This volume is based on contributions to a conference in honor of the work of a leading scholar of Russian imperial and Soviet history, Ronald Grigor Suny. Reflecting the focus of Suny's own research on imperial and national dynamics in Eurasia, contributors explore how multiple forms of belonging were shaped by policies, practices, and discourses in the Eurasian borderlands of Anatolia, the Caucasus, Tatarstan, and Central Asia during the long twentieth century. These areas, the volume argues, constituted a distinct politically- and culturally-intertwined region. The contributions highlight how, despite different assumptions about the relationships between individuals and groups within empires and nations, there are, at times, striking similarities in the management of human diversity within different polities. In itself this finding is neither surprising nor new. However, taken together, the volume's case studies offer a wealth of new empirical research and insightful analyses into how ethnonational, imperial, and civic identities were continuously reformed in relation to each other in the region.
The editors and contributors did not set out to focus on the negative aspects and consequences of the politics of belonging in Eurasia. Yet the volume offers us a powerful reminder of the levels of violence that accompanied the reshaping of peoples and communities from the late nineteenth century onwards. The part of the world that is the focus of the volume has been specifically labeled as “bloodlands.” Yet comparisons that the contributors draw with the dynamics of belonging elsewhere warn against exceptionalizing the Eurasian borderlands.
The editor's excellent introduction and Suny's masterful conclusion contribute to ensuring the volume's coherence. Its structure that distinguishes between the forging of belonging through negation, cultural standardization, and mythmaking helps the reader follow continuities and changes through the crucial historical turning points that the individual chapters highlight. The dynamics of exclusion and inclusion within empires, nation-states, and hybrid polities, such as the Soviet Union, are theorized in Janet Klein's article on the uses of the concept of minority. Klein foregrounds the performative power of the concept, as from the time of its appearance around 1850, through its extensive use during the First World War, and throughout the rest of the twentieth century, this concept shaped constructions of reality on the ground. Drawing on examples from the Russian imperial and Ottoman contexts, Klein convincingly argues that this process of construction, which she terms minoritization, is distinct and historically contingent. Klein's contribution warns against the anachronistic application of the conceptual apparatus to the periods when the concepts that scholars utilize did not exist. This point is reinforced in the volume's concluding chapter by Jeremy Smith, who explores new forms of belonging in Central Asia after the collapse of the USSR. Smith argues against anachronistically perceiving the Commonwealth of Independent States as, from the start, being a mere framework for managing the disintegration of the Soviet Union, showing instead how the purpose of the organization and the place of the Central Asian republics within it developed over time.
The dynamics around the negation of belonging are analyzed in the chapters that depict grotesque cases of state brutality. Ian W. Campbell's contribution tells the story of the capture of the Tekke Turkmen's stronghold, Geok-Tepe, by the Russian army in 1881, and demonstrates how subsequent Russian imperial and Soviet accounts of the event whitewashed mass killings through narratives of Russian mercy. A similar story of collective punishment of the Kirgiz nomads during the 1916 revolt in Semirech΄e is the subject of Matthew J. Payne's chapter, whose analysis goes beyond the actions of the military and politicians in discussing violence of ordinary people, particularly Russian settlers. Even though some actors of the time condemned the brutal suppression of the 1916 revolt as reflecting practices of the past that had no place in a modern, civilized state, in reality, these atrocities were only a prelude for even greater ones. Claire P. Kaiser's contribution appropriately reminds us that violence and coercion associated with reshaping belonging were manifested not only in the times of war. She focuses on the expulsions from the southern Caucasus in the aftermath of World War II, showing a major role played by political elites in Georgia in designing these ethnic-cleansing policies. In this chapter, we can hear particularly well the voices of ordinary people who, in their petitions to the authorities or in personal diaries, expressed bewilderment as to why they were deemed to not belong in Georgia.
Following the Second World War, the most extreme cases of the negation of belonging started to be termed genocide. Norman M. Naimark's chapter reminds us, however, that genocides occur throughout history. The Armenian Genocide of 1915, which Naimark's chapter puts in broad temporal and geopolitical contexts, had major repercussions for the entire region, which are explored in two of the volume's chapters. Jo Laycock focuses on how Soviet Armenia was shaped by the consequences of the 1915 genocide, which affected the ways that a sense of belonging was forged among those resettled in the area. Laycock's analysis introduces a new actor—“western” international organizations assisting with the resettlement of refugees, showing that their practices displayed similarities with the Soviet nation-building project. Both sets of actors, of course, shared common understandings of nationhood that developed in Europe during the previous century. As Jeremy Johnson's chapter demonstrates, one of the ways of constructing a sense of belonging, both Armenian and Soviet, was through the standardization of the Armenian language to encourage the spread of literacy, as well as making the population embrace new Soviet concepts. Multiple reforms of the Tatar language, including changes of the alphabet, discussed in Daniele E. Schafer's contribution, depict the role of the symbolic violence reflected in Soviet policies, as linguistic reforms profoundly influenced what cultural heritage would be accessible to the Tatars.
Mythologizing narratives of nationhood and belonging that are analyzed in the final part of the book, appear, at first glance, to be less overtly violent, yet they turned out to be no less transformative. Whittington deconstructs the concept of the Soviet people from its first appearance in 1935 to its crystallization during the Second World War, demonstrating how the legacy of the Russian empire informed the concept's articulation. Stephen H. Rapp, Jr. shows how narratives about medieval history of the Caucasus were manipulated by intellectuals in Georgia, highlighting the role these narratives played at the time and in the aftermath of the USSR's collapse.
In their introduction the editors promise readers that they will hear the voices of ordinary people from refugees and deportees to nomads. Yet this promise is rarely fulfilled. Most chapters tell us about the views and actions of those who held the upper hand in deciding whom to include and whom to exclude from imperial and national communities. This limitation notwithstanding, this valuable volume offers a rich picture of the politics of belonging in turbulent periods of revolution, war, and regime change in a region of high ethnic diversity that was at the center of constant imperial contestation.
