The Russian Empire and the Soviet Union both possessed very large Muslim populations, and the vast storehouses of documentary materials available to researchers in post-Soviet archives represent a major source for the study of these Muslim populations. Ever since empire came to the forefront of the historiographical agenda in the Russian/Soviet field, numerous scholars have used these archives to analyze official policy toward Muslim populations as well as the internal dynamics of those populations. The purpose of this short piece is to consider the limits and possibilities presented by these archives to the historian. What can these archives tell us about those Muslim societies and what can they not? Most particularly, what kinds of Muslim voices can we find in them and what are the challenges of hearing them?
The Muslim populations of the Russian empire were, of course, highly variegated and integrated into the Russian state to varying degrees. They ranged from the Tatars of the Volga basin, who had been under Russian rule since the middle of the sixteenth century and were well assimilated into the administrative structures of the empire by the nineteenth century, to the people of the North Caucasus and Turkestan, who came under Russian rule only in the second half of the nineteenth century and were governed under specific regulations that emphasized their backwardness and distance from “inner Russia.” The protectorates of Bukhara and Khiva were never fully incorporated into the Russian empire and became part of the USSR only in 1924. My own research has dealt primarily with Central Asia, and I will refer in this article to my own experiences in the archives of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, as well as those of Moscow, but I am confident that what I say applies, in broad outline, to all Muslim societies under Russian and then Soviet rule.
I speak of “post-Soviet” archives because the vast number of archives that we find in the territory of the former Soviet Union were all created by the Soviet state on a modular pattern and for certain specific political reasons. The current organization of the archives, of the collections they contain, and indeed often of individual files in them is the work of Soviet-era archivists and of Soviet-era archival practice. These archives were put together to facilitate the construction of a certain narrative of Soviet history, and this logic governs, to a certain extent, what was included in the archives, what did not interest the archivists, and what was excised. It was not for nothing that until 1991 state archives in each republic were called the “Central State Archive of the October Revolution and Socialist Construction.” They have been named and renamed since then, but the basic logic of their organization and their content has not changed significantly either in Russia or in Central Asia, nor has their position vis-à-vis the state.
There are three sets of archives that we find in each former republic of the USSR: archives that house records of organs of the state, those that maintain records of the Communist Party and its various organs, and the archives of Soviet-era security organs (ChK-GPU-OGPU-NKVD-KGB). Researchers working on the imperial period need only have dealings with the state archives, but the most interesting material for the Soviet period is in party archives, since it was the Party, as the self-proclaimed vanguard of society, that took all policy decisions. The state archives are, generally speaking, the most accessible. Party archives are much more sensitive and have in many instances ended up under the control of the executive branches of governments (the so-called presidential apparatus of each country). They are largely open and accessible in Russia as well as in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. In Uzbekistan, the party archive was open for a few months in 1991-1992 but has been closed to all except a few hand-picked Uzbekistani scholars ever since. The security-organ archives, with their dossiers of interrogations, incriminations and self-incriminations, and their trail of blood, are largely closed.
For the most part, what we find in the officially organized archives of the post-Soviet space are records of organs of power and, more specifically, of the organs of power introduced by the Russians. The state archives of Uzbekistan might claim, as they do, that they hold documents going back to 1298,^[1] but in reality, the vast bulk of the archives’ holdings comprises the documentary trail produced by Russian authorities since their arrival in the region in the 1860s. (Surviving documentation from the chanceries of the khanates conquered by the Russians in the 1860s and ’70s ended up in the Institute of Oriental Studies in St Petersburg, for the khanates were in the realm of Orientalism, not history, where they stayed all the way to the end of the Soviet period.) This basic fact determined the kinds of Muslim voices that may be found in these archives. We find Muslims in these archives only when they deal with the state. There are differences between the imperial and Soviet periods, and at the risk of being schematic, I will discuss the periods separately.
