Post-Communist Transition and the Dilemmas of Young People in Central Asia: A Landscape of Uzbekistan

Every generation bears the ineluctable stamp of the strategic historical experiences to which it has been exposed. In this sense, the history of Post-Communist Central Asian youth has been a unique one. Although “Central Asian” is a construct encompassing highly diverse cultures, it does connote a collective that underwent the same historical experience, i.e. life under the now-gone Soviet political system. In that respect, “Central Asian” is comparable to the notion of the “melting pot”, and in the original Soviet-era melting pot, young people were valorized as the “Great State of the Future” and were brought up in an environment that shaped them according to the so-called “Moral Code of Communism”. However, when the Soviet Union disintegrated, many Central Asian young people saw their world turned upside down, as their status reduced and their financial and political future became uncertain. In this paper, I have attempted to examine and explore this dilemma, which confronts the majority of young people in contemporary Central Asia, particularly in Uzbekistan.