Moscow's Heavy Shadow: the Violent Collapse of the USSR

In Moscow’s Heavy Shadow: the Violent Collapse of the USSR (published with Cornell University Press, 2023) Isaac McKean Scarborough weaves together archival documents from Dushanbe and Moscow to tell the story of how reforms introduced by the central government manifested in Tajikistan. Peripheral Histories? Editor Hanna Matt spoke to Isaac about how the population in Tajikistan experienced the collapse of the Soviet Union, as well as the process of researching the book.

Your book chronicles a tumultuous and violent period of Tajikistan’s history. What fascinates you most about it?

There is much to fascinate and impress about Tajikistan: I have to say that I found it an incredible place to research and in which to live. I don’t know if this is a point of fascination, but in my years in Tajikistan I have been particularly struck by the ways in which the population of the country manages to adhere to a sense of normalcy even in the face of ongoing and seemingly constant change, chaos, and violence. After the formal end of the Tajik Civil War in 1997, the peace agreement between the warring sides stipulated that 30% of government positions should go to representatives of the former opposition. For many individuals who had spent the last five years fighting a guerilla war, this was a radical and difficult change: they were required to receive civilian qualifications and shift to life in, essentially, an office setting. Some of them were sent to study at the Russian-Tajik Slavonic University in Dushanbe, where Prof. Guzel Maitdinova taught. As she once told me, at one point a student arrived at an examination fully armed, holding a Kalashnikov and wearing a full ammunition belt. Maitdinova looked at him and told him to remove his arms before taking his exam. The man protested, saying that his arms had been given to him by his former field commander and that he never removed them – how could she, a woman, demand he do so? Maitdinova responded: ‘I am not a woman. I am a professor. Go into the hall and disarm yourself (razoruzhaites’) and then you can take the exam’. The man ultimately did as he had been told. There was nothing normal about this situation: university exams should not involve Kalashnikovs or the threat of violence; men who had only returned from war should not be expected to know how to study in university. But everyone settled into their roles, as well as they could, and tried to push forward with their normal lives. That Tajikistan has remained as fascinating and often lovely a place as it has is much to the credit of those people from amongst its population who have done just this since 1997.

One of the book’s main protagonists is Qadriddin Aslonov, who briefly acted as the republic’s president in 1991. How is his story emblematic of how the populace experienced the collapse of the USSR?

I open Moscow’s Heavy Shadow with Qadriddin Aslonov’s story – and his brutal murder in December 1992 – because I want to emphasize the ways in which his life and death were representative of many other people’s fates over the same decades. Aslonov, of course, was a leading member of the Communist Part of Tajikistan (CPT) and he was amongst the most privileged of Dushanbe’s residents. But he was also an individual who in the 1980s wholeheartedly embraced the Soviet project, was engaged with promoting its rule over Tajikistan, and then suddenly found himself told to promote independence. Aslonov’s floundering response in 1991 to this challenge was illustrative of many Tajikistani politicians’ reactions to independence, and his lack of understanding about what exactly was going on in Soviet society was also common at the time, from politicians to factory workers to cotton pickers. Caroline Humphrey, for example, has also written about dairy farmers in Buryatia in the early 1990s, who, she says, were ‘not in possession of the master narrative of which they [were] the objects’.^[i] Aslonov, like everyone else, could not figure out how he was supposed to fit into the new master narrative: into the new history of capitalism and markets and nascent populism which was playing out around him. That this environment led to violence, civil war, and ultimately his death, I want to argue, was also broadly representative of these years.

View of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Republic of Tajikistan, 10^th Convocation.  Acting President Aslonov Presiding. Credit: Smirnov, 1991. Courtesy of the Archive of Film and Image Documents of the Republic of Tajikistan 0-108340.

What were the main ways in which experiences differed between urban and rural areas?

There are two ways to answer this question, I think – to consider how life before the collapse of the USSR differed between rural and urban parts of Tajikistan and how it differed during and after the collapse. Rural Tajikistan circa 1985 was largely dominated by agriculture: cotton farming, first and foremost, but also other crops (lemons, walnuts, et cetera) in the mountainous parts of the country. Life there was stable, and in some ways improving: electricity had reached nearly the entire population by the early 1980s, and access to the basic amenities of the Soviet project, from public kindergartens to reliable employment to kolbasa was increasing.

However, the villages lagged far behind cities at all levels, from the endemic lack of running water to centralized heating. Unemployment was also endemic in agricultural communities, where jobs were dependent upon membership in kolkhozes, which were continuously being restructured in order to improve labour productivity – i.e., to employ fewer people. This meant that when Gorbachev began his reform programme, which encouraged factories and farms alike to be even more productive and shed ‘unnecessary’ workers, rural areas were hit especially hard. By the final few years of the Soviet period unemployment in rural areas, including in Tajikistan, was enormously high - especially given the broader economic recession that the entire country was then in. Unsurprisingly, it was often these unemployed rural populations that then backed politicians calling for radical or even extreme change in 1992.

