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Rise of the Surplus Population? Land Decollectivization, Class Stratification, and Labor Precarization in Uzbekistan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2023

Franco Galdini Open the ORCID record for Franco Galdini [Opens in a new window]
Franco Galdini*
Affiliation:
The University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
*
Corresponding author: franco.galdini@manchester.ac.uk
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Abstract

This article identifies decollectivization as one of the central policies through which the so-called “Uzbek model” mediated independent Uzbekistan's incorporation into the global economy as a cotton exporter. As such, it problematizes the way in which the dominant literature on transition framed the country's independent history since 1991 as a “paradox” of no transition and transformation. Since it theorizes the former as the application of privatization, liberalization, and macroeconomic stabilization, the literature cannot explain why, absent this standard reform package, Uzbekistan still underwent a momentous transformation from full employment and low migration to mass informalization of economic activity and rural outmigration. Instead, I contend, decollectivization entailed a process of mass expropriation of the rural population from the land—primitive accumulation in Marxian terminology—in order to put it to production for capital accumulation. As such, land use was shifted from the collective reproduction of the rural population during Soviet times to the rent-subsidization of capital accumulation after independence, particularly via import-substitution industrialization. The result has been the class stratification of Uzbek society, most evident in the rise of a vast relative surplus population of landless peasants struggling in the precarious informal economy, including as daily workers and labor migrants.

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Special Feature
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International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 103: Precarious Labor, Capitalist Transformation, and the State , Spring 2023 , pp. 147 - 161
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This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc., 2023

Introduction

For three decades, the literature on transition has dominated the academic debate on the transformation of the independent republics that emerged from the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1991. While vast and diverse, at its most fundamental, this body of scholarly work agrees that a standard reform package of privatization, (price and trade) liberalization, and macroeconomic stabilization represented the only way for these republics to “transition” from the failed Soviet command economy to free market capitalism.Footnote 1 Since it never questioned the efficacy of the reform package, when reality in the former Soviet Union (FSU) defied the literature's expectations—yielding large scale de-industrialization and the pauperization of the working class, rather than development and rising living standards—the latter ascribed this failure to the lack of, or the partial and incomplete, application of otherwise sound reforms (the “transition” package), particularly due to the vested interests of corrupt elites and crony capitalists.Footnote 2 As such, the literature appears to be stuck with the “paradox” of no transition and radical transformation in the FSU,Footnote 3 unable to explain the latter due to its theorization of the former.

In this regard, Uzbekistan is no exception. Since, against the grain of the standard reform package, the government of Uzbekistan (GoU) maintained price distortions and state ownership of the land via the so-called “Uzbek model,” the country was framed as having preserved “the Soviet command economy and governance structures … with only perfunctory nods in the direction of market” reforms.Footnote 4 The result was a “unique phenomenon” of “some sort of hybrid between market and command system.”Footnote 5 As a consequence, Uzbekistan presented “the paradox of a reform that avoided introducing any substantial features of a market economy and liberalization, but nevertheless caused important changes in agricultural production relations and the agrarian structure,” evident in the switch from full employment and low rural outmigration during Soviet times to mass informality and largely seasonal migration after independence.Footnote 6 Again, the transition literature in Uzbekistan seems to be also stuck with the “paradox” of no transition and transformation.

This is the starting point of this contribution, which identifies land decollectivization as one of the crucial policies through which the Uzbek model mediated the country's integration into the global economy as a cotton exporter. While legally land remained state-owned, decollectivization allowed the state to privatize access to the land and commons and, simultaneously, redirect the bulk of the cotton rents from the Soviet welfare system to the subsidization of capital accumulation, mostly in the form of import-substitution industrialization (ISI). In other words, decollectivization demolished the Soviet social contract based on cotton production in exchange for the collective reproduction of the rural population via full employment, welfare, and infrastructure provisions, along with access to the land and commons. As a result, the majority of the rural population was thrown into the ranks of a vast surplus population of landless peasants, whose precarious labor has become a feature of independent Uzbekistan most evident in their struggle to survive in the informal economy, including in subsistence agriculture and as daily and migrant workers. As such, not only do the informalization and precarization of economic activity go hand in hand in Uzbekistan, but the profound transformation of Uzbek society via class stratification occurred precisely because of (the mediation of) the Uzbek model, revealing there being no “paradox.”

Before proceeding with the analysis, a few provisos are in order. The article critiques the specific lack of a convincing explanation for change in Uzbekistan found in the dominant literature on transition, as summarized in the “paradox” of no transition and transformation.Footnote 7 This does not mean that all or even most literature would frame this as a “paradox,” although some of the authors cited/referenced here certainly do. It simply means that, instead of accounting for what happened in Uzbekistan and why, the transition literature assumed what should happen post 1991 and then proceeded to explain why its expectations were disappointed, leaving one to wonder why post-independence Uzbekistan underwent such a deep transformation given that, per the literature, it allegedly failed to reform. As such, the paper's original contribution lies in accounting precisely for this transformation, namely the rise of a vast surplus population that labors in precarious conditions—the theme of this Special Issue—at home and abroad, starting from how the Uzbek state mediated the country's integration into the global economy as a cotton exporter.

