Conquest, Colonialism, and Nomadism on the Eurasian Steppe

Sahadeo, Jeff.
Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, Volume 4, Number 4, Fall 2003 (New Series), pp. 942-954 (Review)
Published by Slavica Publishers DOI: 10.1353/kri.2003.0063

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Review Essays

Conquest, Colonialism, and Nomadism on the Eurasian Steppe

JEFF SAHADEO

Michael Khodarkovsky, Russias Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 15001800. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. 290 pp. ISBN 0-253-33989-8. $39.95 (hardcover). Virginia Martin, Law and Custom in the Steppe: The Kazakhs of the Middle Horde and Russian Colonialism in the Nineteenth Century. Richmond: Curzon, 2001. 244 pp. ISBN 0-7007-1405-7. $80.00 (hardcover). Chinara Ryskulbekovna Israilova-Khar ekhuzen, Traditsionnoe obshchestvo kyrgyzov v period russkoi kolonizatsii vo vtoroi polovine XIXnachale XX v. i sistema ikh rodstva [Traditional Kirghiz society under Russian Colonization in the Second Half of the 19th and Early 20th Centuries and Their System of Relationships]. Bishkek: Ilim, 1999. 213 pp. ISBN 5-8355-1038-1. Russian advances across the steppe lands generated sweeping changes for both the conquerors and the conquered. Acts from the conquest of Kazan in 1554 to the defeat of the Kyrgyz tribes in the late 19th century defined both the character and status of Russia as an empire and forced the steppe and Central Asian peoples to alter not just political arrangements but ways of life. Imperial expansion nonetheless offered a range of opportunities as well as dangers for all the actors involved. Ideas and practices of empire defied, even as they created, simple dichotomies of colonizers and colonized. Colonial relationships produced new and complex dynamics of political power and social interaction as well as transforming ways of seeing the world. Understanding the impact of colonialism, these studies emphasize, is essential to understanding at once the development of the state and the manifold changes in the increasingly diverse, multiethnic society of imperial Russia. Empire remains a hot topic among historians of Russia and Eurasia. Studies over the last decade have pointed to the transformative force of imperial
Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 4, 4 (Fall 2003): 94254.

