SAECULUM. Jahrbuch für Universalgeschichte
Volume 73 (2023), number 2
Resümees
Nikolaos Olma
Situating Uranium Industrialism:
Uranium Production and Epistemic Injustice in Soviet-Era Mailuu-Suu
Despite the constantly growing literature on the history of the Soviet atomic pro- gramme, bottom-up narratives and voices from the Soviet periphery have – ironically – remained peripheral to the discussion. Drawing on a combination of archival material, published memoirs, and oral history interviews, this article examines the GULAG-to- socialist-utopia life cycle of Mailuu-Suu, a Soviet uranium mining town located in the Fergana Valley, in the south of the Kirghiz Soviet Socialist Republic. Between 1945 and 1968, Mailuu-Suu was home to a uranium mining and hydrometallurgical combine, which produced 10,000 tons of yellowcake, a partially refined form of uranium that is used in the preparation of fuel for nuclear reactors and constitutes an intermediate step in the pro- duction of nuclear weapons. The closure of the combine brought the town’s transforma- tion to an industrial centre, but, as the article argues, this ‘industrial conversion’ was ac- companied by the silencing of the town’s uranium legacy and the rewriting of its history. The article highlights the role that Mailuu-Suu’s mines played in keeping the Soviet atomic programme up and running at a time when known uranium reserves in the So- viet Union were scarce and the country frantically sought uranium for its atomic bomb project. And by pointing out that knowledge about radiation was withheld from miners and other workers, it offers a glimpse into the social, racial, epistemic, and environmental injustices that took place in the Soviet Union during and immediately after WWII and suggests that the authorities were aware of the hazards that living in Mailuu-Suu consti- tuted to its inhabitants. Taking into account that similar processes characterised uranium extraction on both sides of the Iron Curtain, the article introduces ‘uranium industrial- ism’ as a global temporal and analytical category, which draws attention to the unique characteristics of state-sanctioned industrial uranium mining that make it distinct from other aspects of uranium-fuelled nuclear modernity.
Isaac McKean Scarborough
Chains of White Gold:
Tajikistan’s Cotton Monoculture across the Soviet Divide
Cotton production in Tajikistan reached its historical peak in 1980, when the local harvest surpassed 1,000,000 metric tons. Representing approximately 10 percent of the total Soviet harvest, the cotton sector had been built up over the previous century to dominate the Tajikistani economy, providing jobs to agricultural workers and central funding for its development. Part of the centralised Soviet planned economy, however, the Tajik cotton harvest and its tons of ‘White Gold’ were directed towards centralised ends: the processing of cotton lint and sewing of cheaper cotton cloth elsewhere in the USSR and the provision of high-quality export cotton abroad. Tajikistan’s place in this hierarchy was clear – and one that precluded shifts to local industrial processing or di- versification of agriculture, even as it brought a steady flow of rubles to the republic. As the Soviet economy contracted in the late 1980s, however, cotton remained con- stant, but the support from the centre in Moscow began to fade. As the disintegration of the USSR in 1991 became the Tajik Civil War in 1992, the cotton harvest collapsed, unable to withstand the combined pressures of war, decentralised purchase orders, and commercialised business decisions. Since the 1990s, harvests have partially recovered, but remain far below their Soviet peak, while in recent years, agricultural diversification efforts have led to significant decreases in the sown acreage of cotton and overall har- vest volumes. Yet Tajikistan’s ‘white gold’ remains a strong influence on the state’s eco- nomic fortunes. This has brought into sharp relief the previous costs of the Soviet cotton monoculture in Tajikistan – the ecological and medical costs on the one hand, and economic underdevelopment on the other – that had long accompanied the stabilising financial flows from Moscow.
Mikhail Akulov/Arslan Akanov
Kolonizatsiia or Korenizatsiia?
