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Creating Culture
in (Post) Socialist
Central Asia
Edited by
Ananda Breed
Eva-Marie Dubuisson
Ali Iğmen
Creating Culture in (Post) Socialist Central Asia
Ananda Breed · Eva-Marie Dubuisson ·
Ali Iğmen
Editors
Creating Culture
in (Post) Socialist
Central Asia
Editors
Ananda Breed Eva-Marie Dubuisson
College of Arts Department of Languages,
University of Lincoln Linguistics, and Literature
Lincoln, UK Nazarbayev University
Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan
Ali Iğmen
Department of History
California State University
Long Beach, CA, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-58684-3 ISBN 978-3-030-58685-0 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58685-0
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Contents
1 Introduction: Making Culture in (Post) Socialist

Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Xinjiang 1
Ananda Breed and Ali Iğmen
2 ‘The Kara Kirghiz Must Develop Separately’: Ishenaaly

Arabaev (1881–1933) and His Project of the Kyrgyz
Nation 13
Jipar Duishembieva
3 Liminal States: Personal Dreams and Performance

in Kyrgyzstan During and After the Soviet Era 47
Ali Iğmen
4 Epic Performances in Central Asia 65

Ananda Breed
5 Poets of the People: Learning to Make Culture

in Kazakhstan 87
Eva-Marie Dubuisson
v
vi CONTENTS
6 Lament in an Affluent Era: Cultural Politics of Kazakh

Life Cycle Songs in Xinjiang 115
Guldana Salimjan
7 Conclusion: Interweaving Texts 141

Eva-Marie Dubuisson
Index 151
Notes on Contributors
Ananda Breed is Professor of Theatre at University of Lincoln, United

Kingdom. She is author of Performing the Nation: Genocide, Justice,
Reconciliation (Seagull Books, 2014) and co-editor of Performance
and Civic Engagement (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and The Routledge
Companion to Applied Performance, Volume One and Volume Two (Rout-
ledge, 2020). She is Principal Investigator of Arts and Humanities
Research Council (AHRC) Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF)
project Mobile Arts for Peace (MAP) Informing the National Curriculum
and Youth Policy for Peacebuilding in Kyrgyzstan, Rwanda, Indonesia
and Nepal (2020–2024); and Co-Investigator of AHRC GCRF project
Changing the Story: Building Inclusive Societies with and for Young People
in Five Post-Conflict Countries (2017–2021). She served as a lead consul-
tant for IREX and UNICEF in Kyrgyzstan for project Youth Theatre
for Peace (2010–2014). Breed was a research fellow at the International
Research Centre Interweaving Performance Cultures at Freie University
(2013–2014).
Eva-Marie Dubuisson is a linguistic anthropologist who researches the
politics of oral tradition and expressive culture, as well as discourses of
ancestry, sacred geography, and ecological protection and change in Kaza-
khstan and Central Asia. Her book Living Language: The Dialogic Emer-
gence of an Ancestral Worldview was published by the University of Pitts-
burgh Press in 2017, and her work has also been published in the Journal
of Linguistic Anthropology, Central Asian Survey, and other collected
vii
viii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
volumes. Her research and writing has been supported by grants and
fellowships from Fulbright, Wenner-Gren, the Social Science Research
Council Eurasia Program, the Seventh Framework Programme of the
European Commission (Marie Curie CIG), the Science Academy, Turkey,
and the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research.
She currently teaches in the Department of Languages, Linguistics, and
Literature at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan.
Jipar Duishembieva (Ph.D. 2015, University of Washington) researches
the cultural and social history of imperial and early-Soviet Central Asia.
Her doctoral dissertation, Visions of Community: Literary Culture and
Social Change Among the Northern Kyrgyz, 1856–1924, examines the
transformations of Kyrgyz society and culture set in motion by the Russian
imperial conquest of the mid-nineteenth century. Most recently, she has
been conducting research on the revolt of 1916 in Central Asia. Her
research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Inter-
national Research and Exchanges Board, American Councils Title VIII
Research Scholar Program, and the National Council for Eurasian and
East European Research.
Ali Iğmen is Professor of Central Asian History, the Director of the
Oral History Program at the California State University, Long Beach
(CSULB), and past President of Central Eurasian Studies Society (2018–
2019). His book Speaking Soviet with an Accent: Culture and Power in
Kyrgyzstan has been published by the Central Asia in Context Series of the
University of Pittsburgh Press in 2012, and was a finalist for the Best Book
Prize of the Central Eurasian Studies Society. He works on the history of
Soviet culture and gender politics in Central Eurasia, currently writing
his second book on four Kyrgyz actresses whose lives and work reflect
Soviet gender and cultural policies of the 1950s to 1980s. He received
his doctorate from the University of Washington in Seattle, and taught
at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Kyrgyz National University in
Bishkek, Osh State University in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, and Boğaziçi Univer-
sity in Istanbul, Turkey. A significant number of awards such as Fulbright-
Hays, SSRC, Mellon Slavic Studies Initiative Grant and FLAS helped him
support his research on Kyrgyzstan.
Guldana Salimjan is the Ruth Wynn Woodward Junior Chair of the
Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Department at Simon Fraser
University. Guldana’s current book project focuses on intersections of
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS ix
gender, memory, and history of Kazakhs in Northern Xinjiang against

the backdrop of the Mao era socialist revolution and reform era grass-
land policies. Her other projects include the cultural politics of Kazakh
genealogical publications and the discourse of the Chinese state project of
“ecological civilization” in pastoral regions of Xinjiang. She has published
works on women’s narrative strategies in Kazakh oral tradition of aytis
and the material culture of tus kiiz. Guldana also researches and writes
about the ongoing human rights abuses in Xinjiang under the pen-name
Yi Xiaocuo. She is the co-director of the Xinjiang Documentation Project
and the founder of the multi-media art project Camp Album.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Making Culture in (Post)

Socialist Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Xinjiang
Ananda Breed and Ali Iğmen
Abstract In this volume, we introduce specific contexts of historical and

contemporary negotiation around the categories of ‘culture’ and ‘perfor-
mance’ in Kyrgyz and Kazakh cultural environments in Central Asia. How
are cultural forms imagined, created, and performed—as a mechanism
to both perform sovereignty and to reimagine traditional forms in the
socialist and postsocialist periods? The relationships, institutional condi-
tions, and creative labor required to generate or maintain particular forms
of culture (literature, education, oral tradition, performance) are referred
to here as ‘culture work,’ and theorized as a form of liminal interweaving.
How and why do processes of culture work occur? What is the specific
content of what might be promoted or allowed as ‘culture’ in highly
A. Breed
College of Arts, University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK
e-mail: ABreed@lincoln.ac.uk
A. Iğmen (B)
Department of History, California State University,
Long Beach, CA, USA
e-mail: Ali.igmen@csulb.edu
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2020
A. Breed et al. (eds.), Creating Culture in (Post) Socialist
Central Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58685-0_1
2 A. BREED AND A. IĞMEN
ideologized contexts, following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991

as instances of nation-building and identity formation, or as a mode of
cultural survival under cultural assimilation and violence in China today?
Keywords Soviet Post-Soviet Central Asia · China · Socialist

multiculturalism · Liminality · Cultural subjectivity · Cultural traditions
In this book, authors present specific contexts of historical and contempo-

rary negotiations around the categories of ‘culture’ and ‘performance’ in
Kyrgyz and Kazakh cultural environments in Central Asia. Together, our
authors aim to address a current lack of scholarship regarding the use of
culture work—the ways in which cultural forms are imagined, created,
and performed—as a mechanism to both perform sovereignty and to
reimagine traditional forms in the socialist and postsocialist periods. The
contributing chapters will analyze how and why these processes of work
occur, as well as the specific content of what might be performed,
following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 as instances of nation
building and identity formation, and as a mode of cultural survival under
cultural assimilation and violence in China today. Since cultural forms
in Central Asia have been largely under-researched within the fields of
Performance Studies, Anthropology, Literary Studies, Area Studies, and
History, the co-editors and contributors of this volume will provide a
cross-disciplinary approach to provide some of the key concepts, practices
and contexts. In particular, there will be an emphasis on what social and
political factors informed the cultural forms at different stages of history.
All of the new independent states of post-Soviet Central Asia, in partic-
ular Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, have inherited mechanisms of national
celebration, as well as its object: the ‘nation’ itself defined largely in
linguistic, cultural, and territorial terms. However, while newly national
states have inherited a strong institutional and ideological legacy in the
sphere of cultural production, this cannot be viewed as a simple case of
post-Soviet reproduction (Adams 2010: 6). The Central Asian states such
as Uzbekistan lack not only the underlying hard power of the previous
system, but also even the organizational and ideological commitment to
soft power resources such as mass spectacle (Ibid.: 5–6). That means that
within the institutions of cultural production, there is plenty of space for
actors to—whether intentionally or unintentionally—subvert the aims of
stated projects (Ibid.), which were largely geared toward the celebra-
tion and memorialization of national identity and culture within each
1 INTRODUCTION: MAKING CULTURE IN (POST) SOCIALIST … 3
former republic. As Adams rightly noted, though we can say in the case
of contemporary Uzbekistan that the state maintains a certain dominance
over cultural discourses in the country, ultimately that ‘state’ is a ‘collec-
tivity of actors who were in the process of making difficult decisions about
the future of their country and their culture’ (5).
The chapters presented in this collection speak to the heart of this
argument, and challenge one of its assumptions: given the flexibility
we see in cultural production today, perhaps we could conjecture that
such practical and ideological ‘wiggle room’ was actually always a funda-
mental feature of the system, even in the strong power days of the
Soviet period. While Soviet discourses of shared, recognizable national
cultural forms were certainly predominant and highly active, it is impor-
tant to recognize that these were not ultimately totalizing in their scope,
nor defined top-down. Kudaibergenova (2017) has similarly argued that
titular ethnic intellectuals and authors in the Soviet period, though highly
constrained, certainly managed to insert their own conversations and
images of ethnicity and history in the ‘national’ canon of Soviet Kaza-
khstan. Similarly, papers from the contemporary period emphasize that
though cultural organization and performances may draw on existing
structural forms, the vision and content of those projects is one not
predetermined, but rather perpetually ‘coming into being.’
We hope the analyzes presented here will generate the potential
to learn from past and present articulations of culture within the in-
betweenness or liminal space of performance, in order to better articulate
the embodiment of culture as a negotiating factor of identities, cultures,
and countries in transition. What kind of social and political interven-
tions have been negotiated through culture? What are some of the artistic
adaptations of cultural forms for new and emerging purposes? How might
cultural forms serve as a microcosm of the macrocosm of current global
movements? How do the examples provided in this volume respond to
overarching challenges or innovations in the interdisciplinary crossover
between performance, politics and culture?
The Soviet discourse and practice of ‘culturedness’ (kul’turnost ’)
became an established political and cultural form during the Stalinist era
in Soviet Central Asia, just as all other regions of the Soviet Union.1
The ‘cultured’ Soviet citizen in the region needed to be well-versed in
literature, music, theatre, and other artistic fields, all within the bounds
1 For the application of ‘culturedness’ in the Kyrgyz SSR, see Iğmen (2012).
of the Marxist–Leninist ideology. In urban centres such as Tashkent and

