‘They Don’t Have Socialism Either’: International Mixing, the 1969 Tashkent Riot, and Nationalization in the Late Soviet South

• In Event: Renegotiating Soviet Ethnofederalism in Central Asia under Brezhnev

Abstract

Late Soviet frictions between nationalization and centralization in the USSR's south, this paper argues, led to increased outmigration and presaged mass displacement from the region when nationalism accelerated in the USSR’s final years. In the Caucasus and Central Asia, late Soviet trends included net outmigration, population growth, a labor surplus, and titular consolidation amid growing republican autonomy, paradoxically alongside state aims for international mixing and the diffusion of national difference. This paper examines a case study of the 1969 Tashkent Riot, largely overlooked in Soviet historiography, to show how local ethnic conflict emerged from broader frictions between nationalization, most exemplified by enhanced republican autonomy, and centralization, which included postwar campaigns for the leveling of development and Soviet integration that privileged Russian-speaking newcomers to the region. A complex interplay of regional, local, and Soviet-wide socioeconomic factors, I show, also played a role, such as growing unemployment and a labor surplus, and the devastating aftermath of the 1966 Tashkent earthquake, which brought more Soviet citizens to the capital, as well as the 1969 Sino-Soviet border conflict, which raised fears and pressures across the country. The 1969 Tashkent Riot would lead some titular nationals to denounce the USSR as a colonial power, while internal diasporas like privileged Russians began requesting central intervention and relocation to the Soviet metropole—citing rising nationalism and socialism’s failures in the republic—decades before the USSR's collapse.

Author

• Lyudmila Austin, Harvard U