A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

Soviet Central Asia 235
sured Tsarist regime; and the present was portrayed as a golden age in
which the destinies of the two peoples were “forever” cemented in an
association between a generous and wise senior partner and a grateful
junior one.A perhaps not readily visible but important aspect of this
doctrine is the fact that no other interpretation was allowed.
Those were the days when the Soviet government was posing as the
champion of the oppressed colonial peoples of Africa and Asia and
heaping abuse on the colonizers; and once the colonies had become
independent in the 1950s and 1960s, the propaganda quickly switched
to the thesis of neo-colonialism while using the resources of the Soviet
empire for the deadly game of subversion so as to turn that part of the
world into a Communist one.Yet at the same time its special brand of
colonial exploitation of Central Asia not only went on unchecked, but
in certain respects it reached monstrous proportions.The classic colonial
pattern of hauling away raw materials in return for finished products
acquired here a degree and forms never imposed by Western powers
on their colonies.As we have said in the introductory chapter, Moscow
turned Central Asia into a megafarm designed to produce ever greater
quantities of cotton.To this end irrigation kept being expanded beyond
the capacity of Central Asian rivers, the soil exhausted by monoculture
kept being saturated with chemical fertilizers, the crops sprayed by
clouds of pesticides and herbicides, and instead of fully mechanizing the
production, cheap native labor was routinely used for harvesting the
Uzbeks’ oq oltin, “white gold,” as the Soviet propaganda cruelly termed
this special variant of “king cotton.” A grim feature of this cheap labor
was schoolchildren, driven to the insalubrious fields in the fall instead of
studying in the classrooms.The policy of cotton monoculture became
pronounced in the 1930s, but it was especially from the 1960s to the
1980s that it reached truly monstrous proportions.Meanwhile genuinely
beneficial economic development of the area such as industrialization,
modestly begun in the 1920s, remained stunted as Moscow chose to
place capital investment elsewhere.Moreover, such industry as there was
tended to be concentrated in urban areas where Russian and other
European workforces, often imported for the purpose, outnumbered the
natives.
Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and up to a point Kazakhstan
were the main producers of cotton.Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan were
used in other ways to suit the rulers in Moscow.The nomadic herders of
Kazakhstan had seen much of their grazing space reduced by the influx
of Russian settlers in the Tsarist era, but in the early years of Soviet rule