Continuities and Novelties in Early Soviet Law-Making about Central Asian Water

In: Journal of the economic and social history of the Orient: Journal d'histoire économique et sociale de l'orient, Band 62, Heft 4, S. 674-730

Abstract

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.