"Unmasking Enemies" Again and Again? The Memoirs of Mordekhay Bachayev and the Revenge of the Soviet Past

Abstract

The memoirs of Mordekhay Bachayev (1911-2007), Bukharan Jewish intellectual and poet, are an important document for understanding the history, culture, and everyday life of Bukharan Jews in the first two decades of Soviet rule in Central Asia. Nevertheless, thus far they have been widely excluded from the post-Soviet efforts of the Bukharan Jewish communities in Israel and the United States to create unifying nationalist historiography. This paper argues that this omission relates to Bachayev openness about interpersonal antagonisms and denunciations within the Bukharan Jewish intellectual circles of 1930s Soviet Uzbekistan. The publications of the memoirs in 1988/89 caused fierce debate among Bukharan Jews about the role and personal guilt of Bukharan Jewish intellectuals during the time of the Great Terror, and transported the internal group tensions and interpersonal differences of the Soviet past into the present.