Rural History of Soviet Central Asia: Land Reform and Agricultural Change in Early Soviet Uzbekistan
- Peripheral Histories ISSN 2755-368X
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Beatrice Penati’s new book Rural History of Soviet Central Asia: Land Reform and Agricultural Change in Early Soviet Uzbekistan (published with Brill, 2025) provides a comprehensive account of early Soviet agricultural policies in Central Asia. Peripheral Histories? Editor Hanna Matt spoke to Beatrice about the reforms’ implementation as well as her experience of conducting archival research in Uzbekistan.
PH: What inspired you to write a book about the rural history of Central Asia?
My first forays in the history of Central Asia concerned political brigandage and guerrilla warfare in the post-revolutionary period (the so-called Basmachi). It was at this point that I encountered the work of Uzbek historian Rakhima Kh. Aminova, who in the 1960s and 1970s wrote a ‘tetralogy’ about change in agriculture and agrarian relations in her republic between the revolution and collectivization. Aminova’s publications are admirable in many respects, but she had to operate within obvious constraints, for instance limited access to archival documents held in Moscow, and above all an overarching ideological framework. For instance, Soviet-era historians had to take a stance about the fundamental nature of the land reform: in Marxist parlance, was it ‘bourgeois-revolutionary’, or was it ‘socialist-revolutionary’? I wanted to reconsider the land reform with fresh eyes, and link it to the broader challenges that the new regime had to face in the region.
More generally, I have always been interested in the material aspects of human life through history. As a high school pupil in Italy, some of my history textbooks were co-authored by a prominent rural historian of Marxist persuasions, Roberto Finzi, and they shaped my understanding of what the discipline is about. In addition, ‘land reform’ as a concept kept coming up at school, from the Gracchi brothers in the late Roman republic, to the agrarian reform in Italy in the 1950s. I found that the excellent scholarship on colonial and early Soviet Central Asia produced since the 1990s was largely focused on cultural aspects, from the intersection between religious thought and revolutionary ideas, to the contradictions of the emancipation of women, to issues of language and ethnic identity. I felt that very important pieces were missing from the puzzle.
PH: How do you see the relationship between early Soviet land reform and collectivisation in Central Asia?
This is an inescapable question, and one that all historians of the period have faced. Aminova and other Soviet-era scholars tended to view policies implemented in the 1920s as a ‘progressive’ preparation for the socialization of agriculture. But this is not how contemporaries viewed them: the land reform was meant to strengthen individual land rights, as evidenced by the emphasis put on the distribution of new official ‘land documents’ to individual households. The reform was meant to lift villagers out of poverty and re-direct what had been paid in rent (in the case of sharecroppers) toward investment. Whilst some Party and Soviet cadres feared the social upheaval the reform would bring, the latter was justified as a way to increase productivity and thus go back to pre-revolutionary benchmarks in agriculture. Socialized production, in the form of simple arteli, was marginal in the reform, and largely limited to areas of new or recovered irrigation.
The reform did bring Soviet (and, more generally, state) power to the village in an unprecedented way, exceeding what existed under the Tsars. The reform ‘schooled’ villagers in the ways of the new regime, through attending meetings, to the workings of unions, and standardized labour contracts. Labels used to designate beneficiaries or ‘victims’ of the reform started shaping how villagers described themselves and others, re-defining, or even upending, existing hierarchies. My favourite example is from a village where the Russian term for farmhand, batrak, came to be regarded as an honorific title, like the provincial governors (beks) of the emirs’ time! As recently argued also by Marianne Kamp with a different set of sources, the land reform was the moment when the language of class was adopted in the countryside, and when pre-existing cleavages became politically relevant, including through physical violence. In this limited, objective sense, one can say that the reform ‘prepared’ collectivization.[i]
Furthermore, the reform ‘re-captured’ the peasants by pushing them to join co-operatives of various kinds: amelioration co-operatives, for instance, or consumers’ co-operatives, or agricultural co-operatives. Co-operatives were key to the distribution of agricultural capital (draught animals and tools). Although politically the co-operatives were meant to be in the hands of the so-called Koshchi (Uz. Qo’shchi, ‘poor peasant’) Union, cotton co-operatives evolved into agents of the Cotton Committee, which also handed out advances on the harvest. So, the reform, through the co-operatives, created new bonds that collectivization would then consolidate. But one should also consider how cotton cultivators had already been ‘captured’, through credit and advance contracts, before the revolution.
PH: You suggest that early Soviet agricultural policies contained elements of humanitarian relief. Could you tell our readers a bit more about this?
