R3.10 The emergence of Central Asian republics (1917–2020)

Central Asia is the region between the Caspian Sea and China, and between Siberia and Afghanistan. Before 1917 it was ruled by the Russian Empire, and it contained no states called Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan or Uzbekistan. By 1991 all five existed as Soviet republics, and in that year they became independent states. How Soviet rule made these nations, and what the nations made of independence, is the subject of this study.

The timeline shows the rhythm of the century. Two short periods of upheaval, in 1916–1924 and 1985–1991, frame almost seventy years of Soviet rule, and the independent republics then had to govern territories that Moscow had drawn.

Russian Central Asia before 1917

Russia conquered Central Asia in stages. The Kazakh steppe came under Russian control between the eighteenth century and the 1840s. In the 1860s and 1870s Russian armies took the settled south: Tashkent fell in 1865 and became the capital of the Governor-Generalship of Turkestan (1867), whose first governor-general was Konstantin von Kaufman. The emir of Bukhara (1868) and the khan of Khiva (1873) became Russian protectorates, the khanate of Kokand was annexed in 1876, and the Turkmen were defeated at the siege of Geok Tepe in 1881, where Russian troops massacred thousands of defenders and civilians.

Russian rule changed the economy of the region. Cotton spread across the irrigated Fergana valley to supply the mills of Moscow, and the Trans-Aral (Orenburg–Tashkent) railway, finished in 1906, tied the region to Russian markets. On the steppe, Russian and Ukrainian peasants settled on Kazakh and Kyrgyz pasture: during the Stolypin reforms of about 1906–1912 well over a million settlers arrived, and nomads lost their best grazing land.

The Jadids and the revolt of 1916

Among Muslim intellectuals a reform movement grew. The Jadids (from usul-i jadid, "new method") opened schools that taught reading by a phonetic method together with arithmetic, geography and history, and published newspapers and plays. Leaders such as Mahmudkhoja Behbudiy of Samarkand, Munavvar Qori of Tashkent and the Bukharan writer Abdurauf Fitrat argued that Muslims had fallen behind because of ignorance and the conservatism of the ulama, the religious scholars. On the steppe a parallel group of Kazakh intellectuals, led by Alikhan Bokeikhanov and Akhmet Baitursynov, campaigned in Kazakh-language publications against the loss of land.

The First World War brought these tensions to a head. Central Asians were exempt from military service, but a decree of 25 June 1916 ordered the conscription of several hundred thousand men for labour behind the front. Revolt spread across Turkestan and the steppe from July: Kyrgyz and Kazakhs in Semirechye attacked settlers, and in Turgai the Kazakh leader Amangeldy Imanov besieged the town of Turgai. Russian troops and armed settlers suppressed the revolt with great violence. Estimates of the dead vary widely, from about 100,000 to over 250,000, and well over 100,000 Kyrgyz and Kazakhs fled across the mountains to China, an exodus Kyrgyz call the Ürkün.

Revolution and civil war, 1917–1924

Two revolutions in Tashkent, 1917

News of the February Revolution reached Tashkent in March 1917. Two kinds of political organisation appeared at once. Russian settlers, soldiers and railway workers formed soviets, while Muslims held congresses and founded councils (shura) led by Jadids and, separately, by conservative ulama. In November 1917 the Tashkent Soviet, dominated by Russian railway workers and soldiers, seized power. It excluded Muslims from government on the grounds that they had no proletarian organisations, so in Central Asia the Bolshevik revolution began as the rule of a settler minority.

Muslim leaders answered by proclaiming the Turkestan Autonomy at Kokand on 27 November 1917, with Jadids among its ministers and Mustafa Shokay, a Kazakh lawyer, later its head of government. It promised autonomy within a democratic Russian federation and called for a constituent assembly. In February 1918 Red Guards and Armenian Dashnak units from Tashkent stormed Kokand; the town was looted and thousands of its inhabitants were killed.

On the steppe, the second All-Kazakh Congress at Orenburg in December 1917 created the Alash Orda government, led by Bokeikhanov. Alash Orda sided with the Whites in the civil war, then went over to the Bolsheviks in 1919–1920 when the Whites refused it autonomy. Its leaders were given positions in the new Soviet Kazakh government, which made them valuable to Moscow in the 1920s and targets in the 1930s.

Economic and social impact: famine and settler violence

The civil war cut Turkestan off from Russia. White Cossacks held Orenburg and the railway, so no grain reached a region that had replaced much of its wheat with cotton. Requisitioning by the Tashkent Soviet and the collapse of trade produced famine in 1917–1920; estimates of the dead run to hundreds of thousands, and some historians, such as Marco Buttino, put Turkestan’s losses close to a million. Cotton farming collapsed, because no one could eat cotton and the Russian mills were closed. In Semirechye armed settlers seized Kyrgyz and Kazakh land and killed returning refugees of 1916. A second famine struck the steppe in 1921–1922, linked to the great famine on the Volga.

The Basmachi movement began in the Fergana valley after the sack of Kokand, under local commanders such as Ergash, Madamin-bek and Kurshirmat. It spread to eastern Bukhara (present-day Tajikistan), where Ibrahim-bek led Lakai tribesmen. In 1921 the former Ottoman war minister Enver Pasha, sent to Bukhara by the Bolsheviks, defected to the Basmachi and tried to unite them in a pan-Islamic war; he was killed in a skirmish near Baljuvan on 4 August 1922. The movement never united. Its leaders were rivals, it had little appeal to the towns, and it was weakened from 1922 by Soviet concessions, but Ibrahim-bek fought on in the Tajik mountains until his capture in 1931.

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The Bolshevik response: force and concessions

Moscow saw that settler rule was turning Muslims against the revolution, which mattered to Lenin because he hoped that Soviet Turkestan would be an example to the colonised peoples of Asia. In October 1919 the government sent the Turkestan Commission (Turkkomissiya), led by Mikhail Frunze and Valerian Kuibyshev, with full powers to restore central control and correct the Tashkent Soviet’s "colonial" policies. Lenin explained its purpose in a letter to the Communists of Turkestan.

It is no exaggeration to say that the establishment of proper relations with the peoples of Turkestan is now of immense, epochal importance for the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic. The attitude of the Soviet Workers’ and Peasants’ Republic to the weak and hitherto oppressed nations is of very practical significance for the whole of Asia and for all the colonies of the world.

V. I. Lenin, To the Communists of Turkestan, letter of 22 November 1919 to the Communists of Turkestan (Collected Works, vol. 30). Lenin wrote to Russian party members in Tashkent, the people he needed to restrain. The letter shows that Bolshevik policy in Central Asia was shaped by the wider aim of revolution in Asia, but it is a statement of intent: the same commission brought the Red Army that crushed Muslim resistance.

The Red Army under Frunze took Khiva in February 1920 and Bukhara in September 1920; the emir, Alim Khan, fled to Afghanistan. Moscow replaced the two monarchies with the Khorezm and Bukharan People’s Soviet Republics, nominally independent and run by Young Bukharan and Young Khivan reformers such as Fayzulla Khodjaev. Concessions followed. Under the New Economic Policy from 1921, trade revived; waqf (religious endowment) property and sharia courts were restored for a time; and settler land seizures in Semirechye were partly reversed.

Above all, the party began to recruit Central Asians. Korenizatsiia ("putting down roots", or indigenisation), adopted as policy in 1923, meant training native cadres, using local languages in government and schools, and promoting non-Russians into party and state posts. Many Jadids joined the Communist Party, because it offered the modernisation they had sought before 1917. Some, such as the Kazakh Turar Ryskulov, hoped for a single Turkic Soviet republic of Turkestan; Lenin and the Politburo rejected that idea in 1920.

Negotiation was as important as force. Soviet commanders offered amnesties and posts to Basmachi leaders who surrendered, and some, such as Madamin-bek in 1920, came over to the Soviet side with their men.

The table of the main groups shows why the Bolsheviks won. They had the Red Army and the railways, while their opponents were divided by region, aims and way of life. Their concessions after 1919 also gave reformers and many ordinary people reasons to accept Soviet rule.

Creating the republics: ASSRs, SSRs and the national delimitation of 1924

The first Soviet units in Central Asia were not national. In April 1918 the Tashkent Soviet proclaimed the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic inside the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). In August 1920 Moscow created the Kirghiz ASSR for the Kazakhs of the steppe (Russians then called the Kazakhs "Kirghiz"), with its capital at Orenburg. Bukhara and Khorezm were separate "people’s republics".