In this regard, although some original material from a small sample of representative interviews and fieldwork observations conducted in Uzbekistan in 2018 and 2019 is introduced, the article mostly relies on the extant literature for empirical data, particularly the seminal anthropological studies by Kandiyoti and Trevisani mostly from the decades of the 1990s and the 2000s. Instead of reviewing this literature in a separate section, the paper reinterprets its conclusions in light of the alternative framework espoused here. In other words, the aim here is not to reproduce a descriptive chronicle of thirty years of rural change in Uzbekistan, which the literature has amply documented; rather, it is to provide a cogent explanation for one of the crucial and lasting characteristics of this change, namely the rise of a vast surplus population that works informally and migrates seasonally by the millions. Therefore, reference to more recent developments also focuses on illustrating the endurance of this feature, rather than presenting an up-to-date picture of specific changes since the late 2000s.

The article is organized as follows. Section 1 introduces the main institutions of collective agriculture in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic (UzSSR), which guaranteed the collective reproduction of the rural population via cotton production in exchange for full employment, welfare, and infrastructure provisions, as well as collective access to the land and commons. Section 2 explores how land decollectivization in independent Uzbekistan demolished the Soviet social contract, leading to the class stratification of Uzbek rural society between a minority of private farmers next to a large majority of landless peasants. As section 3 argues, this relative surplus population of landless peasants struggles in the precarious informal economy, as evident in the rise of the post-independence phenomena of daily workers’ bazaars and mass labor migration, especially to Russia and Kazakhstan. The conclusion summarizes the article's main findings.

Collective Agriculture in Soviet Uzbekistan

In the UzSSR, life largely revolved around the land. More than half of the population resided in rural areas, a figure that, while estimates vary, remains largely true to this day.Footnote 8 In this context, the institutions of collective agriculture—namely collective and state farms, or kolkhozy and sovkhozy, respectively—had come not only to regulate economic activity, particularly the growing of the cotton crop for the industries of the Soviet Union's European republics or for export to hard currency markets, but also to organize rural communities as a whole. In general, sovkhozy differed from kolkhozy in a number of ways, including in that they provided higher wages for workers and were the recipient of larger capital investments, such as inputs and machinery.Footnote 9 However, both “state and collective farms were much more than a production unit,” as they “comprised a rural community”Footnote 10 and “were social institutions, embracing practically all aspects of social and economic life.”Footnote 11 Specifically, kolkhozy and sovkhozy provided electricity, gas, and water delivery and infrastructure maintenance, including for the huge canal irrigation system to grow cotton, as well as kindergartens, schools, clinics, and hospitals, along with collective land usufruct rights for food production and livestock rearing, for farm workers and their families.Footnote 12

This was at the heart of the Soviet social contract that guaranteed the collective reproduction of the working class and, particularly in the UzSSR, of the rural population. Put differently, within the Union-wide conditions of industrial mass production and collective agriculture, the UzSSR grew cotton in exchange for the provision of full employment, social infrastructures, and welfare services,Footnote 13 along with access to the land and commons. Net direct and indirect budget transfers from Moscow sustained this “all-round caretaker” state in the UzSSR,Footnote 14 including via the systematic use of price incentives for cotton, which, while varying, entailed payments for the crop at procurement prices higher than international prices during decades.Footnote 15 The net result was that, by the 1970s, the UzSSR exhibited “a much higher material standard of living … than in most of its Asian neighbours.” Indicators in health and education were equally remarkable, as “[b]y the early 1960s virtually universal literacy was achieved for both males and females (compared to 20 per cent in the Indian subcontinent) and there were seven times as many doctors per person as the average for Asia.”Footnote 16 This included “the development of an extensive network of medical and health care which covered the entire territory of the country.”Footnote 17

Given the significant social wage accrued in the collectives, “an individual occupied in the agricultural or service sectors [could] often earn a higher income and sustain a higher standard of living in [Soviet] Uzbekistan than his industrial or urban counterpart,”Footnote 18 explaining low rural outmigration in the UzSSR, as well as Soviet Central Asia's having one of the lowest migration rates in the USSR.Footnote 19 Thus, despite rapid development, including some industrialization linked to the cotton sector, as in tractor and mechanical harvester manufacturing, as well as in the textile and chemical industries, indigenous nationalities such as Uzbeks and Tajiks continued to prioritize employment in agriculture and services, while Russian immigrants came to dominate higher-skilled industrial and technical jobs especially in the cities.Footnote 20

Even during the precipitating crisis in production and social reproduction of the perestroika years, kolkhozy and sovkhozy in the UzSSR continued the overall provision of social wages, while collective access to the land and commons cushioned the fallout from increasing unemployment in the industrial, construction, and transport sectors. As people moved back to rural areas in order to “share[] work with the existing labour force” or engage in subsistence agriculture,Footnote 21 this resulted in a process of reagrarianization that fueled the growth in “hidden unemployment” in the countryside in the 1980s.Footnote 22 These phenomena would accelerate after independence in 1991, due to the radically changing material conditions of production and reproduction in newly-independent Uzbekistan as a cotton producer for export, to which I now turn.

