Authors

Hanna Matt¹;  ¹ The University of Manchester, UK

Discussion

During the First World War, nearly 300.000 refugees and prisoners of war (POWs) were displaced to Turkestan, which brought the local population into direct contact with a conflict that was being waged thousands of miles away in Russia’s Western borderlands and on the Caucasus front. Many of these POWs remained in Central Asia after the end of the war, witnessing the collapse of the Russian Empire and tumultous period of the revolution and Civil War. In 1921, when famine struck the Volga region, the Soviet government temporarily resettled nearly 150.000 people to the region. Considering the experiences of displaced people and the provision of relief in this context allows us to examine the profound upheavals the region experienced during the transition from imperial to revolutionary rule from a new perspective. Drawing on archival documents from Uzbekistan, Switzerland, and the United States, this paper considers how both imperial and revolutionary governments, as well as voluntary organisations such as the Red Cross responded to the needs of displaced populations. It examines the provision of relief ‘on the ground’ to understand how humanitarian practices were reconfigured under the conditions of the new revolutionary state, highlighting ruptures and continuities across the ‘continuum of crisis’ (Holquist, 2002). I demonstrate that the work of local actors relied on imperial practices of relief in the face of political, social, and economic turmoil in post-revolutionary Central Asia. By considering how these were refashioned to fit the political context of the early 1920s, this paper will provide a window into the ongoing process of transition in the aftermath of the tsarist regime’s collapse. More broadly, by examining responses to displacement this paper will contribute to a fuller understanding of how the impact of war and displacement intertwined to shape the course of the revolution in Central Asia.