Recollections of emerging hybrid ethnic identities in Soviet Central Asia: the case of Uzbekistan

Abstract

This paper is a contribution to the debate about how people in Central Asia recall Soviet ethnic policies and their vision of how these policies have shaped the identities of their peers and contemporaries. In order to do so, this paper utilizes the outcomes of in-depth interviews about everyday Soviet life in Uzbekistan conducted with 75 senior citizens between 2006 and 2009. These narratives demonstrate that people do not explain Soviet ethnic policies simply through the “modernization” or “victimization” dichotomy but place their experiences in between these discourses. Their recollections also highlight the pragmatic flexibility of the public's adaptive strategies to Soviet ethnic policies. This paper also argues that Soviet ethnic policy produced complicated hybrid units of identities and multiple social strata. Among those who succeeded in adapting to the Soviet realities, a new group emerged, known as Russi assimilados (Russian-speaking Sovietophiles). However, in everyday life, relations between the assimilados and their “indigenous” or “nativist” countrymen are reported to have been complicated, with clear divisions between these two groups and separate social spaces of their own for each of these strata.

Keywords:

• Soviet ethnic policy
• collective memory
• Central Asia

Notes

1. For analysis of this type of argument and attempts to depict Soviet peripheries as underdeveloped, see Kuzio (2002).

2. For analysis of similar phenomena in Ukraine, see Kuzio (2002, 246).

3. For a detailed methodology of data collection, see Dadabaev (2010). For limitations of the survey research in Uzbekistan, see Dadabaev (2008).

4. For the similar approach to memory and identity formation in Germany and Russia, see Forest, Johnson, and Till (2004).

5. In addition to ethnic policies, similar policy paradoxes and dualities of intention were also highlighted in gender issues. See Kandiyoti (2007).

6. Many scholars of identity and nationalism recognize that national identity often comprises the influences of both objective and subjective markers. The degree of combination of the two and the degree of subordination to each other defines the dominant identity of the nation. For details, see Ozkirimli (2005).

7. For a comparative perspective with Ukraine, see Kuzio (2002, 247–248).

8. For an analysis of myths and the typologies of mythmaking, see Smith (1984).

9. For the policies of Imperial Russia in Central Asia, see Abashin et al. (2008).

10. For a compact description of Soviet national projects in the early years of USSR, see Abashin (2008, 177–195).

11. For discussion of objective and subjective markers of nation, see Ozkirimli (2005).

12. For policy details, see Slezkine (1994).

13. For the argument that Russianization was the policy of nurturing a Soviet elite, see Gammer (2000).

14. For an introduction of theatrical form of art and its connection to colonialism in Soviet Uzbekistan, see Adams (2005).

15. For debates among literature critics, see Fierman (1981).

16. For that matter, the general population, including the Russians living in Uzbekistan at the time, also accepted this practice. In the findings of an opinion poll conducted in 1990–1991 with regard to Russianization (targeting 820 Uzbeks and 460 Russians), over one-fifth of respondents (22.2%) expressed the perception that Russians held a monopoly over the key posts in the Communist Party and the government. Close to one-third (27.8%) of Russians respondents, meanwhile, said they held negative impressions of people of other cultures and ethnic groups. For details, see S. Nikolaev, “Russians in Uzbekistan”, in Shlapentokh, Sendich, and Payin (1994).

17. For the assertion that these were purely elites, see Gammer (2000).

18. For the evolution of the place of Russian in education in Central Asia see Aneta Pavlenko (2008), in particular 296–300.

19. For a comparative description of the notion of new nationalism, see Chatterjee (1986).

20. According to the survey conducted by the Levada Center, one's place of residence growing up, language and ethnic and religious traditions were the highest ranking categories in associating oneself with “one's people” in Uzbekistan in the Soviet times. See Levada (1993).

21. The public recollections in this study also contribute to the debate about the notion of friendship of people and its nature. There were few studies which focused on this phenomenon among migrants in post-Soviet environments. For instance see, Sahadeo (2007). The narration in this study is an attempt to relate it to the politics and practice of “friendship of people” in the internal context in Uzbekistan.

22. For the Ukrainian case, see Inkeles and Bauer (1959).