Contenu du sommaire : En Asie Centrale soviétique Ethnies, nations, États

Jürgen Paul, The village in Central Asia during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In this paper, it is established that village communities existed in Central Asia during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, although their decomposition was then well under way. Village communities are defined by the characteristic feature that their lands could not be sold individually. In the paper, the part village communities played in the society of their time is characterized. The paper is based mainly on documentary sources.

Kemal Karpat, Les relations de Yakub Bey avec les sultans ottomans : réinterprétation. Yakub Bey a créé un État relativement moderne dans le Turkestan oriental au cours des années 1870 et il accepta peu après la suzeraineté du sultan-caliphe ottoman Abdulaziz. Il renouvela ses vœux d'allégeance lorsque Abdulhamid II monta sur le trône en 1876. Son acte de soumission valut à Yakub Bey de lire la khutba du vendredi et de frapper des pièces au nom du sultan. Ce fut le seul cas de l'histoire du mouvement panislamique du XIXe siècle où un dirigeant alla jusqu'à accepter officiellement la suprématie du caliphe d'Istanbul. L'État ottoman offrit en retour des armes et des officiers à Kachgar. Parmi les raisons qui amenèrent Yakub Bey à soumettre son État à Istanbul figurent la nécessité pour Kachgar de se prémunir contre la Chine et contre la Russie (une fois l'espoir d'un soutien britannique perdu), mais aussi les liens culturels et religieux qui existaient depuis longtemps entre Istanbul et Kachgar, ainsi que l'attachement personnel de Yakub Bey à l'idée d'une union musulmane. Un motif puissant et décisif - rarement mentionné - pouvait être le désir de légitimité éprouvé par Yakub Bey. Ce dernier avait remplacé Buzurg Bey lequel appartenait aux dynasties khodjas qui avaient gouverné le Turkestan pendant des siècles et s'étaient posées en détentrices Je jure de l'autorité. Seul le caliphe possédait une autorité supérieure à celle des khodjas. Aussi la reconnaissance accordée à Yakub Bey par le caliphe se substituait-elle à toute autre autorité et légitimait-elle pleinement la domination de Yakub Bey sur la Kachgarie.

Catherine Poujol, The relations between Central Asia and Palestine or the ways of an emotional sionism. Regenerated spiritually by a messenger from the Holy Land in 1793, the Bukharan Jewish community never ceased from then on to develop its economic, cultural and sentimental links with Palestine. As from the « fashionable » pilgrimages to Jerusalem, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to the settlement of Rehovot in 1890 close to Jerusalem, all kinds of bilateral relations form the core of this early sionism. This trend involved both the wealthy members of the community - enriched by the Russian colonization of Turkestan - and the poorer strata that their circumstances induced to emigrate, to « go up » to Palestine. Several waves were observed before the Russian revolution of 1917. With the implantation of Soviet regime, the Bukharan Jews were faced with a new choice : Sionism or Communism which will generate new emigration streams.

Ilber Ortayli, Reports and considerations of Ismail Bey Gasprinskii in Tercüman on Central Asia. A detailed study of Ismail Bey Gasprinskii's newspaper Tercüman allows to note various features and dimensions of his political thought and attitude towards Russia. His clear views as regard the solidarity of Islamic peoples did not hinder his plea in favor of the adoption of Western institutions. He also emphasized the civilizing mission of Russia in the Asiatic provinces of the Empire. Gasprinskii - who was an official of the Russian Empire - tended to cooperate with Russian liberal intellectuals and officials and attacked vehemently in his articles the pan-Slavist Russian circles. Unlike the Young Turks, he professed to admire the regime of Sultan Abdulhamid II because of the educational reforms it introduced which he supported by word and deed.

François Georgeon, A Tatar traveller in the Far East at the beginning of the twentieth century. Abdurresid Ibrahim, a Tatar native of western Siberia, was an 'âlim instructed in Medina, who worked for a while as a kadi (judge) at the Spiritual Assembly of Orenburg. After several years spent in Istanbul and again in Russia, he undertook in 1907 a long travel in the Far East, crossing through Mandchuria, Japan (where he was to stay for several months), Corea, China, the Indonesian Archipelago, the Eastern Indies, and the sacred lands of Islam, before reaching the Ottoman capital in 1910. The account of his travellings was published in Istanbul between 1910 and 1913 in two volumes. It is a unique document, not only for the informatioas it gives about the Muslim communities in Asia, but also because it shows how the Russian Turks considered Japan's rising power and what they were expecting from it for their emancipation.

Marco Buttino, Turkestan 1917. The Russians' rebellion. In 1917, a famine resulting from the policy pursued by Petrograd in the colony of Turkestan was at the origin of a conflict that developed between the Russian minority and the native population. Whilst Russians were engaged in a dispute with the autochtons for the control of food resources, the Provisional Government endeavored to settle the crisis by political means, promoting the participation of Muslim organizations in the administration of the colony. The October upheaval was a reaction to this compromise resulting in the creation of a Russian dictatorship desirous of confining famine to the native community. During the first years of the Soviet regime, this dictatorship brought about a frightful loss of indigenous population.

