Papers - colonial Turkestan by Beatrice Penati
N. B. Breyfogle, & P. C. Brown (Eds.), Hydraulic Societies: Water, Power, and Control in East and Central Asian History. Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press., 2023
Modern Asian Studies, 2023
A variety of wormwood, Artemisia cina, once grew abundantly in the Syr-Darya province of Russian ... more A variety of wormwood, Artemisia cina, once grew abundantly in the Syr-Darya province of Russian Turkestan. Santonin, a drug derived from it, was in high demand. Flowers harvested by Kazakhs were handed over to intermediaries to be processed in Europe, but from the 1880s entrepreneurs from different parts of the Russian empire established their own chemical plants in Chimkent and Tashkent. They pressured the Russian imperial government to restrict the rights of the Kazakhs on land where Artemisia cina grew, and grant them the exclusive right to exploit this resource. These entrepreneurs used conservationist arguments and advocated a ‘cultured’ approach to the management of natural resources located on supposedly ‘State land’. These attempts collided with the usage rights of the Kazakhs, as defined by Turkestan’s governing Statute. By shifting the argument to the political, rather than legal, level, the industrialists eventually gained a monopoly to the exclusion of local entrepreneurs and even assumed State-like functions. This article reconstructs this controversy and allows a glimpse into the evolving claims to natural resources in the ‘periphery’ by both Tsarist colonial power and the Kazakhs themselves. The article also explores the features of autochthonous and Russian entrepreneurship and situates Turkestan in a web of trade connections to the global pharmaceutical industry.
Journal of Central Asian History, 2022
Historiography on the sblizhenie effort is abundant, as is the scholarship on the variable geomet... more Historiography on the sblizhenie effort is abundant, as is the scholarship on the variable geometries of citizenship (grazhdanstvennost’) in reference to Tsarist Turkestan and to other parts of the Russian empire. More generally, the existence of local self-government organs, or zemstva, gradually introduced across parts of the empire from the 1860s onwards, was indeed one of the proxies for the degree of integration of a certain province or gubernia within the imperial fabric. Crucially, the zemstva were responsible for raising and spending a specific local tax, the zemskii sbor, which could be used for various tasks often close to the heart of local communities and their elites, from infrastructure to schooling and public hygiene. In Turkestan, zemstva did not exist when Lykoshin or Pahlen were writing – and were not established even during the revolution. The zemskii sbor, however, was regularly collected. This essay explains how the zemskii sbor was calculated and paid in Turkestan – an aspect still murky in the extant historiography. This is done on the basis of published and archival documents which include quantitative data, especially templates of tax ledgers and budgetary compilations, as well as by commenting on several flashpoints in the history of this tax in the region. The relation between the zemskii sbor and other levies is also clarified. In addition, the last part of the essay identifies how the revenue from the zemskii sbor was spent in Turkestan, and how this changed over time in the last decades of colonial rule. Knowing how the money was spent is relevant for understanding the implications of the absence of local government organs to preside over such expenditure.
In the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018., 2018
Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 14:4 (2013), pp. 741-774.
P. Sartori (ed.), Explorations into the Social History of Modern Central Asia, Boston-Leiden, Brill, 2013, pp. 65-109.
Central Asian Survey 29:1 (March 2010), pp. 61-78
This article deals with rain-fed tilled land (bahārī) and wasteland in Russian Turkestan. On the ... more This article deals with rain-fed tilled land (bahārī) and wasteland in Russian Turkestan. On the basis of archival and published sources, the numerous twists and turns of Russian surveying policies before and after the endorsement of the 1886 Turkestan Statute are shown, and problems posed by the specific, mutable nature of bahārī land to the mechanism of land-tax allotment within each rural community, in particular for non-resident households are focused on. The 1900 amendments to the Statute radically changed the way land-tax was raised on bahārī land: thereafter it was to be calculated on the basis of its surface area instead of as a share of the harvest. Moreover, provisions passed in 1900, but fully implemented only in 1908, extended fiscal liability to wasteland whence villagers could earn an income through grazing, collecting firewood and other activities. It is demonstrated that these measures brought about a significant expansion in fiscal revenues, thus helping to narrow and ultimately redress the deficit in the Turkestan krai's primary budget, which had been a persistent problem since the region was originally annexed in 1865.
