Book Launch – Pipe Dreams: Water and Empire in Central Asia’s Aral Sea Basin

March 16, 2021

Virtual book launch hosted by the Central Asia Program at the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at the George Washington University on March 15, 2021.

Pipe Dreams explores the ways in which both the tsarist and Soviet regimes used fantasies of bringing the deserts to life as a means of claiming legitimacy in Central Asia, a process that ultimately led to the drying up of Central Asia’s Aral Sea. Maya Peterson argues that the disappearance of the Aral Sea, considered one of the worst environmental catastrophes of the late twentieth century, is deeply rooted in the dreams of the irrigation age of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a time when not only Russians and Bolsheviks, but engineers, scientists, politicians and entrepreneurs around the world united in the belief that universal scientific knowledge, together with modern technologies, could be used to transform large areas of the planet from ‘wasteland’ into productive land. The implications of this broader understanding of the Aral Sea disaster – the transnational aspects of which have often been overlooked in narratives focused on the hubris and folly of communist gigantomania and Soviet disregard for the environment – serve as a reminder that wise water management remains one of our greatest challenges today.

Speakers

Maya Peterson, Author

Maya K. Peterson is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research interests include Russian and Central Asian history, as well as the history of the environment, science, technology, and medicine. Her first monograph, Pipe Dreams: Water and Empire in Central Asia’s Aral Sea Basin, published as part of the Cambridge University Press series Studies in Environment and History in 2019, was a finalist for the Central Eurasian Studies Society’s 2020 Book Prize in History and the Humanities. She is currently working on a transnational history of kumys (fermented mare’s milk) as a therapeutic substance from the nineteenth century through the present.

Artemy Kalinovsky, Discussant

Artemy M. Kalinovsky is Professor of Russian, Soviet, and Post-Soviet Studies at Temple University and the Principal Investigator of the ERC funded project Building a Better Tomorrow: Development Knowledge and Practice in Central Asia and Beyond, based at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018) and A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). He has co-edited a number of volumes on Soviet and Cold War history, including The End of the Cold War and the Third World (London: Routledge, 2011), with Sergey Radchenko, and, most recently, Alternative Globalizations: Eastern Europe and the Post-Colonial World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020), with James Mark and Steffi Marung.

Marlene Laruelle, Moderator

Marlene Laruelle, Ph.D., is Director, Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies; Director, Central Asia Program; Co-Director, PONARS-Eurasia; and Research Professor of International Affairs at George Washington University. She works on political, social and cultural changes in the post-Soviet space. Marlene’s research explores the transformations of nationalist and conservative ideologies in Russia, nationhood construction in Central Asia, as well as the development of Russia’s Arctic regions. She has been the Principal Investigator of several grants on Russian nationalism, on Russia’s strategies in the Arctic, and on Central Asia’s domestic and foreign policies from the US State Department, the Defense Department, the National Science Foundation, Open Society Foundations, Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Henry Luce Foundation, etc.