sentences:  The influence of the clans in the contemporary history of Central Asia is derived from the enormous importance that these have held in the past.The weaker states of Central Asia have relied on the social salience of clans to secure their own legitimacy through pacts and informal agreements.These pacts guarantee that the clans have informal access to power and resources and have allowed for the clans to become central actors in post-Soviet politics
  
  Whereas Czarist colonialism had generally left Central Asia’s clans alone, Lenin declared in 1918 that the Bolsheviks would modernize the region and make its peoples into “Soviet nations.” But the vast communist bureaucracy of the Soviet party-state often failed to provide the social and economic goods it promised, and Soviet-forged identities (whether ethnonational or communist) put down only the shallowest of roots in Central Asia.