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DOI 10.24411/9999-001А-2020-10033
М. Диковицкая
Центр изящных искусств Государственного университета Нью-Йорка в Онеонте Равине Парквэй, 108, Онеонта, Нью-Йорк, 13820, Соединенные Штаты Америки
«Туркестанский альбом» (1871-1872 гг.) и «Типы народностей Средней Азии» (1876 г.): o роли российской фотографии в имперском завоевании Средней Азии
Аннотация
Визуальная культура Российской империи играла неотъемлемую роль в двойном процессе формирования государственности и колонизации. В этой статье освещается вопрос участия фотографии в создании и распространении представлений о природной среде, истории и этнографии Средней Азии на примере двух альбомов — «Туркестанского альбома» (1871-1872 гг.) и «Типов народностей Средней Азии» (1876 г.). Празднование военной победы в исторической части «Туркестанского альбома» отражало идею предназначения России в столкновении европейской цивилизации с мусульманским Востоком. Археологический раздел упрочил бытующий взгляд о том, что современные жители Средней Азии в культурном отношении сильно уступали создателям древних памятников. Часть «Промысловая» закрепила образ Туркестана как оптового поставщика сырья и места будущего экспорта готовой продукции. Подготовленный для III Международного конгресса востоковедов в Санкт-Петербурге альбом «Типы народностей Средней Азии» имел своей целью сбор этнографических данных. Изображение населения колонии как совокупности деиндивидуализированных «типов» способствовало дальнейшему развитию науки о расах. В статье отслеживаются связи национализма с колониализмом, расизмом и ориентализмом.
Ключевые слова: фотография, визуальная культура и государственность, Средняя Азия в составе Российской империи, ислам, III Международный конгресс востоковедов, этнография и антропология, культурный расизм
M. Dikovitskaya
Fine Arts Center of the State University of New York at Oneonta Ravine Parkway 108, Oneonta (NY), 13820, the United States of America
Arguing with photographs: imperial Russian visual culture and the conquest of Central Asia, 1860s-1870s
Abstract
In the Russian Empire, visual culture played an integral role in the twin processes of nationbuilding and colonization. This essay looks at how the knowledge of Central Asia's history, natural and built environment, and ethnography was constructed and presented in Russian photography during the imperial conquest, with a special focus on the two photographic collections. The Turkestanskii Al'bom's (Turkestan Album, 1871-1872) historical section was a celebration of the Russian military victory presented as a confluence of the celestial and the terrestrial histories. The Album's archaeological section contributed to the view that 19th-century Muslim inhabitants of Central Asia were culturally inferior to the ancient monument builders. The trade section solidified an image of Turkestan as both a wholesale supplier of raw resources and a place of future export of manufactured wares. Prepared for the Third International Congress of Orientalists in St. Petersburg, the Tipy Narodnostei Srednei Azii (Types of Nationalities of Central Asia, 1876) began as a collection of ethnographic studies of deindividualized subjects. A portrayal of the colony's population as a collection of "types" this album turned into a visual display of race science. This essay examines nationalism's links to colonialism and provides insight into the history of Russian cultural racism and Orientalism.
Key words: photography; visual culture and nation-building; Central Asia as a colony the Russian Empire; Islam in Central Asia; the Third International Congress of Orientalists; ethnography and anthropology; cultural racism
Integral to the idea of "imperial formation"is a notion of "imperial knowledges." These are the universalizing discourses, the world-constituting cosmologies, ontologies, and epistemologies, produced...by those persons and institutions who claim to speak with authority.
[Inden, 1990]
In the Russian Empire, visual culture played an integral role in the twin processes of nationbuilding and colonization. The establishment of photography as a professional venture in the last third of the nineteenth century led to the mass consumption of images. Seventy-nine per cent of Russians remained illiterate throughout the last third of the nineteenth century; therefore, this contribution tackles the challenge of studying a culture in which images were central to the representation of the world [Hubertus, 2004]. Prompted by Simon Franklin and Emma Widdis's thesis that "Russian discourses of identity have been formed in an implied dialogue with outsiders," [Franklin, Widdis, 2004] this essay looks at how the knowledge of Central Asia's history, natural and built environment, and ethnography was constructed and presented in Russian photography during the imperial conquest, with a special focus on the Turkestan Album (Turkestanskii Al'bom, 1871 -1872) and Types of Nationalities of Central Asia (Tipy Narodnostei Srednei Azii, 1876). This essay counters research that found the Turkestan Album unbiased and "honest in that it showed nothing that was not there....[T]he rigid, flat quality of the photos prevents us from injecting too much of our own emotion into the scenes" [Gibbon, 2009]. I argue that the photographers and album compilers ascribed certain traits to the Central Asians, marking them as aliens to Russian culture, which had consequences for an "anthropology of colonists" [Smith, 1994] and the notion of Russianness. The two photographic collections will be evaluated according to issues of power, identity, and difference regarding religion, geography/topography, perceptions of military conquest, race, and gender.
Central Asia as a Colony of the Russian Empire. Prerevolutionary Russian Central Asia included the governorships of Turkestan and the Steppe, the locals of Turgai and Uralsk, the Emirate of Bukhara, and the Khanate of Khiva. Following a series of conquests and annexations whose initial purpose was to secure Russia's steppe frontier, in July 1867, Tsar Alexander II signed the decree "On Establishment of the Turkestan Governor-Generalship Comprising of Two Locals, the Semirechie and the Syr-Daria." The Governor-General, granted the status of commander of the newly created Turkestan Military District, was also in charge of civilian affairs, with the effect that military and civilian functions were joined. The territories of Samarkand (seized from the Emirate
of Bukhara in 1868) and the former Khanate of Kokand (renamed the Fergana Local after having been reduced in size in 1868, and then finally abolished in February 1876) were added to Turkestan. The possession of Samarkand, the historical capital of Timur "Lang" (in European usage, Tamerlane), held a special meaning in the Russian nationalist imagination: it was interpreted as the culminating point in the retaliation process that had started with the overthrowing of the three hundred-year "Mongol yoke" in the late fifteenth century1. In 1873, the Amu-Daria Local was established (Fig. 1). After the final subjugation of Tekke Turkmens in 1881 the Transcaspian Local was formed. The annexation of the Pamir Highlands following the 1895 British-Russian boundary agreement was the final stage of the conquest of Central Asia. On the eve of World War I, the area of Turkestan situated between 35°38' and 47°30' Northern Latitude and 50°20' and 83°20' Eastern Longitude was equal to the combined areas of Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Holland, and Denmark. As the first general census of 1897 revealed, out of the Russian Empire's 13,906,772 Muslims, 6,996,654 lived in Central Asia.
Colonialism is a practice of domination, which involves the subjugation of one people to another. Like colonialism, imperialism implies socio-economic, political and also military control over a dependent territory [Kohn, Red-dy, 2020]. At present, there is a consensus in academic literature that Central Asia, although not separated from the metropolitan country by sea, was a colony ruled and economically exploited by the Russians2. As Will Myer has
1 Leading Russian historians Mikhail P. Pogodin (1800-1875), Sergei M. Solovyov (1820-1879) and Vasilii O. Kliuchevsky (1841-1911) advocated expansion into Asia. The possession of Samarkand, the historical capital of Timur "Lang" (in European usage, Tamerlane) where his tomb (died in 1405) has been preserved for centuries, held a special meaning in the nationalist imagination. In 1892, popular illustrated magazine Niva published the article "Our Movement to the East: To the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of Taking Samarkand by the Russian Troops" ("Nashe Dvizhenie na Vostok: Po Povodu 25-letiia Vzyatiia Samarkanda Russkimi Voiskami") and a reproduction of the original drawing, commissioned to Piasetskii, of "The View of the Asiatic Part of the City of Samarkand" (Niva, 19, No. 2 (1892), 450-452).
2 Daniel Brower, Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire (London & New York, Routledge Curzon, 2003), pp. 10-11; Ariel Cohen, Russian
noted, the presentation of Central Asia as a colony of the Russian Empire has changed over time. Historians writing in English were primarily concerned with political and economic issues whereas those writing in French focused on the cultural dimension of colonialism. In the late 1960s, both schools became interested in a study of Islam, "which had been seen as belonging to the cultural sphere, being awarded a political status" [Myer, 2002]. Elaborating on the 1904 statement by Vasilii O. Kliuchevsky on Russian history as the history of a country that colonizes itself, Alexander Etkind advanced the thesis that Russia has been both the subject and the object of colonization and its corollaries, such as Orientalism: "The state was engaged in the colonization of foreign territories, and it was also concerned with colonizing the heartlands."3 More recently, Viatcheslav Moro-zov employed postcolonial theory to analyze Russia as a subaltern empire dependent on the West's material and normative hegemony and colonizing its own periphery on behalf of the global capitalist core4.
Imperialism: Development and Crisis (Westport, Connecticut & London, Praeger, 1996), p. 152; James Gibson, "Russian Imperial Expansion in Context and by Contrast," Journal of Historical Geography, 28, No. 2 (2002), p. 193; Andreas Kappeler, The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic History (Harlow, Longman, 2001), pp. 161, 207; Adeeb Khalid, "Culture and Power in Colonial Turkestan," Cahiers d'Asie central, 17/18, (2009), pp. 413-447; Jeff Sahadeo, Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent (Bloomington & Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 2007); Geoffrey Wheeler, "Russian Conquest and Colonization of Central Asia," in Taras Hunczak, Russian Imperialism from Ivan the Great to the Revolution (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1974), pp. 264-298.
3 Etkind wrote: 'The internal colonization of Russia was more akin to the British colonization of America than that of India' [Etkind, 2011].
4 According to Morozov, Russia has played a peripheral role in the Eurocentric global order because of the inherent structural inequality of the capitalist world. The fact that Russia's main identity discourses were similar to those of other aspiring powers such as China, India or Japan is due to their shared subaltern experiences, that is their internalization of a normative order whose nodal points are defined by the West (Ibid, 65).
Edward Lazzerini found application of postcolonial theory to Russian Central Asia problematic (Edward Lazzerini, "'Theory, Like Mist on Glasses...': A Response to Laura Adams," Central Eurasian Studies Review, 7, no. 2 (Fall 2008), 3-6). The "Cambridge School" of South Asian history denies the Saidian thesis that Western imperial power was always absolute and hegemonic (Edward Said, Orientalism, New York, Pantheon Books, 1978). However, as Alexander Morrison has noted, "there was in fact no systematic attempt to co-opt the former Muslim ruling elite" by the Russian administration in Central Asia prior to 1917 (Alexander Morrison, Russian Rule in Samarkand, 1868-1910: Comparison with British India (London & New York, Oxford University Press, 2008), 90). Moreover, there was the absence of three
Russian Photography in the Service of Empire. From its inception, photography proved to be an invaluable companion to civilians engaged in the mapping of the Russian Empire's previously unchartered territories. The first Russian geographical explorer to employ the Daguerreotype was Grigorii Karelin, who used it as early as 1840 on his journey through what is today's Eastern Kazakhstan [Morozov, 1953]. In 1843, another self-taught photographer, Sergei Levitskii, used the Da-guerre camera during an expedition surveying water springs in the Northern Caucasus. The advantages of direct photo-engraving (the photogravure) were quickly realized by the Russian army personnel, who in turn contributed to its technological advancement. Military engineer Dmitrii Birkin conducted the first experiments in enlargement and reduction of maps and built, in 1869, a photo-geodesic device. In 1878, he became the first chairman of the Fifth Department of the Imperial Russian Technical Society (the IRTO) — the Division of Light-Writing (the name by which photography was then known) [Garanina, 1979]. The Seventh Department — the Division of Aeronautics — took an active part in aerial photographic shooting. In the second half of the 1880s, Viatcheslav Sreznevskii lectured on "The Application of Photography to Engineering" at the newly opened Institute of Engineers of Ways of Communication in St. Petersburg. He built a photographic camera for Vsevolod Roborovskii who accompanied prominent scientist Nikolai Przhevalskii in his travels in Asia.
During the years of the Central Asian conquest, The Proceedings of the Imperial Russian Geographic Society (the IRGO) were almost entirely taken up with accounts of exploration along the Asian frontier—the reports of scholar-travelers illustrated by military draftsmen and photographers. The IRGO Vice-President, prominent geographer and naturalist Pyotr Semenov (from 1907 on known as Semenov-Tian'-Shanskii) is reported to have said, "[E] very annexation in Central Asia is a source of satisfaction to our scientific men. Fresh fields are opened up for research, and all this must naturally be of interest to persons devoted to science" [Marvin, 1882]. In 1860, the IRGO awarded a silver medal to Anton Murenko for his "album of photographic drawings" — the name by which photographs were known at that time — titled From Orenburg across Khiva to Bukhara. Combat engineer and sapper Mikhail Priorov, assigned to accompany ar-
features "prominent in the British administration of India: the creation of locally recruited military formations; native personnel trained in clerical and administrative duties; and the holding out of prospects of eventual self-government" (Geoffrey Wheeler, "Epilogue," in Gerald Morgan, Anglo-Russian Rivalry in Central Asia: 1810-1895 (London, Frank Cass, 1981), 219).
