American Research on Russia’s Moslems

Abstract

The contemporary histories of Russia’s Moslems and their attitudes towards the policies implemented by the local regimes in their respective regions started to attract more interest from American researchers after the Russian Revolution and studies conducted by American scholars in this field entered a new phase after the 1950s. In this article, Serge A. Zenkovsky examines various works on the Moslem regions of the Russia from different authors with highlighting their strengths as well as their shortcomings and errors. He starts with Eugene Schuyler’s Turkistan report on the Moslem regions in Central Asia then moves on to Richard Pipes’ analysis of the relations between the Soviet regime and Turkic peoples in Formation of the Soviet Union, Firuz Kazemzadeh’s discussion on aspirations of the Caucasians and their desire to establish an autonomous state in The Struggle for Transcaucasia, Richard Frye’s history of early Central Asia in History of Bukhara, Edward Sokol’s groundbreaking work The Revolt of 1916 in Russian Central Asia which provides a relatively objective and complete explanation of the events in Central Asia in 1916, Charles W. Hostler’s Turkism and the Soviets which provides statistical data on Turkic peoples, Alexander G. Park’s Bolshevism in Turkestan which discusses the Sovietization of Turkestan, Thomas G. Winner’s The Oral Art and Literature of the Kazakhs of Russian Central Asia which discusses the Kazakhs’ approach to Islam and lastly he examines Ivar Spector’s The Soviet Union and Muslim World which confers findings on diplomatic relations between the U.S.S.R. and Middle Eastern peoples.