The national delimitation

In 1924 the Communist Party redrew the map of the region on national lines in the national delimitation. The decision was taken by the Politburo in June 1924 and carried out in October. The Turkestan ASSR, Bukhara and Khorezm were abolished, and new units were created for the peoples the Soviet ethnographers identified as nations: the Uzbek and Turkmen SSRs (27 October 1924, admitted to the USSR in May 1925), the Tajik ASSR inside Uzbekistan, and the Kara-Kirghiz Autonomous Oblast (from 1926 the Kirghiz ASSR); the Karakalpak Autonomous Oblast followed in 1925. The steppe republic gained the Syr Darya and Semirechye regions of Turkestan and was renamed the Kazak ASSR in 1925, with its capital at Kyzylorda and, from 1929, Alma-Ata.

The flow diagram of the republics shows that the map of 1924 was not final. Tajikistan was raised to a union republic in October 1929, gaining the Khujand region from Uzbekistan, and the Stalin Constitution of 5 December 1936 made the Kazakh and Kirghiz units union republics too. From 1936 to 1991 there were five Central Asian SSRs.

The delimitation was based on Stalin’s definition of a nation, written in 1913, as a stable community with a common language, territory, economic life and culture. Applying it was difficult in a region where Uzbek- and Tajik-speakers lived in the same towns, many people spoke both languages, and nomads and farmers of the same group lived side by side. Samarkand and Bukhara, cities with large Tajik-speaking populations, went to Uzbekistan; the Fergana valley was split between Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and (from 1929) Tajikistan, leaving minorities and enclaves on every side.

Stalin explained how the new nations fitted into socialism in a speech of 1925 to students at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow.

Proletarian in content, national in form – such is the universal culture towards which socialism is proceeding. Proletarian culture does not abolish national culture, it gives it content. On the other hand, national culture does not abolish proletarian culture, it gives it form.

J. V. Stalin, The Political Tasks of the University of the Peoples of the East, speech, 18 May 1925. Stalin was speaking to future party cadres from the eastern republics, and his formula (often quoted as "national in form, socialist in content") explains the logic of korenizatsiia: national languages and cultures would carry a socialist message. It is a statement of policy, so it shows the regime’s intentions, not how Central Asians experienced the delimitation.

Divide and rule, or making nations?

Historians disagree about why Moscow drew these borders. Cold War writers such as the British official Olaf Caroe (Soviet Empire, 1953) argued that the delimitation was a policy of divide and rule, which split the Turkic Muslims of Turkestan into small units so that they could not unite against Moscow. Since the archives opened, Arne Haugen (The Establishment of National Republics in Soviet Central Asia, 2003) and Adeeb Khalid (Making Uzbekistan, 2015) have shown that Central Asian communists themselves pressed for national units, and that the Uzbek nation in particular was a project of the Jadids before it was a Soviet one. Francine Hirsch (Empire of Nations, 2005) describes how ethnographers and local elites worked together to classify peoples, a process she calls "double assimilation": peoples were to be assimilated into nationalities, and nationalities into the Soviet state.

The two views can be weighed. The fear of pan-Turkic or pan-Islamic unity was real (Ryskulov’s Turkic republic had been rejected in 1920), but the new borders also gave each nation a territory, a capital, a written language and an elite. Those institutions outlived the USSR.

Soviet control and Stalinism, 1920s–1940

Between the late 1920s and 1940 Stalin’s policies remade Central Asia more completely than the revolution had. Collectivisation and the planned economy changed how people lived and worked; campaigns against Islam and the veil attacked their customs; and terror destroyed the first generation of Central Asian communists.

Political control and the 1936 Constitution

Each republic had its own Communist Party, government and supreme soviet, but real power lay with the party in Moscow. The first secretaries of the republican parties were often outsiders: Filipp Goloshchekin, a veteran Bolshevik, ran the Kazakh party from 1925 to 1933. The secret police (OGPU, from 1934 the NKVD) watched officials as well as the population. The 1936 Constitution kept the federal form of the USSR.

ARTICLE 17. To every Union Republic is reserved the right freely to secede from the U.S.S.R.

Constitution (Fundamental Law) of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, adopted 5 December 1936. Article 17 was a formality while Article 126 of the same constitution made the Communist Party "the leading core of all organizations of the working people, both public and state". Read together, the two articles show the gap between the federal structure of the USSR and its centralised one-party rule. In 1991 that federal structure turned out to matter, because it gave each republic the legal standing of a state.

Russification

From the mid-1930s the regime moved away from korenizatsiia towards Russification. The written languages of the region were changed twice. Arabic script was replaced by the Latin alphabet between 1927 and 1930, which cut new generations off from older Islamic and Jadid writing, and then by Cyrillic between 1938 and 1940, which brought the national languages closer to Russian. A decree of 13 March 1938 made Russian a compulsory subject in all non-Russian schools. Propaganda now described the Russians as the "elder brother" in a "friendship of peoples". Russians and Ukrainians held many key posts, especially second secretaries of the republican parties and heads of the security police.

The attack on Islam and the hujum

The campaign against Islam began in 1927. Sharia courts and waqf property were abolished between 1927 and 1930; thousands of mosques and madrasas were closed and their buildings turned into clubs, schools or warehouses; and many mullahs were arrested. Shoshana Keller (To Moscow, Not Mecca, 2001) shows that by the end of the 1930s organised Islamic life had been largely destroyed in public, although prayer, fasting, circumcision and religious burial continued in private.

At mass meetings in Tashkent, Samarkand and other towns, thousands of women burned their veils. But the hujum provoked a violent response. Many women who unveiled were attacked, raped or killed by relatives or neighbours, and many re-veiled. A top-secret report from Uzbekistan, based on information from the secret police, recorded the violence in 1928.

Aside from this, during this period 36 instances of murder and injury in connections with the women’s campaign have been noted, committed by relatives and people close to the victims. There were 34 cases of murder and injury of women for causes or by persons who remain unclear/unknown … and 34 cases of women being injured by husbands and relatives because they attended women’s meetings wishing to unveil, demanding divorce, etc.

Diakov, Report on Terror in the Villages of Uzbekistan, top-secret report covering January to November 1928 (RGASPI archive; translated in the Seventeen Moments in Soviet History collection). As an internal report it had no reason to hide the violence, so it is valuable evidence of resistance to the hujum; but its author classified attacks as "terror" by class enemies, and its figures, as he admits, are incomplete.

Douglas Northrop (Veiled Empire, 2004) argues that the hujum turned the paranji into a symbol of Uzbek national and Muslim identity, so veiling became more widespread for a time than before 1927. Marianne Kamp (The New Woman in Uzbekistan, 2006) stresses that many Uzbek women chose to unveil, and that the campaign drew on reforms Uzbek women and Jadids had begun themselves. Both agree that the hujum showed the limits of Soviet power in Central Asian homes. In the longer term, schooling, paid work and party membership changed women’s lives more than the hujum did, and the veil had largely disappeared from towns by the 1950s.

Collectivisation and cotton

Collectivisation reached Central Asia from 1929–1930. In the oases of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, the main aim was cotton. Moscow wanted "cotton independence" so that the USSR would not need to import cotton, so farms were forced to plant cotton in place of grain and were supplied with grain from Russia. Irrigation canals were dug, often by mass voluntary-compulsory labour (hashar): the Great Fergana Canal in Uzbekistan was built in 1939 in about six weeks by some 160,000 collective farmers. Uzbekistan became the cotton field of the USSR, a monoculture it kept until 1991.

Collectivisation brought resistance. Peasants slaughtered their animals rather than give them to the collective farms, and the Basmachi revived in parts of Tajikistan and Turkmenistan in 1930–1931. Rich farmers and religious figures were labelled kulaks or bai and deported, often to labour settlements in Ukraine, Siberia or Kazakhstan. At the same time industry grew: the Turksib railway linking Turkestan and Siberia (1927–1930), coal mines at Karaganda and copper works at Balkhash in Kazakhstan, and a chemical plant at Chirchiq in Uzbekistan.

Sedentarisation and the Kazakh famine, 1930–1933

The most destructive Soviet policy in Central Asia was the attack on Kazakh nomadism. In the 1920s most Kazakhs still lived by herding sheep, horses, cattle and camels, moving between summer and winter pastures. Soviet planners regarded nomadism as backward and wanted the steppe to supply meat and grain to the cities. Goloshchekin called for a "Little October" on the steppe: in 1928 the property of about 700 of the richest bai households was confiscated and their families deported.

