Uzbekistan’s Transformation: Strategies and Perspectives

20 Ibid., 111 f. 
21 Ibid., 114–116. 
22 Barbara Junisbai, “Improbable But Potentially Pivotal 
Oppositions: Privatization, Capitalists, and Political Contes-
tation in the Post-Soviet Autocracies”, Perspectives on Politics 
10, no. 4 (December 2012): 891–916 (901). 
23 Ibid., 905. 
24 Tommaso Trevisani, “The Reshaping of Cities and Citi-
zens in Uzbekistan: The Case of Namangan’s ‘New Uzbeks’”, 
in Ethnographies of the State in Central Asia: Performing Politics, 
1990s the public sector had profited from rising invest-
ment, in association with the expansion of manu-
facturing in the second decade of independence and 
enabled by high global prices for cotton, gold and 
natural gas.
25
These “new Uzbeks” (yangi davr odam), as state 
propaganda referred to these ideal citizens, were the 
product of a modernisation programme ideologically 
grounded in a narrative of de-Sovietization and 
national consolidation,
26
which had effected a deep 
transformation also affecting the urban landscape. 
The changes signified by widened roads, new multi-
storey buildings, shopping centres, restaurants, and 
expanded and covered bazaars, also opened up new 
possibilities of employment and consumption and 
were perceived by the majority as representing pro-
gress.
27
Official statistics backed up the perception 
with figures indicating steady economic growth aver-
aging 8 percent and implying a continuous rise in 
the standard of living.
28
In reality, however, life became harder for many 
Uzbeks after the end of the Soviet Union. Large sec-
tions of the population were economically squeezed 
and often forced to seek alternative and/or additional 
sources of income.
29
Seasonal labour migration to 
Russia, Kazakhstan and elsewhere grew after the dis-
solution and restructuring of the agricultural collec-
ed. Madeleine Reeves, Johan Rasanayagam and Judith Beyer 
(Bloomington, 2014), 243–60. 
25 World Bank, Uzbekistan: On the Path to High-Middle-Income 
Status by 2030, 13 April 2016, https://www.worldbank.org/ 
en/results/2016/04/13/uzbekistan-on-the-path-to-high-middle-
income-status-by-2050.print (accessed 1 July 2020); Mamuka 
Tsereteli, “The Economic Modernization of Uzbekistan”, 
in Uzbekistan’s New Face, ed. S. Frederick Starr and Svante E. 
Cornell (London, 2018), 82–114 (85 f.). 
26 Sergej Abashin, “Entsowjetisierung und Erinnerungs-
politik in Zentralasien”, Jahrbuch für historische Kommunismus-
forschung, (2014): 125–38; March, “The Use and Abuse of 
History” (see note 14).