Olga Chekhovich: Two Facets of a Soviet Academic

Abstract

The essay focuses on the personality and work of Olga Dmitrievna Chekhovich (1912–1982), an eminent Soviet and Uzbekistani scholar of mediaeval history whose entire academic career was spent in Tashkent. Based upon on the documents of her personal archive I try to reconstruct Chekhovich’s two facets - a Communist Party propagandist and a scholar. In doing so, I argue that the two facets of Olga Chekhovich are not oppositional but rather complementary; insofar as, taken together, they constitute a holistic image of a Soviet Oriental Studies scholar in the particular social and political space. What we see as duplicity was in fact a consistent form of the scholar’s self-presentation both within the academic community and in the social milieu beyond it. It let the scholar safely stay within the confines of the social and political system, becoming an integral part of it; and at the same time shape her or his own social and intellectual space within which she or he could advance and defend her or his positions, opinions, and views. In the larger scheme of things, this case study lets us address the question of whether one can view the Soviet school of Oriental studies as ideologically uniform, isolationist, and conforming solely to the directives of the ‘center’. The overall picture appears even more complicated if we pay more attention to the contradictory nature of Oriental studies—the various currents and struggles, the movement of scholars between center and periphery, their familiarity with scholarly works produced in the West, as well as a certain degree of autonomy from ideology.