Artemy M. Kalinovsky

Old politics, new diplomacy: the Geneva accords and the Soviet withdrawal from AfghanistanArtemy Kalinovsky is writing his PhD thesis at the London School of Economics and is a research assistant at the Cold War Studies Centre. The title of his PhD is ‘The Soviet Disengagement from Afghanistan: 1980–1992’. He has an MA from the London School of Economics and a BA from the George Washington University.

While much has been written about the origins of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, little is known about the Soviet effort to disengage. This article sheds new light on the diplomatic efforts under Mikhail Gorbachev to engage the US and secure an ‘honourable’ withdrawal for Soviet troops. Drawing on declassified Russian and US documents, it also explores the internal Soviet debates as well as Moscows relationship with its client in Kabul on the eve of withdrawal.

The Soviet Union and Mosaddeq: A Research Note

Although it is generally accepted that the Soviet Union did not play a significant role in the events leading to the overthrow of Mohammed Mosaddeq in 1953, little has been written about how the Soviets perceived the Iranian leader and the movement he inspired. This article argues that Soviet leaders generally saw Mosaddeq as weak and ill-disposed towards the Soviet Union. The Soviet failure to secure an oil concession in Iran in 1946 and general conservatism about anti-colonial movements during the late Stalin period conditioned their assessment of Mosaddeqs premiership. After Soviet policy towards the Third World changed in the mid-1950s, Mosaddeqs movement was reinterpreted as a genuine “struggle of national liberation.”

Tractors, Power Lines, and the Welfare State: The Contradictions of Soviet Development in Post-World War II Tajikistan

Abstract This article considers the Soviet campaign to transform the Tajik countryside by mechanizing agricultural production and bringing the welfare state to the villages in light of broader 20th century rural development efforts. It begins by examining the attempt to mechanize agriculture and electrify the Tajik countryside through the eyes of the officials charged with implementing these technologies. Problems with how these technologies were introduced meant that while cotton output expanded, it required increasing amount of labor. Turning to the problem of resettlement, the article emphasizes that resettlement was shaped by competition for labor between districts and farm managers. Increasingly, in the Brezhnev era, it also came to be seen as an easier way to fulfill the modernizing imperative and the commitments of the welfare state. Under pressure to ensure access to schools and medical services, officials found it more convenient to move villages from mountain areas to valleys where such services could be more easily provided. At the same time, the demand for agricultural labor stimulated a kind of “involution” in the countryside, where managers had to find ways to keep labor on the farm. To do so, they could offer cash rewards, building materials, and access to private land and fertilizer.

From Countryside to Factory: Industrialisation, Social Mobility, and Neoliberalism in Soviet Central Asia and Mexico

This article traces the rise and decline of state-led industrialisation as a tool of social mobility in the second half of the twentieth century. It examines ideas of transforming primarily agrarian societies into industrial states in the USSR and developing countries, and then considers how these ideas were applied in two cases: Mexico and Soviet Central Asia. In both cases, state-led industrialisation achieved some important social goals, but ultimately proved disappointing and was abandoned in the 1980s. Politicians and planners increasingly emphasised individual entrepreneurship and a more limited role for the state as a path to achieving greater social mobility. The article argues that while external ideological and economic factors were important in both cases, attention must also be paid to the way scholars and planners reflected on the shortcomings of the industrialisation programme conceived in the post-war decades.

The Professional Middle Class in Afghanistan: From Pivot of Development to Political Marginality

Abstract: This essay explores the various efforts to create an Afghan middle class through three periods: first under the Musahiban dynasty (until 1973) and republic (1973–1978), second during the communist period and Soviet intervention (1978–1992), and lastly since the United States-led invasion in 2001. Drawing on archival research and oral histories, the authors place the development programs of each era into broader context, while pointing to the similarities and differences. The authors also compare the Cold War period, when state-led modernization was in vogue, and the current era, when the role of the state is minimized and NGOs are a dominant part of the development landscape.

