The Many Ways of Being Soviet: Urban Elites, People’s Friendship, and Ethnic Diversity in Postwar Soviet Frunze
4/2018
Forum AI
Urban Milieus, People’s Friendship, and the Late Soviet Transnational Experience
Городская среда, дружба народов и позднесоветский опыт транснациональности
SUMMARY:
The article analyzes ideas and concepts of belonging among cultural and political elites in the capital of Soviet Kyrgyzstan, Frunze (now Bishkek) as a late Soviet multiethnic city. The author argues that local elites availed themselves of various concepts of being Soviet in order to redefine their social position within a highly differentiated social and ethnic environment. Even if these elites identified themselves with the Soviet project, they could refer to a range of different, sometimes mutually exclusive ideologies and notions of citizenship. In this sense, they not only belonged to diverse urban milieus but also were Soviet in many different ways.