You argue that Gorbachev’s reforms undermined Tajikistan’s economic and political stability and ultimately contributed to the outbreak of civil war in the region. Can you tell our readers a bit more about this?

As with the case of rural villages, the entire Tajik SSR went from a position of slow but stable growth to one of utter collapse and degradation between 1985 and 1992. This was largely because the republic had been highly integrated into the Soviet economic and political superstructure. Tajikistan’s place within this was largely understood as a producer of cotton: its farms produced around 11-12% of the Soviet Union’s total harvest, which was bought up by Moscow and then distributed to ginneries both in Tajikistan and elsewhere and sewn into clothing and other products in Russia and Ukraine. As part of a unified monetary union, however, Tajikistan was able to access financial support within the USSR for the development of local industry, hydroelectrical production, and other sectors – and received direct payments and consumer goods from elsewhere in the USSR to support its population. Nearly all consumer goods in Tajikistan, and many industrial inputs, came from outside of its borders. This was not unique in the Soviet Union, which was a highly internally integrated economy, but the degree of reliance on outside economic actors was particularly high in Tajikistan.

Gorbachev’s reforms can be derived down to three essential points: first, that firms (‘enterprises’) should have more freedom over what they produce and with whom they do business; second, that private business (‘cooperatives’) should be encouraged; and third, that market-driven trade, including international trade, should be promoted. This turned out to mean that firms produced less but charged more, made fewer deals with peripheral firms, and that private businesses bought up and sold off huge volumes of consumer goods, including abroad. This had negative consequences across the whole of the USSR. For a republic like Tajikistan, however, where a particularly high percentage of consumer goods needed to be brought in from elsewhere, the cost was precipitous. By late 1991, there were basically no goods available in Dushanbe or most other places in Tajikistan: no medicine, no gasoline, no basic inputs. At the same time, truckloads of nails, wires, cabbages, chickpeas, onions, and other basic necessities were recorded as being exported from Tajikistan to Afghanistan and Pakistan. The republican government, unable to change the policies dictated by Moscow, watched without much capacity to control the situation. And as Vadim Volkov has convincingly shown in the case of Russia at the time, as the state receded, populist politicians and those willing to use violence to achieve their ends stepped into the vacuum left by the retreating state and economy.^[ii]

Why did you choose to write about Tajikistan in particular? What can its trajectory tell us about the collapse of the Soviet Union more broadly?

I am of course partial to Tajikistan: I have lived in the country for a number of years and it remains one of the places I spend time in most happily. I also think that Tajikistan’s experience of Soviet disintegration and post-Soviet violence has much to tell us about the process of Soviet collapse as a whole. For the most part, peripheral experiences of Soviet power, state development, and later collapse are essentially siloed off – they are treated as exceptions to the rule or separate from the bigger story, which tends to be told from the perspective of Moscow. This, however, is like reviewing a restaurant on the basis of the menu (what the chef has intended) and not on what is actually served (what the kitchen produced). Narratives about Soviet power or Soviet collapse that are told from the perspective of Moscow tend to focus on the plans, programmes, and machinations of politicians in Moscow – not on their outcomes across the enormity of the USSR. This is equally true for histories of perestroika and the Soviet Union’s final years, which overwhelmingly present the views of Gorbachev and his advisors (or his critics) and argue about the intentions of the reform programme. Yet we hear very little about the mess served out by the economic kitchens everywhere: the growing unemployment, the downturn in production figures, the basic collapse of the economy.

Looking at Tajikistan, however, allows us to reorient to the consequences of reform and away from the plans or intentions behind them. In this sense, Tajikistan becomes less of a periphery or an outlier and instead part of a spectrum of many geographies, all of which were part of the Soviet collapse – and most of which experienced some amount of violence, recession, and social disorder. This also allows us to consider these outcomes as a constant, and to look for the underlying similarities of experience that underpinned the economic recession and disorder. In part, as I’ve tried to show in Moscow’s Heavy Shadow, this was the consistency with which economic reforms were applied. Much in contrast to what was being repeated in Moscow, perestroika’s reforms were applied with constancy and consistency across the USSR’s factories, farms, and other firms. This was impossible to see in Moscow, because the politicians were invested in seeing the opposite – that their reforms were correct, their intentions right, and the negative consequences the fault of others. But the actual results of these very plans were obvious in Dushanbe, and from the perspective of a place like Tajikistan we can see very clearly how the reforms of perestroika did in fact lead to the collapse of the USSR.

