CESR
Central Eurasian Studies Review

Publication of the Central Eurasian Studies Society

ISSN 1538-5043 (Print)
ISSN 1543-7817 (Electronic)

Contents of this issue

Volume 1, Number 1, Winter 2002.

Editorial Introduction

Editors - CESR Vol. 1 No. 1

Editor-in-Chief: Virginia Martin (Huntsville, Ala., USA)
Section Editors:
Perspectives: Robert M. Cutler (Ottawa/Montreal, Canada)
Research Reports and Briefs: Laura Adams (Boston, Mass., USA), Jamilya Ukudeeva (Riverside, Calif., USA)
Reviews and Abstracts: Mikhail Degtiar (Tashkent, Uzbekistan), Resul Yalcin (London, England)
Conferences and Lecture Series: Peter Finke (Halle, Germany), Cengiz Surucu (Bloomington, Ind., USA)
Educational Resources and Developments: Daniel C. Waugh (Seattle, Wash., USA)
Production Editor: John Schoeberlein (Cambridge, Mass., USA)
Web Editor: John Schoeberlein (Cambridge, Mass., USA)

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Editorial Introduction

Virginia Martin, Editor-in-Chief, Central Eurasian Studies Review, Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of Alabama in Huntsville, USA, Tel.: +1/256-824-2572, martinviemail.uah.edu

Have you ever found yourself wishing you had known more about the latest developments in your field a foreign scholar's innovative approach, a fierce debate at a conference, the release of a new body of statistics while you were still thinking through your research results rather than after your conclusions had been committed to print? All scholars potentially face this problem of timely access to information, even in the age of the Internet. For scholars of Central Eurasia, the considerable distance across regions, cultures and scholarly traditions makes communication and access to information even more of a challenge. Overcoming this problem was one reason for founding the Central Eurasian Studies Society, as John Schoeberlein writes in his "Perspectives" column, and we consider the Central Eurasian Studies Review (CESR) to be a crucial element of the work of CESS.

CESR was created with the rather modest assumption that however accomplished we all may be in our scholarly pursuits, we are still students and we will always have something to learn. In this light, CESR is conceived as a vehicle for promoting dialogue and open exchange of ideas and information. We have much to benefit from the knowledge and experience of others working on related questions. If a historian can improve her/his approach to research in Uzbekistan from reading Adeeb Khalid; if a sociologist comes to a new understanding of the dilemmas facing Azeri intellectuals from Liaman Rzayeva and starts a discussion with her about it; if a numismatist is inspired by one of the presentations described by Stuart Sears that was given at the conference on medieval Iranian coinages; if Shoshana Keller's experiences in the classroom inspire another educator to follow her model - then CESR will have succeeded in its most basic goals. I believe that if we take seriously our roles as students and endeavor to be open-minded and learn from others as much as we can, then scholarship will benefit enormously.

One of the goals of CESS as an organization is to promote higher standards of scholarship. CESR can contribute to this effort indirectly, in the ways that I have described above. But it is important to note that CESR is not a peer-reviewed journal; the editors of CESR do not accept or decline submissions based on a systematic process of assessing the work's accuracy or unique scholarly contribution. The disciplines within Central Eurasian studies are too diverse to expect from our small editorial staff of volunteers the background needed for such a task, nor do we have the organization required to obtain outside reviews. But what CESR and its editors aspire to do well is to seek out and present scholarship-in-the-making, research-in-progress, classroom experiences, reviews of recent publications, reactions to conference presentations - all with the object of fostering communication among scholars.

This first issue of CESR is more than a bit of an experiment, and as with every trial, there are things one learns and then does differently the next time. We welcome your comments on how we can improve. Some things we already know. For instance, we had envisioned a larger publication, and so we know that we want more contributions from the Central Eurasian studies community throughout the world. We will work harder from our end to solicit contributions from you, particularly to the Reviews and Abstracts section, which turned out to be surprisingly thin in this issue. However much we do to encourage your participation in this venture, it remains clear that CESR cannot succeed unless there are willing contributors to share ideas in this public way. We are also working on expanding the possibilities of information-exchange in the web-version of CESR. And the CESS Publications Committee, of which I am Chair, is engaged in an on-going discussion about other types of publications that can bring recognition and strength to CESS in ways that can supplement and complement CESR.

For now, I encourage you to read and enjoy this first issue. The five sections of CESR should offer something for everyone. As you are reading, please think of ways that you can contribute your ideas and experiences to future issues. Beyond submitting articles to the Review, we are also in need of volunteers to work behind the scenes, both on CESR and for the organization more generally. In particular, we seek "correspondents" who will track research, publications, events and personages in their fields and/or their countries. Please see the CESS website for more information on this important role. Also, CESS is embarking on an important initiative to coordinate development of library collections so that Central Eurasian studies does not remain marginalized and underfunded. Chris Murphy of the Library of Congress describes the project, and the participation he needs from you, in his piece in the Perspectives section. Finally, you are encouraged to share your research in a more traditional and time-honored way: at the CESS Annual Conference, which will be held 17-20 October 2002 in Madison, Wisconsin. The Call for Papers included in this issue provides instructions and deadlines.

I would like to acknowledge the amazing collaborative effort that has resulted in this first issue of CESR. The CESS Publications Committee, composed only of volunteers, has worked since last spring on this project. Without a central editorial office, we have communicated almost entirely via email. If this small group effort is any indication of the type of open communication and information exchange that CESS was founded to encourage, then our organization has a bright future indeed. And you are welcomed to participate in it!

[Contents]

Perspectives

Setting the Stakes of a New Society

John Schoeberlein, President, Central Eurasian Studies Society and Director, Harvard Forum for Central Asian Studies, 1737 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA 02138, USA, Fax: +1/617-495-8319, schoeberfas.harvard.edu

Were we living in the days of the vast empires of Chinggis Khan or Tamerlane, when political unity was imposed over a domain extending across much of Eurasia from China to Eastern Europe and Asia Minor, perhaps no one would doubt the sense in founding a Central Eurasian Studies Society. Politics, after all, determines how many people think we should carve up the world for scholarship. Today, too, perhaps the arguments might seem more compelling as we follow the war in Afghanistan, which could send waves of instability outward across the political terrain of Central Eurasia.

I am not among those who hope for things to get worse so that others will recognize the importance of this region. Were we working in the 13th century, even if there had not been the world largest empire in this region, I think there would still have been enough for our field of scholarship to explore in the culture reflected in Chinggis Khan's yurt, or in the spread of Mongol terms and military institutions all across Eurasia, or in the comparative economy of Chinese, Muslim and Russian cities after nomadic conquest. There need not have been an empire at stake. And building a strong scholarly community will not hinge on the journalists and policy-makers gathering to watch the region go up in flames.

I believe that the historical moment at which we have arrived which has allowed the Central Eurasian Studies Society to embark on its trajectory is propitious for the success of its endeavor in much deeper and more positive ways. This is the point which I will elaborate in this short survey of the Central Eurasian Studies Society as we stake out our goals and foundation. Those goals are two-fold: we want to improve communication among scholars as well as consumers of scholarly research, and we want to foster higher standards of scholarship. Before elaborating our goals, I should first define Central Eurasia, as we use this term, and then I will explain why a new society is needed to achieve these goals.

What is Central Eurasia?

While definitional discussions are often polemical and dogmatic, my purpose here and I think our purpose in the Society is to define a domain in which scholars will find it useful to communicate among themselves. Put another way, we seek to specify the geography that begs for close comparisons and common understanding. Any region and especially one which is situated amidst so many others, as Central Eurasia is requires connections and comparisons in many directions.

Our definition of Central Eurasia is anything but dogmatic. In my time as President of the Central Eurasian Studies Society, I have received dozens of queries from scholars of regions which are treated as marginal to other area studies domains, asking whether they fit the definition of Central Eurasia: Tungusic and Turkic peoples of Siberia, Uralic peoples of the Volga Basin, Tibet, Caucasian Muslim and Christian peoples, Muslims of Eastern Europe. My answer has been: If you can find a good home for yourself among scholars of Central Eurasia, we will try to accommodate you. Part of what motivates these questions, I believe, is the sense that study of Russia is too often assumed to be study of Moscow, study of China has little room for non-Han Chinese peoples, study of the Islamic World has lost touch with what used to be an "Islamic heartland" or "Christian outposts," but now is treated only as lands of historically preserved anomalies.

The unifying characteristics of Central Eurasia are not universal, but no region is universally unified. The things which unite large parts of Central Eurasia are significant: the historical interface between nomads and settled peoples; the lands where Turkic, Iranian, Caucasian, Mongolian, Tungusic and Tibetan peoples have proliferated; the Inner Asian territories of Islam, Buddhism and Shamanism; and the countries which have emerged with new independent significance and accompanying agendas of nation-building following the collapse of the Soviet Union. These unifying characteristics are in the domains of language, religion, life-ways, and culture, as well as of course, histories of domination, geographic proximity and ensuing economic links.

