The nomadic people of Eurasia left behind rich treasures that rival those of sophisticated settled societies. Many of these precious items, which can be seen today in museums around the world, were made of gold, bronze, and silver with unique animal-inspired designs. They served decorative, practical, ritual, and spiritual purposes and were widely exchanged along the continent’s trade routes.

In this interview, Dr. Petya Andreeva from Parsons School of Design, New York, discusses some findings from her research into the decorative and funerary art of Eurasia.

An interview with

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Petya Andreeva

Assistant Professor of Asian Art and Design History, Parson School of Design, New School

Petya Andreeva received her Ph.D. from the East Asian Languages and Civilizations Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Her upcoming book entitled Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea: Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies, 700 BCE-500 CE will be publsihed by Edinburgh University Press in March 2024. The book draws from her dissertation, Fantastic Beasts of the Eurasian Steppes: Toward a Revisionist Approach to Animal-Style Art which received international recognition in the Best Asian Humanities Dissertation category at the International Convention for Asia Scholars (ICAS) in 2018. Professor Andreeva has broad research interests inlcuding funerary art in China and Inner Asia, arts of the Silk Roads, nomadic material culture, art of Soviet Central Asia, and the global history of ornament. Her main field of research is the cultural and artistic transmissions along premodern trade networks, namely the Silk Roads and their precursor – the Eurasian steppe. She is particularly interested in the display of portable luxury and the formation of collective memory in nomadic communities along the porous borders of sedentary empires (China, Persia and Greece). Her research aims to challenge Euro-centric narratives in the study of decorative and funerary art.

Originally from Bulgaria, she is fluent in Mandarin, Bulgarian, Russian and has a working proficiency in Japanese and Mongolian.

https://www.newschool.edu/parsons/faculty/petya-andreeva/

The decorative art of Eurasian nomadic peoples is a great subject to study. Going to the roots of this art, what do you think led to its development and the apparent love for exquisite decorations, given that nomadic people led otherwise simple lives and had to travel a lot?

This is a really important question. Contrary to traditional narratives that highlight the “monumentality” of sedentary empires (palaces, large reliefs etc.), early pastoral societies left behind numerous treasures that rival those of their settled neighbors. The majority of these valuable items are adorned with animal-inspired designs, which feature composites or what I call zoomorphic junctures. These are highly conceptual designs that we sometimes overlook, as we tend to focus on the large amounts of gold found in nomadic tombs and hoards. In steppe imagery, it is common to encounter an animal body combining deer antlers, a raptor’s beak, the mane of a feline, and the snout of a wolf—all elaborately rendered on gold surfaces via casting, hammering, soldering, and a number of other sophisticated techniques.

Species tend to be represented metonymically and then fused together; the resulting animal bodies are inverted in conceptually interesting ways that we would not normally encounter elsewhere in the ancient world. In my work, I have argued that these counterintuitive animal images were inspired by both political and ecological factors that are rooted in nomads’ exposure to diverse ecosystems and their anxiety about the inexplicable whims of nature. Environmental challenges led to economic concerns, which in large and reluctant nomadic alliances would have jeopardized the position of the super-elite (what I call the “elite nucleus”). As they were exposed to different ecological conditions at least semiannually, nomads started to visualize the fauna on which they staked their lives as being perpetually in flux—hence the hybrid, unstable bodies we encounter in the so-called “animal style” of the steppe. Eurasian nomads are still rarely mentioned in theoretical discourses on design concepts, but their image system was incredibly intriguing and complex and very indicative of how climate change and political instability might affect people’s creative products.

Across the five-thousand-mile Eurasian steppe network, we find a great number of metalworks—mostly gold and bronze (less often silver)—as well as felt textiles. These meticulous arrangements give us better insights into the curation and decorative scheme of the mortuary space, instead of just a glimpse into the individual objects. We often encounter images of the same hybrid animal body on the jewelry adorning the body, and on the textiles enveloping the floor of the tomb: in the Pazyryk culture of the Altai, for instance, bird heads attached to deer antlers are a particularly ubiquitous motif seen across media and modes of making. Animal-style designs were highly transferable and malleable, and so we encounter them on metalwork, woodwork, bone carving, felt, and other materials consistent with the nomadic lifestyle.

Most nomadic tombs contain portable items of great value. Many of these were used during the tomb occupant’s life on earth as currency exchanged for safe passage, for strategic commercial transactions with sedentary neighbors like China, or as a symbol of political clout within the diverse nomadic alliance. But once arranged inside the tomb and attached to the deceased’s body, they entered a new lifecycle and took on new functions. This is to say, what we often refer to as “decorative art” might also have fulfilled other important roles in political and economic decision-making in nomadic societies. During a burial, the body of the deceased noble and probably some parts of the barrow would have been exposed to the scrutiny of an excitable and possibly highly divided audience of members of different clans—and so the curatorial approach to the space and the body’s adornment were of paramount importance. The glittering gold would have been viewed by both allies and potential rivals of the deceased leader just as a new power vacuum opened in a relatively unstable confederation. And, ultimately, fluency in this complex visual language became a political tool used by a very small elite nucleus to define their agency in the reluctant alliance of different nomadic groups. It also helped the elite to manufacture collective bonds in these rather unstable nomadic confederations.

When we imagine the luxury and decorations of the Eurasian nomads, we mostly think of Scythian treasures and animal style. Can you elaborate on what happened later and how this art developed?

Animal style flourished along a far more extensive geographical, cultural, and temporal expanse than one might expect. It was present in every cultural sphere on the steppe, as well as adjacent regions, from the frontiers of China to the Hungarian plain. Indeed, the so-called Scythians have often been designated as the primary creators and carriers of the animal-style tradition. But there are a few caveats worth mentioning here. While it retains some usefulness as a category, “Scythian” has become something of an umbrella exonym in itself, often applied arbitrarily to ethnically or culturally unrelated nomadic groups on the Eurasian steppe. We often think of Peter the Great’s Siberian collection in the State Hermitage Museum as containing classic examples of “Scythian art,” but the objects are of unclear provenance and came into the tsar’s collection from plundered Siberian tombs at a time when looting and illegal excavation were especially frequent occurrences in southern Russia. There are, of course, a great number of Pontic Scythian tombs that fit Herodotus’ descriptions, many of which are in Eastern and Central Ukraine. Because of the intensive Greco-Scythian interactions in this region, we see a departure from zoomorphism and a higher proclivity for depicting human figures in these nomadic works.

But while we mostly associate animal-style design with Eurasian nomads—be they Scythians, Xiongnu, Donghu, Sarmatians, or otherwise—it is also true that these animal-inspired designs penetrated the porous boundaries of neighboring sedentary empires like China and Persia. This is significant because for far too long, nomads have been viewed as the passive recipients of the “enlightened” traditions and inventions of China, Persia, and Greece, or as mere intermediaries between those empires. Now we know that steppe-style objects appeared in the aristocratic tombs of major Eurasian empires, whose elites wanted to showcase their worldliness and access to the most “unconquerable” of domains. Indeed, while both the Greeks and the Chinese continued to indulge in labeling the nomadic Other as “barbarian” in their writings, their funerary and commercial practices tell a rather different story. As long as it did not overshadow the local, showcasing nomadic gold was a new status-defining token. This is why we see nomadic-style plaques and buckles in locations as distant as the tomb of the King of Nanyue in South China and China’s Lelang outpost in modern-day North Korea in the second century BCE.

In my forthcoming book, I study the politics behind the adoption of such motifs and objects by societies that, for the most part, viewed themselves as enemies of or superior to the steppe nomads. I even go so far as to suggest that grand structures in Achaemenid Persia, like the Apadana palace in Persepolis, feature animal combat scenes that were inspired by Scythian and Saka decorations and might have involved nomadic labor. This makes sense considering the defeats the Persians suffered at the hands of the Scythians (recorded by Herodotus) and all the Scythian prisoners of war taken by Darius. The Persians sort of “delimited” animal style in the grandness of the Persian relief: animal style was there to denote control over the “Barbaric Other,” but it did not feature prominently enough to overshadow the grandeur of the local format. This visual and political strategy is what I refer to as “governable Otherness.” Visual references to the Nomadic Other were helpful political tools as long as they were inscribed in a local monumental format.

Finally, animal style endured for much, much longer than previously acknowledged. We see traces of Iron-Age nomadic design in later periods, including some of the gold of the Tibetan empire in the seventh and eighth centuries—recently excavated examples of Tibetan gold come from Dulan county in Qinghai province in northwestern China. The Komi and Udmurt settlements in Western Siberia and the Ural lowlands have also yielded some great examples of possible “offshoots” of Iron-Age animal style (known in the Russian literature as “Permian animal style”), most dating to between the fifth and tenth centuries. I would argue that in the Migration period, these Permian motifs reached northern Europe, where they were subsequently incorporated into the designs of the Germanic tribes.

My most recent work has focused on an even later resurrection of animal style. In the westernmost segment of the Mongol empire, a return to this long-forgotten decoration might have been politically motivated. The Mongols of the Golden Horde had to reconcile two distinct identities: that of a worldly, astute trade partner and that of the legitimate successor to an uninterrupted, centuries-old nomadic tradition. It is therefore not surprising that some ancient animal-style designs feature prominently in the arts of the Golden Horde, which was centered on the Western steppe.

Trade was obviously a major factor in the exchange of goods. Can you tell us a little more about how trade influenced the value of these goods?

Yes, trade was certainly an important factor in the dissemination of animal-style art (and design). We can identify a few “commercial hotspots” on this steppe route, which was a precursor to the more widely known “Silk Road” network. On the western end, there were the commercial interactions between the Greeks and the Scythians (and later the Sarmatians). There is great evidence of this in the diverse inventories of royal Scythian tombs in Crimea. Herodotus mentioned cities like Olbia and Chersonesos, and in fact most of the Bosporan Kingdom centered around Crimea, a strategic trade center and hotbed of cross-cultural encounters. The archaeological record supports this. On the easternmost end of the steppe route, China bought into the increasingly lucrative nomadic market from around the fourth century BCE, even before the emergence of the first nomadic empire (the Xiongnu). There are textual records that the first emperor of the Qin Dynasty rewarded a stockbreeder in northern China who facilitated trade with the Rong nomads. We know that Chinese imperial workshops started to produce animal-style goldworks and export them to the nomadic market, receiving much-needed livestock in return. I have previously suggested that China was probably the only power player in Eurasia between the fifth and third centuries BCE to truly see and realize the great potential of the nomadic market. How they did that so successfully is a more complicated question that I explore in my book, but a major reason might be that Chinese art had been entirely zoomorphic from its inception, and likewise relied on abstract and composite animal designs. In other words, Chinese artisans were primed to embrace the zoomorphism of their nomadic clientele, whereas the Persians’ and Greeks’ designs concepts were much more reliant on human figures and narratives.

Is there any spiritual meaning to these decorations? Are they still heavily defined by an animal spirit?

Several trail-blazing studies have indeed proposed that the emergence of certain design motifs, chief among them the reindeer antler in South Siberia, might have been inspired by shamanistic practices. Shamanism is often the “go-to” explanation for the artistic innovations of ancient societies in Siberia and Mongolia. I certainly think that there is merit to these interpretations and do not reject the search for “meaning” behind these animal motifs. But I myself am more interested in the function (rather than meaning) of animal-style designs. This is necessary because my studies tend to adopt a “macro” perspective: I am dealing with an enormous geographical and cultural expanse inhabited by many diverse nomadic societies. There must be a reason for the incredible transferability and longevity of certain design idioms (like the zoomorphic juncture, for instance)—how did tropes like the bird with deer antlers travel so swiftly from the northern Chinese periphery to eastern and central Europe? It is highly unlikely that the motif meant the same thing in every single micro-zone on the Eurasian steppe route. So we have to ask a different question: could it be that these zoomorphic designs fulfilled a similar function in all these different nomadic confederations, which had some political and ecological concerns in common? The animal images in question present an alternative, skewed version of ecological reality. They feature fragmented, dissected, and reconfigured animal bodies, which are based on the signature anatomical parts of various real-life beasts—from stags to wild goats to snow leopards. These unstable anatomies, so to speak, indicate a very particular response to changes in the ecological environment, including environmental shifts bigger than just the seasonal migration patterns, which had profound consequences for many nomads. With this idiosyncratic image system, nomadic makers visualized an alternative and more manageable ecological system that was at their disposal and mercy. This was perhaps a coping mechanism that enabled them to deal with real-life environmental and political anxieties. Look, for instance, at the so-called Golden Man of Issyk in Kazakhstan, or the no less awe-inspiring Golden Woman of Taksai. Such warrior suits consist of thousands of elaborate gold adornments, most featuring animal-style designs. The wearer was seen as the master of this newly formed fantastical biota, and this helped them reaffirm their legitimacy to an awestruck audience. In short, animal images were much more than mere spiritual symbols or totems; they also served as important political tools for establishing a leader’s legitimacy. The body became praxis through which important political messages could be sent to the viewers of the burial-turned-spectacle.

Can you tell us about funerary art in China and Inner Asia? What items would usually go into a tomb and why?

I actually started my academic career as a Sinologist, and continue to work in both Central Asian and Early China studies. I have gained many valuable skills from my extensive Sinological training. My interest in Central Asia started in graduate school, where my professors inspired me to start exploring China’s relationship with its neighbors and long-distance trade partners, including the steppe people on its frontier, which Chinese texts often label as barbarians. Early Chinese chronicles tend to be the most detailed, even if not always reliable or nuanced, in their ethnographies of steppe peoples. As I mentioned earlier, I was curious to find out why we often find animal-style plaques in the inventories of early Chinese tombs.

In the Bronze Age, Chinese burials feature bronze ritual vessels as the highlights of their inventories. In the fourth and third century BCE, many bronze casters also gained skill in goldsmithing, at Beikangcun near Xi’an, and there is an excavated tomb of a Chinese bronze caster from the Warring States who was buried with tools and matrices for the production of both nomadic animal-style objects and Chinese ritual bronzes. Chinese burials from the Han dynasty (third century BCE to third century CE) embrace a more diverse repertoire. They tend to have elaborate murals featuring cosmological guides to the souls of the deceased, procession scenes, directional animals, and Confucian and Daoist narratives, among other images. Some members of the imperial family wore extremely rare and luxurious “jade suits”—burial garments made of hundreds of small jade pieces joined by gold wire or silk thread. This opulent personal adornment is in some ways reminiscent of the golden men and women of Kazakhstan.

Chinese tombs from the Han dynasty also tend to feature mountain-shaped incense burners, bronze mirrors, lacquer items, and “mingqi” spirit articles (architectural models, figurines of dancers, acrobats, servants, etc.). A great number of painted silks have also been found in Han dynasty burials. My all-time favorite tomb to teach and study is the famous Mawangdui burial complex of noblewoman Lady Dai and her family. The lacquer, silks, and brocades found here are really of top-notch quality and point to the ways aristocrats in China visualized and “regally ensured” their afterlife. Food vessels and even chopsticks, as well as cosmetic boxes – all made of lacquer—have been discovered there.

Even more interesting is the appearance of lacquer, bronze mirrors, and other Chinese imports in the tombs of Xiongnu elites north of the Chinese border. Clearly, diplomatic gifts and intensive trade defined the rather tumultuous relationship between the two entities. To cut a long story short, I am really fascinated by the opportunistic reciprocity between China and its northern neighbors—various steppe groups that, over time, became a growing threat to China’s hegemony in North Asia.

Your forthcoming book is entitled Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea: Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies, 700 BCE-500 CE. Can you tell us about this research?

I am thrilled that my first monograph is already under production with Edinburgh University Press and is scheduled to be published in March 2024. The book builds on my dissertation and explores hundreds of objects from every micro-zone on or adjacent to the Eurasian steppe route: the Mongolian-Manchurian grasslands, South Siberia, the northern Korean peninsula, the Kazakh steppes, the Ural lowlands, the North Caucasus, Crimea, and parts of the Hungarian plain. The main argument of the book is that due to concerns over political legitimacy, the elite nucleus in every nomadic alliance—from the Pontic Scythians and Sarmatians to the Xiongnu—embraced animal-style design as their de facto visual rhetoric in order to construct collective bonds in otherwise reluctant political alliances that were structured not around ethnic ties but rather around shared geopolitical goals and enemies. I also seek to understand why and how animal style entered the aesthetic systems of sedentary empires like China and Persia. Steppe nomads were consistently “othered” by their geopolitical enemies, but they were also increasingly recognized as worthy opponents and potential trade partners that power players like China needed to interact with if they wished to expand their economic influence in Eurasia. I am interested in the visual and material manifestations of this reluctant symbiosis, which never resulted in true reciprocity yet shaped much of the political landscape of Central Eurasia.

My second inquiry throughout the book is inspired by one of my academic idols, Ernst Gombrich: I am fascinated by the psychology and logistics of image-making. I am especially interested in the factors that contribute to abstraction. At what point do designs become “abstract” or “semi-abstract”? Early nomadic images do not fully embrace abstraction and are not entirely divorced from ecological reality, even if they feature fabricated hybrids. This changes dramatically with the later and more powerful nomadic confederation of the Xiongnu, who were well on their way to forming the first-ever nomadic empire and needed more standardized designs to make them more legible to various trade partners and rivals across an increasingly global Eurasia. In the book, I link abstraction to political and economic agendas as well.

I have invested years of research into this project, including fieldwork in Kazakhstan, Russia, China, Mongolia, South Korea, and my home country, Bulgaria. It was important to me to look at as many primary sources as possible from the cultural zones in question because of the study’s unprecedented geographical scope. To that end, the materials I present are combined with textual sources in Modern and Classical Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Mongolian, and Bulgarian.

What legacy did this decorative and funerary art leave for us today? Do we see it in contemporary art or commercial goods, fashion, jewelry, or furniture?

I really appreciate this question because far too often, the arts of ancient societies are viewed in a historical vacuum, as detached from modern-day developments, when in reality, they provide important antecedents and lessons for contemporary societies. This is especially true in the case of pastoral nomads, whose lifestyles can certainly add to our present conversations around sustainability and efforts to combat climate change. Also, the relationship between images, politics, and manufactured collective memory in these ancient nomadic confederations is quite relevant to present-day discourses around nationalism, borders, and cross-cultural exchange.

Traces of animal-style art have endured to this day. We certainly see the reliance on metonymically conveyed animal bodies in the textile production of much of Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, parts of Xinjiang, and Mongolia today. I am thinking of the “shyrdak” and “ala kyiz” felts that one finds in many Central Asian bazaars. Producing these stitched and colored felts is a very labor-intensive collective process, and the skills behind these lived practices are usually transmitted from mother to daughter. Many of these traditional felts feature abstract deer antlers, which, interestingly can be found on much of the Pazyryk textile corpus from the Altai Mountains all the way back to the fourth century BCE. Clearly, this penchant for conveying animals through their antlers, beaks, horns, or other representative body parts (in a sort of “synecdoche”) can be traced back to the animal-style period.

I am also reminded of how animal-style design has been interpreted in Kazakh fashion in recent years. A great number of amazing designers from Kazakhstan have adopted references to ancient nomadic motifs in their own takes on “national costume,” reinterpreting deer antlers, goat horns, and other animal-inspired motifs through a modern lens, as well as drawing on the traditional manipulation of felt and fur. One can hardly overlook the famous Golden Men (and Women) of Kazakhstan. At least six such figures have been excavated from various parts of Kazakhstan since 1969. Many modern silhouettes in couture fashion in the country are inspired by the elongated and sumptuous figure of the Golden Man. So ingrained are these phenomenal discoveries in the collective consciousness of Kazakhstan that one can even find a statue of the Golden Man standing on a winged lion in front of the Kazakh embassy in Washington, DC (and its counterpart on Republic Square in Almaty).

