Governing through Museums in Central Asia. Colonial Collecting, Kraevedenie, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan (the 1830s-1930s)

The scholarship of museum studies has a rich tradition of analysing museums as instruments of imperial/colonial governance; however, it has focused on Western European colonial contexts. By contrast, the Russian Imperial (colonial), Soviet (specific colonial), and independent (post-Soviet, post-socialist, post-colonial, post-post-colonial?) experiences remain overlooked. Even within post-socialist heritage studies, research concentrates on Russia and East-Central Europe, leaving Central Asia – a region shaped by both Russian and Soviet colonialism – at the margins of scholarly debates. This region offers an important perspective for rethinking global histories of museums, especially their role in shaping imperial narratives, identity politics, and nation-building. This raises fundamental questions: How, by whom, and under which conditions were museums established in Central Asia? My thesis addresses these questions by building on the established Western historiography of museums as colonial institutions and drawing on extensive archival research in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Determined by the geographical and chronological specificities of the region, the study takes a transregional approach and traces collecting and museum- making practices from the Russian conquest and colonization of the Steppe in the first half of the 19th century to the years 1924–1936, when national delimitation led to the creation of five Central Asian republics under Soviet rule. It seeks to recover overlooked actors and events, offering a revised perspective on the history of museums in the region, with a focus on Kazakhstan. The research engages with key theoretical questions concerning the coloniality of the tsarist and Soviet regimes, their periodization, continuities, and ruptures – issues that remain central to the ongoing debates about the nature of the Soviet project.