ALMATY, Kazakhstan -- In Central Asia's two biggest countries,Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, modernist reformers who were repressed in the early Soviet period are now being celebrated in documentaries, television serials, and at high-level conferences.
Yet for the ruling authoritarian elite, the adulation these intellectuals and founding fathers enjoy in their countries seems to be a double-edged sword.
That is partly because history-obsessed partner Moscow -- currently engaged in a protracted and bloody attempt to conquer swathes of sovereign Ukraine -- tends to be quite sensitive about the period.
But these authoritarian regimes have their own reasons for wanting to control the ghosts of their nations' past.
In Uzbekistan, it is the Jadids -- a progressive movement of Muslim intellectuals that emerged around the turn of the 20th century in Turkic-speaking parts of the Russian Empire -- who are back in the spotlight.
Viewed by many people in Uzbekistan not just as forward-thinking founding fathers, but also modern-day role models, it is perhaps unsurprising that Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoev is fond of mentioning them.
In the past few months alone, the Jadidist movement and their ideas have been feted in his speeches, in a documentary thick with government messaging, and at a conference where elder daughter and top aide Saida Mirziyoeva gave a keynote speech.
"It would not be a mistake to say that the ideas, dreams, and desires of the Jadids have found their reflection in the policies of President Shavkat Mirziyoev," Mirziyoeva told local and foreign academics at the December 11 conference called Jadids: Ideas Of National Identity, Independence, And Statehood.
"The New Uzbekistan, led by the president, is confidently moving along the path of building a secular legal state and civil society, creating a high-quality education system, ensuring freedom of speech and openness," added Mirziyoev's daughter.
The comparison between the New Uzbekistan brand championed by Mirziyoev and the ideals of the Jadids is one the president has made himself, most recently at a session of the Republican Council for Spirituality and Education in Tashkent on December 22.
Not all modern-day adherents of the Jadids, sometimes called neo-Jadids, are fond of it, to say the least.
In Kazakhstan, it is the Alash national consciousness movement from the same period that recently received a pop culture push.
In fact, the Mirzhaqyp, Oyan, Qazaq! (Mirzhaqyp, Wake Up, Kazakh!) film released in the second half of last year that covers the life and times of key figures in the movement proved so popular that it took authorities by surprise.
With the film backed by state broadcaster Qazaqstan still attracting significant attention, cinemas stopped showing it in early October, provoking public anger.
"We didn't think there would be such interest. And so we chose one window [to show the film] after which, since the audience was interested, we extended it for another week," explained Culture and Information Minister Aida Balaeva at the time.
Balaeva stressed that the film's run was only ended for scheduling reasons and pointed out that it could still be viewed online.
But coincidence or not, the film stopped showing right after an activist in the northeastern city of Semey who watched the film gave an impromptu speech in the cinema hall after it finished.
Eldos Dosanov pointed out the parallels between the repression suffered by Alash members and contemporary activists and called on Kazakhs not to "let history repeat itself."
Later that month, Dosanov was arrested and sentenced to a week in administrative detention after a court ruled that his speech was a call for unsanctioned public demonstrations.
Nation Builders
Unlike Alash, the Jadids cannot be classed as a strictly national movement.
The movement's founder was the Crimean Tatar intellectual Ismail Gaspirali and drew on other Pan-Turkist movements of the period.
But the territory that now makes up Uzbekistan became an important hub of Jadidist activity in the first decades of the 20th century.
For the Jadids, the priority of the day was the modernization of society, including through education, which was dominated by Islamic madrasahs.
Centuries before, cities like Bukhara and Samarkand had been regarded as centers of the Islamic world.
But the Silk Road trading routes that facilitated global exchanges of knowledge as well as wealth died as maritime, rather than overland trade, came to the fore.
And by the late 19th century, the region was under the control of the Russian Empire, which practiced elements of indirect rule, allowing people like Muhammed Alim Khan, the last emir of Bukhara, to govern as part of a Russian protectorate.
Tashkent-born Jadids like Abdulla Avloniy and Munavvarqori Abdurashidkhon built schools that brought them into conflict with religious conservatives, whom the emir backed, and published newspapers that got shut down by tsarist authorities.
Worse was still to come under the Bolsheviks, and Abdurashidkhon was one of the many Jadids arrested and executed during Soviet leader Josef Stalin's murderous purges in the late 1920s and 1930s.