Ил. 1. Карта Туркестанского края. 1873 Fig. 1. A Map of Turkestan. 1873.
chaeologist Pyotr Lerkh on his travels through the newly established Syr-Daria Local in 1867, produced dozens of images of the ancient architectural monuments and inscriptions. (On behalf of the IRGO, Lerkh also composed the instructions for finding, observing, describing, and preserving monuments for Russian officers participating in the 1873 military action against Khiva.) The 1865-1868 Turkestan Scientific Expedition, organized by the IRGO, encompassed two departments — mathematical and physical. The former, headed by astronomer O.V. Struve, consisted of topographers charged with the task of completing the map of territory between the cities of Vernyi and Dzhulek. The latter, led by Nikolai Severtsov, studied physical geography, geological stratigraphy, flora and fauna, and the means of production in the conquered lands. Attached to the Russian army Grigorii Kryvtsov produced two albums, of "types and views of the Kokand Khanate" (1872) and "views and types of the Khiva Khanate" (1873). The second album, supplemented by a comprehensive explanatory note, was sent off to the IRGO. The photographic oeuvre of Lev Barshchevsky (Leon Barszczewski in his native Polish), a colonel of the Russian army stationed in Samarkand and Piandzhikent between 1876 and 1897, included such diverse subjects as minerals and glaciers (shot during the geological expedition
led by Sokolov), images of the specimens of flora (taken with botanist Lipskii), photos of the archaeological finds, and portraits of both the Bukharan courtiers and the mountaineers living in remote villages. The images taken in the Emirate of Bukhara were awarded a gold medal at an 1885 Paris exhibition in Paris5.
Early Studies of Russian Turkestan. Shortly after his arrival in Tashkent the first Governor-General of Turkestan Konstantin Petrovich von Kaufman (1867-1882) initiated a land survey and a population census. He sought assistance of both military staff and civilian specialists sourced throughout the Russian Empire. Alexander Geins, Head of the Chancellery (the main advising and executive office) between 1867 and 1869, possessed an advanced knowledge of geography and statistics. The materials generated through activi-
5 The photographic legacy of this avid amateur naturalist and ethnographer — 590 glass plates (now in the Reprographic Section of the University
of Warsaw) and a number of prints (now at the Institute of Ethnology, The Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan) — led Zbigniew Jasiewicz to conclude that Leon Barszczewski's images were the second most important work on Russian Central Asia after Kaufman's Turkestan Album in the nineteenth century. I am thankful to Dr. Jasiewicz for the information about the present condition of these collections in Poland.
ties of four commissions were made public in Turkestanskie Gubernskie Vedomosti, the Russian-language newspaper inaugurated in April 18706, whose editor-in-chief Captain Nikolai Maev later collected and published them in the statistical yearbook, Materials for Statistics of Turkestan (Materialy dlia Statistiki Turkestan-skago Kraia, 1872-1874). Several works were authored by Russian officers. Major Aleksei Maksheev published "Notes on Geography, Ethnography, and Statistics of Turkestan" ("Geo-graficheskie, Etnograficheskie i Statisticheskie Materialy o Turkestanskom Kraie," Zapiski IRGO po Otdelu Statistiki, 1871, vol. 2). A colonel of the General Staff Alexander Kaulbars wrote on The Source of the Amu-Daria River (Nizoviia Amu-Dar'i, Opisannye po Sobstvennym Issle-dovaniiam v 1873 godu). Kaulbars, a participant in the campaign against Khiva, published the first detailed descriptions of the customs of the Kazakhs and the Kara-Kalpaks (Zapiski IRGO po Obshch. Geografii, 1881, vol. 9). Alexander Khoroshkhin of the Ural Cossack Regiment, fluent in the Kazakh language from childhood, penned A Collection of Articles on Turkestan (Sbornik State, Kasayushchikhsya do Turkestanskago Kraia, 1876), with the foreword by Nikolai Maev. Future Governor-General of Turkestan Aleksei Kuropatkin authored Turkmenia and the Turkmen (Turkmeniia i Turkme-ny, 1879). Tugan Mirza Baranovskii published on the customs of the Turkmen as observed during an expedition (Russkie v Akhal-Teke, 1879 god, 1881). The Syr-Daria's Military Governor Nikolai Grodekov presented an account of War in Turkmenia (Voina v Turkmenii, 1883), which was accompanied by a detailed ethnic map. He also published On the Customary Law among the Kazakhs and the Kyrgyz of the Syr-Daria Local (Kara-Kyrgizy Syr-Dar'inskoi Oblas-ti, Yuridicheskii Byt, 1889).
Kaufman approached Vladimir Mezhov, a recent retiree from the Imperial Public Library in St. Petersburg, with the request to compile a contemporary bibliography on Central Asia. International in its scope, Turkestanskii Sbornik Sochinenii i Statei (1867-1887) included, on Mezhov's initiative, not only the titles of some 4,713 books and articles, but the publications in their entirety. Assembled in St. Petersburg and housed in Tashkent, the 416 volumes were accompanied by a comprehensive three-vol-
6 Between 1870 and 1883, its supplement, Turkestan Native Newspaper (Turkeston Viloyatining Gazeti), was published four times a month, twice in the Sart and twice in the Kyrgyz languages. Translators Ibragimov and later Chanyshev were in charge. Nikolai Ostroumov, a graduate of the Kazan Theological Academy, became its editor in 1883 on orders of the next Governor-General, Mikhail Grigorievich Cherniaiev (who wished to discontinue the Newspaper in Kyrgyz). The daily in the Sart language circulated at the rate of 500 copies and became an independent newspaper in 1887.
ume index. In addition to a public library7 and a museum (founded in 1876), several learned societies opened in Tashkent. Scientist Aleksei Fedchenko, geographer Ivan Mushketov, naturalist and the director of the Turkestan School of Silk Culture V.F. Oshanin, explorer Nikolai Severtsov, and zoologist A.I. Vil'kins were members of the Turkestan branch (1871-1894) of the Imperial Russian Society of Friends of Natural History, Anthropology, and Ethnography. The mining engineer Alexander Tatarinov chaired the Central Asian Learned Society for the Study of Local History, Geography, Mineralogy, and Trade (founded in 1869 but officially opened in January 1871). Inspired by the 1867 All-Russian Ethnographic Exhibition in Mos-cow8. Kaufman personally ensured the participation of Turkestan in various expositions, both in Russia and abroad.
Daniel Brower traced the origin of Kaufman's ethnographic project in Turkestan to the time when he had served in the Caucasus under the Viceroy Prince Mikhail Vorontsov (1845-1856). Vorontsov encouraged Russian officials to familiarize themselves with the "customs of the people" and expected that this knowledge would give them an "insight to govern justly their difficult subjects"9 [Brower, 1997]. In the
7 In 1878, the Tashkent Public Library holdings consisted of 5,381 publications in 9,734 volumes, out of which 2,695 were in Russian, 1,444 in French, 850 in German, and 392 in English, Latin, Italian, Swedish, Dutch, Czech, and other languages; there were 183 subscribers, and 2,780 volumes circulated. The library received an annual subsidy, in the amount of 1,300 rubles, from the state treasury: the librarian was paid 800 rubles, and the rest was spent on the new acquisitions and book binding (Lev Kostenko, Turkestanskii Krai: Opyt Voenno-Statisticheskago Obozreniia Turkestanskago Voennago Okruga (St. Petersburg, 1880), 411-412).
8 The exhibition consisted of dioramas with 300 mannequins portraying over sixty ethnic groups, and a wide range of additional displays representing the material culture and physical features of the peoples of the Russian Empire (Nathaniel Knight, The Empire on Display: Science, Nationalism and the Challenge of Human Diversity in the Ail-Russian Ethnographic Exhibition of 1867 (Washington, DC, NCEEER, 2001)).
9 On the orders of the Chief Military Commander in the Caucasus, ten issues of the informational writings on mountaineers, Sbornik Svedenii o Kavkazskikh Gortsakh, were published between 1868 and 1881. They were succeeded by the extensive collection of materials for description of locales and inhabitants, Sbornik Materialov dlia Opisaniia Mestnosti i Plemen Kavkaza (1881-1916), produced by the Caucasian School District. Originally conceived as an administrative aid by the government, these materials were read with interest by the educated Russian public. Leo Tolstoy, for instance, would consult the Sbornik Materialov when working on his novel Hadji Murad in 1896-1904. On the Caucasian War of 1817-1864 and the Muslim rebellions in the 1870s, see Charles King, The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus (Oxford & New York, Oxford University Press, 2008).
colonial context, this quest for knowledge may be seen as an integral part of the larger political project to sustain the Russian presence in the newly conquered regions.
In Central Asia, the colonial system of power was established from the late 1860s through the 1880s. At that time, scientists and politicians in St. Petersburg distinguished between the British and the Russian modes of interacting with the natives on the empire's fringes. In a conversation with Charles Marvin, geographer Semenov described the British mode as "advancing and retiring." He was convinced that the Russian way of being a consistent presence was "decidedly the more preferable. When you advance in Central Asia, it is always a mistake to retire — it is misunderstood by natives. They regard it as a sign of weakness" [Marvin, 1882]. Granted an almost unlimited authority by the tsar, General Kaufman, trained as a military engineer, sought out rational, state-of-the art methods to make Turkestan a permanent part of the empire. In the spirit of his time, Kaufman believed that the disciplinary knowledge produced by ethnographers and geographers would empower Russian officials by equipping them with the scientific facts about the "true nature" of native peoples. This information was deemed instrumental for achieving stability within the imperial domains. This understanding was mirrored in Mezhov's foreword to the Turkestanskii Sbornik. "A collection such as this one is more than necessary for the land which lies several thousand miles away from ours. This encyclopedia, encompassing works on the land's past as well as the various aspects of its social, administrative, and economic life, must become a desk manual for those who are entrusted with the governing of this land" [Mezhov, 1878].
In the Beginning Was the Image. If "the line between science and empire" [Brower, 2003] was blurred, so was the line between empire and visual culture. Painting and drawing were regarded as important aids in conveying information on Turkestan to the rest of the Russian Empire. Before his dispatch for Tashkent, Kaufman met with the Russian artist Vasi-lii Vereshchagin (1842-1904), who had studied under Parisian painters Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Bida in 1864-1866. Kaufman invited Vereshchagin to visit Central Asia as "an art volunteer" and promised him an ensign's salary and individual freedom of movement. During his first trip to Turkestan in 1867-1868, Vereshchagin joined the tsar's troops shortly after they had entered Samarkand. The painter spent his days riding around town and visiting older mosques and bazaars. He found the scenery, buildings, and costumes "very unusual and interesting." At the same time, Vereshchagin formed a condescending attitude toward the subjects of "the old and new poets of the East" who had glorified "'gorgeous, incomparable,
divine' Samarkand," and he insisted that these "metaphors must be understood in a relative sense because Samarkand, like all Asian cities, is pretty dirty and stinky" [Vereshchagin, 1894]. It is worth noting that Vereshchagin had not traveled to the Ottoman Empire or India prior to visiting Turkestan. Nevertheless, acting according to the learned Orientalist belief of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg10 and the Gerome studio in Paris he did not find it difficult to generalize the condition of this particular city to apply to all of Asia. In the military and genre scenes of his Turkestan Series (Turkestanskii Tsykl, 1869-1872) —some 250 drawings and paintings the artist called "a poem" — native characters are presented in a sinister light, which influenced the orientation of Russian visual culture for decades to come11.
In his memoirs, Vereshchagin wrote of his and Kaufman's surprise, while wandering through the Emir's palace, at the inaccuracy of the description of the "throne of Tamerlane" (Kok Tash) given by Arminius Vambery, the Hungarian traveler who had infiltrated Central Asia disguised as a dervish in 186312. Whereas
10 On Russian Orientalism see Emanuel Sarkisyanz, "Russian Attitudes toward Asia," Russian Review, 13, No. 4. (October 1954), pp. 245-254; Adeeb Khalid, "Russian History and the Debate over Orientalism," Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 1, no. 4 (Fall 2000), pp. 691-699; Nathaniel Knight, "On Russian Orientalism: A Response to Adeeb Khalid," Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 1, no. 4 (Fall 2000), pp. 701-715; Susanna Rabow-Edling, Slavophile Thought and the Politics of Cultural Nationalism (Albany, SUNY Press, 2006); Vera Tolz, "European, National, and (Anti-)Imperial: The Formation of Academic Oriental Studies in Late Tsarist and Early Soviet Russia," Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 9, no. 1, (Winter 2008), pp. 53-81; Alexander Morrison, "'Applied Orientalism' in British India and Tsarist Turkestan," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 5, No. 3 (2009), pp. 619-647; Stephanie Cronin, "Introduction: Edward Said, Russian Orientalism and Soviet Iranology," Iranian Studies, 48, no. 5 (2015), pp. 647-662.
11 The Turkestan Series transformed the genre of Russian battle painting. In the thirteen large canvases, war was depicted as a series of bloody combats, and victories were the results of valor and sacrifice of many soldiers and not the tactics of parading generals. Vereshchagin's 1874 solo exhibition in St. Petersburg was loudly protested by some viewers who accused him of shaming national pride. Kaufman also publicly denounced the artist in front of the tsar. On Vereshchagin see V.D. Barooshian, V.V. Vereshchagin: Artist at War (Gainesville, University Press of Florida, 1993); Maria Chernysheva, "The Russian Gerome'? Vereshchagin as a Painter of Turkestan," RIHA Journal0096 (18 September 2014), https://www.riha-journal.org/articles/2014/2014-jul-sep/chernysheva-vereshchagin, accessed on April 20, 2020.
12 The writing in question is Arminius Vambery, Travels in Central Asia: Being the Account of a Journey from Teheran across the Turkoman Desert on the Eastern Shore of the Caspian to Khiva, Bokhara and
in the Vambery text the marble throne was identified as green, it was off-white; instead of an iron plaque behind the throne, they found an inscription in stone, etc. The painter recalled how this led to Kaufman's suggestion that Vambery had never visited Samarkand. If one could not trust a foreigner's narration, then the important task of describing and showing "the real Turkestan" to the public was to be relegated to Russian visual artists.
