Crossing Boundaries: Maya Peterson’s Pipe Dreams

Abstract

Crossing BoundariesMaya Peterson’s Pipe Dreams Adrienne Edgar (bio) Anyone who has traveled in rural areas of Central Asia will recall seeing oozing, salt-encrusted fields, rendered unfit for cultivation by faulty Soviet irrigation practices. On my first visit to Turkmenistan in the 1990s, I passed miles of such ruined land on my way to a friend’s home village.1 While the devastation of the Aral Sea is the best-known result of the Soviet drive for cotton in the region, the environmental effects of Soviet rule extend far beyond the shores of that doomed body of water. Maya Peterson’s important book helps us understand how this situation came to be. In Pipe Dreams: Water and Empire in Central Asia’s Aral Sea Basin, Peterson tells a story of technology, modernist ideology, and imperial hubris.2 The drive to remake Central Asia’s land and water, begun under the tsars, reached its culmination in the Soviet era. In a perfect cascade of unintended consequences, Soviet “modernizing” policies of agricultural development in Central Asia resulted in famine, the spread of malaria, the destruction of agricultural land through salinization, and the desertification of the Aral Sea and surrounding areas. Water and the environment are vitally important yet neglected aspects of Soviet history. Discontent over environmental damage was a key factor fueling the separatist sentiments that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the Soviet successor states are still struggling with the legacy of poor stewardship of natural resources. Yet the study of environmental history in Russia and the Soviet Union is in its infancy, and the number of works on this topic relating [End Page 352] specifically to Central Asia can be counted on the fingers of one hand.3 In Pipe Dreams, as Peterson explains in the introduction, the physical environment is not just the setting for the action; nature, and especially the vital yet unpredictable resource of water in all its forms, is itself a key actor. The book’s narrative arc follows the course of Central Asia’s rivers from the Aral Sea and lower Amu Darya into the mountains and back again, as Peterson tells of the human actors who sought to harness, manage, and control these waters. Like Central Asia’s waters, Peterson’s narrative crosses borders and transcends boundaries both physical and chronological. While many works on Soviet Central Asia have focused on a particular “national republic” (partly because the structure of Soviet archives nudges historians in this direction), Pipe Dreams follows the story of water and irrigation wherever it leads, paying little heed to the Soviet-drawn borders separating Kazakhstan from Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan from Uzbekistan.4 Peterson’s source base is extensive and includes Russian imperial and Soviet archives from five different post-Soviet countries, as well as a wide array of published materials. Peterson’s research also transcends international borders. She views Russian and Soviet hydraulic projects in Central Asia as part of the global Irrigation Age of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in which science and technology were harnessed to bring water to arid regions and to turn “wastelands” into prosperous areas. These modernist visions sought to transform arid landscapes in places as diverse as North Africa, China, Australia, and the American West. Chronologically, Peterson does not allow her account to be limited by the traditional periodization of Russian/Soviet history, which has tended to emphasize the rupture of the 1917 revolution. She argues convincingly that the roots of the Aral Sea disaster do not just lie in Stalinist “gigantomania” and the communist drive for agricultural and industrial development but stretch back into the 19th century. She sees continuity in the goals and methods of Central Asia’s imperial [End Page 353] Russian and Soviet rulers, each of whom pursued “modern”—and ultimately self-serving and destructive—ways of watering and cultivating the region. As the book’s title tells us, Pipe Dreams is about both water and empire, and Peterson’s focus on continuity and the physical environment allows us to see empire in Eurasia in new ways. Few would dispute the imperial qualities of the Russian Empire, but debates about the nature of...