The Sovietization of Central Asia

The creation of states within the Central Asian geography and demography was a political construct of Russian colonialism turned Soviet enterprise. Despite the fact that this analysis is of Soviet Central Asia, it is necessary to understand the development of the area into the Soviet system. The development of the state, the development of ethnicities, and interaction between customary culture and the pursuit by the political elite to mold it are all highlights of Central Asia during Soviet rule.

Before the Russians' movement south through Central Asia to create the buffer during imperialism with the United Kingdom the area was home to nomadic peoples and sedentary peoples. Throughout the previous five hundred to one thousand years, any idea they had holding any semblance to being like a state would have been the empires, so to speak, ruled by the great Khans. These empires were usually fluid, and no nationalism was ever really created. Most dealt in family units, some extremely large, some quite smaller. There was no singular language that could be distinct to the area and create a unified ethnic language. Before 1917, everyone that was literate read and wrote in Arabic, but many spoke in different dialects and many in Turkic languages.

Even though this is just a quick screening of pre-Soviet times in the area, it is a major point that there was no real state-system in Central Asia as we know it today. It was the Soviet system that developed the political and national boundaries in their own right in order to keep the areas under their control. Interestingly enough, it was this beginning of a sense of national identity that helped deteriorate centralized Soviet control of Central Asia.

Since this is just a short analysis, there will only be a slight covering of how the Soviets were able to develop Soviet Socialist Republics, or SSR's. The Russians had already developed administrative entities under the tsars in the area, so when the Bolsheviks came into play, they were quick in setting up an autonomous republic in Turkestan, attaching it to the Russian Federal Socialist Republic, making Uzbek and Kazakh the official languages. Then they developed systems that the Muslims could rally around and see as there own, which then lead to Moscow coming down once they had absorbed the Muslims, taking away any special treatment and creating the five Central Asian Soviet Republics out of the governorates of the time, and by 1936, the lines were drawn for what each individual state has even today as independent states.

The creation of national identities' by Moscow was strategic and political. One purpose was to curb pan-Islam and pan-Turkic pride to develop as political movements that might create upheavals in the south and Turkestan's representation of Islam within the Russian borders. In fact, according to Olivier Roy in the book The New Central Asia: The Creation of Nations, it was the very idea of a Turkestan that the Soviets wanted to eradicate. There were a couple reasons in the choices of developing the ethnic lines, one being picking ethnic lines that would not favor nations outside the borders of the Soviet system, in order to prevent movements of nationalism within the Soviet borders, creating ethnicities that were all encompassing within the Soviet Union. This and the language differences were the key players in drawing the boundaries in breaking up the greater Turkestan of Central Asia.

The small linguistic differences that different areas of Central Asia had are what they focused on for separating the ethnicities. As mentioned earlier, the languages in Central Asia used the Persian, or Arabic alphabet, even though their language most closely coincided with Turkic phonetics. After 1917, Uzbek, Kazakh, and Kirghiz all adopted revised Arabic alphabets, ones that were more unilaterally efficient in the Central Asian languages. However, despite Soviet pressures to do this, they realized just a few years later the danger in having a language that separated them from Russians and gave them more common ground with Muslims outside of the Soviet Union. In 1928, a Latin based alphabet was introduced and approved for the Turkic languages of Central Asia. This coincided with the Soviet Union's first big push for literacy, and many in Central Asia learned how to read for using the Latin based alphabet. This in turn helped to separate them from the outside, since the Koran and older Islamic classics were no longer written in a way to be understood.

Despite the fact that different languages were being disseminated because of Moscow's ideas and local creativity, it was the Russian language that was still the center of administrative and centralized communication with the rest of the Soviet world. Eventually, a Cyrillic alphabet was introduced for the local languages, that way, students would not have to learn two alphabets. Throughout the Soviet rule, words were loaned from Russian into the common, everyday, local speaking languages, which have helped to develop the individual languages that are spoken today in each republic.

Despite the hurried creation of these new Central Asian states, most of the people of Central Asia still have a similitude to their historic culture. They are now players in what was a Western idea of the state system, and during Soviet Rule and Current Independent status have developed economic structures and systems of government that would definitely keep them from ever going back to the fluid border system of the Khans. The biggest problem for the Soviets was the ties to Islam. Leadership in Moscow would change often and ideas on how the people in Central Asia should be fluctuated with the leadership, but the one consistent worry was Islam.

Even with the economic plans that had this vast land, rich in resources that could sustain an industrial machine, and the development of mines, plants, and machinery shops, the vast majority sustained their old way of life of farming and taking care of their livestock, even though by now, individuals had their own plot of land (communal though it may have been). Many worried about the communal and overall success of the farms because many owned their own livestock, taking care of their individually owned items before they took care of the collectivized items and often used the states resources to provide for their own livestock and houses.

This was brought into light all the way at the end of the Soviet control with the changes that Gorbachev made in response to Central Asia's Islamic community and economic system. Propaganda was published throughout Central Asia on the dangers of Islam, targeting the religion as a method to tie themselves to a nationalist identity, rather that a part of the larger whole of the Soviet Union. But, to Gorbachev it was Islam and the problems with corrupt farming practices was just a signal that Soviet policies were failing and that the local party bosses and leaders were had been doing nothing other than paying lip service to the Soviet Centralized leadership over the years.

Interestingly enough, it would appear that the most significant part about Central Asia being under Soviet control is the fact that the Soviet Union was the entity that brought the area into a more modern sense of political existence. Right now there are five republics in Central Asia, where one hundred years before there was just a vast area of land controlled by the Russian tsars. To go along with these republics, there are five distinct languages with alphabets that coincide with 5 separate ethnicities. None of these existed one hundred years ago. Sure, one could argue that there were Kazakhs, and there were Uzbeks, but not to the extent now where they are recognized to having their own state and national legitimacy.

The Soviet Union tried to organize Central Asia into SSR's that would be most productive and useful to the Soviet Union, and it would appear that in doing so, they have just now created five ethnicities. These seem to be the biggest marks on Central Asia from the Soviet Union the development of the states, the creation and promulgation of the ethnicities, and how Moscow molded and created the individual groups to be what they are now.