Home and Away: Why the Asian Periphery Matters in Russian History

Only when the USSR crumbled from the outside in did most scholars and observers, Russian and Western alike, understand the implications of its hierarchical, multinational structure. At that time, Salman Rushdie noted a similar ignorance of the bounds of British history, writing in The Satanic Verses, “the trouble with the English is that their history happened overseas, so they don’t know what it means.”¹ Replacing “overseas” with “overland” or “over mountain and desert,” would give us, I argue, a statement that applied not only to Mikhail S. Gorbachev and his band of reformers but also to many scholars of contemporary Russia, even as the millions of post-Soviet migrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia to the Russian Federation underscore the consequences of an entwined system. Writing the periphery into metropolitan history has become a critical task for historians across the Western world seeking to understand the continued power of imperial linkages.²

Interactions and relations with Central Eurasia have had profound effects on Russia, Russians, and Russianness. This essay serves notice to historians of Russia’s core that a too-common neglect of its southern peripheries—beyond occasional mentions of far-flung lands that produced Kerenskii, Stalin, or other interlopers—limits understandings not just of the tsarist empire or the Soviet Union but also of Russian history proper. Conceptual tools from other (post)-imperial situations provide starting points, but above all what we need is a thorough understanding of the myriad events and processes that intertwined “mainland” Russia’s history with that of Central Eurasia.

The relationship between Russia and its southern peripheries has fascinated me since my first trip to Moscow in 1992. Expecting to be surrounded by fair-skinned Slavs resembling hockey players and ballerinas— Canadian stereotypes of Soviet citizens—I found myself in an international city, rubbing shoulders with Caucasus and Central Asian peoples, among those from Asia and Africa. Georgian restaurants highlighted our culinary experiences and fruits from the Ferghana Valley helped us through the immediate post-Soviet chaos, with empty store shelves and European Union food aid sold on the streets. At the Tret´iakov Gallery we encountered the art of Vasilii Vereshchagin, whose canvasses of exotic Central Asian locales earned him global recognition. In St. Petersburg, the Hermitage hosts the spoils of conquest, from the jewels of Central Asian khans to the tent of Bukhara’s emir. A statue of Russia’s most renowned explorer of Central Asia, Nikolai Przheval´skii, in the nearby Alexander Garden may, with the camel below it, seem incongruous in the “Venice of the North.” But neighboring busts display not only the famed Russian author Mikhail Lermontov, whose classic novel, A Hero of Our Time, is set in the Caucasus, but also the Russian diplomat Aleksandr Gorchakov, who as Tsar Alexander II’s foreign minister, stated in an 1864 circular to European capitals that “the task of civilizing … her neighbors, on the Continent of Asia, has been assigned to Russia as her special mission.”³

Central Eurasia—discussed here as the North and South Caucasus as well as Central Asian lands conquered by tsarist forces in the 18th–19th centuries and then reconquered by the Red Army in the Civil War—transformed Russia, both conceptually and materially. The consequences of control over these lands permeated daily life, influencing how Russians thought of themselves, the clothes they wore, the food they ate, and how they interacted and understood frequent encounters with their “Asian neighbors.” The USSR’s relatively closed borders accentuated Central Eurasia’s economic and even demographic importance to Russia. Cities such as Yerevan and Tashkent emerged as hubs for Cold War foreign policy strategies, highlighting the multitude of ways that Central Eurasia became implicated in Russia’s quest to be seen as a transnational, regional, and global actor.

Identity and Inquiry

As many historians of imperial Russia have already observed, Central Eurasia played a foundational role in allowing the tsarist regime to consider itself at once a European state and empire. As Mark Bassin and Willard Sunderland have argued, conquered regions deemed “Asian,” from the 18th century onward...