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Recent Studies on Post-Soviet Central Asia

During the years that large regions of the Muslim-inhabited territories of Central Asia were part of the Soviet Union, most research on these areas was carried out by Soviet-based scholars. Their publications usually followed the general patterns of official state ideology, necessarily so if the research results were to be approved and printed. Approval was delivered by a bureaucrat (whose name appeared in the publication itself as the responsible censor). Certain controversial disciplines, such as the study of politics, were accordingly often shunned by Soviet researchers. Many published works handled ‘safer domains’: Soviet achievements, ethnography, linguistics, archaeology, early history, folklore, and – somewhat less often – economics, literature, art and music. Written by both Russians and non-Russians working in Soviet Central Asia, practically all books and periodicals such as Sovyetskaya Tyurkologiya appeared in Russian and were intended for internal consumption, as is also attested by the almost general absence of abstracts in other languages. Western scholars of Soviet Central Asia were only exceptionally permitted to carry out research there – and usually only on certain subjects. Most of them had to depend on books and periodicals appearing in the Soviet Union, which the Library of Congress in Washington DC and parallel institutions in Europe acquired quite regularly. A serious problem remained. Many Western scholars, openly or covertly, distrusted the results of Soviet research – and had no easy way to check their doubts directly. These limitations notwithstanding, valuable research on Central Asia was carried out in the West in such disciplines as history, linguistics, literary analysis, lawgiving, and folklore. One may mention, among others, scholars like Shirin Akiner, Marie Broxup and Geoffrey Wheeler in the United Kingdom; Alexandre Bennigsen, Chantal Lemercier Quelquejay and Olivier Roy in France; Annemarie Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 46, No. 5, 771–777, September 2010