The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review

Soviet Central Asia: The Failed Transformation by William Fierman

Review by: Catharine V. Ewing
Russian Review, Vol. 51, No. 4 (Oct., 1992), pp. 586-587
Published by: Wiley on behalf of The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review
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586 The Russian Review

deliberately encourage them, and in several instances, government officials successfully

prevented pogroms from occurring in areas under their control.
Aronson analyzes in detail each aspect of the origins of the pogroms, explaining the
pattern of their timing and occurrence as related to the way in which railway and water
communications developed in western Russia. The assassination of Alexander II and the
mourning period that followed, curtailing Easter celebrations, set the stage for popular
unrest. Adding to the volatile mixture was the difficulty of communicating with an illiterate
public that relied on hearing information read aloud to it by the priest at Sunday service.
During the spring and summer of 1881, the regional economy faltered, so that itinerant
workers arriving from other areas found themselves without anticipated employment, becom-
ing a destabilizing force in the area. The press, which enjoyed relative freedom from
censorship-a remnant of the regime of Alexander II--aided in fomenting public belief that
the tsar wanted attacks on the Jews. While many officials did what they could to head off
disorders, lack of personnel, poor planning, and inconsistent enforcement often just chased
rioters to another area of town or to the next village. Nevertheless some officials did success-
fully prevent pogroms in their cities and towns. Official reports on the pogroms indicate that
while the government initially believed them part of a revolutionary conspiracy to bring
down the regime, the evidence led the Ministry of Interior to conclude that there had been
no organized effort to incite the population in this manner. In contrast, some revolutionaries
initially thought that the pogroms might be the beginning of a spontaneous rising against
tsarist authority, and a few tried to redirect the anger at all "exploiters" rather than just
Jewish ones, but they soon altered their position-although not out always out of repulsion
for the anti-Semitic character of the riots.
Aronson, in a work rich in detail and anecdote, has relied heavily on published rather
than archival sources to prove his point. Most of the material was not hidden away in
obscurity, but has been available to scholars wishing to reexamine the question. While a
number of specialists dealing with Russian Jewish history over the past two decades have
indeed accepted this important revision, too many others have ignored it. Because Troubled
Waterssynthesizes the existing literature and fills in the gaps with further exhaustive detail, it
ranks as the definitive work available on the subject and thoroughly refutes every aspect of
the "conspiracy theory." All that now remains is for historians of Russian Jewry to take heed
of its message.

Alexandra S. Korros, Xavier University

Fierman, William, ed. Soviet Central Asia: The Failed Transformation. Boulder, CO: West-
view Press, 1991. xxi + 328 pp. $39.50 (paper).

This collection of articles is unified by introductory and concluding essays that place Central
Asia in the broader contexts of the disintegrating Soviet Union and of less-developed areas in
general. The thesis is that the Soviet leaders have not only failed to integrate Central Asia
into a modern Soviet state, but that their often misguided efforts to do so have created
problems which will last well into the next century. The contributors support that thesis with
a wealth of information about the historical, demographic, social, cultural, economic, and
political realities in Soviet Central Asia through 1990.
The result is a comprehensive analysis of the policy failures in Central Asia. Moscow
claimed to be creating a modern industrial economy, but the reality for the region has been a
semicolonial relationship, with Central Asia supplying raw materials to the industrial home-
land. Collectivization has brought not abundance but a cotton monoculture which has de-
pleted the soil and water, produced environmental catastrophe, and led local officials to
falsify harvest figures to satisfy the planners. Although the Party wanted central control,

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 Book Reviews 587

Moscow increasingly yielded power to a local elite which valued kinship and ethnic ties over
ideology. Arrests for corruption in the 1980s further reduced central control by removing the
very officials who had mediated between Moscow and the Central Asian republics.
Social and cultural integration policies have not been any more effective than the eco-
nomic and political ones. Beneath the veneer of Party claims of multinational harmony lies
the reality: Central Asians and Europeans rarely socialize across ethnic lines and in inter-
views frequently express negative opinions of each other's lifestyle. Islam has both survived
and continued to shape the behavior of even nonreligious Central Asians. Few women have
achieved equality with men: most remain limited by early marriage, frequent pregnancy, and
little education to a life of poor health and menial labor. Efforts to assimilate Central Asians
through the study of Russian language and literature have produced backlash and resent-
ment. Finally, the combination of unbalanced economic growth and sharp cultural differ-
ences with the rest of the Soviet Union created a population explosion among the largely
immobile Central Asian peoples. The result has been widespread poverty and the explosive
tensions associated with a large pool of unemployed, unskilled, and frustrated young people.
The sweeping changes in the Soviet Union in the 1980s led-in some cases forced-
Moscow to admit many of these policy failures and to yield more political, socioeconomic,
and cultural autonomy to the Central Asian republics. These changes also made available to
scholars much of the data presented and analyzed by the contributing authors. There is, not
surprisingly, more information on Uzbekistan than on Tajikistan, Turkmenia, or Kirgizia.
But overall the book is well written, well edited and timely: a most valuable resource for the
reader who is seeking to understand the current situation and the future problems in the
region.

Catharine V. Ewing, Phillips University

Todes, Daniel P. Darwin without Malthus: The Strugglefor Existence in Russian Evolution-
ary Thought. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. 221 pp.

Reading this fine precise analysis by Daniel Todes prompted a reflection upon the changes in
Darwinism's reputation in the years between the centenary celebrations of The Origin of the
Species in 1959 and the more recent one of Darwin's death in 1983, especially among Russian
historians. The political history of Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union had shaped our under-
standing and defense of "scientific truth"; we fiercely defended the freedom of pure scientific
inquiry from the perverse attacks of the Zhdanovites and other ideological neanderthals.
(The same was true for "free historiography" and "free literary creativity," which had been
similarly abused.) Those were the pre-Lapsarian days, before Kuhn and Rorty and Foucault
and Derrida reminded us what Karl Marx (purified now, after the 1844 manuscripts entered
the public domain, into a younger and more Hegelian questioner) had taught us earlier:
intellectual understandings are, after all, social events and social constructs like everything
else, and we must examine them in social space (our own space included).
Todes makes the point that all Russians who read Darwin, whether they call themselves
"Darwinists" or "anti-Darwinists," rejected the Malthusian metaphor of the struggle for
existence. Unlike Darwin himself, they saw no explanatory power in Malthus' observation of
the horrific effects of overpopulation, and they rejected Darwin's Malthusian conclusions
about the evolutionary consequences through intraspecies competition. Moreover, they iden-
tified Darwin's Malthusianism with both a British individualism (unsuitable for the collectiv-
ist Russian mentality), and the crowded British geographical landscape (or, for Darwin and
Wallace especially, the observed-from-afar lush tropical jungle), very unlike the wide-open
Russian spaces which gave plenty of room for population growth. Some Russians (such as
Kropotkin) were convinced that natural selection favors cooperative strategies, and they

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