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expansion and the colonial encounter both along the borderlands of the Russian state and in the metropole. 1 Two major developments facilitated the importance of studying Russia as an empire. First, the collapse of the Soviet Union not only opened the eyes of scholars of the region to continued repression of non-Russian nationalities but opened the doors of regional archives and libraries to foreigners.2 At the same time the explosive field of colonial studies appeared, inspired by Edward Saids seminal text, Orientalism.3 Even if Said and other colonial theorists convinced of the centrality of empire building to the politics and culture of Great Britain and France remained ambivalent on
Among recent works on empire in imperial Russia, see the articles in Imperial Dreams, Russian Review 53, 3 (July 1994): 33181; Susan Layton, Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995, 2000); Theodore R. Weeks, Nation and State in Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier, 18631917 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996); Daniel R. Brower and Edward J. Lazzerini, eds., R ussias Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 17001917 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Adeeb Khalid The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Jane Burbank and David Ransel, eds., Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); Robert P. Geraci, Window on the East: National and Imperial Identity in Late Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Geraci and Khodarkovsky, eds., Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion, and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Paul W. Werth, At The Margins of Orthodoxy: Mission, Governance, and Confessional Politics in Russias Volga-Kama Region, 18271905 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002); and Daniel Brower, Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire (London: Curzon, 2003). 2 Important studies of Russia as an empire had emerged, of course, beforehand: on the steppe and Central Asia, see Thomas G. Winner, The Oral Art and Literature of the Kazakhs of Russian Central Asia (Durham: Duke University Press, 1958); Elizabeth E. Bacon, Central Asians under Russian Rule: A Study in Culture Change (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966); Richard A. Pierce, Russian Central Asia 18671917: A Study in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960); Edward Allworth, ed., Central Asia: A Century of Russian Rule (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967); Hlne Carrre dEncausse, Rforme et revolution chez les Musulmans de lEmpire russe (Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1978). In general, however, most Western historians of Russia and the Soviet Union remained unaware of the importance of empire to past and present ideologies and policies, despite the prophetic works of Carrre dEncausse that demonstrated the continuing legacy of imperial policies and predicted a collapse of the Soviet Union along national lines. See her LEmpire clat (Paris: Flammarion et Cie, 1978); appearing in English as Decline of an Empire: The Soviet Socialist Republics in Revolt, trans. Martin Sokolinsky and Henry A. La Farge (New York: Newsweek Books, 1979). 3 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978).
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the application of their conclusions to Russia, numerous scholars working on the Russian borderlands clearly saw the parallels between their subjects and those invoked in studies of West European empires.4 Empire, in fact, as numerous scholars have argued, played an even more important role in Russia than elsewhere in Europe, for it was through the acquisition of territories from the 16th to the 20th centuries that Russians sought to overcome their sense of political weakness and marginality and to prove their always-fragile status as a truly European state.5 The intersection of Russian imperialism and the pastoralism of the steppe nomads provides a particularly useful lens to view motivations and processes of empire and their impact on politics and economics, society, and culture. Empire building on the steppe followed a long period during which tribes emerging from the region had held control over Moscow through the Golden Horde. Charles J. Halperin and Donald Ostrowski have noted the influences, cultural as well as political, of the tribes on the Slavic princedoms of the era. 6 From the 16th century onward, therefore, as power in the region shifted increasingly to the Muscovite state, Michael Khodarkovsky argues that Russian leaders employed steppe peoples as a gauge against which they judged their rising power, their identity as conquerors, and increasingly, their civilization. Even as Russians proclaimed their military and cultural superiority over steppe nomads, they recognized the legacy and continuing power of tribal leaders to shape the practices and politics of empire in Central Eurasia. Steppe peoples,
Saids legacy for the study of Russia as an empire, although undeniable, remains at once in dispute and rarely fully explored. Some authors have simply noted his seminal influence: see Katya Hokanson, Literary Imperialism, Narodnost, and Pushkins Invention of the Caucasus, Russian Review 53, 2 (July 1994): 338; and David Wolff, To the Harbin Station: The Liberal Alternative in Russian Manchuria, 18981914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). Nathaniel Knight has questioned the application of Saids theories on Orientalism to Russia, but Adeeb Khalid has convincingly demonstrated his scope and meaning for the case of the tsarist empire. See Nathaniel Knight, Grigor ev in Orenburg, 18511862: Russian Orientalism in the Service of Empire? Slavic Review 59, 1 (Spring 2000): 74100; and the exchange between Knight and Khalid: Orientalism in Russia, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1, 4 (Fall 2000): 691727. 5 For the evolution of Russia as a European empire, see Wortman, Scenarios of Power, vol. 1 and Mark Bassin, Russia between Europe and Asia: The Ideological Construction of Geographical Space, Slavic Review, 50, 1 (Spring 1991): 117; see also Jeff Sahadeo, Creating a Russian Colonial Community: City, Nation, and Empire in Tashkent, 18651923 (Ph. D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2000). 6 Charles J. Halperin, Russia and the Golden Horde: The Mongol Impact on Medieval Russian History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); and Donald Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols: Cross-Cultural Influences on the Steppe Frontier, 13041589 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
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meanwhile, as Virginia Martin and Chinara Ryskulbekovna IsrailovaKhar ekhuzen argue, sought to exploit the machinery of colonial rule and adapt new practices of empire to their own cultures in the face of tsarist administrators and, subsequently, waves of Slavic colonists. Such efforts grew more and more difficult as both the ideology and the exercise of empire proved hostile to the very existence of pastoral societies. Pastoral economies required interaction with sedentary neighbors, which had far-reaching consequences. As Anatoly Khazanov has argued, the trade and exchanges with settled peoples necessary for the functioning of nomadic societies generated constant tension among members of those societies, threatening ideals of independence and social equality.7 Khazanov, whose studies on nomadism preceded the extension of modern European empires, has tended to view the development of nomadic societies in a cyclical pattern of war and peace, prosperity and deprivation, power and weakness, as they rise and fall due to shifting balances of power with adjacent sedentary societies, as well as climatic conditions and numerous other factors. As all these authors demonstrate, however, the arrival of Russian conquerors portended a far more dramatic, and far more traumatic, form of contact for pastoral societies than any previous relationship with sedentary units. Russians came not only with new, more powerful weapons but, even more important, with an imperial ideology evolved to vaunt the superiority of their settled way of life and to demand that their new subjects eventually abandon nomadism altogether. Such a demand strained to the limit the adaptive flexibility of Kazakh and Kyrgyz nomadic societies, which both Virginia Martin and Chinara Israilova-Kharekhuzen argue was at the center of their ability to survive in the harsh and unforgiving steppe and mountains. These environments required constant movement of peoples and generated constant conflict for usable land. Even more challenging than dealing with the administrative measures to promote their own settlement was the encounter with hundreds of thousands of Russian colonists who arrived on the steppe in the late 19th century. These settlers, as Virginia Martin argues, played a far larger role in altering nomadic societies than the power and laws of the tsarist government. As Khodarkovsky shows, as early as the 16th century, the colonial encounter, the reality on the ground between colonizer and colonized, subverted the goals of Russian imperial theorists and state leaders as often as they enforced them. All the authors, but most explicitly Virginia Martin, wrestle with the central dilemma of those working within the new paradigm of colonial studies.
7

