An ethnically diverse region that abuts the Caspian Sea in southwestern Russia, Astrakhan Oblast is home to the country’s largest Kazakh community. Almost 150,000 people, or 18 percent of the oblast’s population, identify as ethnic Kazakhs. Although Astrakhan does border Kazakhstan, most of them are not recent immigrants from the neighboring country. Their families have been living in what is now Astrakhan since long before the current national borders were drawn.

Author

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Dor Shabashewitz

Dor Shabashewitz is a Russia-born Israeli journalist and political analyst with a background in anthropology and sociolinguistics. He worked as a junior researcher at the RAS Institute for Linguistic Studies and conducted extensive fieldwork in Astrakhan’s Kazakh and Nogai rural communities as a part of his Master’s studies at the European University at St. Petersburg. In 2021, the Russian Federal Security Service forced him to leave the country following politically motivated accusations of “extremism” and “separatism.” These days, he covers ethnic minority rights and regional politics in the Lower Volga and Central Asia for RFE/RL’s Tatar-Bashkir Service.

*The article that follows provides a brief overview of the sociolinguistic situation among those Kazakhs living in the Russian part of the Volga River delta. It is based on field research conducted by the author during his master’s studies between 2019 and 2021.

In the Middle Ages, Astrakhan was part of the Golden Horde and, later, an independent khanate. In 1556, it was conquered by the Russians and eventually incorporated into the Russian Empire as a governorate. The first major wave of Kazakh migration to Astrakhan Governorate began between 1799 and 1801, when Bökey Khan, son of the Junior jüz leader Nuraly, led several thousand nomadic families from across the Ural River to a more fertile area in the Volga River delta. A steady influx of Kazakh settlers continued well into the mid-nineteenth century. The new Astrakhan Kazakh community led by Bökey enjoyed the status of a semi-independent vassal state for several decades before gradually ceding most of its autonomy under pressure from the Russian authorities.

The early Soviet years revived the idea of a Kazakh autonomous area in Astrakhan. In 1919, some of the Kazakh districts of Astrakhan Governorate were grouped together under the name Volga-Caspian Kirghizia and transferred to what later became the Kazakh SSR. Most of them stayed and became part of Kazakhstan upon its independence, but some of the transfers were reversed in the 1920s. Thus, the Volodarsky and Krasny Yar districts ended up in Russia’s Astrakhan Oblast despite 70 percent and 50 percent of their inhabitants, respectively, being ethnic Kazakhs.

Notwithstanding the omnipresent linguistic Russification of the Soviet era, Kazakh enjoyed certain formal privileges in the Kazakh SSR as a co-official language that was used in many schools, especially in rural areas. State-funded magazines, newspapers, books, and movies were produced in the language. Government support for the national language and its social prestige only increased after Kazakhstan became a sovereign country in 1991. This was not the case in Astrakhan Oblast—the region’s Kazakh community had no linguistic autonomy or representation under the Soviets, and this did not change when the USSR fell apart.

Vitality Factors

In what state, then, is the Kazakh language among Astrakhan’s Kazakhs after decades without formal recognition? In what domains is it still spoken? What do the Astrakhan Kazakhs think of their ethnic language, and what role does it play in their identity? These were the questions I hoped to answer when I set off on a fieldwork trip to my home region’s Volodarsky district as a master’s student in social anthropology back in 2019.

During my fieldwork, I visited numerous rural settlements of varying sizes, ethnic compositions, locations, histories, and economic conditions. It became evident that all of these factors played a significant role in the vitality of Kazakh in any given village, but the relative weight of each factor was rather unexpected. My analysis showed that the share of ethnic Kazakhs in a village did not correlate strongly with how much they used the language in their daily lives. I have been to monoethnic Kazakh villages that spoke almost exclusively Russian, as well as mixed ones where Kazakh was still maintained by some members of the younger generations.

Geography and the perceived history of a settlement turned out to be the two most defining factors. Inhabitants of villages that are close to Astrakhan City and have a stable public transport connection to the city tend to switch to Russian more quickly than residents of more remote ones. Career opportunities in rural areas are scarce, prompting villagers to look for jobs in the urban center. When logistically possible, many opt to continue living in their villages and commute to work several times a week instead of moving to the city. Despite its impressive ethnic diversity, Astrakhan City is overwhelmingly Russian-speaking. Kazakh rural commuters tend to integrate into this environment and “bring it home” after work, influencing the linguistic landscape of their communities.

“Perceived history” deserves an anthropological study of its own. Many of the Astrakhan Kazakhs I interviewed explained that their villages were originally founded by Russian peasants or created by the Soviets in a centralized way and populated by collective farm workers of diverse origins. Many settlements with such histories gradually became majority-Kazakh, but most locals believed they were “not really Kazakh villages” and thus considered Kazakh a rather inappropriate language to use in public spaces. In settlements such as Vinny, this mentality led to Kazakh becoming a family language only, with Russian as the sole means of communication in all other domains—even between Kazakhs.

This stands in stark contrast to the village of Altynzhar, which was founded by Kazakh settlers and has a long tradition of local pride. The renowned nineteenth-century Kazakh composer Qurmangazy is buried in Altynzhar; the village hosts a museum dedicated to his life and to the culture of the region’s Kazakh community more generally. Altynzhar was also home to the Kazakh poet and language activist Mäjilis Ötejanov. Due to its history and cultural significance, Altynzhar is often viewed as the informal capital of the Astrakhan Kazakhs. This status, combined with the lack of reliable public transportation, helps the local population to maintain their language and identity better than elsewhere.

Language Use

Despite the differences between individual settlements, home is by far the most common domain of use for the Kazakh language across Astrakhan Oblast. For most of my respondents, constant code-switching between Russian and Kazakh is the default register when they talk to their relatives. The ratio of elements from the two languages, however, varies widely. Kazakh may dominate or it may only be represented by several words—but, as my experience shows, it is never fully absent.

In Vinny, I interviewed a young Kazakh man who was born and raised in the village but went to an urban high school and later moved to a different part of Russia for university. These days, he lives and works in Astrakhan City. At the time I met him, he was visiting Vinny to see his parents, who still lived there permanently. During the interview, he said he spoke no Kazakh at all: “I do not speak Kazakh… Never wanted to learn it, thought it was useless. Grandma would talk to me in Kazakh, and I am like… I do not understand everything, but I can get the general idea.”

Just an hour later, I overheard him using numerous Kazakh words in a Russian-language conversation with his mother. Answering my ensuing question, the young man explained: “There are still some words that are easier for me to say in Kazakh. Like ‘scoop’ or ‘ladle’—I just say ojaw.” Later, I discovered other Kazakh words in the speech register he used at home. They were terms related to farming, as well as the names of certain traditional foods and houseware items.

This case is by no means unique—in fact, it is very typical. Lexical domains related to rural ways of life and things you find in a traditional household seem to be the least likely to be forgotten by young and predominantly Russian-speaking Astrakhan Kazakhs. This may be because they lack any similar rural experience gained in a non-Kazakh context.

Leaving the “Kazakh” village for the “Russian” city, one practically replaces one’s entire vocabulary—but with exceptions. The array of subjects discussed in urban settings is at least as wide as that in rural areas, but the two sets of lexical domains do not always coincide. Traditional ethnic cuisine, cattle farming, agriculture, and culturally specific rural household items are not things that city dwellers usually speak of, hence the words for them are not as easily replaced with Russian equivalents in the speech of first-generation urbanites. Sometimes, the Kazakh words remain the only ones they know. The lack of need or even opportunity to talk about these things in Russian makes this set of Kazakh vocabulary more resistant to attrition. It is only natural for urban Kazakhs to use these terms when they go to a rural area to visit their family. This may be viewed as a “light version” of cue-dependent language retrieval.

Equally, even among those Astrakhan Kazakhs who live in rural settlements and use Kazakh-Russian code-mixing as their default home register, one can point to specific domains that almost universally trigger the use of a much higher share of Russian-language elements. This includes all of the “complicated” domains, as the respondents call them. For example, a middle-aged man from the village of Novy Rychan said: “When fixing a TV set, we are most definitely talking in Russian.” In a different settlement, I witnessed four men talking in almost “pure” Kazakh—that is, using few Russian elements. Then one of them mentioned the COVID-19 pandemic, and this change of subject, combined with “complex” vocabulary related to healthcare and government policies, triggered an instant switch to almost equally “pure” Russian.

As is evident from these situations, Kazakh is often regarded and used as a rural and “simplistic” language, fitting for discussions of farming but not technology or anything modern. This set of associations speaks to its low social prestige—but may also be viewed positively by some. Many heritage speakers of Astrakhan Kazakh associate the language with a sense of home and strong family ties. “Kazakh is… It is something about your home, you know, where you feel most comfortable and secure. It is the mother language, after all. Whenever I hear it, I think of those evenings I spent in the village of Multanovo with my parents and grandma as a kid. I miss this feeling now that I live in the city,” said one of my respondents.

Two other important domains associated with Kazakh, which are intertwined with each other, are religion and ethnic celebrations. While overwhelmingly secular in daily life, most Astrakhan Kazakhs identify as Muslim. Many hardly ever go to mosques—in fact, there are large, exclusively Kazakh villages with no mosques at all. Moreover, the minority that does adhere to a strictly Islamic way of life is viewed as odd and even suspicious by the more secular majority.

Still, events such as weddings and funerals almost universally have an Islamic element to them. Interestingly enough, many of my respondents think of Islam as inseparable from the Kazakh language. “When the Quran is being recited, you are supposed to talk in Kazakh,” said a middle-aged man from Novy Rychan. Obviously, the recitation itself happens in Arabic, and one is supposed to listen to it rather than talk simultaneously. What this respondent meant was that the “religious” and “traditional” atmosphere of such events triggered increased use of Kazakh before and after the recitation and other rituals.

Kazakh as an Unwritten Language

While still widely spoken in some of the more remote villages, Astrakhan Kazakh remains a practically unwritten language. In the early Soviet years, Kazakh was used at numerous village schools as the primary language of instruction, but it was quickly downgraded to being taught as a subject only. By 1966, it had disappeared from the region’s school system entirely.

The perestroika era brought a surge in ethnic activism, with Kazakh language lessons being reintroduced in almost a hundred village schools in the late 1980s and 1990s. Unfortunately, this did not last long: Vladimir Putin’s rule brought another wave of linguistic Russification as part of his “unity through uniformity” policy. Kazakh was soon downgraded to an optional, once-a-week class. Today, fewer than 20 Astrakhan Oblast schools offer it in any form, even though over 140 of the region’s rural localities have a Kazakh majority or plurality.

This lack of Kazakh at school has resulted in entire generations having little exposure to written Kazakh and being functionally illiterate in it, even when perfectly literate in Russian. This can be seen from the way the names of many Astrakhan Kazakhs are written in their Russian IDs and passports. When giving their children legal names, many parents opt for naive phonetic approximations that do not match the way a name is normally spelled in Kazakhstan (eg., Kuvanshkirey rather than the more typical Qwanışkereý in Kazakh or Kuanyshkerey in Russian). Many of my respondents said they had trouble understanding and distinguishing the “weird letters” used in Standard Kazakh, referring to the additional and modified Cyrillic characters that are absent from the Russian alphabet.

Lack of language-specific literacy is not the only linguistic barrier between Kazakh-speakers in Astrakhan and those in Kazakhstan. As explained above, Russian dominates all of the “formal” domains in Astrakhan Oblast, from education to technology and interactions with the government. This means that most Astrakhan Kazakhs never discuss these topics in Kazakh and may be unfamiliar with the more “complex” vocabulary in that language, even when fully proficient in the registers related to home, family, traditions, and rural lifestyle.

“The Kazakh word for ‘proof’ is dälel, which I only know because I looked it up. My neighbor grew up speaking Kazakh, but she would not understand me if I used it when talking to her. She just uses the Russian word, dokazatelstvo,” said a respondent from Multanovo. This is a perfect example of a term perceived as “complex” and thus unknown to many Astrakhan Kazakhs.

Most Astrakhan Kazakhs are well aware of the differences between their ethnic language and the Kazakh of Kazakhstan. A middle-aged, native Kazakh-speaking respondent from Novy Rychan talked about his trip to Atyrau, Kazakhstan, saying that he felt insecure about his Kazakh skills while there. He opted to talk to locals in Russian because he feared they would mock his “incorrect” Kazakh. This perception of Astrakhan Kazakh as “simplified” and “Russified” is fairly common among its speakers. While somewhat negative, it may also serve as a marker of the community’s identity, helping to distinguish between “us” (Astrakhan Kazakhs) and “them” (Kazakhstan Kazakhs).

Future of Kazakh in Astrakhan

The case of an Astrakhan Kazakh person looking up and memorizing a “complex” word associated with the Kazakh language of Kazakhstan illustrates a small but important tendency. A growing number of young, native Russian-speaking Astrakhan Kazakhs are deliberately immersing themselves in Kazakhstani media, explaining that they want to learn the “proper” way to speak their language and reconnect with their culture, which has been partially lost to colonization and assimilation.

While most young Astrakhan Kazakhs seem to have no interest in using their ethnic language in any form, this minority tendency offers hope that Kazakh will live on in Astrakhan Oblast. If the language policy does not change in the decades to come, the local dialect may eventually die out as a natural form of communication in rural communities, but Standard Kazakh is likely to be maintained by the conscious activist minority.

That being said, the continuity of the language policy is a big “if.” Russia’s government has been increasingly unstable since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. In many regions, ethnic minorities feel that they are unfairly overrepresented among those sent to fight in Ukraine, and this is especially true for Astrakhan Kazakhs. At the same time, the federal government is cracking down on indigenous activism more heavily than ever.

The growing dissent among minorities has led to the emergence of numerous secessionist organizations. An overview of pro-independence movements that view Astrakhan as a part of their hypothetical states can be found in my recent article for New Eastern Europe. It is hard to make predictions about the success of these movements, but in the event that they succeed, language policy and power dynamics between the region’s ethnic groups are more than likely to change.