There is no question but that this is a region united by historical and cultural links, even if there has not been a strong consensus on what to call the region. We have chosen the term "Central Eurasia", while others have used "Central Asia", "Inner Asia", "Inner Eurasia", and other variations across other languages all meant to encompass more or less the same domain. The term "Central Eurasia" has its negative as well as positive points. Perhaps the most important positive is precisely that it is a neologism which can be defined as needed, whereas "Inner Asia" is often understood not to include regions as far west as the Caucasus, "Central Asia" is sometimes construed very narrowly to include only the lands surrounding the Gobi Desert or only the former Soviet republics between the Tien Shan-Pamir Mountains and the Caspian Sea, etc. Without wishing to displace other terms or champion one interpretation, we have chosen "Central Eurasia" as it seems to signify what we mean, for most people, better than other terms.

So what exactly does it signify? An inexact effort to stake out this term would include lands from the Iranian Plateau, the Black Sea, and the Volga Basin through Afghanistan, Southern Siberia, and the Himalayas to Muslim and Manchu regions of China and the Mongol lands. Scholars who feels that their object of study is marginal in this circumscription are welcome to help us build a society in which their own regions are strongly represented. Ultimately, all useful definitions will be historically contingent the shape of the world did change enduringly, for example, when Chinggis Khan's armies conquered much of the known world, and again when Communist governments sought isolation from lands beyond their borders. We must take account of the overlapping categories that make up Central Eurasia in historically appropriate ways. Under this rubric, scholars can gather, because it provides terms of commonality and a field of comparison which are meaningful for their particular studies.

Why Form a New Society?

A society strange as it may seem to remind us is a social entity. The lack of a society implies the absence of social interactions, which are essential for scholarship. Communication has suffered in the field of Central Eurasian studies for several reasons, including scholarly fragmentations, political rifts and lack of a unifying medium for communication, and these factors have served as obstacles to forming a society for the study of the Central Eurasian region.

Central Eurasia has seldom been treated as a field of scholarship in its own right. Parts of Central Eurasia have been attached to other area studies domains, no matter how weak the connections or how low the priority they receive in that context. For example, in North America, the entire northern tier of Central Eurasia has been claimed by a society whose name and orientation feature "Slavic Studies" for the simple reason that this territory has been under Russian domination. Scholars who are interested precisely in that Russian domination may find a home in Slavic studies, but others in both Slavic studies and Central Eurasian studies find the connections too tenuous to be meaningful. Scholars of China, Japan and Korea typically see little of interest in Mongolia, Tibet and Turkistan, though these regions are attached in North American scholarship to "(East) Asian Studies", at the same time as being largely ignored in this context. When I decided I would focus my anthropological research on the area surrounding the Tien Shan-Pamir Mountains in the early 1980s, I came to understand that depending on which way I turned or really, where chance events would allow me to do research I would be expected to find a home among one of three virtually non-overlapping communities of scholars: Islamic/South Asian studies, East Asian studies or Soviet studies. Divided between these area studies domains, what is central to Central Eurasia was treated as peripheral to everything else.

Furthermore, because Central Eurasian scholarship has been divided and peripheralized, it has been impossible to develop the critical mass that is essential for strong scholarship. When a historian of Daghestan or Turkistan publishes before a Russian studies audience, there is simply unlikely to be the depth of feedback that would prompt healthy critical exchange and the ultimate improvement of scholarship. I've heard many scholars of Central Eurasia complain that at most of the conferences they would have the occasion to attend, they have to spend the first half of their presentation explaining where their topic is situated and what it is all about. Anthropologists of Central Eurasia are hard pressed to find a body of literature on which to teach a course on the subject. Few theoretical arguments have been elaborated in a developed scholarly exchange focused on this region, which is a tremendous obstacle to the development of social sciences with a focus on this part of the world.

Further fragmentation of the scholarly community stemmed from political cleavages. The tightly closed political systems of the Soviet Union and China imposed severe isolation on scholars of this region working in those countries. Constraints of politics and poverty limited the development of scholarship in Afghanistan and Iran, both within the countries and in cooperation with scholarship in other countries. Even in the countries with better resources and fewer political constraints, scholarship developed in enclaves that sometimes had limited interaction with one another in Europe, North America, Japan. Some of these barriers have come down now with the end of the Cold War and the opening of China. But new constraints limit linkages for example, what was once a quite unified scholarly domain in the Soviet Union has now fragmented into as many independent countries, between which scholarly exchanges have been reduced to very near nil.

The fact that Central Eurasia has not been a unified political space has practical, linguistic implications for the study of the region. We can compare our situation with Latin American studies: when one knows Spanish, one can exchange ideas with virtually the entire community of Latin Americanists. Africa is not unified by a single language, but it is very nearly unified by the history of domination by three countries, and English and French enable one to engage scholarship across the region. But the information space of Central Eurasia is divided among Russian, Chinese, Turkic and Persian, plus a plethora of more localized languages. Despite the dreams of "pan-Turkists" and the dwindling proponents of Russian as a world language, there is no more plausible lingua franca for regional scholarship than the entirely exogenous English language, in which far too few scholars in the region are proficient.

Linguistic fragmentation does more than inhibit information exchange: it complicates the development of scholarly resources for the study of the region. There are very few satisfactory introductory texts for students to read. Only in the last decade have teaching materials in English begun to be available for some of the main Central Eurasian languages, but in most cases we cannot point to adequate textbooks, grammars, readers and dictionaries. This, in spite of the fact that for scholars to be well trained in many fields, they must have a knowledge of at least two or three difficult languages. There is a lack of key reference resources such as encyclopedias and bibliographies. There are few translations of major contributions to culture or scholarship. There are few institutions where a student can get a comprehensive foundation in the study of any part of Central Eurasia. Fewer still that are prepared to teach many of the key languages.

Critics and skeptics of our efforts to build a community and improve scholarship may argue that all of these obstacles have hindered previous efforts to establish societies seeking to represent scholarship on Eurasia. A century ago, the Royal Central Asian Society was founded in Britain, but by the 1970s the focus was almost completely lost and the society was reorganized as the Royal Society for Asian Affairs. The Central Asian Studies Society in London has for some decades produced an important journal Central Asian Survey but appears not to have a membership. Two North American societies appeared in the 1980s, the Association for the Advancement of Central Asian Research (AACAR) and the Association for Central Asian Studies (ACAS), perhaps in part because they occupied the same space, both organizations lost momentum before long and have appeared largely or entirely lifeless for most of the last decade (with the important exception of the Journal of Central Asian Studies, which isstill associated with AACAR). More hope might be pinned on the European Society for Central Asian Studies, which has successfully organized biannual conferences for a decade, though the life of this organization seems confined to the conferences and the ensuing conference volumes.

Where CESS Can Make Its Mark

Given the obstacles, what can a new society do that others could not? The answer is: our Society can put its energy into building the infrastructure the community, the institutions, the resources lacking in the past. When this infrastructure is in place, it can help foster higher standards of scholarship. These are the goals of CESS.

Two years ago, a group of people motivated by both frustration at the lack of development of this field and by inspiration that we have a real opportunity now began to lay the foundation for the Central Eurasian Studies Society. The moment of conception was a meeting at the University of Wisconsin organized by Uli Schamiloglu, the Fourth Annual Workshop on Central Asian Studies. Here, an informal "temporary executive committee" was formed to get the ball rolling. I remember Marianne Kamp, who was drafted as chair and main motivator of the committee, saying that at the end of a year, we'll know whether it is going to fly. Thanks to her great ability to set reachable goals and to elicit the energy and focus in others needed to meet them, it is flying.

In fall 2000, we held our first annual conference. In winter 2001, we held the first elections, in which the membership elected a dedicated and diverse board. In the time since I was elected as President, our focus has been on laying the institutional foundation and building two key activities: the annual conference (under Uli Schamiloglu and Steve Sabol's leadership) and the publication, the Central Eurasian Studies Review, with Virginia Martin as Editor-in-Chief leading a strong committee of section editors and correspondents.

From the outset, the CESS initiative has had grand ambitions but modest goals. Given that for the foreseeable future, we will have to rely exclusively on volunteer effort, we must methodically build our capacity to do great things. We must prove to our members that it is worth their support and active engagement. In time, we can hope to unite the lion's share of scholars in North America and worldwide who focus on Central Eurasia to become the conference that all feel drawn to attend and the periodical that all can benefit from reading. But for now, I am greatly heartened by the tremendous interest and support we have received from a rapidly growing membership already over 700 members, the majority in North America, and many also in other parts of the world, in over 50 countries, including all of the countries of Central Eurasia.