The cold war and the historiography of the Soviet Union

The article engages with the dynamic nature of International History: the interplay between domestic and foreign policy, the role of technology, the link between political economy and international relations are only some examples of potential new subjects of enquiry for historians. The author raises three points of discussion for scholars of the Soviet Union and the Cold War. The first one is the legacy of the czarist empire on Soviet foreign relations, particularly with regard to the policies used to govern relations among various ethnic groups. The second one is on the dialogue between economic history and political economy and its impact on Soviet foreign policy. Third and last: the question of subjectivity, which is necessary to understand the political culture of who took and implemented foreign policy decisions.

Daniel Immerwahr, Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. 303 pp

Over the past two decades diplomatic historians have been studying U.S. development efforts in the Cold War, and an exciting new monograph on the subject seems to appear almost every year. Works by scholars such as Nils Gilman, Michael Latham, Nick Cullather, Corinna Unger, and David Ekbladh have elucidated the links between U.S. global ambitions and official aid programs from the optimistic 1950s through the 1970s and beyond the Cold War era. Their works in turn have helped inform larger books in the field, such as Odd Arne Westad’s Global Cold War: Cold War Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); as well as the approach of scholars looking at bilateral relations, such as Thomas Field in From Development to Dictatorship: Bolivia and the Alliance for Progress in the Kennedy Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014). Daniel Immerwahr’s outstanding new monograph engages with this literature even as it sets out to challenge some of its central premises. As Immerwahr says in his introduction, much of the literature tends to follow a “modernization comes to town” narrative: U.S. postwar elites convinced of the inevitability of centralization and industrialization and full of optimism that methods developed for the fight against economic depression and the Axis powers could be adopted to battle poverty in the postcolonial world and keep away Communism, deployed such policies through bilateral aid and international institutions. Only when the shortcomings of these policies became evident did the consensus shift away from large-scale and state-centered development to a more “local” approach that focused on villages and communities. Immerwahr shows convincingly that this narrative is flawed. Without denying the power of “modernization theory” and the development ideas associated with that school of thinking, he convincingly demonstrates that a competing strain of the development school always had an equal, or stronger, hold on the imagination of policymakers. The book’s greatest strength is the way it revisits the connection between domestic developments and foreign policy paradigms in the twentieth-century United States. The authors cited above tend to see U.S. postwar policies rooted in prewar enthusiasm for a state’s power to gather knowledge, harness nature, and manage the economy on a large scale for the wider benefit of society. Immerwahr shows that throughout the twentieth century there were always writers, thinkers, and activists who challenged this

Sotveskii kishlak: mezhdu kolonializmom i modernizatsiey

aim of the Tajik Mufti Amonulloh Ne’matzoda (2006) for the Pamiris (as quoted by Mastibekov: ‘We will appoint a good Muslim leader in Badakhshan and we will make them good Muslims’) was absolutely beyond discussion. Mastibekov occasionally leaps from one point to another, and he sometimes uses very specific terms which are only explained later. This does not lessen the very positive valuation of this book; the description of the religious development in the Pamirs during the last 100 years and facts regarding the Ismailiyya in Tajikistan is extremely important and helpful for the understanding of an area so neglected by Western scholars. This is all the more true because the author includes a mass of Tajik and Russian sources and refers to key informants and eye witnesses. While the author refers in detail to the period under Stalin when the old religious authorities were eliminated, he does not explain the development of the khalifas, who are currently themost important religious authorities in the Pamirs. He explains that the Pamirs today have a strong attachment to their religion, but what happens while practising this religion remains undescribed. Yet, it is the khalifas who since the 1930s have preserved Ismaili knowledge and who protected their holy books from persecution under Stalin at risk of their lives. And it was the same khalifas who already during the years of perestroika and glasnost (i.e. since 1985–87) and without any external support reactivated the Ismaili teaching and brought it from the hidden and private into the public life of the Pamirs, 10 years before the Aga Khan’s first visit (1995) to GBAO. The author has therefore omitted a very strong argument for the persistence of the Ismailiyya in the Pamirs over the last 100 years. From an ethical perspective in research work it is doubtful if names of interview partners should be listed as Mastibekov has done. Despite these latter points there is no doubt that Mastibekov has presented one of the best and most substantial publications on the Tajik Ismailis and the Pamir region of recent years.

