The study of modern Central Asian history has long been bifurcated between the Russian and the Chinese sides of the region. Much of the non-English scholarship is in Russian or Chinese, and it is the rare historian who can read both. Aside from the linguistic hurdles, since at least the 1880s the two sides have experienced notably different political and social trajectories. Scholarly access to former Soviet Central Asia opened wide, then mostly shut, after the Soviet collapse, while access to China's Xinjiang Province closed more slowly but definitively. Even before then, the different policies that the Chinese and Soviet Communist Parties pursued toward their ethnic minorities/nationalities (an important distinction) resulted in much less material being produced in any language about, not to mention by, Muslims in China. These obstacles are all good reasons not to try to write a comprehensive history of Central Asia. Yet that is what Adeeb Khalid has done, in a book aimed at introducing a broad audience to this complex region. Khalid uses his formidable range of languages and long-time travel throughout Central Asia, including a recent trip to Xinjiang, to show the connections as well as the disjunctures between the two sides. The greatest challenge in writing such a book is organizing the material into a coherent narrative, which Khalid has done admirably well. The book focuses on comparative experiences of colonialism and modernity, and is particularly helpful for understanding why two ostensibly Marxist governments treated minority populations so differently. For anyone trying to understand Central Asia as a whole, this book is the new standard account.
The peoples who lived between Khurasan (northeast Iran) and Altishahr (the towns around the great Taklamakan desert basin) shared longstanding cultural and economic ties. Regional political practices created loose appanage systems that differed between east and west even before the Chinese and Russians took over. The western Transoxiana region was governed by the Uzbek khanates of Kokand, Bukhara, and Khiva, whose rulers spent as much energy battling rebellious subordinates as they did each other. The eastern Altishahr region was dominated by the Mongol Zunghar state until the Qing dynasty crushed it in 1756. Under Zunghar or distant Qing rule, local Muslim notables exercised authority on behalf of the government. The Qing named the region Xinjiang (“New Dominion”), but for decades maintained only a few military garrisons there. This light hand enabled the notables to seek help from Kokand in throwing out the Qing. After putting down a large rebellion in the 1820s, one Qing councilor urged the government to bind Xinjiang more closely to Beijing by settling Han farmers in the region and giving them governing power. The emperor did not take his advice at the time, but Khalid shows that the idea of pacifying Xinjiang by making it Chinese has deep roots.
The Russian conquest of the Uzbek khanates between 1865 and 1881 did not sever ties between the two sections of what came to be called Turkestan. The Russian advance coincided with the near collapse of Qing control over Xinjiang as the dynasty weakened from European predations. The Qing retreat allowed an agent from Kokand, Yakub Beg, to make a serious bid to turn Altishahr into an independent state, even as he pledged symbolic loyalty both to Russia and to the Ottoman empire. Yakub Beg's government did not survive the massive Qing re-conquest in 1876. The re-conquest further persuaded the Russians to cede the Ili River valley back to Qing control in 1881, the only instance of Russia voluntarily agreeing to relinquish territory. Nonetheless, people, goods, and ideas continued to be exchanged across the new border.
The period of imperial rule is the start of daunting organizational challenges for the historian. Khalid alternates between events in Russian Turkestan and in Xinjiang, comparing the differing methods and goals of each empire. Whereas China cultivated a narrative in which all its subjects should form one Confucian whole, Khalid points out that the Russian empire was never about advancing Russians as a nation, but instead the interests of a ruling elite that in turn served the tsar. In Turkestan agents serving the tsar often were not ethnic Russians, but Tatars, Uzbeks, and even a few Kazakhs who engaged in commercial or scientific activity that furthered Russian state interests. One of the most interesting of these agents was the Kazakh officer Shoqan Valikhanov, who conducted ethnographic research among the Kyrgyz and in Xinjiang. The fact that these tsarist agents could be local to the region gave Russia greater reach into Xinjiang than the Qing could manage by relying on Han or Hui (ethnic Han who were Muslim) soldiers who had to travel and be supplied over long distances. This fascinating analysis of the big picture also shows some of the drawbacks to such a sweeping comparison, because Khalid has no space to discuss Valikhanov's views on the people he worked with.
