[17]
1950–1991: BEYOND THE HEARTLANDS: CENTRAL AND EASTERN INNER EURASIA IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

While the Soviet heartlands entered the fossil fuels era in the 1930s and 1940s, regions east of the Urals – in the Kazakh steppes and Central Asia, in Siberia, Mongolia, and Xinjiang – underwent a similar momentous transition only in the second half of the twentieth century. Though none of these regions were, strictly, colonies, their histories in the late twentieth century continued to be shaped by the needs and concerns of the Russian and Chinese heartlands.

The policies of the heartlands towards other regions of Inner Eurasia were dictated partly by the quasi-imperial role of the heartlands, and partly by historical inertia. In the Soviet Union, most aspects of Soviet policy towards other regions seem to have been accepted by an elite group whose members all belonged to the Soviet nomenklatura, whatever their cultural or national origins. There was remarkably little grumbling over the allocation of resources before the late 1980s. Like the leaders of the Mongol Empire, the Soviet elite had a shared commitment to the success of the imperial enterprise, and that limited conflicts over regional policies and ensured a broad consensus on most aspects of political, economic, and even cultural policy.

Until the system began to break down in the 1980s, most Soviet leaders accepted the established division of resources and power, under which regions away from the heartlands were valued primarily for their strategic and military significance, and as reserves of labor, land, food, timber, cotton, metal ores, precious metals, and, perhaps most important of all, fossil fuels. At the end of the 1980s, about 71 percent of all proven and probable Soviet reserves of oil came from western Siberia, 9 percent from Kazakhstan, and another 4 percent from Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan; while 72 percent of proven and probable reserves of natural gas came from western Siberia, 3 percent from eastern Siberia and the Far East, and another 10 percent from Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.¹

However, in the final decades of the Soviet era, the periphery began to catch up with the heartlands. That is why, for most of central and eastern Inner Eurasia, the second half of the twentieth century was experienced, not as an era of stagnation or decline, but as a period of modernization and development. In many of these regions, industrialization really began during and soon after World War II, kick-started by the relocation of industries to the east after the Nazi invasion. By the end of 1941, over 1,500 entire factories had been transported to the Urals, to western Siberia, to the Volga region, or to Kazakhstan and Central Asia, and with them came perhaps 10 million workers and evacuees.² The fossil fuels revolution reached much of central and eastern Inner Eurasia in the less violent and less hurried post-Stalin era, and the methods used were generally less coercive than in the 1930s. Regional elites enjoyed greater stability than they had earlier, and some of the more extreme policies of the Stalin era were reversed. For example, members of the Muslim nations deported in 1943 and 1944 were allowed to return home after 1956, and several Autonomous Republics abolished in the 1940s were re-established, including those of the Kalmyk and the Chechens, but not the Crimean Tatars.

KAZAKHSTAN AND CENTRAL ASIA

Most Soviet planners valued Kazakhstan mainly for its abundant, under-farmed steppes. But they also began to realize that it was rich in energy and mineral resources.

In the steppelands, the most important change in the post-war years was the Virgin Lands program, a vast, government-managed plan to raise Soviet agricultural production by creating large, mechanized farms in Inner Eurasia's central steppelands. The project brought under the plow large areas that had ceased to be used by pastoralists since the collectivization and sedentarization campaigns of the 1930s, and it Russified much of steppeland Kazakhstan. (See Chapter 14.) In this way, the Kazakh steppes finally joined the Pontic steppes as a major agrarian region, though their more delicate ecology and the sheer speed of change ensured that the transformation was generally less successful. With the important exception of Mongolia's steppelands, the campaign marked one of the last chapters in Inner Eurasia's long-delayed agricultural revolution. The Virgin Lands program also counts as one of the last great Inner Eurasian migrations of peoples. In just a few years, it brought to the steppes several hundred thousand migrants from many different parts of Inner Eurasia.3

Launched by Khrushchev in 1954, the Virgin Lands program was supervised by Party organizations and cadres. Between 1954 and 1956, the Party sent 300,000 people and 50,000 tractors to the steppes of Kazakhstan, western Siberia, and the North Caucasus. Though none of these regions were truly “virgin lands,” having been used by pastoral nomads for several millennia, the idea of an ecological battle to conquer the natural world helped revive the enthusiastic campaign mentality of the 1930s and the war years. Many migrants really were volunteers, often leaving behind harsh conditions on collective farms, while some were sent after their release from the camps, under the amnesties of 1953–1954. Like the founders of Magnitogorsk 20 years earlier, they often found themselves far from cities and supplies, with instructions to set up campsites and start plowing the fragile steppe soils. Their disillusionment was sometimes extreme. As in Magnitogorsk, life was chaotic and conflicts common, particularly where criminals were involved and vodka was available.⁴ But many immigrants were genuinely enthusiastic, particularly those from camps or from impoverished villages, for whom the virgin lands promised a new life.

Some of the new state farms were planned carefully, with specially created parks and squares and with electricity and phone services. By the 1960s, the program had helped raise the level of services, of education, and of supplies in many areas of northern Kazakhstan. As a collective farm chairman of Korean origin told a western researcher, “The Virgin Lands opening not only improved the economy, but it significantly raised the standard of living and the culture of the village.”⁵

The Virgin Lands program brought some 36 million hectares into cultivation, an area equal to all the arable land of Canada. Soon Kazakhstan was producing more than 25 percent of Soviet grain and, for the first time in Soviet history, agricultural output rose beyond the level of 1913. But the methods of farming used were extensive rather than intensive, and in an arid region, it was inevitable that soon large areas would be turned to dust.