There was a deliberate decision to focus on building our foundation in North America at the same time as welcoming participation of scholars throughout the world. Eventually, we will have the capacity to organize more activities in other parts of the world, but for now we are setting our stakes on building a solid core, to avoid becoming spread too thin.

As an area studies society, we are determined to encompass all fields of humanities and social science scholarship. Where area studies organizations are often dominated by particularists and thus by historians, philologists, and scholars of culture, we feel that the support of area studies would be missing an important purpose if it did not also build a base for the grounded knowledge of generalizers, such as anthropologists, political scientists and comparative historians. While we are concerned about scholarship at the cutting edge of international research at the top rank institutions, we are also anxious to help scholars in all parts of the world to partake of the process of building high international scholarly standards.

In this goal we will build on the momentum growing in the field since the early 1990s, when it suddenly became imaginable for many to devote themselves to the study of the newly opening countries. It may be that more dissertations were written in North America on Central Eurasian politics in the decade of the 1990s than in all time previously. In all disciplines, there was a tremendous influx of young blood into Central Eurasian studies, and now a number of these people are finding faculty positions in North American universities. The rise of the region in Europe, by comparison, has been less precipitous, and in Central Eurasia itself, scholarship has suffered greatly from the loss of state patronage. Yet overall the field is gaining considerable momentum.

A few people have asked what their CESS membership can offer them, and it is a reasonable question, but more people have been asking what their volunteer efforts can contribute to our Society. This is our greatest resource. And our most urgent task is to develop the capacity to make good use of all the energy and creativity that our members have to offer.

CESS as a Cyber-Society

With all that is dividing us in terms of geography, practical constraints and divergent scholarly traditions, we have some key tools that enable us to build a community across the disparate terrain of Central Eurasian studies. It was a wonderful thing to get together at the CESS Second Annual Conference this past October with many scholars whom I had never met, but had known of for years. Nothing can fully replace face-to-face familiarity and the opportunity for exchange "in true life."

But it has been equally wonderful to see how much we can build through interactions via electronic connections. In working with CESS, I have developed relations of tremendous respect and admiration with people whom I've met either never, or only once or twice in passing. After our first Board was in place following last winter's elections, we quickly composed a set of committees to further our key activities. And their work has proceeded with great energy, primarily through the exchange of views and information via e-mail. Were we reliant on traditional communications, we would have had so much less substantive exchange with our members, because our time and capacity would have been exhausted by stuffing envelopes and licking stamps.

Our goals, meanwhile, are focused on the concrete. I am very grateful for the conference and its concrete interactions, and it is one of our key priorities to strengthen this event so that as many people as possible are able and inclined to attend. Though we will make our publications available via the world wide web, we will also put great weight on producing paper editions, as we recognize that libraries, readers, and tenure granting departments still work that way.

Another dimension of the new shape of the world under the influence of the internet was manifest when we received literally hundreds of notes expressing dismay and concern following the September 11 attacks in the U.S. Our members and supporters all over the world including some countries seriously devastated by war such as Afghanistan, Chechnya and Tajikistan showed that there is a powerfully connected community in our Central Eurasian Studies Society, facilitated by this new ease and immediacy of communication across the globe.

A Better World at Stake

Another thing that has been driven home to many of us by the events following the September 11 terrorist attacks is that our Society has urgent responsibility to communicate its knowledge to the world. I had no suspicion when I visited Uzbekistan the first time nearly two decades ago or even when I was there this past summer that this would be a place where my country's troops might operate. How many of those soldiers even knew last summer that there was a country called Uzbekistan? How many of the policy-makers and pundits who are devising plans for the future of Afghanistan knew names like Massoud, Mullah Omar and Hamid Karzai a few months ago? Currently, without the world knowing Central Eurasia, whole cities are being annihilated in Chechnya, Armenia is being virtually depopulated of youth, Uyghurs of Xinjiang are being drowned in an ocean of Chinese and responding with violence, bombs are falling in Abkhazia. These events are only the starkest demonstration that there is a need to better understand Central Eurasia for the sake of the world.

And it is not only violence and tragedy which should render this region worthy of our world's attention. Each of us has our own store of rich experiences from our engagement with the cultures and peoples of Central Eurasia, whose real human aspirations, strivings and accomplishments are there to be told to the world.

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Libraries and CESS

Chris Murphy, Turkish Area Specialist, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, USA, Tel.: +1/2027075676, cmurloc.gov

As the field of Central Eurasian studies grows over the next few years, CESS, as an organization representing the interests of the individuals and institutions working in this field, needs to consider issues confronting the libraries and librarians supporting our research. Other area studies associations, e.g., the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) or the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), have approached libraries in their fields by either creating a standing committee of the organization (AAASS) or by establishing an affiliated association (MESA). While either of these approaches is workable, each has had the same fundamental problem: the librarians have tended to talk only to themselves. This is reflected by the fact that librarians constantly make decisions critical to the support of research based on their own inter-librarian discussions with little input from scholars working in the field. On the other hand, scholars often only approach libraries and librarians when the scholar needs a specific item. This ad hoc way of doing business has led to a further problem: the librarians active in an association often concentrate on "library issues" such as cataloging, and to a greater or lesser extent ignore the most important role of librarianship, that is, collection development. I describe this situation from personal experience, having served as President of the Middle East Librarians Association, and having spent five years in a university library as a Near East Specialist.

CESS, now at the beginning of its existence, is moving to correct this flawed approach. We are establishing a standing Library Committee to concentrate on libraries and library issues in the field of Central Eurasian studies. I have agreed to chair the committee and am hopeful that a scholar who is not a librarian will volunteer to become co-chair of the committee. While it is necessary for librarians to be involved in this committee, including in leadership roles, it is even more important that active scholars always be part of the committee's work. The presence of working scholars will keep the committee focused on what should be our most important library goal at this point in this field's development, namely, the building and development of collections supporting our research. I am therefore seeking volunteers, both librarians and active scholars, to serve on this new committee. Ideally, the committee will be composed of no more than six individuals, with at least two scholars who are not librarians and one graduate student as members.

Once the committee is fully established it will immediately undertake two activities, both of which are designed to focus the committee's attention on questions of collection development. First, the committee will read and discuss the Association of Research Libraries report on the acquisition of foreign materials, which was published about five years ago. This document gives the most recent "photograph" of area studies collection activities at major research libraries in North America. Secondly, the committee will create a questionnaire eliciting information about collection development at the libraries serving our field and at other major research libraries in North America. This will provide specific information that will allow the committee to begin to make recommendations for activities which will be helpful to the field. At the same time every effort will be made to get librarians and scholars in our field to become involved in the work of the Library Committee of CESS.

Volunteers are asked to contact me by the end of February at my e-mail address, cmurloc.gov, or by telephone at +1/202-707-5676.

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Research Reports and Briefs

Reports

Migrant Labor, Labor Rights, and the Eurasian Economic Community

Roza Zhalimbetova, Senior Counselor, Social-Labor Department, Eurasian Economic Community, Kazakhstan, Tel.: +7(3272)65-01-89, +7(3272)62-48-97, intecomkaznet.kz, zhalimbetovanursat.kz, and Gregory Gleason, Professor of Political Science and Public Administration, University of New Mexico, USA, Tel.: +1/505-277-7391, Fax: +1/505-277-3161, gleasongunm.edu, http://www.unm.edu/~gleasong

One of the most significant public policy consequences of the disintegration of the USSR was the disruption of the single labor market. During the period 1992-2000 the governments of the former Soviet countries adopted national legislation designed to protect their newly established national interests through the regulation of domestic labor markets with respect to movement, health and safety, and education and training. During this same period, pay differentials among the former Soviet countries and high unemployment in some regions gave rise to substantial inter-regional and inter-state labor migration. However, the absence of a unified approach to labor markets among the post-Soviet countries has limited the governments' capacity to address collectively such urgent public policy problems as labor exploitation, inadequate health and safety protections for migrant labor, and socially destructive practices such as trafficking in women and children.

Little systematic, empirical research has been conducted by joint Eurasian and North American researchers on the scale and magnitude of labor movements within the Eurasian Economic Community. To address these lacunae in the literature, we have initiated a research project designed to establish the scope of labor movements within Eurasia with special reference to migrants. We have used primarily government documents and data for the initial survey. At a later point, with the help of other researchers, we hope to collect primary data through a sampling process. We are anxious to enlist other researchers in this effort. We hope to develop an analytical base that will be policy relevant and may lead to improvement in government policy toward migration throughout the Eurasian region. Our research has been facilitated by the focus on migratory policies that has been adopted by the newly formed Eurasian Economic Community.

