Bob Weinberg:	Welcome. My name's Bob Weinberg. I'm head of the history department here, and I want to welcome you to our biannual Paul Beik Memorial Lecture. Paul Beik taught European history, in particular, French and Russian history from 1945 to 1980, and he was such a beloved teacher that his students endowed this speaker series.
	So every two years, we bring someone who gives a lecture on French or Russian history. And it's my great honor to introduce this year's speaker is Maya Peterson from the class of 2002, and it's really nice. I'm getting older, and a lot of things don't go well when you get older, but this is one thing that's good because I get to introduce former students who are now doing wonderful things.
	Maya was a history major in honors here and a German minor and also did something in Russian. No, Russian minor, German studies concentration. Anyway, she knows German. She knows Russian. I don't know what else she knows, and she graduated with high honors, and then she went to Harvard for her Ph.D. in which she received in 2011. 
	And in graduate school and immediately after her degree, she was able to get a series of fellowships, and it seems to me she may have spent four years out of the United States doing research in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and from Facebook postings, all around Central Asia as far as I could tell. So I just assumed she was a lot younger than I am, which is true, so she had the energy to do that.
	And then she also had a fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich for a year. She's also now teaching at the University of California in Santa Cruz, where she's an assistant professor and she teaches a variety of courses on Russian history, on environmental history. She also teaches a class in the Silk Route, which actually someone, Lillian Li, used to teach that-
Maya Peterson:	Oh.
Bob Weinberg:	... before she retired here.
Maya Peterson:	[inaudible 00:02:28].
Bob Weinberg:	Yeah, but her specialty is water policy and cotton production in Central Asia in the 19th and 20th Century. And what makes her work especially interesting is that she goes over the 1917 divide. Most people are usually just focusing on the Soviet period or maybe on the Imperial Period.
	But she does both, and she's going to talk to today about the cotton industry, the production of cotton in Central Asia and the impact of cotton production on the Aral Sea, which as you'll see, no pun intended. It just came out. You might have trouble finding on a map today, but once it was very visible to the naked eye on the map. But anyway, let me welcome Maya [inaudible 00:03:20], and thank you.
Maya Peterson:	Okay. Thank you so much. Can you all hear me? It's always a pleasure to come back to Swarthmore. I've come back many times for reunions, but I think this is the first time I'm back for something really academic. So thank you, Bob, so much for inviting me, and it's really fun to have some of my professors here in the audience, so thanks to all of you for coming out. And thanks to everyone else for coming on a Thursday evening, as well. I know there are other things you could be doing with your time, so I'm excited that you're all here.
	As Bob already mentioned, my talk today explores the deep-seated roots of the rapid disappearance of the Aral Sea, which is located on the border between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. So it is visible on this map. This is, I guess, kind of an old map. Once considered the world's fourth largest lake in terms of surface area, by September 2011, the Aral Sea had lost 85% of its surface area and 92% of its volume.
	The disappearance of the sea over the past five decades, here's an even more recent photo, has been accompanied by degradation of the soil, increased wind and dust storms, climate change, species die-off, closure of the local fishing industries. So if you saw those posters, right, with the boats stranded in the desert, that's because the sea has receded so far.
	You can see the old outlines. Oops. I guess it's not connecting. But you can hopefully see on the map there, the old shoreline of the sea, so those boats have been stranded many, many miles away from the sea. Another problem in the area is myriad human health problems, right, anemia, respiratory and kidney diseases.
	And then if we add to this the fact that an island in the Aral Sea was home to a Soviet bioweapons testing facility, and that island is now part of the mainland, you basically have a recipe for disaster, and this is supposedly the exposé written by someone who headed up that biological weapons program in the Aral Sea.
	So today, instead of the Aral, which means island, Sea, people now refer to Aralkum, the island desert. It's also called Akkum, or the white sand desert, and that's to complement the existing Karakum and Kyzylkum deserts, the black sand and red sand deserts in the region.
