Paper short abstract:

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.