PRE-REVIEW VERSION: DO NOT CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION !
The publisher (Armand Colin) only allows the publication of the version sent to the peer‐ reviewers – I have only added the name at the top.
BEATRICE PENATI
The Soviets discover rural Central Asia: the Karp commission in context.
1. Introduction
“Little is known of the life of our Central Asian republics: according to overheard rumours, and to sparse notes by newspaper correspondents. One knows that there cotton grows extensively, that there are some mountains, some deserts, that there live people who were once called ‘Sarts’, but now one must not call them in this way, that, on the top of that, there dwell the ‘Tashkent gentlemen’ Saltykov-Shchedrin wrote about, and that a short time ago there took place the national delimitation and new republics have been founded”.1
These are the opening words of a small book which aimed at showcasing one of the most celebrated
policies of the Soviet regime in Central Asia in the 1920s, the land-and-water reform, to the public
opinion of what some may define as the Russian (or Soviet) ‘metropole’. The book was
commissioned by the Central Asian Bureau of the central committee of the all-Union communist
party (SredAzBiuro in acronym)2. Most materials concerned the Uzbek SSR, overlooking Turkmenia
almost entirely.3 Moreover, despite its criticism of “sparse notes by newspaper correspondents”, the
book referred to materials from the Pravda Vostoka (Pravda of the Orient). What mattered, was that
the ‘Moscow worker’ got the thick of it: that life in Central Asia was changing, shaped by socialism,
to the point that former images of it were no more applicable.
The book also included two documents: the report by the head of the Uzbek communist party,
Akmal Ikramov, on the results of the reform, read at the 2nd Plenum of the Uzbek party central
1
Sredne-aziatskoe Byuro TsK VKP(b), Zemel’no-vodnaya reforma v Srednei Azii. Sbornik materialov, pod red. I.S. Kraskin, Moskva-Leningrad, Moskovskii rabochii, 1927, p. I. ‘Sarts’ (Sarty in Russian) are the settled population of the Central Asian oases; on this term: Sergej Abashin, “Les Sartes, un people d’avenir: l’ethnographie et l’Empire au Turkestan russe”, Cahiers d’Asie Centrale, 17/18, 2009, pp. 353-379.
2 On this organ at different times of its history, see: S. Keller, “The Central Asian Bureau, an essential tool in governing
Soviet Turkestan”, Central Asian Survey, 22 (2-3), 2003, p. 281-297; C. Teichmann, “Cultivating the Periphery: Bolshevik Civilising Missions and ‘Colonialism’ in Soviet Central Asia”, Comparativ, 19:1, 2009, p. 34-52.
3 On the reform itself, see: A.L. Edgar, Tribal Nation. The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan, Princeton, Princeton UP, 2004,
committee in February 1926; and a report by Isaak A. Zelenskii, first secretary of the SredAzBiuro,
read at the Plenum of the Bureau itself on March 14th 1925, and titled “On the land-and-water
reform in Central Asia”. Indeed, on March 14th 1925 Zelenskii did present a report at the Plenum of
the Central Asian Bureau: but it was not on the land reform. It concerned “agrarian relations” and it
was conceived as a stepping stone towards another report, also on “agrarian relations”, to be read at
the central committee of the all-Union party. If the land-and-water reform was ‘in the air’, it was not
mentioned – at least not by Zelenskii – either than as a slogan coming from the countryside itself, the
Bolsheviks being the “firemen” who kept it under control.4 In March 1925, in Moscow, the climate
was still quite relaxed: one still spoke of “creating commissions” at all levels. In the Central Asian
republics themselves, on the other hand, the solution of the “agrarian question” was a top item on the
agenda and an urgent issue in some densely populated areas.
It is at this climate that we need to look to understand the genesis of the Karp commission. Its
product – the collection of monographs called The modern Central Asian village [Sovremennyi
kishlak (or aul) Srednei Azii]5 – had of course little in common with an agitprop book destined to the
average ‘Moscow worker’. But the two had something in common: the discovery of the Central
Asian countryside or, more exactly, its re-discovery through the prism of Soviet goals of economic
and social transformation. Similarly, the two had to deal with Russia’s prerevolutionary knowledge
of Central Asia: a knowledge that could be falsified, but also came to help with its terminology,
research techniques, and experience of the field. That of the Karp commission was at the same time
the first Soviet, and one of the last colonial inquiries about rural Central Asia. One may object that
the usage of pre-revolutionary tools of knowledge was widely spread, in particular as far as the
peasantry and its economy were concerned.6 One may also object that some leaders, for instance
Preobrazhenskii, considered more or less explicitly the countryside as a ‘colony’ of the city,
signifying by this the way surplus should be ‘pumped out’ of the peasant economy to support
industrialisation. Would it make sense to talk about the colonial approach to the Central Asian
countryside in terms of ‘residual’ of Tsarist rule on Turkestan, or wouldn’t it be better to consider it
as another evidence of a Bolshevik ‘urbanocentric’ approach? This paper aims at discussing these
issues, by providing an outline of the inquiry, its origin, and its reception.
4
L.Z. Kunakova, Zemel’no-vodnaya reforma v Ferganskoi doline (1925-1926 gg.), Osh, Iz-vo Gospedinstituta, 1962, p. 92; I. Zelenskii, “O zemel’no-vodnoi reforme v Srednei Azii”, in: Zemel’no-vodnaya reforma, pp. 3-27, here p. 7.
5
Kishlak is the Russified version of qishloq: etymologically related to qish (winter), this word originally meant the winter quarters of the nomadic or transhumant pastoralist population. It was usually translated in Russian as ‘village’ or ‘countryside’ [derevnia] in sedentary areas of Turkestan. Aul denotes in Russian sources the nomadic encampment and was used as administrative unit in the pre-revolutionary period.
2. Institutional aspects: origin, staff, loyalties
“Face to the village” in Central Asia
We need now to take a step back and describe the political climate of 1924-1925, both in the USSR
at large and in Central Asia more specifically. The latter had started a significant recovery from the
tragic situation in which some five years of revolution, civil war, and famine had pushed the
economy.7 In the early 1920s, the some of the regions of what became later known as the Uzbek SSR
had been ripped by disturbances usually referred at as the basmachi insurrection. By 1925,
‘pacification’ (or repression) had almost been completed in Fergana and the Samarkand province, but
band raids were still a matter of concern in the former Bukharan emirate.8 At least symbolically, the
national delimitation of the Central Asian republics and autonomous regions in 1924 marked the
appropriation of this territory by the new Bolshevik regime.
