The Soviet State and Lineage Societies: Doctrine, Local Interactions, and Political Hybridization in Kazakhstan and Kirghizia During the 1920s and 1930s
Résumé
The Soviet state, in the wake of colonial policy, manipulated the existing hierarchical social order of the Kazakh and Kirghiz SSRs, playing groups against one another to ensure loyalty. Lineages, like nomad pastoralism, were one of the traits of backwardness that Sovietization sought to eliminate. Newly discovered local party reports reveal how the Soviet authorities perceived the kinship relations, how they suggested and disseminated the lineage categories, and how these categories were actualized in the government on the local scale.