PhD and a Cup of Tea: Reconfiguring Humanitarianism in the Margins of Empire – Displacement and Relief in Turkestan, 1914-1924
During the First World War, nearly 300.000 refugees and prisoners of war were displaced to Turkestan, which brought the local population into direct contact with a conflict that was being waged thousands of miles away in Russia’s Western borderlands and on the Caucasus front. After the end of the war and the collapse of the Russian Empire, Central Asia once again became host to refugees fleeing catastrophe in Soviet Russia. In 1921, when famine struck the Volga region, the Soviet government transported thousands of people to remote parts of the nascent USSR.