Paper short abstract:

The October Revolution and the creation of the USSR led to the emergence of a new Soviet national policy. The prosed paper will present and analyze the Soviet policy towards Central Asian Gypsies as a specific part of Soviet policy towards minorities.

Paper long abstract:

The October Revolution and the creation of the USSR led to the emergence of a new Soviet national policy, which reflected also on the so-called Central Asian Gypsies. The term Central Asian Gypsies is a cover designation for a heterogeneous set of communities which differs in their origins and identities. Local peoples in Central Asia label them most often as Lyuli or Jughi (in Tajikistan). In fact, the term Lyuli usually indicates from one side the “real” Central Asian Gypsies, whose endonym is Mughat), but also other Intermediate and Gypsy-like communities (such as Mazang, Tavoktarosh / Sogutarosh / Kosatarosh, Agha / Kashgar Lyuli, Kavol, Chistoni, Parya, Balyuj). In addition to these communities, in Central Asia during this period lived also Roma communities (called also European Gypsies). There are available studies of early Soviet policy toward Roma, which however completely neglect their Central Asian counter-part. The prosed paper will attempt to fill this gap. It will present and analyze the Soviet policy towards Central Asian Gypsies as a specific part of Soviet policy towards minorities.

The first steps of Soviet national policy toward the Gypsies (a general umbrella term at that time for both European and Central Asian Gypsies) in the mid-1920s were not met with the response from local authorities in Central Asia. They interpreted the term only as a designation of the Roma living in the region and de facto refused to pursue the policy of the sedentarization of nomads and land allocation in relation to Central Asian Gypsies. However, gradually the situation changed, and the local authorities started to consider also Central Asian Gypsies as a target of the common soviet policy towards Gypsies. As soon as in the 1930s a number of Gypsy kolkhozes were established as well as Gypsy artels in the cities. A new, Gypsy party elite is beginning to emerge, and even activities for Gypsy woman liberation begin to unfold. However, these first steps were discontinued in the late 1930s in view of the overall changes in Soviet nationalities’ policy. The outbreak of World War II finally put end to the Soviet state's affirmative policy on Central Asian Gypsies, and many returned to their old nomadic way of life and traditional occupations.

Paper short abstract:

The main argument of the paper is that "the urban planning steps of the Communist Party in Tashkent in the first years of the revolution tried to control Tashkent by hiding and using conservative codes, rather than creating the city of a socialist, equal and classless society."

Paper long abstract:

The Soviet Union, shortly after the Bolshevik revolution, attempted to control all of Turkestan again. While military conflicts continued in the region until the 1930s, the Bolshevik regime attempted to implement important institutional reforms for political and cultural hegemony in the region. The regime soon realized that its efforts were concentrated around the following basic question: Should the steps required by the socialist revolution be taken as an outside power in Central Asia, or should the necessary steps be taken to take the region under military, political and institutional control first? It is seen that the aforementioned problematic is discussed with many sub-titles, with examples from many different fields, looking at the past today. The nationality policy of the Soviets (Koranizatsiia policy), the religion policy of the Soviets in Central Asia, the women's policies of the Soviets in Central Asia, etc.

This study, on the other hand, aims to discuss the stalemate of the Bolshevik regime in the dilemma of realizing a regional control-revolution in Central Asia and the ways out of this impasse, based on the urban planning issue that it put forward around the ideal of creating a "socialist city". While discussing this, the city of Tashkent, which was accepted as the center in Central Asia in the first years of the Bolshevik regime - and afterwards - will be examined. In this framework, in the paper, first of all, the physical and institutional structure of the city of Tashkent in the Tsarist period and the first years of the Bolshevik regime will be discussed; Then, the urban planning efforts of Tashkent in the first years of the revolution will be examined in detail. While this is being carried out, the ongoing debates between the socialist urban utopians' assertions about the city and the party officials who claim that the conditions for the revolution have been completed within the Party and that the only decision now belongs to the party will be emphasized. The main argument of the statement is that "the planning steps of the Communist Party in Tashkent in the first years of the revolution tried to control Tashkent by hiding and using conservative codes, rather than creating the city of a socialist, equal and classless society." Based on this specific claim, what is generally defended in the statement is that the Soviet Union tried to control the region with a colonial understanding by reproducing and using patriarchal social relations by reproducing conservatism rather than a revolutionary consciousness very quickly in the first years of the revolution.