From 1929 Kazakhs were forced into collective farms and settlement points, often with no shelter or fodder, while the state requisitioned grain and livestock to feed the cities and the army. The herds collapsed: Kazakhstan had about 40 million head of livestock at the end of the 1920s, and by 1933 the great majority had died, been slaughtered or been taken. Without their animals, nomads had nothing to eat. Hundreds of thousands fled to other parts of Kazakhstan, to Siberia, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, and across the border into China, carrying typhus and other diseases with them.

The chain of causes shows that the famine was the product of policy, not of a natural disaster, although a hard winter (jut) in 1927–1928 had already weakened the herds. Sarah Cameron (The Hungry Steppe, 2018) estimates that more than 1.5 million people died, about 38 per cent of all Kazakhs, the highest proportional loss of any Soviet nationality in the famines of 1930–1933. Other estimates range from about 1.15–1.42 million (Isabelle Ohayon, counting deaths from the famine itself) to over 2 million (the Kazakh demographer Makash Tatimov, who includes permanent emigration). Estimates differ because the censuses of 1926 and 1939 cannot separate the dead from those who left: about 600,000 Kazakhs left the republic for good.

Goloshchekin reported the flight of the nomads to Moscow as a sign of progress. In 1931 he described it in these words.

The Kazakh, who has never once left his aoul, who did not know the roads except for those of his nomadic itineraries, now travels from one region to another in the interior of Kazakhstan, integrates himself into Russian and Ukrainian kolkhozes, changes employment, leaves to work on construction sites in the Volga or Siberia.

Filipp Goloshchekin, first secretary of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan, 1931, quoted in T. Ryskulov, Collected Works (1997), translated by Isabelle Ohayon. Goloshchekin presented the starving refugees as nomads joining modern Soviet life. The passage is evidence of how the party leadership in Alma-Ata described, or concealed, the catastrophe; its date matters, because by 1931 local officials and the secret police were already reporting mass flight and deaths.

Kazakh officials raised the alarm. Uraz Isaev, head of the Kazakh government, wrote to Stalin in 1932, and Turar Ryskulov, then deputy head of the RSFSR government, wrote to Stalin, Molotov and Kaganovich in 1932 and again in March 1933 describing mass death. Goloshchekin was removed in 1933 and replaced by Levon Mirzoyan; requisitions were eased and some livestock was bought abroad. By then the Kazakh nomadic way of life had been destroyed. Kazakhs, who had been about 58 per cent of the republic’s population in 1926, made up 38 per cent in 1939. In Kazakh the famine is called the Asharshylyq.

The census graph shows that the famine began a long period in which Kazakhs were a minority in their own republic. Deportations in the 1930s and 1940s and the settlers of the 1950s kept the Kazakh share down until the 1970s; it rose again only with higher Kazakh birth rates and, after 1991, the emigration of Russians and Germans.

Was the Kazakh famine a genocide?

This question is debated by historians and is politically sensitive in Kazakhstan and Russia. Genocide in international law, under the UN Genocide Convention of 1948, requires an intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such, in whole or in part.

• Genocide. Soon after independence, a commission of Kazakhstan’s parliament chaired by the historian Manash Kozybayev concluded that the famine was genocide, and many Kazakh historians and much public opinion describe it in this way. Some early Kazakh accounts called it "Goloshchekin’s genocide", placing the blame on one man. Those who use the term point to the targeting of a nomadic people, Goloshchekin’s contempt for nomadic life, continued requisitions while people starved, and the treatment of refugees as class enemies.

• Intent contested. Cameron finds no evidence that Stalin set out to starve the Kazakhs, although Moscow expected settlement to cause hunger and did not foresee its scale; she stresses that the regime set out to destroy nomadism as a way of life. Ohayon finds no evidence of a deliberate plan to eliminate the Kazakhs as a group, and notes that the genocide claim in some Kazakh textbooks does not rest on the international legal definition. Robert Kindler (Stalin’s Nomads, 2018) argues that the genocide label hides the part played by local officials, many of them Kazakhs.

• Deliberate sacrifice. Niccolò Pianciola argues that, although mass death was not the aim, the leadership consciously accepted it as the price of extracting livestock for Moscow and Leningrad, within a "hierarchy of consumption" that put Kazakh herders at the bottom. He also stresses the colonial character of rule on the steppe, where European officials and settlers held power.

The debate turns on intent and on definitions more than on the facts, which are largely agreed. A careful judgement distinguishes the legal definition from wider uses of the word, attributes each view to its holders, and does not let the label decide how serious the catastrophe was. Kazakhstan commemorates the victims on 31 May, its day of remembrance for the victims of political repression and famine, and unveiled a monument to the famine’s victims in Astana in 2012.

Terror, purges and deportations

The Great Terror of 1937–1938 destroyed the leaders of the national republics. The Uzbek leaders Fayzulla Khodjaev (head of the Uzbek government) and Akmal Ikramov (first secretary of the Uzbek party) were tried with Nikolai Bukharin in the Moscow show trial of March 1938 and shot. Turar Ryskulov was shot in 1938. Former Alash Orda leaders were executed or died in prison, among them Bokeikhanov and Baitursynov (both 1937–1938); in Kyrgyzstan, 137 victims of executions in November 1938 were found in 1991 in a pit at Chong-Tash near Bishkek, among them leading Kyrgyz officials. Thousands of writers, teachers and former Jadids were arrested as "bourgeois nationalists" or "pan-Turkists".

Kazakhstan also became a land of camps and exile. The Karaganda corrective labour camp (Karlag) was one of the largest in the Gulag, and ALZhIR near Akmolinsk held the wives of men executed as "traitors to the motherland". In September and October 1937 about 172,000 Koreans were deported from the Soviet Far East to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the first deportation of an entire Soviet nationality, on the grounds that they might help Japan.

Society, culture and identity

Soviet rule also created many things Central Asians later valued. Literacy, very low in the 1926 census, rose rapidly through mass schooling in national languages. Universities, theatres, opera houses, academies of sciences and national histories were founded; the Central Asian State University opened in Tashkent in 1920. Each nation received a codified literary language and a national canon of writers and heroes, from the medieval poet Alisher Navoi for the Uzbeks to the epic hero Manas for the Kyrgyz. Women entered schools, factories and the party in growing numbers. A Soviet-educated native elite of teachers, engineers and officials grew up, loyal to the system that had promoted it.

How far did this amount to totalitarian control? The state controlled politics, the economy, publishing and the public practice of religion, and the terror showed that it could destroy anyone. But Islamic practice, family and kinship networks, local languages and customs survived, especially in the countryside and in the private sphere. Adeeb Khalid argues that Soviet rule destroyed the Jadid project of a modern Muslim nation while keeping its national frameworks, so that Central Asians became both Soviet and national. The table of Soviet policies weighs control against its limits.

The Second World War, 1941–1945

Military impact

Central Asia was far from the front, but it sent millions of soldiers to it. Figures vary between sources, but Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan each provided well over a million servicemen, and the five republics together several million; hundreds of thousands did not return. Units raised in the region fought at Moscow, Stalingrad and Berlin. The 316th Rifle Division, formed in Alma-Ata and Frunze under General Ivan Panfilov, fought in the defence of Moscow in November 1941. The story of "Panfilov’s 28" men who died stopping German tanks became a Soviet legend; an investigation by the Soviet military prosecutor in 1948 found that much of it had been invented by a journalist, a finding kept secret until 2015.

Central Asians received the title Hero of the Soviet Union, among them the Kazakh women Aliya Moldagulova, a sniper, and Manshuk Mametova, a machine-gunner, both killed in action. Some prisoners of war took a different path: the German army recruited Central Asian prisoners, many facing death by starvation in the camps, into the Turkestan Legion, and émigrés such as Mustafa Shokay, who died in Berlin in December 1941, had hoped Germany would back a free Turkestan. After 1945 returning legionaries were sent to the Gulag.

Political impact

The war tied Central Asians more closely to the Soviet state. Shared sacrifice and victory in the Great Patriotic War, as the war was called in the USSR, became a foundation of Soviet identity in the region. The regime also needed the support of believers, so it relaxed its war on religion. In October 1943 it created the Spiritual Administration of the Muslims of Central Asia and Kazakhstan (SADUM) in Tashkent, an official body that ran a small number of registered mosques and a madrasa in Bukhara under state supervision. Eren Tasar (Soviet and Muslim, 2017) shows that from then on Islam was managed by the state rather than simply suppressed. Political control did not weaken: the NKVD ran the special settlements of deported peoples.