Dozens of artists and draftsmen, both professional and amateur, visited the new colony. D.V. Velezhev was among the first to make drawings of the ancient monuments in Tashkent and Khodzhent, and D.L. Ivanov focused on Samarkand antiquities. Military engineer D.K. Zatsepin was the creator of several hundred watercolors made out-of-doors between 1860 and 1887. Vereshchagin and Captain Fyodorov supplied illustrations for Voennyia Deistviia na Oksuse i Padeniie Khivy (Moscow, 1875) — the 1875 Russian translation of Januarius MacGahan's Campaigning on the Cxus and the Fall of Khiva (New York, 1874). Nikolai Karazin, in addition to his numerous sketches from nature, was commissioned to produce large oil paintings, including the "Entry of Russian Troops in Samarkand on June 8, 1868" (1888), "The Khiva Expedition of 1873" (1888), and "The Battle of Geok Tepe" (1889). He also published an illustrated travelogue, From Orenburg to Tashkent (O Orenburga do Tashkenta, St. Petersburg, Hermann Hoppe, 1886). Kara-zin's drawings, reproduced in Niva and other domestic periodicals, were collected by many, including Marvin who passed them on to Lord George Nathaniel Curzon, a future Governor-General and Viceroy of British India. Artist L.E. Dmitriev-Kavkazskii produced the sumptuously illustrated travelogue Through Central Asia: The Notes of an Artist, 1887-1888 (Po Srednei Azii: Zapiski Khudozhnika, 1887-1888, St. Petersburg, A.F. Devrien, 1894). Works of Captain D.M. Rezvoi, lithographed by artist Pyotr F. Borel' in the 1880s, were published by St. Petersburg-based A. Il'in in the album of "the views of Khiva and the portraits of the participants of the Khiva Expedition." Captain K. Dickhoff, a participant in the Khiva and the Kokand campaigns, paid special attention to the architectural details in his studies. Colonel M. Alikhanov-Avarsky's drawings accompanied the official Turkestan Guide edited by A.I. Dmitriev-Mamonov (Putevoditel'po Turkestanu i Zhelieznym Dorogam Tashkentskoi i Sredne-Aziatskoi, 1907-1908, St. Petersburg, tip. V.Ia. Mil'shteina, 1907).
Semirechenskii Al'bom (the Semi-rechie Album), 1867. It was photography that promised to give the most "accurate" visual record of objects seen and events expe-
Samarcand, Performed in the Year 1863 (London, John Murray, 1864).
rienced13. Both Vereshchagin and his French teacher Gerome, whom Vereshchagin assisted in his work on the sculpture of Tamerlane (1898) by supplying the native garb and photographs of the steppe horses, greatly valued and used this new technology. Moscow botanist Fedchenko, invited to Tashkent by Kaufman, also praised photography and recommended its usefulness to the Governor-General.
Within Russian Central Asia, the Semi-rechie Local (translated as "the land between the seven rivers"), with the capital Vernyi (now Almaty), was the earliest destination for the Cossacks of Siberia. Between 1847 and 1867, fourteen Cossack villages were founded with a total population of 15,000. The initial colonization of the Semirechie was economically disastrous: the indigenous population was impoverished and experienced frequent conflicts with the new overlords whose immense lots often blocked customary migration routes of cattle; the forests became extinct as the result of excessive use of wood for building and fuel in Cossack villages; and contrary to initial expectations, this region later imported, rather than exported, bread from other regions of the empire. Nevertheless, the album (author unknown) which Kaufman ordered in 1867 celebrated its history.
The Semirechie Album (Semirechenskii
13 Photography was considered a business of state importance on the frontier of Russia's Northwest where Kaufman, responsible for the suppression of the Polish rebellion, had held the positions of the Vilna (Vilnius) Governor-General and Commander of the Vilna Military District from April 1865 through October 1866. The district's former trustee I.P. Kornilov laid out an ideological program for producing specific images in a letter to the inspector of the Vilna Educational District V.P. Kulin: I salute I.P. Trutnev for his photographs and wish him much success. He must make public the views of Vilna, its Orthodox churches, remarkable archaeological findings, and, finally, ethnographic photographs.... The first issue [of the album] could...contain the types: Orthodox Russians and Russian Old Believers, Polish nobility, Lithuanians, Tatars, Belorussians.... The issue may include five photographs of Jews and five of Poles.. Everybody talks about Poles and Jews nowadays, and it will be very interesting for us, the old Vilnians, to see pictures of these cunning nationalities.. The selected scenes must be typical and, at the same time, a little comic, calling for a beholder's smile. There should be no theatrical solemnity or graciousness, which are always of great concern to the Poles, in these pictures.. There must be images of a Jew and a Pole obsequiously petitioning in the Governor's or the District Chief's reception room. I.P. Kornilov, Pis'mo Byvshego Popechitelya Vilenskogo Uchebnogo Okruga I.P. Kornilova — Inspektoru Vilenskogo Uchebnogo Okruga V.P. Kulinu ot 17 yanvarya 1870 g. (Russian State Historical Archives, f. 970, op. 1, d. 908, pp. 66—66ob), emphasis added. I am grateful to Dr. Mikhail Dolbilov for bringing this letter to my attention.
Al'bom, 1867) was an important antecedent of the Turkestan Album. It included portraits of nine Cossack officers and the Khotiukov family (the fourth-generation Russian settlers in the area), and also the first photographs of indigenous peoples — the anonymous Kyrgyz, Kazakhs, Kara-Kalpaks, Taranchi, and Dungans, some depicted engaged in their occupations. Among one hundred images, twenty-three showed landscapes (with roads and rivers) and twenty-five — towns, individual buildings, and street scenes. Cossack resettlement in the Semirechie was shown as a move from an old home to a new home, where the new home, despite its unusual landscape and neighbors, was an extension of, rather than a radical departure from, the old14.
Preparation and the Content of Turkestanskii Al'bom (the Turkestan Album), 1871-1872. The Turkestan Album was commissioned by General Kaufman and compiled by A.L. Kun, M.I. Brodovskii, N.V. Bogaevskii, and General M.A. Terent'ev. In 1871-1872, Kun, a graduate of the Oriental Faculty at St. Petersburg University and the titular adviser for the Governor-General, directed a group of professional and military photographers15 to follow closely the movement of the Russian troops and document through pictures the vast
14 In a similar fashion, the Turkestan Album included the photograph of a Russian log house, which served as the forepost to the city of Tashkent on the Orenburg-Tashkent Road. This line was followed by settlers' manuals and informational pamphlets, produced from the late 1880s on by various publishing houses whose purpose was to counter rumors about the hardships of living in the borderlands (Willard Sunderland, "Peasant Pioneering: Russian Peasant Settlers Describe Colonization and the Eastern Frontier, 1880s-1910s," Journal of Social History, 34, No. 4 (Summer 2001), pp. 897-898).
15 The opinions as to how many people participated in this project diverge. Loginov identified N. Nekhoroshev
as a sole creator (Alexei Loginov, "Nekhoroshev," in John Hannavy, Encyclopaedia of Nineteenth-Century Photograph (New York, Routledge, 2008), Vol. 2, 986987). Sonntag designated Priorov's album Iz Srednei Azii (1866-1867) as an antecedent to the Turkestan Album. She is also of the opinion that this "album-and-photographer resurrection challenges a previous belief that Kaufman's commission of the Turkestan Album was due to the 1867 Moscow Ethnographic Exhibition, attended before his departure for Tashkent" (Heather S. Sonntag, "Photography and Mapping Russian Conquest in Central Asia: Early Albums, Encounters, and Exhibitions, 18661876," Journée d'Etude Centrasiatique, Atelier 3: Histoire du Turkestan russe et du Xinjiang, (26 October 2007), http://www.reseau-asie.com/cgi-bin/prog/pform.cgi?langue=fr&Mcenter=article_ standard&TypeListe=showdoc&ID_document=269 accessed on April 20, 2020). Gorshenina mentioned, in addition to the names of Nekhoroshev, Kryvtsov, and Priorov, Captain Kablukov and Pichugin (Svetlana Gorshenina, "Krupneishie Proekty Kolonial'nykh Arkhivov Rossii: Utopichnost' Ekzostivnoi Turkestaniki General-Gubernatora Konstantina Petrovicha fon Kaufmana," Ab Imperio, 3, (2007), 291-354
territory between Orenburg, Kuldzha, Semi-palatinsk, and Samarkand. The images were taken in the city of Samarkand, the Zaravshan Military District, and the Syr-Daria Local. The Album consisted of four sections arranged in six volumes: "The Archaeological Part" (two volumes) compiled by Kun and Bogaevskii, "The Ethnographical Part" (two volumes) assembled by Kun, "The Trades Part" prepared by Kun and Brodovskii, and "The Historical Part" arranged by Terent'ev. Each section had a title page, a concise preface (identical in all four sections), and a table of contents followed by the visual plates that measured 45cm x 60cm (17%"x23%") and contained from one to eight images each. The album leaves had decorative borders, lithographically printed running heads, and individual captions. Some 1,230 gold-toned mounted albumen prints were supplemented by watercolor drawings (artist L.A. Shostak), military-topographical maps, and architectural plans.
According to Istoricheskii Vestnik (1899), there were six sets of the Album produced: a set for Tsar Alexander II and one each for his heir, Prince Alexander, for the Imperial Academy of Sciences, for the Imperial Russian Geographic Society, for the newly founded public library in Tashkent, and for the use of the Governor-General of Turkestan. In addition, there were fifty copies of a smaller album issued that included 130 of the "most telling and bright" images selected from the full version16.
The Album's "Preface" referred to the Russian advance into Central Asia as instrumental in opening this region to European civilization. Leading historians interpreted the Timur epoch as the time when the Mongol invaders, after having settled in the Samarkand area in the second decade of the thirteenth century, adapted to "the original Aryan culture" and created a sophisticated urban civilization in the oasis [Dmitriev-Mamontov, 1907] ("The Aryan race" is a race concept which in the nineteenth century described people of Indo-European heritage as a racial grouping.) Scholars posited that a period of steady decline began after Samarkand fell victim to the nomadic Turko-Uz-beks led by Sheibani Khan in the late fifteenth century. Lev Kostenko wrote that under the Timurids cultural life had been "dynamic and lively, and mathematical and astronomical discoveries were made" while more recently there has been "no learning, and the sciences that
16 Anxious that his brainchild be accessible to the larger society, Kaufman had bequeathed the negatives of the historical, industrial, and ethnographical sections to the IRGO, and the negatives of the archaeological section to the Imperial Russian Archaeological Society—on the condition that all the negatives would be kept under the same roof, at the Imperial Public Library in St. Petersburg. His hope was that these two would soon republish their holdings, which did not happen.
drive the societal development absolutely petered out" [Kostenko, 1870]. It was further emphasized that it was only through the intervention of an external force that any renaissance would be possible: "[T]o assist the remnants of the Asian Iranian branch of the ancient Aryans in their cultural struggle with the Turko-Mon-golian Central-Asian world there appeared the Slavic Russian tribe, this European representative of the same ancient Aryans" [Dmitriev-Mamontov, 1907].
Accompanying texts explained the "novel photographic drawings" to a public unfamiliar with the new territory. General Terent'ev outlined a history of the Russian military expeditions in his "Essay on Movement of the Russians into Central Asia."17 The connection between the imperial conquest and scientific exploits was presented as natural and simultaneous: "The occupation of Tashkent, and then of Samarkand, had opened up a vast field of knowledge to be seized through comprehensive familiarization with the region by Russian researchers of Central Asia"18. Kun wrote on ethnography and archaeology in the Syr-Daria Local19. He collaborated with Bogaevskii on
17 Shortly thereafter, Terent'ev published two books — Rossiia i Angliia v Srednei Azii (1875; the English translation, Russia and England in Central Asia, came out in Calcutta in the same year) and Rossiia i Angliia v Bor'bie za Rynki (1876) — in which he accused Great Britain of secretly distributing rifles among the Turkoman tribes for use against Russia. Terent'ev was convinced that the 1858 Indian Mutiny had failed because of the absence of proper planning and outside support, so that "sick to death" natives were now waiting for "a physician from the north" to help them bring down "the British yoke." Terent'ev presented the Russian rule as less harsh than the British regime as he wanted his readers to believe that peoples of India were anxiously waiting for his countrymen to flood their country. The theory of the "lesser evil" of Russian versus British domination, as well as the view of the war in Asia as an outcome of the economic competition for expanding capitalist markets was adopted by Soviet historiography in the twentieth century.
18 Preface. Turkestanskii Al'bom, po Rasporyazheniiu Turkestanskago General-Gubernatora General-Adiutanta K. P. fon Kaufmana (1871-1872), p. 1.
19 In November 1868, on the recommendation of Vasilii Vasilievich Grigoriev, Kun left Orenburg for Central Asia where he collected materials for the Russian learned societies. The following April, Kaufman
dispatched Kun to study the Il'minskii method of teaching Russian to natives, the knowledge of which
qualified him for the position of Chief Inspector of Turkestan schools from 1876 to 1882. Upon his return from Kazan in August 1869, Kun was transferred to the Zaravshan Military District to conduct statistical studies. This district established in June 1868 on the territory taken from the Emirate of Bukhara was enlarged in 1870 through the inclusion of several mountain principalities on the Zaravshan River. (The district was renamed the Samarkand Local in 1886.) While there, Kun took part in a research expedition to the upper course of the Zaravshan River led by Fedchenko. In 1871, Kun shipped fifteen boxes with
"The Materials for Samarkand and Its Vicinities." These two essays were combined in one text, titled "The Materials for Archaeological Description of Ancient Monuments of the Syr-Daria and the Zaravshan." Brodovskii wrote a commentary for "The Trades Part," which was also published as an individual brochure (Tech-nicheskiie Proizvodstva v Turkestanskom Kraie, 1875)20.