All photos provided by 
Petya Andreeva

Usto Mumin, or Aleksandr Vasilievich Nikolaev (August 30, 1897 – June 27, 1957), was an artist who lived and worked in the Uzbek SSR. Nikolaev arrived in Tashkent after demobilization in 1920, and from that moment on his life and artistic creativity were bound up with Central Asia. His pupils called him Usto Mumin, which means “Faithful Master.” One of his best-known paintings, “Pomegranate Zeal,” tells the love story of two young boys. He was persecuted by the Soviet authorities and spent four years in prison between 1938 and 1942. Following his release, Nikolaev returned to Uzbekistan and continued to work as an artist, illustrator and theatre designer. He received an Honorary Award from the Central Executive Committee of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic for his role in establishing the Uighur Theatre in Tashkent. Nikolaev died in Tashkent in 1957.

His life and work are the subject of two recently published books: Eleonora Shafranskaya, Usto Mumin: transformations. Moscow: Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, 2023 (Элеонора Федоровна Шафранская Э.Ф. Усто Мумин: превращения. Москва: Музей современного искусства “Гараж”, 2023), and Boris Chukhovich, ‘Love, Friendship, Eternity’ by Usto Mumin. Prague: Artguide s.r.o., 2023.

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Eleonora Shafranskaya

– Doctor of Philology, Professor of the Moscow Humanitarian Pedagogical Institute. Born in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, lived in Tashkent until 1997, taught philology at the Tashkent State University and the Republican Pedagogical Institute of Russian Language and Literature. Since 1997 she has been living and working in Moscow. In 2008 she defended her doctoral dissertation on the theme “Mythopoetics of a foreign cultural text in Russian prose of the 20th – 21st centuries” at the Volgograd State Pedagogical University.

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Boris Chukhovich

 – Central Asian art and architecture historian, independent curator, associate researcher at the University of Montreal, President of the Central Asian Cultural Heritage Observatory Alerte Héritage.  Until 1998, he worked at the Research Institute of Art Studies in Tashkent, after immigrating to Canada, he collaborated with various universities in Montreal, Quebec, Toronto, was a visiting researcher at the Fondation de la Maison des sciences de l’Homme (Paris, 2014) and Politecnico di Milano (2022-2023). Curated exhibitions of Central Asian contemporary art in Montreal, Ottawa, Venice, Bishkek, Alma-Ata. Author of numerous publications on the art and architecture of Central Asia in the 20th and 21st centuries. Lives and works in Montreal.

In this interview, Eleonora Shafranskaya and Boris Chukhovich talk about their research and their books dedicated to this incredible yet mysterious artist.

How did your scientific interest in the work of Usto Mumin come to be?

Eleonora: I would say that a lot came together here. The personality of Usto Mumin (the nickname of the artist Alexander Nikolaev) became interesting to me after watching the play Pomegranate Zeal, directed by Mark Weil (Ilkhom Theatre, Tashkent), for which Usto Mumin was imprisoned.

I turned to the FSB office (ex-KGB) in Moscow to become acquainted with the artist’s investigation file. He was arrested in 1938 in Moscow, at the exhibition of achievements of the national economy—then the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition—where Usto Mumin was the leading artist of the Uzbek pavilion. A month later, I received copies of the pages from his case, which were forwarded to me from the relevant structure in Uzbekistan. It is really a rare case; I think that I was just lucky to access the FSB archive files.

My attention to Usto Mumin was sparked by a research interest in the fate of creative figures (writers, scientists, artists) who suffered under the Soviet regime. To date, this layer of the history of the twentieth century has not been fully explored. There is still a lot of work for more than one generation.

Boris: In October 2001, the 6^th World Congress of the International Association for Visual Semiotics was to be held in Quebec. I had not studied semiotics before, but it suddenly became clear that after the September attacks, many European scholars had decided not to experience the hardship and abandoned the transatlantic flight. Hotels, banquets, and congress halls had been paid for in advance, and the organizers of the congress, trying to somehow compensate for the costs, invited scientists who were already in Quebec to participate in the forum. Thus, I ended up participating in a scientific event with an unusual profile for me. The sensations were surprising. I was particularly struck by the ability of semioticians to extract new information layer by layer from the same image. This fundamentally distinguished their analysis from what I had encountered in Uzbekistan. In Uzbekistan, historians of art aimed for the widest possible coverage and chronological scale. For instance, Lazar Rempel and Galina Pugachenkova wrote The History of Art of Uzbekistan from Ancient Times to the Middle of the 19th Century, which encouraged their colleagues to enlarge themes and corpus of study as much as possible. Visual semiotics, on the contrary, plumbed the depths of micro-facts and micro-stories. In contrast to panoramic breadth, which is fraught with simplification and schematism, they cultivated deep readings and thorough consideration of each specific problem. In parallel with semiotics, many participants in the congress appealed to the iconological tradition of studying art, represented, in particular, by the texts of Abu Warburg and Erwin Panofsky.

This congress had two consequences for my scientific activities. In a relatively short period in 2003, I wrote voluminous texts about two works of art: the Monument of Independence of Uzbekistan (the so-called “globe” on the main square of Tashkent) and Usto Mumin’s tempera Love, Friendship, Eternity, as it was called at that time. Ultimately, these texts resulted in two long projects. One is an eight-year multimedia project that undertook an extensive exploration of the image of the sphere in representations of power in the history of world culture. Another is a 20-year book project in which I tried to provide a comprehensive analysis of Love, Friendship, Eternity. As can be seen from the combination of a semi-amateur monument erected by direct order of then-President of Uzbekistan Islam Karimov and one of the most famous works of art in 20^th-century Central Asia, it was not the object of study that was important to me, but the method of analysis itself. At the same time, I can say that Usto Mumin’s works were at the intersection of many areas of my interests. Since my immigration to Canada, I had been interested in cross-cultural hybridities, creative expressions of exile, and gender history, not to mention Central Asian art of the 20th and 21st centuries. Mumin turned out to be the pivotal figure for all these issues.

How would you describe his creative path? Where does such a fine painting come from and how does it combine different worlds—European and Eastern?

Eleonora: Questions of art criticism are not within my sphere of expertise. However, I will answer as I see fit. This synthesis is associated both with the atmosphere of Samarkand, where Nikolaev ended up in the 1920s, and with colleagues who influenced the artist, chief among them Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin and Daniil Stepanov. Nikolaev, judging by his biography (including his parents’ hobbies) and the recollections of his colleagues, was a knowledgeable man; he knew the history and theory of painting very well.

Boris: This question contains the presumption of a binary structure of the world, which allegedly consists of the East and the West. I don’t have that division in my mind. I prefer to talk not about the amorphous East, supposedly opposed to the West, but about Samarkand, which is unlike other cities in Central Asia, never mind the world as a whole. To describe Samarkand, I don’t need to define it as an eastern city. After all, it is far west of Novosibirsk and Irkutsk, which have never been described as “eastern”. In Samarkand, Nikolaev joined Daniil Stepanov’s circle, the members of which cultivated love for Quattrocento and tried to use his legacy to portray the people of Samarkand. In addition, Usto Mumin’s language combined to varying degrees the influence of Russia’s Silver Age graphics, Persian miniatures, and to a lesser extent Suprematism, as well as Russian icons. I called the search of this group pre-Raphaelite. I showed that Usto Mumin was not the sole inventor of this approach; by the time he appeared in Stepanov’s society, the circle’s aesthetic program was already fully developed. If earlier art historians wrote that Usto Mumin synthesized East and West, I believe that, first of all, he synthesized what such artists as Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, Alexei Isupov, and Daniil Stepanov himself had brought to the activities of Stepanov’s circle. Nikolaev was, however, perhaps the only one to add to the program of the Samarkand Pre-Raphaelites the substratum of Persian or Central Asian miniatures. Neither Petrov-Vodkin, Isupov, Stepanov, Nikolai Mamontov, nor Alexander Samokhvalov were ever inspired by this, while Nikolaev experienced a brief surge of interest in it between 1923 and 1927.

Tell us about his stories. In what are they rooted: Persian miniatures, Arabic or local tales, or his own world?

Eleonora: His relocation to Central Asia became a powerful trigger for his artistic nature. Everything you listed; all the influences came together. Certainly, he created his own imaginary world. By the way, my book contains his publication of a legend composed by himself based on the folklore plots of Central Asia. Thus, I state that Usto Mumin was also a literary writer.

Boris: Having established that Usto Mumin’s first cycle was based on a very definite narrative, I tried for a long time to establish its basis. In my opinion, there were three possibilities. This plot could be: 1) literary, 2) life, or 3) autobiographical. Although the Persian-language classical literature is full of homoerotic motifs, I did not find a structural correspondence between the lovers from these works, e.g., Saadi or Hafiz, and the young men from Pomegranate Zeal, who ask the permission of a religious person for a ritual entry into a love union that legitimizes their relationship. On the contrary, in the stories of Nikolaev himself and the memoirs of his close friend Galina Kozlovskaia, there are at least two plots from real life that are related to the Samarkand cycle. First, this is the story of two old men whom the artist met in a teahouse next to Shah-i Zinda. The story of their life, which readers will learn about from my book, was one of the triggers for the creation of the tempera Love, Friendship, Eternity. Another plot that influenced Nikolaev remained in the archive memoirs of Galina Kozlovskaia, who described the Pomegranate Zeal ritual as she heard it from Usto Mumin. In her description, young men in white robes gather in the garden on an autumn night to share slices of ripe pomegranates to music and dance and, having exchanged with others, taste them, drinking water from a large silver bowl. This ritual was supposed to bind the participants in a single circle of friendship. It is interesting, however, that the Samarkand cycle of Usto Mumin did not literally reproduce one plot or the other. The personages of the tempera Pomegranate Zeal do not accept new adherents into their ranks, but clearly honor the newly formed couple. In turn, the personages of Love, Friendship, Eternity do not reproduce anything from the plot of the story of the old teahouse owner with his friend, but are only partially associated with them. Finally, one of the drawings of the Samarkand cycle – When I saw Samarkand… – contains an expressive allusion to the inner presence of the artist himself in the scenes he depicts. All these factors indicate that Nikolaev, who did not know Farsi and could not read Persian literature, was inspired not by book plots, but by direct life stories that he witnessed in Samarkand.

You cite several quotes in your book, one of which sounds like the artist’s moral code: “be sincere, be content with little, love yourself and boldly pick forbidden fruits.” Was Usto Mumin a Sufi? How is the philosophy of Sufism reflected in his work? Is there an invisible connection between the artist and the world of mystical Islam?

Eleonora: Usto Mumin was not a Sufi. This is one of the myths that accompanies his biography. My book describes in detail, with references to facts (conversations, interrogations, personal confessions), his initiation into Islam, which was of a purely artistic nature. It was not banter; it was a completely sincere game, the life of an artist. He wanted to organically reincarnate into the Other, to look at the world through the eyes of this Other. There was a new phase coming in his life. He just as sincerely and organically reincarnated into another role.

Boris: I have not been able to find any biographical facts testifying to Usto Mumin being a Sufi. This claim became very popular in the 2000s-2010s, not due to the discovery of new information about the artist, but because society broke with Soviet values and was in search of new points of support. Along the same lines, some art historians at that time managed to present Alexander Volkov as a Sufi mystic, but he was always indifferent to religion and never made any attempts to merge with the Muslim population of Turkestan in clothing, language or lifestyle. Uzbek art at the beginning of the 21st century was going through a stage of intense dervishization: the main characters of Uzbek art were qalandars, hermits drying in the deserts, blissful sleepy vagabonds, as well as birds illustrating the poems of Navoi or Attar. Certainly, Alexander Nikolaev converted to Islam, but there is a significant distance between a Muslim and a Sufi, which the art critics who wrote about Mumin forgot too quickly. The texts of Nigora Akhmedova, Tigran Mkrtychev, and to some degree Eleonora Shafranskaya are full of Sufi interpretations of the artist’s work. However, all these associations seem to me excessively free. In assigning certain Sufi meanings to Mumin’s paintings, the art critics have avoided any documentary analysis of the artist’s thoughts or statements on this matter. As a rule, this was pure fantasy on a topic set by the critics themselves, and not a systemic study of the artist’s intentions.

His work is loaded with scandal because of the obvious homoeroticism. How do you describe it in your book?

Eleonora: The answer to this question can be considered a continuation of the previous one. One of the key words in the title of my book is transformation. The biography of Usto Mumin is a chain of transformations, but not always ones conceived by him. Some transformations were dictated by changes to the paradigm within which he was forced to exist (e.g., from his former social status into a Soviet citizen).

The homoeroticism of a number of plots of his Samarkand works (1920s) is also an imaginary world. This world appears most pronounced in the work Pomegranate Zeal, created in the genre of a hagiographic icon as a narrative about the acquaintance of two young men: their love, wedding, and death.

The main character of this icon is located in the center. Apparently, this is Usto Mumin’s dreaming young man holding a paradise fruit in his hand, an incised pomegranate. The whole plot presented in the hallmarks is imaginary. This is one of the transformations of the artist, his artistic nature. It does not matter whether the transformation is real or imaginary.

Boris: Any erotica remains a phenomenon of psychology and culture. Certainly, I had to take into account that, both in the time of Nikolaev and today, homoerotica is perceived as scandalous in many places.

Some colleagues ask: “Does it matter whether Nikolaev was homosexual or not—what’s the difference?” For me, such indifference is inexplicable. After all, the self-perception of a young man in the process of growing up and his whole subsequent life—which would have developed either according to the prevailing normative gender attitude or in contradiction to it—depends on whether he was or was not. Equally unacceptable to me are attempts to silence homoerotic motifs in the artist’s work.

By the way, the Sufi interpretations appeared in the 2000s and 2010s as a form of camouflage for these motifs. Therefore, I took seriously all the evidence I had collected about the artist’s biography and, based on this factual information, built my own interpretation of both the key facts of Nikolaev’s life and his main artistic cycle. Since I am not religious, I perceive homosexuality as one of the natural attractions and behaviors of a man. I write about this side of the artist’s life calmly, as well as about any other property of his personality. Needless to say, this matter is not scandalous, shameful or embarrassing to me.

In what sense is Usto Mumin an innovator: only in terms of plots or also with regard to technique?

Eleonora: In terms of plots, sure. Usto Mumin portrays young boys. As far back as the 19th century, Russian artists (e.g., Vasily Vereshchagin and Nikolai Karazin) painted Bachas with something of an ethnographic tinge, evoking condemnatory emotions in the viewer. Usto Mumin captures the aesthetic and, apparently, the philosophical facet of this phenomenon, possibly inspired by medieval Sufi poets.

As for technique, I recommend that you familiarize yourself with Boris Chukhovich’s book Friendship, Love, Eternity by Usto Mumin, which was published simultaneously with mine. By the way, an unprecedented fact in history: two books about Usto Mumin were published simultaneously, and the presentation of both took place at the same time in Tashkent.

Boris: Your question fits into a linear system of ideas about progress in art. According to this system, an artist’s work only gains meaning if he succeeds in being an innovator, either in terms of language or in promoting some new artistic content. However, this approach does not reflect the specifics of human sciences, which deals with unique phenomena and often cannot be integrated into some “objective” line of progress without aberrations.

As for Mumin’s technique, it has long roots. He learned it from Daniil Stepanov, who studied the secrets of Renaissance painting for the restoration of old canvases. Nikolaev himself emphasized more than once that this technique coincided with that used by the Samarkand nakkoshi, who painted the walls of houses with traditional patterns. To call this technique innovative would be a clear misunderstanding. As for the subjects, I also trace the genealogy of the depiction of gender-indeterminate couples in the paintings of different countries, from Europe to Iran. Perhaps only the enigmatic plot of Pomegranate Zeal, with the culmination of its 11th scene, the tempera Love, Friendship, Eternity, was truly unique for the Islamic context in which these images appeared.

Overall, what is the artist’s legacy? Did someone imitate him or were his aesthetics banned?

Eleonora: Usto Mumin forbade himself to write on a homoerotic topic. He was aware of the corresponding articles that were introduced into the Criminal Code. Here is a quote from my book:

“The campaign that began in 1933 in the USSR to introduce an article on sodomy into the Criminal Code equated the suspects of homosexuality with spies, counter-revolutionaries. First, they are arrested for homosexuality, after a few years, for counter-revolutionary activity. Most often, the arrests ended in execution.

Whether Nikolaev got into this meat grinder because of his non-traditional orientation, or he was such is unknown, but his interest in the handsome young men who became the heroes on his canvases was probably enough to start the persecution. So, that rumors began to spread, eventually leading to the birth of a myth.”

Nowadays, Usto Mumin is imitated by many artists. Usto Mumin is now in vogue. These days, the Nukus Museum of Art is hosting an exhibition by the artist Djengis Lepesov. These works are seemingly a clear homage to Usto Mumin. Moreover, the museum shop sells crude copies of Usto Mumin’s works made by modern painters.

Boris: Indisputably, Nikolaev came to be criticized with increasing frequency by his contemporaries for the horrifying eroticism of his works, and after his arrest, his art was banned for several years. Since the 1960s, however, it has been gradually rehabilitated and then glorified.

The last chapter of my book shows the influence exerted by Usto Mumin on subsequent generations of artists in Uzbekistan. This influence is paradoxical. On the one hand, many of the leading artists, starting with Chingiz Akhmarov, and then Bakhodir Jalalov and Javlon Umarbekov, consciously or unconsciously created images inspired by the aesthetics of Usto Mumin’s early works. On the other hand, the general muminization of the official art of Uzbekistan during the decades of Islam Karimov’s rule emasculated the inner content of the homosexual love drama narrated by Nikolaev in a coherent sequence of scenes. Only its formal signs remained: slumbering young men with a rose over their ears, birds in cages, and juicy pomegranates.

What does your book reveal for a reader who is not familiar with the spirit of that time?

Eleonora: It is precisely the spirit of the times that is one of the main components of the book. The period broke people; twisted their destinies, mentally and physically; instilled in people a fear that has not been eliminated to this day. Well, and one more thing: my book contains previously unknown facts of the biography of Usto Mumin.

Boris: I would prefer that readers themselves speak on this score. I hope everyone will find something of their own.

Photos provided by
Boris Chukhovich

In his recent book, Hidden Caliphate: Sufi Saints beyond the Oxus and Indus, Waleed Ziad examines the development of Muslim Sufi networks across Asia from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.

Ziad writes about the power and influence of the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi Sufis, who inspired major reformist movements until the the early twentieth century. As Sufi saints, scholars, popular poets, and jurists, the Mujaddidis were called upon to mediate between elites, subjects, and communities. They led trade caravans, mediated negotiations, and conducted diplomacy. Their texts and mystical poetry helped to define the contours of Persianate Islam from Delhi through Peshawar to the steppes of Central Asia.

In this interview, Waleed Ziad discusses how Mujaddidi Sufis rose to this role and influence, some of them becoming particularly prominent figures in Central Asia; why a good king was a good Sufi disciple; the importance of Bukhara for Sufi networks; and what Central Asian coins tell us about regional connectivity.

An interview with

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Waleed Ziad

Waleed Ziad is Assistant Professor and Ali Jarrahi Fellow in Persian Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Formerly a Research Fellow at the Abdallah S. Kamel Center for the Study of Islamic Law and Civilization at Yale Law School, Ziad has conducted fieldwork in over 120 towns across Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Pakistan.