All photos by

Dor Shabashewitz and Valery Maslov

Tatiana Krupa, a Ukrainian archaeologist, historian, and restorer, has extensive experience studying fragments of fabrics that date back to the Golden Horde era. She has done work on fabrics that have been found on the territories of both modern Kazakhstan and Ukraine. This land was once home to Scythians and a lot of textiles were imported from China—particularly silk. In this interview, she talks about her finds and discoveries, as well as her recreation of the costume of a Golden Horde princess.

Interview with

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Tatiana Krupa

Researcher at the Research Laboratory of Experimental Archaeology and Head of the YMAI International Research Laboratory of Pavlodar State Pedagogical University,

For several years, you have been studying fragments of fabrics found in Kazakhstan that date back to the Kimak-Kipchak and Golden Horde times. You have examined around 100 samples found in Pavlodar province. Tell us about these fabrics—what are they like (in terms of structure, decoration, color, and dye composition)?

I have been studying Kazakh textiles since 2009, when I first came to Kazakhstan. My studies are not limited to archeological textiles. I studied samples of a unique and one-of-a-kind historical textile taken from the old coverlet of the legendary Sufi leader Akhmet Yasawi. I took these samples and studied them more closely in Kharkiv, Ukraine, where at that time I was the head of a small grant at V. Karazin Kharkiv National University. The results that we obtained allowed us to establish when the mausoleum and the khanaka were built.

As for my studies of archaeological textiles and Kimak-Kipchak and Golden Horde-era finds from the Irtysh Steppe, I first saw these textiles in March 2018, when I went to the international forum “Izdeu” and met with my current colleagues. These materials affected me so strongly that in June 2018 I went to Pavlodar for a month to study them. And in 2019, at the invitation of the Pavlodar Pedagogical University, I moved from Ukraine to Kazakhstan.

Since then, I have managed to get acquainted with and study materials from the Irtysh Steppe region and beyond. Among the most interesting finds of the Golden Horde era in Kazakhstan, it is worth highlighting finds from the excavations of the Bolgan Ana mausoleum, which is part of the complex of Dzhuchid mausoleums of Ulytau. These fabrics are all very different! There are fabrics of simple weave, there are brocades, there is damask… Their colors: red and yellow, polychrome… The vast majority of these fabrics are silk. However, this is not surprising. After all, silk is the most durable fabric in terms of preservation in archaeological sites.

Bolgan Ana mausoleum is part of the Ulytau National Historical, Cultural and Natural Reserve-Museum in Karaganda region of Kazakhstan. It also features the mausoleums of Zhoshi Khan and Alash Khan, Zhuban-ana, Duzen, Ayakkhamyr, Dombaul, Khan Ordasy, as well as nine medieval settlements and fortified settlements.

In one interview, you said that the fabrics found in Kazakhstan are similar to those found during archaeological excavations in Ukraine. Tell us about these fabrics—do they also date back to the Golden Horde era? And where in Ukraine were they found?

I am a citizen of Ukraine, and as mentioned above, I moved to Kazakhstan because of my Kazakhstani colleagues’ interest in my research. I am very grateful for this!

I have been working with archaeological costumes and fabrics since the second half of the 1980s. As a historian and archaeologist of antiquity by education, until 2008 I worked on the excavations of Tauric Chersonesus. Antique costume is also the topic of my diploma. And since I am also a bit of a fashion designer, sooner or later I took an interest in archaeological textiles. At one time I worked in the Kharkiv branch of the National Restoration Center of Ukraine. Therefore, many archaeological fabrics from finds in Ukraine passed through my hands. These include materials from the Bronze Age, and Chernigov, and Chersonesus, and the monuments of the Saltov period (8^th-10^th centuries), as well as materials from the excavations of the burial grounds of the late medieval nomads (11^th-14^th centuries) found on the territory of Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Poltava, and Zaporozhye region. All of them have been analyzed and the studies published.

Interesting material was also provided by the Ust-Alma burial ground, which dates from the first centuries AD and is associated with Crimean Scythia. For example, the material found in one of the graves made it possible to make a graphic reconstruction of women’s costume of that time. I remember that when I worked with these materials back in the second half of the 1990s, I was struck by the cut of the sleeves and the seam with which women’s costumes were made. An interesting headdress, a calaf, was also found there. It was very fine work!

Scythian textiles from earlier times are also known to us—for example, a red woolen fabric from the barrow of the Caravan barrow group near Kharkiv. Both the barrow and the fabric date from the 7th century BC. I think that the fabric was imported.

Among the interesting finds of the Scythian period, one can name white linen fabric from the mound Bliznets-2 (on the outskirts of the city of Dnipro), which researchers associate with Orik Arimastides (a representative of the royal Scythians). This fabric covered the top of the wooden structure of the burial chamber.

Very bright textiles come from the Middle Ages! I want to note that the centers of textile production (judging by the finds) clearly correlate with the geopolitical interests of that time. For example, at ancient Russian sites (Chernigov or Novgorod-Siversky), we find fabrics of Byzantine production. Silk silver brocade from Chernigov is well known. A feature of this find is the presence on the fabric of an interesting bone button wrapped in silk. If we talk about the monuments of the Steppe belt, which correlate with the nomadic component, then there is Chinese-technology silk. Such finds are familiar to us from the monuments of the Saltovian time (8^th-10^th centuries), including the Netailovsky burial ground (Kharkiv region), or the Golden Horde time (Zaporozhye or Dnipropetrovsk regions).

The Kazakh finds echo existing material from the rest of Eurasia. And this should come as no surprise: all textile production is related to the functioning of a single entity, namely the Great Silk Road.

Perhaps the most extensive collection of archaeological textiles on the territory of Kazakhstan is located in Pavlodar. Chief among these are the excavations of T.N. Smagulov, the director of the Margulan Center of Pavlodar Pedagogical University. There are also archaeological textiles of the Kimak-Kipchak period (9^th-11^th centuries) from the Baidala burial ground (a suburb of the city of Pavlodar). Of interest here is the prevalence of Chinese silk. Even though the mound itself, in which several dozen samples were found, was robbed in antiquity, the remaining finds still allow us to create an impression of the dress that the buried woman wore.

Although research on this material has not yet been completed, we can assume that her dress corresponds to the so-called fashion of East Turkestan and was strongly influenced by the Uyghur Khaganate.

Another interesting finding by our archaeologists was a female headdress from the Mukyr burial site (Pavlodar region). Although the attire itself dates back to the Golden Horde period, after carefully studying it, we came to the conclusion that it is older than the burial site by 100-150 years. Now we are talking about a special type of framed headdresses, which in the Horde period are correlated with the so-called bokka—headdresses of Yuan type. If the latter appeared in our latitudes in the epoch of Ulus Jochi, the find from Mukyr (as well as the famous find of F. Arslanova, the “silver bokka,” which is now stored in Pavlodar) predates it.

Besides Pavlodar finds, I would like to note the unique finds of Kazakh archaeologist A. Kesenalin as a result of the excavations of Bolgan Ana (Ulytau) mausoleum. In this mausoleum, according to scientists, was buried the closest relative of Jochi Khan. Therefore, the study of preserved textiles can shed light on the palace fashion of the Golden Horde. Although the extensive materials themselves are still in the process of preservation, we have made a copy of the preserved elements of the dead woman’s costume from modern materials as close to the originals as possible.

If we are talking about a single type of brocade and silk fabrics circulating across the vast expanse of the Golden Horde, is there any information about who made such fabrics, how, where, and what these fabrics were called? Who wore them?

Who wore them? Given the cost of silk, of course, clothes made from such fabrics were worn by the nobility. In the Byzantine sources of the era of Vasileus Justinian, it is noted that the cost of silk was three times higher than the cost of gold. And even if during the period of Ulus Jochi the market was already more saturated with silks than in the 6th-7th centuries, its cost remained high. In the era of the Horde, we know of several centers for the production of silk fabrics. Such fabrics were made in Chinese trading posts along the main routes of the Great Silk Road—for example, I am currently conducting research that links the current smooth silks in Margilan (Uzbekistan) with the legacy of such production. However, other textile researchers agree that “Chinese technology” does not necessitate their production in China. There are also fabrics of Byzantine origin; indeed, significant space in the famous Byzantine Book of the Eparch is devoted to their production. Such fabrics have been found in ancient Russian monuments, for example in Chernigov. There is another well-known silk production center—Sogd—although not all researchers recognize it as a separate center.

A far more interesting question, in the context of a discussion of ancient brocade fabrics, relates to the technology of manufacturing gold threads. These fabrics are exquisite. Here we know of two technologies: Middle Eastern and Chinese. And they are both fantastic! I have been studying them for a long time using scanning electron microscopy. And in 2009, I was even the head of a grant at the Foundation for Fundamental and Applied Research of V. Karazin Kharkiv National University devoted to this topic. The difference between these technologies is in the way the gold threads are made. Middle Eastern ones are just a strip of metal (with an average thickness of 5-6 microns) made on a thread-base. Chinese threads are made by rolling a strip of metal out on an organic substance (the serous membrane of the intestine of an animal) and only then winding it onto a warp thread. By the way, the average thickness of the metal of these threads, according to scanning electron microscopy, is 0.6 microns.

In the Kipchak Khanate burial site of Guva-2 (Kalmykia), elements of samite costume with images of apostles were found. Finds made of samite (including with the faces of angels and apostles) were also found in other Kipchak Khanate burials (Korotokh, Chechnya, etc.). Do you find samites/aksamites or another type of fabric in your finds? If so, how are they different? Have samites been found during excavations in Ukraine and Kazakhstan? If so, where?

Samites are just a variation of twill fabrics with a pattern. They are well known throughout Eurasia. I have already mentioned the fabrics with which I worked. Of course, there were also so-called samites. At the same time there were a lot of fabrics with golden weft (brocade) and of simple weave. And in Bolgan Ana Mausoleum in Kazakhstan, one can find silk kamka.

It is known that Louis XIV’s clothes were made from spider thread and in 2012 a spider silk dress was woven and sewn especially for the Albert & Victoria Museum. Do you know of any attempts to recreate fabrics similar to those of the Golden Horde era? Perhaps such attempts are being made in Kazakhstan?

Antique written sources mention fabrics (namely linen) made of thread produced by some mollusks. We are talking about linen. This is mentioned, for example, by Josephus Flavius. Silk is different. When we talk about silk, we primarily mean cultured silk, which is produced from the cocoons of mulberry silkworms. But there is also the oak silkworm. Unlike its fully domesticated mulberry colleague (the mulberry silkworm is the only domestic insect in the history of mankind), this wild species has a completely different protein formula of silk. In my practice, I have found such silk once in Ukraine. So Louis XIV was not unique. The materials that date back to the Golden Horde and that I had in my hands are exclusively cultured silk. As for the recreation of fabric, this is complicated. Working with silk is very difficult and requires experience. That is why when silk production centers die, they are not restored.

In 2010, when I first visited Taraz in Kazakhstan, I suggested that silk production could have taken place here in Chinese factories. However, it is not possible either to prove nor to deny this hypothesis. It is connected with the specificity of archaeological sources as such. Simply put, what could archaeologists look for? The cultivation of silkworms? But this is a very simple technology: racks on which mulberry branches and caterpillars are placed. As you know, to find such finds is a rarity. And even finding them is not a 100% guarantee that silk production occurred.

All photos by
Tatiana Krupa

Author

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Aksana Ismailbekova

Aksana Ismailbekova is a research fellow at Leibniz-Zentrum-Moderner Orient (ZMO). Ismailbekova completed her PhD dissertation at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg in Halle, Germany. Based on her dissertation, she wrote her monograph Blood Ties and the Native Son: Poetics of Patronage in Kyrgyzstan, which was published by Indiana University Press in 2017.

Complex context

In recent years, the Internet and social media have brought attention to domestic violence against women in Central Asia, as well as the suicide of young married women, bride kidnappings, early arranged marriages, and conservative beliefs (such as the insistence that brides be virgins). Central Asia is known for strong kinship systems with traditional marriage patterns. Though these ostensibly protect women and children, serving as a safety net and security provider, the prevalence of various forms of violence against women cuts against this.

Some women justify domestic violence, participate in bride kidnappings and arranged marriages, and encourage their daughters to stay with their husbands’ families despite hardships. Such women, who defend “traditional” norms, are attacked for being backward and unintelligent for their acceptance of their “property” status. They are marginalized and valued less as valid producers of knowledge, and as such are “muted” not only locally, but also internationally. Yet it is crucial to consider all women’s voices, as well as the experiences, incentives, and constraints that encourage women to maintain these traditional practices. Only in this way can we see the complexity of gendered subjectivities.

There is also a context worth examining more closely: the impact of the Soviet era and post-Soviet changes on the lives of women in Central Asia. The situation of Central Asian women is different in some respects from that of women in other parts of the world. The Soviet and post-Soviet experience can be described as “neither colonized nor modern.”[1] Central Asian women live within a system that has maintained its traditional kinship structure, arranged marriage rules, and gendered control of resources. Yet they are also actively involved in local economies. They are the social and cultural drivers of a particular kind of change and adaptation.

International donors and agencies follow their neoliberal notion and ground economic gender empowerment in individual property rights, in opposition to social norms and customs that would hinder women’s economic rights. Their main agenda, therefore, is empowering women by increasing gender equality through the provision of access to land rights and other resources. What this misses, however, is the complexity of women’s position in Central Asia: the multiple meanings underpinning the concept of women being viewed as ‘property’ and local women’s perceptions of property. These aspects need to be examined through the lens of kinship and marriage systems and power/hierarchy relations in Central Asia. Kinship and marriage are a fundamental cultural horizon for Central Asians, informing how women think through these legal, social, and political categories. Indeed, women could be empowered by their membership of large extended-kin networks.

Soviet Heritage vs Strong Nationalism; Islam and Conservatism vs Western Ideas

On the one hand, we have the Soviet legacy of women’s emancipation, which not only allows, but actively encourages, women to engage in the wider economy through work as well as looking after children. On the other hand, with the collapse of the USSR, we have witnessed the revival of Islam, conservatism, and traditionalism, due primarily to the promotion of nationalism. Western donors, too, have influenced the situation by promoting gender equality and individual private property. Thus, women are caught between the Soviet heritage and strong nationalism, between conservative Islam and Western ideas. It is under these conditions that they claim their right to work and hold property.

