The Centennial of the 1917 Russian Revolution and the Post-Soviet Space: Narratives from Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Russia

Abstract

The main focus of present Thesis is to identify the attitude of people, intellectuals, and governments in the post-Soviet countries of Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Russia towards events that took place one hundred years ago, i.e. the Russian Revolution of 1917, and explore how citizens of these three countries relate to those past events in the year of the 100th Anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union governments of newly independent post-Soviet states in search of their nation-building strategies started revising the Soviet past and tried to establish narratives that served their interests best. Using the theory of collective memory as its main theoretical framework, this Thesis tries to determine, on the one hand, the way people in those three former Soviet republics remember, reconstruct, and interpret the 1917 events, and on the other hand, the positions and modes of narration of the ruling elites in Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Russia. In addition, this Thesis attempts to identify similarities and differences in narrations of the 1917 events that developed in the years that followed the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).