Paper long abstract:

Soviet Central Asia that had enjoyed representation during the 1947 New Delhi Conference (Asia Relations Conference), were uninvited to the 1955 Bandung Conference. The decision to exclude Central Asia seems politically-sound, since inviting the Central Asian republics would allow the Soviet Union to exert its influence on Asia and Africa seeking their own alternative path amidst US-USSR rivalry. However, this exclusion alarmed the Soviet centre that began promoting 'Asian-ness' of Central Asia in order to forge affinity with Asian and African nations gaining independence from European colonial rule. The Central Asian republics, on the other hand, constructed their 'localised' versions of socialist internationalism both as a strategy to channel the Soviet centre's influence and as a mean to consolidate their national identities in the cultural realm. This paper traces the activities of the Uzbek office of the Union of Soviet Societies for Friendship and Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (SSOD) in the earlier years of the Cold War. The Uzbek office, which was the subordinate to the SSOD main office in Moscow, served as the republican-level cultural diplomacy agency. The Uzbek SSOD was in charge of disseminating positive images of Soviet Uzbekistan and building amicable relationship with foreign intellectuals. Therefore, the question of how to promote an economically-advanced and internationalist national image of Soviet Uzbekistan while repudiating the outside criticism towards Central Asia's colonial subordination to the Soviet Union was at the core of its operation. The agency's efforts remain key to understanding the outcomes and legacies of the Cold War that continue to shape post-communist Central Eurasia today.