 Website

“Hidden Caliphate” was awarded the Albert Hourani Prize, the most prestigious prize in Middle Eastern Studies (through the Middle East Studies Association), was shortlisted for the Bloomsbury Pakistan 2022 Book Award, and has recently been shortlisted for the British Association for South Asian Studies 2023 Book Award.

In your book, you focus at length on “a vast, intricate network of scholar-mystics known as the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi (literally meaning “revivalist”) order.” As you write, the Mujaddidis followed a comprehensive “exoteric” curriculum—ranging from Persian poetry, ethics, and logic to medicine and jurisprudence—before graduating to the higher “esoteric,” or “hidden,” sciences. Could you please tell us more about Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi Sufism and its influence on the Muslim world from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries? Was the emergence of this order in some way a response by the Muslim intelligentsia to the end of the Islamic Renaissance?

To understand the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi Sufi network, we need to turn to the fountainhead of the tradition, Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi (d. 1624), from the town of Sirhind, located between Lahore and Delhi. His work, I argue, truly transformed Muslim societies from Istanbul to Indonesia. But his contributions are widely misunderstood today.

Sirhindi was part of the Naqshbandi order, which began in Bukhara, and his teacher was the Samarkandi Sufi Baqi Billah who migrated to Kabul and North India. Sirhindi was known as the Mujaddid, or reviver of the second millennium of Islam—and his followers were thus called the Mujaddidis. They became the most widespread Muslim network prior to the twentieth century. Sirhindi is a fascinating figure who in his early career worked with the Mughal administration. He became perturbed by the politicization of Sufism and the careless, cultic use of Sufi practices that he witnessed around him. He critiqued Sufi charlatans claiming spiritual authority, on the one hand, and corrupt, self-serving scholars with no spiritual compass, on the other. In response to these two currents, Sirhindi developed a revolutionary philosophical-practical system.

There are three of his many contributions that define the Mujaddidi order and which spurred the rapid expansion of its networks in the centuries to come. These were the key ingredients of the great revival, the building blocks of the Mujaddidi “hidden caliphate.”

First, Sirhindi was a synthesizer. He effectively bridged the gap between Sufism and sharia, the world of the mystics and that of the jurists. I will not be able to do justice to his philosophical works in this brief discussion, but we can say he insisted that Sufism had to be circumscribed within sharia, and likewise, sharia had to be understood through Sufism.

Second, he systematically laid out the path of Sufi spiritual wayfaring. This inspired a streamlined curriculum combining sciences from hadith studies, law, and logic to breathing exercises and meditation, bringing together the insights of multiple (mostly Central Asian) Sufi orders. His teachings were then disseminated through integrated educational institutions that served as both madrasas (colleges) and centers for Sufi practice. In other words, the worlds of the scholars and of the Sufis were reunited as integral parts of one system.

Third, he had some fascinating ideas on millennial revival and his own role in cosmic millennial transformations—namely that, a thousand years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad (1602), the spirit of Islam required renewal, and Sirhindi and his students—the Mujaddidis—were its agents. So Sirhindi and his successors built a paradigmatic Sufi center at Sirhind, one so famous that the city itself became known as the “Abode of Guidance.” This took place over the course of the seventeenth century.

How did these philosophical and institutional developments translate into the public sphere? How did the Mujaddidi Sufis assume transregional socio-political leadership?

This has a lot to do with the politics of the eighteenth century in South and Central Asia. Older imperial structures broke down, many smaller states emerged from the fragments of the earlier empires, and European powers slowly began to encroach in places like Khiva and Bengal. Local ruling elites on both sides of the Amu Darya and Indus, like Bukhara and Peshawar, effectively entrusted scholastic and social services to Sufi orders, especially the Mujaddidis, whose popular authority appealed to the urban intelligentsia and tribal and rural populations alike. These Sufis then formed institutional networks quite separate from the fiscal-military institutions of the state and with a lot more resilience and longevity. Their Sufi centers, madrasas, and shrines formed a superstructure that enabled a transregional knowledge economy and provided coherence to the politically fragmented region. This coherence was made possible through a constant flow of texts, practices, and human capital. In tandem, their rural institutions and land endowments spurred agricultural production.

The Sufi centers were spaces where multiple ethnicities and classes came together. As in prior centuries, ruling elites did not confine themselves to a parallel “secular” space. Rather, they too spent time in the Sufi centers; their participation as patrons and disciples was inextricably tied to the practices of power. A good king was a good Sufi disciple.

As such, my work is an inquiry into the nature of the “fiber,” to use Joseph Fletcher’s term, that held together parts of Eurasia before the twentieth century.

How was this fiber fashioned? Relying on Sirhindi’s pioneering theological interventions—specifically with regard to reconciling and integrating divergent Sufi pedagogies and sharia—the Mujaddidis became a synthetic tradition, one that was both transregional and local. So they were quite easily able to adapt to faraway places and absorb older sacred communities and spaces. A diversified support and capital base meant that they were not restricted to any one region or dependent on localized sources of income.

They became the arch-intermediaries, the proverbial honest brokers. As Sufi saints, scholars, popular poets, and jurists, the Mujaddidis were called upon to mediate between urban and tribal elites and subjects, antagonistic polities, colonial and local authorities, and agrarian and highland communities. They led trade caravans across the Khyber Pass and the Amu Darya, and, when required, even raised armies. Their institutions became public spaces furnishing a suite of social services that went far beyond education, meditation, and popular religious rituals. They were soup kitchens, caravanserais, and safe houses, as well as loci for trade, negotiation, and diplomacy. They were also sites for the production and propagation of poetry and texts—didactic, polemical, and historical—that helped define the contours of Persianate Islam in this period.

With regard to your question about whether this was a response to the end of an “Islamic renaissance,” I would answer that it is more accurate to describe the Mujaddidi intervention as the next stage of intellectual-spiritual development in the broader Muslim world. This was a time when many sciences that had been forming in places like Bukhara since as early as the tenth century, from cosmology to law and literature, started coming together in a much more systematic, institutionalized way. This was a period that witnessed the growth of vast networks, an unprecedented exchange of scholars and scholarship, where students would travel from Siberia to Bukhara, where they would meet colleagues from Peshawar and Kabul.

At the center of your narrative is the very important question of how the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi Sufis inspired major reformist movements and articulated effective social responses to the fracturing of Muslim political power amid European colonialism. Could you please elaborate on your answer to this question? There is a contrary view, at least in Central Asia, that Sufi Islam was a major obstacle to twentieth-century reformist movements such as the Jadids and Young Turks.

Throughout the course of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, virtually every major social movement and even anticolonial resistance movement in Central Asia and its neighbors was connected to the Mujaddidis.

My book focuses on the career of one particular Mujaddidi Sufi based in Peshawar and Bukhara, named Fazl Ahmad, who died in 1816. (In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Peshawar, now in northwest Pakistan, was one of the two capitals of the Afghan Durrani Empire founded by Ahmad Shah Durrani.) As I immersed myself in Fazl Ahmad’s story, and physically followed his footsteps across the Indus and Amu Darya, it appeared that he was connected to almost every major mystic, intellectual, political figure, and social movement in the Afghan Empire, Central Asia, Tatarstan, and India during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The famed Uzbek state-builders of Bukhara, the kings Shah Murad and Amir Haydar, were not just his disciples but his licensed Sufi deputies, who were assigned by him to teach meditative practices to their own students. They reignited the Bukharan academic scene. Several Afghan kings were his disciples; they relied on Fazl Ahmad for transregional diplomacy and on his successors to help them mobilize against Britain. The notorious English agents and Great Gamers William Moorcroft and Alexander Burnes depended on Fazl Ahmad’s son to get them into Central Asia for the first time. These were the first English forays into Central Asia. Fazl Ahmad’s deputies in Peshawar led the charge against the Mujahidin movement in the 1820s. This is a fascinating moment: the Mujahidin movement was the first attempt to set up a Wahhabi-type puritanical state in the eastern Muslim world. And Fazl Ahmad’s deputies were successful in driving these radical ideologies out of the region and preventing their entry into Central Asia.

A third son, meanwhile, mobilized thousands of tribal auxiliaries in a decisive battle against the Sikhs of Lahore, who had looked poised to occupy Afghanistan in the early 1800s. Yet another disciple was the Akhund of Swat, an incredible ascetic of the Afghan highlands who set up a famous Sufi state in the mountains of the Swat valley in present-day North Pakistan and who led campaigns against colonial forces in the 1860s. The custodians of Mazar-e Sharif, the sacred epicenter of Central Asia, where Imam Ali is believed to be buried, were also disciples of Fazl Ahmad. One of them penned his biography. Several of the great Sufi-scholars of Siberia were likewise from his lineage. One of the largest madrasas in Xinjiang, the Chong madrasa, was part of his lineage via Osh in Kyrgyzstan.

And yet, Fazl Ahmad’s name is all but forgotten. Through his story—and he is one of thousands of these transnational Mujaddidi Sufi figures—it becomes clear that this vast Inner Asian world was entirely interconnected: the pastoral nomads of Central Asia, the urban centers, the ungovernable highlands, and the rural breadbaskets. So at the time of the fracturing of the great Safavid, Mughal, and Uzbek empires in the eighteenth century and the rise of small states, khanates, and the Afghan empire, Fazl Ahmad and his Sufi contemporaries were a force that kept this world together.

With regard to the Young Turks and the Jadids, it is true that many of their critiques centered around the role of Sufi orders in preventing progress. But we should keep in mind that Kursavi and Marjani were both Mujaddidi Sufi shaykhs. Plus, as scholars argue, major reforms in the late Ottoman empire, like the Gulhane edict that launched the Tanzimat reforms, directly reflected a Mujaddidi ethos. In addition, these modern movements inherited many of their critiques of corrupted Sufism from the Mujaddidis.

How do you see Sufis in general—as more of a political network or an intellectual (spiritual) one?

One of the key interventions that this book makes is recognizing that prior to the twentieth century, Sufism was at once spiritual, intellectual, and political. Although Sufis’ primary concern was spiritual development, their efforts reached much further.

First, of course, we have to rid ourselves of the notion of Sufis being recluses. Undoubtedly, all of the protagonists of my book spent a significant amount of time meditating and wandering. Most also passed through spiritually intoxicated phases, lost in contemplation of the divine. But the Mujaddidi Sufis—and, frankly, most of the Sufi schools—did not see God-intoxication and being reclusive as sustainable in the long term. The true guides were meant to be connected to the world and their communities. They were to be those who could practically guide others in their spiritual journey and their worldly affairs.

From the early years of Islam, Sufis and scholars provided leadership to the Muslim world and beyond. This is not a new idea. The notion of the Hidden Caliphate, which I introduce in my book, is a very old concept. For both Sunni and Shia Muslims, after the tragedy at Karbala, political and true spiritual authority were no longer fused. The rulers were not expected to be spiritual guides. Among most Muslims, there was an understanding that true authority lies with the ones of gnosis: imams, jurists, academics, and especially Sufis. These people of gnosis were the Hidden Caliphs, supposedly the true inheritors of the Prophet. The kings and khans were simply the Apparent Caliphate: they provided day-to-day governance and kept order, but purely in the temporal realm. The Hidden Caliphs were the ones who were supposed to guide hearts and provide moral leadership.

In your book, you pay great attention to Bukhara as the center of Sufi networks. Why did Bukhara remain at the center of these networks, what was so unique about it, and what is the legacy of the Sufi orders in this city?

Several chapters of my book concern Bukhara, which is a pivotal node in my study. The establishment of the Mujaddidi order in Bukhara in the late eighteenth century, via the Afghan Durrani Empire, transformed Bukhara into not just a center of scholarship and mysticism, but also a Sufi scholarly-cultural hub linking Siberia and Kazan with North India.

In the 1770s, the main protagonist of my book, Fazl Ahmad, settled in Peshawar, which was one of the two capitals of the Afghan Durrani Empire. From Peshawar, he embarked upon five journeys to Bukhara, where the celebrated khanate-builder of Bukhara, Shah Murad, and his son Amir Hayder became his devoted disciples. Contemporary sources tell us that Fazl Ahmad’s disciples numbered in the thousands on both sides of the Amu Darya, and he appointed over 600 deputies to run centers and manage communities of disciples. Many of these deputies belonged to ancient sacred lineages of Central Asia—Dahbidis, Ahraris, and Juybari Khwajas—thus forging scholastic bridges between Transoxiana and the Mughal and Afghan Empires.

In Bukhara, Fazl Ahmad witnessed Central Asia’s last scholastic renaissance. After decades of political and environmental crises in the early eighteenth century, the Manghit khans of Bukhara fought to reconsolidate Bukhara’s position as a political and academic capital. Starting in the mid-eighteenth century, Bukhara’s own scholarly class received considerable patronage. Students traveled from Bukhara (and Khoqand and Khiva) via reinvigorated trade routes to study with teachers in Afghan territories. Soon afterward, scholars from the Afghan and Mughal Empires came to Bukhara. These migrants included Fazl Ahmad, who was awarded the Mirakon Sufi center at Qarakul gate, where he met the young khan Shah Murad two years after his coronation in 1787.

The Bukharan sources tell us that Shah Murad was deeply committed to Sufism and hadith study. They tell us thatt he lived like a dervish, wearing patched garments, and engaging in manual labor; and that he even refused kingship until pressured by the community. The Peshawari sources, meanwhile, give us detailed accounts of his daily practices at Fazl Ahmad’s Sufi center. We learn that he spent up to four hours a day at the Mirakon Sufi center with his master, Fazl Ahmad.

The sources also give us detailed accounts of the range of sciences taught at this Sufi center, from jurisprudence and scriptural study to poetry, methods of meditation, and spiritual travel through the lata’if (metaphysical energy centers corresponding to points on the body).

Eventually, we are told, Shah Murad excelled in spiritual practices to the extent that he—and later his son Amir Hayder—would become deputies of Hazrat Fazl, with permission to guide their own students.

These sources also reveal that under the influence of Mujaddidi Sufis like Fazl Ahmad, a new ethos of kingship emerged in Bukhara. The kings in fact refashioned themselves as theologians and Sufis. We have detailed correspondence between Amir Hayder and Fazl Ahmad in which the king takes advice from his teacher on how to train his own disciples, on meditative practices, and on questions of adab.

At a library in Peshawar is a fascinating set of letters between Amir Hayder and Fazl Ahmad’s deputy in Peshawar, Hafiz Daraz, who was one of the foremost scholars of the Afghan Empire. Amir Hayder’s letter to this scholar contains 17 highly technical questions—ranging from logic and law to metaphysics and medicine—to which Hafiz Daraz responds.

Both Shah Murad and Amir Hayder patronized education, such that Bukhara boasted 80 madrasas by Amir Hayder’s time and sources claim that over 30,000 students were supported by the state. Amir Hayder often sent personal invitations to the principal scholars of the Afghan and Mughal Empires, like Bibi Sahiba Kalan, the great female scholar and the head of the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi order in Qandahar, Afghanistan, who is the subject of my next book.

For their part, the Afghan kings began offering stipends for students to study in Bukhara, and by 1800 an extensive academic exchange had developed between Peshawar and Bukhara. Each city had 100 institutes of higher learning, drawing students from as far afield as China and Dagestan.

Fazl Ahmad began appointing his own deputies from the Mughal intellectual centers of Punjab and Peshawar to Balkh, Samarkand, Bukhara, and Khiva, where they were provided for by local elites. These include, among others, a scholar from Punjab who in a matter of years became known as La’l Beg Samarqandi. His shrine and that of his son were revered in Samarkand until the early twentieth century.

Besides Hidden Caliphate, you have written In the Treasure Room of the Sakra King: Votive Coinage from Gandhāran Shrines, which explores copper currency from the Sakra region in northwestern Pakistan, dated from ca. 550 to 1100 and corresponding to the Nezak, Turk Shahi, Hindu Shahi, and Ghaznavid periods. What motivated your research into Sakra coinage? Do you have any interest in Central Asian coinage?

This is actually a book about Central Asian coins! The very idea that Central Asia, and Central Asian empires, were somehow particular to Russian-occupied Central Asia north of the Amu Darya has prevented us from recognizing the scope and connectivity of states like the Kushans, the Hephthalites, the Western Turks, and even the Timurids.

The book focuses on a cave temple and associated sacred sites in the highlands in northern Gandhara (northwest Pakistan) that were inaugurated under the Central Asian Kidarite dynasty in the fourth century and persisted well after the Ghaznawids. This cluster of sacred sites produced hundreds of fascinating copper coins meant to serve as temple offerings for pilgrims; these combined Hellenistic, Saiva, Vaisnava, Zoroastrian, Middle Iranian, Turkic, and even Byzantine iconography.

The period that I cover in this book spans several great kingdoms, most of which had Turkic roots: the Kidarites, the Hephthalites, the Nezak, the Turk Shahis, the Hindu Shahis, and the Ghaznawids. The type of political and religious symbols that appear on these coins will be very familiar to any scholar of Central Asian coinage: tamghas, deities like Anahita, sacred animals that carry divine grace, the fire altar, and Sasanian-style three-quarters facing or facing portraiture of the kind that one typically finds in Sogdiana. Some coins even feature the tamgha of Sogdiana. In fact, one of the first coins I discovered from the site features a Hephthalite tamgha and a duck carrying pearls in its beak, surrounded by a beaded border. This is the earliest datable representation of this sacred animal, which famously appears on the murals of Afrasiab and is now a symbol you will find painted on walls in various locations across Samarkand. Like Hidden Caliphate, this book is also about cultural and religious exchange across what we now call the Turkic, Iranian, and Indic worlds.

How well do you think Central Asia is connected to South Asia, particularly Afghanistan and Pakistan? What is particularly interesting in our shared history? How might we strengthen our intellectual links?

In my work, I conceive of all these regions as one interconnected space. In fact, I would argue that treating them–following modern politics–as three separate geographies prevents us from adequately understanding the history of this vast interconnected and rich zone. Across this whole region, the Persian language was a binding agent, along with many vernacular tongues that were inspired by Persian literature. There were shared sensibilities around kingship, faith, and adab. I argue that Sufi networks sustained this sphere well into the early twentieth century.

So in order to understand the Durrani capital cities of Peshawar or Kabul, one has to look to Bukhara, Khoqand, and Yarkand. These regions have a deep interconnected past, whether in the Mughal period, the Kushan period, or the Achaemenid period. Scholars, priests, literary figures, and armies constantly moved back and forth.

All photos by
Waleed Ziad

Ayşe Zarakol’s book Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders challenges our understanding of the history of international relations and makes sense of the apparently chaotic and brutal conquests of the nomadic warriors from the Mongol steppes. As Professor Zarakol explains, the influence of the Mongols and of their thirteenth-century leader, Genghis Khan, has extended beyond the borders of their empire, beyond politics, and beyond their era. They introduced a new type of sovereignty and empire-making that can still be seen today and that laid the foundations for a history shared by many people of both the East and the West.

In your book Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders, you discuss how Asia first became unified through Genghis Khan’s conquest of the world and highlight the high level of centralization of the Chinggisid model of sovereignty. Tell us, please, what was Genghis Khan’s role in the formation of Eastern civilization? How did the civilization of the Mongol Empire determine the specific history of Asian civilization? How do you argue your conclusions?

The basic argument I make in the book is that even though Asia or Eurasia had been a connected space before the thirteenth century, the thirteenth century is still a turning point for this continent because this was when much of the space came under the rule of the same empire, the same person. The Mongol Empire played a role in Asian history similar to that of the Roman Empire in European history, because being under the same type of governance structure has a very significant influence across Asia and Eurasia that we can trace for decades and centuries to come.