In October 2000 the Presidents of Belarus, the Republic of Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, the Russian Federation and the Republic of Tajikistan signed the "Treaty on Establishment of the Eurasian Economic Community."[1] The organization is sometimes popularly referred to as the EAEC. The treaty was ratified by the parliaments of the member states and came into effect in May 2001 (Isingarin 2000, 2001). The basic goal of the Eurasian Economic Community is to bring to fruition the framework for Eurasian integration that began with earlier interstate treaties and agreements such as the Customs Union Agreement (1994). Attaining the goals of integration, inter-state coordination and policy harmonization requires action of the EAEC member states regarding the establishment of a single labor market and labor migration policy. The creation of a single labor market includes the exchange and joint use of labor throughout the economic space of the EAEC member states.

To achieve this goal the EAEC has developed a general "Conceptual Framework of the EAEC Labor Market" to be used as a model for national policy and legislation. The framework consists of four interrelated objectives, each with its own set of sub-goals. These are described in the "Program for the Effective Use of Labor Potential within the Sovereign State;" the "Program of Formation of Mutually Supporting Inter-state Relations in the Social-Labor Sphere;" the "Program of Equalization of the Social-Labor Conditions of Citizens of the Member States of the Customs Union;" and the "Program for Effective Use of Labor Potential."

One of the significant aspects of the general labor market is inter-regional and inter-state worker migration. This includes such phenomena as contract workers, seasonal workers, and commercial periodic travel (generally referred to as "shop-tours"). These types of labor-related movement have developed into unprecedented forms and levels of what is essentially labor-related migration. An adequate legal framework, however, is not in place to provide regulatory authorities and protections for such migration.

A number of urgent problems have emerged with respect to labor migration. In many cases the foreign migrants represent competitors in domestic national labor markets, contributing in some cases to inter-group rivalries or tensions. This phenomenon also can lead to a situation in which economic enterprises have an incentive to use low-paid foreign migrant labor rather than relatively higher priced domestic labor. The enterprises may thereby also lose the motivation for making improvements in labor conditions.

Recently the subject of "near-border migration" has received a great deal of treatment. A great deal of this form of migration has occurred, for example, between the neighboring oblasts of Russia and Ukraine, and Russia and China. The question of near-border labor migration from China is also highly relevant for Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The basic occupational categories of near-border labor migration include retail trade and, to a lesser extent, construction, industry, and agriculture. Near-border labor migration allows those inhabiting the near-border regions to use the advantages of their position, given that near the border the selection of work is usually greater and the differential in wages is often substantial.

It is important to note that the forms of labor migration that have emerged do not necessarily promote effective labor use for the EAEC as a whole nor provide optimal conditions for the migrant laborers themselves. The measures that have been implemented in the EAEC have been directed for the most part at protecting the national labor markets through the imposition of quotas, licensing, citizenship requirements for work permits and so on. These measures have often had detrimental effects on the work conditions for migrant workers themselves.

To remedy some of the public policy problems of labor migration a policy framework has been developed in the framework document "On Labor Migration and Social Protections for Migrant-Workers." The goal of this framework is to establish the basic lines of cooperation among the countries of the EAEC in the sphere of labor activity and social protection of migrant workers. This framework refers to the workers who have permanent residence in one EAEC member state but are working in another state. The framework also refers to members of the families of such workers.

One of the more severe problems of the labor market in the Community states has to do with the labor market for the more vulnerable social groups of the population, in particular women, youth, and pension-age or near pension-age workers. Women made up 53-57 percent of those seeking work through employment agencies at the end of 1999 in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and 60-69 percent in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Russia. The proportion of young people (up to age 30) among the unemployed in 1999 varied from 30 to 36 percent in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia and from 60 to 62 percent in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

In the development of the national labor markets discriminatory tendencies have developed with respect to women as a result of their declining workplace competitiveness. Women's labor tends to be increasingly concentrated in those professions and sectors that are especially notorious for misuse and exploitation. Trafficking in women has increasingly come under the control of international organized crime. The OSCE has noted the "close connection between the trafficking in people and the countries of transitional economies" and the "deteriorating position of women and the large level of female unemployment" (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe 1999). The concentration of women in the traditional sectors of the economy and in relatively low paid work leads to the maintenance and even increase in differential pay of men's and women's labor. In some branches of the economy the average pay of women is a third lower that the average pay of men (Republic of Kazakhstan 1997: 65).

The vulnerability of workers to fluctuations in labor market demand is represented in the duration of unemployment periods. The average duration of unemployment in Belarus in 1998 was 6.9 months and in 1999 it was 7.3 months. Comparable figures for Kazakhstan were 7.4 months and 6.0 months; for Kyrgyzstan, 9.4 months and 8.2 months; for Russia, 7.6 and 6.6 months and for Tajikistan, 5.5 and 3.8 months (Kazakhstan i strany SNG 2000: 34).

It is ironic that at the same time as there is a flow of labor resources out of the countries of the EAEC there is also a process of attraction of foreign labor. The idea of establishing quotas for foreign workers has been considered with the goal in mind of protecting the internal labor markets. Thus, in Kazakhstan in 2001 it is anticipated that the influx of foreign labor will be contained at the level of 10,500 people. At the present time a draft version of new "Rules on the Order of Quotas, Conditions, and System of Approvals" has been developed and it is planned that this will be used to regulate foreign labor in the near future in Kazakhstan. According to this plan, the state national executive agencies will issue approvals regarding the overall number of workers that can receive licenses and, within these general figures, the local organs will have authority regarding each specific worker (Panorama 2001: 1).

At the present time, the majority of EAEC citizens who work abroad do so without protection of any inter-state agreement. There simply are no laws that can protect their interests. At some point, each country that is interested in sending workers to work abroad should take upon itself the solution of this problem. Foreign labor migration necessitates, above all, the lessening of social tensions that take place as a result of the unemployment of the economically active population. In view of the absence of legal sources of income and realistic economic conditions for the improvement of the standard of living through employment in one or another of the countries of the Community, it is necessary to develop and implement a policy for export of labor abroad.

The system of government measures for the regulation of foreign labor migration should consist of at least the following elements: creation of a legal and regulatory framework; the organization of a system of services for promoting sending labor abroad; and the development and adoption of an inter-state agreement for sending workers to work abroad and hiring citizens of the Community for seasonal labor.

Overall, the general labor market of the member states of the EAEC should support the citizens in free movement throughout the territory of these states in looking for work, in providing social guarantees of citizens in work conditions, in guaranteeing equal conditions of pay, safety, medicine and insurance, and in providing educational and other pertinent benefits. The seriousness of the social problems and the key role that labor markets play in successful economic integration strategies suggests that much more empirical research needs to be done on the subject of labor migration in the former Soviet states.

Notes

[1] The EAEC is popularly referred to in the Russian language as the "EvAzEs". For background on the EAEC, see Galina Islamova, "Eurasian Economic Community: Purposes, Challenges and Prospects." Central Asia and the Caucasus, 7 (1), 2001.

References

Islamova, Galina

2001 "Eurasian economic community: purposes, challenges, and prospects." Central Asia and the Caucasus, 7 (1). Lulea, Sweden.

Isingarin, Nigmatzhan

2000 "Kazakhstaninitsiator integratsionnykh protsessov [Kazakhstan: initiator of integration processes]," Kazakhstanskaia pravda, 31 May 2000, p. 2.

2001 Personal Interview, July 1, 2001.

Kazakhstan Government Document

1997 Otchet o polozhenii zhenshchin, Respublika Kazakhstan [Report on women, Republic of Kazakhstan], 1997, p. 65.

Kazakhstan i strany SNG

2000 No. 1, p. 34.

Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe

1999 Trafficking in Human Beings: Implications for the OSCE. OSCE, Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights. September 1999.

Panorama

2001 Almaty, 30 March 2001, p. 1.

[Contents]

Azerbaijani Intellectuals during the Transition

Liaman (Leman) Rzayeva, Ph.D. student, Department of Sociology, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey, liaman_rhotmail.com

Throughout the history of Azerbaijan, the entry and spread of Western ideas, the "channels of Westernization" as we would call them, seem to be a determining factor for various changes. They were also important for the development of the defining features and functions of Azeri intellectuals. In this report, I will briefly summarize the history of Azerbaijani intellectuals and then report on my own research which examines the contemporary attitudes of Azerbaijani intellectuals.

Before colonization by Tsarist Russia, the territory of Azerbaijan was divided into small feudal states, khanligs, who often fought with each other. With Russian conquest, the West entered into Azerbaijan and introduced modernization, industrialization, secularization, vernacularizing print media, and a standardized education system, even in the periphery. The newly introduced values and concepts were very different from the ones prevailing among the indigenous population. This gave rise to the first Azeri intelligentsia and determined its character: well educated, bound by common education, alien to its people, agitated by various issues, and not always understood by its people. Intellectuals viewed their people as backward and tried to help them with tools imported from Western terminology. Soon afterward, Azerbaijan experienced a period of independence, 1918-1920, the period of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic. The ADR was headed mainly by the Tsarist colonial intelligentsia and was too short-lived to establish its own concepts and notions. Later, Azerbaijan was occupied by the Red Army and was integrated into the Soviet Union, which has always been seen as a continuation of Tsarist Russia, especially in respect to the non-Russian minorities.