In Turkestan, the imperial state was largely non-interventionist and its small staff included few Muslims. A two-tiered system of administration emerged in Russian Turkestan, in which lower-level administration and lower-level courts continued to be staffed by “natives” and to function in the vernacular. Rather few of these records have ended up in the archives, but where they exist they can shed some light on dynamics of intra-Muslim relationships and how Muslims dealt with each other under the conditions imposed by the colonial state. The state archives of Uzbekistan contain, for instance, papers from the Islamic (qazi) courts that functioned in Turkestan under Tsarist rule, which if used with the requisite understanding of the functioning of Islamic law (and, of course, a knowledge of Uzbek written in the Arabic script) can convey interactions within Muslim society and the voices of various actors in it. Nevertheless, I would emphasize the thinness of these records. Many of the files contain little more than routine paperwork. One might also note that Turkestan never had a spiritual assembly such as those that existed in Ufa, Bağçasaray, and Tbilisi (Tiflis). These assemblies, established by the imperial state, were staffed largely by Muslims, and to the extent that they dealt explicitly with Muslim religious life, they can be said to convey Muslim voices (of religious elites).^[2] There is no equivalent for these bodies in Central Asia. Therefore, the voice of the religious elites (the ulama) of Turkestan remains quite elusive in the archives.
The upper level of administration, tied into empire-wide structures and career paths, had very few Muslims in it and even fewer Turkestanis (the majority of Muslim functionaries at this level were Tatars and Kazakhs, many of the latter from the Steppe krai). The records here are much more plentiful and form the bulk of the rich documentation in the state archives of the Central Asian countries. Here, however, Muslims appear primarily in two roles: either as supplicants or as objects of suspicion. Muslim supplicants write petitions to various organs of the administration in regard to any number of issues: seeking resolutions of disputes, asking for privileges or exemptions, complaining about one another, and so forth. Muslims also appear in the archives as objects of suspicion in reports of the chanceries of the governor-general and of the governors of various oblasts, as well as in the records of the special section of the department of police, or the Okhrana, which opened its Tashkent office in 1907. There is plentiful material on Muslims suspected and/or accused of criminal or political activity. The Okhrana’s files on those caught in the net of suspicion provide some very interesting detail on the lives of the individuals concerned, but they are always framed in a state discourse that should be seen as a state discourse and not taken as a transparent vehicle of information. If one were to believe the files of the Okhrana, in the decade and half leading up to the revolution, Turkestan was full of Turkish emissaries who apparently roamed the region freely; monies were routinely being collected for Turkish causes; groups of “mujahidin” (or madzhakhidin, in the spelling preferred by the police) were stockpiling vast caches of weapons in the countryside; and pan-Islamic sentiment was widespread. Yet, what is lacking here are the voices of the suspects themselves – even interrogations, with all the problems that they entail, are rare, and the bulk of the material is in the form of surveillance reports and reports of spies, translated into Russian.
In other Muslim areas of the Russian empire where the state’s reach into Muslim society was deeper, we can find a broader range of materials on Muslims and Muslim voices in a broader range of contexts. In European Russia, in addition to petitions and police reports, we have documentation for Muslim interaction with zemstvo organs and local courts, as well as the records of the “spiritual assemblies” of Ufa, Bağçasaray, and Tbilisi.
Things are a bit different for the Soviet period. The revolution was a revolution also in that it made room in the ruling apparatus for Muslims as well. The new state established by the Soviets was avowedly interventionist as it sought to reshape not just the economy, but also society, culture, and even the individual. There is a great deal more material on Muslims in Soviet-era archives than in those of the imperial holdings because organs of the state become more involved in the lives of the state’s Muslim citizens. Indeed, the gradual increase in the level of the state’s penetration of the lives of its Muslims – who in Turkestan had remained tuzemtsy down to the revolution – can be traced through the consistent increase in the volume of documentation devoted to them. We can also see the shift in language the bureaucracy uses in discussing Muslims: in Turkestan, tuzemtsy gave way to the korennoe naselenie in bureaucratic discourse only over the course of several years.
