Published with license by Brill Schöningh | doi:10.30965/18763316-12340050 © Artemy M. Kalinovsky, 2023 | ISSN: 0094-288X ( print) 1876-3316 ( online) russian history 4 (2022) 264–288 brill.com/ruhi “The Pillars of Our Statehood:” Glasnost’, Soviet Networks, and National Mobilization Artemy M. Kalinovsky Professor of Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet Studies, Department of History, Department of Political Science, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA Artemy.Kalinovsky@temple.edu Abstract Scholars of Gorbachev’s reforms and the Soviet collapse usually note that the last Soviet leader underestimated the power of nationalist mobilization and acted belat- edly, and ineffectually, to stop it. In this article, I consider the effects of the strategy that Gorbachev adopted in the wake of the Alma-Ata events (remembered as Jeltoqsan in Kazakhstan), when protests erupted after an ethnic Russian from outside the republic was installed as first secretary. Gorbachev realized the importance of nationalist senti- ment and was sympathetic to many of the grievances raised by intellectuals. He hoped that better knowledge of the problem would help him manage it, and he counted on the intellectuals to make common cause with their counterparts across the USSR . They did so, but the all-union publications, institutions, and networks to which they turned ultimately amplified nationalist sentiment and catalyzed the movement for indepen- dence, undermining the prospects of all-union reform. I explore this phenomenon by considering the Aral-88 expedition, the role of journals like Druzhba Narodov, and knowledge production on the region among ethnographers and economists at the Institute of Oriental Studies in Moscow. Keywords glasnost – nationalism – reform – knowledge – environment A 1990 article in the literary journal Druzhba Narodov [Friendship of the Peoples] began with a vivid summary of how quickly the Soviet image of Central Asia had changed in the perestroika era. “Central Asia is an unknown land. Our Downloaded from Brill.com 02/22/2024 05:40:23PM via Temple University