The Soviet Union re-arranged the administrative boundaries on the basis of the idea of a nation as an entity with its own territory, language and culture. The administrative rearrangement was followed by cutting off all relations with the outside world. Script reforms were part of this policy. Together with this, all members of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia were silenced. The aim was to create a new Soviet identity: Russian speaking, passive, and submissive. The same features applied to the intelligentsia. During the Soviet regime the West still entered into Azerbaijan through Russia, but this time it was Soviet Russia. Modernization policies, including industrialization, secularization, the spread of standardized education and Russification continued, although this time they had a socialist pitch in them. A new Soviet intelligentsia was created that had features closer to the Gramscian definition (Gramsci 1971).

Despite all the efforts, another perception of intellectualism among the Azeri intellectuals persisted. This perception was closer to Said's "vocation of representing" (1990) and Burbank's "culture of entitlement" (1996), which was common among pre-revolutionary intellectuals with their roots in the traditions of Western intellectualism. It was these features that allowed an explosion of intellectual activities in the late 1980's and early 1990's. But later the voices of intellectuals slowed down. Why? Was it due to the sharply deteriorating economic conditions, which first hit the intellectuals? Or was it due to a disappointment in the political regime? These are the reasons mentioned by the intellectuals themselves. Pre-revolutionary Azeri intellectuals did not work in very democratic and economically prosperous conditions. Their intellectual efforts often cost them years of prison, exile, repudiation, etc. Was it then a continuation of the Soviet habit of conformism and neutrality? Even though at first sight this seems to be the answer, the situation is not so simple.
The research I will briefly report on here was performed in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Masters degree in the Sociology Department of the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. The goal of my research is to identify the specific features of Azeri intellectuals, or ziyali, to understand their role during the transition to independence, and to investigate how they perceive the changes in Azerbaijan in the last decades, particularly in the spheres of language and education. As I began to work on this research project, I consulted with Azerbaijani citizens living in Turkey, where I also lived, and I got a picture of two types of Azerbaijani intellectuals: the scientist and the activist. I decided to study both of these types and reviewed the international literature on intellectuals. Then I prepared a questionnaire for semi-structured in-depth interviews, first conducting a pilot study with Azerbaijani professors living and working in Turkey. The fieldwork was conducted in Baku, Azerbaijan, in October-November 2000. Using a snowball-sampling technique, I asked people to refer me to other persons who would fit the scientist and activist categories I was looking for. Meanwhile, I followed all the main governmental and oppositional newspapers and TV channels, and met with relatives, friends and neighbors. I shared with them my research interests and tried to get opinions of as many people as possible.

I conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with thirty respondents, half of which were men and half women. Most of the respondents were in their 40s-50s. Most worked in universities and represented a variety of professions ranging from the arts to computer science, though 13 of the respondents (8 females) worked in the field of natural sciences. In the questionnaire, demographic items were followed by questions about education, language use, religion, cultural activities, and a set of questions getting at the respondent's image of the intellectual, their attitudes about current events and future prospects.

Based on these interviews, I argue that the idea of "channels of Westernization" sheds light on the issue of the roles of intellectuals in Azerbaijan today. After the collapse of the USSR and Azerbaijan's proclamation of independence, the West gained relatively independent and direct access to Azerbaijan. Whether entered directly, or through Russia or even Turkey (this study shows that positive attitudes towards Russia are based on the view that Russia is a source of Westernization, while Turkey is often viewed as a model of successful Westernization), the new channels do not bring new inspiration to the Azeri intellectuals because such new inspiration does not exist any more. That is, Western Europe is rather preoccupied with debates over the meanings of "specific" versus "universal," "intellectualism," and "fragmented truth," and there is no debate about the commonly accepted ideas making their voices heard in Turkey. This makes the Azeri intellectuals face a dilemma, as their particular situation, such as the Karabagh problem, assumes the undertaking of such roles. In fact, this explains their passiveness and withdrawal: they simply seem not to know what to do (though we cannot ignore the above mentioned factors). They seem to be torn between their own necessities, "truth," and the changing realities. However, they are still "marginal men" (in Kedourie's [1960] terms), and elitist at the same time. They see their own society from the eyes of foreigners, considering their own society as backward and themselves, being different, as a potential force capable of helping to overcome the backwardness. This situation of being torn between the West and East also finds its expression in a feature not mentioned in any analysis of Western European intellectuals. The situation was reflected only in the Soviet official definition of intellectuals, which includes qualities such as moral purity, honesty, good reputation, etc. The next question is whether this feature reflects the Eastern roots of both the Russian and Azeri cultures, through which the Western European perceptions of intellectuals were assimilated in Azerbaijan.

A similar situation is observed in the attitudes among the ziyali towards Russia and towards changes in the society, including the changes in the script and educational system. These changes were introduced to reassert Azerbaijani independence, and were often interrelated. The difference in the perceptions is caused by the view of Russia either as a source of Westernization, which carries positive values, or as a continuation of Tsarist/Soviet Russia with its colonial ambitions. Thus, to understand the recent developments in Azerbaijan, it seems necessary to investigate the ways through which the Western models enter Azerbaijan and how they are incorporated into the Azerbaijani reality.

References

Burbank, Jane

1996 "Were the Russian intelligenty organic intellectuals?" In: Intellectuals and Public Life: Between Radicalism and Reform. L. Fink, et al., eds. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

Gramsci, Antonio

1971 "The intellectuals," In: Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Q. Hoare and G. N. Smith, eds. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Kedourie, Elie

1960 Nationalism. London: Hutchinson.

Said, Edward W.

1990 Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures. New York: Vintage.

[Contents]

The Local Perspective: Interviews with Sakha in the Viliui River Region[1]

Aileen A. Espiritu, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, History Programme, University of Northern British Columbia, 3333 University Way, Prince George, British Columbia V2N 4Z9, Canada, Tel.: +1(250)960-6684, Fax: +1(250)960-5545, espirituunbc.ca

From 1996 to 2000, my research partner Dr. David R. Marples and I embarked on a project entitled "Yakutsk-Sakha and the Siberian North-East: Resource Development, Environmental and Health Issues."[2] A major component of the project was an extensive program of interviews in the towns and villages along the Viliui River region, which I conducted in the winter of 1996 and the summers of 1997 and 1998 (see Espiritu 1998, 1999a and 1999b). I interviewed over 80 Sakha living along the Viliui River about their health, lifestyle, quality of life and access to medical care. One of our goals was to provide a survey of the social-health situation in the republic from the grassroots as compared to the level of the authorities. In addition, I interviewed local government officials in Viliuisk to provide the regional/district perspective to republican questions.

I conducted open-ended interviews using 27 questions as a basic guideline to determine how these residents viewed resource development and the environmental situation. I began the interview process in the winter of 1996 in the city of Viliuisk and in the town of Verkhnii-Viliuisk. Twenty-three interviews with health care professionals were conducted over a seven-day period. In the summer of 1997, I returned to this area, and within a two-week period interviewed 83 respondents in Viliuisk, Verkhnii-Viliuisk, Suntar, and Suldiukar. The following summer, fifty more interviews were collected in Viliuisk and Niurba, with most of the interviews in Viliuisk being obtained from the city government. The latter were held to ascertain how a small regional city copes with economic crisis at both the republican and federal levels. In total, 156 interviews were conducted, each averaging 45-60 minutes in length. Of these, I discarded 18 because the interviewees were unresponsive or because of other factors (such as a supervisor or another person of authority walking in and observing the interview, thus making the interviewee nervous or affecting the way in which they answered questions).

I also carried out interviews in the Viliui River Basin with individuals with children. They ranged in age from 20 to 70 years. Those with children were selected because they make up a major segment of the population and also because they would have a wider range of demands on health care and social services, whether this be pediatric care, family planning, general medical care for themselves and their children, daycare, child care allowances, or medicines. The interviews demonstrate that this category of mothers and fathers provides rich information and experience regarding health care and social welfare. The wide age range also enhances the study because it gives insights into the health situation both in the Soviet period and at the present. The older interviewees provided a picture of local conditions prior to the construction of hydroelectric dams, diamond mines, and missile testing.

The general results are divided here into categories: health, health care delivery, and the environment, leaving aside the team's findings on resource development and the economy because of space limitations.

Health and Health Care Delivery

Over the past forty years, the Viliui River Basin has been developed for its diamond resources at the mouth of the Viliui River at Mirnyi. Hydroelectric dams followed in the 1980s and 1990s. Because of such sources of environmental problems, many residents in the Viliui River region believe that their state of health is in decline, and that incidences of cancer are rising dramatically. Indeed, a majority of those interviewed believe that many of their ailments, from cold to influenza, from gall bladder disease to Hepatitis A and B, derive from environmental causes. While there were similarities in some of the ailments that seemed to be most worrisome for men and women, there were also gender differences in what were deemed to be common ailments and their related causes. A large majority (80%) of those interviewed suggested that they and their children were more often sick with a common cold or influenza because the air was not as pure as it used to be and that the water they drank was contaminated. Despite the practice of obtaining drinking and cooking water from lakes around the Viliuisk city area rather than the Viliui River, Viliuisk residents still named the impurity of the water they consumed as a potential source of increased incidence of disease.

