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Abstract

Harnessing the newly acquired state capacity of a unified country and projecting itself as a proud member of the emerging socialist bloc, the early years of the People’s Republic of China witnessed an unprecedented production of representational materials showcasing “ethnic diversity.” Among these were fifty feature-length fiction films depicting the country’s major non-Han peoples. Previous scholarship conjectured that socialist China actively sought to affirm the nation’s diverse ethno-cultural identities. This state sponsored cultural production even led one scholar to characterize the early PRC as embodying “inclusionary nationalism.” This paper, focusing on ten socialist-era films made about Tibetans, challenges and refines this interpretation. It argues that the so-called inclusionary nationalism was predicated on the wholesale rejection of the Tibetans’ native culture and political structures as prerequisites for inclusion. The analysis reveals that the Maoist assault on Tibet’s Buddhist theocracy took a drastic departure from the expected trajectories of secularization and scientific revolution. Instead, Maoist cultural production adopted a bold strategy of portraying Mao as a rival to the Dalai Lama and presenting the Chinese military as a more righteous and efficacious “army of Bodhisattvas” than Tibet’s native clergy. The paper demonstrates how the Maoist cultural economy, in its fervent drive to advance the integrationist ambitions of a Han-centric state, appropriated the semantics of the Tibetan religious economy and sought to dismantle it by turning its own logic against it.

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This paper examines the stabilization of Islamic minarets in Soviet Uzbekistan as part of the broader history of twentieth-century architectural conservation and engineering practice. Focusing on the work of structural engineer Emmanuel Gendel (1903–1992) and master restorer Ochil Bobomurodov (1922–1993), it analyzes the straightening of the Ulugh Beg and Bibi-Khanym minarets in Samarkand and the Gavkushon Minaret in Bukhara between the 1960s and 1970s. We argue that these interventions reveal the emergence of a distinctive Soviet approach to the preservation of historic monuments in Central Asia—one shaped not only by ideological frameworks of heritage policy but also by engineering experimentation, institutional infrastructures, and the material constraints.

Situating these projects within the historiography of Soviet heritage-making, the paper engages with scholarship that has interpreted restoration in Central Asia primarily through the lenses of political symbolism, nation-building, ideological reconstruction, or institutional formation of heritage protection agencies. While these perspectives have illuminated the political uses of monuments, they have often left aside the technical conditions that determined whether such monuments could survive at all. By reconstructing the engineering logic behind the straightening of leaning minarets, this study foregrounds conservation engineering as a historically situated form of technological knowledge.

Methodologically, the paper combines archival documentation of restoration projects, technical publications by Gendel, Soviet periodicals, visual documentation of buildings, and oral testimony related to Bobomurodov’s work in Bukhara. The comparison between Gendel’s centrally engineered interventions in Samarkand and Bobomurodov’s straightening strategies for Bukharan minaret demonstrates how conservation knowledge circulated and was adapted within Soviet institutional and regional contexts. By highlighting Soviet Uzbekistan as a site of technical experimentation and methodological innovation, the paper contributes to a more geographically inclusive history of architectural conservation and invites reconsideration of how engineering expertise, economic context, and local restoration masters intersected in the preservation of Islamic monuments in Central Asia.

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This article focuses on Soviet toponymic policy in Kazakhstan during the interwar period. The primary objective of this policy was the dismantling of the imperial symbolic legacy. The author posits that the massive wave of renamings in the 1920s and 1930s was not merely a series of spontaneous ideological gestures by the Bolshevik leadership. On the contrary, it represented a considered, albeit contradictory, attempt to decolonize the cultural landscape.

Drawing on a vast array of unpublished documents from the Central State Archives of the Republic of Kazakhstan (TsGA RK), the National Archives of Uzbekistan (NA Uz), and the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GA RF), the author reconstructs the complex mechanics of cataloging "alien" monarchical and religious onyms. This research successfully identifies and systematizes over one hundred cases of radical name changes within the republic during the period under study.

Ultimately, the author concludes that Soviet toponymic policy was characterized by a profound dualism. On one hand, it declared a struggle against the imperial legacy and the liberation of oppressed borderlands. On the other hand, it inevitably constructed a new, even more rigid hierarchy of dominance. This system transformed both the natural and urban environments into a resource for Soviet propaganda.