Laboratory of Socialist Development

Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan

Artemy M. Kalinovsky

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781501715570
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: History

Artemy Kalinovsky's Laboratory of Socialist Development investigates the Soviet effort to make promises of decolonization a reality by looking at the politics and practices of economic development in central Asia between World War II and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Focusing on the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic, Kalinovsky places the Soviet development of central Asia in a global context.

Connecting high politics and intellectual debates with the life histories and experiences of peasants, workers, scholars, and engineers, Laboratory of Socialist Development shows how these men and women negotiated Soviet economic and cultural projects in the decades following Stalin's death. Kalinovsky's book investigates how people experienced new cities, the transformation of rural life, and the building of the world's tallest dam. Kalinovsky connects these local and individual moments to the broader context of the Cold War, shedding new light on how paradigms of development change over time. Throughout the book, he offers comparisons with experiences in countries such as India, Iran, and Afghanistan, and considers the role of intermediaries who went to those countries as part of the Soviet effort to spread its vision of modernity to the postcolonial world.

Laboratory of Socialist Development offers a new way to think about the post-war Soviet Union, the relationship between Moscow and its internal periphery, and the interaction between Cold War politics and domestic development. Kalinovsky's innovative research pushes readers to consider the similarities between socialist development and its more familiar capitalist version.

1

DECOLONIZATION, DE-STALINIZATION, AND DEVELOPMENT

Over the course of the 1950s Central Asia became a frontline region in the ideological battle for the Third World. As Odd Arne Westad pointed out in his influential Global Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union both had a major liability as they sought influence in the postcolonial world—they both had internal colonies.1 For the United States, this internal colony was its disenfranchised black population. For the Soviet Union, this was the part of the country colonized by the Russian Empire. For the Soviet Union, though, these regions also provided an opportunity. As former colonial territories with cultural ties to South Asia and the Muslim world, the Central Asian republics could play a central role in the Soviets’ contest with the United States, and later, China. Just as (some) US policymakers realized that they would need to support civil rights for African Americans if they hoped to gain allies in Africa, Soviet leaders grasped that overcoming colonial legacies in Central Asia and the Caucasus could help Moscow reach out to postcolonial states.2

The Soviet engagement with the Third World had important consequences for Central Asian politicians and the republics themselves. Three of Nikita Khru- shchev’s priorities in the 1950s and early 1960s—consolidation of power within the party, de-Stalinization, and engagement with the Third World—provided opportunities for Central Asian leaders to negotiate economic and cultural modernization in their republics. By becoming Khrushchev’s allies in domestic power struggles and in Moscow’s battle for the hearts and minds of the Third World, local politicians were able to negotiate the development of their republics away from agriculture (and especially cotton) toward industrialization and win support for greater cultural autonomy. The wave of decolonization occurring beyond the USSR’s borders provided the impetus to complete the “decolonization” of the Central Asian republics within a Soviet framework.

The Political Legacies of Stalinism

In the wake of the Russian Revolution and Civil War, the Bolsheviks offered an alternative to anti-colonial politics to the peoples of the Russian Empire. Rather than seeking fully independent statehood, as the subjects of the former Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires had done, the tsar’s former subjects would get their own ethno-territorial units, led by representatives of their own nationality. The elimination of indigenous leaders (along with other old Bolsheviks) during the 1930s put an end to whatever claim the USSR could make to an alternative form of anti-colonialism. A major component of Nikita Khrushchev’s attempts to overcome the Stalinist legacy in the 1950s was the promotion of a new group of indigenous leaders who could in turn help Moscow reach out to the post- colonial world.

Many of the Central Asians who sided with the Bolsheviks in the 1920s emerged from the milieu of reformers and intellectuals active in the late tsarist period.3 Some of them were from among the jadids, people who had responded to Russian colonialism by advocating for reform, particularly of education, and opening up to models from India, the Ottoman Empire, and Europe to allow for as much cultural and technological borrowing as would be beneficial for their own societies.4 Those who joined the Soviet regime did so because, in Adeeb Khalid’s words, “They saw themselves creating a new civilization—modern, Soviet, Central Asian, Turkic, and Muslim all at once. They hoped to co-opt the state to the work of modernization that exhortations alone had not achieved in the prerevolutionary era.”5 Other indigenous communists, including the Tajik leader Shirinsho Shohtemur, had been educated in Russian native schools or had been radicalized laboring alongside Russian workers prior to the revolution. Both groups would perish in Stalin’s purges of the Bolshevik elite 1930s.6

The elimination of the “old” communists made way for a younger generation raised primarily in Soviet institutions: educated in Soviet schools, trained in Soviet factories, or within the Red Army.7 The careers of these individuals overlapped with those of local communists of the 1920s and 1930s, but whereas the latter were in positions of real power and responsibility, the former were cutting their teeth in the Komsomol, the youth wing of the Communist Party. The younger generation survived the purges and benefited from them, assuming senior positions in the republic while still in their early thirties or even late twenties.8 At the same time, their ability to shape policy and negotiate for resources was limited. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan were all led by Europeans, appointed by Moscow to execute the party line, for at least part of this period. No Central Asian was present in the senior decision-making body of the party (the Politburo, or presidium as it was known between 1952 and 1966) or had access to Stalin’s inner circle.

As he consolidated control within the party leadership, Nikita Khrushchev sidelined many of the officials appointed under Stalin and replaced them with younger cadres. The motives for the changes varied. Some of the people removed during the 1953–1956 period were suspected of resisting de-Stalinization and other Khrushchev initiatives. Among the charges against the Uzbek first secretary Usman Yusupov, for example, was that he had continued to praise Stalin’s lieutenant and secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria, whom Khrushchev had helped arrest, try, and execute in 1953.9 Khrushchev’s “secret speech,” at the 20th congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), where he delivered a radical (if selective) criticism of Stalin’s rule, and the campaign against the “cult of personality” that followed was not universally welcomed. By March–April of 1956, it was becoming clear that many rank-and-file party members were ambivalent about de-Stalinization, as were many segments of the Soviet population.10 Khrushchev needed reliable people who would be able to mobilize support behind the broader de-Stalinization of Soviet society that he envisioned.

The individuals who climbed to the heights of republican leadership in the 1950s were people who had spent their entire adult lives within the Soviet system and were fully socialized within it. Speaking of this generation’s intellectuals and writers, the literary historian Rasul Khodizoda wrote that their “service in the building and strengthening of the Soviet state, in the propaganda and agitation of communist thought and belief was sincere and self-sacrificing. To the end of their lives they were firmly grounded in this thought and spirit.”11 The same could be said of their counterparts in the political arena. At the same time, both the intellectuals and the politicians continued to champion their republic’s cultural and economic interests (at least as they understood them) and could be dogged lobbyists for both.

At the time of the 20th Congress in February 1956, the Communist Party of Tajikistan was led by Bobojon Gafurov, a former journalist and party activist who had written on Tajik history.12 Even during the Stalin era Gafurov had been a strong advocate for his republic’s development, assembling cadres and pushing for resources to develop its cultural, intellectual, and economic potential. He had risen to the top post in the republic in 1946 and oversaw the formation of a Tajik Academy of Sciences and the Tajik State University.13 In May 1956 he resigned from his position at the head of the Communist Party of Tajikistan and moved to Moscow, where he became the director of the Institute of Oriental Studies. Whether the move was a demotion followed by a soft landing or a kind of promotion which put Gafurov closer to the center of Moscow’s new Third World policy is difficult to say. On the one hand, Gafurov was a product of the Stalin era. He praised Stalin as late as April 1955, calling him Lenin’s “most loyal co-worker.”14 Khrushchev was wary of keeping Stalin loyalists at the helm of party organizations, at both regional and republic level. At the same time, there is evidence that Khrushchev and Gafurov actually had a favorable relationship in 1954 and 1955, with Khrushchev backing Gafurov in several disputes and praising him for agricultural experiments in the republic.15 There is no record of Gafurov being criticized at the time of his resignation; on the contrary, E. I. Gromov, the party’s Central Committee representative, explained that Gafurov was needed in Moscow to take charge of the Institute of Oriental Studies and develop academic expertise for Soviet foreign policy.16 Even if it is true that Khrushchev did not want Gafurov in Stalinabad, he nevertheless promoted him to a position of some importance. Gafurov was a member of the CPSU Central Committee and he played an important role in developing Moscow’s Third World policy.

