“Sowing the Seed of National Strife in This Alien Region”: The Pahlen Report and Pereselenie in Turkestan, 1908–1910
“Sowing the Seed of National Strife in This Alien Region”: The Pahlen Report and Pereselenie in Turkestan, 1908–1910

Summary/Abstract: The report of the Commission for the Inspection of the Turkestan region led by Senator Count Konstantin Konstantinovich von der Pahlen (1861–1923) was frequently cited in the publications of the first generation of western historians to work on pre-revolutionary Russian Central Asia.2 As Richard Pierce noted, whilst at the time the Pahlen Commission’s one-year tour of inspection from June 1908–1909, together with the immense labor of writing, collating and correcting the twenty-three volumes of its report, might have been an exercise in futility, the latter later became a gold-mine of information for historians excluded from Soviet archives in Russia and Uzbekistan. Combined with Pahlen’s lively memoirs, composed in exile in 1922 in his native German and published and translated in 1964, the Pahlen Report was the single most important source for the administrative structures and economy of the Russian Empire’s most colonial periphery, namely Turkestan.

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