Inedible Harvest

This chapter discusses cotton growing in the region that became Uzbekistan and the people who grew it. It begins by explaining the transformation of Russian Turkestan into a land of cash crops and exploitative labor relations, conditions that shaped early Soviet developments. The chapter then highlights the language of ownership, dependence, and status that elderly Uzbeks used when remembering their rural youth, comparing those terms with the Communist Party's language of class. In addition to words that can be thought of as expressing class relations, respondents from all parts of Uzbekistan, whether they were born in Russian Turkestan's cash-oriented cotton economy or in the less commercialized agricultural economy of Bukhara or Khiva, also identified themselves in status terms. A discussion of the words that respondents used to describe their family livelihoods and relationship to land ownership before collectivization lays a foundation for themes in subsequent chapters, wherein processes of land reform and collectivization politicized these terms and consolidated dehqons' class-based identities. The chapter concludes with an account of 1917, a revolutionary year that brought upheaval to Uzbek dehqons, as cotton planting suddenly disappeared and violence spread across Central Asia.