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AbstractA variety of wormwood, Artemisia cina, once grew abundantly in the Syr-Darya province of Russian Turkestan. Santonin, a drug derived from it, was in high demand. Flowers harvested by Kazakhs were handed over to intermediaries to be processed in Europe, but from the 1880s entrepreneurs from different parts of the Russian empire established their own chemical plants in Chimkent and Tashkent. They pressured the Russian imperial government to restrict the rights of the Kazakhs on land where Artemisia cina grew, and grant them the exclusive right to exploit this resource. These entrepreneurs used conservationist arguments and advocated a 'cultured' approach to the management of natural resources located on supposedly 'State land'. These attempts collided with the usage rights of the Kazakhs, as defined by Turkestan's governing Statute. By shifting the argument to the political, rather than legal, level, the industrialists eventually gained a monopoly to the exclusion of local entrepreneurs and even assumed State-like functions. This article reconstructs this controversy and allows a glimpse into the evolving claims to natural resources in the 'periphery' by both Tsarist colonial power and the Kazakhs themselves. The article also explores the features of autochthonous and Russian entrepreneurship and situates Turkestan in a web of trade connections to the global pharmaceutical industry.

AbstractThis article analyses the drafting process and underlying principles of early Soviet legislation on water rights and taxation on water in Central Asia. While the new Bolshevik ideology provided an ideal justification to enact the State-centric, technocratic principles implicit in the Tsarist Turkestan "water law" of 1916, it took a very long time for the Soviet regime to produce a comprehensive legislation that would explicitly replace the local pre-existing customs which had survived in the colonial period. This is surprising especially in the light of the continuity in personnel in the government agencies that governed land and water resources across the 1917 revolution. Two possible reasons for this slowness were the early Soviet "decolonisation" imperative and the inertial persuasion that the legislator could not fully grasp the intricacies of water-related rights and duties.

This paper narrates the story of Red Orient (Rus. Krasnyi Vostok; Uz. Qizil Sharq) textile trust (trest). This trust was initially owned by the Bukharan People's Republic, then, after the national delimitation of Central Asia, by the Uzbek SSR. Its activity included all the steps of the added-value chain of industrial transformation of ginned cotton (spinning, twisting, dyeing, finishing, weaving, and printing). Its factories and mills, initially all located in Russia, served as a training ground for the first generation of native Uzbek textile workers while its management participated in the planning and construction of the first cotton textile plant in Fergana towards the end of the decade. Two threads are entangled in this story: first, the day-by-day workings of the New Economic Policy in a small industrial organization; second, the economic side of early Soviet nationality policies. This paper looks at the nitty-gritty aspects of procurements, bookkeeping, audit, and management. It shows how balance sheets were more an item for negotiation and a political weapon, than a diagnostic tool for the efficiency of Red Orient's business. Above all, the story of Red Orient reveals that early Soviet economic policies did not exclude that the Central Asian cotton harvest could be processed by mills owned by the republics themselves, and result in finished textiles for the Central Asian market. The Bukharan (later, Uzbek) governments, either directly or through their representatives in Moscow, confronted all-Union agencies in the name of the "national" nature of the trust, be it to settle complicated debt relations, to reshape the procurement of raw materials, to acquire additional looms and, ultimately, to negotiate the construction of the first textile factory in Fergana. In other words, the republics, as shareholders and eponymous "nations" of the trust, took ownership of its destiny and day-to-day trade and production activities.

This article studies when, how, and by whom the decision to nationalise land properties the rent from which supported mosques, shrines, and hostels (rather than schools) was first taken in Soviet Uzbekistan. Through a quasi-philological reconstruction of the drafting process behind the land reform decree in a peripheral area of Fergana, the article demonstrates how local power dynamics produced incentives for provincial Party and Soviet leaders to prove themselves better Bosheviks than their neighbours. A close scrutiny of chains of command is essential for capturing the importance of local political agency, pace top-down interpretations that privilege Moscow's or Samarkand's viewpoints instead.

SUMMARY: In 1927 the Aim canton, which the national delimitation of 1924 had assigned to Kyrgyz Republic, was split in two parts, the larger of which was assigned to the Uzbek SSR. Besides the intrinsic interest of such a redefinition of the frontier, this had the important consequence of precipitating a sort of micro-land reform for this handful of villages only (as Fergana had already undergone) on the basis of a specific decree. First, by projecting the petitions and decisions on the "correction" of the border against this socioeconomic background, the article demonstrates the spread of discursive tropes pertaining to Soviet-style economic development in shaping the "nationalist" rhetoric of a variety of local actors, and argues that such tropes were decisive in making this rhetoric acceptable. Second, by exploring the special case of Aim, which generated abundant documentation, this article reveals the decision-making process at the basis of the land reform, both in general and in this specific locality. In particular, the author highlights the distance between the initial plans and achievements, and manipulations with social categories. Статья посвящена эпизоду национально-территориального раз-межевания среднеазиатских республик СССР в 1920-х гг. В 1927 г. часть территории, вошедшей в качестве кантона в Киргизскую АССР при разграничении 1924 г., была передана в состав Узбекской ССР. Помимо самой проблемы уточнения границ, особый интерес пред-ставляет земельная микрореформа, проведенная в пределах нескольких кишлаков, вошедших в состав Узбекской Республики, на основании специального декрета. Обращения c предложениями об исправлении границ и принятые на их основе решения рассматриваются в ши-роком социально-экономическом контексте, что позволяет выявить роль советских дискурсов экономического развития в формировании националистической риторики на местах. Сама эта риторика станови-лась приемлемой для советской власти благодаря опоре на аргументы экономического характера. Рассмотренный в статье частный случай, хорошо документированный в источниках, позволяет также изучить процесс принятия решений по поводу проведения земельной реформы как в данном конкретном случае, так и в целом. В качестве характерных черт этого процесса автор называет разрыв между первоначальными планами и их воплощением на практике, а также манипулирование социальными категориями.

AbstractJust after the conquest of the Kokand khanate in 1876, the new Russian rulers carried out land surveying and land-tax assessment in the rich and densely populated Fergana province. These "organisation works" constituted the most consistent attempt ever to establish a cadastral system in Russian Turkestan. Differently from what would happen later, they incorporated tentative claims to bring under control the land rights of the Muslim rural population and to internalise the process of land-tax raising. In this context, Russian local officials tested alternative and partly contradictory policies, and their results served as a background experience for the Turkestan Statute of 1886.