by Artemy M . Kalinovsky (Author)
Artemy Kalinovsky's Laboratory of Socialist Development investigates the Soviet effort to make promises of decolonization a reality by looking at the politics and practices of economic development in central Asia between World War II and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Focusing on the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic, Kalinovsky places the Soviet development of central Asia in a global context.
Connecting high politics and intellectual debates with the life histories and experiences of peasants, workers, scholars, and engineers, Laboratory of Socialist Development shows how these men and women negotiated Soviet economic and cultural projects in the decades following Stalin's death. Kalinovsky's book investigates how people experienced new cities, the transformation of rural life, and the building of the world's tallest dam. Kalinovsky connects these local and individual moments to the broader context of the Cold War, shedding new light on how paradigms of development change over time. Throughout the book, he offers comparisons with experiences in countries such as India, Iran, and Afghanistan, and considers the role of intermediaries who went to those countries as part of the Soviet effort to spread its vision of modernity to the postcolonial world.
Laboratory of Socialist Development offers a new way to think about the post-war Soviet Union, the relationship between Moscow and its internal periphery, and the interaction between Cold War politics and domestic development. Kalinovsky's innovative research pushes readers to consider the similarities between socialist development and its more familiar capitalist version.
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 332
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 15 May 2018
ISBN 10: 1501715569
ISBN 13: 9781501715563
Kalinovsky's work offers rich illustration through the voices of the Tajiks who lived through and participated in the Nurek dam project, and in Tajikistan's wider efforts at development. Laboratory of Socialist Development is an opening salvo for a new focus in central Asian studies-examining the final forty years of Soviet rule in central Asia.
-- Marianne R. Kamp, Associate Professor of Central European Studies, Indiana UniversityKalinovsky foregrounds the competing emotional, as well as ideological and economic, impulses that went into the industrialization effort. His comparison of development in Tajikistan with Third World developmental campaigns is innovative and points to similarities in assumptions and goals between capitalist and communist development economists, which contemporary ideological blinders concealed.
-- Shoshana Keller, Professor of Russian and Eurasian history, Hamilton College, and author of To Moscow, Not MeccaArtemy Kalinovsky has achieved what other scholars have only talked about: using development to link international, domestic political, and social history. Laboratory of Socialist Development shows how Soviet Tajikistan developed, and what that meant for Tajiks, for the Soviet Union, and for the Cold War. A true tour de force.
-- David C. Engerman, Ottilie Springer Professor of History, Brandeis UniversityLaboratory of Socialist Development grapples with how universal ideas were negotiated locally and ultimately reshaped. Throughout the book, Kalinovsky demonstrates how the modernizing paradigm changed, as large-scale investment failed to yield the hoped for result for both European and Soviet modernizers, who sought to recreate European style modernity in the Third World and Central Asia.
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