Jahrbuecher fuer Geschichte Osteuropas, 59:1, 2011, pp. 1-27.
Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient, 2010
Just after the conquest of the Kokand khanate in 1876, the new Russian rulers carried out land su... more Just after the conquest of the Kokand khanate in 1876, the new Russian rulers carried out land surveying and land-tax assessment in the rich and densely populated Fergana province. These 'organisation works' constituted the most consistent attempt ever to establish a cadastral system in Russian Turkestan. Differently from what would happen later, they incorporated tentative claims to bring under control the land rights of the Muslim rural population and to internalise the process of land-tax raising. In this context, Russian local officials tested alternative and partly contradictory policies, and their results served as a background experience for the Turkestan Statute of 1886.
Papers - Soviet Central Asia by Beatrice Penati
In the mid-1920s, Uzbekistan's countryside experienced a 'land reform' , which aimed at solving r... more In the mid-1920s, Uzbekistan's countryside experienced a 'land reform' , which aimed at solving rural poverty and satisfying radical fringes among peasants and Party, while sustaining agricultural output, especially for cotton. This book analyses the decision-making process underpinning the reform, its implementation, and economic and social e fects. The reform must be understood against the background of the wreckage caused by war and revolution, and linked to subsequent policies of 'land organisation' and regime-sponsored 'class struggle'. Overall, this is the rst comprehensive account of early Soviet policy in Central Asia's agricultural heartland, encompassing land rights, irrigation, credit, resettlement, and the cooperative system.
Series: Handbook of Oriental Studies. Section 8 Uralic & Central Asian Studies, Volume: 31
Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 2019
This paper narrates the story of a textile trust (trest), named Red Orient (Rus. Krasnyi Vostok; ... more This paper narrates the story of a textile trust (trest), named Red Orient (Rus. Krasnyi Vostok; Uz. Qizil Sharq). This trust was initially owned by the Bukharan People’s Republic, then, after the national delimitation of Central Asia, by the Uzbek SSR. Its activity included all the steps of the added-value chain of industrial transformation of ginned cotton (spinning, twisting, dyeing, finishing, weaving, and printing). Its factories and mills, initially all located in Russia, served as a training ground for the first generation of native Uzbek textile workers while its management participated in the planning and construction of the first cotton textile plant in Fergana towards the end of the decade.
Two read threads are entangled in this story: first, that of the day-by-day workings of the New Economic Policy in a small industrial organisation; second, that of the economic side of early Soviet nationality policies. This paper looks at the nitty-gritty aspects of procurements, bookkeeping, audit, and management. It shows how balance sheets were more an item for negotiation and a political weapon, than a diagnostic tool for the efficiency of Red Orient’s business. Above all, the story of Red Orient reveals that early Soviet economic policies did not exclude that the Central Asian cotton harvest could be processed by mills owned by the republics themselves, and result in finished textiles for the Central Asian market. The Bukharan (later, Uzbek) governments, either directly or through their representatives in Moscow, confronted all-Union agencies in the name of the "national" nature of the trust, be it to settle complicated debt relations, to reshape the procurement of raw materials, to acquire additional looms and, ultimately, to negotiate the construction of the first textile factory in Fergana. In other words, the republics, as shareholders and eponymous "nations" of the trust, took ownership of their destiny and day-to-day trade and production activities.
Acta Slavica Iaponica, vol. 26, 2015, pp. 39-72.
This article studies when, how, and by whom the decision to nationalise land properties the rent ... more This article studies when, how, and by whom the decision to nationalise land properties the rent from which supported mosques, shrines, and hostels (rather than schools) was first taken in Soviet Uzbekistan. Through a quasi-philological reconstruction of the drafting process behind the land reform decree in a peripheral area of Fergana, the article demonstrates how local power dynamics produced incentives for provincial Party and Soviet leaders to prove themselves better Bosheviks than their neighbours. A close scrutiny of chains of command is essential for capturing the importance of local political agency, pace top-down interpretations that privilege Moscow's or Samarkand's viewpoints instead.