I think we still tend to under-estimate the impact of war, revolution, and civil war periods in Central Asia because no fronts ran through Turkestan, in the way they did in the Volga-Ural region, or Ukraine. There is now greater awareness that the 1916 uprising was part of the region’s ‘continuum of crisis’, and we speak more openly about inter-ethnic violence. But what happened in rural sedentary areas during the First World War in particular is still under-researched. So, for instance, early Soviet scholarship tended to present the land reform as a departure from colonial-era agrarian relations. I would argue instead that it constituted a rupture from, and a reaction to, the catastrophe which the arc of war and revolution had generated, including famine, forced migration, and the collapse of hydraulic infrastructure – with its sequels of floods, mudslides, and swamping.
Humanitarian concerns seem to me most evident at the beginning of the period I have studied: initial measures were meant to allow an impoverished rural population to survive and recover. Indeed, fear that a radical shake-up of agrarian relation could hamper this recovery had to be overcome before the reform could be decreed. But similar concerns are also evident toward the late 1920s, in association with the return of Bukharan subjects who had fled to Afghanistan. At both ends of the period, humanitarian relief concerned, to a significant extent, displaced populations and returnees to Soviet territory. And on both occasions such relief was linked to the imperatives to pre-empt or contain armed resistance.
PH: What are the key continuities and discontinuities between the imperial and Soviet periods that you identified?
I have already mentioned similarities in the way cotton was procured, and in the authorities’ awareness of the connection between food availability and peasants’ decisions about the crop mix. However, colonial-era authorities did not possess the capacity or the intention to intervene in the market, while Soviet authorities targeted specific terms of trade. In the mid-1920s the Central Cotton Committee tried hard to extend its control over the regional agencies responsible for grain procurement and, to some extent, distribution. I have also alluded to the fact that individual land rights were now brought under the control of state organs. This represented the end of legal pluralism – a key point on which the USSR differed from the Tsarist empire. Last but not least, the scale of investments made in the re-capitalisation of beneficiary households and even in irrigation was unprecedented for the region, and predictably led to inter-institutional squabbles on how the reform was budgeted, and paid, for.
PH: What were the key differences in agricultural policies in Central Asia compared to Russia and other grain producing regions?
I think the main difference is timing. As Marco Buttino explained, the Russian revolution in Central Asia was a revolution ‘of the Russians’.[ii] Revolutionary-era policies negatively affected Central Asian Muslims, both nomads and sedentary. In irrigated areas, the nationalization of cotton and the expropriation of suburban orchards and gardens had devastating effects. But in the villages, there had been no seizing and redistributing of agricultural land comparable to what the Bolsheviks ‘put their hat on’, so to say, after coming to power in October. So, the great reshuffling of land rights and agrarian relations happened later than in Russia, and it was meant to remedy rural poverty after the disastrous effects of revolutionary upheaval.
From another viewpoint, though, the cotton-growing areas of former Turkestan were ahead of the curve relative to grain-producing regions: advance contracting in cotton was almost complete in 1928, when it was just being introduced for grain. Because cotton was to be sold, in practice, to a monopolist procurement agency, at prices set by the latter, there could be no hiatus between official prices and ‘bazaar prices’. Furthermore, because cotton cannot be eaten, or distilled into vodka, or fed to animals, cultivators could not ‘sit on the harvest’, hoping for prices to rise. Some dynamics of the NEP period, from the ‘scissors crisis’ early on, to the procurement crises at its end, are not easily detectable, or unfolded differently, in southern Central Asia.
PH: You also pay great attention to the specificities of different provinces in the regions. In what ways did reforms unfold differently between them?
First, in Uzbekistan the land reform did not take place everywhere at the same time. It started in 1925 in the provinces that had already been part of the Russian empire, that is, Fergana, Tashkent, and Samarkand.[iii]Fergana was the epicentre of cotton agriculture and the area with the strongest ‘land hunger’. Landless labourers were particularly numerous in the Namangan district. This was why the rate of acceptance of newly irrigated land in Fergana was the highest, with potential beneficiaries being moved to other provinces in an attempt to satisfy as many of them as possible. In the Tashkent province villagers were demanding agricultural capital more than land per se, while in the Samarkand province land redistribution was accompanied by measures to cultivate land that had turned into swamps in the years of war and revolution. In the Bukhara oasis the reform started one year later, so that more data could be collected on population and agriculture. Resistance to the reform and the backlash against it were stronger than in the previous three provinces; new irrigation projects ended in abysmal disaster in the short term.