Group of Delegates from Tajikistan – Participants in the 19^th All-Union Party Conference, Moscow. Credit: Gavrilov, 1988. Courtesy of the Archive of Film and Image Documents of the Republic of Tajikistan 0-107646.

Your sources allow your narrative to move between Moscow and Dushanbe. What unique insights does this allow you to gain?

One of the things I really wanted to do with Moscow’s Heavy Shadow was to show the consequences of reform: to demonstrate the ways in which plans and initiatives crafted in the Soviet capital played out and impact peoples’ lives elsewhere. As I began parsing out the myriad ways in which perestroika had change the social and economic fabric of life in Soviet Dushanbe, however, I found that I had at best a vague sense of what the actual perestroika programme represented. Even secondary sources for the most part did not include detailed descriptions of the reforms, or lists of relevant regulations. So I decided to add the lens of Moscow as well – to consider both the creation of reform programmes in Moscow and their application in Dushanbe. When I arrived at the central archives in Moscow, however, I did so with a clear-eyed sense of what the outcomes would be; I didn’t approach the reforms as a series of theoretical changes with plausibly good intentions but rather a reform programme that, as I well knew, ultimately had led to recession. This lens – from the outside in, as it were – allowed me to change the normal paradigm and refocus the story of the late 1980s on the lived experiences of those who were present. But both perspectives were ultimately necessary to explain what had been reformed and the waves of impact that it went on to create in places like Dushanbe.

Could you tell our readers a bit about your experience of conducting research in Tajikistan and the practical challenges this presented?

I had very positive experiences conducting research in Tajikistan, including in the Central State Archives and in the Library of the National Academy of Sciences. I think it should be said that being courteous and respectful of local norms goes a long way in gaining access to the materials and sources that we as historians are interested in. I had the privilege of spending nearly 18 months in Tajikistan while working on Moscow’s Heavy Shadow, a period of time that allowed me to establish myself in the city as a historian and someone who took Tajikistan’s history seriously and who was invested in the country, not just as a topic for scholarly argument, but as a home. I worked with local historians and scholars on their projects, spent a fair amount of time in the Academy of Sciences, and published a few articles in local newspapers. This later helped when I requested archival access or contacted individuals for interviews as I was not a complete unknown or outsider.

Of course, there are challenges approaching institutions in Tajikistan, and the process can be very long. I think there can be an unfortunate tendency sometimes for Western researchers to expect that non-Western state institutions “should” operate like the ones they are used to, and to get overly frustrated when access can be slow, or predicated on longer procedures. But it really isn’t our place to dictate the norms of action: when we enter another country to study it, we are outsiders, guests, and we need to operate by the local standards whether or not we particularly like them. Doing just this little, I think, can make for both better research access but also much richer material and a better understanding of the context about which we are writing. 

What questions remain unanswered in your book?

One of the underlying questions that I leave somewhat ambiguous in the book has to do with the relative advantages for Tajikistan of remaining in the Soviet Union – I don’t fully engage with the serious body of literature that has critiqued the USSR’s development practices as largely exploitative and colonial. In recent and ongoing work, I’ve tried to address these issues more directly, and have been looking at balance of payments and financial transfers between Dushanbe and Moscow to try to better understand the ways in which the Tajik SSR was part of a larger, centrally-driven, imperial system of finance and material extraction.^[iii]

I also think a great deal more work deserves to be done on the period of the Tajik Civil War between 1993 and 1997. My own narrative ends abruptly in late 1992, and most accounts of the Civil War tend to focus on the first six months and then the formal end to hostilities in 1997. This, however, leaves the longest part of the civil war – the four years between 1993 and 1997 – little studied, even though it was a period of economic blockades, cross-border guerilla fighting, economic recession, massive refugee flows, and continued violence. We know, moreover, that violence continued for years in Dushanbe after the formal end to the war in 1997, much as Prof. Maitdinova’s anecdote implied. Yet so little of this later period of war has been properly documented or narrated. My own small contribution, I hope, has been to help explain how the Tajik Civil War began – I would look forward to others’ continuation of the story into its later years, a history that still very much deserves to be told.

Isaac McKean Scarborough is Assistant Professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies in the Institute for History at Leiden University. He is an economic and social historian of the postwar period in Central Asia and other imperial peripheries.

^[i] Caroline Humphrey, ‘The politics of privatization in provincial Russia: Popular opinions amid the dilemmas of the early 1990s’, The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 18, no. 1 (1995), 46.

^[ii] See Vadim Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism. Cornell University Press, 2002.

^[iii] Isaac McKean Scarborough, ‘Like Cooking Plov with Hoja Nasreddin: Recalculating Financial Transfers to Tajikistan, 1971-1989’, Europe-Asia Studies 75, no. 6 (2023): 1014-1040.