Central Asia and the Caucasus

Touraj Atabaki,Sanjyot Mehendale

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134319930
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Asia Central

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, a number of linkages have been established between newly independent Central Asian states, or populations within them, and diaspora ethnic groups. This book explores the roles that diaspora communities play in the recent and ongoing emergence of national identities in Central Asia and the Caucasus.
The loyalties of these communities are divided between their countries of residence and those states that serve as homeland of their particular ethno-cultural nation, and are further complicated by connections with contested transnational notions of common cultures and 'peoples'. Written by highly respected experts in the field, the book addresses issues such as nationalism, conflict, population movement, global civil society, Muslim communities in China and relations between the new nation-states and Russia.
This innovative book will interest students and researchers of transnationalism and Central Asian studies.

1 IntroductionTransnationalism and diaspora in Central Asia and the Caucasus

Touraj Atabaki

Of the many momentous events that have marked the twentieth century, the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, the world’s largest empire, arguably has had the most far-reaching consequences. Population dislocation, mass migration, and immigration were among the consequences of this dramatic series of sociopolitical changes. The end of Tsarist Russia caused the first wave of migration out of the fallen empire. In Central Asia and the Caucasus, during the early period of Soviet rule, an exodus of refugees left their homelands for neighboring countries, mainly Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey, and China. In Iran and Turkey these political refugees set up cultural and political organizations and endeavored to sustain their links with the homeland. In later years, particularly during the 1930s, under pressures exerted on their already unwelcoming countries by the Soviet government, many of these refugees were forced to leave for other distant countries, in Europe or the United States, in pursuit of a safer haven. Unfortunately, there are no statistics available on the exact number of these refugees. Nevertheless, on the basis of available archival materials, one can deduce that prior to the outbreak of World War II there were tens of thousands of Tatars, Azerbaijanis, Armenians, Georgians, Turkmen, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, and Kyrgyz wandering into and out of the neighboring countries, some toward Europe or the United States, forming the first Caucasus and Central Asian diaspora communities.

The second wave of population dislocation was engendered by the process of forming the new Soviet state. An immediate consequence of implementing the ethno-federalist and authoritarian modernizing policies adopted by the Bolsheviks were massive migrations, forced or “voluntary,” unique in modern world history. The engineered partition of the Tsarist Empire and the demarcation of the new borders in Central Asia began as early as April 1924, when the Sredazburo (Central Asian Bureau) of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party voted to partition the Tsarist administrative province of Turkestan. A process of administrative realignment across Central Asia then followed, and was finally completed in 1936. Under the new alignment, all of Central Asia was administratively divided into three organizational categories: autonomous republics, autonomous regions, and national territories. By adopting an ethno-administrative policy in Central Asia, the Bolsheviks initially divided the entire region into three national-territorial entities for Uzbeks, Kazakhs, and Turkmen.However, to avoid any possible revival of old territorial solidarity, they offered the heartland of the former Turkestan – the khanates Bukhara, Kokand, and Khiva – to the Uzbeks.

Thus Uzbekistan extended from Osh at the eastern edge of the Ferghana valley to Khiva and Khwarazm in the west, and from Tashkent in the north to Zarafshan and Termiz near the northern border of Afghanistan, comprising all three former khanates of Bukhara, Kokand, and Khiva. The new demarcation, however, left the area’s other major ethnic groups, most prominently the Tajiks and Kyrgyz, with a strong sense of betrayal. Fearful of escalation of national sentiment among Tajiks who spoke Persian, the language of neighboring Iran and Afghanistan, the Soviets formally recognized the Tajiks and Kyrgyz as the other two major ethnic groups in the region. They did so by concluding their territorial realignment with the allocation of an administrative territory to these ethnic groups. Subsequently, five republics were formed in the region, with each supposed to accommodate a titular or dominant ethnic group: Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Uzbek, or Turkmen.

Following this engineered partition, a new project for the homogenization of each Central Asian republic was initiated. To enhance this project, a process of nativization began which meant that the titular ethnic group gained access to high positions in the local administration. Whereas it was possible for so-called “recognized ethnic minorities” to enjoy “cultural freedom” within the new republics, it soon became clear that if one wished to advance one’s career it was necessary to adopt a certain degree of overt “titularness.” Meanwhile, titular ethnic cultural distinctiveness was gradually constructed and Sovietized, and members of the titular nomenklatura were encouraged to advance the particular interests of their republic. Likewise, the Soviet policy of registering nationality in the internal passport at the republic level tended to encourage non-titular ethnic groups to declare themselves as a members of the titular group in official documents, for the sake of advancement within the government apparatus.

