ABSTRACT
At almost the same time as the establishment of the Turkish Republic, Soviet Uzbekistan was experiencing a similar situation. The Soviets, not unlike the Kemalists, had inherited significant problems from the empire they had replaced. As in Turkey, one of the most pressing concerns for the Soviets in Uzbekistan, as throughout Central Asia, was the lack of unity among the population.4 While there were various manifestations of collective consciousness among the Uzbeks – stemming from religious, regional and dynastic affiliations – there was a lack of national identification. The absence of national consciousness, although certainly conducive to the Soviet (and earlier Tsarist) take-over of the region, subsequently became a cause of concern, first, for the reformminded Jaddidist (modernist) intellectuals, and later for the Bolsheviks, as they sought to incorporate Uzbekistan, and the other newly created republics, as ‘equal’ members into the Soviet Union. As it was for the Kemalists in Turkey, so was the root of the problem for the Soviets that the national-state demarcation of Soviet Central Asia in 1924 had created an Uzbek state, but not an Uzbek nation.5