	The disappearance of the Aral Sea has not come as a surprise. Indeed, the understanding that the sea had been killed or allowed to die at the expense of the people in the region fueled ecologically focused nationalist movements in the late 1980s when reformed-minded Soviet Communist Party leader Mikhail Gorbachev's introduction of programs of political restructuring and transparency, known as perestroika and glasnost, allowed Soviet citizens an unprecedented opportunity to gather together and speak out against the central government.
	"Why," Soviet Central Asians wanted to know, "Was there so little concern coming from Moscow for the indigenous people of the region, their livelihoods and their basic health needs, including access to fresh water?" 
	So the simplest answer to these questions is that the destruction of the Aral Sea was the predictable result of 20th-Century beliefs about the human ability to conquer nature combined with the highly centralized Soviet government's love for carrying out transformative projects on a hitherto unseen scale against the background of a cold war in which the Soviet Union both strove for autarchy and leapt at any chance to prove the superiority of communism over capitalism, often in the form of large-scale construction projects.
	In Central Asia, these large-scale construction projects consisted of a combination of the damming of the region's two main rivers, the Amu Darya and Syr Darya. So, let's see. Here's the Amu, and this is the Syr Darya. So they were dammed for hydropower purposes upstream. For some reason, this is not working very well. But basically in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and downstream, they were diverted for irrigated agriculture.
	So the increasing consumptive withdrawals of water, that means water that's not returned later to the hydrolic system, from both the Amu and Syr rivers from the 1960s onward soon began to have a noticeable effect on the level of the Aral Sea, which depends heavily on contributions from these rivers. By the early 1980s, neither river reached the sea, and with declining inputs of water, the surface level of the sea rapidly began to fall.
	But I would argue that the Aral Sea should not be seen as just another victim of the Soviet command economy with its five-year economic plans based on the maximum extraction of resources. Older attitudes deeply bound up in Russia's geopolitical desires in the region, whoops. This printer printed twice, and Russians' relationships to both Europe and Asia must also be understood in order to fully grasp both the reasons for the late 20th-Century destruction of the Aral Sea and the devastating effects that this has had on the local indigenous population, and it's these deeper seated roots of the disappearance of the Aral Sea that I wish to explore today.
	I also wish to highlight the ways in which a focus on saving or restoring a dying sea can sometimes neglect much of the human history of this environmental tragedy. I want to recognize that while restoring the sea, even partially, might improve life in the region today, it cannot undo over a century of colonial oppression. Moreover, a focus on the Soviet killing of the sea ignores that even though communism has collapsed, many of the other mentalities which have led to the sea's disappearance continue to be alive and well and have effects which continue to be felt far beyond the Aral Sea.
	In order to get to those conclusions, though, I'd first like to go back in time. So as Bob said, my research is on both the 19th and 20th Centuries, so I'd like to go back to before the Soviet Period. Russian encounters with the Aral Sea can be traced back almost three centuries, and I'm just going back to a modern map of the region so that you can follow along with where these places are that I'm talking about.
	In 1721 at the command of Tsar Peter the Great, an ill-fated expedition traveled to the region of the Aral Sea to investigate rumors of gold. Russians saw the Central Asian region as a stepping stone to Persia and a route to the riches of the East. By the mid 19th Century, the Russian empire had expanded its influence southward across the Kazakh Steppe.
	With no natural boundaries to impede Russian imperial expansion, the British Empire feared that Russians would eventually have designs on India, the proverbial jewel in the British Crown. The 19th-Century tensions between the Russian and British empires over the Central Asians lands which lay between them would be encapsulated in the idea of The Great Game. 
	So as the Russian Empire expanded southward, Russian military expeditions explored and mapped the region of the Aral Sea as well as the two great rivers of Central Asia, which I've just mentioned, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, which fed into the Aral Sea. For these Russian explorers, the unpredictability of the environment in the Aral region reflected the dangers it obscured. In the Amu River Delta, for instance, on the southern shore of the Aral Sea, tall forests of reeds and overgrown islands concealed Caspian tigers.
	Oops, and that's not the Caspian tiger. That's the Caspian tiger. Sorry for having those out of order. Yet to the Russians, the inhabitants of the region were even more fearsome than the tigers, so there's one of our inhabitants. Russians were, to an extent, familiar with the nomadic Turkic speaking Kazakhs, for the Kazakh Steppe had been incorporated into the Russian empire in the 18th Century.
