Central Asia in the Imperial Russian Mind

Central Asia in the Imperial Russian Mind Alexander M. Martin (bio) Matthias Golbeck, Russland in Zentralasien: Autobiografische Texte der Eroberung und Erschließung Turkestans (1860–1917) (Russia in Central Asia: Autobiographical Texts on the Conquest and Penetration of Turkestan [1860–1917]). 339 pp. Vienna: Böhlau, 2022. ISBN-13: 978-3412525125. €80.00. Katya Hokanson, A Woman's Empire: Russian Women and Imperial Expansion in Asia. 360 pp. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2023. ISBN-13: 978-1487545604. $80.00. What sort of empire was imperial Russia? No one seems to agree. V. I. Lenin called it a "prison of nations."1 After the "imperial turn" of the 1990s, historians emphasized its tradition of toleration and diversity.2 Some recent scholarship has argued that its colonialism was mainly directed against the Russian people itself, or that it was mostly a unitary state and thus no empire at all.3 Lately, something like the prison-of-nations thesis has come back to life, and there are calls for Russian studies itself to be "decolonized."4 [End Page 406] The disagreement is hard to adjudicate because all these narratives operate at a high level of generalization. One remedy in such cases is to reduce the scale of investigation to a level where objects appear in finer-grained detail. When master narratives of modernization seemed to be at an impasse in the 1970s, one response was the development of microhistory.5 Similarly, we can study Russia as an empire by zeroing in on concrete actors and specific aspects of empire. A number of scholars have done this in recent years, examining both how empire was imagined in 19th-century Russian culture6 and how individual historical actors experienced it in everyday reality.7 The books under review in this article, both of which study Russian memoirs about Central Asia, represent valuable contributions to this literature. I discuss first the book by Matthias Golbeck, then that by Katya Hokanson, and conclude with some thoughts about these books' relevance to our ongoing debate about decolonization. _______ Matthias Golbeck's Russland in Zentralasien offers a broad overview of Russian memoir accounts of Central Asia from the Russian conquest in the 1860s to World War I. The book originated as a dissertation defended at the University of Bonn in 2019. An important source of inspiration for it was a collaborative Swiss and German research project that Golbeck's [End Page 407] Doktorvater Martin Aust had helped direct in 2013–16. According to Golbeck, that project, titled "Imperial Subjects: Autobiographical Practices and Historical Change in the Continental Empires of the Romanovs, Habsburgs, and Ottomans (Mid-19th to Early 20th Centuries)," took Benedict Anderson's idea of nations as "imagined communities," applied it to empires, and explored the role of "discourses of imperial self-description and identification" in creating these communities (15).8 Golbeck follows the lead of "Imperial Subjects" by taking up the notion of autobiographical discourses as a constituent element in the construction of empires and asking how it applies to the specific case of the Russians in Central Asia or, as Golbeck calls it, Turkestan. Answering this question requires a source base of texts. As the first chapter explains, Golbeck's starting point was a list of 139 texts concerning Central Asia in Petr Andreevich Zaionchkovskii's bibliography of prerevolutionary Russian memoirs.9 From this list, he selected 41 authors who were diverse in age, social status, and profession and who wrote at different times and in various genres (autobiographies, diaries, and accounts of specific events or travels). Almost all turned out to be men; Golbeck explains that he was aware of almost no texts by women until the project was essentially finished. Golbeck's selection process reflects the overall conception of his book. His aim is to construct a more or less representative sample of texts and then analyze them in relation to certain topics. The book accordingly has a thematic structure. Within each chapter, individual authors are treated as representative of larger groups, such as military officers versus civilian travelers or authors from the 1870s versus authors from the 1890s. This approach gives the reader a strong sense of the way particular themes are...

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