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Soviet Union [USSR] Uzbeks
The history of the Uzbeks and their homeland is closely tied to
that of Turkestan, an ancient territory stretching from the Caspian
Sea in the west and extending into China and Afghanistan in the
east, encompassing most of the areas of the present-day Turkmen,
Uzbek, Tadzhik, and Kirgiz republics and the southern portion of
the Kazakh Republic. In the centuries before the birth of Christ,
Turkestan was populated by people of Persian stock, and they
endured successive waves of invaders. In the sixth century B.C.,
Turkestan for the most part belonged to the Persian Achaemenid
Empire. Alexander the Great invaded Turkestan in the fourth century
B.C., and the Huns overran the area in the fifth century A.D. Arabs
conquered Turkestan in the seventh century A.D. and introduced the
Islamic religion and culture. Another series of invasions by
predominantly Turkic peoples began at the end of the tenth century
and continued into the thirteenth century when the great Mongol
invasion swept the area. The Mongol invaders were soon assimilated
by the Turkic population and adopted their language, culture, and
religion.
In the beginning of the sixteenth century, Turkestan was
conquered by yet another wave of Turkic nomads, the Uzbeks. The
Uzbeks, whose name derives from Uzbek Khan the ruler of the
Golden Horde (see Glossary) at the beginning of the fourteenth century,
were a mixture of Turkic tribes within the Mongol Empire. The
center of the Uzbek state became the city of Bukhara. Subsequently,
the independent Uzbek khanates of Khiva and Kokand evolved. The
khanates of Bukhara, Khiva, and Kokand inherited aspects of the
Iranian, Turkic, and Arabic civilizations. Their populations were
mostly Uzbek, but within their borders also lived considerable
numbers of Tadzhiks, Turkmens, and Kirgiz. By the eighteenth
century, the khans of Khiva, Bukhara, and Kokand had extended their
control over the innumerable independent tribal kingdoms and ruled
central Turkestan. But the process of consolidation was not
complete, and many peripheral areas in Turkestan remained almost
totally independent of or in rebellion against one or another of
the three khanates. In the vast steppes and deserts in the north,
the Kazakhs grazed their herds as they always had; the nomadic
Turkmens roamed the wide stretches of pastureland to the west; the
rebellious Kirgiz made their home in the mountainous valleys in the
east; the Iranian-speaking Tadzhiks maintained their traditional
life-style in the southeast, in the highlands north of the Hindu
Kush.
Although Peter the Great attempted the first Russian invasion
of Turkestan in the beginning of the eighteenth century, systematic
Russian penetration of Turkestan was undertaken only in the midnineteenth century. By the end of the nineteenth century, the
khanates of Bukhara and Khiva, greatly reduced in size, had become
vassal states of the Russian Empire. The rest of the territory and
the entire territory of Kokand was incorporated into Russian
Turkestan, created in 1867, which was divided into five provinces
and presided over by a Russian governor general. Turkestan,
together with the four provinces of
Kazakhstan (see Glossary),
constituted what came to be known as Russian Central Asia
(subsequently Soviet Central Asia). In spite of tsarist toleration
of the Muslim religion and customs, Russian conquest of Turkestan
had an immediate impact on some of the indigenous culture and
society. Early in the twentieth century, economic development came
to Turkestan, new towns sprang up, cotton grew where once nomads
grazed their herds, and railroads linked Turkestan with markets in
Russia. The nomadic Kirgiz, Kazakhs, and Turkmens were especially
resentful of the evolving changes. In 1916, when the Russian
government ended its exemption of Muslims from military service,
much of Russian Central Asia rose in a general revolt against
Russian rule.
In November 1917, the Bolsheviks established Soviet power in
the city of Tashkent. In April 1918, they proclaimed the Turkestan
Autonomous Republic. The great mass of the Muslim population,
however, took no part in these events. Only after the Bolsheviks
attacked the Muslim religion, intervened directly in native society
and culture, and engaged in armed seizure of food did the
indigenous population offer fierce resistance in a national and
holy war against the Soviet regime, known as the
Basmachi Rebellion (see Glossary).
The autonomous soviet republics of Khorzem (formerly Khiva) and
Bukhara were established in 1920 and incorporated into the Soviet
Union. In 1924 and 1925, the entire Soviet Central Asian territory
was reorganized by an act known as the national delimitation
process in Central Asia. The Turkestan Autonomous Republic was
abolished and divided along ethnic and linguistic lines into the
Uzbek and Turkmen union republics, the Tadzhik Autonomous Republic
within the Uzbek Republic, and the Kirgiz Autonomous Republic and
the Karakalpak Autonomous Oblast within the Russian Republic. At
the same time, the Kazakh Autonomous Republic within the Russian
Republic was also established. The Tadzhik Autonomous Republic
became a union republic in 1929, and the Kirgiz Autonomous Republic
became a union republic in 1936. The Karakalpak Autonomous Oblast
became an autonomous republic in 1932 and was transferred to the
Uzbek Republic in 1936. The same year, the Kazakh Autonomous
Republic was transformed into a union republic.
In the 1980s, the Uzbeks were the most populous nationality in
Soviet Central Asia. Of the nearly 16.7 million Uzbeks in the
Soviet Union in 1989, most of them lived in the Uzbek Republic,
which lies in the middle of Soviet Central Asia. Most of the
remaining Uzbeks lived in the other four Central Asian republics.
In the 1989 census, the population of the Uzbek Republic was
slightly over 19.9 million, with Uzbeks making up almost 71
percent. The largest minority in the Uzbek Republic in 1989 was the
Russians with over 1.6 million, or 8.3 percent of the total
population, followed by the Tadzhiks (932,000), Kazakhs (808,000),
and Tatars (468,000). In addition, there were 411,000 Karakalpaks,
most of whom lived in the Karakalpak Autonomous Republic in the
Uzbek Republic. The Karakalpaks constituted only 31 percent of
their autonomous republic's total population and were the second
largest nationality, after the Uzbeks.
Uzbek, the language of the Uzbeks, belongs to the Turkic family
of languages and has both a variety of dialects and a mixed
vocabulary of Arabic, Persian, and Russian loanwords. The original
Arabic alphabet was replaced in the 1920s by the Soviet government
with an alphabet based on Latin script and subsequently with an
alphabet based on Cyrillic script. In 19879 about 98.3 percent of
the Uzbeks regarded Uzbek as their first language.
Uzbeks were among the least urbanized people in the Soviet
Union. In 1979 only about 25 percent of all Uzbeks lived in cities.
Nevertheless, Tashkent, the capital of the Uzbek Republic, had a
population of nearly 2.1 million people in 1989, and five other
cities had populations over 200,000. The populations of these
cities had a disproportionately high number of Russians and other
non-Uzbeks, however.
Uzbeks were the third largest nationality in the Soviet Union
but in 1971 ranked tenth in the number of students in institutions
of higher education and fifteenth in the number of scientific
workers per thousand. Uzbeks were also very underrepresented in the
CPSU. In the early 1980s, Uzbeks ranked twelfth among Soviet
nationalities in party membership. Although they made up about 4.8
percent of the total population of the Soviet Union in 1979, they
held only 1.5 percent of the seats on the CPSU Central Committee.
Uzbek membership in the Uzbek Republic's party organization was
also below their share of the republic's population. Russians, in
contrast, made up only about 8.3 percent of the population of the
republic but held 21 percent of party membership. Russians also had
a majority in the Central Committee of the CPSU in the Uzbek
Republic and tended to occupy top party positions.
Data as of May 1989
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