Yet, the countryside remained largely out of the grasp of the Soviet and Party institutions. To
a different extent, this was also true in Russia proper. After having concluded its civil war against
White forces (or even during the civil war itself) the Bolsheviks became engaged in a sort of war
against their own peasantry. This struggle, analysed among others by Andrea Graziosi,9 left unhealed
wounds in the relations between Soviet power and the peasants. In an attempt to highlight the
pro-peasantry features of the New Economic Policy, between May 1924 and the first months of 1925 the
all-Union party adopted a new attitude, condensed by Zinoviev’s slogan “Face to the village”
[Litsom k derevne]. The beginning of this campaign is conventionally seen in the 13th all-Union Party
congress in May 1924, where the regime seemed to shift the general accent of its policies towards the
peasant economy.10 This shift spurred initiatives to attain a better knowledge of the social life of the
villages, if not else in order to “study the objective conditions in which the activity of Party and
Soviet organizations took place”.11
In Central Asia, a key agency in this process belonged to the Central Asian Bureau of the
Party’s central committee (SredAzBiuro). In 1924-1925, the Central Asian Bureau intended to tackle
agrarian issues not only in nomadic and resettlement areas, but also in the southern oases of the
former Turkestan republic – without forgetting the former Bukharan and Khorezm republics. On the
7
The best account for these years is: M. Buttino, La rivoluzione capovolta, Napoli, L’Ancora del Mediterraneo, 2004.
8 On the basmachi in eastern Bukhara, see my: B. Penati, “The reconquest of Eastern Bukhara. The struggle against the
Basmachi as a prelude to Sovietization”, Central Asian Survey, 26:4, 2007, pp. 521-534.
9
A. Graziosi, La grande guerra contadina in Urss, Napoli, Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1998.
10 M. Wehner, « Licom k derevne : Sowjetmacht und Bauernfrage, 1924-1925 », Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas,
42 (1), 1994, p. 20-48; Stephan Merl, Der Agrarmarkt und die Neue Ökonomische Politik, München-Wien, Oldenbourg, 1981, pp. 40-49; T. McDonald, Face to the Village. The Riazan Countryside under Soviet Rule, 1921-1930, Toronto, Toronto UP, 2011, p.4.
11
occasion of its meeting of December 28th, 1924, the executive commission of the SredAzBiuro
appointed the three leading members of a commission in charge of collecting and organising all the
materials produced by all the committees, groups, etc. who had dealt with “land use, land
organisation works, and the land stock” in Central Asia. The head of the commission was Dunaev,
who would soon be appointed president of the planning commission (Gosplan) of the Uzbek SSR,
but was then the deputy head of its council of people’s commissars. With him collaborated Andreev
and, above all, Asfendiarov, the former people’s commissariat of the Turkestan republic who had
played a leading role in the management of land reform of the early 1920s.12 While it is unclear what
materials this commission produced, it is quite likely that it soon included other members, such as
Shelekhes, the plenipotentiary of the all-Union Labour and Defence Council [Sovet Truda i Oborony,
STO in acronym] in Central Asia.
Then, in early February 1925, the executive commission of the SredAzBiuro approved the
commencement of a thorough inquiry, generally labelled “on the countryside”, to be carried out in
the next months.13 One month and a half later, inquiries took the form of a more focused commission
for the study of a sample of sedentary and nomadic “villages” (kishlak and aul, respectively); parallel
to this, a SredAzBiuro commission composed by Zelenskii himself, Shelekhes, Udarov, Rykunov (of
the Central Asian Water Administration), and Manzhara, started preparing a report on land
relations.14 Indeed, this second commission may have contributed to the formulation of Zelenskii’s
and Molotov’s doklad to the Politbiuro in May, but it is quite likely that the two relied upon the data
collected until then by the ‘technical’ commissions.
The commission charged of the sample study was guided by Karp, a technician, expert in
irrigation works. It included, among others, Rykunov of the water administration, but also
agronomists and economists (such as Foteev) and a representative of the koshchi [poor peasants’]
union (Odeli). When Karp, in his correspondence, had to define the affiliation of the commission he
presided, he referred to it as a “Commission of the Central Asian Bureau”.15 This is how apparently
the Karp commission was born in Spring 1925. Things, however, were more complicated.
12 Ispolkomissia SredAzBiuro, protokol, 28.12.1924, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 16, d. 1175, ll. 1-16, here l. 11. Asfendiarov had
made clear his views on the “agrarian question” in a short programmatic article in the official journal of the Central Asian Economic Council one year before. In his view, the land issue was still urgent in central Asia but was neglected, and people like him “were regarded as relics of war communism, or even leftist social-revolutionaries, supporters of land equalisation [chernoperedel’tsy]”: S. Asfendiarov, “Zemel’nyi vopros v Turkestane”, Narodnoe Khoziaistvo Srednei Azii, no. 2-3, September-October 1924, pp. 54-56, here p. 54.
13 Ispolkomissia SredAzBiuro, protokol, 1.2.1925, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 16, d. 1175, ll. 57-60, here l. 57. 14
Ispolkomissia SredAzBiuro, protokol, 19.3.1925, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 16, d. 1175, ll. 88-98, here ll. 89, 93.
The commission who lived twice
There is a reason why most materials about the Karp commission are concentrated in the archival
collection of the Plenipotentiary of the all-Union Labour and Defence Council [Sovet Truda i
Oborony, or STO], now in the Uzbekistani central archive in Tashkent (TsGARUz). This organ
gathered the representatives of the republics, of the economy (glavki, VSNKh, etc.) and of the
all-Union people’s commissariats, and acted as a sort of ‘clearing house’ between conflicting interests.
The STO plenipotentiary in Central Asia (UpolSTO in acronym) was an essential step of the chain of
command between Moscow and this region and had a soft spot for the demands of the Central Cotton
Committee. The UpolSTO was not the only ‘regional’ institution in Central Asia: there were the
Central Asian Economic Council, too, and the Central Asian Water Administration, and others with
more specific tasks. Yet, the UpolSTO seems to have represented Moscow’s views more than those
others.
In January or February 1924, five agricultural experts, economists and technicians met in
Tashkent under the chairmanship of Karp. They gathered on the premises of the UpolSTO and
defined themselves as the “UpolSTO commission for the inquiry of the countryside” [po
obsledovaniyu kishlaka]. 16 Besides Karp, the commissioners were Magidovich, Mitkevich,
Yaroshevich, and Putilov. The commission would meet again and its ranks will increase, to include
Yurii Poslavskii and a Berezov, at the end of February. Minutes of most meetings of this UpolSTO
commission are available throughout 1925 and there is no possible doubt that this commission
gradually transformed itself in the Karp commission which was responsible for The Modern Central
Asian Village, whose genesis I described at the end of the last sub-section. The names of many of the
authors of the latter are to be found on the proceedings of this ‘first’ UpolSTO-backed commission
since May 1925: the Karp commission started its ‘second life’ under the SredAzBiuro, but retained
its liaison with the UpolSTO.17
Did this shift in the commission’s main affiliation change its scope? There are a few
differences between the original working plan of the ‘first Karp commission’ and the final outcome
of the inquiry. Nevertheless, it is possible that these changes did not occur depend on the
commission’s changing affiliation, but simply on the latter’s need to revise its goals in a context of
insufficient and problematic access to financing. The ‘first Karp commission’, based at the
UpolSTO, envisaged its own role in a perspective of strong institutional continuity with previous
initiatives of organizations linked to the UpolSTO itself. In particular, the ‘first commission’
16 Commission for the inquiry of the countryside at the UpolSTO, Protokol no. 1, [before 23.2.1925], TsGARUz, f. r-1,
op. 1, d. 305, l. 1.