At the health care administrative levels, all across the Viliuisk River Basin, there was resignation among the physicians that nothing much could be done to improve the health situation without a significant injection of money from the government of the Republic of Sakha. There were, however, a few individual health care givers, both nurses and doctors, who in their own way attempted to educate the population on disease and illness prevention. This was most notable among the physicians in Viliuisk and Verkhnii-Viliuisk who worked in the Family Planning clinics. While most of the therapeutic procedures they performed were abortions, they also perceived that they were at the front line of educating their elementary school and especially high school age population on birth control and HIV infection. By all accounts, it appeared that these health care professionals went into the schools to inform students about family planning. Nonetheless, for the most part in these areas, sex and sex education remain taboo topics.

Overall, a majority of the interviewees felt that their health was getting worse, especially in the period since the collapse of the Soviet Union. This perception coincides with another, namely that the health care system as a whole has deteriorated or has not kept up with technological advances of treatment and cures for ailments and diseases. Suffice it to say that 98% of those questioned about the health care system argued that it was in a very poor state because of the lack of funding, lack of free access to medicines and vaccines, lack of access to the newest technology, and the difficulties involved in traveling to the large, medically and technologically equipped hospital in the city of Yakutsk.

Prior to the collapse of the Soviet regime, patients did not have to pay for medicines, medical procedures or examinations, and patients and families could fly to Yakutsk at reasonable rates. The collapse of major industries and the economic downturn has rendered the health care system dependent on imported medicines. These have to be paid for in hard currency, and donations of medicines and medical supplies to such remote regions are relatively limited. The opening up of the market in the Russian Federation has made travel for medical attention expensive, if not impossible for most families. Many of those I interviewed indicated that their predicament is exacerbated by the fact that their salaries are not paid on time and are often in arrears of six months to more than one year.

The Environment

All the interviewees with the exception of those who worked for the Ministry of Nature Protection and the diamond mining industry regarded the environment of the Viliui River Basin as the worst in all of the Sakha Republic, owing to the heavily polluted water coming from the Markha River, a major tributary of the Viliui. Initially, the toxic wastes were dumped indiscriminately into the Viliui and Markha rivers. All the respondents cited the depletion of fish stocks (particularly the Karras, the national fish of the Sakha) and low water levels as an indicator of the effects of pollution. Residents of the city of Viliuisk were transporting their water from nearby lakes, using blocks of ice in the winter months for their water needs. They were also using the Viliui River for cooking, drinking, and bathing. Though the residents recognize the dangers that they face, most indicated resignation to the situation, arguing that they cannot do anything about it other than boil their drinking water.

Although there was resignation among many respondents regarding the pollution of their environment, most were aware that better environmental practices, such as finding environmentally sound ways of developing resources and using the land, could improve the ecology. A minority of those interviewed (about 10%) believed that any kind of resource development was dangerous, and about the same number advocated a return to traditional Sakha economies defined by pastoral farms, hunting, fishing, and gathering. This group maintained that activities such as mining, forestry, harvesting, exploration, and extraction of minerals merely served the needs of the republic and the federal government, and that the latter were "raping Mother Earth."

The image of the Earth as Mother is particularly prevalent in the conception of the world held by the Sakha people. The environment is placed within the larger context of Sakha spirituality and cosmology. All those who chose to talk about traditional Sakha views regarding the environment (37 interviewees) associated the environment with spirituality, arguing that any disturbance of the environment, most notably mining, digging, deforestation, and damming of rivers, is a sin against the Earth and against Sakha beliefs. However, only a minority (5 respondents out of the 37) suggested halting or reversing these activities altogether. The remainder, including the larger group which did not talk about traditional views on the environment, suggested that it was imperative to develop natural resources not just for revenue and job creation for the unemployed (the majority of whom were between the ages of 16 and 25), but also because the residents of Sakha needed to develop as a people socially and economically.

Conclusions

The problems faced by the Republic of Sakha are acute. In the health sphere, declining life spans and very high rates of infant mortality and infectious diseases give cause for concern. The countryside is impoverished, living standards have fallen markedly, and there are some critical situations in gold mining settlements that have basically been abandoned with the closure of the mines, but where much of the local population has remained.[1] The Republic has suffered above all from the financial crisis that continues to affect the Russian Federation, and which has rendered the federal system a liability since the Fall of 1998. Because of its (almost devoted) adherence to the federal system, the Republic of Sakha has borne the brunt of the consequences of its collapse. Despite the recent boom in the oil and gas industry globally, it is difficult to determine at this point whether the fledgling oil and gas industry, also found in the Viliuisk Region, will have a discernible effect on the Sakha economy. A resource-rich region, it is today reliant on the one industry in which it has retained a portion of the control (diamonds, and 20% of the total), as other resources fall into decline.

The euphoria of sovereignty has clearly dissipated. Politically the main gains have been derived by representatives of the Sakha rather than other groups within the Republic. Migration of skilled personnel, especially Russian managers, in addition to stagnation and decline in the developed industries such as gold and coal extraction, have contributed to the economic malaise. Unemployment is growing and has led to a rise in violent crimes, and drug and alcohol abuse. To some extent, the Republic of Sakha is a microcosm of Russian society as a whole, but it has taken on a more extreme form because of its remoteness and the difficulties of living in an Arctic climate. The government response has been to work through a number of ministries and departments to try to develop grassroots responses to the various problems pervading the rural communities, particularly alcoholism.

Notes

[1] I thank my research partner Dr. David R. Marples (University of Alberta, Canada) for his editorial comments and valuable insights regarding this brief report.

[2] In association with the International Center, Yakutsk State University and The Kate Marsden Society, City of Yakutsk.

[3] In 1998, for example, nine settlements in Oimiakon, Aldan and Usr'-Maiskii ulus were officially liquidated.

References

Espiritu, Aileen

1999a "Economic Development Versus the Environment: Dissonance between Folk Law and State Interests in the Vilyuysk River Region," In: Folk Law and Legal Pluralism: Societies in Transformation: Papers of the XIth International Congress of Folk Law and Legal Pluralism: Societies in Transformation. K. von Benda-Beckmann and Harald W. Finkler, eds., pp. 195-202. Moscow: Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology.

1999b "Ekonomicheskoe razvitie i okruzhaiushaia sreda: nesootvetstvie obychnogo prava gosudarsstvennym interesam v Viliuiskom raione," In: Obychnoe pravo i pravovoi pliuralizm. N. I. Novikova and V. A. Tishkov, eds., pp. 110-114. Moskva: Institut etnologii i antropologii, Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk.

1998 "The Health and the Environment in Vilyuysk: The Consequences of Modernity," Annual Meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Boca Raton, Florida.

[Contents]

Recent Work in Archives in Uzbekistan and Russia

Adeeb Khalid, Associate Professor, Department of History, Carleton College, USA, Tel.: +1/507-646-4214, akhalidcarleton.edu

During 2000-01, I spent 8 months in the archives in Uzbekistan and Russia doing the basic primary source research on a project entitled "The Making of Soviet Central Asia, 1918-1929." My research was funded by a research scholarship from the American Councils for International Education (ACTR/ACCELS) and a grant from Carleton College. The project is conceived as a broad study of the social, cultural, and political transformation of Central Asian life in the first decade or so of Soviet rule. I wish to pay particular attention to the period from 1917-1924, which has tended to be neglected by the several important dissertations done on the early history of Uzbekistan. I also wish to highlight the role of local actors (the Jadids, Muslim communists, Basmachi/Qo'rboshi, etc.). I worked in Uzbekistan for over five months and in Moscow for another three. The purpose of this report is to describe conditions in the archives and the holdings that I found useful.

The Central State Archives of the Republic of Uzbekistan

Located in Tashkent, this archive contains extremely rich documentation on the Governorate-General of Turkestan (1865-1917), the Turkestan Autonomous Republic (1918-1924), the People's Soviet Republic of Khiva (1920-1924), the People's Soviet Republic of Bukhara (1920-1924), and Uzbekistan (from 1924 on). The archive has excellent guides to its holdings. They are printed, but available only in the reading room. There are, in addition, typed handlists describing other collections not included in the guides. There is also an extensive card catalogue that locates documents in given subjects. I was told, however, that it was not open to foreigners (even though I had used it in the past). Its usefulness is compromised to an extent by the fact that it uses the old Soviet system of classification, which can obscure more than it reveals.

