The classic study of resistance to Tsarist Russian colonialism, the genocide that followed, and its connection to the Bolshevik Revolution. In 1916, Tzar Nicholas II began drafting Russian subjects across Central Asia to fight in World War I. By summer, the widespread resistance of Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Tajiks, Turkmen, and Uzbeks turned into an outright revolt. The Russian Imperial Army killed approximately 270,000 of these people, while tens of thousands more died in their attempt to escape into China. Suppressed during the Soviet Era and nearly lost to history, knowledge of this horrific incident is remembered thanks to Edward Dennis Sokol’s pioneering Revolt of 1916 in Russian Central Asia. This wide-ranging and exhaustively researched book explores the Tsarist policies that led to Russian encroachment against the land and rights of the indigenous Central Asian people. It describes the corruption that permeated Russian colonial rule and argues that the uprising was no mere draft riot, but a revolt against Tsarist colonialism in all its dimensions: economic, political, religious, and national. Sokol’s masterpiece also traces the chain reaction between the uprising, the collapse of Tsarism, and the Bolshevik Revolution.

The definitive study of a nearly forgotten genocide, reissued with a new foreword. During the summer of 1916, approximately 270,000 Central Asians—Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Tajiks, Turkmen, and Uzbeks—perished at the hands of the Russian army in a revolt that began with resistance to the Tsar’s World War I draft. In addition to those killed outright, tens of thousands of men, women, and children died while trying to escape over treacherous mountain passes into China. Experts calculate that the Kyrgyz, who suffered most heavily, lost 40% of their total population. This horrific incident was nearly lost to history. During the Soviet era, the massacre of 1916 became a taboo subject, hidden in sealed archives and banished from history books. Edward Dennis Sokol’s pioneering Revolt of 1916 in Russian Central Asia, published in 1954 and reissued now for the first time in decades, was for generations the only scholarly study of the massacre in any language. Drawing on early Soviet periodicals, including Krasnyi Arkhiv (The Red Archive), Sokol’s wide-ranging and exhaustively researched work explores the Tsarist policies that led to Russian encroachment against the land and rights of the indigenous Central Asian people. It describes the corruption that permeated Russian colonial rule and argues that the uprising was no mere draft riot, but a revolt against Tsarist colonialism in all its dimensions: economic, political, religious, and national. Sokol’s masterpiece also traces the chain reaction between the uprising, the collapse of Tsarism, and the Bolshevik Revolution. A classic study of a vanished world, Sokol's work takes on contemporary resonance in light of Vladimir Putin’s heavy-handed efforts to persuade Kyrgyzstan to join his new economic union. Sokol explains how an earlier Russian conquest ended in disaster and implies that a modern conquest might have the same effect. Essential reading for historians, political scientists, and policymakers, this reissued edition is being published to coincide with the centennial observation of the genocide.

The 1916 Revolt was a key event in the history of Central Asia, and of the Russian Empire in the First World War. This volume is the first comprehensive re-assessment of its causes, course and consequences in English for over sixty years. It draws together a new generation of leading historians from North America, Japan, Europe, Russia and Central Asia, working with Russian archival sources, oral narratives, poetry and song in Kazakh and Kyrgyz. These illuminate in unprecedented detail the origins and causes of the revolt, and the immense human suffering which it entailed. They also situate the revolt in a global perspective as part of a chain of rebellions and disturbances that shook the world’s empires, as they crumbled under the pressures of total war.

In July 1941, the Soviet Union was in mortal danger. Imperiled by the Nazi invasion and facing catastrophic losses, Stalin called on the Soviet people to “subordinate everything to the needs of the front.” Kazakhstan answered that call. Stalin had long sought to restructure Kazakh life to modernize the local population—but total mobilization during the war required new tactics and produced unique results. Kazakhstan in World War II analyzes these processes and their impact on the Kazakhs and the Soviet Union as a whole. The first English-language study of a non-Russian Soviet republic during World War II, the book explores how the war altered official policies toward the region’s ethnic groups—and accelerated Central Asia’s integration into Soviet institutions. World War II is widely recognized as a watershed for Russia and the Soviet Union—not only did the conflict legitimize prewar institutions and ideologies, it also provided a medium for integrating some groups and excluding others. Kazakhstan in World War II explains how these processes played out in the ethnically diverse and socially “backward” Kazakh republic. Roberto J. Carmack marshals a wealth of archival materials, official media sources, and personal memoirs to produce an in-depth examination of wartime ethnic policies in the Red Army, Soviet propaganda for non-Russian groups, economic strategies in the Central Asian periphery, and administrative practices toward deported groups. Bringing Kazakhstan’s previously neglected role in World War II to the fore, Carmack’s work fills an important gap in the region’s history and sheds new light on our understanding of Soviet identities.

Laura Engelstein, one of the greatest scholars of Russian history, has written a searing and defining account of the Russian Revolution, the fall of the old order, and the creation of the Soviet state.

Examines the transition Central Asia underwent in the twentieth century following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Soviet colonial legacy and the attempts of new states to build secular states within the radical Islamic world.

From the years leading up to the First World War to the aftermath of the Second, Europe experienced an era of genocide. As well as the Holocaust, this period also witnessed the Armenian genocide in 1915, mass killings in Bolshevik and Stalinist Russia, and a host of further ethnic cleansings in Anatolia, the Balkans, and Eastern Europe. Crisis of Genocide seeks to integrate these genocidal events into a single, coherent history. Over two volumes, Mark Levene demonstrates how the relationship between geography, nation, and power came to play a key role in the emergence of genocide in a collapsed or collapsing European imperial zone - the Rimlands - and how the continuing geopolitical contest for control of these Eastern European or near-European regions destabilised relationships between diverse and multifaceted ethnic communities who traditionally had lived side by side. An emergent pattern of toxicity can also be seen in the struggles for regional dominance as pursued by post-imperial states, nation-states, and would-be states. Volume I: Devastation covers the period from 1912 to 1938. It is divided into two parts, the first associated with the prelude to, actuality of, and aftermath of the Great War and imperial collapse, the second the period of provisional 'New Europe' reformulation as well as post-imperial Stalinist, Nazi - and Kemalist - consolidation up to 1938. Levene also explores the crystallisation of truly toxic anti-Jewish hostilities, the implication being that the immediate origins of the Jewish genocides in the Second World War are to be found in the First.