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Uzbekistan
Influences in the Soviet Period
Unfortunately for the reformers and their efforts to reform the
language, following the national delimitation the Soviet government
began a deliberate policy of separating the Turkic languages from
each other. Each nationality was given a separate literary language.
Often new languages had to be invented where no such languages
had existed before. This was the case for Uzbek, which was declared
to be a continuation of Chaghatai and a descendant of all of the
ancient Turkic languages spoken in the region. In the initial
stage of reform, in 1928-30, the Arabic alphabet was abandoned
in favor of the Latin alphabet. Then in 1940, Cyrillic was made
the official alphabet with the rationale that sharing the Arabic
alphabet with Turkey might lead to common literature and hence
a resumption of the Turkish threat to Russian control in the region.
Because of this artificial reform process, the ancient literature
of the region became inaccessible to all but specialists. Instead,
the use of Russian and Russian borrowings into Uzbek was strongly
encouraged, and the study of Russian became compulsory in all
schools. The emphasis on the study of Russian varied at various
times in the Soviet period. At the height of Stalinism (1930s
and 1940s), and in the Brezhnev period (1964-82), the study of
Russian was strongly encouraged. Increasingly, Russian became
the language of higher education and advancement in society, especially
after Stalin orchestrated the Great Purge of 1937-38, which uprooted
much indigenous culture in the non-Slavic Soviet republics. The
language of the military was Russian as well. Those Uzbeks who
did not study in higher education establishments and had no desire
to work for the state did not make a great effort to study Russian.
As a result, such people found their social mobility stifled,
and males who served in the armed forces suffered discrimination
and persecution because they could not communicate with their
superiors. This communication problem was one of the reasons for
disproportionate numbers of Uzbeks and other Central Asians in
the noncombat construction battalions of the Soviet army.
Data as of March 1996
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