Authors

Roman Osharov¹;  ¹ University of Oxford, UK

Discussion

The newspapers published in Turkestan, or Russian Central Asia, represent a valuable source for Central Asian history in the second half of the nineteenth century through to the revolutionary period of 1916-1917. The papers published in Turkestan in the First World War years between 1914 and 1917 allow us to reconstruct the public sphere in this region of the Russian Empire, uncover neglected micro-histories and investigate the ways in which the Great War impacted ordinary people.
This proposed paper will examine the titles such as Turkestanskiia Vedomosti, which was an official newspaper published by the Governor-Generalship of Turkestan, private newspapers like Turkestanskii Kurier and Turkestanskii Krai and other publications that captured the last years of the Tsarist rule in Central Asia. Through them, I plan to examine the everyday life in Turkestan during the First World War, as well as the events leading up to the 1916 revolt, one of the most significant events in Central Asian history that marked the end of Tsarist rule, and the Russian revolution the following year. I will also examine the extent to which Turkestan and its diverse society were attuned to the Great War and the impact it had on them.