Becoming Soviet through War: The Kyrgyz and the Great

Fatherland War

Moritz Florin

Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, Volume 17, Number

3, Summer 2016, pp. 495-516 (Article)

Published by Slavica Publishers

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/kri.2016.0033

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/631066

Access provided by Tulane University (3 Feb 2019 13:31 GMT)

Forum: Soviet Central Asia in and after World War II

Becoming Soviet through War

The Kyrgyz and the Great Fatherland War

Moritz Florin

In October 1941, many expected the Soviet state to collapse; this included
not only those living under German occupation but also the people on the
home front. In the Kyrgyz Republic, rumor had it that Turkey would soon
intervene and that Central Asia would become part of a Turkish protectorate.1
Initially, people stayed calm, but when the Soviet state started to requisition
ever more cattle and grain and recruit more and more Kyrgyz men, turmoil
spread throughout the countryside. Over the summer of 1942, armed groups
of deserters challenged Soviet power in the northern Issyk-Kul´ region and
southern Dzhalal-Abad. The Central Committee had to send in troops to
quell the uprisings.2 While Soviet propaganda would later tell a war story of
common patriotism and voluntary recruitment, it seems that in reality most
Kyrgyz men could only be drafted via brute force and intimidation.
Rumors and uprisings point to the fact that at the beginning of the war
many rural Kyrgyz did not identify with the common war effort or, for that
matter, the Soviet state. Nevertheless, in what follows I argue that these same
rural Kyrgyz started to identify with the Soviet state as a result of the war.
Even the greatest challenges—such as renewed grain requisitions and the
corresponding hunger or the evacuation, flight, and deportation of hundreds
of thousands of people to Central Asia and Kyrgyzstan—could not stop this
larger trend. Becoming Soviet did not necessarily entail an understanding
or the internalization of Soviet ideology (even though this could be a side
effect). Instead, people of different generations and regional backgrounds
could become Soviet by starting to identify with a community of suffering
and heroism that was created by war. This community came into existence as
 1
  Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial´no-politicheskoi istorii (RGASPI) f. 17, op. 43, d.
823, l. 38, “Protokoly zasedanii plenuma TsK KP Kirgizii,” 7–8 September 1942.
 2
 Ibid.

Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 17, 3 (Summer 2016): 495–516.
496 MORITZ FLORIN

a result of the spontaneous dynamics of the conflict, of individual experiences

in the Soviet army or in the rear, and of the state’s effort to create inclusive
myths for all Soviet citizens. In some cases this entailed not only identification
but also the emergence of new, typically Soviet patterns of daily life and—as
Eren Tasar has shown—ways of accommodating local and Muslim traditions
within a Soviet identity.3 Of course, this article cannot argue that all the
people living in remote rural areas of Central Asia became Soviet through
war. Nevertheless, the Kyrgyz example can help us understand that the war
created new interpretations of Soviet identity. War provided people of diverse
backgrounds with new reasons to identify with the Soviet state.
Recent research has argued that the Bolsheviks’ attitudes toward Central
Asia were shaped by the belief in the civilizational superiority of “European”—in
this case, Soviet socialist—modernity. The nomadic way of life was considered
to be particularly backward, and thus had to be transformed.4 While some
Central Asians shared this belief in the necessity of modernization, they also
adapted the slogans of Bolshevism for their own purposes.5 Ali Igmen has
highlighted the ways Kyrgyz club managers, festival organizers, actors, and
authors participated in shaping the institutions and discourses of modern
nationhood during the 1920s.6 This project remained elitist, however.
Writing about the fate of Central Asian nomads during collectivization and
famine, Robert Kindler and Adrienne Edgar have convincingly argued that
they learned to interact with communist officials and to use the newly created
institutions in local struggles for power or survival. This, however, did not

 3
  Eren Tasar, “Islamically Informed Soviet Patriotism in Postwar Kyrgyzstan,” Cahiers du
monde russe 52, 2–3 (2011): 387–404.
 4
 Publications specifically addressing the experience of Central Asian nomads include
Paula A. Michaels, Curative Powers: Medicine and Empire in Stalin’s Central Asia (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003); Isabelle Ohayon, La sédentarisation des Kazakhs dans
l’URSS de Staline: Collectivisation et changement social (1928–1945) (Paris: Maisonneuve
et Larose, 2006)); Robert Kindler, Stalins Nomaden: Herrschaft und Hunger in Kasachstan
(Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2014); and Niccolò Pianciola, Stalinismo di frontiera:
Colonizzazione agricola, sterminio dei nomadi e costruzione statale in Asia centrale (1905–1936)
(Rome: Viella, 2009). On the Kyrgyz Republic, see also Ohayon, “Lignages et pouvoirs locaux:
L’indigénisation au Kirghizstan soviétique (années 1920–1930),” Cahiers du monde russe 49,
1 (2008): 145–82; Benjamin H. Loring, “Building Socialism in Kyrgyzstan: Nation-Making,
Rural Development, and Social Change, 1921–1932” (PhD diss., University of Michigan,
2008); and on the postwar period, Moritz Florin, Kirgistan und die sowjetische Moderne: 1941–
1991 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015).
 5
 See, e.g., Adrienne Lynn Edgar, Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
 6
  Ali F. Igmen, Speaking Soviet with an Accent: Culture and Power in Kyrgyzstan (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012).
BECOMING SOVIET THROUGH WAR 497

necessarily entail a more positive sense of identification with the Soviet state
and its modernist ideals.7
In what follows, I argue that during the war the modernist impetus
did not completely disappear. Nevertheless, the war created new grounds
for identifying with the Soviet state. Focusing on Soviet Tashkent, Paul
Stronski has already demonstrated how the war helped solidify a sense of
loyalty between Uzbek city residents and the Soviet state.8 Other authors
have focused on the ways in which “non-Russian”—here, Central Asian—
soldiers were integrated into the Soviet army during the war.9 Wartime
patriotism also created new hierarchies and lines of exclusion, however.
Researchers such as Amir Weiner, Mark Edele, and Rebecca Manley have
demonstrated how imagined hierarchies of suffering and heroism could
affect the relationships between veterans and their compatriots in the
hinterland or between evacuees and locals.10 The Kyrgyz example can also
help us understand how wartime patriotism affected interethnic relations
in rural areas. For rural Kyrgyz, the biggest shock of the war came with
Stalin’s 1944 decision to deport hundreds of thousands of Chechen, Ingush,
Karachai, and others from the North Caucasus to Central Asia. It is hardly
surprising that the indigenous population of the Kyrgyz Republic was less
than enthusiastic about being forced to take in hundreds of thousands
of uninvited guests at a time of scarcity and hardships. In this context,
wartime patriotism arguably not only worked to foster inclusion but also to
create new boundaries between supposed patriots and traitors, Soviet and
non-Soviet, indigenous and deported peoples.

 7
 Kindler, Stalins Nomaden, 233; Edgar, Tribal Nation, 11, 197–220.
 8
 Paul Stronski, Tashkent: Forging a Soviet City, 1930–1966 (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 2010), 12; Adeeb Khalid, Islam after Communism: Religion and Politics in
Central Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 76–79.
 9
 Brandon Schechter, “ ‘The People’s Instructions’: Indigenising the Great Patriotic War
among ‘Non-Russians,’ ” Ab Imperio, no. 3 (2012): 109–33. On the Uzbek case, see Boram
Shin, “Red Army Propaganda for Uzbek Soldiers and Localised Soviet Internationalism during
World War II,” Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 42, 1 (2015): 39–63. On the Kazakh case, see
Roberto Carmack, “ ‘A Fortress of the Soviet Home-Front’: Mobilization and Ethnicity in
Kazakhstan during World War II” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 2015).
10
  Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik
Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 8–10, 314–24. On the role of
veterans during and after the war, see Mark Edele, Soviet Veterans of the Second World War: A
Popular Movement in an Authoritarian Society, 1941–1991 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008). On the relationship between evacuees and locals, see Rebecca Manley, To the Tashkent
Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2009), 220–37.
498 MORITZ FLORIN

