![Sample our Area Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5922/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Area-Studies.jpg"})
Abstract
This paper aims to reconstruct widely accepted concepts of the top-down authoritarian nature of Central Asian politics in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan through a comparative study of the pro-democratic movements that emerged in the late 1980s. By analysing data from interviews with the cultural elites of the late Soviet perestroika period and data on the indigenous nationalist movements such as Erk, Zheltoksan, Birlik and others, we question why such nationalist movements did not “survive” or emerge as a significant political platform as promised in post-independence Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and why they failed to change the political outlook of one party rule or the dominance of one nationalising regime. Furthermore, we analyse how such nationalist movements had an opportunity to turn into semi-democratic movements but failed to transform after their agenda (arguably, independence) was achieved, leaving “communists-turned-nationalists” to continue their policies in newly formed countries. Thus, the paper also looks at how these cultural elites eventually contributed to the local “authoritarianism” and lack of plurality in views and identifications.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the organisers of the 2013 Soyuz conference that was held at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University in March 2013, where this paper was first presented. We are grateful for the comments of Zhanara Nauryzbayeva, Laura Adams, and the participants at the conference, as well as those of two anonymous reviewers and the editorial board of the Asian Studies Review. Our work and collaboration were greatly influenced by our academic community in Cambridge – the Cambridge Central Asia Forum, the Centre for Development Studies, the Department of Slavonic Studies and the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge, as well as the Asia-Pacific Research Centre at Hanyang University and Lund University.
Notes
1. See March (Citation2002), Beachain & Kevlihan (Citation2014) and Rasanayagam (Citation2014).
2. In order to avoid falling into the trap of an ethnosymbolic approach to nationalism, one has to bear in mind that although particular myths emerging from oral epics – e.g., the Bearslayer in Latvia (“Lacplesis”) or Manas in Kyrgyzstan and Central Asia in general – do appear to be widely shared, their political and cultural appropriation for political goals occurs due to the formation of the more or less stable structure of agency. The further crystallisation of such myths happens when a national community achieves a level of some “modernisation” and nations emerge. This is particularly true of sedentary societies and communities.
3. The Bolshevik policy of korenizatsiia or indigenisation in the 1920s gave the members of each republic’s titular nationality privileges over land, housing, jobs and education, and encouraged recruitment of local intellectuals for high-ranking government posts.
4. See Shin (Citation2017).
5. As Abashin notes (2010, p. 89), the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras, which encompass more than a third of Soviet history, “are absent from the Museum”, because not only did these periods “yield no eloquent testimony of mass resistance and repression”, but also dissidents from these periods “were marginal, in relation both to the dominant ideology and to the established Uzbek elite”.
6. Interview with the Museum’s guide, 13 February 2011.
7. Along with Abdurauf Fitrat (1886–1938), Cholpan (1893–1938) and Abdulla Qodiriy (1894–1938) are the two most celebrated Jadid writers in today’s Uzbekistan. It was much later that Abdurauf Fitrat, who was more of a leading Jadid ideologue than a literary figure, was rehabilitated.
8. It should also be noted that the elites that built their careers during the Stalinist era (late 1920s to 1940s) were also subjected to a series of interrogations in the 1930s that jeopardised their newly-earned status as state writer-intellectuals as well as their lives. Often they were questioned on their relationships with the former Jadid or Bolshevik leaders and reprimanded if found to have had close personal or professional connections to them. This past experience may have contributed to their reluctance to rehabilitate their predecessors.
9. This was a continuation of the wartime restoration of national histories in Central Asia, which was encouraged by the Soviet centre desperate to win the hearts of its peripheral population. See Shin (Citation2016).
10. For Khrushchev era nationality policy, see Bell (Citation1999), Kreindler (Citation1990) and Khlevniuk (Citation2001).
11. The network of bribery and corruption, however, expanded beyond the Uzbek SSR and across the Soviet Union. For further discussion of this see Collins (Citation2006).
12. The social and environmental problems of cotton monoculture – including economic dependency on the centre, drying up of the Aral Sea, use of child labour for cotton harvest and widespread rural unemployment – also fed the discontent among the native population, who came to see cotton monoculture as representative of Moscow’s exploitation of Uzbekistan. See Ro’i (Citation1989).
13. Interview with author, 20 February 2011, Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
14. “Rashidov Rehabilitated”, The Moscow Times, 12 November 1992.
15. Furthermore, files on the early Uzbek Bolshevik leaders including Faizulla Hojaev and Akmal Ikramov and the 1930s trial records are selectively sealed as classified information.
16. Interview with author, February 2011, Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
17. Interview with author, January 2011, Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
18. Author’s interview with the director, February 2011, Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
19. In the case of Kenesary Kasymov or December 1986 protests.
20. Kazakhstanskaya Pravda, 17 December 1991, p. 2.
21. Olzhas Suleimenov interview (2005), Epokha newspaper.
22. Interview with author, April 2011, Almaty.