Writing and representing the Russian Conquest of Central Asia

Alexander Morrison (Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan) will present a paper “Writing and representing the Russian Conquest of Central Asia” at the Research Seminar “The Boundaries of History” of the Center for Historical Research and the Faculty of History of the Higher School of Economics in Saint Petersburg at 18:00 on May 29, 2014.

Alexander Morrison is Professor of History at Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan. In 2007–2013 he was Lecturer in Imperial History at the University of Liverpool. In 2000–2007 he was Prize Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford, where he completed his PhD thesis “Russian Rule in Samarkand 1868–1910: A Comparison with British India.” This work was published under the same title by Oxford University Press in 2008. Alexander Morrison is currently writing a history of the Russian conquest of Central Asia.

Russian literature and empire has proved a burgeoning field over the last thirty years, emerging in parallel with an ‘imperial turn’ in historiography which has led to a welcome focus on Tsarist Russia as a multi-ethnic state. However, while historical writing on Russian encounters with non-Russian peoples has been fairly evenly spread between the Western Borderlands, the Caucasus, the Volga-Ural Region, Siberia and Central Asia, literary scholarship is inevitably dominated by Russia’s intense cultural relationship with the Caucasus, a region that captured the Russian romantic imagination like no other. As Susan Layton has noted, ‘The conquest produced a vast literary Caucasus’, and Katya Hokanson has argued for the crucial role of this encounter in forging a sense of Russian narodnost’ in the 19^th century, but in Central Asia, the site of 19^th century Russia’s other great encounter with the Muslim world and the exotic Asian ‘other’, there was apparently no corresponding impact on the public or even the elite literary consciousness. While Vasilii Vereshchagin's Central Asian canvases provided vivid visual representations of Russian expansion in the region, no author ever became as synonymous with Russian imperialism in Central Asia: there was no Central Asian Lermontov, and no Russian Kipling. However, despite the lack of a 'high' literary tradition, there was in fact a rich legacy of Russian writing on the conquest of Central Asia in the form of campaign memoirs, journal articles and military historiography, which together represent a diverse and now largely ignored written legacy. This paper will analyse both the process of composition and the purposes for which these works were used by the Russian military establishment, explore their particular tropes and ideological preoccupations, and also attempt to establish what, if any, impact they had on educated society in Russia.

Venue: Saint-Petersburg, Promyshlennaya st., 14 A, office 323

Contact Information: Maria Ukhvatova

E-mail: mukhvatova [AT] hse [DOT] ru