Intimacy and Race in Late Soviet Central Asia

The demise of communism, Westernization, internal economic reform and the disintegration of the Soviet state create fertile soil for the growth of drug abuse and drug trafficking in (the former) USSR. Rates of drug abuse have soared since the mid-1980s, especially in the European parts of the (former) Union; also, organized interregional drug mafias have emerged to serve this rapidly expanding market. The (former) USSR does not now participate significantly in the international narcotics market as a consumer or supplier of illicit substances; however, this pattern of relative self-sufficiency could change dramatically in the 1990s. Convertibility of the ruble could result in a large flow of Western hard drugs such as cocaine, heroin or crack into European Russia. A rapid expansion of trade, travel and economic ties with Western countries will widen the pipeline for the movement of drugs. Finally, Moscow's weakening hold over the (former) Soviet Central Asian republics and Central Asia's generally bleak economic prospects correlate with an apparent massive expansion of drug crop cultivation in that region; if current trends continue, (former) Soviet Central Asia could well become a significant world supplier of hashish and opium products, during the 1990s.

Social and political reorganization in Central Asia - transition from pre-colonial to post-colonial society, Shirin Akiner the impediments to the development of civil societies in Central Asia, Touraj Atabaki Russia and former Soviet Central Asia - the attitude towards regional integrity, Vyacheslav Ya Belokrenitsky foreign policy perspectives of the Central Asian states, Tatian Shaumian Iran and Central Asia, Tchangiz Pahlevan Turkish policy in Central Asia, Gareth M. Winrow towards better mutual comprehension among Turkic-speakers, Edward Tryjarski the politics of oil and the quest for stability - the Caspian Sea, Tadeusz Swietochowski literature and the nation in contemporary Uzbekistan, Roberta M. Micallef the assertion of Uzbek national identity - nativization or state-building process? Victoria Koroteyeva, Ekaterina Makarova language and culture in transition in Uzbekistan, Cay Dollerup Turmenistan's place in Central Asia and the world, Rainer Freitag-Wirminghaus the Hazara of Afghanistan - the thorny path towards political unity, 1978-1002, Kristian Berg Harpviken ethnic identity versus nationalism - the Uzbeks of northeastern Afghanistan and the Afghan state, Gabriele Rasuly-Paleczek Nawruz in Tajikistan - ritual or politics? Ali Attar the early 20th century Kazakh intelligentsia - in search of national identity, Gulnar Kendirbaeva ethnic religious resurgence in Xinjiang, Kulbhushan Warikoo a Central Asian-Chinese ethnic melting pot - the case of the Gansu corridor, Sabira Stalberg nations transgressing nation-state - constructing Dungan, Uygur and Kazakh identities across China, Central Asia and Turkey, Dru C. Gladney past and present of a Manchu tribe - the Sibe, Liliya Gorelova the Tuvans in China - ethnic identity and language, Mariana Mongush Central asia in the minds of the Mughals, Richard Foltz Russian slaves in 17th century Bukhara, Audrey Burton the royal clan of the Turks and the problem of its designation, Sergey, G. Kljyashtorny burial sites in Hexi, Susanne Juhl.