Muslims show up in Soviet-era archives, among other things, as actors in new organs of power. In the first years of Soviet rule, Muslim actors speak in a variety of voices and sometimes even in local languages, but as the Soviet order is consolidated, a more thoroughly Soviet Muslim elite emerges that speaks in a voice ever more orthodox – one could, after all, only “speak Bolshevik” in the organs whose records we find in the archives. After that, the only unorthodox Muslim voices we find in the Soviet-era archives are in the documents produced by the security organs and available in party or state archives. The most common of these are svodki (digests) of surveillance reports that the GPU began producing in 1923, which became fatter and fatter as the years went by. They were compiled for various audiences, come in various forms, and have in some cases been published.^[3]
Materials from the lower reaches of the Soviet and party bureaucracy contain many documents penned by Muslim functionaries, most of which are in the vernacular. In the 1920s, these documents are an interesting hybrid of Arabic-script form and Soviet content and provide a wonderful study of the evolution of the political language used by the lower-level apparat (and indeed, of the evolution of a new political vocabulary in the various Turkic and other languages of the Muslim communities of the USSR). Two collections of documents in the official archival system, one in Azerbaijan, the other in Uzbekistan, are worth noting. These are the papers pertaining to the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan (1918-1920) and the People’s Soviet Republic of Bukhara (BNSR, 1920-1924), two Muslim states run by governments dominated by modernist Muslim elites that had complicated relations with the nascent Soviet state.^[4] These collections also contain state-related materials, but the relation of the two states to Muslims is different, and therefore, the collections offer very interesting insights. I have worked only with the BNSR collections and will limit my comments to those, although I suspect that most of what I say applies to the Azerbaijani archives as well.^[5]
The official language of the Bukharan government was Uzbek and the vast bulk of the documentation is in the Arabic script. Only when BNSR authorities, whether in the Party or the state apparatus, dealt with the Soviet state – mostly through the Party’s plenipotentiary organs in Tashkent, the Turkbiuro (1920-22) and the Sredazbiuro (as it was renamed in 1924) – did they use Russian. The Bukharan archive then exhibits diglossia at several levels. At the most basic level, the split between Uzbek and Russian marks the very form of the documents, with manuscript Arabic-script texts of internal correspondence clearly distinguishable from the typewritten Cyrillic documents directed to external audiences. But there are other crucial differences as well. Bukharan documents often belong to a different chancery tradition than the Russian ones adopted by the new Soviet state. The BNSR documents hark back not to the chanceries of the emir of Bukhara, but rather to those of the late Ottoman empire, with its century-long experience of the creation and consolidation of a modern bureaucracy. The visual resemblance to late Ottoman documents is striking but so is the language. Internal BNSR documents speak the conceptual language of Muslim modernism. More specifically, it is a late Ottoman language of political and cultural reform refracted through Central Asian debates. Documents addressed to Tashkent or Moscow, on the other hand, more or less speak “Bolshevik” – they are loaded with the vocabulary of revolution and class. They are indistinguishable from party or state documents anywhere else in the Soviet state.
The fundamental fact is that archives are primarily repositories of state records and provide insights only into Muslim interaction with the state. The vast stretches of social and individual existence that did not touch the state are largely absent from these archives. Yet, post-Soviet archives contain enormous amounts of documentation about Muslims, including ordinary people. What are the possibilities and pitfalls of using these documents to gain insight into Muslim societies of the Russian empire and the Soviet Union?
Clearly, the documents illustrate best the ways in which the state thought about its Muslim subjects or citizens and how it sought to manage, control, reshape, or transform them, as well as the fears and paranoia it entertained. The archives can also tell us a great deal about how Muslims interacted with the state. A careful and sophisticated reading of the archives can tell us much about the strategies members of the empire’s various Muslim communities adopted in dealing with the state and the range of attitudes they exhibited. Yet, the archives have little to say about the vast stretches of social and individual existence that did not touch the state (which were enormous in the imperial period). To the extent that these were the spaces where many aspects of the worldviews of the empire’s Muslim subjects were shaped, their absence from the archives is a serious problem that can hinder serious investigation of Muslim strategies and attitudes vis-à-vis the state.
