{"id":50147,"date":"2026-11-13T12:05:50","date_gmt":"2026-11-13T11:05:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/?p=50147"},"modified":"2026-11-13T12:05:58","modified_gmt":"2026-11-13T11:05:58","slug":"turkestan-textbooks-tsar-stalin-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/uzbekistan\/turkestan-textbooks-tsar-stalin-education\/","title":{"rendered":"From \u201cObey the Tsar\u201d to the \u201cStalin School\u201d: What Sixty Years of Textbooks Taught Children in Turkestan"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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From the Russian Empire to Stalin’s Soviet Union, school textbooks in Central Asia served as instruments of political control. Drawing on rare historical sources, Abbosbek Mominov explores how successive regimes sought to shape children’s loyalties – and how Jadid reformers challenged their vision of education.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In 1903, children in Tashkent who reached lesson 109 of their school reader read this: \u201cTo obey the tsar is the command of God Almighty. Whoever the tsar may be, obeying him is a duty for everyone.\u201d Almost forty years later, in 1941, a new generation memorised a different line from its primer: \u201cWe gain knowledge in Stalin\u2019s school.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Between these two books, two forces fought over the school in Turkestan. One saw it as a way to open the nation\u2019s eyes. The other wanted to turn it into a machine for producing loyal subjects, first of the empire and then of the Party. This struggle is best followed not through historians\u2019 general conclusions but through the textbooks, curricula and journals of the time, most of which now sit in the rare-book collections of libraries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Read more on Novastan<\/strong>: Who Made the Nations of Central Asia<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A note on the name. Until 1917 \u201cTurkestan\u201d meant the Turkestan Governor-Generalship, the colonial administration that Russia set up in 1867 with its capital in Tashkent. The Emirate of Bukhara and the Khanate of Khiva lay outside it as Russian protectorates under their own rulers. In April 1918 the governor-generalship became a Soviet autonomous republic, and in October 1924 the national delimitation divided it among new national republics, among them the Uzbek SSR. The first textbooks quoted here were written for the Muslims of a Russian colony, the last for the children of a Soviet republic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A sermon inside a textbook<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The 1903 sentence comes from Muallimi soniy<\/em> (\u201cThe Second Teacher\u201d), a reader compiled by Ali Asghar Kalinin for the Russian-native schools and printed with the governor-general\u2019s permission. Lesson 76 says plainly why one should finish such a school: the graduate would find work as an interpreter or a clerk, and a man who knew Russian would become an official. Lesson 108 presents the conquest of Turkestan as an event that happened \u201cby the will of the Lord of the worlds\u201d. Lesson 110 is the sermon (khutba<\/em>) for Nicholas II, which, the book says, was to be read on imperial holidays in \u201call the Muslim mosques\u201d of the region. The colonial school, in other words, tried to instil loyalty to the empire through the most sacred notions of Islam: religious duty, obedience and the Friday sermon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Title page of Muallimi soniy<\/em> (1903), a reader prepared for Russian-native schools in Turkestan.
Credit:<\/em> Courtesy of the A. Avloni National Institute of Pedagogical Excellence, Tashkent.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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In 1902, the newspaper Turkestanskie Vedomosti<\/em> summed up the purpose of this school in one phrase: \u201cto teach children to think in Russian\u201d. People understood this well. Akmal Akromov, a classmate of the writer Abdulla Qodiriy, recalled that many parents refused to send their sons to such schools for fear the boy would \u201cturn Russian\u201d, and scolded those who did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A lesson from a 1903 textbook presents obedience to the Russian tsar as a religious duty.