Economic impact

In 1941–1942 hundreds of factories were evacuated eastwards from the western USSR, and many were rebuilt in Central Asia, above all in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. An aircraft factory from near Moscow became the Tashkent aviation plant; Rostov’s agricultural machinery works moved to Tashkent. Kazakhstan’s coal (Karaganda), lead, copper and other metals became vital once the Germans held the Donbas. Uzbek cotton and food went to the front. Workers laboured long hours, many in the labour army, and food shortages caused hunger and rising mortality in 1942–1943.

Social impact: evacuees and deported peoples

About a million evacuees, among them many Jews, intellectuals, scientists and orphaned children, came to Uzbekistan alone; Tashkent became known as the "city of bread". Rebecca Manley (To the Tashkent Station, 2009) shows that evacuees were not always welcome where housing and food were short. Uzbek families who adopted orphans became a celebrated part of the Soviet war story: the Tashkent blacksmith Shaahmad Shamahmudov and his wife adopted fourteen children of different nationalities.

Stalin also deported whole peoples accused of collaboration, or of possible collaboration, with Germany. Most were sent to Kazakhstan and Central Asia and placed in special settlements under NKVD control, where many died in the first years from hunger and disease.

Figures from NKVD records as reported by historians; other deported groups included Karachais, Balkars, Kalmyks, Poles and Greeks. Estimates of deaths in transit and the first years vary by group, from about a fifth to a quarter or more.

The consequences diagram shows how widely the war reached. By 1945 Central Asia had a new industrial base, Soviet patriotism, an officially managed Islam and a far more mixed population. Deported peoples were not allowed to leave their settlements until after Stalin’s death; the Chechens returned home from 1957, but the Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks were not allowed to, which led to conflict later.

Post-war reconstruction and the Khrushchev years, 1945–1964

Reconstruction and reorganisation, 1945–1953

Stalin’s last years brought renewed repression. Campaigns against "bourgeois nationalism" targeted historians and writers who praised pre-Soviet leaders; in Kazakhstan the historian Ermukhan Bekmakhanov was sentenced in 1952 for his favourable account of the nineteenth-century rebel Kenesary Kasymov. Hunger returned in 1946–1947. Cotton and irrigation expanded, and on 6 October 1948 an earthquake destroyed much of Ashgabat, killing tens of thousands; among the dead were the mother and brothers of the future Turkmen president Saparmurat Niyazov.

Central Asia also became the site of Soviet nuclear and space programmes. The Semipalatinsk Test Site in north-eastern Kazakhstan saw the first Soviet atomic test on 29 August 1949; there were about 456 nuclear tests there by 1989, over a hundred of them in the atmosphere or on the surface before 1963. Uranium was mined at Mailuu-Suu in Kyrgyzstan. The Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, built from 1955, launched Sputnik (1957) and Yuri Gagarin (1961).

Khrushchev and the Virgin Lands

Nikita Khrushchev, who led the USSR from 1953 to 1964, wanted a quick increase in grain. In February 1954 he proposed ploughing the "virgin and idle lands" of northern Kazakhstan, western Siberia and the Altai.

There are large amounts of undeveloped land in eastern areas. For example, there are up to 40,000,000 hectares of overgrown, idle and virgin lands, un-irrigated hayfields and pastures in 14 provinces of the Russian Republic and eight of the Kazakh Republic.

Nikita Khrushchev, report to the Central Committee plenum On Further Increasing the Country’s Grain Production and Putting Virgin and Idle Lands into Cultivation, 23 February 1954 (Seventeen Moments in Soviet History). Khrushchev was arguing a case to the party leadership, so he stressed the size of the opportunity. To planners in Moscow the steppe was "idle"; to Kazakh herders it was pasture.

The Virgin Lands campaign was launched at once. About 19 million hectares were ploughed in 1954 and a further 14 million in 1955, and more than 300,000 volunteers, mostly young Komsomol members from Russia and Ukraine, went to the new state farms. Leonid Brezhnev was sent to Kazakhstan in 1954 and led the Kazakh party in 1955–1956. The harvest of 1956 was a record, but yields fell when the thin steppe soils were exhausted, and dust storms in the early 1960s blew away topsoil from millions of hectares. Tselinograd ("Virgin Lands city", formerly Akmolinsk) became the region’s capital; it is now Astana.

For Kazakhs, the Virgin Lands brought new towns, roads and jobs, but also another wave of Slavic settlers. In 1959 Kazakhs made up only 30 per cent of the republic’s population, their lowest share. The north of Kazakhstan became largely Russian-speaking, which later shaped Kazakhstan’s caution towards Russia.

De-Stalinisation and the Thaw

De-Stalinisation after Khrushchev’s Secret Speech of 1956 brought the release of many prisoners and the rehabilitation of some purged leaders, including Ryskulov. Deported peoples were freed from the special settlement regime in 1956. Censorship eased: the Kyrgyz writer Chingiz Aitmatov became famous with Jamilia (1958), the story of a young woman who leaves her husband for love. Khrushchev also tried to reorganise the economy through regional economic councils (sovnarkhozy, 1957) and briefly grouped the four southern republics into a Central Asian Economic Region (1962), which Central Asian leaders saw as a threat to their republics’ powers. Native leaders gained ground: Sharof Rashidov became first secretary in Uzbekistan in 1959, and Dinmukhamed Kunaev in Kazakhstan in 1960.

The Brezhnev years: stability of cadres and white gold, 1964–1985

Leonid Brezhnev (1964–1982) promised officials stability of cadres, meaning that leaders would no longer be purged or moved about. In Central Asia this produced long-serving native first secretaries: Kunaev in Kazakhstan (1960–1962 and 1964–1986), Rashidov in Uzbekistan (1959–1983), Turdakun Usubaliyev in Kyrgyzstan (1961–1985), Jabbor Rasulov in Tajikistan (1961–1982) and Mukhamednazar Gapurov in Turkmenistan (1969–1985). Kunaev was a full member of the Politburo from 1971, a sign of how far a Central Asian could rise.

These leaders ran their republics through patronage networks based on region, family and clan. Moscow accepted local control, corruption and quiet Islamic practice in return for loyalty and plan fulfilment; some historians call this a "little deal". Living standards rose, with schools, hospitals, electricity and housing reaching the villages, and the Tashkent earthquake of 26 April 1966 was followed by the rebuilding of the city as a Soviet showcase.

The core of the bargain was cotton, known as "white gold". Uzbek cotton harvests rose to over 5 million tonnes a year by about 1980, most of the Soviet total, with Turkmenistan and Tajikistan the next largest producers. Children and students were sent to the fields every autumn, and heavy use of fertiliser, pesticides and defoliants poisoned land and water. The Cotton Affair showed the price of the system. From 1983 investigators from Moscow, led by Telman Gdlyan and Nikolai Ivanov, found that Uzbek officials had reported millions of tonnes of cotton that did not exist and been paid for it. After Rashidov’s death in 1983, thousands of Uzbek officials were dismissed or prosecuted, and many Uzbeks came to see the investigation as an attack on the nation.

Population grew fast. Central Asian birth rates were far higher than in the Slavic republics, so the region’s share of the Soviet population rose sharply between 1959 and 1989, while jobs in the countryside did not keep pace. Central Asians also served in the Soviet war in Afghanistan from 1979, some as interpreters, and the war brought the Afghan conflict to the region’s southern border.

The environmental impact of Soviet policies

The Aral Sea

In 1960 the Aral Sea, on the border of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, was the world’s fourth-largest lake, fed by the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers. From the 1950s Soviet planners diverted ever more of their water to irrigate cotton and rice. The Karakum Canal, begun in 1954, carried Amu Darya water hundreds of kilometres across the Turkmen desert, and many canals were unlined, so much of the water was lost to seepage and evaporation. The irrigated area of the Aral basin nearly doubled between 1950 and the mid-1980s.