17
intended to use the inquiries on peasant households’ budgets conducted by the Water Administration
(as well as by the Central Statistical Direction [TsSU]) as the foundation of its work, and was
unwilling to compile its own.18 The Water Administration had carried out its own inquiry in 1924 on
around one hundred units in all the regions of the Uzbek SSR (and in Semirechie and Turkmenia),
although ostensibly excluding Fergana19. It is unclear whether the ‘second Karp commission’ used
the data on peasant households’ budgets of the Water Administration, but surely it did not neglect
those of the Central Statistical Directions of each republic: hence, it used a part of the documentary
basis of the ‘first commission’, but to a lesser extent and only in preparation for its own inquiries.20
The Karp commission officially started its work in the second half of March 1925, after the
corresponding deliberation by the Party’s Central Asian Bureau. Fieldwork did not take off before
the good season had started and all the staff had been recruited. The Karp commission was initially
supposed to finish its fieldwork in two months and a half (roughly, April to June 1925). In practice,
the commissioners and their staff were still scouting the villages in August 1925, while other
administrations, namely the Statistical Direction and its branches, provided some additional data
(e.g. prices, bazaar days, etc.) in October or even in 1926.21 Moreover, the elaboration of these raw
data should have taken three months, but it actually occupied the commission for no less than eight.
As a result, the conclusion of the commission’s activity was put off to April 1926.22 This means that
its results were made available only after the official completion of the land-and-water reform in the
three ‘core provinces’ of the Uzbek SSR (Tashkent, Samarkand, Fergana): the inquiry, instead of
providing the necessary know-how to carry out the reform, was regarded at the moment of its
publicationmore correctly as a historical document, portraying the situation in the countryside before
the first significant measure aiming at the transformation of agrarian relations.
The prolongation of the work of the Karp commission beyond what had been initially
forecast had important consequences on its budgetary sustainability and, again, on its institutional
affiliation. At the end of 1925, Karp wrote to the plenipotentiary of the Central Cotton Committee in
Central Asia, Grigoriants, lamenting that, once the fieldwork and the collection of materials
concluded, the commission he presided lacked funding to process and publish them.23 It is relevant
18
UpolSTO commission for the inquiry of the countryside, minute, no. 4, 24.2.1925, TsGARUz, f. r-1, op. 1, d. 305, ll. 3-4.
19 ‘List of the localities where budget inquiries took place in 1924 and number of budgets described’, [early 1925],
TsGARUz, f. r-1, op. 1, d. 305, ll. 16-18
20 ‘Organisational plan for the inquiry of the Central Asian village and aul’, [after mid-March 1925], TsGARUz, f. r-1,
op. 1, d. 305, ll. 126-138, here l. 130.
21 For instance: Karp to the District Statistical Bureau of Gidjuvan, 19.4.1926, TsGARUz, f. r-1, op. 1, d 343, l. 98. 22 Conclusion on the commission’s work, Financial-credit section of the UpolSTO, [autumn 1925], TsGARUz, f. r-1, op.
1, d. 305, ll. 117-118.
here that Karp did neither write to the Uzbek Cotton Committee (which had little autonomy), nor to
the Central Cotton Committee itself, therefore highlighting the regional dimension of this initiative.
In addition, in explaining the nature of the commission to Grigoriants, Karp did not refer to it as an
initiative of the Party’s Bureau, but as an initiative of the UpolSTO. And it is quite clear that the
UpolSTO was again deeply involved in the inquiry by then, because only two days later, in an
identical plead to obtain enough money for publication, Karp co-signed a letter with the UpolSTO
himself, Shelekhes, to the Uzbekistani republican government. In that letter, the Uzbekistani
government was named as one of the initiators of the inquiry, together with the UpolSTO itself.24
Knowing that, in April 1926, Karp would however define again his commission as an organ
of the Central Asian Bureau, how should we interpret this evidence? In other words, was the Karp
commission a party initiative, or a Soviet one? Perhaps Karp only wanted to insist on the institutional
liaison which he deemed most useful in each case: given the intimate relation between Shelekhes and
the Central Cotton Committee, and the tense relations between the latter and the Central Asian
Bureau,25 he chose the UpolSTO when writing to Grigoriantz. But the involvement of the UpolSTO
at these dates seems more substantial than that of the Uzbek SSR. For instance, the expenses of the
commission were not handled by the Central Asian Bureau, or by a Party organ, but by the Central
Asian Water Authority, which depended from the STO and, given its regional focus, from the latter’s
plenipotentiary in Tashkent.26 Indeed, the Central Asian Water Administration was the first source of
funding for the Karp commission, contributing for 25,000 rubles out of its original total budget of
67,580. The rest was paid by the individual republics, namely by Uzbekistan (some 23,950 rubles)
and the Kirghiz republic (ca. 7,980 rubles). The Turkmen republic should have participated with
10,645 rubles, but in the late autumn of 1925 it pulled out of the commission’s work and decided to
conduct its own inquiry.27 The Uzbek and Kirghiz republic, together with the Central Asian Water
Administration and, this time, the Uzbek Cotton Committee, would also cover part of the publishing
expenses.28 Republican communist parties participated in the inquiry indirectly and only after the
first shift in institutional affiliation (from UpolSTO to SredAzBiuro): each central committee had to
24 Karp and Shelekhes to the SNK UzSSR, 30.12.1925, TsGARUz, f. r-1, op. 1, d. 113, ll. 461-463.
25 See B. Penati, “Le Comité du Coton et les autres : secteur cotonnier et pouvoir économique en république ouzbek”,
Cahiers du Monde Russe, à paraitre.
26 Karp to SNK UzSSR, 17.6.1925, TsGARUz, f. r-1, op. 1, d. 113, l. 24. 27
Note on the financial situation of the commission for the inquiry of the Central Asian village and aul on August 1st, 1925, TsGARUz, f. r-1, op. 1, d. 305, ll. 67-68; summary of the work of the commission, [November-December 1925], ibidem, ll. 91-94.
28
create a special commission to recruit reliable translators and ‘Party collaborators’ [partrabotniki] for
the Karp commission.29
Composition of the Karp commission
The Karp commission is named after its leader, B.B. Karp, an expert in irrigation having worked
both for the pre-revolutionary government and under Bolshevik rule. Thus, he was a technician or, to
use a typical, slightly depreciative Soviet term, a “bourgeois specialist”.30 He led a team of 29 people
to conduct fieldwork. In the final phase of research eight more people joined the commission to
provide advice on specific issues; among them, there were six professors of the Central Asian State
University in Tashkent (SAGU). The latter’s Institute of Soil Studies and Geobotanics also acted as a
consultant for the commission. The Central Asian Water Administration and the various regional
cotton organisations were also involved. Despite the link with the Central Asian Bureau, party
elements seem to have played a relatively minor role: in particular, some of the “young people” who
helped the commissioners on the spot seem to have been Bolshevik militants,31 possibly what the
Party called vydvizhentsy, urban factory workers detached to the countryside as leaders and
role-models. Commissioners were recruited through academic institutions (the Central Asian State
University in Tashkent), military organizations, and the apparatus of the Soviet State itself (for
instance, one commissar was detached from the all-Union people’s commissariat for internal trade).
