The governance arrangements put in place for Siberia and Mongolia after the collapse of the Qing and Russian Empires were highly unusual, experimental and extremely interesting. The Buryat-Mongol Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic established within the Soviet Union in 1923 and the independent Mongolian People’s Republic established a year later were supposed to represent a new model of transnational, post-national governance, incorporating religious and ethno-national independence, under the leadership of the coming global political party, the Communist International. The model, designed to be suitable for a socialist, decolonised Asia, and for a highly diverse population in a strategic border region, was intended to be globally applicable. This book, based on extensive original research, charts the development of these unusual governance arrangements, discusses how the ideologies of nationalism, socialism and Buddhism were borrowed from, and highlights the relevance of the subject for the present day world, where multiculturality, interconnectedness and interdependency become ever more complicated.

This book re-examines the origins of modern Mongolian nationalism, discussing nation building as sponsored by the socialist Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party and the Soviet Union and emphasizing in particular the role of the arts and the humanities. It considers the politics and society of the early revolutionary period and assesses the ways in which ideas about nationhood were constructed in a response to Soviet socialism. It goes on to analyze the consequences of socialist cultural and social transformations on pastoral, Kazakh, and other identities and outlines the implications of socialist nation building on post-socialist Mongolian national identity. Overall, Socialist and Post-Socialist Mongolia highlights how Mongolia’s population of widely scattered seminomadic pastoralists posed challenges for socialist administrators attempting to create a homogenous mass nation of individual citizens who share a set of cultural beliefs, historical memories, collective symbols, and civic ideas; additionally, the book addresses the changes brought more recently by democratic governance.

The Russian Revolution in Asia: From Baku to Batavia presents a unique and timely global history intervention into the historiography of the Russian Revolution of 1917, marking the centenary of one of the most significant modern revolutions. It explores the legacies of the Revolution across the Asian continent and maritime Southeast Asia, with a broad geographic sweep including Iran, the Caucasus, Central Asia, China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, and India. It analyses how revolutionary communism intersected with a variety of Asian contexts, from the anti-colonial movement and ethnic tensions, to indigenous cultural frameworks and power structures. In so doing, this volume privileges Asian actors and perspectives, examining how Asian communities reinterpreted the Revolution to serve unexpected ends, including national liberation, regional autonomy, conflict with Russian imperial hegemony, Islamic practice and cultural nostalgia. Methodologically, this volume breaks new ground by incorporating research from a wide range of sources across multiple languages, many analysed for the first time in English-language scholarship. This book will be of use to historians of the Russian Revolution, especially those interested in understanding transnational and transregional perspectives of its impact in Central Asia and Southeast Asia, as well as historians of Asia more broadly. It will also appeal to those interested in the history of Islam.

When the Soviet Union broke apart in 1991, the Russian Federation and the newly independent republics of the Baltics, the Caucasus and Central Asia engaged in redefining their national identity in a challenging regional and global context. The stances and policies towards the minorities living in these countries became part of the striving towards national independence and identity formation. Despite vastly different post-Soviet nation-building trajectories, the development and implementation of state policies towards minorities had similar relevance and importance across the region. Thirty years after the end of the USSR what is the situation of minorities and minority issues in the countries that emerged from that multi-ethnic state? How have the former republics – including Russia dealt with their minorities and minority affairs? To what protection and rights are minority communities entitled to? Studies of the dissolution of the USSR and of nation-building in the independent post-Soviet states have flourished over the past decades. However, despite the relevance of the theme, there is a dearth of specialist publications which address the many issues related to minority communities in the post-Soviet space. This volume attempts to fill this gap by providing a collection of essays covering some of the most relevant aspects of the contemporary status and situation of minorities in the area.

Manchuria is a historical region, which roughly corresponds to Northeast China. The Manchu people, who established the last dynasty of Imperial China (the Qing, 1644–1911) originated there, and it has been the stage of turbulent events during the twentieth century: the Russo-Japanese war, Japanese occupation and establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo, Soviet invasion, and Chinese civil war. This innovative and accessible historical survey both introduces Manchuria to students and general readers and contributes to the emerging regional perspective in the study of China.

This edited collection examines the effects of the Great War and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in East Asia. Contributors to this collection highlight how Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Mongolian groups and individuals actively sought to envision a global order in which the center of gravity lay in the Western Pacific, not the Northern Atlantic.

