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International audience; The 1916 Revolt was a key event in the history of Central Asia, and of the Russian Empire in the First World War. This volume is the first comprehensive re-assessment of its causes, course and consequences in English for over sixty years. It draws together a new generation of leading historians from North America, Japan, Europe, Russia and Central Asia, working with Russian archival sources, oral narratives, poetry and song in Kazakh and Kyrgyz. These illuminate in unprecedented detail the origins and causes of the revolt, and the immense human suffering which it entailed. They also situate the revolt in a global perspective as part of a chain of rebellions and disturbances that shook the world’s empires, as they crumbled under the pressures of total war.

This article attempts to answer the question of how an ethnographic survey transformed into a political question at the heart of the young Soviet Kirghizia. The debate centered on whether a class could be made out of the manaps, the tribal chieftains, utterly suspect in Soviet eyes. The article argues that by clothing the Soviet assault on the Central Asian traditional nomadic societies in the developmentalist Marxist rhetoric, the authorities justified the elimination of a social group – manaps – that they held accountable for the backwardness and unproductiveness of the nomadic economy. Thus, the “proper” categorization of manaps had deep consequences for the theoretical and ideological legitimacy of the Soviet project of socialist construction in the national periphery.