Soviet Central Asia, with its indigenous Muslim population of some twenty-five million, was originally just as much a part of the Muslim East of the caliphates as the Middle East, which it adjoins geographically and with which it has considerable cultural affinities. Like the Middle East, too, its political and administrative structure has been radically changed as the result of great power involvement, albeit with widely differing consequences, of which the principal is that while the states of the Middle East no longer recognize or are subject to the imperial fiat of the great powers in whose hands their destinies once lay the Ottoman Empire, Britain, Russia and France the five Soviet Socialist republics of Central Asia remain under the so far undisputed prescriptive authority of the Soviet government. This situation has enabled that government to plan and operate, without any external interference and only limited internal opposition, administrative, social, cultural and economic reforms which, in their scale and uniformity, have exceeded anything yet attempted in the Middle East. It would be reasonable to suppose that the progress of these reforms in a region bordering not only on the Middle East but on South Asia and on China would engage the constant attention of all specialists interested in the developing countries of Asia. In fact, however, there is no evidence of any such attention being paid to the region by any university or learned society in Britain. The Hayter Sub-committee convened in 1960 was concerned, like the Scarbrough Commission before it, with practical arrangements in the universities for the study of past and present developments in Asia and Africa, and in the U.S.S.R.; but while its report contained positive recommendations for the creation in the universities of 'Area Study Centres' in respect of the Middle East, South and South-east Asia and the Far East, there was no provision for or even mention of Central Asia. The primary object of the present article is to draw attention to the many respects in which current developments in Soviet Central Asia should be regarded as of outstanding interest and importance. But before embarking on this it will be useful to consider how it is that the constantly changing and in many ways unique situation there has so far remained outside the purview of university disciplines and research. In an article entitled 'What goes on in Soviet Central Asia', published in the February 1971 issue of the Journal of the Royal Central Asian Society (subsequently renamed 'The Royal Society for Asian Affairs'), I put forward two possible reasons for this curious lacuna: the belief that the study of Soviet Central Asia would tend to be political rather than scholastic and would thus attract too few or the wrong type of student; and the fact that orientalists, who generally take little account of the press and modern literature of eastern countries, might

Central Asian History as Soviet History Adrienne Lynn Edgar (bio) In a spring 2015 forum in this journal, a group of established scholars discussed Central Asia’s place in the field of Russian and Soviet history.1 Are scholars of Central Asia, they asked, marginalized by—or worse—marginal to the broader profession? The current collection of essays helps answer this question. Here four young historians present research on Central Asia that is not only valuable as Central Asian history but also addresses questions that are absolutely central to the history of the Soviet Union. What did it mean to be “national,” to be Soviet, to be both national and Soviet? How did World War II transform Soviet citizens and their relationship to one another and to the Soviet state? How did Soviet experts conceive of modernity and economic development? How did the Soviet Union represent itself at home and abroad? Each of these essays uses valuable, hitherto underutilized sources: soldiers’ letters from the front, written in Uzbek and other non-Russian languages; republican archives in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan; the writings of Tajik economists; a trove of photographs from the Sovinformbiuro; oral history interviews. Timothy Nunan and Artemy Kalinovsky focus on topics scarcely explored in Soviet Central Asia—visual culture and political economy. Charles Shaw and Moritz Florin approach the more established topics of ethnicity, nationality, and Soviet identity in innovative ways. All four of these essays investigate the wartime and postwar years, crucial periods in Soviet Central Asian history that have only recently become the object of sustained attention. The essays offer a wealth of material for discussion, but I focus here on three themes that make particularly significant contributions to the field of Soviet history, in my view: World War II as a turning point in the transformation of Central Asia (and, by extension, the Soviet Union as a whole); the evolution of identities in Central Asia during and after the war; and the place of Central Asia in the intersection of Soviet domestic and foreign policy during the postwar era. [End Page 621] World War II as a Turning Point The first post-Soviet generation of Western scholars in the 1990s and 2000s focused mainly on the period between the revolutions and World War II, for understandable reasons. A wealth of untouched archival materials and indigenous-language sources existed for the 1920s and 1930s that was richer and more diverse than that of the later Stalinist era. From a strictly practical point of view, it made sense to gain an understanding of the early Soviet period before turning to the later decades. These early post-Soviet works focused primarily on nation making, gender, and Islam—all topics that had attracted attention from scholars well before the post-1991 “archival revolution.”2 Taken together, these monographs suggested that the Soviet transformation of Central Asia in the interwar period was incomplete. Indeed, in some ways it had scarcely begun. At the beginning of World War II, mass education continued to be rudimentary, and few Central Asians knew Russian. Most Central Asians remained mystified by, if not completely unfamiliar with, the main tenets of Marxist-Leninist ideology. Efforts to transform the status of women and “backward” family customs had met with limited success. Historians working on the 1920s and 1930s knew—or surmised—that the war and early postwar years were crucial in making Central Asia Soviet, but we did not yet have the evidence to demonstrate this. The next wave of scholarly work turned to the wartime and postwar periods, and dissertations and books dealing with this period have begun to appear in recent years.3 Charles Shaw and Moritz Florin emphasize the war as a turning point in the transformation of Central Asia and its integration into the Soviet “imagined community.” First and most obviously, the war transformed the [End Page 622] young Central Asian men who served in the Red Army. As Shaw shows, Uzbek soldiers learned Russian, adapted to Soviet frontline culture, and learned to present themselves in new ways. They also mastered the Soviet culture of frontline letter writing, which included the very non-Uzbek practice of writing to girls they had never met. (In...