Time of the Turkestan Album: History vs. Archaeology. In the last third of the nineteenth century, the benefits of archaeological explorations in the colonies began to be perceived as equivalent with the legal and fiscal reforms implemented by the European governments. As part of the "archaeological push" in Turkestan, Lerkh visited the monuments on the banks of the lower course of the Syr-Daria and initiated several digs as early as 1867; Vereshchagin, en route to Tashkent, stopped in Dzhankent, where he attempted to continue Lerkh's work (the excavation findings were displayed at his 1874 solo art show in St. Petersburg); Turcologist Vasilii Radlov (Friedrich Wilhelm Radloff) traversed the Semirechie in 1869 and wrote about Samarkand and the Zaravshan Valley; Khoroshkhin surveyed Samarkand antiquities in 1872; A.A. Kushakev-ich described Khodzhent and Ura Tiube in the same year; and M.N. Rostislavov presented a report on Major Borzenkov's 1874 excavation of Afrasiab — an ancient city on the territory of Samarkand destroyed by the Mongols in the early thirteenth century.
The ancient architectural remains, together with the appropriated land, came into imperial possession at the time when photographic surveys — "a sort of pictorial census of the state's patrimony" — became available, due to "print-capitalism," [Anderson, 2006] to the subjects of the European states. The Turkestan Album's archaeological section was conceived as a pioneering visual compendium of Central Asian architectural antiquities. As Great Britain was Russia's major competitor for supremacy in Asia during "the Great Game," it is not surprising that the Turkestan Album had a prototype in the photographic albums compiled, beginning in 1847, on British India.
"The Archaeological Part" introduced the viewer to "the past life of the region in preserved ancient monuments."21 Two volumes showcased the historic buildings and tombs in the City of Turkestan (the fifteenth-century Mausoleum of Sultan Akhmed Yassavi and
the archaeological finds from a number of sites, including Tashkent, to St. Petersburg
20 Neither of these texts accompanies a Library of Congress (Washington, DC, USA) copy of the Turkestan Album in its present condition, https:// www.loc.gov/item/2006700061
21 Preface. Turkestanskii Al'bom, po Rasporyazheniiu Turkestanskago General-Gubernatora General-Adiutanta K. P. fon Kaufmana (1871-1872), p. 1.
the Mausoleum of Rabichi Begim, Timur's great-granddaughter), Tashkent (the fifteenth-century Mausoleum of Sheikhantaur and the Madrasa of Kokal Tash, built by Barak Khan in the 1560s), Khodzhent (the sixteenth-century Mausoleum of Sheikh Maslakhatdin), Aulie Ata (the Shrine of Aulie Ata), and Ura Tiube (the Rustem Bek Madrasa). The bulk of this section was devoted to Samarkand, a city of special interest to the Russian archaeologists since it contained extant, "although badly damaged by the passing of time" [Bartold, 1925] architectural monuments of the era of Timur and the Timurids. The Album featured the Mausoleum Guri Mir (1403) — a burial place of Timur and his descendants, attached to the madrasa erected by Timur's favorite grandson Mohamed Sultan Mirza. The captions in Russian refer to Timur as "Timur Kuragan": after marrying into the thirteenth-century Mongol conqueror Ch-inggis Khan's family, Timur added "GurkanJ" to his name (Gurkan is the Persianized form of the original Mongolian word kurugan, "son-in-law"). Kaufman saw to it personally that the tomb of Timur would be set in order — the effort, which left some domestic and foreign connoisseurs dissatisfied. In his 1888 letter to the Times of London, George Dobson remarked on the "disfigurement" wrought by the Russians who "bungled in repairing and trying to remodel delicate contour of the cupola of Timur's tomb"22.
Although the images in "The Historical Part" gave some idea of how extensively the fortifications and buildings were damaged during the recent conflict23, "The Archaeological
22 George Dobson, Russia's Railway Advance into Central Asia: Notes of a Journey from St. Petersburg to Samarkand (London, W.H. Allen and Co, 1890), 211. The photograph of the cleaned and restored gravestones appeared in Dmitriev-Mamonov's Putevoditel'po Turkestanu (1907) on p. 334.
23 Artist Vereshchagin left a testimony of the
devastation brought on by war. Shortly after entering Samarkand whose denizens had opened the gates to the Russians, Generals Kaufman, Golovachev, and Romanovskii decided to press forward to Katta Kurgan and the Zyrabulak Heights (where the decisive victory over the Bukharan troops would be later won). Kaufman did not want to destroy one-third of the city houses, located next to the citadel, which made it an easy target for partisan attacks. In June, during the six-day native rebellion against a small Russian garrison, Officer Nazarov's squad "corrected this mistake" and burned down everything between the Bukhara road and the road, which the returning [Russian] soldiers would use....Waiting for our liberation, our chief artillery officer decided to retaliate a mosque whose minaret was used for shooting at our wounded. Knowing my weakness for mosques merchant Trubchaninov notified me, 'Vasilii Vasilievich, the plaster is being knocked down!' "Plaster" was the name he used for the faience tiles of the mosque exterior, which he knew I admire. I dashed to M. and hardly talked him into sparing the minaret, which was already bombarded with several shells. Vasilii V. Vereshchagin, Na Voine v
Part" suppresses this reading. The latter offers a grim picture of copious domed edifices and their interiors, crumbling due to modern-day natives' "apathy" and "incapacity" to care for their architectural heritage. As John Steadman noted, the fullest development of the myth of Asia as a "special" geopolitical unity belonged "not to the poet...but to the political economist and the historian."24 Russian scholars posited
Azii i Evrope: Vospominania Khudozhnika (Moskva, Kushnerev & Co, 1894), pp. 48-49 In retribution, the returned Russian army burned down the entire city center with its market square. The largest in Central Asia citadel, with the wall perimeter of 2.67 km and the surface area 11.38 sq. km, was transformed into a modern fortress, the surrounding seventeen city quarters (out of a total of 102) were demolished, and a new part of the city was founded in 1871 to the west of the former city wall.
24 John M. Steadman, The Myth of Asia (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1969), 260. Russian writers often referred to their contemporary Central Asians as to the inhabitants of medieval khanates. The reverberations of the concept of Oriental Despotism are found in Konstantin Pahlen's Mission to Turkestan. In his memoirs, Count Pahlen wrote about the Registan Square, the main commercial center of Samarkand featured in "The Archaeological Part": On one side of the courtyard there is a tall building with a cloistered hall of pointed arches, common to all the mosques in Turkestan, and surmounted by a dome very much like the one in Florence, bla'zed richly in white and blue. An immense terrace runs the whole length of the building, with an imposing flight of steps leading down to the courtyard. Six hundred years ago Tamerlane stood on these steps to judge the misdeeds of the subjects of his far-flung empire, and here, at a nod from him, thousands, — nay, tens of thousands — of heads rolled in the dust, and thousands of other trembling human beings were dismissed with a blessing.. I slowly mounted the steps of the terrace.. I stood and surveyed the kind of scene Tamerlane must have witnessed from this very spot, and these involuntary thoughts came to my mind: how patient were these people, enslaved for thousands of years, how lacking in will power, how unassertive, how dependent for the fulfillment of their needs on the mercy of a transitory despot. They had abided in meekness like this under Tamerlane and Alexander the Great...and like this they now stood and bowed before the remote and distant figure of the Ak-Padishah, the White Tsar [the Russian tsar]...who had vouchsafed them peace, well-being, and order after an eternity of extortion and petty tyranny. K.K. Pahlen, R.A. Pierce & N.J. Couriss, Mission to Turkestan: Being the Memoirs of Count K.K. Pahlen, 1908-1909 (London, Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 31-32, emphasis added. Surrounded by the sheer beauty of the colorful Registan architecture — the three madrasas (theological seminaries) Shir Dar ("the lion-bearing"), Tillia Kari ("the gold-covered"), and Ulug Bek (named after Timur's grandson) — the Russian statesman gazes over his countrymen's heads and daydreams of the ages past. Pahlen's reference to the Church of Santa Maria del Fiore strengthens the disjunction: the dome of this Florentine church, designed by Filippo Brunelleski in 1418 and executed by 1436, has been the symbol of the Italian Renaissance. Its innovative
that Islam's rigid undeviating regulations with regard to family life, clothing, food, and state administration were responsible for Central Asia's "backwardness": by preventing innovations and the quest for improving social condition, the "Koran has completely enslaved the minds with the heavy chains of ineptness" [Kostenko, 1870]. In his 1901 book Koran i Progress, the editor of Turkestan Native Newspaper and director of the Tashkent Teachers Seminary Nikolai Ostroumov reiterated the thesis of the Ernest Renan lecture "Islam and Science" (Sorbonne University, 1883) that the idea of progress was foreign to Muslims25. By severing the link between the present and the past, the Turkestan Album contributed to the view that contemporary inhabitants of Central Asia were culturally inferior to the ancient monument builders.
The animating force behind "The Archaeological Part" was the antiquarian gaze which, unlike the commercial gaze, did not treat land as a commodity to be enjoyed. The antiquarian gaze created a momentum for the study of ancient remains. The Turkestan Album preceded by a decade N.I. Veselovskii's "Program for Gathering Scientific Data on the Ancient Cities of Turkestan" (1882)26. At the same time, there was an explicit connection between the scientific interest in the past and the empire's financial and administrative support of architectural preservation in the colony. By serving as the custodian of Central Asian antiquity, Imperial Russia sought the status of its legitimate heir, with an aura of international prestige regarding its cultural and educational initiatives.
"The Historical Part" spans a period of only eighteen years: it begins with a picture of Ak
design was made possible by the freedom of thought and architectural experimentation, which had deep humanistic consequences for the European culture. On the contrary, the Registan's splendid building is described with the Asian "obedient infantile" people bowing, as it were, before tyrants.
25 Nikolai Ostroumov, Koran i Progress: Po povodu Umstvennago Probuzhdeniia Sovremennykh Rossiiskikh Musul'man (Tashkent, A.L. Kirsner, 1901). Renan's writings were widely known and admired in Russia. Renan's The Life of Jesus influenced Nikolai Ge and other Russian painters.
26 The Album aided the massive restoration projects
of the last century, including the reconstruction of the Bibi Khanym Mosque (1399-1405). Erected in honor of Timur's favorite wife, Saray Mulk Khanym this spacious and lavishly decorated building was the Samarkand's Congregational (Friday) Mosque. Timur is said to have brought in architects from Iran
and India for this assignment (he had sacked Delhi in 1398) and used ninety elephants to haul precious
stones and construction materials. According to medieval descriptions, the mosque interior boasted 480 columns. Shown in "The Archaeological Part" domes were destroyed in the 1897 earthquake. (The Bibi Khanym Mausoleum, a separate structure situated near the mosque and the madrasa, was also photographed.)
Mechet' taken in July 1853 and concludes with the plan of the Seidun action carried out in June 1871. The image sequence and captions contributed to the naturalization of the principal narrative — an homage to Russian military might. The historical section opened with the knee-length portrait of Count Vasilii Perovskii 27under whose command the tsar's army captured the fortress Ak Mechet' considered by the Kokandian defenders invincible. It is followed by the suite of portraits of commanders in the 1860s — oval-framed physiognomic renderings shot against a neutral studio background. Generals Kaufman, Kolpakovskii, and Romanovskii are the recipients of the Order of St. George the Triumphant of the Third Degree, the white-enameled cross with a central medallion bearing the image of St. George on horseback slaying the dragon. St. George was venerated throughout Christendom as an example of bravery in protection of the poor and the defenseless. In Imperial Russia, St. George was also worshipped as a patron saint of the tsars. These portraits reminded the viewer about the official reason for the conquest — the government's continuous patronage and protection of the Russian population of the Eastern borderlands from the Muslims of Central Asia. Portraits of the Cavaliers of the Order of St. George were followed by individual and group photographs of the holders of the Sign of Military Order, later called the Cross of St. George28. The photographs of two native awardees, the guides and camel drivers "Kyrgyz Akhmed" and "Kyrgyz Dzhar Mohamed" stand out in this portrait gallery. These men are not dressed in Russian military uniforms. In accordance with the 1844 regulations, the Muslim honorees received the Sign of Military Order in which the depiction of a Christian Saint was replaced with the double-headed eagle of the Russian Empire's coat of arms. The captions indicate their perceived ethnicity instead of affiliation with a military unit.
Space of the Turkestan Album: Landscape and Built Environment. "The Histori-
27 Mounted under Peter the Great, the 1717 military campaign against Khiva resulted in the extermination of Russian troops. Conceived as a long-overdue retribution, the 1839-1840 expedition led by the Commander of the Orenburg Military Corps Perovskii was unsuccessful: the Russian soldiers suffering from a severe winter had to turn back after having advanced a half-way to the Khanate.