Land Decollectivization and Class Stratification: Private Farmers vs. Landless Peasants

During the decade of the 1990s, the Uzbek model mediated the transformation of sovkhozy into kolkhozy and, gradually, into shareholding cooperatives named shirkats, “with the aim of reducing the government's financial responsibility” for collective farms and “reliev[ing] the state budget from expenditures.”Footnote 23 By 1994, sovkhozy had all but been eliminated.Footnote 24 The result was progressive labor retrenchment in the context of initial rounds of labor shedding that left part of the workforce “unemployed and landless,” giving rise to the “casualization of agricultural labour.”Footnote 25 In shirkats, as workers turned into shareholders of the collective, this effectively “did away with the obligation of the republican budget for wage payments,”Footnote 26 which instead became the responsibility of management. Amid economic crisis and insolvency following the collapse of the USSR, wage arrears or outright nonpayment became the norm,Footnote 27 in parallel to the overall retrenchment of labor across the Uzbek economy, as evident in the dramatic reduction in real wages (underemployment), as well as pension and welfare payment arrears, nonpayment, or payment in kind.Footnote 28

As a result, the rural population was increasingly being left to fend for themselves. For this reason, in parallel to the gradual transformation of collective farms, since the first years of independence many rural households were allotted plots for their private use. While the practice of awarding smallholdings had been introduced during the final years of the Soviet Union,Footnote 29 their size increased “from 110,000 ha before independence to 630,000 ha in 1994”Footnote 30 to comprise about three million plots on 10 percent of total arable land.Footnote 31 Again, the objective was for the state to reduce welfare provisions significantly, if not end them outright, in order to redirect the bulk of cotton rents to subsidize ISI. As President Karimov candidly opined, “[e]ndowing people with land played a truly revolutionary role, as it eliminated each individual's dependence on the state” (emphasis added).Footnote 32 However, while becoming “a safety-valve for the rural residents” in view of the production slump that followed the collapse of the USSR,Footnote 33 these smallholdings have been far “too small and insecure to provide a reliable basis” for subsistence, particularly for larger households,Footnote 34 whose members were pushed to engage in multiple informal jobs at home and abroad to guarantee their reproduction (next section).

The hokim (i.e., governor) was one of the central figures in this process of transformation of collective agriculture. As one interviewee put it,

when everything broke down, we were left with cotton. [The] over-centralization of power [in the hands of the] hokims in the rural areas was necessary. The hokim was really the master who had to provide all the conditions: give water, give fertilizer, give tractors, give gas so that people could work.Footnote 35

Appointed by the president, hokims secured the provision of subsidized inputs such as fuel and fertilizers in order to guarantee the continuation of cotton production for export. In turn, however, the central government purchased the whole harvest at below-market prices to resell it at international prices on the world market and pocket the difference; that is, cotton rents that went to subsidize capital accumulation in the form of ISI.Footnote 36

Therefore, from day one of the transition, transformation revolved around the appropriation of cotton rents. As explained, during Soviet times the UzSSR was the recipient of net direct and indirect budget transfers from Moscow, including via the systematic use of price incentives for cotton, which guaranteed employment, welfare, and infrastructures in exchange for cotton production, in the context of collective access to the land and commons. This radically changed following independence, as, rather than substitute for these transfers, cotton rents largely went to expand old industrial enterprises such as the textile and chemical industry, and, crucially, to develop new manufacturing sectors such as the automotive and electronics industry.

The Uzbek model mediated this process via specific policies that appropriated and channeled cotton rents to ISI. For example, as the state exercised monopsony power over the cotton harvest, the Ministry of Finance purchased the crop at below-market prices to resell it at international prices in the world market via government-affiliated trading companies. The Central Bank and National Bank would then allocate the cotton rents thus accrued to priority industrial projects via the provision of credit at low or even negative interest rates, including through commercial banks. Moreover, these manufacturing industries could acquire hard currency at preferential exchange rates for the tariff-free import of parts, components, and machinery.Footnote 37 Following the rise in commodity prices including cotton, particularly from the 2000s onward, these rent-subsidized benefits were systematically extended to small and medium enterprises (SMEs), as well as to small capitalist farmers entering the horticulture sector.Footnote 38

Still, while during the first half of the 1990s, the Uzbek model “undoubtedly unleashed forces of inequality in rural society,” at the same time “the guaranteed access to land … almost certainly limited these disequalizing forces. … Work sharing was widely distributed among the labour force, the great majority of whom were toiling within an overall framework of cooperative agriculture” (emphasis added).Footnote 39 Along with organizing production of cotton and wheat according to state orders,Footnote 40 shirkats continued providing and maintaining at least part of the rural infrastructure and services so indispensable for the reproduction of the rural population, including grazing rights and forage on the collective land as well as inputs (e.g., tractors, fertilizers) for private production on household plots.Footnote 41 Succinctly put, cooperatives still “‘bound’ a considerable part of [the] rural labour force” together.Footnote 42

The introduction of the 1998 Land Law and a series of other pieces of legislation would radically change that.Footnote 43 The crux of the law entailed the gradual dismantlement of kolkhozy and shirkats in order to create private commercial farms responsible for cotton, wheat, and other agricultural produce on the basis of long-term leases varying from ten to up to fifty years.Footnote 44 Again, hokims played a crucial role in the implementation of this process, including in the allocation of the newly-created farms via specially organized district commissions.Footnote 45 While reform was uneven in terms of timing and geographical catchment area,Footnote 46 it demolished the foundation of collective agriculture, including collective access to and use of the land and commons for the reproduction of the rural population, turning the majority of the latter into landless peasants.Footnote 47 In the poignant words of one of those peasants, “without [land], what do I do? Can't you see that the [private] farmers have fenced off their land? It looks like a jail. There is no other land available. When this was a kolkhoz, it was different. There were no fences, there was land available.”Footnote 48

This “newly commodified context of a land lease market”Footnote 49 spurred “a process of emerging class formation, as a small elite of medium-size f[a]rmers controls most of the arable land, while farm-workers-cum-dekhan-peasants comprise the poor.”Footnote 50 Following decollectivization, the former (fermery) accounted for 5–10 percent of total rural households, while occupying about 85 percent of the sown area and concentrating most assets and income. The latter consisted instead of the overwhelming majority of the rural population, divided in approximately four million small peasant (dekhan) holdings on 10–12 percent of the sown area.Footnote 51 These millions of landless peasants form what, with Marx, I define as a relative surplus population “only partially employed or wholly unemployed”Footnote 52 that struggles to reproduce itself amid precarity and informality at home and abroad (next section).