In contrast to the Pontic steppes, where Turkic and pastoralist traditions vanished almost entirely, in the Kazakh steppes there remained large populations of Kazakhs, even if they no longer nomadized. For them, the Virgin Lands program represented a final stage in the destruction of traditional lifeways that had already been undermined by almost 200 years of Russian fort-building, administration, and peasant colonization, and particularly by the ordeal of Stalinist collectivization. When asked in the early 1950s about the Virgin Lands program, the Kazakh Party leader, Rakhmizhan Shayakhmetov, replied, “Kazakhstan is for sheep, not for grain.” Khrushchev sacked him and replaced him with a Ukrainian, Panteleimon Ponomarenko, who would be succeeded in 1955 by a Khrushchev loyalist, Leonid Brezhnev. From 1960, the Kazakh Party would be led by a Kazakh, Dinmukhamed Kunaev, a close friend of Brezhnev and an enthusiast for the Virgin Lands program. Kunaev would rule the Party until 1986, when Gorbachev, in an attempt to break Kunaev's cozy networks of clan-based power, replaced him with a Russian, Gennadi Kolbin, in a move that would provoke violent protests in the Kazakh capital, Almaty (see Chapter 16).

In the 1950s and 1960s Kazakhstan also began to produce increasing amounts of coal, iron ore, lead, copper, and nickel, particularly in the more Russified and urbanized northern regions transformed by the Virgin Lands program. Indeed, so diverse is the metal wealth of Kazakhstan that a Soviet geologist once joked that it could export the entire Table of Elements. Its mineral resources were often exploited using methods that showed little concern for the needs of local populations. In Oskemen (former Ust-Kamenogorsk), a plant manufacturing uranium fuel rods for nuclear power stations generated high levels of radiation that damaged the health of the town's residents. In the 1970s, Kazakhstan's western regions were found to contain large amounts of gas and oil. The largest oil fields were in the west around Mangyshlak on the Caspian Sea.⁶ Kazakhstan also acquired a modest manufacturing sector, whose industries included fertilizers, tractors, and bulldozers.

Kazakhstan's vast territory (it included 12 percent of the Soviet Union) also offered remote sites for two projects that were crucial to the Soviet military: rocketry and weapons testing. After the founding of the Baikonur launch site in 1955, initially to test intercontinental ballistic missiles, Kazakhstan became the center of the Soviet space program. The site of Baikonur was chosen partly because it was well away from settled areas and partly because the flat steppelands made radio transmission easier. Most Soviet space rockets would be launched from here, including the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, in 1957, the first unmanned mission to the moon in 1959, and the first manned space flight in April 1961. Soviet planners also used Kazakhstan to test nuclear weapons. One hundred miles from Semipalatinsk (Semey), in the north-east of Kazakhstan, the Soviet government conducted more than 450 nuclear tests between 1949 and 1989, when the test site was finally closed. Over 100 of those tests were atmospheric. Radiation carried by strong steppe winds left high levels of contamination, one of whose consequences was to double the rate of still births in Kazakhstan between 1960 and 1980.⁷ The Soviet Union also created nuclear waste dumps near the shores of the Caspian Sea.

In Transoxiana, as in Kazakhstan and Siberia, most Soviet investment was used to develop regional resources rather than to diversify manufacturing. Agriculture, cotton, and extractive industries continued to dominate the regional economy. The importance of cotton increased as massive irrigation projects brought water to larger areas, many of them ecologically fragile. Between 1940 and 1965 the area under cotton increased by more than 50 percent, and by 1991, Central Asia was producing 92 percent of all Soviet cotton (almost 75 percent came from Uzbekistan alone) and 17 percent of global production. By then, cotton generated 60 percent of Uzbekistan's GNP and employed 40 percent of its workforce.⁸ Production increased mainly because of expensive extensions to the region's ancient irrigation networks.

Here, too, economic policies took little account of the needs of local populations. From the 1960s, vast canals such as the Karakum canal in southern Turkmenistan have drained off as much as 90 percent of the water of the Amu Darya river. So extravagantly did local state farms use irrigation water (which was supplied virtually free under the planning system) that by the 1980s, over-irrigation and desalinization began to undermine production. By 1985, 12 percent less cotton was being produced than in 1980, and today the flow of water from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers is just a tenth of the pre-Soviet levels.⁹ By 1990, the Aral Sea had shrunk by 50 percent, its waters were too salty for many fish species, and it had retreated 90 miles from the once flourishing fishing port of Muynak. Add in massive loads of fertilizers and pesticides, and the environmental consequences were disastrous. In the late 1980s, when the global average of pesticides used per hectare was c.300 grams, state farms in Uzbekistan were using about 54 kilograms of pesticide.¹⁰ Near the Aral Sea, child mortality increased in the 1980s as residues from DDT and other pesticides appeared in water supplies and foodstuffs.¹¹ “The Aral Sea's slow death has wiped out vegetation and wildlife, worsened the climate, and exposed polluted salt flats to desert winds that spread poisons over tens of thousands of square miles.”¹²

Though the scale was new, for Central Asia this was an old story. On his way to Bukhara in the mid-sixteenth century, the English traveler Anthony Jenkinson visited “Sellizure” south of the Aral Sea. He wrote that,

The water that serveth all that Countrey is drawen by diches out of the riuer Oxus, unto the great destruction of the said riuer, of which cause it falleth not into the Caspian sea as it hath done in times past, and in short time all that lande is like to be destroyed, and to become a wildernes for want of water, when the riuer Oxus shall faile.¹³

“Sellizure” is today the ruined site of Dev-Kesken-Kala on the Uzboy, the dried-up ancient course of the Amu Darya.

