Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History

Generations of Tajik Economists

The growth of economics as a profession within Tajikistan began in the late 1940s with the creation of Tajik State University and the local branch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences becoming a semi-independent institution. But it really took off in the early 1960s, when political changes and the demands of industrialization created the demand for more competent cadres to take part in planning at all levels. The development of a “national” economy thus produced the need for specialists to oversee it, who then used their positions to articulate new visions for that economy. Furthermore, the growth of regional and republican social science tracked, and was connected to, the Soviet Union’s engagement with the Third World during this era.

Khrushchev’s power struggles and engagement with the Third World opened up opportunities for Central Asian leaders to challenge some of the terms of their economic relationship with Moscow. In the case of Tajikistan, this meant securing Moscow’s commitment to the construction of the giant Nurek Dam as the first step toward the industrialization of southern Tajikistan. Indeed, the Soviet domestic periphery was being shaped by Moscow’s engagement with the international periphery, in cultural as well as economic terms.¹⁸ The economics profession, meanwhile, had already gotten a boost during the 20th Party Congress (which also saw the reinvigoration of oriental studies as a discipline that could be useful in the anticolonial struggle) and at the 21st Party Congress in 1959. Party leaders called on economists to improve their efforts and integrate their views into planning. Economists in Moscow used this call to expand old institutes and create new ones, a process that was [End Page 591] then repeated in the republics.¹⁹ Economic “sectors” within the republican academies were transformed into full-fledged institutes. Among the main tasks for Tajikistan’s institute, created in 1963, was research on the placement of productive forces within Central Asia, the rational use of labor, and patterns of economic development in a communist society.²⁰

Most teachers of economics in Dushanbe in the late 1950s were from the European republics of the USSR. Young Tajik economists who wanted to do graduate work had to go to either Leningrad, Moscow, or Tashkent. Among these scholars was Ibadullo Kasimovich Narzikulov. Born in Samarkand in 1909, Narzikulov had an ideal Soviet biography. His father, a craftsman, died when Ibadullo was 4, and the future economist entered the workforce at age 13. He joined the Komsomol in 1925, at age 16, and the Communist Party in 1929. Soon afterward, he went to Leningrad to study engineering at the M. I. Kalinin Industrial Institute, which he completed in 1935. For the next 11 years he worked in Tajikistan’s Gosplan, ultimately becoming its chairman. In 1946, he left Gosplan to pursue a research career, completing a dissertation at the Institute of Economics at the Academy of Sciences on “The Development of Socialist Industry in Tajikistan.” In 1954, Narzikulov became the rector of Tajik State University and, simultaneously, the first chairman of the Department of Industrial Economy. In subsequent years he would play a leading role in the development of the Academy of Sciences and the Council on the Study of Productive Forces (SOPS) within it. He also returned to working in Gosplan, combining his research and practical interests.²¹ By 1963, Narzikulov was seen as “one of the most qualified” economists in Tajikistan and recommended for further graduate work (doktorantura), qualifying him to supervise graduate students and thus develop his own “school” within the republic.²² Narzikulov appears to have had a close relationship with Nikolai Nikolaevich Nekrasov (1906–84), a planner and economist who worked in the all-union SOPS and was known, among other things, for his work on [End Page 592] regional planning and for encouraging local scholars and planning bodies to play an active role in policy debates.²³

Between the late 1950s and his death in 1973, Narzikulov pursued work on three fronts: developing the field of economics within Tajikistan, mobilizing economists to improve planning within the republic, and boosting the republic’s voice within central planning organs. In the early 1960s, he helped create a working group to develop proposals for the Eighth Five-Year Plan (1966–70).²⁴ He also organized studies on the economic possibilities opened up by the construction of the Nurek Dam.²⁵ These issues continued to be the focus of Narzikulov’s work in the last decade of his life. In this period, he also turned increasingly to the problem of labor and its relation to the issue of territorial planning.²⁶

Narzikulov’s overarching goal was to convince Soviet planners that Tajikistan could and should be transformed into an industrial republic. While opponents of industrialization argued that the republic’s poor transport links and lack of existing infrastructure made it a poor candidate for investment, its supporters pointed to the many features that did make the republic a favorable target for an industrialization program. A survey undertaken by the Academy of Sciences in the early 1930s had identified vast deposits of various metals and potential for further industrialization in both the North and the South of the country.²⁷ In fact, as of the early 1950s, the only sector of the economy substantially developed was cotton growing. (One of the arguments against building the Nurek Dam had been that as an agricultural republic Tajikistan did not need that much electricity).²⁸ Having worked in the planning organizations himself, Narzikulov understood the importance of countering such perceptions when it came to lobbying for resources and investment. One of Narzikulov’s projects was an Atlas of the Tajik SSR, which [End Page 593] appeared in 1968.²⁹ At 200 pages, the atlas contained maps and detailed information regarding the natural resources of the republic. By all accounts, the atlas was one of Narzikulov’s main priorities in this period, and it can be seen as a work of counterrepresentation meant to popularize the idea of a Tajikistan as a land wealthy in resources and ripe for investment. Narzikulov also published a work called Lenin and the Development of the Productive Forces of the Soviet State, in which he connected the founding leader’s views on placement of industry with the logic of developing industry in Tajikistan itself.³⁰ Like the atlas, the book was intended to reach a wider audience within the republic and perhaps the USSR as a whole. Although a work intended for the general reader rather than an academic audience, it articulated the kind of political claims that republic-level economists would make from the early 1960s onward.

Narzikulov also helped mentor a new generation of economists who continued his work. Rashid Rahimov, who had grown up in the North, studied at the Plekhanov Academy in the 1950s, worked briefly at the closed “nuclear city” of Chkalovsk near where he grew up, then began graduate work at the academy. Although Narzikulov, whose main institutional base at the time was the university, was unable to supervise his thesis, Rahimov credited Narzikulov for helping him find a topic and mentoring and encouraging him to pursue the work. Rahimov defended his dissertation in 1958, and in 1963 he became the director of the newly founded Institute of Economics, remaining in the post until 1993.³¹ Another Narzikulov student, Nazarali Honaliev, continued his mentor’s inquiries into labor and planning and wrote a number of works arguing for industrial territorial planning to better reflect the population distribution within the republic. Born in the Shugnan District of Badakshan in 1940, Honaliev graduated from Tajik State University’s Economics Faculty in 1965, worked for several years in the Human Resources Department of Shirin, a candy factory in Dushanbe, then went to work for SOPS, simultaneously pursuing graduate work under Narzikulov. After Narzikulov’s sudden death in 1973, Honaliev had to defend his dissertation in Kazakhstan—a reflection of how much Narzikulov still dominated the study of economics in Tajikistan and the subfields relating to labor, population, and [End Page 594] planning in particular.³² Other young economists continued their graduate work at the Institute of Economics in Moscow.