Since land ownership and monopsony power allowed the state to purchase most of the cotton harvest and a significant percentage of the wheat harvest at below-market prices, private farmers struggled to profit from these state-order crops. This explains the ongoing conflict “between fermer[y] and district authorities … around factors that determine the profitability of agriculture.”Footnote 53 With the introduction of the profit motive and the “acquired monopoly on large-scale agricultural production,” however, fermery became “the sole gatekeepers” for landless peasants “to a variety of income possibilities including agricultural wage labour, cotton stalks and grazing areas.”Footnote 54 In other words, private farmers could squeeze this vast relative surplus population “freed” from the land and limit the cost of inputs in order to establish several alternative avenues of accumulation.Footnote 55

Multiple cropping is a case in point. So, for example, “winter wheat was preferred by farmers as it offered space for follow-up cultivation of high-value crops such as maize, rice, vegetables, and potatoes after the wheat harvest in early summer,” including via subletting the land to dekhans in exchange for part of the harvest, money, or a combination of both.Footnote 56 In 2018, for instance, the going rate to sublet an hectare of land in the Fergana Valley after the winter wheat harvest was $200 USD.Footnote 57 Fruit and vegetable production for export became particularly profitable following the introduction of several pieces of legislation promoting it from the 2000s onward.Footnote 58 Likewise, farmers could divert finance and inputs meant for state-order crops to these alternative cash crops.Footnote 59 Finally, as access to the commons was privatized and land use changes resulted in the area for feed declining “by two thirds to 9% during 1991-2004,”Footnote 60 formerly free and available cotton stalks and cereal straws for use as fuel or feed for livestock became precious commodities to be sold, particularly during winter.Footnote 61

As the transition literature avers that “real land privatization in Uzbekistan was never intended,”Footnote 62 it cannot explain why, despite this lack of “real” reforms, the country underwent a radical process of rural stratification evident in the rise of a class of small capitalist farmers in parallel to the precarization of most of the rural population, while, simultaneously, cotton rents went to subsidize capital accumulation in the form of ISI. In effect, by focusing on the legal form of land ownership, which remained in the hands of the state, the literature misses the very real “expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil”Footnote 63 (primitive accumulation) introduced with decollectivization and the ensuing privatization of access to land enforced via land leases. For the majority of the rural population, this meant landlessness and mass precarization.

The available empirical data are unequivocal about the link between decollectivization, landlessness, and the growth of the informal economy. In 2003, for example, “only 7.2% of those workers who became unemployed due to the reorganization of 178 shirkats found jobs in non-agricultural enterprises and organizations.”Footnote 64 Overall, according to the GoU's own estimates, private farms could provide employment to “no more than 25% of the former shirkat workers.”Footnote 65 Despite the GoU's increase in subsidization for industrialization including SME expansion, particularly at times of high commodity prices from the 2000s onward, the sheer scale of labor shedding due to decollectivization was such that it overwhelmed the country's job creation capacity. As a result, in the 2001–2005 period, in parallel to the acceleration in the dismantlement of shirkats,Footnote 66 “employment in the informal sector grew by 31%, or by 1,340,000 people” while “the number of temporary, casual and seasonal [read: precarious] workers rose by 50%,” reaching a staggering 5,657,600 in 2006.Footnote 67

Simultaneously, the dismantlement of the institutions of collective agriculture led to the collapse in the social services such as health and education they had established and run for decades, further deepening the precarization of this vast relative surplus population. For example, inpatient and specialized care became less accessible especially in rural areas. “[B]etween 1997 and 2003, overall bed capacity was reduced by 50%, with a reduction of the number of hospitals in rural areas by 50%.”Footnote 68 Equally, the number of kindergartens in rural areas plummeted from 6,474 in 1991 to 2,073 in 2013, with coverage reaching a mere 8 percent of children aged 1–6 in the same year.Footnote 69

Successive changes to farm sizes in the decades following decollectivization never reverted the overall expropriation of the rural population from the land. Instead, the general trend has been one of land concentration and the ongoing precarization of the vast majority of the rural workforce. For example, different phases of land “optimization” in the late 2000s and 2010s to increase farm hectarage and achieve economies of scale for cotton and wheat, as well as to diversify into the production of fruits and vegetables, left overall employment in agriculture largely concentrated in the informal economy. As a 2022 World Bank report states, “at about 27 percent of employment in 2020, the agricultural share has remained unchanged since at least 2010, and more than half of agricultural workers are subsistence [read: informal and precarious dekhan] farmers.”Footnote 70

The next section offers evidence of the various forms in which this vast surplus population labors in the informal economy, including as daily workers and labor migrants.