Gafurov’s replacement in Tajikistan, Tursun Uljaboev, had risen through the ranks of the Komsomol (which is also where he was working during World War II), and his party career had already taken off during Stalin’s last years. At the time Khrushchev was consolidating his power, Uljaboev was rising through the ranks of Tajikistan’s party organization. He earned praise for his management of the southern Kulob region, ran the Agitation and Propaganda sector in the Central Committee, led the economically productive Leninobod region in the north of Tajikistan, and became chairman of the Council of Ministers of the republic in 1955.17

It was the Uzbek politician Nuritdin Mukhitdinov whose star rose highest in this period. Mukhitdinov had served as an agitator during World War II and been wounded; after returning to Uzbekistan he embarked on a party career. In 1955, Khrushchev returned from his Asian tour via Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, where he removed Amin Niyazov and promoted Mukhitdinov.18 Mukhitdinov also came from the generation raised under Stalin’s rule, and confesses in his memoirs to having been in awe of the leader, but growing disillusioned by 1953. Mukhitdinov became a candidate (nonvoting) member of the presidium in 1956 and a full member at the end of the following year, the first Central Asian to belong to the inner circle of party leadership.

As Khrushchev explained, Mukhitdinov was being promoted to help correct for Stalin’s destruction of the Central Asian communists and his failure to include any of them in the Soviet leadership. Considering Moscow’s new foreign policy ambitions, such a state of affairs was unacceptable: “In the center we don’t have enough people from the East, or even enough people who know it. You are an Uzbek, an Asian, from a Muslim background, which means you understand these questions. Who else, if not you, should handle our Eastern policy?”19

Mukhitdinov’s portfolio was not limited to foreign policy. Following the 20th party Congress, Mukhitdinov was assigned to help party ideologist Mikhail Suslov prepare a resolution “on overcoming the cult of personality and its consequences.”20 Mukhitdinov was encouraged by Khrushchev to think of himself not only as an Uzbek leader but an all-Soviet one, and to take active part in presidium discussions. Mukhitdinov, in turn, lobbied for the rehabilitation of the leaders shot in 1937–1938, and was able to announce progress on this front at the First Congress of the Uzbek Intelligentsia in October 1956. Uzbek communists Akmal Ikramov and Fayzullah Khojaev, who had been tried along with Stalin’s adversary Nikolai Bukharin at a show trial in 1938, were rehabilitated thirty-two years before the rest of the codefendants.21 Mukhitdinov also used his position to promote the study of national histories and Central Asia’s role in the Soviet Union’s battle for hearts and minds in the developing world.

As elsewhere in the Soviet Union, the loosening of cultural and political controls and the revelations in Khrushchev’s speech at the 20th Party Congress led intellectuals and cultural figures to question certain aspects of the Soviet system that went beyond the criticism of the “cult of personality” and the excesses of Stalinism. Although Central Asians rarely attacked the system directly, they openly criticized aspects of cultural and intellectual life they most disliked. Composers and musicians challenged the superiority of European musical forms.22 In Tajikistan’s Union of Writers “jadidism” was discussed in a positive way for the first time since the 1930s.23 At a congress of Tajik intellectuals in Dushanbe, the writer Jalol Ikromī delivered an impassioned speech about the lack of works in Tajik, and the poet Abdusalom Dehoti criticized the political leadership for having a poor command of literary Tajik. He even proposed having party leaders take a language exam—harking back to the more radical indigenization policies of the late 1920s, when officials were expected to learn and work in local languages within a year of their arrival.24 Other intellectuals also began to talk openly about Central Asia’s colonization during the tsarist era—an interpretation officially favored in the 1920s but then abandoned because it threatened to undermine the position of the party, which was, after all, dominated by Russians. As Mukhitdino...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration
• Introduction: The Promise of Development
• 1. Decolonization, De-Stalinization, and Development
• 2. Ayni’s Children, or Making a Tajik-Soviet Intelligentsia
• 3. Defining Development
• 4. Plans, Gifts, and Obligations
• 5. Nurek, “A City You Can Write About”
• 6. Shepherds into Builders
• 7. The Countryside Electrified
• 8. “A Torch Lighting the Way to Progress and Civilization”
• 9. The Poorest Republic
• Conclusion: A Dream Deferred
• A Note on Sources
• Notes
• Bibliography of Primary Sources
• Index