Socio-Political Movement in the Russian Central Asia Outskirts on the Eve of the Russian Revolution of 1917

Abstract

The article presents an analysis of the development of social and political movements in the two administrative- territorial units of the Russian Central Asia border regions — the Steppes and Turkestan. The process of modernization in the region at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries coincided with its integration into the empire-wide political space. Therefore, the population of the region took part in the events of the Revolution of 1905–1907, state party system formation and the election campaign to the State Duma. The article stresses that the socio-political movement in the region was represented by organizations and branches of Russian parties, expressing the interests of different social groups of the Steppes and Turkestan. The peculiarity of this movement was the presence of the national-liberation struggle of the indigenous ethnic groups. Its purpose was to address a range of problems that were generated by the imperial colonial policy. The author comes to the conclusion that late inclusion of Turkestan in the integration processes in the empirewide space, and its late discovery for the peasant resettlement than in the Steppes defined multi-vector development of the national liberation movement there. Thus, in the steppe region it was the national intelligentsia that took the leading role defending the interests of the Kazakh population. It slowly integrated into the all- Russian party movement and appeared on the platform of the Russian Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party. However, in Turkestan, with traditional social relations dominating, Islam still had the greatest impact on the socio-political life of the regional population in the early twentieth century. Therefore, the national liberation movement there was initially based on pan- Islamism ideas and its main goal was the formation of the Islamic political wing.

DOI 10.14258/izvasu(2016)2-17