A Precarious Surplus Population: Dekhan Peasants, Daily Workers, Labor Migrants

Next to the category of commercial farming, with the 1998 Land Law household plots were renamed dekhan farms.Footnote 71 By referring to “the pre-collectivized term” dekhan, the GoU was emphasizing rural households’ “ability and need to sustain themselves,”Footnote 72 in the context of decollectivization and the ensuing drawdown of the welfare state. In general, dekhan farms consist of a garden plot adjacent to the house (tamorka), including a shed with privately owned livestock and, when funds are available, a small greenhouse, as well as a subsidiary plot, with their combined size normally not exceeding 0.25 hectares, though varying according to land availability, with the smallest being as little as 0.06 ha.Footnote 73 Despite occupying a small percentage of the arable land, these farms have played “an important role in agricultural production, in terms of both subsistence farming for individual households and the cultivation of fruit, vegetables and livestock for the market,” peaking at 75 percent of total food output in the country by the mid-2000s, with women contributing a significant share of this agricultural labor.Footnote 74 More recent figures estimate that dekhan farms continue supplying a remarkable 60 percent and 92 percent of total horticulture and livestock output, respectively, for the domestic market and also for export.Footnote 75

As such, since with decollectivization agriculture was transformed into a livelihood strategy for most of the rural population, peasants have engaged in intensive small-scale farming in order to provide for their families, including by selling their surplus produce on the myriad dekhan markets throughout the country's towns and cities. This is especially the case of women dekhans, who “primarily sell their products in local markets and are generally disconnected from retailers and exporters. Higher-value activities, such as trade, transport, and marketing, are [instead] the domain of male farmers and specialized firms.”Footnote 76 However, while supplying “more than a quarter of the food consumption of rural households,”Footnote 77 dekhan farms continue spending only “part of their time in agriculture, being forced by [the] small size of their land plots … to look for additional off-[dekhan] farm jobs.”Footnote 78

In other words, the privatization of access to the land and the mass shedding of millions of workers from collectives and cooperatives was only very partially offset by the granting of small plots to rural households. Instead, this vast relative surplus population of landless peasants created by decollectivization has struggled to secure its reproduction via a combination of casual, daily, and seasonal jobs in the large informal economy, whether in the agricultural, service, or industrial sector, at home and abroad. As Cornia put it in the mid-2000s, “[m]ost of the people made redundant [by decollectivization] depend upon casual work, have fallen back on household production using small plots or have migrated under distress to the daily labour market of Tashkent or to Russia or Kazakhstan.”Footnote 79 As such, informal work, including migrant and daily labor and work in subsistence agriculture, lies at the heart of labor precarization in the country. Finally, despite the significant changes to private farms organization in the past two decades, according to the same 2022 World Bank report cited above, “most work” in Uzbekistan continues to be “informal,”Footnote 80 hence very often precarious.

This explains why the late-Soviet phenomenon of mardikor (“daily worker”) bazaars, formerly a way for, e.g., rural students to complement their stipends, has become an enduring feature in rural areas, towns, and cities across Uzbekistan.Footnote 81 Mardikory often hail from “households where labour resources far outstrip their access to land and where opportunities for alternative earnings are severely limited.”Footnote 82 While mostly a male domain during Soviet times, given the extent of precarity women mardikor bazaars have now become common throughout the country.Footnote 83 As recently as 2019, I could observe potential workers stand for hours at major road intersections, often next to main markets, waiting to be informally employed at a negotiated price mostly for unskilled work. Often, mardikor bazaars were organized along gender lines, with men and women waiting at different, albeit close, places, such as at two different sides of the same road junction.Footnote 84

In parallel, landlessness and joblessness spawned huge migratory flows from rural Uzbekistan to the cities and to third countries, due to the growing gap in living standards between rural and urban areas, a radical reversal of the situation obtaining during Soviet times.Footnote 85 Despite the lack of precise statistics, the available data suggest that at least hundreds of thousands of people have been moving between rural areas and towns and cities across the country, especially the capital Tashkent. Due to stringent registration (propiska) rules, however, internal migrants have preferred to find accommodation on the outskirts of Tashkent and in its satellite cities, where accommodation is also more affordable and whence a veritable sea of commuters descend on the capital on a daily basis.Footnote 86 While the propiska has linked a host of social services such as healthcare provision and pensions to a citizen's official place of residence since Soviet times, its enforcement has become much stricter after independenceFootnote 87 for the specific purpose of the “administrative geographical containment of [‘freed’] labor in rural areas,”Footnote 88 replicating the countryside's precarity in the cities. For instance, figures from the late 2000s indicated that “87% of domestic migrants have never been registered, while 79% never acquired a temporary right for residence,”Footnote 89 making them vulnerable to harassment and bribery from the police. Interviews conducted in Uzbekistan in 2018 and 2019 confirmed that these trends largely persist.Footnote 90

Moreover, in the wake of rising oil prices in the 2000s and the ensuing construction boom in the northern energy-rich FSU republics, millions of (mostly seasonal) migrant workers emerged from this vast relative surplus population “freed” from, and denied access to, the land and the commons. Unsurprisingly, international migrants from Uzbekistan “most often” have been “from rural areas and from large families,” with 81 percent thereof being male and 19 percent female in 2017.Footnote 91 Generally, they have taken up informal work in construction, trade, and agriculture in Russia and, to a lesser but still significant extent, Kazakhstan,Footnote 92 facing harassment and bribe-taking by the police at border crossings on the way to their destination, as well as lacking social protection at home and in the host countries, where they toil in appalling conditions and experience discrimination in the housing market and in access to social services. Tellingly, Uzbekistan's migrant workers mention high unemployment and low wages as the main reasons for migrating.Footnote 93