In the late twentieth century, though most production continued to focus on rural produce, including cotton, wool, raw silk, leather, and carpets, the Soviet government also began to see Central Asia, like Kazakhstan, as a major source of energy and minerals. There was significant investment in hydroelectric power in the mountainous regions of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, and in Central Asia as a whole electricity production increased by eight times between 1960 and 1985. Natural gas and smaller amounts of oil were found in Turkmenistan and on a smaller scale in Uzbekistan. The region also began to produce mercury, antimony, and uranium (mainly from Kyrgyzstan), as well as aluminum, while gold was mined in the Kyzylkum desert, on the border between Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan.¹⁴ In Turkmenistan, there was considerable production of non-ferrous materials.

By the 1980s, industrialization and modernization were beginning to transform lifeways in many areas of Kazakhstan and Transoxiana. Electricity and modern forms of communications mainly benefited the towns, with their large Russian populations. But all areas benefited from free education and health care, better water supplies, and cheap energy, housing, and transport. Before the Soviet period, rates of literacy in Central Asia were as low as 3 or 4 percent. By 1960 they had reached 60 percent and by the end of the Soviet period adult literacy rates were as high as in most of the Soviet Union, while infant mortality rates were lower and life expectancy higher than in other Muslim countries such as Turkey and Iran. Population growth was exceptionally high by Soviet standards. Income levels and consumption levels remained lower than in most of the Soviet Union, but were much higher than they had been in the middle of the twentieth century.¹⁵

Politically, the most significant change in the second half of the century was the consolidation of indigenous elites. By 1978, almost 60 percent of the Uzbek leadership consisted of Uzbeks and local leaders made up a similar proportion in Turkmenistan. These officials were very much part of the Soviet system and served its interests loyally. But like many middle-level politicians in the Brezhnev era, they managed to consolidate their local power, using regional clan networks as well as the quasi-clan networks of the Soviet nomenklatura. Traditional clan ties were similar to, but much more extensive than, the Muscovite ties of mestnichestvo, which had been abolished at the end of the seventeenth century, though the term was still used in the Soviet period to refer to local political networks. Clan networks survived in Central Asia partly because of the late emergence of modern state structures, and partly because, where markets were so undeveloped, they played an important role in the allocation of resources. Their importance probably increased in the Soviet period, as that of traditional tribal loyalties was undermined.¹⁶ Clans often consisted of many thousands of members related by kinship, work ties, and through neighborhoods (mahallas or villages, qishloq). They were dominated by elders and wealthy elites, but provided both protection and services and even scarce goods to their members.¹⁷

Within each republic, networks of clan loyalty shielded local leaders to some extent from the power of Moscow. Dinmukhamed Kunaev ruled through such networks in Kazakhstan. The Rashidov network in Uzbekistan was so powerful that one Uzbek scholar described First Secretary Sharof Rashidov (1917–1983), the leader of Uzbekistan from 1959–1983, as “a nineteenth-century khan.”¹⁸ But clan ties touched all levels of Central Asian politics.

Clan politics also operates at the subnational level, as hokims [governors] appoint relatives and clan members to key positions within the regional or raion government structures. Within the rural sector, the kolkhoz … directors give land or prized positions on the farms to their relatives and friends. During the Soviet period, brigades on the collective farms incorporated wholesale the avlod, urugh, or aul, the most traditional kin-based form of clan network.

Under Brezhnev, local leaders such as Kunaev and Rashidov thrived as long as they shared the goals of the Soviet system and continued to meet its economic demands. In Transoxiana, that meant, above all, meeting targets for cotton production and maintaining order. After Brezhnev's death, investigations were launched during the so-called “Uzbek Affair” into widespread falsification of figures on cotton production. Rashidov himself died before the investigations had proceeded far, but most leading officials in Uzbekistan would be replaced, many of them by Russians. In retrospect, Rashidov has been seen by many Uzbeks as a national hero who tried to protect Uzbek interests.¹⁹

After the violent attempts to suppress religious beliefs in the Stalin era, Islam survived and even flourished in the second half of the century, along with the region's robust regional cultures. Particularly in rural areas, where there was little Russian presence, traditional kinship and clan structures were so closely bound up with religious traditions that Islam became a vital marker of identity. Indeed, the persecution of Islam at the official level and the decline in formal Islamic education in the Soviet era ensured that Islam became increasingly important as a private form of identity, even as it lost many of the public features of an institutionalized religion.

