American historiography of Soviet nationalities has attracted a quizzical phraseology. The ominous “Great Friendship” and the mocking “Surrogate Proletariat” of Cold War-era studies, and the more recent formulations such as “Affirmative Action Empire” and (for Central Asia) “Veiled Empire,” all evoke the dissonances between the asserted and the real, and between the plans and outcomes that marked the Soviet project.^[1] The present work under review is partly a demonstration that the intertwining pattern of theoretical contradictions and practical solutions in Soviet nationalities policy was scalable from the all-Union to the republican level: if the USSR was, to use Francine Hirsch’s phrase, an “Empire of Nations,”^[2] then Adrienne Lynn Edgar has climbed down a level in the hierarchy to reveal the Turkmens of Central Asia as a problematic “Nation of Tribes” (a slight contortion of her title).
Edgar’s excellent monograph, Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan is the best portrayal to date of precisely what happened after 1917 and through the decade or so after the 1924 national delimitation of Central Asia, when those familiar cut-out figures, “the party authorities” and a given “nationality,” actually interacted, shared members and ideas, and shaped each other’s policies and actions over time. Edgar sees Turkmenistan as “a textbook case of a nation created by state fiat,” though “[f]ar from being passive recipients of a national culture invented in Moscow, Turkmen themselves played a major role in shaping the institutions and discourses of nationhood in the 1920s and 1930s” (P. 5). Grounded in exhaustive archival research and extensive reference to the best scholarship in Russian, Turkmen, and western languages, Edgar’s methods embrace ethnographic sensibilities and an eye for intellectual history.
The first four chapters reveal the cultural and historical categories that served as inputs for the creation of Soviet Turkmen national identity, chart the “assembly” of the nation through the 1924 national delimitation, and highlight the growth of the new Turkmen national elite and their often bitter relations with the bureaucrats from Moscow who relegated them to secondary status while supposedly “assisting” them. Perhaps the most radical effects of the give-and-take between center and periphery, however, are revealed in Chapter 6, “A nation divided: Class struggle and the assault on ‘tribalism’.” Turkmen kinship and family structures occupied the nexus between economic survival strategies and identity. When the authorities attempted in the 1920s and 1930s to dismantle kinship structures in order to create a class of poor peasants dependent on the state, their efforts backfired. Most Turkmens rode economic waves caused by the uncertainties of rural production and the relatively easy capitalization of labor, so that they alternately helped and were helped by their extended kin-groups. In such an economic environment, the concept of rich “exploiters” as a class made no sense. While the Soviets trumpeted the collapse of the “tribal-clan structure” and tried to theorize kinship out of existence as a supposed class victim of the advance of feudalism, adroit Turkmens started to express normal kin conflicts in terms of class, an example of the “striking ease with which each side adopted and manipulated each other’s categories” (Pp. 195-196). The end result was that “[t]hrough land reform and other ambitious programs aimed at transforming Turkmen rural life, the regime broadened the scope for descent group competition and reinforced the rationale for kin-based solidarity [among Turkmens unconverted to the Soviet cause].” (P. 168).
Edgar has a flair for using her meticulous research to boil large-scale, messy processes down to tight patterns of details that reinforce the human dimension. Cascades of unanticipated side-effects poured forth in the wake of political pronouncements as the populace willfully defied state intrusion. Edgar documents cause and effect for no fewer than eight types of subterfuge and passive resistance engaged in by Turkmens facing expropriation of land during collectivization (Pp. 180-181). The only mode of resistance that has hitherto been studied in any depth, popular revolts that were put down by force, represents the tip of the iceberg (Chapter 7, “Cotton and collectivization: Rural resistance in Soviet Turkmenistan”).
Even as Moscow seems to have succeeded in getting the Turkmen party elite to understand what a “poor peasant” was, that very category became a booby-trap on another social front: the modernization of gender and family relations. The “Emancipation of the unveiled” to which Edgar ironically refers in the heading of Chapter 8 represents the difficult task the Soviets faced in dealing with the issue of Turkmen women. Although Muslim, they traditionally went unveiled, which meant that the symbolic, ritualistic unveilings staged in neighboring Uzbekistan during the hujum could not be replicated so effectively on Turkmen soil. So the zhenotdel went after other ways Turkmen women suffered oppression, often at the expense of Turkmen approval, as the authorities seemed paradoxically “determined to expunge the very social and cultural practices that were most closely identified with being Turkmen” (Pp. 222-223). Many of the closest identifications were bound up with Islam, but here Edgar balances the growing literature on the Soviets’ mishandling of the religion card in Central Asia^[3] with a story that shows how Central Asian Muslims could feel the sting of their own opportunistic abandonment of traditions. Among the provisions of the 1918 Code on Marriage and the Family was the guarantee of the freedom of either spouse in a marriage to divorce the other. Within a few years, there arose the worrisome trend of Turkmen women becoming serial divorcées as their families married them off again and again to collect more bride wealth (galïng). The biggest losers, of course, were the poorest husbands, who might spend their life savings on the customary bride wealth and never be able to marry again once divorced. Gaigïsïz Atabaev, chairman of the sovnarkom, was the Turkmen official who noticed that the Communist Party’s intended class allies – (male) poor peasants – were paying the price for measures aimed at gender equality. Atabaev’s personal intervention in 1925 caused the Turkmen TsIK to back down and effectively make an exception of Turkmenistan in the campaign for women’s rights. Edgar finds in this controversy an important exception to the “surrogate proletariat” thesis, according to which the Communist Party tried to fashion the women of Central Asia into its base of support by manipulating gender and family customs in women’s favor (Pp. 239-244).
