Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings (New York: Lawrence Hill, 1973), 93.
As David Chioni Moore argues, Langston Hughes’s Central Asian observations can be seen as a distinct Afro-planetary vision. David Chioni Moore, “Local Color, Global ‘Color’: Langston Hughes, the Black Atlantic, and Soviet Central Asia, 1932,” Research in African Literatures 27, No. 4 (Winter 1996): 49-70.
Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution, 94.
Joseph Stalin, “A Year of Great Change,” Pravda 259 (November 7, 1929), ➝.
Vladimir Paperny, Architecture in the Age of Stalin: Culture Two (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
Nariman Skakov, “Culture one and a half,” in Comintern Aesthetics, eds. Steven S. Lee and Amelia Glaser (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020), 232.
The journal was active throughout the 1920s and included writings by the most influential artists and critics of that time: Viktor Shklovskiy, Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Aleksei Gastev, Sergei Tretyakov, etc. On the use of the term ustanovka, see Alexandra Novozhenova, “‘Luchshie i prekrasneyshie veshhi — eto te, kotorye dvizhutsa ili sluzhat dlya dvizheniya drugih.’ Proizvodstvennichestvo kak energeticheskaya model” (“‘The best and the most beautiful objects are the ones that move or serve the movement of the others.” Productionism as an energetic model,” in Korobka s karandashami (Box With Pencils) (Moscow: V–A–C Press, 2021).
Sasha Novozhenova, “Sotsializm – NOT – Amerikanizm: nauchnaiia organizatsyia truda i rabota Gustava Klutsisa dlia jurnala ‘Vremia’” (“Socialism – NOT – Americanism: Scientific Organization of Labor and Gustav Klutsis’s work for the journal ‘Vremia’”), in Korobka s Karandashami (Box With Pencils) (Moscow: V–A–C Press, 2021), 66.
Dav Rozit, Chirchikstroy (Gosudarstvennoie izdatel’stvo UzSSR, 1935), 5. My translation.
Rozit, Chirchikstroy, 8. My translation.
For instance, pre-revolutionary research on the hydrology of the Chirchik River can be found in The Atlas of Asiatic Russia, published by the Central Administration of Land and Agriculture in 1914.
In 1923, Ivan Aleksandrov finished one of his major books, Orosheniie novuh zemely v Tashkentskom regione (Irrigation of the New Lands in the Tashkent Region), where he describes the features of the main river of the region, Chirchik.
See Chirchik’s history in three parts published as a public history resource, MyTashkent, ➝.
I found this phrase on the website of Rushydro, a Russian corporation that owns the majority of Russian hydroelectric power facilities that were originally built during the Soviet era. Interestingly, the website also features an essay about the history of Chirchikstroy. The website exemplifies a corporate public history initiative with a specific focus on the hydropower facilities' role during the war, or, as the site authors describe it: "how the dams fought." “Hydroelectric Power Stations that Tamed Lightning,” JSC RusHydro, ➝.
See Sasha Novozhenova, “Formulae of Energy,” syg.ma, March 1, 2019, ➝.
Novozhenova, “Formulae of Energy.”
Novozhenova, “Sotsializm – NOT – Amerikanizm.”
As cited in Novozhenova, “Sotsializm – NOT – Amerikanizm,” 90.
Novozhenova, “Formulae of Energy.”
Harold Dorn, “Hugh Lincoln Cooper and the First Détente,” Technology and Culture 20, no. 2 (April 1979): 322–347.
Rozit, Chirchikstroy, 14.
For instance, controling the oxygen emitted during the reaction would increase the resistance of the equipment and the entire structure of the plant.
Rozit, Chirchikstroy, 18.
Rozit, Chirchikstroy, 3.
Rozit, Chirchikstroy, 3. My translation.
“V pomoshch partorgu i proforgu Chirchikstoya” (“For the party and union organizers”), Udarnik Chirchikstroya (1934), 14, 19.
“Nash otvet podshefnikam” (“Our Answer to the Wards”), Ekstrennyi vypusk Udarnika Chirchikstroya (Emergency issue of the Chirchikstroy Udarnik), June 18, 1934. My translation.
