Customer Reviews

Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan

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This book was decent for what it was. The author explores how the Soviets created Turkmenistan back in the 1920s and 1930s, and she did a great deal of research and used many good sources. However, I was hoping for more. She basically talks about this creation occuring in the 1920s and 1930s throughout the entirety of a not-very-lengthy book, and then has one 5 page chapter where she suddenly fast-forwards up to present day. I found this very disappointing, since it would've been interesting to know what happened between then and now, especially considering the fact that a second world war occurred, the cold war occured, and the USSR collapsed between then and now. I would imagine at least some of that had an effect on the creation and continued building of Turkmenistan as a country.

This new and original contribution to texts on Central Asia under the Communist empire is necessary, original, insightful and typically liberal. The irony of the liberalism here is that in the 1930s and 1970s the same liberalism was used to describe how Soviet Communism would triumph over western capitalism. Then the academics heralded the progress in central asia, whereby women were no longer stoned for adultery, whereby women could actually show their faces in public, whereby women could go to school and, worst of all perhaps for the touchy `culture' women might actually speak their minds, vote, enroll in the military and get divorces.

Today those liberal triumphs are condemned by the same liberals for being against the culture. One thing can be sure, if you read through the lines of this book, Communism did reform the backward cultures, it brought light to people who only 40 years before had never had Veils, but had created a Veil in response to Sufi missions, and then Communism came and removed the degrading Veils. It was an assault on a fake culture that had never existed. The communist obsession with finding tribal identities amongst the many turko-mongolian peoples of Central Asia is perhaps more interesting and less biased. And for these two topics this is worth reading, but be careful not to be taken in by the idea that wearing a veil is somehow liberating to a women, because actually it just makes women into objects.

Seth J. Frantzman