Health and development require one another: there can be no development without a critical mass of people who are sufficiently healthy to do whatever it takes for development to occur, and people cannot be healthy without societal developments that enable standards of health to be maintained or improved. However, the ways in which health and development interact are complex and contested. This volume unites eleven case studies from nine countries in three continents and two international organizations since the late-nineteenth century. Collectively, they show how different actors have struggled to reconcile the sometimes contradictory nature of health and development policies, and the subordination of these policies to a range of political objectives.

The Russian Far East was a remarkably fluid region in the period leading up to, during, and after the Russian Revolution. The different contenders in play in the region, imagining and working toward alternative futures, comprised different national groups, including Russians, Buryat-Mongols, Koreans, and Ukrainians; different imperialist projects, including Japanese and American attempts to integrate the region into their political and economic spheres of influence as well as the legacies of Russian expansionism and Bolshevik efforts to export the revolution to Mongolia, Korea, China, and Japan; and various local regionalists, who aimed for independence or strong regional autonomy for distinct Siberian and Far Eastern communities and whose efforts culminated in the short-lived Far Eastern Republic of 1920–1922. The Rise and Fall of Russia’s Far Eastern Republic, 1905–1922 charts developments in the region, examines the interplay of the various forces, and explains how a Bolshevik version of state-centered nationalism prevailed.

Language, Literacy, and Social Change in Mongolia is the first full-length treatment of literacy in Mongolian. Challenging readers’ assumptions about Central Asia and Mongolia, this book focuses on Mongolians’ experiences with reading and writing throughout the past 100 years. Literacy, as a powerful historical and social variable, shows readers how reading and writing have shaped the lives of Mongolians and, at the same time, how reading and writing have been transformed by historical, political, economic, and other social forces. Mongolian literacy serves as an especially rich area of inquiry because of the dramatic political, economic, and social changes that occurred in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. For the seventy years during which Mongolia was a part of the communist Soviet world, literacy played an important role in how Mongolians identified themselves, conceived of the past, and created a new social order. Literacy was also a part of the story of authoritarianism and state violence. It was used to express the authority of the communist Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party, control the pastoral population, and suppress non-socialist beliefs and practices. Mongolians’ reading and writing opportunities and resources were tightly controlled, and the language policy of replacing the traditional Mongolian script with the Cyrillic alphabet immediately followed the violent repression of Buddhist leaders, government officials, and intellectuals. Beginning with the 1990 Democratic Revolution, Mongolians have been thrust into free-market capitalism, privatization, globalization, and neoliberalism. In post-socialist Mongolia, literacy no longer serves as the center for Mongolian identity. Government subsidies to pastoral literacy resources have been slashed, and administrators now find themselves competing with other “developing countries” for educational funding. Due to the pressures caused by globalization, Mongolians have begun to talk about literacy and language in terms of crisis and anxiety. As global flows of English compete with new symbols from the distant past, Mongolians worry about the perceived lowering standards of Mongolian linguistic usage amid rapid economic changes. These worries also reveal themselves in official language policies and manifest themselves in the multiple languages and scripts that appear in the capital of Ulaanbaatar and other urban areas.

In the aftermath of the First World War the Western great powers sought to redefine international norms according to their liberal vision. They introduced Western-led multilateral organizations to regulate cross-border flows which became pivotal in the making of an interconnected global order. In contrast to this well-studied transformation, Hirst considers in detail for the first time the responses of the defeated interwar Soviet Union and early Republican Turkey who challenged this new order with a reactive and distinctly state-led international politics. As Mustafa Kemal Atat?rk took up arms in 1920 to overturn the terms of the Paris settlement, Vladimir Lenin provided military and economic aid as part of a partnership that both sides described as anti-imperialist. Over the course of the next two decades, the Soviet and Turkish states coordinated joint measures to accelerate development in spheres ranging from aviation to linguistics. Most importantly, Soviet engineers and architects helped colleagues in Ankara launch a five-year plan and build massive state-owned factories to produce textiles and replace Western imports. Whilst the Kemalists' cooperation with the Bolsheviks has often been described as pragmatic, this book demonstrates that Moscow and Ankara actually came together in an ideological convergence rooted in anxiety about underdevelopment relative to the West, gradually arriving at statist internationalism as an alternative to Western liberal internationalism. Drawing on extensive archival research and offering an often-ignored and non-Western perspective on the history of international relations and diplomacy, Against the Liberal Order presents a novel interpretation of the international order of the interwar period that crosses the borders of historical disciplines and contributes to questions of current concern in world politics.