This chapter explores the complex process of imagining postimperial orders in Northern Eurasia. It focuses on Siberian Regionalism and the agency of Buryat and Sakha Indigenous intellectuals and politicians during Russia’s imperial transformations around the 1905 and 1917 revolutions. Siberian Regionalism, originating in the middle of the nineteenth century, advocated for a self-governing, decolonized Siberia within a transformed imperial framework. Indigenous intellectuals adapted these ideas to protect their languages and cultures against settler colonialism and Russification, emphasizing self-government as crucial for survival. The 1905 Revolution accelerated political self-organization, with Buryat congresses calling for territorial autonomy and Sakha activists seeking inclusion in local governance and cultural rights. During the 1917 Revolution, Indigenous leaders and Siberian Regionalists collaboratively advanced visions of a decentralized Russia, contributing to the establishment of the Buryat-Mongol Autonomy and Sakha inclusion in zemstvo self-government. Although Siberian Regionalism’s influence waned during the Civil War, Indigenous movements persisted, later aligning with Bolshevik autonomy promises. Siberian Regionalist approaches to territorial autonomy remained relevant when designing the Yakut and Buryat Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republics. This chapter highlights diverse Indigenous and regionalist approaches to shaping postimperial futures amid global decolonization dynamics, challenging the notion of a linear transition from empire to nation-states.
During the 1990s, a conventional wisdom emerged, based on literature going back decades, that political decentralization might be among the most effective forces for democratization. If ordinary people could participate in autonomous local governments, democracy would be built from the ground up, ultimately shaping the entire political system. Once decentralization reforms were implemented across the world, however, the results were disappointing. Authoritarianism not only thrived at the local level, it could also undermine democratization at the national level. Thus, local-national transference still held, but sometimes as a poison. In this context, the case of post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan is an anomaly. Here, the relative success of political decentralization—rather than its failure—nevertheless failed to spur democratization at the national level. I argue that this is because decentralization allowed national authorities to appease international donors while they consolidated their own power. Moreover, while decentralization empowered local communities, it did so in ways that personalized local authority and pitted local and national authorities against one another, resulting in intense localism and antagonistic center-local relations that undermined any democratic transference. The case study findings are based on ten months of field research, which includes interviews with local and national officials, ordinary villagers, and representatives of NGOs and international organizations.
This research has been conducted within the framework of the joint project ‘Integrated Watershed Management in Central Asia – Implementing an Educational and Research Concept for Capacity Building in Kyrgyzstan’, driven by German and Kyrgyz universities and financed by the German Volkswagen Foundation. After gaining its independence in 1991, Kyrgyzstan was confronted with arising social and economic difficulties. The newly formed Kyrgyz government was not able to provide the population with a functioning drinking water supply system (WSS) and all its connected proper services. Nowadays, many villages in Kyrgyzstan lack adequate WSSs for drinking as well as irrigation water. The present thesis is focused on problems in the accessibility to clean drinking water in rural areas of Central Kyrgyzstan. On the example of the village of Kara-Suu in the central Naryn oblast, the today's structures of the WSSs are examined. Kara-Suu was chosen as a more or less typical soviet-style Kyrgyz village in order to find some answers to the defined main research question: What are the problems in the management of drinking WSS in rural areas of Kyrgyzstan? Most data has been gathered during field research by using the following methods: An overview of the research area was gained by direct and indirect, respectively participating and non-participating observation, on- site inspection, mapping of the water supply system in a GIS, semi-structured expert interviews with various stakeholders and representatives of different authorities, and standardized interviews on the basis of a questionnaire with villagers of Kara-Suu. The study in Kara-Suu showed that after getting independent in 1991, ownership and operation of the rural drinking WSS were decentralized and handed over to the administration of the village and villagers themselves. However, the administration as well as the villagers has little knowledge about management, operation and maintenance of a local drinking WSS, which has originally been planned and managed by the prior existing soviet collective farms. The deterioration of the freshwater WSS in Kara-Suu expresses itself in the fact that much of the water supply infrastructure (e.g. pumps, pipelines, public standpipes) is technically outdated, poorly maintained and out of function due to the discontinuation of funding from the government as well as the unwillingness or inability of the local community and people to self-management. Based on the investigations in Kara-Suu, it can be concluded that the problem of inadequate access to water and its partially poor quality are rather rooted in the poor management and low awareness of local people, than in the physical availability of enough fresh water for domestic use and consumption. The main conclusions of this research are as follows: 1) Only the investment of money cannot improve the situation in the WSS in rural areas; 2) It is necessary to change the attitude of the water user towards water as an economic good; 3) To raise awareness, responsibility and capacity of people to manage the WSS properly; 4) Not only to build a WSS, but also to establish the legal and social institutions that would help to create the needed conditions for a sustainable development and management of the rural water infrastructure.
