Speaking Soviet with an Accent: Culture and Power in Kyrgyzstan

By Ali F. Igmen

Speaking Soviet with an Accent presents the first English-language study of Soviet culture clubs in Kyrgyzstan. These clubs profoundly influenced the future of Kyrgyz cultural identity and fostered the work of many artists, such as famed novelist Chingiz Aitmatov.

Based on extensive oral history and archival research, Ali Igmen follows the rise of culture clubs beginning in the 1920s, when they were established to inculcate Soviet ideology and create a sedentary lifestyle among the historically nomadic Kyrgyz people. These "Red clubs" are fondly remembered by locals as one of the few places where lively activities and socialization with other members of their ail (village or tribal unit) could be found.

Through lectures, readings, books, plays, concerts, operas, visual arts, and cultural Olympiads, locals were exposed to Soviet notions of modernization. But these programs also encouraged the creation of a newfound "Kyrgyzness" that preserved aspects of local traditions and celebrated the achievements of Kyrgyz citizens in the building of a new state. These ideals proved appealing to many Kyrgyz, who, for centuries, had seen riches and power in the hands of a few tribal chieftains and Russian imperialists.

This book offers new insights into the formation of modern cultural identity in Central Asia. Here, like their imperial predecessors, the Soviets sought to extend their physical borders and political influence. But Igmen also reveals the remarkable agency of the Kyrgyz people, who employed available resources to meld their own heritage with Soviet and Russian ideologies and form artistic expressions that continue to influence Kyrgyzstan today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Release date: Jul 31, 2012
• ISBN: 9780822978091

Ali F. Igmen

Richard Polt is Professor of Philosophy at Xavier University. With Gregory Fried he has translated Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics and Being and Truth, and edited A Companion to Heidegger’s “Introduction to Metaphysics” and Nature, History, State: 1933-1934.

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CENTRAL EURASIA IN CONTEXT

Douglas Northrop, Editor

SPEAKING SOVIET WITH AN ACCENT

Culture and Power in Kyrgyzstan

ALİ İĞMEN

UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260

Copyright © 2012, University of Pittsburgh Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Printed on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Igmen, Ali

     Speaking Soviet with an accent : culture and power in Kyrgyzstan / Ali Igmen.

             p      cm. — (Central Eurasia in context)

     Includes bibliographical references and index.

     ISBN 978-0-8229-6206-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Minorities—Government policy—Soviet Union—History. 2. Kyrgyz—Cultural assimilation—Soviet Union—History. 3. Soviet Union—Cultural policy—History. 4. Soviet Union—Ethnic relations—History. 5. Popular culture—Kyrgyzstan—History. 6. Politics and culture—Kyrgyzstan—History. 7. Kyrgyzstan—Intellectual life—20th century. I. Title.

     JN6520.M5I45 2012

     306.095843'09041—dc23

2012006941

ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-7809-1 (electronic)

To Franz Goebel

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Crafting Kyrgyzness

Map of Kyrgyzstan

Chapter 1: Being Asiatic Subjects of the Empire

Chapter 2: The Making of Soviet Culture in Kyrgyzstan during the 1920s and 1930s

Chapter 3: The Emergence of the Soviet Houses of Culture in Kyrgyzstan

Illustrations

Chapter 4: Celebrations in Soviet Kyrgyzstan during the 1930s

Chapter 5: Soviet Theater in Kyrgyzstan in the 1930s

Chapter 6: Self-Fashioning Kyrgyzness among Women

Conclusion: Speaking Soviet the Kyrgyz Way

Notes

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To all of the colleagues, friends, and family members in the United States, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkey who have helped make this book possible, I express my sincere appreciation.

