The centenary year of the 1916 Central Asian Revolt has received more attention than many had anticipated, with numerous conferences and publications in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Russia, but S. Frederick Starr's Central-Asia Caucasus Institute at the Johns Hopkins University is so far the only western institution to have recognized the anniversary, with a reception in June 2016 at which the publication under review was launched.Footnote ¹ Unfortunately this reprinting of a sixty year old monograph (closer in time to the revolt itself than to our day), with no revisions or additions other than a four-page foreword, does an important subject few favors. It does not help that Starr manages to cram as many factual errors and misleading statements into those four pages as most scholars could manage in a full-length book. This begins with the very first sentence, in which Starr states that “a century ago approximately 270,000 Central Asians—Kazakhs, Tajiks, Turkmen, Uzbeks, and especially Kyrgyz—perished in one of the most ghastly mass deaths in modern history” (vii). In fact, estimates of the number who died vary widely—while the only demographic studies we have, based on tax data, suggest that some 267,000 people “went missing” in Semirech΄e in 1916, this includes missing births and emigration. The number of deaths was probably closer to 150,000, and of these it is not clear what proportion died directly at the hands of Russian forces, or as a result of disease and starvation while fleeing to China.Footnote ²

This story is horrific enough without the need for embellishment, but it soon becomes clear why Starr is espousing a maximalist estimate of the number of deaths, as he compares this “mass killing” to the Armenian genocide. In this he is echoing accusations that were first heard from the “Asaba” opposition party in Kyrgyzstan in the early 1990s, and which have gained considerable traction in the media and among nationalist historians in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan during the centenary year, without receiving official endorsement in either country.Footnote ³ These accusations are aimed squarely at Russia, and have unsurprisingly been vehemently refuted by Russian historians, and indeed by many in Central Asia.Footnote ⁴ Starr's desire to side with the “little guy” is understandable but misguided. There is no clear evidence of the intent of the Russian colonial authorities to destroy the Qazaqs or Kyrgyz “in whole or in part, as such”—though they certainly suppressed the revolt with extreme brutality and engaged in ethnic cleansing to free land for further Russian settlement. The accusation of genocide has the effect of shutting down all debate and dialogue between Russian and Central Asian historians, and it is driven not by any interest in historical truth, but by a form of ethnic and linguistic nationalism that is potentially extremely dangerous in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, with their large Russian minorities.

Starr also lends credence to the absurd idea, put forward by G. I. Broido in the 1920s, that the revolt was deliberately provoked by the authorities to give them an excuse to seize more land for Russian settlers.Footnote ⁵ The notion that local Russian colonial officials, most of whom were hostile to or at best ambivalent about peasant settlement in Turkestan, would have thought this a remotely sensible course to embark on when the Empire was staggering under the pressures of war is absurd.Footnote ⁶ The revolt came as a surprise to the authorities—3,000 Russian settlers were killed in Semirech΄e, as no adequate measures were in place to protect them. Broido was certainly correct in identifying the expropriation of land for Russian settlement as the deepest underlying cause, but his suggestion that the revolt and its suppression were planned by the authorities is the crudest kind of conspiracy theory, typical both of the hysteria over supposed plots and treason that dominated educated Russian opinion during the Great War, and of a period in Soviet historiography when all the disasters of the late Tsarist period were attributed to Machiavellian maneuvering rather than plain blundering.Footnote ⁷ Sokol himself lent it little credence (166–68), yet Starr writes that “it remains a hypothesis that must be carefully tested in each of the many regions in which the Uprising welled up” (ix–x).

The most egregious myth peddled by Starr, however, is that the history of the Uprising was suppressed in the Soviet period, the archives closed, the topic taboo. Even he is forced to admit that “during the first years after the Bolshevik coup, informative articles on the events of 1916 appeared in Russia”—as Sokol's book is based almost exclusively on Soviet publications, it would have been hard to deny this—“but by the end of the 1920s these ceased” (vii). This is simply untrue—important works on 1916 continued to be published in the 1930s.Footnote ⁸ While the revolt did largely disappear from Soviet historiography in the high Stalinist 1940s and early 1950s, there was still a section on it in the 1943 history of the Kazakh SSR, though now reconfigured for patriotic purposes.Footnote ⁹ From the 1960s, debate and discussion opened up once again—not just “a couple of minor studies” (viii), as Starr dismisses them, but Habib Tursunov's monograph on the subject, which remains the main full-length study in Russian, A.V. P΄iaskovskii's important publication of documents, and interpretations of the revolt as part of Uzbek, Qazaq, and Kyrgyz national history.Footnote ¹⁰