Whereas contemporary scholarship on Soviet Central Asians in the Great Patriotic War has been written drawing extensively on Russian-language sources and state and regional archives in Russian Federation, Vicky Davis’s book challenges this Eurocentric approach by conducting a reverse experiment of writing on the Soviet war experience from margins to the center. Davis traces how the lives of Soviet citizens called to war from remote Kyrgyzstani villages near the border with China changed throughout the 1940s and beyond. This is a microhistory “of over three hundred [Soviet Central Asian] individuals,” whose lives had been permanently altered by war (p. 8). The source base is primarily comprised of data from the Issuk-Ko’l Archives (Kyrgyzstan), as well as from family archives, Russian-language local press, and interviews (conducted mostly in Russian). This work is “not a state-centric overview of political decisions and military maneuvers; rather, it weaves together the threads of many individual people behind the statistics” (p. 11). Even though state policies are the backdrop of the narrative, the personal stories of individuals loom large through their experience of evacuation and deportation, draft-dodging and Sovietization, commemoration [of war] and ambivalence. The book is structured chronologically and thematically and is divided into three parts. The first narrates the experiences of Central Asian combatants. Chapter 1 outlines sources, scope, and structure. Chapter 2 covers the chaotic regional conscription process. Chapter 3 details the discrimination and disaffection of ethnic minorities in the Red Army, tribulations of deserters and POWs, and those in penal and labor battalions. The second part focuses on the home front. Chapter 4 details the war economy. Chapter 5 summarizes social hardships, from challenges to patriarchal norms, food shortages, declining public health, and child-labor practices. Chapter 6 analyzes wartime propaganda for local consumption, a “cultural revolution” that ideologically aligned Central Asians with the rest of their Soviet kin. The third part considers the overall impact of the wartime population displacement on the region. Chapter 7 focuses on ethnically and socially diverse evacuees, while chapter 8 charts a different trajectory of displacement—that of the ethnically diverse deportees (Poles, Pontic Greeks, and Crimean Tatars). Chapter 9 concludes with an analysis of the Soviet memory of the war and underscores the differences in commemoration of the national war effort in various post-Soviet Central Asian republics. The book builds on and contributes to the burgeoning field of World War Two mobilization and mobility in Soviet Central Asia. The evidence base for the bulk of the book, immediately outside of Kyrgyzstanis’ experience, rests on recent Western scholarship, whereas recent post-Soviet Russian historiography dealing with the multinational war effort is conspicuously absent. One wonders if a proposed focus on ethnic minorities and rejection of the Eurocentric approach could have been elevated by choosing not to focus exclusively on a Russian-language Kyrgyz broadsheet and comparing it to coverage in Kyrgyz or any other minority language of Soviet Kyrgyzstan. Given the absence of archival materials dealing with the Central Asian communities and experiences outside of Kyrgyzstan, Soviet Kyrgyzstanis’ experiences emerge as a multilayered, multifaceted narrative, whereas experiences elsewhere in Central Asia are outlined only in cursory fashion. The ultimate question is how the experiences of predominantly rural Kyrgyzstanis compare to those elsewhere in rural and suburban Central Asia—outside of Tashkent, Frunze, and Alma-Ata—that Davis frequently relies on for comparative perspective. Does the wartime experience of often more Russified and better integrated urban dwellers in Central Asia differ from that of their multitudinous rural counterparts? Overall, Central Asia in World War Two is a unique book that offers new data on a lesser-studied Central Asian republic and attempts to balance the “big picture” with microhistory on the regional and provincial levels. This approach illuminates the war (and postwar) experiences of not only a titular (Kyrgyz) nation, but also those of ethnic minorities. It is a welcome addition to the subfield of multiethnic Soviet history that analyzes “national” republics as internally heterogeneous units. It weaves together the stories of everyday Central Asians (predominantly Kyrgyzstanis, but not exclusively so) on the war front and the home front. Davis’s book is written in engaging prose, connects pre- and postwar themes, and is, hence, a valuable resource for non-history majors to learn about Soviet history “from below” through the experiences of (often marginalized) individuals.

