Marianne Kamp’s new book offers a richly detailed account of how collectivization was experienced in Soviet Uzbekistan and how the process has been remembered. It is based upon more than one hundred and twenty oral history interviews with rural youth who participated in collectivization (what Kamp calls the “collectivization generation”), as well as work with published and archival sources. It continues and expands Kamp’s interest in using vernacular language materials to detail Soviet Uzbekistan’s history “from below.” Her first book, the prize-winning The New Woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, Modernity, and Unveiling under Communism (2006), drew upon a wide range of sources in Russian and Uzbek outside of the party-state to detail how Uzbekistani women responded to the violence of the Soviet state’s 1927 unveiling campaign.
While Kamp’s first book was focused largely on urban women, she ventures into a different theme with this book: the profound transformations that rural residents of Central Asia experienced as Moscow sought to incorporate them into the collectivist whole and boost agricultural production in the 1920s and 1930s. This is an understudied topic. There is a distinguished body of research about collectivization on the Russian heartland. In the periphery, its study has tended to focus on Ukraine, which endured a terrifying famine during the 1930s, and, to a much lesser degree, Kazakhstan, which also saw severe famine. But we know far less about how other non-Russian regions experienced collectivization and why they avoided severe famine. Collectivization was also a particularly formative moment. As Kamp argues, the study of this period can tell us more about how rural Uzbekistan became Soviet and how residents came to identify with a Soviet order.
The book more generally lies at the intersection of at least three areas of scholarly interest: oral history; the study of collectivization; and what might be called “generational approaches” to Russian and Soviet history. Part of the value of this book lies in its remarkable source base, the oral histories that Kamp and her research team have collected. In the 1920s and 30s, literary rates were low in the Soviet countryside, and the sources that we do have about collectivization tend to be heavily biased towards the party-state. The problem is particularly acute in Central Asia. There, collectivization overlapped with other kinds of cultural dispossession, including the forced transition of the vernacular languages of the region from the Arabic script to the Latinate one. Sadly, it is now too late to conduct oral history interviews with those who witnessed collectivization. But thanks to Kamp’s foresight (the interviews were conducted in the early 2000s), the rural voices in her study have been preserved.
While these oral histories are uniquely valuable, they present considerable challenges of interpretation. Kamp’s research team (most of the interviews were conducted by the Young Scholars Society, a group of young Uzbekistani scholars under the supervision of Kamp and Russell Zanca, an American anthropologist) focused on interview subjects living in rural locations born before 1925 who participated in collectivization. Most respondents were seniors: they ranged in age from seventy-five to one hundred years of age. As Kamp notes, this cohort also endured other types of upheaval that would have colored their view of the past. Many fought on the front lines in World War II. All experienced the profound disorientation of the Soviet collapse in 1991. Finally, in the early 2000s, as these interviews were conducted, independent Uzbekistan embarked on its own project of national history writing that rejected many elements of the official Soviet version of events.
The complexities of these different layers of memory means that some interviews require considerable analysis. Kamp navigates these challenges, as well as the accompanying hurdle of explaining collectivization, itself a technical and complex subject, carefully, though I did wish for a much better map. Unfortunately, the one contained in the book is small and very difficult to read. It does not do justice to one of the real achievements of her team’s oral history project. They conducted interviews in twenty-five different communities in seven of Uzbekistan’s provinces, an impressive regional distribution of work.
As Kamp navigates these layers of memory, an interesting subtheme emerges: the durability of Soviet understandings of the past among Kamp’s interview subjects. Even as they were encouraged by the Uzbekistani state in the 2000s to reject Soviet narratives, many respondents continued to view many of the key events of collectivization through a Soviet lens. Their responses reveal the limits of the spread of independent Uzbekistan’s national memory culture and perhaps even hint at some of the reasons why Uzbekistan has continued to maintain close ties with Russia today.
On collectivization, Kamp’s book is broader than the title might initially suggest. It does not focus narrowly on the heart of forced collectivization, the years of the First Five Year Plan (1928–32), but examines a selection of themes related to the agricultural transformation of Uzbekistan in the 1920s and 1930s. The first three chapters on the 1920s focus on the rise of cotton growing in Uzbekistan; the struggle between Central Asian rebels (the so-called Bosmachi) and the Red Army for control of rural locales; and the intricacies of land reform. As Kamp shows, the material conditions of Uzbekistan were distinct from those of European Russia. Agricultural production was focused on a cash crop, cotton, rather than food products, like grain or meat. With their spotlight on local voices, these chapters form an important complement to Beatrice Penati’s Rural History of Soviet Central Asia: Land Reform and Agricultural Change in Early Soviet Uzbekistan (2025), which analyzes Uzbekistan’s rural transformation in the 1920s through the lens of economic history.
Chapters 4 through 8, which focus on the 1930s, form the real heart of the book. Here, the voices of Kamp’s protagonists emerge most clearly, perhaps in part because they remembered the 1930s more lucidly than earlier decades. Kamp tackles subjects such as mass collectivization, dekulakization, famine, life on the collective farm, and the experiences of orphans (a term that she uses to refer to children who have lost their father, as well as those who have lost both parents). Some important observations about the distinctive course of collectivization in Uzbekistan emerge. While in Russia the institution of the peasant commune helped form the basis for the collective farm, in Uzbekistan there was no similar system of communal ownership. As a result, collectivization proceeded piecemeal. The focus was on getting the individual dehqon, or resident who worked the land, to sign up. If in other parts of Central Asia collectivization is a story of migration, the starving Kazakhs who fled as hunger set in or the Tajiks resettled to work on large-scale water engineering projects, then in Uzbekistan the story is far more fixed in place. Collectivization did profoundly change the way that many dehqons worked, but most were able to stay in their homes.
Though “generational approaches” to the Soviet past have inspired interest from scholars of Russia (the work of Shelia Fitzpatrick on the “Brezhnev generation” in Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union 1921–1934 (1979), and Donald J. Raleigh, Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia’s Cold War Generation (2013), come to mind), Kamp is one of the first to apply such an approach to Central Asian history. As she explains, the specifics of Central Asian culture, with its strong emphasis on deference and respect for those who are older, meant that members of the “collectivization generation” wielded unusual authority within their community. Though this age-based system of hierarchy created challenges for the young researchers who carried out the interviews (they struggled, for instance, to interrupt their interviewees with follow-up questions), it may also suggest that the understandings of these older respondents have been especially influential in shaping collective understandings of Uzbekistan’s past.
The basic emphasis of Kamp’s study is on collectivization as a project that enjoyed popular support. People identified with agitators who urged them to collectivize, and they became genuinely invested in making the collective farm their own. Collectivization brought material benefits, including wheat, oil, sugar, and cloth. It became an important system of social support for those on the margins, like the orphans in Kamp’s book. Ultimately, the portrait of collectivization that emerges in this book is more carrot than stick. Part of this is surely due to the way that collectivization was experienced in Uzbekistan. The republic avoided the severe famine that struck Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and parts of the Russian SFSR. But I also wondered if further work with other members of the “collectivization generation” might lead to different answers. Kamp’s respondents were in some senses a distinctive and privileged group: They had enjoyed unusually long lives (all respondents were between seventy-five to one hundred years of age yet average life expectancy in Uzbekistan during the years they were interviewed was only around sixty-five years). Certain professions like teachers, collective farm directors, and relatives of those named as kulaks were overrepresented in the group. They had also remained in the rural locations where collectivization took place, even as the republic experienced significant urbanization in the post-war era. This is not to doubt the importance of Kamp’s findings but simply to suggest that there may have been more critical views among the “collectivization generation” as well.