Eastern Bukhara (that is, the provinces of Qashqa-Darya and Surkhan-Darya) and Khorezm were affected by policies aimed at the ‘liquidation of non-toiling households’, but these were not a land reform in the proper sense, because expropriations were not linked to public investments to endow beneficiaries with agricultural capital. Furthermore, class struggle was explicitly advocated here, while most Party and Soviet cadres in 1925 were very keen to downplay this message to avoid potential social disturbances that could hamper the recovery of agriculture. In eastern Bukhara, the campaigns against ‘non-toiling households’ were intertwined with very campaigns for the procurement of grain, echoing developments in the USSR at large. In Khorezm, specific challenges arose from the very labour-intensive nature of agriculture, which required more men and animals to maintain canals and to turn water-wheels than elsewhere.
PH: You highlight local perspectives throughout the book. How were you able to locate these in the archives?
I am pleased that you have found such ‘local perspectives’ in the book, because in my view the book contains far less ‘from below’ material than I would have wanted! This shortcoming is to some extent a function of the sources available. The Central State Archive in Tashkent has documents down to the provincial level. I knew that the materials of district (rayon) level land commissions are located in provincial archives in Uzbekistan, but I was never granted access to them. Ditto for the documents of low-level Soviet administrative organs. As for the Party, for information down to the provincial level, I had to rely on carbon-copies of minutes and their attachments sent to the Central Asian Bureau of the Central Committee, or to the Central Committee itself, to be found in RGASPI in Moscow. Together with newspaper articles and propaganda publications, this set of sources allows some glimpses on what happened on the ground, but tends to over-represent successes, on one hand, and ‘pathological’ episodes, on the other. So we know that some commissions were met with all honours (including melons and soft furnishings), but also that some commissioners deserted their posts to go fishing: the uneventful bit of the reform is only captured at the macro level, when one looks at how landownership was reshuffled and agrarian relations changed, province by province. An exception is represented by ‘experimental districts’ for wholesale land organization in the late 1920s, which left a larger and more accessible paper trail and even debates in the press. I sought to exploit them, especially for Assaka (now Asaka).
There is definitely potential for micro-historical studies on some episodes I did not manage to excavate thoroughly, such as the ambiguous attitude to Soviet policies of Urgut-based sufi leaders, the fraudulent behaviour of the director of the Siob co-operative in Samarkand, or how the cleavage between Qurama and Uzbeks played out during the reform.
PH: What questions remain unanswered in your book?
There are many of them! The book says very little about the subjectivity of peasants, in particular how they lived though, and interpreted, the extension of the Party-state’s grasp on the countryside outlined above. Luckily, Marianne Kamp’s new book addresses these questions. Hopefully other historians can delve deeper, using local archives.
Greater access to archives would also cast light on two other issues: the role of the OGPU and the profile of young Party cadres from the European parts of the USSR who arrived in Central Asia in 1924-1925. For example, I have barely managed to sketch out the personality of Mikhail E. Katsenelenbogen, who did much to catalyse local land seizings into a full-blown land reform. Another personality that I believe deserves a full-length biography is Sanjar Asfendiyarov, whose role as people’s commissar for agriculture in Turkestan was crucial, and whose pre-revolutionary trajectory appears fascinating. One could study him to unlock the history of ‘Turkestani Kazakh’ cadres and the re-framing of elite identities among Kazakhs more generally.
Last but not least, I could not dig deeper into the history of the Koshchi Union, for which we only have a very slim Soviet-era publication, but an entire archival fond. I can see a potential dissertation there. My hunch is that the Koshchi Union served as the rural branch of the Party, which remained otherwise urban-based through the 1920s. But who signed up for Koshchi membership? Who used the organization to shield themselves, or maintain, under a new cover, ‘moral economy’ ties within the village? And what were the relations, at the microscopic level, between Koshchi and the co-operative system?
Beatrice Penati is Senior Lecturer in Russian and Eurasian Studies at the University of Liverpool. She has published on the fiscal, environmental, and agricultural history of Tsarist and early Soviet Central Asia, and is now working on a new project tentatively titled ‘Capitalism in Turkestan’. She is keen on hearing from prospective graduate students with an interest in the agricultural and economic history of Russian and Soviet Central Asia.
[i] See also Marianne Kamp, Collectivisation Generation (Cornell University Press, 2024).
[ii] Marco Buttino. “Turkestan 1917 la révolution des Russes.” Cahiers du Monde Russe et Soviétique 32, no. 1 (1991): 61–77.
[iii] Land reform took place in the neighbouring Turkmen republic at the same time, and in the Kyrgyz autonomous republic in 1927.