The Heritage of Soviet Oriental Studies

Michael Kemper, Stephan Conermann, Michael Kemper, Stephan Conermann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136838538
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria asiatica

This book examines the Russian/Soviet intellectual tradition of Oriental and Islamic studies, which comprised a rich body of knowledge especially on Central Asia and the Caucasus. The Soviet Oriental tradition was deeply linked to politics – probably even more than other European 'Orientalisms'. It breaks new ground by providing Western and post-Soviet insider views especially on the features that set Soviet Oriental studies apart from what we know about its Western counterparts: for example, the involvement of scholars in state-supported anti-Islamic agitation; the early and strong integration of 'Orientals' into the scientific institutions; the spread of Oriental scholarship over the 'Oriental' republics of the USSR and its role in the Marxist reinterpretation of the histories of these areas. The authors demonstrate the declared emancipating agenda of Soviet scholarship, with its rhetoric of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism, made Oriental studies a formidable tool for Soviet foreign policy towards the Muslim World; and just like in the West, the Iranian Revolution and the mujahidin resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan necessitated a thorough redefinition of Soviet Islamic studies in the early 1980s. Overall, the book provides a comprehensive analysis of Soviet Oriental studies, exploring different aspects of writing on Islam and Muslim history, societies, and literatures. It also shows how the legacy of Soviet Oriental studies is still alive, especially in terms of interpretative frameworks and methodology; after 1991, Soviet views on Islam have contributed significantly to nation-building in the various post-Soviet and Russian 'Muslim' republics.

1 Introduction

Integrating Soviet Oriental Studies

Michael Kemper

The purpose of this article is to provide a broad sketch of the chronological development of Soviet Oriental studies, and to discuss some of the major trends and characteristics of Soviet research on the “Soviet Orient” from 1917 to the post-Soviet period. This overview will also briefly introduce the various chapters of this volume, and discuss them as contributions to an integrating view on Soviet Oriental studies. “Integrating” here refers, on the one hand, to the elaboration of a perspective on Oriental studies in the USSR as one comprehensive discipline. On the other hand, it refers to the integration of Soviet research on Islam and Muslim societies into the general debates on Oriental studies in Europe and “Orientalism.”¹

Why Study Soviet Oriental Studies?

In the Soviet Union, Oriental studies (or “Orientology,” vostokovedenie) was a huge interdisciplinary field that is difficult to demarcate. The Soviets inherited the conventional definition of “the Orient” from classical Oriental studies in Europe: it comprised the belt from North Africa over the Middle East, Central, South and South East Asia to China, Japan and Korea. This huge geographical range was reflected in the structure of the major Soviet centers of Oriental studies in Moscow and Leningrad and in five republican institutes of Oriental studies in Tashkent (Uzbekistan), Baku (Azerbaijan), Tbilisi (Georgia), Dushanbe (Tajikistan) and Yerevan (Armenia). At all of these institutes the Orient was compartmentalized, with changing focus areas, into the various regions of the Orient (usually with sectors and “cabinets” on individual topics or literatures).

There are a great many Soviet Russian works intended to give an overview of the emergence, development and structure of Oriental studies in the USSR, all more or less written from an ideological position and in a self-congratulatory style, downplaying the many conflicts and crises in the field;² in addition, hundreds of individual careers of Soviet/Russian Orientalists have been meticulously listed, although with some conspicuous lacunae, by Sofiia Miliband in her biographical dictionaries.³ And while the recent years have seen the publication of some new studies on individual scholars as well as some memoirs of Orientalists,⁴ there is still no comprehensive critical survey of Soviet Oriental studies or any of its sub-disciplines.

There are good reasons for disliking the politicized scholarship of the Soviet era (for its submission to power, its gross ideological simplifications and its flawed methodologies), but we are suggesting in this volume that Oriental studies in the Soviet Union constituted an interesting and important object in itself – a discipline with its own discourses, mechanisms and constraints that tells us much about the workings of Soviet humanities. In the USSR, Oriental studies enjoyed considerable prestige because of its connection to traveling and the learning of foreign languages (including Western ones), and because it opened up much-coveted jobs. In addition, simply to dismiss the huge body of Soviet writings on Islam and Muslim societies on the grounds that it was generated by an obsolete ideology would preclude us from understanding contemporary patterns of Orientology and historiography in Central Asia, the Caucasus and Russia, a good deal of which is still following the paradigms set in the Soviet period.⁵

In fact, the history of Soviet Orientology might contribute to a broader understanding of East–West/Eurasian relations in general, and of Western “Orientalism” in particular. “Western” here must include Russian, since Russian and Soviet Oriental studies developed on the basis of European, in particular German, scholarly traditions. The neglect of the Soviet Oriental experience – or of the “Soviet Orientalist projects,” to adapt a term used by Edward Said⁶ – conveniently prevents us from asking whether the now “victorious” Western perspective on the Orient, and on Islam in the Caucasus, Central Asia and Afghanistan, is indebted, in many respects, to the work of Soviet scholars.

