Masha Kirasirova (NYU Abu Dhabi, Assistant Professor of History)
30 April 2019
Lecture: A Tashkent Spectacle: 1960s Soviet Central Asian Cinema for the Afro-Asian World.
Abstract: As Sino-Soviet relations deteriorated in the early 1960s, Moscow leaders grew increasingly concerned about Chinese propaganda depicting the USSR as white, Russian, and colonial. To counter these narratives, the Communist Party asked the Uzbek filmmaker Kamil Yarmatov to produce a new dramatization of the foundation of Soviet power in Central Asia. Yarmatov’s trilogy, completed between 1965 and 1970, was promoted at the 1968 International Tashkent Film Festival and shown in “Weeks of Soviet Film” around the world, including in Damascus, Syria. My talk will analyze these films’ reinterpretation of key historical dynamics, such as the Central Asian revolt of 1916, relations between Russian colonizers and the colonized, and the politics of the subsequent Russian Civil War.
Bio: Masha Kirasirova is an Assistant Professor of History at NYUAD. She is completing her book manuscript, The Eastern International: Culture, Power, and Realpolitik in Soviet-Arab Relations.