Two Views on the Future of Central Asia: V. V. Barthold and N. S. Lykoshin as Experts on the Issue of the Nation-Building in the 1920s

Upon embarking on nation-building in Central Asia in the early 1920s, the Bolsheviks carried out significant preparatory work on studying the economic, cultural, linguistic, legal, and historical features of Turkestan and the surrounding territories. This large-scale work involved a wide range of “bourgeois” specialists, such as engineers, irrigators, lawyers, orientalists, ethnographers, and administrators-professionals who had succeeded during the Russian empire. Their excellent knowledge of local peculiarities and regional specifics, languages, and their many years of work experience in various fields were “politically” valued by the Soviet leadership, and they were enlisted as “experts” to identify the features and specifics of the unification of the territories of the Turkestan Republic and neighboring states. Within this article it will be presented the views and attitudes of Russian Turkestan studies towards the national-territorial demarcation of Central Asia, whose professional opinions were of interest to the Soviet leadership-Turkestanologist N. S. Lykoshin, and the famous orientalist V. V. Barthold.

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