Uzbek: War, Friendship of the Peoples, and the Creation of Soviet Uzbekistan, 1941-1945
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Making Ivan-Uzbek: War, Friendship of the Peoples, and the Creation of Soviet Uzbekistan, 1941-1945 By Charles David Shaw A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Yuri Slezkine, Chair Professor Victoria Frede-Montemayor Professor Victoria E. Bonnell Summer 2015 Abstract Making Ivan-Uzbek: War, Friendship of the Peoples, and the Creation of Soviet Uzbekistan, 1941-1945 by Charles David Shaw Doctor of Philosophy in History University of California, Berkeley Professor Yuri Slezkine, Chair This dissertation addresses the impact of World War II on Uzbek society and contends that the war era should be seen as seen as equally transformative to the tumultuous 1920s and 1930s for Soviet Central Asia. It argues that via the processes of military service, labor mobilization, and the evacuation of Soviet elites and common citizens that Uzbeks joined the broader “Soviet people” or sovetskii narod and overcame the prejudices of being “formerly backward” in Marxist ideology. The dissertation argues that the army was a flexible institution that both catered to national cultural (including Islamic ritual) and linguistic difference but also offered avenues for assimilation to become Ivan-Uzbeks, part of a Russian-speaking, pan-Soviet community of victors. Yet as the war wound down the reemergence of tradition and violence against women made clear the limits of this integration. The dissertation contends that the war shaped the contours of Central Asian society that endured through 1991 and created the basis for thinking of the “Soviet people” as a nation in the 1950s and 1960s. The first chapter addresses the experience of soldiers in the Red Army, paying special attention to the army’s policies to support Central Asian men with propaganda and agitation. The second chapter focuses on the laborers who faced high mortality in the mines and industrial sites of the Urals and Siberia. Deprived of cultural support, agitators, and segregated from Slavic workers, they offer a case study in how the Soviet war-time state could operate both as a nation and an empire at the same time. The next two chapters address the Uzbek homefront, the contributions of Uzbek women who stayed in the region, and changing gender roles. Via an “emancipation of necessity” Uzbek women continued the professional gains they made during collectivization and replaced men in mechanized agriculture and in leadership positions. I examine the wartime contributions of three noteworthy women to show how the state both respected cultural mores that prevented them from serving at the front, but also pressed them into new, public roles. The next chapter focuses the interaction between evacuated Russian and Uzbek writers. I argue that their cooperation facilitated the narrative of Friendship of the Peoples while also allowing the evacuees to assert their tutorial rights as elder brother and masters of socialist realism. The final chapter addresses the durability of the Ivan-Uzbek identity in the face of social breakdown and resurgent religious tradition after the war. 1 To the memory of Pete and Mary Charney i Table of contents: Introduction iii Acknowledgements xiii PART ONE: Mobilizing Uzbek men 1: Making Ivan-Uzbek 1 2. An Underclass among the Innocent: Central Asian trudarmeitsy in the Urals 55 PART TWO: Mobilizing Uzbek women 3. The Uzbek Homefront: an Emancipation of Necessity 69 4. Crafting the Female Face of the Uzbek War Effort 95 PART THREE: Friendship of the Peoples among the Soviet intelligentsia 5. Writing Friendship in Wartime Central Asia, or Why dzhigits Could Not Slay Dragons 112 PART FOUR: Postwar Uzbekistan 6. The Victories of Ivan-Uzbek and the Failures of Postwar Transformation 195 Epilogue 220 Bibliography 223 ii Introduction In the heady days just after the German capitulation to the Allies in May 1945 a Red Army soldier stationed near Novohrad-Volin’skii in west-central Ukraine penned a short congratulatory note to a young woman in the distant homefront on a kolkhoz outside of Andijan in Uzbekistan’s Fergana valley. Apart from its first line, the letter was written in Russian although both author and addressee were Uzbek. With spelling and grammatical idiosyncrasies in tact, the letter reads: Warmest, hot regards [Uzbek: Alangali issik solom] Hello from Novograd-Volinskii. This day or evening I inform you with this letter, when you receive it I don’t know, maybe at night or during the day, the exact time won’t interest you. […] Best wishes in your life, hot, fiery hello. Hello unknown Ogulkhan. With greetings to you from Mukhammed Ergashov. Firstly I decided to write this letter to show my great thanks [reshil s bolshoi poklonom napisat’ pis’mo]. If you don’t like this letter, you can throw it underfoot! My only desire is to meet you. If you have a friend [znakomyi], give an answer. I suspected you as my countrywoman [zemliachka] in the newspaper, Leninskoe znamia and decided to write these words. I’ll tell a bit about myself, I am also from Andijan, from khodzhabad district serve in the ranks of the red army […]. The other day I saw the end of the war. Maybe you and I will see one another. Ogulkhan, if I receive a response from you then I will write with more detail about myself or more precisely. If you can read Russian then I will write in Russian, or if you can’t I can write in our language [esli mozhete chitat’ po ruskii to budu pisat’ po ruski, libo nimozhete mogu napisat’ po svoemu]. So long I am finished writing so long with regards unknown, Mukhamed or Misha. Write a response to this address. […] Mikhail Ergashov I await your reply.1 The letter’s recipient, Ogulkhon Kurbanova (as spelled in her documents and other publications), was one of Uzbekistan’s female heroes of the homefront. The nineteen-year-old daughter of kolkhoz chairman in Izbaskent district (outside of Andijan) had harvested 18,000 kg of cotton in the 1944 season, an effort that resulted in her photo and accomplishment being published in army newspapers, such as Leninskoe znamia, in winter 1945. The letter was one of hundreds and perhaps thousands she received from Red Army soldiers of different nationalities stationed all 1 Arkhiv akademii nauk respubliky Uzbekistan (AAN RUz) f. 54, op. 1, d. 21, l. 135, 135ob. iii over the Soviet Union and the capitals of Eastern Europe who wrote in congratulations and thanks, asking for photos and letters in reply and sometimes even proposing further friendship, acquaintance, and marriage. Ergashov’s identity was less clear. He too was likely an ethnic Uzbek and a young man, based on his mastery of the Cyrillic alphabet (which had only been taught since 1939) and his intelligible if grammatically imprecise Russian. His desire to meet Ogulkhon and query about her marital status implied he was single. He seems to have been a rank-and-file soldier given that he provided none of the service details that officers often did. However, not much else is clear. If Ogulkhon had been able or willing to reply, to whom should she have addressed the letter? Was he Misha or Mukhamed Ergashov? Russian or Uzbek or perhaps both? How are we to understand this act of seeming ethnic transformation wherein an ethnic Uzbek self-identifying as a Russian wrote to another Uzbek in Russian knowing full well that very few young women in the Fergana countryside were literate much less bilingual? This dilemma of self-presentation lies at the heart of this dissertation. It asks what sort of transformation occurred at the front to encourage Mukhamed to introduce himself as Misha, and what was the significance of this hybrid identity for both Uzbek history and Soviet history more generally. It also asks by what processes a young Uzbek woman became an unexpected pan- Soviet celebrity, how her example challenged local gender norms, and why she nonetheless did not make an analogous transformation, i.e. to Olga. I would like to introduce another individual, one of the main characters of the first chapter, whose example provides one of the dissertation’s structuring principles and whose nickname offers a response to the question of Ergashov’s identity. Turakul Toshev was an ethnic Lakai from the remote and arid southwest corner of Tajikistan near the Afghan border who was called up to the army in the first summer of war. He lacked literacy and was trained with a broomstick in place of a rifle. After being captured by the Germans and then escaping, he eventually wound up in Italy fighting the Fascists with a local partisan group. There he gained the nickname “Ivan-Tajik,” though he was neither ethnically Russian nor Tajik – “Ivan” because he was a Soviet soldier and whatever communication he made was in limited Russian, and “Tajik” because of his home republic, though he did not speak that language. In an act of daring, he assassinated an Italian general near Bologna, an act that is commemorated in the local museum dedicated to the resistance movement. The path of Ivan-Tajik was certainly exceptional, yet his life story shared its basic contours with many others from Central Asia: from distant mountains, deserts, and villages to the heart of the Russian and European conflict; from farmers and herders into soldiers. An entire generation of men from Muslim families that spoke no Russian was transformed in the trenches, to stay alive and to thrive. They modified their ritual piety and learned Russian; many – such as Misha or Mukhamed Ergashov – went by their Russian nicknames. The lucky who survived replaced their provincial worldviews with pan-Soviet possibilities.