In recent years, several scholars have used post-Soviet archives as a window into the lives of the Muslim communities of the Russian empire and the USSR, and even to find a non-elite perspective on them. Robert Crews uses petitions from Muslim subjects of the Russian empire to make some very bold claims about the place of Islam and Muslims in the Russian empire.^[6] Working on a different era, Douglas Northrop uses OGPU and NKVD svodki as a mine of information about the quotidian realities of Soviet Uzbekistan.^[7] Both scholars claim quite explicitly that their use of these sources frees them from dependence on narratives created by “nationalists” and “intellectuals” and allows them to capture the voices of the people.
There are a number of crucial issues to contend with before we can make state-generated sources serve as conduits of popular opinion or attitudes. The documents no more contain the unvarnished thoughts of the people in whose name they are written than any elite proclamations made by intellectuals on behalf of the people. We need to be aware of the conditions in which the documents we find in the archives were produced. The documents we find in the archives have all gone through a number of transformations before we get them. The petitions from humble villagers were written by professional scribes to accord with accepted formulas and modes of presentation that the bureaucracy would understand. They were then translated into Russian by other professional translators. The language used there comes to us through many different prisms. What the petitions sought and the expressions of loyalty they contained are part of a larger set of strategies that cannot be discerned solely from the archives. Rather, some sort of comparison with other Muslim voices existing outside the ambit of the state might provide a check. Did Islamic discourse existing outside the purview of the state differ markedly from the expressions contained in the petitions? We can know only if we step outside the state-generated archives and find other sources against which to triangulate the archival sources.
Similarly, the svodki from the Soviet period are fascinating documents, but there are a number of problems with treating them as forthright representations of reality. The neatly typed documents that greet researchers in the archives contain many layers of literary production and many kinds of translations. They are based on reports from the field gathered, presumably, by “native” informants who commanded local languages. They were then translated into Russian by professional translators before being excerpted, abstracted, and classified in the course of the production of the digest in a way that was worthy of the eyes of the exalted readers. This is a complex production process about which we know very little, yet each of its stages takes us farther and farther from any access to “reality” the spy reports might have afforded in the first place. The translation involved is not just linguistic (from Uzbek or Kyrgyz or Tajik into Russian), but also conceptual. The svodki often have Central Asians using a vocabulary that sounds very strange indeed – it is most likely the result of translators translating the reports from “Muslim” into “Bolshevik” partly as a reflex and partly as a way of ensuring intelligibility for the anticipated readership.^[8]
The svodki are most useful as catalogues of the fears and anxieties of the regime and of the way it discerned reality. The sovdki can very fruitfully be studied to discern the classifications the Soviet state imposed on its population and the way they changed over time. It is interesting to see how for the OGPU the main divide in Central Asia remained that between “Russians” and locals, with the Russian population categorized by class, while the local population evoked interest for a different set of reasons.
The actual records of the ChK-GPU-OGPU-NKVD persecution – the accusations, the denunciations, the interrogations – are in separate archives and seldom available to researchers. Especially in Uzbekistan, where Soviet “repression” has been turned into a key feature of a national martyrology, selected scholars have been admitted into the archives of the political police and we have a small body of literature, mostly in a semi-academic register, based on these sources. Yet, this body of documentation raises its own set of problems. What are we to believe in the reams of stenographic record? Quite apart from the ethical issues involved in using evidence obtained under torture (as most of the interrogations were), we are beset with the basic issues of veracity (do the accused mean what they say? do denunciations carry any truth? and so forth) and accuracy (the records are mostly in Russian, when not all interrogations were conducted in it).
