Dissertation: "A Fortress of the Soviet Home Front": Mobilization and Ethnicity in Kazakhstan during World War II (original) (raw)
After the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Soviet leadership fully mobilized Kazakhstan's populations for war. Communist Party and government officials in Moscow and Almaty responded to this crisis by conscripting ethnic Kazakhs into the Red Army, mobilizing the republic's industrial workers and collective farmers for intensified production, and waging a grandiose propaganda campaign designed to instill Soviet patriotism in these soldiers and laborers. During the war, Soviet authorities also deported large Soviet German and North Caucasian populations to Kazakhstan, where local Party and government officials forced them to eke out a desperate existence on the Gulag's "special-settlements." This dissertation is the first English-language study that analyzes these wartime mobilizational campaigns inside Kazakhstan. Drawing on a wide range of previously unexamined archival holdings in Kazakhstan and Moscow, published documentary collections, Soviet newspapers, and memoirs, the dissertation argues that mobilization catalyzed the integration of the republic's population into Soviet military, economic, and ideological institutions. As a direct result of this integration, the republic's Kazakh population acquired a much stronger Soviet identity, but the boundaries of Kazakhstan's ethnic hierarchy became more pronounced and the republic's status as a raw materials base for Russia became more firmly entrenched.
Sign up for access to the world's latest research.
checkGet notified about relevant papers
checkSave papers to use in your research
checkJoin the discussion with peers
checkTrack your impact
Related papers
Although much attention has been paid to national construction in Soviet and post-Soviet Central Asia, the field of literary and cultural analysis of the origins of current national symbols and texts in this region is yet not fully acknowledged and discovered. This article tries to shed light onto the literary construction of an ethnic identity and its historical background in Soviet Kazakhstan and its influence on the post-Soviet ideology in this multicultural country. In doing so it investigates the ways and the time when most of the important historical epics were “re-written,” brought back by the Kazakh writers and intellectuals in the mid-twentieth century. The importance of investigating this period and this phenomenon is twofold. First, it provides further contribution to the Soviet creation of binary approaches to the formation of ethnic identities and the continuous attack on local nationalisms. Following the arguments of some scholars in the field (e.g. [Adams, Laura. 1999. “Invention, Institutionalization and Renewal in Uzbekistan's National Culture.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 2; Dave, Bhavna. 2007. Kazakhstan: Ethnicity and Power. London: Routledge]) this asserts that the local cultural elites found ways of bargaining and re-structuring such identity contributing to its “localization” through the usage of pre-Soviet and pre-Russian historical symbols. In a way, they were able to construct their own “imagined community” and resistance to the past and existing (according to them) colonialism within the given framework of Kazakh-Soviet literature. Secondly, the historicity that became a leitmotif of most important literary works and later on a main focus of national ideology in post-Soviet Kazakhstan must be viewed not just as an instrument of legitimation in this post-colonial state but also as a strong continuity of cultural and ethnic identity lines. The very fact that a detailed and continued genealogy of Kazakh medieval tribes and rulers was the main focus of major works by such famous Kazakh writers as Mukhtar Auezov or Ilyas Yessenberlin demonstrates the importance of the “continuity” and kinship and family lines for Kazakhs. The paper raises the questions of how national and elitist these movements were before the independence and how the further post-independent projects of using and re-establishing these links and continuity formed more questions than answers for the nation-builders in independent Kazakhstan.
Saeculum: Journal of World History, 2023
The article delves into the origins of independent Kazakhstan by looking at the critical yet underexplored years between Stalin’s death and the collapse of the USSR. The ambiguity surrounding the memory of this period functions as the article’s point of departure. Endeavoring to understand that ambiguity, the article steers clear of reified binaries of ‘Soviet’ and ‘anti-Soviet,’ ‘authentic’ and ‘foreign,’ ‘national’ and ‘imperial.’ Instead, it regards this ambiguity as reflecting a holistic, if contradictory, experience of Kazakhstan as part of the Soviet Union. The tendencies that could schematically be interpreted as either deepening Kazakhstan’s colonial status or, on the contrary, as promoting the Kazakh national consciousness and a sense of agency were all direct by-products and spin-offs of the entangled social, economic, and cultural transformations and the accompanying changes in power relations between the Soviet metropole and the no-less Soviet periphery. The article is divided into four parts. First, it examines the economic developments, which brought about profound reorientation in the republic’s economic landscape. Secondly, the article analyses demographic changes attesting to the gradual recovery of Kazakhs from the devastation of famine and war. The process of cultural Kazakhization is explored in Part 3 of the article. Finally, the article investigates three episodes of overt resistance, which, while evidencing a growing national self-confidence among the Kazakhs, also revealed the persistence of their Soviet allegiances. Placed side by side, these episodes bring to the surface the evolving nature of the Soviet project in the Kazakh Republic with its contradictions and consequential shifts.
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.