Paper abstract:

The uprising of 1916 in the history of the Kyrgyz people left a deep mark on the lives of several generations. In every Kyrgyz family, memories of the tragic events of that period were transmitted from the mouths of grandparents. In the recent Soviet past, there was one official version of the Uprising of 1916, which did not take into account the individual memory of thousands of people who survived the tragedy of the uprising.

Today, one of the qualitative methods of studying historical events is oral history. Oral histories include not only the memories of the participants of the uprising of 1916 and their children, but also the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of contemporaries and witnesses of that time. Oral memoirs are valuable material for sociological and historical science, because they "give the word" to the ignored (so-called "non-historical") layers of society. Oral histories more reflect "small history" (microhistory), individual memories, history created "from below" (history from below), daily memories. The peculiarity of oral history is studying the experienced past and its interpretation and meaning for people in the present.

Oral histories collected from children and grandchildren from eyewitnesses of the uprising demonstrated the deep trauma experienced by the residents of our region. These are stories about forced flight to China, about the trials of crossing difficult mountain passes, about violence by Chinese soldiers at the border, about the loss of their children and close relatives, about the difficult life in a foreign land and the bitterness of loss about their former life together with other refugees from Issyk-Kul. Oral histories of witnesses and eyewitnesses of that time are one of the ways to release individual traumatized memories.

Another important means of conveying ways of experiencing, comprehending and relating to the world that are difficult to discuss is visual sources using photographs. Precisely because they are deeply rooted or — as sociologist Pierre Bourdieu writes — are "beyond awareness, and therefore they cannot be touched through volitional, deliberate transformation, they cannot even become visible" [Bourdieu 1977: 94]. Through the photo, the image of the person himself, her/his family, partner and friends is analyzed, allowing to realize all aspects of everyday life that were previously taken for granted. Photographs allow us to tell about the participants of the 1916 Uprising, about the injured men, women and children, and, therefore, give us an important opportunity to make the faces of the study participants visible and their stories heard.

Paper abstract:

For more than seven decades, the medieval city of Otrar has been one of the most active archaeological sites in soviet and independent Kazakhstan. However, many scholars examining the history of the site today - archaeologists and historians alike - largely ignore the first systematic excavations of the site undertaken in the late imperial period by the Tashkent-based Turkestan Society of Amateurs of Archaeology. My paper breaks with this tradition and proposes that the archaeological excavations should be revisited.

In this paper I examine 1904 excavations of Otrar in the wider context of turn of the century theories surrounding the ancient past of Central Asia, which by the early 20th century was one of the Russian Empire's most recent, and simultaneously most explicitly-colonial conquests, on the one hand, and the place of nomadic societies in it on the other. I argue that for turn of the century interpreters, Otrar did not materialize as a site of prolonged interest in part because of a conscious decision to interpret "nomadism" and "sedentarism" as a diachronic series of two mutually-exclusive modes of societal organization. Rather than rely on the supposedly-objective new materialist science of archaeology and its evidence to amend existing civilizational taxonomies and narratives, the evidence was made to fit the narrative.

Paper abstract:

The Treaty of Kuldja (Ili) signed between Russia and Qing in 1851 started the official Russo-Qing trade in Xinjiang. The Russo-Qing trade in Xinjiang did not originate from the treaty, however. Signing the treaty was instead a way for the Qing to reassert its authority in Xinjiang's foreign commerce after decades of prevalent smuggling. This paper argues that the pre-1851 Russo-Qing unofficial trade in Xinjiang, which was legal for Russia but illegal for the Qing, had many characteristics of the post-treaty official trade, only with a smaller volume and fewer industrial products. The article supplements the scholarly discussion on the Russo-Kazakh-Qing tripartite relations by examining materials related to the pre-treaty era Russo-Qing trade in northern Xinjiang in Chinese and Russian sources. By comparing the narratives of Russian travelers and quantitative data from the Semipalatinsk custom registrar with the Qing palace memorials and chronicles, the research finds that the Qing officials in Xinjiang played the leading role in forging the discrepancy in the sources. While presenting themselves as an effective law-enforcing agency that fought against smuggling as shown in the memorials to the Qing emperors, the Qing officials from the lowest to the highest level were also active participants in smuggling as described in Russian sources. The research further highlights the role of Kazakh nomads and Central Asian merchants in this trade. Studying the development of the unofficial Russo-Qing trade in northern Xinjiang is conducive to tracing how the center of the Russo-Qing official trade gradually shifted from the Lake Baikal area (Kyakhta) in the 18th century to Xinjiang in the 19th century.