Soviet Central Asia: Ethnic Dilemmas and Strategies

Abstract

Gorbachev came to power with a mandate to try and reverse the stagnation course that the Soviet Union seemed determinedly set on, announcing an ambitious program of political and economic reform designed to ‘reconstruct’ the Soviet Union within his first eighteen months in office. But before most of these reforms could even be introduced Gorbachev had to deal with a threat to political and economic transformation that he had never reckoned with, a resurgence of national feeling in the USSR. Nationalist challenges to his policies have come in two distinct waves. The challenge was resistance to Gorbachev’s program by the party leadership of many national republics. This resistance was particularly heavy in Central Asia. Gorbachev responded by dismissing those who rejected his policies and replacing them with more supportive cadre. The second problem, which is still growing in severity, has developed from Gorbachev’s reform program itself; national minorities have used their increased rights of political self-expression to demand the ‘reconstruction’ of the power relationships between the dominant and dominated nationalities of the USSR. For now this problem is centered in the Baltic and Caucasian republics, but its reverberations must inevitably reach Central Asia as well.