Book Discussion on Making Uzbekistan: Three reviews and my response (original) (raw)
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Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR
In Making Uzbekistan, Adeeb Khalid chronicles the tumultuous history of Central Asia in the age of the Russian revolution. Traumatic upheavals—war, economic collapse, famine—transformed local society and brought new groups to positions of power and authority in Central Asia, just as the new revolutionary state began to create new institutions that redefined the nature of power in the region. This was also a time of hope and ambition in which local actors seized upon the opportunity presented by the revolution to reshape their society. As the intertwined passions of nation and revolution reconfigured the imaginations of Central Asia's intellectuals, the region was remade into national republics, of which Uzbekistan was of central importance. Making use of archival sources from Uzbekistan and Russia as well as the Uzbek- and Tajik-language press and belles lettres of the period, Khalid provides the first coherent account of the political history of the 1920s in Uzbekistan. He explores the complex interaction between Uzbek intellectuals, local Bolsheviks, and Moscow to sketch out the flux of the situation in early-Soviet Central Asia. His focus on the Uzbek intelligentsia allows him to recast our understanding of Soviet nationalities policies. Uzbekistan, he argues, was not a creation of Soviet policies, but a project of the Muslim intelligentsia that emerged in the Soviet context through the interstices of the complex politics of the period. The energies unleashed by the revolution also made possible the golden age of modern culture, as authors experimented with new literary forms and the modern Uzbek language took shape. Making Uzbekistan introduces key texts from this period and argues that what the decade witnessed was nothing short of a cultural revolution.
The contemporary history of Uzbekistan
2014
The opinions expressed here are those of the author only and do not represent the Uzbekistan Initiative. No. 14 uzbekistaninitiative Key Points • The president plays a crucial role in the political system of Uzbekistan, but its status has changed and some responsibilities have been transferred to the Government and the Parliament. • Political parties slowly but gradually have become an integral part of Uzbekistan's social and political life. However, their success depends on their modernization and the overall political liberalization of the country. • The next prime minister will be nominated by the political party which has secured the greatest number of deputy seats in elections to the legislative chamber. The parliament now has the right to express a vote of no-confidence in regard to the prime minister. • The mahallas function as a kind of self-government of citizens at the local level. At the same time, mahalla activity is tightly bound with local public authorities. • More than 6,000 NGOs are registered in Uzbekistan. In spite of some achievements they experience difficulties in defining their sector of activities and they are undermined by a lack of professionalism and difficult relations with state institutions. • The study of contemporary history is a relatively new trend in Uzbekistan's historical scholarship. This discipline did not exist in the Soviet period, and does not have a clear methodology and needs to develop interdisciplinary and comparative approaches.
The theoretical debate on the creation of nations has long been divided between two main schools: the primordialist, which sees nations as enduring entities with essentialist features; and the constructive, which sees the nation as a product of modernity. A third school, ethnosymbolism, tries to move away from this dichotomy and takes into consideration both approaches. I join this school in arguing that nations are a modern construct, yet built upon some preexisting cultural and ethnic roots that are reinterpreted in new contexts. 1 Uzbekistan offers a case study of this multilayered construction, in which both contemporary political conditions and ancient cultural references are merged to advance a consensual and successful nationhood narrative.
National Policy and Identity under the Soviet Authorities in Uzbekistan in the 1920s and 1930s
The Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies
This article addresses the national policy of Soviet authorities in Uzbekistan in the 1920s and 1930s. It also studies the 'consolidation' of different tribes and ethnic groups in the process of establishing the national socialist republics and forming the 'socialist' nations and peoples within the framework of these states. The Soviet power considered the 'consolidation' of different tribes and ethnic groups as an important step in the construction of national socialist states. Certain tribes such as kipchaks, kurama, kongrats, mangits and others disappeared as a consequence of such consolidation. This article discusses how the national identification of 'socialist nations' was carried out by the introduction of 'socialist values' in the culture and life of local populations, different ethnic groups and tribes, which resulted in the dilution of self-identification as well.