Based on a significant body of anthropological literature covering many parts of the world, I argue that a decisive factor for women’s overall status is their position in the system of property relationships: as actual and potential property owners, as potential items of property themselves, and as providers—as well as recipients—of productive and reproductive labor. Together, labor and property transactions comprise the bundle of practical activities known as “provision.”[2] Provision practices tend to influence and be influenced by understandings of social identity.

In my long-term projects, I explore property through the prism of women’s worldviews, looking at how kinship and the marriage system shape understandings of property relations outcomes in comparative context. While giving voice to Central Asian women, I also engage with postcolonial discussions of feminist anthropology and women’s property relations.

Gender and Property Relations

Various studies of post-socialist countries[3] have dealt with the concept of property in terms of relations, morality, and embeddedness. Property relations are embedded in wider social relations and moral values in post-socialist countries. However, there is only limited literature on the intersection of gender and property relations in post-socialist countries.[4] For its part, scholarship on Central Asia has explored historical and contemporary approaches to property—especially land, grazing rights, livestock, and land grabs[5]—while neglecting to look at women’s property relations through the prism of marriage and the kinship system.[6] There are several reasons for this, most of them methodological.

The property regime is so important to gender issues because property is not, as it is often considered, merely ownership. Instead, property can fruitfully be seen as bundles of rights. Not all these bundles necessarily amount to full ownership. Property also manifests itself in distinct layers: the level of ideology; the institutional level, which includes regulations; the level of legal relationships; and the level of actual relationships. It is important to understand why the ideology of protection does not translate one-to-one into actual protection.[7]

In my case, when I was 27 years old, I ‘learned’ that I owned one hectare of land in Kyrgyzstan. Somehow, however, I was not made aware that I was entitled to this land until my brother needed my signature as proof that I had legally rejected the land to which I was entitled. I was surprised that I had inherited land from my family. When I wanted to keep it for myself, my sisters became angry with me and asked, “Why won’t you give the land to our brother? You cannot claim any property from your family members because you are married; and the younger brother is taking care of our parents.” My family had not wanted me to know about my land so I would not use my agency. My case is atypical, but some women might know their property rights even if they don’t claim them.

Central Asia: An Ideal Place to Study Gender

Central Asia is an ideal place to study the paradoxical configuration of women, maintenance of kinship systems, and property in Soviet and post-Soviet contexts and adapting to new realities.[8] The women of Central Asia, with their Soviet and post-Soviet experiences, can offer new insight into feminist anthropological discussions by examining kinship, marriage, and property from a different perspective to ‘White European’ and ‘American’ feminists, or other postcolonial countries.

Central Asia is a good laboratory for the investigation of contradictions because these primarily Muslim societies feature diverse modes of social organization. All of them belong to the Turkic group (Uzbeks, Turkmens, Kyrgyz, Uighurs, Kazakhs), except for the Tajiks, who have linguistic and cultural ties with Iran. There are, however, long-standing differences in kin terminologies between historically nomadic and sedentary peoples. Thus, kinship is a significant domain and source of cultural diversity in regional countries—yet to date it has hardly been examined by a comparative anthropology of kinship.

Anthropologists have long known that Kyrgyz, Kazaks, Tajiks, and Uzbeks trace their ancestry differently—and thus marry according to very different rules. Traditionally, most ethnic Kyrgyz and Kazaks were mobile herders or pastoral nomads; they mainly engaged in livestock breeding. By contrast, ethnic Uzbeks and Tajiks were sedentary farmers and urbanites; their main occupations were as craftsmen and traders. Consequently, Kyrgyz and Kazaks resided in mountainous places and Uzbeks and Tajiks in the grasslands. They have different residence rules, descent systems, terminologies, and marriage strategies. Kyrgyz and Kazakhs receive a bride price (kalyng) as compensation for the loss of their daughters’ economic services, while Uzbeks and Tajiks organize a dowry (sep) as a pre-mortem inheritance for their daughters. Through the institutions of dowry and bride price, families negotiate rights in persons and property transmission.

In addition to kinship in the economic and domestic spheres, there are local ideas of kinship related to property. Such ideas differ in their symbolic realm, spatial aspects, the exchangeability of property, and relatedness. I treat these local ideas seriously and explore how they differ in different kinship systems.

Ethnography from Central Asia should be in dialogue with debates on gender and kinship, marriage, and property. Here, there are many similarities between women in Central Asia and their counterparts in Africa and the Middle East, especially when it comes to their strong faith in kinship, property, and power. In general, the feminist anthropology has remained powerful in challenging essentialist theories developed in Western countries,[9] demonstrating that different cultures have different arrangements for kinship, marriage, and property. Applied to Central Asia, this approach would examine Central Asian women’s worldviews through the prism of Central Asian women themselves, thereby proposing alternative approaches to understanding kinship, marriage, and strategies for caring for daughters, as well as matrilocal ideas.

There is a difference between using local people’s own ideas to understand property as a category of analysis and using outside theory. Strathern, for example, avoided the concept of property altogether, although she did deal with other issues related to things and persons, objects and subjects, that contribute beyond European or Euro-American notions of property. Identifying women and local ideas offers new perspectives on ways in which women in Central Asia create and perpetuate relationships.[10] For example, there is a local idea of treating daughters as vulnerable (Uzb. Ojiza) and the associated ideal of providing for a daughter’s “security” in marriage. Ojiza is a strategy of individuals in a patriarchy; through it, women can exert a degree of agency by using it to call for support.[11].

Is “Culture” the Main Cause of Both Women’s Victimization and Their Empowerment?

Should local society, “culture” or kinship be blamed for women’s situations? On the one hand, claims about women being men’s “property” may be being used inappropriately and in contexts far removed from any system of local/kin-based checks and balances. At the same time, it is an inescapable fact that when a woman’s kin and her husband’s kin work together to force her to stay married, she may have nowhere to go.

Women often stay in such relationships because they are dependent on their husband—not because they are seen as their husband’s property, but because a woman alone would not be able to earn sufficient income to support herself (and possibly her children). In many cases, a woman’s position in society and the family is her choice: she wants to remain married despite challenges and occasional domestic violence in order to maintain access to a certain income. Then again, it may be that patriarchy prevents women from getting jobs, making them dependent on their husbands for income. In such a context, women must use patriarchy to exercise their agency. This is exactly what Kandiyoti argued decades ago in her work “Bargaining with patriarchy”[12].

Despite the efforts of international organizations to improve the condition of women, women themselves maintain the patriarchy (even its violent aspects), engage in bride kidnapping and arranged marriages, and encourage tradition in invisible ways. Local voices of women help to illuminate their vision of the world, explaining how they envision the kinship system, marriage rules, work, and property relations.

New media, the Internet, and social media platforms have opened new ways for women to express their visions of the world, even if their voices are controversial and different from those of experts, international organizations, and activists. There is, of course, a need for greater protection and regulation of virtual environments to support those who use them.

Economy and Culture Intersect

In this context, it is important to look at the intersection of property, work, and family relations (specifically, the economic contribution of wife and husband, parents and children, to the household). Individual families can be understood as single economic units. Each member makes a complementary economic contribution, such that the sum of several members’ efforts makes up the total household economy. In other words, the hypothesis of “labor and inheritance” can be applied, meaning if one contributes to household labor, one is entitled to inherit. In families, labor is organized on the basis of kinship relations, age, and gender.

Nevertheless, the value of women’s economic and social contribution can vary between ethnic groups. In some ethnic cultures, women who look after children and help in the household are very valuable; others, such as the Kyrgyz and Kazakhs, encourage women to engage in paid work. Intergenerational transmission of property and marriage payments (dowry and bride-price)[13] are also linked to family economic transactions and compensation. The combination of identity and indebtedness is at the root of bride price and dowry.[14] Depending on the economic basis, contribution, and change, different identities face changes. These lead to a change in the values and status of women and their economic contribution.

The Western notion of patriarchy does not apply to Central Asia, as in many cases women choose their position in their societies and families. Women want to stay in a marriage despite pressure and occasional domestic violence, as they want to have access to certain income. At the same time, it may be that patriarchy prevents women from getting jobs and generating income, making them dependent on their husbands for money. Economy and culture intersect.

[1] Kandiyoti, Deniz (2007) ‘The politics of gender and the Soviet paradox: neither colonized, nor modern?’ Central Asian Survey, 26:4, 601 — 623.

[2] Patrick Heady and Lale Yalçın-Heckmann, “Implications of Endogamy in the Southwest Eurasian Highlands: Another Look at Jack Goody’s Theory of Production, Property and Kinship,” History and Anthropology 31, no. 2 (2020): 257–281.

[3] Chris Hann, “Property, Neoliberalism and Rural Privatization. Overview,” in Property Relations: The Halle Focus Group, 2000-2005 (Halle/Saale: Max-Planck-Institut für Ethnologische Forschung, 2005); Chris Hann, “The State of the Art. A New Double Movement? Anthropological Perspectives on Property in the Age of Neoliberalism,” Socio-Economic Review 5 (2007): 287; Katherine Verdery, “Fuzzy Property: Rights, Power, and Identity in Transylvania’s Decollectivization,” in Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World, ed. Michael Burowoy and Katherine Verdery (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 53-82; Katherine Verdery and Caroline Humphrey, eds., Property in Question. Value Transformation in the Global Economy (Oxford: Berg, 2004); Katherine Verdery, The Vanishing Hectare. Property and Value in Postsocialist Transylvania (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).

[4] Exceptions are Frances Pine, “Reproducing the House: Kinship, Inheritance and Property Relations in Southern Poland,” in Distinct Inheritances: Property, Family and Community in Changing Europe, ed. Hannes Grandits and Patrick Heady (Münster: LIT-Verlag, 2003), 279-295; and Lale Yalçın-Heckmann, “Remembering the Dead and the Living of the Kolkhoz and Sovkhoz: Past and Present of Gendered Rural Life in Azerbaijan,” Ab Imperio 2 (2005): 425–440.

[5] Paolo Sartori, “Introduction: Dealing with States of Property in Modern and Colonial Central Asia,” Central Asian Survey 29, no. 1 (2010): 1-8; Sarah Robinson, Chantsallkham Jamsranjav, and Kramer Gillin, “Pastoral Property Rights in Central Asia: Factors and Actors Driving the Reform Agenda,” Études rurales 200, no. 2 (2017): 220-253.

[6] Except a few scholars by whom I am inspired, including Deniz Kandiyoti (2007).

[7] See Keebet von Benda-Beckmann’s work on bundles of rights and Judith Beyer’s work on social protection. Benda-Beckmann, Franz von, Keebet von Benda-Beckmann and Melanie G. Wiber (2006) ‘The properties of property’. Changing properties of property. Ed. Franz von Benda- Beckmann, Keebet von Benda-Beckmann and Melanie G. Wiber. New York: Berghahn Books; Judith Beyer (2016) The force of custom. Law and the ordering of everyday life in Kyrgyzstan. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

[8] Deniz Kandiyoti, “The Politics of Gender and the Soviet Paradox: Neither Colonized, nor Modern?” Central Asian Survey 26, no. 4 (2007): 601-623.

[9] Marilyn Strathern, The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia (Berkeley, CA, and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990).

[10] Marvin Harris’ -emic/-etic distinction; Headland, Thomas N., Kenneth L. Pike, and Marvin Harris. 1990. Emics and etics: The insider/outsider debate (Frontiers of Anthropology). SAGE Publications Inc: Newbury Park

[11] Ismailbekova Aksana. (forthcoming 2022) ‘Daughters as Ojiza: Marriage, Security and Care strategies for Daughters among Uzbeks in Southern Kyrgyzstan’. In Féaux de la Croix, Jeanne and Madeleine Reeves (eds.) Central Asian Worlds. The Routledge Handbook. Routledge.

[12] Kandiyoti Deniz. 1988. “Bargaining with Patriarchy.” Gender and Society 2: 274–290

[13] Jack Goody, Production and Reproduction: A Comparative Study of the Domestic Domain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).

[14] Heady and Yalçın-Heckmann, “Implications of Endogamy.”

For the last few years, Professor Cholpon Koichumanova has been working on a project studying the role and place of women in modern Kyrgyzstan.

The project has been implemented with the support of the National Academy of Sciences of the Kyrgyz Republic and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

In this interview, Dr. Koichumanova talks about some of her findings and shares her views on how to expand women’s prospects in Kyrgyz society.

Interview with

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Cholpon Koichumanova

Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor, Corresponding Member of the National Academy of Sciences of the Kyrgyz Republic. Author of more than 50 scientific articles, 5 monographs and 2 recommended textbooks. Head of the “Center for Humanitarian Research in Central Asia” of the National Academy of Sciences of the Kyrgyz Republic.

What does the life of a rural woman in Kyrgyzstan look like today?

As younger people in Kyrgyzstan move to urban areas or abroad, rural areas in Kyrgyzstan are increasingly left to women.

More than half of women—65 percent of the total female population—currently lives in rural areas. They cope with aging and poorly maintained countryside infrastructure, a lack of water and other resources, and the overall deterioration of living conditions. In addition, the life of a rural woman is defined by family, social, and cultural values that sometimes threaten this group of the population.

What are the specific problems?

In Kyrgyzstan, about 1.5 million people living in 396 villages do not have access to clean drinking water. This problem holds special gender significance since, first, it directly impacts housekeeping and other forms of life of the population, and, second, it is one of the main factors affecting human health. The insufficient provision of safe drinking water to the rural population, along with unsatisfactory sanitary conditions, causes epidemiological tension, increasing the incidence of acute intestinal infections, helminth infections, and typhoid fever. About 30,000 cases of acute intestinal infections are registered in Kyrgyzstan every year; per Ministry of Health reports, treatment of diseases transmitted through dirty water costs the country more than 4 billion soms per year. Solving the problem of access to clean water is therefore paramount.