By the late 1960s, Tajik economists had already become established as a professional group with a recognized academic status and a strong voice in policy debates.³³ Their influence is clear when we see how their ideas filter into policy documents, as well as how their findings are directly cited in correspondence with central planning institutions. Indeed, one criticism from colleagues at the Academy of Sciences in Moscow was that Tajik economists were being so drawn into planning debates they had little time for more theoretical research.³⁴ Crucially, while it is often alleged that postwar Tajikistan was dominated by an elite from the republic’s North that ignored the needs of its South and East, these economists showed no signs of such “regionalism.”³⁵ In their research and recommendations, scholars from various regions, as well as those who came from outside the republic, tried to think of Tajikistan as a whole.³⁶

Labor, Industry, and Population

Population and labor issues were one of the main concerns of Tajik economists in this period. For developing countries and development specialists, large populations could be seen as either a blessing or a curse. In the neo-Malthusian view, a large and rapidly growing population made raising standards of living all but impossible—a conclusion that would lead some countries to adopt birth control and even forced sterilization.³⁷ For others, including the influential economist Arthur Lewis, a large agricultural population provided ideal conditions for industrialization, as capitalists could take advantage of low labor costs.³⁸ Within the USSR, the population debate became increasingly important in the postwar period. Even as population growth slowed or fell [End Page 595] to negative levels in the Baltic republics and the RSFSR, it was booming in Central Asia and parts of the Caucasus. What was the proper policy prescription? According to some demographers based in Moscow, a unified policy for the entire USSR made little sense, since it would either encourage population growth in regions with an “excess” supply of labor or discourage it in regions where the birth rate was already falling. A differentiated policy, in contrast, was politically difficult, and indeed generally opposed by Central Asian scholars and politicians, since they saw the subsidies provided to large families as an important tool for raising living standards.³⁹

The population problem looked different from Moscow than it did from Dushanbe or Tashkent. For Moscow-based demographers, the Soviet Union was divided into three zones: a western zone (where industry was located but the labor force was shrinking), an eastern zone (Siberia, which contained great mineral and hydrocarbon wealth and seemed to represent the greatest opportunity for future development), and the southern zone—Central Asia and parts of the Caucasus, which were relatively underdeveloped but had booming populations.⁴⁰ Ideally, people would move from the southern zone to the eastern zone, where they were most needed.

For Tajik economists, however, the question was not so much how to move the population to the European regions of the USSR or to Siberia but rather how to engage them in productive industry within the republic itself. Like their counterparts in other Central Asian republics, Tajik economists were concerned with how to ensure a rising standard of living for a rapidly growing population while drawing that population into the industrial workforce. This did not mean that they rejected the benefits of migration for the Soviet economy or even for Tajiks themselves. On the contrary, their plans presumed that young Tajiks would go to work in enterprises across the USSR, eventually bringing their skills back to their home republic. However, they did not see migration as solving the broader problem of living standards in the republic; moreover, they believed that Tajikistan possessed sufficient natural resources to justify using the labor force closer to home. These issues were at the heart of Narzikulov’s own research and that pursued by his students. Already in 1964, Narzikulov [End Page 596] had argued that Tajikistan and Central Asia were ideal locations for industrial development precisely because of their rapidly growing population and labor force. At a time when the Soviet Union was facing an increasing imbalance in its labor supplies, Narzikulov offered an easy solution: “In the future, the labor resources of Tajikistan and all of Central Asia will greatly increase thanks to the rapid natural growth of the population, and the introduction … particularly into agriculture, of complex mechanization, automatization, and the decrease in the share of the population not engaged in material production. This means that even the rapid growth of the economy is not going to lead to problems in satisfying the demand for labor resources.”⁴¹ Since Tajikistan and Central Asia had ample labor, which the more developed regions lacked, this fact justified industrialization.

Narzikulov would return to these themes repeatedly in the following decade, as would his students. By examining their work, we get a sense of how they evaluated the pros and cons of investment within the republic. For example, Nazarali Honaliev took up the issue of labor and industrial location in his dissertation.⁴² Using a formula offered by A. A. Ivanchenko in a 1964 publication to calculate the effectiveness of industrial location,⁴³ Honaliev compared the effect of placing a shoe factory in northern Kazakhstan (rich in resources, but sparsely populated), eastern Siberia (the location of prospective consumers, but also sparsely populated), and Kurgan-Tiube, a small city in densely populated southern Tajikistan. He showed that despite its distance from customers and raw materials, the last offered an opportunity to build the most efficient plant, primarily because of the abundant labor and cheap electricity available. Honaliev then went on to argue that the emphasis on developing light industry in southern Tajikistan had provided employment mostly for women, leaving fewer job opportunities for men. Tajikistan, Honaliev concluded, needed more machine-building and metal-processing plants, and it had the electricity and labor resources to make them effective. His starting point, however, was not the economic rationale for the plants but rather the need to provide employment. He explicitly called the failure to build such plants up to the mid-1970s a mistake and took issue with planners who insisted that Tajikistan lacked workers qualified to staff such industries, insisting that the foundation of a large skilled workforce had already been [End Page 597] laid. He concluded with an extensive list of industries and factories that could be built to draw Tajiks into the workforce.

Like most of their counterparts in the Soviet Union, these economists rejected the idea that the booming population was a problem: they saw the population as a resource, not a curse. Yet they were also committed modernizers who believed that industrialization and education would transform the consciousness of Central Asians and bring them to a new level of cultural development and affluence. For example, at a 1969 conference in Frunze, Narzikulov rejected suggestions from a colleague who advocated government efforts to encourage smaller families by arguing that such reasoning was contrary to the humane goals of a socialist society; moreover, Central Asia’s potential was so great that it could generate economic growth that outpaced population growth.⁴⁴ Yet Narzikulov firmly believed that only by drawing this population into the industrial workforce could their cultural and material lives be improved, a view shared by most of his colleagues into the 1970s and 1980s.

