Olimjon, whom I met in 2004, is a lecturer in philosophy at a higher educational institute in Samarkand. He described himself as having been a committed communist in the Soviet period, but since independence, he has become an actively engaged Muslim who regularly attends the Friday prayers at a registered mosque near his university. The mosque was built in the years after independence by staff at his institute, and he was one of the original hundred signatories needed for its registration in 1996. He was born in 1942 and graduated from the history faculty at Samarkand State University. For his military service, he was posted to a district near Moscow, where he rose to a leading position within the branch of Komsomol (the youth organisation of the Communist Party) in his unit. He was proud that he had held this leadership position in a Union-wide context, despite the fact that he was from Central Asia. Olimjon described how, as a youth, he had internalised a communist consciousness during his school and university education. At the same time, from his present perspective as a practicing Muslim after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he maintains his former self at arm's length, explaining his previous consciousness as something he automatically, unreflexively developed in response to the pervasive propaganda to which he had been exposed at school and university, a ‘child's consciousness’, as he described it.