Paper short abstract:

By considering late-Soviet Frunze's green spaces as "shared texts" cowritten by authorities, experts and citizens, this paper investigates the emergence of a locally-rooted subjectivity based on the tensions and transition towards more individualistic and romantic relationships with nature.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation investigates how green spaces in late-socialist Frunze contributed to the creation of a localised iteration of the Soviet project over the 1970s and early 1980s and demonstrates the important role they played in shaping the way residents of Frunze came to see themselves as Frunzentsy. Drawing on the Soviet subjectivity approach but investigating a geographical area and time period which receive limited attention in the literature, this work considers texts as crucial tools for defining and internalising what it meant to be Soviet. It considers physical (green) spaces as “shared texts” in which various actors, authorities included, negotiate the meaning of public spaces, nature and indeed socialism. Through their textual interactions in the pages of Vechernyy Frunze, in the form of letters to the editors, academic commentaries and responses of government officials, multiple individual voices were shaping a Frunze-based subjectivity. By redefining the role of nature in the urban context and negotiating responsibility for green spaces themselves, writers were not only participating in the Soviet project, they were shaping it and making it increasingly individualistic. This paper therefore argues that Frunze’s green spaces became a crucible in which local authorities and the city’s inhabitants forged their views of culture, nature and indeed of being Soviet.

Paper short abstract:

This paper creates a framework for the 'ecology of knowledge' of Soviet ethnography without assuming goals of nation-building. Using this framework, it analyzes Soviet ethnographer Saul Abramzon's scholarship, demonstrating the benefits of renewed attention to 1940s and 1950s Soviet ethnography.

Paper long abstract:

This paper proposes an approach based on Charles Rosenberg's 'ecology of knowledge' as the basis for renewed scholarly attention to Soviet ethnography from the 1940s and 1950s. Noting that previous scholarship has often been focused on the contributions of ethnographic scholarship to Soviet nation-building projects in the 1920s and 1930s, this paper endeavours to remedy the limitations of these frameworks for the study of later periods of Soviet rule by indicating the potentials of studying the 'ecology' of the field in the 1940s and 1950s in its own right. Probing this ecology, which encompasses the multidimensional exchanges between scholarship and Soviet society as reified in its institutional bases and textual outputs, allows for detailed study of the influence of scholarship on society and vice versa, without assuming any (national) frameworks to be the basis of these exchanges. The effectiveness of this framework is demonstrated through an analysis of Russian-Soviet ethnographer Saul Abramzon's work between 1939 and 1953 on the Kyrgyz epic Manas. Abramzon, as a member of the first generation of scholars that was fully educated during the Soviet period, was highly influential in developing the field of Kyrgyz Soviet ethnography, and therefore provides a valuable insight into the 'ecology' of the field in this period. By analysing three key publications by Abramzon and their associated debates, this paper outlines the changing positions of Abramzon, Manas and the ethnographic field throughout the 1940s and early 1950s, as they were influenced by Stalinist projects and changing circumstances within the institutes themselves.

Paper short abstract:

History of the military units of Kazakhstan according to the materials Central Archives of the Russian Ministry of Defense

Paper long abstract:

This study examines the history of military formations - rifle and cavalry divisions, as well as rifle brigades, which were formed on the territory of Kazakhstan during the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union (1941-1945). In total, during the war years in Kazakhstan, 16 divisions were formed (4 of them cavalry) and 7 rifle brigades, of which 5 were national, that is, the personnel consisted of Kazakhs. The source base of the article was the historical documents of the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, in which more than 20 archival funds containing materials on the history of Kazakhstani military formations were studied. Each of them has its own separate fund in this archive. In the course of research work in this archive, it was possible to find historical forms, combat characteristics and descriptions of the combat path of Kazakh divisions and brigades. This complex of archival sources makes it possible to recreate the history of the formation and combat path of more than half of Kazakhstan's military formations documented and in chronological order. The article used both general scientific and historical methods of research, among which the methods of archival search and archeography, comparative historical analysis, and comparative analysis should be especially noted.