The Cinema of Soviet Kazakhstan

This article investigates the emergence, development and role of the newsreel during the Soviet period of Kazakh history. In particular, it focuses on the ‘Soviet Kazakhstan’ series, which was produced over six decades. The article stresses the value of the newsreel as an historical source, one relatively neglected in the past. It explores the reasons why the new Communist authorities were attracted to the newsreel, a mass medium that could play a central role in the building of a socialist society. It goes on to consider the relationship between the ‘message’ of newsreels and the ideological stance of the Communist Party – and particularly on those occasions when the two were literally ‘out of sync’. The article also investigates the subject matter of newsreels produced in the 1930s and 1940s and the extent and nature of party control. It discusses the changes of the 1960s, changes that allowed for a greater emphasis on character in addition to the simple portrayal of events. It argues, however, that these changes were modest and that, even in the 1980s, the predominant images were of factories and combine harvesters. It concludes that the newsreel played a central role in promoting acceptance of the principles of Communism and, perhaps more prosaically, in raising hopes of a better future. While accepting that ‘Soviet Kazakhstan’ was always ideologically conditioned, the article contends that it did create an invaluable screen chronicle that reflected at least some aspects of reality.

In our study, the history of anti-Islamic politics in Soviet Kazakhstan at 1928-1940 was given.Although secular reforms started to be implemented after the establishment of the Soviet Union,Muslims did not experience any problems in the first ten years. The soft policy of the Soviets, whowanted to gain the support of Muslims in the Turkistan region, was effective in this. Although theSoviet Constitution gives the individual freedom of belief, the Communist Party saw “religion” assomething that should be destroyed. In the middle of the 1920s, the League of Militant Atheists, ananti-religious organization, was established in the country and an anti-Islamic propaganda started.The organization, which was supported by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, started topublish several anti-religious magazines and newspapers. With the new policy pursued, de factointerventions against religion increased in the mid-1930s. Most of the places of worship were illegallyclosed, Muslim clergy were oppressed, even sent to camps, and an anti-religious museum wasopened. After the Second World War began, the religious policy of the Soviet government changed.In our study, the Central State Archive of the Republic of Kazakhstan and the Presidential Archive ofthe Republic of Kazakhstan, as well as archive documents published in Russia were used as sources.Keywords: Soviet Union, The League of Militant Atheists, Islam in Turkistan, Muslims in SovietKazakhstan, Oppression Against Religion

In this article I describe and analyse the conditions of youth in post- Soviet Kazakhstan, their attitudes to work and their economic practices. The article argues that the post-Soviet changes, most importantly neo-liberal reforms and rise of consumerism, have transformed the conditions of youth, their attitudes to work and their patterns of work. First, the neo-liberal reforms and the abolition of the welfare state have dispossessed the majority of youth from the access to welfare, education and work of the Soviet era. This has created a huge social cleavage among already stratified youth. While the sons and daughters of the elite, immersed in conspicuous consumption, have monopolized places in universities and good jobs, the dispossessed youth live in dire poverty. Poverty, insecure family backgrounds, lack of good formal education and lack of necessary contacts marginalize dispossessed youth in the labour market. The economic niche available to them consists of menial jobs in the informal sector. In spite of their poverty, the dispossessed youth have a consumerist mentality. This has created a tension between youth and parents among the dispossessed. While parents ask young people to get more involved in available strategies of survival, the latter, seeing a gloomy future, immerse themselves in the present through sex and drugs. Moreover, in order to survive and have minimum access to the consumerist goods and services, young people get involved in deviant strategies: males get involved in theft, drug dealing and small-scale racketeering and females in prostitution. This subjects them to enormous violence in prisons, streets and places of entertainment. The conditions of the dispossessed youth are characteristic of the post-Soviet changes. While a tiny elite and their foreign partners plunder resources, the dispossessed majority are struck by despair and poverty.

