Paper abstract

This paper examines the everyday lives of Kyrgyz women in rural Soviet Kirghizia in the 1940- 1950s. While scholarship frequently examines women’s experiences in the Soviet Union, Kyrgyz women are typically placed on the margins (if at all), and oral history in the region has been neglected. This paper presents and contextualizes interviews of thirty Kyrgyz women who lived in the Issyk Kul region during the period.

The paper argues that the familiar image of Soviet womanhood and femininity was not what Kyrgyz women experienced in their everyday lives. Born into and living in traditional and patriarchal Muslim Central Asia, they developed distinct daily coping skills and strategies that made them different to the Soviet norm. Their feminine experiences and identities were a result of being a woman balancing modern Soviet values with lived Kyrgyz traditions.

The reality of the lived experiences of Kyrgyz women was a response to political, social, and economic upheaval during previous decades. In addition to dekulakization in the 1920s and 1930s, Stalinist purges of the 1930s, and the Great Patriotic War, policies of rapid industrialization and collectivization posed significant challenges for ordinary people. Women, particularly, took the brunt of this time on themselves. These interviews, recording personal experiences that do not fit into official histories of the period, provide individual insights into how they responded, and how they remember, the turmoil of the era.

Paper abstract

The proposed presentation examines the nature, number and survival strategies of women in migration to the territory of Kazakhstan. The considered female migrations, including exiles, deportations, evacuations, accounted for 40 to 70% of the migration flows of the forced migration contingent. The presentation highlights the main groups of women, analyzes the main categories in each wave of migration. We will analyze the main groups (the German population evicted from the North Caucasus, Crimea, Georgia), and establish the number of those women who were expelled as part of the above contingents, but were included in the statistics as other nationalities, and did not represent a large statistical value for the bodies of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Kaz SSR. This will allow us to assess the reliability of the special census of the NKVD.

Based on the declassified materials of the prosecutor's office, the NKVD-MVD of Kazakhstan, the materials of the census of deportees-special settlers in the territory of the Kazakh SSR, personal files, statements to the authorities identified in the archives of the Russian Federation (State Archive of the Russian Federation, Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History), archives of the Republic of Kazakhstan (Archive of the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan, the Central State Archive of the Republic of Kazakhstan, the Archive of the Committee on Legal Statistics and Special Accounts of the General Prosecutor's Office of the Republic of Kazakhstan), oral interviews with eyewitnesses, families of the repressed, we will show the strategy of women's survival, the mechanism of control and the role of state bodies in their lives.

This complex of archival materials will allow not only to reconstruct the process of women in migration on the territory of Kazakhstan, but will also help to identify the “forgotten” repressed female names that were deliberately not included in the processes of Soviet glorification and are still absent in the public and educational space of the country.

Paper abstract

Throughout the 1980s, a steadily-growing scandal played out in the newspapers of the Soviet Union—the Uzbek Cotton Scandal. Investigations revealed that the leaders of the Soviet Union’s Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic had falsified cotton production reports for decades and defrauded Moscow out of billions of rubles. Though historians have discussed the Cotton Scandal as it relates to Soviet political history and economics, little attention has been given to the discourse that constituted the Scandal and made it truly “Uzbek”. This paper examines how the Soviet press, influenced by historically-rooted Orientalist tropes, decades of Soviet nationality policies, and the reform programs of the 1980s, transformed its coverage of the cotton industry’s corruption into a public explication and condemnation of Uzbek national identity. Analyzing the subject matter of and language used in Soviet newspaper narratives of the Uzbek Cotton Scandal ultimately reveals a discourse of qoralash—an Uzbek word that can be translated to mean “accusation”—against the Uzbek nation as a whole. The qoralash discourse that developed in the Soviet press returned Uzbeks to the status of culturally backward outsiders and created a justification for renewed political interventions and centralized cultural control.

Paper abstract

This article tells about the terrible famine that claimed the lives of millions of people in Kazakhstan in 1932-1933, its consequences and the help of the Kyrgyz people to the Kazakh people in difficult times. There is a reason to say that there was a terrible famine, because historical archival documents are known, in which more cases of cannibalism, child murders are recorded . Such evidence is confirmed by OGPU documents stored in our archives. The problem of famine, which became the "tragedy of the Soviet people", is one of the main problems of the historiography of Kyrgyz history. We cannot deny the famine that claimed thousands of lives in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan as a result of the collectivization policy pursued in the USSR. The geographic scope of the famine was also extensive. Because in 1932, on Stalin's personal order to take away all the grain from private farms and collective farms, millions of people were starved to death in Ukraine, the Volga region, the North Caucasus and Kazakhstan (Central Asia).

As a result, in the spring of 1932, Kazakhs began to move en masse to Kyrgyzstan. The death toll has increased, serious crimes have been committed, and the number of diseases has expanded. That time was tough for Kyrgyz people. Subsequent historical sources show that grain was taken abroad for the starving and that the industrialization policy of the Soviet Union called for large-scale grain exports. However, there were people who opposed Stalin's order and helped the Kyrgyz-Kazakh people. One of them was the Chairman of the SNK (Council of People's Commissars) of the Kirghiz ASSR Zhusup Abdrakhmanov. On his initiative, food stations and canteens were opened in our country, great assistance was provided to the for nation who deprived of food , especially the Kazakhs. This determination saved thousands of lives. Regrettable, by such a heroic decision he was called an "enemy of the people" and in 1938 he became a victim of repression.

The problem of the famine of 1932 and its consequences is still being supplemented by new research by historians. There are several reasons for this: the anti-peasant policy was based on the agrarian policy of the Stalinist regime. And this proposed action was based on administrative-repressive, violent and coercive methods. The famine was closely connected with the export of grain, collectivization and industrialization, and the country's anti-peasant approach.

The article was written on the basis of archival documents.