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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Uzbekistan
Index
Uzbekistan's literature suffered great damage during the Stalinist
purges of the 1930s; during that period, nearly every talented writer in
the republic was purged and executed as an enemy of the people. Prior to
the purges, Uzbekistan had a generation of writers who produced a rich and
diverse literature, with some using Western genres to deal with important
issues of the time. With the death of that generation, Uzbek literature
entered a period of decline in which the surviving writers were forced to
mouth the party line and write according to the formulas of socialist
realism. Uzbek writers were able to break out of this straitjacket only in
the early 1980s. In the period of perestroika and glasnost
, a group of Uzbek writers led the way in establishing the Birlik
movement, which countered some of the disastrous policies of the Soviet
government in Uzbekistan. Beginning in the 1980s, the works of these
writers criticized the central government and other establishment groups
for the ills of society.
A critical issue for these writers was the preservation and purification
of the Uzbek language. To reach that goal, they minimized the use of
Russian lexicon in their works, and they advocated the declaration of
Uzbek as the state language of Uzbekistan. These efforts were rewarded in
1992, when the new national constitution declared the Uzbek language to be
the state language of the newly independent state. At the same time,
however, some of these writers found themselves at odds with the Karimov
regime because of their open criticism of post-Soviet policies.
Data as of March 1996
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