‘Marlene Laruelle paves the way to a more focused and necessary outlook on Central Asia, a region that is not a periphery but a central space for emerging conceptual debates and complexities. Above all, the book is a product of Laruelle’s trademark excellence in balancing empirical depth with vigorous theoretical advancements.’ – Diana T. Kudaibergenova, University of Cambridge ‘There is no other book that delves so deeply into the complex issue of Central Asia nation- building. Laruelle offers comprehensive empirical evidence to highlight similarities and differences in the processes whereby the leadership of four Central Asian states attempted to build their nationhood after the Soviet collapse.’ – Luca Anceschi, University of Glasgow ‘Laruelle explores the multitude of historical, political and geopolitical factors that predetermine different ways of looking at nations in post-Soviet Central Asia. Those manifold contexts present a general picture of the transformation that the former southern periphery of the USSR has been going through in the past decades.’ – Sergey Abashin, European University at St Petersburg Central Peripheries explores post-Soviet Central Asia through the prism of nation-building. Although relative latecomers on the international scene, the Central Asian states see themselves as globalized, and yet in spite of – or perhaps precisely because of – this, they hold a very classical vision of the nation-state, rejecting the abolition of boundaries and the theory of the ‘death of the nation’. Their unabashed celebration of very classical nationhoods built on post- modern premises challenges the Western view of nationalism as a dying ideology that ought to have been transcended by post-national cosmopolitanism. Marlene Laruelle looks at how states in the region have been navigating the construction of a nation in a post-imperial context where Russia remains the dominant power and cultural reference. She takes into consideration the ways in which the Soviet past has infl uenced the construction of national storylines, as well as the diversity of each state’s narratives and use of symbolic politics. Exploring state discourses, academic narratives and different forms of popular nationalist storytelling allows Laruelle to depict the complex construction of the national pantheon in the three decades since independence. The second half of the book focuses on Kazakhstan as the most hybrid national construction and a unique case study of nationhood in Eurasia. Marlene Laruelle is Director and Research Professor at the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (IERES), Elliott School of International Affairs, The George Washington University. She has published widely on ideology, nationalism, and identity and their impact on domestic and foreign policies in the post-Soviet space. m Cover icons: Freepik, Wichai.wi from www.fl aticon.com Cover design: www.ironicitalics.com Central Peripheries FRINGE Series Editors Alena Ledeneva and Peter Zusi, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL The FRINGE series explores the roles that complexity, ambivalence and immeasur- ability play in social and cultural phenomena. A cross-disciplinary initiative bringing together researchers from the humanities, social sciences and area studies, the series examines how seemingly opposed notions such as centrality and marginality, clarity and ambiguity, can shift and converge when embedded in everyday practices. Alena Ledeneva is Professor of Politics and Society at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies of UCL. Peter Zusi is Associate Professor at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies of UCL. Central Peripheries Nationhood in Central Asia Marlene Laruelle First published in 2021 by UCL Press University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT Available to download free: www.uclpress.co.uk Text © Marlene Laruelle, 2021 Images © Author and copyright holders named in captions, 2021 The author has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Non- derivative 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). This licence allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work for personal and non-commercial use providing author and publisher attribution is clearly stated. Attribution should include the following information: Laruelle, M. 2021. Central Peripheries: Nationhood in Central Asia. London: UCL Press. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800080133 Further details about Creative Commons licences are available at http://creative commons.org/licenses/ Any third-party material in this book is published under the book’s Creative Commons licence unless indicated otherwise in the credit line to the material. If you would like to reuse any third-party material not covered by the book’s Creative Commons licence, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. ISBN: 978-1-80008-015-7 (Hbk.) ISBN: 978-1-80008-014-0 (Pbk.) ISBN: 978-1-80008-013-3 (PDF) ISBN: 978-1-80008-016-4 (epub) ISBN: 978-1-80008-017-1 (mobi) DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800080133 Contents List of figures vii Preface ix Introduction: Central peripheries 1 Part 1: Writing the national biography 1 The longue durée of national storytelling: Soviet roots and the quest for ethnogenesis 17 2 Centrality and autochthonism: Uzbekistan’s nationhood 36 3 Aryan mythology and ethnicism: Tajikistan’s nationhood 64 4 National unity versus pluralism: Kyrgyzstan’s nationhood 81 5 Reborn nation, born-again religion? The case of Tengrism 96 Part 2: Politics and the Nazarbayev order 6 Hybridity in nation-building: the case of Kazakhstan 113 7 Ideology of the ‘crossroads’: Eurasianism from Suleimenov to Nazarbayev 134 8 Media and the nation: searching for Kazakhness in televisual production 152 9 Language and ethnicity: the landscape of Kazakh nationalism 168 10 Generational changes: the Nazarbayev Generation 192 Conclusion: The missing pieces of Central Asia’s nationhood puzzle 210 References 220 Index 246 CONTENTS v List of figures 6.1 Proportion of Kazakhstan’s age groups with various levels of command of the Kazakh language. Source: Statistical Agency of the Republic of Kazakhstan. ‘Natsional’nyi sostav, veroispovedanie i vladeniia yazykami v Respublike Kazakhstan—itogi Natsional’noi perepisi naseleniia 2009 goda v Respubliki Kazakhstan’, 2010. Calculated from command of Russian by age group (p. 269) and total size of age groups (p. 4). 121 10.1 Grade school students in Kazakhstan by language of study, as a proportion of the total, 2003–18. Source: Statistical Agency of the Republic of Kazakhstan. ‘Chislennost’ uchashhikhsia obshheobrazovatel’nykh shkol po yazykam obucheniia, tysiach chelovek’, 2018. 199 Previous publication Chapter 1 was previously published as Marlene Laruelle, ‘The Concept of Ethnogenesis in Central Asia: Political Context and Institutional Mediators (1940–50)’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 9 (1) (2008): 169–88. Chapter 2 was previously published as Marlene Laruelle, ‘The Nation Narrated: Uzbekistan’s Political and Cultural Nationalism’, in Constructing the Uzbek State: Narratives of the Post-Soviet Years, ed. Marlene Laruelle, 261–82, Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2018. An earlier version of Chapter 3 was published as Marlene Laruelle, ‘The Return of the Aryan Myth: Tajikistan in Search of a Secularized National Ideology’, Nationalities Papers, 35 (1) (2007): 51–70. Chapter 4 was previously published as Marlene Laruelle, ‘Kyrgyzstan’s Nationhood: From a Monopoly of Production to a Plural Market’, in Kyrgyzstan beyond ‘Democracy Island’ and ‘Failing State’: Social LIST OF FIGURES vii and Political Changes in a Post-Soviet Society, ed. Marlene Laruelle and Johan Engvall, 165–84, Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2015. Chapter 5 was previously published as Marlene Laruelle, ‘Religious Revival, Nationalism and the “Invention of Tradition”: Political Tengrism in Central Asia and Tatarstan’, Central Asian Survey, 26 (2) (2007): 203–16. Chapter 6 was previously published as Marlene Laruelle, ‘The Three Discursive Paradigms of State Identity in Kazakhstan: Kazakhness, Kazakhstanness and Transnationalism’, in Nationalism and Identity Construction in Central Asia: Dimensions, Dynamics and Directions, ed. Mariya Omelicheva, 1–20, Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2014. Chapter 8 was previously published as Marlene Laruelle, ‘In Search of Kazakhness: The Televisual Landscape and Screening of Nation in Kazakhstan’, Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization, 23 (3) (2015): 321–40. Chapter 9 was previously published as Marlene Laruelle, ‘Which Future for National-Patriots? The Landscape of Kazakh Nationalism’, in Kazakhstan in the Making: Legitimacy, Symbols and Social Changes, ed. Marlene Laruelle, 155–80, Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2016. Chapter 10 was previously published as Marlene Laruelle, ‘The Nazarbayev Generation: A Sociological Portrait’, in The Nazarbayev Generation: Youth in Kazakhstan, ed. Marlene Laruelle, 1–21, Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2019. A note on web pages cited in this book In some cases, web pages cited in previously published material are no longer available at the originally accessed URL. In such cases the information is retained for reference purposes. Readers may be able to locate archived versions by using the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, at https://archive.org/web,