Those who belonged to the Party or to State institutions were paid by their permanent employers, not
from the commission’s own budget.32
The commission had a staff of some twenty people: according to one document (June 1925)
one third of them consisted of local translators and interpreters. Out of the other fourteen
(technicians, team leaders…) only three have vaguely Muslim names, but it is hard to tell what their
background was.33 One exception is a Mustafa Buraliev (or Buralkiev), who had ‘graduated’ in
Oriental Studies at the Red Army Academy. Although the latter was located in Moscow, it had
strong relations with the Turkfront – the headquarters of the Red Army in Central Asia. Hence,
‘local collaborators’ were certainly involved, but the leadership of the inquiry was solidly in the
29 Organisational plan for the inquiry of the Central Asian village and aul’, [after mid-March 1925], TsGARUz, f. r-1, op.
1, d. 305, ll. 126-138, here l. 130.
30 On the alternate fortunes of “bourgeois specialists” in the Russian people’s commissariat for agriculture (Narkomzem),
see J.W. Heinzen, “Professional Identity and the Vision of the Modern Soviet Countryside: Local Agricultural Specialists at the End of the NEP,” Cahiers du Monde Russe, 39 (1-2), 1998, pp. 9-25.
31 G. Cherdantsev, “Sovremennyi kishlak i aul Srednei Azii. (Kriticheskii ocherk)”, Narodnoe khoziaistvo Srednei Azii,
no. 12, December 1927, pp. 197-204, here p. 199.
32 Correspondence between Karp and various institutions, Summer 1925, TsGARUz, f. r-1, op. 1, d. 113, ll. 147, 151;
Karp commission [?] to a Party provincial committee [unclear], 30.9.1925, ibidem, l. 320.
33
hands of Russian or European elements. Moreover, in Autumn, when the commission moved to the
analysis of the materials, ‘native’ staff decreased: the commission then counted fifteen “economists”
(all of them Russian or European, including two women), two “senior economists”, three
consultants, two statisticians and two accountants. Among them, we find some of the most prominent
experts in agrarian relations and related subjects of Soviet Central Asia, who were sometimes quite
young at that date. This is the case of L. Pogorelskii, later author of an important study on agriculture
in pre-revolutionary and early Soviet Khorezm,34 Demidovich, and Yurii M. Poslavskii. The latter,
then a “consultant”, will soon write a virulent critique of the commission’s result.
3. Fieldwork and methods
Precedents
We have already mentioned some of the inquiries carried out in the 1920s, which constituted the
informative basis of the work of the Karp commission: the controversial 1917-1920 agricultural
census, but above all the works of the republican (especially Uzbek) Central Statistical Directions
and those of the Central Asian Water Administration. To these, one must add the materials of the
commission for administrative delimitation [rayonirovanie]. The latter were not available for all the
districts targeted by the Karp commission, but only for three cantons [volosti] in Fergana, and one
in Khorezm. In the case of districts located in the province of Bukhara, or in that of Pishpek (now
Bishkek), no materials from this commission were available. In those cases, the Karp commission
collected its own data and carried out its own delimitation, although it is unclear whether the latter
(functional to the inquiry) ‘spilled over’ and was endorsed in the ultimate administrative
delimitation.35 We only know that the commission for rayonirovanie offered to pay 3,000 rubles (a
relatively modest sum) for the final publication of the results of the Karp commission: it is therefore
possible that materials were shared in both directions, and that some of the Karp commission’s work
was also used for delimitation.36
Besides and before the inquiries that directly provided some informational basis, there existed
a few studies on the Central Asian countryside which included the analysis of peasant households’
budgets. Some of them were carried out before the revolution; the most important one, to which
everybody seemed to refer, was the one published as The budgets of 45 households of the Fergana
34 I.V. Pogorel’skii, Ocherki èkonomicheskoi i politicheskoi istorii Khivinskogo khanstva kontsa XIX i nachala XX vv.
(1873-1917), Leningrad, Izdatel-stvo Leningradskogo Universiteta, 1968.
35 Commission for the inquiry of the village, minute, no. 10, 3.6.1925, TsGARUz, f. r-1, op. 1, d. 305, ll. 61-62. Materials
of the rayonirovanie commission were available for the volosti of Isfara, Balykchi, Aravan, Assaka, and Khanki-Urgench.
36
province. The inquiry had been carried out in 1915, but the results were only published in 1924, by
the Economic Council [Ekonomicheskoe Soveshchanie] of the Turkestan republic.37 The relatively
marginal position of cotton in the general design of the Karp inquiry marks the difference between
the work of his commission and some others studies of peasant households’ budgets which had taken
place with the manifest goal of improving the cotton sector. We have mentioned the fact that the
Uzbek Cotton Committee only paid for a fraction of the commission’s costs – and only in the last
phase of its activity. In other cases, on the contrary, even ‘independent’ scholarship had chosen a
cotton-centric approach: for instance, in 1924 the ‘Seminar on Agricultural Economy and
Organisation’ of SAGU’s Faculty of Agriculture published a series of monograph studies titled
“Typology of cotton culture” in various provinces. The monographs about Fergana and the Hungry
Steppe were authored by I.M. Foteev and K. Arasimovich.38 Despite the fact that these authors
studied cotton-growing households only, some elements of this inquiry anticipate what one would
see in The Modern Central Asian Village. First, the inquiries have in common the focus on peasant
households’ budgets; second, they analyse the budgets over the same lapse of time (from March to
March); third, both look very closely at an extremely small sample of households (under 10
elements).
Of course, this raises the question of whether such a small sample could be considered as
representative. Both in the Karp inquiry and in the one of SAGU’s agriculture specialists a couple of
years before, this problem was solved by choosing “typical” households. The typicality of a
household depended on its ability to condense a set of features that were dominant for a specific
population (i.e. the households, or a category of households, in a given province). The same
happened in the selection of villages. Looking for these features, both the Karp commission and
SAGU’s specialists focused on natural elements, namely the nature of the soil, precipitation, etc. In
doing so, they openly endorsed the methods of Professor N.N. Kazhanov.39 Technical choices are
seldom politically anodyne: we will see how Kazhanov and his fortune will cast a shadow on The
Modern Central Asian Village.
37
Byudzhety 45 khoziaistv Ferganskoi oblasti po obsledovaniu 1915 g., Tashkent, Izdanie Ekonomicheskogo
Soveshchania TSSR, [1924]. For a list of surveys of peasant households’ budgets in the region, which does not however mention the Karp commission, see S.N. Abashin, “Semeinyi byudzhet sel’skikh Uzbekov”, Vostok, 2, 2000, pp. 61-77, here pp. 61-65.
38 I.M. Foteev, Tip khlopkovogo khoziaistva Fergany, Tashkent, SAGU, 1924; K. Arasimovich, Tip khlopkovogo
khoziaistva Golodnoi Stepi, Tashkent, SAGU, 1924.
