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The Surrogate Proletariat
Moslem Women and Revolutionary Strategies in Soviet Central Asia, 1919-1929
By Gregory J. Massell PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1974 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-07562-4
CHAPTER 1
Imposing a Structure of Power in Central Asia: The Determinants of Soviet Success
The Setting: An Overview
Soviet Central Asia encompasses a vast area at the heart of the Eurasian continent, an area (about 1.5 million square miles) that is almost half the size of the United States. It is delimited by European Russia and Siberia in the north; it stretches southward to the Himalayas and the Pamir, where it borders on Iran and Afghanistan; and it is flanked by the Caspian Sea in the west and by Chinese Sinkiang in the east.
Its terrain and climate are varied and, in large part, forbidding. From north to south, arid or grassy steppes are followed by great expanses of desert-country, and then by high plateaus and mountain ranges, the deserts and plateaus studded with relatively few and far-flung oases and fertile valleys coterminous with rivers and irrigation canals. Two great rivers, Amu-Daria and Syr-Daria, with a few tributaries between them, form the main water system of the region, flowing in the general northwesterly direction to the Aral Sea.
In so vast an area, only about ten million people lived in 1897, fourteen million in 1926, not fully seventeen million in 1939, about twenty-five million in 1959, and about thirty-three million in 1970. At the same time, the region's extraction potential in oil, coal, iron, and a host of non-ferrous metals was discovered to be enormous, and certainly large enough to rival such great Soviet extraction basins as Baku, Donets, Kuznetsk, and Bashkiria. This makes the region's mining potential, in absolute terms, among the highest in the Soviet Union, and, per capita, among the highest in the world. In addition to becoming one of the Union's chief suppliers of industrial raw materials, Central Asia has also come to serve as one of the U.S.S.R.'s prime food- and fiber-baskets, with contributions ranging from fruit, vegetables, and wheat to livestock, wool, silk, and cotton, the latter group constituting by far the largest element in the Union's overall agricultural output. If nothing else, the very magnitude of these stakes explains, in part, both long-term Soviet commitment and recent, increasingly overt Chinese interest in the area.
The region's population includes three principal ethnic groups: Turkic (approaching twelve million in 1959 and seventeen million in 1970, with the latter figure including, in millions: Uzbeks, 9.1; Kazakhs, 4.8; Kirghiz, 1.4; Turkmen, 1.5); Iranian (mainly Tadzhiks, about one and one-half million in 1959 and over two million in 1970); and Slavic (Russians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians, altogether about eight million in 1959 and almost ten million in 1970). Among the smaller ethnic groups there are Karakalpaks, Arabs, Jews, Persians, Uighurs, Dungans, Kurds, Tatars, and Armenians. The Slavic component has risen from about seven percent in 1897 to almost one-third in 1970. The greatest increases in Slavic population have taken place in all of the region's larger cities and in its northern (Kazakh) territories, where Slavs now constitute an absolute majority, even though a veritable population explosion among Soviet Moslems in the 1950's and especially the 1960's has reversed this trend throughout Central Asia. At the same time, the region's urban population has grown at approximately the same rate and to similar proportions, with Slavs accounting now for the lion's share of the inhabitants of major cities. Formally, most of the indigenous population has been Moslem ever since the Arab invasions in the eighth century, with the Sunnite-Shiite division corresponding roughly to the Turkic-Iranian one.
On the eve of the full-scale Russian arrival in the area (in mid-nineteenth century), traditional occupations in the region were basically of two types: sedentary pursuits of the oasis, and nomadic pastoralism of the steppes, deserts, and high plateaus. In the first category, Uzbeks, inhabiting primarily oases and lowlands in the south-central part of the region, and (to a lesser extent) Tadzhik mountaineers in the extreme southeast tended to concentrate in sedentary agriculture, urban commerce, and artisan trades. In the second category, the bulk of Kazakhs in the northern steppe, Kirghiz on eastern plateaus, and Turkmen in the arid desert country of the southwest tended to combine nomadic stockbreeding with marginal agriculture and the caravan trade (as well as brigandage on caravan routes, especially in the case of Turkmen). The rural proportion of the largest of the indigenous peoples ranged from about 90 percent for Uzbeks and Tadzhiks to over 99 percent for Kazakhs, Kirghiz, and Turkmen.
The social structure of indigenous communities tended to reflect basic subsistence patterns: the most pronounced residues of tribal organization were to be found among the pastoral nomads and, to a lesser extent, among the mountaineers. Yet, whether tribe- or village-oriented, whether nomadic or sedentary, local traditional societies were organized around kinship units in relatively self-sufficient communities, by and large along patriarchal, patrilineal, and patrilocal lines. Among other things, this meant that male and female roles were, on the whole, sharply differentiated, though elements of ritualized female inferiority tended to be more pronounced in sedentary communities than in nomadic-pastoral ones. Likewise, polygamy was sanctioned by both religion and custom, though it tended to be practiced more consistently in settled village communities and towns than in the nomadic-pastoral milieu, and was prevalent primarily among relatively well-off and privileged strata.
