Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan available in Paperback
Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan
- ISBN-10:
- 0691127999
- ISBN-13:
- 9780691127996
- Pub. Date:
- 09/25/2006
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0691127999
- ISBN-13:
- 9780691127996
- Pub. Date:
- 09/25/2006
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan
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Overview
Tribal Nation addresses this question by examining the Soviet effort in the 1920s and 1930s to create a modern, socialist nation in the Central Asian Republic of Turkmenistan. Adrienne Edgar argues that the recent focus on the Soviet state as a "maker of nations" overlooks another vital factor in Turkmen nationhood: the complex interaction between Soviet policies and indigenous notions of identity. In particular, the genealogical ideas that defined premodern Turkmen identity were reshaped by Soviet territorial and linguistic ideas of nationhood. The Soviet desire to construct socialist modernity in Turkmenistan conflicted with Moscow's policy of promoting nationhood, since many Turkmen viewed their "backward customs" as central to Turkmen identity.
Tribal Nation is the first book in any Western language on Soviet Turkmenistan, the first to use both archival and indigenous-language sources to analyze Soviet nation-making in Central Asia, and among the few works to examine the Soviet multinational state from a non-Russian perspective. By investigating Soviet nation-making in one of the most poorly understood regions of the Soviet Union, it also sheds light on broader questions about nationalism and colonialism in the twentieth century.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691127996 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/25/2006 |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Sales rank: | 489,322 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Tribal Nation
The Making of Soviet TurkmenistanBy Adrienne Lynn Edgar
Princeton University Press
Princeton University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-691-12799-9
Introduction
TRIBE, CLASS, AND NATION IN TURKMENISTANON OCTOBER 27, 1991, the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic declared its independence from the Soviet Union. Rejecting the communist ideals promoted under seven decades of Soviet rule, the new state committed itself to fostering the "all-round development of the historical, national, and cultural traditions of the people of Turkmenistan." The president of independent Turkmenistan, a former Communist Party bureaucrat named Saparmurat Niyazov, declared that he would henceforth be known as Türkmenbashi, or "head of the Turkmen." Niyazov's regime exchanged the Soviet hammer and sickle for traditional symbols of nationhood-a flag, an anthem, and new holidays ranging from the conventional (Flag Day and Independence Day) to the idiosyncratic (Carpet Day and Melon Day). The new patriotism found its most passionate expression in the Turkmen national oath, which was heard frequently on television and at public gatherings:
Turkmenistan, my beloved motherland, my homeland, You are always with me, in my thoughts and in my heart. For the slightest evil against you, let my hand be paralyzed, For the slightest slander against you, let my tongue be lost, At the moment of my betrayal of the motherland,its president, or its sacred banner, let my breath be stopped.
Just seven decades earlier, Turkmenistan had seemed an unlikely site for such an outpouring of nationalist fervor. A seminomadic people at the time of the Bolshevik ascent to power in 1917, the Turkmen were fragmented into genealogically defined groups that spoke different dialects, were often at war with each other, and were ruled by at least five different states. The Turkmen population, overwhelmingly illiterate, was scattered over a huge and largely inaccessible expanse of arid terrain. Although these Turkmen groups claimed common ancestry, they possessed no clearly bounded territory, no common political institutions, no uniform language, and no mass culture of print and education-in short, none of the trappings of modern nationhood.
What brought about this remarkable transformation from a stateless conglomeration of tribes into an independent, apparently unified nation-state? Until recently, most Western scholars viewed the Soviet regime as a "breaker of nations," a radically centralizing state that suppressed indigenous national consciousness. Over the past decade, however, historians have argued persuasively that the Soviet regime itself served as midwife to the separate states that emerged on its territory in 1991. The Soviet Union, in short, was a maker of nations. By creating territorial republics based on ethnic criteria and promoting "national cultures" within them, the Soviet state fostered national consciousness and incipient national statehood among its numerous non-Russian minorities.
