Backwardness and biology: Medicine and power in Russian and Soviet Central Asia, 1868--1934

This dissertation traces the evolution of modern medical institutions alongside that of Russian and Soviet policies towards indigenous Central Asians, from the establishment of the Imperial colony through the mid-1930s. Based on two years of archival research in Uzbekistan and Russia, the dissertation demonstrates how medical science helped Russia construct its own identity as an “advanced” nation using the colonial powers as a reference point, as it scientifically substantiated the “backwardness” of Central Asians, both in their physical nature and in their byt, or daily lives. Throughout the period, Russian and Soviet medical practitioners pointed in particular to indigenous gender norms as a source of ill-health, and allied with the state in its attempts to transform them. Chapter One discusses Russia's civilizing mission in Turkestan, and demonstrates medical professionals' sense of colonial inadequacy. Conscious of the strides of European colleagues in their own colonies, and impatient with the Imperial order's paternalism toward the professions, as well as its passivity towards a culture they viewed as not only inferior but dangerously unhealthful, physicians strove to impose their paradigm of health and healing with greater force. Chapters Two and Three document the re-creation of health care institutions in the region through 1928, showing how indigenous political elites deployed the language of backwardness, of “degeneration” and the policy of korenizatsiia, or indigenization, to demand greater attention to the indigenous health. Chapter Four argues that increasing calls to assimilate Central Asians into the Soviet order throughout the decade gave rise to medical research which portrayed indigenous people as racially alien and inferior. The elevation of the category of class above all other organizing principles in public health is the subject of Chapter Five. This period, during the collectivization and industrialization drives of 1929–32, saw radical attempts to transform byt through public health, and to implement eugenic measures. Changing nationality policies and the creation of a new, Soviet scientific orthodoxy ultimately eliminated race and nationality as permissible parameters for medical research and the provision of health care.