The views of these economists, and the regional political leaders who generally supported them, were similar to those of colonial and postcolonial elites in places like India.⁴⁵ Industrialization was not just an end in itself but a path to raising standards of living for the population. The socialist state was an instrument for the pursuit of development. It was also, as local politicians and scholars like Narzikulov at times reminded Moscow, an instrument for overcoming the colonial legacy. (We will examine some of the possible mechanisms for influencing policy available to these scholars below.) Yet while the state may have been an instrument of development, development was clearly one of the things that legitimized communist rule, especially on the periphery. As we will see, once the consensus on development began to come apart in the 1980s, it cast doubt on the very legitimacy of Soviet rule.

Equality and Industrialization

Economists, planners, and party leaders who argued for the industrialization of Tajikistan assumed that industrialization would lead to higher standards of living as peasants left the relatively low paying work in collective farms for the more cultured world of the factory. By the late 1960s, as Tajikistan seemed to be falling behind the rest of the union, they began to question this premise. How were equality and standard of living to be understood? [End Page 598] Was equality simply a question of electricity or industrial production per unit of population? Such questions—and the shortcomings of the Lewis model of development—had already led Western experts and even the World Bank under its director, Robert McNamara, to change their understanding of what was meant by “development,” moving beyond indicators like GDP growth to focus on questions of poverty, inequality, and eventually “basic needs.”⁴⁶ Just as disappointment with the 1960s “development decade” led to a paradigm shift in international development thought, disappointment with the “industrialization decade” in the USSR led scholars and planners to rethink their earlier assumptions and look for new tools to understand the causes behind the lack of change.

The Nurek Dam and the development that flowed from it was also part of a push to raise living standards in Central Asia and bring them into line with those of the wealthier Soviet republics. Electrification, industrialization, and education all had a role to play. Indeed, industrialization had spurred the development of economics within the Central Asian republics in the 1950s and 1960s, and economists in the republics became active proponents of industrialization. In particular, they argued that industrialization was crucial to achieving equality across the Soviet Union, bringing the level of development in relatively backward regions into line with those of the most developed parts of the USSR. To do so, they had to overcome claims by opponents that argued for greater specialization among the republics and against “parallelism” in the placement of industry.

A number of scholars working in the university’s Economics Faculty studied the relationship of industrialization to the standard of living of the republic’s population.⁴⁷ For example, B. G. Schii, who taught in the university’s Economic Faculty, argued that bringing Tajikistan closer to the levels of other republics would involve continued industrialization not just in the existing cities but throughout the republic, as well as a development of agriculture that focused not just on cotton but on horticulture and viniculture.⁴⁸ Elsewhere, Schii connected the argument about regional equality under socialism to the placement of industry within republics. Taking issue with [End Page 599] Soviet authors who assumed that equality across region was a law (zakon) of socialism, Schii insisted that it was only a pattern (zakonomernost´). While celebrating the great gains Tajikistan had made since the October Revolution, he also highlighted ways in which it remained behind the rest of the union, a backwardness that would be eliminated only in the context of planning that rejected narrow specialization for a given republic and instead developed all fields of the economy permitted by a region’s resources.⁴⁹ Schii, like many of his colleagues, was underlining the fact that the Soviet Union’s claim to being truly anticolonial was not to be taken for granted; rather, it was the task of the union to overcome inherited inequalities. In his insistence on developing industry within the republic and going beyond “narrow specialization,” he also echoed the views of contemporaries like Raul Prebisch, who were making similar arguments about countries participating in the world economy: namely, that specialization benefited advanced economies much more than peripheral commodity-producing ones.

In the early 1970s, Tajik economists began to focus more on consumption as an indicator of the USSR’s success (or lack thereof) in achieving the kind of broad-based equality the system promised. In a wide-ranging article that appeared in 1970 in the Izvestiia Akademii nauk Tadzhikskoi SSR, the flagship journal for social science research in the republic, Rahimov (the head of the Institute of Economics) and Ia. T. Bronstein (his one-time student, who had trained in Leningrad and then in Dushanbe) addressed a number of questions relating to the further development of Tajikistan.⁵⁰ They covered many of the themes that were already being explored by Narzikulov and others working in the republic’s institutions, including the importance of bringing women into the workforce, but their central concern was the question of regional equality [End Page 600] and how such equality was to be understood.⁵¹ In part, the article seemed to address the broader community of economists and planners in the Soviet Union. The point, they insisted, was not simply to look at how much each republic was producing, but rather to see how its citizens were living:

One of the most important problems of communist construction is the evening out of economic development among union republics. In particular, for the Tajik SSR, despite the enormous gains in its economic potential, the problem of lifting up the economy to the average for the union and the level of the more developed republics remains. Usually the level of development is judged by the level of national income per inhabitant, according to which the [Tajik] republic is still noticeably behind. Such a comparison of republics in the conditions of a single government requires certain remarks. The essence and goal of evening out the economic development of regions is not in “equal” levels of production, but in equal possibilities for consumption, and equal levels of welfare. And from this point of view, only once we have provided for the population of Tajikistan in the same measure as the populations of other regions and the country as a whole, do we have the right to speak about reaching an equal level of development.⁵²

This was a significant shift even from Narzikulov’s earlier conceptions that largely saw production and standard of living as rising together and took it for granted that industrialization would raise living standards. Bronshtein and Rahimov were careful, however, to point out that theirs was not a call to shift investment priorities—quite the opposite. In the past, Tajikistan had been left behind in its development because it made more sense to industrialize other regions. Now, they argued, it was time to shift attention back to the republic. Raising living standards did not mean dependency; rather living standards could rise even as the republic’s contribution to the broader Soviet economy grew: “Sometimes there is disagreement with this position, pointing to the fact that a lower national income means a smaller contribution into the common effort [obshchee delo] and, therefore, a certain ‘dependency’ of a less economically developed region. This, in our view, is a disputable question … in particular, some of the backwardness in the production of national income by Tajikistan is connected to a significant degree with the fact that we have not developed our natural resources.”⁵³ Rahimov and Bronshtein were [End Page 601] thus arguing that regardless of Tajikistan’s overall contribution to the Soviet economy, the center had a responsibility to ensure the welfare of its citizens on a par with others—especially since, as they suggested, it was the center’s earlier unwillingness to invest in industrialization that had left Tajikistan behind. Once again, the Soviet Union was being called upon to fulfill its promise as a developmental, postcolonial state. Indeed, the following decades would see growing investment in health, education, services, and rural construction.⁵⁴ Although Rahimov and Bronshtein do not appear to have engaged directly with Western writing on this topic, their thinking paralleled that of their Western counterparts, because they were struggling with similar problems.

