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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.
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.
Price: $194.00
Pages: 690
Publisher: Brill
Imprint: Brill
Series: Handbook of Oriental Studies. Section 8 Uralic & Central Asian Studies
Publication Date:
12 December 2024
ISBN: 9789004697775
Format: Hardcover
From the peer review reports:
"This book is the result of masterful research. It will become a milestone in studies of the economic and social history of modern Central Asia and for studies of agricultural policies during the New Economic Policy in the Soviet Union more broadly." - Niccolò Pianciola, University of Padua
"This volume is a much needed and appreciated contribution to the fields of Central Asian history and Soviet history, but will also surely be welcomed and prized by economic historians, and historians of agriculture, labour or social relations with comparative interests in Eurasia and the Middle East." - Flora Roberts, Assistant Professor of Environmental History, Utrecht University
"With clarity, rigor, and an unflinching eye for contradiction and complexity, this book demonstrates that land reform was a pivotal moment in state-building, mass inclusion, and contested rural development in a region that was considered the last frontier of Russian colonial conquest and that was later transformed into an active subject of the new ethnofederal state forged by the Bolsheviks. Providing both an Uzbek-centered narrative and a comparative reflection that links the case to other contexts – such as Mexico, Zimbabwe, or Iran – Penati shows the global relevance of agrarian reform and socialist transformation of rural societies, opening new research paths for further studies and marking a milestone in the historiography of Central Asia and in the comparative history of agrarian reforms worldwide." - RICCARDO MARIO CUCCIOLLA, Cahiers d’histoire russe, est-européenne, caucasienne et centrasiatique [Online] 66/4 (2025), DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/15k82.
"This book is the result of masterful research. It will become a milestone in studies of the economic and social history of modern Central Asia and for studies of agricultural policies during the New Economic Policy in the Soviet Union more broadly." - Niccolò Pianciola, University of Padua
"This volume is a much needed and appreciated contribution to the fields of Central Asian history and Soviet history, but will also surely be welcomed and prized by economic historians, and historians of agriculture, labour or social relations with comparative interests in Eurasia and the Middle East." - Flora Roberts, Assistant Professor of Environmental History, Utrecht University
"With clarity, rigor, and an unflinching eye for contradiction and complexity, this book demonstrates that land reform was a pivotal moment in state-building, mass inclusion, and contested rural development in a region that was considered the last frontier of Russian colonial conquest and that was later transformed into an active subject of the new ethnofederal state forged by the Bolsheviks. Providing both an Uzbek-centered narrative and a comparative reflection that links the case to other contexts – such as Mexico, Zimbabwe, or Iran – Penati shows the global relevance of agrarian reform and socialist transformation of rural societies, opening new research paths for further studies and marking a milestone in the historiography of Central Asia and in the comparative history of agrarian reforms worldwide." - RICCARDO MARIO CUCCIOLLA, Cahiers d’histoire russe, est-européenne, caucasienne et centrasiatique [Online] 66/4 (2025), DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/15k82.
Dr Beatrice Penati is Senior Lecturer in Russian and Eurasian History at the University of Liverpool. She has published widely on the history of taxation, cotton, economic policy, and resources use in Tsarist and early Soviet Central Asia.