Anatoly Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World, 2nd ed., trans Julia Crookendon (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994).

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On the one hand, new works on colonialism seek not only to give a voice, and agency, to the colonized but to explore the wider significance of their role in shaping the colonial encounter and the ideology and practices of empire itself.8 As such, not only can the colonized engage and manipulate a colonial system, but they can alter its very foundations. More recent work has questioned the dichotomy of colonizer and colonized, as the workings of empire, for example, often favored native elites over poor settlers.9 On the other hand, scholars want not to minimize the destructive power of the conquerors. European colonialism was an extremely violent process, and brutal military force remained the ultimate arbiter of disputes between agents of empire and those they subjugated. A continued willingness to resort to violence to overcome resistance and subdue rebellions at any cost demonstrated the centrality of empire to both the image and practice of rule in European empires, particularly in Russia. Taken together, these recent studies of empire on the steppe demonstrate its manifold effects on people and institutions from the tsar and central policy makers in St. Petersburg to pastoral Kyrgyz nomads in the Tien-Shan mountains. Michael Khodarkovskys work reveals at once the complexity and variable impact, as well as the continuing centrality, of the formation of a steppe empire to Russia in the centuries following the collapse of the Golden Horde. The conquest of its former conquerors allowed Muscovite leaders to develop new imperial forms of identity. Primary among these was that of a Christian empire, in direct descent from Rome and Byzantium. Christianity offered ambitious Muscovite leaders a global significance to empire and marked its clear difference from the animist, pagan, Buddhist, and Islamic faiths predominant among the steppe peoples. Tsarist statesmen, however, worked to define other contrasts that would bolster their status and superiority over the peoples of the steppe. They lauded their own settled lifestyle and their centralized state, which they opposed to the pastoralism and loose, shifting tribal confederations of their neighbors. Increasingly accompanying these distinctions was an ideology that Russia had both the power and the obligation to remake steppe peoples in its own image, in an early vision of a mission civilisatrice. Conver8

Martin pays homage in this regard to the influence of history from below, as constructed in Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) and the colonial ethnographers John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992). 9 On the permeability of the categories colonizer and colonized, see Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994); Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The Manly Englishman and the Effeminate Bengali in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1998).