Institutes

In the Soviet Union, Oriental studies were cultivated for research on Asia and Africa, and for building and maintaining foreign political and cultural relations to the “de-colonizing” or “developing” countries of those continents. Since the 1920s and then through the Cold War era, Oriental studies in the USSR were also a prestigious arena for competition with the West – however few the actual contacts with Western scholars were; and the competition for interpreting the Orient was also a struggle for hegemony over the East.

This is illustrated by the fact that the initiative for establishing the first Marxist Oriental studies institutions in Moscow was taken in the “Red Years” directly after the First World War, when the Bolshevik government was attempting to provoke and support anti-colonial revolutions in the East. The famous Baku “Congress of the Peoples of the East” of 1920 summoned the Muslims of the Middle East to fight against British colonialism and to follow the Soviet model of development,⁷ and this enthusiasm provided the stimulus for a first Soviet project of a Marxist Oriental teaching institution. This project foresaw a “University of Social Sciences for Workers of the Orient,” proposed to be based in Baku, above all to educate cadres for communist parties in Iran and Turkey.⁸ While this Baku project was not implemented, in 1921 the Soviets established a “Communist University of the Toilers of the East”⁹ in Moscow, as a party school for communists from Muslim countries, as well as a similar university for Chinese students.¹⁰ Also in Moscow, the Bolsheviks created, in October 1921, a first Marxist school for teaching Oriental languages and history to a predominantly Russian student body, with a strong dose of Marxist political economy and the history of revolutionary movements in its curriculum. This school was founded on the basis of the Lazarev Institute, which had its origins in an Armenian language school that had been established in Moscow in 1815. Completely restructured and then known as the Narimanov Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies, this school was for more than three decades the USSR’s most important teaching institute for educating party and administrative workers, spies and diplomats, educators and translators as well as economists who in one way or another had to deal with the foreign Orient, or who would be sent to work in regions of the “Soviet East” (sovetskii vostok). The director of the Narimanov Institute, Mikhail Pavlovich (d. 1928), was also president of the All-Russian (after 1922: All-Soviet) Association of Scientific Orientology, an organization set up to organize and coordinate Oriental studies in the whole of the Soviet Union.¹¹ The Association had its own journal, Novyi Vostok (New Orient, 1922–1930), with a strong political outlook.¹²

While Moscow became the new center for Marxist political studies on the Orient, the traditional philological and historical research of the pre-1917 Russian school of Orientology was continued in the Petrograd/Leningrad Asian Museum (founded in 1819) and at the university. As David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye explains (Chapter 2), Russian Orientology in St. Petersburg had its origins in the first half of the eighteenth century, when the first German Orientalists were attracted to take on positions in Peter the Great’s collections and nascent academic institutions. In 1854, St. Petersburg Orientology obtained a boost by the transfer to the city of the whole Oriental faculty of the University of Kazan (where a first Oriental studies chair had been filled, again with a German scholar, in 1807). Thus enlarged, the new St. Petersburg Oriental faculty, with its nine chairs for Oriental languages and literatures at the turn of the twentieth century, was the leading establishment of its kind not only in Russia but also in the whole of Europe.

When the Bolsheviks came to power they regarded the Petrograd/Leningrad professors as remnants of the Czarist “bourgeois” society, and as unsuitable for the new political tasks of Soviet political and social construction. Still, the new government understood the value of classical Oriental studies, and in 1930, when the Bolsheviks believed they had established political control over the Leningrad scholars, the Asian Museum was upgraded to the status of an Institute of Oriental Studies of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (Institut vostokovedeniia Akademii nauk SSSR, abbreviated as IVAN). In 1950 this academic Oriental Institute was transferred to Moscow, to be closer to the leadership. However, the huge manuscript collection of the old Asian Museum and a part of the personnel remained in Leningrad, where they now formed the “Leningrad Branch” of the Oriental Institute of the Academy. In Moscow, the academic research institute IVAN and the Narimanov Oriental studies “Party school” existed side by side for a few years; then, in 1954, the Narimanov Institute was closed down, with its staff being integrated into Moscow State University (where it formed the Institute of Asia and Africa as a teaching unit). The strong connection between the various research institutes and the Oriental faculties of the universities was characteristic of the whole Soviet period, in both Moscow and Leningrad.¹³ Soviet Orientalists often used to work at several institutions simultaneously, with university teaching being largely discrete from research.

