The Oil Lamp and the Electric Light: Progress, Time, and Nation in Central Asian Memoirs of the Soviet Era

Abstract

The Oil Lamp and the Electric LightProgress, Time, and Nation in Central Asian Memoirs of the Soviet Era Artemy M. Kalinovsky (bio) and Isaac Scarborough (bio) Over the last 20 years, newly appearing autobiographical accounts of Soviet politicians, government officials, spies, diplomats, artists, writers, dissidents, and even “ordinary” people have significantly informed almost every aspect of Soviet historiography. Studies of Soviet foreign policy, of behind-the-scenes political drama, and even Soviet economic management regularly draw on the memoirs or diaries of key participants, most of them made public only after 1991. Our current understanding of the Terror, the Gulag, and the Soviet dissident movement is unimaginable without the memoirs and diaries that recount personal experiences of these events.1 First-person accounts have also informed cultural histories of the Thaw era and Soviet citizens’ travel abroad.2 First-person accounts remain at the center of debates about Soviet subjectivity in the Stalin era and beyond.3 With few exceptions, however, these accounts have been based upon, and concerned with, ethnic Russian actors. Autobiographical writing from Central [End Page 107] Asia and the Caucasus has yet to make a substantial impact on how these regions are studied by historians, and on the historiography of the USSR more generally. This is partially due to the fact that the histories of the Soviet Union still privilege Russia and Soviet European territories, such as Ukraine and the Baltics. At the same time, there are also objective barriers to the inclusion of a greater number of peripheral Soviet voices. Aside from the range of languages needed to access non-Russian-language accounts, the limited production and haphazard circulation of autobiographical writing in post-Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus makes any systematic collection of such materials far more difficult than with those produced in Russia, Ukraine, or the Baltic states. In contrast to the memoirs of many Russian politicians, intellectuals, and artists, which are carried by major publishing houses, available in bookstores and international libraries, and sometimes even in translation, Central Asian memoirs are often self-published and difficult to find. Their print runs are frequently small; even when published by an established press, they are badly distributed and available almost exclusively through local networks and used booksellers in the region. Although historians of Soviet Central Asia have sometimes made very good use of oral history, they have rarely made extensive use of memoir literature.4 While Central Asians may not have produced the same volume of memoirs and autobiographies as their counterparts in Russia or Ukraine, however, they nevertheless began to leave published first-person accounts of their lives and experiences in the Soviet period and have produced many more since. This opens up space for an important reengagement with the region’s period of Soviet (20th-century) history, using the lens of Central Asians’ own memories and voices to consider and evaluate events in that history. It also presents a series of important research questions: What new perspectives do these memoirs provide on Soviet history and how it is remembered? How are Central Asian memoirs different from Russian ones? What particular challenges do they present to the researcher, beyond those common for memoirs in general? This article employs and analyzes a new online collection of memoirs that have been collected and digitized over the past few years; they are [End Page 108] currently available at http://islamperspectives.org/rpi/collections/show/18 as a joint project of the Russian Perspectives on Islam initiative and George Washington University’s Central Asian Project. The purpose of this collection is to give researchers access to memoirs that they might not be able to find otherwise or might not even be aware of. The initial collection described here includes approximately 70 volumes collected by the authors in the course of our research in Tajikistan. We hope that these will be later supplemented by donations from other scholars working elsewhere in post-Soviet Central Asia; the volumes presented here are most likely a fraction of what is out there. In what follows, we situate the collected volumes in their context, considering and evaluating the conditions in which they were written and distributed. Second, we analyze some...