Abstract
This article considers the Soviet campaign to transform the Tajik countryside by mechanizing agricultural production and bringing the welfare state to the villages in light of broader 20th century rural development efforts. It begins by examining the attempt to mechanize agriculture and electrify the Tajik countryside through the eyes of the officials charged with implementing these technologies. Problems with how these technologies were introduced meant that while cotton output expanded, it required increasing amount of labor. Turning to the problem of resettlement, the article emphasizes that resettlement was shaped by competition for labor between districts and farm managers. Increasingly, in the Brezhnev era, it also came to be seen as an easier way to fulfill the modernizing imperative and the commitments of the welfare state. Under pressure to ensure access to schools and medical services, officials found it more convenient to move villages from mountain areas to valleys where such services could be more easily provided. At the same time, the demand for agricultural labor stimulated a kind of “involution” in the countryside, where managers had to find ways to keep labor on the farm. To do so, they could offer cash rewards, building materials, and access to private land and fertilizer.
Funding statement: Funding: Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek 275-52-011.
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Note
The research for this article was completed as part of a project on development and modernization in Soviet Tajikistan being sponsored by the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).
©2015 by De Gruyter
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- Aufsätze – Articles – Articles
- Socialist Promises, Ethnography and the Building of a Kyrgyz Soviet Nation
- Tractors, Power Lines, and the Welfare State: The Contradictions of Soviet Development in Post-World War II Tajikistan
- Qadimism and Jadidism in Twentieth-Century Daghestan
- Der mongolische Maskentanz (Tsam) in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart
- Religious History of the Gaṇḍī Beam: Testimonies of Texts, Images and Ritual Practices
- Reconciling Ethnic Nationalism and Imperial Cosmopolitanism: The Lifeworlds of Tsyben Zhamtsarano (1880–1942)
- Buddhist Scriptures in 17th Century Mongolia: Eight Translations of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā
- Rezensionen – Comptes rendus – Reviews
- Drège, Jean-Pierre/Zink, Michel: Paul Pelliot: de l’histoire à la légende
- Park, J. P.: Art by the Book: Painting Manuals and the Leisure Life in Late Ming China
- Vogel, Hans-Ulrich: Marco Polo Was in China. New Evidence from Currencies, Salts and Revenues
- Vuillemenot, Anne-Marie: La yourte et la mesure du monde – Avec les nomades au Kazakhstan
- Widmer, Caroline: Der Buddha und der „Andere“. Zur religiösen Differenzreflexion und narrativen Darstellung des „Anderen“ im Majjhima-Nikāya
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