Who’s the Xo’jayin Here?: The Rural Household Economy in Late-Soviet Central Asia

• In Event: Industrialization, Deindustrialization, and the Soviet Modernization Project: Revisiting Economic Transformations in Late Soviet Central Asia

Abstract

This paper explores the late-Soviet household economy in rural Central Asia, examining labor, production, and exchange practices in cotton-growing regions of Tajikistan’s Vakhsh Valley and Uzbekistan’s Fergana Valley. Drawing on oral history interviews and archival materials from the Brezhnev and Gorbachev years, I argue that Soviet efforts to regulate rural surplus labor—first through policies promoting outmigration and later via economic reform—stemmed from a fundamental misrecognition of the household’s economic role within the command economy. Soviet planners and social scientists perceived Central Asia’s rural labor reserve both as a latent resource for industrialization and as an obstacle to modernization. When initiatives to drive rural-to-urban migration faltered, officials began to interpret low labor mobility not merely as a logistical hurdle but as a reflection of the household’s function as an economic entity. Yet what was increasingly dismissed as a relic of tradition—an archaic form of family-based production resistant to socialist transformation—was, in reality, an economic arrangement that functioned within and alongside the planned economy. Rather than a vestige of the past, the rural household’s mode of reproduction shaped economic practices and the division of labor in ways that defied official categorization. Perestroika-era reforms thus exposed deeper tensions within the Soviet modernization project—between central planning and lived social arrangements—and its underlying assumptions about labor, mobility, and economic life in rural Central Asia.

Author

• Alexander Maier, Columbia U