Nomads and Soviet Rule: Central Asia under Lenin and Stalin

Description

The nomads of Central Asia were already well accustomed to life under the power of a distant capital when the Bolsheviks fomented revolution on the streets of Petrograd. Yet after the fall of the Tsar, the nature, ambition and potency of that power would change dramatically, ultimately resulting in the near eradication of Central Asian nomadism. Based on extensive primary source work in Almaty, Bishkek and Moscow, Nomads and Soviet Rule charts the development of this volatile and brutal relationship and challenges the often repeated view that events followed a linear path of gradually escalating violence. Rather than the sedentarisation campaign being an inevitability born of deep-rooted Marxist hatred of the nomadic lifestyle, Thomas demonstrates the Soviet state's treatment of nomads to be far more complex and pragmatic. He shows how Soviet policy was informed by both an anti-colonial spirit and an imperialist impulse, by nationalism as well as communism, and above all by a lethal self-confidence in the Communist Party's ability to transform the lives of nomads and harness the agricultural potential of their landscape. This is the first book to look closely at the period between the revolution and the collectivisation drive, and offers fresh insight into a little-known aspect of early Soviet history. In doing so, the book offers a path to refining conceptions of the broader history and dynamics of the Soviet project in this key period.

Get the book

Amazon.com

Search the book

eBay.com

Search the book

Other editions

• 

  Nomads and Soviet Rule: Central Asia under Lenin and Stalin

  • 2018-06-14
  • 272 pages
  • Ebook
  • Bloomsbury Publishing

Similar books

• 

  Nomads and Soviet Rule: Central Asia Under Lenin and Stalin

  By Alun Thomas

  This is the first book to look closely at the period between the revolution and the collectivisation drive, and offers fresh insight into a little-known aspect of early Soviet history.

• 

  Stalin's Nomads: Power and Famine in Kazakhstan

  By Robert Kindler

  This is the first English-language translation of an important and harrowing history, largely unknown to Western audiences prior to Kindler’s study.

• 

  Everyday Life in Central Asia: Past and Present

  By Jeff Sahadeo, Russell Zanca

  5. Karpov, Ocherki p0 istorii Turkmenii, 14—15; Irons, The Yomut Turkmen, 5—7. 6. See Saray, The Turkmens, especially chapter 4; Irons, The Yomut Turkmen, 7; A. Kuropatkin, Turkmeniia i Turkmeny, (St. Petersburg: n.p., 1879); 31. 7.

• 

  The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan

  By Sarah Cameron

  153 But the case of Kazakhstan's Little October would seem at odds with Scott's conclusions about authoritarian state planning. In its very design, this state-sponsored social engineering project invited and encouraged local involvement ...

• 

  Curative Powers: Medicine and Empire in Stalin's Central Asia

  By Paula Michaels

  Bonnell, Victoria. “The Peasant Woman and Stalinist Political Art of the 1930s.” American Historical Review 98 (February 1993): 55–82. Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Edited by John B. Thompson. Cambridge, Mass., 1993.

• 

  The Silent Steppe: The Story of a Kazakh Nomad Under Stalin

  By Mukhamet Shai͡akhmetov

  "Here is a rare book. It is the first-person story of Mukhamet Shayakhmetov, born into a family of nomadic Kazakh herdsmen in 1922, the year of the consolidation of Soviet...

• 

  Mobilities, Boundaries, and Travelling Ideas: Rethinking Translocality Beyond Central Asia and the Caucasus

  By Manja Stephan-Emmrich, Philipp Schröder

  This collection brings together a variety of anthropological, historical and sociological case studies from Central Asia and the Caucasus to examine the concept of translocality.

• 

  The Central Asian Revolt of 1916: A collapsing empire in the age of war and revolution

  By Alexander Morrison, Cloe Drieu, Aminat Chokobaeva

  The 1916 Revolt was a key event in the history of Central Asia, and of the Russian Empire in the First World War. This volume is the first comprehensive re-assessment of its causes, course and consequences in English for over sixty years.

• 

  The Kazakh Khanates between the Russian and Qing Empires: Central Eurasian International Relations during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

  By Jin Noda

  In The Kazakh Khanates between the Russian and Qing Empires Jin Noda portrays the structure of the foreign relations that existed between the Kazakh Chinggisid sultans and the Russian and Qing empires during the 18th and 19th centuries

• 

  Russian-Soviet Unconventional Wars in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Afghanistan [Illustrated Edition]

  By Dr. Robert F. Baumann

  ... Terry Hammond, Red Flag Over Afghanistan (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1984), 80-85, 132-37; Bradsher, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union, 153-60; ... York: St. Martin's Press, 1988); David Gibbs, "Does the USSR Have a 'Grand Strategy'?