“You Cannot Study These Things from Moscow”

As the 1960s became the 1970s, the debate on labor began to change within Central Asia and the USSR as a whole. Now it was no longer a question just of creating industry for the republic but of understanding why locals were not joining the workforce.⁵⁵ As late as 1970, party and state officials in Tajikistan regarded the problem as one of inadequate information and directed agencies to organize advertising and meetings calling on youth from the countryside to join the workforce in either the smaller cities or the more developed industrial centers of Dushanbe (the republic capital) and Leninabad.⁵⁶ In the 1970s, however, attention turned to diagnosing why such measures tended to magnify the problem rather than solve it.

Prominent specialists in Moscow were crucial in highlighting the needs for more “local” studies across different disciplines, not just economics. For example, Boris Urlanis, a leading Soviet demographer who frequently alerted officials and the public to the population problems in the European parts of the USSR, also became a vocal critic of how demographic questions were studied. At a meeting of the academy’s social science section in 1968, he complained about the limits of his discipline and the academy’s failure to invest in studying [End Page 602] local processes. “Ethnography is also an important science, and ethnographers also send tens, hundreds, of expeditions to study the ways of life and morals of people who live in prehistoric times. But when the question is about how people are living now, how to deal with the acute demographic situation, how to study the problem with the modern population, no money is provided for this, and the academy is completely indifferent.”⁵⁷ Despite his apparent confusion about what it was ethnographers actually did, Urlanis was making an important point about the shortcomings of demographic knowledge as gleaned from aggregate statistics. His comments were echoed by Nekrasov, the Moscow planner and economist who collaborated closely with Narzikulov. Highlighting the diversity of conditions even within Central Asian republics, Nekrasov argued: “You understand that one cannot study these questions from Moscow. You have to study this question more holistically and in a wider form together with sociological investigations. We have to engage the scholars who are involved with these questions in the union republics.”⁵⁸ Nekrasov and Urlanis thus offered two correctives to the way that Soviet social scientists and planners viewed demographic questions. First, they recognized that the way things looked from Moscow was not how they looked from Dushanbe or Bishkek. Second, they criticized a certain kind of empiricism that was predominant in social science and called for better understanding of social relations through qualitative study. These arguments, it should be underlined, came not from ethnographers and sociologists but from a demographer and an economist.

Such arguments empowered local scholars and contributed to a shift in how questions of labor, population, and planning were studied. To improve their understanding of local conditions, Tajik economists had to turn to a social science just making its reappearance in the Soviet Union, sociology. After suppression under Stalin, the discipline of sociology saw a revival during the Thaw. In the 1970s, according to one of its practitioners, the discipline was constantly under pressure from party officials who were frightened by the consequences of what such research might uncover. The results of studies could be hidden not just from the public but even from some of the leaders. In the meantime, the Party tried to appropriate the discipline by having its organs conducting its own surveys and publishing them in the main academic journal, Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia.⁵⁹ In Kyrgyzstan, a sociological laboratory had already been organized in the mid-1960s, and by [End Page 603] the 1970s it was playing an important role in studying industrial as well as ethnic relations.⁶⁰ In Tajikistan, too, a Sector for Sociological Research was set up at the Academy of Sciences, but the republic had no trained sociologists. Thus “sociological” surveys were carried out primarily by labor economists and researchers based in the Philosophy Department of the Academy of Sciences. Recognizing the importance of sociology for “economic and cultural construction,” the Tajik Central Committee called for the professionalization of the discipline within the academy and within state organs.⁶¹ Ideological control notwithstanding, such studies could undermine the consensus among Tajik planners, suggesting that the reasons that Tajiks were not entering the industrial workforce or moving to cities might be more fundamental than access to education or the placement industry.

The terms of the debate on labor thus began to shift. It was no longer a question simply of developing industry but figuring out how to attract young people to participate in it. What had been taken for granted in the 1960s now merited more detailed study. Although there were no more than a handful of specialists working on this issue, in the 1970s for the first time we see the appearance of studies that try to understand attitudes of youth in the Tajik countryside and their reluctance to move to the cities.⁶² In a study completed in 1974, Sh. Shoismatullaev, a young sociologist of Honaliev’s generation who had trained in Dushanbe and Moscow, researched the attitudes of school graduates in rural Tajikistan and found that few of them expressed any interest in a technical education. Shoismatullaev also looked into the reasons that these young men and women preferred to stay in the countryside and found that while socioeconomic factors were important, the hold of traditional values probably played an even greater role.⁶³ Later, other scholars, like Honaliev, focused their attention on what happened when these young people did join PTUs, either within the republic or in other parts of the USSR.⁶⁴

Shoismatulloev’s articles inaugurated a whole series of studies in Tajikistan that introduced new questions and new vocabulary into the understanding of [End Page 604] labor problems, including the role of “values” and the family in determining life choices.⁶⁵ Inevitably this led to questions about how much rural society had to change to adapt to new circumstances and how much state policy would have to adjust to accommodate itself to reality. If, as some studies showed, rural youth were often deficient in Russian, should PTUs do more teaching in Tajik? Would that leave their graduates unprepared to work in national industries?⁶⁶ These studies convinced scholars there was much more to be learned about how people lived before planning could effectively take cultural factors into account. As one economist complained at a conference in 1974: “We do not know our population well enough. We study and know the economy better than we know the main productive force [i.e., the working-age population]. We have only started studying the influence of national traditions and psychology on the mode of reproduction of the population and the use of labor resources.”⁶⁷

One conclusion that Tajik economists drew was that if the population did not want to move, perhaps it was better to bring development to the population. From the 1930s on, agricultural development in the mountainous republic had been based on the principle of moving mountain dwellers to the valleys. This required massive displacement of peasants in the short term and in the long term often led to conflicts among settlers. In the 1960s, Narzikulov and others began to question the wisdom of this policy. Narzikulov organized a research program within SOPS to study the potential for developing mountain regions. In 1972, he and a colleague presented their first results, pointing out that while the favoring of valleys made sense in an earlier period, the valleys were now overcrowded, while the mountain areas had enormous potential for agriculture and tourism and were in any case more pleasant to live in. They advocated a program of research and investment to prepare some of these districts for modernized agricultural production and even light industry.⁶⁸ Other economists developed this line of thinking, also arguing that industry needed to be located where people were already concentrated.⁶⁹ [End Page 605]

