Almost every volume in this series was written inside the Soviet system, by authors it had formed. This one was written by an outsider who admired it. Central Asia in Modern Times is the work of Devendra Kaushik, an Indian Marxist historian who came to the subject from New Delhi, not from Moscow or Tashkent — a scholar who held a fellowship at the Lenin State University in Tashkent from 1962 to 1965, worked in the Indian archives as well as the Soviet ones, and offered his book, in his own words, to readers in a country whose "friendship of the peoples of the Soviet Union with the people of India is increasing daily." That difference of standpoint is the most interesting thing about the book, and it is what makes it a sharper test than the average Progress title of the question this series exists to press. Kaushik is not a functionary reciting a required line. He is a genuine historian, a sympathiser rather than a servant, who has chosen the Soviet account of Central Asia and made the case for it with real learning. When such a writer applies the category of colonialism with unsparing force to one empire and cannot bring himself to apply it to the other, the failure cannot be laid at the door of a censor. It has to be laid at the door of the framework itself.
Date the argument, not the spine. The English edition carries "© Progress Publishers 1970," but the preface is signed from New Delhi in January 1968, and the book reads as a document of the middle 1960s: its running statistics lean on the census of 1959, its Tashkent research belongs to 1962–65, and it was written before the Soviet tanks entered Prague in August 1968. It belongs to the high season of Soviet–Indian friendship — the years in which Moscow brokered the Tashkent Declaration between India and Pakistan (January 1966) and presented itself to the newly decolonised states of Asia and Africa as the one great power that had abolished national inequality on its own soil. Kaushik states the export purpose himself, without embarrassment, in his preface: the Central Asians "were the first in the world to bypass capitalism in their transition from pre-capitalist relations to socialism," and "their experience is likely to be of interest to the nations which have broken with colonial slavery and embarked on the path of independent economic and political development." The book is a regional history, but it is also an exhibit in a case being made to Delhi, Cairo and Jakarta: look what socialism did for our own backward peoples; it can do the same for yours. That the exhibit was prepared by an Indian scholar, edited and given a foreword by the Soviet orientalist N. A. Khalfin, made it more persuasive to its intended audience, not less.
The organising idea is the "non-capitalist path" — the claim that a society still living under feudal and pre-capitalist relations could be carried directly to socialism without first passing through capitalism, provided a proletarian state undertook to carry it. Central Asia is presented as the doctrine's first and most complete proof. "In Central Asia," Kaushik writes, "the problem before the Soviet power was to turn a technically backward, small and partially patriarchal and natural peasant economy into a large-scale mechanised collective socialist economy, bypassing the stage of large-scale capitalist farming." Bound up with the leap is a second idea that recurs throughout the book, and which the Soviet editor is careful to underline in an editorial footnote to the preface: the sblizhenie (drawing-together) of the Central Asian peoples with "the revolutionary forces of the Russian Empire," a convergence "vital for the future overthrow of the rule of the tsar." The leap over capitalism and the drawing-together toward Russia are the twin engines of the whole account.
A reader who follows this series into its Third-World volumes will recognise the theory at once, because those books are its heirs. The "non-capitalist path," or "socialist orientation," is the doctrine on which Kaysone Phomvihane's Revolution in Laos (Progress, 1981) sets a peasant nation on "the direct transition to socialism bypassing the capitalist stage of development," and on which Ten Years of the Ethiopian Revolution (Progress, 1986) presents a junta of army officers as "bypassing capitalism." Central Asia is where that export theory comes home — or rather, where it started. It is worth noticing, in passing, an irony the book cannot afford to notice: the direct leap from backwardness to socialism, skipping the capitalist stage, is precisely the terrain of the theory of permanent revolution that the official Soviet literature spent decades denouncing by name. The forbidden idea is celebrated here, provided no one calls it by its author's name.
The credibility of everything that follows depends on saying plainly, first, how much of this book is good. A great deal of it is.
