Cinema, Local Power and the Central State: Agencies in Early Anti-Religious Propaganda in Uzbekistan

Cloé Drieu (1)

1 CETOBaC - Centre d'études turques, ottomanes, balkaniques et centrasiatiques

Lenin, Stalin or Trotsky took early measures to control the cinema in order to transform and enlighten the masses and to implement a proletarian and atheist culture that could replace former norms and homogenize beliefs and values. However , the use of theatre or cinema as a vector for cultural changes was also praised— in a less conceptualised manner—by some Muslim Turkestani élites, who had come to consider, at least as early as 1913, performing and visual arts a mirror that could help society to understand its illnesses and thus to overcome them. e early Soviet period radicalized these conceptions of power and enlightenment toward cinema, which proved a locus for political debates, modernization and agencies that were contended, throughout the 1920s and the 1930s, by Russian Communists and vernacular political or cultural élites in power. Examples of early anti-religious policy as well as film propaganda shed light on this process. In the Soviet context, the analysis of film production permits us to ascertain a complex set of dependencies and agencies between central and local powers, between artists and politics. is article will first focus on a brief institutional history and on the way vernacular élite and ordinary people welcomed the cinématographe in order to underline its peculiar position for our understanding of the cultural changes in the inter-war period. Second, it will examine how officials organised * My thanks go to Adeeb Khalid, Alexandre Papas, Juliette Cadiot, Jean-Claude Penrad, Stefan Reichmuth and Paolo Sartori for their valuable comments and their advice. is essay also benefited from the comments of Stéphane A. Dudoignon, when an earlier version of it was presented at his seminar " En islam soviétique: questions, méthodes et connais-sances ". I am also very grateful to Justine Landau for her English editing of an early version, and especially to Kaveh Askari for having completed a marathon weekend session finally editing this essay.

Domaines: Histoire; Art et histoire de l'art; Science politique

Cloé Drieu. Cinema, Local Power and the Central State: Agencies in Early Anti-Religious Propaganda in Uzbekistan. Welt des Islams, 2010, 50 (3), pp.532 - 563. ⟨10.1163/157006010X545835⟩. ⟨halshs-01700280⟩