A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

Soviet Central Asia 229
Soviet society, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union...”, is especially
significant; it reveals the unique role of the Communist Party,
totally different from that of a political party in the Western sense: an
organism beyond and above the law and conventional government, it
was the real master of the country.The remark about its Uzbek branch
is revealing too: like a military platoon, it had to carry out the orders of
the high command at the center (hence the Russo-Uzbek term otryad,
rather uncommon outside of military parlance).
Aside from these specific aspects of integrated parallelism, there also
existed a less explicit but nevertheless pervasive and insidious integration.A
doubling of functions was one such device: the fact that almost
every functionary in a top executive position, whether governmental,
political, or cultural, had a twin colleague, theoretically the number two
of that position but in fact performing the role of keeping an eye on his
partner.In most cases, the “number one” was an Uzbek, Kazakh, etc.,
according to the republic, “number two” being a Slav, usually a Russian
or a Ukrainian.Another device was the doubling of the basic institutions
or publications with Russian ones – or, rather, of the Russian ones with
the native ones.Thus the Communist Party of the RSFSR was paralleled
by those of the republics, in addition to the existence, as the
supreme arbiter, of an All-Union party; the Academy of Sciences of the
Russian SFSR was paralleled by those of the other Union republics,
again in addition to the Academy of Sciences of the USSR; the Union
of Writers of the Russian SFSR, by those of the other republics (again,
besides the umbrella Union of Writers of the USSR).The literary
monthly Novyi Mir, published by the Union of Soviet Writers in Moscow,
had such counterparts as the bimonthly Sharq Yulduzi published by the
Union of Uzbek writers in Tashkent; the Bolshaya Sovetskaya Entsiklopediya,
the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, also had its counterparts in the encyclopedias
of the Union Republics, published to accompany the new constitutions
of 1978 (besides the fourteen-volume Uzbek one, there is the
thirteen-volume Qazaq Sovet Entsiklopediyasy, the eight-volume Türkmen
Sovet Entsiklopediyasy, the eight-volume Entsiklopediyai Sovetii Tojik, and the
six-volume Kyrgyz Sovet Entsiklopediyasy).
The constitution naturally says nothing about religion, unless we take
the plausible view that Communism and the Communist Party assumed
the role of religion and of an organized religious hierarchy.We have
seen the central place that Islam had occupied in the life of the area’s
Muslims, and the new regime made a sustained and massive effort to
eradicate it and to substitute “scientific atheism” and Communism for