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Author(s):  
А.А. Улунян

В статье исследуется роль и место «азиатской периферии» в период установления британо-российских отношений в 1924 г. Британские архивные документы позволяют сделать вывод о сохранявшейся значимости для британской стороны действий СССР в сопредельных с британской Индией странах. Одновременно британские дипломатические службы и разведывательное сообщество обращало особое внимание на складывавшуюся в советской Центральной Азии обстановку с целью выяснения возможного её влияния на британские позиции в регионе, а также советское продвижение на Восток в приграничные государства. В статье делается вывод о стремлении лейбористского правительства Макдональда избежать обострения взаимоотношений с СССР во имя достижения главной цели – подписания и ратификации договоров с Москвой несмотря на очевидные активные действия последней в индийском прикордонье. Автор приводит документальные свидетельства и оценки британскими дипломатами, а также военными действий СССР как в самой Центральной Азии, где советское руководство начинало проводить новую национально-территориальную политику, так и в приграничных с ней странах. The study examines the role of the Asian periphery in the establishment of diplomatic relations between the USSR and Great Britain in 1924. British archival documents suggest that the United Kingdom regarded Soviet activities in countries bordering British India as extremely important. At the same time, the British foreign office and intelligence were paying close attention to the situation that was unfolding in Soviet Central Asia, trying to assess its impact on the British standing in the region, as well as the possible Soviet expansion eastwards into the neighboring countries. The article concludes that MacDonald's Labour government wanted to avoid confrontation with the USSR in order to attain its main goal — signing and ratifying agreements with the Soviet state, despite it being rather active near the borders of India. The author cites documents and assessments by British diplomats and military officers. These sources cover both Soviet actions in Central Asia itself, where the USSR leadership was beginning to pursue a new national and territorial policy, as well as in the countries bordering that region.


2022 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Uluğ Kuzuoğlu

Abstract This article rethinks the history of Chinese script reforms and proposes a new genealogy for the Chinese Latin Alphabet (CLA), invented in 1931 by Chinese and Russian revolutionaries in the Soviet Union. Situating script reforms within a global information age that emerged out of the nineteenth-century communications revolution, the article historicizes the CLA within a technologically and ideologically contrived Sino-Soviet space. In particular, it shows the intimate links between the CLA and the Unified New Turkic Alphabet (UNTA), which grew out of a latinization movement based in Baku, Azerbaijan. The primary purpose of the UNTA was to latinize the Arabic script of the Turkic people living in Soviet Central Asia, but it was immediately exported to the non-Turkic world as well in an effort to latinize languages across Eurasia and ignite revolutionary internationalism. This article investigates the forgotten figures involved in carrying the Latin alphabet from Baku to Shanghai and offers a new framework to scrutinize the history of language, scripts, and knowledge production across Eurasia.


Islamology ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 84
Author(s):  
Filipp Khusnutdinov

Among the theologians who influenced the processes of re-Islamisation in late Soviet and early post-Soviet Central Asia, the name of Sayyid Mahmud Tarazi (ca. 1895– 1991) deserves special attention. Better known by his honorary nickname Altin-khan-tura, he was an authoritative Turkestani emigrant and prominent scholar. The present article offers preliminary research on the dissemination in Soviet Uzbekistan of his most famous work: the first complete interlinear translation of the Qur’an with commentary in Central Asian Turki. In less than half a century, this work has undergone more than ten publications in various regions of the Muslim world. As archaeographic and field research indicates, Tarazi’s translation has been featuring in personal library collections of some local religious figures, including prominent “official” and “unofficial” theologians from the region, and could have impacted their own work. Since the personality of Tarazi has not yet wholly entered the academic discourse on “Soviet Islam”, the article also provides a brief biography of the scholar in the context of his direct and “secret” links to local 'ulamā. The focus of this article on the history of the dissemination of Tarazi’s Qur’an translation allows illuminating some of the re-Islamisation processes that took place in Central Asia during the period under review.


2021 ◽  
pp. 187936652110685
Author(s):  
David Siegel

During the 1990s, a conventional wisdom emerged, based on literature going back decades, that political decentralization might be among the most effective forces for democratization. If ordinary people could participate in autonomous local governments, democracy would be built from the ground up, ultimately shaping the entire political system. Once decentralization reforms were implemented across the world, however, the results were disappointing. Authoritarianism not only thrived at the local level, it could also undermine democratization at the national level. Thus, local-national transference still held, but sometimes as a poison. In this context, the case of post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan is an anomaly. Here, the relative success of political decentralization—rather than its failure—nevertheless failed to spur democratization at the national level. I argue that this is because decentralization allowed national authorities to appease international donors while they consolidated their own power. Moreover, while decentralization empowered local communities, it did so in ways that personalized local authority and pitted local and national authorities against one another, resulting in intense localism and antagonistic center-local relations that undermined any democratic transference. The case study findings are based on ten months of field research, which includes interviews with local and national officials, ordinary villagers, and representatives of NGOs and international organizations.


