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The history of public education in Uzbekistan as reflected
in foreign historiography
Mirjalolkhon ASATULLAEV
1
Samarkand State University named after Sharof Rashidov
ARTICLE INFO
ABSTRACT
Article history:
Received July 2025
Received in revised form
15 July 2025
Accepted 25 July 2025
Available online
15 August 2025
This article examines the history of public education in
Uzbekistan through the lens of foreign historiography. It
explores the restructuring of the universal compulsory
education system, the separation of church and school, and the
development of adult education programs.
2181-
1415/©
2025 in Science LLC.
https://doi.org/10.47689/2181-1415-vol6-iss7/S-pp80-86
This is an open access article under the Attribution 4.0 International
(CC BY 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.ru)
Keywords:
A. Park,
J. Wheeler,
devastation,
famine,
epidemic,
literacy,
Soviet colonialism,
K.E. Bendrikov,
A. Noof,
J. Noof,
E. Bacon,
District,
education,
decree,
schools,
teacher,
apparatus,
educational process.
O‘zbekistonda
xalq
ta’limi
tarixining
chet
el
tarixshunosligida aks ettirilishi
ANNOTATSIYA
Kalit so‘zlar
:
A. Park,
J. Uiler,
vayronagarchilik,
ocharchilik,
Ushbu maqolada xorijiy tarixshunoslik nuqtai nazaridan
O‘zbekiston xalq ta’limi tarixi, umumiy majburiy ta’lim ta’lim
tizimini qayta qurish, cherkovni maktabdan ajratish, kattalar
ta’limi tizimini tashkil etish haqida ma’lumotlar berilgan.
1
Assistant, Samarkand State University named after Sharof Rashidov.
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epidemiya,
savodxonlik,
Sovet mustamlakachiligi,
K.E. Bendrikov,
A. Noof,
J. Noof,
E. Bekon,
tuman,
ta
’
lim,
farmon,
maktablar,
o
‘
qituvchi,
apparat,
o
‘
quv jarayoni.
История народного образования в Узбекистане в
отражении зарубежной историографии
АННОТАЦИЯ
Ключевые слова:
А. Парк,
Дж. Уиллер,
разруха,
голод,
эпидемия,
грамотность,
советский колониализм,
К.Е. Бендриков,
А. Ноуф,
Дж. Ньюф,
Э. Бекон,
район,
образование,
постановление,
школы,
учитель,
аппарат,
учебный процесс.
В данной статье представлена информация об истории
народного образования в Узбекистане в освещении
зарубежной историографии, перестройке образовательной
системы всеобщего обязательного обучения, отделение
церкви от школы, организация системы образования для
взрослых.
In foreign bourgeois literature, considerable attention is paid to the development
of public education in Uzbekistan. Many books and articles have been published in which,
using documentary material, most often tendentiously selected, the history of public
education and training of personnel in the republics of Soviet Central Asia and
Kazakhstan is presented.
It must be said that now even the authors of the most reactionary trend are forced
to acknowledge the fact that the Soviet government, in the first days of its existence,
abolished all social and national restrictions in the public education system.
The Bolsheviks, writes A. Park, immediately began to restructure the educational system.
Its initial goals were the introduction of universal compulsory education, the separation
of church from school, and the organization of an education system for adults. The author
notes that in 1918, the Fifth Congress of Soviets proclaimed the principle of free and
equal educational opportunities for workers and the poorest peasantry, and abolished
pre-
revolutionary restrictions based on race and nationality, “thus laying the legal
foundation for the development of a state educational system for national minorities of
the RSFSR.”
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The author talks about measures to ensure the operation of the school, about the
allocation of 56 million rubles in 1918 for the needs of public education, about the
publication of textbooks in 12 languages, the organization of special departments of
public education for national minorities, and so on. But then A. Park states that in
connection with the “cessation of Moscow subsidies” for the needs of public education in
national regions with the beginning of the NEP, educational institutions were closed in
many places, and the rural school,
the basis of Soviet education in the “Muslim
community, almost disappeared”
[1].
G. Wheller, speaking about the reduction in the number of schools and the number
of students in 1921
–1923, also emphasizes that the central government “cut subsidies for
the needs of education in Soviet Turkestan and suggested that the government of the
Turkic Republic rely on local resources in school construction [2].
It is easy to see that while A.
Park speaks of “terminating the Moscow subsidy,”
G.
Wheller writes only of “reducing” it, which is closer to the truth. But both Park and
Wheeler, driven by a single desire to impose on the reader the idea of the dismissive,
“colonialist” attitude of the RSFSR government, Russian communists to the needs of the
workers of the Turkestan Republic, deliberately remain silent about the true reasons for
the reduction of the school network in Turkestan in 1921
–
1923.
Indeed, after the rapid and to some extent spontaneous growth of the school
network in 1918
–
1920, many schools began to close in 1921 due to a number of
objective historical reasons. This is explained primarily by the exceptional difficulties of
the period of civil war and foreign intervention, which gave rise to deep economic ruin,
famine, and epidemics. The rampant Basmachi rebellion caused enormous damage to the
ongoing construction of the Soviet school, as a result of which village and aul schools in
the Fergana, Samarkand regions and the Tejen region of Turkmenistan were almost
completely liquidated.
The economic situation of the Turkestan Republic became especially acute in the
summer of 1921 due to drought, crop failure and famine in the Volga region and
neighboring areas. The workers of Turkestan had to shelter over 200 thousand people
from the Volga region, although the food situation in Central Asia itself was also difficult.
As the magazine “Life of Nationalities” reported, two
-thirds of the population of the
Kirghiz Autonomous Republic were starving at the time. By the end of 1922, there were
up to 170,000 homeless children in Turkestan who needed to be provided with shelter
and food [3].
These and other circumstances led to a reduction in the school network. In 1923,
the student contingent in the TASSR fell from 422 thousand to 69 thousand. The situation
in Central Russia was not the best, where it was also necessary to reduce subsidies for
public education. In 1923, the government of the Turkic Republic accepted 577 school-
type institutions into its budget, including 492 aul-kishlak schools, maintained at the
expense of the population. Using local resources, 696 schools were opened in the
Semipalatinsk region alone, 431 of which were for the Kyrgyz population. These schools
covered 26.6 thousand children [4]. Local party, trade union, public and cooperative
organization
s were involved in school construction. “Measures have been taken to ensure
that,” the journal “Life of Nationalities” wrote in 1923, “that existing schools would first
accept children of workers and Red Army soldiers, laborers and peasants [5].
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The successes of the new economic policy gradually created the necessary
conditions for overcoming the difficult situation in school construction. Since 1924, the
number of schools and cultural and educational institutions has grown at an ever-faster
rate. In 1926, in the territory of Central Asia, there were already 2,575 first-level schools,
85 second-level schools, and 89 vocational schools, as well as 11 Soviet party schools,
3 workers' faculties, a state university in Tashkent, a higher pedagogical institution in
Samarkand, a cooperative and water technical school, and legal courses.
In Uzbekistan in 1924-25, there were 54,800 students in 831 primary schools, and
in 1927-28, there were 96,672 children studying in 1,788 schools. If before the national
demarcation, there were 447 schools of literacy in all of Turkestan, then in 1924-25 in
Uzbekistan alone there were already 1,005 schools of literacy with 33,835 students, and
in 1926-27 there were 1,431 schools and 37,648 students [6].
Bourgeois researchers, seeking to denigrate Soviet policy in the national republics
of the country, ignore the fact that the reduction in the network of schools and the
number of students was temporary, and remain silent about the real reasons that caused
the aforementioned difficulties in school construction in 1921
–
1923. Although the
chronological framework of A. Park's book covers the years 1917
–
1927. He makes his
conclusion about school construction based on data from 1921
–
1923, and as a result
comes to the false conclusion about the "failure of the Soviet government's attempts to
create a more or less satisfactory system of public education in Turkestan [7].
Thus, bourgeois historians create entire concepts on the most primitive distortion
of facts. Their conjectures are in blatant contradiction with historical reality. It was
precisely the successes in school construction that led to the fact that by 1930 literacy in
Uzbekistan had increased to 27.3%, and in 1940 to 98% to 2% in 1897 [8].
Falsifying the history of public education in Soviet Uzbekistan, A. Park, as a faithful
knight of the concept of “Soviet colonialism,” claims that in the first years of Soviet power,
the interests of the local population in the area of public education were allegedly
infringed in favor of the European (read: Russian) population. He claims that in the
Turkish Republic, the Europeans had 1/3 more schools than the Muslims, and the
European school accommodated twice as many students. "Only such efforts were made to
satisfy the needs of non-Russian peoples in education." [9].
A. Noof and J. Neuf also try to convince the reader that preferential attention was
paid to city schools with “their Russian” contingent, as a result of which in 1923 literacy
among Europeans was 35.3%, and among the local population 2% [10]. It seems that
during the 5 years of Soviet power, there was no shift in the literacy of the local
population. Meanwhile, its literacy in 1922, according to the Soviet researcher
K.E. Bendrikov, was not 2%, but 8%.[11]
As for the disproportionality in providing Soviet schools for children of different
nationalities in the Turkic Republic, it did indeed still exist in the early years. But this was
explained by a number of historical reasons, which A. Park, A. Noof and J. Newf prefer not
to talk about. As K.E. Bendrikov notes, this disproportionality was one of the legacies of
the pre-revolutionary past, when the Russian population of Turkestan, colonized by
tsarism, was provided with schools even better than the population of European Russia,
not to mention the indigenous nationalities. The rapid growth of the network of Soviet
schools with instruction in the languages of the indigenous population was hampered by
an acute shortage of national teaching staff, as well as textbooks and teaching aids in the
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native language. In addition, the Soviet school was established in a stubborn struggle
with the traditional Muslim school maktabs, the network of which was quite significant in
the first years of Soviet power.
Some foreign researchers show an understanding of the objective nature of the
difficulties that had to be overcome in the first years of Soviet power in organizing a new
system of public education. E. Bacon, for example, attributes to these difficulties the
generally low educational level, as a result of which few qualified people among the local
nationalities could be entrusted with education. Few Russian teachers knew local
languages. There was a shortage of textbooks. The development of female education was
a very difficult matter. The development of school education in nomadic areas was
particularly difficult. Summarizing all these difficulties, E. Bacon notes: "The Soviet
government was faced with the enormous task of implementing its policy of achieving
universal literacy and creating a cadre of skilled administrators, professional and
technical workers" [12].
Despite all the complexity of this matter, already in the first 2-3 years of the
existence of the Turkestan Republic, a lot of work was done in the field of education of
local nationalities. In 1919, compared to the end of 1917, the school network increased
by 855 primary and secondary schools, and the total number of students (excluding
religious schools) increased from 54,775 in the pre-revolutionary period to 154,346.
At the same time, the proportion of local nationalities increased accordingly from 11.1 to
59.4% [13].
These facts convincingly testify to the falsity of the conjectures of the bourgeois
falsifiers who distort the essence of Soviet policy in the field of education of the peoples
of Central Asia in the first post-October years.
If A. Park speaks of the “infringement” of the rights of the local population in
providing schools in the first years of Soviet power, then A. Noof and J. Newf extend this
assertion to the subsequent period. Claiming that the last Muslim school was replaced by
a Soviet one in the mid-1930s (in reality, in 1928), the authors write that during this
period (that is, until the mid-
1930s), the “lion’s share of the funds” allocated for publ
ic
education by the government were absorbed by European city schools [14].
And here we are faced with a deliberately biased presentation of the facts. First of
all, it must be said that the network of confessional schools was steadily shrinking, and by
the end of the 1920s, their number was already insignificant. Back in 1924, out of
212 madrassas and 191 maktabs located in the cities, 10 madrassas and 41 maktabs
were reorganized into Soviet schools. This process progressed every year.
The idea imposed on the reader that the schools where the local population
studied were maintained only by waqfs and were not provided by the state budget does
not correspond to reality. In the budget of the People's Commissariat of Education of the
Uzbek SSR, waqf incomes then constituted only 7-8%; more than 50% was provided by
local budgets, the rest by the state budget. The authors’ scientific dishonesty also
includes the fact that, when characterizing the period up to the mid-1930s, the authors
cite statistical data from 1923, which, as we have shown, are also incorrect.
Not content with this, A. Noof and J. Neuf direct the sharpest edge of their criticism
at the first teachers of the Soviet school. They claim that most teachers of local nationality
preferred to hold party and government posts rather than be "poorly paid teachers" in
"potentially hostile local areas" [15]. This is a gross slander against the wonderful
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representatives of the first generation of Soviet teachers, for whom work in the field of
public education was, first and foremost, the fulfillment of their civic patriotic duty. Such
wonderful teachers as T.N. Kary-Niyazov, Shakuri, Abdulla Avloni, Hamza Hakim-zade
Niyazi, Aibek, and many others grew out of them.
The first Soviet teachers had to work in an incredibly difficult environment, when
“the school was in extremely difficult conditions: the teaching staff did not receive wages,
the children were starving, the school buildings were not heated…”
[16].
The enemies of Soviet power, the baistvo, the Basmachi, the reactionary clergy, and
the bourgeois nationalists terrorized the teachers of the new schools in every possible
way. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Uzbek SSR Kary-Niyazov, who took
part in organizing one of the first Uzbek schools in
Fergana, recalled that in 1918, “gangs
of Basmachi attacked the city, persecuted Soviet teachers, and killed them. The school
staff was forced to organize an armed detachment that guarded the school at night.”
Many such facts can be cited.
Based on the fact that universal primary education in rural areas was achieved in
Uzbekistan only in 1940, some bourgeois historians claim that the pre-war Soviet school
system “did not provide equal and fair opportunities for young people,” especially in
rural areas.
“…The son of a peasant,” writes V. Kulski, “completed his education by the age of
11, after which he had to work on a collective farm, and he remained a peasant for the
rest of his life.” [17]
.
Meanwhile, in Uzbekistan, from the very first days of the existence of Soviet power,
a wide network of various educational institutions was deployed, where farmers and
their children, often without even four years of education in a Soviet school, received
special training. By 1923, according to incomplete data, about 100 agronomic, craft,
pedagogical and other schools were opened in the Turkic Republic. Special preparatory
groups were created for students of local nationalities in all educational institutions [18].
During the indigenization of the state apparatus, dekhkans were widely involved in
various courses to train workers for the Soviet apparatus. For example, in 1928
–
1929,
republican courses to train workers and farm laborers were organized under the
People's Commissariat of Justice; 90% of their students were people of local nationalities.
To train financial workers from indigenous nationalities, the People's
Commissariat of Finance of the Uzbek SSR opened corresponding courses not only in
Tashkent, but also in the Samarkand, Andijan, Kokand, Khorezm, Bukhara districts,
where the nominees were, as a rule, residents of the villages [19].
During the socialist reconstruction of agriculture, broad masses of farmers
mastered the latest machine technology and received professions that the pre-
revolutionary village had no idea about. Machine operators were trained at various
courses, in evening schools for collective farm youth, at special training centers of state
farms and tractor schools. In 1931, 9,250 people received the profession of a tractor
driver, and at the beginning of 1932, 69,983 machine operators were trained in the
Narkomzem system alone. Already in those years, the formation of female cadres of rural
machine operators began. In 1931, 6.4 thousand women of local nationalities worked in
state farms and MTS, and in 1933, 14,682 women. Yesterday's illiterate peasant, who
knew how to handle only primitive medieval tools, became a qualified, technically
competent worker, specialist, and manager of collective and state farm production.
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At each new stage of socialist construction, the Soviet system of public education
faced increasingly important tasks, and the Communist Party and the Soviet state, relying
on the active support of the working masses themselves, persistently sought to
successfully resolve these tasks.
Particular attention was paid to the development of public education in Uzbekistan
and other national republics of the Union, which was of great importance in ensuring the
actual equality of peoples previously oppressed by tsarism, the flourishing of their
economy and culture, the grandiose achievements of which are now known throughout
the world. And no speculations of foreign falsifiers can refute these real facts or distort
the historical truth of our lives.
REFERENCES
1.
A. Park. Bolshevism in Turkestan. (1907-1927), N. Y., 1957, p. 356-357.
2.
G. Wheller. The Modern History of Soviet Central Asia, L., 1964, p. 204.
3.
Киргизская Автономная республика, Жизнь национальностей, 1923, № 1,
стр. 47, 55.
4.
К. Е. Бендриков. Очерки истории народного образования
в Туркестане. М.,
1960, стр. 447.
5.
Жизнь национальностей, 1923, кн. 2, стр. 235.
6.
Там же, стр. 127.
7.
А. Парк. Указ соч., стр. 361.
8.
К. Е. Бендриков. Указ соч., стр. 381.
9.
А. Парк. Указ соч., стр. 361.
10.
A. Nove and J. Newth. The Soviet Middle East. A. Communist Model for Asia, N.
Y., Wash., 1967, p. 70.
11.
К. Е. Бендриков. Указ соч., стр. 447.
12.
E. Bacon. Central Asians under Rusian Rule, N. Y., 1966, p. 146.
13.
К. Е. Бендриков. Указ соч., стр. 438.
14.
A. Nove and J. Newth. The Soviet Middle East. A. Communist Model for Asia, N.
Y., Wash., 1967, p. 68-69.
15.
Nove and J. Newth. The Soviet Middle East. A. Communist Model for Asia, N. Y.,
Wash., 1967, p. 70.
16.
Коммунистическая революция, 1928, № 5, стр. 59.
17.
W. W. Kulski. The Soviet Regime. Communism in Practice, N. Y., 1963, p. 291.
18.
Жизнь нациоанальностей, 1923, кн. 3
-
4. стр. 102.
19.
А.
Новодворский. Из истории деятельности ЦКК
-
РКИ Узбекистана.
Общественные науки в Узбекистане, 1964, № 6, стр. 39.
