{"id":49395,"date":"2026-09-01T20:34:54","date_gmt":"2026-09-01T18:34:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/?p=49395"},"modified":"2026-09-01T20:36:41","modified_gmt":"2026-09-01T18:36:41","slug":"central-asia-soviet-borders-statehood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/kyrgyzstan\/central-asia-soviet-borders-statehood\/","title":{"rendered":"Who Made the Nations of Central Asia?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Why Soviet borders do not make Central Asian statehood artificial<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In January 2026, Russian state television commentator Vladimir Solovyov did what a small but persistent chorus of Russian nationalists has done regularly since the invasion of Ukraine: he described Central Asia as part of a natural Russian sphere of power and suggested that Moscow could extend its military operations there if it judged this necessary<\/a>. The remark prompted a sharp response from Uzbek politician Alisher Qodirov, who dismissed it as propaganda and stressed that the states of Central Asia are sovereign and capable of defending their interests<\/a>. The exchange was brief, but the argument behind it is familiar. Russian nationalist commentators periodically suggest that Central Asian sovereignty is somehow contingent – an accidental product of Soviet administrative borders rather than the outcome of a deeper political history. Western coverage often treats such statements primarily as geopolitics: another expression of Russia’s post-imperial anxiety or its competition with China for influence in the region. Recent analysis of Russian-Central Asian relations has documented the growing frequency of such irredentist rhetoric<\/a>. That interpretation is not wrong, but underneath it lies a historical claim that deserves to be addressed on its own terms. The idea that Moscow simply “invented” the nations of Central Asia is misleading.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Soviet rule profoundly reshaped Central Asian nationhood. It territorialised identities, codified languages, built national institutions and created republics whose borders later became international frontiers. But that is very different from saying that Central Asian political identities appeared out of nothing in 1924. The process drew on pre-existing communities, political movements, religious institutions and local elites, and it was negotiated, appropriated and contested by Central Asians themselves. Modern Central Asian nations are therefore neither timeless entities that survived unchanged from antiquity nor arbitrary creations handed down fully formed by Moscow. They emerged from a much longer interaction between local political life, Russian imperial rule, indigenous reform movements and Soviet nationality policy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Political life before the Bolsheviks<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Central Asian nationhood cannot be understood by starting the clock in either 1917 or 1924. Pre-Soviet Turkestan was not an empty political space waiting for Bolshevik ethnographers to give it shape, although it would be equally anachronistic to imagine that the region already possessed mass national movements corresponding neatly to today’s five republics. Society was overwhelmingly rural, literacy remained limited, and modern political ideas about nationhood circulated mainly among relatively small urban and educated circles. Adeeb Khalid’s study of Jadidism and colonial society provides the key background for this pre-revolutionary political and intellectual landscape<\/a>. Russian imperial rule had also transformed the region’s social and political structure well before the Bolshevik Revolution, particularly through settler colonisation, the creation of new administrative centres and the expansion of a Russian-speaking bureaucracy whose influence was disproportionate to the size of the settler population in many parts of the region.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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National-territorial delimitation of Soviet Central Asia in 1924-1925, showing the reorganisation of the region into new Soviet republics and autonomous territories. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
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The empire restricted indigenous participation in imperial politics while preserving a degree of local administration. At village and volost level, Muslim communities could manage taxation, minor judicial disputes and communal affairs, but their authority remained subordinate to Russian officials. Elections could be annulled, administrative decisions required approval, and Muslim political participation was constrained by the colonial state’s suspicion of wider political mobilisation. This system was therefore neither simple exclusion nor meaningful self-government. Russian rule combined political marginalisation with the selective preservation of indigenous elites deemed useful or reliable. The Emirate of Bukhara, for example, survived as a nominally sovereign protectorate under Russian domination, retaining its court, treasury and Islamic establishment. The Khanate of Khiva remained under a similar arrangement, while Kokand, regarded as less manageable and more threatening to imperial control, was annexed outright in 1876. Local political authority thus survived, but in fragmented and highly constrained forms determined by the priorities of empire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read more on Novastan<\/strong>: Bukhara Before the Border: Aini and the Politics of Tajik-Uzbek Memory<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one of the most important new expressions of indigenous reform was Jadidism. The Jadids – their name derived from the usul-i jadid, or “new method”, of education – were Muslim modernists who founded schools, newspapers and theatres and sought to reform education, religious life and society in cities including Tashkent, Samarkand and Bukhara. Education stood at the centre of their programme. Some Jadid reformers advocated or experimented with education for girls well before the Soviet state later presented women’s emancipation as one of the defining achievements of socialist modernisation. Khalid’s work remains a foundational source on Jadid reform, education and indigenous intellectual life<\/a>. This does not make the Jadids straightforward proto-nationalists in the modern sense, nor were they politically unified. But it matters because it demonstrates that debates over reform, identity and political authority already existed before Soviet power consolidated itself across the region.