Naming the colony: the self-undermining archive in Vasil’ev’s 1915 Chu Valley irrigation plan

In 1915, the imperial engineer V. A. Vasil’ev published an irrigation plan whose title page designated Semirech’e a koloniia, or colony. This article asks how such a technical document could legitimate imperial intervention while producing evidence that unsettled some of its own premises. Through close reading of Vasil’ev’s plan alongside Fond 54 of the Central State Archive of the Kyrgyz Republic, it develops the self-undermining archive as an analytic for colonial technical documents that record and attempt to manage internal instability within a single documentary apparatus. The article traces this mechanism across statistical, textual and transimperial registers, showing how the plan documented indigenous irrigation, market integration and water use even while recoding the Chu Valley as a space awaiting colonial improvement.