Undermining the Soviet State: Social Mobilization and Self-Administrative Associations in Central Asia’s Neighborhoods during the Late Soviet Period

This presentation examines the emergence and role of state-sponsored voluntary organizations, or self-administrative associations, in Soviet Central Asia during the 1950s and 1960s. Established under Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization policies and rapid urbanization programs, these organizations—mahalla committees, house committees (domkom), women’s councils (zhensovety), comrades’ courts, and volunteer militias (druzhiny)—were intended to integrate local populations into governance and reinforce socialist administration at the neighborhood level.

While designed to uphold Soviet authority, these organizations in Central Asia became sites of negotiation and confrontation rather than mere instruments of state control. Their interactions with local traditions of self-governance, shaped by Islamic practices and pre-Soviet communal structures, reveal the complexities of state-society relations in the Soviet periphery. In particular, Soviet Uzbekistan—along with comparative cases from Tajikistan’s Leninabad and Kyrgyzstan’s Osh—illustrates how these associations operated at the juncture of state directives and local norms, sometimes reinforcing socialist ideology and at other times resisting or subverting official policies.

Zayra Badillo Castro is a professor at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, and holds a Ph.D. in History from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, and an M.A. in International Studies and Diplomacy. Her research examines the social transformation of urban spaces in Central Asia after the Second World War. She is currently completing a monograph on the reconstruction of Tashkent and the debates among architects, political leaders, and the leadership in Moscow in defining a new urban identity for a Central Asian metropolis in the twentieth century.