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Jadids were not the only indigenous source of authority. The ulama – Muslim scholars, judges and teachers – represented another deeply rooted social and religious establishment. Some opposed Jadid reform, while others adapted to the changing political environment after 1917. Their authority was neither uniform nor uncontested, but it long predated the Bolsheviks and remained socially significant across much of Turkestan. A 2024 study of the Tashkent Ulama society documents how religious scholars organised politically during the revolutionary opening of 1917<\/a>. By the time Soviet leaders began reorganising Central Asia, they were therefore not working on an empty political map. They were intervening in a region where multiple forms of authority, identity and reform were already competing, and where Muslim intellectuals, religious figures and local elites had their own ideas about how political life should develop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Moscow actually did in 1924<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The decisive Soviet intervention came with the national-territorial delimitation of Central Asia beginning in 1924. The process reorganised the former territories of Russian Turkestan, the Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic and the Khorezm People’s Soviet Republic into new territorial units associated with particular nationalities. Yet the familiar image of Moscow drawing five modern states in a single bureaucratic exercise is misleading. The Uzbek and Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republics emerged in 1924, but Tajikistan initially became an autonomous republic within the Uzbek SSR before becoming a union republic in 1929. Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan followed different territorial and constitutional trajectories, with their status continuing to evolve during the following decade. The map that ultimately became contemporary Central Asia was therefore produced through a process of repeated administrative and political decisions rather than one act of Soviet cartography.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Historian Francine Hirsch<\/a> has shown that Soviet nationality policy was rooted in a particular Marxist understanding of historical development. Bolshevik officials believed societies moved through identifiable stages and that nationhood itself could be a necessary phase on the path towards socialism. This gave ethnography, census-taking and classification enormous political significance. Soviet experts attempted to identify populations, languages and national categories and then give them institutional and territorial form. The process was not simply descriptive: by deciding which languages would be codified, which categories would appear in censuses and which populations would become titular nationalities of republics, the Soviet state helped create the administrative reality it claimed merely to be recording.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Arne Haugen<\/a> and other historians have placed greater emphasis on the political context in which delimitation occurred. Soviet leaders were wary of broader Turkestani, Muslim or Turkic political projects that might provide an alternative focus of mobilisation to Moscow, particularly after years of armed resistance and instability. The resulting territorial divisions therefore served both ideological and political purposes. But neither interpretation supports the simplistic idea that Central Asian nations were arbitrary inventions imposed on passive populations. Local elites participated extensively in delimitation debates, arguing over borders, cities, linguistic communities, economic resources and the status of particular populations. Their influence was constrained by Soviet power, and Moscow retained ultimate authority, but the process was not simply one of Russian cartographers drawing lines across a blank map.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This distinction matters because the argument that Soviet borders were politically constructed is true but insufficient. Nearly every modern state is the product of political construction, conflict and institutionalisation. The relevant question is not whether Soviet authorities drew borders but how those borders acquired political meaning and why they proved durable. Territorial delimitation nationalised space, but it did not by itself create fully formed nations. That required decades of institutional work carried out within the new republics themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nation-building was not a one-way process<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Creating republics was only the beginning. Languages had to be standardised, alphabets repeatedly reformed, schools and publishing systems expanded, universities and academies established, literary canons assembled and histories written. New bureaucracies had to be staffed and new political elites trained. A central element of this process was korenizatsiya, or indigenisation, through which Soviet authorities sought during the 1920s to increase the presence of local nationalities in party structures, courts, ministries and other institutions. The policy was intended to make Soviet rule more legitimate and effective, but it also created