Meanwhile, at the Soviet level the party-state system, with its drive to centralize power, monopolized the key command positions throughout the Soviet Union, denying access to these positions to almost all non-Russian nationalities. Its high-ranking administrators formed the privileged core of a trans-ethnic population. Even at the republic level, without exception, a native Russian always filled the position of deputy first secretary of the Communist Party in every republic. The Sovetskij chelovek (Soviet person) was the ideological embodiment of this trans-ethnic party system, subjected to the original, revolutionary-popular idea of Soviet patriotism, whose identity was grounded in a sense of loyalty to the Soviet state. Thus absolute loyalty to Moscow predominated over any form of loyalty to individual republics.

However, within the republics a concealed ethno-nationalism gradually developed not only within each dominant group but also between the ethnic minorities, which fostered interests different from those of the titular nation. Ethno-nationalism in the Central Asian republics is the direct outcome of this peculiar type of ethno-federalist administrative structure adopted by the Soviets. While they attempted to link a single constructed titular nation to its own state, in order to achieve social homogeneity and political cohesion, they simultaneously denied the smaller ethnic minorities in each republic equal rights with the titular nation. Although the Soviet government never genuinely encouraged ethno-nationalism anywhere within the Soviet Union, one can point to occasional instances when Moscow made concessions to minority groups in order to consolidate its power at the local level. One may therefore conclude that in the post-Tsarist Empire the Bolsheviks, while aiming to construct a peculiar institution of Soviet ethno-federalism in part through the invention of the Sovetskij chelovek paired with patriotism, in the end unwittingly stimulated ethno-nationalism by the application of their elitist and centralizing policies. Underlying this fundamental problem was the fact that the imposed territorial borders never corresponded adequately with the cultural groupings. As a result, ethno-nationalism during the Soviet era became the most dynamic force in local politics. While the titular nationalities in each republic enjoyed preferential treatment and tended to comprise the local administrative hierarchy, ethnic minorities strove to consolidate their presence in particular sectors of the administration, especially those most strictly controlled by the Russians, by adopting a “defense” system based on nepotism.

In order to achieve a clear historical break and to impede any potential call for unity among people who shared a common language and culture but lived under different national flags, the Soviet authorities in the early days of their rule launched a widespread linguistic refashioning project in Central Asia. The Sovietization of the languages in Central Asia was initiated under the authority of Russian orientalists working at institutions inherited from the Russian Empire. The chief target of this project was to form national languages based on a certain spoken dialect, and to install these as the official written and literary languages. Accordingly, each republic would have a national language different from the languages spoken or written by co-ethno/linguistic groups outside the Soviet Union.

The invention of national languages created modern Kyrgyz and Turkmen in 1924, and Karakalpak in 1925. Furthermore, to establish pan-Soviet consistency and to break all links with the past, the Arabic alphabet for all national languages was changed in 1929 to Latin and in 1940 to Cyrillic. By then, Soviet territorial state-building in Central Asia had been concluded, with five Soviet Socialist Republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan established in addition to the Autonomous Republic of Karakalpakstan in Uzbekistan and the Autonomous Province of Gorno Badakhshan in Tajikistan.

Along with territorial state-building and language policies, the Soviet regime also implemented a wide range of social engineering projects in Central Asia. In the 1930s, the Bolsheviks instigated a policy of forced sedentarization of nomadic people, and of mass collectivization of agricultural lands into the collective farming units known in Russian as kolkhoz and sovkhoz. Moreover, the pace of industrialization that was unsettling all of Russia during the 1930s caused dramatic labor shortages in some industrial sectors and regions. The Stalinist policy of “encouraging labor migration” or the “voluntary labor migration in building socialism”, which in practice was nothing less than displacement of a segment of population within each republic, and often to a new republic, created colossal population dislocation.

Completing these enormous waves of mass migration were the catastrophic deportation schemes engineered by the Communist Party during World War II and the immediate years after. The Crimean Tatars, the Volga Germans, and the Meskhetians were the most prominent of such deported ethnic groups. Nevertheless, although Khrushchev, following Stalin’s death, in his secret speech delivered to the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956, acknowledged the deportation of several national communities from their homelands, their respective autonomous territories were never restored to them.

Therefore, although the ultimate aspiration of the early Bolsheviks was to create a homogeneous state, the immediate consequence of the ethno-federalist administrative policies adopted by the Communist Party, in combination with forced migrations and mass deportations, was the development of ethno-nationalist sentiments among Soviet citizens. The Bolsheviks’ recipe of “modernization and urbanization completely overlooked the difference between the immigrant population seeking to fit in, on the one hand, and an indigenous population seeking to assert its proprietary claim to homeland on the other.”¹ Moreover, by ignoring the “significance of the subjective ‘sense of place’ that served as an integral element in the way indigenes defined themselves and viewed the world,” Stalin’s perception of homeland was as “an empty container within which nations could be created and destroyed”² and eventually a Sovetskij chelovek could live.

