Fighting for the Soviet Empire: War Propaganda Production and Localized Discourses on Soviet Patriotism in Uzbekistan during the Second World War

Cultural encounters between Soviet Europe and Soviet Asia during the Second World War had a significant influence on redefining the location of the Uzbek nation within the Soviet empire, as well as the location of the Soviet Union within the Uzbek nation. During the war, Moscow cultural elites were evacuated to Central Asia, while Central-Asian Red Army soldiers marched into battle. Due to this criss-crossed mobilization, the hierarchical centre-periphery relationship was interrupted as the Soviet authorities learned the importance ofwinning support from the Central- Asian periphery. Leading Uzbek intellectuals and Russian cultural elites were therefore assigned to promote Soviet patriotism among the local population. Together, they constructed heroic narratives for the Uzbek nation and (re)discovered the Uzbek people's pre-Revolutionary history, which sometimes contradicted Soviet ideology. Nevertheless, their collaborative efforts to localize Soviet war-propaganda messages added an Uzbek dimension to post-war Soviet identity, which contributed to the empire's weathering of the storm of decolonization in Asia.