavy-­handed Rus­sian leadership. Ukraine’s initial enthusiasm for the CIS was quickly dampened by failure to make pro­g ress over key issues such as the Black Sea fleet. A more thorough reenvisaging of the CIS was advanced in autumn 1993 by Turkmenistan’s president Saparmurat Niyazov: “From the beginning Turkmenistan has sought to compensate for the in­effec­tive­ness of the mechanisms of the CIS through bilateral relations and concluding vari­ous agreements with member states, while viewing the CIS chiefly as a consultative mechanism, for the possibility of exchanging opinions, experiences, and for planning action programs.” This he contrasted as a “dif­fer­ent conceptual approach” to the prevalent and more integrated Rus­sian one.31 Thus at least four dif­fer­ent conceptions of the CIS w ­ ere prevalent at the same time: as a successor to the USSR, which had real power with Rus­sia at its center; as a mechanism for managing the immediate consequences of the breakup of the USSR; as a purely economic organ­ization; and as a mere talking shop. This uncertainty over the nature of post-­Soviet space and of Rus­ sia’s role in it continues up ­until ­today. The real­ity was, as Niyazov put it in the same article, “­whether the breakup of the USSR was an unjustified accidental turn of history or a long-­term multistage pro­cess . . . ​at the end of the day it brought about an end to a single state.” Nevertheless, po­liti­cal statements and newspaper reporting suggest a

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broad expectation in Rus­sia that Rus­sian dominance would continue, at least in Central Asia. However, one by one the unifying features of the CIS dis­ appeared: manned borders and customs posts emerged already in the course of 1992, and the Central Asian states left the ruble zone (or rather the ruble zone collapsed in 1993), ejected Rus­sian border guards at dif­fer­ent points in the 1990s, rejected dual citizenship agreements, and introduced new versions of national history. More ambitious integration proj­ects, like a common citizenship, a joint CIS army, and a CIS court for ­human rights, all pushed for by Rus­sia in the first half of the 1990s, never r­ eally got off the ground. In a move of ­g reat symbolic significance (though barely implemented in practice), Uzbekistan followed Turkmenistan in officially dropping the Cyrillic alphabet in ­favor of the Latin one in 1994. The reasoning b­ ehind this move was based on a clear downgrading of Rus­sia’s regional and global significance: “[The Cyrillic alphabet] cannot provide the Uzbek language the conditions for further development. . . . ​[The Latin alphabet ­will allow] in­de­pen­dent Uzbekistan to more easily occupy its deserved place in world society.”32 Although the CIS states consistently agreed on the princi­ple of f­ ree trade, the temptation to follow protectionist policies proved hard to resist. On January 16, 1992, Kazakhstan and Rus­sia signed an agreement “On Removing Constraints in Economic Activity,” which provided for the ­free movement of goods, ser­vices, ­labor, and finance. Shortly afterward, however, the Rus­sian Federation set up customs points along the Kazakh border, leading to loud protests from Kazakhstan. When Kazakhstan in turn attempted to establish a customs regime with Rus­sia in the summer of the same year, Rus­sia responded by raising the price of energy exports to Kazakhstan ­until Nazarbayev backed down. The logic b­ ehind the sporadic strengthening of the border regimes between CIS states that ­were supposed to have signed on to the ­free passage of goods and ­peoples across borders was outlined by Yeltsin at a meeting of his government on June 4, 1992. The transportation across borders of stolen goods, most seriously of firearms, was showing a rapid increase and was set to keep growing, according to Rus­sian experts. As well as arms entering Rus­sia, reports from the Ministry of Culture documented the disappearance of large numbers of icons and other cultural artifacts, meaning that traffic across the border was in need of control in both directions, according to Yeltsin. Central Asian countries ­were singled out for having instituted visa-­free agreements with non-­CIS countries, which meant essentially that p­ eople could pass between Rus­sia and the outside world without any effective controls.33 This led to unilateral Rus­sian action to strengthen borders, thereby underlining one of the reasons for the failures of CIS integration: Rus­sia continued to be unpredictable and failed to adhere to clear agreements. Karimov explic­

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itly blamed Rus­sia’s failure to live up to its commitments for his initial consideration to leave the ruble zone: “Moscow is continuing a policy of pressure and diktat. Many decisions are not being fulfilled, so if we have to we ­will adopt our own currency.”34 Rus­sian arrogance also r­ ose to racist levels on occasion, with no attempt at concealment.35 In July 1992, precisely as agreement was being reached between Rus­sia and Turkmenistan over a joint command for Turkmenistan’s border troops, Rus­sian officers raised objections to the recruitment of Turkmen border guards to work alongside the Rus­sian troops already in place, which this agreement entailed. Referring to the numerous tasks a border guard was expected to carry out, A. Reznichenko, then chief of the Border Defense Department of the Central Asian Border district, claimed, “The Turkmens, we have become convinced, are not yet capable of d­ oing all ­these t­ hings. . . . ​But when it comes to desertion and violating regulations, they are masters.”36 The trajectory of Central Asian disillusionment with Rus­sia did not follow exactly the same course for each of the states. Niyazov was committed to a course of official neutrality for Turkmenistan. This involved dealing with Rus­ sia in a pragmatic way, buttressed by trade in gas, which meant that even such adverse comments as Reznichenko’s ran like ­water off a duck’s back. On the other hand, any kind of po­liti­cal integration was not an option, as explained in Niyazov’s comments on the CIS. Karimov’s comments over the ruble zone and the alphabet change, among other issues, express a clear frustration, disillusionment, and refusal to accept Rus­sian leadership. Nazarbayev shared many of ­these frustrations, and expressed them openly on occasion, but was nevertheless keen to nurture his relationship with Yeltsin and continued to promote schemes for greater Eurasian integration, especially in economic terms, but based on a partnership of equals. During a visit of France’s president to Kazakhstan in September 1993, in an interview with Le Figaro Nazarbayev blamed the failings of the CIS not on Yeltsin himself, but on some of Yeltsin’s advisers: “They think that if Rus­sia ­were to be alone—­without the CIS—it would quickly revive, and every­thing would be better. I ­don’t know who is leading ­these ­people, but I know that the destruction of the loose mechanism of the CIS ­will be the beginning of the destruction of Rus­sia.”37 A further reason for the drift of Central Asia from Rus­sia’s orbit was the loss of attractiveness of Rus­sia as a pole: with its economy at rock bottom, embroiled in an internal war with Chechnya, and coming close to a civil war itself in the autumn of 1993, Rus­sia did not look like a power that could provide the security and economic prosperity that post-­Soviet leaders so craved. Other poles w ­ ere starting to look far more attractive: for the three Baltic states, Eu­ro­pean Union membership was calling. The energy-­rich countries,

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Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, could call on international investors with far more resources and know-­how than Rus­sian ones (this was especially the case with Azerbaijan) and conclude energy agreements separately with other powers as well as with Rus­sia. For the Central Asian states, apart from the interest in energy resources, Western attention initially focused on issues like democ­ratization and was less obvious than for other parts of the former USSR. The first governments to focus more attention on the region ­were Turkey and Iran. In 1992, all five Central Asian states (as well as Azerbaijan and Af­ghan­i­stan) joined the Economic Coordination Committee, which had been founded by Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan in 1985. This suggested that the Central Asian states might realign according to cultural, linguistic, or religious affiliation, with Tajikistan most likely to align with Iran, and the o ­ thers with Turkey. However, while Turkey invested considerably in education programs, Iran focused mainly on relations with its fellow Caspian littoral states, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, and on issues such as pipeline construction. Both countries competed in investing in telecommunications and in providing air transport links. Ultimately, the main interests appeared economic rather than integrational. Central Asian membership in international Islamic organ­izations was also limited and halfhearted from the beginning.38 In the 2010s, China was to become the principal economic alternative to Rus­sia, eventually embedding its engagement u ­ nder the rubric of the “One ­Belt, One Road” proj­ect. But while economic investment was always welcomed, it often clashed with popu­lar sentiment, and Sinophobia remains strong across the region. In all, alternative belongings other than to the nation and state—­regional, linguistic, or religious—­never took hold to any g­ reat extent in Central Asia. Failure to agree on the basic nature of the CIS, Rus­sian indifference and arrogance, the loss of Rus­sian attractiveness, and the growing attraction of alternative poles ­were all reasons for the continued decoupling of the Soviet Union a l­ittle more than three years ­after its official demise. But nevertheless, geography, history, shared language, and the legacy of a centralized economy all dictated that ties should have remained closer than they did. As in the months before December 1991, it was the more elusive, emotional ingredient much discussed by Ronald Grigor Suny—­nationalism—­that played a decisive role. As nation-­states consolidated, borders took on symbolic significance as markers of nationhood that made any surrender of control over them impossible and fed into a hardening of conceptions of the border. National currencies, national histories, and, increasingly, national language policies also ran up against the Rus­sian link.

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Newspapers reveal that, by 1995, this realization hit Rus­sian commentators as something that had not been anticipated and that led to major soul-­searching over Rus­sia’s approach to its “near abroad.” The influential chair of the Duma Committee on International Affairs, Vladimir Lukin, noted, “Beyond Kazakhstan, nothing is clear . . . ​this creates a completely unprotected country. Completely unmonitored with re­spect to narcotics, arms dealing, and all kinds of gangsterism generally. This is very dangerous.”39 At almost the same time, an article in Moskovskie novosti complained, “It is not hard to see that Rus­sia’s influence in the Central Asian region is declining from year to year. Pushed out of the ruble zone and fenced in by customs posts and new borders, post-­Soviet Asia is turning southward.”40 Such regrets also affected official policy. Rus­sian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev proposed “gathering” the former Soviet republics together using Rus­sia’s military influence, which had been exercised in resolving Tajikistan’s Civil War and could now be consolidated through the establishment of military bases throughout Central Asia.41 Rus­sian unease at ­these developments was reflected in growing concern over the situation of ethnic Rus­sians who now found themselves cut off from the Rus­sian Federation by increasingly strong international borders. The Rus­ sian foreign policy concept of 1993 listed as the second foreign policy priority, the “protection of the rights, dignity and well-­being of Rus­sian citizens,” a­ fter the first priority “to ensure Rus­sia’s security in all dimensions.”42 Rus­sia’s self-­ proclaimed right to protect ethnic Rus­sians beyond its borders played some role in Rus­sia’s engagement in Tajikistan and in the (prob­ably unsanctioned) Rus­sian military intervention in Transnistria, but other­wise did not lead to any further military or other direct cross-­border activities in the 1990s. The Rus­ sian authorities did, however, use two other tools more regularly. One was to put direct pressure on governments to ensure the rights of Rus­sians. T ­ hese could be linked to international agreements or other forms of cooperation from Rus­sia. In 1995 economic agreements made between Yeltsin and Turkmenistan’s president Niyazov ­were also linked to the protection of Rus­sians in Turkmenistan.43 The second tool was to provide direct material, financial, and po­liti­cal backing to Rus­sian organ­izations in the former Soviet states. In the first post-­Soviet years, such efforts ­were focused especially on Cossack groups in Ukraine and northern Kazakhstan. In 1993–94 the status of Cossack organ­izations became a source of some tension between Moscow and Almaty, as Cossacks in northern Kazakhstan declared their own regional self-­ rule and the Rus­sian Ministry of Justice registered a “Siberian Cossack Force,” which had four of its sixteen subdivisions in Kazakhstan. The Kazakh authorities responded by refusing to register any Cossack organ­izations ­until a

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compromise was reached whereby some Cossack organ­izations ­were registered, with the proviso that they ­were not military formations.44 Rus­sia also sought to extend the concept of citizenship on an ethnic basis to Rus­sians abroad. A June 1993 amendment to the citizenship law allowed qualified ­people to obtain Rus­sian citizenship even if such individuals had already acquired citizenship in another country. The right to dual citizenship was enshrined in Yeltsin’s constitution that was brought in ­later the same year. This dual citizenship was at odds with practices elsewhere in the former Soviet Union (and in the Rus­sian Federation before June 1993), and raised fears that substantial portions of the population in the post-­Soviet states would be encouraged to develop their identification with Rus­sia at the expense of the nation-­building and state-­building proj­ects of Kazakhstan and other new countries. Despite strong pressure from Rus­sia to sign bilateral treaties on dual citizenship, Turkmenistan was the only Central Asian state that Rus­sia was able to prevail on.45 Even in that case, Turkmenistan repealed its agreement in 2003. The Central Asian states w ­ ere equally cool about a Rus­sian proposal in 1994 to create a common citizenship for CIS members.46 Rhe­toric about the plight of Rus­sians in Central Asia surfaced in the Rus­ sian press in response to new language laws and perceived discrimination against Rus­sians. Concerns ­were highest in relation to Kazakhstan, where almost 4.5 million ethnic Rus­sians still remained in 1999 (down from 6.2 million in 1989). The language laws of 1989 and 1995, which relegated the Rus­sian language to second place ­behind Kazakh while remaining an official language, ­were a constant source of protest. The move of the capital of Kazakhstan from Almaty to Astana (formerly Akmola), on the edge of the predominantly Rus­ sian regions of northern Kazakhstan, in 1997 was widely interpreted in Rus­ sia as a move designed to keep an eye on ­those regions.47 Press reports complained regularly of the rewriting of history in Kazakhstan to portray negative aspects of imperial Rus­sian rule, and linked this to discrimination against Rus­sians.48 As Matthew J. Payne notes in chapter 4 of this volume, historians in both Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan w ­ ere quick to take advantage of the breakdown in links with Rus­sia to portray the 1916 revolt as a key part of the strug­gle for national liberation, and subsequent reprisals as almost genocidal acts perpetrated by Rus­sians. In November 1993, in the wake of the collapse of the ruble zone, Kozyrev toured the Central Asian states with the main aim of highlighting the plight of ethnic Rus­sians.49 While official concerns about ethnic Rus­sians generally became more muted ­after the mid-1990s, the issue remained a popu­lar one for Rus­sian nationalists as well as Rus­sian and Cossack groups within the region.

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The power of nationalism in post-­Soviet Central Asia is difficult to mea­ sure. Most thorough anthropological investigations have focused on the ethnically mixed Ferghana Valley, which cannot be representative of most of the populations. While official nationalism has been investigated through issues such as language laws, the extent to which they w ­ ere popularly driven remains an elusive question. While Central Asia’s leaders did not go as far and did not have the same nationalist biography as Zviad Gamsakhurdia, whose role in promoting a par­tic­u­lar vision of the Georgian nation is discussed by Stephen H. Rapp Jr. (chapter 10 in this volume), they ­were not shy about embracing a new vision of the nation. Occasional outbreaks of ethnic mobilization, ­whether against the state or against other nationalities, since 1991 suggest that power­ ful forces have been at work ­here, but their precise nature when it comes to mainstream popu­lar nationalism is in need of further investigation. The failure of the Yeltsin regime to maintain its domination over any parts of the post-­Soviet space other than Belarus was instrumental in setting the international agenda of his successor from the earliest days. The low point of Rus­sia’s presence in Central Asia may have come in May 1999, when the last Rus­sian border guards leaving Bishkek ­were forced to run the gauntlet of locals hurling abuse and spitting at them as they left their base.50 A few months ­later terrorist attacks in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan prompted Vladimir Putin, as prime minister and soon to become president, to pres­ent Rus­sia as the potential savior against the threat of extremist Wahhabism and to build a new security presence for Rus­sia in Central Asia. Putin’s War on Terror, launched in military terms in Chechnya soon ­after and extended globally ­after 9/11, started in Central Asia. This was followed by quiet efforts to reinvigorate the CIS and pursue a number of proj­ects for security and economic integration.51 ­These ­were generally more effective than any proj­ects of the Yeltsin years, and the latest, the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), is the most ambitious. But the EEU, like other proj­ects, has not been straightforward. All have suffered from the difficulties already apparent in the early 1990s—­a disconnect between the understandings of Central Asian leaders and the public who by now ­were fully comfortable with their place as in­de­pen­dent players on a global stage, and arrogance and indifference on the part of Rus­sia. The attachment of Rus­sians to the post-­Soviet space, reflected in both official discourses and surveys of popu­lar attitudes, was evident in the 1990s and its consequences are part of the story of the crisis over Crimea and Ukraine since 2014. The continuity in this disposition is, of course, extremely complex. Not least, it would seem that Rus­sians are well aware of differentiations within the post-­Soviet space that are not always reflected in academic studies: at one

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extreme are the Baltic states, whose place in the Soviet system was always dubious and whose right to complete separation has rarely been challenged, even when they have treated their Rus­sian populations unfairly. Belarus and Ukraine, especially Crimea, ­were the subjects of a more emotional disposition, not only ­because of notions of Slavic brotherhood but also ­because of a historical understanding of territorial continuity. The Caucasus, north and south, figured prominently in Rus­sian cultural works of the nineteenth ­century and ­were exoticized and respected,52 although in the 1990s the region was portrayed more as a place of danger. At the other end of the scale is the Central Asian region that is the main subject of this chapter, which was typically treated as less intrinsically linked to Rus­sia and more as a zone of economic and security dependence.53 Eco­nom­ically backward, dependent, Islamic Central Asia, regularly patronized with a tinge of racism by Rus­sians, the region’s increasing exit from the Rus­sian orbit has been hardest to swallow b­ ecause of the humiliation it implies. The “decoupling” of the post-­Soviet space, in spite of the clear intentions of the original architects of the CIS, was conditioned by economic realities, Rus­sian arrogance and presumptiveness, and the emergence of nation-­states in familiar forms that would not tolerate subordination to a former imperial power. The Rus­sian presumption that the territories and p­ eoples of most of the former Soviet states would naturally belong to a common space led by Rus­ sia clashed early on with local senses of national belonging. In hindsight, ­there appears to have been a certain inevitability ­behind this pro­cess. In spite of the significant differences between them, their failure to develop a regional identity or sustained cooperation, and variations in their post-­Soviet po­liti­cal development, the five Central Asian states decoupled from the former Soviet Union along a remarkably consistent trajectory. The f­actors ­behind this decoupling—­national proj­ects, competing visions of the CIS, Rus­sian heavy-­ handedness, and a shift in the relative attractiveness of Rus­sia compared with other poles—­have continued to plague efforts at both Eurasian integration and nation-­state building in the region.

Conclusion Ronald Grigor Suny

The stunning success of the nation-­form in the past two centuries and the steady eclipse of empires across the globe testify to the extraordinary ability of nations and nationalisms to exploit the discourses and emotions that make certain kinds of po­liti­cal communities more attractive, cohesive, and durable than ­others. The sentiments of national pride, the sense of shared destiny, the affection for local landscape and homeland, as well as hostility to the foreign, powerfully mobilized p­ eople from early modern times, if not earlier, to coalesce into communities ­imagined as nations. The spectacular emergence and spread of the post-1789 discourse of the nation, with its claims that shared culture deserves, indeed requires, po­liti­cal recognition, autonomy, or even statehood, and that po­liti­cal power emanates from the p­ eople or­ga­nized as the nation, overwhelmed older legitimizing formulas that founded po­liti­cal authority on conquest, paternity, and divine ordination. Yet empires, the longest-­lived and most durable po­liti­cal formations through h ­ uman history, also had affective ties, senses of belonging, that maintained privileged elites in power and convinced imperial subjects to acquiesce in an essentially unequal, hierarchical, and exploitative po­liti­cal structure. Imperial affective ties ­were both similar to and differed from national emotions. Noble elites expressed patriotic loyalties to emperors and empresses, the dynasty and the state. Commoners held rulers in awe, feared their wrath, but also desired their protection. Tsars ­were batushka, ­little ­father, but they 199

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­ ere often stern paternal figures. The relationship between ruler and ruled w was one of parents to c­ hildren, rather than one of b­ rothers and ­sisters in the idealized conception of the nation. As Krista A. Goff and Lewis H. Siegelbaum note in the introduction to this volume, despite evident differences in their ideal forms, empires and nation-­ states as real po­liti­cal structures shared many similarities in how they governed. Scholars have used t­ hese categories to illuminate distinct features of the Romanov Empire and the Soviet Union. Few would argue that tsarist Rus­sia or the USSR was unequivocally identical to classic landed empires or the g­ reat Eu­ro­pean overseas empires or that they neatly fit the mold of a modern nation-­ state. Even as historians deploy ­these models, they stumble over the complexities of polities that involved both nation-­making pro­cesses and rhe­torics (homogenization, formation of a sovetskii narod about which Anna Whittington writes in chapter 9) along with imperial instrumentalities (institutionalized and ­legal differentiations between nationalities, some inferior to o ­ thers, and social groups that approached the fixities of an estate [soslovie] system). As Valerie Kivelson and I argued for several hundred pages in Rus­sia’s Empires: From Muscovite times Rus­sia exhibited aspects of a “national” community—in the sense of a country and ­people with a thin coherence and some shared popu­lar and elite ideas about the polity, the realm, and the roles and identities of the ­people within it—­without the connotations and cluster of meanings that would be attached to a modern notion of nation from the late eigh­teenth ­century on. . . . ​At the same time, Rus­ sia operated within an imperial paradigm of governance—­rule by a sovereign and a group of ­people (the ruling dynasty, the nobility) having the right to rule, sanctioned by reciprocal duties, by ser­vice, by God, nature, and physical force. Soviet Rus­sia perpetuated this paradigm of rightful consolidation of power: the Communist vanguard was required to master a singular form of po­liti­cal knowledge. It is precisely ­these kinds of imperial tendencies, which hindered an easy transition to more demo­cratic forms of governance.1 To illustrate how a nation-­state perpetuates imperial rule over its ostensible citizens, treating them as subjects of a central state, consider the Republic of Turkey. Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, itself the victim not only of rival imperial powers and their annexationist ambitions but also of the Ottomans’ own genocidal program against Armenians and Assyrians, the Kemalist republic set about in a top-­down effort to forge a modern Turkish nation-­state, homogenizing its population—­expelling Greek Christians and Turkifying Kurds—­and insisting that ­every school child regardless of ethnic-

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ity or religion recite daily Ne mutlu Türküm diyene! (How happy is the one who says I am a Turk!). But what could be more imperial than forced assimilation of Jews, the remaining Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek Christians, the Alevis, and Kurds; the pro­cess of distinguishing and differentiating of ­peoples that Janet Klein (chapter 1 in this volume) highlights as minoritization; the refusal to grant the most elementary national rights, such as education in their own language (e.g., Kurdish); repeated confiscation of property (the infamous varlik vergesi of 1942) of specific ethnoreligious groups; and the military campaigns from the late 1920s u ­ ntil the pres­ent that repressed Kurdish re­sis­tance to Turkish rule and destroyed thousands of Kurdish towns and villages in eastern Anatolia (historic Armenia, present-­day Kurdistan)? The point ­here is that what has been seen as nation-­making, that is homogenization, has imperial qualities to it: coercion, even vio­lence, discrimination, and the maintenance of distinctions that reinforce inferiority and superiority. As Goff and Siegelbaum forcefully state in their introduction, “Nations must take owner­ship of their own be­hav­iors.” The histories of both empires and nations, as the essays in this collection demonstrate, are saturated by “bloody belonging” in Ian W. Campbell’s pungent words (chapter 2). In the “shatterzone of empires” that stretched from eastern Eu­rope through the Caucasus and Anatolia to Central Asia, imperial, national, and civil wars, ethnic cleansings and genocides destroyed millions of lives as they restructured collapsed empires into new national and imperial formations. Vio­lence by the civilizing empire was justified by the projected and purported inferiority and brutality of ­those to be suppressed, ­those who understood only force and strength. “Pedagogic killing,” or what I have referred to as exemplary repression, aimed to teach Tekke Turkmen in the 1880s and Ottoman Armenians in the Hamidian massacres of the 1890s that re­sis­tance was futile.2 ­Here imperial vio­lence ­either established a new order (in Central Asia) or sought to preseve one that was being threatened (in the vilayets of eastern Anatolia). Rus­sia’s frontiers ­were exceptionally vulnerable, and expansion accompanied by extraordinary vio­lence was rationalized ­because outsiders constantly threatened the empire. From the earliest times, through the Mongol conquests to the modern raids on frontier forts by nomads, reasons (and excuses) for further movement east and south ­were used to defend the most sadistic treatment of the ­peoples beyond the ever moving borders. The vio­lence by the Rus­sians in Central Asia and Caucasia, the Soviets in Ukraine and Kazakhstan, and Ottomans in nineteenth-­century Anatolia was not aimed at extermination of a w ­ hole ­people; rather than annihilation, it was directed at punishment (as occurred in 1916 in Kazakhstan) or submission to an imperial authority (as

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in the Hamidian massacres of the 1890s). The fine line between extermination and repression was not clear to every­one at all times, as in the request for clarification as to how to h ­ andle Kirgiz prisoners: “Do you want me to exterminate all of them or just the ones who oppose us?” Glory was a potent emotion associated with the military and the state elite that both inspired further effort and gave satisfaction from what had been accomplished. Both tsars and self-­styled Communist dictators thrived on the achievements of their warriors. Ultimately each conquest moved the frontier into new points of conflict with other ­peoples ­until imperial overreach made it nearly impossible to defend effectively the empire that stretched thousands of miles from the capital. Tsarism would falter when confronted by Japan in 1904–5 and Germany, Austro-­Hungary, and the Ottomans in 1914–15; and the Soviets would strain attempting to hold both Poland and Af­ghan­i­stan in their sphere of influence in the 1980s. Imperialism and colonization bred their own emotional repertoire that reinforced notions of inferiority and superiority. Matthew J. Payne shows (chapter 4) how Slavic peasant settlers in Central Asia transformed themselves into “barons” and the local Kirgiz (Kazakhs) into “dogs” who had no rights to the land, which was the tsar’s. ­After all, the colonizers fashioned themselves as the tsar’s p­ eople and the native p­ eoples as foreigners of another origin (inorodtsy). Within empires, belonging could be to the state, the dynasty, or the person of the ruler, but competing attachments to locality, religion, and ethnicity coexisted and w ­ ere often far stronger than affiliation to the realm. Jo Laycock (chapter  6) demonstrates how Armenians, both Soviet and diaspora, became attached to the fragment of their ancestral homeland that lay within the Soviet Empire. From the establishment of Soviet Armenia in 1920, “a site of crisis came to be transformed into a potential locus of Armenian belonging, a national home not only for the Armenians who had arrived in the region during the war, but also for the Armenian refugees who remained dispersed across the ­Middle East and beyond in the Genocide’s aftermath.” Atrocities and their attendant suffering are integral to the stories of imperial conquests and the cleansings involved in nation-­making. The Mets Yeghern of the Armenians, the Urkun of the Kirgiz, and the Holodomor of the Ukrainians, along with the expulsion from the land of Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, and the Palestinian Arabs (Nakhba) are horrors committed by empires or aspiring nation-­ states that became foundational to the self-­ representation of the victim ­peoples affected. As Norman  M. Naimark (chapter 3) reminds us, “Almost all genocides are perpetrated at the behest of po­liti­cal leaderships and are not spontaneous eruptions of mass killing.” What­ ever the structural, environmental, cultural, or international context in which