The important point about the historiography of 1916 is not that it was a suppressed or taboo subject, but that it was constantly reinterpreted to suit the prevailing political climate. In the 1920s and 1930s it was still acceptable to denounce Tsarist rule as an “absolute evil,” and Bolshevik authors such as Piotr Galuzo and Turar Rysqulov took a very radical, anti-colonial line that persisted into the 1930s.Footnote ¹¹ In the 1940s, this was replaced with the orthodoxy that Russian rule in Central Asia was a “lesser evil,” compared both to the “feudal” regimes which preceded it and the alternative of British imperialism, and it was held to have had a “progressive significance” for the peoples of the region. Some historians were denounced for “nationalist deviation” for writing approvingly about the resistance offered by Shamil or Sultan Kenesary to Russian expansion (the latter leading to the famous “Bekmakhanov affair”); these movements were classed as “feudal” and “reactionary.”Footnote ¹² However, the notorious Joint Scientific Conference on the History of Central Asia and Kazakhstan in the pre-October period held in Tashkent in 1954 decided that the 1916 revolt should be classed as “progressive.” It could no longer be described as an inter-ethnic conflict, but as a class struggle in which the Central Asian peoples, assisted by their Russian “elder brothers” among the settlers, rose up against both the Tsarist regime and the “Bais and Manaps” of their own exploiting classes. The violence inflicted on settlers by Qazaqs and Kyrgyz in Semirech΄e was reinterpreted as attacks on “kulak villages,” created as a result of the Stolypin reforms, while the violence inflicted by the settlers was conflated with repression by the Tsarist regime. Earlier Soviet writers such as Rysqulov, Broido, Brainin, and Shafiro were criticized for over-emphasizing the national element of the revolt and ignoring its class basis, but the revolt was still framed as a series of “national-liberation movements,” in uneasy tension with the idea of class struggle.Footnote ¹³ The story of these historiographical somersaults is well-known—Lowell Tillett's 1969 account remains unsurpassed, and in fact Sokol himself describes them briefly (165–75)—but Starr is apparently completely unaware of them.Footnote ¹⁴ He also ignores the extent to which these Soviet interpretations remain alive and well today: the bogus idea of class struggle has proved remarkably durable in modern Russian publications.Footnote ¹⁵ Meanwhile, the anachronistic division of the revolt into separate Kyrgyz, Qazaq, Uzbek, Tajik and Turkmen “national liberation movements” is now the orthodoxy in the post-Soviet historiography coming out of Central Asia.Footnote ¹⁶

