Speaking Soviet with an Accent: Culture and Power in Kyrgyzstan

1. Being “Asiatic” Subjects ofthe Empire

9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 The Bolsheviks inherited the images of “Asiatic” Kyrgyz from their imperial predecessors. These predecessors who concerned themselves with Central Asia included tsarist government officials, Russian intelligentsia, writers, artists , and their Turkic counterparts. The Bolsheviks, despite their best intentions , were not able to fully rid themselves of these ingrained images of the “Asiatic” peoples, including those of the Kyrgyz. The Central Asian communists , together with other Bolshevik elites, created and also contested these images, which included ethnic and religious stereotypes. Such images were by no means constant or static. On the contrary, when the Bolsheviks replaced the imperial authorities, they realized that the officially recognized identities of the Kyrgyz populations were not set in stone. One reason that the meaning of Kyrgyzness was subject to change was that the ethnic composition of communities in Kyrgyzstan was in flux, especially during the last thirty years of the imperial period. Bolshevik cultural policy makers often drew upon the definitions their predecessors laid out when describing Kyrgyz and other Central Asian peoples. Explicating the Bolshevik understanding of Kyrgyz culture, therefore, requires an analysis of imperial Russian definitions of so-called “Asiatic” cultures. The Bolsheviks indicated in various ways that the “improvement” of CHAPTER 1 Being “Asiatic” Subjects of the Empire 10 9 BEING "ASIATIC" SUBJECTS OF THE EMPIRE “amateur talents” (samodeiatel’) among Kyrgyz was one of the main goals of their clubs.1 The official meaning of amateur talent and cultural improvement seems to appear in every piece of club correspondence. For example, in addition to containing definitions of people’s cultural improvement and development , the Bolshevik documents under review liberally utilized the term “cultured,” and from their use of the term we can also deduce what they considered to constitute “ignorance” versus “education.” The driving force in the language used by administrators of Soviet clubs and other cultural institutions was the goal of transforming people’s identities and communities. Achieving “cultural transformation” was absolutely necessary if the new Soviet state apparatus and the nation of Soviet peoples were to be considered developed. Some Bolshevik cultural revolutionaries, like their Westernizing predecessors, saw the concepts of culture and development in the context of the Western European world.2 Marxist ideology provided the blueprint of sociocultural development for Vladimir Lenin and his comrades, with the Bolsheviks admitting that Russia’s sociocultural progress was well behind that of Western Europe.3 For Lenin and other Bolsheviks , most sociocultural models that symbolized modernity came to Russia from the West and predated the Bolsheviks by decades, if not centuries. Scholarship on modernity in Russia has emphasized the fundamental cultural differences between West and East and scrutinized Russia’s place in Europe during the Enlightenment. According to scholars of Russian and Soviet history, Russia’s encounter with modernity had a specific character.4 Western-oriented Russian intellectual discourse perceived the Enlightenment , nation-state formation, and the development of civil society as representative virtues of modernity. Indeed, Western-oriented imperial Russian leaders and elites saw modernity as a product of the West, and their interpretations gradually created a type of modernity that reflected Russia’s physical and cultural location in the world. The same group focused its attention on the poor education of the diverse peoples of Russia, targeting illiteracy and questioning the ambiguous boundaries between Russia’s ethnic groups. They had reservations about the autocratic behavior of the Russian state, suggesting that it was not allowing civil society to develop to its greatest potential . Thus, the main problems impeding progress toward modernity were the complex ethnic composition of Russia’s population and the lack of education, which would be necessary to forge a civil society. Turkic and Muslim thinkers who sought to modernize Russian society also expressed similar if not identical concerns. Late imperial rulers and thinkers, Russian and non-Russian alike, wanted to build a Russia that did not fall behind Europe but that, at the same time, kept its “distinct” character . Russia’s concept of its distinctive character informed the leaders’ ap- BEING "ASIATIC" SUBJECTS OF THE EMPIRE 9 11 proach to modernity. Turkic individuals learned to negotiate the terms and requirements of modernity with the state and the society and internalized modernity in ways that seemed real to them.5 In this way, too, both Russian and Turkic thinkers rendered modernity relevant for their own needs and cultures. “Orientalizing” and Categorizing Ethnicities Officials of...