Civilization and Russification in Tsarist Central Asia, 1860–1917

The concept of “civilizing mission” served as the main legitimizing tool for Russian rule in its Central Asian province of Turkestan. As this article shows, most representatives of the tsarist empire understood civilization as the advance of Russian culture, so that the semantic fields of “civilization” and “russification” overlapped in Russian discourse on Central Asia. Especially during the 1880s and 1890s, tsarist ideologues identified civilization with long-term cultural, linguistic, and even religious russification of Central Asia’s Muslim population. While the colonial administration largely refrained from deliberate interventions into local life and thus from any actual politics of russification or Christianization, tsarist ideologues interpreted the concept of “civilizing mission” as an argument for national and religious homogenization. However, after the Andijan uprising in 1898, such hopes proved to be unrealistic, and most colonial officials thus contented themselves with securing merely the political loyalty of the native population.