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Accepted Paper:
Sovietness of Kyrgyz War Letters
Dinara Abakirova
(Indiana University)
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the effectiveness of wartime Soviet propaganda like self-perfection, exhortation, People’s friendship, Russian supremacy, and celebration of national historical figures on Kyrgyz people, including both soldiers in the war front and their close ones at home. It tries to answer the question ‘To what extent were the agitations effective?’ through analyzing the Kyrgyz letters between fighting soldiers and the home front during the Great Patriotic War. Additionally, it also explores the change in Kyrgyz identity. The choice of epistolary as an object for the research enabled to go beyond the official historical records and find personal perceptions, decisions, and experiences about Soviet propaganda, and the war in general. The findings of the research show that most of the propaganda were productive making the Kyrgyz soldiers fight and the home front laborers work effective in the Soviet-German war. However, they do not allow to conclude that Kyrgyz identity of soldiers changed because of the agitation; the soldiers just gained additional knowledge, and skills with the war.