Everyday life at the edge of collapse: elite autobiographical narratives of the late Soviet transformation in Uzbekistan

This article examines everyday life at the edge of systemic collapse, focusing on how the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emergence of independent Uzbekistan were experienced and interpreted by members of the intellectual and administrative elite. Drawing on seventeen in-depth interviews conducted within an international oral history project (2023–2025), it analyses elite autobiographical narratives as a key site through which large-scale political transformations were understood, negotiated, and retrospectively reinterpreted. Rather than presenting the collapse of the Soviet system as a sudden rupture, the findings show that it was widely perceived as the outcome of a gradual process of internal erosion. At the same time, independence was experienced in fundamentally ambivalent terms: as both an anticipated development and a source of uncertainty embedded in everyday practices, expectations, and social routines. This ambivalence is traced through three interrelated dynamics: declining trust in Soviet ideological and institutional frameworks, region-specific experiences such as the “cotton affair” and structural economic dependence, and the interpretative role of elite actors navigating between Soviet socialisation and enduring cultural references. By foregrounding everyday life as an analytical lens and elite autobiographical narratives as empirical material, the article contributes to debates on late socialism, memory, and post-Soviet transformation. It argues that systemic collapse is not primarily lived as a singular historical break, but as a prolonged and uneven process mediated through habit, uncertainty, and reinterpretation.