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119 CentraL aSian LiveS at war One of the starved travelers from our train, who stole a boiled beetroot from a stall, barely saved his life by running faster than the half dozen Uzbeks who pursued him with their knives drawn. There is no doubt in my mind that they would have killed him if he had not managed to lose himself in the innards of our train. The angry Uzbeks kept walking around the train for a long time waiting for him to emerge. It now seems unreal that anybody would kill a man for stealing a boiled beetroot, but at that time we thought the Uzbeks’ reaction normal and even justified. —Aleksander Topolski, 1999 5 • The mechanics of the Soviet state’s response to the war, from the efforts to mobilize the Tashkent population to the creation of a wartime industrial center in the Uzbek capital, are only one aspect of the wartime situation that unfolded in Soviet Central Asia. For a fuller understanding of what transpired, one must also investigate how the residents of the city—Uzbeks, long-term Russian Tashkenters, and the recent arrivals who had escaped the brutality of the front lines—experienced the war years. While Tashkent certainly provided refuge from the battlefield horrors of the Nazi-Soviet conflagration, survival in the Uzbek capital was by no means guaranteed. Fear, outrage, patriotism, and despair were all emotions that surfaced on the Central Asian home front. Initially, however, the Nazi invasion and reports of the fall of Soviet cities in rapid succession caused panic to spread throughout the region. Rumors of the impending arrival of German forces in Central Asia, exaggerated accounts of up to 5 million people dead in the battle of Kiev, and the evacuation of thousands of wounded soldiers to the stronski text i-350/3.indd 119 6/25/10 8:53 AM 120 O CentraL aSian LiveS at war Uzbek capital fueled speculation that the Soviet experiment was nearing a disastrous conclusion.1 Defeatist attitudes, such as the comments of a Tashkent shoe factory worker who claimed that the Soviet Union had “100 Red Army men standing behind one machine gun,” occasionally gave way to outright anti-Soviet statements that, at best, showed little attachment to the Soviet system or, at worst, cheered on the enemy.2 One Textile Kombinat worker, Shkaev, refused to help the war effort, stating that he would not work “for swine [svolochi] and would not work” for the duration of the war.3 A Russian construction worker believed that “Hitler would make red meat out of the Red Army,” while an Uzbek Tashkenter, who was mobilized into the army, stated that he “would go fight for the kulaks” instead.4 These statements create a complicated picture of the mood of Soviet Tashkent at war. While Soviet officials expressed concern that Tashkent residents were detached from the war effort at the start, comments like these by both Russians and Uzbeks indicate that parts of the multiethnic Tashkent population were overtly hostile to Soviet rule. During the war, there was a constant tension between the confidence of state propaganda and a sense of insecurity within Soviet society. Officially , the Soviet people were unified for victory over the Nazi threat, but many residents of the home front were unsure of the outcome of the war and thus prepared for all contingencies. The attempts of Party and state officials to forge a unified community in the wartime socialist city clashed with the reality of life in Uzbekistan, a place where hunger, poverty, and disease ravaged the population. These hardships on the home front were exacerbated by the evacuation crisis, which opened up deep ethno-national divisions among the region’s diverse population. Various ethnic groups from across the Soviet Union suddenly had to live together, and they immediately viewed each other as competitors for the region’s scarce resources, particularly food, medicine, clothing, and shelter. These shortages increased the sense of instability and vulnerability among the wartime population of Uzbekistan . Few people felt comfortable or at home in Tashkent, a city that was out of harm’s way and to which countless Soviet citizens fled. Instead, many found Central Asia’s reported safety to be illusory, causing residents—Uzbek , Russian, Jewish, Korean, Polish, and countless other groups—to rely only on themselves, not on the state, the city, or their neighbors, for survival . The recollections of the city’s wartime residents demonstrate that the gulf between the public image...

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