other capital cities of the Soviet Socialist Republics, the state opera, ballet,
theatre, and philharmonia carried out the state-sanctioned cultural activ-
ities in larger scale. The nomadic Kyrgyz and Kazakh populations, and
those in smaller rural regions came into contact with Soviet ‘cultured-
ness’ mostly in Lenin’s Corners in factories and collective farms, and in
Red Clubs and other Houses of Culture. First, being ‘cultured’ required
the improvement of traditional forms of art with modern, namely Western
forms of art. For example, modern stage productions were to replace
traditional performances of the akyn (bards).
Gradually, however, indigenous cultural forms found their way into
Soviet literature, theatre and film. The Soviet policy, supported by the
slogan ‘national in form, socialist in content’ encouraged talented writers
such as the Kyrgyz author Chingiz Aitmatov to forge a Soviet artistic
tradition that blended indigenous and Soviet forms of cultural produc-
tions. During the first half of the Soviet era most Soviet authors, artists,
actors and other people of the arts learned to assert themselves within the
limitations of the official Soviet cultural forms. This delicate and often
dangerous assertion took place in a liminal space, in which professional
artists found various ways to stay ‘national in form, socialist in content,’2
a dictum guiding the research and understanding of every performative
sphere of life from art (Tagangaeva 2016) to music (Harris 2008) to
language (Shelestyuk 2019); one could even understand the very cate-
gory or notion of tribal identity itself in this new way, as Edgar (2004)
has well-described in the case of Turkmenistan.
The two-sided notion of a specifically socialist multiculturalism was
experienced throughout the former Soviet Union and China over the
twentieth century and tended to follow relatively specific patterning
linking categories of ethnic and performative identity. For example, in her
exposition of the establishment and development of Soviet national art
in Buryatia, Tagangaeva (2016) explains how ‘a specific visual aesthetic
and discourse [was] formed, based on the close link between art and
ethnicity. National art was tied to the development of Soviet ethnog-
raphy, which enabled the naturalization of art through geographic and
ethnic essentialist attributes’ (393). Ethnographic and academic research
2 For a general overview of this two-sided mode of socialist nationality building in the
Soviet Union, see Slezkine (1994), Martin (2001), Suny and Martin (2001), and Hirsch
(2005).
on ‘folk’ and artistic traditions led to a typology of nations defined in

cultural terms, all which in turn orbited, and were still oriented toward,
the cultural center of Russian modernism, and thus the Soviet institution-
alization of art can be understood also as the colonization of cultural form
(Ibid.: 397–399). In Buryatia, for example, artists working in the Soviet
framework confronted the category of the ‘national’ as clichéd orientalism
(Ibid.: 405–406). In China at the same time, comparable demarcations of
cultural form led further, for example, to the canonization of ‘national
musical traditions’ of ethnic minorities like the Uyghur Shashmuqam
(Harris 2008). Although the artistic outcome of such endeavours often
created bland and propaganda laden productions, many individuals dedi-
cated themselves to improving the quality of their work. Many took pride
in their education in art institutes and higher education institutions while
not abandoning their ethnic, regional, and national ways of seeing and
being in the world.
In our contributions to this volume, we wish to foreground the work
and activity of individuals and groups in the establishment, maintenance,
and performance of cultural traditions across Central Asia. Here we view
‘culture’ not as a given, but as a space continually (re)claimed by those
working creatively within environments of political socialism and nation-
alism including indigenous performative and intellectual traditions. In
formulating our approach to this special collection of essays and to best
articulate the ‘coming into being’ of varied cultural forms and performa-
tives, we bring together key concepts and terms that are derived from
our varied disciplines and theoretical frameworks including: interweaving,
liminality, dwelling, and affective sovereignty, which we explain briefly
here. Additionally, throughout our research articles we explore how other
cultural and linguistically specific terms that connote a specific defini-
tion within Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Russian, Tajik, or Kazak, might contribute a
deeper understanding of how our theoretical terminology might apply in
other contexts or across cultures as well. The terminology provides a web-
like structure that links between the articles in this volume to generate
new thought processes that potentially provides alternative points of
access or lenses between disciplines, our own form of border crossing
or liminality.
Anthropologist Victor Turner has described liminality as ‘a fructile
chaos, a fertile nothingness, a storehouse of possibilities, not by any means
a random assemblage but a striving after new forms and structure, a
gestation process, a fetation of modes appropriate to and anticipating
postliminal existence’ (1990: 12). The articles here explore the Kyrgyz
thinker Arabaev’s and Kyrgyz actresses’ development as influential intel-
lectuals in their own liminal spaces where they were confronted by
changing times and changing modes of literary and artistic expression.
The contributions here also examine the ways in which treasured tradi-
tions such as the Kyrgyz epic Manas, and the Kazakh oral traditions
of aitys, wedding songs, and elegy performed by elderly ethnic Kazakh
women in China experienced new forms and structures in changing polit-
ical landscapes where national and linguistic identities thrived to emerge
in a postliminal existence.
The concept of interweaving comes from the study of textuality: ‘A
text is a tissue of words.’ The term comes from the Latin texere, meaning
literally to weave, join together, plait or braid; and therefore, to construct,
fabricate, build or compose (Barber 2007: 2). In our study we examine
the performative traditions as woven texts, as those forms which are over-
lain in social history, where we may locate the ‘social relations, ideas,
values [of] the cultures that produce them,’ (Ibid.). Performance theorist
Erika Fischer-Lichte et al. uses the term interweaving as opposed to inter-
cultural to oppose the binary between Western and non-Western forms,
and notions of authenticity to situate the historic use of performance as
a mediating factor between cultures to decontextualize, appropriate, and
adapt to fit other goals (2014: 2). Fischer-Lichte affirms her usage of
interweaving in relation to the application of cultural forms to new social
realities:
Interweaving functions on several levels: Many strands are plied into a

thread; many such threads are then woven into a piece of cloth, which
thus consists of diverse strands and threads…seen within an ‘as well’ logic,
that is, the interconnectedness, as suggested by the metaphor of threads
woven into cloth…Performances in general take on a paradigmatic role in
society: All that occurs publicly in them – both between the performers
and between the performers and spectators – may reflect, condemn, or
negate the surrounding social conditions and/or anticipate future ones …
By permanently probing the emergence, stabilization, and destabilization
of cultural identities, these performances can transfer their participants into
states of in-betweenness, which allow them to anticipate a future wherein
the journey itself, the permanence of transition, and the state of liminality is
indeed constitutive of their experience … The interweaving of performance
cultures can be thus described as an aesthetic Vor-Schein, as the philoso-

pher Ernst Bloch put it: the anticipation in and by the arts of something
that will become social reality much later, if at all. (Ibid. 11–12)
The concept of interweaving is applied to ascribe aesthetic experiences