It could be argued that enough has already been written about the book edited by S. Franklin and E. Widdis, which has become the object of a lively discussion, a discussion where emotional reactions seem occasionally to dominate, even though the questions at stake deserve to be treated in a scholarly and dispassionate way. Understandably, these questions are not just scholarly; they are at the same time the depository of proofs, arguments or counter-arguments for sought after, imagined or historically real self-identities. Ironically, the discussion is about a book that is neither among the most important nor the best in the last years. A reader will find interesting pages and information here, but the authors often offer several different interpretations of the same fact, failing to provide proofs for the correct one. Let me mention the in the lands in the film Aleksandr Nevskij, which has nothing to do with the betrayal of Christ (p. 113): the Judas par excellence in Russia was (is?) Mazepa, who also passed to the German (Swedish) camp. The allusion to mazepynstvo is quite obvious in the film. As to the bank notes of the 1990s, I do not think that they lend themselves to a double interpretation, namely, as either overlapping Soviet images or being a challenge to them (pp. 24-28): in my opinion, by 1996, they were already a symbol of of the new state and challenged the Soviet/Russian interpretation of the Kyivan past. Incidentally, the notes were considered state symbols already by Andrew Wilson in his book The Ukrainians: Unexpected nation (2001; cf. pp. 227-228). The Greek ruins on the same notes do suggest the 2000 year old history of the Ukrainian lands: this may be considered a manifestation of silly nationalism, but let us recall that the first person who stated the same idea for Russia was V. Tatishchev. Thus, today myths of antiquity are as silly as the ones-although that is not often appreciated nor recognized as dangerous.Although the book contains only minor errors,2 I am skeptical about its usefulness. It is a hybrid product of post-modernist and late-structuralist criticism, trying to unite various specialties, ranging from philology and language to history (spanning a time-frame from the early-medieval to the present), from modern cultural studies to questions of nation-building, not to mention issues of identity of the self and/or the other. As a result, the first surprise is that the book is 'only' 244-pages long. Brevity is often a virtue, but it can become a handicap when one tries to include everything just to suggest the endless contradictions and fluidity (as the editors say in the Preface) of all the parameters that make up National Identity and Russian Culture. It is hard to find a more difficult and broader subject in all of the human sciences, and to distil them into a short book requires enormous skill and clarity of vision. Unfortunately, the current book is a hybrid product designed for only a vaguely identified audience. Scholars will find it more or less useless because of the oversimplifications-and will treat the book as redundant. On the other hand, it is hard to recommend the book to non-specialists or students (the intended audience), since it lacks basic historical, cultural and linguistic data that might allow that type of reader to follow the culturological discourse that the editors tried to initiate. To give one example: B. Gasparov's analysis of the linguistic situation in Old-Rus', in Muscovy, and then in the empire, the USSR and even in contemporary Russia is hardly profitable for a student that has not taken courses in the history of the language and medieval literature, or digested books and articles by people like B. Uspenskii and V. Zhivov. On the other hand, for a specialist, Gasparov's short overview of such radically different works (both in terms of language and socio-cultural background) as Monomakh, Epifanii the Wise, Avvakum, and Zyzanii only provides evidence of the superficiality of his approach. …