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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.