Being Muslim had little to do with personal belief or observance of ritual and everything to do with customs and way of life. … For the vast majority of Central Asians, Islam was a form of localism, a marker that opposed Muslims/Central Asians/locals to Europeans/outsiders/Russians.²⁰

Far from blending together, as some Soviet officials had hoped, the cultures of Muslim Central Asians and immigrants from other parts of the Soviet Union remained quite distinct. And this had important consequences, particularly on demographic patterns. Unlike the Soviet Union's Slavic populations, whose birth rates were falling, Central Asian birth rates remained high, and Muslim populations began to grow faster than Slavic populations. Low levels of urbanization, particularly among the Islamic populations of Central Asia, also protected traditional social and cultural structures. In 1989, while levels of urbanization had reached more than 65 percent in the Soviet Union as a whole, they were below 40 percent in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, and below 30 percent in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.²¹

In the Brezhnev era, under powerful and increasingly self-confident local leaders, new national traditions blended with traditional identities.

An enormous range of behavior and values were subsumed under the rubric of national traditions: they included marking births, weddings, and funerals with often lavish feasts; circumcising all boys …; eating certain foods, furnishing one's living quarters in a certain way …; placing a high value on families.²²

Islam and the cultural traditions associated with it became integral to emerging Central Asian identities and “national” traditions. And in the era of perestroika, the weakening of Soviet cultural control allowed a rapid revival of Islamic worship, traditions, and education throughout Central Asia.

Despite Central Asia's semi-colonial status, much changed in the final decades of the Soviet era. Rising living standards and educational levels, a new accommodation between Islam and Soviet ideology, and increasing security of tenure for Central Asian politicians may help explain why, in 1991, neither elites nor the population at large showed much enthusiasm for the breakdown of the Soviet Empire.

SIBERIA

In Siberia, the crude, brutal, and lop-sided methods of development used under Stalin were largely abandoned after his death. Many camps were closed in the 1950s, GULAG was dissolved in 1957, and the largest camp systems, including Dalstroi and Norilsk, were shut down.23 Slave labor ceased to be the main driver of growth in the Far North.

After the transformations of the Stalin era, many indigenous Siberians began to live settled lives. Many moved into prefabricated houses on “state farms,” sent their children to Russian-speaking schools, and worked for wages. While their children often headed for the cities, some tried to defend what aspects of their traditional cultures still survived, by preserving languages and religious traditions, and defending traditional lands against encroachment by mining enterprises and farmers.²⁴

The center began to invest not just in timber, metal ores, and energy, but also in Siberian manufacturing, transportation, and education. The Far North in particular was transformed. “[B]y the late 1960s the traditional hunting grounds and reindeer pastures of the far north had become the major source of Soviet phosphates, nickel, gold, tin, mica, and tungsten, as well as timber.”²⁵ New industries appeared, including oil and gas production, aluminum manufacture, large machine-building complexes, and defense industries, as well as hydroelectric projects such as the Bratsk dam on the Angara river, which was for a time the world's largest single generator of electricity. By the late 1970s, western Siberia was by far the largest producer of natural gas in the Soviet Union, and also a major producer of oil. By the 1980s, Siberia accounted for 10 percent of Soviet GDP and 50 percent of its foreign currency earnings.²⁶

Rapid urbanization and migration from collectivized villages turned modern Siberia into a land of cities rather than villages. By 1959, half of its population lived in towns.²⁷ Higher wages, and even socialist idealism, attracted economic migrants to remote regions, despite the often poor conditions and shortages of goods. Travel was revolutionized. Most railways were electrified, but the arrival of air transport, which could reach remote areas more easily than railways, had almost as much of an impact as the first railroads. Under Stalin, airports had been built in major cities such as Irkutsk, Tomsk, and Novosibirsk, as well as in more remote cities such as Norilsk. But air travel really took off in the second half of the century, encouraged by subsidized fares and the building of new airports. In 1951, just over 300,000 people flew in Siberia; by 1980, 19 million flew in the region.²⁸

In an era of grandiose projects, including the Virgin Lands program, the Bratsk dam, and the BAM (Baikal-Amur Magistral or railway), “opening up Siberia” began to be seen not just as a planning goal, but also as a patriotic goal, and voluntary migration began to replace the forced migrations of earlier periods. From 1954, construction of the “academy town” of Akademgorodok outside Novosibirsk brought huge numbers of scholars and scientists to Siberia. Akademgorodok was home to the Siberian branch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, created in 1957. It was intended to create a new type of scholarly and scientific environment in which scholars could talk across disciplines, free from some of the constraints of other Soviet research institutions.

But many of these grandiose projects, like those in other parts of the Soviet Union, were implemented with little thought for their human or environmental side effects. Many of Siberia's towns were highly polluted, and large hydroelectric projects flooded some of Siberia's most fertile soils. Siberian agriculture never fully recovered from the disasters of collectivization. Indeed, the amount of farmed land in Siberia declined over the years, and Siberia ceased to be agriculturally self-sufficient.²⁹ Such distortions, though less extreme than in the Stalin period, were perhaps inevitable in a region whose development was still dominated by the priorities of the Soviet heartland.

MONGOLIA

Much had changed in Stalin-era Mongolia, but in the middle of the century its economy remained archaic. In the 1960s, most Mongolians still lived in traditional gers, so that a visitor from Chinggis Khan's empire would have found much that was familiar. Serious economic planning did not begin until 1948, and not until 1959 was most of the economy brought under state control. (Map 17.1.)³⁰

Map 17.1 Google Earth map of Mongolia.

