LAUSR

The centenary year of the 1916 Central Asian Revolt has received more attention than many had anticipated, with numerous conferences and publications in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Russia, but S. Frederick Starr’s Central-Asia Caucasus Institute at the Johns Hopkins University is so far the only western institution to have recognized the anniversary, with a reception in June 2016 at which the publication under review was launched.1 Unfortunately this reprinting of a sixty year old monograph (closer in time to the revolt itself than to our day), with no revisions or additions other than a four-page foreword, does an important subject few favors. It does not help that Starr manages to cram as many factual errors and misleading statements into those four pages as most scholars could manage in a full-length book. This begins with the very first sentence, in which Starr states that “a century ago approximately 270,000 Central Asians—Kazakhs, Tajiks, Turkmen, Uzbeks, and especially Kyrgyz—perished in one of the most ghastly mass deaths in modern history” (vii). In fact, estimates of the number who died vary widely—while the only demographic studies we have, based on tax data, suggest that some 267,000 people “went missing” in Semirech é in 1916, this includes missing births and emigration. The number of deaths was probably closer to 150,000, and of these it is not clear what proportion died directly at the hands of Russian forces, or as a result of disease and starvation while fleeing to China.2 This story is horrific enough without the need for embellishment, but it soon becomes clear why Starr is espousing a maximalist estimate of the number of deaths, as he compares this “mass killing” to the Armenian genocide. In this he is echoing accusations that were first heard from the “Asaba” opposition party in Kyrgyzstan in the early 1990s, and which have gained considerable traction in the media and among nationalist historians in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan during the centenary year, without receiving official endorsement in either country.3 These accusations are aimed squarely at Russia, and have unsurprisingly been vehemently refuted by Russian historians,