Paper long abstract:

The single most famous example of an Uzbek family that adopted evacuated children during WWII is the family of the blacksmith Shomakhmudov and his wife. Directed by Shukhrat Abbasov in 1962, "You Are Not an Orphan" was the title of the Uzbekfilm movie, loosely based on the Shomakhmudovs story.

I will analyze the movie to understand what impact it had on the post-war meaning of Soviet Uzbekness and the power relationships within the "family" of Soviet nations.

I will compare the Shomakhmudovs case to another significant single parent family that suggests different family model-single parent one. An Uzbek woman, Fatima Kasimova, became a sole caregiver to the 10 adoptees, while serving as a head of the collective farm.

Unlike the Shomakhmudovs, this case received relatively little Soviet press coverage. I argue that this disparity in publicity highlights limitations of the Soviet modernity discourse, both central and Uzbek. Kasimova family was deemed incomplete and hence deficient. In the eyes of the Soviet state, Kasimova suffered from three "deficiencies" -female, rural, and Uzbek (though the lack of male labor on collective farms during and after WWII allowed her to rise to the rank of the head of a farm). However, the very fact of Kasimova's successful career proves that the post-WWII integration of Central Asians into the Soviet norms was not a rigidly gendered (male only) phenomenon - though the Soviet public discourse still did not have a proper language to incorporate these cases into a larger framework. Success stories like Kasimova's were a perfect fit for Soviet women's magazines, but not for daily news with extensive coverage like Komsomolskaia Pravda, or Soviet Uzbekistan. This success story of a Muslim Soviet woman serves as an illustration of the socio-cultural hybridity of Soviet discourse. The central party press picked the case of complete family with the man at its center (Shomakhmudovs). The press for women as well as the authors of the late 1950s documentary about Uzbek collective farms selected this single mother and a kolkhoz leader as Soviet woman who successfully sustained the double-burden of "production and reproduction". The two discourses are not entirely contradictory, and both worked at decentering and hybridizing Soviet examples as centered on Russian/European norm of femininity, masculinity and family.