Debating and Planning

Starting in the 1960s, Tajik economists created a body of research that informed debates within the republic and gave the republic’s leaders material that they could use in the ongoing negotiations and debates on planning with the center. Personal connections such as the friendship among Narzikulov, Rahimov, and the influential Nekrasov ensured that local voices got heard. There were also strong institutional links that provided for regular exchanges of information and ideas. For example, SOPS within Tajikistan maintained close relations within its republic Gosplan and with the same institution in Moscow. There were a number of routes, beyond publication, that Tajik economists and planners could use to push their ideas, including discussions of 5-year plans and 15-year development schemes, budget committees within the Supreme Soviet, and party organs.⁷⁰ A review of correspondence on planning from Gosplan and the USSR Council of Ministers shows that not only did the economists’ recommendations inform what politicians and planners from Tajikistan said to Moscow, but that they could also count on a sympathetic hearing. This did not mean that they could get what they wanted, however: their claims on resources had to contend with all-union priorities, as well as more politically powerful neighbors like Uzbekistan.⁷¹ Moreover, by the early 1980s, it was the very idea of local specificity, which Central Asian scholars had helped develop, that was undermining their universalist claims to Soviet development and serving as an argument against investment.

The biggest problem, however, was the “path dependency” that followed from the construction of the Nurek Dam and the subsequent decision to use its electricity to power several industrial giants, including an aluminum factory and a chemical plant. These capital-intensive plants required a relatively small but skilled workforce. To meet production targets, managers [End Page 606] tried to attract experienced workers from across the Soviet Union and proved reluctant, at least in the beginning, to hire locals, especially those from outside the immediate area. Although the ideas of Tajik planners—that industrial placement should be more dispersed to draw in the local population—found support among senior Soviet officials, the decision to build the plants could not be undone. The general preference of Soviet planners for large industrial plants, on the basis that they made for a better investment, often contradicted the broader social goals of the local economists.

In the early 1960s, Khrushchev, troubled by the localism he himself had helped unleash, tried to roll it back by creating institutions that would improve coordination between republics. “Localism” in development had already been attacked before 1961, but between the Tajik “cotton affair”⁷² that year and Khrushchev’s ouster in 1964 it became a particular focus of concern.⁷³ Khrushchev was troubled by the uneven pace of development in the Central Asian republics, on the one hand, and, on the other, by republican leaders’ insistence that new enterprises be located within their own borders. The former was upsetting the political balance and complicating Khrushchev’s political alliances, while the latter led to waste and corruption.⁷⁴ In a lengthy memorandum prepared between trips to the region in 1962, Khrushchev complained that the search for “independence” had gone too far: “in the industry of these republics there is a great deal of unnecessary parallelism … each one would rather do something poorly as long as they can do it themselves.” Khrushchev proposed instead the creation of a single coordinating body for Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan.⁷⁵ This idea was taken up with the creation of the Central Asian Bureau, headquartered in Tashkent, at the end of 1962, and the Central Asian Economic Coordinating Council [End Page 607] (Sovnarkhoz) the following year.⁷⁶ Similar structures were also created for the Caucasus; all were abandoned within months of Khrushchev’s ouster in 1964. At least some Tajik economists seem to have felt that these structures, meant to depoliticize economic decisions at the republic level and channel them through a broader regional framework, were “contrary to Leninist nationality principles.”⁷⁷

Khrushchev’s call for better coordination served as a stimulus for Tajik planners to put together a coordinated long-term program for development. Drawing on the various studies conducted since the 1930s and ideas developed by Nekrasov, Narzikulov, and others, they responded to Khrushchev’s call by offering a long-term program of industrialization and presenting the many advantages Tajikistan possessed across numerous sectors: soil rich in precious metals, and possibly oil and gas; a large working-age population; and most important, the availability of cheap electricity from the Vakhsh Cascade, including Nurek, Rogun, and a series of smaller dams.⁷⁸ The document paid only lip service to interrepublic coordination, promising irrigation and electricity for Tajikistan’s neighbors.⁷⁹ With an appendix that included proposals for dozens of factories, mines, and transport projects, it responded to Khrushchev’s call for better coordination between republics by arguing that southern Tajikistan could be treated as a coherent whole.⁸⁰

This approach seems to have worked, as Tajikistan succeeded in having Moscow recognize the creation of the Southern Tajikistan Territorial-Production Complex. (The term appears to have originated at a meeting of the Central Asia Committee in Dushanbe in 1963, although it was called the “Southern Tajikistan National Economic Complex.”⁸¹ In Soviet planning, such complexes were organized around a particularly rich source of energy (the Vakhsh River, in the Tajik case), to take advantage of a particular [End Page 608] region’s natural and human resources.⁸² The specific contours of the complex remained undefined and would be subject to ongoing negotiation over subsequent decades. At the heart of the debate were different understandings of the ultimate purpose of such a complex, and of industrialization in general.

Party leaders and central planners had been won over to the Nurek project in part because it provided the cheap electricity needed for major aluminum and chemical plants, then considered crucial to Soviet industry as a whole. At least some Tajik leaders preferred a more diversified development that would employ the rapidly growing working-age population. There are two different stories about why the aluminum and chemical plants ended up dominating the early years of the complex’s development, one from archival sources and another from memoirs. According to files in the collection of the USSR Council of Ministers, Tajik leaders tried to lobby Moscow for a reorientation toward light industry and “machine building,” which could be more broadly distributed around southern Tajikistan. (In doing so, of course, they were also following the advice of their leading economists at the time.) The response from Gosplan reads almost like a caricature of Soviet planning: “To use the electricity that would be freed up if the aluminum factory was not built, it would be necessary to construct over ten large machine-building plants. However, the necessary prerequisites for such construction—raw materials, a qualified workforce, and consumers—are currently lacking in Central Asia.”⁸³ The aluminum factory would have to be built because nothing else was going to use up all this cheap electricity. Yet it was precisely to create a qualified workforce and stimulate other industry (that is, create consumers) that Tajik planners and economists like Narzikulov, Rahimov, and Honaliev asked for more diverse investment.