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mass killing, ethnic cleansing, or genocide occurs, the immediate cause of ­these crimes against humanity are the choices made by power­f ul po­liti­cal actors at the helm of the state. The making of nations took on a particularly strong state-­directed form within the Soviet Union. As both Daniel E. Schafer (chapter 7) and Jeremy Johnson (chapter 8) show, a concerted effort was made to create a national literary language, eliminate foreign words, establish an appropriate (po­liti­cally acceptable) alphabet, and reform orthography. From myriad unwritten local vernaculars, Volga Tatar and Armenian ­were steadily, though not always consistently, molded into a national language to be taught in schools and used in the national media. In a bizarre dialectical pro­cess, literacy campaigns and orthography changes promoted both literacy and illiteracy, making it impossible in some cases (certainly in the Tatar Republic, but not in Armenia) for ­people to read older texts written with dif­fer­ent words, alphabets, and spellings. In the 1930s, in the traditionally Muslim nations where the literary language had been written in Arabic script, the Rus­sian language and the Cyrillic alphabet ceased to be negative instruments of imperial conformity and w ­ ere promoted as an introduction into the positive language of revolution and the class strug­gle. By the 1960s, one-­third of “Tatar” words ­were actually of Rus­ sian origin. Armenians, like Georgians, kept their traditional alphabets but with modernizing innovations. As Johnson argues, “Over the course of the first two de­cades of Soviet rule, Armenians learned to speak Soviet, but with an Armenian accent that reflected the legacy of international humanitarian education and the par­tic­u­lar historical and linguistic circumstances of the Soviet Armenian nation-­building proj­ect.” Both in Soviet and non-­Soviet nation-­ making, language was a field of strug­gle, and forging the nation (in both senses of the word “forging”) could cost ­people their lives. Nations ­were made in the USSR at the same time as an all-­union collective identity, the Soviet P ­ eople, was also being forged. Unity was essential as the vast country faced the threat of war from both East and West. The search for a formula that would encompass the diversity of the Soviet imperial space yet include hundreds of language, religious, and ethnic groups ­under one rubric excluded and divided even as it included and united. Whole ­peoples and social groups ­were expelled from the body politic, as the ­Great Purges ruined hundreds of thousands of lives. The war mobilized p­ eople around a shared Soviet patriotism, but differences and hierarchies among the nationalities remained potent, with Rus­sians favored as ­those who made the greatest sacrifice to save the socialist system. “The clear preference for the Rus­sian ­people,” writes Whittington, “embodied in repeated reminders that Rus­sians ­were the ‘older ­brother’ and the ‘first among equals’ and the reliance on the Rus­sian

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language, highlighted per­sis­tent imperial hierarchies.” The war, which inflicted “unpre­ce­dented destruction on Soviet territory and citizens . . . ​paradoxically created a home for the Soviet p­ eople.” Broad patriotic affiliations, like identifying with the Soviet Union or belonging to civil rather than ethnic nations or to the Eu­ro­pean Union or Central Asia, appear to be more difficult to sustain than the affective ties to national home, homeland, f­ amily, and nation—­perhaps ­because of the latter’s association with kinship and myths of shared blood and ancestry. Yet as Jeremy Smith proposes, the loosening of the Soviet bonds took more time and was more difficult than would be assumed from the belief that nations are au­then­tic and real, while transnational associations are imposed, artificial, and doomed to fail. At a time when the Baltic republics, Armenia, Georgia, and Moldova hurried to sever ties with the Kremlin, ­there was no rush to go it alone on the part of most of the other Soviet republics. In Central Asia in par­tic­u­lar Smith detects a “lack of vis­i­ble po­liti­cal activism in f­avor of secession.” Still, he argues, Central Asian leaders took an active part in calling for in­de­pen­dence. Soviet disintegration was both a function of the center falling apart and the result of a genuine quest for “decoupling” on the part of the republics. As the nationalist first president of the in­de­pen­dent Armenian Republic, Levon Ter Petrossian, declared a­ fter the attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991, “the center had committed suicide,” implying that t­ here was no choice but in­de­pen­dence.3 The jerry-­built Commonwealth of In­de­pen­dent States, as fragile as it was from its inception, in fact took four years to disintegrate. Ultimately, Smith argues, the agency of Central Asian po­liti­cal leaders in pursuit of their own interests accounts for divergences among states linked by common history and geography. The centrifugal forces of local, national, and personal interests that tore the USSR apart overwhelmed the centripetal aspirations of many who opposed and ­later regretted the disintegration of the ­union. In his deeply textured exploration of the ingredients that contributed to the making of Georgian national repre­sen­ta­tions, Stephen H. Rapp Jr. shows that the most organic and primordial of national identities, like ­those promoted by late Soviet and post-­Soviet Georgian nationalists, ­were constructed out of patchy se­lections made by ethnic entrepreneurs like Zviad Gamsakhurdia. For in­de­pen­dent Georgia’s first president, Georgians w ­ ere of ancient origin, Christian, Eu­ro­pean, with a mission to bridge East and West. Complex pan-­ Caucasian connections or Persian lineages w ­ ere set aside; imperial experiences ­were reduced to repression and erosion of the national essence. The multiethnicity of Georgia through centuries was reconceived as the hospitality of Georgians who welcomed “guests,” like Armenians, rather than an example

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of medieval cosmopolitanism in an age before nations and nationalists. Guests, of course, can be asked to leave, and Gamsakhurdia’s fundamental wish was a homogeneous Georgia for Georgians. Although the nation-­state appears to have eliminated empire as the preferred po­liti­cal system and form of governance in the modern world, in my view, most states in the twentieth and twenty-­first ­century operate more like imperial polities than like the idealized images of national states. Discrimination, differentiation that marks off inferiors from superiors, and institutionalized hierarchies of class and ethnicity flourish within the formal discourse of the nation that continues to preach liberty, fraternity, and equality. As a pioneer of popu­lar sovereignty, the United States gradually equalized its citizens, expanded the franchise, and guaranteed rights of ­people formerly denied them. But since its inception it had coexisted with millions of enslaved African Americans and for centuries deported and massacred native p­ eoples. Even ­after the Emancipation Proclamation, Americans enforced l­egal subordination of ­those same ­peoples through Jim Crow, segregation, and repressive policies ­toward Indians, driving them out of their homelands into less hospitable lands. One can argue that the United States only approximated the definition of an egalitarian, demo­cratic, inclusive nation-­state with the enfranchisement of ­women and the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, achievements of nation-­ making that many conservative and reactionary ele­ments work actively to reverse. Claire P. Kaiser (chapter 5) shows how the late-­Stalinist expulsions of designated ethnic groups from Georgia w ­ ere both “a Soviet tool of imperial population management” and “an instrument of nation-­building and national homogenization at the local level. In other words, by expelling minorities, Georgian authorities enacted imperial prerogatives t­oward national goals—­and the republic’s population likewise answered in national idioms.” As she writes, “Expulsion represents one of the most radical tools available to empires and nations alike to define territories and refine populations.” Empires appear to dis­appear, but their specter remains to haunt the fragile bonds of the nation.

N ote s

Introduction

1. Valerie Kivelson and Ronald Suny, Rus­sia’s Empires (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 4. 2. In his book on the construction of a modern Turkish nation, Uğur Ümit Üngör identifies and analyzes t­ hese be­hav­iors—­physical destruction, memory politics, etc.—as “new technologies of population policies.” Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), vii. 3. ­There are some notable exceptions, including Krishan Kumar, who blurs the distinction between empires and nations by emphasizing similarities between them and arguing that empires are still v­ iable po­liti­cal proj­ects. See, Krishan Kumar “Nation-­ states as Empires, Empires as Nation-­states: Two Princi­ples, One Practice?” Theory and Society 39, no. 2 (2010): 119–143; and the special issue of Thesis Eleven 139, no. 1 (2017) on Empires and Nations. 4. See, for example, Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France, c. 1500–­c.1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), and Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2010). 5. Kivelson and Suny refer to “the aspirational fiction of equality and homogeneity” in Kivelson and Suny, Rus­sia’s Empires, 5. The classic treatment of nations along ­these lines is Benedict Anderson, ­Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 6. For a collection of essays exploring the interplay between imperial and nationalizing ideologies, see Alexei Miller and Stefan Berger, eds., Nationalizing Empires (Budapest: Central Eu­ro­pean University Press, 2015). 7. Lale Can, “Connecting ­People: A Central Asian Sufi Network in Turn-­of-­the-­ Century Istanbul,” Modern Asian Studies 46, part 2 (March 2012). See also Elena I. Campbell, The Muslim Question and Rus­sian Imperial Governance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015); Alan W. Fisher, “Emigration of Muslims from the Rus­sian Empire in the Years ­after the Crimean War,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 35, no. 3 (1987): 356–71; Adeeb Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); James Meyer, “Immigration, Return, and the Politics of Citizenship: Rus­sian Muslims in the Ottoman Empire, 1870– 1914,” International Journal of ­Middle East Studies 39 (2007): 15–32; James Meyer, Turks across Empires: Marketing Muslim Identity in the Russian-­Ottoman Borderlands, 1856–1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Michael Reynolds, “Buffers, Not Brethren:

207

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Young Turk Military Policy in the First World War and the Myth of Panturanism,” Past & Pres­ent 203 (May 2009): 137–79; and Mustafa Tuna, Imperial Rus­sia’s Muslims: Islam, Empire and Eu­ro­pean Modernity, 1788–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 8. See Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Eu­rope between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010); Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz, eds., Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Vio­lence in the German, Habsburg, Rus­sian and Ottoman Borderlands (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). Such analyses have lent themselves to both comparative and intertwined histories. See Michael David-­Fox, Peter Holquist, and Alexander M. Martin, eds., Fascination and Enmity: Rus­sia and Germany as Entangled Histories, 1914–1945 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012). 9. For example, Michael A. Reynolds, Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Rus­sian Empires, 1908–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), and Alexander E. Balistreri, “A Provisional Republic in the Southwest Caucasus: Discourses of Self-­Determination on the Ottoman-­Caucasian Frontier, 1918–19,” in The Ottoman East in the Nineteenth C ­ entury: Socie­ties, Identities and Politics, ed. Yaşar Tolga Cora, Dzovinar Derderian, and Ali Sipahi (London: I. B.Taurus, 2016), 62–87. 10. Charles S. Maier, Once Within Borders: Territories of Power, Wealth, and Belonging since 1500 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 19. 11. See, for example, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, The ­Great Challenge: Nationalities and the Bolshevik State, 1917–1930 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1992); Robert Conquest, Stalin: Breaker of Nations (New York: Penguin, 1991); and Walter Kolarz, Rus­sia and her Colonies (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1953). 12. Ronald Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993). 13. While most scholars outside the former Soviet Union have accepted Suny’s interpretation of Soviet nationhood and nationality polices, in many post-­Soviet states, it remains common for state leaders, historians, and ­others to view their Soviet pasts through a post-­colonial lens and define their nations as primordial. Audrey Altstadt represents the “nation-breaking” perspective in her history of early Soviet Azerbaijan. Altstadt, The Politics of Culture in Soviet Azerbaijan, 1920–40 (London: Routledge, 2016). 14. Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 9. 15. On Rus­sian imperial colonialism in Central Asia see, for example: Daniel Brower, Turkestan and the Fate of the Rus­sian Empire (London: Routledge, 2003); Ian Campbell, Knowledge and the Ends of Empire: Kazak Intermediaries and Rus­sian Rule on the Steppe, 1731–1917 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017); Adeeb Khalid, “Culture and Power in Colonial Turkestan,” Cahiers d’Asie centrale 17–18 (2009): 403–36; ­Virginia Martin, Law and Custom in the Steppe: The Kazakhs of the M ­ iddle Horde and Rus­sian Colonialism in the Nineteenth ­Century (Richmond: Curzon, 2001); Alexander Morrison, “Rus­sian Rule in Turkestan and the Example of British India, c. 1860–1917,” Slavonic and East Eu­ro­pean Review 84, no. 4 (October 2006): 666–707; Jeff Sahadeo, Rus­sian Colonial Society in Tashkent, 1865–1923 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007); and Paolo Sartori, Visions of Justice: Shari’a and Cultural Change in Rus­sian Central Asia (Leiden: Brill, 2016). 16. Paula Michaels, Curative Powers: Medicine and Empire in Stalin’s Central Asia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003). See also Sarah Amsler, The Politics

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of Knowledge in Central Asia: Science between Marx and the Market (New York: Routledge, 2007); Adrienne Edgar, Sonja Luehrmann, Sergey Abashin, and Elena Gapova, “Roundtable ‘Sub Altera Specie’: A View at Postcolonial Paradigm from Inside Rus­ sian/Soviet History,” Ab Imperio, no. 2 (2008): 80–92; Benjamin Loring, “ ‘Colonizers with Party Cards’: Soviet Internal Colonialism in Central Asia, 1917–39,” Kritika: Explorations in Rus­sian and Eurasian History 15, no.1 (Winter 2014), 77–102; and David Chioni Moore, “Is the Post-­in Postcolonial the Post-­in Post-­Soviet? ­Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique,” PMLA 116, no. 1 ( January 2001): 111–28. 17. Douglas Northrop, Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). 18. Adeeb Khalid, “Backwardness and the Quest for Civilization: Early Soviet Central Asia in Comparative Perspective,” Slavic Review 65, no. 2 (2006): 231–51. Marianne Kamp also views the Soviet Union as a twentieth-­century modernizing state rather than an empire in The New ­Woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, Modernity, and Unveiling ­Under Communism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006). As Moritz Florin pointed out, however, Khalid “softens” his stance in Making Uzbekistan. Moritz Florin, “Beyond Colonialism? Agency, Power, and the Making of Soviet Central Asia,” Kritika: Explorations in Rus­sian and Eurasian History 18, no. 4 (Fall 2017), 828. 19. Adrienne Edgar, “Bolshevism, Patriarchy, and the Nation: The Soviet ‘Emancipation’ of Muslim ­Women in Pan-­Islamic Perspective,” Slavic Review 65, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 255. 20. Edgar, “Bolshevism,” 272. 21. Florin, 828. 22. Eric D. Weitz, “From the Vienna to the Paris System: International Politics and the Entangled Histories of ­Human Rights, Forced Deportations, and Civilizing Missions,” American Historical Review 113, no. 5 (December 2008): 1313. 23. See Niccolò Pianciola, “Famine in the Steppe: The Collectivization of Agriculture and the Kazak Herdsmen 1928–1934,” Cahiers du Monde russe 45, nos. 1–2 (2004): 137–92; Krista Goff, “What Makes a ­People? Soviet Nationality Politics and Minority Experience ­after World War Two” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2014). 24. One exception from the imperial period is the case of the Circassians, which a few scholars have analyzed through the lens of genocide. See, for example, Walter Richmond, The Circassian Genocide (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013) and Stephen Shenfield, “The Circassians: A Forgotten Genocide?” in The Massacre in History, ed. Mark Levene and Penny Roberts (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999), 149– 84. Geraci, for example, notes that a “figurative form of genocide . . . ​enabled the a­ ctual genocide undertaken militarily” in the Caucasus. Robert Geraci, “Genocidal Impulses and Fantasies in Imperial Rus­sia,” in Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, Subaltern Re­sis­tance in World History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 358. Yet, even the Circassian case remains unresolved historiographically. Charles King, for example, writes about the Armenian Genocide, but hesitates to apply the label of genocide back in time to the Russian Empire, noting only that its strategy in the Caucasus amounted to “what one would today call genocide.” In reference to Circassians, he describes instead their “exile,” “forced movement,” “mass exodus,” and en masse death, dispersal, and resettlement. King, The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), xviii, 16, and 94–98.

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25. Robert Geraci, “Genocidal Impulses,” 345, 359–60. 26. Geraci, “Genocidal Impulses,” 364. 27. Ronald Grigor Suny, They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else: A History of the Armenian Genocide (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2015), 350–51. 28. Some scholars have used varying definitions of genocide to argue that the Soviet government ­under Stalin committed genocide in Soviet Ukraine. For examples, see Yaroslav Bilinsky, “Was the Ukrainian Famine of 1932–1933 Genocide?” in Journal of Genocide Research 1, no. 2 (1999), 147–56; Robert Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-­Famine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); and Norman M. Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2012). Other Soviet historians have detailed why they think the genocide label in par­ tic­u­lar is inappropriate for this mass death event. See J. Arch Getty, “Starving the Ukraine,” London Review of Books 9, no. 2 ( January 22, 1987): 7–8, and Suny, They Can Live in the Desert, 350–54. Unfortunately, we know very ­little about famines in the North Caucasus and the Volga region, but a number of scholars have studied the famine in Kazakhstan. Although some have applied the genocide label to the Kazakhstan case, Sarah Cameron has shown that the general consensus among Western scholars is that this tragedy does not fit the definition of genocide. See Sarah Cameron, “The Kazakh Famine of 1930–1933: Current Research and New Directions,” East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies 3, no. 2 (2016): 117–32. A 2018 roundtable also addresses this debate. See Con­temporary Eu­ro­pean History 27, issue 3 (August 2018): 432–81. 29. See, for example, Max Bergholz, Vio­lence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016); Jan Gross, Neighbors (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2001); Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2001), and Suny, They Can Live in the Desert. 30. “Kirgiz” (Киргиз) was an ambiguous imperial ethnonym applied to both Kazakh and Kyrgyz nomads despite separate identifications within t­ hese communities. From 1925 onward, Soviet authorities distinguished between the two groups, each identified with an autonomous republic, and in 1936, a Union republic. Since in­de­pen­ dence in 1991, the preferred transliteration is Kyrgyz. For the category of inorodtsy see chapter 4. 31. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 11–16, 231–32. According to one historian of internationalism, 119 international organ­izations w ­ ere created between 1900 and 1909 and another 112 before the war. F. S. L. Lyons, Internationalism in Eu­rope, 1815–1914 (Leiden: Sythoff, 1963), 229. 32. Frederick W. Taylor, The Princi­ples of Scientific Management (New York: Norton, 1967 [1911]). 33. Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Terry Martin, “An Affirmative Action Empire: The Soviet Union as the Highest Form of Imperialism,” in Suny and Martin, A State of Nations, 67–90; Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). 34. Anderson, ­Imagined Communities; Andy Chebanne et al., eds., Unifying Southern African Languages: Harmonisation and Standardization (Cape Town: CASAS, 2003); Nils

NOTES TO PAGES 1 3 – 1 6

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Langer and Winifred V. Davies, eds., Linguistic Purism in the Germanic Languages (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 2005). 35. Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 21–22; Terry Martin, “Interpreting the New Archival Signals: Nationality Policy and the Nature of the Soviet Bureaucracy,” Cahiers du Monde russe 40, nos. 1–2 (1999): 113–24. 36. See Pierre Nora, ed., Realms of Memory, Rethinking the French Past, 3 vols., trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). For a collection of articles elaborating on his approach, see Nora, Présent, nation, mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 2011). For a collection critical of Nora’s approach, see Pascal Blancard and Isabelle Veyrat-­Masson, eds., Les guerres de mémoires: La France et son histoire, enjeux politiques, controversies historiques, strategies méeditiques (Paris: La Découverte, 2008). 37. As in the popu­lar “Song of the Motherland” from the 1936 musical comedy Circus [Tsirk] with its refrain “Broad is my native land,” and its stanza “From Moscow to the very borders / From the southern mountains to the northern seas.” 38. Both can be eternal. Anderson’s observation that “nations . . . ​always loom out of an immemorial past, and, still more impor­tant, glide into a limitless f­uture,” can also be said of empires. See ­Imagined Communities [rev. ed., 1991], 11–12. 39. Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Rus­sian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 96–98. For Kolonitskii’s analy­sis of Aleksandr Kerenskii as a cult figure during 1917, see his “Tovarishch Kerenskii:” antimonarkhicheskaia revoliutsiia i formirovanie kulta “vozhdia naroda.” Mart—­iiun’ 1917 goda (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2017). 40. See Jan Plamper, The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 22–25, 111–12. 41. See inter alia Rebecca Manley, To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009); I. Grinberg, G. Karataev, and N. Kropivnitskii, eds., Evakuatsiia v Kazakhstan: Iz istorii evakuatsii naseleniia zapadnykh raionov SSSR v Kazakhstan, 1941–1942 (Almaty: Fortress, 2008); Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Leslie Page Moch, Broad Is My Native Land: Repertoires and Regimes of Migration in Rus­sia’s Twentieth C ­ entury (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 256– 62; and Mark Edele, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Atina Grossmann, eds., Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2017). 42. For an analy­sis of the recent history of the officially sponsored search for a Rus­ sian national idea, see John P. (Pat) Willerton, “Searching for a Rus­sian National Idea: Putin Team Efforts and Public Assessments,” Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-­Soviet Democ­ratization 25, no. 3 (2017): 209–34. 43. Anderson, ­Imagined Communities (rev. ed., 1991), 204. 1. Making Minorities in the Eurasian Borderlands

Many thanks to the editors of this volume, Krista A. Goff and Lewis H. Siegelbaum, for their insightful suggestions through many stages of my contribution, and to two anonymous reviewers, who offered helpful points on how I could make my chapter richer. Ron Suny has—­through his own work—­inspired me to reach across imperial bound­aries to explore fruitful historiographical connections.

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1. See, for example, Eric Weitz, “From the Vienna to the Paris System: International Politics and the Entangled Histories of H ­ uman Rights, Forced Deportations, and Civilizing Missions,” American Historical Review 113, no.  5 (2008), 1313–43, and Mark Mazower, “Minorities and the League of Nations in Interwar Eu­rope,” Daedalus 126, no. 2 (1997), 47–63. 2. The preceding paragraph and other parts of this chapter draw on my forthcoming work, “Making Minorities in the Late Ottoman Period: Armenians and Kurds” in Kurds in Turkey: Politics, Violence and Resistance, ed. Fatma Müge Göçek and Ayça Alemdaroğlu (New York: Routledge, 2019). well as some of my other works: “Osmanlı İmparatorluğunda Azınlığı İnşası: Ermeniler ve Kürtler,” in Kürt Çalışmaları Konferansı II, (Istanbul: İsmail Beşikci Vakfı Yayınları, 2016); “The Perils of Minorityhood,” Stanford University Press Blog, April 2015, http://­stanfordpress​.­typepad​.­com​/­blog​/­2015​/­04​/­the​ -­perils​-­of​-­minorityhood​.­html; “The Minority Question: A View from History and the Kurdish Periphery,” in Minority Rights and Multiculturalism in the Arab World, ed. Eva Pfoestl and ­Will Kymlicka (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 27–52; and “Minorities, Statelessness, and Kurdish Studies ­Today: Prospects and Dilemmas for Scholars,” Journal of Ottoman Studies/Osmanlı Araştırmaları Dergisi, special issue in honor of Rifa’at Abou-­el-­Haj, no. 36 (December 2010), 225–37. 3. A few examples include Christine Philliou, Biography of an Empire: Governing Ottomans in an Age of Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), Ussama Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Vio­lence in Nineteenth-­ Century Ottoman Lebanon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), İpek Yosmaoğlu, Blood Ties: Religion, Vio­lence, and the Politics of Nationhood in Ottoman Macedonia, 1878–1908 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), Julia Phillips Cohen, Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), Bedross Der Matossian, Shattered Dreams of Revolution: From Liberty to Vio­lence in the Late Ottoman Empire (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), Mostafa Minawi, The Ottoman Scramble for Africa: Empire and Diplomacy in the Sahara and the Hijaz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016), Michelle Campos, Ottoman ­Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-­Century Ottoman Palestine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), Yaşar Tolga Cora, Dzovinar Derderian, and Ali Sipahi, eds., The Ottoman East in the Nineteenth C ­ entury: Socie­ties, Identities and Politics (London: I. B. Tauris, 2016). 4. Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 2. 5. Hirsch, Empire of Nations, 3. A very helpful (and more extensive) treatment of the historiography of nationalities and minorities can be found in Krista A. Goff, “What Makes a ­People? Soviet Nationality Politics and Minority Experience ­after World War Two” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2014), esp. 22–31. 6. See, for example, Daniel R. Brower and Edward J. Lazzerini, eds., Rus­sia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and ­Peoples, 1700–1917 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), and Vera Tolz, Rus­sia’s Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 7. Robert D. Crews, For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Rus­sia and Central Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

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8. See, for example, Elena I. Campbell, The Muslim Question and Rus­sian Imperial Governance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), and Mustafa Tuna, Imperial Rus­sia’s Muslims: Islam, Empire, and Eu­ro­pean Modernity, 1788–1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 9. See, for example, Theodore R. Weeks, Nation and State in Late Imperial Rus­sia: Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier, 1863–1914 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996), and Leonid Gorizontov, “Anatolii Remnev and the Regions of the Rus­sian Empire,” Kritika: Explorations in Rus­sian and Eurasian History 16, no. 4 (2015): 901–16. 10. Derya Bayır, Minorities and Nationalism in Turkish Law (Surrey: Ashgate, 2013), 27–28. Although I am unable to expand on the broader history of the millet system ­here, it is worth noting Rodrigue’s point that the millet system we speak of (and to which scholars often refer) was r­ eally in­ven­ted in the nineteenth c­ entury (Aron Rodrigue, “Difference and Tolerance in the Ottoman Empire,” interview by Nancy Reynolds, Stanford Humanities Review 5 (Fall 1995), 81–92). 11. Benjamin White, “The Nation-­State Form and the Emergence of ‘Minorities’ in Syria,” Studies in Ethnicities and Nationalism 7, no. 1 (2007): 66. 12. Alan Bullock et al., eds., Harper Dictionary of Modern Thought, new, rev. ed. (New York: Harper, 1988), cited in White, “Nation-­State Form,” 65. 13. White, “Nation-­State Form,” 65–66. 14. Laura Robson, States of Separation: Transfer, Partition, and the Making of the Modern ­Middle East (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 26. 15. Weitz, “From the Vienna to the Paris System,” 1313. 16. Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Eu­rope’s Twentieth ­Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 42. 17. Weitz, “From the Vienna to the Paris System,” 1317. 18. Weitz, “From the Vienna to the Paris System,” 1319. 19. Robson, 28. 20. Weitz, “From the Vienna to the Paris System,” 1316. 21. Weitz, “From the Vienna to the Paris System,” 1321. 22. As far as I have been able to discern, Ottoman (or even Turkish nationalist) official documents did not refer to non-­Muslim groups—or even Muslim groups—as “minorities” ­until 1920 when the National Pact (Misak-­i Milli) discussed the rights of minorities (akalliyetler). See Bayır, Minorities and Nationalism, 68. 23. I focus ­here on Armenians as a key nodal point, as Weitz calls them, also ­because, for reasons that I w ­ ill touch upon presently, they w ­ ere, I believe, the “minority extraordinaire” in the late-­Ottoman period. Jo Laycock (chapter 6) and Norman Naimark (chapter 3) address dif­fer­ent aspects of the Armenian Genocide in the pres­ent volume. 24. Although this vio­lence has been chalked up to Kurdish barbarity or religious rivalries, I suggest a more nuanced interpretation of ­these often violent conflicts between some Kurdish and some Armenian communities in eastern Anatolia. See my Margins of Empire: Kurdish Militias in the Ottoman Tribal Zone (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), esp. chap. 4. 25. Taner Akçam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (New York: Holt, 2006), 38–39.

