This article explores the links between informal moneylending and aspects of sociality and morality. It documents the moral reasoning and strategizing of two female moneylenders who operate in the radically destabilized context of post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan. By analyzing these women's lending practices and the way they talk about their experiences, we are able to document in some detail the constitutive intertwinement of morality, sociality, and formality in the workings of credit and debt, and demonstrate how questionable behavior is transformed into moral practice. This in turn highlights important features of the post-Soviet capitalist frontier.

What are ethnic boundaries made of? How do people come to experience such boundaries? Notwithstanding the formidable analytic attention to the role and effects of boundary drawing in social life, such questions are rarely asked. We look at the apparently stable boundary between Russians and Kyrgyz villagers in the Issyk-Kul region to trace how its dimensions were naturalized through settler colonialism, Soviet modernization, and postsocialist upheaval. But even if naturalized, the boundary behaves as a "presence absence" whose relevance fluctuates and whose momentary features remain unpredictable, as we demonstrate by focusing on transgressive mixed marriages between Russian and Kyrgyz villagers.

Defining the post-Soviet states’ relationship to the Soviet past has been essential in forming their new national state identities. This article examines, first, how the post-Soviet Kyrgyz state reconstructs its Soviet past on the level of official discourse, particularly in school history textbooks, and second, how history teachers—as professionals and private citizens—relate to the official discourse when making sense of the Soviet past. This work illuminates that representations of Soviet socialism in Kyrgyz history textbooks are ambivalent, nuanced, and contradictory, oscillating mainly between two colliding discursive strands of the Soviet Union as a colonial and oppressive power versus the Soviet Union as a nation-and-state building and modernizing state. It also demonstrates how arguing for one or another narrative strand has resulted not only in ambivalent but also in unreconciled contradictory discourses about the Soviet past, thus demonstrating unsuccessful attempts by state ideologists to establish a clear-cut hegemonic discourse about Soviet socialism in the post-Soviet Kyrgyzstani history textbooks. By analysing how history teachers interpret and reconfigure official discourses and individual narratives on the Soviet past, this article argues that the teachers relate to the official discourses ambivalently and cynically, which is reflected in their creative interpretation and negotiation of official textbook texts. It concludes that a post-Soviet nation understood as an imagined community is not a durable but a fragile and temporary imagination.

This article analyzes the creation of hegemonic discourse in a post-transformation society by examining representations of Soviet socialism in post-Soviet history textbooks and in the discursive practices of history teachers in Kyrgyzstan. While the textbooks attempt to fix a new hegemonic discourse about Soviet socialism, they also contain contradictory discourses. History teachers, in turn, have appropriated the discourse of the Kyrgyz nation-state and its modernization, adapting it to their own experiences. Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan has become a new type of state, where hegemonic discourse on both the official level and in the discursive practices of its citizens is ambivalent and outright contradictory.