The artists of the Sixtiers generation in Soviet Kazakhstan have typically been understood as the creators of an authentic Kazakh style. This article demonstrates that a web of constructed vectors helped consolidate art as ‘Kazakh’ in the 1960s and early 1970s. I argue that the Sixtiers mined the history of nomadic populations in Central Asia for site-specific cultural forms as a means to connect with an expanding art world and the global context of decolonialization. Neither wholly official nor countercultural, the Sixtiers produced a cultural milieu that stretched the limits of the sayable in late Soviet socialism and defined the margins of modernity with which Kazakh artists continue to contend.

At the present stage of the development of the humanities in Kazakhstan, a special place occupies the Russian language as the second language after Kazakh. Until 1997, the Russian language was the state language in the territory of post -Soviet Kazakhstan. The Russian language acquired the status of the language of interethnic communication. The tendency is present at the present time. Strengthening the attention of the young generation to learn the Russian language on a professional basis. In multinational Kazakhstan, the Russian language is a means of entering the world cooperation with international countries. All public educational schools in Kazakhstan, teaching the Russian language as a foreign language is mandatory. The exposition of interest in learning the popular Russian language is increasing. Therefore, the theme of our scientific research was the vocabulary of the Russian language, in particular polysemia, which is not only to replenish the vocabulary of students, but also deepens the culture of speech when studying polysemia The Russian language is improved in terms of grammar and style of the Russian language, depending on the situation and context of professional speech .. therefore, the object of study was the methodology for studying vocabulary and the process of mastering polysemia was the subject. students of middle classes.

2. Women, Marriage, and the Nation-State: The Rise of Nonconsensual Bride Kidnapping in Post -Soviet Kazakhstan

What to Name the Children? Oral Histories of Ethnically Mixed Families in Soviet Kazakhstan and Tajikistan Adrienne L. Edgar (bio) When Rustam Iskandarov’s son was born in 1984, Rustam, a man of mixed Tajik and Russian descent living in Tajikistan, thought carefully about what to name him. It was important that the child’s first name match the other parts of his name, Rustam explained. A Russian first name would not go well with a Tajik patronynic and surname, and the “wrong” first name could cause lifelong social problems for the boy. Ultimately, Rustam and his wife (a woman of mixed Tajik-Tatar descent) chose the name Timur for their son. Rustam explained their reasoning: “My main concern was to make sure that he would have an easier life. Because, for example, his patronymic is Rustamovich, and his last name is Iskandarov. All right, let’s say I were to give him the name Vasilii, for instance: how does Vasilii Rustamovich sound?1 That’s why I picked a neutral name like Timur. Timur is a common name here and in Russia. So, Timur Rustamovich is a synthesis and a more agreeable combination.”2 Rustam’s story illustrates the challenges faced by ethnically mixed couples in Soviet Central Asia as they chose names for their children. In every society, personal names signal individual identity and reflect community values, while also serving as “powerful determinants of inclusion and exclusion.”3 In multiethnic societies, a first name can be an important signal of the future identity and community the parents envision for their child. Bestowing a name, moreover, is a low-cost yet clear way of declaring one’s desired ethnic [End Page 269] affiliation. Unlike acquiring a new language or adopting new customs, which require a certain investment of time and energy, naming is easy and free.4 For mixed families, however, this decision was far from clear-cut; should the child have a name from the mother’s culture or the father’s? From both or from neither? What if the parents themselves were ethnically mixed, as in Rustam’s case? Among mixed families in Central Asia, whether a child was given a Turkic or Persian name, a Muslim name of Arabic origin, a Russian name, or some other sort of name revealed something of the parents’ preferences and allegiances. Yet mixed families were signaling more than just ethnic and religious identity in the names they chose for their children. In this article, I draw on oral history interviews to investigate the process of choosing names for children in Soviet-era mixed families in order to gain insight into the motivations for bestowing particular names and the experiences of the people who bear these names.5 Oral history is virtually the only source available for understanding how the process of naming worked in the past, since few people document their reasons for this decision. The process of choosing a name for a child, moreover, is so fraught with significance that it is often indelibly stamped in the memory of the parents, making it a particularly fruitful area of inquiry for the oral historian.6 This article is part of a broader project using oral history to investigate mixed marriages and ethnic identity in the late Soviet period. The research is based on more than 80 in-depth interviews conducted in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan with men and women of different ages and from a variety of regional, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. All the interviewees were participants (or former participants) in ethnically mixed marriages or the offspring of such marriages. These marriages came in a variety of different mixtures: Kazakh-Russian, Kazakh-Tatar, Russian-Tajik, Uzbek-Tajik, Russian-Korean, Kazakh-Korean, Russian-Armenian, and a number of others. I chose Kazakhstan and Tajikistan as the primary venues for this research because these two former Soviet republics represent opposing poles on the [End Page 270] spectrum of ethnicity and nationality in Soviet Central Asia. Kazakhstan, with its extremely diverse population and high rates of interethnic interaction, offered fertile ground for ethnic mixing. Tajikistan, more socially and religiously conservative and ostensibly more ethnically homogenous (even though “Tajik” as a nationality formed only in...