Sampling and rayonirovanie
There is quite an extensive literature on the history of statistics in general, and on its history in
Russia and the USSR in particular. Martine Mespoulets has thoroughly discussed the nature and
methodological problems related to the choice of “typical villages” and, within them, “typical
households”.40 One of the products of the Great Reforms in Russia was the establishment of local
self-government bodies (zemstvo). Yet, no zemstvo had existed either in the steppe areas inhabited by
the Kazakhs (or Kirghiz, as they were called at that time) or in Turkestan, i.e. in the territory where
the Karp commission was operating. In a way somewhat similar to the flourishing of monograph
studies on single French villages mentioned by Marc Bloch and studied by Alain Desrosières,41 the
zemstvo carried out their own statistical surveys and published them. Since 1870, and above all after
the first national conference of the zemstvos in 1887, the opportunities for local statisticians to
compare their methods and results multiplied themselves and an effort to harmonise local practices
became visible. The method of sample surveying itself was thoroughly discussed, together with the
sampling techniques to be used. In practice, a sample survey does not look at the whole population,
but, as the name says, at a sample within it. This is what makes a sample survey different from a
census, which, by definition, does not exclude any element of the population concerned. Because
sample surveys were less costly, the zemstvos used them to obtain ‘snapshots’ of the economic and
social situation between two censuses. Sample censuses were also employed by the local offices of
the Russian State Statistical Committee, for instance in 1870 to study the Terek Cossacks, and again
between 1876 and 1881.42
The first national conference of 1887 consecrated sample surveying in Russia, by stating at
which conditions its results would be acceptable and comparable.43 One of these conditions was
‘typicality’ in the choice of the sample (villages and households): a ‘typical village’ was
characterised by “the most important economic features and the peculiarities of each specific area”,44
while ‘typicality’ was defined as “conformity to the local usual environment”.45 Of course, in order
to know about this ‘environment’, statisticians had to rely upon previous censuses, and hope that the
40 M. Mespoulets, Statistique et révolution en Russie. Un compromis impossible (1880-1930), Rennes, Presses
Universitaires de rennes, 2001, esp. pp. 79-90 ; see also : idem & A. Blum, L’anarchie bureaucratique. Statistique et pouvoir sous Staline, Paris, La Découverte, 2003, p. 301.
41 A. Desrosières, La politique des grands nombres. Histoire de la raison statistique, La Découverte, Paris, 2000, ch. 7. 42
Blum – Mespoulets, Anarchie bureaucratique, p. 301.
43 N.A. Svavitskii, “Kombinatsionnye tablitsy, kak priem izuchenia tipov i faktorov krest’yanskogo khoziaistva v
zemskikh podvornykh perepisyakh” , Vestnik Statistiki, 10-12, 1924, pp. 99-164, here p. 106, quot. In Mespoulets, Statistique et révolution, p. 82.
44 A.A. Gur’ev, “Proskhozhdenie vyborochnogo issledovania i pervye ego opyty v Rossii”, Vestnik statistiki, 1-4, 1921, p.
1-48, here p. 16, quoted in : Mespoulets, Statistique et révolution, p. 80.
latter were reliable. If the census were inaccurate, ‘typicality’ would be ill-defined – and the sample
with it.
This definition of ‘typicality’ had an important logical implication: in order to identify ‘typical
villages’ that could reunite a maximum of the ‘typical characteristics’ of a given area, it was
advisable to define areas that were as much homogeneous as possible. In other words, the
‘population’ in question was defined in order to create a better sample of it. This is the reason why
sample statistics was intimately related to the first experiments in the delimitation in economically
homogeneous areas [rayony], which would combine with the redefinition of economic boundaries in
the early Soviet period. This practice is known by the Russian term rayonirovanie: lacking a good
translation (“regionalisation” has a completely different meaning), the Russian term will be used in
the following paragraphs.
In early Soviet Central Asia, when the Karp commission started working, not only was there
a census available, but an effort of thorough rayonirovanie was also underway. A rural census had
taken place in 1917-1920, at least in the ‘core provinces’ of Tsarist Turkestan and in Semirechie. It
covered the bulk of the main oases, with their irrigated agriculture and sedentary population, and also
included some nomadic or ‘semi-nomadic’ districts, especially in the Syr-Daria and the Semirechie
provinces. Yet, the rural 1917-1920 census was all but reliable: at that time, the region was in turmoil
because of the revolution and civil war. Rural areas (Fergana in particular) were not easily accessible
and data were compiled in a haphazard way, often relying upon pre-1917 statistics or extrapolating
from them.46 In 1925, when the land-and-water reform took place in Uzbekistan, it was clear that the
‘revolutionary’ census could not constitute a solid informational ground.47 This cast a doubt on the
process of rayonirovanie and subsequent sampling.
A specific rayonirovanie commission had been charged to revise pre-1917 administrative
boundaries so that they could make sense from an economic point of view. Partly related to the
operation of delimitation [razmezhevanie] of the national republics and autonomous provinces of
Central Asia, the administrative-economic rayonirovanie does not seem to have influenced it in a
decisive manner.48 Administrative units were ultimately modified in 1927, replacing the former
cantons [volosti] with the new, larger rayony, and suppressing the district [uezd] level. Although
economic reasons were still relevant, in 1927 the rationale for rayonirovanie included the need to
46
For an overview of pre-revolutionary demographic statistics, focusing on definitions of ethnicity in Turkestan, see: S. Abashin, “Empire and demography in Turkestan. Numbers and the Politics of Counting” in: T. Uyama (ed), Asiatic Russia, London, Routledge, 2011, pp. 129-149.
47 Head of the Administration for Land Consolidation (Upravlenie z/u) to the commissariat of agriculture (NKZ),
[beginning of 1926], TsGARUz, f. R-226, op. 1, d. 23, ll. 1-3, here l. 2.
48
simplify and make Soviet institutions closer to the citizen by merging the cantons together. Indeed,
the new notion of rayon first occurred in the land reform (starting in late 1925), when it simply
meant a group of contiguous cantons: it is true that this merge took place looking at economic
similarities, but the boundaries of each canton were almost never altered on this occasion.
When the Karp commission started its work in March 1924, sincere efforts to redefine
boundaries from scratch were underway. The method chosen bore the name of Kazhanov and was
described as “biological theory”. As anticipated above, Kazhanov’s parameters were exclusively
natural, or physical. He advised to look only at the quality of the soil, the availability of water, the
climate, etc., because it was from these, and from these only, that possible crops and yields
depended. In this perspective, “specialisation consisted in the preference given to the crop that
[already] prevailed in a given area”.49 Kazhanov’s method had been also employed in SAGU’s
inquiries on cotton culture.50 Yet, it was not the only theoretical framework available in those years.