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26. For example, Taner Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2012) and Uğur Ümit Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 27. See, for example, Ümit Kurt, “The Making of the Aintab Elite: Local Incentives and Provincial Motives B ­ ehind the Armenian Genocide (1890s–1920s)” (PhD diss., Clark University, 2016). 28. Robert Geraci, “Rus­sia: Minorities and Empire,” in A Companion to Rus­sian History, ed. Abbott Gleason (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), 243–60. 29. Theodore Weeks, in his work on the subject, also does not historicize the concept of “minority,” but does note that the term is “misleading and highly Russocentric” in his “National Minorities in the Rus­sian Empire, 1897–1917,” in Rus­sia ­under the Last Tsar: Opposition and Subversion, 1894–1917, ed. Anna Geifman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 121. And Ronald Suny acknowledges the modernity of minorities when he writes, “Minorities existed as a result of complex historical experiences and the discursive understandings and internal and external repre­sen­ta­tions that constructed them as minorities. More specifically, minorities ­were created in the pro­cess of nation-­ making. The constitution of national communities affiliated with state apparatuses constituted other communities as minorities” (Ronald Grigor Suny, “Making Minorities: The Politics of National Bound­aries in the Soviet Experience,” in The Construction of Minorities: Cases for Comparison across Time and around the World, ed. André Burguière and Raymond Grew [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001], 246). 30. John W. Slocum’s other­wise very insightful piece on the inorodtsy also opens by defining the inorodtsy as a distinct l­egal category to designate a set of ethnic minorities from 1822 to 1917 (“Who, and When, W ­ ere the Inorodtsy? The Evolution of the Category of ‘Aliens’ in Imperial Rus­sia,” Rus­sian Review 57, no. 2 [1998]: 173). 31. Andreas Kappeler, The Rus­sian Empire: A Multiethnic History (Essex: Pearson, 2001), 124. 32. Kappeler, Rus­sian Empire, 129–41. See also Yohanan Petrovsky-­Stern, Jews in the Rus­sian Army: 1827–1917: Drafted into Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). The few exceptions ­were mostly Bashkir or Kazakh notables, who might fill lower-­level bureaucratic positions, but still w ­ ere unable to rise in the bureaucratic ranks. 33. Charles Steinwedel, Threads of Empire: Loyalty and Tsarist Authority in Bashkiria, 1552–1917 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), 5. As Suny puts it, “From the late ­Middle Ages Muscovy was a ‘ser­vice state’ in which the privileges and rights of the vari­ous social estates ­were linked to merit as determined by the monarch. . . . ​Nobility was conferred, at least in theory, b­ ecause of ser­vices rendered to the ruler. The privileges granted to merchants and townspeople ­were contingent on the functions they performed in the economy.” Ronald Grigor Suny, Looking T ­ oward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 32. 34. Kappeler, Rus­sian Empire, 125. 35. Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2010), 220. 36. Geraci, “Rus­sia: Minorities and Empire,” 246. Slezkine says of the beginning of this transformation: “By the early nineteenth ­century ‘foreigners’ (inozemtsy—­people

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from a dif­fer­ent land) had become ‘aliens’ (inorodtsy—­people of a dif­fer­ent birth). Outsiders who used to be redeemable by baptism had become congenital and apparently perennial outsiders. A Khanty Orthodox Christian, a Yakut merchant, and a Tungus cart driver ­were all inorodtsy; a Polish Catholic noble, a Baltic Farmer, and a German landowner ­were not.” See Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Rus­sia and the Small ­Peoples of the North (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 53. 37. Slocum, “Who, and When, ­Were the Inorodtsy?” 173. 38. As Ian Campbell illustrates in chapter 2 of this volume, no m ­ atter what the specific details of the dif­fer­ent narratives about the campaign against the Tekkes, it was clear that it was a m ­ atter of Rus­sians conquering or civilizing the Turkic inhabitants of the region, that is, Rus­sian versus non-­Russian. 39. Slocum, “Who, and When, ­Were the Inorodtsy?” 174. 40. Slocum, “Who, and When, ­Were the Inorodtsy?” 41. Slocum, “Who, and When, W ­ ere the Inorodtsy?” 175. As a nonspecialist, again, I am curious about the usage of the term “minority” in the imperial Rus­sian context. When did the term appear? Was this overlap as clear as Slocum suggests? 42. Slocum, “Who, and When, ­Were the Inorodtsy?” 184. 43. Peter Holquist, “To Count, to Extract, and to Exterminate: Population Statistics and Population Politics in Late Imperial and Soviet Rus­sia,” in A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-­Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 112. 44. See Hirsch, Empire of Nations. Although Hirsch’s study focuses mainly on the Soviet era, it is clear that Soviet ethnography had its roots in late imperial Rus­sia (see Marina Mogilner, Homo Imperii: A History of Physical Anthropology in Rus­sia [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013]). 45. Holquist, “To Count,” 112. For a study of the wider implications of this beyond the military (particularly in the context of electoral politics), see Juliette Cadiot, “Searching for Nationality: Statistics and National Categories at the End of the Rus­ sian Empire (1897–1917),” The Rus­sian Review 64, no. 3 (2005): 440–55. 46. Holquist, “To Count,” 115. 47. Kappeler, Rus­sian Empire, 94. 48. Andreas Kappeler, Rußland als Vielvölkerreich: Entstehung, Geschichte, Zerfall (1992), 220, cited in Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Rus­sia, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 3. Nathans notes that across Eu­rope, “the Jews became, and came to be perceived as, the pan-­European minority” (4). 49. Kappeler, Rus­sian Empire, 268–69. 50. Kappeler, Rus­sian Empire, 269. 51. Kappeler, Rus­sian Empire, 271. 52. Kappeler, Rus­sian Empire, 271. 53. Charles Steinwedel, “The 1905 Revolution in Ufa: Mass Politics, Elections, and Nationality,” Rus­sian Review 59, no. 4 (2000): 571. 54. Steinwedel, “1905 Revolution,” 556. 55. Steinwedel, “1905 Revolution,” 575. 56. See Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Rus­sian Empire: The Campaign against ­Enemy Aliens (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

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57. Gyanendra Pandey, Routine Vio­lence: Nations, Fragments, Histories (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 84. 58. Pandey, Routine Vio­lence, 129. 59. Pandey, Routine Vio­lence, 133. 60. See Pandey on this point for a dif­fer­ent context (Pandey, Routine Vio­lence, 146). 61. Holquist, “To Count,” 133. Indeed, Lohr sees Rus­sia’s participation in World War I as being, in large part, “a sweeping campaign directed against certain minorities suddenly recast by the regime and society as dangerous internal enemies”—­alternately “­enemy aliens,” “­enemy citizens,” or “­enemy minorities,” as he calls them (Lohr, Nationalizing the Rus­sian Empire, 1–4). 62. Citing language from the Tenth Congress (Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review 53, no. 2 [1994]: 425). Slezkine h ­ ere is also noting the irony of being “unmarked.” While they did not possess a “nationality,” and their territory was “unmarked” and somewhat amorphous, “Rus­sians w ­ ere increasingly becoming identified with the Soviet Union as a ­whole” (443). 2. Bloody Belonging

The research in this essay was carried out with the support of a Grant to Promote New Research Initiatives awarded by the UC-­Davis Committee on Research, which I gratefully acknowledge. At vari­ous stages of revision I have received helpful comments from the editors of this volume, two anonymous reviewers, the participants of UC-­ Berkeley’s Rus­sian history kruzhok, and my fellow panelists at the conference “Asia in the Rus­sian Imagination,” hosted at the University of Utah. I am thankful to all of them for their careful reading and critical commentary. Any remaining errors of fact or interpretation are, of course, my own responsibility. 1. F. M. Dostoevskii, “Dnevnik pisatelia. 1881. Ianvar’. Glava vtoraia, III. ‘Geok-­Tepe: chto takoe dlia nas Aziia?’ ” in Sobranie sochinenii (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 1995), 14:503–8. 2. See James Robertson, “Re-­Writing the En­glish Conquest of Jamaica in the Late Seventeenth ­Century,” En­glish Historical Review 117, no. 443 (September 2002): 813– 39; Jacqueline Hill, “The Language and Symbolism of Conquest in Ireland, c. 1790– 1850,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Sixth Series, 18 (2008): 165–86. 3. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Vio­lence: The My­thol­ogy of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973) and The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (New York: Atheneum, 1985). For the uses of American Indian historiography in the study of the Rus­sian Empire, see Steven Sabol, The Touch of Civilization: Comparing American and Rus­sian Internal Colonization (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2017). 4. Benjamin Brower, “The Amîr ʿAbd Al-­Qâdir and the ‘Good War’ in Algeria, 1832– 1847,” Studia Islamica 106, no. 2 (2011): 177. 5. Susan Layton, Rus­sian Lit­er­a­ture and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 10. 6. Harsha Ram, The Imperial Sublime: A Rus­sian Poetics of Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003); Katya Hokanson, Writing at Rus­sia’s Border (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008).

NOTES TO PAGES 3 6 – 3 8

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7. Vahan  D. Barooshian, V.  V. Vereshchagin: Artist at War (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994); Eleonora Shafranskaia, Turkestanskii tekst v russkoi kul’ture: kolonial’naia proza Nikolaia Karazina (istoriko-­literaturnyi i kul’turno-­etnograficheskii komentarii) (St. Petersburg: Svoe izdatel’stvo, 2016). 8. Sergei Abashin details official views of one incident during the conquest alongside local perspectives. See “Ocherk pervyi: tri vzgliada na zavoevanie” in Sovetskii kishliak: mezhdu kolonializmom i modernizatsiei (Moscow: NLO, 2015), 56–115. Alexander Morrison argues that veterans of the Central Asian campaigns carefully controlled their public image through the production of official history in “The ‘Turkestan Generals’ and Rus­sian Military History,” forthcoming in War in History. 9. Dostoevsky’s rhe­toric, Robert Geraci has argued, was also compatible with genocidal fantasies: a “great-­power ventriloquism” that presented Rus­sians as more capable of empathy with their Asian subjects than western Eu­ro­pean empires, and hence more able to assimilate them out of existence. See Geraci, “Genocidal Impulses and Fantasies in Imperial Rus­sia,” in Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Re­sis­tance in World History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 360–61. 10. Bruce Grant, The Captive and the Gift: Cultural Histories of Sovereignty in Rus­sia and the Caucasus (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009). 11. See the map in Adrienne Edgar, Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2006), 22. 12. Anonymous, “Turkmeniia i Khiva,” Turkestanskii sbornik (hereafter TSb), 34:224. 13. L. P. Morris, “The Subjugation of the Turcomans,” ­Middle Eastern Studies 15, no. 2 (May 1979): 194–99. 14. A. Karryev, ed., Istoriia Turkmenistana: uchebnoe posobie dlia VUZov (Ashkhabad: Turkmenistan, 1966), 132. All translations are mine ­unless other­wise noted. 15. Karryev, Istoriia Turkmenistana, 132–33; “Vremennoe polozhenie ob upravlenii Zakaspiiskim kraem,” accessed July 24, 2017, http://­www​.­vostlit​.­info​/­Texts​/­Dokumenty​ /­M​.­Asien​/­XIX​/­1860​-­1880​/­Russ​_­turkmenII​/­Razdel​_­IV​/­45​.­htm. 16. Peter Morris, “The Rus­sians in Central Asia, 1870–1887,” Slavonic and East Eu­ ro­pean Review 53, no. 133 (October 1975): 530. 17. Dzh. Davletov and A. Il’iasov, Prisoedinenie Turkmenii k Rossii (Ashkhabad: Ylym, 1972), 126–27. 18. N. I. Grodekov, Voina v Turkmenii: pokhod Skobeleva v 1880–1881 gg. (St. Petersburg: Balashev, 1883), 1:149–51. 19. M. A. Terent’ev, Istoriia zavoevaniia Srednei Azii, s kartami i planami (St. Petersburg: Komarov, 1906), 3:41. 20. On Skobelev, see Hans Rogger, “The Skobelev Phenomenon: The Hero and His Worship,” Oxford Slavonic Papers 9 (1976): 46–78; Stephen M. Norris, “Depicting the Holy War: The Images of the Russo-­Turkish War, 1877–1878,” Ab Imperio, no. 4 (2001): 141–68. 21. Skobelev was open to exemplary executions if local camel d­ rivers failed to provide the goods and ser­vices he required; see Grodekov, Voina v Turkmenii, 2:58–59. 22. Kuropatkin telegraphed his congratulations on “complete victory” to Skobelev at 1:00 p.m. See Rus­sian State Military-­Historical Archive (hereafter RGVIA) f. 1396, op. 2, d. 121, ll. 214ob–215 (Kuropatkin report to Skobelev, January 13, 1881).

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23. RGVIA f. 400, op. 1, d. 4837, l. 100ob. (Skobelev report to ­Grand Prince Mikhail Nikolaevich, February 20, 1881). 24. RGVIA f. 400, op. 1, d. 4837, ll. 102–102ob. 25. RGVIA f. 165, op. 1, d. 1753, ll. 31–32. “Vospominaniia Kuropatkina Alekseia Nikolaevicha: ‘Sem’desiat let moei zhizni.’ Tom II, chast’ 4, glava 23–26.” 26. On the complex ­mental gymnastics required for pan-­Slavs to see Asia as something extraneous and distinct from Rus­sia, see Mark Bassin, “Rus­sia between Eu­rope and Asia: The Ideological Construction of Geo­graph­i­cal Space,” Slavic Review 50, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 13. 27. Kim A. Wagner, “Savage Warfare: Vio­lence and the Rule of Colonial Difference in Early British Counterinsurgency,” History Workshop Journal 85 (2018): 220. 28. Compare discussion ­here to Bakhtiyar Babajanov, “ ‘How ­Will We Appear in the Eyes of Inovertsy and Inorodtsy?’ Nikolai Ostroumov on the Image and Function of Rus­ sian Power,” Central Asian Survey 33, no. 2 (Summer 2014): 270–88. 29. “The Gorchakov Memorandum, 1864,” accessed July 26, 2017, http://­www​.­fas​ .­nus​.­edu​.­sg​/­hist​/­eia​/­documents​_­archive​/­gorchakov​.­php. 30. On disputes between the Ministries of War and Foreign Affairs, see Morris, “Rus­ sians in Central Asia.” 31. A. N. Kuropatkin, Zavoevanie Turkmenii (pokhod v Akhal-­Teke v 1880–1881 gg.) s ocherkom voennykh deistvii v Srednei Azii s 1839 po 1876 gg. (St. Petersburg: Berezovskii, 1899), 11–12. 32. Grodekov, Voina v Turkmenii, 1:112 (on the conquest of Khiva). 33. Grodekov, Voina v Turkmenii, 1:175; Kuropatkin, Zavoevanie Turkmenii, 98; Terent’ev, Istoriia zavoevaniia Srednei Azii, 3:4–5. 34. L. K. Artamonov, “Pokorenie Turkmen-­tekintsev,” TSb, 363:11a. 35. Grodekov, Voina v Turkmenii, 1:194. 36. On artillery, see Grodekov, Voina v Turkmenii, 1:234–35 (citing pre­ce­dents from Algeria and the Caucasian wars); on mines, see A. Maslov, Zavoevanie Akhal-­Teke: ocherki iz poslednei ekspeditsii Skobeleva (1880–1881) (St. Petersburg: Suvorin, 1882), 111; on body counts, see Charles Marvin, The Rus­sian Advance ­towards India: Conversations with Skobeleff, Ignatieff, and Other Distinguished Rus­sian Generals and Statesmen, on the Central Asian Question (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1882), 98–99. 37. Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 48. 38. Christian Dettmering, “No Love Affair: Ingush and Chechen Imperial Ethnographies,” in An Empire of ­Others: Creating Ethnographic Knowledge in Imperial Rus­sia and the USSR, ed. Roland Cvetkovski and Alexis Hofmeister (Budapest: Central Eu­ro­pean University, 2014), 341–67. 39. I. Ibragimov, “Nekotorye zametki o Khivinskikh turkmenakh i kirgizakh,” TSb, 82:311. 40. Quotation from M. N. Galkin, “Etnograficheskie materialy po Srednei Azii i Orenburgskomu kraiu,” TSb, 4:25–26. See also “Chetyrnadtsatmesiachnyi plen u turkmenov: iz zapisok Gulibefa-­de-­Blokvilia,” TSb, 16:18–19. 41. RGVIA f. 165, op. 1, d. 1764, l. 5ob. “Vospominaniia Kuropatkina Alekseia Nikolaevicha: ‘Sem’desiat let moei zhizni.’ ”

NOTES TO PAGES 4 1 – 4 3

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42. Grodekov, Voina v Turkmenii, 4:74. On Kuropatkin’s role, see RGVIA f. 400, op. 1, d. 756, l. 127 (note of the Asiatic Section of the Main Staff, September 3, 1882). 43. For Skobelev’s Manichean rhe­toric during the campaign, see Artamonov, “Pokorenie Turkmen-­tekintsev,” 18a; Grodekov, Voina v Turkmenii, 2:44; Kuropatkin, Zavoevanie Turkmenii, 181–82, 199. 44. A. Kvitka, “Poezdka v Akhal-­Teke,” TSb, 365:27b. One popu­lar account presented the Tekkes as submitting to their defeat “as to the w ­ ill of Allah.” See E. N. Aleksandrova, “Geok-­Tepe,” TSb 330:266. 45. RGVIA f. 1396, op. 2, d. 121, ll. 127–129ob. (Kaufman to Miliutin, February 20, 1881). 46. K. Geins, “Ocherk boevoi zhizni Akhal-­Tekinskogo otriada, 1880–1881 g.,” TSb, 330:91. 47. The phrase in quotes is from Kuropatkin, Zavoevanie Turkmenii, 148. See also “Iugo-­zapadnaia Turkmeniia,” TSb, 376:80; “Dvadtsat’ shest’ let tomu nazad,” TSb, 417:132. 48. K. M. Fedorov, Akhal-­tekinskaia ekspeditsiia 1880–1881 gg. (n.p., 1904). 49. RGVIA f. 165, op. 1, d. 1769, l. 230. “Vospominaniia Kuropatkina Alekseia Nikolaevicha ‘Sem’desiat let moei zhizni.’ Tom III, chast’ 9-ia, gl. 59–63.” 50. RGVIA f. 165, op. 1, d. 1764, l. 7ob. 51. RGVIA f. 165, op. 1, d. 248, ll. 153ob–156 ( January 22, 1881) and 156–157ob ( January 23, 1881). 52. For this often-­told story, see Aleksandrova, “Geok-­Tepe,” 267 and “Venok v pamiat’ Mikhaila Dmitrievicha Skobeleva, s prilozheniem portreta i predsmertnogo prikaza,” TSb, 289:52–53; Kuropatkin compares it to a similar piece of theater by Cherniaev ­after the fall of Tashkent, RGVIA f. 165, op. 1, d. 1764, l. 81. 53. M. Alikhanov-­Avarskii, “Zakaspiiskie vospominaniia,” TSb, 438:23a. On Alikhanov-­Avarskii’s checkered ­career in Transcaspia, see Alexander Morrison, “The Pahlen Commission and the Re-­Establishment of Rectitude in Transcaspia, 1908–1909,” Monde(s) no. 4 (2013/2), 56–57. 54. Alikhanov-­Avarskii, “Zakaspiiskie vospominaniia,” 13a; A. A. Semenov, “Ocherki iz istorii prisoedineniia vol’noi Turkmenii (1881–1885),” TSb, 546:47a–48a. 55. Terent’ev, Istoriia zavoevaniia Srednei Azii, 3:91–92. 56. Grodekov, Voina v Turkmenii, 2:35. 57. Apologias for Skobelev darkly hinted that unspecified forces wanted to depict him in a more unfavorable light, for example, V. P., “Pokorenie Turkmenii,” TSb, 376:76–77. 58. Grodekov, Voina v Turkmenii, 4:4. 59. On the actions of the German military in 1870–71 and its attitudes ­toward international law more broadly the work of Isabel Hull is indispensable. See Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005) and Hull, A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law during the ­Great War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014). 60. Quoted in “Po povodu budto by zhestokostei, soveshennykh russkimi voiskami v Srednei Azii vo vremia khivinskogo pokhoda,” TSb, 151:155. 61. Geins, “Ocherk boevoi zhizni,” 72. 62. V. P., “Zavoevanie Akal-­tekinskogo oazisa. Istoricheskii ocherk,“ TSb, 296:101.

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63. Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early Amer­i­ca (New York: Norton, 2008), xix–xx. 64. Grodekov, Voina v Turkmenii, 1:73–74; I. Popovich-­Lipovats, “Akhal-­tekintsy,” TSb, 349:35a; “Chetyrnadsatmesiachnyi plen,” 19. 65. V. Shakhovskoi, “Ocherki konno-­gornogo artillerista iz Akhal-­tekinskoi ekspeditsii, 1880–1881 godov,” TSb, 289:215; Artamonov, “Pokorenie Turkmen-­tekintsev,” 5b. 66. Nikitin’s ­trials are described in Grodekov, Voina v Turkmenii, 3:240; Fedorov, Akhal-­tekinskaia ekspeditsiia, 6; Osten-­Saken, “Bombardir Agafon Nikitin,” Russkaia starina, no. 9 (1882): 638–40. Kuropatkin’s memoirs also offer a detailed account in RGVIA f. 165, op. 1, d. 1764, l. 43ob. 67. Terent’ev, Istoriia zavoevaniia Srednei Azii, 3:172–73; “Pamiatnik bombardiru,” Istoricheskii vestnik no. 28 (1887): 234; Maier, “Ocherki Akhal-­Tekinskoi ekspeditsii 1880– 1881 goda: iz vospominanii ranenogo,” TSb, 376:41; S. K. Anikin, “Bombardir Agafon Nikitin,” Chtenie dlia soldat, no. 5 (1901): 191–93. 68. Artamonov, “Pokorenie Turkmen-­tekintsev,” 27a; Geins, “Ocherk boevoi zhizni,” 88–89; Shakhovskoi, “Ocherki,” 222. 69. Benjamin Brower, A Desert Named Peace: The Vio­lence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844–1902 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 200. 70. Artamonov, “Pokorenie Turkmen-­tekintsev,” 5b. 71. Shakhovskoi, “Ocherki,” 197; Muravtsev, “Turkestanskii otriad v Akhal-­ Tekinskoi ekspeditsii 1880 g.,” TSb, 330:103–29. 72. Grodekov, Voina v Turkmenii, 4:195–96. 73. Popovich-­Lipovats, “Akhal-­tekintsy,” 42a. 74. “Chetyrnadsatmesiachnyi plen,” 44; “Iz Petro-­Aleksandrovskogo ukrepleniia: o kazni dvukh turkmen za ograblenie russkogo karavana,” TSb, 73:162. 75. Shakhovskoi, “Ocherki,” 214–15, 217. 76. Kuropatkin, Zavoevanie Turkmenii, 168; Muravtsev, “Turkestanskii otriad,” 176; “Akhal-­Tekinskaia ekspeditsiia,” TSb, 277:39. The last citation is from a journal for lay readers, Semeinye vechera, and nicely illustrates the appeal and per­sis­tence of the simile. 77. Elizabeth Kolsky, “The Colonial Rule of Law and the ­Legal Regime of Exception: Frontier ‘Fanat­ic­ ism’ and State Vio­lence in British India,” American Historical Review 120, no. 4 (October 2015): 1223. 78. RGVIA f. 165, op. 1, d. 248, ll. 142–142ob. (Staff Captain Baluev to Kuropatkin, January 12, 1881, 3:00 p.m.). 79. “Venok,” 52. 80. RGVIA f. 165, op. 1, d. 1764, ll. 78–79ob. 81. Artamonov, “Pokorenie Turkmen-­tekintsev,” 21a; Geins, “Ocherk boevoi zhizni,” 92; Skobelev’s correspondence on ensuring food delivery was published in A. F. Artsishevskii, “M. D. Skobelev v Akhal-­teke, 1880–1881 g.,” TSb, 363:33b–34a. 82. Aleksandrova, “Geok-­Tepe,” 265–66; A. V. Shcherbak, “Istoriia odnoi tekinskoi devochki i eia niania—­soldata Rodiona,” TSb, 330:269–77; Terent’ev, Istoriia zavoevaniia Srednei Azii, 3:198. 83. V. P., “Zavoevanie,” 101. 84. Grodekov, Voina v Turkmenii, 3:292; Artsishevskii, “M. D. Skobelev v Akhal-­teke,” 33b–34a. 85. V. P., “Zavoevanie,” 58.

NOTES TO PAGES 4 6 – 4 9

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86. V. Shakhovskoi, “Ekspeditsiia protiv Akhal-­Tekinsev: istoricheskii ocherk ochevidtsa,” TSb, 372:35a. 87. Muravtsev, “Turkestanskii otriad,” 153–54; Geins, “Ocherk boevoi zhizni,” 72. 88. Grodekov, Voina v Turkmenii, 4:2; also see Geins, “Ocherk boevoi zhizni,” 92–93. 89. Morrison, “Turkestan Generals”; Alexander Morrison, “Commemorating the Rus­sian Conquest of Central Asia” (unpublished article, 2017). I am grateful to Professor Morrison for sharing his findings with me prior to publication. 90. RGVIA f. 165, op. 1, d. 1766, ll. 31ob–32. “Vospominaniia Kuropatkina Alekseia Nikolaevicha: ‘Sem’desiat let moei zhizni.’ Tom III, chast’ 8-ia, glava 49–50.” See also RGVIA f. 2292, op. 1, d. 70, l. 1 (letter from offices of the Transcaspian railroad to the staff of Transcaspian oblast, October 30/31, 1897). 91. Aaron J. Cohen, “Long Ago and Far Away: War Monuments, Public Relations, and the Memory of the Russo-­Japanese War in Rus­sia, 1907–1914,” Rus­sian Review 69, no. 3 ( July 2010): 391. 92. RGVIA f. 2292, op. 1, d. 70, ll. 1–2 (October 30/31, 1897), 8ob. (undated notice sent for printing in Zakaspiiskoe obozrenie). 93. RGVIA f. 2292, op. 1, d. 70, ll. 68–68ob. (chief of staff of the 2nd Turkestan army corps, F. N. Neelov, to military commander of Vladikavkaz district, August 20, 1905). 94. Morrison, “Commemorating.” 95. N. A. Khalfin, Prisoedinenie Srednei Azii k Rossii (60–90e gody XIX v.) (Moscow: Nauka, 1965), 352. Khalfin defends his use of “inclusion,” a term that he argues (p. 5) includes both the sense of conquest and peaceful accession. 96. Davletov and Il’iasov, Prisoedinenie Turkmenii k Rossii, 253. 97. E.  A. Glushchenko, Rossiia v Srednei Azii: zavoevaniia i preobrazovaniia (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2010), 10, 232–70, 558. 98. ­Here I rely on the information presented in Slavomir Horak, “The ­Battle of Gökdepe in the Turkmen Post-­Soviet Historical Discourse,” Central Asian Survey 34, no. 2 (Summer 2015): 149–61. 3. The Armenian Genocide of 1915

An earlier version of this essay was presented as a paper at a conference on the 100th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide at UCLA, April 10–11, 2015. My thanks to the participants in that conference for their helpful criticisms. My gratitude also goes to my wife, Katherine Jolluck, for reading and commenting on the essay, both at the time and now. 1. This way of thinking about genocide is exemplified in my book, Genocide: A World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). This approach is also followed by Ben Kiernan in Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). 2. Judith Thurman, “A Loss for Words,” New Yorker, March 30, 2015, 32. Thurman interviewed the last Selkʹnam speaker. 3. Norman M. Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2011), 15–29. For arguments pro and con, see “Forum: Perspectives on Norman Naimark’s Stalin’s Genocides,” Journal of Cold War Studies 14, no. 3 (Summer 2012): 149–89.