The bar chart of the sea’s area shows the result. The sea’s level fell by about 20 centimetres a year in the 1960s and by 80–90 centimetres a year in the 1980s; the sea split into separate lakes, and its salinity rose until native fish died out. The fishing industry, which had employed tens of thousands at Aralsk in Kazakhstan and Muynak in Karakalpakstan (Uzbekistan), collapsed by the late 1980s. Winds lifted salt and pesticide residues from the dry seabed, and the population of the delta suffered high rates of anaemia, respiratory disease, cancer and infant mortality.

Under glasnost, Soviet writers and scientists could describe the disaster openly. In 1987 a correspondent for the literary newspaper Literaturnaia gazeta visited the former shore.

… it is simply inhumane and incompatible with the principles of socialism today for those in the upper echelons of the planned management of the economy to continue to take no notice of them, to continue to regard Central Asia as a subtropical paradise where rich Uzbeks (Tajiks, Turkmenians, Kirghiz) eat pilaf and melons and get rich on "white gold."

Vladimir Sokolov, staff correspondent for Uzbekistan, "Fate of the Aral Sea", Literaturnaia gazeta, 18 November 1987 (translated in Seventeen Moments in Soviet History). Writing in a Moscow paper in the second year of glasnost, Sokolov blamed central planners, not Central Asians, and attacked the Russian stereotype of rich cotton republics that the Cotton Affair had spread. The article shows how environmental damage became a national grievance in the late 1980s.

Nuclear testing, erosion and chemicals

• Semipalatinsk. About 456 nuclear tests between 1949 and 1989 exposed villagers to fallout, especially from the above-ground tests of the 1950s and early 1960s; estimates of the number of people affected run to hundreds of thousands, and studies have linked the tests to raised rates of cancer and birth defects.

• Virgin Lands erosion. Ploughing the dry steppe and planting wheat year after year exposed the soil to wind; dust storms in the early 1960s damaged millions of hectares.

• Chemicals. Pesticides (including DDT) and the defoliant butifos used in the cotton harvest contaminated water and land, and drainage water from the fields made rivers saline downstream.

• River diversion. A plan to divert Siberian rivers south to refill Central Asia’s rivers was debated for decades and cancelled in 1986.

The environmental impact was among the longest-lasting legacies of Soviet rule. It created disputes over water between upstream states (Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, which control the rivers’ sources) and downstream states (Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan) that continued after 1991. Kazakhstan’s Kokaral Dam (2005) restored part of the North Aral, but the southern sea, in Uzbekistan, continued to shrink.

Gorbachev and the road to independence, 1985–1991

Gorbachev’s policies in Central Asia

Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary from March 1985, saw Central Asia as a centre of corruption and stagnation. His first impact was an anti-corruption drive that replaced the long-serving Brezhnev leaders. The Cotton Affair purges continued in Uzbekistan. Saparmurat Niyazov replaced Gapurov in Turkmenistan in December 1985, and Usubaliyev was removed in Kyrgyzstan.

In Kazakhstan, on 16 December 1986, Kunaev was replaced by Gennady Kolbin, a Russian from outside the republic. On 17–18 December thousands of students and young Kazakhs demonstrated in Alma-Ata. The Jeltoqsan ("December") protests were broken up by troops and police; officially two people died, but unofficial accounts give higher figures, and thousands were detained or expelled from universities and the party. The student Kayrat Ryskulbekov was sentenced to death, commuted to imprisonment, and died in prison in 1988. Moscow called the protests "Kazakh nationalism"; in Kazakhstan they are remembered as the first open protest for national rights in the late Soviet Union.

Glasnost allowed the region’s history and environment to be discussed openly, from the Kazakh famine and the purges to the Aral Sea and the Semipalatinsk tests. Perestroika disrupted supply chains and subsidies on which the republics depended. In 1989–1990 every republic passed a language law making its titular language (Kazakh, Uzbek, Kyrgyz, Tajik or Turkmen) the state language, which alarmed Russian speakers.

Protest, resistance and ethnic violence

New movements appeared. The Nevada–Semipalatinsk movement, founded in February 1989 by the poet Olzhas Suleimenov, collected over a million signatures against nuclear testing; the last test at Semipalatinsk took place in October 1989, and President Nazarbayev closed the site on 29 August 1991. In Uzbekistan the popular front Birlik ("Unity", 1988) campaigned for the Uzbek language, the Aral Sea and an end to the cotton monoculture, and Erk ("Freedom", 1990) split from it. The Islamic Renaissance Party was founded in 1990.

Economic hardship, overcrowding and the weakening of authority also produced violence between communities. In June 1989 Uzbek crowds attacked Meskhetian Turks in the Fergana valley, killing about a hundred, and the Soviet government evacuated tens of thousands of Meskhetians. In February 1990 riots in Dushanbe followed rumours that Armenian refugees would be given scarce housing. In June 1990 clashes between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks over land in Osh and Uzgen killed about 300 people officially, more by other estimates. The violence showed Moscow’s weakness and convinced many Central Asian leaders that firm control mattered more than reform.

Sovereignty, the referendum and the coup

Gorbachev replaced Brezhnev-era leaders with a new generation, who soon built their own power. Nursultan Nazarbayev became first secretary in Kazakhstan and Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan in June 1989; during 1990 they, Niyazov and the Tajik leader Kakhar Makhkamov all took the new title of president of their republics. In Kyrgyzstan, after the Osh violence, the supreme soviet chose a physicist outside the party machine, Askar Akayev, as president in October 1990. During the parade of sovereignties all five republics declared sovereignty, from Uzbekistan in June 1990 to Kyrgyzstan in December.

Sovereignty was not independence. In the Union referendum of 17 March 1991, voters in all five republics backed a "renewed federation" by over 90 per cent, the highest yes votes in the USSR. Nazarbayev was one of the strongest supporters of Gorbachev’s new Union Treaty, which was due to be signed on 20 August 1991.

The vertical timeline of 1986–1991 shows how quickly the situation changed after August 1991. The hardline coup by the State Committee on the State of Emergency on 19–21 August destroyed the Union Treaty and the authority of the Communist Party. Akayev opposed the coup at once, while Karimov, Niyazov and Nazarbayev waited to see who would win. Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan declared independence on 31 August, Tajikistan on 9 September and Turkmenistan on 27 October, after a referendum in which about 94 per cent voted yes. Kazakhstan, with its large Russian population, waited until 16 December, the last Soviet republic to do so.

On 8 December 1991 the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus signed the Belovezha Accords, declaring that the USSR had ceased to exist and founding a Commonwealth of Independent States without consulting the Central Asians. The Central Asian presidents met at Ashgabat on 12–13 December and decided to join, as founding members on equal terms. On 21 December eleven republics signed the Alma-Ata Declaration.

In order to ensure international strategic stability and security, allied command of the military-strategic forces and a single control over nuclear weapons will be preserved … With the formation of the Commonwealth of Independent States the USSR ceases to exist.

Alma-Ata Declaration, signed by the leaders of eleven former Soviet republics, Alma-Ata, 21 December 1991 (translated by Helen Fedor for the Library of Congress). The meeting place mattered: holding it in Kazakhstan’s capital gave the Central Asian states the status of founders of the Commonwealth of Independent States, not latecomers to a Slavic club. The stress on common military command and nuclear control shows how much the new states still expected to share with Russia.

Why did the republics become independent?

The factors diagram groups the causes. Martha Brill Olcott (Central Asia’s New States, 1996) describes independence as unexpected and largely unwanted: the republics depended on Moscow for subsidies, markets, security and fuel, and their leaders were Soviet officials, not nationalist rebels. On this view, the trigger came from outside the region, in the coup and in the Slavic leaders’ decision to dissolve the Union.

Other historians give more weight to developments inside the region. Seventy years of Soviet nation-making had produced states in waiting, with borders, capitals, languages, national histories and native elites, so that when the Union collapsed power passed smoothly to the republican leaderships. Jeltoqsan, Nevada–Semipalatinsk, Birlik and the language laws show real national feeling, sharpened by the grievances that glasnost exposed. The best explanation combines these: protest and national feeling shaped the republics’ politics, but did not by themselves bring independence, which the leaders accepted in late 1991 and then used to consolidate their own power.

Nation-building after 1991: the shared challenges

The five new states faced the same problems at once. Each had to create the institutions of a state (an army, a currency, borders, a foreign ministry), rebuild an economy designed to serve the USSR, and give its citizens a national identity, all while the leaders who had run the Soviet republics tried to stay in power.