Insurrection and Hunger: Experiencing the War in the Kyrgyz

Countryside
When the war began, an overwhelming majority of Kyrgyz were still living in
the countryside.11 Over the preceding 25 years they had undergone considerable
turmoil. They had experienced a failed insurrection, famine, and flight in 1916.12
Some of them had returned to their native regions after the Bolsheviks had
promised them land, only to again come under attack in repeated campaigns
to transform their ways of life.13 Collectivization, famine, and terror did not hit
them as severely as the neighboring Kazakhs.14 Nevertheless, their traditional
social and political structures were thoroughly transformed. The new authorities
attempted to marginalize, exile, or kill the old elite and replace it with young,
more or less reliable newcomers. Some young Kyrgyz went to Soviet schools
and universities; others found new occupations as heads of collective farms
(kolkhozes) or in the newly created Soviet bureaucratic apparatus.15 It is no
exaggeration to say that the Soviet state succeeded in thoroughly uprooting
the way of life of the Kyrgyz before the war began.16 However, this does not
necessarily mean that most of the now collectivized and sedentary Kyrgyz
started to identify with the Soviet state positively or to understand its ideology.
In 1941, even the Soviet authorities were highly skeptical about the
loyalty of people in the Kyrgyz countryside, and the party leadership at
Frunze did not expect that they were prepared to fight for the Soviet state.
When the war began, knowledge about ideology was often rudimentary
at best throughout the rural Soviet Union, and the Kyrgyz Republic was
certainly no exception.17 During the early months of the war, party officials
from Frunze repeatedly embarked on trips to the countryside, where they
11
  According to the 1939 census, the Kyrgyz were the least urbanized of all titular nation-
alities of the USSR. In 1939, only 4 percent lived in towns (Gerhard Simon, Nationalismus
und Nationalitätenpolitik in der Sowjetunion: Von der totalitären Diktatur zur nachstalinschen
Gesellschaft [Baden-Baden: Nomos-Verlagsgesellschaft, 1986], 432).
12
  On the 1916 insurrection, see Jörn Happel, Nomadische Lebenswelten und zarische Politik:
Der Aufstand in Zentralasien 1916 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2010).
13
 Niccolò Pianciola, “Décoloniser l’Asie Centrale? Bolcheviks et colons au Semirech´e
(1920–1922),” Cahiers du monde russe 45, 1–2 (2008): 101–44.
14
 For an analysis of demographic data, see Shaiyrkul Batyrbaeva, Epokha Stalinizma v
Kyrgyzstane v chelovecheskom izmerenii (Moscow: Rosspen, 2010), 14–15, 192.
15
 Florin, Kirgistan und die sowjetische Moderne, 29–40.
16
 Loring, “Building Socialism in Kyrgyzstan,” 344–48; Ohayon, “Lignages et pouvoirs
locaux”; and for Kazakhstan, Ohayon, Sédentarisation des Kazakhs, 366–68. Ohayon speaks of
“deculturation and acculturation” leading to the transfer of lineages of clans and tribes into the
hierarchies of the new kolkhozes, thus providing a basis for further Sovietization during and
after World War II. For a comparison, see Pianciola, Stalinismo di frontiera, 431–46.
17
  David Brandenberger has argued that until the war the popular reception of propaganda
remained “selective, inconsistent, and superficial” throughout the USSR (Propaganda State in
BECOMING SOVIET THROUGH WAR 499

tried to test the preparedness of the local population for war. The head of
the Propaganda Department of the Kyrgyz Central Committee, Nefedova,
for example, reported a conversation she had had in 1941 at a collective
farm in the Chui region. There she asked a tractor driver what he had to say
about the Civil War and sought to establish whether he knew what the New
Economic Policy (NEP) had been. Because the “tractorist” could not answer
any of her questions, she gave him a lecture on the Bolshevik Party, Lenin,
and dialectical materialism. The tractor driver reacted indignantly: “Good to
know, but really, this does not affect me at all.” Nefedova was outraged but
considered such an attitude to be characteristic of the general “theoretical
level” in the Kyrgyz Republic.18
In 1942, another member of the Kyrgyz Central Committee visited a
collective farm in the Issyk-Kul´ region and reported: “One of the elderly
women in the collective farm told us: ‘Yes, we have an agitator, Partorg
Ivashchenko; she sometimes stops by, talks for a while; then she sleeps for
two hours, goes for a walk, and again sleeps for two hours.’ We asked the old
woman: ‘Did she at least read something to you?’ To which she answered:
‘No, Partorg Ivashchenko says that the papers are big and long, and that we
do not understand anything anyway, so why bother?’ ”19
The quoted passage illustrates that in some cases propaganda could even
be counterproductive: daily reading lessons and classes in Marxism-Leninism
were often perceived as unnecessary burdens when people were struggling to
meet their everyday needs.20
If, however, most people in the Kyrgyz countryside did not even know
what the Soviet state was all about, it was very difficult to convince them
to fight for it. Indeed, in Central Asia the state had to fear insurrections at
any sign of weakness. During collectivization, only terror and expulsion had
silenced what some authors have labeled a second civil war in the Central
Asian countryside.21 It is no wonder then that during the war, the state
administration again lost control. During the summer of 1942, insurrectionists
killed the local head of the Executive Committee and freed prisoners in the
Chong Alai district of southern Kyrgyzstan. In other regions, such as Toguz-

Crisis: Soviet Ideology, Indoctrination, and Terror under Stalin, 1927–1941 [New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2011], 2).
18
  RGASPI f. 17, op. 43, d. 822, ll. 155–60, “Stenogramma VII-go plenuma TsK KP(b)
Kirgizii,” 18–20 May 1942.
19
  “Protokoly zasedanii plenuma TsK KP(b) Kirgizii,” 7–8 September 1942, l. 142.
20
  Ibid., ll. 140–42.
21
 Kindler, Stalins Nomaden, 179–205. Writing about the Kyrgyz Republic, Loring more
cautiously speaks of “social unrest,” “fierce resistance,” and “political turmoil” (“Building
Socialism in Kyrgyzstan,” 278–80).
500 MORITZ FLORIN

Torovsk near Dzhalal-Abad, party officials themselves stood at the head of

the uprisings. In the northern Issyk-Kul´ region, the insurrectionists fled
to the mountains, and officials at Frunze suspected that the local leaders knew
their whereabouts but were refusing to reveal them.22 It is not entirely clear
just how dangerous these uprisings were for the Soviet authorities. Further
research will be necessary to determine their size and influence beyond the
borders of the Kyrgyz Republic.23 We do know, however, that the Kyrgyz
Central Committee decided to send in troops to quell them.24
Grain requisitions also did much to antagonize the Kyrgyz countryside.
While the targets had been relatively moderate in 1941, the Central Committee
decided to significantly raise them in May 1942.25 It was clear from the
beginning that most collective farms would have difficulty complying with
the new quotas: in September 1942, the Central Committee estimated that
without the use of force, only 40 percent of even the original targets could
be met.26 Forced requisitions in the autumn of 1942 thus came to resemble
those of collectivization in the early 1930s; the goal was not only to collect as
much grain as possible but probably also to show force and to spread fear. Any
resistance was considered to be “desertion” and punished accordingly.27 Just as
in most other regions of the Soviet Union, brute force proved more successful
than any appeal to wartime patriotism, and when the Central Committee
met in January 1943, it could announce that the quotas had been fulfilled at
almost 100 percent.28 Requisitions and resistance resulted in a loss of up to 50
percent of the republic’s cattle. As a result, hunger spread. I have not found
any numbers on the death toll; reports of typhoid in towns in early 1942 and

