Colonising the Conditions of Thought: Civilisational Hierarchies and Literary Form in the Soviet Periphery, 1924–1929

Abstract: This paper argues that Moscow’s developmental classifications determined the institutional conditions of cultural production in the Soviet periphery and penetrated the epistemological conditions under which peripheral intellectuals could work, shaping which modes of understanding remained structurally expressible. Through a direct comparative analysis of Ukrainian writer Mykola Khvyl’ovyi’s 1929 satirical short story Ivan Ivanovich and Uzbek intellectual Abdalrauf Fitrat’s 1924 allegorical drama Satan’s Mutiny Against the Lord, the paper finds that civilisational hierarchies produced fundamentally different timelines for cultural autonomy and different formal possibilities for how critique could be articulated at all. A five-year gap between ideological enforcement in Central Asia and Ukrainian suppression reveals that geographic positioning within the Soviet structure determined when, as opposed to whether, peripheral intellectuals faced systematic elimination, with civilisational classifications dictating the duration of autonomous thought. The literary forms available to each writer both reflected and reproduced the developmental logic that governed their respective republic’s position within Moscow’s imperial hierarchy.