Although some of the practices and institutions I study in the book predate the Mongol Empire, the Mongols played a role in spreading and diffusing them. As a package, they became attached to the person and the story of Genghis Khan. His example became very significant, and others aspired to be like him. Even in regions that were not under his direct rule, you can see the influences. I am an International Relations scholar, and I argue that Genghis Khan’s empire essentially created a world order similar to our modern international order, because it covered much of the known world at the time. Its sovereignty model, as we call it—the kind of statehood model that they introduced—spread and influenced other geographies beyond Central Asia. That was a major contribution. At least for the next four centuries, until the seventeenth century (and perhaps even beyond), you can see empires in different parts of Asia that are clearly influenced by the Mongols.

Interview with

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Ayşe Zarakol

Ayşe Zarakol is Professor of International Relations at the University of Cambridge, where she also has an appointment as a Politics Fellow at Emmanuel College. Her research is at the intersection of historical sociology and international relations, focusing on East-West relations in the international system, the history and future of world order(s), conceptualizations of modernity and sovereignty, rising and declining powers, and Turkish politics in comparative perspective. Her new book, Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders, which advances an alternative global history for international relations focused on (Eur)asia, was published by Cambridge University Press in March 2022. In this book, Dr. Zarakol re-theorizes sovereignty, order, and decline from a more global perspective.

The book looks, first, at the Mongol Empire and the four Khanates as one world order. Then I have a chapter that is dedicated to studying the Timurid Empire, together with the early Ming Dynasty (of China), as empires influenced by the Mongols; this is easy enough to see in the case of Timur, but the early Ming dynasty, I argue, was also very much influenced by the Mongol model.

In the next chapter, I look at the influences of the Mongol Empire on the great Islamic empires of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: the Ottomans, the Safavids, the Mughals, and also to some extent the Shaybanids—between them they covered much of the world in the sixteenth century. Finally, I have a chapter looking at the influences of that world on Europe, on Moscow, Russia—places that we call the West today were also influenced. So that’s the historical story, essentially.

How did you come to your conclusions?

I work on sovereign evolution of statehood and the evolution of international order-making. In International Relations so much of our work in that areas has traditionally focused on Europe and the European trajectory. I was trying to come up with some comparisons outside of Europe—how the story of sovereignty unfolded elsewhere. I was working on the Ottomans originally, because that case was more familiar to me, and I started seeing historians arguing that the Ottoman conceptions of law and sovereignty in the sixteenth century had very clear Timurid, and even Mongol influences and origins. Then I thought, well, if the Ottomans were influenced by the Mongol Empire so many centuries later, others directly ruled by them must have been as well. Thus, I started pulling that thread across Eurasia.

I discovered that historiography of each region is very specialized. Historians usually study very specific countries and regions. But in recent years, historians of different parts of the world had separately been arguing that the Mongol Empire influenced their part of the world, countering more narratives that they had only engaged in destruction.

For example, even though the Ming were not Mongols—that they rejected the Yuan Dynasty and all the Mongol stuff—in recent years, historians of the early Ming have shown that the early Ming emperors did not act like traditional Chinese emperors. They were warrior emperors, they were interested in military campaigns and external recognition, they centralized power…and you cannot explain that except by reference to the Yuan/Mongol legacy.

What I did in the book was to bring all these separate accounts of different parts of Asia and Eurasia together into one big, connected story. I rely on the work of the historians who discovered these facts for their own regions. But as an International Relations scholar, I can focus on the big picture and tie it all together.

We are particularly interested in Central Asia. As you know, some countries—like Kazakhstan—consider themselves the heirs of the Golden Horde, but at the same time, statehood or khaganates existed long before the Mongol invasion, which led to the destruction of many states and cultural monuments during the thirteenth century (which was the Golden Age of Enlightenment of the Islamic World in this region). What is the legacy of the Mongols in Central Asia?

Many things predate the thirteenth century and have a long history, including various Turkic practices. I do not claim in the book that Genghis Khan invented everything. Central Asia was connected to the Persianate world, which was very advanced, and to China, the Sinosphere. The difference was that in the thirteenth century is that Eurasia was very fragmented politically. The Mongols of Genghis Khan were essentially able to unite different parts of Asia. They could even have brought Europe into the mix, by the way, but they stopped — and Europe at that point remained peripheral. But by connecting East and West Asia, the Mongols supercharged development on the continent because they were able to take some practices from East and export them to the West, and some practices from the West and export them to the East, and everything in-between. The connection is really what facilitates this moment of legacy making.

The initial conquests were quite brutal. I’m not an apologist for Mongol conquest—I’m sure it was terrible to live through them—but at the same time, once the conquests had been completed, the empire did have this function of, as I was saying, connecting different parts of Asia. They had an advanced postal system reliant on horses that spanned the whole continent and facilitated trade as well the movement of people (artisans, traders, and so on).

Some historians call this the Genghisid exchange—similar to the Columbian exchange that brought New World goods to the Old World (and vice versa). You can see the influence on Islamic art for instance. Islamic art was very different before the Mongol conquests, but as a result of the Mongol Empire you have the very clear Chinese influences on tile-making. Again, I don’t want to come across as an apologist for the Mongol empire (or any empire), but at the same time, we have to acknowledge that a lot of things that we consider to be great achievements of civilization would not have been possible without it.

The same thing with the Timurids—again, the influence on art and architecture in Timurid cities such as Samarkand and Bukhara is visible to this day. After the collapse of the Timurid Empire, many of the artisans and intellectuals that they sponsored ended up traveling to Anatolia and Iran, and of course with the Mughals they went into Indian subcontinent. Both the Mongols and the Timurids ended up really influencing those subsequent empires. Beyond what I talk about in the book—the political influences, the influence on the type of sovereignty and the type of empire-making—there are major influences on art, architecture, political theory, literature, and all that.

Even in China—I was talking about the early Ming previously—we can see this. To give one example, one of the things the Mongols were very interested in was the study of skies. This probably predates them—it’s not just a Mongol practice, it’s a Turkic practice—but they spread the idea that governments/ruling dynasties should sponsor astronomy/astrology. Wherever we see the influences of Mongol-style empire-making, you can see ruling dynasties sponsoring observatories. Samarkand is a good example of this. The early Ming empire also sponsored astronomers (often Muslim astronomers, interestingly). So there are all sorts of unexpected positive influences, but of course also terrible violence. It is a mixture.

How did Mongol political order influence China and Russia in particular? For Russia, the question of belonging to East or West was always a crucial one, and maybe for China too?

I discuss this quite a bit in the book. So what I argue in the book is that this is a type of centralized rule where the Khan—or whatever the leader is called in the local context—is the ultimate law-giver. That’s an unusual claim to authority because even though there are many kings and rulers across history, they are often accountable to religious authority, the things they say have to be approved by the ulama, the church etc. In the context of China Confucianism was a check on centralized authority. Before the Mongols come on the scene, the emperors were not that powerful (with the exception of much earlier history).

By contrast, what Genghis Khan essentially says is: I am the lawgiver, I’m not responsible to anybody because I’m a world conqueror, so I make all the laws. What we see in places influenced by this model is essentially great centralization of authority. That’s why sixteenth-century Ottoman or Mughal rule, for instance, is unusual in contrast to earlier Islamic models of governance: suddenly you have the rulers essentially saying they know better than the ulama (jurists) what the laws should be and making laws that seem to supersede sharia (religious law) — and that’s a direct line to the Mongols.

Similarly, in China their influence is one of centralization. As I said before, before Mongols takeover, the Chinese emperors were not so powerful. The Yuan Dynasty, direct descendants of Genghis Khan, change that dynamic. The Yuan emperors, as well the early Ming emperors, and also, I suppose some of the early Qing emperors (though I do not discuss the Qing in the book), were all centralizers—as I said, they aspired to be world-conquerors. As the Mongol influence fades in the Ming period, you start seeing in the growing influence of Confucianism and isolationism, by contrast, and the emperors become more symbolic and withdrawn.

In the Russian case, or really in the case of Muscovy—it’s better to say Moscow than Russia because while Moscow was ruled by the Golden Horde, it also benefited from that rule at the expense of other Russian cities—there is a very direct influence that we can see, and historians of Russia have written about it. Their conception of sovereignty was also rather changed by their experience under the Horde. People may know that there were references to in the sixteenth century to the idea that Muscovy was a third Rome, hence the title of Tsar (Caesar). But historians have also shown that the Russian Tsars in this period were acting more like the Mongol khans. In other words, you see a much more extreme centralization of authority both with Ivan III and, especially, with Ivan IV. I discuss these influences in the book. However, I also argue that some of the intolerant excesses of Ivan IV for example cannot be laid at the feet of the Mongols. After all, the Mongols, as I said, were brutal, but they were relatively pluralist in their rule vis-à-vis cultural and religious practice—they did not try to control their subjects’ religious faith and so on. They were generally relaxed about such things. Efforts to police the boundaries of religion, persecute witchcraft, and so on are more rooted in European and Christian history. In the excesses of Ivan the Terrible, I think we see perhaps a combination of the centralizing power of the Mongols with the Christian persecution of divergent practices, paranoia about witchcraft, and so on. We cannot blame the Mongols for all the terrible things their successor states do.

The Mongols were generally fine with pluralism. Even when the Genghisid sovereigns converted to Islam or other religions, they never—unlike their European counterparts—became religious zealots. Not because they were outstanding liberals but because they saw themselves as above it all, including religion.

Let’s move on to the concepts of East and West. What do you think belongs in the category “East” and what belongs in the category “West”? And how does the study of “Eastern civilization” help the study of the West, history, and/or contemporary politics? If we just substitute the Eastern lens for Eurocentrism, do we risk seeing another imbalanced picture?

When I talk about the rise and fall of the Eastern world orders, I’m not trying to suggest an unchanging essence to the East. Instead, what I’m trying to assert is the idea that the European trajectory is not necessarily always generalizable, and Europe was not always dominant, and the histories of other places also deserve to be told. Furthermore, if we want to think about what the future may look like, there is no guarantee that it’s going to look like the last 100 or 200 years. This means we need more historical examples to think with, different examples that can better spark our imagination about what may be next. That’s what I’m doing.

I think there are certain similarities in the time period that I am studying that make it comparable in some ways to modern international relations. For instance, my focus is on centralization; the nation-state is also organized around centralized sovereignty. It’s not centralized around the person of the ruler. It’s centralized, territorialized sovereignty. All the empires I look at aimed to be world empires—they had universal claims. So that’s similar to modern international order which also aims for universality. At the same time, of course, there are differences as well: if you were living in the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, or sixteenth century, you would not think Europe was the center of the world, you would think “Asia” (whatever you called it) was the center of the world. That’s where the excitement was, economically, culturally, politically.

So these are the points that I’m trying to make, but not in a jingoistic manner. And I am not trying to advocate for Asia-centrism in the place of Eurocentrism. What I am saying is the more we fill out the missing parts of the historical picture, the more balanced it will be. And then hopefully others will talk about Africa and the Americas (and other time periods as well).

Your book is praised for introducing new concepts and debates—such as order and decline—into international relations. Could you please tell us more about this contribution?

What I argue is that the discipline of International Relations focuses only on great-power rise and decline because it studies European history from the seventeenth century onwards, which is a story of European regional order becoming global. From that vantage point the international order itself seems to be always expanding and it’s only the specific great powers that rise and decline: the Netherlands, then Great Britain, the US, etc. What I say in the book by contrast is that if we take a bigger-picture view—if we study history at a more macro level—we realize that it’s not only great powers that can rise and decline, but international orders themselves. Even beyond that, in the book I have this notion of what I call “the ecumene,” such as deep norms, deep cultural understandings that underwrite world politics. For instance, we now take the nation-state for granted, but there were no nation-states in history. The deep belief that nation-states are natural things is part of our ecumene. We think nation-states were always around and will be here forever, but the people who lived in the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, or sixteenth centuries likewise thought the way they did things was going to last forever. Even those deep norms themselves can decline and change. The gist is that we need to separate great power vs order vs ecumene decline from each other and look at how orders fragment, how deep norms shift. We shouldn’t just look at great powers, we should study the deeper fabric of world politics as well.

We are currently witnessing an attempt to unite Turkic states, and it is not only Turkey that is taking the initiative on this, but also other countries with Turkic languages, including Central Asian countries. Is the creation of a union of Turkic states one of the geopolitical scenarios for a future world order? What are the prospects of such initiatives?

I know that there are efforts around this, but personally I don’t think it’s the way to go. I don’t believe it would even work. I’m not against some kind of collaboration. What I was trying to do in the book is tell a bigger story of connection that goes beyond ethnicity—the connection of Asia and Eurasia. It’s kind of remarkable to realize that Moscow, Beijing, Ankara, and so on were all under the control of the same empire at some point. And then of course their successor states took those models to India and so on. I obviously don’t advocate for Mongol-style rule, but I believe those of us in Eurasia should remember that there is a shared history that ties us—one that is not rooted in nationalist ideas because it dates to a time before nationalism. At any rate, the Mongols didn’t really care for nationalism, they didn’t have a notion of it—I mean, they used the word ulus, but it wasn’t the modern sense of ulus as a nation (as it is understood in many Turkic languages today), it was “me and my house (relatives).” Competing aristocratic Mongol houses would have no difficulty destroying each other. It goes without saying that regular people had no rights to begin with and nothing in common with the rulers except perhaps some linguistic ties.

In other words, if anything should bring Asia together, it’s not some kind of ethnic or linguistic tie but the fact that we have shared histories and experiences, just as Europeans do. Asia is not just East Asia: there is a bigger space that has been connected for centuries. We should remember that—and maybe remembering that can help us develop a more robust Asian identity. Why can’t I, as somebody from Turkey, say I’m Asian—which sounds ridiculous because that’s not what we do, but why not, right?!

Interview by Elvira Aidarkhanova, Analyst, PhD in International Affairs

While my colleague Zaure Batayeva collected the stories, communicated with the authors, and translated the Kazakh-language texts that would eventually make up Amanat, my job was to translate the stories that were originally written in Russian. I’m a professional translator who has been working with Central Asian authors for almost a decade now, and I have a good reading knowledge of Uzbek and some knowledge of Kazakh, but I mostly make my living as a certified translator of Russian. And right now, in the spring and summer of 2022, in the wake of Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, a Russian translator is a complicated thing to be. All around me, colleagues who have long focused on Russian literature and Russian culture are despairing. How can we accept funding from sources related to the Russian government? How can we justify devoting time to the study of Russian society or art or architecture while next door, in Ukraine, those things are being ruthlessly destroyed? How can we speak of the beautiful aspects of the Russian culture and language when that culture and language are being weaponized to negate and annihilate Ukrainian culture? And most to the point, for my fellow literary translators: Will anyone ever want to publish or read a Russian book again?

Read more: Translating Central Asian Literature: An Interview with Shelley Fairweather-Vega

All this worrying has been productive for some of my colleagues, who have pivoted quickly to translating war writing from Ukraine, powerful texts that demand the world’s attention. Thanks to this, readers in other languages—and, I have to suspect, many of the translators themselves—are turning their attention to Ukrainian arts and letters for the first time. Better late than never, certainly; their efforts can only be applauded. I, too, rushed to translate a war poem by a young Ukrainian poet. But I had little time to spend on that work because my schedule was full of projects already arranged: translations of Central Asian literature. Nobody is canceling or reconsidering these Uzbek and Kazakh projects (as has happened with English translations of works from the Russian Federation), but there has also been no unusual rush to produce and publish them (as is still happening with translations of work from Ukraine and by Ukrainians). This puts me, as a Russian-language translator who does not focus on either Russian or Ukrainian literature, in a distinct and somewhat uncomfortable position.

With all respect to the vital war-related translation work that is happening right now, I want to argue that this is also the perfect time to translate and publish Central Asian literature in English. Most fundamentally, this is because every time is the perfect time to read translated work; we can never get too much of other people’s ideas and stories. But more specifically, the war in Ukraine has reminded us—both Russia-watchers in the West and a large portion of the general public—that the huge geographical area we often think of as the “post-Soviet space” is much more complex (culturally, linguistically, politically) than we usually bother to acknowledge. That space, of course, includes Central Asia.

In Kazakhstan, for instance, there are striking similarities to the pre-war situation in Ukraine. Both countries are caught between bigger powers vying for influence (Russia and Europe in the latter case, Russia and China in the former). Both nations have been rediscovering their own histories, with pride and also pain. Both countries have marked linguistic diversity (Russian, as a colonial language with dwindling influence, and local languages that are gaining in popularity). Both places have experienced recent political upheaval accompanied by violently suppressed protests. Both countries have grappled, both philosophically and practically, with the legacy of their Russian colonial and Soviet past and struggled to adjust to a post-Russian future.

Many of the recurring themes in Amanat reflect this shared struggle, as it has been observed by women writing in Kazakhstan ever since independence. Asel Omar’s two stories in the collection provide one example. Her first, “French Beret,” describes one family’s small triumph against political repression in the Stalinist era. Her second, “Black Snow of December,” explores the protagonist’s conflicting thoughts about the Jeltoqsan protests of 1986, and how members of different social strata in Almaty interacted as those events played out. Family relationships are another persistent theme, especially the ways in which they have changed with the times in Kazakhstan. In Oral Arukenova’s story “Amanat,” siblings debate how to honor their mother’s last wishes; Zira Naurzbayeva contemplates the relationships between mothers and daughters in her “Beskempir” and “My Eleusinian Mysteries;” in Zhumagul Solty’s “Awkward Conversation,” a daughter frets over her parents’ relationship; and Madina Omarova’s narrator ponders her own responsibility for a seemingly motherless neighborhood girl in “Once Upon an Autumn Evening.” Perhaps the most striking motherless girl in the collection is Verka, the young trickster in Olga Mark’s “The Lighter,” who—like the female protagonists in the stories by Zaure Batayeva, Aigul Kemelbayeva, Aya Ömirtai, and Raushan Baiguzhayeva, as well as in Arukenova’s cycle “Procedures Within”—is experimenting to find the best way to make a living, or even establish a career, in a world transformed. Finally, Lilya Kalaus treats the topic of old political wounds with almost a slapstick touch in her “Operatic Drama,” in which two male characters squabble over whose ancestors were most repressed by the Soviet regime. These themes will surely sound familiar to people throughout the so-called “post-Soviet space,” and in every other part of the world besides. And several of the stories in Amanat could truly take place in any city in the world—Omarova’s “Poet,” for example, published here, only confirms it geographical location in the story’s last sentence.

All this helps me answer the question I have been asking myself: How do I justify translating Central Asian writers while the eyes of the world are on Ukraine? I translate Central Asian literature because its authors address universal themes from their own unique perspective. I translate it because there is more than one place in the world where Russian culture has influenced authors who write with startling beauty and power, but where Russian policies have frequently resulted in disaster. And I translate it because Central Asian authors should not be required to wait until catastrophe strikes, as it has in Ukraine, for their chance to be read outside the region.

The Poet
By Madina Omarova. Translated from the Kazakh by Zaure Batayeva

Autumn had come quickly to Almaty. The summer heat had disappeared in one day, and a cool wind from the mountains had enwrapped the city. The city became unhappy.

I noticed the man first. We were walking towards each other. Suddenly his eyes fell on me. He stared and then smiled. He started walking faster. I also smiled and took his hand when he approached. He hugged me, squeezed me, and kissed me. He had aged. I’m not saying that he had become an old man, but he looked older. He said we should go to a nearby café and have a meal. I had nothing else to do, so I followed him. He took tea for himself. I asked for laghman noodles and fifty grams of cognac. And for bread. “And some bread, of course,” I shouted to the waiter.

