On March 19th, the regular meeting of the Eastern Seminar, organized by the TAIF Professorship in the History of the Muslim Peoples of Russia took place. Niccolo Pianciola, an adjunct professor at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, delivered a lecture.
Opium was an important part of trade between tsarist/early-Soviet Central Asia and Chinese Xinjiang. Studying of the archival documents in Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Great Britain allowed Pianciola to trace the evolution of the opium trade as well as its connection to the region’s social and political history, and the history of tsarist and Soviet Russia.
Turkestan’s Semirechye (Zhetysu) region occupied an important position in opium production within the Russian empire. During the First World War, opium became a strategic resource. Since the cultivation of poppies and the opium trade were associated with transnational migration from China as well as everyday life along the border, studying this issue provides a new view into the social history of the Central Asian borderlands, as well as the socio-economic consequences of the creation of a border between tsarist Russia and Qing dynasty in China in the second half of the 19th century. The regional opium trade played an important role in in the process of the government’s collapse, civil war, and the state reconsolidation between the Central Asian uprising in 1916 and the creation of the Soviet opium monopoly in the 1920s.
In his own research, Niccolo Pianciola has attempted to fill a gap in scholarly literature on global opium trade, which, as a rule, neglects tsarist Russia, the Soviet Union and Chinese Inner Asia. Regional studies exist, but not one of them focuses on the tsarist/Soviet side of the border. The opium trade is of particular scholarly interest because it was always located in a “gray zone” between legality and illegality. As for the chosen time period, it includes various stages of the collapse and reconstruction of the imperial state administration in Central Asia on both sides of the border.
Initially, the main producers of opium in tsarist Turkestan were the Dungan people (Hui) — Chinese-speaking Muslims who immigrated to Turkestan in the late 1870s first half of the 1880s, but preserved ties with Xinjiang. The study of the opium trade during this period can be conditionally divided into four stages:
- First stage – trade from 1881 until 1914, when imperial control (officially, at least) did not exist. The imperial administration did, however, attempt to regulate the issue. Studying this stage is relevant for evaluating the colonial policies of tsarist Russia in Central Asia and for understanding the economic and political situation in the region of imperial administration.
- Second stage – corresponds to the period of the First World War when the tsarist government tried to impose a state monopoly on poppy cultivation to meet the army’s demand for opiates (morphine). Importantly, this policy became one of the main reasons for discontent within the Dungan (Hui) population of tsarist Turkestan during the Central Asian uprising of 1916, when the Dungan committed brutal aggression against Slavic farmer-colonizers. Several months after repression of the rebels, the tsarist regime collapsed.
- Third stage – the period of civil war. The years from 1918 to 1920 were devastating for Turkestan. The opium trade was, without a doubt, the region’s most profitable activity. It served as the basis for monetary emissions in the eastern part of Turkestan (opium was used directly as money in various parts of Asia in the 20th century). During the civil war, local Bolsheviks released bank notes ensured by opium reserves. Anti-Bolshevik forces also used the opium trade in Xinjiang to finance their political struggle.
- Final stage – began after 1920, when the Bolsheviks won the civil war and conquered Turkestan. They began attempting to impose a state monopoly on poppy cultivation, officially banning the opium trade. This new period continued until 1929 when the repression of free agricultural markets throughout the Soviet Union and forced collectivization stopped the short-lived opium trade of the NEP period.
The border served as a political shield from government authorities for population groups across the border, but also allowed labor and goods to cross it regularly in both directions. This created economic opportunities for the borderland population, and with these opportunities they considered the border being an institution
Anna Matochkina