I worked through about 15 collections (fondy), including the major ones devoted to the Central Executive Committees and Councils of Ministers of Turkestan and Bukhara, as well as the two ministries of education.

The archive has a small and helpful staff who service a small reading room. Since the number of foreign researchers is small, one can develop very good relations with the staff. I have been working at the archive since 1991 (this was my fourth visit), and have only very good things to say about the institution and its staff. They also have excellent copying facilities. Photocopies cost 51 so'm (about 17 cents at the official rate, but only 7 cents at the street rate) and are done overnight. There seems to be no limit on the number of copies that may be ordered, except for the proviso that complete files (dela) may not be copied.

Other Archives in Uzbekistan

The Tashkent city archive is located on the edge of the city in the Sorok Let Pobedy neighborhood. It is housed near the Yangiobod bazaar in a nine-story residential building, which it shares with several other offices of the city government. The archive is little used and the staff are not used to foreigners doing historical research. Photocopying is available, but not professionally done.

I also made an exploratory trip to the Samarqand viloyat archive. It is a small archive with a very friendly director. Photocopying is readily available.

On the whole, the scope and quality of material remaining in regional archives does not compare with the centralized collections held in Tashkent. The Party archives (the former Uzbek branch of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, now the Presidential Archive) remains closed to foreigners and indeed to most Uzbekistani scholars, except those with official permission (and this seems to be granted only to those working on the "repressions" of the 1930s).

The Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI)

I worked primarily in the collections of the Central Asian Bureau of the Communist Party, which was the highest organ of power in Central Asia between 1922 and 1934. Its collection is copious and extremely rich. Unfortunately, RGASPI is open only three days a week. It is a much bigger operation than the Central State Archives of Uzbekistan, and is constantly crowded. Many of the fondy have been microfilmed, and are available only in microform. Original paper copies can, however, be ordered. Copying is possible, although each researcher is limited to 400 copies per visit (apparently regardless of the length of the stay). Copies are expensive (paper copies cost $1; microfilms are 35 cents apiece, and actually are of better quality) and take a long time to make, with two months being the usual time frame for fulfillment. One usually needs to have a friend pick up orders.

Library Work

I hoped to examine complete runs of several Uzbek-, Russian-, and Tajik-language periodicals. The main holdings of Russian-language materials are in the Rare Books Section of the Alisher Navoiy Public Library in Tashkent. Uzbek- and Tajik-language sources are to be found there and at the Beruni Institute of Oriental Studies at the Uzbekistan Academy of Sciences in Tashkent. Both of these institutions have extremely rich holdings that complement each other, but neither institution has any copying facilities (although at Beruni, microfilms of small numbers of pages may be ordered at $2 per page; this is useful enough if one's research concerns the intensive study of a unique manuscript, but not practical for periodical research). Beruni charges foreign researchers an annual "membership fee" of US$30. This is completely legitimate and answers a pressing need for cash. Its working hours are unfortunately short: the reading room is open Mondays through Fridays from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., and then from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. Navoiy is open seven days a week, the hours are longer, and no fee is required, but no copying is possible. The periodicals not housed in the rare books sections are in a different location, which shut down in mid-February for repairs, and was still closed as of this writing.

In Moscow, the Russian State Library (the Leninka) remains closed for repairs, although the periodical section, housed in the annex in Khimki, is open. The holdings, including those in Central Asian languages, are wonderful, featuring complete runs of most major magazines after 1923. Microfilming is available at about 60 cents per exposure. The commute to Khimki (45 minutes from the center of the city) can, however, be daunting.

[Contents]

Preparing and Conducting a Field Trip to Baku and Bishkek

Jamilya Ukudeeva, Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science, University of California, Riverside, USA, Fax: +1/719-623-9121, jamilyacitrus.ucr.edu

The collapse of the Soviet Union opened new horizons for scholarly research on Central Asia mainly in the areas of social science and humanities. The previously understudied areas offered new case studies, but offered little infrastructure for the researchers bound for the field. Scholars of social science and humanities were among the first who introduced the images of the Westerners to Central Asia and visited the area on a regular basis. This paper will share some of the experiences during my field trip to Baku and Bishkek.

The research was conducted in Baku and Bishkek in the summer of 2000. The goal of the research was to interview and survey the participants of the social movements in the late 1980s and early 1990s and to do archival work in the libraries. I should note that the general atmosphere and attitude towards the research on political issues was more open in Baku than in Bishkek.

Using E-mail

I started to plan the field trip from my desktop computer at the University of California, Riverside by subscribing to various email distribution lists such as Caucasusyahoogroups.com, CentralAsia-Lfas.havard.edu, and others. Such lists can be useful in planning your accommodations and getting the first contacts. However, I found it difficult to network based solely on email. Many people do not have email accounts. Others have changed email addresses. Some do not check their accounts regularly. Most of my networking was done through telephone contacts and personal referrals upon my arrival to Baku and Bishkek.

Getting Appointments

I found it easier to get appointments in Baku than in Bishkek. First, political activists and scholars in Baku are quite open to interviews on political issues. They did not evade the meetings, did not decline any questions, were willing to meet for follow-up meetings, and were helpful with finding new contacts and materials. As for Bishkek, some former political activists and officials in Bishkek were very cautious and reserved when talking about political issues. In some cases it was extremely difficult to make appointments with officials, former activists or scholars.

Second, the better infrastructure of the political parties in Baku made it easier to locate the activists and to contact them. Most of the political parties have their own permanent offices, where you can find their members, find their contact information, or leave a message for them. Very often, a direct phone call to the political party can get you the home phone number of the person you are looking for. In Bishkek, political parties do not have a good infrastructure. They change their location and phone numbers quite often, may not answer the phone, and lack contact information of their members. However, the experience with NGOs in Bishkek was quite different they were more open and easier to locate and interview.

Xerox and Internet Access

There are many Internet cafes in Baku. Most of them are on the major streets. Some are open 24 hours a day. The fee for Internet access is two-three dollars per hour. The speed is slow but acceptable. There are few Internet cafes in Bishkek and the Internet connection is incredibly slow.

In Baku free public access to the Internet is provided at the Open Society Institute, Soros computer center, and the USIS's office of the Information Resource Center. In Bishkek free public access to the Internet is available only at the National Library, where an advance appointment in person is required.

Xerox machines are hard to find in Baku and Bishkek. Xerox machines are usually available in all libraries. Flyers in the library lobby indicate where the xerox service is located. The price is about 5 cents per copy.

Receipts

If you have a grant or scholarship, there may be a requirement for reporting expenses during the trip. In Baku, most places (other than street markets and bazaars) give receipts automatically, or upon request. In Bishkek it is necessary to ask for a receipt. In some cases people might see the request for a receipt as a strange or even offensive inquiry.

Libraries

Bishkek and Baku libraries are not computerized; instead they use card catalogs. Most of the catalogs are in Cyrillic. In recent years, the Azeri libraries moved away from Cyrillic and started to catalog their new acquisitions in Latin script. Unfortunately, open access to the library holdings is limited to just a few collections. In most cases, one has to fill out book search forms and submit them to librarians. The book search usually takes one hour.

In Azerbaijan the best libraries are the Akhundov National Library, the Library of the Academy of Science, the Institute of Manuscripts (for ancient and medieval documents), and Baku State University Library. Most of the microfilms of the Azeri newspapers archived at US libraries lack the issues published during the turbulent times of November 1988, January 1990 and August 1991. The Akhundov National Library carefully cataloged the newspapers during these times.

In Bishkek, the Kyrgyz National Library, Chernyshevskii Library, and the Academy of Science are the main libraries to go to. Newspaper archives are divided between the Kyrgyz National Library and the Chernyshevskii Library. The current and recent newspapers (from the last two years) are stored at the National Library, while older newspapers are kept in the archives of the Chernyshevskii Library.

Access to the libraries in Baku and Bishkek requires two 3 x 4 cm pictures, a passport, and a document certifying affiliation with an educational institution (student ID in my case). There is a small library membership fee, and symbolic charge for every book search.

[Contents]

Brief

Soviet Census Resources

Lawrence W. Crissman, Director, ACASIAN, Griffith University, Nathan, Brisbane, Queensland 4111, Australia, crissmanasian.gu.edu.au

The Australian Centre of the Asian Spatial Information and Analysis Network (ACASIAN), has received a final installment of map materials matching the 1959 Soviet census from our colleagues at the Laboratory of Cartography, Institute of Geography, Russian Academy of Sciences, in Moscow. An earlier collaborative project, completed in 1997, produced a 1:1 million resolution Geographic Information System (GIS) spatial database containing all ADM3 (raion and gorsovet) level administrative units plus all cities and rural towns included in the 1989 Soviet census. We have digital versions of the unpublished figures for total, male, female, urban and rural populations at the same local levels for the 1959, 1970 and 1979 Soviet censuses. Our long-term goal is to create the spatial data for those three earlier census dates, beginning with 1959, which would constitute a spatio-temporal GIS for the entire Soviet Union in the post-war period.

