The Central Asian Revolt of 1916: A Collapsing Empire in the Age of War and Revolution

382 Pages·2020·4.253 MB·English

by  Alexander Morrison, Cloé Drieu, Aminat Chokobaeva

The Central Asian Revolt of 1916
Resisting the Military Draft of 1916. From Bayaly Isakeev Kirgizskoe
vosstanie 1916 (1932).
The Central Asian

Revolt of 1916
A collapsing empire in the age
of war and revolution
Edited by
Aminat Chokobaeva, Cloé Drieu
and Alexander Morrison

Manchester University Press
Copyright © Manchester University Press 2020
While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press,
copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter
may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of
both author and publisher.
Published by Manchester University Press
Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA
www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk
British Library Cataloguing- in- Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 5261 2942 0 hardback
First published 2020
The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any
external or third- party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee
that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Cover image: S. Chuikov, ‘The Kyrgyz rebellion against tsarism in 1916’, 1934–36.
© Kyrgyz National Museum of Fine Arts

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK
Contents
List of maps and tables vii
Notes on contributors viii
Acknowledgements xii
Note on translation, transliteration and dates xiv
Glossary and abbreviations xv
Editors’ introduction 1
Aminat Chokobaeva, Cloé Drieu and Alexander Morrison
1 Why in Central Asia, why in 1916? The revolt as an
interface of the Russian colonial crisis and the World War 27
Tomohiko Uyama
2 The exemption of peoples of Turkestan from universal
military service as an antecedent to the 1916 revolt 45
Tatiana Kotiukova

3 The 1916 uprisings in Jizzakh: economic background
and political rationales 71
Akmal Bazarbaev and Cloé Drieu

4 The “virtual reality” of colonial Turkestan: how Russian
officials viewed and represented the participation of the
local population in the 1916 revolt 95

Oybek Mahmudov

5 Fears, rumours, violence: the tsarist regime and the
revolt of the nomads in Central Asia, 1916 126
Jörn Happel
v
vi Contents
6 When the nomads went to war: the uprising of 1916
in Semirech’e 145
Aminat Chokobaeva
7 Scales of violence: the 1916 Central Asian uprising in the
context of wars and revolutions (1914– 1923) 169
Niccolò Pianciola
8 Violent acculturation: Alexei Kuropatkin, the Central Asian
Revolt, and the long shadow of conquest 191
Ian W. Campbell
9 Refugees, resettlement and revolutionary violence in
Semirech’e after the 1916 revolt 209
Alexander Morrison
10 Links across time: Taranchis during the uprising of 1916
in Semirech’e and the “Atu” massacre of 1918 227
Ablet Kamalov
11 Making political rebellion “primitive”: the 1916 rebellion in
the Kazakh steppe in long- term perspective (c. 1840– 1930) 256
Xavier Hallez and Isabelle Ohayon
12 From rebels to refugees: memorialising the revolt of 1916
in oral poetry 289
Jipar Duishembieva
13 A Qırghız verse narrative of rebellion and exile by Musa
Chaghatay uulu 308
Daniel Prior
14 Domesticating 1916: the evolution of Amangeldi Imanov
and the creation of a foundation myth for the Kazakh

Soviet Socialist Republic (1916– 1939) 327

Danielle Ross

Select bibliography 347
Index 356
Maps and tables
Maps
1 Russian Central Asia in 1916 xix
2 The revolts in the district of Jizzakh 83
Tables
1 Population and revolt in the district of Jizzakh 79
2 Array of workers for work in the rear of the army from
the district of Jizzakh 82

vii
Notes on contributors
Akmal Bazarbaev graduated with a master’s degree in Central Asian
Studies and Original Source Studies from Tashkent State Institute of
Oriental Studies. In 2018, he completed his PhD thesis on property
rights, land- water use and agrarian transformation in the Hungry Steppe
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is currently a
Junior Researcher at the Institute of History, Academy of Sciences of
Uzbekistan.
Ian W. Campbell is Associate Professor of History at the University
of California, Davis. His first book, Knowledge and the Ends of Empire:
Kazak Intermediaries and Russian Rule on the Steppe, 1731–1 917, was
published by Cornell University Press in 2017. He is currently working
on a transregional history of borderlands violence in the Russian
Empire.
Aminat Chokobaeva is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Nazarbayev University.

Her interests include the uprising of 1916 in Semirech’e as well the

broader issues of state- building and governance in the region. She has

previously published on the Soviet historiography of the uprising of 1916
and the politics of memory in independent Kyrgyzstan.
Cloé Drieu is Research Fellow at CNRS in the Centre d’études turques,
ottomanes, balkaniques et centrasiatiques (CETOBaC). She specialises
in the history of Central Asia during the interwar period through the
lens of Uzbek cinema (long- feature films); she is the author of Fictions
Nationales, Cinéma, empire et nation en Ouzbékistan (Karthala, 2013),

now translated for Indiana University Press (2019). She now works on
the impact of World War I in Central Asia and, since 2014, has also been
researching the Soviet soldiers who fought in Afghanistan (1979–1 989).
Together with colleagues at the EHESS (School of Advanced Studies in
viii