In 1927 the Aim canton, which the national delimitation of 1924 had assigned to Kirgizia, was spl... more In 1927 the Aim canton, which the national delimitation of 1924 had assigned to Kirgizia, was split in two parts and the larger of them was assigned to the Uzbek SSR. Besides the intrinsic interest of such a redefinition of the frontier, this had the important consequence of precipitating a sort of micro-land reform for this handful of villages only (as Fergana had already undergone it) on the basis of a specific decree. First, by projecting the petitions and decisions on the “correction” of the border against this socio-economic background, this article demonstrates the spread of discursive tropes pertaining to Soviet-style economic development in shaping the “nationalist” rhetoric of a variety of actors, and argues that such tropes were decisive in making the latter acceptable. Second, by exploiting the special situation of Aim and the consequent abundant documentation, this article casts light on the decision-making process at the basis of the land reform, both in general and in this particular locality, focusing on the distance between plans and achievements and on the manipulation of social categories.
Monograph issue "Enquêter dans les sociétés coloniales", eds. E. Sibeud, H. Blais, C. Fredj,
"""In 1925, the USSR communist party’s Central Asian Bureau ordered an inquiry on the countryside... more """In 1925, the USSR communist party’s Central Asian Bureau ordered an inquiry on the countryside, resulting in the series The Modern Central Asian Village. It combined pre-revolutionary methods with Soviet attention to social stratification, while the benchmark of the pre-1917 economy and the composition of the commission revealed the heritage of Tsarist colonial rule.
En 1925, le Bureau pour l’Asie centrale du parti communiste d’URSS commanda une enquête sur les campagnes qui aboutit à la publication d’une série intitulée Le village centrasiatique moderne. Elle combinait une méthodologie prérévolutionnaire à un intérêt tout soviétique pour la stratification sociale. Par ailleurs la référence à l’économie d’avant 1917 comme standard et le profil des commissaires y étaient révélateurs de l’héritage du pouvoir colonial tsariste.
"""
Cahiers du Monde Russe, 52(4), 2011, pp. 555-589.
This article explores the role of the Central and national Cotton Committees before and after the... more This article explores the role of the Central and national Cotton Committees before and after the national delimitation. Then, it discusses the competition between regional and federal banks, their involvement in the cotton sector, and their entanglement with politics in Moscow and Tashkent. Similar networks were mobilised in the struggle to control grain supply to the peasantry and in the recapitalisation of the Uzbek trade organisation. The centrality of cotton in the local economy and the weakness of local power agencies triggered a direct confrontation between the Central Cotton Committee and the Party’s Central Asian Bureau. This leads to a critique of the interpretive paradigm opposing “centralisation” to “decolonisation” in the history of early Soviet Central Asia and, more generally, to a reappraisal of the role of semi-autonomous economic actors during the NEP.
"Revolutionary Russia", 25(2), 2012, p. 187-217.
The land-and-water reform that took place in the Uzbek SSR in the 1920s was intended to solve the... more The land-and-water reform that took place in the Uzbek SSR in the 1920s was intended to solve the agrarian question in sedentary areas. However, competition between several power agencies and the importance of technical expertise led to divergent views and inconsistencies in its implementation. This article presents an overview of its institutional history and crucial phases: preliminary land surveys, expropriation and redistribution of land and implements, and the formalisation of the rights on newly received land. Besides the Soviet ambition to ‘politicise’ land ownership and bring it under control, the article emphasises the continued presence of Russian land settlement priorities, bureaucratic practices and former tsarist personnel in the reform, arguing that a stronger grasp on individual land ownership was, if not an explicit goal, one of the most useful by-products of the reform in the eyes of local administrative organs.