[Contents]

Reviews and Abstracts

Book Review

Bold, Bat-Ochir, Mongolian Nomadic Society: A Reconstruction of the 'Medieval' History of Mongolia. New York: Palgrave Publishing (St. Martin's Press), 2001. 204 pp. + xvii. ISBN: 0-312-22827-9. $59.95 cloth

Reviewed by: Timothy May, University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA, tmmaystudents.wisc.edu

The vast majority of what Westerners have learned concerning the Mongol Empire and Mongolia between the days of the Empire and the twentieth century has been through two methods: the interpretations of Western scholars and through translations of works by Soviet scholars who rarely deviated from the theoretical and ideological methodology prescribed to them. With the fall of the Soviet Union, scholars in the former Soviet Union and its satellites, such as Mongolia, have been freed from their intellectual shackles and now must analyze their history with a fresh perspective. This is not to say that previous work under a more repressive regime did not have merit, but nevertheless, variance from the official interpretation of Marxism was marginal. While many Western scholars disagreed with Marxist interpretations of history, the Marxist influence concerning pastoral-nomadic society, though often criticized, continues to have a great impact on the interpretation of Mongolian history. This fact alone makes Bat Ochir Bold's book, Mongolian Nomadic Society: A Reconstruction of the 'Medieval' History of Mongolia, an important development in the historiography of all aspects of Mongolian history.

Bat-Ochir Bold, a Mongolian scholar at the University of Iceland, has set forth to examine the current views on Mongolian nomadic society, namely that it was a feudal structure. He views his book as an attempt to study the structural and developmental characteristics of Mongolian nomadic society over the course of Mongolian history. Approaching this topic from theoretical and empirical perspectives, Bold focuses his work from the twelfth century to the twentieth century due to the source material available. After the twelfth century a fairly stable and independent Mongolian society existed. In his opinion, although political institutions changed, nomadic society remained relatively unchanged until the 18th century, when the combination of Manchurian rule and the growth of Buddhism hampered the development of Mongolia and altered nomadic society.

Mongolian Nomadic Society is divided into six chapters and a conclusion. The first chapter focuses on the source material. Bold evaluates the primary and secondary materials through historiographical and cultural interpretations. The core of the study, chapters two through four, examines the structural elements of nomadic society. These include the roles of social and economic factors as well as tribal and political-administrative elements. In these chapters, Bold compares pre-industrial Europe with feudalism in Mongolia, essentially comparing Europe with a Mongolian model of production. Although this, on the surface, seems absurd, is it not the reverse of what Marxist and non-Marxist scholars have done? The fifth chapter focuses on the spread of Tibetan Buddhism in Mongolia and its ramifications on nomadic society. The sixth chapter attempts to depict the essence, function and evolution of traditional nomadic society. Then, in his concluding remarks, Bat-Ochir Bold outlines the internal structure and evolution of traditional nomadic society.

In Bold's view, attempts to evaluate Mongolian history have been mired in two problems. Attempts prior to 1921, when Mongolia entered the sphere of Soviet influence, were bound to tradition, which included Buddhist and Chinese interpretations of events. After 1921, a new generation of scholars made their own attempts to reinterpret their history, but suddenly found themselves, both willingly and unwillingly, examining their past through the lens of Marxist dogma, often dictated from the Soviet Union.

According to Marxist-Leninist theory, society moved through five stages: primitive society, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and finally socialism, with communism being the pinnacle of socialism. For Mongolia, and their Soviet allies, this presented a problem. If these stages were applied to Mongolia, it was quite apparent that Mongolia never reached a capitalist stage. Therefore, they were in a feudal stage before the intervention of the Soviets and the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party (MPRP). To accommodate this and similar problems in Central Asia, the Communist party adopted the idea that certain stages could be bypassed en route to socialism. During this period, the Soviet scholar Vladimirtsov coined the idea of nomadic feudalism in 1934. Although many scholars discussed this concept, most adhered to it. Even as late as 1976, it remained an essential part of Mongolian historiography, although many scholars, Western as well as Soviet, rejected it based on its theoretical ambiguity. Nevertheless, nomadic feudalism remains a model that scholars examine and use today.

To dispute the concept of nomadic feudalism, Bold delves into the structure of nomadism. In doing so, he asks two questions: to what extent has ecological change influenced animal husbandry in Mongolia; and, how has the origin of livestock keeping been determined ecologically? Although the questions are similar, they intertwined and have not received much attention. After examining this, he then compares the results for the Mongolian nomadic economy with that of feudal Europe.

In the third chapter, Bold examines the evolution of the Mongolian socio-political organization, ranging from the tribe to the various forms of kinship, both fictive and non-fictive. By doing so, we see the development of the state, prompting Bold to ask: should this state be considered feudal? And if so, how should feudal be defined?

During his examination of the social strata, Bold relies heavily on the research of Mongolian, Soviet and Hungarian scholars. An integral part of chapter four focuses on the terminology used in discussing the social structure before and after the Manchurian period, and how both periods differentiate between Chinggisids and non-Chinggisid taiji, or nobles.

Many readers will find chapter five especially interesting. The debate on the effects of Buddhism on Mongolia has always been a heated one. Arguments range from Buddhism essentially ruining the martial ardor of the Mongols and depleting it of manpower to the other end of the spectrum that it benefited the Mongols by introducing a world religion and ending the influence of shamanism. Bold, to his credit, does not fall into the trap of entering this debate. Instead he turns his attention to how Buddhism or rather Lamaism affected the nomadic economy. One aspect that he covers, which is often overlooked, is that permanent monasteries did not spring up overnight. Instead, they gradually evolved from a ger and eventually became the large fixed structures that are commonly associated with Lamaism.

In the final chapter, Bold examines the dynamics of the development of Mongolian nomadic society, particularly in the areas of livestock, family, political structure, and military conflict. Through the study of these elements, Bold then examines why the nomads of Central Eurasia were so aggressive and why they were so successful. As part of this study, Bat-Ochir Bold includes climatic problems, the mobile lifestyle of the nomads, their strategies, and, surprisingly, the role of shamanism with its focus on the Möngke Köke Tengri, or Eternal Blue Heaven. The religious element of the nomadic conquests is something that is all too commonly overlooked and has attracted little research. In his discussion of the evolution of nomadic society, he concludes, quite plausibly, that it is erroneous to conclude that a single dramatic change occurred, such as with the introduction of Buddhism, or the Mongols' incorporation into the Manchu Empire, but rather change was gradual and not immediate.

Bold concludes that Mongolian nomadic society is so different from Medieval or Northern Europe that one cannot study Mongolia based on models draw from those used to study Europe, and for that matter, China. The evolution of agricultural and nomadic peoples are simply too disparate to establish a model from one and apply it to another.

Mongolian Nomadic Society is a welcome addition to the study of Mongolia as well as the study of state formation. Too often scholars, often unconsciously, apply methods based on one culture or society that are woefully inadequate and inappropriate for another. The cultural context must always be kept in mind. There are a few minor issues with his system of transliteration, such as his use of "Genghis Khaan." In his note on transliteration, he maintains that he prefers to use this as it is more familiar to Western readers, but the use of Khaan is not familiar at all. Although it is a perfect transliteration from the modern Mongolian, it is odd to the Western eye. Nevertheless, these are minor issues and do not detract from the questions he poses. The importance of this volume is not so much his overall conclusions, but that it may serve as a stimulus for scholars to rethink how they view Mongolian nomadic society, even if they disagree with the author.

[Contents]

CESR Central Eurasian Studies Review

Contents of this issue

Perspectives

Research Reports and Briefs

Reviews and Abstracts

Conferences and Lecture Series

Educational Resources and Developments

Editors - CESR Vol. 1 No. 1

Editorial Introduction

Perspectives

Setting the Stakes of a New Society

What is Central Eurasia?

Why Form a New Society?

Where CESS Can Make Its Mark

CESS as a Cyber-Society

A Better World at Stake

Libraries and CESS

Research Reports and Briefs

Reports

Migrant Labor, Labor Rights, and the Eurasian Economic Community

Notes

References

Azerbaijani Intellectuals during the Transition

References

The Local Perspective: Interviews with Sakha in the Viliui River Region[1]

Health and Health Care Delivery

The Environment

Conclusions

Notes

References

Recent Work in Archives in Uzbekistan and Russia

The Central State Archives of the Republic of Uzbekistan

Other Archives in Uzbekistan

The Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI)

Library Work

Preparing and Conducting a Field Trip to Baku and Bishkek

Using E-mail

Getting Appointments

Xerox and Internet Access

Receipts

Libraries

Brief

Soviet Census Resources

Reviews and Abstracts

Book Review

Book Abstract

CESR
Central Eurasian Studies Review