Le Turkestan Russe: Une colonie comme les autres? ed. by Svetlana Gorshenina, Sergei Abashin (review)

345 Ab Imperio, 3/2010 Alexander MORRISON Svetlana Gorshenina & Sergei Abashin (Eds.), Le Turkestan Russe: Une colonie comme les autres? (Tashkent and Paris: IFEAC – “Editions Complexe,” 2009). 548 pp., maps, ills. (=Cahiers d’Asie Centrale ; No. 17/18). ISBN: 978-2-80480174 -8. This weighty volume of essays on the Russian empire’s most remote and alien region has had a rather long gestation, and consequently some of the research presented here has already seen the light of day – six of the sixteen pieces (by Sergei Abashin, Marlène Laruelle, Hisao Komatsu, Ekaterina Pravilova, Jeff Sahadeo, and David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye) consist of material already published elsewhere more or less in its entirety, and in consequence will only be mentioned briefly. The editors have done a fine job of providing an intellectual agenda for the volume, but could perhaps have been both more selective and more comprehensive in what they chose to publish. The question posed in the title demands to be answered from as many angles as possible, but the dominant theme in le Turkestan Russe is cultural, reflecting the trend of the past two decades of research in Russian history since the “Imperial Turn” began. In their joint introduction the editors explore some of the difficulties of writing the history of Russian Turkestan – the first of which is defining it institutionally and territorially, as apart from the three “core” provinces of Samarkand , Ferghana, and Syr-Darya, at various times it had attached to it Kuldja, Semirechie, Transcaspia, and the protectorates of Bukhara and Khiva, each of which was subject to different legal and administrative regimes. They make it clear that their priority is to provide a “double view” – that is, to give equal weight to the experience of colonizers and colonized. Elsewhere in the volume both editors actually question the salience of these categories, but 346 Рецензии/Reviews the real, unspoken, challenge is linguistic, as Russian sources tend to be much more accessible and easy to use than those in Turkic or Persian. In a historiographical essay whose excessively lengthy title I will not attempt to reproduce, Svetlana Gorshenina expands more fully on the handicaps scholars working on tsarist CentralAsia have had to overcome, most notably an idea of Russian “exceptionalism” derived from both tsarist and Soviet discourses that insisted Russia was not and could not be a “colonial” power because of her distinctively tolerant and assimilationist approach to non-Russian peoples. Gorshenina asks rhetorically whether Russian Turkestan will ever be able to escape from this paradigm and enter the field of postcolonial studies alongside “normal” European colonies in Africa, Asia and the Americas, a question that already seems rather out of date. It is true that the argument that the tsarist empire was not colonial is still widespread in Russia today, while much of the new historiography emerging from CentralAsia suffers from strong political control and an often strident nationalism that is not conducive to objectivity. Nevertheless, the past twenty years have seen a remarkable flowering of publications on Russian Imperialism that frequently do make use of techniques and ideas developed in the study of other colonial powers, most obviously in the work of Jeff Sahadeo1 andAdeeb Khalid,2 whose first book was published in 1998.At the same time, the rigid categorization of empires as “territorial” and “maritime” or “dynastic” and “colonial ” is increasingly questioned, and it is widely understood that the supposedly clear boundary between colonizer and colonized could sometimes be blurred even in the “classic” empires of the British and French (something explored by Abashin in his piece in this volume on the creation and contestation of the ethnographic category of “Sarts”). With a few exceptions, most scholars in the West (and many in Russia) would thus accept the broadly “colonial” nature of Russian rule in Central Asia, predicated, as it was, on the separate and inferior status both of the territory and its population, something Khalid explains well in his essay on “Culture and Power in Colonial Turkestan,” which explores both the structures of exclusion and the attempts of Turkestan ’s Muslim reformers, the Jadids, to overcome them. By contrast, the essay by Robert Crews seems to present a return to the idea...