In Kyrgyzstan, decolonisation has gone beyond the academic and scientific sphere to the public: the issue is being discussed both on online and offline platforms, influencers set the new tone in the language issue, while creative people show in intuitive language the narratives of full sovereignty.
CABAR.asia spoke to Elmira Nogoibaeva, head of the research site “Esimde”, about what it is like to work with the colonial consciousness and about the role of oral history in building the identity of the state and its people.
“Esimde” is the research site to study and understand the processes, events and “white spots” remaining in the people’s memory and history. It is committed to contribute to the social shift in perceiving the history and memory of Kyrgyzstan in the 20th-21st centuries.
In your opinion, when did Kyrgyzstan start to rethink its history and identity? This conversation seems to have started just recently or maybe the decolonisation processes that are taking place have not drawn public attention?
If we look at the Soviet period as decolonisation, even then there were people who can be referred to as dissidents. They spoke about preservation of culture, arts. And that’s why they were blamed for nationalism.
Dissidence is one of the attempts to protect one’s own national identity. Decolonisation is the academic term.
First, not everyone understands what it is. Second, some people think that it is a sort of some solidified substance, the frozen situation.
In fact, decolonisation is the process of understanding oneself in the past, return to oneself. Because during colonisation, the colony/mother country rewrites the entire history – it determines what was important and what was not; who was the hero and who was the villain, like with the basmachi.
The mother country described Urkun (the Central Asian revolt against tsarist Russia in 1916 – Author’s note) as the class struggle between rich and poor. Colonisation is described as bringing peace, civilisation, modernisation to the backward people, and instead they take the people’s identity, selfhood.
Postcolonial theories, postcolonial discussions developed and were relevant in the 80-90s. We knew very little about it and it was available only at the level of academic communities. We should understand that the Soviet Academy, Kyrgyzstan academy are institutions that fully depend on the authorities. They are funded by the authorities.
There is such a term as the colonisation of science – it is resisting new independent theories, researches, especially, when they are courageous, daring, riotous.
For example, I encountered it when there was the presentation of the book by Amirbek Usmanov and Petr Kokaisl “Kyrgyzstan through the eyes of witnesses” (the book contains archival documents covering political, economical, geographic, social situation in Central Asia in the 18th-20th centuries – Author’s note) seven years ago. They wrote a non-fiction book based on archives. Reputable historians said it was not the academic science as it was based on oral history.
The age of colonialism has gone, but its influence is still strong. What do you think, which stage of decolonisation is Kyrgyzstan at?
I refuse definitions of various stages because this is the continuation of the linear development. If we keep on dividing the concept of linear development, we will always be the third world – a developing or immature country. We will always be at the end.
We have passed through a 70-year period (years of the USSR existence, 1922-1991 – Author’s note], when we were long suggested that our people did not have anything special until 1917 because it was the poor and restricted nation without culture, without alphabet. And a white man brought civilisation to it, and it survived due to it. In addition to survival, he had the industry boom.
Second, in these 70 years the public developed fear because in the Soviet history we often spoke about victories, improvements of the industry. But we didn’t tell the price paid by the people. We did not talk about deportations. We did not talk about the Urkun. We did not speak about the huge numbers of political prisoners. No one said about GULAG (main directorate of corrective labour camps, existed as part of punitive agency bodies of the USSR – Author’s note).
Those days, a sound person with dignity and self-righteousness turned into a small fearful screw. People lost their memory or tried to forget about it because of fear.
Let’s recall the metaphor by Aitmatov: when people are deprived of memory, they become obedient mankurts, prepared to shoot at their culture, their mother, figuratively speaking.
Therefore, having studied memory for a long time, I understand that memory is a very strong and important tool to return to oneself, to own identity, to own past, which means, to own dignity. When a person does not remember their past, they cannot be confident in their present and future.
Have post-Soviet countries chosen the same way to their own identity?
If we take 15 ex-republics, the first one to break away were the Baltic states because they were the last to join the USSR and they remembered their history. They reverted to themselves much earlier. And the Central Asian states were incorporated into the Russian Empire long before the Soviet period.
