In 1927, Cho’lpon returned to Uzbekistan to make use of his drama schooling by staging plays around the country. But a rude surprise awaited him. Around the middle of the decade, the Bolshevik Party felt that its hold on power in Central Asia was strong enough to take ideological control of the region. Beginning in the latter half of the 1920s, jadids and other old-generation national elites were expelled from the party in favor of a new generation of Uzbek intellectuals trained by the Komsomol (the Communist Youth League) and other party-associated organizations.41 Both Cho’lpon and Fitrat quickly became symbols of the old generation and were therefore attacked frequently in the press. Poets of the new generation who fancied themselves dedicated socialists attacked Cho’lpon for his poetry’s supposed decadence, pessimism, and anti-party views. Though they condemned jadids, we should not forget that many members of this new generation were students of jadids. They too believed in the need to spread education among Uzbeks, liberate women, modernize everyday life, and restore the Uzbek nation to its former glory, but they also saw themselves as superior to their predecessors in political will. They would achieve modernity for Uzbekistan where jadids like Cho’lpon had failed because of conservatism, timidity, and complacency. As a result of the attacks, several old-generation thinkers were arrested and exiled to Siberia. Cho’lpon escaped a probable arrest by again heading to Moscow in 1932.
During his second extended stay in the Soviet capital, Cho’lpon, like other persecuted writers across the Soviet Union, avoided controversy by reducing his publishing activity. He had never been a prolific poet: he published only three collections by 1932, Springs (Buloqlar [1922]), Awakening (Uyg’onish [1923]), and Secrets of Dawn (Tong sirlari [1926]). But around 1927, he largely stopped publishing original works and turned to translation. His friends and contacts in Uzbekistan’s Communist Party found him a job as a translator in Moscow.42 There he translated Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the first half of Maksim Gorky’s Mother (1907), and various works of Turgenev, Chekhov, and Leonid Andreev into Uzbek. He also met and married a Russian woman, Ekaterina Ivanovna (her surname is unknown).43
A lull in secret police activity allowed Cho’lpon to return to Uzbekistan in 1934. The latter half of the 1920s until 1932 was a period of denunciations, violence, and a strong push to construct socialism. Scholars have referred to these years, specifically 1928 to 1932, as the “Cultural Revolution.”44 The time is best known for Stalin’s annulment of Lenin’s NEP (New Economic Policy), the beginning of collectivization, the inauguration of the first five-year plan, and massive purges of the established intelligentsia in favor of inexperienced, politically engaged youth. The period that followed has been dubbed the “Great Retreat,” though recent research notes that Stalinism was not a total betrayal of revolutionary ideals; indeed, it achieved many of the economic goals of the Bolsheviks such as forced industrialization and collectivization.45 Nevertheless, when the first push to collectivize failed, along with other violent modernist projects, Stalin decided to make peace with the old intelligentsia and—to an extent—with traditional culture.46 These conciliations permitted Cho’lpon’s return.
Once back in Uzbekistan, Cho’lpon too decided to compromise with the Soviet state. He continued translating, rendering into Uzbek the second part of Mother, Gorky’s Egor Bulychov (1932), Alexander Pushkin’s Dubrovsky (1833) and Boris Godunov (1825), and the Iranian-Tajik communist Abulqosim Lohuti’s Journey to Europe (1934).47 He well understood why his poetry was criticized and attempted to rewrite his poetic biography. Because critics had lambasted him for the pessimism of his verse, his collection Soz (Lyre [1935]) emphasized his new optimistic persona and his enthusiasm for Soviet rule with poems such as “The New Me” (Yangi men) and “May First” (1 May), which celebrated international workers’ day. A 1934 poem, “Ten Years without Lenin” (O’n yil Leninsiz), panegyrizes Lenin on the tenth anniversary of his death.48 In 1934, he also submitted the first book of his dilogy of novels Night and Day to an Uzbek literary contest designed to encourage the writing of socialist prose.49
Determining Cho’lpon and other Uzbek litterateurs’ position on Stalin and Soviet politics at this time is fraught with complications because Soviet rule had rather ambiguous effects on the region. The Soviet system allowed jadids to pursue the creation of a nation-state, mass native-language education, women’s liberation through unveiling, and campaigns against Islamic clergy, the enemies of jadids.50 As for collectivization, it, oddly enough, did not produce the same disastrous results that it did in Ukraine and Kazakhstan. While rural Ukrainians and Kazakhs suffered and died of famine, Uzbeks were saved by the early fruit harvests in their warmer climate. New research suggests that many Uzbek farmers enthusiastically participated in dekulakization because they truly bore grudges against the richer peasants who cheated them and acted as usurers, as seen in Cho’lpon’s novel.51
On the other hand, the new generation’s attacks on their jadid predecessors demonstrated that Stalin had no tolerance for pluralism and democratic debate. How to implement the party line was a matter of negotiation, but the content of the party line was Stalin’s and Stalin’s alone. Many were dissatisfied with the failure of the Soviet Union to create an Uzbek proletariat; they harangued Moscow for turning Central Asia into a cotton plantation. Among themselves, they accused the Bolsheviks of imperialism and chauvinism.52 Throughout the late 1920s, the repeated failures to Uzbekify the party apparatus in Uzbekistan raised the ire of anti-colonial Uzbek thinkers. By the early 1930s, such efforts came to a complete halt. Native rule subordinate to Moscow continued, but only Uzbeks competent in Russian could climb the ranks.53 As for Cho’lpon, he must have been particularly incensed that his art and elegies had been the subject of frequent denunciations. Memoirists tell us that Cho’lpon, indeed, hated Stalin and wrote his fair share of poems mocking the mustachioed menace.54 The brief thaw in 1934 nevertheless offered some hope to the alienated, a chance for the Soviet Union to achieve the utopian ideals it had long promised, and therefore, we should read Cho’lpon and others’ moods at this time as extremely disappointed but also hopeful for change. After all, they had no idea what was coming.
What was coming was a new set of purges, commonly known as Stalin’s Great Terror, and Cho’lpon did not escape this time. Critics began denouncing him in the local press again in 1936. In 1937, he was called to 25 Stalin Street, the inauspiciously named location of the Uzbek Soviet Writers’ Union, to answer for his lack of productivity and other errors, but this meeting was only a prelude to his NKVD arrest. Cho’lpon now likely knew that his days were numbered because he decided to treat the terrifying situation with levity:
Figure 2. Cho’lpon’s mugshot in his NKVD file. Courtesy of Hamid Ismailov.
| Ziyo Said [a playwright]: | You had a word with [Mannon] Uyg’ur. |
| Cho’lpon: | Then we talked about Arabic words, but that’s a lie, I am not an Arab, I am not a nationalist. I hate Arabic, to hell with Arabic words. (laughter)55 |
Critics commonly leveled the accusation of “nationalism” against Cho’lpon and others, suggesting through the facile charge that jadids were hateful chauvinists opposed to Soviet internationalism. Soviet critics considered the jadid desire in the 1920s to purify the Uzbek language by ridding it of non-Turkic vocabulary as a particular manifestation of this “nationalism,” hence