Tables (Tajikistan)

Tables were a key form of material and symbolic infrastructure of the Soviet system in Central Asia. The tables that the Bolsheviks used for state-building were of a European type, which necessitated sitting on chairs. When Soviet officials travelled the region of Tajikistan in 1920s to take part in military and political campaigns such as show trials (as represented on the above image from 1925), they took tables with them. Carrying tables on horses, donkeys, and camels – along with armaments - to the mountains and valleys of Tajikistan was part of the physical organization of Bolshevik rule. Tables also frequently and prominently featured in Soviet propaganda photographs, an important and expensive investment by the Bolshevik government in the first half of its existence for the popularization of the Bolshevik rule. What made tables such an important object of the Communist regime?

The Soviet regime featured tables in their symbolism because they were a key symbol of Russian imperial rule, which they inherited. The word stol (table in Russian language) signified not only a piece of furniture, but a symbol of rule. The words prestol (throne or altar) and stolitsa (capital city) derive from the word table (stol) because they were related in the Russian imperial imagination and representation. A ruler’s table (throne) is located in the capital city, where sacral governance and presiding takes place. Every time Russian imperial officials carried a table with them to represent the centre’s rule, they were symbolically taking a piece of the throne or government to represent and carry out central tasks. This governing ritual was appropriated by Bolsheviks in Central Asia because they did not aim to institute self-governance and self-rule, but rather force through Moscow’s central governance.

The table allowed for a specific political imagery, which naturalized power on unequal terms. The table in the imperial imagination symbolized permanence, producing an image of immobility and naturalness. It marked those who sat (master and host) from those who approached it, i.e. those who ruled from those who were receivers of rule. Tables produced behaviour, which aimed to institute a hierarchy. Sitting at tables aimed to signal victory and peace: while guns represented fighting and instability, tables imitated poised, bureaucratic and stable governance. The table was a medium of political communication to produce an image of a confident and victorious state.   

Another piece of symbolism that tables carried was the idea of stately provision as a technique of governance, which had its roots in Russian imperial imagination since the Middle Ages. The idea of a feeding and “caring” (zabota) governance was used by the Bolshevik regime, even amid hunger and forceful food requisitioning. The government, according to the feeding governance logic, not only administered, but also literally fed its population. This is why the Bolsheviks colloquially called the Kremlin the kormushka (feeder). The Soviet images of a feeding state were carried out at tables: this is where the imagery of rationing cards and documents of achievements were issued and distributed. Soviet food and goods distribution was hierarchical, as people received according to their status and relation to the state. Tables aimed to cement the hierarchy between the giver and the receivers. Carrying and photographing tables in the furthest corners of Tajikistan was a way to carry not only a piece of a distant throne, but also the imagery of a feeder.

Literature:
Tamara Kondratieva, Kormit’ i Pravit’. O vlasti v Rossii XVI–XX vv, Mosow 2009.
Botakoz Kassymbekova, “Drinking for the Revolution in Stalinabad Alcohol, Soviet Empire and Discipline at the Festive Table,” Historische Anthropologie 28, no. 2 (2020).

Botakoz Kassymbekova is a Lecturer at the University of Basel, Switzerland.