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    Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan
    Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan
    Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan
    Ebook294 pages7 hours

    Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan

    By Adrienne Lynn Edgar

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    On October 27, 1991, the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic declared its independence from the Soviet Union. Hammer and sickle gave way to a flag, a national anthem, and new holidays. Seven decades earlier, Turkmenistan had been a stateless conglomeration of tribes. What brought about this remarkable transformation?



    Tribal Nation addresses this question by examining the Soviet effort in the 1920s and 1930s to create a modern, socialist nation in the Central Asian Republic of Turkmenistan. Adrienne Edgar argues that the recent focus on the Soviet state as a "maker of nations" overlooks another vital factor in Turkmen nationhood: the complex interaction between Soviet policies and indigenous notions of identity. In particular, the genealogical ideas that defined premodern Turkmen identity were reshaped by Soviet territorial and linguistic ideas of nationhood. The Soviet desire to construct socialist modernity in Turkmenistan conflicted with Moscow's policy of promoting nationhood, since many Turkmen viewed their "backward customs" as central to Turkmen identity.



    Tribal Nation is the first book in any Western language on Soviet Turkmenistan, the first to use both archival and indigenous-language sources to analyze Soviet nation-making in Central Asia, and among the few works to examine the Soviet multinational state from a non-Russian perspective. By investigating Soviet nation-making in one of the most poorly understood regions of the Soviet Union, it also sheds light on broader questions about nationalism and colonialism in the twentieth century.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateSep 5, 2006
    ISBN9781400844296
    Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan
    Author

    Adrienne Lynn Edgar

    Adrienne Lynn Edgar is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She was formerly an editor of World Policy Journal.

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    • 5/5
      “Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan” by Adrienne Lynn Edgar is a brilliant and comprehensive history of the Turkmen people and the creation of Turkmenistan. Edgar’s conclusions about Turkmenistan are similar to those in Adeeb Khalid’s study of Uzbekistan (the authors cite each other) and in Arsène Saparov’s study of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Nagorno-Karabakh. These are: 1)Whatever the merits or faults of Soviet nationalities policies, the Soviet Union was a maker and not a breaker of nations, as Conquest and others have argued. 2)The National Delimitation of Turkestan, Bukhara, and Khorezm was not due to Soviet ‘divide-and-conquer’ colonial policies, since ethnic and religious violence were already widespread in Turkestan, or in the case of Saparov’s study, the Caucasus. Rather the purpose of the NTD and the creation of national republics was to minimize and contain ethnic and religious conflict, not enflame it. That being said, Edgar’s approach to her study of Turkmenistan is markedly different than Khalid’s study of Uzbekistan. In studying the creation of Uzbekistan, Khalid is primarily interested in the role of the Muslim modernist reformers known as the Jadids. His study is less concerned with the history of the Uzbek people and socialist construction in the Uzbekistan SSR than it is with how the idea of an Uzbek state emerged. In studying the creation of Turkmenistan, Edgar focuses on the history of the Turkmen people and the objective difficulties in creating a socialist Turkmen nation. She examines the challenges of establishing a uniform Turkmen language out of the various dialects of different Turkmen tribes, indigenization, the Basmachi insurgency, revolts against collectivizing and the emancipation of women, etc. An excellent book!

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