as those ‘in between’ the static categories of society and culture. In this
way, the authors in this volume also apply the notion of interweaving as a
liminal experience, through which the personal and contingent spaces in
which cultural and performative traditions themselves come into being.
In forms of ‘counterideology’ and ‘mobilization’ under difficult polit-
ical circumstances, how can we foreground the emergence of cultural
subjectivities (Biehl and Locke 2017: 21)?
Similarly describing the state of inbetweenness or the state of
becoming, in his analysis of the unfolding of social life, anthropologist
Tim Ingold emphasizes dwelling, or ‘the forms people build, whether
in the imagination or on the ground, arise within the current of their
involved activity, in the specific relational contexts of their practical
engagement with their surroundings (Ingold 2011: 186).’ In our own
historical and ethnographic analyzes, and in our engagement with the life
of cultural construction, we extend Ingold’s understanding of ‘dwelling’
in the spaces of society and the everyday, toward the inhabitation and
building of sites of history. Such an engagement moves away from static
categories and toward an emphasis on the biographies and experiences of
those individuals and communities involved in the (re) construction of an
indigenous cultural commons through the performances of oral traditions
and the institutionalization of indigenous intellectual spaces.
All the chapters in this collection rightly point toward what David
Gullette and John Heathershaw (2015) have called an ‘affective politics of
sovereignty’ in the formation of national consciousness in the early Soviet
republics, the ways in which identity and belonging structure historical
and political consciousness, and the strong role played by cultural forma-
tions in doing this work of history-making. As socialist logic prescribed
culture as belonging to the category of ethnicity, those ethnic groups
granted semi-independent republic or provincial status under Soviet or
Chinese state socialism were in a position to articulate cultural forms,
while the dynamics of transnational shared culture, or ethnic and cultural
minorities without access to state resources were largely ignored. Across
Central Asia, we argue that ‘culture’ itself cannot be taken for granted;
rather, cultural products are the deep investments of families, collectives,
and storied individuals who carry and promote oral and performative
traditions to become a part of—and to be maintained as—indigenous
‘culture’ under the larger projects of state socialism and nationalism.
The authors examine various types of social and political interventions
by several individuals and groups, beginning with the late nineteenth
century, and ending with the first two decades of the twenty-first century.
The contributions in this volume provide various examples of cultural
assertion and survival in multiple ways.
The narratives begin at the end of the nineteenth century when
intellectuals such as Kyrgyz thinker Ishenaaly Arabaev’s life, intellectual
pursuits, and personal decisions were shaped by the historical conditions
in Central Asia, as presented in the first chapter here. Arabaev’s inter-
actions with the empire’s Muslim intellectuals, and his exposure to the
ideas of Muslim cultural reform through medrese study and the print
media, made him aware of the plight of his ‘own’ people, the Kyrgyz,
and allowed him to conceive of his community as extending beyond his
Sarybaghysh tribe. Arabaev was born into and raised in a culture with
a strong oral tradition. He was familiar with the poetic repertoire of
the oral poets of his country (qyns and zhomoqchus ); he valued their art
highly and it had a tremendous influence on how he came to imagine
being Kyrgyz. Throughout his career, Arabaev had tried to navigate and
reconcile his multilayered—ethnic, religious, linguistic, and cultural iden-
tities. His close collaboration with Kazakh intellectuals and his tendency
to intermingle Kyrgyz and Kazakh affairs added another dimension to his
identity. His cultural alliances with Kazakh intellectuals during the late
imperial period later led to political alliances that played an integral role
in shaping the choices he made after the demise of the Russian empire.
The second chapter on the Kyrgyz actresses of the Soviet era conveys
the strength of the sense of belonging. The cultural policies of the Soviet
era, and the responses of the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz to these policies place
the consequences described above in historical context. During the first
half of the twentieth century, in the Kyrgyz SSR, by asserting particular
ways of conduct on and offstage authoritative women upheld what they
saw as traditional gender roles. They upheld nomadism and reverence for
the elderly and the environment as their indigenous values. Although,
the Soviet rhetoric placed these women in a liminal space, they did not
see themselves marginalized. Ironically, the Kyrgyz women in this study
played traditional gender roles on stage such as the wife of their national
hero Manas, Kanykei to perpetuate the image of an idealized Kyrgyz

woman.
Their successors, the generation of the early twenty-first century,
approached traditions in new ways. The examples of Sakhna Nomadic
Theatre and Osh Uzbek Theatre presented in the third chapter, illu-
minate the use of Manas as an interweaving text that can be adapted,
rewritten, and expanded to nurture artistic explorations. Here, there are
some contradictions and tensions between how Manas can serve on a
local level through its flexible application to a specific community and how
Manas has been performed and implemented on a national level in terms
of political ideology and notions of sovereignty. It is the duality between
the local and national levels that demonstrates the tension between the
fluidity of Manas as a form that can be improvised according to its audi-
ences and contexts and the use of Manas toward nationalism. These two
stories, one from the early twentieth century, another from the twenty-
first, expose that there are various potential ways that Manas and other
cultural forms more broadly can be used as an interweaving text between
ancient traditions and histories and contemporary social, cultural, and
political contexts.
The fourth chapter on the Kazakh poetry shows that the powerful
connections between the Kazakh oral tradition and modern nationalism
in the twentieth century are still apparent today, as the power of nation-
alism itself lies not in its fixity, but in its ambivalence as seen in the oral
tradition of aitys in Kazakhstan in the twenty-first century. The poetry
and the shaping of poets within this tradition confers both pride and
grief, not only for the suffering of Kazakhs under Soviet rule in the past,
but perhaps more importantly for the struggle to maintain language and
tradition in the national present. While aitys was intentionally coopted
as a ‘folklore genre’ by the Soviet state, and while the art form is still
very much constrained by government censorship, the oral tradition is still
nonetheless seen as a vehicle of cultural continuity by its supporters. There
is a retraditionalized ‘nation,’ invoked and lauded in aitys performances.
Kazakh language becomes metaphorically important in that context as
evidence of the existence of Kazakh culture. In this ideological and
political economy of performance, Kazakh language becomes a central
key: more than anything else, linguistic acumen symbolizes knowledge
of history and culture, a culture always under threat in the reality of
post-Soviet politics in Kazakhstan.
As an alternative to state nationalism in Central Asia, Chinese Kazakhs’

cultural sentiments are expressed differently, due to the historical prece-
dence of ‘local nationalism’ denounced as counterrevolutionary in the
Chinese Communist Party’s ‘Directive on the Rectification Movement’
in 1957. However, instead of resonating with China and Kazakhstan’s
national visions, Chinese Kazakhs tell stories that are grounded in where
they have a sense of belonging to sustain communal solidarity. It is
imperative to note the disjuncture between the post-Soviet Central Asian
cultural experience, and that of ethnic and religious minority populations
in Xinjiang, the semi-autonomous western region of China. While the
former Soviet republics are building a national politics, Central Asians
in China are facing extreme and increasing measures of oppression and
control, most recently in the form of mandatory ‘re-education centers’
where hundreds of thousands have been detained (see for example articles
by Smith-Finley [2019] or Zenz [2019]).
The fifth chapter describes the experience of Kazakhs living in the
Xinjiang Autonomous Region in China, and shows that the narratives and
cultural politics around oral traditions such as wedding songs and funeral
elegies, traditionally sung by elder women, can shed light on traumatic
political transformations from a feminist perspective. The older genera-
tion has faced not only the cultural revolution of the Maoist era, but also
the continued repression and violence of the current era. Connections
among family, cultural traditions, and pastoral lifeways have been deeply
challenged by state efforts at ideological ‘reform’ and ‘modernization,’ as
well as urbanization. The sentimental depth of elders’ lament indicates the
continuous reproduction of space and social networks, a way to interact
[with] others and with their changing environment. Therefore, under-
standing the way that women’s oral traditions function in families and
communities among Kazakhs in Xinjiang helps us to see why and how
people are responding to life changes in a cultural way. Women’s words
are a shared and resonating soundscape of lament connecting modern
families to the histories that came before them, and to the traditions being
lost. The framework of lament shows us that people are grieving for some-
thing greater: the mourning and memory of elders allows the ‘death’
of Islamic cultural identity, pastoral lifeways, and gendered traditional
knowledge, to be said out loud.
In bringing together this collection of articles, we wish to illustrate
and emphasize ‘culture’ itself as a space of assertion and erasure, of
collaboration and coming into being, a performative space in which indi-

viduals and communities assert a vision of history and claim an affective
and sovereign space in the present. While the formation of a national
ethnic consciousness has often been foregrounded in the literature on
socialist nation-building, this is often given as a top-down and determin-
istic project. But how do local artists and intellectuals work from within to
shape and form ‘cultural’ traditions through time? How are spaces of ‘tra-
dition’ used as creative commentary on the very processes of socialization
and history-making of which they are part? How do emic understand-
ings of language, spirituality, environment, come to be an active model
of cultural education across different cultural spaces? What is the role
of poetry, performance, and oral tradition, in social and political life?
Finally, while we emphasize the role of cultural assertion, ultimately, we
must also honor the conditions of historical trauma and displacement in
which cultural creativity cannot always be a form of survival. Cultural
traditions also stand as a testament to that which has been lost, or what
might be lost, in the social fabric of history. Indeed, such an acknowl-
edgment becomes a raison d’etre of many indigenous performative and
intellectual traditions; these traditions become a space of pedagogy not
only about ‘national consciousness,’ but also about efforts to sustain such
an identity in the face of cultural colonialism. Liminality—the life of the
in-between—itself becomes a creative means of sustenance and collabo-
ration, in the face of cultural and physical displacements in socialist and
nationalist environments.
References
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Uzbekistan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Barber, K. (2007). The Anthropology of Texts, Persons and Publics: Oral and
Written Culture in Africa and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Biehl, J. and Locke, P. eds. (2017). Unfinished: The Anthropology of Becoming.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Edgar, A. (2004). Tribal Nation, the Making of Soviet Turkmenistan. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Erika Fischer-Lichte, E., Jost, T., and Jain, S. I. eds. (2014). The Politics
of Interweaving Performance Cultures: Beyond Postcolonialism. New York:
Routledge.
Gullette, D. and Heathershaw, J. (2015). The Affective Politics of Sovereignty:

Reflecting on the 2010 Conflict in Kyrgyzstan. Nationalities Papers 43 (1):
122–139.
Harris, R. (2008). The Making of a Musical Canon in Chinese Central Asia: The
Uyghur Twelve Muqam. Oxon and New York: Routledge (Ashgate).
Hirsch, F. (2005). Empire of Nations, Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making
of the Soviet Union. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Iğmen, A. (2012). Speaking Soviet with an Accent: Culture and Power in
Kyrgyzstan. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press.
Ingold, T. (2011). The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood,
Dwelling, and Skill. Oxon and New York: Routledge.
Kudaibergenova, D. (2017). Rewriting the Nation in Modern Kazakh Literature:
Elites and Narratives. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Martin, T. (2001). Affirmative Action Empire, Nations and Nationalism in the
Soviet Union, 1923–1939. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Shelestyuk, E. (2019). National in Form, Socialist in Content: USSR National
and Language Policies in the Early Period. SHS Web of Conferences 69.
Slezkine, Y. (1994). The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist
State Promoted Ethnic Particularism. Slavic Review 53 (2): 414–452.
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Xinjiang: Has PRC Counter-Terrorism Evolved into State Terror? Central
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Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tagangaeva, M. (2016). ‘Socialist in Content, National in Form’: The Making
of Soviet National Art and the Case of Buryatia. Nationalities Papers 45 (3):
393–409.
Turner, V. (1990). Are There Universals of Performance in Myth, Ritual, and
Drama? In: Schener, R. and Appel, W. eds. By Means of Performance: Inter-
cultural Studies of Theatre and Ritual. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Zenz, A. (2019). ‘Thoroughly Reforming Them Towards a Healthy Heart Atti-
tude’: China’s Political Re-Education Campaign in Xinjiang. Central Asian
Survey 38 (1): 102–128.
CHAPTER 2
‘The Kara Kirghiz Must Develop Separately’:

Ishenaaly Arabaev (1881–1933) and His
Project of the Kyrgyz Nation
Jipar Duishembieva
Abstract This chapter revisits the historical circumstances under which

the notion of Kyrgyzness developed and further solidified into the
concept of the modern Kyrgyz nation. It does so through the example
of the Central Asian Kyrgyz intellectual Ishenaaly Arabaev. The chapter
reveals that early twentieth-century Kyrgyz nationalism emerged along-
side a Kazakh nationalist discourse, which had a significant influence on
Kyrgyz intellectuals’ conception(s) of the nation. Furthermore, it outlines
how the idea of the Kyrgyz national territorial autonomy was formed in
the early 1920s, after a period of shock and recovery from the devastation
of the revolt of 1916, the revolutions of 1917 and the fall of the Russian
imperial regime. Through it all came new efforts to redefine what it meant
to be Kyrgyz, encouraged by the changing political and cultural climate
of the early 1920s and enforced by various political alliances.
J. Duishembieva (B)
University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 13

Switzerland AG 2020
A. Breed et al. (eds.), Creating Culture in (Post) Socialist
Central Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58685-0_2
14 J. DUISHEMBIEVA
Keywords Ishenaaly Arabaev · Intellectual history · Soviet Kyrgyz

nationality · Kara Kirghiz · Islamic education · Russian imperialism in
Central Asia
In March 1924, Ishenaaly Arabaev, a prominent Kyrgyz intellectual,

writer, and educator, found himself in Tashkent speaking in front of the
members of the Central Asian Bureau to justify the creation of the Kara
Kyrgyz Autonomous Oblast (KKAO):
If an Uzbek is speaking, he begins with Ferghana and Samarkand and

immediately passes to Aulie Ata through Tashkent, forgetting to touch
upon the Kara Kirghiz. And if another Kirghiz [Kazakh] has his turn,
he speaks of Jeti Suu and Syr-Dar’ia, and absolutely fails to mention
the Kara Kirghiz of Jeti Suu. I recently have said that along with [the
Uzbek, Turkmen and Kazakh] nationalities, it is necessary to promote
two more nationalities: the Kara Kirghiz and Tajik, so that there are five
nationalities.1
Arabaev did not always hold the above-mentioned opinion. Before the
1920s, he saw himself as part of the Kazakh-Kyrgyz intellectual milieu
and accepted the possibility of a Kyrgyz and Kazakh cultural and polit-
ical unity.2 Prior to 1917, Arabaev published on the pages of Ay Qap
and Qazaq and wrote a primer for Kazakh and Kyrgyz children. He
later became a founding member of the Alash party’s branch in Pishpek.
1 Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’no-Politicheskoi Istorii (henceforth RGASPI).

F. 62. Op. 2. D. 101. L. 97.
2 Prior to 1925, terms such as Kara-Kirghiz and Wild Mountain (dikokamennye) Kirghiz
were used to designate present-day Kyrgyz. Meanwhile, terms such as Kirghiz and Kaisak-
Kirghiz/Kirghiz-Kaisak were used for present-day Kazakhs. It is difficult to speculate
what the reason was for this kind of confusion in the use of these terms, but it is
important to note that Kyrgyz and Kazakhs have always called themselves only Kyrgyz
and Kazakhs, respectively. In April of 1925, the Sredazbiuro (Central Asian Bureau) TsK
RKP (b) decided to discard the term Kara Kirghiz and to use the term ‘Kirghiz’ to
designate Kyrgyz and the term ‘Kazakh’ to designate Kazakhs (RGASPI. F. 62. Op. 2.
D. 183. Ll. 35–36 ob.). Until 1991, Kirghiz/Kyrgyz was spelled KIRGIZ in Russian
and KYRGYZ in Kyrgyz. In 1991, the Kyrgyz government decided to use the spelling
KYRGYZ in both Russian and Kyrgyz languages, and since then, it is spelled ‘Kyrgyz’
in English. I only use the term Kirghiz whenever it is used by the contemporary political
activists and intellectuals themselves, in all other instances I use the term Kyrgyz.
2 ‘THE KARA KIRGHIZ MUST DEVELOP SEPARATELY’ … 15
Arabaev grew up immersed in a culture with rich oral tradition from which
he took a constant inspiration, but he also received a traditional Islamic
education and was able to write and read, a skill that was not widespread
among the nomadic Kyrgyz and Kazakhs of the early twentieth century.
He actively participated in the developments of the period between 1910
and 1914 which marked a critical transition in the history of northern
Kyrgyz literary culture, when the traditional system of knowledge based
on orality gave way to new modes of learning.
This period witnessed a rise in the number of educated Kyrgyz, who
later, during the early Soviet period, came to dominate the political,
cultural, and literary scene. Knowingly, and sometimes unknowingly, they
participated in the discussions on what it was to be Kyrgyz and how
their Kyrgyzness distinguished them from the rest of the population of
Central Asia.3 They listed nomadic lifestyle and oral tradition as one of the
distinct markers of their identity, while knowledge and awareness of their
genealogy—the ability to trace their beginnings to a single ancestor—also
played a major role in defining Kyrgyzness. Arabaev was one of these intel-
lectuals who, prior to 1916, contributed to the discourse of the nation
with his works on language, culture, and literature. He held a unique
position among his contemporaries, for he had a first-hand experience of
both oral and written/print cultures.
On the example of Arabaev’s experiences as a cultural and political
figure of the late imperial and early Soviet periods, this paper aims to
revisit the historical circumstances under which the notion of Kyrgyz-
ness developed and further solidified into the concept of the modern
Kyrgyz nation. It reveals that early twentieth-century Kyrgyz nationalism
emerged alongside a Kazakh nationalist discourse, which had a significant
3 I discuss this in my Ph.D. dissertation. See, Jipar Duishembieva. Visions of Commu-

nity: Literary Culture and Social Change among the Northern Kyrgyz, 1856–1924/Ph.D.
dissertation; University of Washington, 2015.
16 J. DUISHEMBIEVA
influence on Kyrgyz intellectuals’ conception(s) of the nation.4 Further-

more, it outlines how the idea of the Kyrgyz national territorial autonomy
was formed in the early 1920s, after a period of shock and recovery from
the devastation of the revolt of 1916,5 the revolutions of 1917 and the fall
of the imperial regime. Through it all came new efforts to redefine what
it meant to be Kyrgyz, encouraged by the changing political and cultural
climate of the early 1920s and enforced by various political alliances.
Ishenaaly Arabaev: Early Life

and Intellectual Pursuits
The end of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of the modern-
izing Kyrgyz intellectuals, who were well-versed in the oral tradition of
their ancestors in addition to being exposed to concepts and attitudes
of modernity through travel and education in the reformed Muslim reli-
gious institutions of the Russian and Ottoman empires. Although they
were limited in number, their activities spurred further development of
4 On the process of nation-building in Central Asia in early Soviet period see Adrienne
Lynn Edgar. Tribal Nation: The Making of the Soviet Turkmenistan. Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 2005; Marianne Kamp. The New Woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, Modernity,
and Unveiling under Communism. University of Washington Press, 2006; Ali Iğmen.
Speaking Soviet with an Accent: Culture and Power in Kyrgyzstan. University of Pitts-
burgh Press, 2012; Sergei Abashin. Natsionalizmy v Srednei Azii, v poiskakh identichnosti.
Aleteiia, 2007. Some of the earlier and most influential studies on the Soviet nationality
policy include Yuri Slezkine. (1994). ‘The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How
a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism.’ Slavic Review. Vol. 53. pp. 414–452;
Ronald Grigor Suny. The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of
the Soviet Union. Stanford University Press, 1993. Works on the Soviet nationality policy
and its implementation include Terry Martin. The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and
Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939. Cornell University Press, 2001; Francine
Hirsch. Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union.
Cornell University Press, 2005.
5 In the summer of 1916, the population of Central Asia revolted against the Russian
imperial regime. The revolt was a result of the decree of the labor conscription which
called up the entire male population of Central Asia between the ages of 18 and 43 for
service in non-combatant roles. It had resulted in many deaths and was ruthlessly put
down by the imperial army. On the revolt of 1916 see Daniel Brower. Kyrgyz Nomads,
and Russian Pioneers: Colonization and Ethnic Conflict in the Turkestan Revolt of 1916;
Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas. 1996. Bd. 44. pp. 41–53; Jörn Happel. Nomadische
lebenswelten und zarische politik: der Aufstand in Zentralasien 1916. Stuttgart, 2010.
the notions of Kyrgyzness. This section concentrates on Arabaev’s forma-

tion as an intellectual and discusses his efforts in the spheres of education,
press and publishing.
Ishenaaly Arabaev was born in 1881 in Qyzyl Tuu volost of Pishpek
uezd of Semirech’e region. He lost his father when he was two years old
and was raised by his mother. At the age of ten, Arabaev hired himself
out to a Kyrgyz bai 6 for a period of two years. Subsequently, he worked
until he was eighteen for a local mullah, with whom he learned to read
and write.
By the end of the nineteenth century, lessons with a hired mullah
were becoming common among the Kyrgyz nomads, and the majority
of the first generation of Kyrgyz intellectuals had a basic mekteb training,
as well as exposure to the informal learning networks of the Kyrgyz oral
poets and bards, the aqyns 7 and jomoqchus .8 By the beginning of the
twentieth century however, knowledge based on oral transmission and
pure memorization was not enough to keep up with the demands of a
changing society. Arabaev and many of his contemporaries understood
this well. They grew dissatisfied with the quality of education provided
by the local mullahs; and those who could afford it moved to uezd
centers such as Toqmoq and Przheval’sk, which contained large commu-
nities of Muslims from Russia and Central Asia, including many Tatars, as
well as Kazakhs and Sarts.9 Upon graduation, these students returned to
6 A man of considerable wealth.