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4. Helen Fein, cited in David B. MacDonald, Identity Politics in the Age of Genocide: The Holocaust and Historical Repre­sen­ta­tion (London: Routledge, 2008), 8. 5. For some of ­these terms and their meanings, see Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 16–18. 6. For an exploration of the historiographical dimensions of the Armenian Genocide, see Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Müge Göçek, and Norman M. Naimark, A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). See especially Suny’s, “Writing Genocide: The Fate of the Ottoman Armenians,” 15–42, and Göçek’s “Reading Genocide: Turkish Historiography in 1915,” 42–55. 7. Ronald Grigor Suny, “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else”: A History of the Armenian Genocide (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2015); Donald Bloxham, The ­Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011); Taner Akçam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2006), and The Young Turks’ Crime against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2012); Fatma Müge Göçek, Denial of Vio­lence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Pres­ent, and Collective Vio­lence against the Armenians 1789–2009 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 8. Kévorkian, Armenian Genocide, 1. 9. Suny, “They Can Live in the Desert,” 370. 10. For the Rwandan Genocide, see, among o ­ thers, Scott Straus, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power and War in Rwanda (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007). Straus argues that the figure of 800,000 is too high (p. 51). Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We W ­ ill Be Killed with Our Families (New York: Picador, 1998). 11. See especially Liisa Malkki, Purity and Exile: Vio­lence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), and Rene Lemarchand, “Genocide in the ­Great Lakes: Which Genocide? Whose Genocide?” African Studies Review 41, no. 1 (April 1998), 3–6. 12. See Jo Laycock, chapter 7 in this volume. 13. Donald Bloxham, “The Armenian Genocide of 1915–16: Cumulative Radicalisation and the Development of a Destruction Policy,” Past & Pres­ent 181 (November 2003): 141–91. 14. See Ümit Kurt and Dogan Gurpinar, “The Balkan Wars and the Rise of the Reactionary Modernist Utopia in Young Turk Thought and the Journal Türk Yürdu [Turkish Homeland],” Nations and Nationalism 21, no. 2 (2015): 348, 352. 15. See Benjamin L. Madley, “Reexamining the American Genocide Debate: Meaning, Historiography, and New Methods,” American Historical Review 120, no. 1 (February 2015): 98–139, and Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016). On the G ­ reat Leap Forward as genocide, see Naimark, Genocide: A World History, 93–97. 16. Ian Kershaw, “ ‘Working T ­ owards the Führer’: Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship,” Con­temporary Eu­ro­pean History 2, no. 2 ( July 1993): 103–18.

NOTES TO PAGES 5 3 – 5 9

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17. Suny, “They Can Live in the Desert,” 134–37. 18. Cited in Ronald Grigor Suny, “Writing the Genocide: The Fate of the Ottoman Armenians,” in Suny, Göçek, and Naimark, A Question of Genocide, 20. 19. For the Indonesian genocide, see the work, in par­tic­u­lar, of Robert Cribb, “The Indonesian Massacres,” in ­Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts, ed. Samuel Totten and William Parsons (London: Routledge, 2009), 280–326. 20. On the settling of local disputes in the Greek Civil War, see Stathis Kalyvas, The Logic of Vio­lence in Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 21. See Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia ­under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides. 22. Jürgen Zimmerer, Genocide in German South-­West Africa: The Colonial War of 1904– 1908 and Its Aftermath (London: Merlin Press, 2008). 23. Some of this argument is taken from Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-­Century Eu­rope (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 188–90. 24. Norman M. Naimark, “The Many Lives of Babi Yar,” Hoover Digest, no. 2 (Spring 2017): 177–78. 25. Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 26. Naimark, Genocide: A World History, 20–21. 27. Tim Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2015), 323–24. 28. Naimark, Fires of Hatred, 69. 29. See Göçek, Denial of Vio­lence, 124–25, 204–6. 30. Suny, “They Can Live in the Desert,” 235. 31. Cited in Peter Longerich, Joseph Goebbels: Biographie (Munich: Siedler, 2010), 434, 462. Longerich also notes Goebbels’s disgust for the Jews when he views films from the Warsaw ghetto. 32. George M. Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2002), 31–42. 33. Irene Silverblatt, “Modern Inquisitions,” in Imperial Formations, ed. Ann Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan, and Peter C. Perdue (Sante Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, 2007), 277. 34. Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, “On the Reasons for the Just War among the Indians (1547),” http://­www​.­history​.­ubc​.­ca​/­sites​/­default​/­files​/­courses​/­documents​/­%5Breal​ name​%5D​/­sepulveda​_­1547​.­pdf. 35. Kévorkian, Armenian Genocide, 2. 36. Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (New York: Penguin, 2006), 538–40. 37. Snyder, Black Earth, 180. 38. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of Amer­i­ca: The Question of the Other (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 133. 39. (Antonio de la Calancha,1638), in Ian Morris, Why the West Rules—­For Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal about the ­Future (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 460.

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40. Mohamed Adhikari, The Anatomy of a South African Genocide: The Extermination of the Cape San P­ eoples (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010). 41. A. Dirk Moses, “Genocide and Settler Society in Australian History,” in Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Vio­lence and Stolen Indigenous C ­ hildren in Australian History, ed. Moses (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 32–35. 42. Lyndall Ryan, “ ‘No Right to the Land’: The Role of the Wool Industry in the Destruction of Aboriginal Socie­ties in Tasmania (1817–1832) and Victoria (1835–1851),” in Genocide on Settler Frontiers: When Hunter-­Gatherers and Commercial Stock Farmers Clash, ed. Mohamed Adhikari (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2014), 188–89. 43. Ala-­ad-­Din Ata-­Malik Juvaini, from the text of Mirza Muhammad Qazvini, The History of a World Conqueror, trans. John Andrew Boyle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 1:123–29. 44. See Catharine MacKinnon, “The Recognition of Rape as an Act of Genocide: Prosecutor v. Akayesu,” Guest Lecture Series of the Office of the Prosecutor (The Hague, October 27, 2008). 45. Regina Mühlhauser, Sexuelle Gewalttaten und intime Beziehungen deutscher Soldaten in der Sowjetunion 1941–1945 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2010). 46. Cited in Kévorkian, Armenian Genocide, 629. 47. Naimark, Fires of Hatred, 38–39, 208n80. 48. Valerie A. Kivelson and Ronald Grigor Suny, Rus­sia’s Empires (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 4. 49. Piotr Koropachinskii, Ufa Provincial Zemstvo Chairman, 1906, cited in Charles Steinwedel, Threads of Empire: Loyalty and Tsarist Authority in Bashkiria, 1552–1917 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), 4. 50. Stoler, McGranahan, and Perdue, Imperial Formations, 11. 51. Tara Zahra, “­Imagined Noncommunities: National Indifference as a Category of Analyses,” Slavic Review 69, no. 1 (March 2010): 93–119. See also Pieter M. Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists in the Language Frontiers of Imperial Rus­sia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 52. Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Rus­sian Empire: The Campaign Against E­ nemy Aliens during World War I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 53. See Matthew J. Payne, chapter 4 in this volume. 54. Melissa Kirschke Stockdale, Mobilizing the Rus­sian Nation: Patriotism and Citizenship in the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 15–38. 55. Fernand Braudel, Memory and the Mediterranean (New York: Vintage Books, 2002), 281. 4. “Do You Want Me to Exterminate All of Them or Just the Ones Who Oppose Us?”

Epigraph: Manash Ķozybaev, Groznyi 1916 god, tom 1 (Almaty: Kazakhstan, 1998), 178–79. Translations are the author’s u ­ nless other­wise noted. 1. D. A. Amanzholava, “. . . ‘Takoe Upravlenie Gosudarstvom—­nedopustimo’: doklad A. F. Kerenskogo na zakrytom zasedanii IV Gosudarstvennoi Dumy. Dekabr’ 1916 g.,” Istoricheskii arkhiv, no. 2 (1997): 4–22. For the crisis of imperial governance, see Joshua A. Sanborn, Imperial Apocalypse: The G ­ reat War and the Destruction of the Rus­ sian Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 186–87.

NOTES TO PAGES 6 6 – 6 7

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2. For the origins of Civil War vio­lence in the context of total war, rather than revolution alone, see Joshua A. Sanborn, “Unsettling the Empire: Violent Migrations and Social Disaster in Rus­sia during World War I,” Journal of Modern History 77, no. 2 (2005), 290–324. See also Daniel Brower, Turkestan and the Fate of the Rus­sian Empire (New York: Routledge, 2012), 318, and Peter Holquist, “Violent Rus­sia, Deadly Marxism? Rus­sia in the Epoch of Vio­lence, 1905–21,” Kritika 4, no. 3 (2003): 627–52. 3. Joern Happel, “Between Duties and Border-­Crossing: An Intelligence Officer in Rus­sia’s Central Asia, 1916,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 59, no. 5 (2011): 449–62; Edward Dennis Sokol, The Revolt of 1916 in Rus­sian Central Asia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016 [1954]), 158; Jörn Happel, Nomadische Lebenswelten und zarische Politik: Der Aufstand in Zentralasien 1916 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2010). The exact numbers are difficult to ascertain but Alexander Morrison judiciously estimates deaths at closer to 150,000. See Morrison, “The Revolt of 1916 in Rus­sian Central Asia. By Edward Dennis Sokol. Foreword by S. Frederick Starr. ­Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016 [1954]),” Slavic Review 76, no.  3 (2017): 772. 4. Marco Buttino, Revoliutsiia naoborot: Sredniaia Aziia mezhdu nadeniem tsarskoi imperii i obrazovaniem SSSR (Moscow: Zvenia, 2007), 80. Sokol calculates six thousand buildings destroyed. Sokol, Revolt of 1916, 149, 159. 5. “Sart” was a term of imperial ethnography for Turkestan’s settled population in towns and villages. See Daniel Brower, “Islam and Ethnicity: Rus­sian Colonial Policy in Turkestan,” in Rus­sia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and ­Peoples, 1700–1917, ed. Daniel Brower et  al. (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1997), 115–37. Adeeb Khalid, “Theories and Politics of Central Asian identities,” Ab Imperio 5, no. 4 (2005): 313–26. 6. “Kirgiz” (Киргиз) was an ambiguous imperial ethnonym that applied to both Kazakh and Kyrgyz nomads despite each p­ eople’s separate group identity. John Schoeberlein-­Engel, “Identity in Central Asia: Construction and Contention in the Conceptions of ‘Ozbek,’ ‘Tajik,’ ‘Muslim,’ ‘Samarquandi’ and Other Groups” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1995), 32. 7. Sokol, Revolt of 1916, 149. 8. Eduard G. Kolesnik and Mikhail G. Tarasov, “Cossacks in the Interethnic Conflicts in Central Asia in the Early XX C ­ entury ‘Kyrgyz’ Rebellion in 1916,” Journal of Siberian Federal University: Humanities & Social Sciences 6, no. 2 (2013): 291–301. All the Rus­sian settlements destroyed in the rebellion w ­ ere concentrated in Semirech’e and the 1,905 colonists murdered, 684 wounded, and 1,150 taken hostage ­were a tremendous blow to the colony of 295,000 p­ eople. M. K. Koigeldiev, ed., Semirech’e: 1916 god (Sbornik dokumentov i materialov) (Astana: Astana poligrafiia, 2008), 94. 9. Buttino, Revoliutsiia, 91. 10. Marco Buttino, “Study of the Economic Crisis and Depopulation in Turkestan, 1917–1920,” Central Asian Survey 9, no. 4 (1990): 59–74. 11. A. V. Piaskovskii and S. G. Agadzhanov, eds., Vosstanie 1916 goda v Srednei Azii i Kazakhstane: Sbornik dokumentov (Moscow: Izdatelʹstvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1960); Kh. T. Tursunov, Vosstanie 1916 goda v Srednei Azii i Kazakhstane (Tashkent: Gos. izd-vo Uzbekskoi, 1962); Lowell Ray Tillett, The ­Great Friendship: Soviet Historians on the Non-­ Russian Nationalities (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 176–82, 186–92.

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12. Alexander Morrison, “ ‘Sowing the Seed of National Strife in This Alien Region’: The Pahlen Report and Pereselenie in Turkestan, 1908–1910,” Acta Slavica Iaponica 31 (2012): 1–29. 13. Inomdzhon Abdusattorovich Mamadaliev, “Vosstanie 1916 goda cherez prizmu XXI veke (Posviashchaetsia 100-­letie Vosstanie v Khudzhande),” Uchenye zapiski Khudzhandskogo gosudarstvennogo universita im. akademika B. Gafurova: Gumanitarnye nauki 43, no. 2 (2015): 6. 14. See, for instance, G. Sapargaliev, “Samoderzhavnaia politika genotsida protiv Kazakhskogo naroda,” in Natsional’no-­osvoboditel’noe dvizhenie v Kazakhstane i Srednei Azii v 1916 godu: Kharakter, dvizhushchie sily, iroki: Materialy mezhdunarodnoi naucho-­ tvoreticheskoi konferentsii, Almaty, 1916, 18 Oktiabria, ed. Manash Kabashevich Kozybaev and S. F. Mazhitov (Almaty: In-­t istorii i etnologii im. Ch. Ch. Valikhanova, 1996), 43–51. See also Aminat Chokobaeva, “Born for Misery and Woe: National Memory and the 1916 G ­ reat Revolt in Kyrgyzstan,” in Nationalism and Identity Construction in Central Asia Dimensions, Dynamics, and Directions, ed. Mariya Y. Omelicheva (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), 37–52. On the rebellion’s suppression as a genocide, see Kuban Mambetaliev, ed., Vosstanie 1916 goda: Dokumenty i materialy (Bishkek: [n.p.], 2015), 248–55. 15. See, for instance, the discussion of the Geok-­Tepe campaign in Ian Campbell, chapter 2 in this volume. 16. This was clearly the view of Resettlement Agency employee turned revolutionary, G.  I. Broido—­also an influential early historian of the rebellion. G.  I. Broido, “Materialy k istorii Vosstaniia Kirgiz v 1916 gody (Pokazanie, dannoe 3 Sentiabria 1916 g. T. G. I. Broido Prokuroru Tashkentskoi Sudebnoi Palaty po delu o Kirgizskom Vosstanii 1916 g.),” in Vosstanie Kirgizov i Kazakhov (Moscow, 1924), 407–34. 17. Mark Levene, The Crisis of Genocide, vol. 1, Devastation: The Eu­ro­pean Rimlands, 1912–1938 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 67. 18. Ronald Grigor Suny, “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else”: A History of the Armenian Genocide (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2015). For a discussion of imperial modernization in Turkestan, see Brower, “Kyrgyz Nomads and Rus­ sian Pioneers.” 19. Levene, Devastation, 65–72. 20. John W. Slocum, “Who, and When, W ­ ere the Inorodtsy? The Evolution of the Category of ‘Aliens’ in Imperial Rus­sia,” Rus­sian Review 57, no. 2 (1998): 173–90. 21. Slocum, “Who, and When, ­Were the Inorodtsy?” 22. See Janet Klein, chapter 1 in this volume. 23. Iu. A. Lysenko, “Vopros o voinskoi povinnosti dlia Kazakhskogo naseleniia (70-­e gg. XII–­nachalo XX v.),” Izvestiia Altaiskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta 4, 76, no. 2 (2012): 158–62. Of course, many inorodtsy did serve in the Rus­sian military, but the government resisted conscripting Kirgiz and Sarts. See Uyama Tomohiko, “A Particularist Empire: The Rus­sian Policies of Christianization and Military Conscription in Central Asia,” in Empire, Islam, and Politics in Central Eurasia, ed. Tomohiko (Sapporo: Slavic Research Center, 2007), 23–24. 24. Tomohiko, “Particularist Empire,” 23–24. 25. Sanborn, “Unsettling the Empire,” 318. 26. Steven Sabol, Rus­sian Colonization and the Genesis of Kazak National Consciousness (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 70–71, 84–85.

NOTES TO PAGES 7 0 – 7 2

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27. Alexander Morrison, “Metropole, Colony, and Imperial Citizenship in the Rus­ sian Empire,” Kritika 13, no. 2 (2012): 327–64. 28. On the draft decree’s illegality, see Ķozybaev, Groznyi 1916, 155–58, 209; A. Panfilov, “K istorii Ukaza ot 25 iiunia 1916 goda,” in Sapargaliev, Natsional’no-­ Osvoboditel’noe Dvizhenie, 55–62. 29. Slocum, “Who, and When, ­Were the Inorodtsy?” 30. Alexander Morrison, “Peasant Settlers and the ‘Civilising Mission’ in Rus­sian Turkestan, 1865–1917,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 43, no. 3 (2015): 1–31. 31. Steven Sabol, “Comparing American and Rus­sian Internal Colonization: The ‘Touch of Civilization’ on the Sioux and Kazakhs,” Western Historical Quarterly 43, no. 1 (2012): 29–51. 32. A. Zorin, “Iz istorii Vosstaniia Kirgizov i Kazakov v 1916 g,” Bor’ba klassov, no. 7–8 (1932): 128. 33. Petr G. Galuzo, “Vosstanie v 1916 g. Srednei Azii; Dnevnik A. N. Kuropatkina,” Krasnyi Arkhiv 34, no. 3 (1929): 39–94; Ķozybaev, Groznyi 1916, 329–30. 34. Ian Wylie Campbell, “Knowledge and Power on the Kazakh Steppe, 1845– 1917.” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2011), 359–62, 374–89; Brower, Turkestan, 131–51. 35. For Rus­sia’s “settler colonialism,” see Jeff Sahadeo, “Conquest, Colonialism, and Nomadism on the Eurasian Steppe,” Kritika 4, no. 4 (2003): 942–54. On Stolypin’s “­Great Rus­sia,” see Alexei Miller, “The Romanov Empire and the Rus­sian Nation,” in Nationalizing Empires, ed. Stefan Berger and Alexei Miller (Budapest: Central Eu­ro­pean University Press, 2015), 309–68. 36. Theodore R. Weeks, “Russification and the Lithuanians, 1863–1905,” Slavic Review 60, no. 1 (2001): 96–114. 37. Willard Sunderland, “The ‘Colonization Question’: Visions of Colonization in Late Imperial Rus­sia,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas (2000): 210–32. 38. Willard Sunderland, “The Ministry of Asiatic Rus­sia: The Colonial Office That Never Was but Might Have Been,” Slavic Review 69, no. 1 (2010): 148. On the full embrace of Rus­sia’s liberals for this sort of manifest destiny, see Morrison, “Metropole.” 39. Peter Holquist, “ ‘In Accord with State Interests and the P ­ eople’s Wishes’: The Technocratic Ideology of Imperial Rus­sia’s Resettlement Administration,” Slavic Review 69, no. 1 (2010): 151–79; Sunderland, “Ministry of Asiatic Rus­sia.” 40. Zorin, “Iz istorii,” 128. 41. George J. Demko, The Rus­sian Colonization of Kazakhstan, 1896–1916 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), 43, 132; Brower, Turkestan, 47. 42. Demko, Rus­sian Colonization, 27. 43. Kushbek Usenbaev, 1916: Geroicheskie i tragidicheskie stranitsy (Bishkek: Sham, 1997), 31. 44. Brower, Turkestan, 126–51. 45. On the similarity of Semirech’e to other Eu­ro­pean settlement frontiers, see Morrison, “Peasant Settlers.” 46. Morrison, “Peasant Settlers.” For Rus­sia’s “settler colonialism” on the Eurasian steppe, see Sahadeo, “Conquest, Colonialism, and Nomadism.”

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47. Ķozybaev, Groznyi 1916, 131. 48. On samovol’tsy in general, see Lewis H. Siegelbaum, “Paradise or Just a ­Little Bit Better? Siberian Settlement ‘Fever’ in Late Imperial Rus­sia,” Rus­sian Review 76, no. 1 ( January 2017): 22–37. 49. Sahadeo concentrates on urban colonists, but colonial administrators’ concerns about plebeian Rus­sians as “civilizers” certainly applied to rural colonists as well. Jeff Sahadeo, Rus­sian Colonial Society in Tashkent, 1865–1923 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 108–36; Morrison, “Peasant Settlers,” 391–93. On colonist vio­ lence against Kirgiz, see chapter 4 of Agrarnaia istoriia Kazakhstana (konets XIX–­nachalo XX v.): sbornik dokumentov i materialy (Almaty: Daik-­Press, 2006), 457–515. 50. Morrison, “Sowing the Seed of National Strife.” 51. Morrison, “Peasant Settlers.” 52. Brower, “Kyrgyz Nomads and Rus­sian Pioneers.” 53. Morrison, “Peasant Settlers.” 54. Galuzo, “Vosstanie v 1916 g.,” 41. 55. For war­time radicalization, see Peter Holquist, “Violent Rus­sia, Deadly Marxism? Rus­sia in the Epoch of Vio­lence, 1905–21,” Kritika 4, no. 3 (2003): 627–52. 56. Alexander Victor Prusin, Nationalizing a Borderland: War, Ethnicity, and Anti-­Jewish Vio­lence in East Galicia, 1914–1920 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2016), 48–64. 57. Lysenko, “Vopros o voinskoi povinnosti,” 162. Ķozybaev, Groznyi 1916, 46. 58. Ķozybaev, Groznyi 1916, 46. 59. Ķozybaev, Groznyi 1916, 30. See also 193, 239. 60. Brower, “Kyrgyz Nomads and Rus­sian Pioneers,” 47. 61. Galuzo, “Vosstanie v 1916 g.,” 57. 62. Piaskovskii and Agadzhanov, Vosstanie 1916 goda, 672. 63. Ķozybaev, Groznyi 1916, 185. 64. Ķozybaev, Groznyi 1916, 110 65. Ķozybaev, Groznyi 1916, 306. 66. Galuzo, “Vosstanie v 1916 g.,” 58. 67. Happel, “Between Duties and Border Crossing, 677–78; Buttino, Revoliutsiia, 78. 68. Brower, Turkestan, 166. 69. Galuzo, “Vosstanie v 1916 g.,” 59. 70. Ķozybaev, Groznyi 1916, 84–88. 71. See Semirech’e: 1916 goda (Sbornik dokumentov i materialov) (Astana: Astana poligrafi ka, 2008), 70–80. 72. Sokol, Revolt of 1916, 159. T ­ hese counties included Dzharkent, Przheval’sk, Lepsinsk, Vernyi, and Pishpek. The sixth county, Kopal, was not affected by the rebellion or its suppression. 73. Levene, Devastation, 6. 74. Kuropatkin was following an old script that he was familiar with—he had been at Geok-­Tepe. See Campbell, chapter 2 in this volume. 75. Galuzo, “Vosstanie v 1916 g.,” 61. 76. Galuzo, “Vosstanie v 1916 g.,” 65. 77. Morrison, “Metropole,” 359. 78. Galuzo, “Vosstanie v 1916 g.,” 55, 58. 79. Ķozybaev, Groznyi 1916, 337.

NOTES TO PAGES 7 6 – 7 9

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80. Buttino, Revoliutsiia, 82. 81. Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 70–72. 82. Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, 56. 83. Sahadeo, Rus­sian Colonial Society, 191. 84. Adeeb Khalid, “Turkestan v 1917–1922 godakh: bor’ba za vlast’ na okraine Rossii,” in Tragediia velikoi derzhavy: Natsional’nyi vopros i raspad Sovetskogo Soiuza (Moscow: Sotsial’nopoliti, 2005), 211–15. 85. Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, 70. 86. Buttino, Revoliutsiia, 151–59. 87. Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, 82–84. 88. Sahadeo, Rus­sian Colonial Society, 197. 89. Sahadeo, Rus­sian Colonial Society, 236–37, 288–92; Turar R. Ryskulov, Sobranie sochinenii: v trekh tomakh, tom 3, (Almaty: Kazakhstan, 1998), 175–76. 90. Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, 70–71. 91. Alexander Garland Park, Bolshevism in Turkestan, 1917–1927 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), 36. 92. Morrison, “Peasant Settlers.” 93. Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, 108. 94. Hallez Xavier, “Turar Ryskulov: The ­Career of a Kazakh Revolutionary Leader during the Construction of the New Soviet State, 1917–1926,” (Paper presented at the Colloquia Humanistica, 2014), 127. Late imperial Rus­sia was no more immune to social Darwinism than the United States. Sabol, “Comparing American and Rus­sian Internal Colonization.” 95. Ryskulov, Sobranie sochinenii, 175–76. 96. Buttino, “Study of the Economic Crisis and Depopulation.” Buttino estimates a loss of 500,000 natives in Turkestan from 1915 to 1917, that is, in the year of the rebellion, and a further 1 million from 1917 to 1920, a decline of 30.5 ­percent. Nomads’ numbers declined even more starkly, from 1,793,100 to 1,231,700 ­after the suppression of the 1916 Revolt. 97. Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, 108–9. 98. Niccolò Pianciola, “Décoloniser l’Asie centrale?” Cahiers du Monde russe 49, no. 1 (2008): 101–44. 99. See David Budianskii, Istoriia Bezhentsev-­Kyrgyzov (1916–1927 gody) (Bishkek: [n.p.], 2007), 138–92. 100. Ķozybaev, Groznyi 1916, 186. 5. “What Are They ­Doing? ­After All, ­We’re Not Germans”

For their constructive comments on this material at vari­ous stages, I thank Krista Goff, Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Peter Holquist, Benjamin Nathans, Bruce Grant, and Ronald Grigor Suny. Earlier versions of this chapter w ­ ere presented at the 2014 Hoover Institution Summer Workshop on Totalitarian Regimes, 2015 Davis Center for Rus­ sian and Eurasian Studies conference “Belonging, Politics, and Knowledge in Central Asia and the Caucasus,” and 2016 Association of Slavic, East Eu­ro­pean, and Eurasian Studies convention. All translations are the author’s ­unless other­wise indicated.

