Retrospective Bordering: Genghis Khan, Central Asia, and Soviet Imagination

The talk examines Soviet historical novels about Genghis Khan by Vasily Yan and Aleksei Kalashnikov as a site of ideological struggle over the meaning of the Mongol conquest and its place in Central Asian history. Focusing on literary representations of the conquest of Bukhara and Samarkand, it argues that the intensity of Soviet debates surrounding Genghis Khan reflects sustained efforts to control, reinterpret, or suppress his powerful symbolic legacy. Situating these novels within broader Soviet historiographical debates — where Genghis Khan was alternately condemned as a feudal aggressor or cautiously reassessed as an agent of historical transformation — reveals how literary form mediated ideological constraints.

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Host or Publisher Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies