Buryat-Mongol and Alash Autonomous Movements before the Soviets, 1905-1917

Abstract

Despite the Stalinist myth, it was not the Bolsheviks but Indigenous intellectuals who introduced autonomy as a form of post-colonial settlement during the crisis and collapse of the Russian Empire to Siberia and Central Asia. Employing a comparative perspective, this article traces the development and implementation of two autonomous projects in Asian Russia. The Buryat-Mongol and Kazakh (Alash) Indigenous intellectuals synthesized local ideas and the globally circulating notions of national self-determination, enlightenment and democracy when articulating political unity of Indigenous peoples in national terms. By advocating their broader representation in existing and envisioned power structures they fought against discrimination and protected native languages and other forms of cultural expression from assimilation. This article shows that these Indigenous intellectuals were not silent recipients of the policies coming from the imperial and post-imperial centers but actively engaged in designing and ensuring the future of their communities.

Marxism, early Soviet oriental studies and the problem of ‘power/knowledge’

“…Although Lenin increasingly considered the national and colonial questions, many regional Party organisations before the Revolution relegated the national question to a secondary position in search of a unified Marxist organization across the Empire (Blanc 2016). This undoubtedly contributed to a lack of connection between rising demands for legal equality and cultural autonomy among such ÔEasternÕ peoples as Buriat-Mongols and Kazakhs after 1905 and the workersÕ movement based in the cities (Sablin and Korobeynikov 2016). While LeninÕs The Right of Nations to Self-Determination (1964a) and the Lenin-Bukharin analysis of imperialism (Lenin 1964b(Lenin [1916; Bukharin 1929Bukharin [1915Bukharin , 1917) were important milestones in Marxist thinking about the colonial world, it was failure to establish new Soviet governments in some regions during the 1918-21 Civil War (Poland, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Finland and others), followed by successes in some areas, often assisted by Red Army intervention, soon after, that placed the need to address the aspirations of the non-Russian populations at the forefront of the political agenda of the entire movement.…”

Making the Korean nation in the Russian Far East, 1863–1926

“…Unlike most other minority associations, the congress featured many non-Russian citizens and exhibited a major split between proponents of different visions of Koreans' future in post-imperial Russia. Radical socialists left the congress, while the remaining delegates created the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Korean National Societies (Troitskaia and Toropov 2004, 1:15;Sablin and Korobeynikov 2016).…”