Paper abstract:

This paper explores the interplay between Soviet industrial development and nationalities policy in Temirtau, Kazakhstan, one of the numerous industrial monotowns within Soviet Eurasia. While the city’s population was predominantly Russian, the fact that it was located in the Kazakh republic allowed for the small Kazakh minority to assume a prominent role in the local community. Starting during the Second World War, Temirtau was built and populated along with the construction and expansion of the Karaganda Iron and Steel Works, one of the country’s largest plants of its kind. By the mid-1980s, it counted more than 230,000 inhabitants, less than four percent of whom were Kazakhs. In this regard, Temirtau reflected general Soviet industrialization patterns, which typically correlated with an influx of primarily Slavic workers. The local administration, school education, and other communal services were offered exclusively in Russian. Kazakhs who moved to Temirtau from other regions in search of work or higher education often encountered condescension and suspicion from locals, as their oftentimes lacking knowledge of Russian, their accent, and their customs made them stand out in this environment.

At the same time, the imperatives of Soviet nationalities policy also marked the city as distinctly Kazakh. Temirtau had a Kazakh name, local Kazakh myths, Kazakh hero stories, and Kazakh toponyms in the cityscape. While Kazakhs were subject to discrimination in Temirtau, those who managed to adapt to the Russian environment enjoyed particular attention and good career prospects. Kazakhs were vastly overrepresented in key positions and segments of the steel plant workforce and of the urban community at large. As token members of the republic’s titular nationality, they rooted a community that predominantly consisted of European labor migrants. Their visibility helped brand Temirtau as Kazakhstani, which emerged as a new form of identity, distinct from Kazakh, that was based on geography rather than ethnicity. The paper both reconciles and complicates established yet opposing narratives of a successful Kazakhization under Dinmukhamed Kunaev on the one hand, and of the exclusion of Central Asians from the Soviet industrial workforce on the other hand. It also highlights the origins of independent Kazakhstan’s efforts to create a civic rather than ethnic national identity to reflect the country’s multiethnic population.

Paper abstract:

Turkestani emigres who had to leave their homelands after being labeled as “class enemies” or “traitors” by the Soviet regime continued to fight for the independence of their homelands in their new settlements in Europe, Middle East, and the United States until the collapse of the Soviet Union. This paper focuses on the processes of nation-making abroad by Turkestani emigres on three different continents during the Cold War. It argues that the political dynamics in the post-WWII period provided a feasible atmosphere for Turkestani emigres to flourish their nationalism and disseminate the national knowledge among the new generation of Turkestanians who were born outside of Turkestan and could not visit their ancestors’ homelands. Through transnational publications, establishing Turkestani associations, and working at Radio Liberty and the Voice of America, Turkestani emigres established a complex social network that enabled them to disperse their national discourse and endure Turkestani nationalism among the Turkestani diaspora. The national struggle of Turkestanians and their efforts to preserve their national identity provides a new perspective to understand the failures of Soviet nation-making in Central Asia and the agency of emigres in producing and controlling the discourses of nationalism.

Paper abstract:

In late September 1989, Uzbek journalist Karim Bahriev published an article in the newspaper of the Uzbek Writers’ Union lambasting Soviet military authorities. Bahriev claimed to have received letters from countless Uzbek families describing the systematic torture and murder of their male family members conscripted into Soviet army—deaths that were allegedly being covered up as accidents and suicides. Bahriev’s investigative journalism and coverage of what James Critchlow termed the “Recruit Murder Scandal” sparked heated debate regarding the role of Uzbeks in the Soviet military and the relationship between Uzbeks and Moscow as a whole. This paper examines Karim Bahriev’s covereage of the Recruit Murder Scandal as it appeared in the Uzbek-language press and the responses his reporting garnered from government and military officials in the Union-wide Russian-language press.

Ultimately, this paper argues that Bahriev’s critical journalism does not represent a call for national independence or an open rebuke of Moscow, but rather demonstrates the Uzbek literary intelligentsia’s earnest participation in the reform programs of perestroika and glasnost’. Significantly, Bahriev’s journalism transformed a specific national-level grievance into an opportunity to discuss broad problems within the Soviet military and offered potential solutions which he believed would mutually benefit Uzbeks and the Soviet military establishment. Although Bahriev criticized the state of inter-ethnic relations in the Soviet Union and the overall lack of the social and economic development in the Uzbek Republic that Moscow had long promised, his criticisms turn to a call for reimagining the Soviet Union rather than national independence and dissolution. This research contributes to the increasingly nuanced work regarding the processes of perestroika and glasnost’ in Soviet Central Asia and highlights the ways in which Central Asian members of the Soviet intelligentsia worked within the spirit of these reforms to advocate for their own visions of what the Soviet Union should be.

Paper abstract:

All modern countries of Central Asia (CA) have a common Soviet, communist past. 30 years of independence were

marked by parallel processes of national and state building. During these processes it was impossible to ignore the past.

This is how new/old concepts of what a given nation, state was like in the pre-Russian and Soviet periods appeared, how

societies today form their post-coloniality, and how the politics of memory is set by the elites of these countries. New/Old

concept erupted, what we were before Russian invasion in the beginning of the 20 centuries? What we were in the Soviet

period? How the politics of memory is being conducted by the independent countries today? The purpose of this research

work: to study the cultures of memory in the countries of Central Asia and define the role of the state and local narratives,

and how this affects the identity of the societies and states of these countries today.