Regional Dynamics of the Soviet War in Afghanistan and Its Aftermath

The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in December 1979 and the subsequent 10-year involvement of Soviet troops in that country was one of the great crises of the Cold War. The Persian Gulf area, India and Pakistan, Soviet Central Asia and even China were affected by, became involved in, feared the consequences of or changed their policies with regard to Afghanistan. Yet one would strain to come up with an overall thesis for the war’s effects on Afghanistan’s neighbors. In the case of China, for example, the intervention only catalyzed existing trends. The Sino-Soviet split dated back to the 1950s, and Sino-American cooperation had its start earlier in the decade. The main effect of the Soviet intervention was to give Washington and Beijing something else to agree on, and to give Beijing and Islamabad something else to cooperate on. Iran, while not at all pleased with the intervention, largely watched from the sidelines, providing only lukewarm support to rebel groups. Like Pakistan, it also had to deal with a large influx of Afghan refugees. Soviet Central Asia was a separate case; on the one hand, partially mobilized to help the war effort, and on the other, sealed, to the extent possible, from events south of the Amu Darya. Yet while the war had little effect on Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan in the Soviet period, its legacies would become important as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was collapsing and the independent successor states were taking shape, often violently.

[Review of: J.W. Parker (2009) Persian dreams: Moscow and Tehran since the fall of the Shah]

Moscow’s relations with Tehran have often been a source of worry for US policy makers. From the outside, the relationship can be quite difficult to understand. Even as the revolutionary government was destroying the Tudeh party and declaring its opposition both to western capitalism and communism, the Soviet Union continued to be publicly supportive of the new regime. The Soviet leadership never lost hope that the regime’s anti-Americanism could more than make up for its anti-Sovietism. As Leonid Shebarshin, the KGB resident in Tehran in the late 1970s and early 1980s put it: “Khomeini was not attractive to us, but he had a very strong point in his favour: he was rabidly anti-American. That is why we tried to find some way to establish an understanding with Khomeini and his entourage. That is why we were supporting him in our propaganda.” Russia’s relationship with Tehran continues to be a source of concern for US policymakers as they try to find a way to stop Iran for acquiring nuclear weapons and manage its regional ambitions. John W. Parker’s Persian Dreams: Moscow and Tehran since the Fall of the Shah is therefore a very timely book, since it traces this relationship from 1979 up the present day. It is a relationship which, as Parker shows, does not always contradict US interests: Russian pressure, for example, may have played a key role in getting Tehran to disband weaponization of its nuclear program in 2003. Nevertheless, it can often be frustrating, as when Russian leaders refuse to support further sanctions against Iran in the UN Security Council. Parker’s book covers a range of issues where Iranian and Russian interests coincided, collided, or simply ran on parallel tracks: the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the civil war in Tajikistan, energy politics in the Caucasus and Central Asia, the rise of the Taliban, the response to 9/11, and, of course, the nuclear program and Iraq. It is reasonably comprehensive, if not always particularly detailed, and covers all the areas that a reader interested in the topic might wish to learn about. It is the first time that such a narrative has been brought together, a useful achievement in itself. Nevertheless, there are a number of problemswith the book. Parker’s sources are primarily articles fromRussian (and, to a lesser extent, Iranian) media translated by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, a series of interviews with former Russian and Soviet officials, and the odd smattering of more academic studies on the topic. On its own this would not necessarily be a major problem, and of course Parker is working on a topic so contemporary and sensitive that going much deeper would