What is it about?
Focusing on Soviet culture and its social ramifications both during the Soviet period and in the post-Soviet era, this book addresses important themes associated with Sovietisation and socialisation in the Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. The book contains contributions from scholars in a variety of disciplines, and looks at topics that have been somewhat marginalised in contemporary studies of Central Asia, including education, anthropology, music, literature and poetry, film, history and state-identity construction, and social transformation. It examines how the Soviet legacy affected the development of the republics in Central Asia, and how it continues to affect the society, culture and polity of the region. Although each state in Central Asia has increasingly developed its own way, the book shows that the states have in varying degrees retained the influence of the Soviet past, or else are busily establishing new political identities in reaction to their Soviet legacy, and in doing so laying claim to, re-defining, and reinventing pre-Soviet and Soviet images and narratives.
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Why is it important?
Throwing new light and presenting alternate points of view on the question of the Soviet legacy in the Soviet Central Asian successor states, the book is of interest to academics in the field of Russian and Central Asian Studies.
Perspectives
This book is about the legacy of the Soviet Communist Party mentality, culture, economics and society on the peoples of Central Asia. In 1991, we might have thought the old Soviet way of doing things was over, but feelings, ideas, and practices continued with the change of political system. This book explores what changed and what remained the same in those critical years before and after independence.
Dr Sevket Akyildiz
SOAS University of London
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Social and Cultural Change in Central Asia, October 2013, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.4324/9780203761977.
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