Kaushik's central scholarly contribution is genuine and, in 1970, unusual: an account of the nineteenth-century Anglo-Russian rivalry over Central Asia written from the Indian side, using Indian archival material alongside Russian. His demolition of the British "bogey of a Russian invasion of India" — the pretext, "demagogically stirred up by British imperialist circles to give moral cover to their expansionist activities" — is careful, sourced and persuasive, and it corrects a genuine distortion in the British imperial historiography. His portrait of the Tsarist economy in the region is a real piece of Marxist colonial analysis: after annexation "Central Asia was converted into a raw material supplying base for the metropolitan industries," its land turned over to cotton at the expense of food grain until cotton-ginning alone made up "81.2 per cent of the total industrial output" in 1913 — the classic deformed, single-crop colonial economy, described with precision. And he is a scholar, not a propagandist, in his handling of evidence: he rebukes earlier Soviet writers such as Fyodorov and Galuzo for the crude habit of treating every revolt against Tsarism as a "national liberation movement," insisting instead on distinguishing genuine popular risings from the "intrigues" of feudal beks and mullahs. A hack does not correct his own side's exaggerations. Kaushik does, repeatedly.
The gains he credits to the Soviet period were also real, and they should be stated without grudging. Before the revolution literacy among the Uzbeks stood at around two per cent, among the Turkmens at 0.7, among the Kirghiz at 0.2; several peoples had no written language at all, and "literacy was totally absent among nomads and women." Within a generation a mass literacy campaign — the kultpokhod, or culture-march — taught, on the book's figures, "more than a million people, mainly peasants" to read and write in the two years 1930–31 alone. Schools, clinics, a national press and a native intelligentsia were built where the emirs had maintained an army of forty thousand mullahs and not one secular school in Bukhara. The emancipation of women was the sharpest break of all. The Central Asian woman had been "hidden away from the sun by the feudal household wall and the thick horse-hair veil (parandja)"; the Soviet campaign to lift that veil was met, as Kaushik honestly records, by "the furious resistance of the reactionary forces, threats and even murder" — and he does not hide that women were killed for unveiling. The end of the khanates and the Emirate of Bukhara, the abolition of debt-slavery and the jaziya poll-tax on non-Muslims, the first women deputies and the first women on the stage: these happened, and for the people to whom they happened they were liberation. A reader told the whole thing was a fraud would be badly misled, and this introduction does not tell him so.
The quarrel is not with what the book affirms. It is with the boundary the book draws around a single word. "Colonialism," in Central Asia in Modern Times, is a fully operative category — devastating, precise, richly documented — for everything the Russians did before 1917, and it switches off, as if by a governor on a machine, at the moment the Bolsheviks take power. After that the same phenomena reappear under names that carry no charge.
Consider the evidence the book itself supplies about Tsarist rule, and then ask whether any of it recurs, unnamed, in the Soviet chapters. Kaushik describes the flooding of Central Asia with Russian settlers who seized the best land; he describes the crushing of the 1916 uprising — a mass anti-colonial rising he treats with full sympathy — in which "especially severe was the repression against the Kirghiz nomads," when "about 300 thousand of them fled to China from the Semirechye" and "their lands were confiscated and turned over to Russian settlers." A colonial state that drives a third of a million nomads across the border and hands their pasture to settlers of the ruling nationality: the book names this exactly, and names it colonialism. It is the great strength of the volume that it can see this so clearly. It is the great limitation of the volume that it can see it only when the perpetrator is the Tsar.
Turn to the Basmachi — the armed insurgency (from basmach, "raider") that fought Soviet power across Ferghana and the former emirates into the 1920s. Here the sympathy that flowed so readily to the rebels of 1916 is switched off. The Basmachi are "an anti-popular movement," their fighters "bandits," a "microscopic minority" — "ten thousand basmachi" among Ferghana's two million — sustained not by their own people but by "foreign imperialists," the clergy and the bais (the wealthy notables). In the areas they held, "things differed but little from the old regime of the khans." Some of this is true; the movement did draw on reactionary forces and did commit atrocities. But watch what happens to the causes. Kaushik is honest enough to record that the revolt fed on real grievances — closed bazaars, requisitioning, economic collapse — and, remarkably, that "the distortion of the Party's nationality policy by some individual local Bolsheviks also played into the hands of the basmachi." The admission is real and it is instantly neutralised: the coercion that drove peasants to revolt becomes the fault of "individual local Bolsheviks," a local distortion, never the policy of the centre. It is the identical move by which the Tsarist land-seizure was policy and the Soviet one an aberration. The category "anti-colonial resistance," granted without hesitation to the rebels of 1916, is refused to the rebels of 1919 — though both fought Russian power in the same valleys for many of the same reasons.
