This was because the inhabitants of our village were representatives of different nationalities, including doctors, teachers, engineers and clergy who had been displaced from different parts of the former Soviet state in the 1930s and 1940s. There were no statues or slogans on the walls: Apart from a single library and a post office, there were no government institutions. I am from a remote village called Khutor 1 (Farmstead) of the Hazarbagh state farm in the Denau district of Surkhandarya in the 1960s and 1970s. Surprisingly, all these professionals spoke fluent Uzbek, both with each other and with us. Of course, while they spoke their native language at home, all communication at work and on the streets was in Uzbek. In the evenings, our Armenian fellow villager would pass by the hut that housed our village’s only source of electricity – a diesel generator – and call out in Uzbek to the German, old Wilhelm: “Hey Vigeli, aren’t you going to turn on the light