Because of the remoteness of Central Asian populations from modern nationhood before 1917, some scholars have dismissed the national republics created by Soviet rule as "artificial." Like the nation-states formed out of former European colonies in the Middle East and Africa, these scholars argue, Central Asian nations were fictitious creations of their colonial masters, imposed from above with little consideration of indigenous identities and desires. A few predicted-mistakenly, as it turned out-that these nations would not survive the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yet the creation of the Central Asian nations under Soviet rule is not in itself a reason to question their legitimacy or durability. As a vast literature on nations and nationalism has argued over the past several decades, all nations are "artificial" or constructed; the nation is not a primordial, organic entity, but an "imagined community" that is formed in a continual process of invention and negotiation. The notion that political and ethnic boundaries should coincide is a relatively recent idea, linked to the political mobilization of the masses and, some maintain, to the needs of modern capitalism. Like the nations of Soviet Central Asia, the majority of the world's nations were formed in large measure through the actions and policies of states. As E. J. Hobsbawm has written, "Nations do not make states and nationalism but the other way around."
What is striking about the Central Asian nations is not that they were constructed from above, but that their architect was a socialist state bent on bringing about a global proletarian revolution. For reasons both pragmatic and ideological, the Bolsheviks became convinced that the best way to deal with their "nationality problem"-the presence of more than one hundred different ethnic groups within Soviet borders-was to aggressively promote non-Russian nationhood. The Central Asian nations were remarkable, as well, in the rapidity with which they emerged. As a direct result of Soviet rule, aspects of nation formation that took decades or centuries elsewhere-the establishment of a national territory and government institutions, the standardization of a national language, and the emergence of a mass educational system-were accomplished in Turkmenistan and its neighbors in less than a decade. Finally, the Soviet construction of nations was uniquely ambitious and comprehensive. Modern states, whether national or imperial, typically seek to create a set of "totalizing classifications" in place of the premodern blur of diffuse and overlapping identities; in this sense, the Soviet regime's efforts to categorize its population by ethnicity were not exceptional. The Soviet state was unusual, however, in the lengths to which it went to elaborate these new identity categories in the non-Russian periphery.
The 1920s and 1930s were crucial formative years for the Soviet national republics. In this period, the Bolsheviks engaged in a mad rush of nation-building activity, conveniently if unintentionally equipping non-Russian regions with nearly everything they would need for a future existence as sovereign polities. The fundamental requirement that a state possess a territory with clearly defined borders was met by Moscow through its policy of demarcating "national" republics and regions for each ethnic group. The need for administrative structures was filled by republican government and Communist Party hierarchies that duplicated in miniature those on the all-union level. Most aspiring nation-states strive for a single "national language" to replace a plethora of spoken local dialects; by supporting linguistic standardization as well as publishing and education in native tongues, the Soviet regime facilitated the consolidation of such languages. A nation-state needs an elite to rule in the name of the masses and promote "national culture"; with its policy of recruiting local nationals for service in the party and government, the Soviet regime helped to foster such elites.
The nation-making efforts of modern states do not, of course, focus solely on elites; they also seek to mobilize the masses, turning them from reluctant subjects into active and concerned citizens. Here, too, the Soviet regime did a great deal to transform the regions under its tutelage. The Communist Party leadership, assisted by the native elites it so diligently cultivated, used a variety of methods to penetrate local societies and mobilize the non-Russian masses in support of the regime. Soviet authorities traveled to distant parts of the union to survey and study the indigenous inhabitants, established village schools and native-language newspapers, and created mass organizations as venues for popular participation and state control. They sought to undermine the power of traditional elites and to ban "barbaric" practices rooted in religion and custom. So far this is a familiar story, and one that is common to many aspiring nation-states. Yet the Bolsheviks intended to create not just nations but socialist nations, and here they parted company with other modernizers. Soviet authorities campaigned to promote conflict among social classes, enlist the support of the poor and dispossessed, and eradicate existing systems of property ownership and land tenure. In the early 1930s, they sought to bring the entire countryside under state control through the forcible collectivization of agriculture. They banned "bourgeois" and "feudal" forms of literary and cultural activity and ultimately imprisoned or executed many Soviet citizens as "counterrevolutionary nationalists" and "enemies of the people."
Tribal Nation focuses on the Soviet effort in the 1920s and 1930s to create a Turkmenistan that would be at once national, modern, and socialist. In many ways, Turkmenistan was a textbook case of a nation created by state fiat. It was under Soviet rule that the Turkmen first acquired a clearly defined territory, a standardized language, and other features of modern nationhood. Yet this book argues that Soviet policy was by no means the only-or even the most important-factor shaping Turkmen national consciousness. Far from being passive recipients of a national culture invented in Moscow, Turkmen themselves played a major role in shaping the institutions and discourses of nationhood in the 1920s and 1930s.