Like the Alash leaders and many other dissidents repressed during the period, prominent members of the Jadidist movement were posthumously rehabilitated in line with Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost policies in the late 1980s.
But authoritarian Mirziyoev, in power since 2016, is perhaps the first independence-era Central Asian leader to identify with any movement from this politically turbulent period so explicitly.
The climax of that effort thus far appears to be Dreamers, a film about the Jadids that was produced by a company -- Blue White and Green Production -- that RFE/RL's Uzbek Service has reported as being linked to the family of Mirziyoev's son-in-law, Otabek Umarov.
Released in November, the film was criticized by some modern-day admirers of the Jadids who argued that authorities are trying to redefine the movement on their own terms and water down the movement's Islamic identity.
Others argued that the colorful costume-rich production, which includes numerous reenactments as well as a singing and dancing cameo from Tajik-Russian Eurovision star Manizha, let Russian tsarist and post-Stalin Soviet authorities off lightly.
Jamshid Muslimov, an Uzbek economic analyst and admirer of the Jadids, for instance, called the documentary's portrayal of Tsar Nicholas II as an agent of modernization in Central Asia "a complete misinterpretation."
"[The documentary] also implies that the Stalin-era repression of the Jadids was just a product of their time, rather than ignoring the true motive, which was [to supress] their stand for independence and nation-building," Muslimov told RFE/RL.
'Alash's Time Will Come'
Given the production's apparent ties to Uzbek regime insiders, some level of forgiveness for Moscow's trespasses is logical.
Today's Kremlin is both a key partner for Central Asian countries and extremely touchy about any suggestion of Russia's past wrongdoings in the region, whether under communism or tsarist times.
Following the release in 2019 of an independently made Kazakh documentary on the 1930s famine that even according to conservative estimates left more than 1 million Kazakhs dead, Russia's Foreign Ministry saw fit to issue a rebuttal, blaming "supporters of nationalist views" in several "Central Asian countries" for suggesting the Soviets engineered or manipulated the famine.
"Considering a tragedy common to the peoples of the U.S.S.R. as the deliberate 'extermination' of certain groups of the population on racial, national, or religious grounds is at least devoid of any basis, and at most a deliberate provocation aimed at inciting anti-Russian sentiment and interethnic hatred in friendly countries with large Russian-speaking populations," the ministry fumed.
To be sure, there was nothing either explicitly anti-government or overly anti-Russia about the film on the Alash movement that was shown in Kazakh cinemas last fall.
The title Mirzhaqyp, Oyan, Qazaq! is drawn from Alash poet Mirzhaqyp Dulatuly's book of poems of the same name, which was banned by tsarist officials in 1909.
Dulatuly would go on to become part of the short-lived Alash Orda (Alash Autonomy) government that was set up during the chaos of the Russian civil war.
Originally shown by state broadcaster Qazaqstan as a serial, it was only later repurposed for cinemas as a feature-length production.
And yet any portrayal of the movement invites parallels that do not always flatter Kazakhstan's modern-day authorities, according to Almaty-based historian Khangeldi Abzhanov.
"Alash was for a more parliamentary form of government. But today we have a super-presidential republic," he told RFE/RL.
"Alash wanted to develop contacts with the most developed countries of the world. But our government is more oriented towards post-Soviet countries. Lastly, Alash was driven foremostly by Kazakh priorities, Kazakh interests, while many of our present-day officials think in the Russian [language] and want to see Kazakhstan close to Russia," he argued.
Still, Kazakh officials continue to pay lip service to the group.
Marking the 155th anniversary of his birth in 2021, President Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev credited Alikhan Bokeikhan and the Alash government that Bokeikhan headed as prime minister for giving Kazakhstan "an example of statehood."
At a conference commemorating the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Alash government in 2017, Toqaev's predecessor, Nursultan Nazarbaev, was even more effusive.
"The passionate ideas of the Alash movement are the instructions of our ancestors for creating a sovereign state and freedom in general. The dreams of that time about freedom and independence have now come true. Our generation has achieved this," he boasted.
Abzhanov questions the sincerity of such expressions.
"Any Kazakh government will punish itself if it refuses to give tribute to Alash, which is so popular and respected among the Kazakh people," Abzhanov said.
"To some extent, Alash remains in the shadows," the historian added. "But Alash's time will come again."