The deepest silence lies over collectivisation, and it is structural, built into the architecture of the book. In its opening pages Kaushik defines his subject so as to exclude Kazakhstan: "the term Soviet Central Asia refers only to the four of the above mentioned five Soviet republics, and does not include the Kazakhstan which, despite ethnic and cultural affinities, is geographically distinct." Kazakhstan is present in the book when the crime is Tsarist — the "merger of Central Asia and Kazakhstan into the Tsarist Russian Empire" — and defined out of it precisely where the greatest catastrophe of the Soviet period fell. For it was in Kazakhstan that forced collectivisation and the compulsory settling of nomads produced, between 1930 and 1933, a famine that killed on the order of 1.3 to 1.5 million Kazakhs — something approaching two in five of the entire nation, the highest proportional death toll of any Soviet people in those years. (The figures are genuinely contested and the range is wide; the standard modern account is Sarah Cameron's The Hungry Steppe, 2018.) That famine does not appear in this book. What appears in its place is a sentence explaining, in the language of natural economic law, that "the transition from the extensive cattle-breeding nomad economy (especially in Kirghizia and Turkmenia) to settled agriculture was bound to affect the importance of cattle." The destruction of the nomad economy is rendered as a phase of development; the deaths are not rendered at all. And where the book cannot avoid the collapse of the herds — the mass slaughter of animals that accompanied collectivisation everywhere it was imposed — it assigns the whole of it to the class enemy: "the bais and their agents went about persuading the peasants not to join collective farms, to slaughter their cattle and flee abroad." The animals die because the kulaks willed it; the peasants who slaughtered them, and starved, have no motive the book can see.
The same governor operates on the national delimitation of 1924 — the redrawing of Central Asia into national republics along lines settled in Moscow. Kaushik knows this is the point on which Western scholars press hardest, and he meets them head-on, quoting Mustafa Chokayev, Hugh Seton-Watson and Richard Pipes, who read the delimitation as a deliberate "divide and rule," a manufacture of nations "which could be kept apart from each other, played off against each other, and linked individually with the Russian nation." He answers that there is "not a grain of truth in these assertions," that the borders followed genuine ethnography and Leninist principle, and he has real arguments — Lenin did reject the pan-Turkic "Republic of Turks" proposed by Ryskulov, and the region's peoples were genuinely intermingled. But the argument is conducted entirely on one side of a line: the possibility that a policy can be both a sincere application of nationality doctrine and a consolidation of central control is never entertained, because the book's vocabulary has no slot for a Soviet interest that is not identical with the peoples' own. Russification receives the same treatment. The replacement of the Arabic script first by Latin and then, at the end of the 1930s, by Cyrillic is presented as a pure convenience that "brought the working people of Central Asia nearer to the socialist culture of their Russian and other brotherly peoples." The drawing-together is always a movement toward Russian, and it is always free.
Above all, the book proclaims a right it never asks whether anyone could exercise. Kaushik quotes the Decree on Peace and the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia at length on "the right of the peoples of Russia to self-determination up to secession and establishment of independent states," and cites, with evident approval, an early Turkestan Bolshevik promising that "if the will of the people expressed by referendum favoured separation from Russia we would defend their right to secession." The promise is printed as a settled glory of Soviet policy. That in the half-century between that promise and this book no Central Asian republic could conceivably have put secession to a referendum, and that the man who would have organised one would have been shot, is a question the framework cannot pose. The right of self-determination is affirmed exactly to the extent that it is certain never to be claimed.