The exponential growth and acceleration in migration from Uzbekistan to Russia and Kazakhstan in the 2000s, in parallel to the dismantling of the institutions of collective agriculture, testify to the direct and unequivocal link between decollectivization and the rise of a vast relative surplus population in the Uzbek countryside. As hundreds of shirkats were being dissolved between 1998 and 2006, the number of official work permits to Russia for Uzbek citizens soared from a few thousands in 2000 to more than 666,000 in 2009.Footnote 94 Given the high prevalence of informality in migrant work, however, the actual figures were much higher. For example, it is calculated that, already in the early 2000s, next to 44,000 registered Uzbek migrant workers in Russia there were up to 600,000 unregistered ones.Footnote 95 This mass movement of people has continued since, with official statistics estimating that, in 2019, between 2.6 and 3 million Uzbeks were abroad as migrant workers.Footnote 96 And so has the flow of migrant labor's remittances travelling in the opposite direction grown in line with the rising numbers of Uzbek seasonal workers, reaching a gargantuan $6.7 billion USD, or 12 percent of the country's GDP, in 2013.Footnote 97 The international price of oil—a crucial export commodity for the Russian and Kazakh economies—has been a key factor in the upward and downward fluctuations of these remittances, which dropped, for example, as a consequence of the financial crisis in 2009 and again in 2014–2016 due to the recession that hit Russia and Kazakhstan.Footnote 98

These money transfers have been crucial to sustaining consumption particularly in Uzbekistan's rural areas, amounting to about 10 percent of overall income in the two poorest quintile households and providing especially for food and housing, along with the purchase of consumer durables.Footnote 99 This is particularly true given that, while some targeted assistance for the poorest strata of the population has been provided through the revival of an old institution like the mahalla (“neighborhood”),Footnote 100 as well as specific schemes such as the Low Income Allowance, these expenditures “have fallen significantly since the 1990s, and were only 0.1 percent of GDP in 2009,”Footnote 101 a figure that roughly remains the same today.Footnote 102

Conclusion

This paper argued that land decollectivization was central to Uzbekistan's post-independence transformation, as it ended the collective reproduction of the rural population in the country's rural areas, giving rise to the class stratification of Uzbek society as a result. While a minority of private farmers could exploit the labor of a majority of newly-turned landless peasants to profit from multiple cropping and other activities, this vast relative surplus population was thrust into the informal economy, where they struggled to guarantee their reproduction as a precarious labor force engaged in daily, seasonal, and migrant work. In parallel, as the state-maintained ownership of the land and monopsony power over the cotton harvest, it could divert the rents accrued from the sale of cotton on the global market toward capital accumulation in the form of import-substitution industrialization, leaving the majority of the rural population to fend for themselves instead.

As such, the paper explained why Uzbekistan's class stratification and labor precarization following independence were directly related to the Uzbek model's mediation of the country's integration into the global economy as a cotton exporter, putting to rest the “paradox” of no transition and transformation that has marred the transition literature. In this context, it is hoped that future research on the FSU will likewise engage with the issues of ownership and class beyond the legal forms of change in the region, focusing instead on the very real transformation in the relations of production and social reproduction in countries that were once part of the Soviet Union.

References

Notes

1. See, e.g., World Bank, “Uzbekistan: An Agenda for Economic Reform” (Washington, DC, 1993); Ofer, Gur and Pomfret, Richard, “Introduction,” in The Economic Prospects of the CIS: Sources of Long Term Growth, eds. Gur Ofer and Richard Pomfret (Cheltenham, UK, 2004), 1–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 15–17; Marangos, John, “Shock Therapy and its Consequences in Transition Economies,” Development 48 (2005): 70–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pomfret, Richard, The Central Asian Economies in the Twenty-First Century: Paving a New Silk Road (Princeton, NJ, 2019)Google Scholar.

2. See, e.g., Anders Åslund, “Why Has Russia's Economic Transformation Been So Arduous?” paper presented at the Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics (Washington, DC, 1999); World Bank, “Transition, The First Ten Years: Analysis and Lessons for Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union” (Washington, DC, 2002); Cooley, Alexander and Heathershaw, John, Dictators Without Borders (New Haven, CT, 2017), 52–57Google Scholar.

3. See, e.g., Pomfret, The Central Asian Economies, 265.

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7. Because of space constraints, the paper does not concern itself with a growing “heterodox” scholarship that ascribes the transformation of post-Soviet Central Asia and Uzbekistan to the specific policies of “developmental” states, but see, e.g., Bolesta, Andrzej, “From socialism to capitalism with communist characteristics: The building of a post-socialist developmental state in Central Asia,” Post-Communist Economies 34, no. 1 (2022): 71–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Lombardozzi, Lorena, “Can distortions in agriculture support structural transformation? The case of Uzbekistan,” Post-Communist Economies 31, no. 1 (2019): 52–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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16. Khan, “The transition,” 1.

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20. Lubin, Labour and Nationality; Ilkhamov, “Labour Migration.”

21. Khan, “The transition,” 4.

22. Lubin, Labour and Nationality; Islam Karimov, “Uzbekistan's Own Model of Transition to Market Relations,” in Uzbekistan: National Independence, Economics, Politics, Ideology ed. Islam Karimov (Tashkent, 1993), 174–258; Kandiyoti, Deniz, “The Cry for Land: Agrarian Reform, Gender and Land Rights in Uzbekistan,” Journal of Agrarian Change 3 (2003): 225–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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24. Khan, “The transition.”

