Speaking Soviet with an Accent: Culture and Power in Kyrgyzstan by Ali Iğmen (review)

The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union ushered in a new era of cultural history and identity for the former Soviet satellite states and allowed them to form new cultural and national identities while rediscovering old ones. When those states opened up their archives and the documents within them for research and examination, it facilitated an ongoing dialogue among Russian and Western historians, as well as historians of the newly-formed states, regarding the impact of the Soviet Union in all aspects of life, particularly under the formative (and brutal) leadership of Joseph Stalin. In Speaking Soviet with an Accent, Ali Iğmen examines Soviet Russia's attempts to mold local Kyrgyz culture into Soviet culture through authoritarian means and also the ways in which local Kyrgyz responded to these attempts. He divides the book into six chapters, each of which explores and analyzes the responses of Kyrgyz to Soviet efforts to reframe their political and cultural identities (albeit with resistance, compromise, and cooperation), as Kyrgyzstan became a satellite Soviet state during the formative decades of the 1920s and 1930s. Throughout his book, Iğmen uses oral history to expand upon the cultural and narrative memories that lie within each individual's unique story; to analyze cultural policies; and to address the debate about how an oral narrative memory is distinct from, but also connected to, written memory.

As Iğmen writes in the introduction, one of the principal ways the Soviets attempted to create this culture was through physical institutions, such as the House of Culture (or, in Kyrgyz, Madaniyat Ui), which was designed "to introduce Bolshevik ideology to indigenous populations through adult education and entertainment" (1). The ideologies that underpinned the Bolshevik mindset, in particular Marxism, had to contend with the sociopolitical, cultural, and religious narratives (such as Islam) of the indigenous population—these also vied to define what it meant to be ethnically Kyrgyz. The Bolsheviks looked at the native Krygyz through the lens of imperial Russian (11), which influenced how Russians presented Communism to the native population and how the Krygyz received it. Reactions were mixed, however, as the local Kyrgyz intellectuals' responses were sometimes confrontational, sometimes cooperative, and sometimes indifferent.

The Soviets (and the clubs or houses of culture they established) tried to use "reeducation" both to introduce Soviet culture to the population and to help discover talented amateurs who could then serve as future Soviet-approved indigenous leaders. Even though this utopian vision failed to materialize in the Kyrgyz state, it did not stop club/house administrators in their attempts to entrench these culture houses as permanent fixtures of daily life. Administrators wanted Kyrgyz to "reform" certain traditional cultural practices such as the "recitation of national and ancestral myths, and oral narratives of imagined history" that clearly distinguished the pre-Soviet, Kyrgyz culture from the new Soviet culture (46). For example, one of the most prominent Kyrgyz narratives with which the culture clubs had to contend was the national epic Manas, which functioned as an origin myth, a way to tie families together, and "the main code of ethical conduct in society" (61). The Manas, like The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid, focused on an epic hero; it threatened the Soviet clubs' attempts to bind the Kyrgyz population together through a belief in achieving community (Soviet) identity by means of class struggle. In response, the clubs launched a counternarrative campaign to discredit most Kyrgyz oral histories, getting community members to believe "scientific histories" written from a more objective standpoint.

As Iğmen insightfully details, throughout the formation of Kyrgyzstan, Soviets deployed new oral traditions to replace traditional Kyrgyz ones, but they also implemented new cultural celebrations, such as the Kyrgyz Olympiad and official state-sanctioned holidays, both to dispel an old Kyrgyz sense of cultural history and to foster a new feeling of Soviet unity. Interestingly, such celebrations [End Page...