In 1921, when the definition of economic regions at all levels was discussed throughout Soviet
Russia, N. Nikitin had pointed at two other methods: A.N. Chelintsev’s and A.I. Skvortsov’s, both
formulated in 1910.51 The famous agricultural economist A. Chayanov had been also engaged in
these debates.52 In spite of these competitors, Kazhanov seem to have exercised a very strong
influence in the 1920s, but his role has not been fully appreciated by historians, possibly because he
soon fell in disgrace. By 1929-1930, one spoke openly of a “Kazhanov deviation” [kazhanovshchina]
and scholars publicly denounced his ideas: among them, the same Foteev who had referred to them
while writing on Fergana.53 What was wrong in Kazhanov’s theories? By looking at the natural
conditions of agricultural activity, and in particular at the land as a factor of production, they had a
scent of Marxist materialism. What they neglected, it seems, were “social relations”. In the
perspective of State-led industrialisation and, above all, social transformation that emerged from the
ashes of the New Economic Policy, though, Kazhanov’s “biological theory” sounded almost
fatalistic: if everything depended on the nature of soil, precipitation, etc., what room was left for
socialist agency?54
49
H. Chambre, La pianificazione territoriale nella Unione Sovietica. Introduzione allo studio delle regioni economiche sovietiche, Milano, Franco Angeli, 1975 (original French ed. 1959), p. 191.
50 Foteev, Tip khlopkovogo khoziaistva Fergany, p. 2. 51
Chambre, Pianificazione territoriale, p. 188.
52 Ibidem. On Chayanov and his role in Russian and early Soviet economics, see again: Stanziani, Economie en
revolution.
53 I. Foteev, “O ‘teorii’ prof. Kazhanova’, Na agrarnom fronte, no. 7, 1930, p. 73ss, cit. in: Chambre, Pianificazione
territoriale, p. 207.
54
Sampling and categorisation
First, the Karp commission identified sub-district [podrayony] on the basis of the features of local
agriculture; second, it chose ‘typical villages’ within them. The latter always included the ‘centre’ of
these sub-districts and, “whenever possible”, villages where “institutions that [were] important for
the life of the inhabitants” were located: Party cells, of course, but also schools, markets, and so on.
If a ‘typical village’ had none of these, it was dropped in favour of the nearest village possessing
them. The ‘typicality’ criterion was therefore employed somewhat leisurely, in order to allow the
discussion of institutional aspects that were peripheral in Kazhanov’s approach, but essential to
appreciate the degree of ‘sovietisation’ of the Central Asian countryside – or, more probably, its
disappointing absence.
Something similar happened within the village: all households were scrutinised individually a
first time. The results were then skimmed and three groups of households were identified: first, those
who “sold their labour” out of the household itself; second, those who neither “sold” nor “bought”
labour; third, those who “bought labour”. Within these categories, the commission selected the
households to be included in the sample within the ‘wealth layer’ (usually defined on the basis of the
land and capital stock owned) that made up the relative majority of each ‘labour category’, and,
within that ‘wealth layer’, among households displaying average values in all other variables
(number of members etc.).55 Here again, it is worth to remark a few points: a) the idea of ‘typicality’
is applied, but neither thoroughly nor rigorously, in the selection of the relative majority ‘wealth
layer’; b) typical Soviet criteria intervene in the first skimming (sale/purchase of labour) and the
variable defining the ‘layers’ (wealth); c) the first classification, though, takes place on the basis of
labour relations, not of wealth. On the contrary, on the occasion of the land-and-water reform new
“ascribed identities” will essentially depend on the surface of possessed land.
These were the orientations ultimately followed by the Karp commission – those, in other
words, that affected its final, published results. If one looks at the preliminary instructions circulated
within the Karp commission itself, there are some slight, but significant, differences in the sampling
procedure. In particular, an early “general instruction” stated that, after the general inquiry of all
households, the latter should be classified in ten categories on the basis of landownership, from zero
to 10 desyatiny (little more than 10 hectares). Each group would have included elements from the
three labour-related categories mentioned above, and of absentee merchant landowners. Then the
commissioners had to exclude from the sample those falling in the lowest and the highest layer of
landownership, as well as the absentee landowners. The households constituting the sample were
chosen among those of the ‘majority wealth layer’, as above. In the case of households ‘buying
labour’ from others (a naturally stigmatized category, although it could include, for instance, widows
with underage children), there was a possible bias, though: if the number of households for each
‘labour category’ in one of the ‘wealth layers’ was identical, then the ‘labour-buying’ households in
question could not serve as a sample, but for this category the commissioners had to look at the
closest upper layer where ‘labour-buying’ households outnumbered the other two categories.
Although this would only have happened in a very few cases, the instructions reflected a bias against
‘labour buyers’. In practice, it would favour the depiction of ‘labour buyers’ as well-off households,
richer than the other categories.
Besides this possible bias, what was the main difference between these first instructions and
the final ones? First, it seems that, in the end, the ‘tails’ of the wealth (landownership) distribution
were not automatically excluded. Second, the order of priority is inverted: households were first
classified on the basis of their ‘labour status’, then on the basis of their landownership. The effect of
these two changes would be mixed: it is not possible to be positive as to whether method would lead
to stronger distortions.
Objects of inquiry
Although agriculture constituted the most important object of inquiry, as reflected (both qualitatively
and quantitatively) in the final publication, the Karp commission equally scrutinised other aspects:
industry, credit, trade, the situation of co-operatives, “cultural and educational institutions”, and
party and Soviet institutions. Indeed, the last aspect (Soviet and Party construction) was only
included in the first three monograph volumes of The Modern Village, because otherwise it would
have sounded repetitive – or so claimed the authors. The volumes also contained occasional
historical and ethnographic sketches.
A 1927 review in the official journal of the Central Asian Economic Council (SredAzEkoSo),
however, considered this abundance of foci as the major shortcoming of the inquiry and of its
publications. The industry, Party, etc. were described on the basis of interviews with representatives
of specific institutions. These representatives, though, were seldom questioned individually: more
often, the commissioner listened to more than one at the same time.56 In good or bad faith, this
practice inevitably meant that the speakers were the victims of some kind of social pressure. This
may have led to more complete information, but biased or incomplete judgments.
In the case of agriculture, commissioners and their assistants, having identified their sample
households through the procedure described above, studied their economic life throughout one year
using a typical budget form [anketa], the form of which had been long consecrated. The choice of
studying the budgets from March to March (1922-23 in SAGU’s inquiries, 1924-25 in Karp’s) was
quite sensible. Not only it corresponded to the natural cycle of the agricultural year, but it also made
interviews with the local peasants easier. “March to March” meant from one sowing to the next, and
at the same time “from one Nowruz to the next”, as Foteev acknowledged – Nowruz (March 21st)
being the beginning of the new year according to the solar Iranian calendar. Although changes in the
capital stock or patrimony of each sample households were recorded separately when they occurred,
in the final publication of the results this aspect went lost: expenses and gains were re-classified and
only the sum for the year was reported in the published budget tables. The tables in this section of
The Modern Central Asian Village also allow a glimpse in prices, although other sources would
probably provide more details, especially in order to assess seasonal cycles. Nonetheless, in the case
of consumption, a breakup in different goods is sometimes available. We can therefore know, for
instance, how many kilos of dried apricots a household did produce, and how many of them were
destined to self-consumption.
