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Paper long abstract:

Central Asia’s role in the Soviet Union’s attempt to gain influence with non-aligned nations during the Cold War has received considerable attention in recent scholarship. Historians of Soviet Central Asia have written about the Soviet government’s use of Central Asian voices and places in making a case for an alternative, non-colonial model of development to the Third World, the role of Central Asian party elites as intermediaries between the USSR and the non-aligned states, and the use of women’s magazines to promote Soviet visions of development and women’s emancipation to countries skeptical of the socialist superpower’s intentions. In this paper, I intend to follow the example set by Christine Varga Harris’s work on the magazine Soviet Woman and explore some depictions of Central Asia in the Soviet press. Instead of focusing on discourses aimed at external audiences, however, I will instead examine texts and images meant for domestic consumption. What did model Central Asian citizens look like from the Soviet government’s perspective? What were the government’s goals and expectations for Soviet Central Asia during Khrushchev’s early years in power? By answering these questions, I hope to complement the scholarship on Central Asia as a site of Soviet interactions with the Third World with a nuanced portrayal of the region’s place within the USSR’s “family of nations”.