The yurt, the house, and the kolkhoz: collectivisation and its aftermath in Naryn

Submission note: A History Postgraduate Dissertation submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, College of Arts, Social Sciences and Commerce, La Trobe University, Victoria.

I am writing this thesis about Naryn, a region tucked deep in the Tian Shan mountains of central Kyrgyzstan. I look at how Kyrgyz memory, community, religion, culture and agency confronted or adapted to Soviet collectivisation. I examine how a generation of Kyrgyz, raised under Stalinism remember, enact and make sense of their past; how people today imagine their community and identity. Much scholarly attention has been brought to the plight of pastoral communities in Kazakhstan. Much has been written on the ‘cottonisation’ of Central Asia, but little on the life and economy of mountainous pastoralists. A recurring theme in writing has been the breakdown of traditional authority and community, the uprooting of a century-old ‘nomadic’ lifestyle. A shallow consensus has emerged: pastoralism was destroyed irreversibly by an abusive, corrupt, exploitative state power, alien to the pastoralists and detrimental to their interests. Existing romanticised analyses of victimhood overlook how implementing a model of intensive pastoralism on the slopes of the Tian Shan and Pamir could have been achieved. The mountainous geography ensured the population remained culturally peripheral to Sovietisation. People may not have been spared the onslaught of Marxism-Leninism at school and the work place, but at home they were still indiferent, uncomprehending, and they enjoyed privacy. Collectivisation did not lead to the overall destruction of pastoral-nomadic life. Kyrgyz-Soviet rural culture became sedentary, but only in empty spoken formulae. In life, as it was really lived and imagined, Kyrgyz-Soviet rural culture remained nomadic. Furthermore, archival material reveals the settlement campaign, when it was launched in 1931, was frenzied, half-hearted, hectic, badly planned, under-funded and economically unviable.