Earlier works on Russia and the USSR, Dr. Ulrich Hofmeister begins, offer valuable insights and verify the importance of the civilizing mission idea (Zivilisierungsmissionvorstellungen) to undergird their rule in Central Asia. Hofmeister, however, in this large, complex and important work, aims to “fill the gaps” with a detailed study that analyzes and contextualizes Russia's civilizing mission idea and its manifestations, and that follows their development over time from the conquest of the Central Asian states to 1917 (18). Influenced by Foucault's Archeology of Knowledge (1969), Hofmeister proposes that the civilizing idea is a discourse and constant throughout the period.

The etymology of the words civilization and mission reveal underlying assumptions. “Civilization,” a product of the Enlightenment, signifies a process of improvement and a universal, trans-temporal ideal social form. The adjectives “civilized” and “uncivilized” follow from it and express how far a society or individual had progressed toward the ideal. “Mission” carries with it a religious sensibility and a charge or assignment often reinforced by dynamic personal conviction. Other components of the civilizing idea were more equivocal. Names, for example russkii, korennoi russkii, russko-poddanyi and rossiiskii, confuse the line between superior and inferior. Moreover, Russia's civilizing mission was in different ways not like the western mission civilisatrice. Russia developed her own notion of common humanity from her relations with the Kazakhs and Bashkirs in the eighteenth century. Russia's mission contained a multitude of forms and markers signifying difference and sameness, and they all entered the standard repertoire of Russian Central Asian discourse.

In Chapters 4, 5 and 6, the focus is on planning and employing the civilizing mission in Turkestan. Here Hofmeister draws his primary data from some 300 memoirs and reports by bureaucrats, army officers, and contemporary publicists. The first tasks of the Kolonialherren (colonial masters, lords), a term employed throughout, were to acquire geographic and ethnic knowledge and to uncover ways to engage the locals. Perhaps complacently confident that toleration, example, and openness alone would always win over the indigenous population, the principles of gradual and orderly transition to the Russian way of life remained intact. The Kolonialherren agreed about the areas to address: infrastructure, Russian resettlement, urbanization, education, medicine, indigenous women, and nomadism. Starting in the 1880s, however, the observers increasingly pointed out that Russian institutions on their own seemed not attractive enough to win over the indigenes. The Kolonialherren began to fear the costs of civilizing and the troubles arising from the size of their project.

The attack by Islamists on a Russian army camp at Andijan (Andijon) in 1898 challenged the masters’ confidence. Some of the Kolonialherren recognized that local conservatives saw in the Russian lifestyle a decline of morals, which both sides acknowledged. Most observers, though, did not doubt that many city-dwellers had begun to take up Russian lifestyle. Jadidism demonstrated that the local population generally did not disapprove of the European understanding of progress. In the section “Progress as Menace” (Chapter 6.3.3), however, the success of conventional Islamic schools, ascending and tilting in the direction of the Russian administration, presented a threat to some Kolonialherren: the more the Islamic schools appeared to advance modern thinking and national consciousness, the more they made obsolete Russia's civilizing mission and Russia's control, which was in a sense a “planned failure” (295).

Chapter 7 engages the civilizing mission idea in the aftermath of the 1916 uprising in Turkestan. Among the Kolonialherren there was no consensus whether the cause was the change in military recruitment law, local corruption, or the ignorance of local officials. For example, Aleksei Kuropatkin, the governor general of Turkestan, spoke for rigorous administration, the stern but just father, as the key to the civilizing mission's success. By contrast, Aleksandr Kerenskii, then a State Duma delegate, blamed corruption on the administration: if culture and progress are neglected, Russia will never be more than Turkestan's satrap (311). The Bolsheviks made a complete break and declared the civilizing mission idea dead—“even if their own thinking was more influenced by this concept than they publicly admitted” (315). Following is an essay on the civilizing mission in Soviet times.

The book's foundational idea lies in discourse theory, but the narrative basically is historical, recounting the debates over planning and implementing the civilizing mission idea. Unearthing complexity and irony, the fixedness of the mission's goal in the minds of Russian officials, the difficulty of reaching agreement, and the slow realization that the locals were more reticent than imagined is the work's great achievement. Perhaps the narrative is, at places, repetative, especially in the topically organized chapters, when previously cited information is needed to set up a new topic. All in all, this is a strikingly original contribution and new essential reading for students of Russian colonialism. As promised, he does “fill the gaps.” Ulrich Hofmeister is a faculty member at the Institut für Osteuropäische Geschichte, Universität Wien.