Edgar points out instructive ways in which the Turkmens were exceptional among the new Central Asian nationalities, but it is in her handling of the Turkmen tribes’ distinct historical position that I differ with her approach. Chapter 1, “Sources of identity among the Turkmen” clearly portrays the many facets of Turkmen identity under Russian imperial rule. Edgar’s continual reminders about formerly Bukharan, Khivan, and Turkestani localities in the new Turkmen space creates a multi-polar undertone that emphasizes how little material the Turkmens possessed from which they could make a nation. She perceptively states, “In the mid-nineteenth century, the emergence of a nation based on one of the large Turkmen tribes – Yomuts, Tekes, or Ersarïs – would have seemed more plausible than the formation of a Turkmen nation” (P. 8). However, there seems to be a note of exasperation, as if over-correcting for the distortions of Soviet-era ethnic histories, in Edgar’s broad assertion, “It is difficult to identify distinct, let alone cohesive, ethnic groups in Central Asia prior to the twentieth century” (P. 18).^[4]
It is true that the Turkmens were uncommonly fragmented, “acephalic,” and recalcitrant toward nearby states, but this in itself set them apart. Edgar mentions many ways in which the Turkmens were distinct, a short sketch of which will suffice here. Bearing the second-oldest ethnonym of any titular nationality of modern Central Asia (possibly dating to the eighth century), the Central Asian Turkmens began to emerge in the thirteenth century from the wholesale shuffling of tribal structures that followed the imposition of Mongol rule. In the seventeenth century the Turkmens were already the subject of a unique work of ethnic history.^[5] The Turkmen tribes were distinguished from the rest of the Central Asian Turks by their Oghuz dialects and – so far as Central Asian nomads were concerned – relatively heavy cultural influences from Iran. A Turkmen literary language was in use from the eighteenth century; the nascent literature was centered around, but not limited to, the works of the famous Mäkhtumquli, whose seminal influence and reputation as national poet were more than constructs of Soviet nation-builders.^[6] Turkmen tribes preserved their warlike character to an unparalleled degree, and offered the fiercest resistance that the Russians faced in conquering Central Asia in the late nineteenth century. Turkmens have been set apart from other Central Asian ethnic groups on the basis of physical type, economic features (desert nomadism and prevalence of one-humped camels), handcrafts (“Bokhara” pile carpets), certain sacred lineages, and folklore. If we were to visualize a number of such features plotted on a coordinate system, the resulting ethnic “scatter-graph” would be tighter and more distinct for the Turkmen tribes than for any other titular nationality of modern Central Asia. In short, the Turkmens should be considered a nation not only ab imperio, but also, in a sense, ab ovo.^[7]
Edgar commands all the facts underlying Turkmen distinctiveness (“Turkmen-ness,” türkmenchilik), yet by declining to problematize the meaning of that distinctiveness, some things seem to surprise her. In Chapter 5, “Dueling dialects: The creation of a Turkmen language,” she comments, “The xenophobic sentiments expressed against ‘brother Turks’ in the 1920s indicate that neither a pan-Turkic nor a pan-Turkestani identity figured prominently in the thinking of most Turkmen intellectuals” (P. 135) – apparently because those intellectuals had already come to see the Turkmens as a separate people. Further: “The Turkmen passion for linguistic issues [in the 1920s and 1930s] was a bit surprising, given that genealogy rather than language was the primary basis of Turkmen identity” (P. 129) – this is surprising only if we imagine identity as a static essence with a single, overriding “primary basis.” Anthropologists would have us view identity as contingent, assertive, and transitory,^[8] – something suggested by the contestable consensus of a scatter-graph. While it is agreed that history was not “leading the Turkmen inexorably toward unified nationhood” (P. 7), to say that “Turkmenistan was a textbook case of a nation created by state fiat” (P. 5) is only part of the story: such a textbook would not do justice to the underlying distinctions to which the Soviet program in Central Asia gave new form, usually inadvertently (as was seen in the different handling of women’s emancipation in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan).
Tribal Nation is a clearly and engagingly written, vastly informed study of nation-building in Central Asia, which extends the framework for research and takes it to a new level. Throughout the book, the translations from Russian and Turkmen are masterly and graceful, and there are almost none of the scholastic traces with which reworked dissertations are commonly fraught. The book also includes an introduction, conclusion, glossary, bibliography, and index, all of high quality. (Though Barthold would no doubt wish to move his study “A history of the Turkmen people” [Op. cit.] out of the “Primary Sources” section, one thing about Edgar’s work that Turkmenophiles can only admire is her in-depth exploitation of literature from the incomparable early journal Turkmenovedenie). Besides three maps (it would have been helpful to have administrative maps of the 1920s-30s showing places referred to frequently in the text), there are a dozen well-chosen illustrations, mostly vintage photographs. Tribal Nation should be read and re-read by anyone interested in Central Asia and the formation of modern nationalities in imperialist spaces.