Paper short abstract:

This paper examines an underground organization of autonomous house-builders in late-Soviet Kyrgyzstan. Dismissed at the time as nationalist 'squatters', the paper reveals a complex initiative to visibilise and politicise the right to a home in a context where homelessness was deemed not to exist.

Paper long abstract:

Homelessness (üisüzdük) was an issue that sprung dramatically into public discourse in perestroika-era Frunze, the capital of the Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic. The first non-official organization to be registered in the republic, ashar (denoting mutual help or solidarity) was a movement of autonomous house-builders (samostroishchiki) who, in the spring of 1989, began to seize land around the edge of Frunze to demarcate plots for individual house construction. The vast majority of these samostroishchiki were young, Kyrgyz-speaking men and women who worked in the capital city unregistered. Many had spent years living and raising children in barracks, outhouses, or gender-segregated dormitories, unable to receive the urban registration (propiska) that would entitle them to join the queue for urban housing in what was, by the late 1980s, a majority Russian city.

Ashar was quickly labelled a ‘nationalist’ organization by the Soviet authorities: a characterization that has inflected the still-limited portrayals of the movement in anglophone scholarly literature. Dismissed by central newspapers as ‘land-grabbers’ or ‘squatters’, a closer analysis of the ashar movement reveals a complex initiative to visibilise and politicise the right to a home in a context where homelessness was deemed not to exist. Drawing on extensive Kyrgyz-language sources, including newspapers, pamphlets, memoirs and oral histories, this paper reveals the case of an (ultimately successful) claim to be seen by the late Soviet state and a right to a home: a movement, the legacy of which is still felt in the growth of unregistered settlements around contemporary Bishkek.