Crossing Boundaries: Maya Peterson’s Pipe Dreams

Abstract

Anyone who has traveled in rural areas of Central Asia will recall seeing oozing, salt-encrusted fields, rendered unfit for cultivation by faulty Soviet irrigation practices. On my first visit to Turkmenistan in the 1990s, I passed miles of such ruined land on my way to a friend’s home village.1 While the devastation of the Aral Sea is the best-known result of the Soviet drive for cotton in the region, the environmental effects of Soviet rule extend far beyond the shores of that doomed body of water. Maya Peterson’s important book helps us understand how this situation came to be. In Pipe Dreams: Water and Empire in Central Asia’s Aral Sea Basin, Peterson tells a story of technology, modernist ideology, and imperial hubris.2 The drive to remake Central Asia’s land and water, begun under the tsars, reached its culmination in the Soviet era. In a perfect cascade of unintended consequences, Soviet “modernizing” policies of agricultural development in Central Asia resulted in famine, the spread of malaria, the destruction of agricultural land through salinization, and the desertification of the Aral Sea and surrounding areas. Water and the environment are vitally important yet neglected aspects of Soviet history. Discontent over environmental damage was a key factor fueling the separatist sentiments that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the Soviet successor states are still struggling with the legacy of poor stewardship of natural resources. Yet the study of environmental history in Russia and the Soviet Union is in its infancy, and the number of works on this topic relating 1 A 2012 United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) study found that 60 percent of all agricultural land in Turkmenistan is affected by salinization (“1st Environmental Performance Review of Turkmenistan” [https://unece.org/environment-policy/ publications/1st-environmental-performance-review-turkmenistan]). 2 Maya K. Peterson, Pipe Dreams: Water and Empire in Central Asia’s Aral Sea Basin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019).