Oriental Studies and Nationality Policies in the “Soviet Orient”

All of these Oriental institutions were meant to do research on the “foreign” Orient in the first place, and their scholars studied Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Hindi and many other languages and literatures. Yet also on their agenda were the histories and literatures of the “Soviet Orient,” especially of the Central Asian Soviet republics of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, and the Caucasian republics of Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia. Some attention was also paid to Muslim historical sources from regions that were part of the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic (today the Russian Federation), such as the “autonomous republics” of Tatariia and Bashkiriia in the Volga–Urals, as well as Dagestan and Chechnya-Ingushetia and other areas of the Northern Caucasus. A special case was Soviet Kurdology in Leningrad (“the center of Kurdish studies worldwide,” as Michiel Leezenberg reminds us in Chapter 6), for it addressed the Kurds of Soviet Azerbaijan and Armenia as well as those abroad, especially in Iraq. Soviet Orientology was therefore involved in defining cultural and historical identities at home, mostly in cooperation between the central institutions in Moscow and Leningrad and various local institutes and universities.

Our volume scrutinizes Soviet Oriental studies with regard to the “Oriental” regions of the USSR that had large nominally Muslim populations, with a special focus on Central Asia. In particular we are looking at Soviet academic writings on Islam and national identities in the USSR, and we ask questions about the political character of the Soviet discourses on Soviet Muslims. The scholars whose work we study are from different disciplines, in particular from the core philologies of Oriental studies, such as Arabic studies, Turkology and Iranian studies (with their “republican” languages and literatures), but we are likewise looking at the discourses of historiographers and policy-makers. The reader will find references to archeological and anthropological debates on the Soviet Orient; these disciplines had their own institutions, discourses and constraints, and therefore form special but related fields of study.

Our central question is thus to find out the extent to which Oriental studies in the USSR were guided and influenced by Soviet ideology, and the degree to which they were designed to support Soviet foreign and, especially, domestic policies. Already before 1917, Orientalists had worked for the government, as language teachers for the foreign and defense ministries, as advisers and in many other functions. This led to conflicts of interest between academic work and “practical” political assignments, as David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye explains.

The question of whether Oriental studies in the USSR were a state instrument for dominating the “domestic Orient” is situated in the larger ongoing debate on whether the Soviet Union was a colonial empire that could be compared to the British or French empires with their Asian and African overseas colonies. There can be no doubt that the Kremlin maintained, for most of the twentieth century, tight control over the USSR’s “Muslim” republics, and one can argue that, within the framework of the Soviet Union, the Caucasus and Central Asia were, to some degree, Russia’s “adjacent” colonies. However, the USSR understood itself as an emancipating state that ended the colonial exploitation of the former Russian colonies and helped the Muslim populations to attain development and modernization. In the 1920s the Bolsheviks set out to create modern national republics, with clear-cut borders that had little in common with the boundaries of previous local principalities and Tsarist administrative districts in the area. Each of the new USSR republics obtained a state nationality (and therefore also ethnic minorities) with a codified national language that was meant to replace dialects and limit the scope of other languages historically spoken in the given territory; a national literature and culture that needed to be Soviet and modern, not Islamic or traditional; and an historical identity that transcended the traditional feelings of belonging to genealogical and professional groups, to localities and, of course, to religious communities. The Soviet policy of “enrooting” (korenizatsiia, which Terry Martin and Ronald G. Suny call the Soviet “affirmative action policy”)¹⁴ aimed at the creation and support of indigenous national elites. In Central Asia, the Soviets were first forced to cooperate with the local Muslim modernists (mostly of Jadid provenance) but soon managed to replace all pre-revolutionary Muslim elites with a first generation of national cadres educated in the spirit of Marxism–Leninism. The role of ethnographers and linguists in the national delimitation of Central Asia of the 1920s and in the formation of national identities has begun to be studied in recent years.¹⁵ Our contention is that Orientalists also played an important role in the creation of Soviet national republics, mainly by providing the new entities with standard histories that disclosed the presumably ancient origin of the given nations on their assigned USSR territory, and explained the maturation of the major Central Asian peoples over time.¹⁶ This process was understood according to a standard formula: from tribes to nationalities (natsional’nosti) to nations (natsii), in accordance with the Marxist five-step paradigm of human development from primitive to ancient, feudal, bourgeois capitalist and, finally, socialist society.

In this volume, the politically motivated search for a correct Marxist interpretation of a Muslim past in the early years of the Soviet Union is studied in detail by Zifa Auezova (Chapter 14), with the example of early Soviet historiography of the Kazakhs. For the individual Orientalists involved, the writing of history often turned out to be a dangerous enterprise; in the case of Kazakhstan, a first “Kazakh-centered” perspective of history that came into being in the 1920s was soon heavily criticized for its political shortcomings, and then replaced by a new central view dictated by Moscow.

Oriental Studies and the Soviet Discourse on Islam

Next to their contribution to the definition of nations and national literatures, Orientalists also addressed the role of Islam in the history and present of these peoples. The Soviet Union started as an atheist state, and its policy towards Orthodox Christianity was inimical from the outset. The Bolsheviks’ attitude towards Islam was, however, ambivalent, for Islam was part of the historical and cultural heritage of minority nations that the USSR intended to liberate from their previous colonial oppression. The 1920s saw a wide variety of contradicting Marxist interpretations of the so-called “class character” of Islam. The idea was to establish where, on Marx’s unidirectional ladder of human h...