Here There was a Desert: Irrigation and Resettlement in Late-Soviet Tajikistan

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

Abstract

This paper explores post-WWII irrigation projects and population resettlement in cotton-growing areas of Tajikistan as a case study in Soviet modernization. Based on oral history, archival records, and a growing body of literature which historicizes desert spaces in the modern world, this paper argues that local collective farm leaders in Tajikistan wielded surprising influence and agency in expanding cotton monoculture in Central Asia, parallel with, but also distinct from pressures by central party leaders in the USSR. The hierarchical economies of extraction within the Soviet Union rendered power relations unequal, yet collective farm leaders in the Republic nevertheless advanced local and personal interests as they lobbied Moscow for assistance with expanding irrigation works by moving both water and people to low-lying cotton growing areas. Rather than simply being pawns in the unequal politics of the USSR, local farmers and party leaders took the initiative to advocate for these projects, expand the monoculture, and reshape the human geography of the Republic in the process. In the end, however, monoculture rendered them unable to address the environmental and social impacts of decades of intensification of this crops’ production.

Author

• Nicholas Seay, Ohio State U