Mollie Arbuthnot – författare

Poster Propaganda in Soviet Uzbekistan explores how revolutionary politics and the socialist future were visualised in Uzbekistan during the first two decades of Soviet power. The first book-length study to place visual propaganda at the centre of Soviet Central Asian history, it examines how the Soviet state used images to mobilise the population, remake society, and reshape human consciousness itself. In doing so, it reveals how the Bolsheviks reckoned with the ethnic, cultural, and colonial complexities of the vast territories they inherited from the crumbling Russian Empire. Through a richly researched analysis of propaganda posters, the book rethinks communist visual culture alongside the political tumult of nation-building, revolutionary internationalism, and colonial legacies in Uzbekistan in the 1920s and 30s. Drawing on extensive archival research and the period's vibrant Uzbek- and Russian-language periodical press, the book demonstrates how local and national concerns intersected with policies and new cultural norms emanating from Moscow. The politics of representation became a site of intense debate among indigenous intellectuals, European artists, Bolshevik ideologues, and propaganda theorists, all of whom contested who should depict the new Soviet Uzbekistan, how, and what effects such images should have on ordinary viewers. These debates illuminate both the ambitions and the limits of revolutionary imagination in the formative decades of Soviet power. By examining Soviet theories of spectatorship alongside the everyday visual environments experienced by Soviet Uzbeks, the book reveals how the Soviet propaganda system functioned in both theory and practice.