Authors

Discussion

Besides the “high modernist” projects of transformation of nature under Stalin and Khrushchev in Central Asia, during the Cold War, the Soviet Union opened up to the decolonizing world. In this framework, the Soviet rural development model became both a source of legitimacy for Central Asia’s political elite, and a model of communist modernity, development, and emancipation for newly-independent Asian and African countries. From the late 1950s, Uzbekistan was the Soviet republic most similar, in terms of environmental conditions and productions, to the arid macro-region of Asia and Africa towards which considerable aid projects in the field of irrigation were directed, especially in Arab countries (such as Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Iraq and Syria) and Afghanistan. This paper explores the transnational connections between Central Asia and other regions of Asia and Africa (brought by science, cultural diplomacy, development aid and specialized migrations) and the reciprocal influences of Soviet development assistance policies in Africa and Asia in the areas of water management and water policies, and what were the political, economic, environmental consequences of these transnational connections abroad and in the USSR.