Central Asia as a historical region
Abstract
The use of the historical, geographical and geopolitical concept of «historical region» in relation to the newly independent states of Central Asia (the Republic of Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, the Republic of Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and the Republic of Uzbekistan) is analysed, as well as the role of the phenomenon of post-Soviet identity in the formation modern nations and states. The term «historical region» is interpreted as a territory that, at a certain historical time, covered a certain political, economic, cultural, ethnographic, linguistic and mental space. It is noted that in Soviet times, many nation-building measures were taken on the former outskirts of the Russian Empire. The features of Central Asian historical politics in social, geographical (geopolitical) and temporal terms are shown. The image of the Soviet past is interpreted in a complex structure of various levels of historical memory as a set of descriptions, ideas and images of the past generated by power discourse, as collective everyday ideas about the past, and as an individual memory that unites a person with the social stratum. It is concluded that regional and global problems do not allow the countries of Central Asia to develop a unified strategy for preserving historical memory. It is noted that attempts to simplify it to a certain general paradigm distort the real situation, since the attitude towards the imperial and Soviet periods of history in each of the Central Asian states has its own specifics.
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