Credit:<\/em> Muallimi soniy<\/em> (1903), lesson 109. A. Avloni National Institute of Pedagogical Excellence, Tashkent.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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Yet the traditional maktab<\/em>, the only alternative, was in deep crisis. In his 1923 novella Eski maktab turmushi yoki Tolib<\/em> (\u201cLife in the Old School, or The Pupil\u201d), Mo\u02bbminjon Muhammadjonov shows it from the inside. Every Thursday children brought the teacher a coin; a pupil to be punished was held down by his arms and legs and beaten with a whip or a stick. The aim was not to understand the lesson but to be released sooner, and the hero is still \u201cneither literate nor skilled\u201d at sixteen or seventeen. Bukhara was no better. In 1912 the Persian-language newspaper Bukhoroi sharif<\/em> wrote that a student could study Arabic grammar for ten to fifteen years and still be unable to write Arabic correctly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Families therefore faced two roads: a school that taught their children to think in Russian, or one that kept them memorising for ten years and let them go illiterate. The Jadids offered a third.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What the Jadids asked for<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Jadids took their name from usul-i jadid<\/em>, the \u201cnew method\u201d of teaching children to read by sound, which Ismail Gasprinsky introduced among the Muslims of the Russian Empire in the 1880s. In Turkestan, their schools were private, kept going by fees and local benefactors, and tolerated by an administration that had its own project in the Russian-native school. The reformers were neither allies of that administration nor its declared opponents. They wanted what the government school could give, without the purpose it was built for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Jadids did not run away from Russian. Mahmudkhoja Behbudiy wrote in his journal Oyina<\/em>: \u201cFor our own benefit, let us know Russian and study in government schools.\u201d But he wanted the language to serve the homeland and the faith. In 1907 he sent the Muslim faction of the Second State Duma a draft with two demands: that the schools and madrasas of Turkestan be freed from government control, and that \u201cthe Russian script not be forced on the Muslim nation\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The administration answered with more control. Under rules drawn up by a special commission in 1909, teachers in the old schools had to be \u201cpolitically entirely reliable\u201d. In 1910\u20131911 more than fifty new-method schools were closed. The most telling case is that of Munavvar Qori. In February 1911, Munavvar Qori asked the district school inspector for permission to teach Russian in his school. In June 1911, the request was refused until the Ministry of Public Education issued its instructions on new-method schools. Munavvar Qori did not give up, and by early 1914 he had obtained the permission: in a report of 30 January 1914, the inspector noted that his was the only school in the district where Russian was taught. He later described the tsarist police\u2019s attitude to cultural work in one sentence: it \u201copened on one side and closed on the other\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pressure came from within as well. On 3 January 1914, in the mosque of the Ulugh Beg madrasa in Samarkand, before five or six thousand people, a man who had sent his child to a new-method school was declared \u201can infidel, his wife divorced\u201d. Behbudiy recorded the episode in Oyina<\/em>. The new school was caught between two fires.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A compromise that lasted less than a year<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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After 1917 many Jadids went to work in the new Soviet institutions: schools, publishing houses and the Commissariat of Education. For the first time a government was promising mass schooling in the mother tongue, and for a few years the reformers wrote its textbooks and explained its decrees. The price of that cooperation became clear only later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first decrees left room for compromise. Order No. 38 of the Turkestan Commissariat of Education, dated 4 November 1918, made an exception for religious lessons in Muslim schools. An appeal signed by Muhammadamin Afandizoda and Munavvar Qori in the newspaper Ishtirokiyun<\/em> in April 1919 explained it: religion could be taught by the school\u2019s own teacher, but not by imams. For the Jadids this was an acceptable path.