This article examines the path of higher education development in Soviet Kazakhstan from the perspectives of higher education institutions, student enrollment, and postgraduate study. By doing so, it is intended to contribute to a better understanding of higher education history in the republic. Document analysis was used as a methodological tool. The results show that higher education was an integral part of the Soviet system, served and subordinated to it. The development and expansion of the system were determined primarily by economic planning, industry needs, and ideological priorities. Therefore, higher education institutions were established throughout the Soviet period and their number grew steadily. The increase in the number of institutions was accompanied by the increase in the number of students. The growth of the educational opportunities was possible due to the diversity of delivery modes and the establishment of a large number of regional branches and faculties in addition to the main campuses of institutions. As a result, all types of higher education institutions, with the exception of medical schools, also offered correspondence or evening classes, and sometimes both. As for postgraduate education, its expansion was comparatively slow. Moreover, the state’s priority was technical sciences, as evidenced by the allocation of more quotas and the high percentage of teaching staff with postgraduate degrees in those fields.

The artists of the Sixtiers generation in Soviet Kazakhstan have typically been understood as the creators of an authentic Kazakh style. This article demonstrates that a web of constructed vectors helped consolidate art as ‘Kazakh’ in the 1960s and early 1970s. I argue that the Sixtiers mined the history of nomadic populations in Central Asia for site-specific cultural forms as a means to connect with an expanding art world and the global context of decolonialization. Neither wholly official nor countercultural, the Sixtiers produced a cultural milieu that stretched the limits of the sayable in late Soviet socialism and defined the margins of modernity with which Kazakh artists continue to contend.

Although much attention has been paid to national construction in Soviet and post-Soviet Central Asia, the field of literary and cultural analysis of the origins of current national symbols and texts in this region is yet not fully acknowledged and discovered. This article tries to shed light onto the literary construction of an ethnic identity and its historical background in Soviet Kazakhstan and its influence on the post-Soviet ideology in this multicultural country. In doing so it investigates the ways and the time when most of the important historical epics were “re-written,” brought back by the Kazakh writers and intellectuals in the mid-twentieth century. The importance of investigating this period and this phenomenon is twofold. First, it provides further contribution to the Soviet creation of binary approaches to the formation of ethnic identities and the continuous attack on local nationalisms. Following the arguments of some scholars in the field (e.g. [Adams, Laura. 1999. “Invention, Institutionalization and Renewal in Uzbekistan's National Culture.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 2; Dave, Bhavna. 2007. Kazakhstan: Ethnicity and Power. London: Routledge]) this asserts that the local cultural elites found ways of bargaining and re-structuring such identity contributing to its “localization” through the usage of pre-Soviet and pre-Russian historical symbols. In a way, they were able to construct their own “imagined community” and resistance to the past and existing (according to them) colonialism within the given framework of Kazakh-Soviet literature. Secondly, the historicity that became a leitmotif of most important literary works and later on a main focus of national ideology in post-Soviet Kazakhstan must be viewed not just as an instrument of legitimation in this post-colonial state but also as a strong continuity of cultural and ethnic identity lines. The very fact that a detailed and continued genealogy of Kazakh medieval tribes and rulers was the main focus of major works by such famous Kazakh writers as Mukhtar Auezov or Ilyas Yessenberlin demonstrates the importance of the “continuity” and kinship and family lines for Kazakhs. The paper raises the questions of how national and elitist these movements were before the independence and how the further post-independent projects of using and re-establishing these links and continuity formed more questions than answers for the nation-builders in independent Kazakhstan.

