| Review of: | The birth of Tajikistan: national identity and the origins of the republic by Paul Bergne |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Alexander Morrison |
| Reviewed in: | International Affairs |
| Date accepted online: | 10/04/2008 |
| Published in print: | Volume 83, Issue 06, Pages 1193-1234 |
Book Reviews: Russia and Eurasia
It is hard to resist the temptation to turn the review of this posthumously published book into a potted biography of its remarkable author. Paul Bergne died in April 2007, just over a month before
The purpose of the book is two-fold. First to show how and why the backward, mountainous Tajik Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) was upgraded to a full-blown constituent republic (SSR) of the Soviet Union in 1929 when so many factors-poverty, illiteracy, remoteness, low population-seemed to militate against it. This was complicated enough, given the number of myths and conspiracy theories which circulate about the 'national' demarcations under Stalin, and the amount of archival research Bergne had to do in Moscow (the Uzbek archives, where many of the relevant documents are held, were closed to him) in order to establish the hard facts of this process. Second, and more complicated still, is his account of the origins and creation of a 'Tajik' national identity among the disparate Persian-speaking peoples of Transoxiana. Central Asian identities before 1917 were extremely complex and often ill-defined, and bore little resemblance to the neat demarcations which emerged between 'the stans' in the 1920s and 1930s. The term 'Tajik' was in widespread use to indicate Persian-speakers, especially amongst themselves, but it was often interchangeable with 'Sart', a term meaning an urban-dweller with no particular linguistic or ethnic significance. The Ismaili Pamiri Tajiks of Eastern Bukhara formed a separate group, normally placed by Russian ethnographers and orientalists in the same category as the urban Persian-speakers of Samarkand and Bukhara, even though they were often despised by the latter as backward (and heretical) rustics who spoke incomprehensible Iranian dialects (pp. 9-11, 126-7).
Bergne shows how the early stirrings of what could be described as nationalism in Central Asia before 1917 almost invariably took Turkic forms. The Jadids-Islamic reformers-considered Turkic to be 'progressive', while Tajik Persian was associated with the 'backward', 'feudal' court and administration of the Emir of Bukhara. The potential Tajik nation was thus, to say the least, weak and ill-defined in 1917, and the Nationalities Commission of the Turkestan Soviet Republic which was established in 1920 did not even recognize them as a separate people (pp. 22-3).
Bergne goes on to chronicle the first calls for a 'homeland' for the Persian-speakers of Central Asia in the early 1920s, which originated with the 'Irani' Shi'i community of Samarkand, who were descended from Iranian slaves and were at first largely ignored by Sunni Persian-speakers (pp. 24-5). Nevertheless, a Tajik Autonomous Republic, consisting almost entirely of the remote, mountainous region of Eastern Bukhara and the Pamirs, was created within the Uzbek SSR during the National Territorial Demarcation of 1924. The motives behind this were mixed: it was partly a response to the arguments of Russian orientalists for the existence of a Tajik ethnie (p. 127), which would need to pass through a national stage in order to become socialist. It was also a desire to dilute the power of what could potentially be an over-mighty Uzbek Republic and to provide a model 'homeland' for Central Asian Persian-speakers which might be used to extend Soviet influence over the neighbouring Tajiks of Afghanistan. Over 60 per cent of those classed as 'Tajiks' in the first Soviet census were left outside the borders of the new republic, as they largely lived in urban centres in the Zarafshan valley which were surrounded by a Turkic-speaking rural population. Nevertheless, as Bergne observes, it was with the creation of the Tajik ASSR in 1924 that 'conditions were set for the birth of a Tajik identity' (p. 131).
Subsequent chapters deal with administrative problems within the fledgling, poor, remote republic and the difficulties of recruiting efficient (or indeed literate) party cadres to work there from among the urban Tajiks of Samarkand and Bukhara (pp. 55-65). Many who ended up in Dushanbe (then little more than a village) or Khorog would later be purged in 1929 (pp. 70-1). The standardization of the Tajik language and the switch from the Arabic to the Cyrillic script form the subject of chapter 8, and the economic reconstruction and foreign relations of the republic are covered in chapters 9 and 10. It is, however, the final chapter on the creation of the Tajik SSR that deals with perhaps the most historically contentious issue of all, the ramifications of which sour diplomatic relations between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan to this day.
If one motivation behind the creation of the Tajik SSR was a desire in Moscow to cut the Uzbek SSR down to size, it was also the outcome of extensive lobbying by Tajik party cadres and intellectuals: Central Asians were by no means simply passive objects of central Soviet policy. The archival documents which Bergne uncovered show that the outcome of the demarcation process was not wholly dictated from Moscow, but was heavily influenced by the struggles and polemical debates between the local Tajik and Uzbek party organizations (pp. 40-1, 101-24), not least over the fate of the largely Tajik-speaking city of Samarkand, which was the first capital of the Uzbek SSR. The Tajik party leadership won the battle to have the Persian-speaking region of Khujand at the mouth of the Ferghana Valley attached to the republic on linguistic grounds, despite its geographical remoteness, but lost in their attempt to have Samarkand, Bukhara and part of Surkhan-Darya province transferred to them (pp. 101-24).
Bergne had a great love for Tajikistan and for Persianate culture, but throughout this book he handles emotive topics dispassionately and with characteristic even-handedness. Thus while his research does help to confirm the widespread feeling among Tajiks that the Uzbek leadership sought to sabotage the creation of their republic almost from its inception, and that many Tajik-speakers in the Samarkand, Bukhara and Surkhan-Darya regions described themselves as 'Uzbeks' in the early Soviet censuses under duress (pp. 12-13, 58, 105-6), Bergne also debunks the cherished myth of an ancient Tajik 'nation' existing before 1917. To this fairness, objectivity and scholarly rigour he added humour and humanity in abundance.