The Many Faces of Soviet Modernization in Post-Sta- linist Kazakhstan
The period between Stalin’s death and the collapse of the USSR is crucial to our under- standing of modern-day Kazakhstan. As an era preceding the formation of independent Kazakhstan, it holds many keys to the country’s modern-day economic, political, and demographic development as well as the self-perception of Kazakhstanis and, in par- ticular, ethnic Kazakhs. Avoiding popular binaries, such as “Soviet” and “anti-Soviet”, “authentic” and “foreign”, “national” and “imperial”, the article approaches the ambi- guities of the period as reflecting a holistic, if contradictory, experience of Kazakhstan as part of the Soviet Union. It argues that colonial trends, although evident, were con- comitant with an increase in industrial investment and the ongoing Kazakhification of elites and the public imagination. These tendencies revealed broader demographic and political changes: high birth rates among ethnic Kazakhs and a complex center-periph- ery dynamic between Moscow and Alma Ata.
The article is divided into four parts. First, it examines the economic developments that brought about a profound transformation in the republic’s economic profile. Sec- ond, the article analyzes the demographic changes attesting to the gradual recovery of Kazakhs after the devastation caused by famine and war. The process of cultural Ka- zakhification championed by republican bureaucrats and the intelligentsia is explored in part 3. Finally, the article investigates three episodes of overt political resistance, which, while evidencing a growing national self-confidence among Kazakhs, also revealed the persistence of their Soviet allegiances as well as tensions between Moscow and the local leadership. Placed side by side, these episodes bring to the surface the evolving nature of the Soviet project in Kazakhstan, with all of its contradictions and shifts, which formed the backdrop to independence.
Masha Salazkina
Al-Biruni in Tashkent:
On Cultural Heritage and Revolutionary Patience in the 1970s Cinema of Soviet Uzbekistan
This article revisits the history of the Tashkent Festival of Cinemas of Asia, Africa and Latin America, which was held in the Soviet Union between 1968 and 1988 – unique at the time, the festival offered a stage for the largest number and widest variety of films representing the world beyond Europe and North America.
Within this large body of work, the paper singles out one specific type of cinema, widely represented at the festival: films that offered a (re-)construction of cultural her- itage through the genres of ethnographic film, literary adaptation, and historical epic. While providing an overview of this cinematic mode as showcased in Tashkent, it focuses on a specific iteration as an example of the cultural and political dynamics of this trans- cultural space: a Soviet Uzbek biopic of Al-Biruni, the early modern Islamic polymath (Abu Reyhan Biruni, directed by Shukhrat Abbasov, 1973), screened to much acclaim at the Tashkent festival in 1974.
The article places this cinematic project simultaneously within its Soviet and interna- tional contexts, as part of the UNESCO-led millennial commemoration of Al Biruni’s life and work, which was taking place at that time. Comparing the intersecting Soviet and UNESCO models of cinematic engagements, the article argues for the reading of the film as constructing complex imaginaries of past communities in addition to negotiating different conceptions of “world cultural heritage” across different local, national, liberal, postcolonial and socialist internationalist frameworks.
David Leupold
Back to the Cosmic Future?
The Bishkek Planetarium and the (Un-)Claimability of the Socialist Past
Wishes to protect landmarks of the Soviet period are commonly believed to stem from a deep-rooted sense of post-Soviet nostalgia shared by some of those who lived under real socialism. Yet this explanatory model can hardly elucidate the motivation that drove a young and amorphous activist group composed of a law graduate, an architect, an economist, a philologist, and a software engineer, who were all born almost a decade after the end of the Soviet Union. This article seeks to reconstruct the struggle of the activist group and their quest for reclaiming the abandoned Soviet-era planetarium as an object of the public domain.
To this end, the author not only conducted a series of in-depth interviews with the ac- tivist group but, in 2021, also participated in various court hearings at the Supreme Court (verkhovniy sud). Empirical evidence is further complemented by a thorough review of local media resources and secondary literature related to urban politics and the right to the city, as well as the cultural history of Soviet space exploration and its relevance in the Kyrgyzstani context. On the one hand, the paper explores the different motives and worldviews of the activists and the ways in which these affected their visions to appro- priate and re-evaluate the material legacy of an iconic site representative of socialist-era astronomy and space travel. On the other hand, it meticulously reconstructs the legal dispute over privatization which ultimately ended in the failure to save the planetarium from irrevocable destruction. Here it argues that the contradictory stance of the Kyr- gyzstani courts – first recognizing the claims and then declaring the planetarium “un- claimable” – reveals the fundamental paradox that characterizes the relationship between present-day “post-socialist” state power and the material legacy of the ancien régime.