Making Kolkhoz Patriots: The Biographical Practices of Uzbekistan’s Department of History of the Great Patriotic War

• In Event: Hearing Voices: An Accountant, Blokadniki, and Uzbek Kolkhozniki

Abstract

From 1943 to 1947, the Institute of History of the Uzbek SSR’s Academy of Sciences conducted an ambitious project to document the republic’s contributions to the war effort. It was modeled on Gorky’s Histories of the Factory and the so-called “Mints Commission” of the Great Patriotic War. Like its predecessors, the Uzbek historians were charged not only with recording events but gathering personal interviews. Soviet biographical practices were considered to be machines of personal transformation in which citizens constituted themselves as actors on the historical stage. But unlike the Moscow commission that focused on soldiers, the Uzbek commission’s emphasis was the “leading people” of agriculture – from kolkhoz chairmen to simple harvesters. Whereas other Soviet biographical projects privileged urban, Russian-speaking, and literate subject-authors, the Tashkent-based historians recorded primarily non-Russian, non-literate, and rural voices.

Author

• Charles David Shaw, Central European U (Austria)