This is just one example of the health care issues that women living in rural areas face. Since medical services are provided here through feldsher-obstetric stations (FAP), it is necessary to carry out major repairs there and provide residents with proper health care services, including psychological health services. We need a full-time psychologist in every village, since it is rural women and girls who are most exposed to domestic violence and are left alone with their problems, which subsequently lead to murders, suicides, etc.

Violence against women remains one of the main problems in Kyrgyzstan, and this problem is only getting worse. Unlike urban women, rural women typically do not seek help from law enforcement agencies. They either distrust law enforcement agencies or are prevented by a certain mentality from filing formal accusations against relatives, neighbors, and fellow villagers.

There has been a catastrophic increase in abduction for the purpose of forced marriage. According to research data, 60 percent of marriages in mono-ethnic rural areas happen after bride kidnapping (ala kachuu), of which two-thirds occur without the consent of the girl. According to various studies, between 22 and 35 percent of the victims of ala kachuu did not even know their kidnapper. The kidnapping of a woman for marriage occurs twice as often in rural areas as in urban ones and is associated with physical, mental, and often sexual violence.

Rural women today make up 60 percent of the migration flow abroad, often leaving their children with elderly parents and other relatives. In this regard, it is necessary to strengthen control over children whose parents are working abroad, since it is they who are most often subjected to psychological, physical, and sexual violence by adults. It is necessary to officially register the guardianship of relatives who are caring for the children of migrants. Also, if a child is entitled to benefits and payments from the state, then a guardian has the opportunity to receive them. In the absence of a legal representative, a minor is not able to receive benefits on his own. Guardianship makes it possible to identify migrant children and regulate this process.

In recent decades, owing to the difficulties of the transition period, there has been significant destruction of the network of preschool institutions in rural areas, and it is necessary to restore them. According to the most recent data, on average, a little over 22 percent of kindergarten-age children in the republic attend one. In other words, only one child in five goes to kindergarten. Moreover, the proportion of children not enrolled in preschool education is almost twice as high in villages as in cities.

An equally urgent problem for any region of Kyrgyzstan is the poor condition of roads. If in cities they are still trying to rebuild them, then for rural areas this remains unrealistic. It is necessary to improve the condition of roads between villages in order to improve communication between members of the rural population. School buses should be introduced in areas where children have to walk long distances to get to school. Unfortunately, comfortable public transport is not yet available to residents of rural areas of our country.

Generally speaking, there is a lack of jobs for rural women. In addition to taking care of children, women in villages are usually busy with housework: cleaning, cooking, washing, raising livestock, milking cows, tending gardens, and even cultivating the land. It is urgent to create jobs for them. The opening of small businesses will provide an opportunity to embark on new professions and develop entrepreneurship, as well as to combine family and work responsibilities through the growth of home-based jobs using modern information and communication technologies.

We need more women at the political level—in rural keneshes as well as in senior positions in district and regional administrations and other state structures. After all, it is the political power that determines and controls the life of the entire society. The active legal education of rural women should also be organized, empowering women to access economic resources and basic services; own and dispose of land; and understand other forms of ownership, inherited property, the division of property after divorce, and receiving alimony.

Does the government offer protection to rural women and what is the state of the gender laws in Kyrgyzstan?

During the post-independence years, a very solid legislative base has been created in the republic to determine and regulate gender policy. In 1996-2000 we had a specific program, Ayalzat National Program, that incorporated the priorities of the Beijing Platform for Action and was aimed at improving women’s status in the country. When summing up in 2000 the results of the implementation of Ayalzat, it was recognized that women and men lacked equality of opportunity in the sphere of public service. The priority goal set in this program—to achieve 40 percent female participation at the decision-making level—has not been achieved, and the state, represented by its political institutions, is not sufficiently striving to establish a gender balance in power structures. Decrees of the President of the Kyrgyz Republic, such as “On Further Improvement of the Personnel Policy for Attracting Women Leaders to the Public Administration of the Kyrgyz Republic” (2002) and “On Approval of the Regulations on the Commission for Gender Expertise of Normative Legal Acts under the Secretariat of the National Council for Family Affairs, Women and Gender Development under the President of the Kyrgyz Republic” (2004), as well as the provisions of the Law of the Kyrgyz Republic “On State Guarantees for Ensuring Gender Equality,” have become important documents aimed at implementing the constitutional principle of equal access to state and municipal service.

Yet despite the fact that during the years of independence in Kyrgyzstan important laws proclaiming gender equality have been adopted and quotas introduced for women’s representation in parliament and other representative state bodies, in day-to-day life gender equality is being promoted only through the efforts of civil society and with the help of international organizations. The state develops programs and strategies without supporting them with the resources necessary for practical implementation. For example, almost no resources were allocated from the state budget for the implementation of the state’s national strategy for achieving gender equality until 2020.

Kyrgyzstani women actively unite in women’s non-governmental organizations. Initially, women’s NGOs arose in the cities, which can be explained by the relatively high political culture of city-dwellers compared to the rural population. But NGOs are appearing in rural areas too. However, these NGOs exist only thanks to foreign grants, and some rely on funds from subsidiary farms and assistance from international non-productive organizations.

The women’s movement in Kyrgyzstan still lacks consolidation. First, it is a challenge to train women leaders from among the younger generation, as the women’s movement has not seen the influx of young people into its ranks. Second, the state does not provide support to women’s organizations, even those that protect the rights of women and provide them with social support. Third, in the context of the growing influence of religion in the socialization of the younger generation, women’s organizations and groups acting under the auspices of religious and so-called traditional values are becoming more active. Fourth, over the past two years, public opinion has formed a negative view of NGOs as biased by the ideas of the West, which has of course had a negative impact on women’s organizations.

The modern reality is that the formal equality of women and men—enshrined in the Constitution and a number of other legislative acts, as well as in international documents signed by the government of the Kyrgyz Republic and ratified by the Jogorku Kenesh—does not at all guarantee their practical equality. For women, only horizontal movement is really available; vertical movement—to the highest echelons of power—is the prerogative of men. The gender component is also very poorly reflected in the activities of political parties, which everyone knows are the main lever of influence on state power. Women are seen as an object whose life can be improved from outside without developing their own civic initiative.

For example, if in the Jogorku Kenesh of 2016, 26 percent of deputies were women, the level of their representation has now decreased to 17 percent. The most recent local-level elections also show negative trends in women’s political leadership: whereas in 2013 women made up 12-13 percent of local keneshes, they now make up only 10 percent. If earlier there were 70 ayil okmotus in the country that contained no women at all, there are now 80. Today, women are included in the ranks of political parties only because there is legislation on quotas and because it is necessary for the image of political parties. Women are used only as a resource; their political subjectivity for the leaders of the party remains in last place. Consequently, the opportunities for women to gain power and participate in big politics are fraught with difficulties. On the other hand, although the women of Kyrgyzstan show interest in politics, only about 8-10 percent of them believe that political means should be used to protect rights. Notably, among the leaders of non-governmental organizations, the percentage of women who hold such an opinion is much higher: 35 percent.

What is the court of aksakals and what is its role in the social status of women?

In the Kyrgyz Republic, a new public institution for the protection of the rights of victims, the court of aksakals, has gained legitimacy. These are elected, self-governing public bodies that consider materials sent to them by the court, the prosecutor, and other law enforcement agencies that have the right to consider criminal cases, as well as cases of property and family disputes between citizens, in order to achieve reconciliation. Courts of aksakals can be established by decision of a meeting of citizens, local keneshes on the territory of ayil aimaks, and cities where aksakals enjoy respect and authority. It works like this: 5 to 9 people aged 50 and over listen to both sides and make a decision on your issue. They consider issues not only according to the law, but also according to their conscience and personal convictions. Of course, this method is faster than the courts, where proceedings can drag on for many years. There are often gaps in laws, and some issues really need to be resolved “according to conscience” and not according to the letter of the law.

At the same time, as practice shows, the courts of aksakals have not become an effective support for working with the population. One way to increase their activity could be to involve women in their work. Unfortunately, however, according to established tradition, only men are elected to the courts of aksakals; indeed, their very name implies older males. In this regard, it is necessary to consider changing the Law “On the Courts of Aksakals” to the Law on “Courts of Elders.” This would reflect the basic principles of gender equality, protect women from discrimination based on sex, and thereby establish progressive democratic relations. The name “courts of aksakals,” meanwhile, restores a medieval logic according to which wisdom is inherent only in men. This is despite the fact that our studies have shown that in the difficult 1990s, it was women who endured all the hardships of the transition and solved the most difficult problems, showing wisdom, patience, and perseverance. In our opinion, the involvement of women with authority in these courts—accompanied, of course, by a change in their name—would raise the form and method of their activity to a new level.

Are there any signs that rural women are playing an increasing role in the Kyrgyz economy?

As you know, women tend to work in traditionally “female” areas—education, science, health, culture, and art—where wages are low, but without which the development of the country is impossible (women make up 85 percent of all school personnel in rural areas and 90 percent of the staff of nursing stations) Recently, they have become increasingly involved in the system of entrepreneurial relations, forming typical “gender niches” of modern economic activity. Women are seen as more responsible in doing business than men. They traditionally work in trade, consumer goods, services, and education.

In addition, in recent years, women have turned to the traditions and skills of needlework inherited from their mothers and grandmothers—carpet-weaving, embroidery, making products from felt, etc.—to alleviate poverty and unemployment. At first, women worked individually, but in recent years, societies of craftswomen and needlewomen have mushroomed in each region. Some of them number 200 people. Thus, the revival of folk art and handicrafts has been brought about by women from all regions, 90 percent of whom are from rural areas. Needlewomen try to preserve good traditions and pass on their skills to the younger generation. Many of them have their own sewing workshops where young girls practice and even earn money. In order to develop this type of activity, many women apply for small grants from international organizations and receive support. They purchase sewing machines and other necessary equipment and materials, creating jobs and providing financial assistance to their families. No less importantly, needlewomen in the villages pass down their knowledge and skills to younger generations, preserving and increasing the richness of their national culture. The proportion of women who want to engage in business is constantly growing, thereby increasing women’s role in the development of the country.

All photos by
Cholpon Koichumanova, “Daily life of rural women” series from “Женские судьбы: времена не выбирают“, Bishkek, Turar, 2021 

The Soviet state invested heavily in water infrastructure in arid Central Asia. These investments produced transformations with significant social impact.

They also created memories that many anthropological studies have tried to investigate alongside the various perspectives and perceptions of local actors regarding Soviet everyday water politics. This empirical data in a way gives a greater voice to people’s social reality and concerns as their lives were transformed by social politics.

Addressing Soviet water politics through the paradigm of social memories (Connerton 1989) illuminates which Soviet beliefs occupied people’s minds and how people implemented their beliefs in the present social-structural sites of their past lives (Halbwachs 1985). In this essay, I look at how Soviet-era water politics affected perceptions, social practices and political arrangements in rural settings in Soviet Kyrgyzstan (see Figure 1 and Figure 2).

Author

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Kateřina Zäch

Kateřina Zäch is a teaching assistant at the University of Fribourg, where she is pursuing her PhD under the supervision of Prof. Christine Bichsel in the Department of Geosciences. For her dissertation, she is exploring everyday water politics and how rural places are being transformed through human-water relations. She seeks to understand how modern influences have affected rural environments, as well as analyzing how archival and memory practices shape human engagement with water. Her research focuses on cultural aspects of environmental change, the social life of things, modernity, heritage, loss, and memory.

More Infrastructure—Greater Prosperity

Understanding everyday water politics requires close attention to the details of how people lived; how they acted; their relationship to representatives of the local government; and even what they said. The Soviet state claimed that coercive political implementation of Soviet policy was needed to achieve economic growth—which it saw as being tied to the production of diverse goods, metals or other resources—and meet the locals’ need for job security by ensuring labor and material comfort through its water infrastructure (see Figure 3).

Analysis of the empirical data that I compiled during my field research reveals that, from the perspective of many citizens of Soviet Central Asia, Soviet water politics functioned successfully, not least because many of the Soviet pumps, pipes, and water channels continue to function effectively and support local actors’ everyday lives in rural areas even today (see Figure 1 and Figure 3).

The dream of modernization began with the infrastructure of everyday life, which became a point of departure for the support of economic growth. In this sense, the piped water infrastructure can be viewed as an engine helping to realize this growth (see Figure 5).

The social memories I investigated during my fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan reveal that being a pastoralist was a well-paying, state-supported, and highly organized job. In the Soviet era, the structurally organized state recognized the necessity of a well-functioning water supply system that would provide water even to farmers and their families living in mountainous areas.

During the Soviet era, many families in the rural villages of Kyrgyzstan lived in harmony with nature but remained dependent on access to sufficient water to realize their dream of working as farmers on behalf of the state. I interviewed an 83-year-old woman who described the Soviet era as advantageous and helpful in terms of the support and care provided for people. She stated: “In the Soviet period, I worked as a young woman as a cow milker. Around 14 years. The work brought different payment monthly, but often 100 com. Being a farmer, you enjoyed a good standard of living. After I got married, my husband and I worked in a jailloo[i] and had our own well at our disposal.”^[ii]

Thus, the empirical record illustrates the perceived responsibility of the Soviet government to provide working infrastructure, in this case a water pump, to facilitate agricultural production. Importantly, the socialist state met—and possibly even exceeded—these expectations, providing a monthly salary and water access to ensure local actors’ satisfaction with their working conditions. As a result, not only was the situation of the local population, which was now able to cover all the expenses of daily life, improved, but the satisfaction of the local population meant that the political situation was also secured.

Gifts and Dependency

Sufficient water access was part of the effort to provide suitable living and working conditions and develop the infrastructure to cultivate fields in rural Soviet Kyrgyzstan’s arid environment over time. The Soviets instituted a variety of prizes for attainment of its labor and production budgets, with the goal of ensuring that citizens appreciated the state and did not believe that their cooperation with the Party had been forced. In 1990, the Jenish Jolu newspaper published a story about two families that had received prizes for winning the award of “best farmer.” The Party awarded the first family eleven sheep and the second a tractor.^[i][ii] Although these prizes may initially seem benevolent and appreciative, they can also be viewed as a political strategy for binding people to the state and preventing revolts against insufficient working conditions.