The educational pattern was overwhelmingly traditionalist in nature; most of the existing schools offered primarily religious instruction, and were staffed and controlled by Moslem clergymen. It is probably a safe inference that before the mid-nineteenth century the functional illiteracy rate of the indigenous population was never significantly below 100 percent. The highest concentration of those formally learned in Moslem religion, history, philosophy, and law was among the sedentary and relatively urbanized Uzbeks, especially in such ancient Islamic civilizational centers as Bukhara and Samarkand.
A highly complex pattern of social and cultural pluralism was reflected in the region's legal institutions. Two major categories of law were typically in operation here: codified Moslem law {shariat) and local customary law (adat). As a rule, shariat was administered by formal canonical courts staffed by qualified Moslem religious personages. In this form, the system was operative primarily in urban and sedentary-agricultural locales. The adat depended neither on a written code nor on formal administration; the resolution of disputes tended to be entrusted to tribal leaders, to clan and village notables, and/or to local Moslem clergymen. This system tended to be operative primarily in tribal, nomadic-pastoral milieus. In terms of Georges Gurvitch's legal typology, the legal systems of Central Asia's traditional Islamic principalities (such as Bukhara and Khiva) had a "theocratic-charismatic" base; the legal systems of primitive, "poly-segmentary" social organizations (especially among nomads and mountaineers) had a "magical-religious" base. Yet even these two broad categories of judicial legitimation and arrangements were only ideal-typical in nature. Reality was considerably more complex. Central Asia was an extremely variegated patchwork of religious and tribal tribunals, usages, and laws. In such a context conflict resolution could be formal or highly informal, public or private, and the prevailing legal forms, norms, and practices depended to a large extent on the particular region, communal organization, and ethno-cultural milieu, as well as on the personal charisma of the particular judicial mediator.
After centuries of invasions and ethnic flux on a very large scale (including attempts at empire-building by Chingis Khan and Tamerlane), the region's largest political units in the mid-nineteenth century also reflected the basic sedentary-nomadic division. Nomads in the north, east, and west tended to group themselves under hierarchies of tribal chieftains and notables, the latter's authority depending both on personal influence and genealogical lines. The few major towns and agricultural oasis-clusters in central and southern sections, set in valleys and lowlands and at important junctions of the irrigation system (and in many cases separated by enormous stretches of steppe, desert, or mountains), served as bases for principalities ruled by princely-theocratic oligarchies: the khanates of Khiva and Kokand, and the emirate of Bukhara.
Thus, at a high level of generality, the region's ecology, social structures, ethno-cultural configurations, religious traditions, and patterns of political evolution (including colonization by a major — Tsarist Russian — imperial power) may be said to have shared a number of important features with large parts of what we regard as the underdeveloped, traditional world, especially with Chinese Sinkiang, the Near and Middle East, and North Africa.
The Soviet Conquest: Conditioning Factors
The Tsarist conquest of the region (concluded in the 1880's) had not been an especially difficult one. The Soviet military reconquest (1918-22) was carried out with even greater ease, once enough strength could be spared from the fronts of the civil war in the north, and from the victorious confrontation with Allied intervention. On the face of it, the relative ease of the Soviet conquest was due to the strength of what was, for that time and place, a large and modern Red Army, to the correspondingly rapid collapse of organized external and internal challenges to Bolshevik moves, and, ipso facto, to the erosion of viable alternatives.
The successive elimination of the preceding regimes — the Tsar's, the Bukharan Emir's, and the Khivan Khan's — secured the land physically, while the evaporation of counter-revolutionary threats from abroad permitted Moscow to secure its rule de jure. It was quite fortuitous, in this connection, that the consolidation of Soviet power coincided with shrinking competition all along the perimeter of Soviet penetration into the Near East and Central Asia. After some half-hearted attempts to challenge Soviet presence in the area — mainly by forces based in Turkey, Afghanistan, and British India — none of the surrounding nation-states could afford to assume other than a posture of nervous neutrality. Far from being able to influence events in Central Asia, they could only worry about the impact of these events on them. It was impossible to predict the effect of the rise of communist banners north of the Himalayas on British rule in India, on revolutionary potentials in the moribund empires of Turkey and China, and on the shaky tribal monarchies of Afghanistan and Iran.
By 1923, organized internal challenges in the region could also be considered broken. Moscow engaged and liquidated, one by one, the nascent movements and parties that had sprung to life during the collapse of the Tsarist empire. Contestants for local power organized on the basis of religious, tribal, communal, or nationalist ties succeeded but fleetingly in holding a corner of the stage of military and political combat. The orthodox (Ulema-Dzhemieti) and largely secular and liberal (Shurai-Islamiye) Moslem associations, as well as the nationalist and reformist groups of Alash Orda in Kazakhstan, of Young Khivans in Khorezm, and of Young Bukharans in Bukhara, all collapsed in fairly short order. The only serious attempts at guerrilla warfare by tribal and traditionalist elements also failed: the basmachi (mainly Uzbek and Tadzhik) revolt on the southern and southeasterly approaches of the region, and the Turkmen revolt in isolated desert-pockets of the southwest. Even though they festered for a number of years, and erupted spasmodically as late as in 1931, they were effectively contained, deprived of a mass-base, and reduced to minor banditry by the time Moscow was ready for the "national delimitation" of Central Asia into nominally autonomous republics in 1924.