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1. Pavel Polian argues that around six million ­people endured “internal forced migrations” between 1919 and 1953 in Against Their ­Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR (Budapest: Central Eu­ro­pean University Press, 2003), 4. 2. On this nomenclature, see especially Aleksandr M. Nekrich, The Punished P­ eoples: The Deportation and Fate of Soviet Minorities at the End of the Second World War (New York: Norton, 1978); and Robert Conquest, The Nation Killers: The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities (New York: Macmillan, 1970). 3. Ronald Grigor Suny and Valerie A. Kivelson note that deporting or massacring designated minority populations are “practices that nations have engaged in and that empires would have easily understood as part of an imperial repertoire,” Rus­sia’s Empires (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 401. Moreover, such practices of “population politics”—­however ubiquitous across the imperial longue durée—­likewise advanced impor­tant modern goals, as detailed in Peter Holquist, “To Count, to Extract, to Exterminate: Population Statistics and Population Politics in Late Imperial and Soviet Rus­sia,” in A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-­Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 111–44. 4. On the 1920s and “ethnophilia,” see Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 414–52; on the 1930s as retreat in nationality policies and application of ethnic cleansing terminology, see Terry Martin, “The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing,” Journal of Modern History 70, no. 4 (December 1998): 813–61; on the genocidal components of Soviet nationality policy, including deportations, see Norman M. Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2010). On the first w ­ holesale deportation of a national group, see Michael Gelb, “An Early Soviet Ethnic Deportation: The Far-­Eastern Koreans,” Rus­sian Review 54, no.  3 ( July 1995): 389–412. 5. I discuss each of ­these nodes of nation-­building in detail in Claire Pogue Kaiser, “Lived Nationality: Policy and Practice in Soviet Georgia, 1945–1978” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2015). 6. Punitive or preventive expulsions, of course, differed fundamentally in intent from economic resettlement campaigns occurring si­mul­ta­neously in the Caucasus region, even if the memory of such operations at times elides this distinction. On postwar economic resettlement campaigns of Azerbaijanis from the Armenian to the Azerbaijani SSR and their historical interpretations, see Krista Goff, “Deportation or resettlement? History writing and contemporary ethnic conflicts in the South Caucasus” (article under review). 7. Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Leslie Page Moch, Broad Is My Native Land: Repertoires and Regimes of Migration in Rus­sia’s Twentieth C ­ entury (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 286. 8. On the Circassian expulsions and emigration, see Vladimir Bobrovnikov and Irina Babich, eds., Severnyi Kavkaz v sostave Rossiiskoi imperii (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2007) and Dana Sherry, “Social Alchemy on the Black Sea Coast, 1860–65,” Kritika: Explorations in Rus­sian and Eurasian History 10, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 7–30; Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Müge Göçek, and Norman M. Naimark, eds., A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford Uni-

NOTES TO PAGES 8 2 – 8 3

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versity Press, 2011); and on Georgia’s Terror, see Marc Junge and Bernd Bonwetsch, eds., Bolschewistische Ordnung in Georgien: Der Große Terror in einer kleinen kaukasischen Republik (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2015). 9. On the prominence of Georgian and Caucasian po­liti­cal networks in the 1920s and 1930s “between the Caucasus and the Kremlin,” see Erik R. Scott, Familiar Strangers: The Georgian Diaspora and the Evolution of Soviet Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 10. Mgeladze and Charkviani both discuss ­these links at length in their fascinating memoirs of the Stalin era, Kandid Charkviani, Gantsdili da naazrevi: 1906–1994 (Tbilisi: Merani, 2004) and Akaki Mgeladze, Stalin: kakim ia ego uznal (Tbilisi: N.p., 2001). On patronage networks between Georgia and Moscow, see especially Timothy K. Blauvelt, “Abkhazia: Patronage and Power in the Stalin Era,” Nationalities Papers 35, no. 2 (May 2007): 203–32; Blauvelt, “March of the Chekists: Beria’s Secret Police Patronage Network and Soviet Crypto-­Politics,” Communist and Post-­Communist Studies 44 (2011): 73–88; and Oleg  V. Khlevniuk, “Kremlin—­Tbilisi: Purges, Control and Georgian Nationalism in the First Half of the 1950s,” in Georgia ­after Stalin: Nationalism and Soviet Power, ed. Timothy K. Blauvelt and Jeremy Smith (New York: Routledge, 2016), 12–31. 11. I discuss Charkviani’s enthusiasm for outreach to Georgian communities in Iran and Azerbaijan; Georgian efforts to gain territories in northeastern Turkey; Stalin and Charkviani’s involvement in writing Georgian history textbooks; and Beria’s role in the construction of Georgian census categories in Kaiser, “Lived Nationality,” chaps, 1 and 5. On Charkviani’s role in Georgian diaspora outreach in Azerbaijan, see Krista A. Goff, “ ‘Why Not Love Our Language and Our Culture?’: National Rights and Citizenship in Khrushchev’s Soviet Union,” Nationalities Papers 43, no. 1 ( January 2015): 27–44. 12. Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia Archive (sakartvelos šinagan sakmeta saministros arqivi II, or sšssa (II)) Charkviani, Bakradze, and Rapava to Beria, June 1944, f. 14, op. 18, d. 266, ll. 20–22. 13. Nikolai Fedorovich Bugai and A. M. Gonov, Kavkaz: narody v eshelonakh, 20–60-­e gody (Moscow: INSAN, 1998), 213–19. 14. Charkviani and Bakradze to Beria, May 1944, sšssa (II), f. 14, op. 18, d. 266, ll. 6–9. For further details about bud­get, timing, and construction, see “Postanovlenie Soveta Narodnykh Komissarov Gruzinskoi SSR i TsK KP Gruzii ‘Voprosy pereselencheskikh kolkhozov Akhaltsikhskogo, Aspindzskogo i Adigenskogo raionov Gruzinskoi SSR,’ ” January 10, 1945, sšssa (II), f. 14, op. 19, d. 12, ll. 75–78. 15. For a reassessment of the motives ­behind the Crimean and North Caucasus war­ time expulsions, see Alexander Statiev, “The Nature of Anti-­Soviet Armed Re­sis­tance, 1942–1944: The North Caucasus, the Kalmyk Autonomous Republic, and Crimea,” Kritika: Explorations in Rus­sian and Eurasian History 6, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 285–318. 16. The ­wholesale expulsion of ethnic Germans from Eastern Eu­rope is perhaps the most wide-­reaching example, though Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, and Jews likewise faced expulsion and population transfer. On the relationship between postwar “ethnic cleansing” and the establishment of p­ eople’s democracies, see Jan Tomasz Gross, “War as Revolution,” in The Establishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Eu­ rope, 1944–1949, ed. Norman M. Naimark and Leonid Gibianskii (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), 17–40; Holly Case, Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the

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Eu­ro­pean Idea during World War II (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009); and Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-­Century Eu­rope (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 17. Nikolai Fedorovich Bugai, L. Beriia–­I. Stalinu: “Posle vashikh ukazanii provedeno sleduiushchee . . .” (Moscow: Grif i K., 2011), 350–53. 18. Bugai, L. Beriia–­I. Stalinu, 346. See also Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF), f. R-9479, op. 1, d. 476, ll. 110, 126, accessed via Hoover Institution Archives, reel 3.5938. 19. Operations Vistula (April–­July 1947) and Zapad (Autumn 1947) are especially illustrative in this regard. Operation Vistula, carried out by Polish forces, resettled over 140,000 Ukrainians from the south and east of the country to new Polish territories in the north and west, previously inhabited by Germans, to force assimilation into Polish culture and distance Ukrainians from the shared Polish-­Ukrainian border region. Meanwhile, the first mass deportation in Soviet Ukraine, Operation Zapad, expelled alleged Ukrainian nationalists and their families from western Ukraine to Siberia and Central Asia. On “ethnic cleansings” in postwar Poland and Ukraine, see Timothy Snyder, “ ‘To Resolve the Ukrainian Prob­lem Once and for All’: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ukrainians in Poland, 1943–1947,” Journal of Cold War Studies 1, no. 2 (1999): 86–120; Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Eu­rope between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), chap. 10. 20. I borrow the term “­triple occupation” (Soviet-­German-­Soviet) from Snyder, Bloodlands, 239. 21. On the occupation of Iran, see Jamil Hasanli, At the Dawn of the Cold War: The Soviet-­American Crisis over Ira­nian Azerbaijan, 1941–1946 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006) and Louise L’estrange Fawcett, Iran and the Cold War: The Azerbaijan Crisis of 1946 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). On g­ reat power politics in the region, see George Lenczowski, Rus­sia and the West in Iran, 1918–1948: A Study in Big-­Power Rivalry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1949) and Bruce Robellet Kuniholm, The Origins of the Cold War in the Near East: G ­ reat Power Conflict and Diplomacy in Iran, Turkey, and Greece, rev. ed. (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1994). 22. A. Mgeladze to Charkviani, March 28, 1949, sšssa (II), f. 14, op. 27, d. 252, ll. 60–63. I use the terms “Greek,” “Turk,” “Dashnak,” and so on, in this chapter to reflect the categorization of t­ hese persons and groups in soviet party and security archival documents. The categories often obscure the issues of Soviet citizenship or long-­ term generational residence. For instance, the “Greek” community in Georgia was part of the Pontic Greek diaspora, a group that had lived on the Black Sea coast for hundreds of years. Similarly, the “Turk” label at vari­ous points referred to Muslims, Tatars, Azerbaijanis, or subjects of the Ottoman Empire or Turkey. As was the case with “Mensheviks” in Soviet Georgia, “Dashnaks” remained a con­ve­nient e­ nemy for Soviet authorities to invoke. On the role of the Dashnaktsutiun in modern Armenian history, see Ronald Grigor Suny, Looking t­oward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). 23. “Sovet Ministrov SSSR postanovlenie ot 29 maia 1949 g. #2214-856ss ‘Ob obespechenii perevozok, rasseleniia i trudovogo ustroistva vyselentsev s territorii Gruzinskoi, Armianskoi, Azerbaidzhanskoi SSR, a takzhe poberezh’ia Chernogo moria,’ ”

NOTES TO PAGES 8 5 – 8 9

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I. Stalin and M. Pomaznev, Svetlana Savranskaia, National Security Archive, personal collection. 24. Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), chap. 7. 25. Charkviani and Chkhubianishvili to Stalin, June 7, 1949, sšssa (II), f. 14, op. 27, d. 252, ll. 64–65. 26. sšssa (II), f. 14, op. 27, d. 252, ll. 66–67 and Pomaznev to Chkhubianishvili and Charkviani, June 18, 1949, sšssa (II), f. 14, op. 27, d. 252, l. 88. 27. Consisting of 10,240 men, 10,512 ­women, and 10,854 ­children. 28. Only forty Turks and five Dashnaks ­were in this additional group. 29. N. Rukhadze and A. Valis to USSR MGB officer N. N. Selivanovskii, June 1949, sšssa (II), f. 14, op. 27, d. 252, ll. 72–77. 30. Kakuchaia to Beria, April 1953, sšssa (I), f. 13, sp. 27, ll. 1–3. 31. Charkviani to Stalin, October 1949, sšssa (II), f. 14, op. 25, d. 229, ll. 4–5. 32. N. Rukhadze, August 29, 1949, sšssa (II), f. 14, op. 25, d. 229, ll. 11–13. 33. S. Kruglov to L. Beria, May 26, 1949, GARF, f. R-9479, op. 1, d. 476, l. 1, accessed via Hoover Institution Archives, reel 3.5938. 34. GARF, f. R-9479, op. 1, d. 476, ll. 22, 29, 36, 38, accessed via Hoover Institution Archives, reel 3.5938. 35. Maike Lehmann, Eine sowjetische Nation: Nationale Sozialismusinterpretationenen in Armenien seit 1945 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2012), 110–11. 36. Violetta Hionidou and David Saunders, “Exiles and Pioneers: Oral Histories of Greeks Deported from the Caucasus to Kazakhstan in 1949,” Europe-­Asia Studies 62, no. 9 (November 2010): 1484. 37. Arpenik Aleksanian, Sibirskii dnevnik, 1949–1954 gg. (Yerevan: Gitutiun, 2007), 57. 38. Aleksanian, Sibirskii dnevnik, 59. 39. Svetlana Alieva, ed., Tak eto bylo: Natsional’nye repressii v SSSR, 1919–1952 gody, 3 vols. (Moscow: Insan, 1993), 3:213–16. 40. Alieva, Tak eto bylo, 3:213–16. 41. Matinov Levon Nikolaevich to MGB GSSR, July 11, 1952, sšssa (I), f. 13, d. 46, t. 3, l. 16. 42. Matinov Levon Nikolaevich to N. M. Shvernik, December 11, 1949, sšssa (I), f. 13, d. 46, t. 1, l. 12. 43. Bidzhamov Il’ia Semenovich to MGB SSSR, December 12, 1949, sšssa (I), f. 13, d. 41, t. 1, ll. 17–20. 44. Aleksanian, Sibirskii dnevnik, 67. Avlabari is a neighborhood in Tbilisi with many Armenian residents. 45. Aleksanian, Sibirskii dnevnik, 69. The reference to 1936 is most likely regarding the Soviet constitution of that year, which also lifted restrictions on categories of citizenship and associated rights. 46. Bidzhamov Il’ia Semenovich to MGB SSSR, December 12, 1949. 47. Postoian Solomon Vartanovich to MVD GSSR, April 21, 1953, sšssa (I), f. 13, d. 47, t. 2, ll. 106–7. 48. Postoian Migran Solmonovich to G. M. Malenkov, April 14, 1953, sšssa (I), f. 13, d. 47, t. 2, ll. 21–22; Postoian Migran Solomonovich to Rukhadze, September 30, 1951, sšssa (I) f. 13, d. 47, t. 2, ll. 79–80.

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49. Matinov Levon Nikolaevich to MGB GSSR, July 11, 1952. 50. Rukhadze to Charkviani, June 16, 1949, sšssa (II), f. 14, op. 27, d. 252, ll. 83–86. 51. Rukhadze to Charkviani, June 16, 1949. 52. MGB GSSR Major Khoshtaria, June 20, 1949, sšssa (II), f. 14, op. 27, d. 252, l. 82. 53. Mistakidi Dmitri Khristoforovich to Bulganin N. A., March 25, 1955, sšssa (II), f. 14, op. 31, d. 221a, l. 134. 54. See especially Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Noveishoi Istorii (RGANI) f. 5, op. 31, d. 25, ll. 69–95, 117–69. 55. Mzhavanadze to Malenkov, January 12, 1954, sšssa (II), f. 14, op. 28, d. 232, ll. 1–2. 56. P. Kovanov to CC CPSU, September 1957, sšssa (II), f. 14, op. 32, d. 219, ll. 1–2. 57. On the responses to Stalin’s death and de-­Stalinization in Georgia, see Blauvelt and Smith, Georgia ­after Stalin. 58. Mingrelians are a subnational Georgian group from western Georgia. The November 9, 1951, resolution ordered only to prosecute the antiparty and antistate activities of Baramia and his “nationalistic group,” though this vague charge was followed by a November 16 (November 29 in the Council of Ministers) order that arrested and deported to Kazakhstan 37 purported leaders and more than 11,200 ­others, April 8, 1953, Arkhiv Prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii (AP RF), f. 3, op. 61, d. 83, ll. 144–7, reprinted in V. Naumov and Iu. Sigachev, eds., Lavrentii Beriia 1953: Stenogramma iul’skogo plenuma TsK KPSS i drugie dokumenty (Moscow: Demokratiia, 1999). See also Khlevniuk, “Kremlin—­Tbilisi.” 59. sšssa (I), f. 13, sp. 27, l. 225, and GARF, R. 9479, op. 1, d. 607, l. 48, accessed via Hoover Institution Archives, reel 3.5961. 60. Polian, Against Their ­Will, 171. 61. Compiled from Vsesoiuznaia perepis’ naseleniia 1939 goda: Osnovye itogi (Moscow: Nauka 1992), 20–21; Tsentral’noe Statisticheskoe Upravlenie pri Sovete Ministrov SSSR, Itogi Vsesoiuznoi perepisi naseleniia 1959 goda: Gruzinskaia SSR (Moscow: Gosstatizdat, 1963); and Tsentral’noe Statisticheskoe Upravlenie pri Sovete Ministrov SSSR, Itogi Vsesoiuznoi perepisi naseleniia 1970 goda, vol. 4: Natsional’nyi sostav naseleniia SSSR (Moscow: Statistika, 1973), 9–13. The total population of Georgia in 1939 was 3,540,023 and, in 1959, 4,044,045. 62. Lehmann, Eine sowjetische Nation, 110. On the repatriation efforts, see also Maike Lehmann, “A Dif­fer­ent Kind of ­Brothers: Exclusion and Partial Integration a­ fter Repatriation to a Soviet ‘Homeland,’ ” Ab Imperio 2012, no. 3 (November 2012): 171–210; and Joanne Laycock, “The Repatriation of Armenians to Soviet Armenia, 1945–49” in Warlands: Population Resettlement and State Reconstruction in Soviet Eastern Eu­rope, 1930– 1950, ed. Peter Gatrell and Nick Baron (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 140–62. 63. ­These sources of legitimacy likewise provided persuasive evidence in appeals for amnesty and rehabilitation. 64. Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place; From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 139. 65. Martin, “Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing,” 855. 66. Timothy K. Blauvelt, “The ‘Mingrelian Question’: Institutional Resources and the Limits of Soviet Nationality Policy,” Europe-­Asia Studies 66, no. 6 ( July 2014): 993– 1013.

NOTES TO PAGES 9 7 – 9 9

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6. Developing a Soviet Armenian Nation

1. Representative publications include: Ronald Grigor Suny, “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else”: A History of the Armenian Genocide (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2015); Fatma Müge Göçek, Denial of Vio­lence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Pres­ent, and Collective Vio­lence against the Armenians, 1789–2009 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 2. Norman M. Naimark, Fatma Müge Göçek, and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) demonstrate t­ hese shifts. For an overview, see Jo Laycock, “Beyond National Narratives,” Revolutionary Rus­sia 28, no. 2 (2015): 93–117. 3. Dzovinar Kevonian, Réfugiés et diplomatie humanitaire: Les acteurs européens et la scène proche orientale pendant l’entre-­deux-­guerres (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2004); Michelle Tusan, Smyrna’s Ashes: Humanitarianism, Genocide and the Birth of the ­Middle East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Keith Watenpaugh, Bread from Stones: The ­Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015). 4. Precise numbers are difficult to establish. A breakdown is provided in Hamlet Sargsyan “Arevmtahayeri Gaght‘ě Arevelyan Haystan 1915 t‘. ev Heto,” in Hayots‘ Ts‘eghaspanut‘yun Patcharner ev Daser (Erevan: Erevani Hamalsarani Hratarakch‘ut‘yun, 1995), 36–66. 5. On Nansen and the High Commission for Refugees, see Claudene Skran, Refugees in Inter-­War Eu­rope: The Emergence of a Regime (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), chap. 5. 6. On the Caucasus front in general, see Eugene Rogan, The Fall of the Ottomans (London: Penguin, 2016), chap. 7. 7. Suny, “They Can Live in the Desert,” 281. See also Donald Bloxham, “The Armenian Genocide of 1915–1916: Cumulative Radicalization and the Development of a Destruction Policy,” Past & Pres­ent 181 (2003): 141–92. 8. The wider history of the genocidal pro­cess is beyond the scope of this chapter, but see Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011). 9. Central Historical Archive of Georgia, saistorio tsentraluri arkivi f. 519, op. 1, d. 47, Letter from the Chancellery of the Viceroy to the Caucasian Committee for Victims of War, December 25, 1914. Refugees arriving in the South Caucasus at this time included Assyrians and Armenians from Persia. On their origins, see Sargsyan, “Arevmtahayeri Gaght‘ě Arevelyan Haystan,” 43–50. 10. Columbia University, Burke Theological Library, MRL2 Near/Middle East, Near East Relief Committee Rec­ords, Box 1, Folder 1 Correspondence 1915–16 Rockwell and ACASR, Report from American Consul in Tiflis, December 10, 1914. 11. Kévorkian, Armenian Genocide, 706–7. 12. See Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Rus­sia during World War One (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 2–48. An intervention by Mikhail Papandzhanov, an Armenian Kadet, ensured that the special council would take responsibility for refugees arriving in Rus­sian territory from foreign states, for example, Ottoman Armenians, 44.

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13. Rus­sian occupation of t­ hese territories has previously been interpreted in the light of imperial expansionist agendas. Peter Holquist has demonstrated the more complex and contingent realities driving the situation. Holquist “The Politics and Practice of the Rus­sian Occupation of Armenia, 1915–­February 1917,” in Naimark, Göçek, and Suny, A Question of Genocide, 151–74. 14. This is the subject of new research by Asya Darbinyan. A chapter titled “Humanitarian Crisis at the Ottoman-­Russian Border: Assisting Armenian Refugees of War and Genocide 1914–1915,” in Aid to Armenia: Relief, Humanitarianism and Intervention from the 1890s to the Pres­ent, ed. Jo Laycock and Francesca Piana (Manchester University Press, forthcoming). 15. See Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking. 16. A Transcaucasian Federation of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan was created on April 22, 1918, but this rapidly proved unworkable. See Richard Hovannisian, Armenia on the Road to In­de­pen­dence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 186–216. 17. On initial conditions in the First Republic of Armenia see Hovannisian, The Republic of Armenia, 4 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971–96), 1:126–33. 18. The terms “Turk,” “Tatar,” and “Muslim” are used inconsistently in primary sources and in l­ater scholarship to refer to what is now known as the Azerbaijani population in the Caucasus. 19. British Library, India Office, L/PS/11/156 5564 (1919) Tele­g ram from Wardrop (Tiflis), October 3, 1919. 20. Hovannisian, Republic of Armenia, 1:248. 21. Hovannisian, Republic of Armenia, 3:15. 22. Hayastani Azgayin Arkhiv, National Archive of Armenia (HAA), f. 113, op. 3, d. 38, ll. 49–52. Some details on this refugee situation in the North Cacuasus are provided in a letter and attached report sent from the representative of ASSR Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (Moscow) to SovNarKom ASSR, April 1, 1921. 23. Phrasing of Simon Vratsian, Dashnak prime minister of the Republic, quoted in Razmik Panossian, The Armenians: From Kings and Priests to Merchants and Commissars (London: Hurst, 2006), 245. 24. Oliver Baldwin, Six Prisons and Two Revolutions: Adventures in Transcaucasia and Anatolia 1921–22 (London: Hodder and Staughton, 1924), 97. 25. The party was dissolved in Soviet Armenia in 1923. The Soviet Armenian authorities monitored the presence of Dashnaks in refugee communities outside Armenia. See, for example, report on anti-­Soviet activities in Persia. HAA, f. 113, op. 3, d. 47, l. 9, Bi-­weekly information bulletin of Yerevan, Extraordinary Commission of the SSRA, December 1921. 26. Lenin urged “greater gentleness, caution, concessions in dealing with the petty bourgeoisie, the intelligent­sia and especially the peasantry.” Quoted in Ronald Grigor Suny, Looking ­toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 140. 27. By the end of 1921 the following numbers remained—1,100,000 natives, 300,000 refugees, 200,000 “registered” refugees, 75,000 orphans, 30,000 of whom ­were cared for by Near East Relief. HAA, f. 114 op. 2 d. 89, l. 19, Report prepared for Harold Buxton December 1921. 28. The Tsentral’naiia kollegiia po delam plennykh i bezhentsev was initially subordinate to SovNarKom. I. P. Shcherov, Tsentroplenbezh v rossii: istoriia sozdaniia i de-

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237

iatelnosti v 1918–1922 gg. (Smolenskaia gorodskaia tip, 2000). In May  1919 it was subordinated directly to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and underwent several reorganizations over the course of its existence. Activities ­were scaled back from November 1922 and its activities wound down in January 1923 (pp. 48–49). 29. HAA, f. 113, op. 3, d. 38, l. 49, Letter from representative of ASSR Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (Moscow) to SovNarKom ASSR, April 1, 1921. 30. For comparison with other regions of the Soviet Union, see Peter Gatrell and Nick Baron, eds., Homelands: War, Population and Statehood in Eastern Eu­rope and Rus­ sia 1918–1924 (London: Anthem Press, 2004). 31. Near East Relief ’s work with orphans in Soviet Armenia is charted in Nora Nercessian, City of Orphans: Relief Workers, Commissars and the “Builders of the New Armenia” Alexandropol/Leninakan 1919–1931 (Hollis, New Hampshire: Hollis Publishing, 2016). 32. On the LMF, see Jo Laycock, “Saving the Remnant or Building a Soviet State: Transnational Humanitarian Relief in Early Soviet Armenia,” Moving the Social: Journal of Social History and the History of Social Movements 57 (2017): 77–96. 33. Leyla Neyzi and Hranush Kharatyan-­Araqelyan, Prospects for Reconciliation: Theory and Practice, Proceedings of the International Workshop, Yerevan, 27 November  2010 (Bonn: DVV International, 2011), 129. 34. HAA, f. 113, op. 3, d. 81, ll. 12–17, Report on Refugee Question (undated, likely 1925). 35. Speech of Lukashin, reported in Khorordayin Hayastan, November 29, 1924. En­ glish translation provided for LMF, Save the C ­ hildren Archive, Jebb Papers EJ24 Armenia: Reports and Meetings 1920–27. 36. Central Archive of Con­temporary History Georgia, uakhlesi istoriis tsentraluri arkivi (uitsa) f. 617, op. 1, d. 169, ll. 1–2, Resolution on resettlement of Muslim refugees from Yerevan Region, March 22, 1922. 37. The AGBU, founded in Egypt in 1906, had intervened on behalf of Armenian refugees, for example, in Cilicia, during and in the aftermath of the genocide. 38. HAA, f. 114, op. 2, d. 89, l. 12. The Commissariat of Foreign Affairs protested to Curzon that “in view of the above, the government of Armenia is obliged to decline all responsibility for the disastrous consequences for the lives and safety of the refugees.” 39. League of Nations, Scheme for the Settlement of Armenian Refugees: General Survey and Principal Documents (Geneva: League of Nations, 1927), 70. HAA, f. 113, op. 3, d. 81, l. 17, Sargsyan states that t­ here ­were 19,688 arrivals by the end of 1925. “Arevmtahayeri Gaght‘ě Arevelyan Haystan,” 63. 40. See Peter Gatrell and Jo Laycock, “Armenia: The Nationalization, Internationalization and Repre­sen­ta­tion of the Refugee Crisis” in Gatrell and Baron, eds., Homelands, 179–200. 41. Archives of the League of Nations, Geneva (ALON), Nansen Fonds, R1763/48​ /36375/25899, Situation of Armenian Refugees: Dr. Nansen’s Report, May 1, 1924. 42. Armenians from the former Ottoman territories are usually referred to as Western Armenians whereas the Armenians of the South Caucasus are referred to as Eastern Armenians. T ­ here are significant linguistic and cultural divides between the two groups. 43. ALON, Nansen Fonds R1762/48/38492/25899, La situation des Réfugiés Arméniens—­Mémorandum du Dr. Nansen à ce sujet. Referring to a letter from the

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President of the AND to M. Hantoux (League rapporteur for Armenian issues), August 24, 1923. 44. Hovannisian, Republic of Armenia, 1:229. 45. Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (London: Penguin, 2012), 176, 178. 46. On the American Relief Administration and Rus­sian Famine Relief, see Bertand Patenaude, The Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Rus­sia in the Famine of 1921 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). 47. Engineers ­were sent to Armenia to assess the plans in 1924 and 1925. Their reports ­were then assessed by Sir Murdoch MacDonald as part of a special League committee. On this pro­cess see ALON, Nansen Fonds, C1424/320/Ra. 400/0/1, Special Armenian Committee ­under the Auspices of League of Nations. 48. Report by Dr. Nansen, July 1925. League of Nations Scheme for the Settlement of Armenian Refugees. General Survey and Principal Documents (Geneva: League of Nations, 1927), 68–69. 49. Communications with the League suggest this was due to unwillingness to accept the guarantee of the Soviet state bank. 50. ­After Lausanne, attitudes to the Soviet Republic in the diaspora w ­ ere divided. Supporters of the Dashnak party tended to remain hostile, but t­ here was a growing consensus among “liberal” sectors that a Soviet homeland was better than no homeland. On homeland/diaspora relations, see Panossian, The Armenians, 365–71. 51. On the AGBU in Soviet Armenia, see Raymond Kévorkian and Vahe Tachjian, The AGBU: 100 Years of History (Paris: AGBU, 2006), 1, 192–214. The mobilization of diaspora resources was not unique to the Armenian case. See, for example, Jonathan Dekel-­Chen, “Farmers, Philanthropists and Soviet Authority: Rural Crimea and Southern Ukraine, 1923–41,” Kritika: Explorations in Rus­sian and Eurasian History 4, no.  4 (2003): 849–85. 52. HAA f.430 op.1 d.578. Copy of a note verbale addressed by the delagations of Rus­sia, Ukraine, and Georgia to the presidents of the Lausanne Conference, 27th January 1923. 53. Uitsa, f. 617, op. 1, d. 69, l. 40a/b, Protocols of the meeting of the commission for Armenian emigration, commissariats of agriculture and foreign affairs. 54. Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Leslie Page Moch, Broad Is My Native Land: Repertoires and Regimes of Migration in Rus­sia’s Twentieth C ­ entury (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 3. 55. Nicholas Breyfogle, Heretics and Colonizers: Forging Rus­sia’s Empire in the South Caucasus (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 128. 56. See Peter Holquist, “ ‘In Accord with the State’s Interests and the P ­ eople’s Wishes’: The Technocratic Ideology of Imperial Rus­sia’s Resettlement Administration,” Slavic Review 69, no. 1 (2010): 151–80; Willard Sunderland, “The Ministry of Asiatic Rus­sia: The Colonial Office That Never Was but Might Have Been,” Slavic Review 69, no. 1 (2010): 120–50. 57. The Resettlement Administration was incorporated into the Glavnoe Upravlenie zemleustroistva i zemledeliia in 1905. Aleksandr Krivoshein, Zapiska glavnoupravliaushchago zemleustroistvom i zemledeliem o poezke v muganskuiu step v 1913  g. (St. Peterburg: Gosudarstvennaia Tipografiia, 1913). During the war, the Resettlement