Through an interview that I conducted in 2019, I have explored the human perceptions constructed by such political mechanisms, which affected the everyday lives of millions of people working under the Soviet regime. My interviewee, a local woman, indicated that she had enjoyed a secure monthly salary in the exchange-based economic system: “Under the Soviet government, I earned 100 com. This was enough to feed the whole family. One kilogram of flour cost 14 com and one kilogram of sugar 7 com.”^[iii] It is worth noting that the monthly salary that my respondent mentioned was generous. The salary provided was more than she may have asked for. This demonstration of generosity may be an example of the socialist state’s efforts to create an image of family-friendly relationships with the people. Furthermore, this highlights an aspect of Soviet politics that suggests sociality needs to present people as independent and owing nothing to anybody, as Dubin (2015) emphasizes. In reality, such generous policies gave rise to social dependence on the system, as noted by Emerson (1962).

We can see more clearly the intent behind gifts like a tractor or eleven sheep: although ostensibly given to enable recipients to achieve their goals, such gifts were in fact instrumentalized to bind the local population in invisible dependence by recognizing the hard work that they had invested to achieve the Party’s production quotas.

Failed Dreams and Punishment

The legitimized power of the Party was embedded into the social structures of everyday life, embodied in everything from piped water infrastructure to motivational gifts. The Party coerced local actors to work harder and faster, with the sole goal of fulfilling the Party’s plan. Through a system of spying, surveillance, and cadres, the state closely monitored people who were seemingly lazy or presented a danger to the Soviet regime. A collective anger at having to struggle against the Party’s oppressive politics eventually led the people to begin refusing to meet the unrealistic production quotas. Eventually, the Soviet production planning system became characterized by a loss of efficiency, in that the expenditure of materials, energy, and labor was constantly increasing, incompatible with the expected economic quotas.

Beginning in 1991, the total lack of economic, social, and personal direction was amplified. The Soviet Union made many investments in water access, but there was still much to do after its dissolution (McKee et al. 2006). Additionally, there had been a lack of investment in the modernization of water infrastructure in rural areas. As such, locals were coping with repairs on the water infrastructure, particularly the many inactive water pumps that required technical realignments. Moreover, the job of farmer was effectively abolished, leaving the local population with no governmental support in the cultivation and irrigation of their fields and in the rearing of animals in mountainous areas. Those individuals among the younger generation who are interested in pursuing careers as farmers struggle with unsatisfactory conditions and uncertain and potentially irregular income (see Figure 6).

Conclusion

In this short essay, I assessed the social system of water infrastructure through the lens of human perception and memories of piped water systems. I showed that while Soviet water politics were able to build piped water systems, they failed to provide ongoing maintenance and repairs. The reality, combined with economic struggles since the Central Asian states became independent from the Soviet Union in 1991, has left a mixed legacy.

In this film, I share my fieldwork experience of accessing memories of the Soviet era through local residents. Exploring the village of Orlovka enabled me to perceive the local environment and understand everyday water politics as a necessary political responsibility for the successful functioning of a local piped water system. I would like to express my deep gratitude to the local people who entrusted me with their information and provided me with valuable insights into their daily lives.

References

Connerton, P. (1989). How societies remember. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dubin, D. (2015). Das unmögliche Leben: Studien, Essays, Erinnerungen. Berlin: Osteuropa 1.

Emerson, R. M. (1962). Power-dependence relations. American Sociological Review, 27(1), 31-41.

Halbwachs, M. (1985). Das kollektive Gedächtnis. Stuttgart: Enke.

McKee, M., Blabanova, D., Akingbade, K., Pomerleau, J., Stickley, A., Rose, R. & Haerpfer, C. (2006). Access to water in the countries of the former Soviet Union. Public Health, 120, 364-372.

[i] Jenish Jolu 135(5706), November 21, 1990, 3.

[ii] Jenish Jolu, 142(5713), November 27, 1990, 3.

[iii] Interview and fieldwork conducted by Katerina Zäch, Kyzyl-Tuu, 2019.

[i] Jailloo is a mountain pasture where the shepherds bring herds to grazing.

[ii] Interview and fieldwork conducted by Katerina Zäch, Kyzyl-Tuu, 2019.

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

Prof. Dr. Judith Beyer specializes in political and legal anthropology. She conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan where she studied the practices of retraditionalization – how the concept of traditions is viewed in Central Asia and how it became a part of the nation-building processes. Her book The Force of Custom: Law and the Ordering of Everyday Life in Kyrgyzstan (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) reveals the peculiarities of the plural local legal practices. In this interview, she shares some of her findings and talks about her research work in Central Asia.

You are an anthropologist known for your work on the role of law in Central Asia. Can you tell us how you came to combine law and anthropology and what your research is about?

I am a legal and political anthropologist and have been working on and in Kyrgyzstan for almost two decades now. I studied law, anthropology, and Slavonic studies in Germany and spent six months at the American University in Kyrgyzstan (AUK) in Bishkek in 2003 as a DAAD-student.

Interview with

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Dr. Judith Beyer

Head of Research Group “Political Anthropology”, University of Konstanz, Germany. Judith Beyer is currently Member of the International Advisory Board of the peer-reviewed journal Central Asian Survey, Associate Member of the European Network on Statelessness (ENS) and a long-time editor at Allegra Lab, a widely read anthropological blog.

 https://www.soziologie.uni-konstanz.de/beyer/team/prof-dr-judith-beyer/ 

 Twitter

While studying, I gathered data for my Master’s thesis which I wrote on the concept of ‘transition’. It was during the Presidency of Askar Akaev that I noticed how in Kyrgyzstan, politics was being done through constitutional referenda and I observed this particular event in detail and talked to local judges and lawyers about how they envisioned the country’s (legal) future. In my subsequent PhD, I spent almost 2 years in the countryside in Northern Kyrgyzstan in two mountain villages and carried out classical ethnographic fieldwork, particularly with the two local courts of elders (aksakal courts). In my book “The Force of Custom. Law and the Ordering of Everyday Life in Kyrgyzstan” (Pittsburgh 2016) I coin the concept of ‘customization’, focusing on the Kyrgyz term salt (which I translate as ‘customary law’) as a dominant legal repertoire alongside religious law (shari’a) and state law. I argue that although the Kyrgyz concept of salt (Kyrgyz – салт) is often blamed for bringing about more disorder and hardship than order and harmony, it allows my interlocutors in Kyrgyzstan to disavow responsibility for their actions by pushing a model of ‘how things get done here’ to the front. Invoking salt enables actors even as they claim to be constrained by it.

It opens up possibilities to conceptualize, classify, and contextualize large- and mid-scale developments in an intimate idiom. It also is a way to communicate to others that one is an expert in and of one’s own culture. An ethnomethodological perspective, as I pursue it in this book, challenges a conception of social order as hidden within the visible actions and behaviors of members of society. I examine rather how members produce and sustain the observable orderliness of their own actions. I am currently in the process of writing articles on “Law in Central Asia” and the concept of ‘customization’ for two edited volumes that build on this work from Kyrgyzstan.

Speaking of edited volumes, your co-edited volume “Practices of traditionalization in Central Asia” (Routledge 2020) provides important insights into the role of tradition in contemporary Central Asia, Tatarstan and Tibet. Can you tell us about the main arguments of this publication?

In this recent book, I broaden the perspective on ‘customization’ which I developed in the context of law to be applicable beyond the legal sphere and, together with a group of scholars, explore what we call ‘practices of traditionalization’ across Central Asia. In our introduction, Peter Finke and I show how a shift occurred in regard to how the concept of tradition has been employed in the region: while it was framed as the conceptual enemy that needed to be fought and ultimately overcome during the colonial expansion, it became an important tool of nation-building in the post-Soviet era. But the concept is also an emic category of non-elites. It is an important argument that people across Central Asia put forward in order to justify their actions or to contemplate their own and other’s behavior. It is a so-called ‘members’ category’ and needs to be understood from the perspective of the people we work with in the field. In our edited volume, we want to move beyond probing the ‘authenticity’ of particular ‘traditional practices’. Rather than deconstructing tradition in order to do away with it, we see here a site of necessary engagement. Tradition does matter in Central Asia, as it does in Africa and in Europe: it aggregates people, motivates individual and collective action, informs policy, public debates, law, and representation, and is – despite its often enough strategic inception – effectively powerful.

How different and common are these practices across your studied regions?

This is an empirical question: They are as different as people are, but people can gather around the same signifiers, so to speak, to share what we call a ‘cultural model’ and agree on certain practices as being ‘traditional’ in a particular location and context or at a particular time. In our edited volume, we discuss cases that range from political demonstrations in Kyrgyzstan, industrial workers’ gatherings in Kazakhstan, institutions of religious education in Tatarstan, minority communities in Tibet, wedding celebrations in Tajikistan and even the Internet, found with examples from Kazakhstan.

It is interesting that there are cases from Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, where people were practicing transhumance before the expansion of the Russian Empire, and a case from Tajikistan where people lived settled lives even before. Does traditionalization differ between these different types of society?

Traditionalization is a practice that is not related to a particular way of life – be it nomadic or sedentary. It is an inherent capacity of all humans, a way to make sense and order of their world.

More concretely, we treat traditionalization as the institutionalization of a practice which is informed by – and, in turn, informing – cultural models. As a particular type of practice that always needs to be explored in its concrete institutional and interactional context at a particular time, tradition can only be judged from the present. It is an interpretative concept, not a descriptive one. Tradition, therefore, reflects the tensions between continuity and change, or predictability and flexibility. In rapidly transforming societies, however, such as the Central Asian ones, it can be expected that there will be more variation in the interpretation and acceptance (or disavowal) of tradition.

Why are there no cases from Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan in the book?

This is unfortunate, yes. But the simple reason for this is that extended anthropological or ethnographic fieldwork has been almost impossible in both of these countries. Turkmenistan has been, since the demise of the Soviet Union, off-limits to most anthropologists whereas in Uzbekistan, research was possible for a while but then became increasingly difficult. One of our authors has been working on Kazakhstan in the last years as he was no longer able to continue his research in Uzbekistan. The latest developments are positive, however, so there is hope for renewed engagement with this fascinating country. In regard to Turkmenistan, it will remain what we have termed an ‘absent presence’ in Central Asia in another publication (Reeves, Rasanayagam and Beyer 2016, 2).

Coming back to your research on law in Central Asia: How difficult was it for the Central Asian societies to adapt to westernized, codified law after the Russian conquest? Do you have any cases in history where Central Asian revolted against new legal order?

This is an interesting question – it was very difficult for Central Asians, of course, because it was foreign law that was being brought to them and it did not come as an ‘offer’, but through force. It was imposed top-down and went along with the gradual eradication of their own law(s), that is shari’a and customary law. However, one needs to understand that what came to be known as customary law from then onwards was created only in this very context of the Russian encounter: Early ethnographers, who had been sent already during tsarist times, and who often traveled along with soldiers, had been given the task to ‘write down’ and thus codify customary law. What had always been a very flexible, situational, and local way of dealing with conflict, dispute, and management (e.g. of resources, right to pasture usage, marriage regulations) became – through the process of codification – fixed. “Customary law” was in this way invented by the Russian colonial empire – as a fixed corpus of laws, rules, and regulations it is a product of Western (legal) thinking as there has never been ‘the’ customary law of the Kyrgyz, the Uzbeks or the Tajiks, for example. The endeavor was only partially successful because what Russian ethnographers captured was not customary law (or likewise shari’a, as they never managed to transform Islamic law into statutory law either), but their own fiction of it. Thus, both continued to exist, albeit in the private realms of Central Asian households and lineages.

In regard to your question about possible revolts against the new legal order, there are two answers: one is, yes they did, for example, there was an open insurrection against the introduction of administrative reforms such as the election of a head of a village or an encampment in one part of what is today Kyrgyzstan. But in other parts, Russian reforms were made possible because Kyrgyz also aligned with the Russian troops in order to fight the Kokandian rulers, for example. But I would also say that Central Asians fought Russians with their own weapons: They began to take their cases elsewhere: when the newly elected local judges began to stage court cases and to sell decisions, for example, people began to also deal with serious conflicts and crimes inside their households or lineages. But here, regional variation needs to be taken into account again: Russian, and later Soviet control, was exercised to a far lesser extent in the area where I did fieldwork, for example, then in Bishkek or the Fergana Valley, and people learned to accommodate the legal reforms more than they openly resisted them.

Has contemporary law in Central Asia been sufficiently modernized? There are still wide gaps in family and gender law, for example. Some worry that conservative sentiments will be codified and stall development of better protections for women or minorities.

This is not a question of modernization, I would say. If you even want to equate Western law with being more ‘modern’ than non-Western law (which I would refrain from doing), then you only have to look at Turkmenistan which has a highly developed civil code modeled after the German one. The country has also expressed interest in commercial law reform and collaborates with international development agencies in order to modernize its laws to bring them in accordance with international conventions. At the same time, however, the introduction of the Law on Public Associations in 2004 virtually destroyed Turkmen civil society. What you have termed ‘conservative sentiments’ needs to be understood as modern phenomena that goes hand in hand with a neoliberal agenda.

In a way, Central Asia no longer practices “wild capitalism’ (Russ. dikii capitalism/дикий капитализм) as it has been derogatively termed by Western (economic) observers in the 1990s, but has professionalized the stripping down of their countries for parts through legal means. This is why I find the emerging activist movement in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan so important: There are currently many young citizens active on the streets and in the (social) media who are fighting for their (human) rights, for the enforcement of the rule of law and who want to hold their elected representatives accountable. We should be concerned about the latest legal changes in Kyrgyzstan, for example, that curb freedom of speech or intend to confine women to the sphere of the household, but the ongoing protests by the young generation also give me hope. None of this is a question of modernity, however, but rather one of accountability.