There were manifold causes for the fall of all of Moscow's indigenous competitors. The superiority of Russian arms and absence of support from abroad were but some of the short-term factors. Though apparently sharing a broadly defined ethnic and religious background, and facing simultaneously the threat of foreign domination, the contestants tended to act separately, sporadically, uncertainly, and often at cross-purposes. Community of purpose, and with it a modicum of shared will and of rational capacity to act in concert, was lacking, for reasons deeply rooted in the history and constitution of the region. The major conditioning factors in this case can be grouped under three headings: primordial cleavages and conflicts, Tsarist imperial politics, and native elite orientations in a revolutionary era.
Primordial Cleavages and Conflicts
It seems a safe inference that Central Asia was vulnerable to coordinated outside intervention and conquest primarily because, beneath the surface manifestations of overarching ethnic and religious unity, it was rent by primordial attachments of tribe, clan, and village community, as well as of linguistic and geographical separatism and localized micro-cultural life style.4 Such a pattern of cleavages — involving both segmental and cultural divergences — could never be easily transcended here, not even in time of common crisis. It can be said that this basic incapacity had to do with what was surely one of the region's most widely shared characteristics: the primordial antagonistic pattern of its political relationships.
Even when confronted with a common challenge — such as the threat of an enemy's invasion of the region as a whole — local traditional elites (princely-theocratic, religious, tribal, and communal) were unable to abandon what appears to have been their customary political calculus. At the risk of oversimplification we can say that according to this calculus all other groups were considered in terms of narrowly personal, familistic, tribal, dynastic, or communal advantage, and almost invariably fell into one of the following categories: irrelevant strangers — to be avoided or ignored but to be always mistrusted; potential enemies — to be feared or courted, and ultimately destroyed; potential vassals — to be used but to be always suspected; or potential slaves — to be exploited yet kept at arm's length. These attitudes denoted the absence of the basic ingredients of collaboration and trust in relationships outside primary social units, such as a family or clan; in the quintessentially patriarchal world of Central Asia, they also ensured that interpersonal as well as intergroup relations, especially those transcending the confines of a local community, would tend to be characterized by persistent suspicion and rivalry (on sexual as well as political and other grounds) and that the very art of politics would be viewed here, to a large extent, as the art of conspiracy.
Needless to say, such political metabolism was not conducive to regional stability and integration. In fact, all coherently articulated socio-political units that had emerged in Central Asia before the Soviet arrival exerted continuous pressure on each other, and were perennially in a state of tension between federation and fragmentation, with cleavages running simultaneously along urban/rural, sedentary/nomadic, lowland/highland, religious, tribal, regional, ethnic, and dynastic lines. The principalities, such as Kokand, Khiva, and Bukhara (ruled primarily by Uzbeks) — in quest of an enlarged pool of subject-populations and taxes, and (as great Islamic cultural centers) in quest of an enlarged and more homogeneous community of believers — never ceased trying to extend their control to the surrounding countryside, including each other's as well as nomadic habitats. In turn, nomadic tribes (especially Turkmen and Kazakh) — in quest of booty, or tribute, or access to water in a rigorous terrain — exerted continuous pressure on the cities and on sedentary communities, even if they were themselves continuously affected by internal cleavages. Throughout the region's history, however, neither side commanded enough persistent strength to establish clear-cut dominion over the other.
Thus, for example, militant Turkmen clans, when faced with a sharpening water shortage in their realm, and with the Uzbeks' heavy-handed control of the irrigation system in Khiva, repeatedly engaged the Khivan khanate in internecine warfare. Similarly, the gradual encroachment of cotton-growing Uzbek peasants upon Kazakh, Kirghiz, and Tadzhik pasture lands engendered continuous friction. The exchange of the nomad's harvest of meat, hides, wool, and cattle for the cotton goods, silk, metalware, and grains of the urban craftsman and sedentary cultivator was never free of suspicion or open conflict. At the same time, nomadic raids on towns and villages did not preclude raids of neighboring (for example, Kazakh) clans on each other — in search of pasture-and-water rights, booty, women, or vengeance. Also, the commercial proclivities of some Tadzhiks, Uzbeks, Tatars, Bukharan Jews, and Armenians often placed them rather precariously in the role of merchants and usurers in an ethnically alien sea, with resultant frictions that were not always peacefully resolved. As a result, more often than not the region's local communities and ethno-cultural groups tended to view each other with contempt or fear, as inferior or dangerous strangers. No wonder that even the arrival in mid-nineteenth century of Tsarist troops at the gates of the three surviving city-based principalities — Khiva, Bukhara, and Kokand — failed to diminish their mutual distrust and hostility. Even though the response of individual nomadic and semi-nomadic groups to external threats was more coherent, the relations among these groups never really approached rational cooperation. As often as not, one betrayed the other to the Russians."
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Excerpted from The Surrogate Proletariat by Gregory J. Massell. Copyright © 1974 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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