In this awkwardly titled book, Botakoz Kassymbekova explores the mechanisms through which Soviet rule was established in one of the farthest flung corners of the state. Using a rich trove of archival materials from Tajikistan and Russia, Kassymbekova creates a fine-grained picture of Soviet power in action, with its limits, its chaos, and its confusions. Soviet power, Kassymbekova argues, was located not in institutions or laws, but in individuals, who had wide ranging discretionary powers and who were all held personally responsible for the implementation of decisions taken by central authorities. In eight thematic chapters that roughly follow the chronology from the establishment of Tajikistan in 1924 to the terror of 1937–38, Kassymbekova describes in admirable and unprecedented detail “cottonization” and forced migration; collectivization; denunciations and purges; the work of the political police, Machine Tractor Stations, “worker and peasant correspondents”; and the implementation of nationalities policy at the local level. Soviet rule appears as tenuous, capricious, chaotic, and confusing. In this confusion, Kassymbekova espies a number of “tactics of governance” and “strategies of rule” that in fact helped the work of state building. As she says in concluding Chapter 6: “Disorientation of Soviet officials over their roles was, it seems, a strategy that allowed for double-checking officials' loyalty, rotating and keeping them under surveillance. They also allowed Moscow, and ultimately Stalin, to remain the arbiter in unclear situations, throughout the Soviet Union” (159). Yet, the extent to which these “tactics” and “strategies” were clearly thought out and premeditated is never established. One could equally argue that the disorientation of Soviet officials was the result of utter chaos and disorder that was not meant to be, but which plausibly had the effect of producing Soviet power across the land of the Soviets. Seeing a well-articulated tactic or strategy of rule behind every campaign perhaps gives too much credit to the “authorities” (which shift from “the Moscow center” to the Politburo to Iosif Stalin himself over the course of the book).

The story that the book tells could have taken place anywhere in the Soviet Union, and that is precisely the author's point. “Soviet rulers,” she argues, “envisioned … not a conglomeration of cultures or ethnicities but rather a regime beyond or despite cultures” (8)—hence the title of the book. Soviet governance differed very little between Russia and Tajikistan; Central Asia was not a distinct part of the Soviet state. This is her intervention in the longstanding debate in the literature over whether Soviet rule over Central Asia was colonial or not. Soviet rule blurred “boundaries between imperialism and socialism, colonialism and state building,” as it “combined ideas and mechanisms of liberation and oppression, universalism and difference” (17). The exercise of power by modern regimes, it is true, cannot be neatly categorized as imperialism or socialism, colonialism or nation-state building. Nevertheless, the specificities of Tajikistan could have been more fully addressed in the book. Tajikistan was not, say, Ukraine, because it had never been fully a part of the Russian Empire. It was established in 1924 in the mountainous regions of eastern Bukhara, the region that the emirs of Bukhara had always struggled to control. The area was entirely rural and agrarian and had suffered grievously during the civil war. What did Soviet rule mean in such conditions? And who had a stake in it? The vast difference in attitudes between European and Tajik cadres does not come through clearly enough. European workers had a sense of ownership of the revolution and the Soviet state; Tajiks did not. Kassymbekova describes plenty of conflict between European and Tajik cadres, but she never systematically takes up the question of the different stakes the two groups had in the establishment of Soviet rule. Some of it has to do with the fact that Kassymbekova's sources are overwhelmingly archival. While she is healthily skeptical of what this documentation can reveal, she nevertheless has little access to Tajik voices from beyond the archive. (This is also evident in her use of Russian spellings for Muslim names. One wonders what it will take for Central Asians to take their place in histories of the region under their own names, so that Ibrohim Bek, the Basmachi leader executed by the Soviets in 1931, does not suffer a second defeat and effacement of his name by appearing as Ibragim in a book on Tajikistan?) A better understanding of what was going on in eastern Bukhara before the proclamation of Tajikistan as an ASSR would have allowed a more nuanced understanding of the stakes of the Tajik actors and the way they made sense of the upheavals they experienced.