Jadid Intellectuals and Soviet Repression in Recent Uzbek Scholarship: A Narrative Review of Reform and Historical Legacy

This article examines how five Uzbek-language publications from 2025 present Jadid reform, political repression, and the contemporary interpretation of Jadid heritage. It uses a bounded narrative review rather than a systematic search of the field. The publications were compared by thematic focus, evidence cited, treatment of chronology, and relationship between historical explanation and present-day evaluation. The synthesis identifies three approaches: biographical accounts of reform, organisational explanations of repression, and educational interpretations of heritage. Their perspectives are complementary, but their evidential strengths are uneven. In particular, statements about archival research require scrutiny of the references actually supplied, while broad accounts of persecution can obscure differences between individual lives. An established historical monograph is used as a contextual cross-check rather than as a sixth item in the review corpus. The article argues that a responsible interpretation of Jadid legacy requires distinguishing reformist activity, the changing circumstances of Soviet rule, and contemporary claims about historical continuity. Its contribution is a critical comparison of a small body of recent writing, not a comprehensive reconstruction of repression or a measurement of current public attitudes.