A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

232 A history of Inner Asia
of the government, but they became ever more subordinated to the paramount
interests of the new class of Communist bureaucrats obsessed
with the perpetuation of their own power and privileges, which could be
assured only through the suppression of all attempts at any alternative
methods, debates, or experiments, whether political, economic, or cultural
(strikes, for example, were out of the question).It may be instructive
to quote a Western journalist who in 1992 visited the Kazakh city of
Karaganda, center of an extensive coalmining region.The place was
still reeling from the unprecedented events of 1989: “In 1989 these
fearful [coal mining] tunnels spat out their miners in a strike which was
echoed across the Union.Its men were young, angry and organised.
They demanded, and won, an independent trade union.After sixty
years of servitude, the workers were on the march.But their model, they
said, was the United States of America.” 1
On the all-Union level, this led to increasing stagnation and the development
of an unnatural, hypocritical psychological climate; in the case
of Central Asia, the “vertical” self-interest of the new Communist class
was compounded by a “horizontal” self-interest, a pronounced Moscowcentered
and Russo-centric chauvinism that continued the forced submission
of the natives to the Russians despite the “international”
equality claimed by the system.The word “international” (internatsionalnyi
in Russian, introduced into Uzbek etc.as internatsional) had in this
context a special significance: for its parameter was strictly circumscribed
by the outside limits of the Soviet Union, so that the term
applied exclusively to the mutual relationship of the ethnic conglomerate
in that country, and it differed from the word mezhdunarodnyi (khalqaro
in Uzbek), a synonym of internatsionalnyi but applied only to relations with
non-Soviet countries and nationalities. Internatsionalnyi had a positive connotation,
from the point of view of Soviet ideology, in a sense virtually
the inverse of the word’s original meaning: an effacement of ethnic
differences in favor of a growing mutuality and eventual sameness.This
sameness could not but be anchored in a Russian or Russified identity, a
goal known as sliyanie, “fusion,” with the eventual appearance of the legendary
sovetskiy chelovek, the homo sovieticus who also found his way into
Central Asian terminology (sovet kishisi in Uzbek for example).This may
indeed have been the ultimate meaning of the perennial refrain of
“together building Communism,” otherwise puzzling for a society
already ruled by a Communist government. 2
1 C.Thubron, The Lost Heart of Asia (Penguin Books, 1994), p.340.
2 Purists of Marxism-Leninism of course could retort that the role of the Communist Party was
only to steer a socialist state under its stewardship toward the golden age of Communism.