chapter 8 Nation-construction in post-Soviet Central Asia Sergei Abashin In his book Imagined Communities Benedict Anderson refers to the nation as a community whose members do not necessarily maintain direct contact with each other. For this reason, the emergence and existence of the nation relies heavily on a process of what he calls ‘imagination’. Beliefs about common origins, a shared culture or common language are all points of agreement or disagreement, and they are used to draw the boundaries of the imagined nation and to create its symbols. Anderson also describes how the West European empires – among them the USSR – artificially introduced concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘nationality’ into their colonies in Asia. Referring to empires and anti-imperial nationalisms, he notes that ‘one might go so far as to say that the state imagined its local adversaries, as in an ominous prophetic dream, well before they came into historical existence’. 1 Within the system of social coordinates created by the Soviet Union, ‘nationality’ came to play a leading role. The use of nationality as the basis for the administrative and political division of Central Asia in the 1920s, together with the subsequent policy of korenizatsiia or ‘nativization’, resulted in a situation which transformed the classification of nationality from a speculative design into one of the most fundamental principles of state life and one of the chief instruments of administrative control. 2 The very same nations which were fostered and encouraged by the Soviet state, however, were subsequently to become an instrument that could legitimately challenge the very existence of the USSR. Thus, the collapse of the Soviet Union was carried through and justified as the break-up of an ‘empire’ into ‘national states’, which thereby acquired their right to ‘self-determination’. Today the former Central Asian republics are attempting to rebuild themselves as national states, and they appeal to the concept of the nation in order to explain the choice they have made. As they do so, they draw on a pool of discursive and explanatory models that, as Graham Smith has argued, may be described in terms of three characteristics: (1) they ‘essentialize’ and ‘primordialize’ the nation by describing ethnic identities as linear, eternal and 150