Ab Imperio

SUMMARY:

Julia Obertreis’ article examines the history of colonial projects to master the desert spaces of Central Asia during the imperial and Soviet periods. Her analysis is focused on the territories of modern day Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, which were acutely effected by the consequences of imperial policies of irrigation, cotton production and marketing. Mastering the desert was conceptually prepared by and carried out according to modern expert discourses that dealt with problems of irrigation, the cotton industry, and the cultivation and transformation of “lifeless” Central Asian lands into modern and cultured spaces. Obertreis posits a direct continuity between imperial and Soviet discourses of turning the desert into a “flourishing garden” and civilizing the native population. The article also traces this continuity on a more technical level of specific irrigation projects and a general vision of extensive development of the cotton industry. In this respect Russian imperial policy was typical of other colonial empires. It was part of European modernity based on the ideas of cultivation and scientific taming of nature and native “uncivilized” peoples. Obertreis also studies the assimilation of this modern knowledge and discourses by the local population during the Soviet period. This led to the empowerment of local experts and state officials who became active participants in Soviet projects of Central Asia’s modernization. Beginning in the 1970s, a multiethnic community of Soviet experts was involved in the regional cotton economy and irrigation planning. Their research generated a critical discourse combining elements of a partial re-evaluation of Soviet modernity with a more global ecological approach. This article stresses that neither variant of this critical discourse contained anti-colonial rhetoric or indicated rising nationalist self-awareness. Its subversive quality resulted not from some hidden nationalism but from a critique of the Soviet version of modernity as it applied to the exploitation of natural resources, a “conquest” mentality and the romantic nature of grand projects. The article concludes that the 1960–1970’s crisis of modernity, a phenomenon general to both West and East, which in the East took the form of a crisis of socialist modernity, was not specific to Central Asia. Yet in Central Asia the price of modernization revealed itself with unprecedented clarity as the Aral Sea receded and the problems of extensive cotton economy became apparent.