SSR Nostalgia: Soviet Life, No. 337 (October, 1984)

There are many things I wish I was around for. One of which is the end of the Cold War—a curious sentiment, I know, considering how happy most Americans are it is finally over. But I’ve never been able to escape a curious, perhaps macabre, fascination with the Soviet Union’s utter brutality, whether environmental, physical, social, or mental. Propaganda in particular has captured my attention, both for its brazen disregard of reality and its flowery, hagiographic language. It is some combination of the artwork, the glassy eyed zealotry, and the underlying mindset that speaking lies to power will somehow accomplish something positive.

In a recent article on Slate, discussing the reemergence of pseudo-Soviet propaganda in Vladimir Putin’s glorious New Russia, Jack Shaefer links to an issue of Soviet Life magazine, a rather transparent attempt to infuse the English-speaking world with news about the glorious USSR. Of interest to me here was an interview with Inamdzhan Usmankhodzhayev, blessed with the ostentatiously Soviet title, “First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan.”

Q: It is obvious that tremendous technological and industrial progress has been made in Soviet Central Asia and that there have been sweeping changes in the people’s material and cultural standards. Will you please give some examples?
A: Let’s take industry, the main indicator of the republic’s development.
Apart from the cotton-processing and oil-refining industries, we have created and developed ferrous and non-ferrous metallurgical, machine-building, electrotechnical, chemical, mining and coal industries. Before the October Revolution of 1917, even ketmens (a kind of spade) were imported. Today the items Uzbekistan produces include tractors, excavators, cotton harvesters, refrigerators and electronic equipment. We also have an aviation production association.

The issue goes on at great length at how Uzbekistan was poor and backward before the Soviets came along, and the Soviet museums can conclusively demonstrate how perfect the country is now. They also discuss the glories of collective farming, the free Soviet healthcare system, and “Confidence and Dignity in the Multiethnic Union” in Turkmenistan (which includes tidbits like “Before the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic was formed, Turkmenia was extremely poor and backward”).

Now a big part of what I love about this stuff is how clearly false it was: Turkmenistan, for example, was never the prosperous ecological paradise it’s made out to be, nor was Uzbekistan the thriving, classless, non-misogynist utopia of Secretary Uzmankhodzhayev. But as with all propaganda, there is a grain of truth: most human development indicators all did improve under the Soviet system, though (as I have pointed out in other discussions) it’s not that difficult to rise from zero. These changes have been thrown into even starker contrast by the previous fifteen decades of “independence”—while none of the ‘Stans have Moscow’s diktats hanging over their heads, they can’t be said to be noticeably more free… nor can their base conditions be said to have improved (Kazakhstan is the notable exception, but even their new “reforms” leave me little hope for their political future).

Indeed, many locals have decried the disaster of independence, and I have personally heard a long litany of complaints about just how truly bad things were in the 90′s. While a few places have seen incredible improvement, Central Asia as a whole remains in the lurch, victimized by its inability to really throw off the Soviet vestiges that infect its politics… which makes looking at these old propaganda pieces that much more interesting.

This post was written by...

Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.

Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust

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