The Stalinist dictator, Choibalsan, died in 1952, just before Stalin. He was replaced by a collective leadership, within which Jaagiin Tsedenbal (1916–1991) soon emerged as the dominant figure. Tsedenbal was Russian-educated, had a Russian wife, and had been hand-picked by the Soviet leadership. He had been Choibalsan's second-in-command since 1940, and would rule the country as sole leader until 1984. After his dismissal, he was replaced by Jambyn Batmonkh, who would rule until the end of one-party rule in March 1990.

After the disastrous, and unsuccessful, attempts at collectivization in the early 1930s, Tsedenbal launched a new round of collectivization in 1953, when negdels (collectives) controlled just over 3 percent of the country's livestock. The main justification for the new round of collectivization was to improve the technical level of herding, which was still the country's main economic activity. Aware of the disasters of the early 1930s, the government introduced collectivization more cautiously and less violently, and relied more on economic pressures, though the threat of coercion was always present. The government systematically discriminated in favor of collective herders and against those with private herds. It levied lower compulsory quotas and taxes on collectives, provided them with veterinary and other technical services, and made available large tracts of pastureland. By 1960 almost all herders belonged to one of about 300 negdels, most of which coincided with the local sumum, so that it became usual to refer to them as sumum-negdels.³¹ About 50 state farms were primarily agricultural; the rest kept livestock. While herds were collectivized, each family was allowed to keep a maximum of 50 animals for their own use, in a Mongolian equivalent of the private plots on Soviet kolkhozy. In return for wages, families had to supply livestock or livestock products.³² Conventional wisdom held that a household needed at least 100 animals to survive comfortably and yield enough animals to market some produce, so the permitted private herds were enough to supplement a household's income but not to make it self-sufficient. By the early 1960s, wages from collectives, calculated on the basis of labor-days, were probably the main source of income for most rural families.³³

The negdels were large, consisting on average of about 500 households in the early 1960s. Each had its own manager and administrative staff. The negdel centers in which these administrators lived were like “little villages of tents and wood or brick buildings,” each with its own “schools, clinics, veterinary stations, clubs, libraries, shops and post-offices.”³⁴ In fact, the negdels reproduced many of the patterns of pre-revolutionary herding, in which nobles or lamaseries had organized herding on large scales and supplied services that individual households could not provide. Like feudal overlords, the negdels were authoritarian, but they also provided protection and insurance. The continuities were evident to the herders themselves, who continued to refer to the negdel livestock as alban mal or “official animals,” a phrase derived from the alba, the traditional feudal obligations of commoners to their overlords.³⁵ The importance of negdel services would become apparent in the 1990s, when their breakdown left many herders in extreme difficulty.

We have a vivid, and surprisingly positive, if nostalgic, account of life on a negdel from a herder called Sodnomjav, who was interviewed in the 1990s after farms had been privatized. When interviewed, he was in his seventies and had lived through the entire communist era.

In the collective period the organisation of joint work, moving to other pastures, and oto [distant moves for fattening] was very good. The services provided to the herdsmen were also excellent. Also, the making of hay [for fodder] and the repair of hashaa [enclosures and sheds] was done well. People did not need to use ox or camel carts, so they became unused to this sort of work and expected to receive state motor transportation all the time. This was because the state farm concentrated all the camels in one or two ails [households] of specialist camel-herders. So most herders did not have camels for transportation. …

The herdsmen had hay and so forth provided for them, and were instructed where and when to move, so they did not choose places to pasture the livestock themselves. They worked only at the command of, and under the direction of, their leaders, and they moved and worked as a group, together, when the leader instructed. For example, cutting and making hay, shearing sheep and taking hair from the other animals, dipping the animals, all these things the brigade or groups (5–10 ails) did together. So during this period the people had no personal initiative. They ended up just following instructions and waiting to be told what to do.³⁶

After collectivization, the negdels did indeed supply new technological services, such as trucks to move tents during migrations or to move hay for fodder. But the number of livestock barely rose over the next 20 years. In the 1970s there were still about 24 million animals, no more than in the late 1950s, which suggests there was little improvement in the care of livestock. Animals still died of cold and dzhut, even though the government set up special units equipped with helicopters and trucks to supply fodder to animals in crises.³⁷ In practice, like Soviet collective farms, the main contribution of the negdels to the national economy was not to raise the level of livestock production but to maintain existing production levels as more and more of the rural population left for the towns.³⁸

Between 1956 and 1989, levels of urbanization rose from 22 percent to 57 percent. By then, as many as a quarter of Mongolia's population may have lived in Ulaanbaatar alone. Wage work increased. Between 1956 and 1963 the number of wage workers and officials rose from 25 percent to 46 percent.³⁹ These changes reflected a slow diversification of Mongolia's economy and society. Though the Soviet Union had valued Mongolia mainly as a source of livestock products, the Mongolian government understood the importance of creating a more diverse productive base. That aspiration was demonstrated symbolically in 1960 when the government added wheat sheaves and an industrial cogwheel to the national seal, which had previously, on Stalin's recommendation, contained only images of livestock and a livestock herder (Figure 17.1).

