Советский кишлак: Между колониализмом и модернизацией by С. Абашин (review)

Sergei Abashin’s magnum opus surely must tell the reader everything there is to know about Oshoba, Tajikistan. This volume brings together a number of previously published pieces, some of them in an expanded version, with new work, to explore a broad spectrum of themes that interest both historians and anthropologists. Abashin consciously frames his data and interpretation as a response to both late Soviet ethnography and to the whole interdisciplinary field of scholarship in Central Asian studies. While the work is so all-encompassing as to pose an enormous challenge to any reviewer, Abashin consistently analyzes his fieldwork and archival evidence through a questioning of Poliakov’s thesis on the “traditionalism” of Central Asian societies, and an interrogation of interpretations of Central Asia that emphasize colonialism as the Soviet mode of rule there. Abashin embraces Clifford Geertz’s “thick description,” making Oshoba and the mundane details of ordinary people’s lives the focus of every interpretation. Local-ness is Abashin’s lens; Oshoba is “a” Soviet kishlak, and not “the” representative Soviet kishlak (Pp. 47–49).

Even a quick overview of themes is daunting: Russian conquest, Russian colonial rule, taxation, the creation of new elites, continuities from the Russian into early Soviet periods, basmachis/kurbashis and their local ties, the early kolkhozes, local power brokers (little Stalins), marriage, local understandings Islam, the image of rural isolation versus realities of multifaceted connections to center and state, medical care, agricultural development, the mahalla as concept and as social network, and so on. The scope of inquiry, drawing on archival sources, published statistical collections, scholarly work, local memoirs, interviews, and participant observation, runs from the 1870s until 2010.

A close and detailed focus on just one village, and Abashin’s embrace of Foucault’s anti-essentialism, lead the author to conclude, regularly, that people in Oshoba hold multiple views on every possible aspect of life, present and past, and that they do not conform either to Poliakov’s “traditionalism” or to James Scott’s interpretation of peasants as resisting domination using the “weapons of the weak.” “Soviet power and the Soviet system as a whole present a complex balance among various interests and forces, institutions and symbols,” writes Abashin, and in Oshoba, “the distribution of positions of power and of resources was connected with local relationships and in general with local politics” (P. 311). In the dance between Soviet centers of power that attempted to bring a Soviet order to every village, and the interests of local actors, Abashin sees an interactive relationship, in which many people in Oshoba worked to achieve their own goals, which usually centered around improving their material conditions, status, and local networks.

Almost every chapter begins with a theoretical question about colonialism or about social scientists’ uses of terms like tradition and modernity, and Abashin reviews key theoretical works and Central Asia–focused studies related to his topic before initiating his thick description. A chapter on the Russian conquest of Asht region demonstrates the author’s commitment to postulates of postcolonial and subaltern studies, as he decenters the conquerors’ voices, reads Russian accounts “against the grain,” seeks out local narratives, and offers several possible readings. “I try to separate myself both from the imperial narrative and from the nationalist one, for which I use, along with traditional documents (written accounts by contemporary eyewitnesses) local oral remembrances, and with their help constructing at least one additional side or view on the past” (P. 114). Thus, a study of a series of stories about Russia’s violent conquest leads Abashin into narrative analysis, and the somewhat predictable conclusion that truths about the past are multiple and that stories told about the past carry with them ideologies; but Abashin provides no conclusions at all that are substantively about the conquest. This is somewhat to be expected, due to the fact that Abashin’s starting and ending points are both local, and he is not asking why this conquest mattered beyond what it meant to the people of the region. But to the historian who reads all the evidence...