The Rais of the Kolkhoz: Masculinity on Cotton-Growing Kolkhozes

• In Event: Gender, Labor, and Identity in Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus

Abstract

This paper looks at the entanglement between collective farm leadership, materiality, and the materiality of cotton in Soviet Tajikistan. Using secondary sources, archival document, and short-run biographies of former collective farm chairmen (Rais), this paper shows how the material worth of raw cotton and its use as a commodity shaped the development of social and economic relations along gender lines on late-Soviet cotton collective farms.

Author

• Nicholas Seay, Ohio State U