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

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel critically examines the Soviet modernization project in Central Asia by comparing economic sectors across urban and rural spaces in the late 20th century. Emphasizing the varied experiences of industrialization, the panel draws on oral histories, periodicals, published works, and archival materials to explore how different populations navigated economic transformations under Soviet rule and its aftermath. Each paper investigates how the Soviet experiment—and its collapse—reshaped manufacturing centers and production in rural areas. By analyzing multiple sites across Central Asia, the panel challenges simplistic center-periphery models, highlighting the complex internal dynamics of economic change and the ongoing legacies of deindustrialization since 1991.

Sub Unit

• History: 1945-1990

Chair

• Sohee Ryuk, U College Dublin (Ireland)

Papers

• Who’s the Xo’jayin Here?: The Rural Household Economy in Late-Soviet Central Asia - Alexander Maier, Columbia U

• Here There was a Desert: Irrigation and Resettlement in Late-Soviet Tajikistan - Nicholas Seay, Ohio State U

• Factories, Memory, and Collapse: Soviet Working-Class Identity Formation in Armenia and Kazakhstan - Liu Peng, Peking U (China)

Discussant

• Artemy Mikhail Kalinovsky, Temple U