cadres whose political careers, institutional interests and cultural projects became increasingly tied to the republics themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read more on Novastan<\/strong>: \u201cIslands of Soviet power on the steppes\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Faizulla Khodjaev illustrates the complexity of this process<\/a>. Born into a wealthy Bukharan family and active in the Young Bukharan movement before the consolidation of Soviet rule, he became one of the leading political figures of Soviet Uzbekistan. His career shows how pre-Soviet reformist politics could be absorbed into the institutions of the new republic. Similar processes occurred across the region as local teachers, writers, administrators and intellectuals entered Soviet structures and helped determine what Uzbek, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik or Turkmen national culture would mean in practice. Their room for manoeuvre was never unlimited, but they were not merely passive executors of instructions produced in Moscow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Fayzulla Xo\u02bbjayev, one of the leading political figures of early Soviet Uzbekistan. A former Young Bukharan reformer, he became head of government of the Uzbek SSR before being executed during the Great Terror in 1938. Public domain \/ Wikimedia Commons.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Soviet nation-building in Central Asia was therefore neither a unilateral imposition from the centre nor a freely chosen indigenous project. It is better understood as a process of co-production under profoundly unequal conditions. Soviet institutions provided the territorial framework, controlled the political boundaries within which nation-building could occur and possessed the coercive power to decide which political projects were permissible. Central Asian intellectuals, teachers, bureaucrats and political cadres nevertheless played indispensable roles in giving those institutions substance. The Soviet state did not merely classify nationalities; it also created institutional spaces in which local actors could standardise languages, construct national histories, develop cultural institutions and train republican elites whose interests increasingly became inseparable from the republics themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is why saying that Soviet rule shaped modern Central Asian nationhood is historically accurate, while saying that Russia “created” Central Asian nations and therefore somehow owns them is not. The institutions were Soviet, but Soviet was not synonymous with Russian. The Union itself depended on tens of thousands of Central Asian officials, writers, teachers and administrators who transformed republican institutions from bureaucratic categories into lived political and cultural structures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The contradiction at the heart of Soviet nation-building<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The same Soviet system that promoted national institutions also destroyed many of the people who had helped build them. This contradiction is essential to understanding the period and prevents the story from becoming either a celebration of Soviet modernisation or a simple narrative of national emancipation. The hujum, launched in the late 1920s, sought to transform women’s lives through a state-directed campaign against veiling and seclusion. The policy was presented as emancipation, but it also turned women’s bodies into symbols of a wider struggle over modernity, religion and political authority. The backlash was frequently violent, and women who unveiled could become targets of intimidation or murder. Soviet social transformation could therefore simultaneously expand certain forms of opportunity and impose them through profoundly coercive means.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A decade later, the Great Terror devastated the intellectual and political elites of the region. Many Jadids, former reformers and local Soviet cadres who had participated in building national schools, administrations and cultural institutions were arrested, purged or executed. Faizulla Khodjaev himself was executed in 1938. Adeeb Khalid’s work on Uzbekistan captures this contradiction particularly well: Soviet national institutions were built in part by a generation that the Soviet state later decimated. The system had encouraged local intellectuals to construct republican cultures, only to accuse many of those same intellectuals of nationalism once the political environment changed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The republics, however, survived the people who had helped construct them. That fact complicates both Soviet triumphalism and the idea that the institutions of Central Asian nationhood were merely artificial shells. A school system remains a political reality even after its founders are purged; a standardised language continues to shape generations after the intellectuals who codified it have disappeared. By the middle of the twentieth century, the republics had become institutional ecosystems with ministries, universities, artistic establishments, party hierarchies and administrative borders that organised the lives of millions of people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The republics outlived the Soviet Union<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The political significance of those institutions became unmistakable in 1991. Central Asian republics did not generally campaign for independence with the intensity seen in the Baltic states, Georgia or parts of Ukraine. Kazakhstan was the last Soviet republic to declare independence, in December 1991<\/a>, and its population had earlier voted overwhelmingly in favour of preserving a reformed union. Yet when the Soviet Union disappeared, the Central Asian republics did not dissolve into one another, and they did not surrender their sovereignty back to Moscow. Instead, each inherited national administrations, education