SUMMARY:

Taking the analysis of colonial archives of British India by Bernard S. Cohn as a point of departure, the present article is an attempt to explore in the same analytical framework the colonial archives of Russian Turkestan. The article is based on the comparison of four case-types of archives that were represented in the collections of published materials, published documents and photographs. These archives are The Turkestan Collection by V. I. Mezhov (1867-1916), The Turkestan Album by A. L. Kun (1871-1872), the archives of the Turkestan General Governor’s office (1873-1917) and the collection The Turkestan Region by A. G. Serebrennikov (1901-1915). These archives are variegated forms of “colonial knowledge,” they differ in terms of provenance and functionality and represent four different aspects of Russian colonial rule over Central Asia. The archives demonstrate the difference in the language of colonialiality and ways of representing colonial objects. The first case is an ambitious project of cataloguing the whole corpus of rational knowledge that was created in the West and in the Russian Empire, and was focused on the region in question. The second case is the construction by the colonial administration of a glamourous representation of Russian Turskestan for exportation and consumption abroad. The third case is a monologue of the imperial voice represented in the documents of day-to-day administration of the system of indigenized military rule. The forth case is the historical reconstruction of the initial phases of the conquest of Central Asia. The comparison of these archival corpuses of knowledge allows a more adequate reconstruction of the specifics of the colonial situation in Russian Turkestan. The history of the formation of these archival complexes also allows a trace of the architecture and technology of power, as well as the peculiar features of the role of power-knowledge in the context of the Russian Empire. The article concludes with the answer to the question of why these archives should be understood as colonial, and the analytical framework that should be used for writing the history of these archives.