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Paper abstract:

What was Soviet or socialist in the election processes for the people`s councils in the Kyrgyz countryside in the 1920s? It was not only a rhetorical question to answer but also the reality in which Soviet official workers found themselves while trying to implement sovietization policies in the Kyrgyz society in the 1920s. Focusing on the elections to rural soviets in Kyrgyzstan in the second half of the 1920s, I argue that despite the elimination of traditional clan chieftains, called manaps, the new regime could not fully control the electoral processes as it wished. The Kyrgyz society was organized along the lineages where traditionally strong kinship groups dominated local political and economic matters. So, when the Soviet regime introduced universal suffrage, these powerful lineages became dominant in the elections to the local level people’s councils. More importantly, the electoral process reflected preexisting local power contestation in the Kyrgyz nomadic settings rather than Soviet authorities’ anticipated struggle along the class lines. Despite the Soviet state’s attempts to extend its legal rule in the Kyrgyz countryside, the indigenous rules of power and subordination decided the outcome of the electoral process. Thus, borrowing insights from the “legal pluralism” research, which conceptualizes how the multiple overlapping assertions of authority (state and non-state) interplay with each other in the imperial contexts, I suggest looking at the meeting of Bolshevik electoral order and Kyrgyz traditional nomadic authority in the 1920s as an example of “legal pluralism” in the Soviet Central Asian context.