The ultimate demographic consequence of these miscellaneous measures of population displacement adopted by Moscow during the 70 years of Soviet rule was some eight republics in the Caucasus and Central Asia of very diverse ethnic composition. As is shown in Tables 1.1 and 1.2, prior to the fall of the Soviet Union, and based on the last general census conducted in 1989, variety within the ethic composition of the Central Asian Soviet Socialist Republics was high, while Russians composed the main non-native ethnic group in each republic.

Acknowledging the high percentage of ethnic diversity in each republic, through state-party rule, the central Soviet government sought a forced harmony among diverse ethnic groups throughout the Soviet era. Nevertheless, once Gorbachev launched his reform program in the mid-1980s, it soon became apparent that disparities among the ethnic groups in each Soviet republic, and corresponding ethno-nationalism, ran deeper than anticipated. Soon inter-ethnic hostilities among nations, which had supposedly been supplanted by sovetskii chelovek, convinced even admirers of the Soviets’ achievements that the “Soviet person” had never really come into existence.

By the late 1980s, some ethnic minority groups in each Soviet republic began to feel stirrings toward a return to their homeland/motherland, though they did not always know where that was. Following ethnic tension between disgruntled guests and their incommodious hosts, in 1989 some 63,000 Meskhetians were forced to leave Uzbekistan, though they had no homeland to return to. In other cases, ethnic minorities living in areas adjacent to their titular republic one began to call for secession and conjoining with the motherland. In the Caucasus, following the outbreak of hostilities between Azerbaijanis and Armenians over Nagorno- Karabagh in 1988, some 300,000 Armenians and 200,000 Russians and Jews left Azerbaijan, while the number of Azerbaijani refugees coming from Armenia or Karabagh reached 230,000 to 250,000. ³

Table 1.1 Population distribution and ethnic composition of five Soviet Central Asian Republics (1989)

The formation of eight independent republics in the southern region of the former Soviet Union was accompanied by political tensions between neighboring states and ethnic groups, which in some cases led to bloody confrontation. Citizens of the fledgling republics engaged in post-Soviet restructuring of the region, where old identities were being recast and in some cases new ones invented. Often the primary basis for such new or reformed identity was a deep sense of distrust toward Russia and Russians, recasting one’s identity by rejecting the “other”, which often included “other-izing” the Russians.

Table 1.2 Population distribution and Ethnic Composition of three Soviet Republics of the Caucasus (1989)

With a community of 25 million, some 17 percent of the total Russian people, Russians living in the former Soviet states formed the largest displaced ethnic group of the Soviet Union. Language, religion, and the Russian colonial past all alienated the Russian community from its host republics. For decades, the practice of using Russian as the lingua franca had kept the Russian communities in the Caucasus and Central Asia from learning the local languages. From July 1989 to May 1990, all republics in the former Soviet south passed laws replacing Russian with their own national languages as their state language. Following independence, insistence on the use of national languages became even more pervasive, limiting the use of Russian but also the languages of other ethnic minorities.

Russian and non-Russian immigrants leaving the southern independent republics increased in the first years following the fall of the Soviet Union. In Turkmenistan, the size of the Russian population dropped from 12.6 percent of the total population in 1989 to 6.7 percent in 1995; in Uzbekistan, the decrease in the same period was from 8.3 percent to 6.0 percent.⁴ In Kazakhstan, which had a large Russian population, the number of Russians leaving the country for the Russian Federation during 1989–1993 reached 614,838, some 9.9 percent of Kazakhstan’s total Russian population.⁵ The same rate could be observed in the other republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia. Moreover, during the last ten years, in the absence of Sovetskij chelovek, there has been an observable gradual increase in the sense of alienation among ethnic minority groups in each new republic, which has manifested itself in the crafting of a new diaspora identity for themselves. In the post-Soviet era, many of the diasporic populations who had settled in compact communities in the former Soviet republics have formed cultural societies, produced periodicals, and staunchly taught their children their own religious convictions and vernacular languages, even when they were sent to Russian schools. Moreover, they follow intimately the political changes in their country of origin.

In contributing to a definition of diaspora, Walker Connor has observed that “despite massive migration, it is still the case that all but a relatively small percentage of the world’s population lives within an ethnic homeland” and propounds a working definition of diaspora as “that segment of a people living outside the homeland.”⁶ Distinguishing those d...