It should be clear that I am not arguing that Muslim voices in post-Soviet archives are problematic because they are inauthentic in some way. Rather, they are problematic because they are highly complex sources whose meaning has to be teased out with some effort. The problem lies in the very nature of the materials – they are documentary products of a certain kind created for certain purposes that have to be kept in mind. They do not represent the totality of the Muslim experience under Russian or Soviet rule but only a record of Muslim interactions with the state. They contain within them multiple strategies and meanings that have to be properly understood. They can be – and ought to be – read against the grain, but doing so requires a great deal of knowledge about Muslim societies coming from beyond the ambit of the state-generated archives. We need to triangulate the information we find in the archives with other kinds of knowledge. This can be derived from a clear understanding of the logic of practice that obtained in the various Muslim communities of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, as well as from (locally specific) Muslim discourse. Otherwise, we risk replication of the language and the categories of the imperial state (and, usually, that of its most unsavory organs, i.e. the security apparatus). Reading archival documents in conjunction with Muslim sources is a difficult task but not impossible, and I will finish by suggesting some kinds of sources that we might use as a counterbalance to state-generated sources.
Private papers are the hardest to find. A few personal collections (lichnye fondy) exist in state archives, but most of these in Central Asia at least belong to Russians who served there. In any case, they seldom represent the complete record of an individual’s life. One of the bigger disappointments of my research in Tashkent was to discover the existence of a lichnyi fond devoted to Botu (1904-1938), the radical Uzbek poet who was people’s commissar for education between 1928 and 1930 before being purged for nationalism. He was arrested in the first purge of nationalists in 1930 and shot during the second in 1938. Botu was connected with several literary and political milieux in Uzbekistan and Russia. Yet, his lichnyi fond contains almost no traces of those connections; it is filled instead with largely bureaucratic materials, a few photographs, and so forth, that were donated to the archive by his widow in the 1960s.
Private archives are not very common. For various reasons, few Central Asians kept their papers. The only ones who did were modernist intellectuals, most of whom perished in the purges, when their papers were confiscated by the security organs. It is quite possible that the private papers of many of the victims of the purges are still lying, packed in bundles, in the vaults of the present-day successors of the OGPU, although it is far more likely that they were simply destroyed. Some private papers survive in the families, though they tend to be jealously guarded.
A more substantial source is the periodical press. The history of the periodical press of Muslim communities of the Russian Empire is well known,^[9] so I will not repeat it here, except to say that it has all too seldom been used systematically. After the consolidation of Soviet power, the size of the periodical press expanded (especially in Central Asia, where unofficial periodicals had largely struggled to survive before 1917). Until the 1930s, there was no systematic censorship, and the periodical press of the first decade or so of the Soviet period is home to a fascinating array of voices and opinions, much more so than the materials to be found in the archives. After 1929 or so, official control becomes much more suffocating, but the periodical press still affords a window on public life as it was performed in the vernacular. Yet, with the exception of one author,^[10] no one has used this resource systematically. (This criticism applies also to Central Asian authors, who also have not made systematic use of the press.)
Finally, there is a vast trove of materials in Muslim languages of printed books and manuscripts that exist at various levels of distance from the state. They are available for use. The largest collections of pre-revolutionary materials, printed and manuscript, are at the library of Kazan State University and in the holdings of the Beruni Institute of Oriental Studies of Uzbekistan’s Academy of Sciences in Tashkent. Recourse to them affords ways of understanding the Muslim communities of the Russian empire on their own terms. Using them requires additional cultural competences (in the study of Muslim societies) and research techniques (language and paleography skills), without the possession of which no serious claims to expertise on this subject may be entertained.
None of these sources give us direct access to “the people” and none of them allow us to answer questions of our choosing. But they do allow us to judge the documents in the archives more critically. It is only through triangulation – the use of state and vernacular sources contrapuntally if you will – that we get an understanding of the documentary basis of Muslim history of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.