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sions, settlement, and incorporation into the political system of the new tsars emerged as primary goals of empire, although, as Khodarkovsky argues, such ideas were always balanced by pragmatic considerations, primarily the desire to avoid massive and frequent rebellions on the steppe. Muscovite and imperial Russian elite sources emphasizing the differences between themselves and steppe peoples clearly convince Khodarkovsky, who himself argues that the latter, as Asiatic, were racially distinct from Europeans, among whom he apparently includes medieval and early modern Russians. Khodarkovsky admits that Russians of the era were largely oblivious of the category of racial identity but should be more aware himself that categories of identity such as race, then as now, were constructed rather than objective and deployed for particular political and ideological purposes.10 His study in general tends to accept at face value the assertions made in many of the overwhelmingly Russian-language archival and published documents on which it is based. Khodarkovsky, unlike the other authors surveyed in this review, makes no effort to explain his methodology and the inherent difficulties in interpreting imperial expansion and colonial relationships based exclusively on the discourse of the dominant. Saids use of Foucauldian methodology to read texts as discourse rather than fact seems absent here. Khodarkovsky, for example, expounds definitions of nomadic society as static and Muscovite expansion as defensive against unruly nomadic neighbors (26, 221, 34). Virginia Martin, meanwhile, engages in a careful discussion of the limits and the utility of Russian-language sources in interpreting a colonial relationship and propounds the need to reconstruct the co ntext behind the texts (8). IsrailovaKharekhuzen as well recognizes that the Russian-language sources on which she relies are generally state documents that were composed to further specific imperial goals and images concerning the nomads (13). In the case of nomadic societies, whose lack of interest in formal documents prevented them from writing back against their conquerors, imperial sources must be treated with special care. Khodarkovskys first chapter, The Sociology of the Frontier, or Why Peace Was Impossible, nonetheless argues that the differences between Muscovites and steppe peoples, whether constructed or real, rendered conflict inevitable from the 16th century onward. On one side stood Moscow, now with an imperial mission as well as a crusading spirit that drove it to promote and defend Christianity on the steppe. On the other side appeared several nomadic
On the constructed nature of identity, see Bassin, Russia between Europe and Asia; on the wider Western context, see Said, Orientalism; Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995); and Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, eds., Identities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
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tribes, whose debilitating raids along the frontier disturbed Moscows quest for peace and security even as their lack of a Christian identity increasingly identified them as barbaric and immoral (38). As advances in weapons began to favor Muscovite armies, their advance across the steppe was unavoidable. Yet, as Khodarkovsky himself notes, the realities of empire on the ground often belied constructed differences and distance between Russians and steppe tribes. His study of the dynamics and relations of power on the steppe is the strongest section of the book. It casts doubt on his own earlier assertions that the interests of [the] two sides were fundamentally irreconcilable (8). Muscovites and steppe peoples cooperated as well as clashed in the formation of this colonial empire, underneath the apparent cloak of imperial domination. Khodarkovsky portrays the steppe frontier as a fluid, multileveled, and porous boundary. Differing concepts of politics, law, administration, and culture coexisted despite the efforts of imperial administrators to impose a subject status on steppe peoples. Russian control was far from absolute, and inducements played at least as significant a role as military force in Russian expansion. As in Yuri Slezkines study of Siberia, we see a constant struggle between Russian efforts to strengthen their hold over a frontier region and the efforts of steppe peoples to, if not undermine this control, at least exploit the presence of the Russians to serve their own interests.11 Assurance of Muscovite control over the steppe required substantial financial support for native leaders in exchange for promises of loyalty. The maintenance of, in the words of Ronald J. Robinson, a collaborative mechanism remained at the center of Russian empire building for three centuries. 12 Mutual, and often deliberate, misinterpretations of certain terms whether the iasak was tribute or trade, for exampleallowed Moscow to maintain an image of control and the leaders of steppe tribes to maintain an image of equality. Reasons for collaboration and alliances, albeit shifting and tenuous, emerge clearly as Khodarkovsky details the agglomeration of actors on the steppe following the shattering of the Golden Horde. Moscow competed with Crimea and Poland-Lithuania as claimants to the lands of the Horde; meanwhile, tribes and confederations of steppe nomads entered into increasing conflict with one another. For reasons not fully explained, Moscow continued to accumulate power more quickly than its rivals, and through contacts with opposing elites split them into pro- and anti-Muscovite factions. Although this strategy, again enforced through the constant distribution of presents and
11 12

Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors. Ronald Robinson, Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration, in Studies in the Theory of Imperialism, ed. Roger Owen and Bob Sutcliffe (London: Longman, 1972), 11742.

