A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

chapter seventeen
Soviet Central Asia
We have seen how in October 1924 the Turkic and Iranian Muslims of
Central Asia attained nationhood and statehood through a unique historical
process that was directed from Moscow and in which they themselves
had little active participation.The identification of the languages
and nationalities, their classification, and subsequent national delimitation
resembled more the work of scientists studying animal or vegetable
species and then assigning their location in a zoo or a botanical garden
than a nation’s internal rise toward self-determination.Nevertheless, the
scientists, in this instance Russian linguists, anthropologists, and politicians,
had done fairly competent work: one proof is that when the failed
coup of August 1991 against Gorbachev’s reforms brought about the
collapse of the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan,
and Uzbekistan have forcefully asserted their national identity as independent
republics.
A frequent statement in the voluminous Sovietological and post-
Sovietological literature produced in the West is that the borders created
through national delimitation are “artificial,” and minority pockets in
many parts of Central Asia are mentioned as proof of that; moreover,
incidents like the bloody fighting between the large Uzbek minority and
Kyrgyz nationalists that occurred during June 1990 in the Osh region of
Kyrgyzstan are adduced as portents of catastrophic upheavals in the
future.The answer is that perfectly monoethnic and monolingual populations
in a territory they consider their homeland and dominate politically
are a rare occurrence in any part of the world, and that virtually
every national state must devise a compromise on how to deal with one
or more minorities.The related question of the official language versus
dialects or minority languages is also sometimes mentioned as proof that
the borders are “artificial”: Uzbekistan, we are told, is really a mosaic of
local Turkic idioms.Here too the dichotomy between the official or
“correct” language and an assortment of regional or social dialects,
225