22
  “Protokoly zasedanii plenuma TsK KP Kirgizii,” 7–8 September 1942, l. 38.
23
  Uprisings in other republics labeled “Basmachi” were reported in, e.g., “Ukazanie NKVD
SSSR … o meropriiatiiakh po presecheniiu antisovetskoi deiatel´nosti basmacheskikh
elementov,” 5 September 1941, and “Iz ukazaniia NKVD Uzbekskoi SSSR … po vskrytiiu
organizovannoi deiatel´nosti basmacheskikh elementov,” 10 September 1941, in Organy
gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti SSSR v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine: Sbornik dokumentov, 2, bk.
2 (Moscow: Rus´, 2000), 21, 67–68. In his dissertation, Roberto Carmack also mentions
widespread difficulties in mobilizing Kazakh soldiers, especially in remote regions of the
Kazakh Republic. It seems, however, that armed resistance did not occur (Carmack, “Fortress
of the Soviet Home-Front,” 60–68).
24
  “Protokoly zasedanii plenuma TsK KP(b) Kirgizii,” 7–8 September 1942, ll. 41–46.
25
  “Stenogramma VII-go plenuma TsK KP(b) Kirgizii,” 18–20 May 1942, ll. 16–18.
26
  “Protokoly zasedanii plenuma TsK KP(b) Kirgizii,” 7–8 September 1942, ll. 16–20.
27
  Ibid., l. 72.
28
 For the Soviet Union as a whole, see Karel Berkhoff, Motherland in Danger: Soviet
Propaganda during World War II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 70–74.
For the Central Committee announcement, see RGASPI f. 17, op. 43, d. 824, “Protokoly
zasedanii plenuma TsK KP(b) Kirgizii,” 25 June 1943.
BECOMING SOVIET THROUGH WAR 501

many oral history interviews and diaries indicate that hunger soon spread
throughout the republic.29
Hunger was indeed disruptive, as oral history interviewees readily
remembered. It is hardly surprising that during the war they could not study
because they were too hungry.30 By 1943, it was clear that the ideology-
centered propagandistic efforts of the early war years had failed. Arguably,
during the war problems only grew: because teachers were needed as soldiers
or as workers, the educational system almost completely broke down.31 At the
end of the war, most people knew little more about the First Five-Year Plan or
about Leninism than they had before it.

The Patriotic Turn

Hunger and the breakdown of the educational system blocked any attempts
to further educate the masses and make them understand socialist ideology.
Nevertheless, I argue that the war did create Soviet patriots. These patriots did
not necessarily know a lot about socialist ideology. Often they did not care about
the modernist ideals of socialist internationalism. Nevertheless, the war created
a new pantheon of heroes who could displace memories of those who had died
during the Terror as well as new reasons to identify with Soviet institutions such
as the Red Army. Moreover, during the war the Soviet government eliminated
some of the ideological obstacles standing in the way of becoming Soviet,
such as the extreme hostility toward Islam. In this sense, during the war Soviet
propaganda further deemphasized its socialist internationalist origins, replacing
it with more accessible and inclusive patriotic messages. This patriotism was not
29
  On typhoid, see RGASPI f. 17, op. 43, d. 825, l. 215, “Protokoly zasedanii biuro TsK
KP(b) Kirgizii,” 6 January 1942. Even though I did not directly ask about hunger, some
interviewees mentioned the famine in passing. See, e.g., the interview with Roza Aitmatova
(*1937), Bishkek, 21 January 2011. In an interview project conducted by the Organization
for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Academy Bishkek, some older interviewees
mentioned hunger as a central experience of war (“Ustnaia istoriia nezavisimogo Kyrgyzstana,”
Akademiia OBSE, Bishkek 2010, interviews JO-A_1-1 [Kyrgyz, male, born 1926, Dzhalal-
Abad]: 7; NO-KA_1-1 [Kyrgyz, female, born 1926, Naryn]: 1; OO-N_7-1 [Kyrgyz, female,
born 1928, Osh]: 2). In her book on wartime evacuations, Rebecca Manley has studied a
number of diaries containing information about food shortages and hunger (To the Tashkent
Station, 164–72). For Kyrgyzstan, I have used the diary of Juz Gershtein, which also contains
information about hunger (“Oblomok imperii” [unpubl. memoir, Jerusalem, 2007], 423).
30
  “Ustnaia istoriia nezavisimogo Kyrgyzstana,” Akademiia OBSE, Bishkek 2010, interview
JO-A_1-1 (Kyrgyz, male, born 1926, Dzhalal-Abad), 7.
31
  During the war, the number of schools fell from 1,685 to 1,500 and the number of pupils
from 231,800 to 184,800. Almost no Kyrgyz finished high school at the time; only 111
Kyrgyz entered tenth grade in the 1943–44 school year. Among the students at the pedagogical
institute only 179 were Kyrgyz (out of a total of 879). See RGASPI f. 17, op. 44, d. 619, l. 97,
“Stenogramma XII plenuma TsK KP(b) Kirgizii,” 14 November 1944.
502 MORITZ FLORIN

only Soviet or Russian; instead, in the summer of 1942 propaganda also began
to emphasize the specific contribution to the war effort of national minorities
such as the Uzbeks, Kazakhs, or Kyrgyz.32
David Brandenberger has argued that the party hierarchy’s failure to
popularize a revolutionary vision of Soviet ideology necessitated populist
revisionism during the 1930s.33 However, before World War II, this never
became a consistent and successful strategy. Somewhat unwillingly, the party
leaders had to abandon populist themes during the Great Terror, when many
popular heroes and role models disappeared, taking with them a whole
generation of textbooks, novels, and dramas.34 This was certainly also true for
the Kyrgyz Republic, where the old republican leadership and the best-known
intellectuals were killed in 1938.35 Since those executed were considered to be
nationalists, it became increasingly dangerous to work on so-called patriotic
themes. From 1937 to 1941, for example, it became unsafe for intellectuals to
study the Kyrgyz “national” epic Manas.36 Generally speaking, immediately
prior to the war, propaganda again became ideologically sterile; since it was
based on the Short Course of the History of the Communist Party, it also was
highly Russocentric.37
War was, however, capable of replacing the old heroes of the revolutionary
era, creating a new basis for identification with the Soviet state. Such heroes
were quickly identified: as early as the summer of 1942, propaganda began to
tell stories of Kyrgyz war martyrs. Dair Asanov, for example, had supposedly
destroyed 8 tanks and 6 armored vehicles and killed 40 fascists all on his own
before the Germans could defeat him.38 Cholponbai Tuleberdiev had proven
his readiness to sacrifice himself by covering up an enemy’s embrasure with his
32
  Recent analyses of this propagandistic change include Schechter, “ ‘People’s Instructions.’ ”
On the Uzbek case, see Shin, “Red Army Propaganda”; and on the Kazakh case, see Roberto
Carmack, “History and Hero-Making: Patriotic Narratives and the Sovietisation of Kazakh
Frontline Propaganda, 1941–1945,” Central Asian Survey 33, 1 (2014): 95–122.
33
 Brandenberger, Propaganda State in Crisis, 3.
34
  Ibid., 198–215.
35
  Svetlana V. Ploskikh, Repressirovannaia kul´tura Kyrgyzstana: Maloizuchennye stranitsy istorii
(Bishkek: Ilim, 2002), 177–205.
36
 Daniel Prior, Patron, Party, Patrimony: Notes on the Cultural History of the Kyrgyz Epic
Tradition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 30–35; T. A. Abdykarov and
S. R. Dzhumaliev, eds., Sud´ba eposa “Manas” posle oktiabria: Sbornik dokumentov (Bishkek:
Kyrgyzstan, 1995).
37
 On Russocentrism and the history of the Short Course, see Brandenberger, National
Bolshevism, 210–11. On the change of nationality policies before the war, see Terry Martin, The
Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 344–461.
38
  Oskon D. Osmonov, Istoriia Kyrgyzstana: Kratkii kurs, 2nd ed. (Bishkek: Biiktik, 2004),
408.
BECOMING SOVIET THROUGH WAR 503

body.39 The most important such hero, however, was General Ivan Panfilov,
the best-known Soviet martyr in the defense of Moscow.40 Of course, Panfilov
was not ethnically Kyrgyz; his division, however, had been stationed in the
Kyrgyz Republic before the war and—in the Kyrgyz Republic at least—was thus
considered to be “Kyrgyzstanian.”41 As early as 1942, a statue of Ivan Panfilov
was erected in Frunze.42 His division, the so-called Panfilovtsy, took central stage
in future narratives of “Kyrgyz” heroic patriotism during the first years of war.43
Not only were new heroes quickly identified, but some of the old ones
also reappeared. During the war, the Kyrgyz Central Committee asked Kyrgyz
writers to publish a new version of the epic Manas, and in their works they
again started to emphasize the qualities of Manas as a warrior and leader of
his people.44 They also published the works of famous “nationalist” Kyrgyz
bards. One of these was Moldo Kylych, who had written some of his poems
during the 1916 revolt and was considered to be the most “anti-Russian” of
all Kyrgyz poets.45 The Kyrgyz developments mirrored the rise of patriotism
in other republics and in Russia.46 Nevertheless, although the Soviet state was
already censoring the patriotic and supposedly “anti-Russian” texts of Tatar or
Kazakh intellectuals during the war, Kyrgyz intellectuals felt the impact only
during the postwar ideological campaigns known as the Zhdanovshchina.47
Generally speaking, during the war propaganda highlighted the Soviet
peoples’ friendship, mutual aid, and supposedly common history. One of the
best-known poems by Temirkul Ümötaliev, the only Kyrgyz writer reporting
from the front lines, described a Russian, an Azerbaidzhani, and a Kyrgyz
going to battle and, in brotherly union, defeating the enemy.48 Unlike the
central press, which tended to avoid references to the nationality of soldiers,

39
 Ibid.
40
  On the division, see Alexander Statiev, “ ‘La Garde meurt mais ne se rend pas!’ Once Again
on the 28 Panfilov Heroes,” Kritika 13, 4 (2012): 769–98.
41
 On the ethnic makeup and the central and republican treatment of the division, see
Berkhoff, Motherland in Danger, 209; and Florin, Kirgistan und die sowjetische Moderne, 51–52.
42
  Vladimir G. Petrov, Frunze sovetskii, 1926–1991 (Bishkek: Literaturnyi Kirgizstan, 2008),
38.
43
 Osmonov, Istoriia Kyrgyzstana, 409–11.
44
  Mar Baidzhiev, Tashim Baidzhiev: Literaturnyi portret na fone epokhi (Bishkek: ZhZLK,
2004), 17–20; Abdykarov and Dzhumaliev, Sud´ba eposa “Manas,” 55–57.
45
 On the publication history of Kylych’s works, see Pavel I. Diatlenko, Reabilitatsiia
repressirovannykh grazhdan v Kyrgyzstane, 1954–1999 (Bishkek: KRSU, 2010), 170.
46
 Brandenberger, National Bolshevism, 130; “Zadachi zhurnala Voprosy istorii,” Voprosy istorii,
no. 1 (1945): 3–5.
47
 Florin, Kirgistan und die sowjetische Moderne, 74–82.
48
  S. K. Kerimbaev, Sovetskii Kirgizstan v Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voine, 1941–1945 (Frunze:
Ilim, 1985), 168.
504 MORITZ FLORIN

the republican newspapers often did single out national heroes.49 The Kyrgyz
secretary for agitation and propaganda, Abdy Suerkulov, proclaimed in 1943:
“Together with the entire Soviet people, the workers of Kyrgyzstan fight in
the hinterland for the victory over our enemy. They use all their strength to
liberate our sacred earth [sviashchennaia zemlia] as quickly as possible. The
ranks of our war heroes fill. The sons of the Kyrgyz people Dair Asanov,
Gavriil Panteleev, and Tashmat Dzhumabaev belong in the same line as the
heroes of the Soviet Union Tuleberdiev, Shopokov, [and] Anan´ev, as well as
all the other defenders of the Dnieper.”50
In this passage, Suerkulov combined the notion of a “holy earth,” which
had to be “liberated,” with the enumeration of war heroes from Kyrgyzstan
taking part in the defense of the Dnieper. Interestingly, Suerkulov also
incorporated into the ranks of the “heroes of the Kyrgyz people” soldiers who
were born in Kyrgyzstan but who were ethnically non-Kyrgyz, such as Gavriil
Panteleev or Nikolai Anan´ev. According to Suerkulov, these “Kyrgyzstanians”
did not only fight because they wanted to do the Ukrainians a favor or because
they believed in Soviet Marxism but to liberate “holy earth” belonging to the
common “fatherland.” Kyrgyz soldiers, however, did not reconquer Kyrgyz
but only Soviet “earth.” In this sense at least, according to Suerkulov, the
Dnieper discursively belonged to the Kyrgyz as a Soviet people.
Becoming Soviet
Not only did the regime increasingly use patriotic propaganda to create a
Soviet community, but the rural population also became more receptive
to patriotic messages. Willingly or not, increasing numbers of Kyrgyz men
became soldiers in the Soviet army, and people in the hinterland craved
news of them. Usually they did not have access to a radio: postwar figures
indicate that as late as 1950, only 539 of the republic’s 5,074 settlements were
connected to the radio network.51 Since there were repeated paper shortages,
there must have been times when it was difficult to get hold of the most
important newspapers, especially Kyrgyz ones (such as Sovettik Kyrgyzstan).52
However, even if the radio or the newspapers did not reach the Soviet
countryside daily, the war created a strong demand for news.53 Newspapers
49
 Berkhoff, Motherland in Danger, 209–10.
50
  RGASPI f. 17, op. 44, d. 617, l. 174, “Stenogramma X plenuma TsK KP(b) Kirgizii,”
12–14 January 1944.
51
  RGASPI f. 17, op. 132, d. 452, l. 18, “O pomoshchi partiinym organizatsiiam, aktivistam
Kirgizskoi SSR i Udmurtskoi ASSR,” 10 April 1951.
52
  On the newspaper supply throughout the USSR, see Berkhoff, Motherland in Danger, 18.
53
  About the urge to hear news, see Manley, To the Tashkent Station, 199–200; and Catherine
Merridale, Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945 (New York: Metropolitan
Books, 2006), 117, 180, 231.
BECOMING SOVIET THROUGH WAR 505

became part of the everyday life of the Kyrgyz. Some interviewees report that
they themselves read the news to their villages.54
People did not receive news from the front lines only through the press.
With time, returning soldiers began to tell their own stories about the war.
Admittedly, the reputation of Kyrgyz soldiers for battle readiness and heroism
was not high. Recent research has shown that Central Asians were not allowed
into combat units until December 1941, and in October 1943 they were
again “excused” from serving in frontline units.55 Even though three “Kyrgyz”
divisions were assembled during the war, they remained ethnically mixed,
and at least 30 percent of any division were Slavic soldiers.56 Soldiers from
Central Asia and the Caucasus were considered to be politically unreliable;
during the early stages of the war, there was also a general perception that they
did not fight well enough and did not understand orders.57 Kyrgyz soldiers
participated in some of the battles with the highest losses in 1942 and 1943,
yet they were preferably employed in the rear, and according to the most
reliable figures the share of fallen Kyrgyz soldiers remained far below the
Soviet average.58
While Kyrgyz soldiers—like most others from Central Asia and the
Caucasus—were not necessarily considered to make the best soldiers, it was a
good strategy to single them out as heroes. In September 1942, propaganda
started to address the issues of non-Russian, especially Central Asian soldiers,
54
 Author’s interview with Beksultan Zhakiev (*1936), Bishkek 8 December 2010, 2 of
transcript; author’s interview with Roza Aitmatova (*1937), Bishkek 21 January 2011, 6
of transcript. As a topos, this appears in Chingiz Aitmatov’s Jamilia and in later screenings
(Dzhamiila [Bishkek: Magas, 2008], 28; Dzhamilia, dir. Irina Poplavskaia [Mosfil´m, 1968],
Min. 13.05).
55
  Carmack, “Fortress of the Soviet Home-Front,” 81. Some problems with the integration
of non-Russian soldiers are also mentioned in L. S. Gatakova, ed., TsK VKP(b) i natsional´nyi
vopros, 2: 1933–1945 (Moscow: Rosspen, 2009), 665, 670. A different opinion, based on
oral history materials, can be found in Erica Marat, The Military and the State in Central Asia:
From Red Army to Independence (London: Routledge, 2010), 29–32. In her analysis, however,
Marat overlooks how strongly her interviewee’s narratives about the war were shaped by later
propaganda.
56
 “Protokoly zasedanii biuro TsK KP(b) Kirgizii,” 6 January 1942, l. 141; Simon,
Nationalismus und Nationalitätenpolitik, 211.
57
  Shin, “Red Army Propaganda,” 46; Schechter, “ ‘People’s Instructions,’ ” 113–14; Jochen
Hellbeck, Die Stalingrad-Protokolle: Sowjetische Augenzeugen berichten aus der Schlacht
(Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2012), 72–74.
58
  The numbers are from M. V. Filimoshin, “Liudskie poteri vooruzhennykh sil SSSR,” Mir
Rossii, no. 4 (1999): 99. According to these figures, 26,600 Kyrgyz soldiers died during the
war, 0.3 percent of all fallen Soviet soldiers, given a Kyrgyz share of the total Soviet population
of around 0.5 percent. For the Russians, the number of casualties is considerably higher: at
58 percent of the Soviet population in 1939, their share of fallen Soviet soldiers reached 66.4
percent.
506 MORITZ FLORIN

by increasing the number of Russian lessons and by directing propaganda to

them in their native language.59 As Brandon Schechter has argued, by and
large this campaign resonated, at least in the sense of ritual enactment.60 The
soldiers began to use Russian words, and some of them continued to wear
their military clothing back home. A cliché of later Kyrgyz war literature was
the returnee who

drank until the war and beat his wife with a whip. After his return, he
acted as if he had been replaced. He neither drinks nor smokes. He does
not go anywhere without his wife, and he converses in Russian as if it
were his mother tongue. In the morning he runs around his house and
then swings his arms like a scarecrow [an allusion to standard Soviet
gymnastics], and in winter he rubs his chest with snow until it turns red.
People are already talking about him: “Better listen to the mullah and do
not imitate anything.”61

Of course, the passage exaggerates. Nevertheless, it illustrates very well what

many collective farmers felt: that veterans came back changed from the war.
In this example, the veteran had quit drinking and smoking, had learned to
speak Russian, and had acquired new Russianized and masculine habits that
his co-villagers associated with the Soviet army.
The anecdote also suggests, however, that most villagers did not
understand the veteran’s behavior and instead preferred to “listen to the
mullah.” Indeed, instead of acquiring new “Soviet” habits many rural Central
Asians revived old ones. In July 1943, the regime allowed a convention of the
ulema of Central Asia (kurultai) and sanctioned the foundation of a spiritual
administration for the Muslims of Central Asia and Kazakhstan.62 Collective-
farm workers now turned to the authorities with the request to sanction the
building of prayer houses.63 Islam again became a visible and prominent part
of everyday lives. Large prayer meetings in mosques and under the open sky
became common practice again. In the Dzhalal-Abad region, one kolkhoz
59
  Shin, “Red Army Propaganda,” 49; Carmack, “History and Hero-Making,” 96.
60
  Schechter, “ ‘People’s Instructions,’ ” 127, 131.
61
  Mar Baidzhiev, Rasskazy i povesti (Bishkek: Sham, 2005), 64. On the war in postwar Kyrgyz
literature, see Florin, Kirgistan und die sowjetische Moderne, 77–83.
62
 Khalid, Islam after Communism, 78–79; RGASPI f. 5, op. 6, d. 188, ll. 22–26, “Pis´ma
NKVD SSSR,” January–December 1943.
63
  Tasar, “Islamically Informed Soviet Patriotism”; Yaacov Ro’i, Islam in the Soviet Union: From
the Second World War to Gorbachev (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 297, 431–
33. Many examples can also be found in RGASPI f. 17, op. 132, d. 6, ll. 240–43, “Zapiski,
pis´ma, stat´i, spravki mestnykh partiinykh i sovetskikh organov, Soveta po delam russkoi
pravoslavnoi tserkvi i po delam religioznykh kul´tov pri Sovete Ministrov SSSR,” 31 December
1948.
BECOMING SOVIET THROUGH WAR 507

chairman asked his superior to allow him to host celebrations on the occasion
of the circumcision of his son with 500 guests.64 In the Iangy-Dzhol region
of Dzhalal-Abad oblast, the head of the regional propaganda department
married a second wife in the presence of an imam.65
This revival was not necessarily opposed to the general trend of
Sovietization. As Eren Tasar has argued, in some cases dedication to Islam
and Soviet patriotism even reinforced one another.66 Two parallel processes
can thus be observed: first, there was a growing awareness of belonging to
a Soviet community which was about to win a war; and second, people
living in rural areas, both wealthy and poor, hoped that this new Soviet
community would open up a new space for Islam. The following memories
of Roza Aitmatova, sister of the writer Chingiz Aitmatov, show how such
an idea came to shape personal memories and popular narratives of the war:

R. A.: Yes, I can very well remember 9 May. I had a second brother, Ilgiz
Torekulovich, who was working as a postman for our village [Sheker,
in the Talas region] and who learned the news first. On that day, with
several other girls I was gathering brushwood for the oven. After Ilgiz
had returned from school, his mother sent him to help us carry it. And
he immediately said to me: “Do you know what happened today? Today
is Victory Day… .” We returned home and the mullah of the village,
Karakei, was already there to congratulate every single villager. He said
“Today is Victory Day, now life will become better.” And my mother said
that this might be true for those whose husbands would now return from
the front, but her husband would probably not return. Karakei then said
that this did not count; life would become better for everybody. Then
he added the following sentence: “Look, there will soon be a time when
your daughter, when you offer her a slice of bread, will reject it… .”
M. F.: You have reported that the mullah came to your home. In
those days, what role did religion play for you and for your family?
R. A.: Hmm, how was that? Back then, there was a mullah for the
whole village, and everybody respected him, treasured his words… . My
mother came from a wealthy family and had gone to the medrese… . She
was not so religious that she would force us to comply with all religious
rules, but she was a believer. And she taught us that faith commands
integrity and patience.67

Here Roza Aitmatova tries to describe the relationship of the villagers

to Islam: everybody listened to and respected the mullah. Significantly,

64
 Ro’i, Islam in the Soviet Union, 431–33.
65
  Tasar, “Islamically Informed Soviet Patriotism,” 402–3.
66
  Ibid., 387.
67
  Author’s interview with Roza Aitmatova (*1937), Bishkek, 21 January 2011.
508 MORITZ FLORIN

Aitmatova would mention in a later passage of the interview that she “wanted
to be atheist” in later years, because she also “wanted to be Soviet.” In this
particular passage, by contrast, she does not notice any contradiction between
the feeling of belonging to a Muslim village community and to a Soviet
community that had just won a war.
The Kyrgyz example thus helps us understand how the war diversified the
ways in which individuals might identify with the Soviet state. Soldiers often
learned to speak Russian at the front and acquired new habits that their fellow
villagers regarded as “Soviet.” Their compatriots at home, in contrast, did not
necessarily acquire new habits or understand Soviet ideology. Nevertheless,
they often became more eager to hear news about the war effort, which
affected their lives in so many respects. Kyrgyz were certainly encouraged by
the regime’s decision to suspend its antireligious propaganda. Even without
abandoning supposedly “backward” and “superstitious” ways, rural Kyrgyz
could thus start to identify with the common war effort of the Soviet people.

Evacuees, “Special Settlers,” and the Kyrgyz

So far, I have mentioned one of the biggest shocks of the war only in passing:
in 1941 and 1942, around 140,000 people were evacuated or fled to the
Kyrgyz Republic. Although most of these evacuees stayed for only one or two
years, another 170,000 people were deported from the North Caucasus to the
Kyrgyz Republic in 1944.68 For a republic with a total of 1,450,000 inhabitants
before the war, and for a titular nationality numbering around 754,000, this
influx posed a huge challenge.69 In coming into contact with people from all
over the USSR, Central Asians were forced to redefine their role within the
state. This happened in somewhat unexpected ways. Evacuations, as Soviet
authors usually emphasized, exerted a positive and “progressive” impact, even
as their immediate wartime effects on the rural population remained rather
small.70 Deportations, in contrast, were a taboo subject for the Soviet press.71
Moreover, they mainly affected rural areas, with direct repercussions for the
self-image of the Kyrgyz as a Soviet people.
In Soviet mythmaking, the evacuations became a defining moment for the
friendship of peoples. Supposedly, the Kyrgyz willingly and compassionately
provided the newcomers with shelter. One of the most widely propagandized
68
  Numbers from Iu. A. Poliakov, ed., Vsesoiuznaia perepis´ naseleniia 1937 goda: Obshchie
itogi (Moscow: Rosspen, 2007), 67. See also Marc Elie, “La vie en déportation (1943–1953),”
in Les Déportations en héritage: Les peuples réprimés du Caucase et de Crimée hier et aujourd’hui,
ed. Aurélie Campana et al. (Rennes: Presses universitaire de Rennes, 2009), 54.
69
  Vsesoiuznaia perepis´ 1939 goda: Osnovnye itogi (Moscow: Nauka, 1992), 78.
70
 Berkhoff, Motherland in Danger, 109.
71
  Ibid., 218.
BECOMING SOVIET THROUGH WAR 509

stories revolved around orphans, who were taken in by local families.72 In

exchange for helping the newcomers, however, the Kyrgyz also received
something in return: university institutes, theater troupes, a film studio,
and even whole factories were brought to the capital, Frunze.73 Some of the
evacuated factories were not removed, and increasing numbers of Kyrgyz
found work there during and after the war.74 Some evacuees also stayed, later
becoming teachers for the postwar Kyrgyz elite at universities or institutes.75
According to this narrative, the evacuations did demonstrate and strengthen
the “friendship of peoples” while helping the Kyrgyz develop themselves and
their republic.
Though there may be some truth to the myth, the immediate wartime
effects of the evacuations were arguably much smaller. They occurred during
the early stages of the war and were born out of necessity. The evacuees
were supposed to work not for the Kyrgyz Republic but for the front. They
arrived in the winter of 1941–42, when the countryside was in turmoil.
They usually settled in towns, where the overwhelming majority was Slavic
anyway. Almost no ethnic Kyrgyz lived in Frunze at the time.76 Moreover,
since most people were evacuated with their places of work, they did not
rely on the local population. Perhaps most important, most of the evacuees
left the Kyrgyz Republic in 1943.77 So while the long-term effects of the
evacuations on the integration of the Kyrgyz into Soviet society should not
be underestimated, the short-term impact most likely remained small.
The wartime deportations, in contrast, had an immediate effect on rural
areas. The Soviet state had been abusing Central Asia as a dumping ground
for deportees since the 1930s, not only for “kulaks” but also for the first
victims of Stalinist ethnic cleansing: Poles, Koreans, Armenians, and Kurds.
72
  Ibid., 114. On the Kyrgyz Republic, see Kerimbaev, Sovetskii Kirgizstan, 169. According to
Zholdoshbai Malabaev, at the end of the war there were 40 orphanages in the Kyrgyz Republic,
and around 300 children were taken in by Kyrgyz families (Bishkek: Stolitsa Kyrgyzstana
[Bishkek: Erkin-Too, 2001], 66–67). On Uzbekistan, see Manley, To the Tashkent Station, 223;
and Lisa Kirschenbaum, “Our City, Our Hearts, Our Families: Local Loyalties and Private Life
in Soviet World War II Propaganda,” Slavic Review 59, 4 (2000): 825–47.
73
 Kerimbaev, Sovetskii Kirgizstan, 56.
74
  Ibid., 12, 102.
75
  Information on Jewish teachers can be found in Aleksandr P. Iarkov, Evrei v Kyrgyzstane:
Istoriko-kul´turologicheskii ocherk (Bishkek: Menora, 2000), 62. A particularly good example
are the film studios, which were brought to Frunze and stayed. See V. I. Fomin, Kino na voine:
Dokumenty i svidetel´stva (Moscow: Materik, 2005), 490.
76
  According to the official census, in 1939 the Kyrgyz at Frunze numbered 6,117 (approx. 7
percent of the whole). This number fell during the war, because many Kyrgyz spent the war in
the countryside. Others went to the front. See Itogi Vsesoiuznoi perepisi naseleniia 1959 goda,
Kirgizskaia SSR (Moscow: Gosstatizdat, 1963), 130–37.
77
  On the evacuees’ return, see Manley, To the Tashkent Station, 238.
510 MORITZ FLORIN

In 1938, 11,932 people lived in so-called labor settlements throughout the

Kyrgyz SSR.78 The biggest group of deportees came during the war, however.
Around 170,000 people were deported to Kyrgyzstan from November 1943
to July 1944, among them Karachai (November 1943), Chechens (February
1944), Ingush (February 1944), Balkars (March 1944), Meskhetian Turks
(November 1944), Kurds (November 1944), and Hemshins (November
1944).79 After the war, around 10 percent of the total population of the
Kyrgyz Republic belonged to one of these deported groups. They arrived at a
time when the insurrections had been quelled and the war had already taken
a more successful course. In contrast to the evacuees, the deportees were
usually sent to the countryside, not to towns.80
Usually, the deportees were not clearly segregated from the local population.
Instead, local collective farms were supposed to supply newcomers with
housing, while deportees were to provide their labor to the collective farms.
Initially, bureaucrats had planned to find “empty buildings” and erect “heated
tents” (uteplennye palatki ).81 People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD)
documents indicate that in some places the local population really tried its
best to assist the newcomers by offering food and clothes and helping them
build houses.82 In some instances, the local population also voiced compassion.
Collective farmers from the New World Kolkhoz in the southern Uzgen region
reportedly met the newcomers with “exaggerated” compassion, because the
deportees had “suffered from Soviet power too.”83 Frequently, however, there
were neither enough vacant buildings nor “heated tents.” Food was in short
78
  Aleksandr Bezborodov et al., eds., Istoriia stalinskogo GULAGa: Konets 1920-kh–pervaia
polovina 1950-kh godov. Sobranie dokumentov, 7 vols., 5: Spetsposelentsy v SSSR, ed. Tat´iana V.
Tsarevskaia-Diakina (Moscow: Rosspen, 2005), 267–68.
79
  N. F. Bugai, ed., Iosif Stalin—Lavrentiia Berii: “Ikh nado deportirovat´.” Dokumenty, fakty,
kommentarii (Moscow: Druzhba narodov, 1992), 96–121, 153–55.
80
  On the geographical distribution, see Elie, “Vie en déportation,” 54. On the conditions
in the Kazakh SSR, see Michaela Pohl, “ ‘It Cannot Be That Our Graves Will Be Here’: The
Survival of Chechen and Ingush Deportees in Kazakhstan, 1944–1957,” Journal of Genocide
Research 4, 3 (2002): 401–30.
81
  Tsentral´nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Kyrgyzskoi Respubliki (TsGAKR) f. 350, op. 17, d.
206, ll. 177–84, “Iz dokladnoi zapiski nachal´nika pereselencheskogo upravleniia Sovnarkoma
Kirgizskoi SSR ob itogakh raboty za iiun´–iiul´ 1944 g.,” 27 July 1944, in Deportirovannye
narody Kavkaza v Kyrgyzstane: Sbornik dokumentov i materialov, ed. M. K. Imakeeva and
Vladimir M. Ploskikh (Bishkek: KPSU, 2010), 100.
82
 “Dokladnaia zapiska Narkoma vnutrennikh del Kazakhskoi SSR N. K. Bogdanova
zamestiteliu Narkoma vnutrennikh del SSSR V. V. Chernyshevu ob otnoshenii naseleniia
Kazakhskoi SSR k spetspereselentsam Severnogo Kavkaza,” 25 March 1944, in Vainakhi i
imperskaia vlast´: Problema Chechni i Ingushetii vo vnutrennei politike Rossii i SSSR. Nachalo
XIX–seredina XX v., ed. V. A. Kozlov et. al. (Moscow: Rosspen, 2011), 720–23.
83
 Tsentral´nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv politicheskoi dokumentatsii Kyrgyzskoi Respubliki
(TsGAPDKR) f. 56, op. 5, d. 445, ll. 77–79, “Iz informatsii sekretaria oshskogo obkoma
BECOMING SOVIET THROUGH WAR 511

supply, and typhoid spread quickly. According to internal documents, more

than one-fifth of the “special settlers” died during the first (1943–44) or the
second winter (1944–45).84 This death rate of one-fifth was much higher than
among, for example, deported Koreans or Volga Germans.85 The main problem
was that the local population did not have the means to share anything with the
deported at this stage of the war. Often the deportees were crammed into old
stables or even had to live under the open skies.86
The Soviet state did not justify the deportations in public. It was, however,
absolutely necessary to at least somehow explain to the local collective farmers
why they had to take in so many people. Thus local NKVD officials were asked
to “explain” and to “prepare” the collective farms for the task of providing
newcomers with shelter and of ultimately integrating them into the local
workforce.87 It is not entirely clear how NKVD officials responded on such
occasions. Some of the deported people later recalled that the NKVD spread
rumors about them on purpose by, for example, labeling the deportation
trains with the inscription “enemies of the people.”88 NKVD sources, in
contrast, seem to indicate that—during this early phase at least—the state tried
to suppress rumors and even to appeal to the collective farmers to integrate
the deported people into the workforce or into schools.89 According to the
NKVD, it was only due to the insufficiency of such “explanatory work” that
local people often met those deported with open hostility, frequently leading
to “bullying and violence.”90
KP(b) Kirgizii sekretariu TsK KP(b) Kirgizii A. Vagovu o razmeshchenii i trudoustroistve
spetspereselentsev po raionam oshskoi oblasti,” 5 April 1944.
84
  Bugai, “Ikh nado deportirovat´,” 223. Such NKVD numbers should, however, be treated
with care. See the introduction to Kozlov et al., Vainakhi i imperskaia vlast´.
85
  Bugai, “Ikh nado deportirovat´,” 96–121, 153–55; Pohl, “ ‘It Cannot Be,’ ” 408.
86
  For some of the most horrendous examples, see “Dokladnaia zapiska Narkoma vnutrennikh
del Kirgizskoi SSR A. A. Pchelkina Narkomu vnutrennikh del SSSR L. P. Berii o prieme i
rasselenii spetspereselentsev: Chechentsev, ingushei i balkartsev v Kirgizskoi SSR,” 22 April
1944, in Vainakhi i imperskaia vlast´, 732–40.
87
  Pohl, “ ‘It Cannot Be,’ ” 410.
88
  Aza Bazorkina, “Terpenie,” in Tak eto bylo: Natsional´nye repressii v SSSR, ed. Svetlana Alieva
(Nal´chik: Kotliarovy, 2012) 2:107–44, 108; Pohl, “ ‘It Cannot Be,’ ” 406.
89
  See, e.g., TsGAPDKR f. 56, op. 5, d. 445, l. 20, “Iz dokladnoi zapiski sekretaria Issyk-
kul´skogo obkoma KP(b) Kirgizii … o rasselenii spetspereselentsev v raionakh Issyk-kul´skoi
oblasti”; and TsGAKR f. 1445, op. 2, d. 34, ll. 13–20, “Iz dokladnoi zapiski nachal´nika
upravleniia Narkoma vnutrennikh del po dzhalal-abadskoi oblasti,” 9 June 1944. Documents
published in Deportirovannye narody, 66–67 and 71–76, respectively.
90
  TsGAKR f. 1811, op. 1, d. 167, ll. 13–16, “Iz protokola zasedaniia ispolkoma frunzenskogo
oblastnogo soveta deputatov trudiashchikhsia o privlechenii spetspereselentsev k stroitel´stvu
tokmakskoi GES.” For an overview of a similar situation in the Kazakh SSR, see “Iz dokladnoi
zapisi ministra vnutrennikh del Kazakhskoi SSR A. A. Pchelkina ministru vnutrennikh del
SSSR S. N. Kruglovu,” 18 July 1946, in Vainakhi i imperskaia vlast´, 766.
512 MORITZ FLORIN

Some scholars have argued that the deportations resulted in segregation

instead of integration due to the behavior of the deported people themselves.
Supposedly, during their years of exile the deported showed signs of “defiance”
or an “unwillingness to integrate.”91 Marc Elie has even spoken of an “ethno-
cultural revival” among Chechens and Ingush during these years.92 However,
the sources that most scholars have used are less than transparent about the
deportees’ behavior. Arguably, NKVD documents tell us more about the
communication among the NKVD, kolkhoz chairmen, and party officials,
as well as about their attitudes toward the so-called special settlers, than they
do about the deportees. For example, the central authorities in Moscow and
Bishkek constantly demanded that local kolkhoz chairmen integrate the
deported people into the workforce, into schools, and into the Party. However,
this often failed, not only because the deported people were unwilling to do
what they were asked but because they could not. In some cases they were too
weak to work; in others they did not have shoes for their children to attend
school.93 One NKVD report, for example, noted that special settlers refused
to participate in the 1946 elections to the Supreme Soviet on the grounds that
“England and America will help us restore our state.”94 The report, however,
may tell us more about local kolkhoz chairmen and how they spoke about
the special settlers than about the “real” attitudes of the special settlers toward
the Soviet state.
When interpreting the NKVD documents, we should keep in mind the
extremely harsh conditions of the first years of exile. During the late war years,
even the local population was struggling to survive and had little to share.
Sometimes they treated deportees with unnecessary cruelty, detaining them
in stables for weeks, beating them up, and denying them their food rations.
In their desperation, deportees started to steal milk, grain, or even cattle.95 It
91
  This argument is particularly pronounced in Pohl, “ ‘It Cannot Be.’ ”
92
  Elie, “Vie en déportation,” 53–76.
93
  TsGAPDKR f. 406, op. 2, d. 198, ll. 26–28, “Iz dokladnoi zapiski sekretaria frunzenskogo
obkoma KP(b) kirgizii sekretariu TsK KP(b) Kirgizii po propagande i agitatsii Soronbaevu o
massovo-propagandistskoi rabote sredi pereselentsev vo frunzenskoi oblasti,” 12 August 1946;
TsGAPDKR f. 56, op. 4, d. 564, ll. 35–42, 227–334, “Iz protokola zasedaniia biuro TsG
KP(b) Kirgizii o sostoianii khoziaistvennogo i trudovogo ustroistva pereselentsev v Kirgizskoi
SSR,” 12–14 August 1946; TsGAPDKR f. 921, op. 4, d. 1, l. 31, “Spravka Otdela propagandy
i agitatsii talasskogo obkoma KP(b) Kirgizii chlenu propagandistskoi gruppy TsK VKP(b)
Trofimovu o sostoianii agitatsionno-massovoi raboty sredi spetspereselentsev,” 13 February
1947. These documents are published in Deportirovannye narody, 200–45.
94
  Quoted in Pohl, “ ‘It Cannot Be,’ ” 412.
95
 Examples from the oblast level include TsGAPDKR f. 56, op. 5, d. 537, ll. 18–19,
“Dokladnaia zapiska sekretaria dzhalal-abadskogo obkoma sekretariu TsK KP(b) Kirgizii N.
Bogoliubovu o nakazanii dolzhnostnykh lits za gruboe otnoshenie k spetspereselentsam,” 14
September 1945; and TsGAPDKR f. 406, op. 2, d. 182, ll. 33–35, “Iz dokladnoi zapiski
BECOMING SOVIET THROUGH WAR 513

