SUMMARY:

The Introduction to the archival publication presents the argument developed by Adeeb Khalid in his latest book, Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), which revises a tendency to see the creation of the Central Asian republics as simply a Soviet project and hence, ultimately, a Soviet imposition. In doing so, Khalid claims, we ignore longer-term trends in the historical imagination of Central Asia’s modernist intellectuals and the purchase that the ideas of nation and progress had on their minds. Central Asians did not come to the revolution of 1917 with a blank slate. Rather, their societies were in the midst of intense debates about the future. The revolution radicalized preexisting projects of cultural reform that interacted in multiple ways with the Bolshevik project. One result of this interaction was the creation of Uzbekistan. The document published in the “Archive” section illustrates this argument by highlighting specific language and contradictions embedded in the Jadids’ “Chaghatayist” view of Uzbekness.