New Books In Central Asian Studies

Artemy Kalinovsky’s new book Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan (Cornell University Press, 2018) examines post war Soviet Tajikistan, situating Soviet industrial, educational, welfare and agricultural development projects within the broader historiography of post-colonial economic developmental projects in the Third World. The Soviet Union and the US, and later, the People’s Republic of China competed for allegiances in the developing world by offering advice and resources to post colonial leaders. The Soviet Union’s semi-colonial periphery proved to be a fertile testing ground for such large-scale development projects, which Kalinovsky compares to European colonial and post –colonial development projects in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Additionally, the local Tajik elites took advantage of the USSR’s interest in the Third World to argue for large-scale investment in development projects in primarily rural and agrarian Tajikistan. Like leaders of