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It did not last. The statute of the Turkestan labour school, approved in September 1919, placed all schools under the Commissariat and banned religious teaching altogether. The 1920 curriculum for unified labour schools admitted that much of the central programme did not suit Turkestan, yet declared its direction \u201ccompulsory for all schools of Turkestan\u201d. A graduate was expected to know \u201cat least the budget of his home town\u201d. The list of public buildings a child should study included a cooperative, a post office and a hospital, but neither a mosque nor a madrasa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even so, the Jadids kept writing textbooks for a while. O\u02bbzbekcha o\u02bbqish<\/em> (\u201cUzbek Reader\u201d), compiled by F. Sayfiy and Elbek and printed in 30,000 copies in 1921, opens with the poem \u201cLanguage\u201d: \u201cWho are those who sell the Turkic tongue?\u201d Its page on Navoi calls him \u201cour greatest and first poet\u201d. The Jadid spirit lived on inside a textbook of the Soviet state publisher. In Bukhara, which was a separate people\u2019s republic from 1920 to 1924, the 1922 primer Til achg\u02bbich<\/em>, issued by the Bukharan education authority, still begins with Bismillah<\/em> and ends with the Fatiha. In Turkestan, by then, another principle was being stated openly: a 1923 adult literacy programme printed in Kazakh in Tashkent said that all teaching must be tied to politics, \u201cbecause nothing today is outside politics\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read more on Novastan<\/strong>: Between integration and inheritance: How Armenians in Uzbekistan are redefining community<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cNot only six hours of lessons\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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From 1925, the journal Maorif va o\u02bbqitg\u02bbuvchi<\/em> (\u201cEducation and the Teacher\u201d) made the new task explicit. People\u2019s Commissar of Education R. In\u02bcomov defined the aim of education as \u201ccommunist upbringing and the training of forces to build communism\u201d, while admitting that \u201cwe have almost no Party teachers\u201d. His deputy Riza o\u02bbg\u02bbli wrote that a teacher\u2019s job was \u201cnot only six hours of lessons\u201d: he had to go \u201camong the masses\u201d and work for Soviet construction. By 1929, a teacher who stayed out of an election campaign was called \u201cunfit\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The money changed hands too. The waqf endowments that had supported schools and madrasas for centuries were moved into the Soviet education budget; \u201cwaqf capital is today education capital\u201d, the journal wrote. A 1927 report of the Commissariat gave the old schools two years to be \u201cSovietised\u201d and promised to \u201chasten the death\u201d of those that were not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The turn on religion was especially quick. In 1925, Vadud Mahmud argued in the same journal for \u201cscientific, educational struggle\u201d against religion rather than coercion. Four years later N. Inoyatiy wrote: \u201cIn our school we must firmly establish not irreligious but anti-religious upbringing.\u201d The view of the Jadids changed as well. In early 1926, the journal still named Behbudiy, Munavvar Qori, Avloni and Fitrat as leaders of Turkestan\u2019s intellectual and literary renewal. By 1929, it called its own first year and a half, when Vadud Mahmud was literary editor, a \u201cdark period\u201d. The Turon library, founded by the Jadids in Tashkent, was renamed October, and 5,000 books were removed from its shelves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The hammer and sickle in the primer<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In 1930, an all-Russian conference on school books demanded that textbooks stir hatred of the class enemy and that primers raise collectivists and fighters for the cause of the working class. Uzbek primers followed. In Sh. Rahimiy\u2019s Savod<\/em> (\u201cLiteracy\u201d), printed in 50,000 copies in 1930\u20131931, children learned the new letters through sentences such as \u201cThis is Grandpa Lenin. Lenin is my father. I am a Leninist\u201d and \u201cBe a pioneer!\u201d In one story, children tell their religious elders: \u201cEither your God stays in this house, or we do.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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An Uzbek primer teaches children to read using the phrases \u201cLenin is my father\u201d and \u201cI am a Leninist.\u201d
Credit:<\/em> Sh. Rahimiy, Savod<\/em> (1930\u20131931), p. 32. A. Avloni National Institute of Pedagogical Excellence, Tashkent.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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In 1933, M. Buzruk Solihov\u2019s book on nationalist tendencies in Uzbek literature called Jadidism \u201cthe banner of the Uzbek nationalist movement\u201d. Jadid teachers were repressed; Munavvar Qori was shot in Moscow on 23 April 1931. Behbudiy\u2019s demand that the Russian script not be forced met its fate too. On 13 March 1938, compulsory Russian in national schools was decreed, and in 1940 Uzbek was moved to the Cyrillic script. In Oqil Sharafiddinov\u2019s 1941 primer, a child practising handwriting copied the line \u201cThe sickle and the hammer are our emblem.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Children learned the alphabet through Soviet symbols, including the hammer, sickle and emblem of the Uzbek SSR.
