Authors

Zayra Badillo Castro¹;  ¹ School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK

Discussion

The establishment of self-administrative volunteer organisations in the 1960s by the Soviet state, led to a new understanding of the role of the population in promoting a socialist way of life in the private and communal spaces of their neighbourhoods. Comrades’ courts and volunteers’ militias were two of these types of organisations, ran by volunteers, supervising socialist behaviour among neighbours, and in charge of addressing problems over hooliganism in the community. Understood as a new strategy of creating an “all peoples’ state”, promoted by Khrushchev, it pursued an integration of the average citizen in the affairs of the Soviet state at the local level. This paper explores the urban dynamics developed from the intervention or intromission of these state-sponsored organisations in Tashkent in the 1960s. It focuses on the work carried out in living spaces of the city, establishing a comparison of their failures and successes in regulating everyday life in the mahallas and in the new urban developments of the microrayon. These organisations also reflected the personal interests of residents and a local understanding of communal welfare, often influenced by Islam and traditional structures of power in the region. In this presentation, I will discuss the challenges posed on the ground to Moscow’s precepts and expectations for a new and socialist way of life for Central Asia, through the interactions of these organisations with Tashkenters.