Editor’s Note: What follows is part of a cross-blog survey about minorities in Central Asia.

In a 21st century where nationalism, separatism, and multiculturalism are as strong as ever, it is easy to overlook the inherent mutability of ethnicity. This is especially true in Central Asia where terms such as “Tajik,” “Kyrgyz,” and “Uzbek” meant something very different less than a century ago, and terms like “Sart” and “Teptiar” no longer have any meaning.

As part of neweurasia’s latest survey on Central Asian minorities, this post will look back on the deliberate process enacted by the Soviet Union to create ethnicities and nationalities with the ultimate intention of eliminating them entirely.

Ideological Roots

At first it seems surprising that the USSR encouraged national self-determination. After all, communism is inherently an international ideology that encourages horizontal unity of the economic classes; vertical unity based on ethnic identity stands in the way of proletarian revolution.

The answer to this paradox lies in the Marxist conception of history. According to Marxist theory, all societies pass through specific stages of history. Because most of the non-Russian territories of the Soviet Union were still in the feudal stage of history (according to Lenin and the early Soviet elite), they still had to progress through the capitalist stage in order to achieve communism. Part of that progression included essentially jump-starting nationalism.

There were also, of course, more practical benefits to the rhetoric of self-determination. Before the Bolsheviks took power, anti-imperialist propaganda allowed them to gain the support of ethnic groups in Russia in the fight against Tsarist forces.

Constructing Nationalities

After taking power in 1917, the Bolsheviks wasted little time in turning rhetoric into action. They immediately sent ethnographers out into the field throughout the former Russian Empire with the intention of taking censuses, and on that basis reorganizing the entire territory into organizational units based on ethnicity. It was not long before they realized, however, that their task was not as easy as it initially seemed.

The first major challenge was that locals throughout the territories of the recently deceased Russian Empire did not necessarily think of themselves in ethnic or national terms. This was especially true in Central Asia. Central Asians did not necessarily self-identify as any one “ethnicity,” and often placed more emphasis on kinship ties or geographical residence. Moreover, it was not at all clear to ethnographers what basis they should use to classify individuals. Language? Skin color? Culture? Self-identification?

An example of the confusion from Empire of Nations by Francine Hirsch:

Census takers in and around Tashkent noted the tendency of Kurama, Tajiks, and Kazakhs to identify themselves as Kurama-Uzbek, Tajik-Uzbek, and Kazakh-Uzbek. According to the census takers, if they registered someone as “Kurama” without adding that he or she was also “Uzbek,” they risked “insulting not just the head of the household, but all of his relatives.”

As if the task of categorizing populations at the individual level were not difficult enough, several other factors entered into the mix. For instance, though this post has so far emphasized the Marxist ideological impetus for dividing up citizens of the Bolshevik-controlled territories into nationalities and ethnicities, there was another very powerful faction (Gosplan) in Moscow that advocated dividing up the territories by economic factors instead. For instance, rather than an Uzbek SSR, why not an SSR for cotton growers?

Ultimately the ethnographic and economic factions ended up compromising. If you ever wondered why the predominantly Uzbek city of Osh is part of Kyrgyzstan instead of Uzbekistan, it was because of the perception that a Kyrgyz SSR would be infeasible without an urban center.

Another factor that complicated the process of dividing the Soviet territories purely based on ethnic criteria (as if such an endeavor were possible) was the local elites within Central Asia. After half a century of dealing with Russians, local rulers were not stupid. They quickly realized that there would be serious winners and losers to the organizational and administrative reforms being pursued in Moscow. Clan elites stood to gain land, resources, and power by convincing Moscow that their particular “nationality” was the predominant one within a given territory.

In the 1920s, elites in Central Asia began assimilation campaigns to ensure their supremacy in a given language. These struggles ultimately resulted in the five states in existence today: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan.

Moreover, most of the minorities in discussion throughout this survey are those officially recognized by the Soviets. In the 1926 census, for example, Soviet planners decided on 200 ethnicities for the entire Soviet Union; any groups falling outside that list would not be recognized. These “minor” ethnicities were ultimately not given their own SSRs, but were officially recognized and given more limited forms of self-government.

(Note: I encourage readers to take a look at Ben’s excellent survey of the delimitation process, which was intrinsically related to the ethnographic categorization discussed here. That delimitation was a top-down “divide and rule” strategy implemented by Stalin and comparable to the colonial process in Africa is one of the most widely held misconceptions among even experts in Central Asia, from Olivier Roy to Ahmed Rashid.)

Implications for the Present

The significance of this Soviet legacy for the present is immediately obvious. Central Asian rulers are faced with the challenge of building a cohesive nation. Is it possible to create a national spirit that ignores ethnicity? Can a “Kazakhstani” identity successfully be constructed as separate from “Kazakh”? Or will all residents of Uzbekistan, for example, ultimately be forced to become Uzbeks?

The history outlined above makes these questions especially pressing for Central Asian rulers, but they are also faced by leaders all over the world. Because people have a tendency to focus on virtually any difference to conceptualize “imagined communities” (the frequently used expression coined by Benedict Anderson), it is exceedingly difficult to construct national identities that ignore language, custom, ethnicity, etc.

Whether or not Central Asian leaders can overcome those challenges and unify their people will be a question of increasing importance in the coming years. There have already been attempts; just consider Tajikistan President Rakhmonov’s recent name change, or the statue of Tamerlane erected in Marx’s place. An evaluation modern nation-building activity is, however, a topic outside the scope of this post.

Further Reading:

Hirsch, Francine. Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005.

Khalid, Adeeb. The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Martin, Terry. The Affirmative Action Empire. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001.