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Soviet social scientists frequently noted that mixed families were more likely than mono-ethnic families to use Russian, the Soviet lingua franca, as their primary language. Examining the language usage of mixed families is illuminating because these families, unlike most Soviet families, were continually forced to make choices about their language use: which language would husband and wife speak to each other? How they would communicate with the in-laws? Perhaps most importantly, which language(s) would they speak with the children? Among Russian-speaking women who married Central Asian men in the 1940s and 1950s, most learned to speak the local language well. From the early 1960s on, the everyday language in mixed families was most often Russian. Use of Russian was especially common among those mixed families with one Russian parent, but was also widespread in families without either a Russian parent or one from the republic's titular nationality. There was a gendered aspect to language use. Russian wives were frequently the most forceful advocates of preserving the husband's culture, while Central Asian men often pushed the Russian language on their children, hoping to ensure their future success in Soviet society. The result was a disconnect between "official nationality" and language use for many ethnically mixed children: the children were expected to take their father's nationality in their passports, but not necessarily to speak his language.

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This paper examines the form and ideological content of Communist Party propaganda in Kazakhstan during the 1930s (1929-1939). It argues that the form of propaganda - the method by which propagandists conveyed information to the Kazakh populace (usually through classes, lectures, and reading circles) - undermined the transformative impact of its content. Soviet propaganda in Kazakhstan during the 1930s was plagued by chronic shortcomings such as poorly trained propagandists, shortages of print resources, as well as disinterest in propaganda work by local, regional, and even high ranking Communist Party officials. Furthermore, the bureaucracy of the Party propaganda department interpreted the number of propaganda events, rather than the transformative effect of propaganda on Soviet Kazakh society, as a measure of success and equated declarations to improve propaganda work as actual improvements in propaganda work. This bureaucratic culture meant that many of the above-mentioned shortcomings remained unresolved for the duration of the Stalinist period and both factors served to undermine the transformative impact of communist ideology in Kazakhstan, rather than reinforce it.

My paper relies on Marshal McLuhan's paradigm of "the medium is the message" to explain the effect of flawed Soviet propaganda on the Kazakh populace. McLuhan argues the true message of a medium is not its content, but the change in thinking that the transmission technologies engender on society. The chronic shortcomings of propaganda combined with the reality that the experience of normal people in Kazakhstan did not correspond with what the propaganda was promising. Rather than indoctrinating and mobilizing Kazakhs as flag-bearers of Soviet communism, the problems with propaganda limited Kazakh allegiance to and faith in the Communist Party and the Soviet state.

In contrast to previous studies on Soviet propaganda, I prioritize the mechanics of propaganda production and dissemination over propaganda content. While examining propaganda content is an important component of gauging the effect that propaganda might have had on Kazakh society, I argue the mechanics by which this content flowed from the halls of the Kremlin to the Central Asian steppe played a more decisive role in the Soviet state's ability to rule over its population and to make the Kazakhs Soviet. This paper is based on the bureaucratic correspondence of the Kazakh Communist Party's propaganda and agitation department, as well as other archival materials such as lesson plans, instructional texts, and ideological publications from archives in both Russia and Kazakhstan.

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Paper long abstract:

Soviet nationalities policy under Lenin and Stalin has received widespread attention from scholars working at both the center and periphery of the Soviet Union, including across Soviet Central Asia. Considerably less attention has been turned to the fate of so-called "affirmative action" policies in the decades after Stalin's death, when the promotion of the Soviet Union's ethnic minorities broadly continued, even as many initiatives were scaled back in favor of increasing preference for the Russian language and ethnic Russians. Even less attention has been to paid to the experience of ordinary citizens during this time. Working with recently declassified citizens' letters written by residents of Central Asia to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Mikhail Gorbachev personally, this paper considers public discourse about the status of interethnic relations and, in particular, on matters related to the promotion of ethnic minorities. These letters suggest widespread disapproval of central policy initiatives and local conditions, both from ethnic Russians and other Europeans, who complained of growing popular nationalism and the state's undue preference for ethnic minorities, whom they saw as underqualified and undeserving of special treatment, and from non-Russians, who claimed that Soviet policies did not go far enough to promote ethnic minorities in the spheres of politics, culture, and language policy and advocated a more radical position. These letters highlight the party-state's overarching failure to justify and popularize its approach to interethnic relations. Together, these views suggest both the great instabilities that were increasingly present at the Soviet periphery and the increasingly constrained limits in which the party and state were operating. The letters, written between 1986 and 1991, suggest growing instability as articulated by citizens on the ground, offering fresh perspective on rising crisis as the country teetered on the edge of collapse.