Rural History of Soviet Central Asia: Land Reform and Agricultural Change in Early Soviet Uzbekistan - by Beatrice Penati (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book explains how the new Soviet regime in Uzbekistan balanced political priorities, budgetary constraints, and peasant demands to grapple with Tsarist legacies, alleviate rural poverty through land reform, and achieve quick economic recovery, starting from the cotton sector.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

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

About the Author

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.