systems, territorial borders, political elites and institutional cultures that had developed over decades. Their post-Soviet governments then reworked these inheritances to construct national narratives of their own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This does not mean that Russian influence disappeared with the Soviet flag. Economic dependence, labour migration, Russian-language media, security arrangements and institutional ties kept several Central Asian states closely connected to Moscow for decades after 1991. Russia remained particularly important to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, while millions of Central Asian citizens continued to live and work in the Russian Federation. Political elites often maintained strong personal and institutional links with Moscow, and Russian remained an important language of administration, education and regional communication. The post-Soviet story was therefore not one of clean geopolitical separation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But influence is not the same thing as ownership. The states of Central Asia continued to function as distinct political units because the republics created in the Soviet period had become much more than temporary administrative conveniences. Their borders structured economic life and political careers; their education systems created national publics; their cultural institutions produced literature, historical narratives and symbols that people increasingly understood as Uzbek, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik or Turkmen. Post-Soviet elites had every incentive to strengthen these identities, because their own legitimacy depended on the continued existence of the states they governed. They did not need to invent national institutions from scratch. Much of the infrastructure of statehood was already there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why the argument matters today<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

This is where the historical debate becomes contemporary geopolitics. When Russian commentators describe Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan or other post-Soviet states as “gifts” from Russia, they rely on a particular reading of history: Soviet borders were bestowed by Moscow, and states created through those borders therefore possess less historical legitimacy than Russia itself. The implication is that sovereignty may be conditional, particularly when it conflicts with what Moscow defines as its historical sphere of interest. Recent FPRI analysis documents how this kind of irredentist rhetoric has increasingly targeted Central Asian states<\/a>. That rhetoric echoes a broader revisionist understanding of the post-Soviet space in which Russia appears as the principal historical subject while its neighbours are reduced to administrative products of Soviet decision-making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The war against Ukraine has made the political implications of such arguments impossible to dismiss. This does not mean that every provocative statement by a Russian television commentator signals imminent territorial ambition in Central Asia, and treating every rhetorical outburst as evidence of an approaching invasion would itself distort the political situation. But rhetoric matters because it helps normalise a hierarchy of sovereignty. Once some states are described as historically authentic while others are treated as accidental creations, territorial integrity becomes easier to present as negotiable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read more on Novastan<\/strong>: The Lexicon of Kazakh Decolonisation<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Central Asian responses increasingly reject that hierarchy. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and other states have diversified diplomatic, economic and security partnerships, expanded ties with China, Turkey, the European Union and Gulf states, and strengthened cooperation with one another. These policies are not necessarily anti-Russian. In many cases, governments continue to seek workable relations with Moscow while simultaneously reducing excessive dependence on it. What has changed is the growing willingness to articulate sovereignty as something inherent rather than something granted by participation in a Russian-led political space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The history of Soviet nation-building helps explain that confidence. Modern Central Asian statehood was profoundly transformed by Soviet rule, and the republics, borders and institutions of the twentieth century remain central to the countries that exist today. But the region was not politically empty before the Bolsheviks arrived, and nation-building after 1924 was not carried out by Russians alone. It involved Muslim reformers, religious authorities, intellectuals, teachers, bureaucrats and political cadres from Central Asia itself – people who adapted to Soviet institutions, shaped them, resisted them and, in many cases, were eventually destroyed by them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The historical reality is therefore more complicated than either nationalist myth allows. Moscow did not simply invent Central Asia, but neither did Soviet rule merely impose artificial borders on fully formed ancient nations. Modern Central Asian nationhood emerged from the interaction between older identities, imperial rule, indigenous reform movements, Soviet nationality policy and decades of local institution-building. The states that survived the Soviet Union are products of that history. That does not make their sovereignty artificial. It makes it historical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Shakhzoda Khusankhodjaeva. Shakhzoda is a researcher focused on conflict, gender, and regional politics, with a particular interest in Soviet and post-Soviet Central Asia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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