Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality,
and to see the links to virtual rooms.
Log in
Accepted Paper:
The Smorguner Murder, 1899. Garrison life and military ‘honour’ in Colonial Tashkent.
Alexander Morrison
(University of Oxford)
A microhistory of a notorious murder which took place during a trial in the Tashkent Regional Court in 1899, and its implications for understanding military culture and garrison life in colonial Central Asia.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores an incident which was notorious at the time but quickly fell into obscurity – the murder of Aaron Alexandrovich Smorguner, prominent lawyer and editor of the newspaper Russkii Turkestan, during a trial at the Tashkent Okruzhnyi Sud in September 1899 by Colonel Arsenii Dmitr’evich Stashevskii, commanding officer of the 5th Orenburg Cossack regiment. Smorguner was Jewish, and anti-semitism played a part in his murder, as did a warped but deeply-engrained notion of ‘military honour’, which Stashevskii claimed to be upholding: he paid almost no penalty for his crime. The backdrop to the murder lies in the social and domestic world of Tashkent’s military garrison, which remains largely unexplored in existing scholarship, as well as broader questions of military culture in the late Tsarist imperial army officer corps.