In 1991, when the USSR broke up into separate countries, these countries received their sovereignty and also faced problems and weaknesses of national structures. After that, these republics faced the problem of organizing people within their borders with a process that would force them to live together and unite. The main issue at this new stage was the need to maintain relations with Russia, but at the same time, it was necessary to destroy the Soviet influence, which destroys the national character of the past and the need to break off relations with Russia. There were also issues related to the fact that these efforts do not correspond to international global development trends.
This paper analyzes the evolution of scientific national views in the post-Soviet space. The policy of the Soviet era had a great influence on the formation of the activity of the Central Asian region as a nation. The question «Is the process of nation formation in Central Asian countries a priority, i.e. the current existing nations have formed separate states, or the main element of the nation was formed within an already formed state?» is of particular importance.
The post-USSR national identity policy of Central Asian countries was subject to evaluation from different angles. As mentioned earlier, the current national identity in Central Asia was revealed as a new political unit within the framework of the conscious policy of the Soviet Union. Under the influence of this situation, the existing countries of Central Asia, which previously did not have a nation or the consciousness that they were united, adopted national identities such as Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Uzbek, Turkmen and Tajik within the framework of the Soviet system, and this process created the necessary conditions for the creation of a nation in the modern sense. The influence of the emphasis on «national identity» in Central Asia on the identification of the nation is increasing in the process of publicity («glasnost») and restructuring («perestroika»), in particular after independence. The Soviet system was aimed at raising the individual in the socialist republics of Central Asia to the type of homo sovieticus. Therefore, the concept of the ideology of the nation is undesirable, taking into account the ideological structure of the USSR. In this sense, the leaders of the USSR preferred the creation of nations as less harmful to supranational definitions of identity, such as Islam and Turkic affiliation [12]. They believed that the structure they had created by dividing Central Asia would create a transition period and that nationalism would be destroyed by the developed socialism [19]. In other words, the main goal of Soviet policy was not the creation of national states that would be independent in the Central Asian region [13]. Theoretically, with the official doctrine of the Communist Party, there were assumptions that national differences and nations would gradually disappear. But as a result, the system, ironically, failed to achieve the goal of creating the Soviet people.