Ingcborg Baldauf, Some thoughts on the making of the Uzbek nation. The natsional'noe razmezhevanie in Central Asia (1924-1925) aimed at the formation of « national republics and territories. » In the cases of Kazakhs, Kirghiz, Turkmens, and to a certain degree Tadzhiks, the question of ethnic coherence and self-denomination of the emerging nations could be solved without major problems. The rest of the sedentary, semi-nomadic, and nomadic Turkic-speaking Turkestanians, larger by number than any of the other groups, had never in history formed an ethnic or national unit ; there existed several pre-modern concepts of self-identification based on regional, tribal, or even religious definition, none of them depicting congruency with the European romantic, language-centered concept of a nation. The introduction of this concept by Lenin-Stalinist national politics made it necessary to define a new nationality. Out of the prenational identilicatory concepts Sart, Chagatay, Muslim, Turk, and Uzbek, « Uzbek » was chosen to give a name to the nation, and to its territory, the Uzbekistan SSR The paper traces some of the problems the nation-builders found themselves confronted with in the process of shaping the Uzbek socialist nation.

Lars-Erik Nyman, Sinkiang 1934-1943. Dark decade for a pivotal puppet. During the decade preceding 1943 the province of Sinkiang was Chinese in name only, since the Soviet Union held the region as a pawn for supplied war materials to the Kuomintang government in Chunking long before the Burma Road opened. Another reason behind this Sino-Soviet co-operation on Sinkiang was the threat of a possible Japanese Blitzkrieg westwards across the Gobi desert. Only the decisive battle of Nomonhan in Mongolia between Soviet and Japanese army units eliminated the acute danger of such a Blitzkrieg. When the German front of the Red Army was sagging in early 1942 - before the turning point of Stalingrad - the Soviet grip on Sinkiang was replaced by that of the Kuomintang. Moreover, it has been possible in the paper to point out and to correlate historical events in the USSR and the province of Sinkiang during the scrutinized decade.

Nadir Devlet, Islamic revival in the Volga-Ural region. In 922, Islam had acquired the status of the official creed of the region that at the time was known as the Turkic Bulgar State. In 1552, after the decline of the Kazan khanate, the Russians, who were now ruling this land, persecuted the Islamic religion. The oppression lasted till the advent of Catherine II (1762-1796) who inaugurated a more liberal policy towards her Muslim subject. In particular, it is under her reign that in 1789, the Pan-Russian Muslim Religious Administration was organized. The Soviet government, after its institution, embarked on an anti-religious campaign in defiance of all its former promises. This policy was somewhat revised with regard to all the creeds of the USSR, after the outbreak of the Second World War as the authorities deemed it necessary to thus boost the morale of the population. However, after the war, attacks on religion started again. This lasted until the perestroïka and glasnosť when some freedom was again awarded to Muslims, enabling them to create new mosques, to reopen old ones and to practise and propagate freely their religious beliefs. Thus, we can speak of a measure of Islamic revival in this region.

Chantai Lemercier-Quelquejay, The Soviet Muslim world of Central Asia after Alma-Ata. The riots of Alma-Ata in December 1986 are the demoastration of the first serious national crisis in USSR, coming seventy years after the revolution. In order to cope with the Kazakh opposition, Soviet authorities resorted to immediate reprisals and to a renewal of anti-Islamic propaganda and agitation as well as to demographic and administrative policy in an endeavor to reinforce the impact of Russian presence in Central Asia. The lesson to be drawn from the events of Alma-Ata is that Islam continues to represent a potential danger for the stability of the USSR.

Yaacov Ro'i, The Soviet and Russian context of the development of nationalism in Soviet Central Asia. This paper seeks to determine how far the various Central Asian nationalisms, which began to become a vocal political force towards the end of the 1980's, were influenced by extraneous factors. The national consciousness of the region's indigenous ethnic groups focused naturally on their cultural heritage, the region boasting a long tradition of art forms of varying sorts as well as a host of philosophers, thinkers and religious figures. Their immediate allegiances tended to be to the region as a whole or to their specific locality rather than to their union republics, and to their clan or tribe and Islam rather than the nationality as defined by the arbitrary decision of Soviet administrative fiat. The political credo, terminology and atmospherics of the Soviet regime, however, inevitably made their imprint on the Central Asian intelligentsias. So too, did, on the one hand, the increasing nationalism of the Russians and the other European members of the Soviet body politic and, on the other, the openness and democratization that were first the slogans and then the driving impetus of the Gorbachev period and which among others provided the intelligentsias with a broad basis among the local population. The outcome has been a peculiar admixture, of nationalisms whose terms of reference have been Soviet, Russian and European, but whose backbone has been their own cultural heritage and mores which it is their aim to reassert as they endeavor to shake off at least the more humiliating aspects of their subservience to Moscow.

Olivier Roy, Geopolitis in Central Asia. The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and the weakening of Moscow's control on Soviet Central Asia imply a come back of the old centers of power of the sixteenth century : an Iranian state whose external influence is based more on Shiism than on the Persian sphere of cultural expansion, a mainly Sunni and Turkic center of power, embodied nowadays as in the sixteenth century by the Uzbeks, who are dreaming to lead a new Turkestan from Tashkent to northern Afghanistan, and Pakistan posing as the heir of the Moghol Empire, by trying to establish a Sunni Muslim belt from Lahore to Kabul. Between these three centers of power, Afghanistan, divided more on ethnic lines than on political ones, is in danger to collapse.