By Snejana Atanova

Snezhana Atanova is a PhD candidate at INALCO. Her thesis focuses on nationalism and cultural heritage in Central Asia. She recently finished an IFEAC fellowship devoted to national identity in everyday life in Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan. She was awarded a Carnegie fellowship in 2017, in which she explored national identity through the nation-branding initiatives of Russia and Central Asian countries. She earned a Master’s in International Communication from the University of Strasbourg in 2012 and a Master’s from the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO) in 2015.

Interview with

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Pavel Lurje

Head of the Sector of Central Asia, Caucasus and Crimea, Senior Research Fellow of the Oriental Department of the State Hermitage Museum, head of the Panjikent Expedition.

Dr. Lurje is a graduate of St. Petersburg State University’s Faculty of Oriental Studies, specializing in the History of Iran and Afghanistan. In the same year, he was admitted to a doctoral course at the St Petersburg Branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies. Since 1994, he has regularly taken part in archaeological and ethnographical expeditions to Central Asia (Panjikent, Paikend, Ak-Beshim, Hisorak, Krasnaja Rechka) and he spent 8 months in Iran between 1999-2000. His dissertation, entitled “Historico-linguistical analysis of Sogdian Toponymy” [Историко-лингвистический анализ согдийской топонимии], supervised by Dr. Vladimir A. Livshits, was defended in June 2004.

From 2009, he has been working at the Oriental Department of the State Hermitage Museum.

Major research interests: Iranian linguistics, Middle Iranian languages, onomastics, Central Asian antiquities, historical geography and toponymy, language, history, archaeology, culture, arts of Sogdiana and neighboring lands.

 Academia

Panjikent is a Sogdian city, the ruins of which are located in the southern periphery of the present-day city of Panjakent (in western Tajikistan).

You have spent the last decade studying Panjikent. Could you tell us about this project? How have you organized your work with the Hermitage and Tajik archaeologists in this research?

I first came to Panjikent in 1994 as a student. It turned out to be a long-lasting affair, although there were many gaps in-between. Since 2010, I have been leading archaeological excavations from the Russian side, in collaboration with my colleague in Tajikistan, Sharofuddin Kurbanov.

The first Sogdian-Tajik archaeological expedition was formed shortly after the war, in 1946, under the leadership of Alexander Yakubovsky. It was a large project that deployed several teams at a time, where each group was in charge of excavation, exploration, and documentation of archaeological and architectural monuments. It was decided earlier on that the ancient settlement of Panjikent located on the outskirts of a modern city – on the southern bank of Zeravshan river, 60 km east of Samarqand (now on the territory of Uzbekistan) – would be the main target of stationary excavations. In the pre-war archaeological excavations in Central Asia, from 1932-33, one of the most striking discoveries included a large volume of documents found in the ruins of a small castle on Mount Mug, east of Panjikent. As the documents were deciphered, it became clear that one of the main characters was Devashtich (executed in 722 A.D.), who was called “the ruler of Panj (Panjikent).” Eager to make further progress in this important discovery in the post-war period, archaeologists hoped to see documents in Sogdian and other languages that would shed light on the history of the Arab conquest. But they were up for a disappointment – in contrast to the climate of Mount Mug, which was conducive for organic materials to remain intact, the climate of Panjikent irrevocably destroyed such objects. Only clay bullae with holes for laces served as evidence that documents similar to those found in the pre-war period existed here too.

The excavations in Panjikent would have been curtailed, if it was not for the discovery of the mural paintings of Sogd in 1948, followed by findings of carved wood and clay sculptures.

The State Hermitage Museum established a special laboratory for the restoration of mural paintings that primarily focuses on important discoveries in Panjikent, particularly those that are fragile and require special handling. Ever since those discoveries, almost three quarters of a century ago, archaeologists have carried out explorations of Panjikent annually, continuing excavations even during the civil war in Tajikistan. As a result, we unearth new paintings and sculptures practically every year. At its height, the expedition was very large[1] – it involved over 60 specialists in addition to local employees, who even had lunch in several shifts. According to an agreement with the Academy of Sciences of Tajikistan, all the findings were shared between the Hermitage and the local museums. The murals and carved wood had to go through restoration work at the Hermitage, even if they were to be exhibited in Panjikent or Dushanbe.

The situation changed in the 1990s. Now, all the archaeological findings remain in Tajikistan, and we can only bring along diaries, photographs, work plans, and, very rarely, some samples for analysis. We have managed to set up a field laboratory in Panjikent, and as a result, the best samples of murals and paintings are able to arrive in the Panjikent Museum already restored and ready for exhibitions.

The current expedition heavily relies on local Tajik and particularly Panjikent-based specialists. They lead half of the ongoing excavations and rely on high school and college students in their excavation work. They are driven by their intrinsic interest more so than by income (our pay is quite modest); they are interested in broadening their worldview, learning the history of their motherland, and also practicing their Russian (a skill that is in demand in present-day Tajikistan). Working for the expedition has turned into a traditional occupation for locals. Some families trace their lineage of archaeologists from the current generation back to the generation of their grandfathers. Most of the active archaeologists in Tajikistan originate from Panjikent, and we employ postgraduate students. There is a need to train specialists in other areas of archaeology, such as architecture, drawing of objects, epigraphy, numismatics, and restoration work in particular.

Could you tell us a little more about the history of the city of Panjikent? What was it like before and after the Arabs got there?

Panjikent city emerged in the 5th century A.D. during the epoch of the Sogdian culture. Urban life in Sogdia already existed under Achaemenids and Greeks, but it declined at the turn of the new era. In the 4^th century, Sogdians had actively traded in China and India, which contributed to the urbanization process. The main city of Panjikent emerged in the 5^th century and reached 12.5 hectares at its height in the 6^th century. However, our most recent excavations have shown evidence that the fortified settlement on the a nearby hill, which we call a Citadel, had already been built several centuries earlier.

The city life revolved around two temples that were built next to each other, with shrines in the Western part. In the course of the city’s existence, the temples were expanded to include new structures – pylons, chapels, aivans and new decorations. The two look alike temples have been a mystery for researchers for a number of years. In the last couple of years, we have not reached a conclusive answer, and have only complicated our task – we found evidence of a third temple located to the north of the main two temples, smaller in size but similar in structure. It is likely that it continued to function even after the Muslim conquest in 722.

Our evidence shows that décor elements such as murals and carved wood started appearing outside of the realm of temples and palaces and in the homes of well-off city dwellers in the 6^th and 7^th centuries. It is this particular feature – mural paintings in private houses created using lower-cost methods of painting and wood carving – that makes Panjikent akin to Pompeii. The murals portray Sogdian merchants and landowners. The center of a reception hall shows murals with an image of god or a pair of gods. These deities represented the Sogdian religion, a peculiar version of Zoroastrianism with borrowed elements from the Mesopotamian, Greek, and Indian religions[2]. Other walls tended to be decorated with scenes of feasts, hunting, festivals, battles, narrative plots and overlapping carvings that were also figurative.

Starting in the second half of the 7^th century, Panjikent turns into a kingdom of its own, minting its own coin. We know of three rulers of Panjikent: Chamukyan, who ruled at the end of the 7^th century; Chegin Chor Bilge, who ruled in the beginning of the 8^thcentury; and Devashtich, who ruled until 722 A.D. They did not form dynasties, and the second ruler had a Turkic name. Devashtich was one of the main players in the intricate intrigues of Central Asia in the 8^th century. At the time, local kings, but also the Turgesh kagan, the Chinese, the Muslim squads (who also competed between themselves), and fugitive supporters of the Sasanids fought for power in Sogdia. Devashtich was very active in these power games. He corresponded with other actors, subjugated to his power the territories southeast of Samarkand as well as the upper reaches of Zeravshan valley. At one point, he proclaimed himself the king of Sogd and converted to Islam (at least nominally). Conversion to Islam did not save him, however. The amir of Samarkand, his archenemy, conquers Panjikent, setting fire and destroying half of the city in 722 A.D. Devashtich fled to the mountains, where Muslims captured and later executed him. Part of the Devashtich archive remained in the mountains, in the castle on Mount Mug.

Panjikent was on decline during 720-730s AD. This may explain the lack of coins found in the settlement that date back to this period. The last heyday of Panjikent happened after 738, likely connected to the resettlement of people from Samarkand. At this time, none of the temples except for the third smaller one functioned, and the palace on the Citadel was repurposed into a garrison of Arabs and their clients. Many houses were restored and rebuilt, to now include mural paintings in receptions halls. Some of the most striking murals appear in this period, including the “Blue Hall” depicting the cycle of Rustam’s conquests. Rustam is a protagonist of an Iranian epic[3].

There was a rapid transition in the culture of the city after the 750s AD – new murals were not commissioned, and old ones were sometimes deliberately damaged; most of the houses stood abandoned, and the ceramic complex went through changes. Most of the coins followed the Muslim pattern. The city continued to exist in its old location until 770, but the last dwellers left shortly after. It was primarily this peaceful resettlement of city dwellers to a new location that led to the desolation of the city[4]. The old Panjikent was not very comfortable for living – most of the houses were two to three-stories tall and had narrow windows; the absence of running water, sanitary conditions and vegetation made it difficult to live. Such conditions did not correspond to the lifestyle of the new generation of city residents, who increasingly adopted Islam. In the new location, in the lower bank of Zeravshan, where the old Panjikent dwellers moved, there was plenty of water. People lived in separate estates with a central courtyard, typically complete with greenery and a source of water. Starting in 2015, the Panjikent expedition has been exploring the life of the eastern part of the modern Panjikent city in the 9^th-12^th centuries. We have discovered brick structures, a large amount of glazed ceramics and other finds that indicate a fairly high standard of living. Currently, one of the main goals of the expedition is to understand the nature of changes in the material culture that occurred with the advent of Islam, and to explore the linkage between the new material culture, political events, migrations, and changes in local languages.

The Hermitage museum has mural paintings of ancient Panjikent. What is remarkable about them? What were some of the most noteworthy finds in this season?

Yes, the Hermitage stores, studies, restores, and, most importantly, exhibits the mural paintings from Panjikent. Museums of Dushanbe and Panjikent have wonderful collections of murals as well. On the first floor of the Winter Palace we have six rooms, all dedicated to Panjikent. In addition, we are preparing to open access to the Staraya Derevnya fund depository. The distinctiveness of the Sogdian murals can be seen through the murals of the Varakhsha palace (near Bukhara), Afrasiab in Samarkand, and the palace of Kalai Kakhkakh in Ustrushan. The castles in Balalyk-tepe and Tavka in Bactria are similar in their style as well. But it was only in Panjikent that murals could be found in ordinary dwellers’ houses. This is commissioned art, as we would call it now, by the upper middle class and completed in an elegant style, using intricate lines and bright colors. Recently, we had to select a fragment of the Blue Hall in good condition, to create copies for visually impaired visitors. We wanted to take the scene with Rustam and the dragon and turn it into a typhlocopy, a separate relief piece. But it did not work. Although the scene is depicted with the flow of the painting from left to right, it could not be divided into rectangular segments – one part of the scene creeps into another part.

We discover new murals practically every year. In the past, 2016 was one of the most fruitful – we found a burnt carved tree with an image of Buddha (a rarity for Sogd), a very beautiful seal print that illustrates a snake fight, and finally a very early (5^th or 6^thcentury) mural painting with a worship scene. In 2018, the main find was the so-called “third temple” with stone bases of columns. In 2019, the main find was an ostracon with an inscription in Syriac writing. This last find indicated that the presence of Christians. In general, we continue excavations not only for the sake of mural paintings, but also because of the possibility of finding massive archaeological materials such as ceramics, coins, construction objects, or objects of armament and décor. They are as informative as murals, but they also require other methods of analysis.

What modern research methods are used in studying archaeological finds?

“The Paenjikent school” has gained its reputation as the gold standard among archaeologists who specialize on mud-brick monuments of Central Asia. Excavations of Panjikent have been carried out for more than 70 years, and various research methods have been put to use over this period. Particularly, under the leadership of Boris Ilych Marshak, archaeologists tried out many pioneering methods. The methods include close attention to microstratigraphy, when layers of a few centimeters of thickness are separated and special archaeological measurement techniques are used; also there are also methods for fixing and sorting ceramic finds and much more. Panjikent excavations cover large territories – hundreds of square meters every year. An important feature of the Panjikent excavation is the optimal ratio of excavation volume to the accuracy of fixation.

When it comes to pioneering methods, our mural restoration school deserves special attention too. At the initial phases of the excavation, Pavel Kostrov invented the method of fixing, removing, and installing murals with mineral paints on plaster. This method proved well-fitting in the restoration work of other murals, for example, the Pskov frescoes. The key chemical ingredient in the method is polybutyl methacrylate, a polymer reversible glue that penetrates a painting, allowing researchers to remove the painting from the wall and remove the glue without trace later. A completely different method is used to remove carved wood – it is filled with paraffin and removed as a monolith. Both methods have only slightly changed in detail over the past decades.

Currently, we have several collaborative projects with specialists from various natural science fields. A laboratory in Bologna is working with DNA samples from the Panjikent necropolis. Colleagues from the Max Planck Institute in Bonn are planning to come and analyze botanical residues using a flotation method. In Hisorak, our second monument, located in the upper reaches of Zeravshan, at an altitude of 2240 meters, we have planned a number of studies: GPR scanning of the layer (GPR will show the stone foundations of buildings), analysis of the soil composition of the cultural layer, the composition of ceramics, etc. We are especially hoping for dendrochronology – we have found around thirty wooden logs in Hisorak, and the organic matter is preserved there very well.

Could you talk about how the excavations of Panjikent provide resources for the studies of medieval history of Central Asia?

