Cotton Combines (Tajikistan)

Cotton combines: the industrial ideal of farming in Soviet Central Asia

Large parts of the agrarian landscape of Central Asia are deeply marked by the Soviet legacy. Dilapidated large-scale irrigation canals surround farm fields and remnants of kolkhoz buildings give some idea of the Soviet-era rural infrastructure. The Soviet leadership envisioned the industrialisation of agriculture and for large parts of the Central Asian lowlands to be transformed into cotton monocultures.

The story of the Soviet-era cotton combine harvester epitomises this industrial ideal and the difficulty of translating plans into reality. “Cotton production would become the job of land and machines, with minimal manual labor” (Kalinovsky 2018, 179). Efforts to mechanise agriculture intensified in Soviet Central Asia after WWII. Khrushchev pushed for the sophistication of combine harvesters, and engineers continued to improve the technology. Various models were produced in those years, carrying acronyms such as the SkhM-48, SKhS-1.2 and KhS-1.2M (fig.2 - Kasimov and Karamzin 1963). Each combine had its own innovative elements, all with the aim of increasing harvesting efficiency, adapted to specific sowing methods. The efficiency of machinery was meticulously calculated, as was labour. Cotton, after tobacco, was the most labour-intensive crop in Tajikistan.

Soviet propaganda booklets boasted about the achievements of combine manufacturing as early as the mid-1920s, and about the transfer of expertise on cotton farming from Central Asia to cotton-producing countries in the global South (Safarov 1974), while photos in the State Archives of Tajikistan give the impression that combines were widely deployed. However, Pomfret (2002), Kalinovksy (2018), and Keller (2015) describe how the actual use of combine harvesters was limited. At first the diffusion of combine harvesters took off later than anticipated. A conflict over optimal production methods in the 1950s between Tajik and Uzbek engineers (Pomfret 2002, Obertreis 2017) caused a delay in the distribution because combines had to be manufactured anew, even though, at least according to Kasimov and Karamzin (1963, 174) and Shifrin (1966), some combines were compatible with different sowing methods.

While Gleason (1990) argued that the fear of outmigration to cities and subsequent social unrest discouraged the local leadership’s adoption of combine harvesters, Kalinovksy (2018) and Pomfret (2002) rightly ascribe limited mechanised harvesting to economic and technical factors, and question Gleason’s statements. For one, the farm leadership, which held significant power, prevented mechanisation. For the kolkhoz economy, manual harvesting was considered more cost-efficient, because the costs of manual labour remained extremely low, and kolkhoz leadership had the tendency to hoard labour (Kalinovsky 2018). Probably for those reasons, the farm leadership let combines stand idle, and some of those in positions of authority intentionally made them non-operational (Keller 2015). There were also issues with maintenance, due to a lack of spare parts as well as trained mechanics. Lastly, some combines were technically not compatible with all environments and types of cotton. As recalled by rural inhabitants and agricultural scientists in Tajikistan today, the combines were not fit to harvest the precious yet more fragile (and still treasured) long-staple cotton (pakhtai mahinnakh), which was mainly planted in areas with a long growing season, such as the southernmost districts of west Tajikistan. This type continued to be harvested by hand. Another technical issue was that combines did not perform well on rolled terrain (Kalinovksy 2018). As a result, with the expansion of cotton production, manual labour needs only increased over the years and particularly relied on kolkhoz and sovkhoz women labourers, and increasingly as well as on large parts of the young urban population, who were drafted for the (peak of the) harvest, lasting several months.

The skeletal structures displayed in fig.1 (photographed in 2013) are remnants of cotton combines, left on farm fields in the district of Yovon, a locality close to Tajikistan’s capital city Dushanbe. According to inhabitants, the combines were in use until the early 1990s, after which they became obsolete. While the origins and type are unknown (an agronomist at the Tajik Agrarian University could not recognise the model), they must have been brought to Yovon after 1968. The completion of the Baipazam dam and the building of a tunnel enabled irrigated large-scale cotton production, and wheat had to make way for cotton. Local inhabitants born in this locality in the 1980s have never seen the combines in production. They only recall the rusting skeletons in the fields of a former director of the local farm association in the 1990s, with the dismantling of the sovkhoz. The combines turned into scrap metal and have gradually been cannibalised. If anything, the “demechanisation” of cotton harvesting in the 1990s was primarily due to the havoc that the breakdown of the Soviet Union brought to Central Asia. In Tajikistan, the impact was compounded by the civil war of the 1990s.

The issues that stifled the adoption of combines in the Soviet era, as well as the characteristics of cotton labour, are still in effect in parts of Central Asia today. Indeed, mechanised cotton harvesting—coupled with the application of defoliants—is returning to the Uzbek and Tajik cotton fields with the entry of foreign investors (such as the Chinese, in Tajikistan, and foreign cotton cluster owners in Uzbekistan). The giant John Deere harvesters (fig.3) brought in by those foreigners as promises or even gifts of “development,” (cf. Yeh 2013), would have dwarfed the former Soviet-manufactured ones. Discussions on the costs and benefits of machine-picked cotton have returned. At any rate, the relatively small-scale Tajik cotton farmers cannot afford investment in and maintenance of such technology. They also see no reason for doing so; as was the case in Soviet Central Asia, cotton labour is cheap. While the crop is still denoted as “white gold,” those toiling in the fields, still predominantly women, remain barely remunerated. With little alternative sources of income and the need to feed the family, the cash income earned during the cotton harvest remains of great importance to many rural women, providing currency in a time of financial distress.

References
Gleason, G. 1990. Marketization and migration: The politics of cotton in Central Asia. Journal of Soviet Nationalities 1(2): 66-98.

Kalinovsky, A.M. 2018. Laboratory of socialist development: Cold war politics and decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press.

Kasimov, J. and I. Vladimirovich Karamzin. 1963. Cotton growing (Pakhtakori). Dushanbe: Polygraphic Institute of the Ministry of Culture of the Tajik SSR. In Tajik, translated from Russian by U. Ulmasov, Kh. Usmonov and F. Samadi (original title: Khlopkovodstvo). 

Keller, S. 2015. The puzzle of manual harvest in Uzbekistan: economics, status and labour in the Khrushchev era. Central Asian Survey 34(3): 296-309.

Obertreis, J. 2017. Imperial desert dreams: Cotton growing and irrigation in Central Asia, 1860–1991. Goettingen: V&R Unipress.

Pomfret, R. 2002. State-Directed Diffusion of Technology: The Mechanization of Cotton Harvesting in Soviet Central Asia. Journal of Economic History 62(1): 170-188.

Safarov, R. 1974. Uzbekistan. Moscow: Novosti Press Agency Publishing House.

Shifrin, M. 1966. Mekhanikonii pakhtakori (mechanisation of cotton growing). In: Ma’lumotnoma baroi pakhtakoron (a handbook for cotton growers), eds. Y.D. Nagibin, A.M. Mesheryakov, R. Mahmudov, J. Qosimov, N. Muhiddinov, A. Iuldoshev, M. Menlikiev, I. Asrorov, M. Shifrin, D.F. Tolstogan, and B. Kutminskii. Dushanbe: Irfon, 126-143. 

Yeh, E. 2013. Taming Tibet: Landscape transformation and the gift of Chinese development. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Biobliography

Dr. Irna Hofman is a Research Associate of the University of Oxford (China, law and development project), specialised in agrarian transformation in Central Asia, with a particular focus on the political economy of cotton and rural livelihoods.