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payments, allowed a certain success, it also fostered continuing instability on the steppe, with those cut off from Muscovite largesse determined to oppose the formation of a colonial empire. Muscovite and imperial Russian leaders nonetheless maintained the upper hand in battles for military and political control of the steppe by constructing an elaborate network of forts beginning in the late 16th century. Cossacks armed by the Russian state accompanied these lines of fortifications expanding into the steppe. Presents and militarized forts emerged as the carrot-and-stick strategy that drew Nogai, Kalmyk, and Kazakh tribes into the Muscovite colonial empire. The construction of the fortress at Orenburg in 1735 signaled a new phase in the practice of empire, with tsarist officials planning it as a first step in a dramatically new, accelerated, and intrusive Slavic colonization of the region (156). At the time, however, Kazakhs aligned with the Russians also welcomed its construction as security against their own rivals, the Bashkir and Oirat tribes. Yet Orenburg failed to match expectations as a center of trade in an empire now evolving mercantilist policies or as a bastion of security against continued raids from tribes opposed to Moscow. A combination of frontier governors repressive policies, more rapid building of fortresses that severed pastoralist feeding grounds, and the anger of local Cossacks at the continuing instability of a frontier they were charged with policing fueled the intensity of the Pugachev rebellion on the steppe. As Russian power expanded, therefore, so did resistance. Khodarkovsky makes the point that empire came at great cost. In addition to the expenses of military ventures and presents was the hosting in the metropole of an aristocratic diaspora, from Crimeans to Nogais, who might prove useful as potential claimants to future positions of power in their former realm. He hints at the significance of these displaced leaders, many of whom intermarried with the Russian nobility, opening the door to a subject that demands greater treatment as an important corollary to the formation of empire.13 Khodarkovsky concludes with a bold assumption about the significance of building a very expensive empire in the steppe. In the first half of the 17th century alone, if the money that went simply to protect Russian interests in the khanate of Crimea had instead been spent on urban construction, 1,200 towns could have been built. Was empire, a source of greatness and pride, the cause of Russian backwardness vis--vis the rest of Europe? The consequences of empire were nonetheless far more damaging to the conquered than to the conquerors, placing their entire lifestyle and culture in
13

Such an investigation could contribute to recent research that questions the degree to which Russians enjoyed a manifestly superior status in a multiethnic empire. See Werth, Margins of Orthodoxy, 3841.

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danger. As Virginia Martin argues, the Kazakhs of the Middle Horde attempted to negotiate, adapt, and manipulate practices of colonial rule to preserve elements of their own culture and exploit potential advantages of their new colonial situation. The Russian colonial administration and settlers proved formidable challenges in the 19th century; even so, a combination of engagement and resistance to the regime by the Middle Horde Kazakhs thwarted imperial goals of complete control. Martins examination of colonialism on the steppe centers on the intersection of Russian law and Kazakh custom. The efforts of the empires agents to extend imperial law to the steppe and to intervene in the body of Kazakh judicial customs, the adat, touched on fundamental issues of power, justice, and community. Colonial administrators and steppe tribes alike strove to soften the collision of these systems, to avoid open conflict, all the while seeking to bend an emerging syncretic system to their own interests, which for the Russians involved the eventual elimination of nomadism. At the epicenter of the conflict between systems on the steppe was the biy, a Kazakh guardian of the adat who served simultaneously as a judicial and political authority. Knowledge of the complex body of practices and precedents that composed the adat and an ability to judge and rule fairly lifted the prestige not simply of the biy but of his entire clan. Following the 1822 introduction to the steppe of the Speranskii reforms, designed to meld the Kazakhs into loyal subjects, imperial officials were determined to codify and to modify the adat with the eventual goal of promoting settlement and, more immediately, removing the authority of Kazakh leaders, whose sources of power lay beyond their control and understanding. Colonial rulers worked to bureaucratize the steppe, incorporating Kazakh leaders in a new legal and administrative apparatus firmly subject to regulation from above. Under this system, the biy became an elected office, but the winners were ultimately responsible to higher officials instead of to their tribes. Instead of knowledge and fairness, biys gained power through manipulating electoral procedures and the colonial system, using access to colonial officials to promote the interests of themselves or their clan. Even as Kazakhs lamented the poor quality and the opportunism of the new class of biys, they adopted a number of strategies to reconstruct channels of custom and power untainted by colonial influence as well as to turn other procedures of Russian rule to their own advantage. Kazakhs turned increasingly to unofficial clan leaders to adjudicate disputes in an effort to restore the goal of adat, to establish harmony and serve the interests of the entire community. Those not favored by official biys appealed to superior Russian officials, working to demonstrate that these native collaborators were not