Again, it maybe immodest but it is commonly recognized that Panjikent is a model monument of early medieval Central Asian archaeology. Indeed, there is no other monument in Central Asia (or anywhere east of Mesopotamia) that was excavated in synchronous layers and where the excavation work would cover as large of as an area. The research volume in Panjikent came second only to Novgorod, in the Soviet Union. Here again, Panjikent lucked out – Afrasiab, the site of pre-Mongol Samarkand, was 15 times larger than Panjikent and excavations have shown that city dwellers were better-off. It was not excavated as intensely however, due to several reasons. First, Samarkand went through Islamization and Afrasiab flourished only through 1220, at which time it was destroyed by Genghis Khan. It was soon revived in its new location. Consequently, when archaeologists come to Afrasiab, they must first go through layers of the 12^th and 13^th centuries, then the 11^th century, then 10^th and the 9^th, and all these layers must be carefully fixed. Only then, can they reach the layer of the Sogdian period. Due to this, excavations in Afrasiab that target the 6^th-8^th century structures have been irregular and somewhat random, although there were some brilliant finds. In contrast, in Panjikent, traces of the 8^th century are right there as you start digging.

Panjikent excavations have led to a large volume of research. Since such a large area was covered, archaeologists were able to uncover entire neighborhoods, street networks, and lines of defensive structures, and and they were also able to unearth the temples and the palace completely. The volume of publications is also crucial. There is a large volume of monographs that detail information about excavation materials, early layers of Panjikent, numismatics, temples, fortifications, the Citadel and precipitation sewage system; there are also editions on metal, glass, epigraphy and home ownership. Boris Marshak has published monographs with annual reports on Panjikent beginning in 1998, and after his death in 2006 we were able to continue the publications. The annual report for 2019 for example, came out as the 23^rd edition of the “Materials of the Panjikent Archaeological Expedition.” Now, we have the analytical index for the published volumes in preparation. Archaeologists tend to compare most of the other excavated monuments to Panjikent, since it is the most studied monument of Sogdian archaeology.

China is considered to have strongly influenced the Central Asian culture, but it seems that this influence went both ways. The Sogdians also left a huge trace in Chinese culture, didn’t they?

Yes, they certainly did. Central Asia and China had close ties over the stretch of several periods. It is well-known that the embassy of Zhang Qian, in the 2^nd century B.C. paved the way to the West, subsequently leading to the establishment of the Great Silk Road. This resulted in ties between Han China and Central Asia, particularly with Ferghana, the birthplace of “heavenly horses.” Chinese wushu coins and imitations of them are often found in Ferghana, further testifying to this connection. After the fall of the Han Empire, China witnessed the succession of Northern and Southern Dynasties, and it was at this time that merchants from the west – from Sogdiana – began to appear in northern and western China. The Sogdian “Old Letters”, found near Dunhuang, date back to the beginning of the 4th century. These are astonishingly rich sources on the history of that time, on political events, trade and kinship relations.

The so-called Sino-Sogdian sarcophagi and funerary beds, the burial structures of rich Sogdians in China, richly decorated, often with epitaphs, combining Central Asian and Chinese elements, belong to the 6th century. The Sogdian school of silverware production was highly valued in China and was actively imitated by Han Chinese masters. According to Chinese sources, western Hu merchants also played an important role in the Celestial Empire’s economy – they ran guest houses, retail stores, pawnshops, brothels, taverns, and traveling circuses. In the terracotta plastic used in funerals in China there are very frequent images of Western merchants – shaggy, bearded, with long noses and round eyes, depicted as apes in robes and boots. The figurines are often represented riding camels with valuable luggage, playing lutes[5], dancing their drunken dances.

The Tang era, from the 7th century onward, is China’s new heyday, and connections with nearby and distant neighbors are renewed. According to the Chinese sources, East Turkestan firmly enters the orbit of China, and the states of Central Asia are considered to be vassals of China. It is hard to say how much they perceived themselves as vassals. In any case, the King Warhuman – Fohumen, a vassal of Gaozong, commissioned a mural for the Hall of Ambassadors in Afrasiab that depicted the Chinese Emperor on a hunting trip, and the Chinese Empress on a boat trip. There are other images of Chinese people in Panjikent, found among other places, in the recently restored part of the Blue Hall. One expedition had also retrieved a fragment of a Chinese bronze mirror with the depiction of “immortals” in the city of Sanjar Shah, 12km from Panjikent. There are also finds of pieces of Chinese silk, varnish, and paper in Sogdia.

Chinese influence significantly manifests itself in numismatics. The coins of Samarkand, Panjikent and a number of other Sogdian settlements follow the Chinese model. These are cast (not minted!) bronze roundels with a square hole in the center. The coins do not have any image except for tamga signs, and they bare the name of the ruler and/or his region. They are drastically different from minted coins that typically have portraits of the ruler and other images (sometimes heavily degenerated), and are more often made out of silver than bronze, which are typical for the earlier Sogdia.

In 755, General An Lushan, a half-Sogdian, half-Turk serving in the Chinese Army, raised a rebellion and declared himself emperor. A few years later, the Tang Imperial House of Li, with the help of the Uighurs, was able to regain the throne. Since then various foreigners, including Sogdians, fell out of favor in China, the temples of foreign gods were closed, and merchants were persecuted. The Late Tang era began, which lasted another two centuries, but did not reach the splendor of the Great Tang, perhaps the most benevolent dynasty in the history of China for foreigners.

[1] After Yakubovsky, the leadership of the expedition was taken by Dyakonov M.M, subsequently passed on to Belenitsky A.M., and then to Marshak B.I.

[2] There is evidence that some Panjikent dwellers converted to Christianity and Buddhism. Some may have been Manichaeans, but these were inward-looking minority groups.

[3] The scenes depicted on murals do not always correspond to the storyline of Shahname by Firdousi, a poem written almost 200 years after the creation of the murals. The mural has more in common with the fragment of Rustam’s deeds in the Sogdian fragment discovered in Dunhuang and also probably dated the 8^th century.

[4] At this time, there was the rise of Mukanna, which was based on heterodox Islam and local beliefs and its subsequent suppression.

[5] Chinese instrument Pipa, adopted from the Central Asian Barbad.

By Snejana Atanova

Snezhana Atanova is a PhD candidate at INALCO. Her thesis focuses on nationalism and cultural heritage in Central Asia. She recently finished an IFEAC fellowship devoted to national identity in everyday life in Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan. She was awarded a Carnegie fellowship in 2017, in which she explored national identity through the nation-branding initiatives of Russia and Central Asian countries. She earned a Master’s in International Communication from the University of Strasbourg in 2012 and a Master’s from the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO) in 2015.

All photos by Pavel Lurje

This article examines the connection between how archaeological remains were excavated in the past to how such remains are dealt with in present day Kazakhstan. Special attention is given to the snow leopard in the Republic of Kazakhstan.

The discovery of a high-status burial of the Iron Age: The tomb of Issyk

The archaeological heritage of Kazakhstan illustrates a history that goes back thousands of years.

The so-called Saka tribes (archaeologically related to the European Scythians) inhabited the territory of modern-day Kazakhstan in the first millennium BC. Persian written sources reported on them, and these tribes were even depicted on the relief of the Palace of Xerxes in Persepolis (Iran), which dates back to the 5^th century BC. Both archaeological and written sources give insight into this group of people and their impressive craft skills, the animals of the time periods, and the broader history of the 1^st millennium BC in the territory of Kazakhstan.

Authors:

Karina Iwe received her PhD in Archaeology from Kiel University (Germany). She analyzed the Scytho-Siberian Animal Style in the Eurasian steppe belt. She has worked on excavations in Kazakhstan and Ukraine. After museum positions in Nagaoka (Japan) and Frankfurt, she works now as an exhibition curator at the State Museum of Archaeology Chemnitz (Germany).

Political scientist Anja Franke-Schwenk focused in her PhD at Kiel University on Autoritäre Herrschaftsstrategien: Die Legende vom kasachstanischen Schneeleoparden and conducted extended research about political narratives in Central Asia.

The ‘tomb of Issyk’ is one of the most famous archaeological discoveries in the country and was part of a burial site in an area with more than 40 burial mounds, located about 40 km east of Almaty. This burial from the second half of the 1^st millennium BC (est. 4^th or 3^rd century BC) was excavated back in 1969–1970 by a famous Kazakh archaeologist, Kemal A. Akishev. Despite an unclear anthropological identification, the buried person became known for his grave goods under the name “Golden Man of Issyk” (“Золотой человек“, in fact correctly translates as “Golden Human”), pointing out that it was a burial of a noble male.

The image of a large cat regularly appears in the context of the Scytho-Siberian Animal Style (east of the Ural, the Scythians are better named as Saka, according to Persian sources), and this image is depicted in the sphere of Iron Age Kazakhstan.

A more hidden version of a large cat—this one made of gold—was found in the site of Shilikty in East Kazakhstan. This burial site dates back to the 7^th century BC. The presence of the golden cat illustrates the importance of this animal during the early Iron age. Furthermore, neighboring regions also offer a glimpse of the image of predatory cats—like the examples from Arzhan in the Tuva region of Russia, dating back to the 8^th or 7^th century BC, where tigers decorate the dagger of the buried prince/king, or from Alagou in Xinjiang (China), dating back to the 5^th or 4^th century BC. Additionally, in the Pazyryk site, found in Russia’s Altai Mountains, a tattoo of a woman buried in mound 5 of the famous site depicts a more realistic version of a snow leopard with its characteristic fur together with two tigers attacking two deer.

Within the depicted characters of the visual world (Scytho-Siberian Animal Style), the cat’s motif impressively appears not only in single representations, but also in multi-figure scenes with ungulates. Other animal representations highlight animals like mountain sheep (argali), goats, antelope, deer, ibex, horses, wild boar, wolves, or birds of prey. The images illustrate a people group’s sharp observation of their environment and highlight their complex world of spiritual-religious understanding.

Ever since the archaeological excavations uncovered these depictions of large cats, the motif has steadily made its way from ancient burial sites into the modern public spaces of today’s Kazakhstan, and it has become a tool to legitimize the country’s political narrative style.

The political instrumentalization under Nazarbayev

The motif of the snow leopard is an integral part of the country’s cultural heritage and is used widely throughout independent Kazakhstan. It acts as a national symbol in the tradition of the Golden Man of Issyk and as a talisman for the strength and success of the sovereign state. Examples include the Monument of Independence in Kazakhstan’s former capital Almaty (fig. 5), its instrumentalization in the country’s economic development program titled “Strategy 2030/Стратегия развития Республики Казахстан до 2030 года,” and the relief on the marble podium with the gold cast handprint of the Kazakh president Nazarbayev on the top of the Bayterek monument in the city center of Nur-Sultan (fig. 6).

The 107m high Bayterek Tower is particularly noteworthy in its symbolic power for the personality cult of the incumbent president.

As the visionary architect of the capital city, Nur-Sultan, the president not only personally commissioned all of the government district buildings, but also symbolically deposited the political narratives of inseparable unity and the continuity of Kazakh clan leaders’ historical strength and power. The tower, a landmark of the city, symbolizes a mythological tree of life. The golden ball on its top contains the gold-plated handprint of Nazarbayev, which brings luck to anyone who touches it. This mythical power is carried, among others, by the power, purity and peculiarity of the snow leopard. These attributes have been part of the political mythology of the strong president and father of the nation ever since the publication of the 2030 Strategy. In this strategy, Nazarbayev links a number of positive attributes—such as caring, peacefulness, freedom-loving, intelligence, courage, nobility, and virtue—with the Kazakh snow leopard and says he is the guarantor of national sovereignty and economic power. In the logic of his narrative as the “father of the nation,” Nazarbayev epitomizes the state and its radiance, thereby transferring these same attributes to himself.

In other words, Nazarbayev has become the snow leopard, who, in a caring, courageous, and self-sacrificing way, controls the development of the country only for the benefit of the people. The symbolic analogies to historical and cultural figures are not specific to Kazakhstan. Authoritarian rule is based on the reinterpretation of history and symbols and their strategic instrumentalization. The aim is to legitimize political action and the alleged lack of participation by the population. Through the narrative recourse and revival of historical heroes and symbols, the population is given a symbolic orientation based on a seemingly long tradition. This eschatological element of political iconization thus enables a de facto necessity for acting presidents to be seen as the father and protector of the nation.

All photos by
Karina Iwe

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.

A mysterious castle in Uzbekistan’s Surhandarya bears the name of Kyrk-Kyz, meaning “40 girls.” Was this a sanctuary of legendary women-warriors, or was it home to a group of Sufi men known as the “warriors of light?”

In either case, this marvelous architectural monument is full of mysterious spirits and excites the imagination of each humble visitor.

Author

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Elmira Gyul

Professor, Chief Researcher at the Institute of Art Studies of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Uzbekistan. Lecturer in the Republican Scientific Consulting Center NC Uzbektourism.

Furious and breastless

A legend about forty warrior women called Kyrk Kyz—fierce and strong Amazons capable of fighting alongside and against men—is a legacy of the nomadic steppe culture.

According to anthropologist Balkis Karmysheva, this legend was not made up by foreigners but took roots inside Transoxiana itself. In ancient times, when men went off to battles, the elderly, along with the women and children, stayed in the mobile settlements of steppe-dwellers, and it was them who had to undertake the function of protecting the tribe. Therefore, in nomadic societies, girls were taught at a young age how to handle arms just as well as the men.

When the ancient Greeks encountered the nomads of Asia for the first time, they wrote about the mysterious Amazons and how they cut off their left breasts in early childhood, as it was more convenient to shoot a bow without one breast.

Of course, female Scythians and Tomyris, their celebrated queen (who once led her armies to defend against an attack by Cyrus the Great, and, according to Herodotus, defeated and killed him in 530 BC), did not do anything with their breasts. These stories only reflected the immense surprise of the Greeks who caught sight of these women-warriors and believed they were furious men-haters. In addition to such unusual women, the ancient Greeks also wrote of encountering men who seemed to be half-men, half-horse.

It is most likely that these dwellers of “elegant” Greek poleis had a sort of cultural shock because of the nomadic “barbarians” who moved around, ate, and even slept in the saddle…

This is how the mythology of half men-half horses and breastless women was born in the ancient world.