In another version of this story, however, it was Tajik planners themselves who asked for the aluminum factory. According to Kahor Mahkamov (who chaired the republic’s Gosplan in this period and later served as first secretary [End Page 609] of the Communist Party of Tajikistan during the Gorbachev era), Abdullahad Kahorov, the chairman of the Council of Ministers, came to Moscow to lobby for the aluminum factory to be built in Tajikistan rather than Uzbekistan. After winning over Gosplan Chairman Baibakov, who agreed that the cheap electricity provided by Nurek made the placement of the aluminum factory in Tajikistan sensible, the two went to see Aleksei Kosygin, the chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers. Kosygin asked Kahorov whether Tajikistan really needed such a large factory. “It’s most necessary, dear Aleksei Nikolaevich,” Kahorov replied. “How are we going to use up the 2.7 billion kilowatts and 12 billion kilowatt hours that we will produce every year? Of course, to use this energy we need an energy-intensive factory. We will produce so much electricity that we will turn the wheels of the factories, and the welfare of the fatherland will become inevitable. The aluminum factory will become like Nurek, something invaluable, a source of friendship and the brotherhood of the peoples.’”⁸⁴ Kosygin then called Brezhnev and told him the factory should be built in Tajikistan rather than Uzbekistan.

The two versions of this story are not necessarily mutually exclusive.⁸⁵ It is quite possible, for example, that while some Tajik economists and planners preferred more diversified industrialization from the beginning, they also saw the value of a giant like the aluminum plant and understood that without it they might lose Moscow’s interest and willingness to fund Nurek and fulfill their broader dream of an industrialized republic.⁸⁶ If the aluminum plant had gone to Uzbekistan, the dam would have lost one of its main rationales. And the Gosplan document, after all, did not reject the construction of other plants outright—it simply pushed them into the distant future. Tajik planners may have well chosen to secure the aluminum plant now and leave the fight for broader industrialization for another day.

Yet the consequences of this decision would be felt soon. By the mid-1960s, the construction of Nurek was well underway, and work on the aluminum plant was gaining momentum. Both of these required a massive influx of workers from European parts of the USSR, while hiring locals proved to be a challenge. A 1966 report by Gosplan concluded that the migration of workers [End Page 610] from the RSFSR to the Central Asian republics was actually depressing levels of employment among the local population. The more qualified European workers were an important factor in “creating a situation where there is a much higher proportion of the [local] population not engaged in the social economy or in education.” Despite rapid population growth, even in cities that had trouble filling vacancies, “it was difficult to employ young people of the indigenous nationality.”⁸⁷ As the report suggests, the problem was not simply one of Tajiks being unwilling to enter the industrial workforce but also of managers preferring to hire workers they knew had the right skills and would require less training. The internationalist prerogatives of training an indigenous proletariat had to contend with the need to fulfill quotas and plans.

In September 1974, Rahmon Nabiev, chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Tajik SSR, wrote to Kosygin about the Tenth Five-Year Plan (1976–80). His requests reflected what Tajik economists had been saying. He expressed “deep concern” regarding the republic’s relative poverty compared to the rest of the Soviet Union, whether measured by per capita income, industrial production per inhabitant (which had declined from 49.7 percent in 1963 to 37.4 percent in 1973 relative to the union average), the percentage of people employed in industry (4.4 percent), urban living space, or the number of people not involved in “social” production—all this with the highest population growth in the USSR at 3.2 percent per year, with the working-age population expected to grow by 64 percent by 1990. Expanding cotton production further was not an option, Nabiev argued, because there was little land that could be used that was not being used already. Expanding light industry and food industry was also not an option, since raw materials for these industries were not going to expand any more. Nabiev asked Kosygin to speed up the construction of the aluminum and chemical plants. Most important, he asked Kosygin to include a range of factories located near small and medium-size cities, where most of the indigenous working population lived.⁸⁸ Kosygin asked Baibakov to consider Nabiev’s requests in the preparations for the Tenth Five-Year Plan, but it appears that few of them were implemented. Once again, however, we see that the ideas of the economists were indeed not only picked up by the senior politicians in their own republics but even got consideration from officials like Kosygin. [End Page 611]

Preparations for the 1976–90 scheme for the placement of industry provided an opportunity to shift the direction of the republic’s development.⁸⁹ The problem of labor in the “Soviet South” was clearly central to the discussions. Yet planners in Moscow shied away from some of the more difficult questions that had already been raised for at least a decade: a May 1976 comment criticized a draft of the report for assuming that Central Asians and Azeris could be lured to jobs in Siberia.⁹⁰ Planners seemed genuinely stumped by these questions: five months later, V. Kostassov noted that they were still not being addressed in the scheme. While praising the draft for recognizing the “rational placement of industry” as the basic condition for solving regional social problems, including employment, he noted that the basic issues raised in previous years were not addressed. Why was it assumed that Central Asians would move, considering they had proved reluctant to do so? Why was it assumed they would work in “Group A” industries, considering that for the most part these ended up being staffed by Europeans? What would it take for them to actually attend PTUs? Kostassov effectively rejected the claim of Nabiev and the Tajik economists that the solution could come from labor-intensive machine-building industries, instead suggesting that cotton and food processing currently done in other parts of the Soviet Union should be moved closer to the source of raw materials.⁹¹ Although Tajik economists had called for such enterprises too, they believed that light industry alone would not provide enough employment for the republic’s burgeoning population or encourage young people to pursue technical skills.⁹²

Moscow was willing to support the expansion of services and educational institutions, but many officials were growing increasingly skeptical that industrialization would make economic sense or could help solve the local or national labor problem. Narzikulov’s argument from the early 1960s, that the republic’s booming population made it a favorable target for development, was being turned on its head. Since the Tajiks were unwilling to join the [End Page 612] industrial workforce, it made little sense to build industry with a view to hiring them.