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following proper judiciary procedures. Martin notes that such efforts sometimes resulted in telling ironies: Russian administrators, believing that the transition to a settled society with concordant laws needed to be undertaken gradually, rejected Kazakh appeals of a biys decisions based on arguments that they violated Russian law, noting that steppe peoples still were to be governed, for now, by the adat. Kazakhs continued to modify their interactions to fit imperial expectations, all the while working to subvert imperial designs. Martin foregrounds Kazakh agency, demonstrating the ways that the realities of empire were constructed at the local level by colonized subjects as they negotiated unequal power relations inherent in the policies constructed for them at the central level (113). The ability of Kazakh nomads, however, to construct realities of empire significantly diminished as Russian settlers flooded the steppes in the late 19th century. Arriving mostly without permission and eschewing colonial policies on settlement and land use, these settlers, whom imperial administrators had as late as 1894 seen as potential bearers of a higher level of civilization to the steppe, now posed the greatest threat to their policy of a gradual shift of Kazakh nomads to a settled lifestyle. Unrestrained settlement destroyed nomadic land-use patterns. Kazakh nomads were forced to respond with a number of improvised survival strategies, the most important of which were beginning to cultivate hay as fodder for their animals, shortening their migrations, and fiercely defending their now endangered winter pastures, where they began to settle permanently. Competition for land, however, squeezed out smaller clan units, and the system of mutual aid characteristic of the adat grew increasingly difficult to fulfill in this traumatic period of transition. As a result, while some Kazakhs shifted to a semi-nomadic lifestyle, others ended up as hired labor or moved to Russian settlements. Having detailed this dramatic shift in fortunes, however, Martin chooses again to emphasize the ability of the Kazakhs to manipulate the colonial system. Some took advantage of poor Russian knowledge of the land and landuse patterns to increase their share of territory. Many actually profited from the new legal enforcement of boundaries and property, which allowed Kazakhs to protect themselves from the predations of settlers as well as claims from rival clans. Martin quotes a new Kazakh saying at the turn of the 20th century that borders are good for peace (126). But while Martin admits that many of these strategies, particularly seeking redress in the unfamiliar system of Russian law, arose from desperation, these findings resonate only weakly in her overall conclusion that many of these colonized subjects learned to manipulate [law] to their own advantage, and thus to imbue laws with powers that Russian lawmakers never intended them to have (161). This may be so, and Martin

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has done an excellent job at demonstrating the incompleteness of imperial control through the instrument of law. At the same time, missing entirely from the work are the more active forms of resistance the Kazakhs took, in the form of multiple armed rebellions, which would indicate that many found these more subtle efforts at resistance unsatisfactory or unworkable. Included among these would be the great rebellion of Middle Horde leader Kenisary Qasimov, which lasted from 1837 to 1846.14 By reading Martins work, one would never see coming the massive steppe uprising of 1916, which is not mentioned in her work but can be traced directly to intensified settlement in the late 19th century.15 Chinara Israilova-Kharekhuzen, like Martin, examines the intersection between nomadism and colonialism in the 19th century. Also like Martin, she finds that the inherent flexibility of nomadic societies allowed them to continue to practice many social mechanisms and cultural traditions even following strong challenges from Russian administrators and settlers. Her greater emphasis on the role of group dynamics among the Kazakhs, particularly family and clan relationships, nonetheless offers another lens through which to view the changes, as well as continuities, of nomadic life under alien rule. Transformations in land use and the transition, albeit gradual and incomplete, to a semi-settled lifestyle, had important consequences for social bonds among the nomads she is studying, apparently those who inhabit the present-day land of Kyrgyzstan.16 Her principal finding is that the Russian presence stimulated growing social differentiation among the nomads. Powerful tribal leaders who showed a willingness to settle gained great advantages from the Russian colonial administrators, who wanted to use them as models for a future post-nomadic society (78). Some began engaging not only in agriculture but also in rough manufacturing. This was occurring even as many of the poorer Kyrgyz were forced off their land and into working as hired labor, often for new Slavic colonists.
14 On the Qasimov rebellion, see Martha Brill Olcott, The Kazakhs (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1987), 6466. 15 On the 1916 rebellion on the steppe, still an understudied phenomenon, see Edward Dennis Sokol, The Revolt of 1916 in Russian Central Asia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1954). 16 Israilova-Kharekhuzens subjects are not clear when she discusses the Russian imperial period. Her Russian-language sources are studies of the Kirgiz peoples, but pre-1917 Russians tended to employ this term to refer to what are today known as the Kazakhs, with the present-day Kyrgyz being called at the time the Kara-Kirgiz. Because the author does not discuss this differentiation, it is unclear if she is aware of it, or if she is mixing information on various nomadic societies.