American AnthropologistVolume 75, Issue 6 p. 1945-1948 Free Access Archaeology: Central Asia: Turkmenia before the Achaemenids. V. M. MASSON and V. I. SARIANIDI CHARLES C. KOLB, CHARLES C. KOLB Pennsylvania State UniversitySearch for more papers by this author CHARLES C. KOLB, CHARLES C. KOLB Pennsylvania State UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: December 1973 https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1973.75.6.02a01240Citations: 1AboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL References Cited Belenitsky, Aleksandr 1968 Central Asia. James Hogarth, trans. Cleveland: World. Colledge, Malcolm A. R. 1967 The Parthians. New York: Praeger. Culican, William 1965 The Medes and Persians. New York: Praeger. Dupree, Louis, et al. 1972 Prehistoric Research in Afghanistan (1959–1966). Transactions of the American Philosophical Society n.s. Vol. 62, Part 4. Frumkin, Grégoire 1970 Archaeology in Soviet Central Asia. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Gryaznov, Mikhail P. 1969 The Ancient Civilization of Southern Siberia. James Hogarth, trans. New York: Cowles. Kolb, Charles C. 1972 Review of Archaeology in Soviet Central Asia. American Anthropologist 74: 1524– 1526. Masson, V. M. 1972 Prehistoric Settlement Patterns in Soviet Central Asia. In Man, Settlement and Urbanism. Peter J. Ucko, Ruth Tringham, and G. W. Dimbleby, Eds. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman. pp. 263– 278. Rice, Tamara Talbot 1961 The Scythians. Third ed. New York: Praeger. Sulimirski, Tadeusz 1970 The Sarmatians. New York: Praeger. Wheeler, Sir Mortimer 1959 Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka. New York: Praeger. Citing Literature Volume75, Issue6December 1973Pages 1945-1948 ReferencesRelatedInformation

Central Asia has long captured the imagination of Western travelers as an exotic and mysterious destination. After the region was incorporated into the Soviet Union, it became a centerpiece of the Soviet modernization campaign. African Americans in particular were greatly interested in Soviet Central Asia and what they perceived as an alternative to Western imperialism and American racial segregation. This article explores how Soviet Central Asia appeared to African Americans who traveled, worked, and lived in the region in the 1930s and compares these impressions with those of African American tourists who visited the region three decades later. Did African American engagement with Central Asia act as an emancipatory, creative force for interracial solidarity or did it constitute another form of Orientalist discourse?