Central Asia Survey, 26:4, December 2007 (double-blind peer review)
This article concerns the impact of the activity of Ibrahim Bek's bands on the population of East... more This article concerns the impact of the activity of Ibrahim Bek's bands on the population of Eastern Bukhara and the multifaceted Soviet reaction to it in the second half of the 1920s. Because the Soviet goal was not just the annihilation of the Basmachi, but a thorough reconquest of Eastern Bukhara, the Red Army was accompanied by civil authorities and ‘irregular’ troops, including former Basmachi bands fighting on the Soviet side, and village self-defence. Civil and joint civil–military commissions for struggle against the Basmachi offered an initial Soviet socialization for the local population. The mechanisms regulating amnesties and punishments served to disrupt local power networks, while internal and trans-border migrations were used not only to control the bands, but also to prepare agricultural transformations. The new Soviet power also had to compete with the authority exercised in the realm of food supply and famine relief.
Papers - environment by Beatrice Penati
Central Asia is defined in this book as post-Soviet and predominantly semi-arid. Humans in this r... more Central Asia is defined in this book as post-Soviet and predominantly semi-arid. Humans in this region have experienced, interpreted, and reacted to environments in many different ways. This chapter sketches out this diversity, illustrating the changing landscapes that have shaped the livelihoods of Central Asians. It points to the complex layers of Islamic, Turkic, and Persianate influences that affect human-environment relations, as well as the historic links between nomadic and sedentary lifestyles, the legacies of Russian colonialism, Soviet communist ideology, and different kinds of capitalism. An overview of current scholarship suggests the urgency of inter- and transdisciplinary research and discusses established forms of knowledge production on Central Asian environments. The text sets out the book’s conceptual discussion of ‘relating’ in and with ‘environments’. We classify human-non-human species relations according to a broad taxonomy that structures the book: extract, enspirit, protect, and fear. The chapter examines the usefulness of Environmental Humanities for Central Asian Studies, as well as the use of our Central Asian findings in global environmental humanities. It considers how these more-than-human stories might serve as a reservoir of both warnings and inspiration, in searching for forms of resilience in Asia.
Central Asian Survey, 2022
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Papers - colonial Turkestan by Beatrice Penati
Papers - Soviet Central Asia by Beatrice Penati
Series: Handbook of Oriental Studies. Section 8 Uralic & Central Asian Studies, Volume: 31
Two read threads are entangled in this story: first, that of the day-by-day workings of the New Economic Policy in a small industrial organisation; second, that of the economic side of early Soviet nationality policies. This paper looks at the nitty-gritty aspects of procurements, bookkeeping, audit, and management. It shows how balance sheets were more an item for negotiation and a political weapon, than a diagnostic tool for the efficiency of Red Orient’s business. Above all, the story of Red Orient reveals that early Soviet economic policies did not exclude that the Central Asian cotton harvest could be processed by mills owned by the republics themselves, and result in finished textiles for the Central Asian market. The Bukharan (later, Uzbek) governments, either directly or through their representatives in Moscow, confronted all-Union agencies in the name of the "national" nature of the trust, be it to settle complicated debt relations, to reshape the procurement of raw materials, to acquire additional looms and, ultimately, to negotiate the construction of the first textile factory in Fergana. In other words, the republics, as shareholders and eponymous "nations" of the trust, took ownership of their destiny and day-to-day trade and production activities.
En 1925, le Bureau pour l’Asie centrale du parti communiste d’URSS commanda une enquête sur les campagnes qui aboutit à la publication d’une série intitulée Le village centrasiatique moderne. Elle combinait une méthodologie prérévolutionnaire à un intérêt tout soviétique pour la stratification sociale. Par ailleurs la référence à l’économie d’avant 1917 comme standard et le profil des commissaires y étaient révélateurs de l’héritage du pouvoir colonial tsariste.
