Technology and Culture

The continuity of a vision for irrigation is on display in Peterson's Pipe Dreams, where the author's research reveals that Imperial Russia's dreams of constructing vast new systems of canals in Central Asia's arid lands found even more grandiose fulfillment when the Soviet government implemented its development plans. At times engineers and investors drew on indigenous Central Asian knowledge, but more frequently, top-down plans ran into material, social, economic, and natural obstacles. Peterson highlights three inherently contradictory goals that the Russian and Soviet governments pursued: turning Kyrgyz nomads into sedentary farmers, opening Central Asia to settlement by colonizers, and making Central Asia into the land of cotton.

Starting in the 1860s, when Russia's geographers first set foot in the newly conquered lands, they imagined rerouting the lower reaches of the Amu River to reach the Caspian Sea and watering land that they saw as empty desert—believing it to be unused because it was not farmed. All that was required to make it useful was investment, expertise, and labor. A collection of diaries, reports, and letters to the Romanov Grand Duke Nikolai Konstantinovich allows Peterson to examine the repeated failures and moderate successes of canal building through the Hungry Steppe between Bekabod and Jizzakh (in today's Uzbekistan), not only as a water-control project, but also through the lenses of the Russian peasants who settled there. The sources attest to the peasants' apparent gratitude to the Russian government, and they illustrate an innovative social experiment that combined indigenous Central Asian and colonizer labor to provide both groups with irrigable fields. Those human dimensions are Peterson's contribution to what was otherwise a small-scale water engineering project that has attracted historians' attention, from a 1927 account by V. V. Tsinzerling to Julia Obertreis's Imperial Desert Dreams (2017), primarily because of its abundant archival traces rather than because of any transformative dimensions. [End Page 1185]

Competition between indigenous peoples and colonizers is abundantly evident in Peterson's wholly novel research on irrigation projects in the Chu River valley, near today's Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. As seen by Russian administrators, the lush grasslands that Kyrgyz herders apportioned through kin networks needed to be plowed and farmed to reach their productive capacity. Russian administrators crafted legal means to seize land, and settlers from Russia arrived in large numbers. Experts who designed the canal scheme were thwarted by lack of investment, so that the building project dragged on through World War I and into the Civil War years that followed the Russian Revolution. Project administrators recruited Uyghur and Dungan labor migrants from Xinjiang and contracted for prison labor, while Russians and Kyrgyz fought over land—the massacres inspiring the nascent Bolshevik government to restrict colonization.

Pipe Dreams follows administrative visions for controlling water through a series of episodes from Imperial Russia to the Soviet years. In the 1890s, Russia's successful introduction of the highly productive American Upland strain of cotton (Gossypium hirsutum) directed attention to the possibilities for expanding irrigation into dry lands; after the Revolution, increasing cotton production became the obsession of Soviet-era plans for Central Asia, to the detriment of grain growing and livestock husbandry. Soviet-style investment featured massive, highly publicized building projects, one of which was the 1930s Vakhshstroi in southern Tajikistan, whose goal was populating the Vakhsh valley with indigenous cotton growers. Archives reveal the abundant problems that beset this venture, which relied on attracting tens of thousands of laborers to resettle in the area, including labor turnover and hydrology engineering failures resulting in many years of missed targets. Unlike Vakhstroi—where Soviet engineers took pride in using heavy machinery despite being plagued by problems—the Grand Fergana Canal, as well as many subsequent large canals in Soviet Uzbekistan, was dug by several hundred thousand Uzbek peasants in a celebrated "people's construction" campaign, using what Peterson views as the most extreme degree of state...