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9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 37 CHAPTER 3 The Emergence of the Soviet Houses of Culture in Kyrgyzstan Tanabai examined the rusty fetters and admired the master’s handiwork. The craftsmanship on the fetters showed the talent and the legacy of the old Kyrgyz masters. This beautiful craft is forgotten now, all but lost. There is no one or need to continue the tradition. Many other valuable traditions have been lost, too. Tanabai did not know whom to blame for the disappearance of his people’s handicrafts. After all, when he was young, he himself was the one who spoke against the small artisans. He was the one who once, at a Komsomol meeting, gave a long speech on abolishing the bozui [yurt, or gray house], as he saw them as holdouts from the pre-revolutionary ways. He was the one who fought against those who defended the bozui. He was the one who yelled, “Down with the bozui, down with the old ways.” —Chingiz T. Aitmatov, Gulsarat In this excerpt, Kyrgyz writer Chingiz Aitmatov’s character Tanabai Bakasov , a former Kyrgyz Komsomol leader, kolkhoz worker, ardent believer in communist ideals, and war veteran, expresses his conflicting sentiments about his own heritage. Like many Kyrgyz people of his generation who matured during the Bolshevik Revolution, Tanabai believed in cultural revolution .1 But like many of his countrymen, he was torn between the constructive and destructive effects of the revolution. In his short novel Gulsarat, Aitmatov gives voice to Kyrgyz people like Tanabai who, while initially believing in the promises of the cultural revolution, eventually became ambivalent, if not conflicted, about its contradictory results. In fact, many Kyrgyz regional and ail leaders had been active participants in the process of replacing the traditional bozui with concrete houses and putting collective farms in the center of the time-honored ail. They also helped the government build clubs in which both old and young were taught contemporary Western arts in place of indigenous Kyrgyz crafts. By the 1960s and the end of the Soviet era, Kyrgyz revolutionaries like Tanabai had acknowledged that they themselves played an important role in the destruction of their traditions. Another Kyrgyz author , Kazat Akmatov, criticized both the system and Kyrgyz revolutionaries for turning away from the traditional heritage that defined their community.2 38 9 THE EMERGENCE OF THE SOVIET HOUSES OF CULTURE IN KYRGYZSTAN Most importantly, Aitmatov’s politically ambivalent novel Gulsarat, written in 1966, demonstrates that Kyrgyz people responded to the cultural revolution in their country with a sense of reluctance. In fact, the visual, literary, and performing art works produced in the mid-twentieth century contradict the sentiments of this fictional character and his real-life counterparts. Paintings, sculpture, poetry, short stories, novellas (including Aitmatov’s work), and musical productions of the postrevolutionary period indicate that Kyrgyz traditions did not completely disappear due to so-called cultural transformation. For example, Kyrgyz metal workers continued producing fetters for their horses but learned to standardize their products in accordance with kolkhoz requirements. Their art had not disappeared; rather, it had changed into something that was more suitable for modern life. Old masters gave way to new workers. Workers also altered their familiar, everyday habits to fit post-revolutionary ways of living . Such interactions of Kyrgyz people with the state indicate that there was no clear dichotomy between the “developed” and the “backward.” In other words, as the process of cultural revolution confronted the indigenous Kyrgyz way of life, it did not necessarily result in the complete transformation of it. Kyrgyz were not, in fact, passive victims of a system that forced them to abandon everything they knew. On the contrary, they were participants in the production of a cultural revolution that helped them fashion a contemporary community according to Soviet standards. They contributed to the state’s policies of cultural revolution through limited power relations with the Communist Party. Even those who were ail administrators could assert power only as far as the party allowed them.3 Nevertheless, cultural institutions such as clubs played an important role in eliciting participation from ail populations. The archived club correspondence shows that ail leaders in clubs were active in registering complaints about conditions on the ground and in working with regional offices. These indigenous leaders continually appealed to regional administrators to respond to their ails’ needs.4 The archived material from the clubs includes manuals, declarations, reports , and official correspondence, which reveals that, while attempting...

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