“I’m exhausted,” he said. “Lonely.”

“Where’s your wife?”

“The wife’s there, but I’ve got nobody to talk to.”

“Hmm . . .”

“When we were working together, did I ever hit on you?”

“No, never.”

“That’s strange.”

“You hit on every girl around, but not me, not a single time.”

“Interesting.”

“Perhaps I’m not your type.”

“No, you are, you are.”

I wanted to smoke. “If I remember right, you don’t smoke, do you?”

“I don’t. I go to the Union every day. Just wander around and go back home. Nobody’s there.”

“Why not?”

“All my friends are dead. They’re in another world.”

“I see.”

“How about we make love?”

“I don’t know, nothing interesting will come of that.”

“You’ve never slept with me. If you do, you’ll never leave me.”

“ Maybe.”

“More cognac?”

“No, I need to go back to work.”

“I’m exhausted,” he said again. “This world has become meaningless. I’m tired. Everything is in vain.” He squeezed my hand. Autumn falls quickly in Almaty.

Amanat: Women’s Writing from Kazakhstan (Gaudy Boy, 2022, ISBN 9780999451489, $22.00). Selected and translated by Zaure Batayeva and Shelley Fairweather-Vega with contributions by Sam Breazeale. Links to purchase: in North America, in Singapore/Southeast Asia, in Europe.

Dr. Robert N. Spengler, Laboratory Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (Max-Planck-Institut für Menschheitsgeschichte), is the author of a book with the intriguing title Fruit from the Sands: The Silk Road Origins of the Foods We Eat (2019). Dr. Spengler is interested in the vast area between China and Europe, which was long thought to be a space for passing through rather than a source of anything significant, and his interest is physical and archeobotanical. His book confirms that this diverse land—arid in some areas and extremely fertile in others—is home to a vast range of crops, from almonds and apples to tea and rice.

 https://robertnspengler.com/

You are the author of a book with the intriguing title Fruit from the Sands: The Silk Road Origins of the Foods We Eat (2019). What are the main findings of the book? Can you tell us a bit about how you drew these findings and on what archeological data they are based?

That is the theme of my book Fruit from the Sands: The Silk Road Origins of the Foods We Eat, which covers a wide variety of ancient crops. My goal was to take the reader on a journey through time and also a culinary journey across two continents. As such, the book covers Central Eurasia broadly and spans roughly 5,000 years. It goes back in time before what many people would think of as the Silk Road, but I define the Silk Road very loosely to cover all trans-Eurasian exchange.

The first half of the book, for example, is about the grains, crops, and grasses that shaped the ancient world. I write quite extensively about how the two East Asian or Chinese millets made it to Europe and how wheat and barley from Southwest Asia made it to China in the prehistoric era. I also discuss evidence showing that both crossed through Central Asia and were incorporated into the agricultural system in Central Asia. Later in the book, I elaborate on the fruit crops, which everybody gets very excited about.

Could you share some interesting stories about these familiar grain crops, as well as those fruits, such as the apple, that originated in Central Asia?

I guess the big question that archaeobotanists have been working on with grains in Eurasia relates to the millets. I feel like the field of archaebotany has studied the cereal crops—wheat, barley, and also rice—quite extensively, with an immense amount of research having been conducted over the last 60-70 years. But small grain crops, such as broomcorn millet or foxtail millet, have really only started to spawn exciting new research questions over the last, say, 10 years. And both of the aforementioned millets—broomcorn millet and foxtail millet—were domesticated in northern China but had somehow made it across two continents by approximately 3,500 years ago; they reached Europe and became very important crops in Eastern Europe and, slightly later, in crop-rotation cycles in the Roman and Persian Empires.

These are drought-tolerant, short-season crops, so they eventually became very important to feeding the large empires of the Iron Age and onward that formed across two continents, including across Central Asia proper. The millets also became very important in low-investment agricultural systems in Central Asia, notably as a complement to mobile pastoral economies. In the steppe or Central Asian grasslands, millets eventually became a very important crop in places where wheat or barley might have had a harder time growing.

And the history of fruits—something in which I am very interested—has Central Asia as one of its centers of domestication. The region is often thought of merely as a part of the world that things passed through: the typical idea of the Silk Road is that things that originated in China traveled along it to Europe, while things that originated in Southwest Asia got into China. But there is this whole area in the middle that nobody thinks about. One of the things that my team and I are working on is figuring out which actual plants or important crops in the world today originated in Central Asia. And I think the poster child for this—the crop we talk about most in the book—is the apple.

I think many people now realize that the main part of the genetic material of the modern apple originated in southeastern Kazakhstan in a wild apple forest not far from the modern city of Almaty. So it is a really exciting topic because it was a very important component of the economy of the ancient world, it is one of the most important fruit crops grown in the world today, and it largely originated in Central Asia. There are, of course, some caveats. First, there is very good reason to believe that the wild apple forests covered a much larger area of Central Asia in prehistory, possibly all the way down through Uzbekistan and into the Pamir Mountains, whereas now the population is restricted to this one pocket in Kazakhstan. Second, the domestication did not just happen in Central Asia. Thus, we can say that the apple originates in Central Asia, but it was really domesticated via the Silk Road.

When people in early history started moving apples, they inadvertently caused hybridization. There was another wild apple relative in the Caucasus, and when the wild Tian Shan apples from Kazakhstan were planted in the Caucasus, the bees kind of did the rest of the work for the domestication process: they took pollen from the wild apples in one region and combined it with the flowers of wild apples from the other region and created a hybrid. The same process happened again when the apple arrived in Europe, with the result that it hybridized with the European wild apple. So the process is very complicated, but in many ways, not only did the apple originate in Central Asia, but it was domesticated via the Silk Road. Simply by moving it, people completely changed the genetic material. I should also say that the only reason that farmers were able to grow different apple cultivars in the ancient world was because they were able to graft and clone these special hybrids, kind of locking the genetic hybrids into place. It is a very interesting process, but the apple is actually just one of these tree crops from Central Asia.

Another important plant in the world today that was, at least in part, domesticated in Central Asia is the walnut, the wild range of which actually spans from the Caucasus through the Pamir Mountains and across Central Asia. Southern Central Asia is also part of the range for the wild almond.

Yet another really important tree crop from this region is the pistachio, which has its entire wild range in southern Central Asia. I have a graduate student working in my lab right now, Basira Mir-Makhamad from Kyrgyzstan, who is exploring the question of the pistachio as part of her dissertation, so I think we will soon have some better answers as to what the process of pistachio domestication looked like, but we can pretty clearly say that it is another one of these crops that originated in Central Asia and became a major world commodity. The wild range for the pistachio extends south to the northern tip of Afghanistan and touches the edge of the Tian Shan—not quite into Kazakhstan—but all the way down through the mountain ranges, it grows in the foothills, like the apple and walnuts, actually. So the ancient fruit and nut forests that used to cover the foothills of the Central Asian mountains are actually very important to ancient and modern economies.

One of the artifacts we are trying to find in the field is ancient apple seeds. We have found a lot from the Middle Ages, but it is quite surprising how few there are from earlier periods. One of the objectives we are hoping to achieve is to get more projects going in southern Kazakhstan to try to find the ancient apples.

It is believed that the nomadic diet was more protein-based than plant-based. Yet there are many herbs in the steppes that were probably used as food. Could you tell us a bit about the herbs of the region? Have you studied their nutritional or medicinal properties?

That said, as you point out in the question, even the most mobile pastoral groups were still likely using wild plant resources. We do not find a lot of evidence for their use archaeobotanically, but we can still assume that this occurred based on ethnographic analogies. So in the mountain zones highly pastoral groups would historically have dug up wild roots, such as lily bulbs, that would have been an important food source; further north, there are a lot of berries, such as cloudberries or Rubus, that are very important. And there are a large number of different species of leafy greens that may have been important in the past. But again, archaeobotanically, these are slightly harder topics for us to explore.

It is also worth pointing out that there has been a little more work on some of the earlier time periods. So one of the things that we are very much hoping to get at is a better understanding of what cuisines looked like along the Silk Road during the later periods, such as the Qarikhanid period. We are also expanding further back into time with our research and looking at early Holocene diets in Central Asia. Thus far, there is only a little evidence, but even those limited data suggest that these fruits and nut forests were very important to the diet. That is, even before agriculture or pastoralism moved into the region, people were still utilizing some of these plants.

How did the ancient people of Central Asia develop farming techniques in rather arid regions? Did they innovate or borrow from other regions?

Again, this is an interesting and complicated question. Many of my colleagues and I have worked very hard to depict prehistoric Central Asia as more than just an area where everything passed through. This is the traditional image of the Silk Road because the historians who wrote the narrative were either sinologists working in China or Classicists working in the Mediterranean. Traditionally, very few scholars studied Silk Road trade in Central Asia proper, although this situation has changed. In truth, a lot of innovation and technological advancement has come out of Central Asia proper, especially in the medieval periods or the Golden Age of Islam in that part of the world. To this day, we can go to Samarkand and see Timur’s capital centers with their madrasas, big schools that were major places of science and innovation.

Even further back in time, major technological advances in irrigation practices were underway in Central Asia. That said, we know that some of these domesticated crops originated in other parts of the world, as I mentioned above in the case of the millets, which originated in East Asia, and wheat and barley, which originated in Southwest Asia. But what is really important here is that these two East Asian and Southwest Asian crops came together in the same agricultural fields for the first time in Central Asia. Right now, the earliest archeological site to have both sets of crops is in the foothills of Central Asia. So it is clear that while some agricultural technologies spread into Central Asia, the way they were used was very much Central Asian. And what is really amazing about this is that the mingling of East Asian and Southwest Asian crops eventually created the crop-rotation cycles that proved necessary to feed the large empires that formed across the ancient world.

Thus, in many ways, the Roman Empire or the Han Dynasty in China could not have formed without the mingling of these very different crops into a complex agricultural system, and that complex agricultural system originated in Central Asia, allowing all the major empires of the ancient world to feed their dense populations in these growing cities. Technology did spread into Central Asia, but there was also a lot of innovation that occurred in Central Asia proper.

Central Asia is trying to increase its agricultural exports, but so far these are limited to plain grains rather than a wide variety of crops. Do you have any ideas for what Central Asia agriculturists could focus on? Many foreigners note that the fruits of the region are unusually sweet—is this because they are a special variety or just because they are organic?

I am very happy to answer that question, but let me caveat my comments by saying that I am not an agronomist, so this is not actually my area of study, even if I have strong opinions about how some of the Central Asian countries could think about moving forward. The first thing I would say, which is actually already being implemented in the southern Central Asian countries, is that they need to massively reduce cotton cultivation. Cotton is a very water-intensive crop, and it is grown in some of the most arid regions. And I think it is pretty well-known that the decimation of the Aral Sea has largely been tied to the construction of the Karakum canal in the Soviet period. The production of a water-intensive crop in the middle of the Karakum and the Kyzylkum—hyper-arid desert regions—has been a horrible environmental disaster. It has removed an entire sea from the face of the earth, beyond just the water demands. It is also a very pesticide-intensive crop, and that is a complicated situation, but it is tied to the fact that cotton was actually domesticated four times. Cotton has four different centers of domestication, and each one of these centers of domestication came with its own pest load. So there are a lot of bugs that like to eat cotton plants, and that means a lot of toxins need to be sprayed on those fields. Thus, in every way, shape, and form, it is very problematic to cultivate cotton on an industrial scale. Reducing production to a smaller scale is a whole different question, but large-scale industrial production, such as the Soviet Union pushed in Central Asia, is very environmentally destructive and has proven to be one of the negative legacies of the Soviet Union in these Central Asian countries.

Another economic booster that I will just quickly mention is ecotourism. If you are interested in knowing more about ways to boost the economy, Central Asia is the heart of the ancient Silk Road, and it has these amazing mountain forest regions. So rather than expanding water-intensive agricultural systems, which we know are going to be increasingly impacted as global warming continually reduces the glaciers in many of these regions—because glacier melt in the summer is what feeds these agricultural systems, from the Tian Shan all the way down through the Pamirs—it would be valuable to expand tourism. I am talking not just about archeological or historical tourism, but also environmental tourism, because the mountain regions and the arid regions are just so beautiful. But the governments and peoples of Central Asia will need to work together to preserve these great treasures. There is so much that could be done there.

What other interesting archeological findings do you expect in Central Asia? Is it a relatively researched region or can we expect some more news with the advent of newer genetic technologies?

I think that Central Asia, as far as archeology goes, is just coming into its own. During the peak Soviet period of research, there was so much amazing archeological work being conducted there, but in the waning days of the Soviet Union it slowed down or died off. There has been a continual push for new archeology in Central Asia, but due to limited resources the archeological sciences have been overlooked in that part of the world. Central Asia has really exploded onto the international archeological scene in the last 10 years or so as new methods such as archeobotany (my field), but also isotope methods, zooarcheological work with animal bones, and better material analyses methods become available. Geneticists are also moving into this region, studying ancient human and animal genetics. That process is completely changing what we thought we knew about the way people lived in the past and what this part of the world looked like in prehistory.

I think the growing interest in Central Asia is just going to continue. I think we are really just scratching the surface of what the history books and the prehistory books should say about Central Asia. I think there are going to be many major innovations and changes over the next several decades, and I am very excited to be part of that and to be training students and postdocs who will take that tradition forward. Beyond just the plants that my team is interested in, I think we will really learn a lot about human population movements and the way humans interacted with the environment around them in the past. It is all coming together for the first time and I am looking forward to seeing where it goes.

All photos by
Robert N. Spengler

In this interview, Peter Rollberg, one of the rare foreign specialists on Soviet Kazakh cinema, speaks about the first Kazakh filmmakers, their main themes and relations with the audience, and the legacy they left for modern Kazakh society.

Your book is titled The Cinema of Soviet Kazakhstan 1925–1991: An Uneasy Legacy—could you explain why you call it an “uneasy legacy”? Is it in some way a burden for independent Kazakhstan or just an uncomfortable memory?

The word uneasy refers to the complexity of this wonderful yet contradictory legacy. The title also points to current efforts in independent Kazakhstan to decommunize society. Such strategies always carry the risk of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Fortunately, most Kazakhstani intellectuals have been skeptical of radical approaches, including toward national film history.

Interview with

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PETER ROLLBERG

Peter Rollberg is Professor of Slavic Languages, Film Studies, and International Affairs and Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs and Research Initiatives at Elliott School of International Affairs of the George Washington University. Rollberg studied at Lomonosov University in Moscow and at the University of Leipzig where he earned his Ph.D. in 1988. His main field of expertise is Russian literature and film, as well as Georgian and Kazakh cinema. In 1996, Rollberg published volume 10 of The Modern Encyclopedia of East Slavic, Baltic, and Eurasian Literatures (Academic International Press) and in 1997, a festschrift in honor of Charles Moser, entitled And Meaning for a Life Entire. His Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Cinema was published in 2009 (second, enlarged edition 2016). His book The Cinema of Soviet Kazakhstan 1925-1991: An Uneasy Legacy was published in February 2021 by Lexington Books. 

Indeed, the modernization of Kazakhstan in the twentieth century occurred in a communist framework, and while its effects were sometimes horrendous, there were also undeniable accomplishments. Kazakh cinema, for example, boasts incredible achievements. Watching Mazhit Begalin’s His Time Will Come (1957) today, one can only marvel at its artistic robustness and national perceptiveness, and Begalin’s film is not alone in this. True, communist ideology permeated every sphere in Kazakhstan for seventy years, but the nation’s cultural output was shaped in such a complex manner that official ideological guidelines were just one factor among many. The more thoroughly we look at Kazakhstan’s film history (and music, and literature) today, the more will we be able to appreciate its amazing performers (from Hadisha Bukeeva, Eleubai Umurzakov, and Serke Kozhamkulov to Amina Umurzakova, Nurmukhan Zhanturin, and Asanali Ashimov, to name but a few), cinematographers, composers, and directors. Soviet Kazakh cinema is part of the country’s complex—and thus “uneasy”—legacy, but a legacy of which Kazakhs can be proud.

Sovereign Kazakhstan is reassessing its Soviet past and certain painful memories, such as the famine and purges of the 1930s, cast a dark shadow over everything Soviet. Yet Kazakh Soviet cinema seems to be enthusiastic and optimistic. Did Kazakh Soviet cinema or individual artists address the dark pages of the Soviet past? What are your thoughts on the process of rethinking everything Soviet?

Kazakhstani filmmakers, like the vast majority of Soviet citizens, were very loyal to the communist state. At the same time, however, they maintained a great deal of pride in their own culture, in their native heritage. Of course, there was always the threat that the center in Moscow would accuse them of nationalism, which could have dire consequences. But great filmmakers such as Shaken Aimanov were also skilled administrators and politicians who knew how to maintain the sensitive balance between deep love and respect for Kazakh traditional values and dedication to the idea of communist modernization. Of course, films that captured Kazakhstani reality in a harshly realistic manner (for example, Zhardem Baitenov’s excellent Blue Route, 1968) were reprimanded. But the long-underappreciated Abdulla Karsakbaev managed to expose the totalitarian essence of the emerging communist society in A Worrisome Morning (1966), and Damir Manabaev made one of the first honest films about the horrors of collectivization and famine, Surzhekei, the Angel of Death (1991).

Was there one Soviet cinematic tradition or form? How similar or different are Soviet films produced in different republics?

Kazakhstan managed to build its own cinematic world quite distinct from that of Russia, Georgia, or Uzbekistan. Important style-shaping components were typical native landscapes, alternating majestic mountains with dusty steppes and blossoming valleys—easily recognizable elements that we find in historical dramas, children’s films, and contemporary comedies.

Another component is the constant civilizational tension between countryside and city, with Kazakh customs and language dominating the former and Russian language and denationalized urban lifestyles the latter. By the way, Kazakhstani cinematography is outstanding, a genuine phenomenon that has not been sufficiently researched. Great cameramen such as Mikhail Aranyshev, Iskander Tynyshpaev, and Askhat Ashrapov were responsible for creating the essential visual peculiarities of Kazakh cinema. Of equal importance are the scores of Kazakh films—for example, without the life-affirming energy of Nurgisa Tlendiev’s music it is hard to imagine Abdulla Karsakbaev’s wonderfully humorous and poetic children’s films.

What is the peak of full-fledged national cinema in Kazakhstan? Which movies best represent it?

For the Soviet period, it is the 1960s. Films such as Begalin’s The Traces Go Beyond the Horizon (1963), Aleksandr Karpov’s Tale of a Mother (1963), Karsakbaev’s My Name Is Kozha (1963), Shaken Aimanov’s Land of the Fathers (1966), and Sultan-Ahmed Khodzhikov’s Kyz-Zhibek (1970) reveal the philosophical depth and aesthetic richness that Kazakh cinema developed within a mere decade. Unfortunately, the 1970s turned out to be a time of rapid decline, even if that period has its share of superb films, including Viktor Pusurmanov’s prohibited Where the Mountains Are White (1972) and Sharip Beisembaev’s Protect Your Star (1975). The Kazakh New Wave in the late 1980s was very important for the self-reinvention of cinema after the bankruptcy of communist ideology and socialist realism, but its target audience were cineastes rather than the masses that Kazakhstani filmmakers had attracted in earlier years. Some leading New Wave directors—Serik Aprymov, Darezhan Omirbaev, and Ardak Amirkulov, among others—are still active today and, albeit rarely, make highly original films.

