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Soviet Orientalism and Nationalism in Central Asia: Aleksandr Semenov's Vision of Tajik National Identity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Matthias Battis
Matthias Battis*
Affiliation:
History at Wolfson College, University of Oxford
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Abstract

Russian Orientalists participated—often in a close but precarious relationship with the state—in the transformation of Central Asia from a tsarist colony into part of what Francine Hirsch has called an “Empire of Nations.” One of them was the former tsarist colonial clerk Aleksandr Semenov (1873–1958), who together with such prominent representatives of the region's Persian-speaking elites as Sadriddin Ayni or Bobojon Ghafurov, and with the support of his academic mentors, such as Vasilii Bartol'd and Sergei Ol'denburg, effectively—albeit somewhat reluctantly—lobbied for the official recognition of the Persian/Tajik language and of Tajikistani statehood. The study of their cooperation shows how Central Asian cultural heritage was researched and preserved, but also how it was reinvented in national terms and codified; and how these processes were negotiated between local intellectuals, scholars and the state.

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Iranian Studies , Volume 48 , Issue 5: Russian Orientalism to Soviet Iranology: The Persian-speaking World and its History through Russian Eyes , September 2015 , pp. 729 - 745
Copyright
Copyright © The International Society for Iranian Studies 2015

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Footnotes

The research for this article was made possible by the generous support of the Arts & Humanities Research Council and the Gerda Henkel Foundation. The author would like to express his gratitude to his supervisors Dr. Alexander Morrison and Dr. Catherine Andreyev, and to Lubica Pollakova who reviewed this paper.

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