Lost Sogdian Art in China
Little is known of the lives of Sogdians in China, even though the Chinese connections of Sogdian elites played an important political, economic, and cultural role in the lives of…
Dinmukhamed Kunaev’s House Museum
Dinmukhamed Kunaev was a leader of Soviet Kazakhstan. As the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan he was in office from 7 December 1964, to 16 December 1986.…
The Central Asia Collection at the British Library – An Interview with Michael Erdman
The Turkish and Turkic Collections at the British Library are the largest collections of manuscript and printed material from the Turkic World housed anywhere in the United Kingdom. Michael Erdman…
The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan with author Sarah Cameron (video and transcript)
The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan examines one of the most heinous crimes of the Stalinist regime, the Kazakh famine of 1 930–33. More than…
How Does Central Asia Slot into the Global Jigsaw Puzzle? An interview with Peter Frankopan
Oxford University historian Peter Frankopan talks to Voices on Central Asia about his latest book, The New Silk Roads, and where Central Asia fits into the complex global jigsaw puzzle…
The Last Soviet Mufti of Central Asia: Muhammad-Sodiq Muhammad-Yusuf
It was around the end of November 2002 that I first met and spoke with the most famous theologian in Central Asia, Muhammad-Sodiq Muhammad-Yusuf (April 15, 1952–March 10, 2015). Approximately…
SADUM: An Effort To Establish Soviet Islam
Bakhtiyar Babadjanov, a prominent scholar of Soviet Islam, sheds some light on how the Muslims of Soviet Central Asia were administered and guided in accordance with the orders of the…
The Conquest of Central Asia through the Turkestan Album
The Turkestan Album (Turkestanskii Al’bom—1871) was one of the great colonial photography projects of the 19th century. Commissioned by the first Russian governor-general of Russian Turkestan, Konstantin Petrovich von Kaufman,…
“A Scale Model of the Contemporary World:” Nationality, Demography, and Development in the Soviet Union
When, in 1959, the USSR conducted its first census in 20 years, it revealed something remarkable about the geographic distribution of the Soviet Union’s population. Author Artemy M. Kalinovsky Artemy…
Economic Causes of Strife in Tajikistan
Tajikistan unfortunately tends to be treated as an outlier. Located on the edge of the former USSR, it is often cited as the only former Soviet republic to have descended…
An Insight Into Soviet Archives on Islam
Russian Perspectives on Islam (islamperspectives.org) is a unique collection of materials that documents the encounter and evolving relationship between the Orthodox/secular state and the Islamic regions, groups, individuals, and ideologies…