Figure 17.1 The Mongolian national emblem changed as the country industrialized. Jam123, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Coat_of_arms_of_the_People%27s_republic_of_Mongolia.svg. Used under CC0 1.0 https://creativecommons .org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en.

In the 1950s, the government tried to expand agricultural production in the Mongolian steppes through a “Virgin Lands” program dominated, like the Soviet program, by huge state farms and large-scale mechanization. As with the Soviet program, initial successes were not sustained. Indeed, agricultural productivity may have declined, in part because it was so dependent on fertilizers and equipment from the Soviet Union. Total grain output in 1980 was no higher than in 1965, though the sown area was larger.⁴⁰ In contrast to the Pontic and Kazakh steppes, agriculture has not become the dominant form of production in the Mongolian steppes.

Industry and the fossil fuels revolution had little impact in Mongolia before the 1950s, and when change came, it came slowly. In 1949, two joint Soviet–Mongolian companies were formed, Sovmongolmetall and Mongolneft’. The first mined fluorspar, tin, and uranium in Choibalsan province, while Mongolneft’ extracted and refined oil in Eastern Gobi province from the Züünbayan field. Mongolia got 20 percent of the profits on oil, but neither company was successful, and in 1957 the Soviet Union “donated its shares to Mongolia.” By the late 1950s, Mongolian production of coal and oil was mostly for the tiny domestic market, and in 1969 oil production stopped at Züünbayan because it was so uneconomical. In the 1970s, Soviet aid helped build the industrial city of Darhan and the copper mines of Erdenet, and by the early 1980s, there were at least 32,000 Soviet workers in the country. Coal mining increased at the Baganuur field near Erdenet, and a new power plant was built to supply the Erdenet mines. Taken together, the Erdenet mines, coal field, and power plant formed the most important industrial center in Mongolia in the late twentieth century, though it was symptomatic that they depended largely on Soviet equipment, spares, and diesel fuel, as well as on Soviet workers and technicians.⁴¹ Coal mining expanded largely to supply these new industrial cities with fuel. Mongolia's first railways were built in the late 1930s for military purposes. In 1949 a line was completed from Ulaanbaatar to Ulan-Ude on the Trans-Siberian railroad, and in 1956 work began on a rail link to China. By the mid-1950s it was also possible to fly from Ulaanbaatar to all the major provinces.⁴²

In the 1980s, for the first time, industry began to rival herding within the national economy. The percentage of workers employed in herding and farming fell from 70 percent in 1960 to under 40 percent in 1990, while the percentage of workers in industry and mining rose from 14 percent in 1960 to 27 percent in 1990.⁴³ Between 1940 and 1990, the share of GNP from industry, mining, and manufacturing rose from 13 percent to 49 percent, while livestock production and agriculture fell from 64 percent to 16 percent. Meanwhile, traditional manufactures based on livestock products, such as the production of hides, wool, and cashmere, also flourished and began to produce exportable goods.

Industrialization slowly began to transform Mongolian lifeways. Even the traditional dwelling, the ger, began to change, as new fabrics were used, timber floors were added, metal ovens replaced open fireplaces, electric generators allowed the use of electric fans, radios, and even televisions, and lorries began to carry gers on migrations instead of camels (Figure 17.2). Many traditional rural skills were lost, particularly among the young, while the many herders who settled in towns began to acquire a modern education and modern consumer goods such as TVs, which first appeared in 1967.⁴⁴ By 1970, 35 percent of Mongolian households had a radio and 6 percent a TV. By 1985, 51 percent of households had radio and 30 percent had TV. Meanwhile, literacy rates rose from 24 percent in 1940 to 95 percent in 1956. Health care improved with the introduction of modern medicine and clinics to eliminate venereal disease. Simple changes, such as the introduction of improved chimneys in yurts, helped reduce respiratory disease, one of the main causes of premature death. Between 1960 and 1980 life expectancy rose from 47 to 58 years and infant mortality fell even in rural areas. These changes help explain the rapid growth of the Mongolian population from 750,000 in 1944 (similar to the population in the time of Chinggis Khan) to over 2 million in 1989.

Figure 17.2 Mongolian ger. Courtesy of Daniel C. Waugh.

Social, economic, and cultural change, and a loosening Soviet grip, may help explain a growing interest in Mongolia's past. There was a mild post-Stalin thaw, and a partial relaxation in censorship, during which traditional Mongolian themes began to reappear within Mongolian culture. In 1962, a conference was held to mark the 800th anniversary of the birth of Chinggis Khan. A committee of historians and astrologers met at the Gandan monastery in Ulaanbaatar and determined that Chinggis Khan was born on May 31, 1162.⁴⁵ A historian, Academician Natsagdorj, director of the History Institute of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, gave a lecture on Chinggis Khan's role as the founder of Mongolian statehood, and a monument was erected to Chinggis Khan at his presumed birthplace. This was the first official acknowledgment of Chinggis Khan's role in Mongolian statehood. However, under Soviet pressure (after all, the Russian experience of Chinggis Khan's empire was wholly negative), officials criticized this brief display of an embryonic nationalism, and the subject disappeared only to be revived again in the late 1980s.⁴⁶ The monument to Chinggis Khan survived.