28 This military honors system was directly translated into the formal layout of the album leaves: the oval templates of portraits of the cavaliers of the Order of St. George were reinforced with the triple golden contour; of similar shape were half-length portraits of those awardees of the Sign of Military Order who received the Golden Arms, with the double blue line around them; and the photographs of all other Sign of Military Order holders were pasted within the rectangular, horizontally- or vertically-oriented, golden or blue, frames with the cropped corners.
cal Part" presented the annexed territory as it was construed by the military gaze. The formal portraits of victors were interspersed with views of the enemies' fortresses arranged in the order in which they were conquered — Ak Mechet,' Pishpek, Chimkent, Tashkent, Khodzhent, Ura Tiube, Dizag, Samarkand, Piandzhikent, Kitab — and with the images of Russian fortifications built in Dzhulek, Khodzhent, and Ura Tiube. Some citadels (Pishpek, Tokmak) are shown only in drawings: either they were leveled during hostilities or there were no photographers with equipment on hand to take photos prior to the raids. Other strongholds (Katta Kurgan, Tashkent) are still impressive. Although a number of snapshots were taken simultaneously with or soon after the fighting had ceased (for example, Priorov's photos of Ura Tiube), the Turkestan Album did not contain combat images. Its visual plates conformed to the standards of the emerging genre of documentary photography: due to both aesthetic norms of the era and technical limitations, the recording of butchery on the battlefield was deemed inappropriate. The album compilers seem to have shared the approach of the British photographer Roger Fenton whose work on the Crimean War (some 360 images) is exemplified by The Valley of the Shadow of Death" — an image of the desolated cannonball-strewn gully taken in April 185529. In the Turkestan Album, there is no realistic reportage akin to what the Matthew Brady team became known for during the American Civil War (for example, "A Harvest of Death" — a photo of the rotting dead awaiting burial after the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863).
Depictions of native inhabitants were mostly excluded, "edited out" from this section. "The Khodzhent Citadel" by N. Nekhoroshev is no exception. In the foreground of a photo there is a group of indigenous people shown seated next to their loaded Bukharan carts. In the background, a well-preserved native building is seen behind the imposing fortification walls. The presence of human figures gives scale to this picture. Central Asians with their "exotic" two-wheeled carts function as an extension of the scenery; their role is that of stock figures in a colonized landscape.
The Turkestan Album abounds in wide-angled photographs of the fortifications, offering the beholder aesthetic pleasure combined with information and authority. Since most citadels were built on elevations, these shots are imbued with a sense of double mastery, over the enemy and the environment of the region. David Spurr has described such vistas as "an originating gesture of colonization itself":
29 There is a reference to the Christian worldview in this title: "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me" (Psalm 23:4, ESV).
a "mental map," they invited further exploration and incited the establishment of colonial order [Spurr, 1993]. A reflection of nascent political and social design on a new territory that belonged to what I call the genre of "in the beginning was the image," these photos reveal a strong theological undercurrent. It was the first time in the history of Central Asian khanates that foreign photographers approached and shot the native strongholds from a bird-eye view, looking down on the Muslim lands. Circulating these images in the Russian metropole placed Christian viewers in a transcendental position30. The Album's narrative centered on unfolding the viewer's perceived "destiny," that is, to have trampled over "anti-christs" (antikhristy, a plural disparaging name given to non-Christians by members of the Russian Orthodox community). From this perspective, "The Historical Part" was a celebration of the military victory presented as a confluence of the celestial and the terrestrial histories31.
Some native places featured in the Turkestan Album were renamed by the Russians. The fortress Ak Mechet,' also known as Ak Mesjid (White Mosque), was renamed "Fort Perovskii,"
30 According to the Christian worldview, "He [God] sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the heavens like a canopy, and spreads them out like a tent to live in. He brings princes to naught and reduces the rulers of this world to nothing" (Isaiah 40:22-23). Furthermore, "Who is like the Lord our God, the One who sits enthroned on high, who stoops down to look on the heavens and the earth?" (Psalm 113:5-6).
31 In the Middle Ages, Europeans believed that hilltops were the seat of worshipping satan by witches and hence, the long-venerated tradition of erecting St. Michael's churches and monasteries for the spiritual protection of Christians against the evil forces in high places. Archistrategos (Chief Commander) in the Christian Orthodox tradition, Archangel Michael was also a holy protector of Mikhail Fyodorovich, the first tsar of the Romanov Dynasty (1613-1917), and his kin. At the same time, Michael is a high-ranking angel in the Islamic angelic hierarchy: as entered in the Koran, "Whoever is an enemy to Allah and His angels and His messengers and Gabriel and Michael — then indeed, Allah is an enemy to the disbelievers" (Surat al-Baqara 2:98). The Muslims believe that Allah has assigned Michael, the angel of mercy, to reward righteous people for the good they do during their earthly lifetimes. Whereas the Russians saw in "The Historical Part" the documentary evidence of the defeat of Prince of Darkness by Archangel Michael, the Muslims of Central Asia interpreted these events as Allah's punishment.
On perception of Russia by Muslims of Central Asia and the Caucasus, see Ron Sela, "Invoking the Russian Conquest of Khiva and the Massacre of the Yomut Turkmens: The Choices of a Central Asian Historian," Asiatische Studien/Etudes Asiatiques. LX. 2006. No. 2. Pp. 459-477; Eschment B. and Harder H. Looking at the Coloniser: Cross-Cultural Perceptions in Central Asia and the Caucasus, Bengal, and Related Areas. Wurzburg: Ergon, 2004.
and the surrounding town became Perovsk. Stripped of the historic name carrying a strong association with Islam, it began its second life as the most eastern defense point in the Russian line of forts stretching along the course of the Syr-Daria to the river's mouth at the Aral Sea. The Album boasted the views of the fort entrance (with the bridge over the moat), the fortress remains inside the modern fort, the monument to the fallen Russian soldiers (a commemorative cross on the plain cubical podium), and the town's church. Although missionary activities of the Christian Orthodox Church in Central Asia were sporadic, the idea of the messianic role of the Russian people, together with the centuries-old concept of Moscow as the Third Rome, was not abandoned32. "The Historical Part" included many images of new church buildings erected in the Syr-Daria Local and especially, the Zaravshan Military District.
Among four dozen group portraits in the Album, only a few images were taken out-of-doors. This dearth of open-air pictures could be explained by the technical difficulties; several years passed before photographers Nikitin, Ivanov, and Officer Revenskii started producing high-quality exposures of the natural background during the 1877-1878 Russo-Turkish War. A reluctance to have Russian soldiers "shot" in the alien landscape should also be considered in the context of national landscape ideologies.
In the 1860s, the Russian painters Aleksei Savrasov, Ivan Shishkin, Vasilii Polenov, and Viktor Vasnetsov discovered a special beauty in the unassuming and uncultivated northern nature. Illustrated magazines Niva and Vsemi-rnaia Illiustratsiia disseminated reproductions of their works. Soon, Russia's landscapes were memorialized in a variety of photographic albums and postcard series. (Popular in the 1870s was Album of Types and Views of Western Siberia by Lydiia Poltoratskaia, one of the first female photographers.) It was not long before a connection between the national movement, a receptive public, and an ideational
32 Throughout the 1870s, the Russian policies in regard to Islam and the Muslim institutions in Central Asia were less harsh than religious conversion and the forceful Russification of Catholic Poles, Protestant Finns, and Baltic Germans in the Northwest. See Violet Conolly, "The 'Nationalities Question' in the Last Phase of Tsardom," in Erwin Oberlander, Russia Enters the Twentieth Century (New York, Schocken Books, 1971), 152-181; Robert Geraci, "Russian
Orientalism at an Impasse," in Daniel Brower and Edward Lazzerini, Russia's Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700-1917 (Bloomington & Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1997), 138-191; Robert Geraci and Michael Khodarkovsky, Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Convergence, and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca & London, Cornell University Press, 2001); Daniel Brower, Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire (London & New York, Routledge Curzon, 2003).
Ил. 2. Самаркандские древности. Гробница святаго Кусама ибн Аббаса (Шах-Зинде) и мавзолей при нем. Мавзолей Эмира Куту-лука Турди Бек-Ака. Вид на фасад с севера. Часть археологическая, т. 1, л. 27, № 63.Туркестанский альбом, по распоряжению туркестанского генерал-губернатора К.П. фон Кауфмана I-го составил А.Л. Кун. Ташкент, 1871-1872 гг. Библиотека Конгресса (США),
отдел графики и фотографий Fig. 2. Antiquities of Samarkand. Tomb of Saint Kassim ibn Abbas (Shakh Zinde) and adjacent mausoleums. Mausoleum of Emir Kutuluk Turdi Bek Aka. View of the facade from the north. Turkestan Album (Tashkent, 1871-1872), Archaeological Section, vol. 1, pl. 27, no. 63. Library of Congress (Washington, DC, USA), Prints and Photographs Division
framework — that is, an association of certain landscapes with national character and virtues—was firmly in place, and landscape was embraced as the symbol of Russia. If "the myth of the Russian space" [Ely, 2002] originated in Russian fine arts and literature, then, I argue, it was in Russian photography that the myth of the imperial space was formed in the late nineteenth century. Landscape photography was often produced by amateurs — nature explorers, scientists, engineers, and merchants who traveled extensively on business. Photographers who served in the army were transferred and stationed in various parts of the empire throughout their career.
The landscapes in the Turkestan Album were not symbolic of an imperial nation yet:
the desert remained an alien place for Russians who could not identify with Central Asia's natural environment in the early 1870s. In plate after plate, the Album featured treeless landscapes that suggested to the viewer the need for social and material intervention. Kaufman compared the absence of forests with the depopulation of a country and forbade the use of wood in construction in Turkestan. Among the first measures taken by the Governor-General was tree-planting in new villages and towns. The Russian section of the capital city of Tashkent boasted lush greenery. Photos of the private houses surrounded by fruit gardens and wide poplar-lined streets filled "The Ethnographical Part." The best-kept garden, adjacent to the Governor-General's residence, was open to the public all summer and fall, and military orchestra bands played music there on special occasions. Soon the tree-lined streets became a characteristic feature of other Central Asian cities. A European traveler noted that Samarkand's "Russian town is all buried in thick foliage and looks like an immense park full of villas" [Dobson, 1890]. As the crusade of "culture and civilization" against the "hostile nature" in Central Asia continued, such publications as a volume on Turkestan (1913) in Veniamin Semenov-Tian'-Shanskii's Russia, The Full Geographical Description of Our Motherland (Ros-siia: Polnoe Geograficheskoe Opisanie Nashego Otechestva, St. Petersburg, A.F. Devrien, vol. 19) celebrated its progress with photographic images of the settlements adorned with willow, mulberry, and poplar trees33.
The Turkestan Album illustrated architectural landmarks, after which the towns' sections and neighborhoods became historically known. The album compilers' decision to include a large number of the diverse views of native cities and villages (kyshlaks) countered the common Russian opinion that the division between them was nominal and that all settlements in Turkestan were "very similar in their outward appearances, so it suffices to see just one in order to have the impression of all others" [Kostenko, 1880]. According to the native definition, a city had a fortified wall, a citadel, and at least three mosques. The Russian public often perceived Central Asia's towns as indistinguishable because there was no centralized urban planning, and many timber-frame clay houses appeared to be similarly appointed — customarily built without a foundation and only one story. (In some cases, the residences were topped with the roofed open porches or
33 It is worth mentioning that Kaufman wished to be buried in Tashkent so that everybody would know that "here it is a real Russian land where it is not a sin for a Russian man to lie" (quoted in Nikolai Ostroumov, K Istorii Narodnogo Obrazovaniia v Turkestanskom Krae. Konstantin Petrovich fon Kaufman, Ustroitel' Turkestanskogo Kraia. Lichnye Vospominaniia N. Ostroumova, 1877-1881 gg. (Tashkent, 1899), 5).
columned galleries that also served as a dry storage for fruit and vegetables.) The Russians bitterly criticized the "nondescript" [Severtsov, 1873] exteriors of the indigenous dwellings: "[F]rom the street all one sees of a house is a blank wall with a door to one side marking the entrance" [Pahlen and oth., 1964]. Because of the lack of windows, the interiors were believed to be "gloomy, damp, and dark, which led to. eye illnesses" and other malaise34. The brick and mud-brick houses in the Russian parts of the cities were constructed on a different (European) design, with their windows facing the street. Photographs of these buildings are counterpoised with the images taken in the native quarters. According to this view, windows, like human eyes, also gave a "face" to a house, implying intelligence. The window is both a physical and a symbolic opening, to which the local world had to adapt. If the walls of traditional houses "always shut out one's neighbors" [Schuyler, 1876] the houses of new type facilitated the visual contact between the outside and the interior. This increased exchange between the private and the public ultimately led to greater control and surveillance, "intelligence" of a different kind35. As a result, those native house owners who adopted the new style often refused to live in the rooms open onto the street.
The Turkestan Album: Trades and Occupations. The Album's second and third sections, on ethnography and the "culture of the country in industry and related technology," presented customs and occupations of the in-
34 Lev Kostenko, Turkestanskii Krai: Opyt Voenno-Statisticheskago Obozreniia Turkestanskago Voen-nago Okruga (St. Petersburg, 1880), 390. An account left by Annette Meakin, a fellow of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, contradicts that assumption:
The rooms are open to the courtyard on one, and sometimes on two sides, so there is plenty of light and air. As one who is peculiarly sensitive as to any want in this respect, I have no hesitation in saying that, out of every sixty native houses, rich and poor taken together, only one, on average, will be found in which the air is not perfectly fresh and sweet.. A visit to the home of any one of the Russian peasants who have emigrated to Turkestan will sufficiently prove that it is not the climate alone that is responsible for this happy state of things, but rather the absence of window-panes and tightly-closed doors.... Added to this, there is often a small opening in the roof for ventilation.. How can the air be stale when it is continuously changing? Annette M.B. Mea-kin, In Russian Turkestan: A Garden of Asia and Its People (London, George Allen, 1903), pp. 107-108.
