Yulia N. Tsyryapkina,
Candidate of Historical Sciences, Altai State Pedagogical University, Barnaul, Russia, e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Attitudes Towards the Socialism Era in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan: a Study of Historical Memory
DOI: 10.31518/2618-9100-2020-5-20
The article explores the question of how the “era of socialism” is reflected in the historical memory of the population of post-Soviet Uzbekistan based on the recollections of old-timers in the city of Angren, Tashkent region. The main approaches to examining the Soviet past and the politics of memory in Russia, where the “era of socialism” is presented in the Russian public consciousness as a cultural and historical heritage were fixed in the article. In Uzbekistan, the policy of memory is submitted to the goals of the sovereignization of social and political life, the strengtthening of the national state and the legitimation of the political elite. One of the elements of the new collective identity and the politics of memory in Uzbekistan was the criticism of the actions of the Russian Empire in the region, as well as individual initiatives of the Soviet leadership in the Uzbek SSR. It is shown that there was desovietization of urban space in Uzbekistan. An alternative view of the memory of socialism at the micro level is revealed in the article, based on the memories of old-timers about their life in Angren during the Soviet period. The industrial and resource importance of Angren during the Soviet period, as well as changes in its social and urban infrastructure in the post-Soviet period are considered. In the memories of the Angren old-timers, several common narratives are highlighted in description of the city in the “era of socialism”: the developed urban infrastructure, life standard, living conditions in Angren were higher than in the places where the respondents came from (the small towns of the Urals, the Kazakh SSR, rural settlements of various regions of the RSFSR). The respondents with nostalgia highlighted the values formed during the Soviet period: internationalism, “friendship of peoples”, good-neighborliness. The memories about shared holidays in Soviet times, the idea of equality, the same financial status were significant for the respondents. The desovietization of urban space in Angren was expressed in the process of renaming streets, the names of which gave a reference to Soviet political history. The idea that the Soviet city symbols are still involved in the daily life of Angren residentsis proved in the article. Based on the research findings the author concludes that the perception of the memory of the Soviet era by the Russian-speaking residents of Angren shows that their “view from the bottom” does not always coincide with the official interpretation of Soviet history and the old-timers have nostalgia for the bygone time in terms of socio-economic and cultural aspects made based on the fulfilled research.
Publishing: 30/10/2020
The article has been received by the editor on 12.07.2020
How to cite: Tsyryapkina Y.N. Attitudes Towards the Socialism Era in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan: a Study of Historical Memory // Historical Courier, 2020, No. 5 (13), pp. 238–248. [Available online:] http://istkurier.ru/data/2020/ISTKURIER-2020-5-20.pdf
Links: Issue 5 2020
Keywords: historical memory; socialism; nostalgia; post-socialist society; resymbolisation; desovietization