After we finished the cotton production textbook, Muzaffar started making up his own grammatical texts, usually featuring one of these recurring characters: President Karimov and poor Muzaffar. I especially liked to hear about poor Muzaffar’s troubles as a graduate student. One morning, for example, Muzaffar went to the library to get books for his dissertation. Samarkand State University had a closed-stack library which had never been fully catalogued, so you just had to write what kind of books you wanted on a request form and hope for the best. Muzaffar turned in his request at opening time. It hadn’t been processed yet by lunch. The library was closed for an hour and a half, at which point the librarian disappeared altogether. Several hours later, he was discovered asleep in some corner, and was dispatched to the philosophy stacks in the basement, where he again vanished. The library closed for the day, and Muzaffar had to go home. Two days later, he rushed to the library in response to a phone call, and there was a big pile of books waiting for him . . . written in Arabic script, which had been discontinued in 1928. Muzaffar had to get his grandfather to read him the books. “But my grandfather isn’t interested in philosophy. He would read to me only after I spent all Saturday pulling weeds from his cabbage garden. It was a particularly hot day . . .”
The Uzbek orthography had changed multiple times in the past seventy-five years, a reflection of the fact that, as of 1917, there was no standard written or spoken language called Uzbek. There was just a continuum of uncodified Turkic dialects, many of them mutually incomprehensible. The region’s shared literary language, Chaghatay Turkish, was unknown to most “Uzbeks,” whose rate of literacy was estimated by the Soviets at 2 or 3 percent.
Even more remarkably, the very concept of an Uzbek ethnicity dates only to the Soviet period. To quote a 1925 report by the All-Russian Academy of Sciences Commission for Studying the Tribal Makeup of the Population of Russia and Adjoining Countries: “Uzbeks could not conceive of the same sort of unified and distinct ethnic group for themselves as the Kazakhs, Kirgiz, or Turkmens.” Who were the Uzbeks? Did they even exist?
The term Uzbek was used as early as the fourteenth or fifteenth century, to designate a loose confederation of nomadic Turkic-Mongolian tribes in Central Asia, a region whose natives identified themselves primarily by their tribes or clans, rather than by national or ethnic supergroups. In the nineteenth century, Russians started colonizing Central Asia to gain leverage against British India, initiating a century-long strategic rivalry marked by proxy wars, puppet khans, and double agents. The British called this conflict “The Great Game,” but no Russian people called it that. In 1867, Russia established the Russian Turkestan Governor-Generalship, with its administrative capital in Tashkent. When approached by skeptical Muslim envoys, the Russian governor-general would show them an impressive document bound in gold: an enumeration of his plenary powers. Uzbeks called him the “semi-tsar.”
After the 1917 Revolution, the people of Turkestan thought they had seen the last of the Russians. They established an autonomous government, which was, however, liquidated by Red Army forces in 1918. In order to preempt further pan-Turkic initiatives Lenin appointed a Commission for the Regionalization of Central Asia, which, having collected maps, ethnographic reports, economic inventories, and census data, set about distributing the Turkestan natives among five “ethnogenic” categories: Uzbek, Tajik, Turkmen, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz. Most Central Asians were unable to identify themselves with any one of these categories. Cartoons from the period show different tribesmen in regional dress having comical troubles filling out their national identity papers. By 1924, the designation Turkestan had disappeared from common use. Under Stalin it became a “forbidden political concept or name.”
In 1921, a Language and Orthography Congress met to standardize the region’s varying Arabic orthographies, and a Soviet commission was appointed to codify “the cleanest, most distinctive, most Uzbek” of the regional vernaculars. The commission settled upon the Iranized dialect of Tashkent, which was unusually high in Tajik-Persian words and unusually low in vowel harmony, a phonological rule in most Turkic languages.* In 1926, another commission replaced the Arabic orthography with a Latin alphabet. This All-Union Central Committee for the New Turkic Alphabet was fraught with discord between the Caucasian and Central Asian contingents, particularly over the inclusion of uppercase letters, which did not exist in Arabic. The Azeris felt that capital letters were universal and beautiful, as well as necessary for students of mathematics, chemistry, and foreign languages. The Uzbeks countered that the language reforms were targeted mainly at the illiterate masses, for whom an extra form of each letter was a “superfluous luxury.” Though the Central Asians were eventually forced to accept the uppercase, a concession was won by the poet Fitrat: capital letters would look just like lowercase letters, only bigger. Fitrat and the other Turkic “nationalists” also succeeded in preserving vowel harmony in the new alphabet, which had nine different vowels (designated by diacritics).
In subsequent years, the Russian endings -ov and -ova were appended to Uzbek surnames. Khojand, Pishpek, and Dushanbe were renamed Leninabad, Frunze, and Stalinabad. (By the 1970s, there were no fewer than fifteen villages in the Samarkand district named Kalinin, after Lenin’s and Stalin’s titular head of state.) “International” words were Russified: Uzbeks spoke of “Hamlet” as Gamlet, and “hectares” as gektars. Television and radio were broadcast in “Uzbek.”
In the late thirties and early forties, each Central Asian SSR was outfitted with its own local Cyrillic alphabet. The Turkic languages were closer than ever to Russian . . . and further than ever from one another. The poet Fitrat was arrested and convicted of “bourgeois nationalism.” He was shot during the Great Purges. Vowel harmony, upheld by Fitrat as the “iron law” of Turkic languages, was eliminated from Uzbek orthography. (To Turkish people, the near lack of vowel harmony makes Uzbek sound harsh and toneless.)
Throughout the Soviet era, the state universities, the post offices, and all other government agencies operated in Russian. During perestroika, the Soviets proposed a bill declaring Uzbek the “state language”: a purported concession to Uzbek nationalists. The bill, which preserved Russian as the official “language of inter-ethnic communication,” only served to infuriate the Uzbek Writers’ Union. The poet Vahidov charged that, according to his textual analysis, the document itself had been translated into Uzbek from a Russian original; other writers demonstrated that the bill used the word Russian fifty-one times, and Uzbek only forty-seven times. The Uzbek Young Pioneers magazine, Gulkhan, received hundreds of angry letters. The editors wrote back, addressing their replies in Uzbek; the envelopes were all returned by the post office with a note in Russian: “Indicate address!” The bill was modified in 1995, specifying that by 2005, the state language was to be Uzbek, written with a new Latin alphabet. Everyone who had attained literacy after 1950 now needed to relearn the alphabet.