35 In Yevgeny Zamyatin's dystopic novel We (1921), people live in a city called One State where everything, including buildings, is made of transparent glass. While the inhabitants "living in broad daylight" and "having nothing to hide from one another" — after
obtaining a permit they could use the blinds only on a "sex day" — believe that they live in a perfect society, the reader is aware that these subservient people are constantly being watched by the government.
digenous inhabitants of the new General-Governorship. Following on a success of the 1870 All-Russian Manufacturing Exhibition in St. Petersburg, which featured some 2,000 objects and photos from Tashkent, Khodzhent, and Ura Tiube, Kaufman informed the planning committee of the 1872 Moscow Polytechnical Exhibition about his intent to place a copy of the Album in its Turkestan Pavilion. This exposition was organized on the initiative of the Imperial Russian Society of Friends of Natural History, Anthropology, and Ethnography, whose mission was to advance Russian science and educate the common people. The decorative panels on the façade of the Turkestan Pavilion — the work of D.L. Ivanov and Olga Fedchenko (the wife of Aleksei Fedchenko) — imitated the mosaics of the Shir Dar Madrasa in Samarkand. The exhibit contained four sections: geographical-statistical, technological, ethnographical, and natural history. Among oriental rugs and carpets, there were displayed dozens of samples of silk, cotton, and wool fabrics; goat down, sheepskins, camel and horse hair; "rock oil" (petroleum) and its products — kerosene and asphalt — from Maibulak and Mayli; flax, sunflower, poppy-seed, and vegetable oil; opium; silkworm cocoons, healthy and ill silkworms; and live bees and honey from an apiary near Tashkent.
The Album's trades section focused on cotton production36, the silk industry37, iron-
36 Cotton industry was to become the major area for Russian investments. Twenty-two of the section's 213 photographs illustrated all stages of cotton processing. During the American Civil War, the supply of raw cotton to Russia was disrupted. The potential of producing cotton in Central Asia was realized in 1866 by General Romanovskii who received twelve pounds of Sea Island cotton seed from General Kryzhanovskii. The next year, businessmen Khludov and Pervushin began experimental planting. In 1874, Kaufman sent a team of specialists to learn new technologies of cotton-growing and processing in the United States. In the 1880s, the Russians replaced planting the Sea Island cotton with Upland, which was more appropriate for extreme continental, hot and dry conditions. In the next decade, due to expanded irrigation and improved transportation, cotton became a key product of the colony's export. Between 1886 and 1914, the area under cultivation grew from 13,200 hectares to 597,200 hectares (Michael Rywkin, Russia in Central Asia (New York, Collier Books, 1963), 29). (One hectare is equal to 10,000 square meters and is the equivalent of 2.471 acres.) On the eve of World War I, Central Asia was supplying 51.3 per cent of the empire's cotton industry needs.
37 The production of silk was the second-important industry of Turkestan. In 1871, Kaufman founded a school of silk culture that was committed to native education and research into feeding and breeding silkworms. (The school was closed by Governor-General Cherniaiev in 1883.) The Russians also hoped to reduce the loss in cocoon processing at the new factories. However, out of the seven state-sponsored larger mills that opened between 1867
smelting, carpentry, cart-making, and leather-processing in the oases. There were pictures of men at a tannery, a shagreen-leather shop, a reed-processing place, and market stalls. "The Trades Part" fulfilled a threefold mandate. The photographs documented the shape and condition of various native crafts at the time of imperial conquest38. They sought to provide visual content for the study of world history: scholars were convinced that learning about traditional manufacturing processes in Central Asia could shed light on the beginnings of these industries elsewhere39. The exhibition attendees concluded that Central Asia was "well endowed with all kinds of nature's products. but working of the raw materials is, of course, all done by hand and belongs to more inferior stage of development than the one of the Caucasus"40.
and 1872, only one survived (Eileen Marie Crean, The Governor-Generalship of Turkestan under K.P. von Kaufmann, 1867-1882 (Ph.D. thesis (unpublished), Yale University, 1970), 208). The industry was hit with a major silkworm epidemic in 1886, and it was still in decline when Lord Curzon visited Central Asia.
38 This sense of uniqueness of the present transitory moment, together with the orientalist gloss, is also captured in Curzon's letters. Having traveled the new Transcaspian Railway in September-October 1888, he wrote: "It is the blank leaf between the pages of an old and a new dispensation....The era of the Thousand and One Nights, with its strange mixture of savagery and splendour, of coma and excitement, is fast fading away, and will soon have yielded up all its secrets to science. Here, in the cities of Alp Arslan, and Timur, and Abdullah Khan, may be seen the sole remaining stage upon which is yet being enacted that expiring drama of realistic romance (George Nathaniel Curzon. Russia in Central Asia in 1889 and the Anglo-Russian Question. London, Longmans, Green & Co, 1889).
39 In the same decade, the English glass manufacturer, politician, and prolific amateur photographer Benjamin Stone advocated the idea that a record of "ancient customs, which still linger in some remote villages" would allow a glimpse into British social history (quoted in Bill Jay, Customs and Faces: Photographs by Sir Benjamin Stone, 1838-1904 (London, Academy Editions, 1972), n.p.).
40 V. Iversen, "Otchet o Poezdke na Moskovskuyu Politekhnicheskuyu Vystavku," Trudy Imperatorskago
Vol'nago Ekonomicheskago Obshchetsva (St. Petersburg, tip. tov. Obshchestvennaia Pol'za, 1873), vol. 1, book 2, 219. The 1872 Moscow exhibition foreshadowed the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London, of which the Secretary to the Government of India in the Revenue and the Agricultural Department, Sir Edward Buck wrote: The economic survey of India. for the first time provides a complete series of samples, which line the walls of the Economic Court, a scientifically arranged frame-work upon which to rest future investigation and enquiry. The main object. has been the collating in one book or economic ledger, as it can be called, of the information hitherto scattered through reports and records. Edward C. Buck, Preface in Colonial and Indian Exhibition, 1886. Empire of India: Special Catalogue of Exhibits by the Government of India and Private Exhibitors (London, William Clowes & Sons, 1886), p. 3.
Lastly, the album compilers hoped that viewers in the metropole — Russian industrialists and entrepreneurs — would be willing to help replace native "primitive" tools and "outmoded" technologies with the contemporary efficient methods of production.
"The Trades Part" proudly presented the new, state-of-the-art coal mines about which an observer wrote in 1876: "The principal mining operator in the Tashkend Circle is a certain [Alexander] Tatarinov. The Tatari-nov mines have yielded to the present time 300,000 poods or 12 million pounds, about 70,000 poods yearly. The coal is chiefly used for fuel on board the Syr-steamers" [Stumm, 1876]. Coal-mining was an important subject: as the primary source of energy worldwide, coal was used in the iron and steel industry and, from the 1880s, in electricity generation. In the same year, nearly one-third of one hundred landscape photographs taken by Timothy O'Sullivan for the Geographical and Geological Explorations West of the One Hundredth Meridian (1871, under supervision of George Montague Wheeler) featured the mining sites and towns in the United States.
The Album solidified an image of Turkestan as both a wholesale supplier of raw resources and a place of future export of manufactured wares. Russian factories, the participants in the 1891 Central-Asian Exhibition in Moscow, put on display a large number of objects in "the Asian taste" — merchandise made specifically for marketing and sale in Turkestan. Increased trade with Russia had a deteriorating effect on the production of local wares as they could not compete, pricewise, with mass-produced Russian home goods. Annette Meakin reported seeing in a house in Andijan an old "beautifully made mulberry-wood trunk," which was "greatly superior in workmanship to the imported [from Moscow] ones...distinguishable from those of native make by their gaudy colouring"41. At the same time, a growing demand inside Russia for colonial artifacts from Turkestan had a negative influence on native crafts as some makers would not take "the same pains with work destined for an alien and distant market as for the face-to-face customers examining wares in the shops of the bazaar" [Bacon, 1980].
The Turkestan Album: The Woman's Question. In the Turkestan Album, "a study of the amusements or social life" of oases' inhabitants referenced "two important influences," of "Islam and the marketplace." "The Ethnographical Part" and "The Trades Part" featured copious pictures of men partaking in communal prayer and religious ceremonies, involved in various business transactions, watching bat-cha dance, and relaxing in the tea houses and
41 Annette M.B. Meakin, In Russian Turkestan: A Garden of Asia and Its People (London, George Allen, 1903), 114. Such trunk was often the only piece of furniture in the room of a native woman.
opium dens.
Pictures of the oases women are scarce in the Album42. There are only a handful of scenes that include female subjects, and these take place in inner courtyards: "Dance (Celebration) of Women" and the two snapshots taken by Grigorii Kryvtsov inside the palace of Kokan-dian Khan in the city of Assak. Few foreigners were admitted to the women's quarters in native homes (with exception of the Jewish households)43. The lack of visual information in the Album negatively affected the image of the Muslim female for years to come. Many Russians imagined oases women spending "their entire lives between sexual enjoyment and fatty pilaf [a rice and meat dish] in the isolated rooms". Alexander Geins called the Turkestan woman "illiterate, idle, preoccupied only with gossips, fortune telling and mystical interpretation of some incomprehensible to her phenomenon" [Geins, 1898]. He declared her quarters — "Muslim seraglios and inner chambers" — to be a "seat of fanaticism, exclusion and dimwittedness" [Ibid, p. 339]. Konstantin Pahlen quoted the wife of the Chief District Officer in Samarkand Medyanetskaya — a university-educated Russian woman fluent in the Sart and the Kyrgyz languages — who gave "shattering descriptions" of the "idle womenfolk" whose "main topic of conversation consisted of spicy stories of a Boccaccio nature, while their mental level was far too low to enable them to comprehend the inferior status they were allotted in life" [Pahlen and oth., 1964]. This description is in stark contrast with the testimony provided by the Russian Officer and ethnographer V.P. Nalivkin and his wife Maria V. Nalivkina who spent several years among the Sarts of the Fergana Valley. In a unique essay
42 Kazakh women often took part in mass ceremonies and celebrations. Some of them did not cover their faces in public, which led the Russian officials to conclude that the nomadic women of the Steppe were "freer" than the Muslim females in the Central Asian oases. Kazakh and Kyrgyz females were a frequent subject of Russian photography in the second half of the nineteenth century.
43 While the total number of Jews accounted for less than one percent of the population of Turkestan, the number of photos of Jewish subjects (forty images) in the ethnographical section (491 images), is disproportionately large. Jewish females are featured in twelve photographs. It is plausible to assume that non-Muslim women were more willing to have their faces revealed before the camera. In addition, the aura of "liberators" which the Russian military photographers enjoyed helped them attract the Jewish subjects to their studios. Vereshchagin reported from Samarkand in 1868: "[t]here were lots of Jews, with their entire families: feeling more freedom with the arrival of Russians they felt more important than ever, so that they started wearing belts instead of ropes and riding horses, which had been forbidden before" (Vasilii V. Vereshchagin, Na Voine v Azii i Evrope (Moskva, Kushnerev & Co, 1894), 26-27).
devoted in its entirety to the everyday life of oases women, the Nalivkins compared the customs of Turkestan's settled population with the Russian domestic order:
Russian customs are to hide family troubles from the eyes of the outsiders. Here, on the contrary, they are made known to others.. [t] he practice of making public the details of her family life is a native woman's shield against the tyranny of her husband. Despite the rights given to him by religion and customary law, the husband's tyranny here is way less than in Europe. Here the woman can exercise her right for divorce44.
Many Russians drew far-reaching conclusions about the native way of life. To Count Pahlen, for instance, the architectural plan of the native house with two separate inner courtyards reflected the lack of "one of the basic fundamentals of the western view of life, that of the family, which in Asia simply does not exist" [Pahlen and oth., 1964]. The woman's question — a long-lasting crusade for turning the "downtrodden" Muslim female into a conscious citizen through education and participation in the "socially useful works" — was a staple subject in Soviet visual culture. The first comprehensive photographic surveys of Tajik and Uzbek women doing their chores (cooking, washing, spinning, and weaving) and family portraits of females posing with males were obtained much later, during the 1926-1928 Central Asian Ethnological Expedition organized by the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.
The Turkestan Album: Nomads vs. Settlers. According to official statistics, in 1880 the native population of Russian Central Asia comprised the Kyrgyz (forty-eight percent), the Sarts (twenty-two percent), the Uzbeks (six percent), the Tajiks (five percent), the Turkmen (five percent), and the Kara-Kalpaks (two percent)45. The confusion between the Kazakhs
44 V.P. Nalivkin, M.V. Nalivkina, Ocherk Byta Zhenshchiny Osedlago Tuzemnago Naseleniia Fergany (1886), 137-138. A woman leaving house for a prolonged time usually brought her work with her or joined a hostess in sewing, yarning, or cleaning cotton. Women, both wealthy and poor, were responsible for all domestic work as well as other economic activities, including preparing yarn, sewing, and feeding the silkworm. See also Vladimir Nalivkin, Maria Nalivkina, Muslim Women of the Fergana Valley: A 19h-Century Ethnography from Central Asia (Bloomington & Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 2016).