My research for this book flourished in Kyrgyzstan and Turkey with the support of Fulbright-Hays, Social Science Research Council, United States Information Agency, and Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships and grants, and I also received financial support through various mini-grants from the University of Washington and California State University, Long Beach. Research for this book began in 1995 in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, with generous support from a joint mission of the United States Information Agency and Portland State University. I would like to thank Jere Bacharach, Grant Farr, and Marta Colburn for including me in their educational development project in Osh. I am grateful to the Honorable Roza Otunbayeva, then foreign minister and the former president of Kyrgyzstan, for helping me obtain the necessary work and research permits. Bakyt Beshimov, rector of Osh State University, provided graduate student research assistants and librarians and allowed me to teach a course on Western views of Central Asia. I would also like to thank Mukhtar Irısov and his parents for welcoming me into their home in Osh and helping me interview the aksakals (elders) of their clan in Papan.

During subsequent research for this book, Irıs Beybutova, dean of Kyrgyz State National University in Bishkek, introduced me to many helpful individuals. In the final stages of my research, Almaz Akishev, Ruslan Narynov, and Layli Ukubayeva generously provided assistance. I am also indebted to Renee Giovarelli and Zinaida Aliyeva for inviting me to travel with them to Osh and around Ysyk Köl. The oral history interviews in this book would not have been possible without the assistance of Baktibek Isakov of Manas University.

I owe an enormous debt to Gülnara Jamasheva, my Kyrgyz-language teacher, and her sister, Anara Jamasheva, the former director of IREX in Bishkek, who introduced me to Kubanychbek Kendirbaev, a Houses of Culture expert. Kubanychbek in turn introduced me to the archives and archivists in Bishkek, Tokmok, and Kochkor and to actress Sabira Kumushalieva, whose life story provides examples of the concepts I address. I thank Jipar Duishembieva for helping me translate the interviews and Elmira Kuchumkulova for proofreading most of the manuscript.

The research for and writing of this book could have not been accomplished without the academic intensity of Glennys Young, Sarah Abrevaya Stein, and Bruce Grant. I benefited from Young's expertise in the social and cultural history of imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, from Stein's expertise in the histories of the Ottoman and Russian empires, and from Grant's help with the Soviet Houses of Culture and getting me into an excellent workshop at the Max Planck Institute.

The core of this book emerged during a workshop organized by the Social Science Research Council and the Center for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Michigan. I would like to thank the workshop organizers, Seteney Shami, Anthony Koliha, and Donna Parmalee, and participants Bruce Grant, Stephen Hanson, Adeeb Khalid, and Beth Mitchnek.

For helping me pursue the career I now have, I thank Ilse Cirtautas, Daniel Waugh, Janet Ekholm, Reşat Kasaba, Jere Bacharach, Jonathan Lipman, and Mary Neuburger. Many colleagues also provided both academic and moral support. They include Robert Stacey, John Findlay, Ruby Blondell, Uta Poiger, Marianne Kamp, Virginia Martin, Choi Chatterjee, and especially Susanne Young and Lori Anthony, who deserve special acknowledgment for rescuing me when I was stranded at 9,000 feet in Naryn, Kyrgyzstan.

I am also grateful to those who, despite being outside my own field, either graciously critiqued my writing or provided exceptional friendships: Adam Warren, Sandra Joshel, Kate Brown, Holly Haynes, Jade Hidle, Ruby Blondell, Selim Kuru, Sara Maxwell, Robin Brownstein, Thomas Menduni, and Frederick Zimmerman. My colleagues and friends at California State University, Long Beach, including Gerry Riposa, Mark Wiley, Nancy Quam-Wickham, Sebouh Aslanian, Emily Berquist, Jane Dabel, Andy Jenks, Marie Kelleher, Claire Martin, Caitlin Murdock, Lise Sedrez, Kim Trimble, and Hugh Wilford, continue to provide valued support, and Sharon Sievers will be sorely missed at CSULB. Houri Berberian and Patricia (Patty) Cleary deserve a special note of thanks. Houri has been an irreplaceable comrade and friend, and Patty taught me the intricacies of the system at CSULB.

