The Battle of Gökdepe in the Turkmen post-Soviet historical discourse

Horák, Slavomír

doi:10.1080/02634937.2014.964940

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…This was depicted as a pivotal event for the governing elite of post-Soviet Turkmenistan (Turkmenbashi 2002, 270-273), a thing that, however, indirectly elevated the Teke tribe from which both presidents were drawn. The historiography of the Geoktepe battle confirms the ethnic exclusiveness of the Turkmens on their territory and idealized their sense of independence and freedom (Horak 2014).…”

Section: Turkmenistan: the Place Where Personality Cult And Nation-bumentioning

confidence: 85%

“…National historians attempted to demonstrate connections between president Niyazov's ancestors and personalities from Alexander the Great to Prophet Muhammad. The connection of Turkmenbashi's family with the Geod Depe Battle in 1881 (considered as the greatest defeat of the Turkmen nation) was made the object of scientific research already in the 1990s and overemphasized in Turkmenbashi's biography, which soon became a mandatory school subject (Horak 2014). According to the book, one of Turkmenbashi's presumed ancestors, Tangrykuly Batyr, had been killed in the Geod Depe Battle (Detstvo i iunost ' Velikogo Serdara 2004, 142).…”

Section: Personality Cult Features and Competitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A tale of two presidents: personality cult and symbolic nation-building in Turkmenistan

Polese

Horák

2015

Natl. pap.

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This article proposes a comparison of the attitudes of the first and second presidents of Turkmenistan to discuss possible overlap between personality cult, as it has been initiated and developed by the two presidents after independence, and nation-building narratives in the country. Nation-building in post-Soviet spaces has been studied comprehensively, but this paper is distinguished by two interpretative frameworks. First, this article is possibly the first comparison of personality cult as it has been constructed by the two Turkmen presidents since 1991. Second, it looks at some specific aspects of the personality cult as possible markers of a Turkmen national identity that becomes, by force of this, de-ethnicized. We suggest that a number of idiosyncratic aspects of the personality cult in Turkmenistan contribute to construct an official nation-building narrative so concentrated on the figure of the president as to minimize the ethnic features of nation-building measures that scholars have noticed in a wide range of cases in the post-socialist region.

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Section: Turkmenistan: the Place Where Personality Cult And Nation-bumentioning

confidence: 85%

Section: Personality Cult Features and Competitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A tale of two presidents: personality cult and symbolic nation-building in Turkmenistan

Polese

Horák

2015

Natl. pap.

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“…Firstly, as hinted to earlier, given the authoritarian and closed nature of the regimes in the region, often nation-building policies are linked to efforts of power concentration and regime-building. The case of Turkmenistan is perhaps the most obvious example of this whereby the development of a discourse regarding a common sense of belonging was framed using the personality cult of President Niyazov in the first instance and then his successor Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow (Horak 2005(Horak , 2015Polese and Horak 2015). While there is nothing problematic about such a focus, indeed it is to be expected given the authoritarian nature of the regimes, it does portend to a top-down perspective on nation-building in the region which does not account for the other side of the state-society relationship.…”

Section: Framing Nationhood and Identities In Post-soviet Central Asiamentioning

confidence: 99%

Between “imagined” and “real” nation-building: identities and nationhood in post-Soviet Central Asia

Isaacs

Polese

2015

Natl. pap.

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Much of the existing literature on nation-building in Central Asia offers a statist topdown approach which focuses on how the nation and nationhood is "imagined" by political elites. In this special issue the contributors provide an analysis which seeks to explore the process of nation-building in Central Asia by addressing the other side of the state-society relationship. The case studies in this collection examine the "grey zone" between "imagined" and "real" differences between state-led policies and discourses related to nationhood and identity and how they are received by different audiences at different levels (regional, national and international). The authors bring to the fore the contested nature of nation-building in Central Asia as well as focusing on new or less conventional analytical tools for the study of nation-building such as cinema, construction projects and elections. This article provides the introduction to the special issue and lays out the contribution the articles make to the existing literature on nation-building in Central Asia. It also sets out the rationale and aims of the collection.

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Slavery and Empire in Central Asia

Eden

2018

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This dissertation is the first major study of a slave trade that captured up to one million slaves along the Russian and Iranian frontiers over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries alone. Slaves served as farm-workers, herdsmen, craftsmen, soldiers, concubines, and even, in rare cases, as high-ranking officials in the region between the Caspian Sea and westernmost China. Most of these slaves were Shīʿites who were captured by Sunni Turkmens and sold in Central Asian cities and towns. Despite the Central Asian slave trade's impressive dimensions, and the prominent role of slaves in the region's history, the topic remains largely unstudied by historians of the region and of the broader Islamic world. Drawing on unpublished autobiographical sources and eyewitness accounts, I argue that slaves' resistance and resourcefulness helped to define the contours of the slave labor system and played a key, unacknowledged role in their emancipation. While previous studies of slavery in the Muslim world have emphasized the role of colonial governments in fostering abolition, I argue that slaves in Central Asia, by fomenting the largest slave uprising in the region's history, triggered the abolition of slavery in the region as a whole. 3 The only monograph on the topic remains a slim but important Soviet-era volume in Uzbek, by Tursun Faiziev:

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The Battle of Gökdepe in the Turkmen post-Soviet historical discourse

Cited by 7 publications

References 7 publications

A tale of two presidents: personality cult and symbolic nation-building in Turkmenistan

A tale of two presidents: personality cult and symbolic nation-building in Turkmenistan

Between “imagined” and “real” nation-building: identities and nationhood in post-Soviet Central Asia

Slavery and Empire in Central Asia

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