The answer to this book was written, from within the revolutionary-Marxist tradition, more than thirty years before it, and it goes precisely to the seam Kaushik cannot open. In The Revolution Betrayed (1936), in the section "Nationality and Culture," Trotsky granted everything real in the Soviet advance and then named the thing the advance concealed. The much-advertised flowering of the national cultures is, under the bureaucracy, a controlled performance: "The Ukrainian, White Russian, Georgian, or Turk newspapers and books are only translations of the bureaucratic imperative into the language of the corresponding nationality." There can be, he wrote, "no talk of uniqueness of national culture when one and the same conductor's baton, or rather one and the same police club, undertakes to regulate all the intellectual activities of all the peoples of the Soviet Union." And the drawing-together that Kaushik celebrates as free convergence wears, in Trotsky's account, a specific and involuntary face: "bureaucratism inevitably takes the color of an autocratic Russification, leaving to the other nationalities the sole indubitable cultural right of celebrating the arbiter in their own language." A book in which the honour of the Central Asian languages is that they may now translate the resolutions of Moscow is the confirming instance of that charge.
Two honesties are owed, and they cut in both directions. The first is that Trotsky wrote in 1936, before the wartime deportation of whole nations and before the worst of the Russification of the 1940s and 1950s; The Revolution Betrayed is a diagnosis of the disease at an early stage, not a witness to its full course, and for the Kazakh famine and the deportations the historical record itself, not Trotsky, must carry the weight. The second honesty is more interesting, because it narrows the quarrel to a single point. On the underlying science Trotsky and Kaushik largely agree: Trotsky too mocked "the theory of unchanging racial types," did not deny that Soviet nations could and would draw together, and would not have disputed a word of Kaushik's chapters on literacy or the veil. The whole dispute reduces to the one question the book is built to suppress — whether the drawing-together was the free movement of emancipated peoples or something done to them, at times at gunpoint, by a state that then entered the vanished herds and the settled nomads in the ledger as progress. Trotsky's own formula is the sharpest statement of the alternative Kaushik never considers: what the USSR practised was "not of the oppression of one nationality over another in the proper sense of the word, but of oppression by the centralized police apparatus over the cultural development of all the nations, starting with the Great Russian."
The pattern is not peculiar to this book; it is the house method of the whole Progress literature on the Soviet nationalities, and the companion volume in this series makes that plain. In The Peoples of the North and Their Road to Socialism (Progress, 1975), the Evenk historian Vasily Uvachan tells the identical story for Siberia — the same real emancipation of a people the empire had left to die, the same "non-capitalist path," and the same governor on the category of oppression, which points with full force at the Tsarist inorodtsy (alien-subject) regime and never once turns homeward, in a whole book on the fate of small peoples that cannot name the small peoples the same state deported. Two authors, two regions, one structure. That the structure survives even when the author is a Siberian native writing his own people's history, and even when the author is a sympathetic Indian writing as a free man in Delhi, is the measure of how little it depends on any individual's courage or servility. It is a property of the doctrine, not of the man.
Central Asia in Modern Times should be read for both of the things it is. It is a real and valuable history: the best Indian-archival account of the Great Game of its generation, a clear-eyed Marxist anatomy of the Tsarist colonial economy, and an honest record of gains — literacy, medicine, the unveiling, the end of the emirates — that were real and were not free of cost only because someone paid it. And it is a monument to a single, disabling silence: a book that wields the word "colonialism" with a scholar's precision against one empire and cannot form the word against the other, that narrates the flight of the Kirghiz to China under the Tsar and defines the Kazakh famine out of its subject, that grants the rebels of 1916 the dignity of resistance and denies it to the rebels of 1919, and that prints the right of secession as an ornament precisely because it had been made unusable. The most telling fact about the book is that its author was, by conviction and by nationality, an anti-colonialist — a man from a country then only two decades free of the British Raj, who knew exactly what a metropolis extracting cotton from a captive periphery looked like, because he had grown up inside one. He recognised the shape at once when it wore a Tsarist uniform. That he could not recognise it when it wore a red flag is not a personal failure. It is the exact thing this series was assembled to show.