Abstract: This article is the first comprehensive reconstruction of arguably the most renowned wartime Soviet adoption story of the Uzbek adoptive parents (Sha)Akhmed Shamakhmudov and Bakhri Akramova and their multiethnic adopted children. Although based on a true story, this family’s saga underwent many iterations and interpretations from the 1940s onward. The article thus pursues two main goals: biographical and conceptual. It reconstructs the family’s history by tracing and analyzing an extensive corpus of documents. Furthermore, critical analysis of this multilingual data set—comprising materials in Uzbek, Russian, and English—suggests that the Shamakhmudov family played an important role in competing interpretations of national Uzbek and hybrid Soviet identities.
Zukhra Kasimova (Sun,) studied this question.