is in this context that the rural population started to blame the victims for
their own fate. This phenomenon was by no means specific to the Kyrgyz
Republic but seems to have been characteristic of the relationship between
local or indigenous people and newcomers in other regions of Central Asia,
too. In one telling example, a Kazakh collective-farm worker reportedly said:
“If I had known that they would bring an enemy of the people to my home,
I would have torn it down a long time ago. It is a pity to let them trample
the earth of our collective farm.”96 In other instances, local collective farmers
denied the supposed “traitors” access to the local cinema or did not let them
enter a school building.97 When an Uzbek woman in southern Kyrgyzstan
made friends with deportees, then fell in love with a Chechen man, the local
kolkhoz administration did not allow her to marry him because he supposedly
was a “traitor.” To set an example, they decided to punish the woman and take
away all her belongings.98
When rural Central Asians started to use the language of Soviet patriotism
to justify discrimination against deportees, this does not necessarily mean
that they identified with the Soviet state. On the contrary, they needed to
disassociate themselves from the victims because often they felt vulnerable
themselves. According to the NKVD, rumors quickly spread that Stalin
would soon start to deport people from Central Asia to the North Caucasus
in exchange for the special settlers.99 Under such conditions of insecurity, it
made sense for local collective farmers to draw a clear dividing line between
themselves and the supposed traitors to the fatherland. Sometimes this
entailed an externalization of images that had been aimed at the Kyrgyz before
the war. During the years of hunger and famine, Central Asian nomads had
nachal´nika UNKVD Frunzenskoi oblasti sekretariu frunzenskogo obkoma KP(b) Kirgizii
Mambetovu o prestupno-bezdushnom otnoshenii predsedatelia kolkhoza ‘Irisu’ kalininskogo
raiona t. Ishimbekova i partorga A. Savirbekovoi k spetspereselentsam, rasselennym v
kolkhoze,” 17 September 1945. For an overview of the situation, see TsGAPDKR f. 56, op.
4, d. 822, ll. 46–51, “Protokoly zasedanii biuro,” 10–19 May 1951. For more examples from
the Kazakh and Kyrgyz SSRs, see the documents in Kozlov et al., Vainakhi i imperskaia vlast´,
732–35, 746–48, 787–89.
96
 “Dokladnaia napiska Narkoma vnutrennikh del Kazakhskoi SSR N. K. Bogdanova,”
720–23.
97
  Ia. S. Patiev, Ingushi: Deportatsiia, vozvrashchenie, reabilitatsiia, 1944–2004. Dokumenty,
materialy, kommentarii (Magas: Serdalo, 2004), 188.
98
  TsGAPDKR f. 56, op. 5., d. 537, ll. 31–36, “Spravka Narkoma vnutrennikh del kirgizskoi
SSR o polozhenii spetspereselentsev v alabukinskom raione dzhalal-abadskoi oblasti,” 16
November 1945.
99
 TsGAPDKR f. 56, op. 5, d. 445, ll. 12–13, “Iz dokladnoi zapiski sekretaria dzhalal-
abadskogo obkoma KP(b) Kirgizii sekretariu TsK KP(b) Kirgizii A. Vagovu o prieme i
raspredelenii spetspereselentsev v dzhalal-abadskoi oblasti,” 16 April 1944, in Deportirovannye
narody, 54–58.
514 MORITZ FLORIN

often been accused of stealing cattle from Russian peasants, of “banditry”

and rape. Their behavior supposedly displayed incorrigible backwardness.100
Now, such accusations were turned against deportees. Chechens and Ingush
supposedly stole cattle, were fanatically religious, and defied any attempt to
civilize them. Idris Bazorkin, an Ingush writer who spent his exile in Frunze,
collected a number of examples of everyday discrimination. Here he describes
the humiliating procedure of checking identity cards:

To outsiders, it is hard to imagine how humiliating this procedure can

be, when the bus suddenly stops and a patrol enters it. Such controls
are often conducted on the basis of outward appearance, distinguishing
Caucasians from the other passengers. The patrol then turns to people
from above: “Documents.” Or he turns to the chauffeur, asking: “There
are no strangers here? No baranty?” When the patrol catches a Caucasian,
amid laughter and rare expressions of sympathy he is thrown out of the
bus. And even if the documents were in order, the settler then sits among
all the others as if he had been spat upon, as if he were being punished
once more for his crimes against the fatherland.101

According to Bazorkin, the people of the Caucasus were excluded from

the Soviet multiethnic majority population as pariahs. The word baranty,
meaning something like “bandit” or “predator,” is also of interest in this
context. In Russian, the word carries the connotation of backwardness. Here
it was obviously used as a pejorative term specifically for deportees.
Looking back, Kyrgyz interviewees and scholars sometimes mention the
people of the North Caucasus in tandem with the evacuees, incorporating
them into a narrative of mutual help and the friendship of peoples during
the war.102 We should, however, also consider what the deportees themselves
had to say about their situation before their rehabilitation and return to the
North Caucasus. Indeed, according to a stream of letters that deportees sent
the Soviet government during the Thaw, the locals had been among their
worst tormentors during the war and immediate postwar years. In March
1956, a group of Chechens and Ingush wrote in a letter to Nikita Khrushchev
that the “hatred of the local population against us will remain, if not forever,
then for a long time. Even after the speech about the cult of personality, a
Chechen or Ingush can rarely leave his village without being insulted on the
bus or tram.”103 A 1956 letter, signed by 13 “special settlers,” declares: “We
100
 Kindler, Stalins Nomaden, 225–26.
101
 Patiev, Ingushi, 339.
102
 “Ustnaia istoriia nezavisimogo Kyrgyzstana,” interview JE-B_1-1 (Uzbek, born 1923,
Osh); Alieva, Tak eto bylo, 91.
103
 Patiev, Ingushi, 346.
BECOMING SOVIET THROUGH WAR 515

cannot go on living where we are now, because neither with the Kyrgyz nor
the Kazakh do we have any ethnic or linguistic commonalities.”104
The above-cited examples indicate that the deportations usually resulted
in segregation instead of assimilation of the deported people. Both local
officials and ordinary civilians drew a dividing line between themselves
and the supposed traitors in their everyday interactions. In this context,
the patriotic language of war was both accessible and opportune. Even
if the state tried to appeal to a socialist sense of responsibility to reintegrate
deported children into schools and deported adults into the workforce and
local soviets, the local kolkhoz chairmen and workers could use the language
of patriotism to justify segregation. This wartime division of Soviet and non-
Soviet people cannot be attributed to socialist ideology, which instructed the
local population to integrate and educate deportees. The war did not make
the rural population of the Kyrgyz Republic Soviet in this sense. Instead, the
rural population—kolkhoz chairmen or ordinary workers—used the language
of wartime patriotism to justify the failure to reintegrate deported people, to
blame the victims for their own fate, and thus to disassociate themselves from
the supposed traitors to the fatherland.

The Kyrgyz and the Great Fatherland War

The war did not make life better. It brought new hardships and suffering
to a society that had already undergone considerable turmoil before the
war. War, however, was capable of creating new reasons to identify with
the Soviet state as a multinational and powerful homeland. The impact of this
patriotic turn left its mark well beyond the central regions of the Soviet state,
including, somewhat spontaneously, remote and strategically unimportant
regions such as the Kyrgyz Republic. The most important factor facilitating
this development was the change in military fortunes. While the Soviet
state seemed near collapse in 1941, it came out strengthened from the war.
Rural insurrectionists had to accept that they were too weak to seriously
harm the Soviet state. The fortunes of war were not the only force for
change, however; the Soviet state also adapted ideologically. During the war,
propaganda deemphasized the USSR’s socialist and modernist origins and
promoted a more inclusive vision of common Soviet suffering and heroism.
Even supposedly backward people—such as religious believers, nomads, and
illiterates—were now included in this Soviet project. The Kyrgyz example
thus helps us understand how even victims of Stalinism could now become
victors in World War II.

104
  Ibid., 364.
516 MORITZ FLORIN

Patriotic propaganda did not foster inclusion for everyone. Instead

it created new dividing lines. Wartime patriotism promoted sharp images
of collective heroism, suffering, and treason, but it did so by assigning
these traits to ethnic groups as collective actors. The Soviet state accused
the Chechen, Ingush, Karachai, or Balkar peoples of collective treason to
justify their deportation; the Kyrgyz (or, for that matter, Kazakhs, Uzbeks,
or Tajiks), in contrast, were propagandistically elevated into the community
of Soviet wartime patriots. Thus during the war the Soviet state created
not only new “enemy nations” but also patriot nations.105 Deportees were not
clearly segregated from the rest of the population geographically, but they
were now separated discursively. Indeed, Soviet patriotism provided the rural
population of Central Asia with an acceptable language of discrimination.
Learning this language offered one path by which the rural population of the
Kyrgyz Republic could become Soviet through war.

Lehrstuhl für Neuere und Neueste Geschichte mit dem Schwerpunkt der
Geschichte Osteuropas
Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
Bismarckstr. 12, Raum 1.314
D-91054 Erlangen, Germany
moritz.florin@fau.de

105
 On the emergence of the category of “enemy nations” during the 1930s, see Martin,
Affirmative Action Empire, 335–40.