Soviet Nation-Building in Central Asia

The Making of the Kazakh and Uzbek Nations

Grigol Ubiria

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138885288
• eBook ISBN: 9781317504344
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 resulted in new state-led nation-building projects in Central Asia. The emergence of independent republics spawned a renewed Western scholarly interest in the region's nationality issues. Presenting a detailed study, this book examines the state-led nation-building projects in the Soviet republics of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

Exploring the degree, forms and ways of the Soviet state involvement in creating Kazakh and Uzbek nations, this book places the discussion within the theoretical literature on nationalism. The author argues that both Kazakh and Uzbek nations are artificial constructs of Moscow-based Soviet policy-makers of the 1920s and 1930s. This book challenges existing arguments in current scholarship by bringing some new and alternative insights into the role of indigenous Central Asian and Soviet officials in these nation-building projects. It goes on to critically examine post-Soviet official Kazakh and Uzbek historiographies, according to which Kazakh and Uzbek peoples had developed national collective identities and loyalties long before the Soviet era.

This book will be a useful contribution to Central Asian History and Politics, as well as studies of Nationalism and Soviet Politics.

Part I
Theory of nationalism

1
Theorizing modern nationalism

General paradigms and concepts

The importance of nationalism in every country’s history and generally in modern world politics has been an undeniable factor for social scientists. It has also become a subject of great scholarly interest over the last several decades. At first glance, the abundant literature on the subject seems to have captured every aspect of this powerful social phenomenon. However, the fact is that the more the theory of nationalism has been researched, the more puzzling and contested it has become.

Conceptualizing nationalism has proved to be the most challenging task for scholars. Although the vast scholarship on nationalism has produced numerous explanations of such key terms as ‘ethnicity’, ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’, it has failed to develop generally accepted definitions. In various contexts, those often overlapping definitions are understood in different, sometimes even contradictory ways. For example, the term ‘nationalism’ can mean: the demands in Catalonia for greater autonomy or even full independence from Spain; discriminatory policies ensuring ethnic Fijians political supremacy over Fiji’s non-indigenous communities; and the expression of happy emotions during the singing of their nationalist song, ‘Flower of Scotland’, by the Scottish audience at the Murrayfield Stadium in Edinburgh before the rugby match against England.

Apart from the terminological quagmire, scholars of nationalism cannot agree on the genesis of nation and nationalism. What appeared first—nation or nationalism—is still debated. There is no precise answer to the question of how an ethnic group differs from nation or when the former becomes the latter and what the criteria are for this transformation. Moreover, while it is widely admitted that the idea of nationalism is a Western phenomenon, there has been disagreement over whether social developments in other parts of the world should be explained from Western experiences. In short, those conceptual problems in the theory of nationalism have caused significant confusion among scholars.

The purpose of this chapter is to briefly review some of the major works on nationalism that will provide a general theoretical perspective for the definition and conceptualization of the phenomenon, as well as to clarify some closely related concepts, such as ‘ethnicity’ and ‘nation-building’. In general, the concepts and definitions to be discussed in this chapter will serve as a useful framework for understanding basic processes of group identity formation in pre-Soviet Central Asia and, most importantly, Soviet Kazakh and Uzbek nation-building projects.

Ethnicity discourse

In social sciences the term ‘ethnicity’ is a relatively new concept that only emerged in the 1950s as an attempt to substitute for such politically discredited terms as ‘race’ and ‘tribe’. It also subsumed many attributes of what the general term ‘culture’ had previously implied. Since the term’s introduction, two major approaches to the study of ethnicity have been established in social sciences, particularly primordialism and constructivism.

Primordialists, influenced by the ideas of German nineteenth-century romanticism, maintain that group attachments and ethnic identities are natural phenomena deeply etched into history which have the ability to consistently maintain their primary attributes, such as culture, customs, language, religion and even biological features over generations. For example, according to Burkhard Ganzer, ‘No member [of an ethnic group] can escape the ascription of ethnicity; it occurs “from above” and is objective. Changing sides is impossible, and attempts to do so are considered as only “fooling around”.’¹ Harold Isaacs likewise maintains that ethnicity is automatically ascribed to each individual from the very first day of his/her life. A newborn child is immediately endowed with ethnic identity and cultural heritage (including religion, language and social mores) of a community of which his/her family is a part. All these, concludes Isaacs, in conjunction with the geographical environment of the child’s birthplace, will form ‘the outlook and way of life upon which the new individual enters from his[/her] first day’.²

From the extreme primordialist perspective, ethnicity is seen as a sociobiological rather than a cultural category. For example, Pierre van den Berghe proposes to understand ethnicity as an extension of kinship that is grounded in ‘the biology of nepotism’.³ A strong affinity towards co-ethnics and their preference over others, according to van den Berghe, should be explained by genetic kinship among the members of an ethnic group.⁴

Soviet scholarship on the subject strongly upheld the primordialist perspective on ethnicity (or ethnos – in Soviet terminology), defining it as ‘a historically formed community of people characterized by common, relatively stable cultural features, certain distinctive psychological traits, and the consciousness of their unity as distinguished from other similar communities’.⁵ In addition, Soviet scholars had to ensure that their theory of ethnos followed the Marxist grand evolutionary scheme (as codified by Stalin in his 1938 work Dialectical and Historical Materialism), according to which all human societies went through five stages of socio-economic development: primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism and socialism.⁶ Consequently, Soviet theorists formulated an evolutionary scheme of ethnicity, which claimed that in primitive social formations, a dominant form of ethnos was a tribe; in slave-owning and feudal social formations, a narodnost’ (peoplehood); and under capitalism and socialism, it gradually evolved into a natsiia (nation).⁷ The idea of the scheme was to prove that ethnicity had continuity throughout all stages of human development.