Recent works on Soviet nationality policy have emphasized the role of Moscow-based officials and ethnographers in constructing nations in the non-Russian periphery. Using newly opened archives, historians such as Terry Martin, Francine Hirsch, and Jeremy Smith have offered important insights into the evolution of Soviet nationality policy and the Soviet multinational state. Moscow's role in creating nations was undeniably important, as these scholars have ably demonstrated. However, the crucial contribution of local elites in shaping Soviet nations has not received enough attention. In Central Asia, members of the cultural and political elite had their own ideas about nationhood and socialism, which they discussed with their Russian comrades at Communist Party meetings and debated among themselves in local-language newspapers. Particularly in the 1920s, when Moscow's control over cultural and intellectual life in the non-Russian periphery was relatively tenuous, indigenous intellectuals and communists often expressed views that differed substantially from those of the authorities in Moscow.
Tribal Nation draws on an array of Turkmen- and Russian-language published sources, in addition to recently declassified Soviet archives, to analyze the interaction between the transformative policies of the Soviet state and Turkmen conceptions of identity and community. Using insights gleaned from local and non-Russian sources, this study challenges certain long-standing orthodoxies about Soviet nation-making in Central Asia. Among Western scholars during the Cold War era, for example, it was taken for granted that the formation of nations in Central Asia was a process controlled entirely by Moscow, with little input from indigenous populations and little basis in pre-Soviet identities. This view continues to have wide currency among specialists in Central Asian and Soviet history. Even today, some scholars dismiss the division of Central Asia into national republics as a manipulative strategy designed to destroy the region's natural unity and enhance Moscow's control-in other words, as a policy of "divide and rule." Ironically, this older belief in the top-down creation of Central Asian nations has been reinforced to some extent by the more recent recognition that the Soviet state was a "maker of nations." These two schools of thought-the "divide-and-rule" and "nation-making" perspectives-differ over the intentions of the Soviet rulers. Proponents of the former see Soviet nationality policy as Machiavellian to the core, while advocates of the latter see Soviet nation-making primarily as an effort to appease nationalist sentiment and promote historical progress. Yet both tend to underplay the significance of native involvement and local cultural and social realities in the formation of Central Asian nations.
Even in a place as remote from modern nationhood as Turkmenistan, I argue, existing conceptions of identity provided fertile ground for Soviet policies. As I show in the first chapter, a sense of "Turkmenness" based on genealogy long predated the Soviet era. The Turkmen population was made up of a number of tribes, subtribes, and lineages, all of which claimed descent from a single ancestor. The Turkmen shared this emphasis on genealogical descent with other historically pastoral nomadic groups, whose mobility and statelessness precluded forms of identity linked to territory or the state. Under the right circumstances, this belief in a common ancestry had the potential to serve as a unifying factor. Although Turkmen identity had few concrete political or economic manifestations in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the idea that the tribes shared a glorious ancestry and history-and the hope that they might one day unite-had long been a staple of Turkmen discourse.
Because of the existence of a genealogically defined Turkmen identity, Soviet historians maintained that the Turkmen had developed a "proto-nationalist" sensibility well before the Soviet period-a claim that served to underscore the historical correctness of Soviet nationality policy. Yet this argument is misleading, since it implies that history was leading the Turkmen inexorably toward unified nationhood. In reality, the segmented genealogical structure that potentially united the Turkmen groups was equally prone to divide them. The numerous tribes and subtribes that made up the branches of the Turkmen genealogical tree had distinct identities and were often at odds with each other. While Turkmen groups were capable of uniting in the face of a common external threat, they were equally likely to ally themselves with outsiders against rival Turkmen. In the mid-nineteenth century, the emergence of a nation based on one of the large Turkmen tribes-Yomuts, Tekes, or Ersarïs-would have seemed more plausible than the formation of a Turkmen nation. More broadly, the tribal form of social organization was in many ways antithetical to the demands of the modern nation-state. In a stateless, genealogically organized society, personalistic ties based on patrilineal kinship play a primary role in shaping behavior and allegiances. The nation-state, by contrast, is an impersonal arena that stresses the equality of all its citizens and insists on loyalty to the central government. The tendency toward divisiveness in tribal society-what anthropologist Andrew Shryock has called its "contentious multivocality"-is at odds with the unity and homogeneity sought by the nation.