7 Oral poets among the northern Kyrgyz.
8 The process of knowledge acquisition among the nomadic northern Kyrgyz is poorly
recorded until the second half of the nineteenth century. Apart from a selection of texts
located at the Manuscripts Collection of the Kyrgyz Academy of Sciences that were
collected from the territory of the present-day Kyrgyz Republic and date back to the
early nineteenth century, which document the circulation of religious texts at that time,
there are few sources that shed light on the methods of learning and knowledge transmis-
sion among the Kyrgyz nomads. Reading, and especially writing, were privileges restricted
to only a few individuals from the higher strata of nomadic society. Among those rare
Kyrgyz who came from noble families and had leisure to devote to literary pursuits were
the Kyrgyz aqyns Qalyghul, Arstanbek, and later Moldo Qylych. All of them also studied
with mullahs, a fact that would have a lasting impact in popular memory. jomoqchu is a
man (in rare instances a woman), who is skilled in telling or singing tales.
9 TsGA PD KR, f. 10, op. 15, d. 188. New-method schools, as they came to be known
among the public, emerged as an answer to the perceived cultural backwardness of the
Muslims of the Russian empire. These schools were organized on the model established
by the Crimean Tatar intellectual Ismail Gasprinskii (1851–1914), who was an ardent
18 J. DUISHEMBIEVA
their own villages to teach village children. Arabaev continued his studies
at a new-method (jadid) mekteb in Przheval’sk, under the supervision
of a Tatar mullah, who later helped him secure funding from a local
benevolent society to go to Orenburg for further education.10
Arabaev’s road to Orenburg was circuitous. Initially he failed the
entrance exams to the madrasa in Orenburg, and instead entered a
Turkish gymnasium in Istanbul. After six months of study there, Arabaev
travelled for a year and a half around the Middle East. Little is known
about this period of his life. In a ‘personal file’ [lichnoe delo] he mentioned
having visited Izmir, Beirut, Mecca, and Medina during this time, but his
writings contain no description of the cities or account of his experiences
there.11 This biographical gap is curious, but it seems most likely that he
went on a hajj pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, via Izmir and Beirut.
Upon returning to Istanbul, in Arabaev’s words, he began to ‘attract
the attention of Ottoman government officials’ for receiving newspapers
containing revolutionary content from Saint-Petersburg, so he decided
to return to Orenburg.12 In Orenburg, Arabaev entered the Huseyniye
madrasa, and after a summer of teaching, he was able to save up the
money to continue his studies at the Ghaliya madrasa in Ufa in 1909
where he studied for three years.13
advocate of modern education. The term ‘jadidism’ itself came from the new phonetic
method (usul-i jadid) of teaching the Arabic alphabet in the 1880s. By the late nineteenth
century, Gasprinskii’s method spread widely among the Tatars of the Volga and the Crimea
regions, and in the early twentieth century it became a popular way of teaching among the
northern Kyrgyz nomads. The method itself, however, was not limited to teaching Arabic
by using this new method. It also involved the introduction of secular subjects into mekteb
and madrasa curricula, and transforming traditional ways of teaching by organizing the
educational process according to modern methods of instruction.
10 TsGA PD KR, f. 10, op. 15, d. 188.
11 TsGA PD KR, f. 10, op. 15, d. 188.
12 TsGA PD KR, f. 10, op. 15, d. 188, ll. 8–10.
13 Ufa, the capital of the Ufa Governorate, today is the capital of the Republic Bashko-
rtostan, Russia. Madrasa Ghaliya had been founded by Ziya Kamali (1873–1942), a
prominent Tatar thinker, intellectual, and educator, and was famous for its progressive
educational content and methods. From the end of the nineteenth century, reformed
madrasas like Ghaliya had begun to open in the Volga-Ural region, supported by wealthy
Muslim merchants and intellectuals from the area. They differed from the old-style
madrasas mainly in their curriculum, which, along with religious studies, included such
subjects as psychology, pedagogy, chemistry, history, and Russian. The revised curriculum
in these reformed madrasas also allowed students to complete their training more quickly,
It is likely that Arabaev began to think of his community as a

distinct nation during his studies in Ghaliya, aided by his member-
ship in the Kazakh-Kyrgyz student association and participation in the
amateur madrasa newspaper Sadaq.14 Arabaev’s social and political views
were formed through his interactions with teachers and students of
the madrasa, and exposure to their varied ethnic and social back-
grounds.15 In addition to the official subjects in the madrasa curriculum,
students participated in a rich extracurricular program. The majority of
the students of the madrasa wrote poetry, which was encouraged by the
teachers, and many graduates went on to contribute to the development
of the print media in the region as poets, writers or journalists.16 Students
of Ghaliya madrasa also put together plays and published their works in
madrasa newspapers.
Arabaev’s time in Ufa and Kazan coincided with the period following
the revolution of 1905 in the Russian empire, a time marked by height-
ened national sentiment among the empire’s non-Russian population, and
greater activity by national movements in the imperial borderlands. The
revolution of 1905 was sparked off by the events of ‘Bloody Sunday’
of January 9 in St. Petersburg. Social and economic problems which
spilled over into the unrest of the workers and peasants were the under-
lying causes of the revolution.17 The revolution resulted in the October
usually over a period of ten to fifteen years. Besides Ghaliya, some of the most promi-
nent reformed madrasas were Bubiy, Hüseyiniye, Usmaniye and Mukhammediye. These
madrasas, and particularly Ghaliya, would go on to host many Kazakh and Kyrgyz
students. Neither Arabaev’s, nor any of the other known ‘Kyrgyz’ shagirds ’ [students’]
names are mentioned in the lists of Ghaliya madrasa in the file pertaining to Ghaliya at
the Central State Historical Archive of the Republic of Bashkortostan (henceforth TsGIA
RB).
14 The Tatar-Bashkir student association also published a newspaper, Parlaq. See
Tursynbek Kekishev. Sadaq. Almaty, 1986. p. 58.
15 On madrasa Ghaliya, see Liliia Tuzbekova. Madrasa ‘Galiia—vysshee musul’ manskoe
uchebnoe zavedenie na territorii Bashkortostana (1906–1919): 100 letiiu so dnia
osnovaniia. Ufa, 2006.
16 Collection of the madrasa Ghaliya at TsGIA RB in Ufa contains a wealth of
information about the madrasa graduates’ future paths. TsGIA RB, f. R-4767, op. 1,
d. 1.
17 Severe famines in 1891–1892, and again in 1897–1898, in the Russian countryside
dispelled Russian peasants’ illusions about the state’s ability to alleviate their problems. The
peasants’ main demand under these circumstances was land, universal free education, and
fair taxation. Russia’s rapid embrace of industrialization at the end of the 1880s, reflected
20 J. DUISHEMBIEVA
Manifesto which limited the tsar’s autocratic powers, guaranteed the

population of the empire civil rights, allowed for the election of the
legislative assembly, and granted freedom of religion, speech, and asso-
ciation to the population of Russia.18 Muslims of the Russian empire
used 1905 concessions to start their own political movements. The first
All-Russian Muslim congress met illegally in August of 1905 in Nizhnii
Novgorod on a boat on the Oka River, and it was attended by such
Tatar and Azeri intellectuals as Ismail Gasprinskii, Yusuf Akchura, Ghal-
imjan Ibragimov, and Alimardan Topchibashev.19 The idea of creating
the Ittifaq [Union of the Muslims of Russia] party was brought up by
Gasprinskii during that congress.20 The party pursued cultural, polit-
ical, and economic unification of Russian Muslims, freedom of press
and publishing, development of Muslim schools, and legal equality for
Muslims and Russians.21
The period of 1905–1907 saw an increase in the number of newspapers
and magazines in Turkic and Persian languages written in Arabic script.22
These contemporary periodicals witnessed intense debates among Tatar,
Kazakh, Azeri, and Central Asian intellectuals, regarding the future of
their nation and their place within the empire.23 Such newspapers as
Tarjuman [Translator], Yulduz [The Star], Bayanul-khaq [Messenger of
Justice], Idel [Volga] and Shuro [Council ], published in the cities across
the Russian empire, provided a public forum in which Tatar and Central
poorly on the workers’ conditions. They demanded betterment of working conditions,