On the Edge?Central Asia’s Place in the Field David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye (bio) Shortly before the Soviet Union’s collapse, the U.S. Congress invited Firuz Kazemzadeh—at the time, one of the few historians specializing in Russia’s southern periphery—to give a briefing about Central Asia. Fully expecting a host of detailed questions about the Soviet republics, he was surprised to discover that much of his session was taken up trying to explain that there were four of them, and that they had different names.1 Whereas today most legislators in Washington probably do not have a much better grasp of our planet’s geography, it would now be much easier to find scholars able to testify knowledgeably about the region. Once a rarefied specialization with dim, if any, job prospects, there is no question that Central Asian history has enjoyed growing attention and respectability in what is increasingly being called Slavic and Eurasian studies. Nevertheless, its practitioners still complain that they are marginalized—according to one of them, habitually relegated to the 8 am Sunday time slot at the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies convention (378). To what extent are they right? Furthermore, what is their relevance to the field of Russian studies, broadly defined? Kritika’s editors commissioned four prominent scholars who have made their careers in Central Asian history to comment about its place and prospects in the academy. I was then asked if I might reflect on their remarks as someone who has studied Russia’s engagement with the East more broadly. Reflecting Kritika’s stated ambition to transcend “the insularities of national particularism,” these scholars represent four different regions: [End Page 389] Central Asia itself (Gulmira Sultangalieva), Russia (Sergei Abashin), East Asia (Tomohiko Uyama), and North America (Jeff Sahadeo). It would be churlish to complain that Western Europe, which also boasts distinguished specialists, has been left out. Nevertheless, their observations are remarkably congruent. Perhaps we are not as isolated as it often seems. What Is Central Asia? The independence of Central Asia’s five republics has naturally led to a considerable boom in the study of their own history there over the past two decades. Among the region’s leading scholars in this respect is Gulmira Sultangalieva. As professor of history at Kazakh National University in Almaty, Sultangalieva devotes much of her attention to the study of her own country’s past. Nevertheless, many of her remarks are equally relevant to the other states in Central Asia. Sultangalieva points out that the region has a “complex nomenclature.” In a more existential vein, she even wonders, “Has Central Asia existed as a single and coherent region?” (345). What was once vaguely described as “Tartary” on old European maps has variously been known as Turkestan, Central Asia, Inner Asia, Eurasia, Central Eurasia, and the Heartland, albeit with wildly varying boundaries.2 Like Sultangalieva, Abashin refers to “Central Asia.” By contrast, Jeff Sahadeo and Uyama Tomohiko discuss “Central Eurasia.” If they are dissonant, they are not alone. Indeed, there still is no general scholarly consensus about what precisely constitutes Central Asia. Should we take it as “scientifically” defined in 1843 by the Prussian geographer Alexander von Humboldt as “that region of Asia which is 5° north and 5° south of the 44.5° parallel”?3 Do we accept UNESCO’s designation, which encompasses former Soviet Central Asia, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Xinjiang, Mongolia, and Tibet, as well as portions of northern India and Iran?4 Or does Central Asia consist only of the former Soviet republics (Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and sometimes Kazakhstan), according to the more common contemporary political practice? Perhaps the most straightforward solution would be to return to the region’s earlier appellation, (western) Turkestan.5 [End Page 390] That term lost favor in the 1920s as the young Soviet regime separated the region into separate “republics.”6 It is interesting that none of the authors contests that Central Asia was a colony in both the late imperial and the Soviet eras.7 Before 1991, when the USSR was not commonly regarded as an empire, this would have been fraught with political implications. At the same time, there...

The potential geographical distribution of Haloxylon across Central Asia under climate change in the 21st century

