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  • Speaking Soviet in Kyrgyzstan
  • Isabelle Kaplan
Ali İğmen, Speaking Soviet with an Accent: Culture and Power in Kyrgyzstan. 236pp. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2012. ISBN-13 978-0822962069. $27.95.

Today’s students of the Soviet nationality question have many more books on their shelves than they had a decade or two ago, and the volumes could be arranged according to approach. One approach, the “view from Moscow,” focuses on the making and revision of early Soviet nationalities policy at the highest levels of state and party leadership.1 A second adopts a local vantage point, examining how policies scripted in Moscow were experienced on the ground at various points on the Soviet periphery.2 Often the categories overlap, with local studies yielding data that illuminate the center from a new angle.3 [End Page 451]

Ali İğmen’s cleverly titled Speaking Soviet with an Accent is a welcome addition to the localist literature. The accent in question here is Kyrgyz, and İğmen’s focus on the small republic of Kyrgyzstan makes his book one of the few English-language monographs in a literature on Central Asia that has tended to be Uzbekistan-heavy. Though events in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan such as the 2005 Tulip Revolution and the ethnic violence in Osh in 2010 have received some attention from scholars in other disciplines, the cultural history of Soviet Kyrgyzstan remains largely uncharted territory for Western historians of the region, who have had to rely until now on monochromatic, Soviet-style scholarship typically generated by republican academies of science.4 In a pioneering step, İğmen explores the making of Soviet Kyrgyz identity, which he characterizes as a fusion of both cultures: Soviet and Kyrgyz (6). Studies of abstract topics such as culture making are most effective when accompanied by solid examples, and Speaking Soviet with an Accent is at its most memorable when it provides these. While some readers may crave more complete parsing of some of the evidence proffered, İğmen’s work, based on published and archival sources in Russian and Kyrgyz as well as the author’s original field interviews with members of the Soviet Kyrgyz artistic intelligentsia, makes a significant contribution to an underdeveloped field.

The book focuses on the Soviet institution of the “House of Culture” or club and its role in the transformation of Kyrgyz life and identity in the first decades of Soviet rule. Scholars have investigated early Soviet clubs before—as a delivery system for state propaganda, as the seat of the Soviet amateur theater movement, and as a key factor in the campaign for Soviet women’s emancipation, especially in Islamic areas.5 İğmen, likewise, attends to the clubs’ role in these particular cultural campaigns—he includes a chapter on [End Page 452] theater and another on “self-fashioning Kyrgyzness among women”—but goes further to put the club at the center of Soviet cultural transformation in Kyrgyzstan.6 These institutions, he argues, were the spaces where modern “Kyrgyzness” was crafted, “where Kyrgyz traditions and Soviet art forms merged” (2).

İğmen emphasizes the role of the indigenous population in engineering this merger of traditions, and he identifies the club as “one arena in which skilled administrators and members could manipulate the Soviet system, within the limits it set for them, to negotiate with the state about how the Kyrgyz cultural community should be defined” (39). He presents native cadres as consciously engaged in transactions with the local population as well as with the central authorities. In exchange for helping the state to establish the clubs, these “shepherds turned managers” (45) extracted resources from the center to help the local community. With this insight, İğmen’s account joins a range of other works that locate examples of groups and individuals demonstrating agency and subjectivity within the strictures of the Soviet system.7

The author’s more novel contributions are found in the specific examples he provides of the melding of Soviet and traditional Kyrgyz culture, a process that required identification of traditional art forms and themes, such as ancient legends of popular uprisings against oppression, that dovetailed with or could be easily converted to Soviet purpose (44). For instance, club administrators sought to adapt...

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