A writer could not have asked for a more accommodating and professional publisher than the University of Pittsburgh Press. I thank editorial director Peter W. Kracht and the Central Asia in Context series editor Douglas Northrop, as well as Amberle Sherman, editorial assistant, Alex Wolfe, production editor, and the two anonymous readers. I also thank the outside copyeditor, Maureen Creamer Bemko. Only I am responsible for any errors of fact or interpretation that may remain in this book.

Finally, I would like to express my love and gratitude to my family: my intellectually curious grandmother Nafize Gürsoy, my parents Muhsin and Yücel İğmen, my brother Akil İğmen and my sister-in-law Elisabetta Campi, and my niece Asya İğmen. In 1996, my life changed when I met Franz Goebel. I am forever indebted to him for making a home with me and always reminding me of my place, as Mary Oliver eloquently wrote, in the family of things, such as the wild geese, high in the clean blue air.

INTRODUCTION

Crafting Kyrgyzness

On the southern shores of Ysyk Köl, the largest lake in Kyrgyzstan and one considered holy to Kyrgyz, is a tiny ail (village) called Akterek.¹ Even in May 2002, a small white building's signage still declared, in bold lettering, that this was the club of the Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic.² The official purpose of a club or House of Culture (or, in Kyrgyz, Madaniyat Ui) was to introduce Bolshevik ideology to indigenous populations through adult education and entertainment. The existence of a Soviet club adjacent to this religious site seemed striking; the very traditions that considered the lake holy survived many years of antireligious Soviet campaigns to stamp them out. Every ail, town, and city on the shores of the lake had a club, centrally and prominently located in each case and ostensibly displaying the power of the Soviet state and its institutions.

In 1996, in Osh, the second-largest city in southern Kyrgyzstan, it was apparent that although the clubs no longer functioned as they had during the Soviet period, many of them were still social gathering places. They often appeared to have been the only Soviet structures ever to intrude upon the seamless beauty of these wide-open spaces. The symbolism of these buildings, like the edifices themselves, had also endured. After the Kyrgyz Republic established its independence, the residents of Osh were reportedly saddened that one of their clubs was to be converted to a government office, one unrelated to arts or culture. Although the townsfolk no longer used the club for its intended purpose, its symbolic power was still apparent when residents expressed their disappointment about its future. This club had represented a cultural focal point that the townsfolk came to accept as their own. It became a place where Kyrgyz traditions and Soviet art forms merged, crafting the images of Kyrgyzness.

Soviet citizens of Kyrgyzstan, such as the club administrators, artists, actors, writers, and even the ordinary people who participated in the activities of the Soviet Houses of Culture (referred to hereafter as clubs), helped forge the images and symbols of Kyrgyzness. In historical terms, the clubs constitute a wonderful laboratory. In their functioning and in people's memories of them, one may observe the Soviet discourse and practice of culturedness or cultural development, understood as cultural change or cultural revolution, as conveyed by the Soviet clubs and intellectuals in Kyrgyzstan.³

Why and how did the Kyrgyz populations come to see the Soviet clubs as their own? After all, the sole purpose of the clubs was ostensibly to eradicate the so-called backward way of Kyrgyz life. If the clubs were a significant part of an ongoing process of creating a Soviet Kyrgyz community during the 1920s and 1930s, the connections between the clubs and Kyrgyzness need to be understood in order to assess the significance of Soviet culture in Kyrgyzstan and the rest of Central Asia. After all, Kyrgyz people who were involved in the cultural activities of the clubs, Stalinist festivals, Soviet theater, and education were crafting Kyrgyzness in the Soviet Union. Through public performances and artistic expressions, these citizens imagined, symbolized, and expressed what it meant to be Kyrgyz. The experiences of these influential Kyrgyz citizens also provide an excellent opportunity to examine the individual's role in creating a new Kyrgyz identity in the 1930s and beyond.