I do not want to compare Caucasus and Central Asia. We have different factors and reasons. There is the opinion that dekulakization failed in some highland Caucasian countries. And we did suffer from dekulakization. In “Esimde” we are studying this subject.
For example, let’s take Issyk-Kul region. It suffered the most in 1916, every third household suffered from dekulakization. Some were moved to Orenburg, some to Siberia, some to Ukraine.
Russia is a huge country. It’s not only Russians, but also small nations, many of which disappeared forever. If we speak about Russians, they also suffered from the dekulakization.
Why is Russia trying to retain its influence in the post-Soviet states and does it succeed in it?
With Yeltsin, Russia had glasnost, freedom. Then Putin started to recover the system of USSR values over time. First, we should understand that he built his own government system based on FSB officers, just like Stalin built his based on NKVD officers. Then he tried to regain, and also to influence many post-Soviet countries and more.
To retain its influence, Russia has started to use media. In Kyrgyzstan, half of television media outlets are Russian, and they actively promote the ideology of nostalgia for how good it was in the USSR.
In other words, Russia is a sort of a neo-empire, which tries to regain its influence. But times have changed. In 32 years of independence, people have already felt the taste of freedom, and are waking up from mankurtism. Some are still loyal to Russia, like Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Others do not want to get back, like Georgia, Ukraine, Baltic states.
How important are ideology, the role of the state in the decolonisation process?
We should have the ideology of value of every person, every citizen of Kyrgyzstan. It will get us back to the feeling of dignity, right and right to memory. The law must be unbreakable, unlike in Orwell’s works: law is equal for all, but some are more equal than others.
For the society to develop, it is not necessarily to have some common ideology because it leads nowhere. And we have witnessed that. It should be just a law-based society, where the state values every person.
The state must certainly have no fear or look at others. The same Russian media outlets and diplomats still say “Kirghizia”. Let’s take a person, his name may be Take, Takin, but his full name is Takebai, and he is called by his full name at the official level. But Kyrgyzstan is still called different names. Isn’t it the dignity of the state? The question of self-positioning begins with the name.
If we take textbooks, we can see that our geography and history are written according to the concepts of the Soviet period. They are often written with the same colonial language. They change slowly, but insignificantly.
How does the process of self-reflection via art and creativity take place?
Artists describe intuitively what theoreticians have not still designated. It’s the art that speaks and shows intuitively what we feel. And this is great! People talk about the same thing in different languages anyway.
There will be the decolonisation conference in Almaty, and we will hold panel discussions in the same period. So, various Central Asian countries face the process of rethinking. People start talking about it and it goes beyond conference halls to the public discourse. We return to ourselves. And it shows everywhere – in economic, political, cultural systems.
It’s quite difficult to speak about decolonisation while most people do not think that the USSR was the coloniser. What approaches do you use to tell about it?
We, researchers, who try to understand the processes that took place those days, are often being slandered. What for? Only for the fact that we are trying to learn more about ourselves, our nation. We are so tired of this aggression. My attitude is like that: dogs bark, but the caravan goes on.
Here’s the example from my practice. One family waited for their father, who went missing during Stalin’s repressions, all life long. They believed he was alive because they received a message about it. But in fact he was killed in 1938. We brought his photo made just before his execution from Ukraine. The family did not mean to see their father on his last photo after so many years. So, they gathered and read the Quran (the prayer for the dead, a brief excerpt from the Quran – Author’s note). It is important to pray for your relatives and it is important to know how and where they died.
When we tell about the dekulakization, people, including older generation, come and suddenly understand that they did not know much about the history of their family. They learn the true story of their grandmothers, grandfathers, and understand that the truth is not what they used to hear or how Soloviev tells it on TV.
They come to us, look through archival papers. So many people find their fathers in dozens of volumes published by Bolot Abdyrakhmanov (retired GKNB colonel, researcher and instructor at Arabaev KSU – Author’s note) about those repressed. For example, Roza Aitmatova (public activist, sister of Kyrgyz writer Chingiz Aitmatov – Author’s note) found her uncle, brother of Torokul Aitmatov, after so many years, not to mention other people.
In fact, decolonisation is not just a theory, we can see it every day in many things. It takes place one way or another, despite the propaganda and many processes happening in the world.