Using the example of the construction of two major architectural projects – the short-lived national capital city of the Kazakh Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (Kazakh ASSR) Kyzylorda and the House of Government of the Kazakh ASSR in Almaty – the article investigates the development of Soviet architecture in Kazakhstan and links it to the political changes of the 1920–30s. It considers how the building process in Kazakhstan changed under the growing influence of the central Soviet authorities and became dependent on Moscow architectural organizations and construction companies. Furthermore, the article demonstrates the attempts to represent the Kazakh national character in traditionalist and Constructivist architecture associated with the nationalist sentiment of the national communists in the Soviet Kazakh government. It argues that the growing influence of the central Soviet authorities on construction in Kazakhstan furthered the adoption of Constructivist architecture as the main style of the new Soviet Kazakhstan.

This publication presents a discussion of arguments raised in the article on “Masao Miura’s Autobiographical Narrative: Un-Soviet Practices in Soviet Kazakhstan [Autobiografieheskii narrativ Masao Miury: nesovetskie praktiki v sovetskom Kazakhstane]”, by Elza-Bair Guchinova who examines the memoirs of Masao Miura about life in the USSR and thinks over Miura’s behavioral patterns and his strategies of adaptation within a new social context. Miura’s biography was unique: at the age of 13, he was convicted and, after serving time in a labor camp, deported to Kazakhstan where he lived for 54 years before returning to Japan. The article’s author pays particular attention to narrative techniques in Miura’s stories about rural Kazakhstan in the 1940s and 1950s — an environment inhabited by many repressed individuals and marked by pockets of archaism within a rapidly modernizing region. Sergey Kim responds to the issue of critical interpretation of sources related to the epoch under consideration in his comment entitled “Masao Miura’s Memoirs as a Historical Source”.

Using the example of the construction of two major architectural projects – the short-lived national capital city of the Kazakh Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (Kazakh ASSR) Kyzylorda and the House of Government of the Kazakh ASSR in Almaty – the article investigates the development of Soviet architecture in Kazakhstan and links it to the political changes of the 1920–30s. It considers how the building process in Kazakhstan changed under the growing influence of the central Soviet authorities and became dependent on Moscow architectural organizations and construction companies. Furthermore, the article demonstrates the attempts to represent the Kazakh national character in traditionalist and Constructivist architecture associated with the nationalist sentiment of the national communists in the Soviet Kazakh government. It argues that the growing influence of the central Soviet authorities on construction in Kazakhstan furthered the adoption of Constructivist architecture as the main style of the new Soviet Kazakhstan.

The history of public education in Soviet Kazakhstan has been little studied. This explains the great interest aroused by the publication of A. I. Sembayev's monograph devoted to the history of the Kazakh soviet school. Working on this subject for a long time, the author gathered a large amount of data from central, republican and regional archives, from statistical reports, newspapers, magazines and other sources.

This book examines the Kazakh famine of 1930-33, one of the most heinous and poorly understood crimes of the Stalinist regime. As part of a radical social engineering scheme, Josef Stalin sought to settle the Kazakh nomads and force them into collective farms. More than 1.5 million people perished as a result, a quarter of Soviet Kazakhstan’s population, and the crisis transformed a territory the size of continental Europe. Drawing upon a wide range of sources in Russian and in Kazakh, the book brings this largely unknown story to light, revealing its devastating consequences for Kazakh society. It finds that through the most violent means the Kazakh famine created Soviet Kazakhstan and forged a new Kazakh national identity. But the nature of this transformation was uneven. Neither Kazakhstan nor Kazakhs themselves became integrated into the Soviet system in precisely the ways that Moscow had originally hoped. Seen from the angle of the Soviet east, a region that has not received as much scholarly attention as the Soviet Union’s west, the Stalinist regime and the disastrous results of its policies appear in a new light.