45 Lev Kostenko, Turkestanskii Krai: Opyt Voenno-Statisticheskago Obozreniia Turkestanskago Voennago Okruga (St. Petersburg, 1880). Vambery
opined that this data was not reliable as the Russians counted mainly male population of the colony (Arminius Vambery, Western Culture in Eastern Lands: A Comparison of the Methods Adopted by England and Russia in the Middle East (London,
John Murray, 1906), 94). On numbers and the politics of counting see Sergei Abashin, "Empire and Demography in Turkestan" in Tomohiko Uyama,
and the Kyrgyz was widespread in early Russian sources. "Kyrgyz" was the name of all pastoral nomadic peoples whose lands were under Russian control once the power of the indigenous rulers had been abolished in the first half of the nineteenth century. "The Ethnographical Part" opened with photos of the Kazakhs, erroneously called "Kyrgyz-Kazakhs," followed by pictures of "Kara-Kyrgyz" (today's Kyrgyz; Kara is "dark, black" in Old Turkic) and "Cholak-Kazakhs" of the Steppe. While many Kazakhs became officials in Russian service and portraits of several "Kyrgyz" honorees were placed in "The Historical Part," the imperial administrators and scientists singled them out as primitive tribesmen: "The Turkmen is not fully nomadic, he tills the land. [t]he mind of the Turkmen and his character are more developed and exquisite than that of the Kyrgyz, the latter being an almost savage" [Kostenko, 1880]. Three photographs of the Kazakh yurt — a portable home, made of latticed wood tied together and covered with heavy felt — showed the structure and process of assembling. (Contemporary Russian travelogues were full of descriptions of "nightmarish stays" in these "filthy" tent-like dwellings they called kibitka.)
The Album offered a first comparative look at the wedding rituals of the nomadic Kazakhs and Kyrgyz, the settler Tadjiks, and the Jews. "A Girl Run," "Bayga," and horse races in the open were documented. It was accentuated that nomads' amusements and festivities were mostly about "weddings and other family events, although there were some Mohammedan festivals" [Zeland, 1885].
Having received Turkestan photographs, Vasilii Vasilievich Grigoriev, the Dean of the Faculty of Oriental Languages at St. Petersburg University, promised Kaufman that scholars in the Russian capital would "diligently devote all their resources to answer the...queries raised by the albums published under your patronage"46. In his program of the de-Islamization and the Russification of nomads, Grigoriev emphasized that the utmost care must be taken to study each of "the Asian tribes (the Kyrgyz, the Tatars, the Bashkirs, etc.)" in order to understand "what their situation is, what they must become, whether it is possible to preserve their nationality, or whether they must merge with the prevailing nation and become Russified." He insisted that Central Asians, and especially the Muslim clergy, must be denied entry to the Steppe because of "their ill-intended aims" to
Asiatic Russia: Imperial Power in Regional and International Contexts (New York, Routledge, 2012), 129-150.
46 Vasilii Vasilievich Grigoriev, Letter to Kaufman, n.d. Central State Archives of the Republic of Uzbekistan, Fond 1/1-1, Opis' 20, Delo 7247, List 43, 52. Quoted in Svetlana Gorshenina, "Krupneishie Proekty Kolonial'nykh Arkhivov Rossii," Ab Imperio, no. 3 (2007), 35.
"spoil and muddle our Kyrgyz"47.
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, anthropometrical and craniometrical measurements were taken in order to answer the question, "What race do the Kyrgyz belong to, Mongoloid or Turanian"? (The latter was thought to have occupied an intermediate position between the Europeoids and the Mongoloids.) The Kazakhs were found to be similar to the Kalmyks who were considered "typical Mongoloids," and both questions, of the "racial position of the Kyrgyz" and the Turanian race, remained open [Hilden, 1940].
The Turkestan Album propagated the "civilizing mission" view that Central Asians greatly benefited from the Russian presence in their region. These advantages were presented on three distinct levels: political (that the Turkes-tani were now living in peace with the neighboring Central Asian states), economic (that the settled people could finally practice agriculture and trade without fearing the nomads' raids), and cultural (that the Russians brought with them the light of the European civilization). Through the choice of objects, genres ("views" and "types"), and styles (documentary and/or picturesque) that responded to the visual demand in the metropole, these photos played a special role in the reproduction and dissemination of the Russian colonial attitudes not just among the military elite but in the society at large. The Album was intended to be viewed, preserved, and passed down to future generations as a valuable souvenir — a substitute, or partial recreation, of a unique experience. The symbolism of being presented with and owning an album copy became the equivalent to the physical acquisition of a new colony by the empire.
A Debate on Concepts of Nationality and Race in Russian Ethnography and Anthropology. Russian ethnography emerged as an independent scholarly discipline in the 1840s. The concept of narodnost' — the essence of ethnic distinctiveness understood as a link between people's physical features, innate culture and moral characteristics, and their way of life formed under the impact of natural environment — was central to this endeavor. Nathaniel Knight wrote: "Where analogous fields in the West focused on problems of the human race as a whole — its prehistory, unity or disunity, racial composition and universal stages of development — ethnography in Russia sought to identify and describe the specific features endowing every nationality [narodnost'] with a
47 Vasilii Vasilievich Grigoriev, Rossiia i Vostok (St. Petersburg, 1876), 198-199. This book was a compilation of his early scholarly essays. While in Orenburg (1851-1862) Grigoriev was a first administrator of the Steppe to introduce the official use of the Kazakh language — a provisional measure taken to widen the linguistic gap between the Central Asians and the Tatar-speaking Muslims of Kazan.
unique identity.". [Nikolai] Nadezhdin's vision led to the development of a field devoted to the creation of autonomous depictions of individual peoples with a minimum of theoretical analysis and comparison48.
Throughout the 1870s, ethnography remained largely subsumed within the field of geography and was "a science of the particular": the ethnographer's task was to catalogue and describe the features of narodnost' in its natural setting.
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the meaning of the term "race" remained fluid, and the use of racial concepts varied from one country to another. As Anne Maxwell pointed out, the term "race" was sometimes used as if it were synonymous with "species," "culture," or "nation," and sometimes "to denote the ethnicity of sub-groups within national group-ings....This mobility of meaning can be attributed to competing ideas about the role played by skin colour and physical features, as against religion, education and other environmental factors, in determining the different levels of progress achieved by individuals and groups" [Maxwell, 1999]. The last imperial conquest — the acquisition of Central Asia — chronologically coincided with a growing interest in anthropology and the academic study of "race" in the Russian Empire. Stepan Vasilievich Es-hevskii lectured "On Significance of Races in History"49 in an introduction to his new course at Moscow University in the early 1860s. The Russian Ministry of Enlightenment approved the establishment of a first chair of anthropology, under the auspices of the Department of Physics and Mathematics, at Moscow University on October 8, 1876.
There were several distinct types of anthropological discourse "elaborated within different academic societies, incorporating both methodological approaches and political visions of imperial modernization that they advanced using the language of race science"50. Ivan Aleksee-
48 Nathaniel Knight, Constructing the Science of Nationality: Ethnography in Mid-Nineteenth Century Russia (Ph.D. Thesis, Columbia University, 1995), Abstract. See also Nathaniel Knight, "Seeking the Self in the Other: Ethnography of Non-Russian in the Russian Geographical Society, 1845-1860" in Michael Branch, Defining Self: Essays on Emergent Identities in Russia, Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries (Helsinki, Finnish Literature Society, 2009).
49 Published posthumously in S.V. Eshevskii, Sochineniia (Moscow, izdanie K. Soldatenkova, 1870), chast' I. Before moving to Moscow, Eshevskii taught at Kazan University where he founded a museum of ethnography.
50 Marina Mogilner, "Russian Physical Anthropology in Search of 'Imperial Race': Liberalism and Modern Scientific Imagination in the Imperial Situation," Ab Imperio, no. 1 (2007), 199. See also Marina Mogil'ner, Homo Imperii: Istoriia Fizicheskoi Antropologii v Rossii, Konets XIX-Nachalo XX vv. (Moscow, Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2008); Marina Mogilner, Homo Imperii: A History of Physical Anthropology in
Ил. 3. Чугунно-литейное производство. Горн для плавки чугуна (даши-дигризи). Часть промысловая: у туземного населения в русских владениях Средней Азии, л. 14, № 68. Туркестанский альбом, по распоряжению туркестанского генерал-губернатора К.П. фон Кауфмана I-го составил А.Л. Кун. Ташкент, 1871-1872 гг. Библиотека Конгресса (США), отдел графики и фотографий. Fig. 3. Iron smelting production. Forge for fusing cast-iron (dashi-digrizi). Turkestan Album (Tashkent, 1871-1872), Trades Section, pl. 14, no. 68. Library of Congress (Washington, DC, USA), Prints and Photographs Division
vich Sikorsky, a professor of psychiatry at Kiev University, was the leading proponent of Russian racial nationalism. He saw the empire as a dual system, with the Russian core surrounded by the racially inferior non-Russian periphery [Sikorsky, 1915]. Born and educated in Russia, the chief librarian of Musée national d'histoire naturelle in Paris Joseph Deniker pointed to many problems with systematic taxonomy in general and its application to humans in particular. He argued that traditional anthropological concept of race must be replaced by the notion of ethnicity [Deniker, 1900]. The Chairperson of Anthropology at Moscow University Dmitrii Nikolaevich Anuchin was the leader of an influential school of "liberal anthropology of imperial diversity," which differentiated between "race," "nation," and "ethnicity" (narodnost).
Russia (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 2013); Marina Mogilner, "Classifying Hybridity in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Russian Imperial Anthropology," in Richard McMahon, National Races: Transnational Power Struggles in the Sciences and Politics of Human Diversity, 1840-1945 (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 2019), 205-240.
As Marina Mogilner has noted,
Terminologically, liberal anthropologists of the Moscow school preferred a less totalizing and rather unexcited "physical type" to "race." They studied both "Russian" (in an ethnic/national sense) and non-Russian "physical types" in the empire.. The school pursued a utopian project of total anthropological description of the entire population of the Russian empire, establishing not hierarchies but "degrees of kinship" and types of interaction [Mogilner, 2007].
Skepticism of Moscow-based Dmitrii Nikolaevich Anuchin and Anatolii Bogdanov51 on the utility of race as an analytical concept led Nathaniel Knight to conclude that "a mere presence of physical anthropology as a field
51 Anatolii Bogdanov used French craniometrical techniques to measure skulls that he personally excavated from Moscow cemeteries. He produced some of the most influential studies in craniometry (Eugene M. Avrutin. Racial Categories and the Politics of (Jewish) Difference in Late Imperial Russia. Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. 2007. No. 1. P. 27).
Ил. 4. Мусульманская школа. Наказание (фалак). Часть этнографическая: туземное население в русских владениях Средней Азии, т. 1, л. 67, № 197. Туркестанский альбом, по распоряжению туркестанского генерал-губернатора К.П. фон Кауфмана I-го составил А.Л. Кун. Ташкент, 1871-1872 гг. Библиотека Конгресса (США),
отдел графики и фотографий. Fig. 4. Muslim school. Punishment (punish with cane on palms or soles). Turkestan Album (Tashkent, 1871-1872), Ethnographical Section, vol. 1, pl. 67, no. 197 Library of Congress (Washington, DC, USA),
Prints and Photographs Division
of science in Russia should not be assumed to imply the acceptance of racial ideology" [Knight, 2019]. Conversely, Vera Tolz asserted that ambiguities in interpreting "the relationship between physical features, innate moral and behavioural characteristics, and culture, which marked discourses in human difference in Western Europe, were replicated in Russia, and they shaped the ways in which not only race but also ethnicity and nationhood were understood" [Tolz, 2019]. Tolz argued that biological factors were relevant to defining narod-nost', whereas definitions of race included references to cultural artifacts, with the effect that the boundary between biology and culture was "very blurred." I conclude that Russian cultural racism (i.e., the ideas about inherent cultural difference as the cause of unequal social development and "hierarchy of races") in the late nineteenth century can be theorized as a marriage of religious racism (as observed, for instance, in an anti-Muslim bias of Russian colonial photography) [Dikovitskaya, 2007] and cultural nationalism (which insisted on impart-
ing the "Russianness" as a prerequisite for cultivation of the imperial nation).
The Third International Congress of Orientalists (St. Petersburg, 1876).
Founded in Paris in 1873, the International Congress of Orientalists held regular conventions, once every one to three years, during which "scholars of different countries" concerned with Asian and African philology and archaeology could "interchange ideas and form friendships" [Cust, 1897]. Delegates from various states and learned societies attended these meetings, organized by geographical region or language family. The third convention, under the presidentship of Grigoriev, took place in St. Petersburg on September 1-10 (in Russian old style, August 19-28), 1876. Kun participated in the work of its Organization Committee. There were seven sections on cartography, linguistics, ethnography, history, and literatures of Siberia (Eastern and Western); Central Asia; North Caucasus and Crimea; the Caucasus; Eastern Turkestan, Tibet, Mongolia, China, and Japan; India and Persia; Turkey and the Arabian Pen-
insula. Ethnographic reports included information on nationalities in their natural habitats, peoples' anatomy and physiognomy, psychology, customs, clothing and weaponry, religion, and customary law. In addition, there were two sections on "Archaeology and Numismatics" and "Religions and Schools of Philosophy." The convention in the Russian capital was open to the general public; women were welcome as both members and delegates (which was not the case at the fourth congress in Florence two years later).