shorter work hours, and greater participation in the affairs of the state. See Orlando
Figes. A People’s Tragedy. New York, 1997. pp. 157–186; Geoffrey Hosking. Russia:
People and Empire, 1552–1917. Cambridge, 1997. pp. 402–423.
18 Andreas Kappeler. The Russian Empire: A Multi-ethnic History. Harlow, 2001. p. 338.
19 Salavat Iskhakov. Pervaia russkaia revoliutsiia i musul’mane Rossiiskoi imperii.
Moscow, 2007. p. 163.
20 Ibid. 169.
21 Azade-Ayse Rorlich. The Volga Tatars: A Profile in National Resilience. Stanford,
1986. p. 111.
22 Kappeler. The Russian Empire. p. 338.
23 Steven Sabol. Russian Colonization and the Genesis of Kazakh National Consciousness.
Basingstoke, 2003; Adeeb Khalid. The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in
Central Asia. Berkeley, 1998.
Another random document with
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“Honored by fools!” growled Roland.
“Honored by the wisest men in college! Honored by every one! If you
had seen every person in that great crowd on the campus rise when
his name was spoken by the historian——”
“I did see it, and then I got away.”
“Then you were there? But you were not in your place.”
“If I had been, they would have seen that one college man did not
rise when Merriwell’s name was called.”
“And you would have brought on yourself the scorn of every one.
Can’t you see that by his generosity, his fine character, and
manliness, he has risen far above you?”
“No! I see that he has a trick of fooling everybody but me. He can
make his enemies forget that they were once enemies, but I am not
like the others. I want to tell you something, Oll. You think Merriwell
has triumphed, but you are wrong. I am the one who has triumphed,
though no one save myself knows it. Some time Merriwell shall
know, and then he will realize that one of his enemies was more than
a match for him.”
“What do you mean?” asked Oliver, amazed. “Are you crazy?”
“Never mind what I mean, but I speak the truth. I have triumphed,
and Merriwell is my victim. I’ll talk no more about it, so you may as
well close your face.”
And Oliver could get nothing further from his brother.
CHAPTER VII.
THE END COMES.
The day of graduation came. The sun shone bright and clear on this
great day in the life of Frank Merriwell, but still that feeling of
sadness was lingering in his heart, for he felt that he was bidding
farewell to his dear home.
Frank had competed to be a Townsend teacher, and he had been
chosen one of the fortunate six who were to speak for the DeForest
gold medal.
Thus it happened that he was given little time for thought and little in
which to see his friends, all of whom were eager to be in his
company.
Had he known that the oilskin envelope in his possession contained
nothing but blank paper it is not probable he could have spoken as
brilliantly as he did.
When the speaking was over it was generally conceded that the
handsome medal must go to Merriwell.
The faculty adjourned to the Treasury building, and there Frank was
awarded the splendid prize. Each member of the faculty shook his
hand in turn and spoke some word of praise to him. They looked on
him lovingly, for they knew that he had done more to raise the
standard of college life than any other student in the country.
Frank was on his way to his room when he almost collided with
Roland Packard.
Packard had been drinking heavily, and he stopped, his lip curling in
a scornful sneer.
“You think you’re it, Merriwell,” he said, in a tone of great contempt;
“but, if you only knew it, you are the biggest fool alive.”
Frank had no desire to exchange words with the fellow.
“You’re drunk, Packard,” he said quietly.
“You’re a liar, Merriwell!” snarled Packard, who seemed not to have a
single remnant of reason left.
Frank was not in the habit of taking the lie from anybody, but now,
seeing Packard’s arm in a sling, he did not heed the fellow’s insult.
“Your friends think you’re a great gun,” Roland went on; “but you
really are mighty small potatoes. Won the DeForest prize, did you?
Well, you may have to pawn it soon to get bread to keep you from
starving!”
This did not have the effect Roland had fancied it might, which
angered him to a still further expression of rage.
“Oh, you’re mighty cool; but you won’t be so cool when you find
you’re a beggar! And you are! I know what I’m talking about. You will
find it out in time, and I want to tell you now that it is I—I, Roland
Packard, whom you despise, who has made you a beggar! Don’t
forget it!”
He wheeled and walked swiftly away.
Frank stood still and looked after the fellow.
“I wonder what he meant,” Merry muttered, a feeling of uneasiness in
his breast. “Is he plumb daffy? I know he’s pretty drunk, but still it
seems that he must have some reason left.”
Frank was troubled despite himself, and he hurried to his room,
where he made sure the oilskin envelope was still safe in his
possession.
Packard had hurried away to drink still more. Already he was half-
crazed by liquor, but he felt consumed by a burning fire that called
for more, more, more.
The afternoon of graduation-day came and saw all graduating
students in caps and gowns, headed by the faculty, likewise garbed,
march to the music of a band out of the campus and down Elm
Street to the green, which they crossed, turning up Chapel Street to
Vanderbilt. The gates of Vanderbilt are opened but once a year,
always on this occasion, and through the gates they marched, under
the arch and across the campus. The chapel was entered, and then
came the last solemn ceremony of conferring the degrees.
Frank thrilled when he stood up to receive his sheepskin. There was
a choking in his throat, his sensation was a mingled feeling of joy
and sorrow that was like exquisite pain. His face was pale as marble.
When the certificate was placed in his hand he felt that it was the
document that divorced him from dear old Yale, and he sat down
with his teeth clenched to hold back the moan that sought vent.
It was over!
That afternoon a man was seen reeling over the Barnesville bridge.
He was intoxicated, and he seemed to fancy he was pursued by an
enemy or enemies who sought his life. Filled with mad terror, he
climbed upon the railing not far from the eastern end of the bridge
and flung himself headlong into the river.
Several persons had seen this crazy act, and they rushed to rescue
him, if possible. Two men pulled out in a boat toward the spot where
he had last been seen. As they pulled he rose to the surface, made a
few feeble splashes, and sank.
One of the men stripped off his coat and plunged in. He brought the
drowning fellow up, helped the other man get him into the boat,
crawled in himself, and they pulled ashore.
On the shore men worked nearly an hour over the poor wretch, but
all their efforts were unavailing. He was dead. In his pocket they
found some letters, which told them he was a student and that his
name was Roland Packard.
And thus it came about that in the pocket of his dead brother Oliver
Packard found another envelope that looked exactly like the one
Roland had snatched from Merriwell. He was astonished and
puzzled, but he took it to Merriwell.
“One of them must contain the message, Merriwell,” said Oliver,
whose face was marked with deep sorrow.
“To-morrow will tell,” said Frank, “for then I will open them both.” He
took Oliver’s hand. “I am very sorry, Packard,” he said.
“It is for the best,” declared Oliver; but his chin quivered as he turned
away.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE MESSAGE STOLEN AGAIN.
“The time has come!”

