A burgeoning body of recent scholarship has shed light on Central Asians’ roles as intermediaries to the Soviet Union’s foreign “East.” But often missing from this conversation are the perspectives of Central Asians themselves. This paper argues that the Cold War-era “opening” of Central Asia to South Asia exerted long-term impacts on internal affairs in Soviet Central Asia. It does so through focusing on the case study of Pirimqul Qodirov’s famous novel on the founding of the Mughal dynasty, Babur (also known as Starry Nights). Bedeviled by censorship and finally approved by personal intervention of Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of Uzbekistan Sharof Rashidov, the novel both supported Soviet internationalism and bolstered emergent ideas of Uzbek nationhood that became profoundly critical of the Soviet project altogether.
Claire Roosien is a cultural historian of modern Eurasia. At Yale, she teaches courses on modern Central Asia, Soviet and post-Soviet culture, and Russian empire and imperialism. Her book-in-progress, Socialism Mediated: Culture, Propaganda, and the Public in Early Soviet Uzbekistan, examines how Central Asian cultural intermediaries imagined and mobilized mass participation through Socialist Realist cultural production: poetry, novels, film, newspapers, and material culture, among other media. Drawing on published and archival sources in several Eurasian languages, she posits the category of the “state public” to describe the contested imaginaries of state control and public participation, which were particularly fraught along lines of gender and ethnicity. In my analysis, Socialist Realism emerges as a mode for public-formation, much as ego-documents have been examined as modes for the formation of a Soviet subjectivity. From this project, her article on the Red Teahouse as an institution of the state public in Central Asia appeared in Kritika in Summer 2021, and an article on textiles as propaganda for Central Asian women appeared in Central Asian Survey in Winter 2022.