Legends around the name

One of today’s tourist attractions in Uzbekistan is a crumbling fortress dating back to the 9th and 10th centuries called Kyrk-Kyz (“Forty Girls”). The fortress is located in Surkhandarya, about three kilometers to the east of the city of Termez.

Termez is a city in the southernmost part of Uzbekistan near the Hairatan border crossing of Afghanistan. It is the hottest point of Uzbekistan. In ancient times there was an important crossing on the Amu Darya river. From the 9th to the 12th centuries Termez was a big city and a cultural centre and was popular for shopping and crafts. In 1220 after a two-day siege, the city was destroyed by the troops of Genghis Khan.

According to the legends popular among the local people, 40 girls who lived behind the fortified walls of this fortress fought back the attacks of the foreign nomads. They were led supposedly by a local queen called either Gulsim (or Gulaim, or Gauhar). When all the men staying in the fortress were killed, 40 young girls stuck by her and together they successfully countered the enemy’s attack.

But Kyrk-Kyz has been a common name for the area for too long to take this story for granted. It is more likely that the forty Amazons represent the collective image of nomads and steppe women, and it is unlikely that they would have lived in this monumental, formerly grand building.

The Islamic tradition also had an interpretation of who the Kyrk Kyz were. They were perceived as righteous women who either defended the castle or were concubines whom, upon their request, Allah turned into stone to save them from their persecutors, or “infidels.”

In any case, the real story remains unknown, but there are different versions of it by modern scholars. Some think that the castle was used either as a caravanserai (a roadside inn for travelers), or as a country castle-palace—the summer residence of the rulers of Termez. The area where the castle is currently located was called Shahri-Saman in the last century. Because of this, some researchers have associated the building with the Samanid dynasty. The dating of the castle’s construction also favors the version with the Samanids as most references state that the castle was built in the 9^th-11^th centuries, i.e. during the ruling of the same dynasty from 819 to 999.

However, an additional version—likely more accurate—asserts that “Kyrk Kyz” was a spiritual sanctuary, known as a khanqah, and was built in the end of the 14^th–15^th centuries for dervishes and members of the Sufi faith. This theory is what Elizaveta Nekrasova, an Uzbek archaeologist, proposed after she carried out archeological research there in 1980s and did not find any evidence to support the earlier dating. Nekrasova believes that the inhabitants of ancient Termez, who had barely survived the massacre committed by the troops of Genghis Khan, were eager to fully rebuild their city. As they lacked time and resources, they used the most affordable and cheap materials in their construction. This is how Shahri-Saman was built: a mud city from hand-formed bricks made of clay and hay. There were plenty of these raw materials on the banks of the Amu Darya. At that time, Kyrk-Kyz was a part of the new city and not on its outskirts as it is today.

Beginning in the last third of the 14^th century, the territory of Surkhandarya was under the reign of Timur. The Termez rulers were on a friendly footing with their ferocious northern neighbor—the conqueror of the half-world—and Timur himself treated them with great respect, as they were the Seyids (descendants of the Prophet) through Fatima, his daughter, and Hussein, his grandson. Even today Termez has preserved a majestic Sultan Saodat complex known as “the rule of the Seyids,” a group of mausoleums where many famous members of the ruling family were buried.

The castle of Kyrk-Kyz

I happened to be there about six years ago. Its crumbled ruins and accurate brickwork still fascinate every visitor. A walk through the arches and a view of the elegant lines immerse you into the depth of centuries and dreams of the history.

Kyrk-Kyz. Photo taken by the author

Kyrk-Kyz is a square building (54×54 meters) looking at all four directions with massive towers flanked at the corners. Notwithstanding their seemed inaccessibility, these towers had no defensive function: they are hollow, isolated from the indoor premises and do not have loopholes (gun-slots). Four entrances—one located on each side of the building—and plenty of randomly built windows on the outside walls also reject the version that the castle was a defensive building.

There is an 11×11 meter square rectangular yard located in the middle of Kyrk-Kyz with long corridors (enfilades) leading to the entrance halls. These enfilades divide the entire complex into four independent blocks. Opinions on whether the yard was open or closed also differ. Elizaveta Nekrasova believes that it was roofed by a massive dome, which eventually collapsed, and the bricks were picked up by the people living nearby for their own needs.

There were two floors, with rooms located along the perimeter of the yard, and four sectors of the building; the total number of rooms and corridors reaches 52. The ceilings were up to seven meters high. Most certainly, one of the halls was a chillahona, i.e. a special solitary cell to “chill,” meditate, pray, and hold forty-day fasts. One of the rooms on the first floor was a dining hall as there were fragments of tandoors and dishes found there.

There is an air of a sacred building, one “that is open to everyone who seeks to comprehend God.”

It bears the symbols of the world, with the north/east/south/west concept, along with the concept of four elements: fire, water, earth, and air. This pattern is typical for the Zoroastrian temples of fire and is known as chortak, or “four arches” – a square dome pavilion with arches on four pylons with sacred fires. Open to all four corners of the earth, the castle is a symbol and a source of spiritual power.

It also bears some resemblance with an earlier tomb of the Samanid dynasty, which, despite its much lesser size, generally has the same structure – a cube on a flat plane, four entrances on the sides, and a hemispherical dome supplemented by small domes on the sides. But Kyrk-Kyz differs from other monuments with its brilliant brickwork and an amazing variety of arches and domes, which still preserve the purity and elegance of their forms and lines. There are various arches: triangular, oval and speary, as well as various domes. Because of this diversity, the castle is considered a real museum of medieval construction and technical practice.

The arches of Kyrk-Kyz. Photo taken by the author.

Finally, the most interesting thing about Kyrk-Kyz is that this exquisite beauty was built from simple sun-dried mud bricks, and the walls were plastered by clay. Baked bricks can be found only sometimes inside the arches. Wood was used to strengthen the walls and window area. Interior decorations were not preserved.

The brickwork impresses with its virtuosity. Photo taken by the author.

The aesthetics of the castle—bare massive clay walls with no fancy glazed ceramics of Timurids, combined with the decorated shadows of arches—is suitable for Sufi asceticism. But it remains deeply local, built from local construction resources. The land on the right bank of the Amu Darya, with its tugai forests, does not provide enough wood to bake bricks.

Sufi spirits

A central hall of the castle was likely to be a khanqah, a place where the dervishes’ worship rituals took place. It is hard to say today what they were like back then.

The Central Asian Sufi tradition is known by its vocal and quiet zikrs, and in the hall of a khanqah, a group of men would gather in the twilight of the dome space to perform the act of spiritual liberation.

Interestingly, the walls of the gallery leading to the main hall were painted in black. Pure carbon black was used for this purpose, which also links it with the Sufi practice. According to Sufi symbolism, black—the color of mystery and wisdom—meant spiritual liberation. In the beginning of their spiritual journey, the Sufis belonging to some tariqahs wore blue clothes, while those who reached the mystery wore black clothes to mark the path they traveled and their achievement of the absolute spirit.

Modern day residents—the locals—believe in the sacred meaning of Kyrk-Kyz, often coming here to pray and hope. An old shamanistic practice is used for making the wish real: pieces of old clothes are tied to the bushes growing on the ruins, people hope that the local ghosts will accept their sacrifice and make their wishes come true.

Shamanistic practice on the place of the Sufi zikrs. Photo taken by the author.

Termez was also important in Sufi history. It is in Termez, in the 19^th century, that a famous Sufi named Al Hakim At Termiziy was born. Historians believe that he laid the foundation of the first religious dervish tariqah in the world. At Termiziy led an ascetical life, and because of this, he was highly respected by the locals. He became known in history because of his worldview, which was based on the appeal to humility, self-improvement through control over nafs (instincts), and suffering as a means to sanctification. In some way, his worldview had similarities with Buddhism, which, 10 centuries prior, had been the main religion in the Surhandarya region (between the 1^st and 10^th centuries).

Therefore, as much as we wanted, the Kyrk-Kyz, a Surhandarya castle, is not a story of 40 Amazons, even though the mystery of the name remains…

“We are scared for the future of our kids.”

A family in Karaul

It has been thirty years since the last Soviet nuclear test rocked the Semipalatinsk Polygon in Kazakhstan, but its dark legacy still haunts people who live nearby. The victims, now in their fourth generation, continue to pay the price for the Soviet nuclear might. Together with two colleagues, we embark to meet them in the villages of Karaul, Znamenka (Kokentau), and Sarzhal.

The first and youngest victim we meet is a sweet six-month-old baby boy named after Kazakhstan’s first president. Nursultan has a benign tumor of bright red color on his head and six fingers on his left hand. His mom, a young woman in her 20s, tells us she heard that the extra limb could be removed with a laser. When I do my research later, I cannot find any references to that being possible with a laser. Instead, traditional surgery is recommended within the first month of birth.

Author

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Dr. Togzhan Kassenova is a senior fellow with the Project on International Security, Commerce, and Economic Statecraft (PISCES) at the Center for Policy Research, SUNY-Albany. She is also a senior non-resident scholar at the Institute for International Science and Technology Policy and adjunct faculty at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University, and a nonresident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Dr. Kassenova is an expert on nuclear politics, WMD nonproliferation, and financial crime prevention. She currently works on issues related to proliferation financing controls, exploring ways to minimize the access of proliferators to the global financial system. Kassenova holds a Ph.D. in Politics from the University of Leeds and is a Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialist (CAMS). From 2011 to 2015 Kassenova served on the UN secretary general’s Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters.

We do not know if Nursultan’s parents will go for a surgery, but his mom worries that, if left like that, her boy will be teased later in life. Nursultan smiles at us with his happy toothless smile, unaware of his predicament. The disease, known by its scientific name of polydactyly, is caused by a genetic mutation.

The same day we meet a small girl who is missing four fingers on her hand, a genetic mutation similar to Nursultan’s. Her family is kind enough to receive us and share their story. Their other daughter faced cancer and survived after persevering through two years of chemotherapy. Now she is free of cancer but needs regular checks for the benign tumor that remains on her face bone. These checks can only be done in larger cities, and travel requires financial resources that the family does not have. “We reached out to a charity organization, but they told us because she was cancer-free, they couldn’t help,” they tell us. A few years ago, these parents already lost another daughter to sudden pneumonia. She was six.

The elderly couple we visit next appears to be well into their late 70s or early 80s. “At least, they lived to this old age,” I catch myself thinking, knowing that many locals do not live to retirement. They are alive, but their quality of life appalls me. I fight back the tears. There are DIY crutches next to the old man’s bed: they look like they are made of sturdy tree branches. He doesn’t leave the house because he doesn’t have a wheelchair. His wife explains that they lost the documents confirming their status as victims of nuclear testing, and that makes seeking help from the social protection services hard.

From the medics we hear stories of too many people dying young, too many cancers, and too many sick children. With better prenatal screening, doctors can identify pregnancies that will result in the birth of deformed children. “If there is a pathology, the decision how to proceed is made in ‘the city,’” referring to the nearest major city of Semey. In other words, such pregnancies end in abortions in most cases.

It is pretty clear that not all of this devastating data is reflected in official statistics. It is impossible to determine the main culprit of the locals’ poor health: the long-term exposure to radiation during and after the forty years of nuclear tests; the poor environmental situation because of the gold and coal mines nearby; the lack of good medical infrastructure—a problem endemic to both this area and the rest of the rural areas across the country; or all these factors combined. One thing for certain, we see with our own eyes that people continue to suffer.

It is not only the locals’ serious health issues, but also the standard of living that is painful to witness. Locals complain about the lack of jobs, a common problem for the rural areas in Kazakhstan, but especially devastating for places that already suffer so much from the consequences of nuclear testing. In smaller villages that we visit, even the mayors’ offices and clinics do not have modern restrooms but wooden sheds with cesspits outside. For a country that boasts the upper-middle income status and strives to join the thirty most developed nations, this is a shameful sight. We are only about an hour by plane away from Kazakhstan’s glitzy capital, a city that hosts million-dollar international events, including conferences celebrating Kazakhstan’s decision to close the Polygon.

It would be a devastating trip if not for the glimpses of hope, resilience, and love for the native land that we encounter along the way. There is an almost mystical feeling of sacred space when you visit the native land of Kazakhstan’s most revered poets and writers – Abai, Shakarim, and Mukhtar Auezov. Locals are proud to share their roots with these enlightened men and talk about their land with so much love. A phrase we heard often is “Tugan zher,” ‘place of birth’ in Kazakh. The harsh beauty of the endless steppe is mesmerizing.

There is a quiet resilience in the people we meet. They share their stories without drama. The calm voices in which they tell us about the tragedies they continue to endure pierce harder than any scream ever could. They manage to go on despite their losses and hardships. Parents who have lost a child are putting all their heart into bringing up their small daughters – bright and cheery girls who love singing and dancing. A crippled man who cannot stand straight due to a large hump on his back manages to earn a living and support his family. He owns livestock and has learned electric welding. He proudly tells us about a garage he built thanks to his newly acquired skills. The high school teacher who lost his son to suicide and lost numerous classmates, neighbors, and friends to illness, is recording their names and stories so that they are never forgotten. The local medics, the quiet heroes, do what they can to help their fellow villagers, despite their own stories of illnesses, miscarriages, and deaths of loved ones.

Our most memorable encounter happens in the village formerly known as Znamenka (now Kokentau). It is a small rural settlement with just over a thousand residents. Similar to other villages we visited near the Polygon, it struggles. While Znamenka formerly boasted large numbers of livestock, the only current source of employment for its residents is the nearby coal mine – hard labor that comes with a health cost.

We meet an elder, one of the few surviving witnesses of the nuclear tests. His mind is sharp; he remembers all the dates and details of major tests, and his memory never falters. He lost two of his children when they were in their early 50s and tells us about too many funerals that happen in this small community. He is sad his village is no longer what it used to be, but once we switch the subject to the importance of family, he lights up with joy, proud of his big family, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Two of his grandsons play happily nearby as we speak.

I look at them and think about all the kids we have met. I hope against hope that they grow up healthy and happy.

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The author is grateful to the Center for International Security and Policy (CISP), Kazakhstan, for making the trip possible.

All photos by
All photos by: CISP and author