Economic collapse and reform

The end of Soviet subsidies, the break-up of the single economy and the collapse of the rouble zone caused a deep depression. Output fell in every republic in the early 1990s, by over a third in Kazakhstan and by more than half in Tajikistan, according to World Bank estimates, and poverty rose sharply. Each state introduced its own currency in 1993–1995: the Kyrgyz som (May 1993) first, then the Kazakh tenge and Turkmen manat (November 1993), the Uzbek sum (1993–1994) and the Tajik rouble (1995, replaced by the somoni in 2000). The states then chose different paths: rapid liberalisation in Kyrgyzstan and, more selectively, Kazakhstan; gradual, state-controlled change in Uzbekistan; and almost no reform in Turkmenistan.

Many Russians, Germans, Jews, Koreans and other minorities emigrated in the 1990s, taking skills with them. In the 2000s, migration ran the other way for work: hundreds of thousands of Tajiks, Kyrgyz and Uzbeks worked in Russia, and the money they sent home (remittances) became one of the largest parts of the Tajik and Kyrgyz economies.

Presidential power and opposition

Four of the five republics were led for decades by one man (Nazarbayev, Karimov, Niyazov and Rahmon), three of them the last Soviet first secretaries of their republics, who built super-presidential systems: presidents with power to appoint governments and regional governors, rule by decree and dissolve parliament, confirmed by referendums and elections that international observers did not judge free or fair. Opposition parties, independent media and unofficial Islam were controlled or banned. Kathleen Collins (Clan Politics and Regime Transition in Central Asia, 2006) argues that informal networks of kin, region and patronage (clan politics), inherited from the Soviet period, shaped these regimes more than formal constitutions did.

National identity, Islam and minorities

Every republic built a national story around a hero from before Russian rule: Amir Timur (Tamerlane) in Uzbekistan, the epic hero Manas in Kyrgyzstan, the Samanid ruler Ismoil Somoni in Tajikistan, Oghuz Khan and Niyazov’s own Ruhnama in Turkmenistan, and the Kazakh khans and Alash leaders in Kazakhstan. All five allowed a revival of Islam, building mosques and promoting "traditional" Islam, while treating independent Islamic groups as a threat; the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and the transnational party Hizb ut-Tahrir were banned. Minorities faced new pressures: Russians and other Slavs lost their dominant position, Uzbeks in southern Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan became minorities in another nation’s state, and Pamiris, Karakalpaks and others sought recognition.

Foreign relations: Russia, China and the United States

The republics practised what Nazarbayev called a multi-vector foreign policy: keeping Russia as the main security partner and economic link, while drawing in China and the West to balance it. Alexander Cooley (Great Games, Local Rules, 2012) argues that Central Asian rulers used the rivalry of the great powers to win aid, investment and support for their regimes, so they were players in a "new Great Game", not just its prizes.

The table of organisations shows that Russia’s influence ran mainly through security and migration, China’s through trade, loans and pipelines, and the United States’ through the war in Afghanistan. Turkmenistan, declared permanently neutral, joined none of the alliances.

Kazakhstan, 1917–2020

The Soviet inheritance

Kazakhstan’s Soviet history was the most violent and the most transforming in the region. The Alash Orda government of 1917–1920; the Kirghiz (Kazakh) ASSR of 1920 and the Kazakh SSR of 1936; the famine of 1930–1933 and the loss of about 40 per cent of the Kazakh people; the Karlag camps and the deported peoples; the Virgin Lands and the Semipalatinsk tests; and Kunaev’s long rule and the Jeltoqsan protests of 1986 all left their mark. In 1989 Kazakhs were only about 40 per cent of the population, and Russians about 38 per cent, concentrated in the north.

Economic and social policies

Kazakhstan inherited large reserves of oil, gas, coal, uranium and metals. Nazarbayev opened the economy to foreign investors: Chevron formed a joint venture at the giant Tengiz oilfield in 1993, the Caspian Pipeline Consortium began carrying Kazakh oil to the Black Sea in 2001, and an international consortium developed the offshore Kashagan field. After the depression of the 1990s, oil exports and high world prices brought rapid growth in the 2000s, and Kazakhstan’s income per head became the highest in Central Asia. A National Fund (2000) saved part of the oil revenue. The Kazakhstan 2030 strategy (1997) set long-term goals for development.

Growth was unevenly shared. Privatisation in the 1990s created a small group of wealthy businessmen close to the president’s family, and the economy depended heavily on oil. Inequality between the oil-rich west, the cities and the rural south remained a source of grievance.

Political leadership and opposition

Nazarbayev was president from 1990 to 2019. A new constitution of 1995, approved by referendum, made the presidency dominant; in 2007 parliament removed term limits for the "First President", and a law of 2010 gave him the title Elbasy ("Leader of the Nation") with lifelong privileges. Opponents were imprisoned, exiled or brought into the regime. In 1997 the capital moved from Almaty to Akmola in the north, renamed Astana in 1998, a move that strengthened the state’s presence in the Russian-majority north. On 16 December 2011, police fired on striking oil workers and their supporters in Zhanaozen, killing at least 14 people according to official figures.

Nazarbayev resigned on 19 March 2019 and handed the presidency to Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, who won the election of June 2019. The capital was renamed Nur-Sultan in his honour. Nazarbayev kept power as head of the Security Council and of the ruling party, so the transfer was managed from above.

National identity, ethnicity and marginalised groups

Kazakhstan had to build a nation in a state where the titular nation was not a majority. Nazarbayev promoted two identities at once: a Kazakh national identity based on language, history and the memory of the famine, and a civic "Kazakhstani" identity for all citizens, with an Assembly of the People of Kazakhstan (1995) to represent ethnic groups and Russian kept as an official language. Kazakh language use was promoted gradually, and in 2017 the government decided to move the Kazakh alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin script.

The population changed quickly. Hundreds of thousands of Russians and most of the country’s ethnic Germans emigrated in the 1990s, while ethnic Kazakhs from Mongolia, China, Uzbekistan and elsewhere were encouraged to "return" as oralman (repatriates). By the 2021 census, Kazakhs made up about 70 per cent of the population. Opposition activists and independent journalists were among those who met the limits of the regime’s tolerance.

Foreign relations

Kazakhstan inherited about 1,400 Soviet nuclear warheads. Nazarbayev chose to give them up: Kazakhstan signed the Lisbon Protocol in 1992 and ratified the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in December 1993, the last warheads went to Russia by 1995, and in Project Sapphire (1994) the United States removed about 600 kilograms of weapons-grade uranium. Denuclearisation won Kazakhstan Western goodwill. It stayed Russia’s closest partner, as a member of the CSTO and the Eurasian Economic Union, while welcoming Chinese investment and pipelines; Xi Jinping announced the Belt and Road Initiative at Nazarbayev University in Astana on 7 September 2013.

Successes and challenges. Kazakhstan avoided ethnic conflict despite its divided population, grew richer than its neighbours, gave up nuclear weapons and kept good relations with Russia, China and the West. Its challenges were authoritarian rule, corruption, dependence on oil and inequality, shown in Zhanaozen in 2011.

Uzbekistan, 1917–2020

The Soviet inheritance

Uzbekistan was the heartland of the Jadids and of the Kokand Autonomy, and the centre of the Basmachi revolt. Created as a union republic in 1924, it included the ancient cities of Samarkand and Bukhara and most of the Fergana valley; its capital moved from Samarkand to Tashkent in 1930. It experienced the hujum, the purge of Khodjaev and Ikramov, wartime evacuation, the cotton monoculture, Rashidov’s long rule and the Cotton Affair, and the Aral disaster in Karakalpakstan. It was the most populous republic of the region, with about 20 million people in 1989.

Economic and social policies

Islam Karimov, president from 1990 to 2016, rejected shock therapy in favour of slow, state-controlled reform, which spared Uzbekistan the worst of the early 1990s depression but kept the economy closed. The state kept control of cotton, buying it at fixed prices, and gold; it controlled currency exchange, which created a large black market. Forced labour in the cotton harvest, including children, students, teachers and doctors, was criticised internationally; from 2013 the International Labour Organization monitored the harvest and child labour declined.

Political leadership and opposition

Karimov banned the opposition parties Birlik and Erk in 1992–1993; the Erk leader Muhammad Salih, who had stood against Karimov in the presidential election of December 1991, went into exile. The National Security Service, the successor of the Soviet KGB, controlled political life. After bombs exploded in Tashkent on 16 February 1999, killing 16 people, the government blamed Islamic militants and the IMU, whose fighters made armed incursions from Tajikistan in 1999 and 2000, and imprisoned thousands of Muslims accused of "extremism".