Credit:<\/em> Oqil Sharafiddinov, Alifbe<\/em> (1941), p. 52. A. Avloni National Institute of Pedagogical Excellence, Tashkent.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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Forgetting was also a policy<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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After the war, textbooks tied ideology to daily labour. A 1949 second-grade reader holds up as an example the pupils of the afternoon shift who went out to the collective farm and \u201chanded in 500 kilograms of cotton that day\u201d. Control became more thorough. The Uzbek edition of A. N. Volkovsky\u2019s 1950 manual for school inspectors provided for parents who kept a child out of school to be prosecuted under Articles 270 and 274 of the Uzbek SSR Criminal Code. A 1952 manual on school administration published by the RSFSR Academy of Pedagogical Sciences advised inspectors to check pupils\u2019 worldview through essays on \u201cMy favourite book\u201d and \u201cMy favourite hero\u201d, and through their diaries and library records. It quoted Mikhail Kalinin: a teacher should feel himself \u201cunder the strongest control\u201d, stricter than anyone in the world. The same manual leaned on the educator Konstantin Ushinsky, but left out another of his thoughts: \u201cThe most vigilant control will not help in this matter. The educator can never be a blind executor of instructions.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A 1930s Uzbek primer encourages pupils to join the Soviet Pioneer movement and embrace labour.
Credit:<\/em> Sh. Rahimiy, Savod<\/em> (1930\u20131931), p. 39. A. Avloni National Institute of Pedagogical Excellence, Tashkent.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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The Soviet system did not only control. It also rewrote the past. A 1959 booklet by E. Qodirov called the Jadid schools \u201cbourgeois-nationalist\u201d and accused them of not teaching Russian, although Munavvar Qori had sought permission to teach Russian as early as 1911, and by 1914 his school was the only one in the district where Russian was taught. That same year the Academy of Sciences published a collection of materials on progressive social and philosophical thought in Uzbekistan that included the poets Furqat, Muqimiy and Zavqiy, but not a single Jadid. The editing went both ways. In 1960 Y. Abdullayev sharply criticised the Russian-native school as a tool for \u201cRussifying the local population\u201d and dismissed the lesson praising it in Muallimi soniy<\/em> as propaganda. Yet in his detailed analysis of the book, he did not mention the lesson that taught obedience to the tsar as a religious duty, or the sermon. Each era took from the past what it needed and passed over the rest in silence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What sixty years show<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In sixty years, the school in Turkestan lived through three policies: that of the empire, that of the early Soviet years, and that of a fully ideological system. One thing never changed: those in power wanted the school to decide what a child would think. The Jadids wanted something else. They wanted the child to think for himself, to study in his mother tongue, and to know his faith, modern science and, where needed, Russian.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After independence in 1991, the works of Behbudiy, Fitrat, Cho\u2018lpon and Avloni returned to print and to school programmes, and in recent years, the study of the Jadid heritage has become state policy in Uzbekistan. In December 2023, Tashkent hosted an international conference, \u201cJadids: Ideas of National Identity, Independence, and Statehood\u201d, which opened with an address from the president. Since January 2024, a newspaper named Jadid<\/em> has been published on the president\u2019s initiative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read more on Novastan<\/strong>: \u201cThis is the right time to engage with Uzbekistan\u201d: Gulnoza Ismailova on education, talent and the country\u2019s future<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This rediscovery brings the old questions back: what language and script a child should learn in, how much room the school leaves for faith, and who decides what a textbook says. The sources suggest caution with every ready-made answer. The Jadids were denounced as nationalists in 1933 and left out of an anthology in 1959 by people who had their books to hand. What was missing was the willingness to quote them in full.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To restore that heritage honestly, we should turn not to the conclusions of later periods but to the documents of the time: yellowed textbooks, curricula and journal pages. They show what each regime wrote, and what it chose to hide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Sources<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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By section, in the order the examples appear. Titles are given in the original language.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A sermon inside a textbook<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n