"""
Papers - environment by Beatrice Penati
Series: Handbook of Oriental Studies. Section 8 Uralic & Central Asian Studies, Volume: 31
Two read threads are entangled in this story: first, that of the day-by-day workings of the New Economic Policy in a small industrial organisation; second, that of the economic side of early Soviet nationality policies. This paper looks at the nitty-gritty aspects of procurements, bookkeeping, audit, and management. It shows how balance sheets were more an item for negotiation and a political weapon, than a diagnostic tool for the efficiency of Red Orient’s business. Above all, the story of Red Orient reveals that early Soviet economic policies did not exclude that the Central Asian cotton harvest could be processed by mills owned by the republics themselves, and result in finished textiles for the Central Asian market. The Bukharan (later, Uzbek) governments, either directly or through their representatives in Moscow, confronted all-Union agencies in the name of the "national" nature of the trust, be it to settle complicated debt relations, to reshape the procurement of raw materials, to acquire additional looms and, ultimately, to negotiate the construction of the first textile factory in Fergana. In other words, the republics, as shareholders and eponymous "nations" of the trust, took ownership of their destiny and day-to-day trade and production activities.
En 1925, le Bureau pour l’Asie centrale du parti communiste d’URSS commanda une enquête sur les campagnes qui aboutit à la publication d’une série intitulée Le village centrasiatique moderne. Elle combinait une méthodologie prérévolutionnaire à un intérêt tout soviétique pour la stratification sociale. Par ailleurs la référence à l’économie d’avant 1917 comme standard et le profil des commissaires y étaient révélateurs de l’héritage du pouvoir colonial tsariste.
"""
This paper is going to look in particular at three moments:
(a) the 1921 ‘Statute on Water Usage’ and its relations to both the ‘decolonising’ land-and-water reform of 1921-1922 and the process of adaptation of the all-Russian land code to Central Asia;
(b) the tensions between the republican and all-Union levels on the occasion of the drafting (in Tashkent) of a ‘Temporary Water Code’ (1924) and of the introduction of the ‘standard land tax’: different views existed between Moscow and Tashkent as to whether Turkestan should also have a “water tax” (vodnyi sbor), or a payment (rent) for the usage of State-owned irrigation facilities. In the end, at the local level the problem was solved by recurring to the ‘old’ system of the naturopovinnost’, where peasants paid in kind with their own labour for canal repairing etc.
(c) the long and ultimately abortive attempts to produce a comprehensive code between 1926 and 1928, mainly under the direction of Uspenskii, a former Tsarist official in the sphere of land management and resettlement: should Uzbekistan have two separate codes for water and for agricultural land? Was it possible to create water users’ associations that could serve as a basis for land organisation, too? Could melioration co-operatives be the sesame to fund sustainable irrigation networks?
In this paper, I argue strongly that early Soviet attempts at regulating water usage were shaped by the latest debates on a new ‘water law’ for Turkestan that had occurred before 1917. The revolution had delayed the implementation of norms, such as those advocated by Gins, that would have resulted in the expropriation of native Muslim owners of water rights in favour of the State (namely, in the shape of the Resettlement Administration). Yet, the Bolshevik system equally provided a new framework in which water was (in principle) nationalised: in such framework, the idea of a “hierarchy of users” (Joffe) with the State at the top could prosper. In this respect, the fact that it took so long to produce a comprehensive water code, while many attempts in this direction failed, represents an interesting puzzle, which casts light on the precariousness of the Soviet grasp on the Central Asian countryside and its inhabitants.
One of these unanswered questions concerns the costs of the maintenance of the ‘native’ irrigation system. The sources talk about a duty in kind (naturopovinnost’) to be provided by water users as members of a village community. On the basis of data collected from different sources on localities of the Samarkand province, I explore this notion of ‘duty in kind’ and try to understand how its burden was allocated. I contend that the payment for the usage of water had little to do with the amount of water actually consumed by an individual village. I also discuss the relation between this ‘duty in kind’ and the local taxes (zemksii sbor) which the civil-military administration collected and partly re-invested in irrigation works.
I will show that one can approach this topic from the viewpoint of what McNeill called “material environmental history”, by looking at botany, entomology, and quantitative epidemiological studies; but one can also appeal to the intellectual tools of “cultural environmental history” and the cultural history of medicine, if one looks at problems such as the construction of (colonial) knowledge, racial stigma, and transnational circulation of ideas. Finally, one could apply the lens of “political environmental history” and look at the rice-malaria nexus through the prism of power relations and of the ‘systems of domination’ embedded in scientific discourse – namely, the prioritization of cotton.