Jadidism, the modernizing reformist movement that a small cadre of Turkestani intellectuals introduced into the Russian Empire in the 1890s, has been at the heart of Khalid's work for decades. It is no surprise that in this book he makes an ardent case for Jadidism's importance as one of the last direct bridges between the two sides of Turkestan. On the Russian side, local merchants demanded new-style schools so that their children could succeed in the imperial economy. Merchants who had strong trade ties to Russia introduced Jadid schools into north Xinjiang in 1898. The few Chinese-language schools in the region did not appeal to parents, so no Chinese-educated intelligentsia developed in Xinjiang as a Russophone one did in Turkestan. On both sides, modernizers argued for an ethnonational identity based on Turkic languages, an ethos Khalid labels “Turkism.” As in the Ottoman empire, modernizers made up a tiny portion of the population, but wielded outsized influence.
The revolutions and wars of the early twentieth century set the two sides of Turkestan on very different paths, creating headaches for the historian. In his later sections, Khalid generally alternates chapters between Soviet Central Asia and Xinjiang, which creates a clean narrative while still allowing ready comparison. I cannot begin to summarize the rich material Khalid provides over some 350 pages, so I will focus on how two communist states ended up with such different results.
After 1917 the new Soviet government implemented its version of Marxist nationality policy, working with local modernizers to create republics governed by titular nationalities in their own languages, at least in theory. In reality, Soviet nationalization was ultimately a tool to fulfill the communist state's needs. Meanwhile, the Chinese republican government lost control of Xinjiang to assorted Han warlords, but doggedly maintained that it ruled the entire former Qing empire and its peoples as a unitary state. Khalid emphasizes that the inalienable unity of the state has been “the lodestar for all Chinese elites” (138) of all political persuasions. The interwar chaos in Xinjiang allowed the Soviets to intervene deeply, but Iosif Stalin chose to support Han warlords over the nascent Uyghur national movement because the warlords could be used for Soviet economic and military interests. Even as the USSR promoted Tashkent as a beacon of revolutionary hope to Muslims everywhere, Stalin only gave military and economic support to the second East Turkestan Republic of 1944 because it could potentially help protect the USSR as a buffer state. Once the Chinese Communist Party took control in 1949, Stalin lost interest. In the end, both the USSR and China either used Turkic modernizers to further their own ends or discarded them.
In his chapters on the post-war decades, Khalid continues the argument he has made previously that Soviet Central Asian nations are as much a Jadid legacy as a Soviet one. Another legacy that he could have foregrounded is the older one of Russian state structure. The party nomenklatura was a multinational elite serving the state just as the imperial elite had, even though ideological and economic conditions had changed a great deal. The Central Asian nomenklatura was especially disconnected from ordinary citizens. While most Soviet republics developed mass movements for national independence in the 1980s, Central Asia did not. While Baltic, Ukrainian, and south Caucasian governments have needed to win popular support, the Central Asian ruling class has been about as hostile to democracy as the Russian siloviki. The political culture of the old Uzbek khanates also undoubtedly contributes to this pattern. Many interacting phenomena contribute to what we see in Central Asia today.
On the Chinese side the picture appears to be simpler. Mao's Zedong revolution was always about restoring Chinese national dignity; the CCP classified Muslims as ethnic minorities rather than as autonomous nationalities. This was a natural continuation of centuries of policy. Khalid suggests that Beijing's increasingly brutal crackdown on Uyghurs is motivated in no small part by its conclusion that the USSR crumbled because it gave too much power to its nationalities. He concludes his book with a grim account, as best as current conditions allow, of the new Gulag in Xinjiang.
Khalid cannot conclude with a Grand Unified Theory of such a diverse region, but in the end that is the point. Colonialism, modernization, and even communism have all created very different results, not only because they were never simple phenomena themselves, but each iteration of the “-isms” of the modern world was a product of older political and social structures. Khalid's excellent book gives us a large-scale view of how this played out across both sides of Central Asia.