You know the Kazakh film directors and their biographies very well. How could an ordinary Kazakh become a film director? What institutions existed to train such cadres? How good were they?

Filmmakers from all republics were educated at the All-Soviet State Film School (VGIK) in Moscow. Because the competition was tough, Kazakhfilm studio established a one-year preparatory course in the 1970s to help native candidates pass the entrance exam in Moscow—with mixed results. Sergei Soloviev taught a masterclass in the mid-1980s from which the Kazakh New Wave sprang. But the most influential Kazakh filmmaker, Shaken Aimanov, was an actor and stage director who had no special professional education as a film director, yet his best films are alive today, and some deserve to be categorized as auteur films.

Read more: FOUNDING FATHER. Shaken Aimanov: The Man at the Core of Kazakh Cinema

Central Asian art-house cinema usually garners more praise than its mainstream counterpart. Is this just because of the exoticness of the issues and visuals of Central Asia or there are some deeper reasons?

The split between arthouse and mainstream in Soviet cinema happened in the early 1960s. Each serves different purposes and both are legitimate, but for a financially sensitive art such as cinema, arthouse is difficult to maintain without state sponsorship. The Kazakhstani state has been unusually supportive of arthouse cinema, both before and since independence, because it earns the nation international prestige. Kazakh arthouse directors have responded creatively to such great film artists as Bresson and Bergman, but also Scorsese, while preserving their national peculiarities. The latter aspect makes them attractive for international festival audiences. This is also true of the youngest generation of Kazakh filmmakers, including Emir Baigazin and Adilkhan Erzhanov. They may now be at a point where an emerging native arthouse audience actively responds to their sophisticated narratives.

You ended the book in 1991. Do you have plans to write about independent Kazakhstan’s cinema? If so, how would you characterize the trends of the newer era?

The post-Soviet period of Kazakhstani cinema is difficult to analyze in a historical framework because it is more diffuse and the causality of certain trends is harder to assess. The country’s national culture and the State have been growing increasingly distant from each other. Interestingly, during a brief period in the early 2000s there was enough money to fund films of high artistic quality such as Bolat Sharip’s Sholpan’s Sin (2006). However, what was then lacking was an efficient distribution strategy, and as a result, many of the best Kazakhstani films remained virtually unseen. It was Akan Sataev who helped reconnect quality cinema with large audiences—indeed, his Racketeer (2008) is a masterpiece of cinematic storytelling and at the same time a highly entertaining thriller with a clever take on Kazakhstan’s transition to neocapitalism. More recently, Kazakhfilm studio has focused on large historical canvases such as The Road to Mother and Tomiris, but it is unclear how long this trend can last. Many Kazakh filmmakers and producers seem to be obsessed with the prospect of winning an Oscar for Best Foreign Picture, but in my view, that is a complete waste of energy. The Academy Awards have lost much of their prestige, and foreign winners have largely been forgotten very quickly.

Kazakhstan’s creative industry is a promising field, with such world-famous names as Timur Bekmambetov and the singer Dimash, as well as comedians who make careers in Russia. Do you think the Soviet artistic past can in some way be incorporated? Would you like to see any Soviet Kazakh films be remade?

In my view, Bekmambetov has done very little for the rebirth of Kazakh cinema in the new millennium. As a matter of fact, any attempt by Kazakhstani producers to imitate Hollywood’s special-effect-focused transnational patterns, as well as the casting of foreign stars, has only led to embarrassing flops. Remakes of film classics usually turn out to be critical and box-office disasters, but I would like to see young Kazakh directors connect with their national literary heritage, for example, Auezov. For the Kazakhstani film industry as a whole, the most commercially promising genre is comedy, in which directors such as the brilliant Nurtas Adambai have become real virtuosi. Recently, many impulses have transitioned from cinema to the Internet, where ultrarealistic serials attract millions of viewers.

Watch Kazakh Soviet films on the KazakhFilm Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/kazakhfilmstudios

Caroline Eden, a travel and food writer, concludes her new book, Red Sands: Reportage and Recipes through Central Asia, from Hinterland to Heartland, with the words “You can learn a lot over a good lunch.”

Indeed, you can learn a lot over Central Asian lunch. Food in this region means so much: It is a vehicle of hospitality, a marker of identity, a field for talent competition, and—above all—an embodiment of the region’s bountiful spirit, its peoples, places, and nature. Eden’s book is not a mere recipe book and descriptive travelogue, but a lively reportage of her personal encounters and culinary adventures written in rich language through which you can smell and taste the food as well as talk to the people who make it.

Please tell us when your journey to Central Asia began and why it became culinary?

It started in 2009 when I landed in Dushanbe and travelled on to the Pamirs and then back down to Samarkand—this was my first time visiting the region. My travels through India had led me to Central Asia because, like so many others, I was enthralled by the Mughal architecture I’d stood in front of there, such as the Red Fort in Delhi. The founder of the Mughal Empire was, of course, Babur, who was born in Fergana and is buried in Kabul. My first book, Samarkand, covers Central Asia and the South Caucasus (Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia) and was a sort of gentle introduction. I initially started writing about Central Asian food because I got fed up with guidebooks referring to food in Central Asia as “survival fare.”

Caroline Eden

Caroline Eden is a writer and critic who contributes to the Guardian, the Financial Times and The Times Literary Supplement. In 2020, she was awarded the prestigious Art of Eating Prize.

Her latest book, Red Sands, published by Quadrille in 2020, is the follow-up to Black Sea. It is a reimagining of traditional travel writing using food as the jumping-off point for exploring Central Asia. Black Sea was published by Quadrille in 2018. A wholly new format, fusing travel narrative with recipe book, it is the tale of a journey between three great cities: from Odessa, built on a dream by Catherine the Great; through Istanbul, the fulcrum balancing Europe and Asia; and on to tough, stoic, lyrical Trabzon. Black Sea won the Art of Eating Prize, the John Avery Award at the Andre Simon Awards, Best Travel and Food Book of the Year at the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards, and Best Food Book at the Guild of Food Writers Awards 2019. Her first book, Samarkand—Recipes and Stories from Central Asia and the Caucasus, was published by Kyle Books in 2016. It was a Guardian “Book of the Year” in 2016 and went on to win the Guild of Food Writers Food and Travel award in 2017.

 Twitter

Yes, the food in tourist restaurants isn’t always great, but step into people’s homes and it’s another story entirely. And it does keep on improving, year after year, in the touristy cafés, too. It’s obvious, really, when you see how good the markets are—you think, surely there’s a lot more going on than the café menus suggest. Later, I found food to be an excellent vehicle for discussing all manner of things, and in Red Sands, my new book, I discuss everything from the giant walnut forests in Kyrgyzstan to a remarkable cake shop in northern Kazakhstan and how milk cartons in Karaganga tell the tale of the Karlags.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, some Russian restauranteurs complained that the Central Asian food market was very limited: not enough fresh ingredients, since fish and seafood are usually imported frozen, and too limited a variety of fresh vegetables. Do you find the cuisine limited and would it benefit from more open culinary exchanges? You have all sorts of recipes, including Russian and Uighur—what do you think of this mix?

The markets in Central Asia are, of course, all different but if you take a food bazaar, say, in the Fergana Valley, in autumn, it would be extremely shortsighted to dismiss it. There, you will find the finest fresh fruits available in the world (pomegranates, pears, apples, grapes), a spectacular range of locally sourced nuts and dried fruits, freshly baked breads, wonderful honeys, fresh dairy produce, pickled salads… Thank goodness, the markets are not overflowing with imported foods—that would be a tragedy. Of course, there are some imports—Turkish and Russian processed foods (I’m thinking mainly of chocolates), goods from China—but they’re not the majority… It is exactly the sort of scene that the smartest cities in the Western world try to imitate, with “farmers’ markets,” at vastly inflated prices. I’d say that any Russian restauranteur who complained about this was either misinformed or had perhaps spent almost no time in Central Asia.

Your recipes have become very popular on Twitter. How did you obtain and test them so quickly? Have you tried to modify them—for instance, do Central Asians really pickle cauliflower? How did you select them for your book?

The recipes in Red Sands are a mixture. Some were gathered from locals and friends whose homes I stayed in, some are from restaurants, others are imaginative and were inspired by historical events or people. I test them at home, obviously, and I have a friend who is an excellent home cook who tests them with me (I pay her a modest fee for this). On pickled cauliflower, it is popular in the markets where Korean-style salads are sold. Tashkent’s Chorsu Bazaar, Khujand’s Panjshanbe market, and Shymkent’s various bazaars, for example, have vendors selling jars and bags of pickled salads and pickled cauliflower.

For a recipe to be included, usually it needs to add to the narrative in some way or to catch the feel of a place or time. Take bread in Tashkent, for example: bread is a way of talking about the city—it is “the city of bread,” a place of relative abundance and refuge for people who arrived from elsewhere in the USSR during very hard times, such as famine and war. The city was a shelter. There is a recipe (both for non bread and for bread pudding), but only because, more importantly, there is also a story about the poet Anna Akhmatova’s time in Tashkent in the 1940s.

Many of the places you have visited are simple, with friendly owners/workers with whom you make a personal connection. How about high-end places? What can you say about them?

That most of them aren’t very good? I am only half joking. I rarely eat in flashy places, usually because they are more interested in what people are wearing and what they are drinking than in what is coming out of the kitchen. They also never seem to last for very long. For myself, I prefer to go to established places where families and workers eat.

Your book is not only about food but more about places and people (and even seasons!). Which have been the most memorable encounters?

Food is woven throughout the book and I like to say that it forms the first step, and the last, but it is not the whole story: for me, people—and their stories—come first. Memorable encounters are many, but let me name two. I am extremely fond of Imenjon Mahmudov, in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, who has become a friend over the years and who cooks an insanely good plov made with local Uzgen rice—short, fat, reddish, and supremely flavorsome—little peeled eggs from the quails in his courtyard, and local quince and carrots. He has fantastic stories to tell about cooking for mountaineers at the Peak Lenin base camp, including famous climbers such as Anatoli Boukreev, known as a “lung with legs.” Boukreev was depicted in the 2015 blockbuster film “Everest.” I also think often of the poet-botanist Mirzoshah Akobirov, in whose orchard, deep in the Rasht Valley in Tajikistan, I stayed. An incredible man—a singer, a musician, a poet, and a brilliant gardener—and one of the most hospitable people I have ever met.

You prepared for your journey by reading many travelers’ accounts. Which ones were helpful?

I carried two books with me on the journeys I took when researching Red Sands, both of which are very useful and interesting. The first is Through Khiva to Golden Samarkand by Isabella “Ella” Robertson Christie, published in 1925. It is an account of her two journeys to this region, in 1910 and 1912. Ella was a formidable and sharp-eyed traveler, born in 1861 close to my adopted city of Edinburgh. Her musings provided constant reminders to travel unhurriedly but deliberately, to observe quietly, and to examine life both high and low. To indulge a hunger for the world, but to go slowly and stay busy by simply being there. What sets Ella Christie’s work apart from better-remembered writers on this region, such as Peter Hopkirk and Sir Fitzroy Maclean, are her commonplace observations and her motivation. Rather than setting out to spy, break records or gain accolades, she took pleasure in observing and noting the domestic and commonplace—cooking, clothing, and workshops—in great detail.

The second writer is John Wardell, also British, who recorded his years living in Kazakhstan in a fascinating and well-written book entitled In the Kirghiz Steppes (historically, the Kazakh steppe was referred to as Kirghiz) that is sadly little-read today. He arrived in 1914, on his 25th birthday, to mine copper for the tsar, having left London 16 and a half days earlier. He witnessed Kazakhstan on the eve of industrialization and delighted in the seasons changing. He cataloged the flora—yellow irises, marigolds, wild sage, and bitter lemony southernwood—and noted horses’ hooves bruising the herbs so that the air was redolent with perfume. These are far from impossible images. On my own journey through the Kazakh steppe in early summer, red poppies stretched blazing and livid for hundreds of miles and I crushed strongly scented wild mint and thyme underfoot. Wardell’s book, as I carried it with me, was a physical reminder of the value of recording the present, of noting people, places and countries at a time of development and transformation.

All photos provided by Caroline Eden

In his book, Nomads and Soviet Rule: Central Asia under Lenin and Stalin (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Alun Thomas examines the experiences of Kazakh and Kyrgyz nomads in the NEP (New Economic Policy) period and demonstrates the Soviet state’s treatment of nomads to be far complex and pragmatic. He shows how Soviet policy was informed by both an anti-colonial spirit and an imperialist impulse, by nationalism as well as communism, and above all by a lethal self-confidence in the Communist Party’s ability to transform the lives of nomads and harness the agricultural potential of their landscape. This is the first book to look closely at the period between the revolution and the collectivization drive, and offers fresh insight into a little-known aspect of early Soviet history.

Author

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Alun Thomas

Dr Alun Thomas joined Staffordshire University in September 2017. Before this, he worked as a tutor or lecturer at the University of Sheffield, Manchester Metropolitan University, the University of Leicester, Nottingham Trent University and the University of Nottingham.

Dr Thomas’ research to date has concerned the modern history of Russia and Central Asia. He began his doctoral studies in September 2011, funded by a full AHRC studentship. His doctoral thesis, ‘Kazakh Nomads and the New Soviet State, 1919-1934’ described the treatment of nomadic peoples by the Communist Party in the early Soviet period. It built upon original research in archives in Almaty, Kazakhstan and Moscow, Russia. 

Dr Thomas’ present work relates to the postcolonial nature of early Soviet governance in non-Russian regions of the USSR.

 Full bio

Your study provides important insights into Communist politics towards nomads since early Soviet times. The book’s introduction makes the point that this is the period between the revolution and the collectivization drive. What was this period about? Who was in charge? Were there debates around how to treat the nomads and what were they about?

My book looks primarily at the period of the New Economic Policy (NEP), which lasted roughly from 1921 to 1928. The NEP was not applied in a systematic fashion; its effects were felt differently in different places. This makes it tricky to define. It might even be said that what makes the NEP a coherent period of time is what it wasn’t. It wasn’t Civil War, accompanied by ruinous violence, and it wasn’t the first Five Year Plan and collectivization, accompanied by a highly destructive confiscation drive.

This would be an exaggeration though. There was plenty of violence in the NEP era too, not least because of the so-called Basmachi uprising. There were also distinctive patterns in the treatment of nomads in the NEP era, and one had to do with the NEP itself; the Bolsheviks made an effort to establish a standardized tax system which taxed nomads in a proportionate manner, sensitive to their way of life. The NEP also coincided with the Bolsheviks’ ‘national delimitation’ of Central Asia, which divided the region into the five nation-states we have today, and this had profound physical and conceptual impacts on nomadic life.

Central Asian nomads were governed in the NEP period by a mixture of loyal Bolsheviks and local elites with whom Moscow had made an uneasy pact. There was a general consensus that nomadic life was ‘backward,’ but beyond this, there was a lot of disagreement about nomads in the 1920s. Some thought the Party needed to incentivize permanent settlement among nomads, for example, while others felt there was no need to intervene.

How would you describe the Tsarist policy towards the nomads? What were the Tsarist administrators planning regarding the region? Was Tsarist and Bolshevik policy different regarding the European/Russian settlers?

Nomadic experience under the Tsar varied a lot depending on when different regions came under St. Petersburg’s control. Russian influence over the northern Kazakh Steppe came long before the Russian Empire reached the Tian Shan. The Empire made its presence felt in changing legal customs, in schooling, and in structures of authority; but probably its biggest impact from a nomadic perspective came from settler colonialism. Russian peasants arrived in nomadic areas in large waves in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and they tended to acquire the best pastureland, creating much hardship for nomads.

In the early 1920s, many of these European settlers (not only Russians, of course, but others from the western periphery of the former Empire, such as Ukrainians) were forced to leave Central Asia as local nomads reclaimed their pastureland. It seems the Bolsheviks were unsure how to respond. They were caught between two impulses; first, to support processes of decolonization and evince their anti-imperialist ideology; second, to sustain and develop the Soviet economy. Remember that they thought of nomadism as backward. The national delimitation might be thought of as a way for them to resolve the tension between these impulses, but I think the nomadic experience shows that this was near impossible.

Soviet anti—nomad politics affected not only Kazakh and Kyrgyz, but also Turkmen nomads, maybe nomads in Siberia too. Do you know if politics were the same? Or were there differences?

I think this is an open question. Local factors played a huge role in nearly every decision made by the Party regarding nomads, so there will no doubt be variation. The impact of collectivization on nomads was nowhere as bad as it was in Kazakhstan, for example.

However, there are some trends which, in all likelihood, apply in all cases. Moscow had a specific way of understanding space as both national territory and economic resource. This governing mentality cascaded down to Communist Party committees and cells in the form of demands for information and resources. In any nomadic region of the USSR, I’d argue, it was then confronted by a different way of valuing and mapping space. When nomads declared their right to use or migrate through land-based upon their own authorities of custom and practice, the Communist Party argued back with talk of national jurisdiction and macroeconomic targets. The nomadic tendency to migrate made some land seem unoccupied or under-utilized, but to nomads, this land was essential to their wellbeing. In contrast, the Soviet Union took its borders very seriously, but for nomads, these borders were trivial annoyances at best and obstacles to their survival at worst.

Soviet attempts of eradication nomadism could be designated as “carrot and stick policy”. It was a combination of coercion and attraction: higher taxes for nomads, de-kulakization and collectivization campaigns together with educational programs. What were the other carrots? Only education?

I think it’s important to note that most Communist Party members assumed that the nomads were desperate to settle if they felt able to. Some Bolsheviks argued that nomadic elites, the bai and manaps, maintained their power by keeping their communities in a state of migration and thereby keeping their communities impoverished and docile. So there was some surprise in the Communist Party that the arrival of socialism did not create a surge of permanent settlement. Incentives were something of an afterthought.

We have to be cautious of the historical sources, which surely exaggerate the amount of resources actually offered to settling nomads. In principle, the Communist Party committed itself to the distribution of timber to make new permanent dwellings, and it committed resources to make successful new farmsteads. Peasants were asked to help settling nomads to learn productive methods of farming. Nomads who had recently settled were taxed at a lower rate than those that migrated, though tax-collectors reported that nomads often claimed to have settled so that they’d pay less tax, and then simply continued to migrate once the tax-collector had moved on. These kinds of administrative headaches—associated with a highly mobile population—vexed Bolshevik authorities throughout the decade.

Were the local people consulted about the policy? There have been many discoveries that indicate the local elite had participated actively in the central Soviet policies. What would you say about this?

These cases open up interesting opportunities to talk about power and accountability in Soviet Central Asia. Partly, this is a question of which categories we use to understand history. Do we divide up participants by their class, as the Bolsheviks might, or by their ethnicity, their language, their tribal or clan loyalties, their gender, or by their everyday behaviors?

To simultaneously be both a Communist Party administrator and nomadic was very difficult. With some exceptions, like the Red Caravan expedition or the Red Yurts campaign, Soviet centers of power tended to be sedentary and urban. Central Asian elites in the upper echelons of their local Communist Party branch ideally had to be literate and proximate to the bureaucracy. As such, in the book, I tend to emphasize the isolation of nomads specifically from the Soviet state and its decision-making processes.

Yet there was certainly an overlap. Nomadic communities did learn the language of the new regime and could deploy it when needed. When disputing the use of natural resources, for example, nomads sometimes spoke of national representation and the good of the larger Soviet economy. When collectivization began, some tribal elites used the state’s facility for violence against members of rival tribes.

