Decentralized Past: Heritage Politics in Post-Stalin Central Asia

By focusing on the preservation and restoration of architectural monuments, the article investigates instruments and strategies that post-Stalin governments of the Soviet Union used to manipulate public attitudes toward cultural heritage and points at the goals of their policy. It explores the farthest reaches of the Soviet Union, in the central Asian Soviet republics where preservation became the keystone of Khrushchev's, later Brezhnev's, larger cultural program to construct modern socialist nations within the framework of the Soviet Union. The author argues that voluntary preservation societies, which were promoted by the state to spur pride in local ethnic culture and channel the forging of a nationalist agenda, failed to achieve these goals. While it may be true that nineteenth-century nationalist movements in Western Europe and the United States produced strong preservation cultures, the central Asian cases prove that the reverse is not necessarily true: the imposition of preservation bureaucracies does not guarantee the production of nationalist aspirations.