The stories of ordinary citizens who came to represent their nationalities in Soviet cultural space suggest that in pushing certain talented individuals to become the cultural elite, the Soviet system set out to define twentieth-century Kyrgyz culture. Many of these individuals took significant risks in the name of progress and modernity. They stepped out of their comfort zones even if it meant confronting their families, communities, and normative behavior patterns. While accepting the challenges presented by Soviet modernity, however, they often venerated the Kyrgyz ways of living. In other words, they did not forsake everyday patterns of behavior and ways of being that represented Kyrgyzness to them.

The Soviet administration developed cultural policies that included the establishment of these palaces, houses, and clubs while trying to assert political power in Kyrgyzstan. When the first Soviet club opened its doors in the ail of Kyzyl Kyia in March 1920, Kyrgyz lands were still part of the newly established Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (1918–1924).⁴ In October 1924, when the Kara-Kyrgyz Autonomous Oblast (1924–1925) became a separate entity under the jurisdiction of the Russian Federation, there were thirty-five clubs in Kyrgyzstan.⁵

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when Russian forces began to install a new political system in the Kyrgyz lands, they encountered resistance, as was the case with most other Turkic/Muslim societies in Central Asia. The Qurbashy (or Basmachy) revolts against the forces from Russia, including both the Bolsheviks and sometimes those sympathetic to the imperial regime (the Whites), should be regarded as the most prominent resistance in the Kyrgyz lands.⁶ In fact, the Kyrgyz pushback began in 1916 as a struggle against an imperial decree conscripting Central Asians into the Russian army. Despite this widespread resistance movement, the Bolsheviks gained power definitively in Kyrgyzstan in the mid-1920s and established the Communist Party there in 1924. But the party leadership consistently remained non-Kyrgyz, as Russian politicians held the position of first secretary of the party until 1950, when Ishkak Razzakov was appointed (1950–1961).

Although the Soviet state ordered the translation of laws and regulations into the Kyrgyz language in 1924, most of the documents actively in use at the time were in Russian. Furthermore, although Kyrgyz individuals held many government positions in Kyrgyzstan, officials from the western parts of the Soviet Union did most of the administrative decision making. In other words, the lack of education and training, especially in the 1920s, limited the meaningful participation of Kyrgyz populations in Soviet administrative activity, including that which involved the clubs.

In the early 1920s, the Turkestan Narkompros (Narodnyi kommissariat prosveshcheniia, or People's Commissariat of Enlightenment) issued regulations that dictated how the new cultural institutions should be run. The commissariat designed the local club building to suit the region's population and to make it an inviting place where the people could spend their leisure time. The Uzbeks called their club a Red Choikhona, which, as suggested by the name, was akin to a traditional Uzbek teahouse, while the Kyrgyz club was called a Red Yurt, after the traditional dwelling of the region's nomads.

Providing leisure-time comfort, however, was not the primary reason for the clubs; they were primarily intended as venues for revolutionary education. Numerous state documents referred to the idle Central Asians as backward populations waiting to be reformed.⁷ The commissariat proposed that effective reforms could best be implemented through educational programs for adults, and it thus expected the clubs to stage activities, such as readings (for example, a literate member reading the newspaper out loud for the illiterate majority) and short plays, to support the Communist Party's educational efforts.⁸ Club administrators often preferred theater activities because the plays simultaneously entertained and educated the club members.⁹ Clubs, schools, youth organizations, collective farms, local history museums, and other institutions all attempted to define the indigenous populations in Kyrgyzstan and give them a new, suitably Soviet identity. Clubs often gave the children of Kyrgyzstan their first taste of Russian and other Western forms of artistic expression. Beginning in the 1950s, when Kyrgyz schoolchildren read stories by Chingiz Aitmatov that provided fictional role models such as the influential Soviet heroine Jamila or the revolutionary teacher Duishon, they began to construct their own national role models in the image of these characters, who were presented as socialist heroes.¹⁰ This book delves precisely into the phenomenon of how Kyrgyz discarded or preserved their pre-Soviet traditions while participating in the creation of this new culture.

