Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent, 1865--1923

Introduction

Introduction “If I die as governor-general,” read the words of K. P. fon Kaufman on a monument erected to his memory in the center of Russian Tashkent in 1910, “please bury me here, so that all may know that here is true Russian soil, where no Russian need be ashamed to lie.” To create Russian soil from a desert oasis, Governor-General Kaufman had directed the transformation of a ragged military encampment on the edge of the Central Asian city of Tashkent into a European-style urban settlement, the capital of the new tsarist province of Turkestan. Administrators and settlers came by the thousands to populate this new “Russian section” after the conquest of Tashkent in 1865. Two thousand kilometers from European Russia, amid a predominantly Muslim population, and confronted with arid surroundings, these newcomers fashioned an unusual piece of Russian soil. They constructed a new urban space that reflected the influence of their environment and their position as colonizers over the inhabitants of Central Asia. Relations with the local population, successive waves of settlers, economic transformation, world war, revolution , and civil war all affected and altered the society and culture of the colonial city from 1865 to 1923, when Bolshevik commissars asserted tight control over the region. Kaufman and leading tsarist administrators planned Russian Tashkent as a symbol of Russia’s status as a powerful and advanced Western empire. The capital, it was hoped, would impress Central Asians1 as well as observers from Europe and central Russia. Officials graduating from institutes of higher education envisioned the city as a centerpiece for their own civilizing and modernizing missions in Asia. These missions Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent  Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent  did not prevent imperial elites—top bureaucrats, officers, and merchants before 1917, and Russian workers and soldiers afterward—from turning the imbalances of colonial rule to their own benefit. Their efforts to exercise dominance as well as spread progress confronted the complexities of colonial society. Residents of postconquest Tashkent continually negotiated and challenged multiple axes of power. CentralAsian notables, merchants, and labor, whose skills proved vital to the functioning of the imperial city, contested their subordinate status through a balance of accommodation and defiance. Poor Slavic settlers sought access to the fruits of colonial power, even as their presence and behavior challenged elite visions of a clear separation between modern Western colonists and backward Asians. Numerous subject groups, from Central Asian modernist thinkers to lower-class Russian women, gained strong voices in imperial Tashkent by the turn of the century. Alliances and rivalries crossed as well as enforced ethnic, national, class, gender, religious, and generational boundaries. Individuals, from Central Asian politicians to Russian Orientalists and workers, sought to navigate this complicated colonial society in their own quest for power and privilege. Challenges from subordinate groups eroded imperial administrators ’ confidence and abilities to present themselves as agents of power and progress in Tashkent, even as the growing city was realizing their dreams of creating an “Asian St. Petersburg.” By the turn of the century , top officials and Russian liberal intellectuals struggled to reconcile evolving ideas of “civilization,” including democratic government and social justice, with the reality of empire. Central policies, which increasingly saw Turkestan as a reservoir for raw materials and a dumping ground for unwanted migrants, strained relations between the imperial center, or metropole, and periphery. Even as war and revolution swept away tsarist elites in favor of the workers of the Tashkent soviet, however, visions of imperial power and civilization endured. Russian skilled workers asserted their own claim as agents of European progress and denied equality to their Central Asian counterparts in their new, ostensibly socialist regime. Military force, flowing from the soldiers’ barracks on the outskirts of the city, continued as the ultimate arbiter of relations. This study exposes the intricacies of imperial rule in Tashkent from the Russian conquest to the early soviet period. Using material from local , national, and state archives and periodicals, it explores power and resistance, violence and weakness, and interconnections and interdependencies in colonial society. Empire generated multiple strategies of accumulation, accommodation, and alliances. I examine how imperial Tashkent developed and prospered for decades after the conquest, but also how tensions spread across the city in the late nineteenth and early Introduction  Introduction  twentieth centuries. Divisions, murders, and destruction in Tashkent and its immediate surroundings compelled leading Bolshevik officials to impose strict controls on the political and economic...