Authors

Beatrice Penati¹;  ¹ Department of History, University of Liverpool, UK

Discussion

Although the history of Central Asia in the 1920s has received considerable attention, the study of economic policy and agricultural change has long been lagging behind. On the basis of previously untapped archival and published sources from Moscow and Tashkent, this paper offers a new appraisal of the mid-1920s land-and-water reform in Uzbekistan, showing how this set of measures -together with other initiatives in State-sponsored agricultural change- were out of synch, so to say, with what was happening in the main agricultural regions of the USSR, particularly grain-producing areas. The paper briefly discusses the relation between this land reform and the ‘decolonising’ land reform of the early 1920s, as well as the differences and continuities between reform and the subsequent collectivisation drive. It is argued that, because of the particular nature of the land question and the predominance of the cotton sector, State-driven economic and social transformation in Uzbekistan was both lagging behind and more advanced than the rest of the USSR. As for Uzbekistan’s ‘accelerations’, not only did the land reform anticipate the “kulakisation of the peasantry” and the imposition of operational class labels to define the villagers’ relation to co-operatives and other services: parallel to the restoration of cotton procurements, the reform also helped the “capturing” of the peasantry. The paper ends with a call to reconsider the conventional periodisation of the 1920s when dealing with Central Asia - and possibly other ‘peripheries’ of the USSR.