A Union ReframedSovinformbiuro, Postwar Soviet Photography, and Visual Orders in Soviet Central Asia Timothy Nunan (bio) When Soviet photographer Evgenii Khaldei photographed Red Army soldiers raising the USSR’s flag over the Reichstag on 2 May 1945, he captured not only the arrival of Moscow as a global superpower but also the importance that photojournalism would assume in fashioning the image of the Soviet Union in the world. No longer a pariah but rather the liberator of Europe and a superpower, Moscow faced new challenges in how to present itself. Fashioning the image of a Soviet homeland demanded choices at once aesthetic and political. Presenting an image of the Soviet Union that accented its anti-capitalism and opposition to European imperialism was crucial. Yet other countries were busily remaking their institutions and visual self-presentation too. Journalistic outlets in the United States presented an “American century,” while European empires busily reinvented themselves as commonwealths or federations.1 As the terms of comparison with the West were shifting, Moscow needed to reinvent its own visual brand. It had to remind the world what relevance its own policies of ethnofederal republics and citizenship for all—rather than a distinction between metropolitan citizens and colonial subjects—held for the rest of the world. Nor was this merely a repackaging race for its own sake. With communist parties in Eastern Europe struggling for power, communist parties in Western Europe on the upswing, and all of Europe mired in economic depression, Moscow faced both challenges and opportunities. Soviet photographers and journalists had to supply audiences [End Page 553] with visual documents not only of socialist prosperity but also of the Soviet alternative to racial democracy and colonial empire. As Soviet embassies around the world dispatched negatives to communist, socialist, and trade-union papers, the Soviet Union seized on Central Asia to show the enlightened side of Soviet policy. Here former tsarist colonies and protectorates had been transformed into nominally autonomous ethnofederal republics. Already during the interwar period, the five republics carved out of Central Asia had attracted sympathy from European or American socialists, who contrasted them, naïvely, to American cotton plantations and to British or French aerial bombardments in Mandate Iraq or Syria. Soviet Central Asia, it would seem, gave the lie to Western imperialists’ claims to represent “civilization.”2 And during a brief postwar moment, the Soviet federal model gained admirers among not just the anti-imperialist Left but also European imperial administrators as well as colonial intellectuals seeking a nonimperial formula for federative polities.3 The Soviet vision of politics was, in short, attractive in the postwar years. It needed only photographers to shoot it, state outlets and Soviet embassies to package it, and newspapers to print and sell it to European and colonial observers. While the study of imperial visual culture has long occupied the attention of scholars of the British and French empires, studies of the visual ordering of the Soviet periphery remain limited.4 Scholarship on Soviet photography focuses primarily on Russia and the prewar period.5 Some studies of tsarist colonial photography have shifted the focus toward Eurasia, but the Soviet period in [End Page 554] general, and the postwar period in particular, remains poorly understood.6 Studying the visual culture of the Soviet peripheries would not only contribute to an emerging “visual turn” in the study of the late Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, but also—at least as specifically concerns Central Asia—offer a new entry point to debates about the relationship of the Soviet experience to empire.7 As Adeeb Khalid has urged, we need to move beyond comparisons of the Soviet experience to an ideal type of what empire—or its visual culture—looks like.8 As noted above, any use of empire as an analytical concept must be grounded in the postwar reality of empires seeking to reform themselves through federative solutions—indeed, often with the Soviet Union as a reference point in mind. But what if, in addition to thinking about the Soviet relationship to empire less through juridical or political categories of subject or citizen, or through economics, we did so by thinking about how Soviet media depicted the...

This article will focus on Muslim women, Imperial and Soviet schools in Central Asia. The chronological framework of the study covers the regional history from 1865 to 1930. The lower temporal boundary is due to the beginning of the Russian colonial order establishment in the region, the upper one to the year of the women's departments liquidation. Using comparative analysis, the author reconstructs the history of the women's education development in Central Asia. The problem of the research is to find out whether there has been a gap in the approaches of the administration of the Turkestan General-Governor and TASSR and the Uzbek SSR authorities in educating Muslims women and European migrants. The relevance of the paper lies in the study of the new imperial history, along with the revision of the stereotype view on the women emancipation in Soviet Central Asia, alike a successful project of the Bolsheviks, which changed the indigenous people cultural values. In addition to introducing little-known sources of the Soviet period into scientific circulation, the novelty of the article lies in the study of the institutional history of Central Asia through the prism of a gender. In the course of the study, it was found that the relative successes were achieved among the European population, especially during the Soviet period, because was formulated a meaningful gender policy. Despite the difference in management concepts, there were more Muslim women schools under the Soviet regime, especially after Hujum.

Pioneering historical comparison between Soviet Central Asia and socialist Mongolia in the last decades of socialism, this article aims to assess the role of international factors and regional geopolitics in the policies of socialist states towards religious institutions and communities. It also traces long- term sociocultural transformations of Muslim and Buddhist communities in comparative perspective, and questions how individuals and groups responded to antireligious social campaigns, adapted to newly introduced institutions and reframed their religious identities throughout. The research is based on archival and oral- history data, while reflections upon the concepts of secularity and religion assist in working out a critical approach to the sources. The article raises the complex question of fading religiosity in the religious rites and ceremonies which persisted into socialism and beyond, explored alongside the sacral meaning imposed and found in communist commemorations and socialist cults. It argues for the necessity of analysing communities in the shared historical space where foreign state policies and individual histories intersect. While post- Second World War Middle Eastern geopolitics impacted upon the reestablishment of legal Muslim institutions in Soviet Central Asia, the status of socialist Mongolia vis- à- vis Peking became an additional motivation for the Mongolian communists’ assault on the lamas. In Soviet Central Asia in the 1970s–1980s, social life was still centred on Islamic rituals, while in Mongolia, where socialist cults laid down deeper roots, the population demonstrated more profound sacral perception of communal commemorations than Central Asians.

