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  • La rivoluzione capovolta: L’Asia centrale tra il crollo dell’impero zarista e la formazione dell’Urss [The Revolution Turned Upside Down: Central Asia between the Collapse of the Tsarist Empire and the Formation of the USSR]
  • Andrea Graziosi
Marco Buttino, La rivoluzione capovolta: L’Asia centrale tra il crollo dell’impero zarista e la formazione dell’Urss [The Revolution Turned Upside Down: Central Asia between the Collapse of the Tsarist Empire and the Formation of the USSR]. Naples: L’ancora del mediterraneo, 2003. 491 pp. £30.00

This remarkable book, based on years of work in a number of countries and archives, challenges many traditional interpretations and makes it impossible to look at 1917 in the usual way. La rivoluzione capovolta focuses on three cases in Central Asia, analyzed over three periods: the colonial, culminating in the great revolt of 1916; the "Russians' revolution" of 1917; and the civil war.

The first case is Tashkent, with its two cities, the white and the native, and its "revolution turned upside down." The second is Semirech'e, where white colonization, the tensions among the colonists' different groups, and their collective struggle against the nomads were stronger. The final case is Fergana, the valley of cotton, where local Slav, Armenian, and Muslim powers fought each other and switched sides depending on contingencies (the entire book is a lesson in the fragility of ideological affiliations during turbulent times, without excluding that they may eventually grow into firmer commitments).

Everywhere the presence of a third player—the natives—causes unexpected changes in perspective. The food riots led by Slavic women in Tashkent in 1916, which were similar to the riots in many European cities that same year, soon degenerated into assaults against the Muslim bazaar. Even more than in the multilingual regions of Eastern Europe, colonialism turned the diverse ethnic and religious groups in Central Asia into a multiplier of violence.

Similar stories abound. We read of colonists who demanded land and freedom but attacked the nomads to grab that very land (plus water resources) that in Russia [End Page 182] they had seized from landlords. We read of Cossacks who defended their privileges from landless colonists by uniting with natives against the "Bolshevik hooligans" who were attacking the Cossacks and slaughtering the natives; and we learn of the difficult position in which the local revolutionaries, supported by the colonists' lower strata, found themselves when Moscow adopted extreme anti-peasant policies in 1920. Such policies, directed in Russia against the overwhelming majority of the population and thus profoundly unpopular, became "popular" in Central Asia by helping the Muslim Communists' efforts to impose the formation of indigenous power structures and armed units.

The legacy of the great revolt of 1916, which broke the weakest part (the internal colony) of the weakest link (the Tsarist empire), was felt everywhere. Without taking into account the fear it generated among "Russians," it is impossible to understand the events of those years, including the massacres perpetrated by soldiers and colonists against nomads, who in their turn terrorized Slavic settlements and families. The massacres were followed by "ethnic cleansing"—the mass deportation of the surviving natives. The revolt also deepened the food problem and caused famine among the defeated nomads and later among the population at large. Control over grain thus became in Turkestan—to a greater extent and earlier than elsewhere—the axis around which the civil war turned.

Thus, in Central Asia, which anticipated "pan-Russian" events, the collapse of the old regime led to even greater hunger and fear than before. Initially, many high-ranking local officials and ordinary people joyfully welcomed the demise of the old order, but before long, as the 1916 food riots adumbrated, the problems with supplies made the relationships between "Russians" and "Muslims" increasingly difficult, causing price regulations and anti-market feelings to take on "ethnic" overtones. The Tashkent Soviet formed a committee to seize reserves and crack down on profiteers, especially at the bazaar. Muslim and Slavic peasants defended free trade as the only way out of the crisis, but their pleas were drowned out by the more powerful actors who vied with one another to impose their own...

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