Cotton scale (Tajikistan)

Cotton has a long history in Central Asia. While the crop is indigenous to the region (where it was referred to as ghuza), under Tsarist Russia local cotton production was intensified with the introduction of American varieties. After 1917, the Soviet leadership further bolstered cotton production throughout Central Asia (Peterson 2019, Obertreis 2017). They introduced more foreign varieties (including from Egypt, India, and Iran) that eventually resulted in a selection of domestic cotton varieties. Particular regions underwent radical transformation in the Soviet era, such as the southwestern part of the newly established Tajik SSR. Land was reclaimed, giant irrigation systems were built, and people were brought from the highlands to settle and build a life in the lowlands and engage in agricultural production, which, most often, concerned cotton. Oral histories reveal that the early years after resettlement were tough, with expressions of homesickness and associated observations about new experiences and senses of dislocation. When a Pamiri male labourer who had been resettled from mountainous Bartang to one of the southernmost districts of Khatlon saw a pile of cotton on the fields for the first time, he could not believe his eyes as he took it for a glacier, as recalled by one of his grandsons (interview April 2021).

Despite the Soviet leadership’s efforts to mechanise cotton harvesting, most cotton remained picked by hand. In addition to the rural population, students and state officials residing in urban centres were also mobilized during the peak harvest, and sent to the fields. Many urban dwellers, born in Dushanbe in the 1970s recall those years. For some of them, the cotton harvest was one of the only times they left the city. A female inhabitant from Dushanbe, born in 1974, once recalled her very first experience with picking cotton, at a time when Dushanbe was still surrounded by cotton fields. Upon arrival on the fields, she and her classmates vigorously started picking cotton. The volumes of cotton filling their bags quickly impressed them, and already before lunch time, they anticipated their volume to exceed the expected amount that should be picked, and they decided they could break for lunch early; the high volume justified a long rest and in fact, they did not resume working at all after lunch. At the end of the day when their teacher weighed their cotton, it appeared to be far below expectations (around 7 kilogrammes), and they encountered a furious teacher. The voluminous nature of raw cotton quickly betrays the eye.

The cotton scale displayed here, photographed in 2013 in the district of Jaloliddini Balkhi (formerly J. Rumi, Kolkhozobod), was of high importance in rural Tajikistan during the cotton harvest, and remains of importance in cotton-growing areas. In the area of Jaloliddini Balkhi cotton has been the dominant crop since the 1940s. In the Soviet era, some of the southernmost districts of Tajikistan, including Kolkhozobod, became specialised in long staple cotton [pakhtai mahinnakh (Tajik); tonkovoloknistiye klopchatnik (Russian)], best harvested, according to specialists, by hand. According to oral histories, only a part of the cotton in their area was harvested mechanically. Long staple varieties were introduced in the 1930s (initially known as Egyptian cotton) and advanced and spread under the agricultural scientist Krasichkov, who long headed an agricultural research centre in Tajikistan’s Khatlon region (SoyuzNikhi). Long staple cotton was more precious than cotton with shorter staple lengths. It was produced, harvested, and stored separately and processed elsewhere in the Soviet Union, used for the manufacturing of military goods, such as parachutes. Yet producing the long staple was more challenging; the varieties are more input and labour demanding. Harvesting was tougher. 

According to elderly women who still live in the area and laboured their life long on the kolkhoz, picking quotas were high in the Soviet era; around 80 to 100 kilograms, to be achieved before the sun would set and, those exceeding the quota sometimes received present, i.e. in-kind premium. Not all kolkhoz labourers were able to meet the quota and according to former kolkhoz workers, some were exempted from the high quota. Those workers included for instance breast-feeding women, who were brought home by kolkhoz drivers first, after which other workers were picked up with the next shift. The weight of cotton picked by individual labourers was registered and kept in the kolkhoz accounts; the photo of the document, written in Latin, dates back to earlier years, namely the 1930s (taken with permission, in a local archive in the Khatlon region).

The scale is still in use, lifted when the sun sets, and the labourers line-up to have their cotton weighed, before their bag is emptied on the lorry. In this regard, not much has changed since Soviet times, although the mobilisation of children and students has officially been banned, and farmers instead of brigade leaders weigh the cotton and pay out in the evening, or after a couple of days. In fact, one cannot understand rural development problematics in Tajikistan without attending to Soviet legacies when economic fundamentals were laid. Cotton remains part and parcel of the fabric of daily life in most of lowland rural Tajikistan. In discussions with senior agricultural scientists and farmers one still records expressions of superiority and pride as well as memories of the arduous work people had to undertake. Today’s insecurity and marginalisation shape their representation of the past. As recalled by some local inhabitants, while talking about the past at a prominent research station in their locality: “We were rich (Mo ser sum budem), and the field were like gold those days.”

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.
Obertreis, J. 2017. Imperial desert dreams: Cotton growing and irrigation in Central Asia, 1860–1991. Goettingen: V&R Unipress.
Peterson, M. K. 2019. Pipe dreams: Water and empire in Central Asia's Aral Sea Basin. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
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.

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