Renegotiating Soviet Ethnofederalism in Central Asia under Brezhnev

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel explores how Central Asian actors interpreted, contested, and reappropriated Soviet ethnicity politics in Brezhnev’s mature socialist society. After several major shifts under Stalin and Khrushchev, the Soviet Union’s regulation of ethnicity stabilized in the 1960s. In the national republics, political and cultural elites gained greater autonomy, even as the central government continued to determine economic and ideological priorities. While this arrangement provided unprecedented prosperity for many Soviet citizens, it was not without friction. In Central Asia in particular, economic modernization and demographic change strained key pillars of the Soviet ethnofederal order. The participants in this panel examine these tensions from different perspectives. Lyudmila Austin analyzes how various local, regional, and international factors sparked violent riots in Tashkent in 1969, which led to calls for transfers or central oversight decades before the Soviet collapse. Jonathan Raspe examines VDNKh guest books from the republican exhibitions in Almaty and Minsk to show how visitors navigated questions of national identity, with responses varying considerably between Kazakhstan and Belarus. Hilary Lynd explores how the discourse of ethnic authenticity, exemplified by the legend of the mankurt in Chingiz Aitmatov’s The Day Lasts Longer than a Hundred Years, shaped power dynamics between bureaucratic and national cultural elites in the late Soviet ethnoterritorial federation.

Sub Unit

• History: 1945-1990

Chair

• Abigail Schoenfeld, Princeton U

Papers

• ‘They Don’t Have Socialism Either’: International Mixing, the 1969 Tashkent Riot, and Nationalization in the Late Soviet South - Lyudmila Austin, Harvard U

• Republics at an Exhibition: Ethnicity in VDNKh Guest Books in Almaty and Minsk - Jonathan Raspe, U of Zurich (Switzerland)

• Mankurts and Moderns: Ethnicity and Authenticity in the Soviet Ethnoterritorial Federation - Hilary Lynd, UC Berkeley

Discussant

• Jeff Sahadeo, Carleton U (Canada)