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...

The Search for the Center Soviet Central Asia included 5 of the 15 union republics of the USSR: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. All these republics emerged in place of the former Turkestan and Steppe general-governorships of the Russian Empire, as well as two protectorates: Bukhara and Khiva. The Russian Empire gradually incorporated the northern lands of this region and their nomadic peoples beginning in the 1730s. The intensive annexation of settled lands to the south occurred in the 1860-80s, while the territories of Khiva and Bukhara lost their remaining independence only at the beginning of the 1920s. In 1897, the population of these lands, including the protectorates, constituted about 8 percent of the population of the country, and in 1989-17 percent. (1) Evaluating the significance of this population and territory for academic studies of the Russian Empire, the USSR, and the post-Soviet space is no simple matter. A very basic way to start is to compare the number of publications on this area with the overall quantity of publications about the Russian Empire, the USSR, and the post-Soviet space. The comparison, although rather mechanical, does support the initial thesis regarding the disproportionality of interest in various regions of the country that collapsed in 1991. I took just two popular English-language journals from 2010 to 2014: in Slavic Review there were 7 specialized publications about Central Asia out of 126 (separately or as a thematic block), and Kritika had 7 out of 107 (although, of course, there were references to the region in a number of other published articles). If one takes Russian journals, the picture is not much different: in Ab Imperio, of the 202 publications that I examined for the same five years, 15 were directly focused on Central Asia. The share of publications in these cases is therefore approximately two to three times less than the share of the population in 1989 and about the same, or a bit less, of the share of the population in 1897. (2) Of course, the statistics for publications cited above are superficial and warrant further discussion; to make more meaningful statements, one would need a more thorough consideration of all journals, collections of articles, monographs, and dissertations; more refined criteria for the selection of texts; and an analysis of publication activity over a longer period of time. But the issue is not just one of objective evidence of this sort; there is also a widespread impression among those who study Central Asia that other scholars ignore their region, something that is generally absent in conceptual debates about Russia and socialism. (3) The Central Asian perspective is either lacking or mentioned briefly in general discussions about social estates, the reforms of the 19th century, the revolution and civil war, the Stalin period, World War II, the Thaw, the period of stagnation, and in post-Soviet memory. For many, it is as if Central Asia occupies not even a secondary but only a tertiary place and plays no role in attempts to understand this or that time period or social order. Whether real or subjective, the absence of attention toward Central Asia is part of a more general disproportionality in the study of the Russian Empire, the USSR, and post-Soviet affairs. Specialists in other regions (the Caucasus, the Volga region, and Siberia) are probably convinced that their interests are no better represented than is Central Asia, and perhaps even less so. Nonetheless, Central Asian studies have their own specific attributes as well as a clear tendency to form a kind of self-standing region. This probably makes the complaints and grievances of specialists in the region louder and more insistent. What are these specific attributes of Central Asian studies? There are a number of reasons for insufficient attention being paid to Central Asia in both the imperial and the Soviet periods. …

US policy in Central Asia is a topical issue that causes discussions among researchers. One can't help wondering about the origins of this policy, particularly during the Cold War era. This, in turn, leads scholars to question the U.S.'s role in the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the formation of independent states in the former territory of Soviet Central Asia. This article discusses the effectiveness of American propaganda services operating in Central Asia during the Cold War. The most prominent structure which tried to influence political sentiments of population of this region was Radio Liberty (RL). It consisted of former Nazi collaborators during World War II, and Soviet propaganda apparatus used this situation. RL used the concept of a united anti-communist Turkestan which was unacceptable for real situations in Soviet Central Asia. Jamming and the lack of feedback from listeners made great obstacles for activity of RL in this region. That is why the author attempts to prove that the effective-ness of this activity was not so great as its financial support. Using archives of Russian and American security services and documents of Central Asian archives, future scholars will have the possibility to clarify this conclusion.