As in many postsocialist states, the buzzword in Uzbekistan in the last fifteen years has been “transition,” a term that obscures more than it illuminates. The common assumption is that the transition is from command economy to market economy and from authoritarianism to democracy. In many of these states, however, the end of socialism brought about a transfer of wealth from the state to a new bourgeoisie; and privatization resulted with plundering of public and state resources (Humphrey 2002, Nazpary 2002). Thus, transfer of wealth is resentfully questioned throughout the former Soviet Union. Another related development was the success of the former Communist Party elite in reproducing itself. Since the Soviet regime effectively eliminated alternative elites to emerge, the key political players remained the same, merely shedding their ideologies. As anthropologist Katherine Verdery argues, transition entailed a mixture of the old and new, rather than a simple replacement of the old by the new (Verdery 1996).
From Bolsheviks to Busheviks: The Uzbek Political Elite
JVF Conference Papers
