Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Socialism Mediated: The Making of Soviet Culture in Central Asia tells the story of the mediators who made Soviet culture in Uzbekistan. From Socialist Realist writers to popular singers, from women’s activists to village worker-correspondents, they all worked within Soviet institutions to make Uzbek culture Soviet, and to make Soviet culture Uzbek. Drawing on a wide variety of archival and published sources from collections in three countries, Roosien provides the first study of how Central Asians interpreted, implemented, and reshaped the Party-state’s utterly novel cultural directives. Through close analysis of cultural production in conversation with social historical methods, she shows how Central Asia’s intermediaries formulated a new aesthetics of Socialist Realism as a way to mobilize a legitimizing public for the newfound socialist state, while also often revealing the tensions and inconsistencies in that project. Far from a totalizing takeover, the creation of Soviet culture in Uzbekistan was riven with contradictions and gaps, revealing the unexpected resonances and unresolved tensions in the Soviet project of mass culture and mass mobilization.</jats:p>