Central Planning, Local Knowledge? Labor, Population, and the 'Tajik School of Economics'

This article focuses on the views of Soviet Central Asian economists regarding some of the key issues of Central Asia’s development, including the local population’s role in the industrial economy, education, and migration. The peripheral position of these social scientists and the universal nature of the Soviet project (including Moscow’s role as a development donor in the “foreign East”) meant that planners and scholars were at a unique locus point, making them local and global at the same time. The scholars in question were not only similar in their trajectories to colleagues from the “Third World,” but they also sometimes actively engaged in debates about development and changed their views based on what they heard from colleagues in developing countries such as India. Their evolving conception of the economy is important for understanding the fate of the larger Soviet project in the periphery and its significance to the global history of development. Such an approach may not settle the question of the USSR’s colonial nature, but it does highlight the extent to which attempts to overcome the colonial past shaped Soviet politics and the relationship between center and periphery. It also suggests some productive ways to think comparatively about Soviet Central Asia by considering debates over its development within the context of (mostly) contemporaneous debates about development in the postcolonial world.