What is the greatest mistake of the policy that led to the tragedy of collectivization? How big was this tragedy, and how has it affected the region through today ? Were there any alternatives?

Although it’s mainly focused on the NEP years, it was essential that my book contains a chapter on collectivization because of the existential impact the policy had on Central Asian nomadism. The collectivization campaign began in 1928 and the Soviet countryside did not begin to recover until 1934. Kazakhstan was one of the largest nomadic regions of the USSR, and as a proportion of their population, Kazakhs suffered more deaths from collectivization than any other nationality. Approximately one and a half million people died as a result of collectivization in the Kazakh Republic.

Nomadism interacted with collectivization in a number of ways. The perception that nomadism was backward helped to justify the extreme measures taken. The confiscation of resources, particularly livestock, drained an economy that was also suffering shortages and destabilization. The regime’s insistence that collectivized nomads should settle—what the Party called ‘sedentarization’—was an absurdity in a landscape that was unsuitable for sedentary farming. By the mid-1930s, the number of nomads in Central Asia had dropped precipitously.

I struggle to envision any alternative regime in Central Asia after the collapse of Tsarism which was supportive of nomadism. Local political elites who only joined the Communist Party after the Civil War tended to be modernizers who saw nomadism as a hindrance. But the NEP years show that the Communist Party was willing to make accommodations with nomadism and to meet nomads in their own land on their own terms. From my perspective in the 1920s, the cardinal changes leading to sedentarisation occurred at the end of the decade in the high politics of the USSR.

Shelley Fairweather-Vega is a translator from Russian and Uzbek. She collaborates with authors, academics, and activists around the world and has worked on projects as varied as Russian poetry, Uzbek historical fiction, popular science, romance, and detective stories. She is a founder of the literary translation circle in Seattle, Washington, and runs FairVega Translations and FairVega Russian Library Services.

The modern literature of Central Asia seems to be really underrepresented in English—and the West in general. What are the reasons behind this, in your opinion, and how it can be improved?

Thank you for starting this conversation! I’ll tell you about the upcoming books first. They can all be ordered from the publishers at the links I’ve provided.

On October 1, Talasbek Asemkulov’s novel A Life At Noon (Талтүс in Kazakh, published by Slavica Publishers) will be available. It’s a fictionalized memoir of the author’s own childhood in an aul in rural Kazakhstan in the 1960s. Asemkulov is mostly known as a musician, a dombyra player and a composer of kuys (and an expert on the history of Kazakh music). The protagonist in the story is a young boy learning to play the dombyra, and at the same time, learning about the history of his family and his country from all the old men in the aul. It is a book full of stories, and while it’s set in the Soviet era, it was written after the collapse of the USSR, and it’s a very non-Soviet book in every respect.

Then there will be the two books by Hamid Ismailov, first Of Strangers and Bees: A Hayy ibn Yaqzan Tale (Haiy­ibn­Yakzon, coming out from Tilted Axis Press in October). A critic recently described it as “Master and Margarita comes to the Uzbek Cultural Center of Queens” for its odd blend of magic, post-Soviet angst, Sufism, and everyday ups and downs. Its main characters include Avicenna, an Uzbek writer, and a bee. Then, in November, Syracuse University Press will publish Gaia, Queen of Ants (a simplified version of its Uzbek title, Ялмоғиз Гея ё мўр-малаҳ маликаси), another Ismailov book that has never been published in Uzbekistan. This one also has persistent Sufi themes, and it’s also a tale of a clash of civilizations, but the two books are quite different.

This one also has persistent Sufi themes, and it’s also a tale of a clash of civilizations, but the two books are quite different.

I’ve been a professional translator for ten years, and over that time I’ve found myself working more and more on the translation of creative texts (books, poems, film scripts, etc). Ismailov found a short translation I did from Uzbek online and contacted me; I translated some short stories of his and an essay and eventually he convinced me to translate these novels. I was introduced to the Asemkulov book by the author’s widow, Zira Naurzbayeva, who is a fantastic writer herself and knows many more good writers and people who promote Central Asian literature abroad. Now I’ve learned of so many good new books from the region that I can’t possibly stop translating them.

To translate two novels from Hamid Ismailov in row – there must be something about them that made them so attractive to be translated.

Yes, absolutely, and this something is Hamid Ismailov himself. He’s a wonderful storyteller in any language he chooses, and while his novels are all very Central Asian or Russian (in the broad sense of “Russian”), a lot of the emotions, characters, and stories feel very universal to me. His books always have a sense of humor, even if it’s very sad humor, and they have an ironic wisdom that’s very appealing to me. I believe all those elements help Ismailov’s books to resonate with readers all around the world, so they demand to be translated. Ismailov is himself a translator as well, and he understands how the craft of translation works; and as a BBC journalist and long-time resident of the UK, he also has useful connections to the British publishing industry. They know him and there is always an audience ready for his next book.

How do you choose a novel to translate? What do you pay attention to? Is story more important, or do you focus on the way the story is described to catch the attention of western readers?

My decisions are based on the book itself, first. As I read it, I ask myself whether I like it at all, whether I understand it, and how I would describe it to an English-language publisher or literary critic in a way that would be interesting to them. And second, I consider the author, if they’re a living person. Can I develop a good working relationship with the author? Do I trust that person? Do they trust me? Translating someone’s book is a very serious commitment. If the author and translator don’t see eye to eye, I think translating that book would be a very difficult and unpleasant experience. I’m very lucky to have been found by some authors who are wonderful people, with whom I have a lot of trust and mutual respect.

What do you think may attract Western readers to Uzbek or other Central Asian literature?

I think that most Western readers first come to Central Asian literature because they have an interest in Russian literature. In a way, that’s a shame, because literature from Uzbekistan and the other countries deserves to be read and evaluated on its own terms. On the other hand, it’s a blessing, because readers can be pleasantly surprised to discover how non-Russian a book written in Uzbek can be. They discover that Central Asian literature is much more than just exotic Russian literature. I hope a few discoveries like this will pique readers’ curiosity and make them want to learn more about the region and read more, too.

Do you attempt to adapt novels for the western audience’s mentality or keep the original motifs fully intact?

Well, this is one of the fundamental questions of translation: do we “domesticate” the text, bring it closer to what English-language readers expect, or do we “foreignize” it, and make an effort to keep it strange and alien to English-language readers? But it’s not a simple question, because there are many kinds of English-language readers, and there are many kinds of books. For every book, I have to make a judgement: Who will read this book? What will they expect from the book? And what can I expect from the readers, in terms of attention, willingness to learn something new, willingness to think in an unfamiliar way? Usually, I trust my readers to have a sense of adventure. I want them to be fully aware that this story does not come from their native land, and enjoy the interesting, odd things about it. Yet I see no reason to intentionally make the translation sound “foreign”. If the original is a good, well-written Uzbek book, then the translation must be a good, well-written English book, even if the settings, motifs, and themes are rarely described in English or completely unfamiliar.

What are the main differences that you have noticed between the content of Central Asian literature and the current world trends? And do you still feel the Soviet impact in the post-Soviet literature?

Yes, that Soviet shadow is still visible over a lot of Central Asian literature. This is especially a problem, I think, with the authors who were writing under the Soviet system in the 1930s who are the Central Asian “classics” now, or those who were writing later, in the seventies and eighties. Those from the early 20^th century are often classified into just two groups: those who were later labeled nationalists or dissidents who were purged in the 1930s, and the authors who meekly conformed to Soviet rules and wrote socialist propaganda. But I wonder if there is another type of author from those decades whose work has been overlooked? The one or two generations who followed grew up in the Soviet system and might have found it hard to imagine writing in any other way. But of course, poetry and storytelling and art of all kinds has a very long history throughout Central Asia, long before the Russian Empire or the Bolsheviks arrived. Now some authors have more freedom to explore those old traditions, like Ismailov does with Sufi tales and Avicenna, or like Zira Naurzbayeva does in her work with ancient Kazakh myths and legends. And other authors are equally free to join more global trends and write the kinds of things you might find in any Western university’s creative writing program, which may be set in Central Asia, but have more in common with Western writing today than any particular local history or tradition. But I have the sense that those authors, following global literary trends, are in the minority. There is just still too much writing to be done on specifically Central Asian themes. They have not had the chance to be fully explored yet.

Khaled Hosseini, a Hirot-born writer, uses a lot of Persian words in his books in English. Have you also kept some words in Uzbek and Kazakh in the translation?

Certainly. There are some words like greetings that I like to keep in the original language to remind readers that these characters are not speaking English. I also think it’s useful to retain some of the original language for the names of culturally specific items like foods and tools for which there really isn’t an English word. In those cases I expect my readers to learn some new vocabulary, and I hope they’re willing to make the effort.

What are the biggest challenges that you face during translation?

Translating any book is difficult because of the sheer size of the project. It takes stamina to return to the computer day after day to make progress on a big novel. Fortunately, when the book is really engaging, it holds your interest, and the work never gets boring. That was true with all three of these upcoming books.

There is also the challenge of understanding; how can I be 100% certain I’m correctly understanding an Uzbek-language book? Hamid Ismailov is a fantastic author to translate partly because he is happy to answer questions and he understands common translation dilemmas. Any time I wasn’t sure I understood something in the Uzbek, he was able to explain.

The other challenges all have to do with the English language. What do we call this or that part of a horse in English? Does English have a common phrase that is similar enough to this or that blessing or curse in Kazakh? I have to explore every corner of my native language to find the resources to translate Central Asian books well.

The modern literature of Central Asia seems to be really underrepresented in English—and the West in general. What are the reasons behind this, in your opinion, and how it can be improved? Should the writers turn to Russian to improve their chances of being translated, or should they keep writing in their native languages and seek opportunities to be translated?

I certainly agree that it is underrepresented. I think this is, again, mostly a consequence of being overshadowed by Russia and Russian literature for so long. I hesitate to tell every writer to use Russian or to never use Russian. A writer must write her story in the language in which she imagines the story. It’s a big mistake to write while focused on the goal of being translated! First, write an excellent book in the language your imagination speaks, whether that’s your native language or another one, and after that the translator will do her job to make it an excellent book in another language.

Of course, there are dozens of translators that are always working from Russian to English, and very few working from Uzbek or Kazakh. But there are more of those now than there were even five years ago, and they are honing their translation skills—and they are dedicated to the cause of promoting Central Asian literature and poetry. I like to think the truly good books will find their translators no matter what language. Finding publishers in English, sadly, is another question.

If someone wants his/her works to be translated from a non-Russian Central Asian language to English, what should they do, who should they contact, and what should they say?

The perfect scenario is to publish your work in the original language, and get some good publicity for it. If you collect enough recognition and praise, then you need your local publisher or your literary agent to share the news with publishers in other countries. Publishers are busy and have a lot of authors competing for their attention, so even the most artistic, beautiful book needs to have a good salesman promoting it. Sometimes translators can help with this process, but I find that publishers often prefer to hear from authors’ agents, and they bring in a translator later, after all the arrangements for a new publication have been made.

But if publication in the original language is not possible, or if you don’t have an agent who can contact publishers, you’ll need to convince a sympathetic translator to read your book. If they fall in love with it, they might agree to help find a publisher for an English version. I am trying to do this for a few books right now, and it’s very hard work, so I can only agree to do it for books I personally like and ones I think publishers might like, too (those are not always the same thing!).

International book fairs are also good places to present your book and possibly attract the attention of foreign publishers. In general, the more attention you can get for the book and for yourself as the author, the better.

What are your nearest plans regarding translations from Uzbek or other Central Asian literature?

I’m excited to see what kind of response these three 2019 books receive. I hope that if readers like those books, they’ll demand more stories from Central Asia. I have plenty more to recommend to publishers.

The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan examines one of the most heinous crimes of the Stalinist regime, the Kazakh famine of 1 930–33.

More than 1.5 million people perished in this famine, a quarter of Kazakhstan’s population, and the crisis transformed a territory the size of continental Europe. Yet the story of this famine has remained mostly hidden from view. Drawing upon state and Communist party documents, as well as oral history and memoir accounts in Russian and in Kazakh, Sarah Cameron reveals this brutal story and its devastating consequences for Kazakh society. 

Sarah Cameron

Sarah Cameron is assistant professor of history at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she offers courses on Soviet history and the history of modern Central Asia. She received her PhD from Yale University, where her dissertation won the John Addison Porter Prize for the best dissertation in the Arts and Sciences and the Turner Prize for the most outstanding dissertation in European History. At present, she is at work on a new book-length project examining the transformation of the Aral Sea basin over the Soviet era.

Presentation on February 28, 2019

Watch full video

Edited transcript

Today, as you know, I’ll be speaking about my book on the Kazakh famine of the 1930s, and I’d like to begin by sharing a memory by a survivor of the famine. Wherever possible, I placed accounts by Kazakhs at the heart of my book, and it is their story above all that I seek to honor and to tell.

In the early 1990s, Zh. Abishuly spoke about his memories of the Kazakh famine. “I was still a child, but I could not forget this,” Abishuly recalled. “My bones are shaking at these memories coming to my mind.” During the famine, activists with the Soviet regime had stripped Abishuly’s family of their livestock and grain. His father’s relatives had fled Soviet Kazakhstan entirely, escaping across the border to China. For those who remained, Abishuly concluded, hunger was “a silent enemy.”

He remembered the arba, or horse-drawn cart, that collected the bodies of the dead, dumping them in mass burial grounds on the outskirts of settlements. During World War II, Abishuly would go on to fight on the front lines for the Red Army. Nonetheless, he concluded, “Surviving a famine is no less than surviving a war.”

As Abishuly’s recollections reveal, the period of 1930-33 was a time of almost unimaginable suffering in the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan, a vast territory in the heart of Central Asia, wedged between China and Russia. A massive famine claimed the lives of at least one-and-a-half million people. Roughly a third of all Kazakhs perished. It also transformed a territory, Soviet Kazakhstan, analogous in size to continental Europe.

As hunger set in, over a million starving refugees from Kazakhstan flooded into neighboring territories. They also flooded into China, creating a crisis of regional proportions. Some never returned to Kazakhstan, and today, significant diaspora populations of Kazakhs, many of them descendants of those who fled during the course of the famine, remain in the countries that surround Kazakhstan.

Prior to the famine, most Kazakhs practiced pastoral nomadism. By this, I mean that they carried out seasonal migrations along predetermined routes to pasture their animal herds, including sheep, horses, and camels. The famine, however, forced Kazakhs to sedentarize and abandon the economic practice of nomadism. This shift led to very painful and far-reaching shifts in Kazakh culture and identity.

Given its staggering human toll, the Kazakh famine is certainly one of the most heinous crimes of the Stalinist regime. Yet the story of this famine has remained largely hidden from view, both in Kazakhstan and in the West. If we look at really major narratives of the Stalin era, they mention this famine only in passing, and until recently, even the disaster’s major factors and crucial events were not well known.

My book seeks to recover this largely unknown story, and it integrates a wide variety of sources in Russian and also in Kazakh. The book begins with the famine’s roots in the last decades of the Russian empire, the 1890s, when the Kazakh steppe, of course, was under Russian imperial rule. It follows the republic through the tumultuous early years of Soviet rule, including Stalin’s attempt to consolidate his hold over the republic, and it concludes with the republic’s slow road to economic recovery in the post-famine years of the mid-1930s.

I argue that the Kazakh famine of 1930-33 was the result of Moscow’s radical attempt to transform the nomadic peoples of the steppe, who were known as Kazakhs, and a particular territory, Soviet Kazakhstan, into a modern Soviet nation. I find that, using the most violent means, the Kazakh famine created Soviet Kazakhstan, a stable territory with clearly delineated boundaries that was an integral part of the Soviet economic system.

I find that it also created a new Kazakh national identity that largely supplanted Kazakhs’ previous identification with a system of pastoral nomadism. In the famine’s aftermath, Kazakhs began to think of themselves as a national group, as opposed to a social group or one oriented around the system of pastoral nomadism. The creation of this specifically Soviet Kazakh national identity was, in fact, a goal of Stalin’s efforts to transform the steppe. By equipping non-Russian groups such as Kazakhs, Ukrainians, and others with territories, languages, bureaucracies, and cultures, Moscow sought to make them into modern Soviet nationalities and integrate them into the collectivist whole.

But in many other respects, if we look at the story of the famine, Moscow fails to achieve its goals. Ultimately, neither Kazakhstan nor Kazakhs themselves became integrated into the Soviet system in precisely the ways that Moscow had originally hoped. In fact, the scars from the famine would haunt the republic throughout the remainder of the Soviet era and shape its transformation into an independent nation in 1991.

My talk today is going to proceed along a couple of different lines. First, I want to tell you a little bit about how I came to this story of the Kazakh famine, what it was like to research this project, and why I believe we do not hear very much about the Kazakh famine in the West. Then, I want to turn to the question of how and why it is that the Soviet regime came to implement such destructive policies. I will talk a bit about what collectivization looked like in Kazakhstan, and how the famine began. Finally, I will conclude with a discussion of the consequences of the famine for Kazakh society, and I will offer some thoughts on how the story of the famine might alter our understanding of violence, modernization, and nation-building under Stalin.

How did I come to this story?

First, how did I come to this story? I stumbled upon the story of the Kazakh famine in part by accident. I had begun studying to obtain a PhD in Soviet History. When I was there, I got really interested in the story of the Soviet East, which I believed was much less explored than the history of the Soviet Union’s West. I decided to make Kazakhstan the focus of my research efforts, and I went to Kazakhstan to begin learning Kazakh.

When I was there, I started flipping through elementary school textbooks to learn more about Kazakh history. I noticed that these textbooks talked about a devastating famine that hit Kazakhstan during the 1930s, and I was startled, because I myself had never heard of it. I realized that this was a huge story, one which was incredibly important on a human level—some third of all Kazakhs died—but one that also had major implications for how we understand the nature of Kazakhs, of Stalin’s rule, and Kazakhstan today, and I began work on the topic.

It was challenging, of course, to work in the Kazakh and Russian archives, but also in many ways very exciting, because I had a topic that I could discuss with ordinary Kazakhs, and they understood immediately why this was an important topic to explain to audiences in the West. Over the years, I have had time to think a bit about why the story of the Kazakh famine has been marginalized in the West, and I think I have come to a couple of answers.

First, in the West, I think the marginalization of the Kazakh story illustrates to a certain extent how we are still really struggling to incorporate the Soviet East into our understandings of Soviet history. Soviet history in the West is often categorized as European history, but the Soviet Union, of course, was not just a European power. It was an Asian one too.

If we overstress the Soviet Union’s European nature or we neglect its Eastern half, we ultimately, I would argue, end up with a very distorted view of what the Soviet Union was about. For instance, collectivization, the event that triggered the famine in Kazakhstan, has often been framed as a struggle to extract grain for the peasantry, but if we turn to its Eastern half, we also see that it was also about a struggle to transition mobile peoples like the Kazakhs from a system of long-distance animal herding to a network of meat-packing combines and slaughterhouses that would produce meat for the market.

The major trigger for the famine in Kazakhstan is, of course, collectivization. This was part of Stalin’s radical plan to transform the Soviet Union, to help it industrialize, boost production, and catch up with the capitalist West. At the same time, of course, that the famine hit Kazakhstan, it also afflicted other parts of the Soviet Union, most notably Ukraine, and also some grain-growing regions of Russia.

A long-running and very polemical debate has focused on the question of whether the Ukrainian famine, or the famine that hit Ukraine, was used by Stalin to punish Ukrainians as an ethnic group. And in the West, due in part to the efforts of an active Ukrainian diaspora, the story of Soviet collectivization famines has focused largely on Ukrainians. A second reason for the marginalization of the Kazakh story might be this very long-running debate over the Ukrainian famine.

