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Official Rhetoric and Individual Perceptions of the Soviet Past: Implications for Nation Building in Kyrgyzstan

Defining the post-Soviet states’ relationship to the Soviet past has been essential in forming their new national state identities. This article examines, first, how the post-Soviet Kyrgyz state reconstructs its Soviet past on the level of official discourse, particularly in school history textbooks, and second, how history teachers—as professionals and private citizens—relate to the official discourse when making sense of the Soviet past. This work illuminates that representations of Soviet socialism in Kyrgyz history textbooks are ambivalent, nuanced, and contradictory, oscillating mainly between two colliding discursive strands of the Soviet Union as a colonial and oppressive power versus the Soviet Union as a nation-and-state building and modernizing state. It also demonstrates how arguing for one or another narrative strand has resulted not only in ambivalent but also in unreconciled contradictory discourses about the Soviet past, thus demonstrating unsuccessful attempts by state ideologists to establish a clear-cut hegemonic discourse about Soviet socialism in the post-Soviet Kyrgyzstani history textbooks. By analysing how history teachers interpret and reconfigure official discourses and individual narratives on the Soviet past, this article argues that the teachers relate to the official discourses ambivalently and cynically, which is reflected in their creative interpretation and negotiation of official textbook texts. It concludes that a post-Soviet nation understood as an imagined community is not a durable but a fragile and temporary imagination.