Authors

Discussion

This paper looks at the role of all-Soviet institutions such as literary journals, the writer’s union, and environmental organizations in speeding the end of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev and his advisers counted on all-union networks and publications to mobilize support for perestroika and diffuse nationalist tensions. Through these institutions, intellectuals from across the USSR could band together to form an all-union civil society that would challenge the recalcitrant bureaucracy and party conservatives standing in the way of reform. Instead those very networks became a key site where nationalist discourse and grievance was articulated, sharpened, and transmitted. The intelligentsia which Gorbachev had hoped to recruit to his cause took their task as Soviet and national leaders seriously; glasnost, however, forced them to confront the gap between their own experience and the problems of the people they claimed to represent. The paper will focus in particular on the Central Asian republics, arguing that the all-union mobilization encouraged by Gorbachev also led to the consolidation of a view of the region as fundamentally colonial in its relation with Moscow, and one that had more in common with the “foreign East” than it did with the rest of the USSR. In the process, however, the image of Central Asia as part of the “one East,” and of its relationship to Russia as fundamentally colonial, was co-constructed by a surprising array of actors: Russian and Central Asian economists and sociologists, writers and environmentalists, historians and philologists.