“Machinery Manufacturing Plant 'Frunze,' Chirchik, USSR,” Central Intelligence Agency, Office of Research and Reports, December 31, 1957, ➝.
“Heavy Water Plant: Chirchik Electrochemical Combine, USSR,” Central Intelligence Agency, July 1964, ➝.
Revolutionary longue durée projects like the construction of Magnitogorsk, the establishment of the annual International Women’s Day on March 8, and the myth of the October Revolution were created for the radical transformation of reality and consciousness. See Elizabeth A. Papazian, “Literacy or Legibility: The Trace of Subjectivity in Soviet Socialist Realism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies, eds. Jonathan Auerbach and Russ Castronovo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 68-69.
Evgeny Dobrenko. cited in Papazian, “Literacy or Legibility,” 70.
After completing her work in Chirchik, Zelberstein continued her journey and was sent to the Uglich and Rybinsk hydroelectric power plants. “25 let Rybinskoy i Uglichskoy GES,” in Opyta stroitelstva (Izdatelustvo Energiia, 1967), 207–208.
He was appointed after the station was demolished in 1942, during the Soviet retreat from Ukraine, according to a detailed biography of Loginov, who relocated to Ukraine in 1944 after having led Chirchikstroy in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Aleksandre Rogozin, Loginov i yego vremia (Loginov and His Time) (Volgograd: Volzhskogo instituta stroitelystva i tehnologiy, 2013).
Dav Rozit had initially participated in the Russian Civil War (1917–1922), as commissar of a special department of Latvian riflemen in the 15th Army, and in the bloody suppression of counter-revolutionary uprisings, including those in Kronstadt. His career trajectory from peasant to partisan fighter to chairman of the State Planning Committee of Uzbekistan was largely due to the education he received at the Institute of Red Professorship. Rozit’s short biography is available in Mikhail Pole, Istoriya ‘Latyshskih strelkov’: Ot pervyh marksistov do generalov KGB (The History of “Latvian Riflemen”: From the First Marxist to General of the KGB) (Rodina, 2021).
As Jennifer Raab points out in her essay on individualism and gold mining in California, “Once solely associated with the aerial and with distance, ‘prospect’ moved to the subterranean and to the speculative business of searching for metal.” Jennifer Raab, “The Art of Alchemy: Golden Pictures, or Turning Extractive Capitalism into American Individualism,” in El Dorado: A Reader, ed. Aimé Iglesias Lukin, Tie Jojima, Karen Marta, and Edward J. Sullivan (New York: Americas Society, 2024), 72-81.
The story of the Russian invasion is crucial to local knowledge in Tashkent. The takeover of the Niyazbek Fortress was documented in numerous sources, for instance, Yuri Yuzhakov, Shestnadtsatiletnyaia godovshina vzyatiya Tashkenta (The sixteenth anniversary of the takeover of Tashkent) (Saint Petersburg: Komarov, 1881).
Throughout the 1930s, groups of peasants and workers from Kazakhstan were resettled to the area around Chirchikstroy to provide necessary labor.
Administrative expediency was cited as the reason for the transfer of the entire production area under Tashkent's control.
“Chirchik Chemical Plants (REF: 50X1-HUM),” Central Intelligence Agency, November 2, 1959, ➝.
This socialist enthusiasm for free and economically rational circulation is comparable to the academic enthusiasm for the idea of circulation as a kind of marker of the global turn in the social sciences and humanities. Stefanie Gänger argues that researchers borrowing the economic term to describe accelerating globalization risk falling for a utopian perception of a globalized world in which objects, people, and ideas simply glide across the world without obstacles or resistance, without violent effects on communities across the planet and the environment. Moreover, Gänger claims that global and transnational historians risk becoming prophets and preachers for globalization, just as national historians served nationalism and early historians of empire served imperialism. Stefanie Gänger, “Circulation: reflections on circularity, entity, and liquidity in the language of global history,” Journal of Global History 12, no. 3 (November 2017): 303–318.
As Miri Davidson points out in her recent essay, “A globalist, rootless, parasitic, financial capitalism (imagined now as colonial) is separated from a racial, national, industrial capitalism (imagined as self-determining, or even decolonial).” Miri Davidson, “Sea and Earth,” Sidecar (blog), April 4, 2024, ➝.