An existing conception of Turkmenness based on common ancestry was not the only local factor that favored Soviet nation-making efforts. Moscow's policies were also facilitated by the presence of a Turkmen elite willing to embrace the idea of a Turkmen national republic. In the early-twentieth century, a handful of Turkmen had been exposed to new ideas of identity then circulating in Central Asia. Some had attended schools sponsored by the Russian colonial regime, which had introduced them to European understandings of nationhood. Others had come into contact with secular forms of Turkic nationalism advocated by Muslim reformers in the Russian and Ottoman empires. In part because of their exposure to these new ideas, Turkmen elites were willing to shift their primary loyalty from particularistic genealogical affiliations to the broader idea of a Turkmen nation. In fact, their support for Turkmen nationhood frequently went beyond what Moscow expected or considered desirable. As I show in chapter 3, Turkmen elites' enthusiasm for a common Turkmen identity was reinforced in the 1920s and 1930s by the Soviet policy of nativization, which promised preferential treatment in employment and higher education to the "titular nationality" of each republic. As a direct result of this policy, a broader Turkmen identity became not merely a vague aspiration but something with real political and economic meaning.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Tribal Nation by Adrienne Lynn Edgar Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
| List of Maps and Illustrations | ix | |
| Acknowledgments | xi | |
| Note on Transliteration | xv | |
| Introduction: Tribe, Class, and Nation in Turkmenistan | 1 | |
| Part I | Making a Nation | |
| Chapter 1 | Sources of Identity among the Turkmen | 17 |
| Chapter 2 | Assembling the Nation: The Creation of a Turkmen National Republic | 41 |
| Chapter 3 | Ethnic Preferences and Ethnic Conflict: The Rise of a Turkmen National Elite | 70 |
| Chapter 4 | Helpers, Not Nannies: Moscow and the Turkmen Communist Party | 100 |
| Chapter 5 | Dueling Dialects: The Creation of a Turkmen Language | 129 |
| Part II | Constructing Socialism | |
| Chapter 6 | A Nation Divided: Class Struggle and the Assault on "Tribalism" | 167 |
| Chapter 7 | Cotton and Collectivization: Rural Resistance in Soviet Turkmenistan | 197 |
| Chapter 8 | Emancipation of the Unveiled: Turkmen Women under Soviet Rule | 221 |
| Conclusion: From Soviet Republic to Independent Nation-State | 261 | |
| Glossary of Terms and Abbreviations | 267 | |
| Bibliography | 269 | |
| Index | 287 |
What People are Saying About This
This is a beautifully written, extremely well researched, and very well argued investigation of nation-making in Soviet Central Asia. Edgar's work goes much further than that of many of her contemporaries and moves in an important new direction. Rather than simply look out from Moscow, from the top down, she begins from Turkmenistan, from the local, and argues that the actual shapes that nations took were the result of a complex negotiation between local traditions and the plans of the Soviets themselves. This is an extraordinarily important refinement of the existing literature.
— Ronald Suny, University of Chicago, author of "The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States"
"This is a beautifully written, extremely well researched, and very well argued investigation of nation-making in Soviet Central Asia. Edgar's work goes much further than that of many of her contemporaries and moves in an important new direction. Rather than simply look out from Moscow, from the top down, she begins from Turkmenistan, from the local, and argues that the actual shapes that nations took were the result of a complex negotiation between local traditions and the plans of the Soviets themselves. This is an extraordinarily important refinement of the existing literature."—Ronald Suny, University of Chicago, author of The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States"An excellent book. Edgar tackles a big topic with great finesse. She does so in very accessible prose that conveys complex ideas without any jargon. In terms of scope and quality, Tribal Nation ranks among the best historical scholarship in the Russian/Soviet sphere. The making of Soviet Turkmenistan, and the Soviet regime's attempt to build modern socialism through massive intervention in society, is a topic of enormous interest. The book is solidly based on archival research, and displays wonderful mastery of detail."—Adeeb Khalid, Carleton College, author of The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia
An excellent book. Edgar tackles a big topic with great finesse. She does so in very accessible prose that conveys complex ideas without any jargon. In terms of scope and quality, Tribal Nation ranks among the best historical scholarship in the Russian/Soviet sphere. The making of Soviet Turkmenistan, and the Soviet regime's attempt to build modern socialism through massive intervention in society, is a topic of enormous interest. The book is solidly based on archival research, and displays wonderful mastery of detail.
— Adeeb Khalid, Carleton College, author of "The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia"