ABSTRACT
During the 1920s and 1930s, Soviet Russian decorative arts produced for audiences in Moscow and Leningrad were replete with images of Central Asians, typically Uzbeks. 1 Because the multi-ethnic Soviet Union was made up of hundreds of nationalities and language groups, the consistent selection of Uzbeks is puzzling. What did the generalised image of a Central Asian often resembling an Uzbek express which that of a Iakut, Bashkir or Ukrainian could not? It is my argument that the numerous objects featuring Central Asian figures performed a specific function for Soviet Russian viewers that can be recovered only by attending to two important conditions surrounding their production: the Russians' inability to bring this region completely under their political control and the objects' intended function as decoration for the Soviet Russian home. For both Soviet Russian producers and viewers with an investment in the success of Soviet power, orientalist discourse was a convenient means by which intransigent forces defying the Soviet state and its programmes could be 'domesticated' into charming or coy figures. As any number of basic textbooks on Russian civilisa tion have noted, many Russians continued to conceive of Russia as neither a European nor an Asiatic nation, but a mixture of the two and, moreover, to consider themselves as technologically backward, or 'Asiatic', in relation to their European neighbours both before and after the October Revolution. Indeed, in the early Soviet period, the noun aziatsh china, a negative term denoting an 'Asian' way of life, was used to describe the worst parts of Russian daily life (Blank 1994: 40). These decorative works tended to reinforce Russian identity as civilised bearers of culture and did so at the expense of an internationalist Soviet identity in which all citizens, whatever their nationality, were considered equals.
