Renegotiating Identities and Cultural Legacies Chapter Twelve Be(com)ing Uzbek

A Difficult Balance: Russian and Soviet Domination
The third discursive direction is the most complicated, as it deals with the most recent past of Russian colonization and Soviet experience. This is the only part of the Uzbek metanarrative that has dramatically evolved since the collapse of the Soviet Union, for the obvious reason of justifying the nation’s independence.⁵⁹ In tune with Tashkent’s geopolitical stance of refusing any regional alliance under Russian leadership, and an early policy of moving away from the Russian-Soviet cultural legacy, the historiographical narrative on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is a negative one. The whole period from the early nineteenth century—that is, even before the Uzbek Khanates and the Bukhara Emirate became Tsarist protectorates—to independence in 1991 is labeled an era of “Russian imperial domination.” As noted by Sergey Abashin, this anticolonial discourse more or less reproduces all the anticolonial truisms elaborated by Marxist historiography in the 1920s and 1930s.⁶⁰ History textbooks spread this narrative; it is also illustrated in the Museum of Political Repressions, established by Karimov in 2001 and opened a year later in a Tashkent neighborhood where many graves from Stalin’s purges were exhumed.
However, while Uzbekistan associates the Soviet regime with Russian and Tsarist domination, it is challenged to find a balanced narrative that would both embrace the modernization efforts that were part of the Soviet experience and still highly valued by the regime—mass literacy, urbanization, and industrialization—and critique its repressive aspects. It also faces difficulties in defining the role that Uzbek elites played in the Soviet system and naming national heroes who could be celebrated for their fight against this alleged Russian colonialism. Indeed, the dilemma of the Uzbek grand narrative is that those who were repressed by the Soviet regime represent a counternarrative that is not in tune with modern Uzbekistan’s ideological principles.
The popular revolts against the Tsarist regime (Andijon in 1898 and the regional uprising in 1916) and then that of the Basmachi against the Soviet regime in the early 1920s are troublesome due to their open references to Islamic values, sometimes to Sharia. For a regime obsessed with Islamism and whose authoritarianism is legitimated by the struggle against religious fundamentalism, all references to Islam as an ideology of national liberation cannot be publicly stated.⁶¹ Consequently, the Basmachi movement, presented in the 1990s as a movement of national liberation, was downgraded to being a simple “armed movement” (vooruzhennoe dvizhenie) in order to avoid having Islam be too openly associated with the notion of national liberation. A relatively similar pattern was observed with the Jadids—the national-communists of the 1920s and 1930s who sought to reconcile socialism and nationalism and were then liquidated by Stalin—as well as their heirs. Academic historiography does not deny them: Dilorom Alimova, the long-time director of the Institute of History, wrote a positive book on Jadidism in 2000,⁶² and its main figures, such as Abdurrauf Fitrat (1886–1938), are revered by many Uzbek intellectuals; however, they are absent from the state-sponsored pantheon offered for public consumption. Indeed, Jadids arouse suspicion on account of their clearly Pan-Turkic commitments. Their calls for all Central Asian peoples to unite displeased and alarmed an Uzbek state protective of its own sovereignty and hardly inclined to regional integration.
Moreover, as in the majority of the post-Soviet republics, it is easier to denounce the victims of the Soviet regime than to identify their tormenters, as the latter would involve finger-pointing at Soviet Uzbek elites. Nonetheless, the official narrative tries to avoid being too negative toward Russians and remains cautious in remembering that Russian leaders and intellectuals based in Uzbekistan, as well as Russian peasants and merchants, were also victims of Stalin’s mass repressions. Yet there has been no discourse about identifying local executioners, much less lustration. The Uzbek elites of today are unquestionably the heirs of the Soviet elites, and this continuity is problematic for the regime’s metanarrative. That is why the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras seldom appear in Uzbek official historiography and museum studies, with the single, but important, exception of First Secretary of the Uzbek Communist Party Sharaf Rashidov, who reigned over the republic for more than two decades, from 1959 to 1983. Rashidov is regarded as a national hero who defended the interests of his people against Moscow, which partly contradicts the narrative of the Soviet Union as obvious colonial domination.