‘Savages’ and ‘exploiters’: Exploring anti-colonial violence in the time of war and revolution


Chokobaeva A. Akulov M.
December 2021Ain Shams University

Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism
2021#21Issue 3240 - 259 pp.

The paper explores the nature of inter-ethnic, anti-colonial violence during the First World War and the Russian Revolution (1914–1921). It adopts a comparative approach by juxtaposing the 1916 uprising in Russian Central Asia – specifically, in the Semirech’e oblast – against the anti-Mennonite pogroms carried out by the Ukrainian peasantry in 1919. The analysis demonstrates that the imperial state, although a significant factor, exercises a highly ambiguous influence: in one case it becomes an enabler of violence, whereas in another it poses an obstacle to it. Furthermore, the paper questions the conventional wisdom of presenting Russia’s long crisis as a two-part process of state disintegration and subsequent state reconstitution; regional dynamics, especially the power relations between the colonized and the colonizers, need to be taken into account if one intends to construct a more comprehensive history of that period.



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University of Sydney, Kazakhstan
Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan

University of Sydney
Nazarbayev University

10 лет помогаем публиковать статьи Международный издатель

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