So what of Sokol's book—was it worth reprinting? The short answer is no. It was a worthy and respectable attempt to tackle a subject that was virtually unknown in western scholarship at the time, but even judged by the standards of 1954 it hardly justifies the gushing descriptions as “a revelation,” “a masterpiece” or “a classic study of a vanished world,” as described on the back cover. If it had to be reprinted then a facsimile of the original edition would have been more useful, and given that the type has instead been reset, at the very least the opportunity could have been taken to correct the many misspellings of proper names in the original (such as “Ushzkuz” instead of Uch Zhuz, 65; “Serog” instead of Serov, 113). The first half of Sokol's book (1–65), is a general description of Russian colonial rule in Turkestan, and here not only recent scholarship, but even Richard Pierce's much superior monograph from 1960 rendered what he wrote almost entirely obsolete.Footnote ¹⁷ It shares the usual failings of Sovietological work, reproducing the categories and assumptions of the Soviet scholarship on which it relies.Footnote ¹⁸ It seems perverse to republish a book that asserts that the Qazaqs and Kyrgyz were only converted to Islam “after the Russian conquest in the 18^th and 19^th centuries” (6).Footnote ¹⁹ Sokol also repeats the Hobson/Lenin thesis that Central Asia was conquered for its cotton, and Soviet tropes about the economic oppression and class stratification produced by the expansion of the cotton economy in Central Asia from the 1890s (12–24).Footnote ²⁰ Sokol's description of the revolt itself—its causes, development, and suppression—has some more lasting value, largely because of the continued paucity of scholarship in English on the subject.Footnote ²¹ The only book on 1916 to have appeared in western scholarship since then is Jörn Happel's excellent 2010 monograph, which makes innovative use of Okhrana interrogations to write a history of the revolt from below, but even this focuses exclusively on Semirech΄e, while Sokol attempts to be more comprehensive.Footnote ²² No one since Sokol, for instance, has written anything in English about the 1916 revolt among the Turkmen (135–38), or attempted to chart the course of the revolt from the July violence in Jizzakh all the way through to the northern steppe (although for some reason he wrote nothing about the rebellion in Turghai, which had still not been suppressed at the time of the February revolution). He was broadly correct in seeing the revolt not just as a sudden, spontaneous reaction to a misconceived attempt to recruit Muslims into labor battalions, but as having deeper roots in tsarist colonization policies, and the expropriation of the best land in Semirech΄e for Russian settlers. Even so, western scholarship on 1916 has moved on since Sokol's day. Apart from Happel's monograph, there are important articles by Daniel Brower, Tomohiko Uyama, Cloé Drieu, and Akira Ueda.Footnote ²³ All of these, unlike Sokol, are based on direct access to archival sources, and in many cases on materials in Central Asian languages.

It is now possible to do far more profound research on 1916 than Sokol was able to, both in Central Asia and in Russia. Another of Starr's misleading claims is that “even today the Putin government bans access to the Tsarist archives in Moscow, where records of events leading up to 1916 and of the Uprising itself are housed” (viii). Well, this is certainly news to the hundreds of foreign historians who have been working in tsarist-era archives in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other Russian cities for the last 25 years—in March 2016, I was able to work quite freely with the records of the Asiatic section of the Main Staff relating to 1916 in the Russian State Military-Historical Archive in Moscow (RGVIA). The only place where I have been denied access to such materials is in Bishkek, where the government is anxious about the war of words which has erupted between Kyrgyz and Russian historians during the centenary, and has sought to deflect pressure from Moscow—but even here the closure is likely to be only temporary.Footnote ²⁴ RGVIA has recently published a large selection of documents relating to the revolt online.Footnote ²⁵ While these have clearly been selected to emphasize Russian suffering, they do include, for instance, the original of the notorious diary entry in which Governor-General Kuropatkin laid out his plan to deport all the remaining Kyrgyz around Lake Issyq-Qul to the mountainous region of Naryn, reserving all the best land for Russian settlers.Footnote ²⁶ The Russian archives also seem to have cooperated fully in the recent publication by the Kyrgyz-Slavic University in Bishkek of a six-volume collection of facsimile documents relating to the revolt.Footnote ²⁷ The archives that are currently almost impossible for western scholars to access are in Tashkent and Ashkhabad, not Moscow. The prevailing Russian interpretations of 1916 are indeed deeply problematic—they range from the active denial of the colonial nature of Russian rule and the presentation of settlers as the only victims of the revolt, to a more moderate argument that the revolt was a “general tragedy” provoked by the stresses of war, which still ignores both colonial inequality and the massive disparity in casualties on either side.Footnote ²⁸ Moscow has put pressure on Kyrgyzstan to “correct” what it sees as errors in the representation of the revolt in school textbooks.Footnote ²⁹ There is no sense in exaggerating the attempts by the Russian state to prevent the study of 1916, however, nor is the best way of combating them to espouse an extreme nationalist stance that is only shared by a minority of scholars even within Central Asia. Starr's interest in the 1916 revolt is in how it can be instrumentalized to fight contemporary political battles, something that is clear from the reference to “Putin's heavy-handed efforts to persuade Kyrgyzstan to join his new economic union” on the rear cover of this re-edition. This does a disservice both to the history of the revolt, and to the memory of its many victims. A better way to commemorate them than reprinting this outdated book would have been to invest in the scholarship of a new generation, who for the first time are making extensive use of oral history, poetry, and songs in Qazaq and Kyrgyz that give a completely different perspective on the revolt and the suffering it caused to that found in Russian accounts.Footnote ³⁰