In contrast to the primordialists’ arguments, the constructivist approach sees ethnicity as a social construct rather than given or fixed. It does not share primordialists’ belief in the immutable and enduring character of ethnic identities, but argues that they are manipulated by elites, and therefore are subject to change. For example, Michael Fischer emphasizes the fluidity of ethnic identity. For him, ethnicity is not a stable category that is passed on from one generation to the next; quite the contrary, it is a subject of a constant alteration. In Fischer’s words, ‘ethnicity is something reinvented and reinterpreted in each generation by each individual’.⁸ Similarly, Joane Nagel, who considers ethnicity to be a social construct, suggests that ‘the location and meaning of particular ethnic boundaries are continuously negotiated, revised and revitalized, both by ethnic group members themselves as well as by outside observers.’⁹ Another constructivist scholar Paul Brass treats ethnicity as a political category. According to him, the political importance of ethnicity is considerably raised in the process of elite competition for power, wealth and prestige, especially in societies that experience significant social changes. For self-benefit, Brass argues, elites manage to create and transform ethnic groups.¹⁰

The debate on the features defining ethnicity is no less controversial. Richard Schermerhorn, for example, names the following major characteristics of ethnic groups: real or assumed common ancestry, historical memories and one or more identity marker elements that might include ‘kinship patterns, physical contiguity … religious affiliation, language or dialect forms, tribal affiliation, nationality, phenotypical features, or any combination of these’.¹¹ Anthony Smith expands Schermerhorn’s characteristics by adding three more features to ethnie (his preferred French term for ethnic community), namely a collective name for a group, attachment to homeland (not necessarily in the physical terms) and sense of unity.¹² Ethnic features described by Schermerhorn and Smith include nearly all variables generally named during the ethnicity discourse. However, considering the fluid and situational character of the phenomenon, specific features may be ascribed to ethnicity, depending on a particular case study.

Approaches to nationalism

Classical theories of nationalism have examined nation and nationalism primarily from a historical standpoint. Particularly, the debate in the scholarship has mostly been around the causes leading to the origin of the phenomena, or about defining the timeframe during which those processes took place. In this regard, scholars, as in the discourse on ethnicity, have either considered nations as immemorial entities, or have predominantly treated them as the products of modernity. The modernity itself has been associated with those events or changes that were brought about by such various factors as the emergence of capitalism, industrialism, development of communication technologies and the modern state. Overall, four major approaches can be identified in the academic discourse on nationalism, namely, primordialism, perennialism, ethnosymbolism and modernism.¹³

The primordialist approach treats nations from the same perspective as it does ethnicity. It advocates a natural formation of nations rather than their socially constructed nature. Proponents of this approach argue that ‘nations are organically grown entities and that the world is inevitably and fatally divided into nations. It believes that there are national spirits or essences and that nations are collective answers to the call of the blood’.¹⁴

The primordialist approach differs from perennialism primarily in the question of ‘natural givenness’ of nations. In contrast to the former, perennialism concedes the formation of nations through sociohistorical processes, while at the same time asserting that they have been around since ancient times. Perennialism also argues that those ancient communities that developed a sense of ethnonational consciousness have been able to maintain it firmly throughout history.¹⁵ A particularly interesting illustration of this perspective is official Armenian historiography which detects the foundations of the modern Armenian national identity back in the sixth century BC.¹⁶ According to Suny, ‘The very constancy that makes up the Armenian nature in such accounts is a reading back of the present national existence or consciousness into the whole past.’¹⁷

Primordialist and perennialist scholars are mainly criticized for equating contemporary understanding of nation with earlier human communities. According to modernist and ethnosymbolist approaches, premodern societies were largely fragmented along social, ethnic, language and/or cultural lines. In such societies, it is hard to find any unifying bond for all strata. Nor is there a strong drive that would link a particular ethnic group, culture and territory/state as a single entity. Even if a ruling class possesses some sorts of common cultural or national attributes, they are mostly alien to the majority of the population. On the other hand, while in contemporary Western scholarship on nationalism primordialist and perennialist approaches hold relatively limited niches, it is hard to ignore the strength of their practical application in official historiographies as well as in daily politics. Even those nations that are the products of the state-led nation-building projects of the twentieth century—such as Central Asian nations—put enormous efforts in their official historiographies to prove the antiquity of their roots. There is some kind of universal strife among many nationalist politicians, as well as academicians, to illustrate the deep rootedness of their nations by emphasizing the richness of their common cultural heritage and long shared historical past, which is aimed at reinforcing the national coherence and raising national pride among their population. In addition, the ‘ancientness’ of the nation is often referred to by nation-builders, with the goal of demonstrating the nation’s historical belonging, and consequently legal claims, to the territory they occupy at present or inhabited sometime in the past.

The ethnosymbolist approach to nationalism, which posits a midway position between the primordialist-perennialist and modernist approaches, recognizes that the nation is a modern phenomenon rather than a natural or ever-existing entity. However, the modernity of nations, according to ethnosymbolism, does not imply that they are created from scratch, but rather that they have developed on the basis of premodern ‘ethnic cores’. Anthony Smith, a founder of the ethnosymbolist approach, argues that ‘most nations, including the earliest, were based on ethnic ties and sentiments and on popular ethnic traditions, which have provided the cultural resources for later nation-formation’.¹⁸ For Smith, ethnie provides th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Note on transliteration
• Introduction
• PART I Theory of nationalism
• PART II Historical framework
• PART III From Lenin to Gorbachev
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index