“Development” was a dominant paradigm in international politics and organizations in the post-WWII period. The implications and consequences of it in the west and in (post-)colonial countries have been the subject of a growing body of research in recent years. Artemy Kalinovsky connects to this research in his focus on the Central Asian Soviet republic of Tajikistan, the most southern and—due, among other things, to its small population and its high-mountainous landscape—most “peripheral” of the Central Asian republics. He traces development debates and politics from Stalin's death to the end of the Soviet period. Kalinovsky sets out to examine the parallels and entanglements of development discourses and politics in Tajikistan, Moscow as the Soviet center, and the wide postcolonial world, including the west. He characterizes the post-Stalin period as a second “postcolonial moment” in Central Asian Soviet history (244), following the early Soviet period and proceeding to the Perestroika years. As is well known, the post-Stalin period was characterized not only by a liberalization and intensification of Soviet foreign policies under Nikita Khrushchev, but also by a reorientation of development politics in Central Asia. The latter was accompanied by an educational boom and, subsequently, a more active role of Central Asian scholars and experts in development debates.

The study is based on a wide array of primary sources, ranging from archival materials both from Tajikistan (including the party archive that is difficult to access) and Moscow, printed sources of various kinds, memoirs, and oral history interviews. It is organized in nine chapters roughly following chronological order. The text is an easy read and nicely combines official Soviet sources with personal memories from memoirs and interviews. While there is a useful index, the book, unfortunately, contains no bibliography of secondary sources, only of primary sources.

Like a red thread running through the chapters are two notorious demands or problems discussed in various periods and with various overtones. The first one is the industrialization of Tajikistan that was demanded by Central Asian economists from the 1950s (previously, development was related mostly to agriculture) but carried out in only a limited way. The second is the never fully-achieved task of integrating Tadjik population into the industrial workforce. While workplaces in industry seemed to be the best guarantee for the transformation of former peasants into Soviet citizens as envisioned by communists, Tadjik men and women were not very keen to work in industry or to receive a higher technical education. Scholars realized that in order to analyze the reasons for this seemingly strange behavior of the local population, cultural factors like family life and composition, features of rural life, and “traditions” had to be examined. Therefore, social science research was conducted, which found its way into development debates. Following the evolution of these debates, the present book provides important insights into the general development of single academic disciplines in the Soviet Union and the Central Asian scholars and schools emerging within it in the fields of economics and sociology. Valuable information is also given about professional networks of Soviet experts stretching from the periphery to Moscow and vice versa.

The similarities in development discussions between the Soviet and non-Soviet worlds become very clear. They concern, for example, the planning and construction of large-scale hydropower dams like the Nurek dam and the expectations of planners and functionaries of a thorough social transformation that was to be brought about by a dam, or the debate about women's place in the industrial workforce and about the question of whether women would have to work in industry in a developed society or could do cottage labor. It is also very plausible that Central Asians used the decolonization rhetoric and context to demand investments for their republics.

With regard to the intertwining of Tadjik and Central Asian with post-colonial international debates, however, the book is less convincing. After all, Moscow was the most important address for Central Asian experts to relate to. Actual influences of Central Asian debates from outside of the Soviet Union remain an exception. What is more, the author's search for parallels takes him too far sometimes: to detect the origins of neoliberalism in the Central Asian debates on cottage labor is a little far-fetched.

Nevertheless, the study retains its major merit to inscribe Central Asian and Soviet history into the broader post-war and post-colonial history of development. It will provide inspiration and food for thought for further considerations about what socialist development was, both as a discourse and as politics carried out, and how to determine the parallels but also differences between development in a newly independent, post-colonial nation-state (however formal its independence might have been) and a Soviet republic. Besides, the book provides the first coherent political, social, and intellectual history of Soviet Tajikistan and is thus an important contribution to Central Asian studies.