NOTES TO PAGES 1 0 7 – 1 0 8

239

Administration turned its attention to the possibility of Rus­sian colonization of the Ottoman territories of Eastern Anatolia that had been occupied by the advancing Rus­ sian army, although this policy was never officially ­adopted, see Peter Holquist, “Politics and Practice of the Rus­sian Occupation of Armenia,” in Naimark, Göçek, and Suny, A Question of Genocide, 151–74. 58. Mary Kilborne Mattosian, The Impact of Soviet Policies in Armenia (Leiden: Brill, 1962), 53. 59. Gatrell, Modern Refugee, 6. 60. Fridtjof Nansen, Armenia and the Near East (London: Allen and Unwin, 1930). On the Greek Resettlement Scheme, see John Hope Simpson, “The Work of the Greek Refugee Settlement Commission,” Journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs 8, no. 6 (1929), 583–604. 61. On the transformation of landscape and Rus­sian imperial domination, see Maya Peterson, “Engineering Empire: Rus­sian and Foreign Hydraulic Experts in Central Asia 1887–1917,” Cahiers du Monde russe 57, no. 1 (2016): 125–46. 62. On the difficulties and legacies of drawing of borders in the Soviet South Caucasus, see Arsene Saparov, From Conflict to Autonomy in the South Caucasus: The Soviet Union and the Making of Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Nagorno-­Karabagh (London: Routledge, 2014). 63. Some of ­these pro­cesses are documented in Suny, Looking t­oward Ararat, chap. 8. More broadly, see Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 35–44. 64. In the words of Claire Mouradian, “Each war with the other Empires led to cross-­migration of Muslim and Christian refugees, in the South and North and along the Black Sea coast.” Mouradian, “The Origins of a Colonial Vision of Southern Rus­ sia from the Tsars to the Soviets: About Some Imperial Practices in the Caucasus,” in Sophie Hohmann, Claire Mouradian, Silvia Serrano, and Julien Thorez, Development in Central Asia and the Caucasus: Migration, Demo­cratisation and In­equality in the post-­Soviet Era (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014), 38. 65. See also Firouzah Mostashari, On the Religious Frontier: Tsarist Rus­sia and Islam in the Caucasus (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), and George Bournoutian, “The Ethnic Composition and Socio-­Economic Condition of Eastern Armenia in the First Half of the Nineteenth C ­ entury,” in Transcaucasia, Nationalism and Social Change: Essays in the History of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 69–86. 66. Stephen Riegg, “Imperial Challengers: Tsarist Responses to Armenian Raids into Anatolia, 1875–90,” Rus­sian Review 76, no. 2 (2017): 253–71. 67. In the Yerevan guberniia the balance was 53 ­percent Armenians and 37 ­percent Azerbaijani Turks. ­There ­were also 15,937 Rus­sians and smaller numbers of other groups including Yezidis and Kurds in the region. In a number of uezds, for example, Yerevan, the Armenians did not constitute a majority. Figures from Audrey Alstadt, The Azerbaijani Turks: Power and Identity u­ nder Rus­sian Rule (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1992), 29–30. 68. A report prepared in Yerevan (in En­glish) apparently in preparation for the Nansen schemes reported the population was 85.9 ­percent Armenian, 9.88 ­percent Turks

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2.45 ­percent Rus­sians, 1.02 ­percent Yezidis, 0.27 ­percent Syrian, 0.33 ­percent Greeks, and 0.15 ­percent “­others.” HAA, f. 113, op. 3. d. 264, ll. 99–102, (1925/26). 69. In the words of Robert Gerwarth, the Convention “fatally undermined cultural, ethnic and religious plurality as an ideal to which to aspire and a real­ity with which—­ for all their contestations—­most ­people in the Eu­ro­pean land empires had dealt with fairly well for centuries.” Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End (New York: Fararr, Strauss and Giroux, 2016), 246. 70. Liisa Malkki, “National Geographic: The Rooting of P ­ eoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees,” Cultural Anthropology 7, no. 1 (1992): 22–44. 71. Quisling had previously worked with Nansen during the Rus­sian famine. He entered politics when he returned to Norway at the end of the 1920s and was head of the government during the occupation of the country by Nazi Germany. 72. ALON, Nansen Fonds, C1424/320/Ra. 400/0/1, Special Armenian Committee ­under the Auspices of the League of Nations, Report by Quisling February 1926. 73. Sargsyan suggests that between 1921 and 1936, 42,200 repatriates arrived, “Arevmtahayeri Gaght‘ě Arevelyan Haystan,” 62. 74. On Nubarashen and the difficult relationship between the AGBU and Soviet Armenia, see Taline Ter Minassian, Erevan: La construction d’une capitale soviétique (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2007), 97–102. 75. This scheme was ill-­fated in a dif­fer­ent way, raising new questions about diaspora and national “belonging.” See Maike Lehmann, “A Dif­fer­ent Kind of ­Brothers: Exclusion and Partial Integration ­after Repatriation to a Soviet Homeland,” Ab Imperio 3 (2012): 171–211. 76. Nick Baron and Peter Gatrell, “Population Displacement, State-­Building and Social Identities in the Lands of the Rus­sian Empire,” Kritika: Explorations in Rus­sian and Eurasian History 4, no. 1 (2003): 51–100. 77. Benjamin Thomas White, “Refugees and the Definition of Syria 1920–1939,” Past & Pres­ent 235, no. 1 (2017): 141–78. 78. Suny, Looking ­toward Ararat, 136. 79. Harold Buxton, Trans-­Caucasia (London: Faith Press, 1926), 93. 7. Reforming the Language of Our Nation

1. Tatar words and names are transcribed following Library of Congress practices for Tatar in the Cyrillic script. Turkish words follow the modern Turkish Latin alphabet. Translations are the author’s ­unless other­wise indicated. 2. Sălimgărăĭ Janturin, Lȯgat’ (Ufa: Karimov, Khusainov i Ko, 1911). The Eu­ro­pean word supplement never appeared. 3. B. F. Sultanbekov, Istoriia v litsakh (Kazan: Tatarskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1997), 15–22. 4. Adeeb Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Danielle M. Ross, “From the Minbar to the Barricades: The Transformation of the Volga-­Ural ‘Ulama into a Revolutionary Intelligent­sia” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 2011); and Ayse-­Azade Rorlich, The Volga Tatars: A Profile in National Resilience (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1986), 84–122.

NOTES TO PAGES 1 1 3 – 1 1 7

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5. Khalid, Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform, chap. 6. 6. Joan Wallach Scott, “A Statistical Repre­sen­ta­tion of Work: La Statistique de l’Industrie à Paris, 1847–1848,” in Gender and the Politics of History, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 113–38; Benedict Anderson, ­Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 163–85; Jane Caplan and John Torpey, eds., Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2001). 7. Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., Becoming National: A Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 8. M. Z. Zakiev, Tatary: Problemy istorii i iazyka (Kazan: Akademiia nauk Respubliki Tatarstan, 1995), last modified January  21, 2007, http://­web​.­archive​.­org​/­web​ /­20070121153927​/­http://­turkolog​.­narod​.­ru​/­info​/­I323​.­htm. 9. Sagit Khal’fin, Azbuka tatarskago iazyka s obstoiatel’nym opisaniem bukv i skladov (Moscow: Imperatorskii Moskovskii universitet, 1778). 10. Also Tukai, Tukay, and Tuqay. 11. Gabdulla Tukaĭ, “Mȯkharăbă vă Gosudarstvennaia duma,” al-­Gasr al-­Jadid 4 (April 15, 1906) and 5 (May 20, 1906), accessed April 23, 2018, http://­gabdullatukay​.­ru​ /­works​/­articles​/­articles​-­1906​/­moharebe​-­ve​-­gosudarstvennaya​-­duma​/­. 12. Ottoman Turkish words in Tukaĭ’s text include çocuk (child, Tatar bala), el (hand, Tatar kul), hepsi (all, Tatar barysy), istemek (to want, Tatar telă/), nerede (where, Tatar kaǐda), and a dozen more. 13. Percentages do not add up to 100 b­ ecause of rounding. A list of unique words (excluding duplicates, proper nouns, place names, and Rus­sian words used in titles and quotations) was compared with a personal Tatar lexical database containing etymological data. 14. Tukaĭ, “Mȯkharăbă” (original text, paragraph 1). 15. Tukaĭ, “Mȯkharăbă” (modern Tatar translation, paragraph 1). 16. Gabdulla Tukaev, Maktapta milli ădăbiat dăreslăre (Kazan, 1911), reprinted l­ater in Cyrillic as Gabdulla Tukaev, Maktapta milli ădăbiat dăreslăre (Kazan, 2000), accessed April  23, 2018, http://­gabdullatukay​.­r u​/­works​/­articles​/­articles​-­1910​/­mokaddime​ -­laquo​-­uzemeznen​-­yana​-­usep​-­k ilmekte​-­raquo​/­. 17. M.  I. Măkhm/tov, “Tatar ădăbi telenă kergăn rarăp-­farsy elementlary,” in Garăpchă-­tatarcha-­ruscha alynmalar s/zlege: tatar ădăbiiatynda kullanylgan garăp ḣăm farsy s/zlăre, ed. M. I. Măkhm/tov, K. Z. Khămzin, and G. Sh. Săifullin (Kazan: Tatarskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1965), 797. 18. Nikolai Ostroumov, Pervyi opyt slovaria narodno-­tatarskago iazyka po vygovory kreshchenykh tatar Kazanskoi gubernii (Kazan: Tipografiia Imperatorskago universiteta, 1876). 19. Abd al-­K ayum bin Abd al-­Nasyri, Polnyi russko–­tatarskii slovar’ (Kazan: Tipo-­ litografiia Imperatorskago universiteta, 1904). See also Soltan Rakhmankulov and Gabdrakhman Karam, Polnyi russko–­tatarskii slovar’ (Kazan: Izd. Akhmed Gareia Khasanov, 1912). 20. Anderson, ­Imagined Communities, 42–46; Ross explores the links among language, politics, and identity in the Volga-­Ural region in “From the Minbar to the Barricades.” 21. Charles Steinwedel, Threads of Empire: Loyalty and Tsarist Authority in Bashkiria, 1552–1917 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016).

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22. Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993); Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 414–52. 23. Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015) explores this attempt at Jadid-­Soviet collaboration in the 1920s–1930s in Central Asia. 24. G. K. Kasimov, Tataro-­Bashkirskaia Sovetskaia Respublika: Pervaia kniga (Moscow: Tipografiia “Vostochnaia Pechat’,” 1918). 25. Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, 263–64; Adrienne Lynn Edgar, Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2004), 133. 26. Edgar, Tribal Nation, 143–48. 27. Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, 258–63. 28. I. Borozdin, “Sovremennyi Tatarstan,” Novyi Vostok 10–11 (1925): 132. 29. Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 6–8. 30. Tamurbek Davletshin, Sovetskii Tatarstan: Teoriia i praktika leninskoi natsional’noi politiki (London: Our Word Publishers, 1974), 297. 31. M. Korbangaliev, R. Găzizov, and I. Kuliev, Tatarcha-­uryscha s/zlek: 15,000 chamasy s/z kertelgen (Kazan: Tatgosizdat, 1927). 32. Words counted as “pres­ent” in the 1927 dictionary include unlisted but easily understood words formed by the addition of standard suffixes to words found in the dictionary. Words counted as “not found” include words listed in the dictionary with such a radically dif­fer­ent spelling from the early twentieth-­century text that most readers would be unable to find the entry. 33. Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 182–207; Michael G. Smith, Language and Power in the Creation of the USSR, 1917–1953 (The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter, 1998). 34. Ibrahimov’s comments on Latinization at the 1926 Baku conference: Pervyi vsesoiuznyi tiurkologicheskii s”ezd, repr. ed. (Baku: Nagyl Evi, 2011), 363–68. On Ibrahimov’s 1927 essay on the alphabet and vocabulary question: Azade-­Ayse Rorlich, “Which Way ­Will Tatar Culture Go? A Controversial Essay by Galimdzhan Ibragimov,” Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique 15 (1974): 363–71. 35. Smith, Language and Power, 121–42. 36. M. Kurbangaliev, R. Gazizov, and I. Kuliev, Tatarca–­urusca süzlek (Kazan: Tatizdat, 1931). 37. Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 192, 229–30, 397, 414. 38. Tatarskii entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ (Kazan: Institut tatarskoi entsiklopedii AN RT, 1999), 306. 39. Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 202–3, 416–18. 40. Davletshin, Sovetskii Tatarstan, 300. 41. Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 422–31; Helen  M. Faller, Nation, Language, Islam: Tatarstan’s Sovereignty Movement (Budapest: Central Eu­ro­pean University Press, 2011), 117, 126. 42. Smith, Language and Power. 43. Mȯkhetdin Korbangaliev, who compiled the Tatar–­Russian dictionaries of 1927 and 1931, apparently survived the purges but passed away in Kazan in 1941.

NOTES TO PAGES 1 2 2 – 1 3 0

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44. Tatarsko–­russkii slovar’: okolo 38,000 slov (Moscow: Sovetskaia Entsikolopediia, 1966). 45. Tatar teleneng anglatmaly s/zlege, 3 vols. (Kazan: Tatarskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1977–1981). 46. Edward Lazzerini, “Tatarovedenie and the ‘New Historiography’ in the Soviet Union: Revising the Interpretation of the Tatar-­Russian Relationship,” Slavic Review 40, no. 4 (Winter 1981): 625–35. 47. Based on a count of one-­word lemmas excluding spelling variants and multiword phrases. This accounts for the divergence from the dictionary title pages, which claim “about 38,000 words” for the 1966 dictionary and “about 15,000 words” for the 1927 work. 48. Percentages do not add to 100 due to rounding; figures exclude place names and ethnonyms. 49. Davletshin, Sovetskii Tatarstan, 295–310. 50. Garăpchă-­tatarcha-­ruscha alynmalar s/zlege, 8. 51. Garăpchă-­tatarcha-­ruscha alynmalar s/zlege, 9. 52. “Spisok zhertv—­Memorial,” last modified October 9, 2008, http://­lists​.­memo​ .­ru​/­d34​/­f396​.­htm; “Gabbas Shigabutdinovich Saifullin r. 14 iiul’ 1887 um. 28 avgust 1951,” Rodovid, last modified January 25, 2013, http://­r u​.­rodovid​.­org​/­wk​/­Запись:748462; “Deistvitel’nyi chlen Akademii nauk Respubliki Tatarstan Makhmutov Mirza Ismailovich (1926–2008)” Akademiia nauk Respubliki Tatarstan, accessed April 23, 2018, http://­www​.­antat​.­ru​/­ru​/­staff​/­5871​/­. 53. M.  I. Măkhm/tov, K.  Z. Khămzin, and G. Sh. Săifullin, eds., Garăpchă-­ tatarcha-­ruscha alynmalar s/zlege: tatar ădăbiiatynda kullanylgan garăp ḣăm farsy s/z­lăre, 2 vols. (Kazan: Iman, 1993); Ăkhmăt Dusaily, “Tatar telengdăge garăp-­farsy alynmalary,” accessed April 23, 2018, http://­garap​-­farsy​.­narod​.­ru​/­. 54. As cited and translated in Suzanne Wertheim, “Linguistic Purism, Language Shift, and Contact-­Induced Change in Tatar” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2003), 124–25. 55. Wertheim, “Linguistic Purism.” 56. Geoffrey Lewis, The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 57. James H. Meyer, Turks across Empires: Marketing Muslim Identity in the Russian-­ Ottoman Borderlands, 1856–1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 8. Speaking Soviet with an Armenian Accent

1. M. K. Matossian, The Impact of Soviet Policies in Armenia (Leiden: Brill, 1962), 61. 2. Armenian National Archives (Hayastani azgayin arxiv, or HAA) f. 1, op. 3, d. 262, l. 3. 3. For more on the repatriation of Armenians to Soviet Armenia, see M. Lehmann, “A Dif­fer­ent Kind of ­Brothers: Exclusion and Partial Integration ­after Repatriation to a Soviet ‘Homeland,’ ” Ab Imperio, no. 3 (2012): 171–211; Jo Laycock, “Armenian Homelands and Homecomings, 1945–49: The Repatriation of Diaspora Armenians to the Soviet Union,” Cultural and Social History 9, no. 1 (2012): 103–23; Jo Laycock, “Survivor or Soviet Stories? Repatriate Narratives in Armenian Histories, Memories and Identities,” History & Memory 28, no. 2 (2016): 123–51.

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4. Ronald Grigor Suny, Looking ­toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 178–79. 5. Paolo Lucca, “Philology, Documentary Research, and Channels of Cultural Diffusion from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth C ­ entury,” in Armenian Philology in the Modern Era: From Manuscript to Digital Text, ed. Valentina Calzolari (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 417. 6. See Razmik Panossian, The Armenians: From Kings and Priests to Merchants and Commissars (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); Levon Abrahamian, “­Mother Tongue: Linguistic Nationalism and the Cult of Translation in Postcommunist Armenia,” Working paper, Berkeley Program in Eurasian and East Eu­ro­pean Studies (1998); Suny, Looking ­toward Ararat. 7. See L. K. Yezikyan, “Owghghagrowt‘yowny ‘qmahatwowyqi ar‘arka che‘,” Patma-­ banasirakan hands, no. 3 (1999): 35–40. 8. Claire Mouradian, “Statut des langues, statut des nationalités en URSS: le cas arménien,” Raison présente, no. 86 (1988): 117–30. 9. For examples, see Arus Harutyunyan, Contesting National Identities in an Ethnically Homogeneous State: The Case of Armenian Democ­ratization (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 2009); Abrahamian, “­Mother Tongue”; Raymond Pearson, “The Geopolitics of ­People Power: The Pursuit of the Nation-­State in East Central Eu­rope,” Journal of International Affairs 45, no. 2 (1992): 499–518; Ronald Grigor Suny, “Provisional Stabilities: The Politics of Identities in Post-­Soviet Eurasia,” International Security 24, no. 3 (1999/2000): 139–78. 10. Ronald Grigor Suny, “Constructing Primordialism: Old Histories for New Nations,” Journal of Modern History 73, no. 4 (2001): 862–96. 11. Many Soviet actors working in Armenia conflate (and confuse) the categories of Muslim, Turk, Tiurk, Turko-­Tatar, Tatar, Azeri, and Azerbaijani Turk over the first two de­cades of Soviet rule. In 1922, Armenia’s Muslim sector was established explic­ itly to address the issues surrounding the populations of Turks in Armenia. Many of ­these “Turks” would be labeled Muslim and/or Azeri. This sector was renamed the TurkSector in 1923. See HAA, f. 1, op. 2, d. 143, l. 44. 12. Armenian is an Indo-­European language with numerous dialects and varying degrees of intelligibility between dialects. Commonly, the dialects are grouped as Western and Eastern Armenian, but as Burt Vaux and o ­ thers have shown ­there are dozens of dialects with numerous f­actors influencing Armenian language change over time including dispersion, language contact, and state interventions. Burt Vaux, The Phonology of Armenian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 13. HAA, f. 251, op.1, d. 45, l. 10. 14. Inger Marie Okkenhaug, “Refugees, Relief and the Restoration of a Nation: Norwegian Mission in the Armenian Republic, 1922–1925,” in Protestant Missions and Local Encounters in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Hilde Nielssen, Inger Marie Okkenhaug, and Karina Hestad-­Skele (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 207–32. 15. In this chapter, to speak Soviet implies a production of state-­sanctioned language in par­tic­u­lar contexts. Speaking Soviet was one way citizens learned to address Soviet authorities. It was also a way for citizens to express their belonging to the larger revolutionary proj­ect and gain access to the resources of the state. Speaking Soviet gestures to the uptake of the linguistic and cultural turns in Stephen Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), while providing a space to critique the pos­si­ble fixed nature of the categories

NOTES TO PAGES 1 3 2 – 1 3 6

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Kotkin deploys. In response to Anna Krylova’s critique of Kotkin, some authors have gestured to an alternative “speaking Soviet” that allows for a broader theorization of the multiplicity of ideologies that circulated in the Soviet Union. Krylova, “Soviet Modernity: Stephen Kotkin and the Bolshevik Predicament,” Con­temporary Eu­ ro­pean History 23, no. 2 (2014): 167–92. Other authors have deployed speaking Soviet simply to conceptualize the production of Soviet forms of culture and language without engaging directly with Kotkin’s work. Speaking Soviet, unlike Stephen Kotkin’s speaking Bolshevik, remains undertheorized but provides space for an alternative to Kotkin’s notion of fixed ideas or basic tenets of official ideology. For a recent example of scholarship deploying “speaking Soviet,” see Kenneth Slepyan, “The Soviet Partisan Movement and the Holocaust,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 14, no. 1 (2000): 1–27; Rasa Baločkaitė, “On Ideology, Language, and Identity: Language Politics in Soviet and Post-­Soviet Lithuania,” Language Policy 13, no. 1 (2014): 41; Ali F. Igmen, Speaking Soviet with an Accent: Culture and Power in Kyrgyzstan (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012); and Lilya Kaganovsky, “Learning to Speak Soviet,” in A Companion to Rus­sian Cinema, ed. Birgit Beumers (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2016). 16. Richard G. Hovannisian, The Republic of Armenia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 1:126–27. 17. HAA, f. 251, op. 1, d. 164. 18. Nora Nercessian, The City of Orphans: Relief Workers, Commissars and the “Builders of the New Armenia” Alexandropol Leninakan, 1919–1931 (New Hampshire: Hollis Publishing, 2015). 19. Nercessian, The City of Orphans, 190. 20. Nercessian, The City of Orphans, 191. 21. Nercessian, The City of Orphans, 82–96. 22. Nercessian, The City of Orphans, 257. 23. Nercessian, The City of Orphans, 240–44. 24. Nercessian, The City of Orphans, 254. 25. Nercessian, The City of Orphans, 253–54. 26. Nercessian, The City of Orphans, 289–91. 27. The Rec­ord of the Save the C ­ hildren Fund (April 15, 1922), 5. 28. For the closing of the Leninakan City of Orphans, see Nercessian, City of Orphans, 322–40. 29. Jasmine Dum-­Tragut, Armenian: Modern Eastern Armenian (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009). 30. Levon  G. Khachʻeryan, Hayotsʻ hamazgayin Mashtotsʻean hamakarguats miasnakan ew miakerp ughghagrutʻean patmutʻiwně (E.-­I. darer) (Los Angeles: Nor Keankʻ, 1999), 261–81. 31. S. V. Gyulbudaghyan, Hayereni ughghagrut‘yan patmut‘yun (Erevan: Erevani hamalsarani hratarakch‘utʻyun, 1973). 32. For more discussion on Latinization, see Daniel E. Schafer, chapter 7 in this volume. 33. Gyulbudaghyan, Hayereni ughghagrut‘yan patmut‘yun. 34. Terry Martin argues that Soviet authorities promoted a positive image of borderland p­ eoples to populations living on the other side of the border in what he deems the Soviet Union’s “Piedmont Policy” to facilitate the national consolidation and expansion of the territory of the Soviet Union. While policies in Armenia w ­ ere similarly

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designed, territory was not the ultimate goal of promoting Armenia abroad, and many of the forms of positive discrimination in Armenia last long ­after Martin declares them undermined in Western borderlands. See Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 274–75. 35. J. J. S. Weitenberg, “Reform Movements in Armenia,” in Language Reform: History and ­Future, ed. István Fodor and Claude Hagège (Hamburg: Buske, 1990), 5:401. 36. Marrist theory (named ­after Georgian-­born linguist N. Ia. Marr) purported that languages went through stages and eventually all languages would consolidate as one universal language. While celebrated in the early Soviet period, this theory was renounced ­after Stalin rejected it in 1950. 37. See the spelling errors in the document and file titles of the Down with Illiteracy Society files, HAA, f. 251, op. 1. 38. For a discussion of spelling in the aftermath of the reforms, see Khach’eryan, Havots’. 39. Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia Archive (sakartvelos šinagan sakmeta saministros arkivi II, or sšssa II) f. 13, op. 7, d. 148, l. 141. 40. HAA, f. 251, op. 1, d. 198. 41. For an example of the types of scripts used, see HAA, f. 251, op. 1, d. 131. 42. HAA, f. 1, op. 8, d. 188, l. 12. 43. HAA, f. 251, op. 1, d. 84. 44. Hoktemberik, no. 6 (1929). 45. For details of successful literate w ­ omen promoted, see Hayastani Ashakhatavoruhi, no. 7–8 (1928): 12–15. 46. HAA, f. 1, op. 1, d. 178. As one activist complained, “Why have you sent us this lazy empty-­headed ­woman? . . . ​Her illiteracy makes her of no use to us.” HAA, f. 1, op. 3, d. 264, l. 71. Translations are the author’s ­unless other­wise indicated. 47. Suny, Looking ­toward Ararat, 145–47. 48. Weitenberg, “Reform Movements in Armenia,” 401. 49. ­These terms ­were internationalized in the 1940s, but once again re-­Armenianized in the 1960s when state officials made concessions a­ fter protests commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. Mouradian, “Statut des langues.” 50. HAA, f. 1, op. 3, d. 276, l. 16. 51. The Modern History Archive of Georgia (sakartvelos uakhlesi ist’oriis tsent’raluri arkivi, or suita), f. 300, op. 1, d. 284. 52. sšssa II, f. 13, op. 7, d. 134, l. 8; sšssa II, f. 13, op. 12, d. 77. 53. Charles E. Clark, Uprooting Otherness: The Literacy Campaign in NEP-­Era Rus­sia (Plainsboro, NJ: Susquehanna University Press, 2000). 54. HAA, f. 251, op. 1, d. 106. 55. HAA, f. 251, op. 1, d. 1, l. 2. 56. HAA, f. 251, op. 1, d. 7, l. 11. 57. HAA, f. 1, op. 4, d. 136, l. 27. 58. Suny, Looking ­toward Ararat, 142. 59. Hayastani Ashakhatavoruhi (September 1924). 60. The term d‘vatar p‘ogher used in the diagram seems to be a calque from the Rus­ sian, matochnye truby. The terms of anatomy in Soviet Armenia and Georgia ­were largely influenced by the categories in circulation in Rus­sia and Rus­sian language.

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61. Soviet authorities’ production of public health information about ­women’s bodies stood in contrast to bodily policing of humanitarian actors who sought to create Armenian w ­ omen whose bodies should be protected from sin. To this end, toilets for older girls w ­ ere monitored for aborted fetuses, and their sleeping quarters ­were guarded. See Nercessian, City of Orphans, 253–54. 62. Paula Michaels, “Medical Propaganda and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Kazakhstan, 1928–41,” Rus­sian Review 59, no. 2 (2001): 159–78. 63. Maike Lehmann, “Apricot Socialism: The National Past, the Soviet Proj­ect, and the Imagining of Community in Late Soviet Armenia,” Slavic Review 74, no. 1 (2015): 9–31. 64. Krylova, “Soviet Modernity.” 9. Making a Home for the Soviet P ­ eople

Research was supported by American Councils for International Education and the University of Michigan. Thoughtful readings from Maria Blackwood, Susan Colbourn, Markian Dobczansky, Brady G’Sell, Emma Park, Maria Taylor, Rebekah Ramsay, Maris Rowe-­McCullough, and Katherine Younger greatly improved the final product. 1. Nikolai Bukharin, “Geroicheskii sovetskii narod,” Izvestiia, July 6, 1935. References to the “Soviet ­people,” a collective, singular noun, are translated from sovetskii narod ­unless other­wise noted. All translations are my own. 2. Valerie Kivelson and Ronald Grigor Suny offer an overview of ­these discussions, see Rus­sia’s Empires (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), especially 1–16, 75–88. 3. Bukharin, “Geroicheskii sovetskii narod,” Izvestiia, July 6, 1935. 4. Joshua A. Sanborn, Drafting the Rus­sian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics, 1905–1925 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003); Yohanan Petrovsky-­Shtern, Jews in the Rus­sian Army, 1827–1917: Drafted into Modernity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Many groups, including Central Asians and other inorodtsy, ­were exempt or excluded from military ser­vice. Matthew J. Payne discusses the implications in chapter 4 of this volume. 5. Kivelson and Suny, Rus­sia’s Empires, 129. 6. Andreas Kappeler gives a comprehensive overview of imperial policies ­toward ethnic minorities in The Rus­sian Empire: A Multi-­Ethnic History, trans. Alfred Clayton (London: Routledge, 2001). On religious pluralism, see Robert D. Crews, For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Rus­sia and Central Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Paul W. Werth, The Tsar’s Foreign Faiths: Toleration and the Fate of Religious Freedom in Imperial Rus­sia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). In both cases, the extension of privileges to certain groups coincided with harsh repression of ­others. 7. Ian W. Campbell, Knowledge and the Ends of Empire: Kazak Intermediaries and Rus­ sian Rule on the Steppe, 1731–1917 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017). 8. Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993); Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).

