Artemy M. Kalinovsky, Assistant Professor of East European Studies at the University of Amsterdam and author of A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan, was kind enough to chat with me regarding his new research about Soviet Tajikistan and experiences working in the archives.  We decided to separate his tale into two posts, so check back in a week or so for part II: “The Party is Not Over: Archival Adventures in Tajikistan.”

“Basically, the idea is to look at how Tajik elites took Soviet ideas of modernization and implemented them locally.”  Kalinovsky’s continuing work in the Party Archives (as well as the State Archive of Tajikistan, the State Archive of the Russian Federation [GARF], and the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History [RGASPI]) is part of a broader research project provisionally titled “Modernization in a Forgotten Corner: The Politics of Development in Soviet Tajikistan,” which is supported by a Veni grant from the Dutch National Science Foundation (NWO).  If all goes according to plan, this research will culminate in a monograph several years from now; in the meantime, pieces of it will appear as articles, including one in Ab Imperio due out later this year.

Although a great deal has been written about the Sovietization of Central Asia (particularly Uzbekistan) in the 1920s and 1930s (e.g. Adeeb Khalid, Douglass Northrop, Shoshana Keller, Marianne Kamp, Adrienne Edgar), very little has been written about the period following it.  Kalinovsky intends to deal with the reception of Soviet modernity by Tajik elites, a topic which he will take on holistically – from physical industrialization projects like the Nurek Dam to cultural projects like the creation of Tajik opera.

Sigue leyendo →