25. Kandiyoti, “The Cry for Land,” 239, 233, fn. 20.

26. Spechler, The Political Economy, 68.

27. Ilkhamov, Alisher, “Shirkats, Dekhqon farmers and others: Farm restructuring in Uzbekistan,” Central Asian Survey 17 (1998): 539–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kandiyoti, “The Cry for Land.”

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29. Craumer, “Agricultural Change.”

30. Khan, “The transition,” 7.

31. Kandiyoti, “The Cry for Land.”

32. Islam Karimov, “Uzbekistan on the path of deepening economic reforms,” in The Homeland is Sacred for Everyone ed. Islam Karimov (Tashkent, 1995), 162–348, 205.

33. Ilkhamov, “Shirkats, Dekhqon farmers,” 556.

34. Trevisani, “The reshaping,” 129.

35. Interview with former research coordinator at think tank, founder and director of independent think tank (Tashkent, 2018).

36. IMF, “Republic of Uzbekistan: Recent”; Maurizio Guadagni, Martin Raiser, Anna Crole-Rees, and Dilshod Khidirov, “Cotton Taxation in Uzbekistan: Opportunities for Reform,” Environmentally and Socially Sustainable Development (ECSSD) Working Paper n. 41 (Washington, DC, 2005). While the USSR also used raw material rents to fund ISI, this tended to be concentrated in the Union's European republics. As a result, despite some industrial development, the UzSSR exhibited a comparatively much lower level of industrialization in the Union. See, e.g., Alam and Banerji, “Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.”

37. IMF, “Republic of Uzbekistan: Recent”; Franco Galdini, “‘Backward’ industrialisation in resource-rich countries: The car industry in Uzbekistan,” Competition & Change (2022).

38. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), “Improving Access to Finance for SMEs in Central Asia through Credit Guarantee Schemes,” OECD Central Asia Initiative (Paris, 2013); Donald F. Larson, Dilshod Khidirov and Irina Ramniceanu, “Uzbekistan: Strengthening the Horticulture Value Chain,” World Bank (Washington, DC, 2015), 26.

39. Khan, “The transition,” 6.

40. State orders defined the quotas of the cotton and wheat harvest to be sold to the state at below-market procurement prices for resale on the world (cotton) and the domestic (wheat) market.

41. Ilkhamov, “Shirkats, Dekhqon farmers”; Kandiyoti, “The Cry for Land”; Spoor, “Agricultural Restructuring”; Veldwisch, Gert J. A. and Bock, Bettina B., “Dehkans, Diversification and Dependencies: Rural Transformation in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan,” Journal of Agrarian Change 11 (2011): 581–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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43. Djanibekov et al., “Farm Reform.” These included the Law on Agricultural Cooperatives (Shirkats), the Law On Farming Enterprises, the Law On Dekhan Business Entities, and the Program of Economic Reform in the Agricultural Sector of Uzbekistan for 1998-2000. See Center for Economic Research (CER), “The Reorganization of Cooperative Agricultural Enterprises (shirkats) into Farming Enterprises,” Working Paper 2004/02 (Tashkent, 2004).

44. Kandiyoti, “The Cry for Land”; CER, “The Reorganization.”

45. Kandiyoti, “The Cry for Land.”

46. For an overview of the decollectivization process, see Djanibekov et al., “Farm Reform,” 102.

47. CER, “The Reorganization”; Trevisani, Land and Power; Djanibekov et al., “Farm Reform.”

48. Interview with dekhan peasant (Samarkand province, 2019).

49. Kandiyoti, Deniz, “Pathways of Farm Restructuring in Uzbekistan: Pressures and Outcomes,” in The Political Economy of Rural Livelihoods in Transition Economies: Land, Peasants, and Rural Poverty in Transition ed. Spoor, Max (London, 2009), 143–62Google Scholar, 154.

50. Veldwisch, Gert J. A. and Spoor, Max, “Contesting Rural Resources: Emerging ‘Forms’ of Agrarian Production in Uzbekistan,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 35 (2008): 424–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 425–26.

51. CER, “The Reorganization”; Trevisani, Land and Power; Veldwisch and Bock, “Dehkans, Diversification.”

52. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume One, intro. Ernest Mandel, trans. Ben Fowkes (London, 1867/1976), 782.

53. Trevisani, Land and Power, 219.

54. Veldwisch and Bock, “Dehkans, Diversification,” 593.

55. CER, “The Reorganization”; Veldwisch and Bock, “Dehkans, Diversification.”

56. World Bank and Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Transition Economies (IAMO), “Farm Restructuring in Uzbekistan: How Did It Go and What is Next?” Analytical and Advisory Services Support to Agricultural Modernization in Uzbekistan (Washington, DC, 2019), 20; Alexander Platonov, Kai Wegerich, Jusipbek Kazbekov, and Firdavs Kabilov, “Beyond the state order? Second crop production in the Ferghana Valley, Uzbekistan,” International Journal of Water Governance 2 (2014): 83–104.

57. Interview with former university lecturer and consultant for the UN system (Tashkent, 2018).

58. World Bank and IAMO, “Farm Restructuring.”

59. Larson et al., “Uzbekistan.”

60. World Food Programme (WFP), “Poverty and Food insecurity in Uzbekistan” (Rome, 2008), 9.

61. Interview with former university lecturer and consultant for the UN system (Tashkent, 2018).

62. Djanibekov et al., “Farm Reform,” 100.

63. Marx, Capital, 934.

64. CER, “The Reorganization,” 30.

65. International Monetary Fund (IMF), “Republic of Uzbekistan: Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper,” Country Report n. 08/34 (Washington, DC, 2008), 28.

