Collectivization Generation

This introductory chapter provides an overview of agricultural collectivization in Soviet Uzbekistan, focusing on the “collectivization generation.” Most of Uzbekistan's dehqons, meaning anyone who tilled the land, owned their farmland individually, unlike Russia's peasants whose traditions of communal ownership underlay Soviet visions of collectivized agriculture. Two themes are at the heart of these dehqon stories: losing land and livelihood assets or gaining access to them through collectivization; and the resulting rise or fall of family security, influence, and status. Voices from Uzbekistan's collectivization generation reveal the ruptures and transformations through the eyes of dehqons whose life courses moved from precarious or marginalized to empowered and dehqons whose social capital was pulverized by Communism's arrival. Ultimately, these oral histories demonstrate some of the ways that Communist Party designs reconstituted rural identities.