These pieces of information are very important in view of the reconstruction of a reliable
average ‘basket’ of consumers’ goods for Central Asia in this period, which was of course different
from that of the European parts of the USSR usually based to calculate fluctuations in the general
level of consumers’ prices and provide estimated of peasants’ incomes from the sale of agricultural
products. Moreover, the budgets allowed the estimation of a household’s dependence from the
market for its subsistence or, inversely, the rate of marketed agricultural production on its total (in
kind). The latter, also known as ‘market-orientedness’ or ’marketability’ (in Russian, tovarnost’)
depended on an array of factors: the crop mix, in particular, but also the structure of relative prices at
a specific time, the household’s internal consumption, etc. In Central Asia though, a high tovarnost’
coincided (and somehow symbolised) the prevalence of cotton culture on food crops; indeed, this
dependence from the market could bring about tragic consequences in case of abrupt interruption of
grain shipments (as during the revolution and civil war) or when wheat prices peaked, whatever the
reason (as in the summer and autumn of 1925, for instance).
Was attention to tovarnost’ a specifically Soviet or a ‘colonial’ trait? It is impossible to
answer univocally: it is true that the Soviet State in the 1920s was obsessed, with some reason, by
‘grain marketings’ and the extraction of surplus from the countryside. Nonetheless, the study of
tovarnost’ was quite present before the revolution, both in European Russia and in Central Asia,
When looking at Turkestan, tovarnost’ was a synonym of progress, embodying the integration of this
region in the Russian empire and in the world market and the advance from ‘natural economy’ to
‘monetary economy’. It is not by chance that the term tovarnost’ was often used interchangeably
with denezhnost’ – itself a derivate from the root of “money” [den’gi]. Indeed, the authors of The
Modern Central Asian Village also use the term tovarnost’ with a positive connotation or, at least,
lamented the regression into a non-monetary economy after 1917.
4. The Karp commission and its critics
First doubts
The original plans of the ‘second’ Karp commission, whose activity took place after the endorsement
of the SredAzBiuro, were already reduced in comparison to what the ‘first’ Karp commission had
envisaged. The ‘first’ commission had decided to study seventeen districts [volosti],57 while the
‘second’ first expressed the ambition to study twenty of them (including four villages in
Tajikistan).58 Soon it limited itself to sixteen: nine of them in Uzbekistan, three in the Kirghiz
autonomous republic, and four in Turkmenistan. We know that the Turkmen republic would pull out
of this inquiry to carry out its own before the end of 1925. Publication plans reflected this focus on
the Uzbek SSR: the first six volumes concerned this republic; there followed two volumes on
districts located in the Kirghiz cantons of Osh and Pishpek, and then two more volumes on localities
in the Uzbek SSR. This publication program fell short of the original scope by one fourth. Moreover,
even though all volumes carry the date of 1927, last four volumes did not exist in print at the end of
that year.59
The first criticisms to the work of the Karp commission emerged when it had become clear
that the latter was going to cost more than one had initially thought. We already know how Karp was
looking for money at the end of 1925. Illustrating the costs of the commission one year after it had
started its work, Karp performed a samokritika (self-critique), explaining what were the limits of the
commission’s results. In particular, he seemed sceptical about the possibility to extend the results
obtained for single villages (however ‘typical’) to entire districts, because some “economic markers”
(in Karp’s words) had weighed more in the sampling operation. Even before publication and despite
the commission’s financial hardships, Karp adopted a very low profile in describing his own work.60
57 UpolSTO commission for the inquiry of the village, minute, no. 4, 24.2.1925, TsGARUz, f. r-1, op. 1, d. 305, ll. 3-4. 58
Organisational plan for the inquiry of the Central Asian village and aul’, [after mid-March 1925], TsGARUz, f. r-1, op. 1, d. 305, ll. 126-138, here l. 127.
59 Cherdantsev, “Kriticheskii ocherk”. 60
And he did well: as anticipated above, the first ‘semi-official’ review of his commission’s
work was far from a panegyric. Writing for the official organ of the Central Asian Economic
Council, the agriculture specialist Cherdantsev lamented methodological shortcomings, without
nevertheless commenting on the results of the inquiry itself. Those shortcomings were triggered by
the asymmetry between the commission’s goals and the time and means this had at its disposal.
Cherdantsev pointed at the striking differences in quality between different sections of the inquiry, as
well as the different relative importance of each scrutinised aspect (industry, educational institutions,
etc.) in various monograph studies. Above all, he stigmatised the inadequacy of methods used to
assess sectors other than agriculture: while for the latter the commissioners could rely upon the long
experience of zemstvo statistics, nothing similar was available for the study of industry, or even less
for the assessment of ‘Soviet socialisation’ through schools, hospitals, and so on.61
Poslavskii’s critique
Despite being a “consultant” of the Karp commission, Yurii M. Poslavskii would distance himself
from some of their methods. He is the probable author of a long (144-page) typed essay titled “The
characteristics of the agrarian question in Central Asia” or “The agrarian structure of Central Asia”
and based, as the sub-titled made clear, on “the materials of the commission for the inquiry of the
village and aul”. This text was submitted to the Central Asian Bureau and, although it is not dated,
the completion of fieldwork in Autumn 1925 constitutes its post quem term. The document is
particularly interesting because it contains some marginalia, probably by the Bureau’s first secretary,
Zelenskii.
In his report, Poslavskii tried to sketch the overall picture of agrarian relations in Central Asia
and draw some policy-relevant conclusions from it. On the contrary, the individual monograph
studies in The Modern Village series limited themselves to a mere description of the situation.
Poslavskii’s report was likely commissioned by the Central Asian Bureau, in whose archive was then
stored. The author had to find answers to some hot questions on the Bureau’s agenda, in particular in
the imminence of the land-and-water reform. We know that, when the inquiry was commissioned,
the reform was in the air, but there was no explicit relation between the two initiatives. Between
March and September 1925, though, when the commissioners were scouting rural districts, the
situation gradually changed, together with its theoretical interpretation.
As summarised by Carr and Davies,62 Lenin had reproduced in 1898 Marx’s idea that, in a
capitalist system, rural society would become polarised. This was not compatible with the troubling
presence of “middling peasants” in the Russian countryside. The revolution, leading to a vast
equalisation in landownership (at least in Russia proper), made polarisation still more improbable:
yet, the New Economic Policy, with the rapid demographic and economic recovery it brought about
by 1925, seemed to encourage “differentiation”. The existence of poor hired labourers was at the
same time an issue to be solved in the ideal socialist society, and, as a symptom of “differentiation”,
a necessary precondition of socialist revolutionary change. The debate on “differentiation”, its
existence, and whether it should be encouraged or levelled out, was theoretically thick in 1925-1927.
This is why the Karp commission had to pay attention to these signs of “differentiation” and
“stratification”, in its final publications even more than in its fieldwork. This was the cultural
background of the commission’s activity and of Poslavskii’s comments to it.
