Constructing Modernity? Vakhshstroi and the Making of Soviet Tajikistan, 1929–39

In the second half of the 19^th century, the Russian Empire's desire for new domestic sources of cotton set into motion a process that would fundamentally change the physical landscape of Central Asia over the course of the 20^th century. The conversion of Central Asian lands into cotton fields required drastic manipulation of the region's water resources through the construction of large-scale irrigation systems. As the physical environment changed, the lives and livelihoods of Central Asians would change along with it. These changes were not incidental. Russians had long seen Central Asian peoples as backward and uncivilized; thus, the remaking of the physical landscape of Central Asia afforded Russians with the opportunity to reform Central Asians themselves.

This paper uses the case of Vakhshstroi as a lens through which to investigate the interplay of Russian notions about Central Asia and Central Asians with Soviet ideas of modernity. Vakhshstroi was an immense hydraulic project undertaken by the Stalinist administration in the Vakhsh River valley in southern Tajikistan in the 1930s. The aims of the project were twofold: to make the Vakhsh valley the cotton-growing base of the Soviet Union and at the same time transform Tajikistan into a modern Soviet republic and its people into modern Soviet citizens. Vakhshstroi was thus to serve not only as a visible symbol of modern progress and socialist construction, but also as a forge for new Soviet men and women. The paper seeks to determine why the project was largely a failure, both from a technological and an ideological point of view, and to draw larger conclusions from the case of Vakhshstroi about the nature of Stalinist rule in Central Asia, a multiethnic frontier region far from the governing core.