Mongolia's international isolation ended, finally, in 1961, when Mongolia joined the United Nations, and by 1965 Mongolia had formal diplomatic relations with 35 different countries. By 1987, when the USA recognized Mongolia, the number had increased to over 100. Recognition encouraged new cultural and trading contacts. However, until the 1980s, there was no loosening of the Soviet grip on Mongolia, particularly when tensions with China were high. In 1969, Soviet troops returned to Mongolia.⁴⁷

In summary, Mongolia underwent a partial modernization within the Soviet sphere, but when the Soviet grip eventually began to relax, it became apparent that beneath the Sovietized veneer, traditional forms of herding were indeed surviving as well as traditions of Mongolian patriotism and attachment to religious institutions. How strong these traditions were would become apparent in the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

XINJIANG WITHIN A REVIVING CHINESE EMPIRE

In 1949, with the arrival of units of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, Xinjiang became, once more, a remote province of a revived Chinese Empire, and most of its ties to Soviet Central Asia were severed for much of the late twentieth century. (Map 17.2.)

Map 17.2 Google Earth map of Xinjiang.

In October 1955, Xinjiang was renamed the Uighur Autonomous Region. The name made ethnic sense because, under the first PRC census, conducted in 1953, Uighurs made up almost 75 percent of the region's population of just over 5 million people, while Han and Hui (Muslim Han) groups made up just 5 percent.⁴⁸ Chinese authorities would eventually recognize some 13 different ethnic groups in the region, including Han, Hui (Muslim Han), Kazakh, and others. Special administrative regions were created for some of these groups.

In the early 1950s, China ruled Xinjiang with a relatively light hand, administering it primarily through the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and its commander, Wang Zhen. The army absorbed former soldiers of the Guomindang and the Ili National Army, and ruled through local power brokers. For a time, while China maintained good relations with the Soviet Union, Xinjiang continued to trade with Soviet Central Asia. In 1950, China gave the Soviet Union access to the oil and metal resources of Zungharia, in return for a large loan.

However, there were some immediate changes. New restrictions were placed on mosques and Muslim educational institutions, many waqf endowments were expropriated, and the application of sharia law was restricted. Collectivization and plans to expropriate former landowners proceeded cautiously, particularly among herding groups such as the Kazakh. In policies that would have seemed familiar under the Han or the Qing dynasties, Han immigration was encouraged, beginning with demobilized PLA soldiers and exiled convicts, many of whom were settled on military farms, under a large state organization known as the Bingtuan. The Bingtuan would flourish, and the labor under its control was often used for large agricultural projects such as planting and harvesting or the building and renovation of irrigation canals and qarez. Such institutions and projects helped increase the farmed area of Xinjiang from 1.2 to 3.2 million hectares between 1949 and 1961.

In 1955, a Uighur was appointed as titular head of Xinjiang, but real power was now held by the new army commander and First Secretary of the Communist Party, Wang Enmao, a veteran of the Long March, who would dominate the region for much of the next 30 years.

Two factors dominated Xinjiang's history in the next 20 years. The first was the revolutionary reforms of the Maoist era. The second was the closing of the border with the USSR as a result of the Sino-Soviet conflict, which turned Xinjiang into an economic and political backwater, a barrier rather than a corridor for trans-Eurasian exchanges. Both changes were associated with official intolerance of Xinjiang's distinctive cultural traditions and local displays of nationalism, which the government interpreted as evidence of Soviet subversion.

The over-ambitious economic plans of the Maoist “Great Leap Forward,” from 1958–1961, included attempts to settle nomads as farmers. They resulted in large-scale famines and the death of large numbers of livestock. The government also attacked Islamic institutions and traditions, banned the Hajj, and accelerated Han immigration to Xinjiang as part of its plans to reduce ethnic and cultural differences. In 1962, after 200,000 had fled to Soviet Central Asia, the border with the Soviet Union was closed.

Even more chaotic was the era of the Cultural Revolution, from 1965 to 1968, during which there were occasional armed conflicts between Han officials, Red Guards, and representatives of the Bingtuan. Local cultural, artistic, and religious traditions were attacked with particular savagery by Red Guards and other radicals, and mosques and even Qur'ans were desecrated. Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, is supposed to have said, “What is special about your tiny Xinjiang? I despise you.”⁴⁹ So great was the political and economic chaos of this era that many Han immigrants returned to China, and Xinjiang, which had once exported grain, had to import it. In 1964, China carried out its first nuclear tests in the remote Lop Nor region of Xinjiang. Relations with the Soviet Union also worsened during the Cultural Revolution. Between 1966 and 1969 there would be several military clashes between Soviet and Chinese troops along the Xinjiang border.

Some degree of stabilization became possible only after the death of Mao in 1976 and the rise to power of Deng Xiaoping in 1978. Once again, officials began to treat Islam and regional cultural traditions more tolerantly, and in the 1980s there would be something of an Islamic revival. Many new mosques were built and new Muslim educational institutions were established. As in Soviet Central Asia, official repression of religion was turning Islam and Islamic traditions and rituals into important markers of ethnic identity. In 1981, Wang Enmao, who like Deng had been demoted during the Cultural Revolution, was returned to power along with many other purged officials.

