Turkestan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tadjikistan, Kirgizstan

Independence, after 1991 - sudden

    missing:  historical memory, nationalist movement

    does this mean that are "artificial"?

Created by central USSR government betw 19245-1936

    gave:  frontiers, names, pasts, definition of ethnic groups, languages

Competing with "supra-national" identities:

    pan-Islamism, pan-Turkism;  comparable to pan-Arabism

Why did USSR manufacture these nations?

    to break existing nationalisms which were more powerful

Results:  many "small" peoples manufactured in theory;  "nationalisms" invented

But:  "form", not "content"

Stalin pushed "natsional'nost"
Russian Turkic Muslims - had term "milli/millet"  - without territory, no state

Main edict - 1924 - three stages
    1. creation of Soviet republics
    2. "titular" peoples then subsequently attributed
    3. anthropologists, linguists, historians

Not to be "viable" as independent entities
    1. peculiar frontiers
    2. enclaves
    3. capitals with "titular" nationality in minority
    4. minorities within minorites
    5. econ dependence on "center"
    6. absence of direct communication between republics

But "form" existed
    1. political apparatus - Communist Party of X Republic
    2. state structure - Council of Ministers, Head of State
    3. national language
    4. A.N.s and filials

Now - with national territory, national symbols, national language, and in school told of national culture - does this create over time a "reality"?

Benedict Anderson:  Imagined Communities - London 1992

In past - 2 main characteristics of Russian relations with Muslims:
    crusade and assimilation

Ivan IV
Mikhail Stroganov
Catherine II

Issue always at hand:  who are "natives"

The Russian conquest of Central Asia - betw 1865 and 1920 - different from European colonization in Middle East:
    1. pursued continuously through time [Europe - Crusades, then Napoleon]
    2. territorial continuity [only European comparable - Habsburgs in Balkans]
    3. assimilation rather than expulsion - Reconquista, Balkans

        Christianization - novokhreshchenyi - and Russianization

Governor Generalship of Turkistan

    Pan-Islamism, Pan-Turkism - Gaspirali

    Soviet Muslim Congresses

    Establishment of independent "states" - first was Azerbaidzhan in 1918

    "National Communism" - Sultan Galiev in the 1920s

    languages and alphabets - Arabic to Latin 1929, Latin to Cyrillic 1940

    To create new "languages" - case of Jews - Yiddish and Birobijan