With this heated debate, it has really come to seem at times in the West as if famine only occurred in Ukraine, but of course this is not an accurate depiction of the story. For one, many Russian peasants suffered, and many areas of the Russian heartland saw disproportionately high levels of famine mortality. And if we look at the death toll, it was actually Kazakhstan that had the highest death rate of any group during collectivization.

Third and finally, I think the fact that Kazakhs were nomads is a really important part of why this story has been neglected. Most nomadic societies are oral rather than literary societies. They leave fewer traces in the written record. It’s more challenging to uncover their stories, and the sources that we do have are often filled with lots of assumptions, particularly the stereotype that nomads are backwards.

This is, in part, why I worked so hard in my book to incorporate sources that were not produced by the party or the state, such as memoirs and oral histories, and I tried as much as I could to tell the story through the voices of Kazakhs themselves. And if we look historically, I think we find that we have often actually been quick to dismiss violence committed by mobile peoples. We rationalize it as part of a process necessary to civilize so-called backward groups.

In the US, for instance, we need only look to our ongoing struggle to recognize the scale of the crimes committed against Native Americans for such examples. And when you look at how the Kazakh famine is discussed in the scholarly literature, it is often referred to as “a miscalculation by Stalin,” “a tragedy,” or “a misunderstanding of culture.” But such depictions, I would argue, downplay the disaster’s violent nature and seem to stress or somehow imply that the Kazakh famine originated from natural causes.

But as I show in my book, there was nothing inevitable about this famine. Pastoral nomadism was not a backwards way of life. Rather, it was a highly sophisticated and adaptive system. Nor can the famine be attributed to a simple miscalculation by Stalin, as such depictions would seem to suggest. In fact, as I will show, Moscow received very clear warnings about the dangers of settling the Kazakh nomads, and Moscow’s sweeping attempts to transform the steppe through collectivization and industrialization clearly anticipated the cultural destruction of Kazakh society.

How and why did the Soviet regime come to implement collectivization?

Turning to the second part of my talk, what was Kazakhstan, as a place and a society, like on the eve of Soviet rule? How did these local conditions pk-callout to famine? The Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan was created from disparate parts in 1924, and it was an immense territory. It was approximately the size of continental Europe or, to use another measurement, four times the size of the state of Texas. It had a sharp continental climate, with very hot summers and very cold winters. It was very arid and prone to drought.

Kazakhs’ practice of pastoral nomadism was, in many respects, an adaptation to the Kazakh steppe’s environmental conditions, particularly the scarcity of good pastureland and the aridity of the steppe, the scarcity of water. And it had been the predominant way of life in the steppe zone for over four millennia.

Pastoral nomadism is not just an economic strategy, a way of making use of the steppe’s scarce resources. It is also a really crucial source of identity. Historically, if you look at the steppe, the practice of pastoral nomadism had actually determined who was considered Kazakh and who was not.

In the late 19th century, when the steppe was under Russian imperial rule, there were crucial shifts in this system and Kazakhs’ practice of pastoral nomadism. Over a million peasants from European Russia settled the Kazakh steppe. Their arrival made the Kazakh steppe into a multiethnic society. It also provoked important changes to Kazakhs’ nomadic way of life, including shifts in their diet and migration routes. I explore these changes in greater detail in my book. I show how the legacies of Russian imperial rule became an important contributing factor to the famine that occurred under Soviet rule.

However, while Russian imperial rule altered the nature of nomadic life, it did not erase it. Rather, Kazakhs adapted their practice of pastoral nomadism to the challenges of peasant settlement, and on the eve of Soviet rule, it was nomadism, not a sense of being part of a national group, that remained the defining feature of Kazakh identity. The term “Kazakh” was a kind of mixed social and ethnic category, one which denoted an ethnicity but also a way of life, pastoral nomadism.

In the initial years of Soviet rule, the period 1921-1928, also known as the NEP period, or the New Economic Policy, Moscow took a contradictory approach to ruling the republic. Some programs worked to undermine pastoralism. Other programs actually served to support it. Party experts and bureaucrats really struggled in this period to understand what approach they should take. The Kazakh steppe, to a large extent, was a landscape, and Kazakhs were a population that did not have clear parallels in the Marxist/Leninist categories that they brought with them from Russia or Europe.

Karl Marx, for instance, originally predicted that socialist revolution would occur among workers. Lenin, in turn, radically modified a lot of Marx’s ideas, and he predicted that socialist revolution might occur among peasants. But neither of these two men really gave a lot of thought to how and if a socialist-style revolution might occur among a totally different social group, pastoral nomads. Party experts in this period begin to ponder a series of questions. Did nomads actually have classes in the same ways that settled societies did? And if so, how did these classes function? Economically, could pastoral nomads speed through the Marxist/Leninist timeline of history and be transformed into productive factory workers?

Indeed, for some, the seeming absurdity of bringing a socialist-style revolution to this republic dotted with nomads led one prominent Kazakh cadre, Sultanbek Khojanov, to circulate a joke: “You can’t get to socialism by camel.” At the heart of Khojanov’s joke was a question that party experts sought to resolve in this period. Could you get to socialism by camel?—i.e., was nomadism backwards or was it in fact a modern way of life, something compatible with socialist-style modernity?

Given Moscow’s nation-making plans or efforts to transform this group of people into a modern Soviet nation and equip it with its own territory, language, and native cadres, should this defining element of Kazakh culture be retained or should it be eliminated? Entangled with all of these questions was the issue of the republic’s environment. Could a specifically socialist state overcome the limitations that Kazakhstan’s environment seemed to place on human activity? Or, rather, was nomadism the only use of the landscape in this very arid region?

Initially, most party experts associated with the commissariat of agriculture argued that nomadism was the most productive use of the landscape. Some even specifically warned against the dangers of settling the Kazakh nomads. In a kind of eerie prediction of what was going to happen in the famine, one expert, Sergei Shvetsov, went so far as to say, “The destruction of the nomadic way of life in Kazakhstan would represent not only the death of steppe livestock-raising and the Kazakh economy, but the transformation of the dry steppe into an unpopulated desert.”

In 1928, there was a severe shortage of grain across the Soviet Union, and this triggered a shift in policy. Stalin declared the onset of the first five-year plan—that is the modernization scheme that I mentioned at the beginning of my talk. Aspects of Kazakhs’ practice of pastoral nomadism, mainly its distance from markets, tendency for frequent fluctuations in animal numbers, and so on, began to bring this way of life into clear tension with the proposals for more rapid industrialization that began to circulate during the period.

Those who had supported keeping nomadism in some fashion were denounced. A separate group of experts now began to belittle the assertion that the Kazakh steppe’s arid, drought-prone environment might place certain limits on human activity. Settling the Kazakhs and shunting them and their animal herds into collective farms, these experts argued, would “free up large tracts of land,” and these lands could be turned over to grain cultivation, thereby boosting the republic’s production of grain.

They also believed that animal husbandry would be transformed, that nomads’ system of long-distance animal herding would be replaced by large state farms that focused on livestock breeding. Through this transformation, party experts predicted that Kazakhstan would become a meat-packing center to rival Chicago. As I mentioned, the creation of a specifically Soviet Kazakh nationality was a goal of Stalin’s efforts to transform the steppe. At this point, the language of Soviet nation-making served to further legitimize and reinforce the importance of a shift to settled life.

Experts declared nomadism to be incompatible with the development of so-called contemporary culture, such as schools and telegraph connections. Thus, the language of Soviet nation-making served to reinforce the party’s war on a social category: nomad. And throughout the famine, the category of Kazakh and the category of nomad serve overlapping and mutually reinforcing goals for the party’s assault on nomadic life.

By 1928, the party’s war on nomadic life had begun, and it escalated with the launch of forced collectivization in the winter of 1929-30. It was led by Filipp Goloshchyokin, who was Kazakhstan’s leader and party secretary for the bulk of the famine. Goloshchyokin joined the Bolsheviks early, prior to 1917, and before being sent to Kazakhstan, he had gained fame for his revolutionary zeal and toughness, as well as for his supposed role in the murder of the tsar’s family.

But beyond Goloshchyokin, the local-level implementation of collectivization hinged heavily on Moscow’s partnership with local cadres, many of whom were Kazakhs. Indeed, the promotion of native cadres formed a crucial element of Moscow’s attempt to transform Kazakhs into a national group. Strategically, purposely designed to shatter old allegiances and stoke the violent conflict in Kazakh communities, Moscow actually empowered Kazakhs themselves to make some of the most crucial choices in the collectivization campaign: Who should be considered an exploiter and how much grain should be confiscated from them?

And as I’ve found in my research, the efforts of these local cadres were crucial. They often shaped the violence, its intensity, and its character, including which groups won and which lost out. By the winter of 1930, famine had begun. In Kazakhstan, as in other parts of Soviet Union, Moscow anticipated that collectivization would result in massive loss of life, and this human toll was seen as a necessary byproduct of the imperative to transform the region. But Moscow did not anticipate the scale of this famine, and a number of unintended consequences soon emerged.

Animal numbers began to plummet rapidly as the party struggled to push Kazakhs’ animal herds into pens and come up with a form of animal husbandry to take the place of pastoral nomadism. Animals contracted various diseases. Many of them began to perish. By 1931, the predictions of many experts about the challenges of instituting settled agriculture in this region had come to pass. There was a severe drought that worsened the effects of collectivization. It deepened Kazakhs’ descent into hunger, and by July 1932, a report by Kazakhstan’s commissariat of agriculture found that Kazakhstan had “fully lost its significance as the Soviet Union’s main livestock base.”

As the situation inside Kazakhstan became increasingly desperate, many nomads entered into desperate flight. With their herd numbers in ruins, those who remained behind faced almost certain death. The republic itself began to empty out. Ultimately, more than 20% of the republic’s population, roughly a million people, fled the republic in this period, creating an immense regional crisis.

The transitional stage—that is what officials called this flight—demanded extra vigilance, officials warned. And the party actually intensified its assault on nomadic life during this period. It declared fantastical plans to settle the Kazakhs even more quickly than before. Moscow closed the republic’s borders. They shot thousands of starving Kazakhs on the Sino-Kazakh border, and in a strategy explicitly modeled upon a technique used against starving Ukrainians, several regions of Kazakhstan were blacklisted. What that meant was that starving Kazakhs were essentially trapped in zones where no food could be found.

Along the republic’s railway lines, travelers encountered scenes of horror. They reported seeing, “living skeletons with tiny child skeletons in their hands, begging for food.” Many turned to substitute foods to survive. Famine survivors remember eating wild grasses or combing through fields to collect the rotting remains of the harvest. Others turned to cannibalism. Duysen Asanbaev, a famine survivor, remembers, “Suffering was not leaving our heads. Our eyes were full of tears.” As famine enveloped the steppe, diseases such as typhus, smallpox, cholera, and tuberculosis began to spread, and the steppe’s relative underdevelopment served to magnify the disastrous effects of collectivization.

In 1934, the famine finally came to an end. This resolution was reached in part through a certain amount of good luck, including excellent weather and a good harvest in ’34, as well as attention by Moscow to some of the problems revealed by the famine’s course, such as the spread of disease.

The consequences of the famine for Kazakh society

What were the consequences of this famine for Kazakh society, and how might this neglected episode revise our understanding of Stalin’s rule?

The society that emerged from this famine was transformed. More than a million and a half people, and roughly a third of all Kazakhs, perished in this famine. Those who survived described a feeling of trauma. Ibragim Khisamutdinov, who lived through the famine as a young boy, saw starving Kazakhs dying in the streets on his way to school. More than 50 years later, he noted, “To this day, I can hear the desperate cries of the dying and their calls for help.” In important ways, the famine precipitated and enabled a very far-reaching demographic transformation of the republic during the Soviet era.

Moscow actually built a forced labor camp system on Kazakhs’ former pasture lands. During World War II, the republic became one of the major dumping grounds for exiled peoples, and more than a million deportees arrived. Kazakhs became a minority in their own republic; they would not constitute more than 50% of the population of Kazakhstan again until after the Soviet collapse.

In the aftermath of the disaster, nomadism as an economic practice was eliminated. Kazakhs were forced to become a sedentary society. Nationality, not pastoral nomadism, became the most important marker of Kazakh identity. Those Kazakhs who survived became integrated into the party-state. They joined collective farms, entered educational institutions, or joined communist youth organizations. Paradoxically, even as the Kazakh famine devastated Kazakh society, it also created opportunities for Kazakhs to pursue education and upward mobility.

Given these results, I believe that the famine itself should cause us to look differently at the nature of Soviet modernization, nation-building, and violence under Stalin. And here I would like to offer some concluding thoughts.

First, on the subject of violence under Stalin, Moscow’s sweeping program of state-led transformation clearly anticipated the cultural disruption of Kazakh society, and as I discuss in my book in greater detail, there is evidence to indicate that the Kazakh famine fits an expanded definition of genocide.

But there is no evidence to indicate that Stalin planned the famine on purpose or that he sought to destroy all Kazakhs. Many of the disastrous major consequences, from the refugee crisis to the massive outbreaks of disease that accompanied the famine, were counterproductive to the regime’s own interests, and they were unexpected consequences of the collectivization campaign. Nonetheless, I believe that the famine should upend some of our assumptions about Stalinist rule.

It is often assumed, for instance, that the Gulag represented the extreme of suffering in Soviet society, but starving Kazakhs were actually expelled from their land at the height of the famine to make room for the construction of a forced labor camp in Central Kazakhstan, and they died from hunger and disease outside this camp. The literature has stressed the central place of the Soviet Union’s west in the genealogy of Stalinist violence. This is a view popularized by Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands and others. My book, however, shows that the spectrum of violence under Stalin is far broader than previously believed, and that the Soviet East also generated very important practices of social control.

The case of the Kazakh famine is also relevant to the long-running debate over the Ukrainian famine that I mentioned earlier. Simply put, many existing explanations for the Ukrainian famine do not hold water once you put the Kazakh famine in the picture. The idea that the Ukrainian famine was uniquely brutal is central to many claims of those who believe that Stalin specifically targeted Ukrainians, but if you bring the Kazakh case into the picture, this is simply not true.

Indeed, it might be argued that, in many respects, the Kazakh famine was more destructive than the Ukrainian famine, as the Kazakh famine brought about a cultural transformation—the loss of Kazakhs’ nomadic way of life—that was even more far-reaching than that endured by the Ukrainians. The inclusion of the Kazakh case, I would argue, forces us to rethink some of the linkages made between state-sponsored violence against particular ethnic groups and assumptions and attitudes in the Soviet state.

On the question of Soviet modernization, though it had notable successes in important respects, the project of Soviet modernization fell desperately short of its goals in Kazakhstan. Collectivization was an economic catastrophe across the Soviet Union, but nowhere were its effects more disastrous than in Soviet Kazakhstan. Prior to the famine, Kazakhstan had been the Soviet Union’s most important livestock base due to Kazakhs’ livestock herds, but the republic actually lost 90% of its animal herds over the course of collectivization.

Famine survivors, for instance, remember that there was an eerie silence in the steppe, “that there was no mooing, bleating, or neighing.” Only in the 1960s did the republic’s sheep and cattle numbers finally reach their pre-famine levels, and the republic’s camel population never recovered. Despite the assertions of many Soviet experts that Soviet power would conquer nature, Moscow, throughout the course of the famine, really struggled to remake the arid, drought-prone Kazakh steppe as it wished. Water supply problems plagued them throughout the famine, and in the post-famine years, we can see that agriculture continued to be a very difficult enterprise in this region.

We see echoes of this, for instance, in Khrushchev’s Virgin Lands campaign and in the droughts, sandstorms, crop failures, and so on that plagued the steppe in the post-World War II period. Even today, the USDA—the U.S. Department of Agriculture—has designated the Kazakh steppe as a so-called risky zone for agriculture. Thus, as the example of the Kazakh steppe illustrates, environmental factors shaped the nature of Soviet development.

Overall, I would argue that the example of the Kazakh famine should cause us to look at the nature of Soviet modernization differently. Scholars have argued that the Soviet Union carried out a striking leap in state capacity and mobilization during the interwar period. But the Kazakh case reveals that the contours of this leap were uneven, and they look very different in Kazakhstan than they do in parts of the Soviet Union’s west.

With regards to nation-building, the case of the Kazakh famine reaffirms the centrality of nation-building or Moscow’s project of molding certain ethnic groups like the Kazakhs into modern Soviet nationalities by giving them their own territories, languages, and bureaucracies, even as it underscores the very destructive power of these efforts at nation-building. And as I show in greater detail in the book, the Kazakh famine took its peculiarly destructive shape not in spite of the Soviet Union’s nation-making efforts, but partly because of them.

Soviet ideas about nationality, such as the belief that nationality was connected to territory, served to justify and support the regime’s murderous actions, such as the slaughter of thousands of starving Kazakhs who sought to flee to China. The crisis embedded nationality as the primary marker of Kazakh identity. As a goal of Moscow’s nation-making efforts, nationality supplanted pastoral nomadism as the most important marker of Kazakh identity, and Kazakhs began to think of themselves as a national group.

But as I have stressed, this was an incomplete transformation, as it did not eliminate alternate forms of Kazakh identity entirely. One of the most lingering and, I think, pervasive stereotypes about Kazakhstan is that Kazakhs are totally Russified—that they lost their culture under Soviet rule. This is even captured in a popular joke: An Uzbek asks, “How can I become a Russian,” and he is told that he needs to become a Kazakh first.

This is really not true. I think if you look closely at what happens to the Kazakhs during the Soviet period and, more specifically, during the famine, that their culture is not totally destroyed. To give one example, Kazakhs’ allegiances to various clans were transformed by the famine and divorced from their original origins in the system of pastoral nomadism, but they continued to exert a really important influence on Kazakh life in the post-famine years. This influence, of course, changed as many Kazakhs moved away from kin members in the aftermath of the disaster. They lost the economic functions they had performed when Kazakhs were nomads, but they continued to impact Kazakh life.

A study of Kazakh collective farms in the 1950s, for instance, found that most collective farms are composed of a single tribal subdivision, and when they married, most adhered to a Kazakh tradition that prohibited marriage within a given tribal subdivision, and they took, therefore, a spouse from another collective farm. And in Kazakhstan today, nomadism has not disappeared. Rather, it has been refashioned as a usable past, an element that the Nazarbayev regime uses in the service of its nation-building project.

Various state-sponsored projects stress the innovative and sophisticated nature of the nomadic societies that ruled the steppe prior to the Russian conquest. And I will give you one example of this. In the 1960s, Soviet archeologists found the remains of a Scythian warrior in a burial mound. Scythians were, of course, the first known nomadic empire in the steppe. They ruled in the first millennium BC. And today in Kazakhstan, this warrior, who is known as The Golden Man for his gold-plated dress, has become an important state symbol, and you can see him not only in Kazakhstan itself, but also here in DC right outside the Kazakh embassy, if you walk past it on 16th Street. There is a replica of The Golden Man outside.

But in Kazakhstan today, there is little discussion of the famine itself. There is a kind of strange silence about it, a phenomenon that is due in part to Kazakhstan’s close relationship with Russia. Kazakhstan’s own investigation into the famine, which created a new Kazakh identity even as it devastated Kazakh society and transformed Kazakh culture, remains an unfinished project.

All photos from Central State Archive of Video and Photo Documents of the Republic of Kazakhstan (courtesy of Zhanbolat Mamay).