On 13 May 2005, after armed men freed prisoners from the jail in Andijan, thousands gathered in the town square to protest. Troops fired on the crowd. The government gave an official death toll of 187; human rights organisations and witnesses put it at several hundred or more. The Andijan massacre led to European Union sanctions and the expulsion of the US base, and Karimov turned back towards Russia and China.

Karimov died in September 2016. His prime minister, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, was elected president in December 2016 and began a cautious opening: he made the currency convertible in September 2017, released some political prisoners, reduced forced labour in the cotton fields, eased travel and improved relations with Uzbekistan’s neighbours, settling border and water disputes with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. The political system remained authoritarian.

National identity, ethnicity and marginalised groups

Karimov made Amir Timur, the fourteenth-century conqueror from Shahrisabz, the symbol of Uzbek statehood: a statue of Timur replaced one of Karl Marx in central Tashkent in 1994. Uzbek replaced Russian in public life, and the alphabet was officially changed to Latin script in 1993, though Cyrillic stayed in common use. Tajik speakers in Samarkand and Bukhara, Karakalpaks in the Aral region, and devout Muslims outside the official mosques were among the groups who found the national project least welcoming.

Foreign relations

Uzbekistan swung between partners. It left the Collective Security Treaty in 1999, offered the United States the Karshi-Khanabad (K2) base after 11 September 2001, expelled it after Andijan in 2005, rejoined the CSTO in 2006 and left again in 2012. Relations with neighbours were often tense, over water, borders and Tajikistan’s Rogun Dam, until Mirziyoyev’s reforms.

Successes and challenges. Uzbekistan kept stability and avoided the economic collapse and civil war of its neighbours, built a strong national identity and, after 2016, began to reform. The costs were a closed economy, forced labour, the repression of Islam and opposition, and the violence of Andijan.

Kyrgyzstan, 1917–2020

The Soviet inheritance

The Kyrgyz suffered heavily in the revolt of 1916 and the flight to China (the Ürkün), and from settler violence in Semirechye during the civil war. Their territory became the Kara-Kirghiz Autonomous Oblast in 1924, the Kirghiz ASSR in 1926 and a union republic in 1936, with its capital at Pishpek, renamed Frunze in 1926 (Bishkek since 1991). Kyrgyz nomads were collectivised and settled in the 1930s, and the republic’s leaders were shot in the Great Terror; their remains lie at Chong-Tash, now the Ata-Beyit memorial. Under Usubaliyev (1961–1985) Kyrgyzstan was a quiet, poor, largely rural republic, known abroad through the novels of Chingiz Aitmatov. The Osh violence of June 1990 brought Askar Akayev to power.

Economic and social policies

Akayev followed the advice of the International Monetary Fund more closely than any of his neighbours. Kyrgyzstan was the first to leave the rouble zone, with its own currency in May 1993, freed prices, privatised land and small businesses, and in 1998 became the first former Soviet republic to join the World Trade Organization. The reforms did not stop a severe fall in output, and the economy came to rest on the Kumtor gold mine, run by a Canadian company, on re-exporting Chinese goods through its bazaars, and on remittances from migrants in Russia, which by the 2010s were equal to about a quarter or more of GDP.

Political leadership and opposition

In the early 1990s Western observers called Kyrgyzstan an "island of democracy", with relatively free media and political parties. Akayev became more authoritarian later in the decade, extending his rule through referendums while his family’s business interests grew. After flawed parliamentary elections in 2005, protests that began in the south spread to Bishkek, and on 24 March 2005 crowds stormed the presidential offices; Akayev fled to Russia. This Tulip Revolution brought Kurmanbek Bakiyev to power, but his rule became as corrupt and authoritarian as his predecessor’s. In April 2010 protests in Bishkek ended in shooting near the presidential offices, killing over 80 people, and Bakiyev fled.

Under the interim president Roza Otunbayeva, a referendum in June 2010 approved a parliamentary constitution, the first in Central Asia. In 2017 Almazbek Atambayev handed power to his elected successor Sooronbay Jeenbekov, the first peaceful transfer between elected presidents in the region. The system remained fragile: Atambayev was arrested in August 2019 after a deadly armed standoff at his home in Koi-Tash, and in October 2020 protests against flawed elections forced Jeenbekov to resign and brought the nationalist politician Sadyr Japarov to power.

National identity, ethnicity and marginalised groups

Akayev promoted the Epic of Manas as the foundation of Kyrgyz identity, and also the civic slogan "Kyrgyzstan, our common home". Uzbeks, about 15 per cent of the population and concentrated around Osh and Jalal-Abad in the south, were the largest minority. In June 2010, after Bakiyev’s fall, violence between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in Osh and Jalal-Abad killed about 470 people, most of them Uzbeks, according to an independent international inquiry, and temporarily displaced around 400,000. Many Uzbeks afterwards felt excluded from public life. The divide between the north (Bishkek, Chui) and the south also shaped politics.

Foreign relations

Kyrgyzstan was unique in hosting both a US base, at Manas airport near Bishkek (2001–2014), and a Russian airbase at Kant (from 2003). It used their rivalry to raise rents, then closed the US base under Russian pressure. It joined the Eurasian Economic Union in 2015, which eased conditions for its migrants in Russia, and borrowed heavily from China for roads and power lines.

Successes and challenges. Kyrgyzstan was the most politically open state in the region, with competitive elections and a peaceful handover in 2017. But it suffered three overthrows of presidents (2005, 2010, 2020), deadly ethnic violence in 2010, corruption and economic dependence on gold, Russia and remittances.

Tajikistan, 1917–2020

The Soviet inheritance

Eastern Bukhara, the core of present-day Tajikistan, was the last stronghold of the Basmachi under Ibrahim-bek. Created in 1924 as an ASSR inside Uzbekistan, Tajikistan became a union republic in 1929, gaining the northern region of Khujand (Leninabad) but not the Tajik-speaking cities of Samarkand and Bukhara, a loss that Tajik nationalists still resent. The Pamiri peoples of the mountainous east, who are mostly Ismaili Muslims, received the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast. Under Soviet rule Tajikistan was the poorest republic: it grew cotton in the Vakhsh valley and produced aluminium and hydroelectric power, and its party leaders came mostly from the northern Leninabad region. Riots in Dushanbe in February 1990 showed the tensions beneath the surface.

Political leadership and civil war, 1992–1997

Independence brought a struggle for power between regional groups. Makhkamov was forced out after the August coup, and in November 1991 the former first secretary Rahmon Nabiyev won the presidential election. In spring 1992 rival demonstrations in Dushanbe set the old elites from Kulyab and Leninabad against an alliance of democrats, the Islamic Renaissance Party and Rastokhez nationalists, many of them from the Gharm valley and Gorno-Badakhshan. Fighting began in May 1992. The pro-government Popular Front, led by the former convict Sangak Safarov, retook Dushanbe in December 1992 with the help of Russian forces and Uzbekistan, and carried out mass killings of Gharmis and Pamiris.

The diagram of the sides shows that the Tajik civil war was a war between regions as much as between Islamists and secularists. Emomali Rahmonov (later Rahmon), from Kulyab, became head of state in November 1992 and president in 1994. The United Tajik Opposition (UTO) fought on from bases in Afghanistan. Estimates of the dead range from about 20,000 to over 100,000, with 50,000–60,000 often cited, and about a million people were displaced. UN-mediated talks from 1994 led to the General Agreement on the Establishment of Peace and National Accord in Tajikistan, signed in Moscow on 27 June 1997, which gave the opposition 30 per cent of government posts and legalised the Islamic Renaissance Party.

Rahmon then gradually removed the former opposition from power. The Islamic Renaissance Party, the only legal Islamic party in Central Asia, lost its last seats in parliament in 2015 and was banned as a "terrorist" organisation the same year. In 2015 Rahmon was given the title "Leader of the Nation", and a referendum in 2016 allowed him to stand for re-election without limit. Armed clashes in Khorog, the capital of Gorno-Badakhshan, in 2012 showed continuing tension with the Pamiris.

Economic and social policies

The war destroyed much of an already poor economy. Recovery after 1997 depended on aluminium, cotton and, above all, remittances from Tajik migrants in Russia, which at times equalled a third or more of GDP, one of the highest shares in the world (World Bank). Rahmon made the Rogun Dam on the Vakhsh river a national cause, selling shares to citizens, and construction resumed in 2016 despite Uzbek objections that it would cut their water.

