On a Razor’s Edge: Housing, Protest, and Social(ist) Justice in Late Soviet Kyrgyzstan

• In Event: From Housing Struggles to Political Mobilization: Grassroots Activism in Late Soviet Central Asia

Abstract

Beginning in early 1989, thousands of unregistered (nepropisannye) and defacto homeless young people began seizing land around the perimeter of the Kyrgyz capital. Across four different sites, groups of young people in began demarcating 4 and 5-sotok domestic plots on state-owned agricultural land. This unsanctioned mass action in a setting still cowed by the repressive response to the Zheltoqsan uprising in December 1986 was as audacious as it was unexpected. It sent shockwaves through Frunze, pitting mostly rural-born Kyrgyz-speakers against a majority ‘European’ urban population. It also rattled the CP leadership of this seeming ‘most quiescent’ of Soviet republics, forcing them to return early from the XIXth Congress of People’s Deputies to address the house-builders’ demands.

To this day, the history of the 1989 land seizures is both poorly studied and politically divisive—celebrated by some as a nascent grassroots uprising against a sclerotic local party; dismissed by others as a manifestation of nationalist claims-making that took a violent turn in the ‘Osh events’ of June 1990. Both such accounts, I suggest, miss a crucial dimension of the 1989 protests: the fundamentally social(is) nature of the demand for land and housing, articulated in a language of soviet constitutionalism and socialist justice. Drawing on interviews, private archives and memoire literature, this paper situates the 1989 land claims in a wider history of demographic and social transformation, including emergent transnational alliances between perestroika-era neformaly. As such it seeks to reclaim a properly social history of protest movements in late Soviet Kyrgyzstan.

Author

• Madeleine Reeves, U of Oxford (UK)