The words came from the lips of Frank Merriwell, who was standing
beside a small table in a room of one of New York’s big hotels. In his
hand he held the two oilskin envelopes. Across each envelope had
been written:
“To Frank Merriwell; to be opened the day after he graduates from
Yale.”
Frank had studied the writing on those envelopes, and he was
convinced that the words on one had been imitated and copied from
the other.
Bart Hodge was Merry’s companion, sitting near and showing no
small amount of interest in the singular envelopes.
“Which contains the message?” was the question that came from
Bart’s lips.
“That is a conundrum,” admitted Frank, as he gazed from one to the
other.
“This is the one Oliver Packard returned that night the old grads
were celebrating on Osborne corner.”
“Which one is that, the original or the fake?”
“The original.”
“Then what do you make of it?”
“I believe it does not contain the message. I believe the original
envelope was opened by Roland Packard.”
“Why did he do that?”
“I don’t know, unless he expected he would have to give up
something and was determined to hang on to the real message. I am
convinced that there was somebody behind Roland Packard. He was
not working on his own hook. The messenger was pursued all the
way from Colorado to New Haven by a man who seemed
determined to do him injury. That man failed, but is it not possible he
instigated the action of Roland Packard?”
“And you think the stranger employed him to get hold of the
message?”
“I have arrived at that belief.”
“Still, that does not explain the fake envelope.”
“It seems to me that Roland Packard’s curiosity was aroused and he
determined to find out what the original envelope contained. He
opened it. In fact, having studied and examined this envelope
closely, I think I can detect indications that it has been broken open.”
“Then it is likely that Oliver Packard did not restore to you the
message, after all.”
“Not in this first envelope, but you know he brought me this other,
which was taken from the body of his dead brother.”
“Then it is possible that the second envelope is the one that contains
the message.”
“Yes,” nodded Frank. “I almost dread to open it, although the time to
do so has come. Something seems to whisper that it contains a
great surprise for me.”
Frank sat down beside the table, and, with a firm hand, tore open the
envelope he regarded as the original. An exclamation escaped his
lips as he drew forth the contents.
“Look, Bart!” he cried. “I was right! Nothing but blank paper!”
He held the unsoiled sheets up before the eyes of his almost
breathless companion.
“By Jove! you were right!” said Hodge. “You have a way of figuring
things out correctly, Merriwell. The other envelope must contain the
message.”
But, strange to say, Merriwell seemed to hesitate again.
“What if it should not!” he muttered. “What if that also contains
nothing but blank paper!”
“But it must contain the message!” exclaimed Bart.
“Why?”
“Because—because the message was not in this one.”
“A poor reason, Bart. It’s likely this envelope was fixed to deceive the
man who employed Roland Packard to secure the message. I
presume that man offered Packard money to get the message and
turn it over to him. Packard’s curiosity was aroused, and he decided
to find out what the message contained, which led him to remove it
from the envelope. Then he fixed up the original envelope to deceive
the man who had paid him to do the crooked work, but his brother
took it from him in the fight. Following that it is likely that he fixed up
this other envelope for the purpose of fooling his rascally employer.
In such a case, it is almost certain that envelope No. 2 contains
blank paper, the same as the first.”
“Open it!” panted Hodge.
“That will settle it,” said Frank, as he did so.
Bart was rigid as a marble image as Merry drew the contents of the
envelope forth.
From Frank’s lips came a sigh of satisfaction.
“It is the message!” he said.
Had he not been so preoccupied, so absorbed, Frank Merriwell
would have heard the slight rustling sound in the alcove bedroom
behind him. In times of expected danger his alertness was
something remarkable, but just now his mind was concentrated on
the mysterious message which he had taken from the envelope.
Nor did Bart hear anything to arouse his suspicions.
A slight breeze came through the open bedroom window, and gently
stirred the portières behind Frank’s back.
Merriwell’s face grew very pale as he read the opening words of the
message, and his watching companion knew something had
produced a profound effect on him.
“What is it?” Bart was compelled to ask.
“It is from my father, as I believed,” said Merriwell, plainly making an
effort to steady his voice. “I have read nothing but the opening
sentence, but this is what it says:
“‘This, my son, is the confession of your father, who, near to the point
of death and beyond all hope of recovery, is lying in the cabin of
Juan Delores, near Urmiston, which is about fifty miles from
Denver.’”
“Great Scott!” exclaimed Hodge. “Your father dying?”
“Dead by this time, it is likely,” came sadly from Frank’s lips. “And I
not near in his last moments!”
The expression of regret and grief on Frank’s face was sincere and
profound.
“Too bad!” muttered Bart. “But he always was such a strange man!”
“Strange, indeed,” nodded Frank. “I knew little of his life after he
went to seek his fortune amid the mines, save that part which is
closely connected with his fight against his great enemy, Santenel.
He told me that portion of it, but concerning the rest he has said little
or nothing.”
“This may throw light upon it. He calls it a confession.”
“And the fact that he has called it that makes me hesitate once more
about reading. But it must be done.”
Again Merry lifted the message to read.
Over his shoulder darted a hand that snatched the message from his
grasp!
At the same moment, uttering a cry of warning, Bart Hodge sprang to
his feet, pointing toward the parted portières behind Merriwell.
Merry shot to his feet like a flash, but he was barely in time to see a
man disappearing between the portières.
A second time had the precious message been snatched from his
fingers.
“Stop him!” shouted Hodge.
Merry was first to leap between the portières, and yet he was barely
in time to see a man disappearing through a window that led out
upon a fire-escape.
A single glimpse of the man’s face Merriwell obtained as he plunged
after him. He saw him entering the open window of an adjoining
room, the fire-escape running from one window to the other.
At a single bound Frank reached the other window and followed the
man into the room. The fugitive was passing out through a door that
led into the hall as Merry jumped in by the window.
Toward that door bounded Merry. It was slammed in his face.
It had a spring-lock, and for a moment it bothered Frank, who was
compelled to pause to open it. By that time Hodge had reached the
window of the room, into which he looked in great surprise, seeing
that Merry was there alone.
“Where is the——” Frank heard no more of Bart’s question, for he
tore open the door and leaped out into the corridor.
The fugitive had disappeared.
Frank went dashing along the passage, looking for the man, but
seeing nothing of him. The fellow had disappeared in a most
remarkable manner after leaving the room.
“Search, Hodge!” called Merry, and Bart joined in the hunt.
But though they searched everywhere, they found nothing of the
man they were after. The hotel was aroused. The clerk in the office
was notified, and he sent the hotel detective to join in the search.
But, after an hour of hunting, the searchers were forced to give up,
as the unknown thief had not been found.
Then Merry went to the office and took a look at the register to find
out who had occupied the room next to his—the one through which
the desperate rascal had made good his retreat from the fire-escape.
The name on the register was “Anton Mescal, Fair Play, Col.”
“Fair Play!” muttered Hodge, who was looking over Frank’s shoulder.
“What does a scoundrel like that know of fair play?”
Frank asked the clerk if he could give a description of Mescal.
“He is slender, looks like a Spaniard, and has a small, pointed, black
mustache,” was the answer. “I do not remember how he was
dressed, so his clothes must have been fairly within the style.”
“That’s the man!” exclaimed Hodge. “I saw his face, and the
description fits.”
Frank nodded.
“I believe Mescal is the man,” he said. “I will give one thousand
dollars for his capture and the restoration to me of the document
which he snatched from my hands.”
The clerk looked at Merry, as if doubting his ability to pay such a
sum; but the young Yale graduate was taking a small roll of bills from
his pocket. From the roll he drew off two five-hundred-dollar bills,
which he handed to the cashier, who stood near the clerk.
“The money is to be paid to the person or persons who capture or
cause to be captured the thief who stole the document from me, in
case it is restored to my hands,” said Merriwell quietly. “You are to
enlist the services of the regular police and do everything in your
power.”
“The police have been called already,” said the clerk. “I telephoned
the nearest station immediately, and two officers appeared very
shortly. They have been guarding the entrances to the hotel, while
the regular house detectives have been searching. I suspected this
Mescal and gave an accurate description of him to the policemen.
They have not stopped him as yet.”
“Only two officers on guard!” exclaimed Frank. “Yet there is a front
and back entrance, and one through your barber’s shop and by the
way of the bar. Mr. Mescal is out of the hotel by this time.”
“We have done everything we could” declared the clerk.
Frank turned away.
“The message is lost, Bart,” he said.
“Lost?” said Bart, astonished that Frank should give up so easily.
“Yes,” Merry nodded, his face wearing a grim expression.
Hodge was trembling with rage at the outcome.
“It’s an infernal shame!” he hissed. “Merriwell, you must——”
Frank’s hand gripped his arm.
“Come!” said Merry’s voice, still calm and restrained.
Together they went to the nearest police-station, where Frank told
his story to the sergeant in charge, repeating his offer for the arrest
of the thief and the restoration of the message. He was told that
everything possible should be done, and with that promise he was
compelled to be satisfied.
Frank scarcely spoke as they returned to the hotel. Bart wiped the
perspiration from his face and said things to himself.
In his room Merry sat quite still for some time, the look on his face
indicating that he was in deep thought.
Bart did not venture to break in upon his meditations. To Hodge this
second loss of the message, at the moment when Merry had begun
to read it, was something to throw him into a perfect tempest of rage;
but Frank had shown that he was master of his temper.
Bart knew Merry was thoughtfully considering the situation and
studying over it in view of the proper course to pursue. After half an
hour he quietly said:
“That is what I’ll do.”
“What is it?” asked Bart, unable to repress his curiosity longer. “What
have you decided to do?”
“I believe there is not one chance in a thousand that the man who
snatched that message will be captured before he can get out of
New York, and this has led me to decide on a course of action. In the
single sentence that I read my father said that he was at the cabin of
Juan Delores, near Urmiston, which is about fifty miles from Denver.
I shall wait here until to-morrow. If the police have not made a
capture by that time, I shall leave New York.”
“Whither bound?”
“For the cabin of Juan Delores, near Urmiston, Colorado. I am going
to find out the truth, if possible. There is a mystery to be solved, and
I mean to solve it. Bart!”
“Frank!”
“Are you with me?”
Merry had risen. Hodge leaped to his feet. Their hands met, as Bart
exclaimed:
“To the end, through thick and thin!”
CHAPTER IX.
THE OLD INDIAN.
Before them lay the mighty Rockies, rising range on range, till their
glittering, snow-capped summits pressed the sky. Wild and
picturesque and awe-inspiring was the scene. They were in the foot-
hills, and the country was rough and broken.
Frank had drawn rein at the mouth of what seemed to be a small
valley. He was covered with dust, and the hardy mustang he
bestrode showed signs of weariness.
Merriwell was clothed to rough it, having exchanged the garments of
the cities and towns for those more suited to the latter stages of his
search for the cabin of Juan Delores. On his head was a wide-
brimmed felt hat, and he wore a woolen shirt, with a side collar and a
flowing tie, a cartridge-belt about his waist, and leather leggings
covered his trousers nearly to his thighs. There were spurs on the
heels of his boots. His coat he had stripped off, for the day was
warm to an uncomfortable degree.
A Winchester repeating rifle was slung at the pommel of Merry’s
saddle, and a pair of long-barreled revolvers rested in the holsters on
his hips. Taken altogether, he looked like a young man who had
made preparations for almost anything he might encounter.
Bart Hodge, similarly mounted and dressed, had drawn up beside
Frank.
Despite their attire, there was something in the appearance of the
two young men that marked them as belonging to “the tenderfoot
breed.” In other words, the experienced eye would have discovered
at a glance that they were Easterners.
A cool breeze came down the valley, bearing with it a pleasant odor
of wild growing things.
The faces of both lads, lately fresh from college, had been burned
and blistered by the hot suns and searing winds.
“It’s remarkable,” said Frank, “that the people at Urmiston know
Delores, know he lives somewhere in this vicinity, yet not one of
them could give us accurate directions to reach his cabin.”
“Hanged remarkable!” growled Bart. “This is the third day we have
spent in hunting for his old place, and we’ve not even found a clue to
it.”
Merry nodded, frowning beneath the wide brim of his hat.
“We may have passed and repassed it,” he said. “There are plenty of
places where cabins could be hidden in these valleys.”
“That’s right. What are we to do?”
“Keep on hunting.”
“It’s rather tiresome.”
“I shall stick to it till I find the cabin of Delores, if it takes a year!”
exclaimed Frank grimly.
Bart knew he would do exactly as he said.
“Perhaps we may be disappointed when we do find it.”
“At least, I should be able to learn if my father is dead, and where he
is buried.”
“But the message——”
“I have hopes that I may learn the secret of that, also. It may be that
he did not trust it alone to that one document.”
“It’s getting late. What are we to do now? Shall we explore this valley
to-night, or wait till morning?”
Little of the valley could be seen through the narrow pass, and that
little seemed to promise that it led onward far into the hills. After a
moment Frank answered:
“We’ll ride forward and see if we can get a look into it.”
He started onward, and Bart followed, but they had proceeded only a
short distance when they were startled to see, sitting on a boulder at
one side of the pass, a strange figure. At first it was hard to make out
whether it was man or woman, but, as they drew nearer, it
straightened up and revealed, peering from the folds of a dirty red
blanket, the wrinkled and gnarled face of an old Indian. A pair of
beady black eyes were steadily regarding the two young men.
“Watch him, Merry,” cautioned Bart, in a low tone. “These half-
civilized red dogs are treacherous.”
The Indian did not stir as they approached. Beside him, leaning
against the boulder, was a handsome rifle. He did not touch the
weapon.
“Hello, chief,” said Frank, addressing the old man in a manner he
knew was flattering to some redskins, as he drew up.
“How, how,” grunted the old fellow, in answer.
“Are you acquainted in this vicinity?”
“Ak-waint?” said the old man. “No savvy.”
“Are you familiar with the country?”
“Fam-mil? What him?”
“Have you been all round every place here?” asked Merry, with a
sweep of his arm, using the simplest words he could command.
“Heap been all over,” was the assurance.
“Know Juan Delores?”
“Him don’t live round here.”
The answer was prompt enough—a trifle too prompt, Frank fancied.
“Doesn’t?” said Merry. “Where does he live?”
“Heap long way off there,” and the redskin pointed to the north.
“Are you sure?”
“Heap sure.”
“How far? How many miles?”
“Two time ten.”
“Twenty?”
The old fellow grunted an affirmative.
“Do you know the way to his place?”
Another affirmative grunt.
“Can you guide us there?”
“No time.”
“We will pay you well.”
“No time.”
“I will give you fifty dollars to guide us to the cabin of Juan Delores.”
“No time.”
“A hundred dollars.”
“No time.”
“Confound him!” growled Hodge angrily. “Money is no object to him.
It’s likely he doesn’t know the value of money. Now, if you had a
quart of whisky to offer him, Merriwell, you might get him to do the
job.”
“I will give you a new blanket and a rifle,” promised Merry.
“Got blanket an’ rifle,” said the old Indian.
“I will give you a good horse.”
“Got heap good horse.”
“What haven’t you got that you want?”
“No want nothin’.”
“Will you tell us how to get to the cabin of Delores?”
“Go there two time ten mile, find stream, go up him to spring, take
trail from spring; it make you come to where Juan he live.”
Merriwell was not at all satisfied with these directions. There was
something in the manner of the old redskin that seemed to arouse
his suspicions and make him feel that he was being deceived. Of a
sudden Frank asked:
“Who lives in this valley?”
The old man shook his head.
“No know,” he said. “Wolf, bear, mebbe.”
“That’s not what I mean. Is there a white man who lives in this
valley?”
Again a shake of the head.
“Wolf, bear, that all. No; big mount’n-lion—him there. Him kill hunter
—one, two, t’ree, four hunter—what come for him. Him vely bad lion
—heap bad.”
Frank was watching the man closely.
“That’s just what I’m looking for!” he exclaimed, as if delighted. “I
want to shoot a mountain-lion.”
“You no can shoot him. Big hunter try—no do it. Him kill you heap
quick, you go in there.”
“He is trying to frighten us so we’ll not go into the valley,” thought
Frank. Aloud he said:
“That’s all right; I’ll take chances. I reckon the two of us will be too
much for Mr. Lion.”
“White boy much foolish,” declared the old redskin grimly. “Make big
supper for lion. Lion him like white man for supper.”
“And I’ll have the pelt of that lion just as sure as I live,” said Merry, as
if in sudden determination. “Come on, Bart!”
The old Indian rose quickly as they were about to start forward.
“Stop!” he cried. “Ole Joe Crowfoot him tell you truth. If you go in
there you never come back some more. Ole Joe Crowfoot him good
Injun—him like white man heap much. No want to see um hurt. Tell
um to stay back.”
The old savage seemed deeply in earnest now, but that earnestness
was something that added to Frank’s suspicions and made him all
the more determined to go on.
“That’s all right,” said Merry, with a grim smile. “It’s kind of you to
take so much interest in us, but we’re going after your heap bad lion,
and we’ll have his pelt.”
“Night come soon,” said the Indian, with a motion toward the range
on range of mountains rising to the westward. “Then lion him crouch
and spring. Him git you quick.”
“We’ll see. If you wait round here long enough we’ll show you the
pelt of your bad lion when we come back.”
“No come back,” declared Old Joe Crowfoot, solemnly. “No see you
some more. By-by.”
An expression of deep sadness and regret was on his wrinkled old
face as he uttered the words. Merry laughed lightly, and they rode
past him and headed onward into the valley.
“He was very anxious to stop us,” said Hodge.
“That’s right,” nodded Frank. “He was altogether too anxious. As
soon as I tumbled to that I decided to take a look into the valley. Do
you know, we stumbled on the entrance to this valley by accident. I
fancy we might search a week for it, if we were to go away now,
without finding it.”
“I was thinking of that,” said Bart. “It might puzzle us to find it again.
Perhaps that old duffer was counting on that. Those red dogs are
treacherous, and——”
They heard a sharp cry behind them. Whirling in the saddle, Frank
saw the old Indian standing with the butt of his rifle pressed against
his shoulder.
The muzzle on the rifle was turned directly toward Frank, and plainly
the redskin was on the point of pressing the trigger.
Frank knew he was in deadly peril, and he would have attempted to
fling himself from the saddle but for something else he saw.
On a mass of jagged rocks behind the Indian and about twenty feet
above his head had appeared a boy. Not over thirteen years of age
was the lad, whose curly, dark hair fell upon his shoulders. He was
dressed in fanciful garments, like those worn by a young Mexican
lad, and the bright colors of his clothes made him a picturesque
figure.
Plainly it was from his lips that the cry had issued.
In his hand the boy held a stone as large as a man’s fist, and even
as Merry turned he hurled the stone. Straight through the air whizzed
the missile, striking the barrel of the old Indian’s rifle.
Smoke belched from the muzzle of the weapon and the crags flung
back the sound of the report, but the bullet flew wild.
Frank Merriwell’s life had been saved by the stone thrown by the
strange boy.
With an exclamation of rage, Hodge snatched up his rifle and reined
his mount round to take a shot at the redskin, who had wheeled
instantly and was clambering up the rocks toward the boy, as if bent
on murder.
“Soak him, Merry!” panted Bart.
Frank’s first impulse was to shoot, but he quickly saw that he was in
no further danger just then, and he had no desire to shed human
blood unless compelled to do so.
Bart’s rifle rose, but Merry thrust the muzzle aside just as the
weapon spoke, and the bullet flattened on the rocks.
“Why did you do that?” roared Hodge, in amazement and anger.
“Can’t you see! That red devil is going to murder the kid!”
It did seem that the Indian meant the boy harm, and Merry shouted:
“If you put a hand on that boy I’ll bore you!”
At the same time he held his own rifle ready for instant use.

