Soviet Orientalism and the Creation of Central Asian Nations

Orientalism – the idea that the standpoint of Western writers on the East greatly affected their writing about the East, the "Other" – applied also in Russia and the Soviet Union, where the study of exotic peoples incorporated into the Russian Empire became a major academic industry and the standpoint of writers greatly affected what they wrote. Russian/Soviet orientalism had a particularly important impact during the creation of new Central Asian republics, and this book explores this influence, providing a rich picture of academic politics, and showing how academic cultural classification cemented political boundaries, often in unhelpful ways.