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Israilova-Kharekhuzens findings about a growing gap between rich and poor in nomadic societies employ language reminiscent of Soviet class-based historiography, but her conclusions are very similar to those reached by a parallel study of the impact of British colonialism on neighboring nomadic societies in colonial India.17 In fact, the author is more interested in strategies that counteracted such harmful effects on the Kyrgyz nomads, whose egalitarian traditions she clearly admires. Even as many of the wealthy became unwilling or unable to provide animals or shelter to their poorer kinsmen as demanded by the adat, they began to pay taxes for those less fortunate. Pre-colonial forms of social organization from family to clan to tribe (e l ) survived not just pressures from Russian imperial rule but from the Soviet state, which pursued the destruction of nomadic life with renewed vigor. In the 1930s, Kyrgyz nomads simply replicated their tribal units on newly organized collective farms. Israilova-Kharekhuzens fieldwork in newly independent Kyrgyzstan demonstrates continued efforts to maintain a partially nomadic lifestyle as well as a continued identification with pre-colonial group affiliations. One novel feature of Khar ekhuzens work is her argument that changes in nomadic society, although accelerated by contact with the Russian imperial regime, in fact began as a result of earlier struggles with another sedentary empire, the khanate of Kokand. As Khodarkovsky shows in the Russian case, Kokand constructed a number of forts in nomadic territory and worked to better the integration of nomadic societies into a sedentary culture and economy. Kokandian conquest of Kyrgyz regions forced many nomads to pay taxes for the first time, and khans also enforced new ideas of boundaries and property, offering nomadic lands for sale shortly before their own power weakened in the mid-19th century. In fact, a desire to expel Kokandian influence led many Kyrgyz tribal leaders to ally with Russian imperial forces who appeared at the time less threatening to nomadic lifestyles. Martin and Kharekhuzen both include in their studies important information on the functioning of their nomadic societies, on the evolving roles of custom, kinship relations, and culture. They make significant contributions by dispelling more simplistic views of pastoralists that have predominated in previous works based uniquely on Russian and Soviet sources. Both refute the view that nomads were basically pagans with a veneer of Islam that made them at best nominal Muslims; rather, the intersection between Islam and nomadism, between the sharia and the adat is treated more syncretically.18
Fred Scholz, Nomadism and Colonialism: A Hundred Years of Baluchistan, 18721972, trans. Hugh van Skyhawk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 18 On previous views, see Olcott, The Kazakhs, 15; Winner, Oral Art and Literature, 18.
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Both studies would have had a wider reach, however, if they engaged a wider historiography or comparative or theoretical anthropological works. Both seem unaware of the importance of their contributions to a growing literature on the interaction between nomadic and sedentary societies.19 Also limiting the reach of both works is the lack of involved discussion on changes in Russian imperial policy over the course of the 19th century. What forces were shaping decisions about how to govern the frontier, and how did they compare with other regions of the empire? As much as Kazakhs and Kyrgyz could employ flexibility and strategies to subvert imperial goals, ultimate power in the colonial relationship resided in the imperial metropole. Parallel studiesone in Khodarkovskys era taking greater care to explore the adaptivity of nomadic societies and one in the 19th century more explicitly examining imperial policy in a wider contextwould add greatly to these important first steps in a fascinating and still understudied field. Also missing from these studies is a more thorough discussion of what all admit are crucial elements in transforming the steppe frontier: the Slavic colonists. Glimpses of the relationship between these colonists and the nomads offer important insights into the complexity of the colonial encounter. In addition to the authors discoveries of Kyrgyz renting out land to Russian settlers, my own research has uncovered examples of wealthier members of the local nomadic population employing impoverished settlers. As such, many colonists complained frequently that their own regime favored nomads and settled Central Asians at their own expense.20 At the same time, of course, Slavic settlers expropriated the land and exploited the labor of the colonized populations. A more detailed study of this relationship on the ground, in addition to the focus of the works on the impact of state policies and institutions for the steppe frontier and nomadic societies, would reveal to an even greater extent the complexity of the collision between nomadism and colonialism. Department of History University of Tennessee 915 Volunteer Blvd. 6 th Floor, Dunford Hall Knoxville, TN 37996 jsahadeo@utk.edu
19 On the intersection between nomadism and settled peoples, see Thomas J. Barfield, The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989). Anatoly M. Khazanov and Andr Wink, eds., Nomads and the Sedentary World (Richmond: Curzon, 2001). 20 Sahadeo, Down with Progress: The Elusive Quest for Modernity in Russian Tashkent, 190514, in Peopling the Periphery: Slavic Settlement in Eurasia from Muscovite to Soviet Times (forthcoming).