66. CER, “The Reorganization,” 24, 26. Between 2001 and 2006, 1,336 shirkats—or more than 72 percent of the total—were dismantled.

67. Lyudmila Maksakova, “Internal migration in Uzbekistan: sociological aspects,” in Labour migration in the Republic of Uzbekistan: Social, Legal and Gender Aspects ed. Evgeniy Abdullaev (Tashkent, 2008), 40–129, 65–66.

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70. World Bank, “Towards a Prosperous and Inclusive Future: The Second Systematic Country Diagnostic for Uzbekistan,” World Bank (Washington, DC, 2022), 38.

71. Kandiyoti, “Pathways.”

72. Veldwisch and Bock, “Dehkans, Diversification”: 588, fn. 7.

73. Ilkhamov, “Shirkats, Dekhqon farmers”; Kandiyoti, “The Cry for Land”; Veldwisch and Bock, “Dehkans, Diversification.”

74. Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), Uzbekistan: Country Profile 2008 (London, 2008), 21.

75. World Bank, “Uzbekistan: Agri-Food Job Diagnostic,” World Bank (Washington, DC, 2020), 21.

76. World Bank, “Uzbekistan: Agri-Food,” 39.

77. WFP, “Poverty,” 4.

78. World Bank, “Uzbekistan: Agri-Food,” 30.

79. Giovanni Andrea Cornia, “Heterodox Macroeconomic Policies, Inequality and Poverty in Uzbekistan,” in Pro-Poor Macroeconomics: Potential and Limitations ed. Giovanni Andrea Cornia (New York, 2006), 282–304, 302.

80. World Bank, “Towards a Prosperous,” 21.

81. International Crisis Group (ICG), “The Curse of Cotton: Central Asia's Destructive Monoculture,” ICG Asia Report n. 93 (Brussels, 2005); Veldwisch and Bock, “Dehkans, Diversification.”

82. Kandiyoti, “The Cry for Land”: 239.

83. See, e.g., “Uzbekistan: Female Day Laborers Open Window on Unemployment Problem,” Eurasianet, https://eurasianet.org/uzbekistan-female-day-laborers-open-window-on-unemployment-problem.

84. Author's fieldwork observations in various locations in Tashkent, Almalyk, Urgench, and Khiva (May–June 2019); interview with internal migrant worker (Tashkent region, 2019). As my fieldwork precedes the COVID-19 pandemic, more research is needed to ascertain continuities and changes since then.

85. Cornia, “Heterodox Macroeconomic Policies”; Ilkhamov, “Labour Migration”; UNDP, “Sustainable employment.”

86. Interview with former senior analyst at think tank, consultant for International Financial Institutions (IFIs) (Tashkent, 2018); interview with internal migrant worker (Tashkent region, 2019); author's fieldwork observations in Tashkent region, June 2019.

87. Rano Turaeva, “Propiska regime in post-Soviet space: regulating mobility and residence”, Central Asian Studies Institute (CASI) Working Paper presented at the First Annual CASI Conference (Bishkek, 2011).

88. World Bank, “Uzbekistan: Economic Development and Reforms: Achievements and Challenges,” Uzbekistan Economic Report n. 3 (Washington, DC, 2013), 9.

89. Center for Economic Research (CER), “Urbanization and industrialization in Uzbekistan: Challenges, problems and prospects,” Policy Brief 2009/01 (Tashkent, 2009), 13.

90. Interview with former senior analyst at think tank, consultant for International Financial Institutions (IFIs) (Tashkent city, 2018); interview with internal migrant worker (Tashkent region, 2019).

91. UNDP, “Sustainable employment,” 111, 113.

92. World Bank, “Uzbekistan: Economic Development.”

93. IMF, “Republic of Uzbekistan: Poverty”; UNDP, “Sustainable employment.”

94. Sergey Ryazantsev and Oleg Korneev, “Russia and Kazakhstan in Eurasian Migration System: Development Trends, Socio-Economic Consequences of Migration and Approaches to Regulation,” in Regional Migration Report: Russia and Central Asia eds. Anna Di Bartolomeo, Shushanik Makaryan and Agnieszka Weinar (Florence, 2014), 5–54, 12.

95. Irina Ivakhnyuk, “The Russian Migration Policy and its Impact on Human Development: The Historical Perspective,” Human Development Research Paper 2009/14 (Geneva, 2009), 32.

96. See “The number of labor migrants from Uzbekistan is 2.6 million people,” Review.uz, https://review.uz/post/chislo-trudoviyx-migrantov-iz-uzbekistana-sostavlyaet-26-millionov-chelovek.

97. UNDP, “Sustainable employment,” 113.

98. Erica Marat, “Labor Migration in Central Asia: Implications of the Global Economic Crisis,” Silk Road Paper (Stockholm and Washington, DC, 2009); UNDP, “Sustainable employment.”

99. UNDP, “Sustainable employment”; William Seitz, “International Migration and Household Well-Being: Evidence from Uzbekistan,” Policy Research Working Paper n. 8910 (Washington, DC, 2019).

100. Noori, Neema, “Expanding state authority, cutting back local services: decentralization and its contradictions in Uzbekistan,” Central Asian Survey 25 (2006): 533–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

101. World Bank, “Systematic Country Diagnostic for Uzbekistan” (Washington, DC, 2016), 40.

102. Interview with former university lecturer and consultant for the UN system (Tashkent, 2018).