Al-Farabi ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 76 (4) ◽  
pp. 114-131
Author(s):  
W. Fierman ◽  

In the late Soviet era, the domains of use of languages were largely a function of ethnic groups’ status in the Soviet administrative hierarchy. Russian was at the top; below it were the eponymous languages of the non-Russian 14 “Union Republics;” all other languages were used in relatively narrow sets of domains. The “Union Republic languages” included five in Central Asia-- Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Turkmen, and Uzbek. These languages’ use in fewer domains than most other Union Republic languages profoundly affected their expansion into new domains after 1991. Two other factors affecting this primarily rooted in the Soviet era were the ethnic composition of the republics upon the USSR’s collapse and their populations’ language repertoires. In addition to these “Soviet heritage factors,” language policy and ecology have also been shaped by each country’s nation building project, its international orientation, the nature of its political system, and its economic resources. Russian today remains more widely used in high prestige domains in Central Asia than in all other former Soviet republics except Belarus. However, Russian is less used in a wide variety of domains in Central Asia than it is in “autonomous” units of the former RSFSR.


2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 165-176
Author(s):  
F. R. Khusnutdinov

There are still many lacunae in the biographies of the Russian and Turkestan prominent religious scholars of the 19th and 20th centuries. In some cases, the biographies of their acquaintances and counterparts could provide some important data which are missing elsewhere. The present article describes two episodes from the history of acquaintance of the renowned Tatar theologian Musa Bigeev and Sayyid Mahmud Tarazi, a prominent scholar from Turkestan, who was forced to emigrate from early Soviet Central Asia and later became one of the leaders of the Turkestan diaspora in the Middle East. The author cites information from the biographies of both scholars and argues that they may have temporarily belonged to the same émigré circles, and were acquainted with each other. A research of their respective biographies indicates that Bigeev and Tarazi met in Bombay in the 1930s and also may have known each other for twenty years prior to their emigration.The subject addressed in this article is of particular significance in reconstructing the history of contacts between the Russian and Turkestan religious scholars during their emigration and in the period preceding it.Key words: Musa Bigeev, Sayyid Mahmud Tarazi, biography, emigration, Kabul, Bombay, Bukhara.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-258
Author(s):  
Subrata Biswas

The post-cold war world has become susceptible to multiple non-traditional security threats that are no less formidable than the traditional security threats. Drug trafficking poses one such serious non-traditional security threat and drug abuse provides its fuel. Not only do the drugs destroy the very fabric of human resource in a region where trafficking operates and thereby reduces communities to hollow card-boxes, but such trafficking also generates loads of dirty money which fosters the growth of non-State actors engaged in subversive activities. This article argues that following the fall of the erstwhile Soviet empire, the entire Central Asia region has become a hotbed of such non-traditional security threats which is being nourished by an enormous demand for drug abuse in Russia and the scenario spells trouble for India as well. The article also contemplates a constructive role for Russia in this regard.


2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 007-017
Author(s):  
Agnieszka KONOPELKO

The Central Asian region has never been a priority area of EU external policy, although the European Union Global Strategy underlines its support for multilateralism in global strategy. The European Union has been more actively engaged in the region since the launch of the New Great Game in Central Asia between China, Russia and the U.S. Following the “neighbors of neighbors” concept, the EU shapes its relations with post-Soviet Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) on the basis of multilateral strategies and bilateral partnership agreements. The first comprehensive EU strategic document focused on post-Soviet Central Asia, The EU and Central Asia: Strategy for a New Partnership, was concluded in 2007. Despite some allegations that the strategy should take into account the individual needs and specificities of each country, it should be emphasized that the strategy intensified mutual relations between Central Asia and the EU, as well as the EU’s institutional presence in the region, mainly in terms of political and diplomatic dialog. Due to a dynamic approach, the analysis undertaken in the research study allowed for the presentation of positive and negative tendencies, changes and reversals in the implementation of the particular components of the previous EU strategy towards Central Asian countries over time. It should be noted that most objectives outlined in its normative strategy towards Central Asia were achieved to a limited extent, especially in terms of democratization and civil society.


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