Best 5 quotes of Douglas Northrop on MyQuotes

Even under Stalin, Soviet state power, acting through law and the courts, confronted serious limits in its efforts to govern, much less transform, its colonial Central Asian periphery.

In Lenin's view, such changes were positive: nations, as products of capitalist economic relations, fitted into classic Marxist stage theory of development. Even Stalin, who differed on the implications for Soviet policy, agreed that nations were an inescapable phase through which all humans communities must pass. Ultimately, they (like, capitalism) would be superseded, but for precapitalist societies national development and nationalist movements were treated as progressive. Lenin drew a further distinction between great-power nationalism, which oppressed others, and small-power nationalism, which formed in response o it. In places - such as Russia - that had been responsible for national and colonial oppression of others, nationalism was to be combated without mercy and torn out by the roots. Among groups that had been victims of national or colonial oppression, by contrast-such as in the tsarist imperial periphery, where Russian power had created deep economic, political, and social resentment-the Leninist approach was to build socialism while encouraging indigenous development and national differentiation.

Still other rumors held that the ultimate aim of Bolshevik policy, seen in the combination of unveiling and collectivization, was to have all women held in common. In the kolkhoz, peasants ware warned, men and women slept together under giant blanket, and wives became common property.

Supposedly troubled that women would no longer be treated as property, these man saw the hujum as another kind of expropriation, much like the land and water redistribution. One was quoted as saying that unveiling was merely an extension of Soviet land reform, since it aimed to seize the second, third, and fourth wives of bois and transfer them to the poor landless peasants who had to hire themselves out as field hands. (This was a common view, as many Uzbeks also saw the hujum as transferring women from male control to that of the state.)

When agents of the Turkmen secret police came up short in arrests of counterrevolutionaries in 1937-38, they filled their quota by going to the Ashgabat marketplace and rounding up all men who wore beards, on theory that they were likely to be mullahs.