The activities of club managers, festival organizers, actors, and authors show how these Soviet government agents and activists worked toward a so-called modern culture. Making Kyrgyz culture modern was not an entirely new concept for these Soviet cultural workers; they had inherited it from their pre-Soviet predecessors.¹¹ The commissars and other high-ranking officials sent out directives and reports to ail clubs, ordering them to promote cultural activities that furthered the Bolshevik ideology. Regional and ail club administrators, on the other hand, viewed these new cultural institutions and activities as providing opportunities for cultural development and for the improvement of cultural knowledge. These differing views of the clubs' purpose arose from the official correspondence regarding the clubs; it was written in the particular language of the Bolsheviks, which had its own political connotation for the oft-used phrase cultural development.

Kyrgyz intellectuals of the Stalinist era internalized the new Soviet culture. In their lives and work, however, they showed that crucial aspects of Kyrgyz values endured. There emerged a complex culture in which the expressions of Soviet citizenship and artistry reshaped Kyrgyz traditions to reflect the contemporary trends of the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s. Examples of Kyrgyz traditions that Soviet worldviews influenced include salt (codes of conduct for everyday habits and customs), such as reverence for elders and the natural environment, and the appearance of heroes and heroines from Kyrgyz oral tradition in poems, songs, stories, plays, and festivals published or sponsored by the Soviets.

Official documents such as state regulations and directives and the reports by administrators of the Houses and Palaces of Culture, produced between 1925 and 1941, reveal the influence of state and local administrators and intellectuals in constructing these cultural institutions as agencies that guided cultural development in Kyrgyzstan. Most of this government documentation consists of correspondence between regional and higher-level administrators in Frunze or Alma-Ata. An examination of the language used in official directives from the higher-ups, along with the expressed concerns, requests, and complaints of the regional administrators, exposes the sometimes haphazard, sometimes systematic processes of creating culture.

Nevertheless, official documents often leave out a larger part of the story because they offer only a partial record of how these cultural institutions functioned on the ground. Oral accounts of people who lived during this period, and of those who heard their stories, are also invaluable sources when examining the emergence of Soviet cultural cadres in Kyrgyzstan. Interviews, newspaper articles, and memoirs provide additional glimpses of Soviet heroines such as Zuurakan Kainazarova, a beet grower turned national hero, and the actress Sabira Kumushalieva; their life stories illuminate the connections between the activities of cultural institutions and the creation of Soviet political and cultural leadership.

Kumushalieva and three contemporaries—Saira Kiyizbaeva, Baken Kydykeeva, and Darkul Kuiukova—were collectively called the Four Daughters of Tököldösh, named for their native village. Darkul Kuiukova's elder brother, poet and playwright Kubanychbek Malikov, himself from Tököldösh, coined that phrase for his four compatriots.¹² I return to Kumusalieva's story and consider it in some detail at a later point in this book.

Another crucial vanguard of Soviet culture in twentieth-century Kyrgyzstan was Chingiz Aitmatov, without whom neither Sovietness nor Kyrgyzness could be fully understood. Aitmatov was an internationally celebrated author, and his life and early short stories about the prewar era clearly underscore the significant connection between imagining Kyrgyzness in the 1930s and 1940s and then making it a reality. Even after his death, Aitmatov remains the most respected and beloved intellectual of Kyrgyzstan and possibly all of Central Asia, and his work has been accepted as the very definition of Kyrgyz culture. The characters in his early works, mostly written in the 1950s and 1960s, reflect how the state and Kyrgyz intellectuals crafted Soviet heroes like Zuurakan Kainazarova and Sabira Kumushalieva. Aitmatov's characters symbolize ideal Soviet citizens cloaked in their Kyrgyz national traditions. They represent the hard-working kolkhoznitsa, such as Jamila, who broke the chains of tradition. They symbolize the first ail teachers, such as Duishon, who took over the job of educating long-neglected Kyrgyz girls.¹³ Aitmatov effectively provided young and enthusiastic Kyrgyz children with role models. He constructed a history of the Kyrgyz ail, one in which Kyrgyz children would be proud of their achievements and the cultural changes in their Soviet past. Kumushalieva and other actors portrayed Aitmatov's fictional characters in their theatrical, operatic, and cinematic roles to promote these idealized heroes as models for Kyrgyz.