In the spring of 1876, Pravitel'stvennyi Vestnik (nos. 80 and 133) announced a list of thirty-eight questions for upcoming debates, nine of which dealt with Central Asia. In question no. 19, Grigoriev asked prospective participants to reflect on "When did the peoples of the Turanian tribe...begin to occupy territories south of the Tian-Shan' [mountains]? Had not these lands been inhabited exclusively by peoples of the Indo-European [language] family (predecessors of the Celts, the Germans, and the Slavs, etc.)?" [Tretii..., 1876]. Charles-Henri-Auguste Schefer, the director of the École des langues orientales in Paris, presided over the Central Asian Section. (Schefer was a professor of Persian and collector of Islamic manuscripts.) During the September 3rd meeting only five out of the nine preliminary queries were addressed. Having not received any response to his previous inquest, Grigoriev pointed out that according to ancient Chinese sources, Central Asia had been inhabited by a people whose physical characteristics were different from those of the Turkic people who currently occupy this territory. Lerkh was convinced that these "ancient Aryans" spoke a Persian language. Grigoriev was of opinion that they were "the predecessors of the Slavs, the Germans, and the Lithuanians: only from Central Asia could these peoples migrate to Europe"52. James Long, a Calcutta-based missionary, spoke on "the Aryan tribe" which, he believed, had spread from Central Asia to Europe and India some five thousand years ago. He opined that Russians and Britons having the same historical roots ought to cooperate in bringing peace and Christianity to Asia. Long put together an agenda for future research that addressed questions such as whether the Aryan civilization preceded the Ancient Egyptian and the Assyrian civilizations and whether
52 Tretii Mezhdunarodnyi S"ezd Orientalistov: Zasedaniia. In: Vasilii Vasilievich Grigoriev, Trudy Tret'ego Mezhdunarodnogo S"ezda Orientalistov v S.-Peterburge, 1876 (St. Petersburg, tip. brat'ev Panteleevykh, 1879-1880), vol. 1, p. 41. Grigoriev had previously published his findings in the book On the Scythian Tribe of Saka (O Skifskom Narode Sakakh: Istoricheskaia Monografiia, Napisannaia k Dvadsati-Piatelietnemu Iubileiu Imperatorskago Russkago Arkheologicheskago Obshchestva V.V. Grigor'evym (St. Petersburg, tip. Akademii Nauk, 1871).)
the Slavs were the last to leave Central Asia53. The official chronicler concluded, Central Asia was naturally the speciality of this Congress, which was a great success.. The report is a mine of information, and all impartial observers will admit that Russia is doing its duty to our science in these remote regions.. The presence of Buriat, Ostyak, Finlander and Tatar, gave an Oriental reality to the meeting, which can be found nowhere so well as in London or St. Petersburg, the capitals of the two Powers which almost divide Asia between them [Cust, 1897]54.
The Tipy Narodnostei Srednei Azii (Types of Nationalities of Central Asia), 1876. Systematized collected data and quantitative indices were not available in all parts of the Russian Empire and, therefore, anthropologists often had to rely on observations made by ethnographers whose descriptive methods of research were supplemented by photographs. Art professor N.A. Ramazanov used photographs in his work on a collection of mannequins that represented nationalities at the 1867 All-Russian Ethnographic Exhibition in Moscow. In 1872, the Imperial Russian Geographic Society published instructions explaining the difference between "physiognomic shots" and "ethnographic images." The former were defined as profile, full-face, and full-figure portraits produced without any "painterly effects"; the latter focused on "peoples' costume, this or that favorite pose, weapons and surrounding objects.houses, towns, villages, various scenes of public life, [and] domestic animals" [Izvestiia, 1872]. One area that promised to provide strong support for anthropology was documentation of the "types." The "type" represented "the general form or character which distinguishes a given group and was accepted as standard; it was also the person or thing which exhibits these qualities" [Edwards, 1990]. Although not a new concept, the "type" with its underlying assumption of non-variability answered the methodological need for nineteenth-century scientists to classify the empire's population. Between 1875 and 1878, the British Association for the Advancement of Science established a number of committees, collectively known as the "Racial Committee," that physically examined human beings (their height, weight, etc.) and published photographs of "typical races of the Empire." The portrayal of the empire as a collection of "types" called for a close collaboration between the state apparatus and the academe.
On request of the Russian Minister of
53 Ibid., pp. 48-49.
54 Several English-speaking Muslims and Buddhists
from India were present at the Second International Congress of Orientalists in London (1874). The 1867 Exposition universelle in Paris was the first French international exhibition to display human exhibits from North Africa.
National Enlightenment Dmitrii Tolstoy, the Third International Congress of Orientalists was accompanied by a temporary exhibition of archaeological finds, manuscripts, and collectibles shipped by private citizens to St. Petersburg. Lerkh was in charge of the exposition and its documentation55. The Organization Committee asked Governors-General of Turkestan, the Caucasus, and Siberia to provide some live exhibits. On April 30, 1875, the organizers requested that Kaufman send, at his expense, three representatives of "Russianizing Asia" — "a Tadjik, an Uzbek, and a Manchu" who could speak some Russian — for "a live display" in the capital. In the follow-up letter dated May 31, the committee asked him to supply
a) large-format portraits of male and female representatives of all Turkestan nationalities, made en face and in profile, without any headdress, so that facial features and skulls are clearly visible. It is desirable to provide with each photo the exact name, age, tribe [ple-mya], social standing [soslovie], locale, and parents' tribal origin information; b) photographic images of a few natives — full-body nudes (in cabinet-card prints [5.5"x4"]) taken from the front and the back (with the same information) — so that one could determine body's physique, height, proportions, and musculature [Tretii..., 1876].
The exhibition organizers also wished to receive samples of national dress, detailed plans of several cities and surrounding irrigated fields, model town and village homes, silk and cotton industries tools (as described in Brodovskii's brochure Technicheskiie Proizvodstva v Turke-stanskom Kraie), and copies of Turkestanskie Gubernskie Vedomosti and other publications. In response, Kaufman asked that the Imperial Society of Friends of Nature, Anthropology, and Ethnography (prior to 1867 known as the Imperial Society of Friends of Nature at Moscow University) lend its Turkestan collection at the
55 Mainly interested in inscriptions Lerkh worked on an exhibition catalog with photographs, which he planned to publish in the Trudy Tret'ego Mezhdunarodnogo S"ezda Orientalistov v S.-Peterburge, 1876. He became paralyzed in the winter of 1877, and no catalog was produced. The Third Congress papers came out in two volumes. Volume I was edited by Grigoriev and printed in St. Petersburg in 1879-1880. It contained articles in Russian, which limited its use by the international scholarly community. Volume II was edited by the Arabist Viktor Romanovich Rosen and published in Leiden, Germany in 1880. Volume I contained an essay by M.N. Rostislavov on types of land property in Turkestan ("Ocherk Vidov Zemel'noi Sobstvennosti i Pozemel'nyi Vopros v Turkestanskom Krae") and the text of the seventeenth-century French manuscript "Un voyage dans l'Ouzbekistan en 1671," recently discovered by N. Tcharykov in the Russian archives. H.G. Raverty's contribution "On the Turks, Tattars and Mughales" and Lerkh's "Sur les monnaies des Boukhar-Khoudahs ou princes de Boukhara avant la conquete du Meverennahr par les arabes" were placed in Volume II.
Polytechnical Museum in Moscow to the Third Congress. The Governor-General pledged to arrange for some additional exhibits to be sent from the Amu-Daria Local and Kuldzha.
For an unknown reason, nothing was shipped from Turkestan. Kun brought several manuscripts from the former Kokand Khanate, and Kaufman displayed his own collection of native weapons in St. Petersburg. The Governor-General paid 2,000 rubles to provide the "live exhibits" — Uzbek Dzhurabek (the former ruler of Kitab), Sart Muhammed-Kulov (a Tashkent elder), Sattar Khan (a former qazi — a magistrate or judge of a Shari'a court — from Chimkent)56, Kipchak Niiazov, and Solon Alexander Ergentu (from Kuldzha)57.
Kaufman also agreed to spend 1,104 rubles on visual aids. The Russian military personnel searched for indigenous people — ideally, a younger man and a woman, and an older man and a woman from each nationality — whose appearance seemed to be typical for each nationality (Afghan, Chinese, Dungan, Gypsy, Hindu, Jewish, Kalmyk, Kara-Kalpak, Kara-Kyr-gyz, Kyrgyz, Manchu, Sart, Tajik, and Uzbek). The natives were taken to Vladislav Kozlovskii's studio in Tashkent for a photoshoot. The Tipy Narodnostei Srednei Azii (Types of Nationalities of Central Asia) comprised 85 leaves; each plate contained one full-face and one profile picture of one person. A brief caption indicated the individual's age, gender, and ethnicity. Photographs were used to demonstrate perceived differentness of peoples based on their facial and craniological features, skin color, and hair texture. Begun as a compilation of ethnographic studies of deindividualized subjects, Types of Nationalities turned into a visual display of race science.
Russian ethnographers labelled oases' townspeople "Tajik" and "Sart," and peasants either "Sart" or "Uzbek." At the same time, a native could self-identify as both an "Uzbek" (a descendant of the fourteenth-century ruler Oz Beg Khan) and a "Kyrgyz" (a pastoral nomad by lifestyle)58. The preliminary question (no. 8),
56 Sattar Khan learned Russian and began working in the tsarist administration in the late 1860s. After settling in Tashkent in 1881, Sattar Khan became friends with Ostroumov, and "the two shared the view of an archaic Central Asian Muslim culture in need of enlightenment, which could be provided by the Russian colonizer" (Jeff Sahadeo, Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent, 1865-1923. Bloomington & Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 2007. P. 84).
57 The Viceroy Duke Mikhail Nikolayevich (Romanov), scholars Gustav Radde and Adolf Berzhe, and General I.I. Stebnitskii sent four natives from the Caucasus — a Kabardian, a Dagestani, a Chechen, and an Abkhaz — to St. Petersburg. Dressed in native attire they all spoke Russian (Austin Jersild, Orientalism and Empire: North Caucasus Mountain Peoples and the Georgian Frontier, 1845-1917 (Montreal, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002).)
58 A. Khoroshkhin, "Narody Srednei Azii," Turkestanskie Gubernskie Vedomosti, 22 March 1871, quoted in
Ил. 5. Владислав Козловский. Сартянка, 15 лет. Типы народностей Средней Азии. Ташкент, 1876, л. 3. Библиотека Конгресса (США), отдел графики и фотографий. Fig. 5. Vladislav Kozlovskii. A Sart Woman, 15 years old. Types of Nationalities of Central Asia (Tashkent, 1876), pl. 3 Library of Congress (Washington, DC, USA), Prints and Photographs Division
published in Pravitel'stvennyi Vestnik, "How far back in history can the names 'Sart' and 'Tajik' be traced?" did not receive an answer at the Third Congress. Although the creators of the Types attempted to visualize the Sarts and the Tajiks as the disparate populations, the discussion findings on "the existence of a special tribe of Sarts" were inconclusive. Kun was convinced that the "Sart" is not an ethnicity but a common noun for merchants (he first put forward this argument at the January 1870 meeting of the Central Asian Learned Society for the Study of Local History, Geography, Mineralogy, and Trade). Bogdanov tried to prove, based on his craniological studies, that Sarts were distinct from Uzbeks. (Self-identified Sarts speaking the Uzbek language were counted in the 1926 population census as Uzbeks, and this term was eliminated from Soviet ethnography and statistical reports.) The categorization system used in the Types of Nationalities and the "Ethnographic Map of Turkestan" (1879) was an artifact of colonial science. The British explorer
Daniel Brower, Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire (London & New York, Routledge Curzon, 2003), p. 52.
and diplomat in Central Asia Robert Barkley Shaw recorded between 1868 and 1871:
In Western Toorkistan, a man is a Tajik or an Oosbek, or a Kipchak, or a Toorkman in addition to being simply a Bokhariot or a Khokan-dee. Among these various tribes there are two great cross divisions. The first is the division of Toork and Tajik, or of Tartar and of Aryan blood. The other classification is that of nomads and settled people, Kirghiz and Sarts.. The Russians, I see, mistake this classification and confound it with the other, making Sarts to be merely the same as Tajiks (probably because the first Sarts or settled people whom they came across happened to be Tajiks). They are wrong, however, for all the Khokandees whom I met with in Eastern Toorkistan agreed in affirming that Sart is merely a word used by the Kirghiz to denote all who do not lead a nomad existence like themselves, whether they be Tajiks or Oosbeks.. The Sarts or settled people include the Aryan Tajiks as well as the Tartar Oosbeks and others. All over Bokhara and, I believe, as far as the Syr Daria (or River Jaxartes) the Tajiks compose the mass of the population, the cultivators, the shopkeepers,
the merchants, the writers, and sometimes are found as soldiers and even Governors. Beyond the Jaxartes in the Khanate of Khokand, the Tartar tide.proved too strong for them, and they are found more sparsely, as merchants and writers, and even in higher employ, and not so much as cultivators and villagers. This at least is the account given of their own country by the Andijanees and Kokhandees in the service of the Ataligh-Ghazee at Kashghar and Yarkand [Shaw, 1981].
In 1880, the President of the Russian Academy of Sciences Fyodor Litke officially recognized usefulness of the photographic "types." He requested that General Kaufman and Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolayevich Romanov ship "anthropological albums" from Turkestan and the Caucasus to the Museum of Ethnography and Anthropology in St. Petersburg. Although race science remained somewhat inaccessible to the common people in Imperial Russia, "racist attitudes and perceptions based on notions of cultural inferiority and difference were transmitted to the 'public' by a rich conglomeration of signs and symbols" [Avrutin, 2007]. Photography, a "middle-brow art" (from the title of the 1990 Bourdieu book), embodied these signs and symbols. Colonial visual culture paved the way for Tsar Alexander III's policies that affirmed the principle of Russian ethnic supremacy.
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