Authors

Discussion

For the young Uzbek Republik the period of 1920-1930s was the time of modernization and intense social transformations, including a struggle of modernity projects: Jadidism, Bolshevism and traditionalism, the process of ethnicization — the simplification of the national structure of Central Asian society, the unification of the language, the cultural revolution, the hujum movement, the active process of nation-building which basic principle was the unity of culture. The national-state demarcation of the 1924-1929s was accompanied by the clash of three different discourses — Soviet-internationalist, pan-Islamic and local (many local self-identifications: Bukhara, Khiva, Kokand, etc.). New authorities in cooperation with Russian orientalists had to create historical and cultural narratives that describe peoples in terms of national culture, as well as participate in the development of national languages ​​and the formation of national elites to build a new national identity. The paper examines the creation of a new national art as one of the tools of nation-building and explores the process of forming the canon of the national art of Uzbekistan under the influence of Soviet politics and local movements. The process of searching for a unified cultural policy will be explored considering the context of public discussions, on the basis of archival documents, state regulations and acts, orders of central museums, as well as preserved internal documents of local institutions.