You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
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 effects. 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 first comprehensive account of early Soviet policy in Central Asia’s agricultural heartland, encompassing land rights, irrigation, credit, resettlement, and the co-operative system.
Post-Cold War historiography of modern Central Asia has been characterized by a focus on cultural history. Most of this scholarship rests on a set of assumptions about traditional institutions and social practices which merely reflect the bias of Soviet or even Tsarist-era historiography. 'Explorations in the Social History of Modern Central Asia addresses the need for a remedy to this state of affairs and thus offers new insights on a number of subjects relating to the social history of the region. It includes essays dealing with property relations, resource management, forms of local administration, the constitution of new social groups, the construction of identity categories, and an enquiry into the landscape of Islamic practices among the nomads.
A sweeping history of Islamism in Central Asia from the Russian Revolution to the present through Soviet-era archival documents, oral histories, and a trove of interviews and focus groups. Few observers anticipated a surge of Islamism in Central Asia, after seventy years of forced communist atheism. Muslims do not inevitably support Islamism, a modern political ideology of Islam. Yet, Islamism became the dominant form of political opposition in post-Soviet Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. In Politicizing Islam in Central Asia, Kathleen Collins explores the causes, dynamics, and variation in Islamist movements-first within the USSR, and then in the post-Soviet states of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and ...
This is the first detailed "grass roots" account of Uzbekistan's protracted decollectivisation process. It explores continuity and the change in relations between rural communities, agricultural producers, and the local state authorities in the cotton-growing region of Khorezm. Built up during the Soviet period, the cotton sector has maintained its importance for the state and for rural communities in the years following independence, although economic parameters and social conditions have worsened significantly. Uzbekistan's agricultural reform path does not follow that of most post-socialist scenarios and continuity with the past remains strong. Despite seeming immobility, the local view o...
A Slow Reckoning examines the Soviet Union's and the Afghan communists' views of and policies toward Islam and Islamism during the Soviet-Afghan War (1979–1989). As Vassily Klimentov demonstrates, the Soviet and communist Afghan disregard for Islam was telling of the overall communist approach to reforming Afghanistan and helps explain the failure of their modernization project. A Slow Reckoning reveals how during most of the conflict Babrak Karmal, the ruler installed by the Soviets, instrumentalized Islam in support of his rule while retaining a Marxist-Leninist platform. Similarly, the Soviets at all levels failed to give Islam its due importance as communist ideology and military consi...
Collectivization Generation is a history of agricultural collectivization in Soviet Uzbekistan, but it is not focused on Party decisions. Instead, Marianne Kamp offers a history of everyday life that relies on oral history accounts from those she calls the collectivization generation. Born between the early 1900s and the early 1920s, the collectivization generation were rural youth who participated in the transformation of agricultural life in the early 1930s as teens or young adults. A top-down restructuring ruptured their predictable life trajectories and created new categories for understanding self and society. For many, the newly formed kolkhozes became their economic, social, and political milieu throughout their working years, shaping their identities and their material lives. In Collectivization Generation, we meet Uzbeks who were driven from their homes by bandits, whose fathers disappeared in the Stalinist gulag, who suffered starvation and orphanhood. We also meet Uzbeks who told of embracing the project of collectivization, of feeling rewarded with dignity, recognition, pay, association with national triumphs, and with the progress represented by a tractor.
A long environmental history of the Aral Sea region, focusing on colonization and development in Russian and Soviet Central Asia.
In Making Uzbekistan, Adeeb Khalid chronicles the tumultuous history of Central Asia in the age of the Russian revolution. He explores the complex interaction between Uzbek intellectuals, local Bolsheviks, and Moscow to sketch out the flux of the situation in early-Soviet Central Asia. His focus on the Uzbek intelligentsia allows him to recast our understanding of Soviet nationalities policies. Uzbekistan, he argues, was not a creation of Soviet policies, but a project of the Muslim intelligentsia that emerged in the Soviet context through the interstices of the complex politics of the period. Making Uzbekistan introduces key texts from this period and argues that what the decade witnessed was nothing short of a cultural revolution.
The radical right has gained considerable ground in the twenty-first century. From Brexit to Bolsonaro and Tea Partiers to Trump, many of these diverse manifestations of right-wing populism share a desire to co‑opt or supplant the mainstream parties that have traditionally held sway over the centre right. It is now more important than ever to understand similar moments in Australian and New Zealand history. This book concerns one such moment—the Great Depression—and the explosion of large, populist conservative groups that accompanied the crisis. These ‘citizens’ movements’, as they described themselves, sprang into being virtually overnight and amassed a combined membership in t...
This landmark book provides a comprehensive anthropological introduction to contemporary Central Asia. Established and emerging scholars of the region critically interrogate the idea of a ‘Central Asian World’ at the intersection of post-Soviet, Persianate, East and South Asian worlds. Encompassing chapters on life between Afghanistan and Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Xinjiang, this volume situates the social, political, economic, ecological and ritual diversity of Central Asia in historical context. The book ethnographically explores key areas such as the growth of Islamic finance, the remaking of urban and sacred spaces, as well as decolonising and queering approaches to Central Asia. T...