National identity and foreign relations

Tajik identity was built around the Persian-language heritage and the Samanid dynasty of the ninth and tenth centuries: a statue of Ismoil Somoni replaced Lenin in central Dushanbe, and the currency (2000) and the highest mountain bear his name. Tajikistan depended on Russia, which kept the 201st military base, its largest abroad, and guarded the Afghan border until 2005. The long border with Afghanistan made Tajikistan a route for drug trafficking and a front line during the Taliban years (1996–2001). China became its largest creditor in the 2010s.

Successes and challenges. Tajikistan ended a civil war through a negotiated, UN-mediated peace, rare in the region, and restored order. But the peace became one-man rule, the opposition was destroyed, and the economy remained the poorest in the former USSR, dependent on Russia for jobs and security.

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Turkmenistan, 1917–2020

The Soviet inheritance

The Turkmen, defeated at Geok Tepe in 1881, fought on in the civil war, where the Turkmen leader Junaid Khan held power in Khiva and led Basmachi bands until the late 1920s. The Turkmen SSR was created in 1924 from the Turkmen lands of the former Turkestan ASSR and the Khorezm republic. Its society was organised in tribal groups such as the Teke, Yomut and Ersari, and the Soviet authorities redrew its political life around a republic and a written national language, first in the Latin and from 1940 in the Cyrillic alphabet. Collectivisation from 1929–1930 settled many herders and provoked revolts in the Karakum desert, after which some Turkmen fled to Iran and Afghanistan. Cotton, grown in the irrigated oases, became the main crop, and the Karakum Canal, begun in 1954, carried Amu Darya water across the desert to irrigate it. The Great Terror removed the republic’s first leaders, among them the head of its government, Gaygysyz Atabayev, who was removed in 1937 and shot in 1938. Natural gas fields such as Shatlyk (from the 1970s) made it a major Soviet gas producer. The Ashgabat earthquake of 1948 destroyed the capital. Saparmurat Niyazov, an orphan of the earthquake raised in a Soviet children’s home, became first secretary in 1985.

Political leadership and opposition

Niyazov, president from 1990 until his death on 21 December 2006, built the most extreme personality cult in the former USSR. He took the title Turkmenbashi ("Head of the Turkmen"), renamed months of the year after himself and his mother, put up a gold statue of himself that turned to face the sun, and in 1999 was made president for life. His book the Ruhnama ("Book of the Soul", 2001), a mixture of national history, moral guidance and autobiography, became a compulsory text in schools, universities and even the driving test. No opposition was allowed. After an alleged assassination attempt in November 2002, hundreds were arrested, and several former ministers disappeared in prison.

Niyazov’s successor, the dentist and deputy prime minister Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow (president 2007–2022), restored the ordinary names of the months, the pensions Niyazov had cut in 2006 and the full length of school and university courses, and quietly retired the Ruhnama. He then built a cult of his own as Arkadag ("Protector"), and the political system remained closed.

Economic and social policies

Turkmenistan has among the largest natural gas reserves in the world, including the Galkynysh field discovered in 2006. The state kept the economy largely under its control and used gas revenue to provide free gas, electricity and water and cheap fuel to citizens, alongside lavish building projects in Ashgabat. Niyazov also closed hospitals outside the capital and cut education. Dependence on gas left the country exposed: when Russia stopped buying most Turkmen gas after a pipeline explosion in 2009, the economy turned to China, which completed the Central Asia–China gas pipeline from Turkmenistan in December 2009 and became its main customer.

National identity and foreign relations

National identity was built around the Turkmen tribes, the Oghuz Khan legends, the Akhal-Teke horse and carpets, and the Ruhnama; Russian and Uzbek minorities were pushed out of public jobs and Russian-language education was reduced. In foreign policy Turkmenistan chose isolation. On 12 December 1995 the UN General Assembly recognised its permanent neutrality, which Niyazov used to keep out of the CSTO and other alliances and to limit outside criticism. It became only an associate member of the CIS in 2005.

Successes and challenges. Turkmenistan kept stability and provided subsidised services from gas income, and its neutrality kept it out of regional conflicts. It became one of the most repressive and isolated states in the world, with no political opposition, a personality cult and an economy dependent on one product and one buyer.

Comparing the five republics

The five republics shared a Soviet past but took different paths after 1991. The comparison table summarises the differences, which are useful for testing any claim about one republic against the others.

Two patterns stand out. Where the Soviet-era leader survived (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan), the state stayed stable but authoritarian; where the old leadership was replaced or split (Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan), politics was more open but more violent. And natural resources shaped each state’s choices: oil and gas allowed Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan to buy stability, while the poorest states depended most on Russia.

Perspectives and debates

Central Asia was closed to most foreign researchers until the late 1980s, and Soviet archives opened only in the 1990s, so its history has been rewritten more than once. Four debates run through the study.

Was Soviet rule colonial?

Cold War historians, and many national historians in the region since 1991, describe Soviet rule as a continuation of Russian colonialism: Moscow drew borders, imposed cotton, settled Slavs on Kazakh land and replaced national leaders with Russians. Pianciola’s work on the Kazakh famine stresses the colonial hierarchy of European officials and settlers over nomads. Other historians see the USSR as a different kind of empire. Terry Martin (The Affirmative Action Empire, 2001) shows that the Soviet state deliberately built nations, promoting national languages, territories and elites, and Khalid argues that the Soviet project aimed to transform all its citizens, Russians included, and so differed from European colonial rule, which kept colonised peoples separate and unequal. Most now agree that the USSR combined imperial control with real nation-building, and that Central Asians took part in both.

How far did Soviet rule change Islam and society?

Alexandre Bennigsen, writing in the 1980s, argued that a hidden "parallel Islam" of Sufi brotherhoods survived Soviet rule and could threaten it. Later research, with access to archives, presents a more mixed picture. Keller shows how far the state destroyed Islamic institutions in the 1930s; Tasar shows that after 1943 the state and official Muslim clergy worked together through SADUM; Northrop and Kamp show that campaigns such as the hujum were shaped and limited by Central Asian responses. On this view, Islam survived as part of national custom more than as political opposition, which helps explain why independent states could take over its management after 1991.

Was independence won or received?

Olcott’s view that independence was "unexpected" and unwanted fits the referendum of March 1991, the hesitation of leaders during the coup and Kazakhstan’s late declaration. Historians who stress agency point to Jeltoqsan, the anti-nuclear movement, Birlik and the language laws, and to the way the new presidents used sovereignty from 1990 to build their own power. The two views differ more in emphasis than in substance: national feeling was real, but it did not take the form of mass movements for secession as in the Baltic republics.

What explains the regimes after 1991?

The views in the table can be combined. Soviet legacies (elites, borders and networks) explain why four states became presidential autocracies; differences in resources, leadership and regional balance explain why Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan diverged; and the competition of Russia, China and the United States gave every regime outside support.

Applying the ideas in exam questions

Paper 3: revolution and civil war

Paper 3: Stalinism

Paper 3: Soviet legacies

Paper 3: the reasons for independence

Paper 3: nation-building

Self-check

• To do:

  I can describe Russian rule in Central Asia before 1917, the Jadids and the revolt of 1916.

• To do:

  I can explain the economic and social impact of the revolution and civil war, including famine and settler violence.

• To do:

  I can explain how the Kokand Autonomy, Alash Orda and the Basmachi resisted Soviet power, and how the Bolsheviks responded with force and concessions.

• To do:

  I can explain the difference between an ASSR and a union republic and trace how each of the five republics was created between 1918 and 1936.

• To do:

  I can weigh the "divide and rule" and "nation-making" interpretations of the national delimitation.

• To do:

  I can explain Soviet political control, the 1936 Constitution and Russification, and judge the extent of totalitarian control.

• To do:

  I can explain the hujum and the attack on Islam, and their limits.

• To do:

  I can explain the causes and consequences of the Kazakh famine and present the genocide debate fairly.

• To do:

  I can explain the military, political, economic and social impact of the Second World War, including the deported peoples.

• To do:

  I can explain the impact of Khrushchev’s and Brezhnev’s policies, including the Virgin Lands, stability of cadres, cotton and the Cotton Affair.

• To do:

  I can assess the environmental impact of Soviet policies: the Aral Sea, Semipalatinsk, erosion and chemicals.