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Abstract

This paper studies satirical periodicals, such as Mushtum and Mashrab, in shaping early Soviet Uzbekistan between 1923 and 1927. Satire was highly praised by the Bolsheviks as a tool to destroy the remnants of the past and to create a new world. In Turkestan, and later in the Uzbek SSR, however, the Bolsheviks had yet to establish a strong hold over power and governance. In this window from 1923 to 1927, satirists, many former Muslim reformists (Jadids), enjoyed relative freedom in expressing their understanding of what the ideal society should look like. This paper argues that these journals functioned as semi-institutional mediators: although spurred by state newspapers, they were not directly funded by the state and occupied an ambiguous position between official and independent print culture.

While criticizing conservative religious authorities (ulama), contributors also targeted the “ravagery” (their term) brought by revolutionary transformation to Soviet Uzbekistan. Prior to the tightening of political and religious oversight beginning in 1927, Central Asian “Great Break,” satirical critique was neither fully oppositional nor fully aligned with state objectives. At the same time, the context of nationality policy made contributors utilize Soviet categories for expressing these conflicting views. Thus, satirical periodicals were platforms where the state and local intellectuals engaged in defining the emerging Soviet Uzbekistan. They served as semi-institutionally embedded sites in which Soviet nationality policy was mediated and translated into locally recognizable social forms by local intellectuals. Through caricature, recurring typologies, pseudonyms, and visual exaggeration, abstract administrative categories were made legible to a largely illiterate population.

This study analyzes the textual and visual content of Mushtum and Mashrab alongside memoirs by contributors’ children and friends, editorial materials, and state decrees regulating the satirical press. The paper contributes to scholarship on Soviet cultural history, Central Asian nation-building, visual and satire studies.

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This article examines the memory of Stalin-era repressions in Kazakhstan through the prism of highly contested victim figures. It focuses on two key episodes most closely associated with regime violence — the famine of the early 1930s and the repression of the national intelligentsia during the Great Terror of 1937–38. The central task is to analyze the dynamics of the ongoing “war of numbers,” tracing its evolution from late Perestroika publications to the present.

First, the authors examine the demographic methodologies employed by scholars and compare them with available archival data. Second, they situate the debate over victim counts within the framework of an evolving national martyrology and shifting memory politics. Finally, at a theoretical level, they argue that the Famine and the Great Terror generate a fundamental epistemological incommensurability, as their respective “scales of catastrophe” perform different symbolic functions within Kazakhstan’s nation-building project and concomitant historical narratives.

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The aim of my research is to demonstrate how the system of institutional censorship functioned in the Kazakh SSR and, consequently, how the activities of the republican GLAVLIT influenced cultural production in the region during the years of late Stalinism. The GLAVLIT of the Kazakh SSR was a republican branch of the all-Union GLAVLIT, whose headquarters were located in Moscow.

In studies devoted to the history of Soviet cultural policy, GLAVLIT is often viewed as an agency with virtually total control over the cultural field. However, an analysis of the work of the GLAVLIT of the Kazakh SSR shows that the agency was not the primary instrument of repressive control over literature. Rather, it was an element of the bureaucratic infrastructure. I suggest that in the 1940s, the work of republican censors regarding fiction was limited to issuing approval stamps, very rarely returning texts for revision.

This limited role can be explained at three levels: institutional, editorial, and normative. First, Soviet literary production relied heavily on non-departmental censorship: ideologically problematic elements were typically removed by authors and editors before texts reached official censors. Second, the republican branch faced chronic understaffing and a low level of professional training among its personnel. Third, censorship directives did not formally require engagement with fiction. Instead, they focused on verifying factual information related to state security rather than evaluating literary content. This indicates that censorship operated less as direct intervention than as a system of delegated, anticipatory control.

Accordingly, the case of the Kazakh SSR reveals the gap between the normative model of centralized control and actual practices. At the republican level, censorship functioned as a distributed system of filters. A significant portion of the selection took place at the author and editorial level, while the republican GLAVLIT acted more as an administrative mechanism of formal control. This case thus calls into question the notion of a monolithic and vertically integrated censorship apparatus in the Soviet Union. It contributes to a rethinking of center-periphery relations in Soviet cultural policy, demonstrating that, in the context of Central Asia, effective control over literary production relied less on direct intervention by central institutions than on preemptive filtering embedded within local cultural and institutional structures.

The study draws on archival materials from Kazakhstan and Russia, including the fonds of the GLAVLIT of the Kazakh SSR, KazOGIZ, and the Union of Soviet Writers (TsGA RK, Almaty; RGALI and GARF, Moscow).