Peoples’ internationalism Central Asian modernisers, Soviet Oriental studies and cultural revolution in the East (1936-1977)

This thesis analyses the way Soviet orientalists wrote the history of Central Asia, and in particular of the Tajik SSR, one of the region’s constituent Republics. Focusing on the post-war period, it supports the argument that Soviet orientalists reimagined the Central Asian past as part of a wider, global history. Highlighting continuities with the pre-Revolutionary tradition of academic Orientology, it discloses how the orientalist approach of history centred on a vision of human development that contradicted historical materialism in essential ways. While Stalinism imagined history as driven by socio-economic laws of development, Soviet orientalists granted culture a relatively autonomous and progressive force in history too.
Illuminating a distinct “Asian” voice in the heritage of Soviet Oriental studies, this thesis foregrounds the intellectual biography of Central Asian Bobodzhan Gafurovich Gafurov, director of the academic Institute for Oriental studies in Moscow from 1956 until his death in 1977. Crucially, Gafurov’s approach to history resisted the contention shared in capitalist and socialist modes of thinking that ethno-centric nationalism was a necessary by-product of the universal path towards modernity. Gafurov’s activities in UNESCO indicate that anti-colonial activists and pacifists across the Euro-Asian terrain joined forces to try and decolonize world history and civilization while rejecting an exclusively nation-centred historiography. Drawing inspiration from interwar visions of internationalism, these activists highlighted transnational, non-territorial solidarities between peoples too, emphasizing their historically productive, revolutionary potential. It is their attempt to reveal an anti-colonial “peoples’ internationalism” through the prism of Central Asian history that this thesis maps out.