To understand Poslavskii’s remarks and Zelenskii’s reaction one should also look at Party
politics in 1925. In the same days as the 3rd all-Union congress of Soviets, which was asking for
more attention to the peasant economy and raising the issues of rural over-population and land
consolidation [zemleustroistvo], the Political Bureau [Polibiuro] of the all-Union Party central
committee examined agrarian relations in Central Asia twice, albeit cursorily. On May 15th,
Zelenskii proposed and obtained the constitution of a commission “on Central Asian affairs”
including himself and ten other members. Among them there were the representatives of Uzbekistan
and Turkmenistan (Fayzulla Khodjaev and Nusrotulla Maksum), the STO regional plenipotentiary
Shelekhes, the deputy head of the central planning commission (Gosplan) Ivar T. Smilga, the deputy
head of VSNKh Emmanuil I. Kviring, and the deputy people’s commissar for war Iosef S.
Unshlikht.63 Then, on May 21st, Zelenskii and Molotov presented to the Polibiuro a joint report on
agrarian relations.64 It was Zelenskii’s second report on this topic, after the one at the 6th Plenum of
the Central Asian Bureau, but it seems that the session was dominated by Molotov. It was then
agreed that the Central Asian Bureau would present its own proposals on the occasion of the Plenum
of the central committee. So, mid-June, the executive commission of the Central Asian Bureau asked
the Uzbek and Turkmen communist parties to provide their own proposals on the land question, to be
further discussed.65 Zelenskii would then report to the Politbiuro of the central committee on
September 24th, this time not on “agrarian relations” but on the “land reforms” (note the plural) in
62 E.H. Carr – R.W. Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, vol. 1, part 1, London, Macmillan, 1969, pp. 18-23. 63 Politbiuro, protokol, 15.5.1925, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 163, d. 490, l. 23.
64
Politbiuro, protokol, 21.5.1925, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 163, d. 491, l. 39.
Central Asia.66 This was the kick-off, in Moscow, of the process leading to the land-and-water
reform, implying the shift from an ‘intellectual’ interest in land relations to a commitment to change,
which included political mobilisation, propaganda, and financial planning. Poslavskii wrote his
report – and Zelenskii read it – on the event of either of the latter’s two reports to the Politbiuro (May
21st or September 24th). Knowing how slowly the Karp commission worked, the second option is
more likely. Zelenskii wanted a theoretical basis for the land reform, which was now on the Party’s
agenda: Poslavskii instead wrote an essay on “the agrarian structure” of the region.
Poslavskii was refractory to the classification of the rural population on the basis of
semi-automatic operational definitions, based on the acreage of land possessed. The commission itself had
hesitated between “wealth (landownership) layers” and “labour categories” as a first criterion of
classification and sampling. While sharing some of the commission’s theoretical basis (e.g.
Kazhanov’s rayonirovanie), Poslavskii demolished many of its results. First, he insisted on the
impossibility to use categories typical of the European parts of the Soviet Union to explain social
relations in Central Asia.67 In particular, he defined land as a factor of production: from there, he
inferred that land could not be considered separately from capital and, conversely, that the farming
household’s capital (especially draught animals and agricultural implements) should be central, and
not peripheral, as it happened in The Modern Central Asian Village. Hence, according to Poslavskii,
“the presence of landless households, small landowners, households renting or letting land does not
by all means signify either rural over-population or social differentiation in the village”.68 In Fergana
the cleavage between those who gave and those who took land for rent was transversal to any
classification based on possessed land. In the district of Balykchi – he wrote – peasants were so poor
that they would sell their land in kind, for a “handful” of grain. Poverty consisted in the lack of
capital: some peasants, who had some land but no ox, would rent their plots out in exchange for food
and capital, but still till the land themselves and give up all the harvest.69
Poslavskii seemed also to be tolerant of the presence of land rent and big landownership:
talking about the region surrounding Tashkent, he lamented that large plots of land lay fallow and
were unproductive because land rent was discouraged by Soviet power, while their redistribution
would have neither allowed equalisation, nor triggered growth: quite on the contrary, it would have
66 This first report led to the creation of another commission, to report to the Politbiuro on the same topic one week later,
whne the Politbiuro decided to take on this issue from the agenda of the central committee. Politbiuro, protokol, 24.9.1925, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 163, d. 507, l. 34; Politbiuro, protokol, 1.10.1925, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 163, d. 508, l. 18.
67
Dopolnenie k ocherku t. Poslavskogo ‘Agrarnyi stroi v Srednei Azii’ po materialam komissii po obsledovaniu kishlaka, RGASPI, f. 62, op. 2, d. 217, l. 3.
68 Kharakeristiki agrarnogo voprosa v Srednei Azii po dannym komissii po obsledovaniu kishlaka i aula, [Summer 1925],
RGASPI, f. 62, op. 2, d. 217, l. 53.
badly affected agricultural production.70 In the district of Kitab (Qashqa-Darya), the kulaki – if one
needed to identify them – would rather be searched, and found, among landless households, than
among large landowners: one would find them in the local bazaars, selling fruit, wheat, and other
agricultural goods which were traded privately.71 “Labour-selling” and “labour-buying” categories
were not viable either, because they told nothing about the true reasons for impoverishment: in
non-irrigated, rain-fed areas, small landowners worked as daily labourers because their technique was
primitive, and thus they were incapable of supporting themselves – not because the land was
insufficient.72 Therefore, land redistribution alone made little sense, and land should not be given to
very poor peasants (bednyaki) who lacked all means to cultivate it.73 To those who looked for signs
of capitalistic relations (and consequently “differentiation”) in the Central Asian countryside,
Poslavskii replied that those relations were visible in the dependence from Soviet credit, especially
among landless peasants.74
This explains Zelenskii’s disappointment, expressed in some of the marginalia he scribbled
on the essay. This also explains why Poslavskii’s long report was never published, nor disseminated.
It may even explain why the journal of the Central Asian Economic Council, where book reviews
were usually signed, published in 1926 Poslavskii’s harsh review of Zel’kina’s agitprop booklet on
the land reform in Uzbekistan with his initials only.75 In it, Poslavskii insisted on the same idea:
“differentiation” could not be seen if one looked at the Central Asian countryside through the prism
of landownership. Zel’kina had first attempted a comprehensive sketch of agrarian relations, but
failed to provide a correct analysis of the latter. Zel’kina relied on ‘special surveys’ ordered by the
Uzbek people’s commissariat for agriculture before the beginning of the reform: in this way, she
reproduced the same policy-relevant categories of her sources. Again, some months later the same
journal published Poslavskii’s article “On the agrarian question in the Zeravshan province”, warning
the reader in a footnote that “the editorial board [did] fundamentally [printsipial’no] disagree with
some of the author’s positions” and “the article [was] printed as a contribution to discussion” only.76
Here, the economist insisted on the nature of the relation between city and countryside in the region
of Bukhara, explaining that the latter depended on the former not for trade, but for credit. “The
differentiation took place between different social groups on the basis of social-political power and
70 Ibidem, ll. 106, 114. 71 Ibidem, l. 133. 72
Ibidem, l. 35.
73 Ibidem, l. 6. 74
Ibidem, l. 83.
75 Yu. P[oslavskii], review of: E. Zel’kina, Zemel’naya reforma v Uzbekistane, Tashkent, Uzgosizdat, 1925; Narodnoe
Khoziaistvo Srednei Azii, no. 12-13, January-February 1926, pp. 192-193.
76