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9. Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course (New York: International Publishers, 1938), 224. 10. Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Rus­sia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000); David L. Hoffmann, Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917–1941 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary u­ nder Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). This phrase is typically rendered “new Soviet man,” but I prefer to translate it as “person” in keeping with the gender-­neutrality of the Rus­sian original. 11. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921–1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Larry E. Holmes, The Kremlin and the School­house: Reforming Education in Soviet Rus­sia, 1917–1931 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Matthew D. Pauly, Breaking the Tongue: Language, Education, and Power in Soviet Ukraine, 1923–1934 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014). 12. Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organ­ization of Education and the Arts ­under Lunacharsky, October  1917–1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); Katerina Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Richard Taylor, Film Propaganda: Soviet Rus­sia and Nazi Germany, 2nd ed. (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998), 21–62; Mayhill Fowler, Beau Monde on Empire’s Edge: State and Stage in Soviet Ukraine (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017). 13. Daniel Peris, Storming the Heavens: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Shoshana Keller, To Moscow, Not Mecca: The Soviet Campaign against Islam in Central Asia, 1917–1941 (Westport: Praeger, 2001). 14. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Re­sis­tance and Survival in the Rus­sian Village ­after Collectivization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Mary Buckley, Mobilizing Soviet Peasants: Heroines and Heroes of Stalin’s Fields (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006). 15. David L. Hoffmann, Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 1929–1941 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Matthew J. Payne, Stalin’s Railroad: Turksib and the Building of Socialism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001); Elena Shulman, Stalinism on the Frontier of Empire: W ­ omen and State Formation in the Soviet Far East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 16. Douglas Northrop, Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); Marianne Kamp, The New ­Woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, Modernity, and Unveiling ­under Communism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006); Adrienne Lynn Edgar, Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2006), 221–60. 17. Hoffmann, Stalinist Values, 10; Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 152. 18. This is not to say that collectivization ended; although the pace slowed in the 1930s, the pro­cess continued. Rather, leaders largely abandoned class-­based discourses and instead emphasized unity and equality. 19. On Soviet identity as affective, see Ronald Grigor Suny, “The Contradictions of Identity: Being Soviet and National in the USSR and ­After,” in Soviet and Post-­Soviet

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Identities, ed. Mark Bassin and Catriona Kelly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 17–36. 20. Following Ronald Grigor Suny, I use “state patriotism” to refer to feelings of loyalty to the state; see Suny “The Empire Strikes Out: Imperial Rus­sia, ‘National’ Identity, and Theories of Empire,” in A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-­Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 40. ­Because of the Soviet Union’s multiethnic character, patriotism emphasized civic rather than ethnic loyalty. 21. Pravda, January 28, 1934. 22. Central Committee of the CPSU, History of the CPSU, 346. Golfo Alexopoulous reminds us that ­these rights differed considerably in practice, see Stalin’s Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926–1936 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). 23. “Stalinskaia konstitutsiia,” Izvestiia, November 24, 1936; “SSSR—­moguchee mnogonatsional’noe gosudarstvo,” Izvestiia, November 28, 1936. On discussions of the constitution, see Karen Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Cele­brations in the Time of Stalin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 175–202; Samantha Lomb, Stalin’s Constitution: Soviet Participatory Politics and the Discussion of the 1936 Draft Constitution (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017); Olga Velikanova, Mass Po­liti­cal Culture ­under Stalinism: Popu­lar Discussion of the Soviet Constitution of 1936 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 24. For an overview of the pro­cess, including a statistical analy­sis of letter content, see Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF), f. 7523, op. 131, d. 43, ll. 16–55. 25. GARF, f. 3316, op. 41, d. 193, l. 47. 26. For example, GARF, f. 3316, op. 41, d. 193, ll. 49, 50, 57, 58, 64–65, 72–73, and 74. 27. On Stalinism as participatory, see Serhy Yekelchyk, Stalin’s Citizens: Everyday Politics in the Wake of Total War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). On interpreting constitutional letters, see also Lewis H. Siegelbaum et al., eds., Stalinism as a Way of Life: A Narrative in Documents (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 158–206. 28. “Soiuzniki i posobniki fashistskikh agressorov,” Izvestiia, January 25, 1937. See also V. Zhebrovskii, “Put’ pravykh restavratorov kapitalizma—­Bukharina i Rykova,” Istoricheskii zhurnal, no. 3–4 (1937): 65; “Volia trudiashchikhsia,” Izvestiia, March 14, 1938. The term “fascist” dis­appeared from the press following the Molotov-­Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939, only to return in the wake of the German invasion in June 1941. 29. Yekelchyk, Stalin’s Citizens, 11. 30. “Velikaia kliatva sovetskogo voina,” Istoricheskii zhurnal, no. 1 ( January 1939): 7. See also “Lagernaia ucheba Krasnoi Armii,” Pravda, August 3, 1938; “Moguchaia armiia sovetskogo naroda,” Pravda, August 14, 1938. 31. Dmitrii Levinskii, My iz sorok pervogo: vospominaniia (Moscow: Novoe izdatel’stvo, 2005), 42. 32. This “scaling back and rationalization” of previous policy was accompanied by backtracking on certain forms of nationalism, persecution of non-­Russian elites, and a revising of the “greatest-­danger princi­ple,” by which non-­Russians (and not just Rus­ sians) could be acused of ethnic chauvinism, see Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 344–93. Hirsch alternatively interprets this as a second phase of assimilation, planned from the beginning, see Empire of Nations, 7–9. 33. Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, especially 311–43; Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

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Press, 2004), 173–91; Norman M. Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2010). As Claire P. Kaiser demonstrates in chapter 5 of this volume, deportations continued into the postwar period. 34. Arkhiv Prezidenta Respubliki Kazakhstan (APRK), f. 708, op. 02/1, d. 745, ll. 1–8. See Peter Blitstein, “Nation-­Building or Russification? Obligatory Rus­sian Instruction in the Soviet Non-­Russian School, 1938–1953,” in Suny and Martin, A State of Nations, 253–74. 35. Daniel E. Schafer discusses Tatar script changes in chapter 7 of this volume. For a typical discussion about the usefulness of the new Cyrillic alphabet in Kazakhstan, see APRK, f. 708, o. 3/1, d. 738. See also Blitstein, “Nation-­Building or Russification?” 36. “Chest’ i slava geroiam stalinskoi epokhi!” Pravda, July 13, 1937. 37. “Geroicheskie syny geroicheskogo naroda,” Izvestiia, January 15, 1940, 1. Cf. V. Volin, “Velikii Russkii narod,” Istoricheskii zhurnal, no. 5 (1938): 1–17. 38. Serhy Yekelchyk considers the unequal partnership between Rus­sians and Ukrainians in Stalin’s Empire of Memory: Russian-­Ukrainian Relations in the Soviet Historical Imagination (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), especially 39–47. 39. David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Rus­sian National Identity, 1931–1956 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), especially 43–62. 40. For one example, see “Russkii iazyk—­dostoianie sovetskikh narodov,” Pravda, July 7, 1938. The 1938 decree on mandatory Russian-­language education justified the change in similar terms and also emphasized its military importance, suggesting the connection between war and Soviet identity. One copy of the law can be found in APRK, f. 708, op. 2/1, d. 745, ll. 1–8. 41. Nina Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Rus­sia (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2002); Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945 (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006). 42. “Dadim sokrushitel’nyi otpor fashistskim varvaram,” Pravda, June 24, 1941; “Krasnaia Armiia—­rodnoe detishche sovetskogo naroda,” Pravda, June 25, 1941; “Edinyi front narodov protiv fashizma,” Izvestiia, July 5, 1941; “Nepreklonna volia naroda k otporu vragu,” Izvestiia, October 24, 1941; “Liubov’ k rodine i nenavist’ k vragu, Pravda, May 18, 1942; “Sviashchennaia druzhba fronta i tyla,” Pravda, October 27, 1942; “Vsia strana rabotaet vo imia pobedy,” Izvestiia, November 18, 1942. 43. Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Leslie Page Moch, Broad Is My Native Land: Repertoires and Regimes of Migration in Rus­sia’s Twentieth C ­ entury (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014). 44. Brandon Schechter, “ ‘The ­People’s Instructions’: Indigenizing The ­Great Patriotic War Among ‘Non-­Russians,’ ” Ab Imperio, no. 3 (2012): 109–33; Roberto J. Carmack, “ ‘A Fortress of the Soviet Home Front’: Mobilization and Ethnicity in Kazakhstan during World War II” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 2015); Boram Shin, “Red Army Propaganda for Uzbek Soldiers and Localised Soviet Internationalism during World War II,” Soviet and Post-­Soviet Review 42, no. 1 (2015): 39–63; Charles Shaw, “Soldiers’ Letters to Inobatxon and O’g’ulxon: Gender and Nationality in the Birth of a Soviet Romantic Culture,” Kritika: Explorations in Rus­sian and Eurasian History 17, no. 3 (2016): 517–52; Moritz Florin, “Becoming Soviet through War: The Kyrgyz and the

NOTES TO PAGES 1 5 5 – 1 5 6

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­ reat Fatherland War,” Kritika: Explorations in Rus­sian and Eurasian History 17, no. 3 G (2016): 495–516. 45. “Krasnaia Armiia—­rodnoe detishche sovetskogo naroda,” Pravda, June 25, 1941; “Doblestnaia armiia sovetskogo naroda,” Izvestiia, June 27, 1931; “Geroicheskaia armiia sovetskogo naroda,” Izvestiia, November 3, 1942; “Velikii geroizm sovetskogo naroda i ego Krasnoi Armii,” Pravda, November 11, 1942. On “friendship of the p­ eoples” within the military, see especially “Druzhba narodov na fronte,” Pravda, October 14, 1942; “Boevoe bratstvo narodov Sovetskogo Soiuza,” Pravda, October 31, 1942; S. Shatilov, “Plechom k plechu,” Pravda, December  5, 1942; F. Voznyi, “Vospitanie boevogo edinstva,” Pravda, May 29, 1943; D. Rudnev, “Pobratimy,” Pravda, June 11, 1943. 46. Voznyi, “Vospitanie boevogo edinstva,” Pravda, May 29, 1943. 47. Shatilov, “Plechom k plechu,” Pravda, December 5, 1942. 48. Rebecca Manley, To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 1. 49. M. N Potemkina, Evakuatsiia v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny na Urale: liudi i sud’by (Magnitogorsk: Magnitogorskii gos. universitet, 2002); Manley, To the Tashkent Station; Natalie Belsky, “Encounters in the East: Evacuees in the Soviet Hinterland during the Second World War” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2014); Siegelbaum and Moch, Broad Is My Native Land, 239–65; Larry E. Holmes, Stalin’s World War II Evacuations: Triumph and Trou­bles in Kirov (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2017). 50. Diary of Makhsuda M., translated and published in Marfua Tokhtakhodzhaeva, ed., XX vek v vospominaniiakh, ustnykh istoriiakh, pis’makh i dnevnikakh zhenshchin Uzbekistana (Moscow: Natalis, 2008), 235–36. Evacuees also described interactions with locals, see examples in Vasilii Grigor’evich Makurov, ed., Evakuirovannaia Kareliia: Zhiteli respubliki ob evakuatsii v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, 1941–1945: vospominaniia (Petrozavodsk: Karelʹskii nauchnyi tsentr RAN, 2015). 51. Dzhambul Dzhabaev [Jambyl Jabaev], “Leningradtsy, deti moi!” Pravda, September 5, 1941. The poem is cited as an inspiration in APRK, f. 708, op. 7/1, d. 666, l. 20. Jambyl’s authorship, particularly of his Russian-­language poems, is contested, but he nevertheless represented an impor­tant symbol of multiethnic patriotism. He is cited as an inspiration for soldiers in Shatilov, “Plechom k plechu,” Pravda, December 5, 1942. His 1945 obituary described him as a “talented Soviet poet,” who combined “traditional forms with new revolutionary content.” “Dzhambul Dzhabaev,” Pravda, June 23, 1945. On controversies surrounding Jambyl’s authorship, see Susanna Witt, “Between the Lines: Totalitarianism and Translation in the USSR,” in Contexts, Subtexts and Pretexts Literary Translation in Eastern Eu­rope and Rus­sia, ed. Brian James Baer (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Pub. Co., 2011), 149–70. 52. APRK, f. 708, op. 7/1, d. 666, ll. 20–27. On adoptions in Uzbekistan, see Manley, To the Tashkent Station, 223–27. On adoption as an example of the friendship of the ­peoples, see Pashsha Makhmudova, “Oni stali det’mi Uzbekistana,” Pravda, August  16, 1942; Ol’ga Mishakova, “Sovetskaia zhenshchina—­velikaia sila,” Pravda, March 8, 1945. 53. Manley, To the Tashkent Station, 223. See also Gafur Guliam, “Ty ne sirota,” Pravda, April 27, 1942. 54. “Antifashistskii miting predstavitelei narodov kazakhskoi, turkmenskoi, kirgizskoi, tadzhikskoi sovetskikh respublik,” Pravda, February  21, 1943; Izvestiia, February 21, 1943; APRK, f. 708, op. 7/1, d. 666, ll. 131–36.

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55. APRK, f. 708, op. 5/1, d. 705, ll. 78–80. 56. Vasylʹ Sokil, Zdaleka do blyz’koho: spohady, rozdumy (Edmonton: Kanads’kyi instytut ukr. studii, 1987), 139. 57. Sokil, Zdaleka do blyz’koho, 152. 58. Makurov, Evakuirovannaia Kareliia, 263–65. 59. Wendy Goldman, “The Stalinist State and Mass Mobilization: From Evacuation to the ­Labor Draft to Factory Canteens” (Paper presented at Stalinism and War, Moscow, 2016). Her forthcoming book with Donald Filtzer, Fortress Dark and Stern (Oxford University Press) addresses this phenomenon. 60. Pavlo Tychyna, “My idemo na bii,” Pravda, June 24, 1941; Iakub Kolas, “Shalionaga psa—na lantsug,” Pravda, June 24, 1941. 61. Tychyna, “My idemo na bii,” Pravda, June 24, 1941. 62. “O’zbek xalqining jangchilariga ularning el-­yurtlaridan maktub,” Pravda, October 31, 1942; a Rus­sian translation followed. 63. M. I. Kalinin, O kommunisticheskom vospitanii: izbrannye rechi i stat’i, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia, 1946), 179. 64. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no-­politicheskoi istorii (RGASPI), f. 17, op. 125, d. 85, ll. 39–51; Kalinin, O kommunisticheskom vospitanii, 177–79. See also Schechter, “ ‘The P ­ eople’s Instructions.’ ” 65. APRK, f. 708, op. 5/1, dd. 596, 597, and 603. 66. APRK, f. 708, op. 5/1, d. 603, especially ll. 24, 26–27. 67. APRK, f. 708, op. 5/1, d. 678, ll. 19–20. 68. Krista Anne Goff, “What Makes a ­People? Soviet Nationality Politics and Minority Experience a­ fter World War Two” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2014). 69. “Sovetskii Kazakhstan—­frontu,” Pravda, July 17, 1942. 70. Mamadali Kurbanov, “Sovetskii Tadzhikistan frontu i strane,” Izvestiia, January 5, 1944. 71. D. Rudnev, “Pobratimy,” Pravda, June 11, 1943. 72. ­These letters followed the example of the 1942 letter to Uzbek soldiers and w ­ ere usually published in both central newspapers. T ­ hese included letters to Kazakh (February  6, 1943), Armenian (February  27, 1943), Tatar (March  5, 1943), Tajik (March 20, 1943), Turkmen (April 13, 1943), and Azerbaijani (April 21, 1943) soldiers. Only the letter to Uzbek soldiers ran in the central press in the original language. See also Schechter, “ ‘The P ­ eople’s Instructions’ ”; Shin, “Red Army Propaganda for Uzbek Soldiers.” 73. Shatilov, “Plechom k plechu,” Pravda, December 5, 1942; Rudnev, “Pobratimy,” Pravda, June 11, 1943; Iurii Il’inskii, O druz’iakh-­tovarishchakh: dokumental’nye rasskazy (Tashkent: Izdatel’stvo literatury i iskusstva imeni Gafura Guliama, 1985). 74. Brandenberger, National Bolshevism, especially 115–80. 75. T. A. Chumachenko, Church and State in Soviet Rus­sia: Rus­sian Orthodoxy from World War II to the Khrushchev Years, trans. Edward E. Roslof (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2002); Eren Tasar, Soviet and Muslim: The Institutionalization of Islam in Central Asia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 76. On deemphasizing atheism, see APRK, f. 708, op. 5/1, d. 618, ll. 4–6 and 20. Religious accommodations are discussed throughout APRK, f. 708, op. 5/1, dd. 617–18. 77. Manley, To the Tashkent Station, 4–5.

NOTES TO PAGES 1 5 9 – 1 6 3

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78. Brown, A Biography of No Place, 173–91; Isaac Scarborough, “An Unwanted Dependence: Chechen and Ingush Deportees and the Development of State–­Citizen Relations in Late-­Stalinist Kazakhstan (1944–1953),” Central Asian Survey 36, no. 1 (2017): 93–112. 79. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 184, ll. 79–82. 80. For example, the architect A. K. Chaldymov expressed concerns about increased religious activity in a series of letters to Stalin and Malenkov, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 184, ll. 88–113. 81. For example, Wendy Z. Goldman and Donald A. Filtzer, eds., Hunger and War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015). 82. H ­ ere, I largely agree with Brandenberger’s description of war­time “national Bolshevism,” though I place far more emphasis on non-­Russian participation, see National Bolshevism, 115–80. For typical press coverage favoring the Rus­sian ­people, see “Sviatoe bratstvo narodov SSSR,” Pravda, May 16, 1943; Andrei Perventsov, “My—­ russkie!” Izvestiia, May 26, 1943; “Russkii voin,” Izvestiia, May 28, 1943. This was exemplified in Stalin’s 1945 toast to the Rus­sian ­people, “Vystuplenie tov. Stalina,” Pravda, May 25, 1945. 83. Stalin’s speech, delivered on the twenty-­fourth anniversary of the revolution, was frequently cited in discussions of ideological mobilization in the military. The speech appeared in Pravda, November 7, 1941. 84. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 85, ll. 64–65. 85. Kalinin, O kommunisticheskom vospitanii, 176–80. 86. Kalinin, O kommunisticheskom vospitanii, 180. 87. Roger R ­ eese discusses general consequences of the Red Army’s multiethnic composition in Why Stalin’s Soldiers Fought: The Red Army’s Military Effectiveness in World War II (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011), 224–27. For primary sources, see RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 85, ll. 39–51; APRK, f. 708, op. 5/1, d. 1122; Kalinin, O kommunisticheskom vospitanii, 177; Shatilov, “Plechom k plechu,” Pravda, December 5, 1942. Newspapers also reported on efforts to publish textbooks for non-­Russian soldiers, see academic M. I. Muskhelishvili, “Uchenye Gruzii—­frontu,” Izvestiia, September 28, 1941; “Uchebnik russkogo iazyka dlia boitsov vseobucha,” Izvestiia, October 3, 1942. 88. Shaw, “Soldiers’ Letters.” War­time evacuations somewhat mitigated this. 10. Dismantling “Georgia’s Spiritual Mission”

1. Ronald Grigor Suny, “Constructing Primordialism: Old Histories for New Nations,” Journal of Modern History 73, no. 4 (2001): 870. 2. On Gamsakhurdia, see Ronald Grigor Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, rev. ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 317–336; Stephen Jones, Georgia: A Po­liti­cal History since In­de­pen­dence, rev. ed. (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015); and Zviad gamsakhurdias (avtorizebuli) biograpia bibliograpiit (Tbilisi: n.p., 1999). 3. The former was translated into En­glish ­under the Soviet regime: Konstantine Gamsakhurdia, The Hand of a G ­ reat Master, trans. V. Eristavi (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing, 1959). David the Builder has no En­glish rendering. 4. Gamsakhurdia, Hand of a ­Great Master, 80. 5. At the same time, some Georgians contributed to the making of the Rus­sian Empire and Soviet Union. For the Northern Caucasus in this phenomenon, see Austin

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Jersild, Orientalism and Empire: North Caucasus Mountain ­Peoples and the Georgian Frontier, 1845–1917 (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 2002). 6. In this essay, “Caucasian” refers to the Caucasus region and never to the “Caucasian race,” a concept pop­u­lar­ized by Johann Blumenbach at the start of the nineteenth ­century. 7. Grigorii Tsitriniak, “Stepen’ svobody,” Ogonëk 31 ( July 1989): 26–27. 8. Zviad Gamsakhurdia, The Spiritual Mission of Georgia, trans. Arrian Tchanturia (Tbilisi: Ganatleba, 1991). ­There have been other such outbursts in the former Soviet Union, most notably the infamous inquiries into Rus­sian ethnogenesis by Lev Gumilyov (1912–92), which included his notion of the “­Great Steppe.” 9. The same Georgian Bagratid king celebrated in Konstantine Gamsakhurdia’s historical novel. 10. Much would be revealed through a careful study of the emotional substratum of Gamsakhurdia’s ideas and activities. For the possibilities, see Ronald Grigor Suny, “Thinking about Feelings: Affective Dispositions and Emotional Ties in Imperial Rus­sia and the Ottoman Empire,” in Interpreting Emotions in Rus­sia and Eastern Eu­rope, ed. Mark D. Steinberg and Valeria Sobol (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2011), 102–27. 11. Gamsakhurdia, Spiritual Mission, 22. 12. Suny, Making of the Georgian Nation. At the start of this pro­cess, the literary and scholarly activities of Vakhushti Bagrationi ­were especially impor­tant. 13. Rus­sian Embassies to the Georgian Kings 1589–1605, ed. W. E. D. Allen, trans. Anthony Mango, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society/Cambridge University Press, 1970). 14. See, for example, Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 15. Accordingly, Paul Manning’s superb Strangers in a Strange Land: Occidentalist Publics and Orientalist Geographies in Nineteenth-­Century Georgian Imaginaries (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2012) has considerably older antecedents. 16. See Stephen F. Jones, ed., The Making of Modern Georgia, 1918–2012: The First Georgian Republic and Its Successors (London: Routledge, 2014). 17. For modern aspects of t­ hese imperial and Orientalist imaginations, see, for example, Harsha Ram, The Imperial Sublime: A Rus­sian Poetics of Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003); and Bruce Grant, The Captive and the Gift: Cultural Histories of Sovereignty in Rus­sia and the Caucasus (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009). 18. Abesalom Vekua and Davit Lortkipanidze, Dmaniseli hominidebi (Tbilisi: Sakartvelos erovnuli muzeumi, 2011). 19. Philip L. Kohl, “Nationalism and Archaeology: On the Constructions of Nations and the Reconstructions of the Remote Past,” Annual Review of Anthropology 27 (1998): 223–46. See also Ekaterina Pravilova, “Contested Ruins: Nationalism, Emotions, and Archaeology at Armenian Ani, 1892–1918,” Ab Imperio 1 (2016): 69–101. 20. On the origin of the Georgian script, see Tamaz Gamqrelidze, Tseris anbanuri sistema da dzveli kartuli damtserloba (Tbilisi: Tbilisis universitetis gamomtsemloba, 1989). 21. Shushanik’s vita is the oldest original extant text in Georgian; a medieval Armenian-­language version was also produced.

NOTES TO PAGES 1 6 9 – 1 7 5

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22. Gamsakhurdia, Spiritual Mission, 7–8. 23. On the development of ethnonational structures u ­ nder the early Soviet regime, see Suny, “Constructing Primordialism”; and Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (1994): 414–52; and Victor A. Shnirelman, “Politics of Ethnogenesis in the USSR and A ­ fter,” Bulletin of the National Museum of Ethnology 30, no. 1 (2005): 93–119. For a recent Georgian critique of nations as modern phenomena, see Davit Muskhelishvili, Giorgi Cheishvili, and Aleksandre Daushvili, Kartveli eris konsolidatsiis etapebi da taviseburebani ukhsovari droidan dghemde (Tbilisi: Universali, 2016), with En­glish summary, “Consolidation States and Peculiarities of the Georgian Nation,” 695–97. 24. J. V. Stalin, “Marxism and the National Question,” in Marxism and the National-­ Colonial Question: A Collection of Articles and Speeches (San Francisco: Proletarian Publishers, 1975), 21; emphasis added. 25. The meaning of (Asiatic) “Iberia” in Graceo-­Roman sources varies significantly. On the designations for “Georgia”—an exonym—­across a wide linguistic and temporal range, see G. Paichadze, ed., Sakartvelosa da kartvelebis aghmnishvneli utskhouri da kartuli terminologia (Tbilisi: Metsniereba, 1993). 26. Gamsakhurdia, Spiritual Mission, 8. 27. Gamsakhurdia, Spiritual Mission, 8. 28. The claim on Anatolia was fueled, in part, by medieval Georgian monasteries now located in far eastern Turkey, in historical Tao-­Klarjeti. 29. Adopting a similar approach, Elguja Khintibidze identifies several church f­ athers, including Basil the G ­ reat, as “Georgians”: Georgian-­Byzantine Literary Contacts, trans. Arrian Tchanturia (Amsterdam: Adolf M. Hakkert, 1996). 30. Lest there be any confusion, Gamsakhurdia’s reference to the “Caucasian race” is contrary to my usage of “Caucasian” in this chapter, as indicated in note 6 above. 31. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 2:228–35. 32. “Georgia Changes Its Tourist Image,” Georgian Journal, July 7, 2011, accessed May 19, 2017, http://­www​.­georgianjournal​.­ge​/­business​/­5390​-­georgia​-­changes​-­its​ -­tourist​-­image​-­​.­html. 33. Life of the Kings, in Kartlis tskhovreba, ed. S. Qaukhchishvili (Tbilisi: Sakhelgami, 1955), 1:38–42. En­glish translation: Robert W. Thomson, Rewriting Caucasian History: The Medieval Armenian Adaptation of the Georgian Chronicles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 50–51. 34. Gamsakhurdia, Spiritual Mission, 18. 35. Gamsakhurdia, Spiritual Mission, 20–21. 36. Life of King of Kings Davit, in Qaukhchishvili, Kartlis tskhovreba, 323, and Thomson, Rewriting Caucasian History, 314. 37. Qaukhchishvili, Life of King of Kings Davit, 351, and Thomson, Rewriting Caucasian History, 342. 38. For example, Antony Eastmond, Royal Imagery in Medieval Georgia (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998).