Economic reforms allowed the partial revival of an economy that had been brought close to subsistence for many years. The production and sale of grain and cotton increased, and Xinjiang began once again to export cotton, almost all of which came from the Tarim basin and the Turfan oasis. In 1949, Xinjiang produced only c.10,000 tonnes of cotton; by 1990, it was producing over 900,000 tonnes, and cotton was using more and more of the region's scarce supplies of water.⁵⁰ Economic growth began once more to attract Han migrants, slowly turning Zungharia into a Han-dominated region, particularly in its major cities and its capital, Urumqi. The Tarim basin remained overwhelmingly Uighur.

By the late 1980s, both the economy and cultural traditions of Xinjiang had revived, but industrialization and modernization had made little progress. As Millward writes, the region's cities

retained the feel of traditional Central Asian cities, with packed earth roads, winding neighbourhood lanes under dusty shade-trees, dense bazaars and animal-powered transportation. In Kashgar in 1990 the jingle of horsebells remained more common than the roar of motorcycle engines or blare of taxi horns.⁵¹

Not until the 1990s would Xinjiang enter the fossil fuels era.

NOTES

1 Dienes, Dobozi, and Radetzi, Energy and Economic Reform, 38, 56

² Davies, Harrison, and Wheatcroft, Economic Transformation, Table 29b, 300.

³ Pohl, “The ‘Planet of One Hundred Languages’.”

⁴ Pohl, “The ‘Planet of One Hundred Languages’,” 242, 246.

⁵ Pohl, “The ‘Planet of One Hundred Languages’,” 255.

⁶ Kort, Central Asian Republics, 90–93.

⁷ Kort, Central Asian Republics, 94–96.

⁸ Fierman, “The Soviet ‘Transformation’,” 20; Stringer, “Soviet Development in Central Asia,” 149.

⁹ Feshbach and Friendly, Ecocide in the USSR, 74; Fierman, “The Soviet ‘Transformation’,” 20; Kort, Central Asian Republics, 8.

¹⁰ Paul, Zentralasien, 428.

¹¹ Kort, Central Asian Republics, 14–15; Feshbach and Friendly, Ecocide in the USSR, 74–75, 78–79.

¹² Kort, Central Asian Republics, 11; and see Feshbach and Friendly, Ecocide in the USSR, Ch. 4, 73–89.

¹³ Bater and French, Studies in Russian Historical Geography, 1: 18.

¹⁴ Fierman, “The Soviet ‘Transformation’,” 20.

¹⁵ Stringer, “Soviet Development in Central Asia,” 155–157; in the late Soviet era, populations were growing at almost 2 percent per annum; Kort, Central Asian Republics, 11–12.

¹⁶ Collins, Clan Politics, 17, 37, 40.

¹⁷ Collins, Clan Politics, 17–18, 333.

¹⁸ Collins, Clan Politics, 106, 112.

¹⁹ Paul, Zentralasien, 414.

²⁰ Khalid, Islam after Communism, 107.

²¹ Khalid, Islam after Communism, 93.

²² Khalid, Islam after Communism, 99.

²³ Applebaum, Gulag, 457.

²⁴ Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors, 340ff.

²⁵ Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors, 337.

²⁶ Naumov, History of Siberia, 205–206.

²⁷ Naumov, History of Siberia, 209.

²⁸ Hartley, Siberia, 221.

²⁹ Naumov, History of Siberia, 208–209.

³⁰ Bawden, Modern History, 394.

³¹ Bawden, Modern History, 402.

³² Sneath, “Mobility, Technology, and Decollectivization,” 225–226.

³³ For the figure of 100 or more animals for self-sufficiency, see Rossabi, Modern Mongolia, 121; Bawden, Modern History, 398.

³⁴ Bawden, Modern History, 403–404; cinemas were still mobile in the 1960s.

³⁵ Sneath, “Mobility, Technology, and Decollectivization,” 229–231.

³⁶ Humphrey and Sneath, The End of Nomadism?, 39–40.

³⁷ Sneath, “Mobility, Technology, and Decollectivization,” 223; Bawden, Modern History, 404, 430.

³⁸ Atwood, Encyclopedia, 156.

³⁹ Atwood, Encyclopedia, 379; Bawden, Modern History, 408–409.

⁴⁰ Alan Sanders, afterword to Bawden, Modern History, 430.

⁴¹ Atwood, Encyclopedia, 357; Sanders, afterword to Bawden, Modern History, 426–427.

⁴² Atwood, Encyclopedia, 157.

⁴³ Atwood, Encyclopedia, 378.

⁴⁴ Nakami, Batbayar, and Boldbaatar, “Mongolia,” 363; Atwood, Encyclopedia, 379; Bawden, Modern History, 409.

⁴⁵ Boldbaatar, “Eight-Hundredth Anniversary of Chinggis Khan,” 240.

⁴⁶ Bawden, Modern History, 417–418; and see Boldbaatar, “Eight-Hundredth Anniversary of Chinggis Khan,” 237–246.

⁴⁷ Sanders, afterword to Bawden, Modern History, 425–426.

⁴⁸ The following section is based largely on Millward, Eurasian Crossroads, Chs. 6 and 7.

⁴⁹ Millward, Eurasian Crossroads, 274.

⁵⁰ Paul, Zentralasien, 429.

⁵¹ Millward, Eurasian Crossroads, 284.

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