Aitmatov published his first short story, Gazetchik Juyo (Newspaper boy Juyo), in the Komsomolets Kirgizii newspaper in 1952. He saw himself as a historian who thrived when telling the stories of his childhood during the 1930s. His autobiographical and semi-autobiographical early stories, therefore, resemble an oral history experience, peppered with passion and subjectivity. Taking all this into account, we must acknowledge Aitmatov's work as a necessary depiction of a cultural landscape in which Kyrgyz people experienced multidimensional and multidirectional revolution within their turmush (everyday life and habits). What is more, Aitmatov's literary contributions helped embed the cultural revolution into the collective memory of Kyrgyz and other Soviet peoples.¹⁴ Aitmatov's early short stories and novellas, as well as the stories of the Four Daughters, reveal that Kyrgyz intellectuals played a crucial role in creating a discourse of cultural change.

This book is the first to scrutinize the relationship between the clubs, the construction of Kyrgyz identity, and the negotiation required to fashion Kyrgyzness.¹⁵ More specifically, it offers an examination of the ways in which club and theater administrators contested or cooperated with regional directives.¹⁶ There are only limited analyses of how Soviet cultural policies created a Kyrgyz identity.¹⁷ This book offers a view that reverses the depiction of Kyrgyzness as a somewhat static identity. It argues that those charged with putting official policies into action were active agents of contestation and influence. It examines the ways in which Russian colonial cultural policies influenced those of the Soviets and, in turn, led the Kyrgyz cultural elite to rediscover their own cultural forms. Homi Bhabha's work on mimicry and hybridity informs this inquiry, guiding this investigation into whether Russian imperial attention to Kyrgyz cultural forms informed Soviet policies and consequently enticed Kyrgyz intellectuals to mimic colonial fascination with their own culture.¹⁸ Soviet clubs offer a laboratory in which one may test Kyrgyz society's cooperation with and resistance against the Soviet state as a modern phenomenon of cultural mimicry. Although Kyrgyz intellectuals have adamantly rejected the notion that the Soviet state represented a colonial power, they imply that Soviet Kyrgyz identity was a fusion of both cultures. Soviet clubs were one of the institutions that established this fusion.

Ultimately, the creation of clubs, theater, and festivals was an ideological act that aimed to establish a single text or discourse—the cultural revolution in Soviet Kyrgyzstan. This ideological approach was to be the blueprint of Kyrgyz education and liberation from backwardness. However, the sovietization implemented through the clubs, theaters, and festivals did not preclude the possibility of crafting a contemporary Kyrgyz culture, even if Soviet administrators viewed the Kyrgyz people's so-called development as a step toward raising the Kyrgyz to the level of the European peoples of the Soviet Union.¹⁹

CHAPTER 1

Being Asiatic Subjects of the Empire

The Bolsheviks inherited the images of Asiatic Kyrgyz from their imperial predecessors. These predecessors who concerned themselves with Central Asia included tsarist government officials, Russian intelligentsia, writers, artists, and their Turkic counterparts. The Bolsheviks, despite their best intentions, were not able to fully rid themselves of these ingrained images of the Asiatic peoples, including those of the Kyrgyz. The Central Asian communists, together with other Bolshevik elites, created and also contested these images, which included ethnic and religious stereotypes. Such images were by no means constant or static. On the contrary, when the Bolsheviks replaced the imperial authorities, they realized that the officially recognized identities of the Kyrgyz populations were not set in stone.

