Artemy Kalinovsky, Professor of Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet Studies at Temple University, will discuss how Central Asia has come to be reimagined in the post-Cold War Era in the the 5th Annual Edward A. Allworth Memorial Lecture, hosted by Columbia University's Harriman Institute of Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies. 

During the Soviet period, official narratives presented Central Asia as a former colony that had been integrated on equal terms into the USSR while overcoming economic backwardness. This ambiguity was useful for Moscow’s Cold War politics and also shaped how Central Asian actors maneuvered within the Soviet system. In the late Soviet period, this ambiguity was largely abandoned. Some Central Asians began to insist on the region’s colonial status, while economists and sociologists in Moscow argued that Soviet development efforts had failed and that the region was culturally too different to fit into socialist economic schemes.

In this talk, Kalinovsky will trace how different groups within the USSR can the late Soviet period came to reimagine Central Asia as a part of the Third World, discarding the ambiguity of earlier decades. These views also had profound implications for the region’s post-independence transformation: Western development professionals who came to Central Asia after 1991 found the region much more developed than other places they had worked. That also changed over the course of the 1990s, in part because of the continuing influence of Russian scholars, and in part as a result of the development community’s evolving understanding of regional challenges (informed, to a large extent, by local scholars), a change that was solidified with the post 9-11 turn to the Global War on Terror.

Speaker

Artemy Kalinovsky, professor of Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet Studies, Temple University