Rather than a fully-fledged paper, mine would be an attempt to scaffold one of the many topics regional historians are familiar with, in terms that make it comprehensible, appealing, and hopefully more theoretically robust, in the eyes of colleagues from different sub-disciplinary traditions.
to this research effort. On the basis of unpublished UNKhU materials on the “mechanical
movement” of the population in various provinces and cities, this paper aims to quantify the flow of famine refugees into the Kyrgyz ASSR, and pin it down in temporal and spatial terms.
Beyond the mere illustration of new data, this paper intends to ask and tentatively answer the following questions:
1. Anecdotal sources point at the appearance of swamps (and malaria) and the expansion of the acreage under rice in the rural cantons around Samarkand, as a consequence of the hurried growth of irrigation networks without a commensurate attention to drainage: is such a story confirmed by quantitative data on crops?
2. Did past and current crop patterns influence the degree of fragmentation of landownership, “class stratification” in the villages, and, in the end, the outcome of the land-and-water reform of 1925-1926?
3. Was the rural hinterland of Samarkand similar to the rural hinterland of cities of comparable dimension (e.g. Andijan, Kokand)?
This paper is conceived as an exploration of the potential of quantitative sources for the writing of ‘monographs’ on individual districts of Turkestan."
The paper combines the reconstruction of time series for prices and supplies, with a qualitative study of the institutional framework of grain procurements, shipping, and sales at bazaar and subsidised prices, in the specific conditions of southern Central Asia. Because wheat can sometimes be considered a surrogate of rice as a staple food for rural households, rice prices and supplies are discussed. The relation between wheat prices in different localities is also commented upon.
We focus on the similarities and differences between these price patterns and those which are visible in aggregated data at the all-Union level or from parts of the USSR for which more complete series are available and relatively well known. We start by looking at the ‘scissors crisis’ and at its recovery and we conclude by analysing the procurement crisis of 1927-1928 in the Uzbek SSR – a republic where the recovery of the cotton sector made the issue of surplus extraction rather different from what happened in grain-producing regions. In between, we show that the most important event in the history of the mobilisation of the Uzbek countryside before collectivisation, namely the land-and-water reform, took place immediately after the purchasing power of cotton-growing peasants had plummeted."
A first bone of contention between Samarkand and Moscow was the issue of how raw materials should be supplied to the factories included in the trest but located in European Russia, together with the parallel question of whether Qzyl Sharq should supply textiles palatable for the Uzbek market or comply with centrally-driven production plans. A second controversy emerged when plans to expand one of the factories clashed with the Rabkrin audit, which ascertained severe irregularities in the way the Russian manager of the trest conducted its business on behalf of the Uzbek government. Finally, the discussion about the role of Qzyl Sharq in the framework of Russian developmental plans for Central Asia resulted in its transformation in a training ground for Uzbek factory workers of rural background. In this way, by the end of NEP the trest and its activity were integrated in the project for the construction of a spindling and weaving plant in Margelan.
This paper offers a micro-history of Qzyl Sharq and its business in the NEP period. Looking at the conglomerate’s vicissitudes from the viewpoint of both the republican government in Samarkand and Moscow-based institutions, complemented by its own balance sheets and other information available on the specialised economic press, we discuss in some depth the relations between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ in the management of this specific conglomerate and its factories. These relations reflect wider discussions on the economic development of Central Asia under Soviet rule, on economic planning at different levels, and on the characteristics of the Central Asian market of consumers’ goods and of raw cotton. More generally, this study raises new questions about the economic side of early Soviet nationality policies in Central Asia and beyond.