One reason that the meaning of Kyrgyzness was subject to change was that the ethnic composition of communities in Kyrgyzstan was in flux, especially during the last thirty years of the imperial period. Bolshevik cultural policy makers often drew upon the definitions their predecessors laid out when describing Kyrgyz and other Central Asian peoples. Explicating the Bolshevik understanding of Kyrgyz culture, therefore, requires an analysis of imperial Russian definitions of so-called Asiatic cultures.

The Bolsheviks indicated in various ways that the improvement of amateur talents (samodeiatel') among Kyrgyz was one of the main goals of their clubs.¹ The official meaning of amateur talent and cultural improvement seems to appear in every piece of club correspondence. For example, in addition to containing definitions of people's cultural improvement and development, the Bolshevik documents under review liberally utilized the term cultured, and from their use of the term we can also deduce what they considered to constitute ignorance versus education.

The driving force in the language used by administrators of Soviet clubs and other cultural institutions was the goal of transforming people's identities and communities. Achieving cultural transformation was absolutely necessary if the new Soviet state apparatus and the nation of Soviet peoples were to be considered developed. Some Bolshevik cultural revolutionaries, like their Westernizing predecessors, saw the concepts of culture and development in the context of the Western European world.² Marxist ideology provided the blueprint of sociocultural development for Vladimir Lenin and his comrades, with the Bolsheviks admitting that Russia's sociocultural progress was well behind that of Western Europe.³ For Lenin and other Bolsheviks, most sociocultural models that symbolized modernity came to Russia from the West and predated the Bolsheviks by decades, if not centuries.

Scholarship on modernity in Russia has emphasized the fundamental cultural differences between West and East and scrutinized Russia's place in Europe during the Enlightenment. According to scholars of Russian and Soviet history, Russia's encounter with modernity had a specific character.⁴ Western-oriented Russian intellectual discourse perceived the Enlightenment, nation-state formation, and the development of civil society as representative virtues of modernity. Indeed, Western-oriented imperial Russian leaders and elites saw modernity as a product of the West, and their interpretations gradually created a type of modernity that reflected Russia's physical and cultural location in the world. The same group focused its attention on the poor education of the diverse peoples of Russia, targeting illiteracy and questioning the ambiguous boundaries between Russia's ethnic groups. They had reservations about the autocratic behavior of the Russian state, suggesting that it was not allowing civil society to develop to its greatest potential. Thus, the main problems impeding progress toward modernity were the complex ethnic composition of Russia's population and the lack of education, which would be necessary to forge a civil society.

Turkic and Muslim thinkers who sought to modernize Russian society also expressed similar if not identical concerns. Late imperial rulers and thinkers, Russian and non-Russian alike, wanted to build a Russia that did not fall behind Europe but that, at the same time, kept its distinct character. Russia's concept of its distinctive character informed the leaders' approach to modernity. Turkic individuals learned to negotiate the terms and requirements of modernity with the state and the society and internalized modernity in ways that seemed real to them.⁵ In this way, too, both Russian and Turkic thinkers rendered modernity relevant for their own needs and cultures.

Orientalizing and Categorizing Ethnicities

Officials of the imperial state, like the Orientalist Russian writers, were well aware of ethnic differences between the Russian and non-Russian subjects of the empire. Even in the absence of a cohesive and consistent policy regarding non-Russian subjects, these writers emphasized these differences among the ethnic groups, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The late imperial Russian state categorized the languages, religious practices, and byt (everyday life) of non-Russians in order to assign new community characteristics to them. In this new imperial policy, the categories, called narodnost' (nationality, referring to ethnic groups developing into full-fledged nationalities) and natsional'nost (nationality that is fully developed