The arguments of these skeptics in union planning organs found support among scholars who took the idea of “local particularism” to a new level. In 1982, a series of articles by the ethnographer Iulian Bromlei appeared in some of the leading theoretical and scholarly journals of the Soviet Union. Bromlei, a historian by training (he graduated from Moscow State University in 1950), was a specialist on the South Slavic peoples and had led the Institute of Ethnography since 1966.⁹³ In one piece co-authored with Ovsei Shkaratan, a fellow ethnographer, and published in Sovetskoe gosudarstvo i pravo, he engaged the issue of labor and the problem of industrialization in Central Asia and the Caucasus.⁹⁴ The article contained a thinly veiled critique of the entire Soviet development approach and a direct critique of a number of Soviet economists. The construction of factories and technical colleges failed to draw the local population into the workforce, the authors pointed out. The problem, they felt, was the failure to take national traditions into account in determining industrial policy. This not only perpetuated the problem of people not joining the workforce but made them inefficient even when they did so. The details of the argument are beyond the scope of this article, but the key point is their insistence that populations will only be drawn into industries that reflect their own traditions. The article did not so much offer a program (in fact, the authors state explicitly that they did not have one) as articulate a research agenda. It explicitly linked the challenges facing the USSR internally with those of the developing world. Finally, it pointed to the success of Western anthropologists in studying native traditions in countries where the capitalist mode of development was being promoted.⁹⁵ It is not clear how influential the article was, but it seems that at least someone in the leadership agreed with its views: Bromlei and Shkaratan made a similar argument in Voprosy ekonomiki only a few months later, and Bromlei published yet another piece in Kommunist, the party’s key theoretical journal, in May 1983.⁹⁶

Whether or not the articles themselves were widely read, however, the ideas they contained were dangerous: they undermined the idea that there was a developmental path open to all peoples. Earlier attempts to learn more about [End Page 613] “local conditions” by, for example, bringing ethnography and sociology into economic planning assumed that knowledge to be gained from such research could help find the best path to an endpoint that looked more or less similar for everyone. Bromlei and his supporters dismissed this reasoning, simultaneously challenging the Marxist notion that economic conditions determined culture. Such ideas divided economists within Central Asia. Even before the publication of Bromlei’s first article, some in Uzbekistan, for example, seemed to have reached the same conclusions independently, arguing that local traditions meant that Uzbek farmers had a better chance to improve their lot by staying in the countryside and using handicrafts to supplement their income. Tajik economists, however, seemed largely to oppose this idea, insisting that the problem of bringing labor into industry was exaggerated and that it was impossible to improve the standard of living if the rural population kept increasing. As Rahimov argued, accepting the view that Central Asians were best suited for cottage labor rather than heavy industry would also endanger other aspects of the Soviet modernization and social welfare program, including access to education, as parents who were engaged in cottage and agricultural labor would prefer to keep children at home where they could contribute to the household economy.⁹⁷ As stated at the beginning of this article, Rahimov spoke from experience, and he could hardly believe that encouraging cottage labor was now being advocated as actual policy.⁹⁸

The idea that Central Asians were too different had taken hold too deeply, and now had the backing of some well-regarded scholars. As one economist who was also a senior official in the Tajik Gosplan complained in 1981, “We need to overcome this psychological barrier in ministries, offices, and research organizations, where they think that in Central Asia people do not want to work and the industrial enterprises are idle and people are idle.”⁹⁹ Indeed, a 1984 memo on economic reform prepared for Gorbachev noted the futility of investing in the kind of industry Central Asian planners requested, since the local population was only interested in “traditional production” and refused to join the industrial workforce.¹⁰⁰ Tajik politicians, meanwhile, seem to have despaired about having a broader, localized industrialization take place. In reality, what they wanted contradicted Moscow’s priorities in the 1970s and early 1980s, when the political impetus for developing industry in [End Page 614] these republics faded and “efficiency” and “quality” became the watchwords. The developmentalist strategy pursued by Tajik economists did not fit neatly with these priorities.¹⁰¹

This “crisis of faith” in Soviet development at home was matched by a growing disappointment in Soviet development efforts abroad. By the late 1970s, the optimistic Soviet vision of development for the Third World had begun to crumble. Soviet leadership was challenged by several concurrent developments: Chinese assertion of a global role, on the one hand, and the emergence of “dependency theory” and a new international politics that emphasized the divide between the North and the South rather than the East and the West.¹⁰² At the same time, Soviet scholars and politicians were confronted with the poor results of their aid programs over the previous decades. They also found that “traditionalism” was making a revival in many parts of the Third World, particularly in Muslim countries.¹⁰³ The Soviet response, however, was not so much to change policy as to double down on its commitment to the Third World, adjusting theory and positions as necessary.¹⁰⁴

Nevertheless, in the late 1970s and early 1980s Soviet scholars of the Third World—including economists, theorists in the party’s international department, and specialists at the Institute of Oriental Studies—were trying to understand why these countries had failed to develop along the lines predicted by the Soviets. Among the issues they confronted was the population boom and unemployment, the failure to create a progressive working class, and the persistence (or revival) of traditionalist politics.¹⁰⁵ What is noticeably absent in the Soviet critiques, however, is any comparison with the problems in Central [End Page 615] Asia. Naturally, such a comparison would have been extremely problematic. True, Central Asian economists and planners had been alerting Moscow to many similar problems in their own republics. But their arguments never challenged the system as a whole, nor the relationship between the center and the periphery.

Similar critiques had already helped break apart the development consensus in the United States and Europe during the 1970s. The “modernization theory” in vogue in the 1950s and 1960s had presumed that all countries could achieve similar levels of prosperity if they followed the path from agricultural production to modernization and ultimately to a high consumption economy. Although “culture” was never absent from the overall debate, it was the failure of development programs that led policymakers and social scientists to turn to studying local culture as a way to inform and adjust development policy. Ultimately, however, cultural difference formed the basis of many critiques of development.¹⁰⁶

The engagement with the Third World did, however, affect how some of these economists viewed their own position within the USSR. For years, Tajik intellectuals had taken part in presenting their republic as an example of enlightened development to the Third World. Economists played a particularly important role. Even with growing skepticism about Soviet development at home and abroad, Central Asian economists were going abroad to tout Soviet achievements. A prime destination for Tajik economists was India, where they presented reports on how the Tajik experience of regional planning could be applied in the Indian context, lectured at Indian universities, and co-authored books with Indian colleagues with titles like Central Asia: A Model of Social and Economic Development and The Central Asian Economic Region: History, Present, and Perspectives for Social-Economic Development.¹⁰⁷

Yet these contacts worked both ways: at least some of the economists came back from these interactions with a new willingness to challenge their own earlier conceptions about development. For example, Hojamamat Umarov, who first began interacting with Indian colleagues at a seminar in Tashkent in 1977 and traveled to India in subsequent years, became [End Page 616] impressed with the way his Indian colleagues studied poverty, an indicator that Soviet social scientists had avoided. Umarov made rural poverty a focus of his second doctoral dissertation during perestroika, although it was still considered a sufficiently controversial topic that the defense was closed and the thesis marked “for official use only.”¹⁰⁸ Drawing on his interactions with Indian colleagues and his reading of Club of Rome materials, Umarov also became one of a handful of proponents of family planning within Tajikistan as a path to greater prosperity—a highly controversial position, which earned him the enmity of some nationalists as well as economists who held fast to the idea that a booming population was Tajikistan’s best argument for greater investments from the center.¹⁰⁹