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39. Qaukhchishvili, Life of King of Kings Davit, 356–57, and Thomson, Rewriting Caucasian History, 346–48. 40. V. Minorsky, “Caucasica in the History of Mayyāfāriqīn,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 13, no. 1 (1949): 33–34. 41. Qaukhchishvili, Life of King of Kings Davit, 334, and Thomson, Rewriting Caucasian History, 325. 42. On another edge of the Byzantine Commonwealth, the Ethiopic Kebra Nagast deploys a similar strategy. 43. Stephen H. Rapp Jr., “The Coinage of T‛amar, Sovereign of Georgia in Caucasia,” Le Muséon 106, no. 3–4 (1993): 309–29. 44. D. G. Kapanadze, Gruzinskaia numizmatika (Moscow: Izd-vo AN SSSR, 1955), 65–66. 45. Kapanadze, Gruzinskaia numizmatika, 62–63. 46. For Armenia, see Christina Maranci, Vigilant Powers: Three Churches of Early Medieval Armenia (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015); and Lynn Jones, Between Islam and Byzantium: Aght‛amar and the Visual Construction of Medieval Armenian Rulership (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). 47. Gamsakhurdia, Spiritual Mission, 22. 48. This epic had long attracted Gamsakhurdia’s attention: Vepkhistqaosani inglisur enaze (Tbilisi: Metsniereba, 1984). 49. Shota Rustaveli, Vepkhistqaosani, ed. A. Baramidze, K. Kekelidze, and A. Shanidze (Tbilisi: Sakhelgami, 1951). En­glish translation by V. Urushadze, The Knight in the Panther’s Skin, (Tbilisi: Sabchota sakartvelo, 1986). 50. Consider Richard  E. Payne, A State of Mixture: Christians, Zoroastrians, and Ira­nian Po­liti­cal Culture in Late Antiquity (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015). 51. For example, David Braund, Georgia in Antiquity: A History of Colchis and Transcaucasian Iberia 550 BC–­AD 562 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); A. Furtwängler, I. Gagoshidze, H. Löhr, and N. Ludwig, eds., Iberia and Rome: The Excavations of the Palace at Dedoplis Gora and the Roman Influence in the Caucasian Kingdom of Iberia (Langenweißbach: Beier & Beran, 2008); and Gela Gamkrelidze, Archaeology of the Roman Period of Georgia (Tbilisi: Centre of Archaeology of the Georgian National Museum, 2014). 52. Stephen H. Rapp Jr., The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes: Caucasia and the Ira­nian Commonwealth in Late Antique Georgian Lit­er­at­ ure (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). 53. James R. Russell, Zoroastrianism in Armenia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, 1987). 54. Geoffrey Greatrex, “Khusro II and the Christians of His Empire,” Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 3 (2003): 78. 55. Davit II has become a popu­lar symbol of Georgian nationhood. Mikheil Saakashvili was inaugurated at the grave of this Bagratid king at the Gelati monastery near Kutaisi in January 2004. For intersections of Davit’s image and the promotion of the Georgian language, see Christofer Berglund, “ ‘Forward to David the Builder!’ Georgia’s (Re)Turn to Language-­Centered Nationalism,” Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity 44, no. 4 (2016): 522–42. See also Katrine Bendtsen Gotfredsen, “Void Pasts and Marginal Pres­ents: On Nostalgia and Obsolete F ­ utures in the Republic of Georgia,” Slavic Review 73, no. 2 (2014): 246–64.

NOTES TO PAGES 1 7 9 – 1 8 6

257

56. Stephen H. Rapp Jr., “The Georgian Nimrod,” in The Armenian Apocalyptic Tradition: A Comparative Perspective, ed. Kevork B. Bardakjian and Sergio La Porta (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 188–216. 57. Stephen H. Rapp Jr., “Imagining History at the Crossroads: Persia, Byzantium, and the Architects of the Written Georgian Past” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1997), 2:421–23. 58. On commonwealths, see Dimitri Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth, Eastern Eu­rope 500–1453 (New York: Praeger, 1971); and Garth Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Mono­the­ism in Late Antiquity (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1993). 59. Cyril Toumanoff, Studies in Christian Caucasian History (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1963). 11. New Borders, New Belongings in Central Asia

1. Adrienne Lynn Edgar, Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan (Prince­ ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2006); Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); Botakoz Kassymbekova, Despite Cultures: Early Soviet Rule in Tajikistan (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016). 2. Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Eu­rope (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 23; Ronald Grigor Suny pres­ents a more sophisticated picture in The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993). This consensus is noted but partially challenged in Dmitry Gorenburg, “Soviet Nationalities Policy and Assimilation,” in Rebounding Identities:The Politics of Identity in Rus­sia and Ukraine, ed. Dominique Arel and Blair A. Ruble (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2006), 273–304. 3. Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Leslie Page Moch, “Transnationalism in One Country? Seeing and Not Seeing Cross-­Border Migration within the Soviet Union,” Slavic Review 75, no. 4 (Winter 2016): 970–86. 4. Ronald Grigor Suny, “Incomplete Revolution: National Movements and the Collapse of the Soviet Empire,” New Left Review 1, no.  189 (September–­October 1991): 9. 5. Jeremy Smith, Red Nations: The Nationalities Experience in and ­after the USSR (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 6. Valery Tishkov, Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict in and ­after the Soviet Union: The Mind Aflame (London: Sage, 1997). Serhii Plokhy, The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union (London: Oneworld, 2015). 7. Edward W. Walker, Dissolution: Sovereignty and the Breakup of the Soviet Union (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 110. 8. Philip Hanson, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy: An Economic History of the USSR from 1945 (London: Longman, 2003). 9. Suny, “Incomplete Revolution,” 4. 10. Mark R. Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 210.

25 8 NOTES

TO PAGES 1 8 6 –1 9 3

11. Dmitri Trenin, Post-­Imperium: A Eurasian Story (Washington, DC: Car­ne­g ie Endowment for International Peace, 2011), 25–26. 12. Walker, Dissolution, 2. 13. Martha Brill Olcott, “Central Asia’s Catapult to In­de­pen­dence,” Foreign Affairs (Summer 1992), https://­www​.­foreignaffairs​.­com​/­articles​/­k azakhstan​/­1992​-­06​-­01​ /­central​-­asias​-­catapult​-­independence. 14. Suny, Revenge of the Past, 159. 15. See the issue of Cahiers d’Asie centrale, no. 26 (2016) devoted to the theme “1989, année de mobilisations politiques en Asie centrale,” especially Isaac Scarborough, “From February to February and from Ru ba Ru to Rastokhez: Po­liti­cal Mobilisation in Late Soviet Tajikistan (1989–1990),” 143–71. 16. For example, in a referendum in Turkmenistan on October 26, over 94 ­percent reportedly voted for in­de­pen­dence. Elsewhere, presidential election results ­were widely seen as confirming decisions already made. Bruce Pannier, “Kazakh ‘Rerun’: A Brief History of Kazakhstan’s Presidential Elections,” RFE/RL, March 9, 2015. 17. Madeleine Reeves, Border Work: Spatial Lives of the State in Rural Central Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014). 18. Olcott, “Central Asia’s Catapult to In­de­pen­dence.” 19. Gregory Gleason, The Central Asian States: Discovering In­de­pen­dence (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997). 20. See Izvestiia, March 13, 1991; October 2, 1991; December 6, 1991. 21. Nezavisimaia gazeta, August 17, 1991. 22. Walker, Dissolution, 142. 23. Izvestiia, August 30, 1991. 24. Izvestiia, December14, 1991; December 24, 1991. 25. Plokhy, Last Empire, 355–56. 26. Carl Cavanagh Hodge, “Botching the Balkans: Germany’s Recognition of Slovenia and Croatia,” Ethics and International Affairs 12 (1998): 1–18. 27. Bobo Lo, Vladimir Putin and the Evolution of Rus­sian Foreign Policy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). 28. Documents available at http://­www​.­cis​.­minsk​.­by​/­. 29. Cited from Roman Wolczuk, “Ukraine: A Partial but Reluctant CIS Member,” in The CIS: Form or Substance? ed. David Dusseault (Helsinki: Aleksanteri Institute, 2007), 140. 30. For example, Mark Webber, The International Politics of Rus­sia and the Successor States (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996). 31. Saparmurat Niyazov, “Nashe otnoshenie k SNG,” Izvestiia, September 4, 1993. Translations from Rus­sian are by the author u ­ nless other­wise indicated. 32. Shakhabutdin Zaynutdinov, “Uzbekistan meniaet alfavit,” Izvestiia, September 3, 1993. Following the trend, a presidential decree issued in October 2017 mandated that Kazakhstan move to the Latin script by 2025. 33. Izvestiia, June 4, 1992. 34. Interfax, “Prezident Uzbekistana kritikuet pozitsiiu Rossii,” Izvestiia, September 4, 1993. 35. Typically, discriminatory practices and attitudes in the region covered by this chapter are described in the terminology of ethnonationalism, avoiding terms such

NOTES TO PAGES 1 9 3 – 1 9 8

259

as “racist” that are more commonly deployed in North American or West Eu­ro­pean contexts. Given the proximity of the type of stereotyping illustrated h ­ ere, I see no reason to disassociate the phenomena. Jeff Sahadeo, among ­others, has consistently referred to racism in imperial Rus­sian, Soviet, and post-­Soviet contexts. Jeff Sahadeo, Rus­sian Colonial Society in Tashkent, 1865–1923 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007); Sahadeo, “The Accidental Traders: Marginalization and Opportunity from the Southern Republics to Late Soviet Moscow,” Central Asian Survey 30, no. 3–4 (2011): 521–40. 36. Izvestiia, July 28, 1992. 37. Yuri Kovalenko, “Pervyi vizit F. Mitterana v Kazakhstan,” Izvestiia, September 17, 1993. 38. Olcott, “Central Asia’s Catapult to In­de­pen­dence.” 39. Mikhail Karpov, “ ‘My okazalis’ v ochen’ plokhoi geopoliticheskoi situatsii’: Predsedatel’ Komiteta Gosdumy po mezhdunarodnym delam Vladimir Lukin o politike RF na Dal’nem Vostoke i na Zapade,” Nezavisimaia gazeta, March 14, 1995. 40. Azer Arif Oglu Mursaliev and Hasan Mustafaev, “Tikhaia voina za aziatskie kommunikatsii,” Moskovskie novosti, March 29, 1995. 41. Sevodnia, July 7, 1995. 42. “Rus­sian Federation, Foreign Policy Concept 1993,” in Rus­sian Foreign Policy in Transitions, Concepts and Real­ity, ed. Andrei Melville and Tatyana Shakleina (Budapest: Central Eu­ro­pean University Press, 2005), 32. 43. Aleksandr Koretskii, “Vizit Turkmenbashi v Moskvu,” Kommersant, May 19, 1995. 44. Mikhail Alexandrov, Uneasy Alliance: Relations between Rus­sia and Kazakhstan in the Post-­Soviet Era, 1992–1997 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999), 121–22. 45. “Vstrechi v Ashgabade,” Nezavisimaia gazeta, December 24, 1993. 46. Elizabeth Teague, “Citizenship, Borders, and National Identity,” in Rus­sia’s Engagement with the West, ed. Alexander J. Motyl, Blair A. Ruble, and Lilia Shevtsova (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2005), 22. 47. John Glenn, The Soviet Legacy in Central Asia (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 111–13. 48. Vladimir Moiseev, “Sovremennaia istoriografiia Kazakhstana,” Nezavisimaia gazeta, April 20, 1993. 49. Boris Vinogradov, “S vvedeniem natsional’nykh valiut v aziatskikh stranakh SNG v Rossii voznikli novye prob­lem,” Izvestiia, November 20, 1993. 50. Izvestiia, May 8, 1999. 51. Lena Jonson and Roy Allison, Central Asian Security: The New International Context (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2001); see also Lena Jonson, Vladimir Putin and Central Asia: The Shaping of Rus­sian Foreign Policy (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004). 52. Charles King, The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 53. Jonson and Allison, Central Asian Security; Alexey Malashenko, The Fight for Influence: Rus­sia in Central Asia (Washington, DC: Car­ne­g ie Endowment for International Peace, 2013).

26 0 NOTES

TO PAGES 2 0 0 –2 0 4

Conclusion

1. Valerie A. Kivelson and Ronald Grigor Suny, Rus­sia’s Empires (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 11. 2. Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 48. 3. Francis X. Clines, “New Vote Promised: President, in Address to Parliament, Accepts Blame for Coup,” New York Times, August 27, 1991.

Co ntr i b u to r s

Ian W. Campbell is associate professor of history at the University of California, Davis. Krista A. Goff is assistant professor of history at the University of Miami. Jeremy Johnson is a PhD candidate in anthropology and history at the University of Michigan. Claire P. Kaiser is director for strategic initiatives at McLarty Associates and adjunct assistant professor at Georgetown University. Janet Klein is associate professor of history at the University of Akron. Jo Laycock is se­nior lecturer of history at Manchester University. Norman M. Naimark is Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor in East Eu­ro­pean Studies at Stanford University. Matthew J. Payne is associate professor of history at Emory University. Stephen H. Rapp Jr. is professor of history at Sam Houston State University. Daniel E. Schafer is professor of history at Belmont University. Lewis H. Siegelbaum is Jack & Margaret Sweet Professor Emeritus of history at Michigan State University. Jeremy Smith is professor of Rus­sian history and politics at the University of Eastern Finland. Ronald Grigor Suny is William H. Sewell Jr. Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Michigan. Anna Whittington is a postdoctoral fellow at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow.

261

Index

1905 Revolution, 29, 62, 69, 112, 117 1916 revolt/rebellion, 10, 41, 43, 65–68, 73–75, 79, 225n8 Abkhazia/n, 85–86, 90–91, 164 Ajaria/n, 83, 85, 87, 91 Anderson, Benedict, 13, 16, 117, 211n38 arabic language and script, 13, 112–20, 122–28, 136, 140, 176 Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU), 103–6, 109 Armenian Genocide, 3, 9–10, 24, 48, 68, 129, 131, 200–202; “cumulative radicalization” and, 53–54, 55–56; economic motivations in, 58, 59; empire and, 62; forced conversions in, 61; historiography of, 24, 50–51, 97; and “othering,” 56–57; as prototype, 63–64; refugees from, 10, 12, 51, 81, 88, 97–99, 110, 132; World War I and, 55; Young Turk leadership and, 52–53 Armenia/ns, 13, 52–53, 178, 185, 189, 204, 210n23, 239n67; as Christian, 23, 129–35, 175; as deportees in Soviet Union; 87–90, 92; diaspora, 92, 103–9, 130, 136, 143, 202, 238n50; Eastern, 130, 135, 237n42; in Georgia, 175; humanitarian actors in, 129–31, 133–34, 141–42, 247n61; in­de­pen­ dent Republic of (1918–1920), 85, 100–101; linguistic and orthographic reform in, 13, 130, 135–36, 139, 203; literacy campaigns in, 130–32, 137–40; massacres of, 57; as “nodal points” of international system, 22–23, 28; Ottoman, 9–10, 23–24, 30–31, 62; and refugee repatriation, 99–103, 106, 109, 132–35; as refugees in Greece, 104–5, 107, 109; Soviet, 12, 97–98, 101–3, 106–10, 130, 143, 202–3, 236n25; Western, 134, 237n42 Assyrians, 54, 56, 63, 86, 88, 131, 200–201 Azerbaijan/i, 106, 194, 236n18; émigrés, 91; expulsions from, 85–86; in Armenia, 100, 103, 230n6, 239n67, 244n11; and Latinization, 120

Baltics, 191, 193, 198, 204, 215n36 Belarus, 186, 188, 197–98 Belavezha accords (1991), 188, 190 belonging/s, 9, 16, 26, 30, 80, 111, 194, 199, 204; Armenian, 12, 98, 100, 104, 109–10, 137, 143, 202; in Central Asia, 186, 194, 198; and dictionaries, 113–14, 117, 128; and empires, 62, 199, 202; in empires and nations, 1, 3, 6, 14, 16, 201; and Eu­rope, 5, 167; in Georgia, 81, 91–92, 94, 167; Jewish, 28; and Kirgiz, 10, 76; myth of, 14, 43; national, 18, 98, 118, 162; negative, 6, 7; possibilities for, 5; post-­Soviet, 16, 183, 185; and Rus­sian Empire, 62, 66, 182; to Soviet Union, 149, 152, 154, 157, 158, 161, 183, 187 Beria, Lavrenty, 82–83, 90–93 borderlands, 3, 5, 22, 36, 68, 73, 93, 121; Caucasus, 80, 83; contested, 2, 62; Eastern Anatolian, 9, 23; Eurasian, 2, 5, 16; inhabitants of, 6, 27, 66, 68; and multiethnic rule, 8, 11, 43; Ottoman/ Rus­sian, 97, 110; Russification of, 70, 74; Turkestan, 10; western, 15, 73, 102, 156 British India, 3–4, 45 Bukharin, Nikolai, 15, 147–50, 152–53 Byzantine Empire, 163, 175–76, 180 Charkviani, Kandid, 82–83, 85–86, 89, 92–93, 231n11 Chechens/Chechnya, 40, 80, 190, 193, 197 Circassians, 2, 24, 81, 209n24, 230n8 colonialism/colonial empires, 4–5, 36, 39–41, 43, 63, 65–67, 70–73, 75, 78–79 Commonwealth of In­de­pen­dent States (CIS), 185, 188–94, 197–98, 204 Cossacks, 10, 75–76, 150, 195–96 Crimea, 189, 197–98, 231n15 Crimean Tatars, 2, 63 Cyrillic script, 13, 114–15, 117, 120, 122, 124, 127, 154, 192, 203

263

26 4 I nde x

Dashnaks, 11–12, 85–87, 89–90, 93–94, 100–102, 232n22 Davit II Aghmashenebeli, King, 166, 173–76, 181, 256n55 deportation, 30, 62, 232n19; of Armenians from Ottoman Empire, 53–57, 61, 63, 99; definition of, 81; and ethnic cleansing of border regions, 11; from Georgia, 85–86, 90, 92; of Jews and Germans from Rus­sia’s western borderlands, 73; of Kirgiz in 1916, 75; and minority protection, 7, 22–23; Stalinist, 80, 154, 163 dictionaries, 13, 113–14, 116–17, 119–20, 122–23, 124–27, 242n32, 243n47 empires, 26, 79, 205, 207n3, 211n38, 230n3; conquest and expansion by, 35–37; definitions of, 1–2, 62; and nations, 4, 6, 14, 199–200, 207n3, 230n3. See also Ottoman Empire; Rus­sian Empire; Soviet Union: as empire Estonia, 84, 185, 186 Gamsakhurdia, Zviad, 15, 162–66, 168–73, 177–78, 180–81, 197, 204–5 genocide, 3, 48–54, 56, 61, 64, 202–3; in Bosnia, 51, 55, 57; definitions of, 8–9, 49–50, 209n24, 210n28; in Rwanda, 51, 57, 60; settler, 10–11, 49, 58–60, 63; and Spanish conquests, 57, 59, 63; of Tasmanian Aborigines, 59–60, 62. See also Armenian Genocide Geok-­Tepe, 35–36, 38, 40, 42–43, 47 Georgia/ns, 15–16, 31, 81–82, 85, 89, 92, 94, 100, 162, 164–79, 185–86; as Christians, 166, 172–73, 176–80; and “East” and “West,” 167, 176–78, 181, 204; expulsion campaigns in, 80–83, 85–94, 205; and Ira­ni­an/Persianate world, 172, 177–80. See also Meskhetian operation; Operation Volna Geraci, Robert, 9, 25, 217n9 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 4, 185–89, 204 Greeks, ancient, 168, 169, 171, 172–73; in Georgia/the Soviet Union, 11, 85–87, 90–93, 232n22; in Greece, 22, 107; in Ottoman Empire/Turkey, 30, 50, 54, 56, 63, 104, 108, 200, 201 Grodekov, N. I., 39, 41–42, 44, 46 Holocaust, 52–53, 55–56, 58–59, 61 Holquist, Peter, 27, 31, 230n3, 236n13

Imperial Rus­sia. See Rus­sian Empire inorodtsy, 10, 25, 27, 69–70, 202, 226n23 Iran (Persia), 84, 86, 92–94, 158, 177, 194 Islam/Islamic world, 16, 114, 117–18, 121, 126–27, 158, 172–73, 176–77, 183, 189, 194 Jabaev, Jambyl [Dzhambul Dzhabaev], 156, 251n51 Janturin, Sălimgărăĭ, 112–13, 116 Jews, 22, 26, 27–31, 53, 55–57, 61, 63, 86, 201, 215n48 Karimov, Islam, 188–89, 191–93 Kazakhs, 14, 156, 158 Kazakhstan, 9, 67–68, 83, 182, 185–88, 190, 192, 201; post-­Soviet, 183, 194–96, 210n28; Soviet, 85, 87, 157–58, 201 Kerensky, A. I., 65, 67, 70, 73, 75–76, 79 Khalid, Adeeb, 4, 76 Khămzin, Kasim, 124–27 Kirgiz (imperial ethnonym for Kazakh/ Kyrgyz), 3, 10, 67, 69–78, 202, 210n30, 225n6; refugees, 66, 74, 76–77, 79 Kivelson, Valerie, 1, 62, 150, 200, 230n3 Korbangaliev, Mȯkhetdin, 119, 121, 123 korenizatsiia, 12, 98, 107, 150–51 Kostava, Merab, 163–64 Krivoshein, A. V., 71, 106 Kurds, 24, 30–31, 52, 54, 59, 61, 83, 136, 200–201, 239n67 Kuropatkin, A. N., 38–41, 43, 45–46, 67, 70–76, 78 Kyrgyz/stan, 63, 67–68, 157, 182, 186, 187, 196–97, 210n30, 225n6 Latinization, 120–22, 128, 135, 192 Latvia/n, 20, 84, 102, 185 League of Nations High Commission for Refugees, 22, 98, 103–5, 107–9 Lemkin, Raphael, 9, 49–50 Lenin, V. I., 14–15, 78, 101, 119, 140, 154 Lithuania/ns, 20, 84, 185, 186 Lomakin, N. P., 37–39, 42–44 Măkhmutov, Mirza, 116, 125–27 Martin, Terry, 12–13, 154, 245n34 Meskhetian operation, 82–83, 92–93, 231n10 Meskhetians, 83, 91–93 Mgeladze, Akaki, 82, 90, 92 millet system, 20–21, 25, 50, 56–57, 213n10 Mingrelian Affair, 91, 234n58

I n d e x minorities, 6–7, 17–25, 214n29, 215n41; and “minoritization,” 7, 20, 23, 24–25, 30, 69, 201, 214n29 Moch, Leslie Page, 81, 106 Morrison, Alexander, 46, 67, 70–71, 217n8, 225n3 Nansen, Fridtjof, 12–13, 98, 105, 107, 109 Nansen Passport/plans, 98, 104, 105, 107–8, 111 nationalism and nationalists, 2, 16, 89, 131, 158, 181, 186, 194, 199, 258n35; Armenian, 62, 92, 131, 204; in Central Asia, 185–86, 197; Georgian, 91, 163, 165–67, 171, 177–78, 204; Rus­sian, 7, 47, 62, 196; Tatar, 121–22, 125; Turkish, 7, 24, 52–53, 57, 101–3, 128. See also Dashnaks nations, 1–2, 6, 14, 113–14, 151, 162, 169, 199, 201, 211n38; as primordial, 3, 14, 163, 169, 181, 208n13 nation-­states, 6, 19, 31, 184, 194, 198, 200, 205 Nazarbayev, Nursultan, 183, 187–89, 191–93 Near East Relief (NER), 129, 132–34, 236n27 Niyazov, Saparmurat, 191, 193, 195 Operation Volna, 11, 85–91 Ottoman Empire, 2, 7, 9–10, 18–20, 23–24, 28, 50, 55–56, 62, 99 Ottomanists, 19, 24, 29–30 Ottoman Turkish, 112, 115–16, 128, 241n12 peasant settler-­colonists, 10, 66, 70–72, 74, 76, 78–79, 202, 225n8 “peoplehood,” 18, 23–24, 26, 29 Persian language/words, 13, 112–16, 118–20, 123–24, 126–27, 179 Putin, Vladimir, 190, 197 Resettlement Administration (Pereselencheskoe upravlenie), 70–72, 106, 238–39n57 Rus­sian Empire, 2, 7, 9, 46–47, 51, 62–63, 70, 106, 117, 200; expansion of, 8, 35–36, 108; and non-­Russians, 18–20, 25–29, 150 Rus­sia(n Federation), 183, 187–88, 190–97 Rus­sianists, 24–25, 29, 30 Rus­sian language, 119, 121, 124, 127, 152, 154, 160, 202–3, 250n40 Rus­sian ­people, 154, 159–60, 195–96, 198, 203, 239n67 Russification, 70, 120–22, 124, 127–28 Save the ­Children, 129, 132, 134

265

Semirech’e/oblast, 10, 65, 66–68, 70, 71–75, 76–79, 225n8 Shevardnadze, Eduard, 163, 165 Siegelbaum, Lewis H., 81, 106, 228n48 Skobelev, M. D., 35, 38–46, 217n21 Slezkine, Yuri, 31, 214–15n36, 216n62 Slocum, John, 27, 69, 214n30 Soviet p­ eople (sovetskii narod), 15, 147–49, 151–53, 155, 161, 200, 203 Soviet Union, 2, 7, 11, 12, 105–6, 143, 147, 160, 200; “decoupling” of, 16, 183, 184, 194, 198, 204; Down with Illiteracy Society in, 139–41; as empire, 3–5, 31, 79, 81, 149, 160, 169, 200, 202; expulsion campaigns in, 81, 83–84, 230n6, 232n19; and “friendship of the ­peoples,” 124, 127, 155, 167, 251n45; last years of, 184–89, 191; nation-­building proj­ects of, 7, 31, 80–82, 93–94, 98, 103, 107–8, 117–18, 132, 182, 203; non-­Russians in, 19, 31, 80, 136, 154, 157–60, 249n32; state patriotism in, 149, 151, 155, 158, 249n20 “speaking Soviet,” 132, 138, 143, 203, 244–45n15 Stalin, I. V., 82, 85–86, 91, 151, 163, 169 standardization, 11–12, 111, 113, 122–23, 130 Suny, Ronald Grigor, 3–4, 9, 50, 51, 53, 68, 70, 99, 111, 141, 150, 162, 183, 186, 194, 208n13, 214n29, 214n33, 230n3 Tajikistan, 186–87, 189–90, 194–95 Tamar, Queen, 166–67, 173, 176 Tatar language and lexicography, 113–14, 117, 121–24, 126–28, 203; Kerăshen, 114–15; Old, 114–17, 120, 123; vernacular, 113, 115–17, 124; Yangalif, 114, 120 Tatar Republic (Tatar ASSR), 2, 13, 14, 31, 118, 120 Tbilisi (Tiflis), 88, 90, 164, 175 Tekke Turkmen (Tekkes), 3, 8, 14, 35–38, 40–41, 43–46, 201 Transcaspia, 35, 37, 40, 41 Treaty of Berlin (1878), 23–24 Tukaĭ, Gabdulla, 115–16, 119, 123, 126 Turkestan, 4, 10, 37–39, 65–66, 68, 77–78, 182 Turkey, Republic of, 2, 4, 7, 31, 128, 170, 194, 200–201 Türki language, 112–13, 115 Turkmenistan, 37, 47, 186–87, 191–93, 194–96 Turks, 11, 14, 30–31, 53, 83, 85–87, 232n22

26 6 I nde x

Ukraine, 9, 68, 185–86, 188, 190–91, 197–98, 201, 232n19 U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide (1948), 49–50 Urkun, 68, 202 Uzbekistan, 4, 157, 186–89, 192, 194, 197 Vakhtang Gorgasali, King, 179–81

Weitz, Eric, 7, 22, 28 World War I, 9, 55, 62, 68, 97, 216n61 World War II, 15, 149, 153, 155–61, 203–4 Yeltsin, Boris, 188–90, 192–93, 195–97 Yerevan, 99, 101, 109 Young Turks, 7, 24, 50–54, 56, 62–63