Soviet Policy in Xinjiang: Stalin and the National Movement in Eastern Turkistan by Jamil Hasanli

Over the past decade, scholarship on Xinjiang (or East Turkestan) has undergone remarkable changes. Whereas previous scholars were limited to a source base consisting chiefly of Anglo-American consular archives, published Chinese newspaper accounts, and the memoirs of exiled Turkic refugees, a new generation of historians has been able to make ample use of Chinese and Russian archives, along with rare collections of Uyghur documents preserved abroad. Of these three new source bases, however, the Russian archives clearly still offer the greatest untapped potential. Because the Soviet Union played a pivotal role in political developments within Xinjiang throughout the first half of the twentieth century, this is not a negligible lacuna.In part for this reason, Jamil Hasanli's new study of Soviet influence in Xinjiang has been met with great expectations in the field. Focusing on the period of preeminent Soviet involvement in the politics of Chinese-ruled Xinjiang (1930–1949), Hasanli's book is chock full of statistical data and previously classified top-level reports from the Russian archives. The majority of these highly sensitive archival sources have not yet been consulted by any other scholar. This fact alone is cause for celebration. All future scholarship on Xinjiang must consult this book. Hasanli has uncovered archival gems for nearly every major political development during the turbulent reigns of Chinese warlords Jin Shuren (1928–1933) and Sheng Shicai (1933–1944), along with the short but crucial administration of the Nationalist government (1944–1949). Readers will learn, for instance, new details about the fate of the Hui warlords Ma Zhongying and Ma Hushan, who opposed Sheng Shicai for many years in the 1930s, as well as prominent Uyghur politicians such as Khoja Niyaz Haji, who joined Sheng's government in 1934 and was later executed. Perhaps the most precious new insights relate to the visit of Sheng and his wife to Moscow in 1938 to meet with Joseph Stalin and other top Soviet leaders. Hasanli provides a detailed record of the various meetings in which Sheng took part, including his shocking, repeated requests to join the Communist Party, secede from the Republic of China, and overthrow the government of Chiang Kai-shek. After discussing how Sheng fell from political grace in 1944, Hasanli regales the reader with extraordinary detail on the Kazak rebel Osman Batur's meetings with Mongolian leader Khorloogiin Choibalsan, the political career of the Turkic leader Elihan Tore and Soviet battlefield maneuvers on behalf of the East Turkestan Republic.Despite this rich material, the book has several grave shortcomings. Fascinating as all the new political revelations and narrative details are, Hasanli rarely integrates them into an organized analysis of the bigger picture, nor does he engage seriously with the insights of scholars who have made use of Chinese archives over the past decade. (Most egregious in this regard, especially in light of Hasanli's extensive discussion of Soviet interest in mineral prospecting in Xinjiang, is the utter neglect of Judd Kinzley's Natural Resources and the New Frontier: Constructing Modern China's Borderlands.) Far more troubling, however, are the sloppy narrative voice and uncritical scholarly eye that mar considerable portions of this promising book. Hasanli has gained unprecedented access to Soviet archives, but the end result for the reader too often feels like an unfiltered data dump. Lengthy quotations, commentary, and statistics from document after document are translated in interminable detail, with little attempt to sift through the chaff and guide the reader to a critical conclusion. Worse yet, the subjective perspectives of various Soviet officials are all too often presented as historical fact, with little attempt to frame their perspectives as products of a particular political agenda, bias, or other contingent situation. Nor is it merely the Russian source base that is presented without a critical eye. Hasanli also occasionally integrates the discourse of Turkic refugees writing long after the events in question, as when he describes how Sheng Shicai once “invented 125 kinds of torture and 28 methods of killing” (p. 61) to keep the Muslim people of his province in check. A quick glance at the footnote for this strange and unchallenged assertion leads the reader to the polemical writings of Uyghur exile politician Isa Yusuf Alptekin, writing three decades after the events in question. But Hasanli presents his dubious statement as fact.Unfortunately, Hasanli's book is replete with endless examples of this sort of haphazard analysis. Extensively quoted Soviet archival documents contradict themselves from one page to the next, but Hasanli often fails to note the contradiction. Distracting typographical mistakes abound on nearly every page. Lengthy quotations by other scholars are often inserted without any narrative framing and sometimes even without attribution in the main text. Chinese names and places are inserted without any consistency: Kuomintang/Guomindang is spelled at least three different ways, and the names of most Chinese politicians have at least two variants. At times, even identifying who a particular Chinese figure is supposed to be can be difficult. In chapter four, an entire paragraph is set as a block quotation (p. 127), suggesting a lengthy translation from a primary source. But it turns out to be part of the author's main narrative, with a quotation from historian Jay Taylor, whose name is added to the list of hundreds of misspellings and typographical errors throughout the book.As for errors of fact, to take just one obvious example, in chapter one Khoja Niyaz Haji is confidently said to have been killed in a gas chamber in 1942 (p. 38), whereas in the next chapter he is said to have been executed in 1938 (p. 67). Hasanli does not take any notice of the discrepancy in his sources, allowing it to pass without comment. For all the additional detail and color introduced by the voluminous Soviet sources, surprisingly few novel revelations emerge. Hasanli twice promises to reveal the true fate of Ma Zhongying after his defection to the Soviet Union, but at the end of several scattered discussions of him the reader can still only conclude that he disappeared under mysterious circumstances in the late 1930s. (Although Hasanli does not say so himself, his revelations of Sheng's trip to Moscow in 1938 seem to make clear that this visit—and the vote of confidence from Stalin that it represented—was almost certainly the occasion for Ma's final disappearance.) The discussion of the mysterious murder of Sheng's brother Sheng Shiqi in 1942 includes intriguing new details on suspicions surrounding the motives and possible involvement of Sheng or his sister-in-law, Chen Xiuying. Yet, even though the new revelations are clearly inconclusive—the paper trail still ends in nothing more than rumors—Hasanli confidently asserts that Chen “was falsely charged with the murder.” Although we get considerably more detail on the interactions of Turkic separatist leaders such as Elihan Tore with Soviet officials in the 1940s, the basic narrative of decisive Soviet involvement in the East Turkestan rebellion remains unchanged.No serious scholar of Xinjiang can afford to ignore this book. On every page the reader will encounter fascinating new statistics and commentary drawn from the Soviet archives, some of which is truly jaw-dropping. But a distressingly large number of these new insights cannot be cited responsibly in future works of scholarship until they are double-checked against their footnotes, compared with previous scholarship, and reframed to reflect a critical understanding of the archival voice.