In my home country, Kyrgyzstan, we often joke that “every taxi driver in Bishkek is potentially a professor of political science,” because whenever you get in a taxi, the driver ends up talking to you about local politics (or maybe you’re the one talking to the driver). Growing up in a politically contentious society, I naturally became interested in modern political systems in developing countries. I was particularly interested in understanding how the political processes in Central Asia are explained from the perspective of modern comparative politics. However, I soon realized that merely explaining the “now” was not enough, as the current situation had deep roots and a specific history of its own. Therefore, when I decided to pursue my master’s degree at Hokkaido University, I already had a plan to study the history of nomadic Central Asia with a focus on Kyrgyzstan.

Initially, I decided to investigate the history of the Central Asian national republics during the early Soviet period (1920s). I explored the role of national elites in Soviet state-sponsored nation-building processes. Did the Central Asian national elites have any leverage in their interactions with the Soviet center, or was it a one-way decision-making process dominated by Moscow? These investigations resulted in three journal articles written in Russian, Japanese, and English. In these articles, I argued that the Soviet nation-building process was contingent upon many local conditions, and not everything was decided in Moscow. On the contrary, most decisions in Central Asia originated among the local elites rather than their supervisors in the center.

Most importantly, I revealed that an excessive focus on the activities of national elites within the borders of a given republic obscures their cross-cultural and cross-ethnic interactions with representatives of other ethnic groups in the region. I also urged scholars to closely examine the interactions of different national elites with each other, as the socially and politically integrated Central Asian space (the Turkestan Governor-Generalship) during the Russian Imperial period (1860s-1917) was more natural and common for them.

While writing about national republics, elites, and their interactions with the Soviet center and among themselves, I became increasingly aware that Central Asian Soviet studies were overly focused on “high politics,” while simultaneously ignoring a large segment of society that neither spoke Russian nor understood the Soviet state’s policies of sovietization. I realized that despite the importance of unpacking the socialist system in Central Asia from the perspective of the state and the national elite, we scholars had become too fixated on the normative conceptual and chronological frameworks offered by the official Soviet discourse.

To deconstruct the discursive reality of the Soviet state, I delved deeper into society, seeking to understand how nomads in localities made sense of, domesticated, and proactively exploited the new socialist constraints. In doing so, I discovered how the most potent social construct among Kyrgyz nomads at that time, the lineage logic, played a crucial role in state-society relations, overshadowing all other considerations. The first part of this inquiry will be published in the first issue of the journal Ab Imperio in the summer of 2024.

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