Creating Culture in Post Socialist Central Asia Ananda Breed Full Chapter

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Creating Culture in Post Socialist Central Asia Ananda Breed Full Chapter

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Creating Culture in (Post) Socialist

Central Asia Ananda Breed

ISBN 978-3-030-58684-3 ISBN 978-3-030-58685-0 (eBook)

Cover illustration: © Harvey Loake

1 Introduction: Making Culture in (Post) Socialist

2 ‘The Kara Kirghiz Must Develop Separately’: Ishenaaly

3 Liminal States: Personal Dreams and Performance

4 Epic Performances in Central Asia 65

5 Poets of the People: Learning to Make Culture

6 Lament in an Affluent Era: Cultural Politics of Kazakh

7 Conclusion: Interweaving Texts 141

Ananda Breed is Professor of Theatre at University of Lincoln, United

gender, memory, and history of Kazakhs in Northern Xinjiang against

Introduction: Making Culture in (Post)

Ananda Breed and Ali Iğmen

Abstract In this volume, we introduce specific contexts of historical and

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

ideologized contexts, following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991

Keywords Soviet Post-Soviet Central Asia · China · Socialist

In this book, authors present specific contexts of historical and contempo-

of the Marxist–Leninist ideology. In urban centres such as Tashkent and

on ‘folk’ and artistic traditions led to a typology of nations defined in

Interweaving functions on several levels: Many strands are plied into a

cultures can be thus described as an aesthetic Vor-Schein, as the philoso-

The concept of interweaving is applied to ascribe aesthetic experiences

hero Manas, Kanykei to perpetuate the image of an idealized Kyrgyz

As an alternative to state nationalism in Central Asia, Chinese Kazakhs’

collaboration and coming into being, a performative space in which indi-

Gullette, D. and Heathershaw, J. (2015). The Affective Politics of Sovereignty:

‘The Kara Kirghiz Must Develop Separately’:

Abstract This chapter revisits the historical circumstances under which

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 13

Keywords Ishenaaly Arabaev · Intellectual history · Soviet Kyrgyz

In March 1924, Ishenaaly Arabaev, a prominent Kyrgyz intellectual,

If an Uzbek is speaking, he begins with Ferghana and Samarkand and

1 Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’no-Politicheskoi Istorii (henceforth RGASPI).

3 I discuss this in my Ph.D. dissertation. See, Jipar Duishembieva. Visions of Commu-

influence on Kyrgyz intellectuals’ conception(s) of the nation.4 Further-

Ishenaaly Arabaev: Early Life

the notions of Kyrgyzness. This section concentrates on Arabaev’s forma-

6 A man of considerable wealth.

It is likely that Arabaev began to think of his community as a

Manifesto which limited the tsar’s autocratic powers, guaranteed the

poorly on the workers’ conditions. They demanded betterment of working conditions,

“The time has come!”

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