Soviets Drew Borders in Central Asia Not to Create Conflicts Among Republics but to Prevent Elites and Masses in Any of Them from Uniting, Umarov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 4 – Because the lack of correspondence between political and ethnic borders among the countries of Central Asia has sparked so many border disputes, Temur Umarov says, many assume that the reason the Soviets drew those borders in the 1920s was to prevent any effort to unite the region against Moscow.

            “I don’t think the Soviets initially tried to lay the seeds for these conflicts,” the regional specialist at the Carnegie Endowment says. “Instead, they “wanted to make it more difficult for the population and the powers within them to negotiate with each other” (novayagazeta.eu/articles/2023/01/03/rossiia-nikogda-ne-byla-tak-uiazvima-pered-stranami-tsentralnoi-azii).

            Umarov’s observation is an important one. The general view is that Moscow divided up Central Asia to prevent the spread of pan-Turkism which the Soviet government viewed as a threat to itself. There can be little doubt that such fears about forestalling outside influences were part of Moscow’s calculations.

            But it is certainly true that the Bolsheviks were interested in preventing any fusion of elites and masses in non-Russian areas and that including significant minorities within each republic was an effective way of blocking that, an approach that reflected among other things the fact that Stalin was simultaneously a party leader and people’s commissar for nationality affairs.

            By not having ethnic and political borders correspond then, Moscow left two poison pills in Central Asia, one that makes it almost certain that elites and masses will have anything but an easy time of reaching an accord and that the elites and masses will each be interested in border wars, albeit for different reasons.