Umarov also began to articulate a more direct comparison between the situation of the Central Asian republics and the problems of the Third World. In an article published in 1989, he argued that economic relations in the union were inconsistent with claims to equality among nationalities.¹¹⁰ Umarov’s specific complaints were not much different from what Tajik economists had been saying for some time. Like them, he decried the spread of cotton monoculture and low levels of industrialization. Referring presumably to the aluminum plant described above, Umarov argued that to the extent that industry had been constructed in the republic, it had done little for the native population and effectively extended Tajikistan’s role as a raw materials producer. What had changed was how he articulated the problem. Not only was Umarov’s language more forceful than that typical of his fellow economists in earlier years, but he explicitly compared Central Asia to other less developed countries:

Many socioeconomic and demographic problems of the Central Asian republics are analogous to the problems facing developing countries in the East. The majority of them are the result of fast population growth. … This is the contradiction between the growth of the size of the average family and the growth of the demographic load on the working members of the family, between the fast pace of natural population growth and the shrinking availability of land per person. No less serious is the contradiction between the excess labor resources and the insufficient number of qualified working cadres and specialists, [End Page 617] the necessity of providing for full employment and the insufficiency of productive reserves.¹¹¹

Moreover, Umarov did not see this as simply a problem of mistakes in planning but rather a more fundamental issue resulting from the relationship between the center and the periphery: “It seems that this situation is explained by the strict regulation of regional development from a single center, which infringes on local and regional interests, suppresses iniative and enterprise from the population and territorial organs, [and] sharply decreases interest in a more complete and effective involvement of the productive resources of the region.”¹¹²

Umarov was a relative moderate: he still believed in the need to preserve the union. Others took the argument much further. Tohir Abdujabbor, an economist who had defended a dissertation on the development of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province and later worked in Afghanistan during the Soviet war there, emerged as a champion of independence around the same time. In his speeches and writings, Abdujabbor argued that Moscow had neglected Tajik culture while failing to develop the country economically and exaggerating the extent of backwardness in the republic before the Soviet era. Moreover, he claimed, planners had built cities and industries intended for Russians without taking into account the culture of the Tajiks, which explained why Tajiks avoided living in them.¹¹³ The particularist argument, used earlier by reluctant planners to avoid industrial investment, was now being deployed as an anticolonial one.

Conclusion

Starting in the 1960s, Tajik economists initiated or engaged in many of the key debates surrounding their republic’s development. They were able to do this in part because Soviet institutions (like Gosplan, SOPS, and the Institute of Economics) were replicated in each republic, providing venues for discussion to take place. At the same time, the focus and character of these institutions was determined not just by Moscow but by the initiative of people like Narzikulov and his students. The knowledge they created was both a tool for effective rule and a way to reclaim agency in their republic’s development. Their insistence on studying local conditions and adjusting development plans to their findings often challenged the bird’s [End Page 618] eye perspective of planners in Moscow. The post-Stalin USSR, with all of its contradictory priorities and commitments, also created the institutions to challenge and redefine priorities emerging from the center.

Looking back 25 years after the Soviet collapse and from the vantage point of current (Western) development orthodoxy, the efforts of the Central Asian economists might appear foolish. Arguably Tajikistan, with its difficult geography and poor transport links, made a poor candidate for the kind of industrialization they envisioned. Indeed, Tajikistan’s growth in the last decade has been fueled largely by migration, with remittances from laborers at one point equal to almost half of GDP, according to the World Bank.¹¹⁴ Yet to dismiss the ideas of these economists as a dead end is to miss the point of what they were trying to do, and what the Soviet Union was supposed to be about, at least when viewed from the periphery. It is important to understand the context within which they operated and the dreams they had for their societies and to recognize that these were often not very different from the thinking of contemporaries in the Third World. Rahimov’s plea cited at the beginning of this article is in this sense very telling: it can be understood as a reflection of the ways in which changing conceptions of development penetrated and reinvented the Soviet state at its periphery.

Tajikistani economists were, of course, limited by their training and socialization as Soviet economists, by the language of the field they worked in, and by institutions modeled on similar structures in Moscow. Yet the very existence of these institutions provided them with an opportunity to engage in debates and question decisions emanating from Moscow. The multidisciplinary nature of economics as practiced within the Soviet Union also pushed them to view “development” in a more holistic way.

By turning to demography, geography, and sociology, Tajik economists helped shift the debate on what modernization and development meant. If development from the 1930s to the 1950s largely referred to the agricultural development of the territory, in the 1960s it became the industrialization of the republic. By the early 1970s, this picture became more nuanced, as economists began to rethink how territory, industry, and agriculture had to interact if they were going to develop not just Tajikistan but Tajiks. Though they succeeded to a considerable degree in getting support for their views, the Soviet planning system ultimately proved too inflexible to balance the social and economic goals of its constituencies. From the vantage point of the early 2000s, Umarov and a colleague complained, “The negligent attitude toward [End Page 619] socio-demographic, geographic and economic factors led to the appearance of a phenomenon in the 1980s that was paradoxical at first glance: although there was every sign of economic growth, there was no economic development.”¹¹⁵

The shift to studying “local factors” meant to facilitate industrialization and development, however, ultimately proved dangerous. By the 1970s, social scientists on the periphery and in the center were both producing research that showed that culture and values helped explain the failure of locals to join the industrial workforce. Yet the conclusions they drew from these findings were very different. For Bromlei and Shkaratan, as well as a growing number of planners in the center, these “cultural” factors were fixed and largely unchangeable, meaning that continued industrial investment would be throwing good money after bad. For most of the Central Asian social scientists discussed here, however, these were factors that needed to be understood and acted upon. In their view, low mobility meant that industry had to be located where people already preferred to live, while investment in the welfare of rural residents would help transform their “cultural” level and make them more mobile and better prepared for industrial labor. Increasingly, it was the views of Bromlei and the other skeptics that won out in the center. Although questions of cultural specificity affected debates about domestic equality and social welfare in the United States and European countries, the implications for the USSR were much more serious. The notion that all people could develop along similar lines was central to the Soviet idea. Abandoning this notion put the whole Soviet social contract in jeopardy. In the late 1980s, claims about cultural particularism would be used by activists in the periphery to claim autonomy and by nationalists in Russia and the wealthier republics to argue against investments in the Soviet South. [End Page 620]