The paper consists of two parts: after a quick survey of the development of cotton culture in Turkestan and a quick comparison with cotton cultivation in other colonial contexts, we first deal with the various measures resulting in the subsidisation of cotton and explores the decision-making process behind each of them. In particular, the paper discusses fiscal subsidisation (the calculation of land-tax and its practical method of collection), duties on imported cotton and cotton derivates, preferential tariffs for railway freight (once the construction of the latter had been achieved). In the second part, the impact of different forms of State support to the cotton sector will be tentatively calculated as PSE (producer subsidy equivalent) per unit of output. This allows to compare imperial cotton subsidisation with other cases of agricultural support. CSE (consumer subsidy equivalent) is also given. This section also discusses the destination of the extra cost paid by Russian consumers (spindlers) because of cotton subsidisation, and the budgetary effect of cotton-related measures, in relation to the question of the budgetary sustainability of Turkestan as a colony.
This collection has not been paid adequate attention by historians. M. Kamp has only recently made an attempt to use some of its materials to explain the difficulty the Soviets experienced in identifying “class stratification” in the villages – a necessary step in view of the subsequent campaigns of dekulakisation and collectivization.
My paper aims at locating the work of the Karp commission in its institutional, political and economic context. First of all, it is necessary to interpret the enquiry in the long tradition of reports and peasant budget studies that took place in Turkestan in the colonial and early Soviet period. Then, I will focus on how the commission was formed, on its composition, on the practicalities of its work. Then I will examine the reactions to the dissemination of its results both within Party circles (in particular it reception by the Central Asian Bureau itself) and in the wider public opinion. I will do this on the basis of published sources (namely reviews having appeared on specialized Soviet journals) and of unpublished archival materials – including the marginalia of the head of the Bureau, Zelenskii, to the harsh commentary of the Karp commission’s result submitted by a rival economist. By doing this, I will demonstrate that the enquiry did not necessarily reflect the Party’s official standpoint, and how different views existed about the presence of “class stratification” in the countryside. I will show the relation between Sovremmenyi kishlak and the land-and-water reform which took place in the Uzbek SSR in the mid-1920s, and constitutes a more direct reference than the subsequent process of collectivization.
Via a study of this enquiry and its materials, I will finally tackle the crucial and widely open question of the colonial nature of early Soviet rule in Central Asia. While historians are now inclined to recognize that Russian Turkestan was actually ruled according to a pattern broadly visible in most overseas colonies of major European powers, it is still controversial whether the same can be said about the Soviet period. In this paper, I will demonstrate how the work of the Karp commission reflected both pre-revolutionary practices and a new commitment to social transformation.""
The collision between the expectations and rights of the nomads, the industrialists, and the colonial administration allows a glimpse into the evolution of Tsarist colonial policies about land resources and into the way notions of land property were used by each of the parts concerned. Furthermore, this story casts light on the supposed monopolistic nature of pre-revolutionary Russian capitalism. From another viewpoint, through Artemisia cina we see the emergence of conservationism in the region and on the development of scientific expertise in its support. Finally, because the trade of Central Asian wormwood and its derivates was truly global, changing medical practices and consumers' behaviour had a massive impact on the destiny of local harvesting and transformation activities. In this perspective, Central Asia ceases to be a marginalised periphery and appears far more integrated than commonly held.
Cette présentation reconstitue ces débats entre industrialistes, autorités locales et centrales, et porte-paroles des Kazakhs et des marchands locaux, ce qui montre l’évolution de la pensée et des pratiques de chacun de ces acteurs à l’encontre des ressources naturelles dans les dernières décennies de l’époque coloniale. C’est aussi une opportunité pour situer le Turkestan russe dans des réseaux économiques globaux allant bien au-delà du coton.
I will present my experience with different tools (Moodle forums, Answergarden, Kahoot surveys, both at home and in class (BYOD)) in introducing students to the art of asking questions in History at elementary level. I will present different exercises (e.g., formulate articulated questions on primary sources; identify the relevance of a primary source through the usage of 'tags'; identify an author's research question; develop your own research question on the basis of a given source basis) and discuss their outcomes and students' responses in two different contexts: a small elementary class with students predominantly from the Humanities & SocSci vs. a larger class with predominantly STEM students.
Citizens’ organisations, lawyers, and members of the public are welcome to join the discussion. Working languages: English and Russian.
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