	Nor did the Karakalpaks, engaged in fishing and hunting along the shores of the Aral Sea, seem to pose a great threat, but the region was also inhabited by confederations of Turkic speaking nomads who called themselves Turkmen. And this is a photograph of a Turkmen person from the early 20th Century, and these are actually color photographs. If you've never seen the Prokudin-Gorskii collection at the Library of Congress, I'd really recommend checking it out. He developed his own method for producing color photography in the early 19th Century and took photographs all over the Russian Empire, and these are available via the Library of Congress website.
	So the Turkmen were famed for their swift horses but also notorious for robbing caravans of their goods. Many of these fierce Turkmen horsemen served in the armies of the Khan of Khiva, who ruled over the region south of the Aral Sea. Aided by these Turkmen mercenaries, the Khivans, who came from a settled Turkic speaking group known as the Uzbeks, managed thriving slave markets in the cities of the Khanate. Russian captives toiled alongside Persians in the Khivan fields.
	The first accurate Russian maps of the Aral Sea came from the expeditions of a Russian naval admiral named Alexei Butakov, who first visited the region in 1848. Butakov's expeditions were the vanguard of a Russian presence in the region that would soon put an end to the thriving slave markets of Khiva. But it was not just the slave trade that would disappear. Between the 1860s and 1880s, the independent states of Central Asia, including Khiva, came under Russian control.
	And by the 1880s, the last fierce Turkmen nomads had been subjugated or massacred. Today, there are still people in Central Asia who call themselves Karakalpak and Kazakh, Turkmen and Uzbek. But exploration and conquest set in motion a process that has irrevocably changed the land and its inhabitants. 
	So if we fast forward to 1948, 100 years after Admiral Butakov's first expedition to the Aral Sea, the Caspian tiger has virtually disappeared from its haunts in the reeds and marshes of the Amu Delta, and Joseph Stalin has just introduced to the Soviet Union his Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature. This is 1948. While the most important part of this plan included planting trees to create a great series of shelter belts across the vast Eurasian Steppes, and that's what he appears to be plotting right there, no part of the Soviet Union was to remain untouched.
	The issues of the popular Soviet journal Around the World from that year feature the many changes proposed for landscapes across the Soviet Union. One article from February of 1948, for instance, focuses on the construction of a railway in Central Asia's Karakum or black sand desert in what is now Western Turkmenistan, south of the Aral Sea. 
	The railway would bring, at last, a reliable form of mass transit to around a million people cut off from the world by the desert. But more importantly, according to the article, the railway would release the Amu Darya from the burdens of river transport to fulfill its main duties, to irrigate the fields, to supply hydroelectric stations with energy. And the idea that water had a duty to fulfill was a common one among 20th-Century engineers in the Soviet Union and beyond.
	The Amu's duty, according to the prevailing wisdom among both engineers and politicians was not to fill the Aral Sea but to help the people by providing power and agricultural products. The idea of harnessing the waters of the Amu Darya to fulfill its duty by irrigating the Karakum Desert would drive one of the biggest Soviet construction projects in subsequent decades. 
	Construction on a Karakum Canal, and that's down here, began in 1954. The canal would eventually extend from the Amu across the deserts to the shores of the Caspian, reaching a length of 1,375 kilometers in 1988, which makes it one of the longest canals in the world. From at least the 1970s and, more frequently, in the years following independence from the Soviet Union, it has been referred to as either the Karakum River or Turkmen River, Turkmen Darya.
	Central Asians had for centuries, used interchangeable words to describe rivers and their largest canal constructions, blurring the boundaries between what was seemingly natural and what had been shaped by the hands of men. But this new blurring of boundaries carried with it the ominous insinuation that a river that the Amu Darya might be replaced with a canal, the Turkmen Darya, without any serious consequences.
	The Karakum Canal was built to help realize new visions for Soviet Turkmenistan in the 1950s, which included encircling the desert with a green ring of rich plantations and gardens planted with subtropical cultures, including first and foremost, cotton. A shift in economic emphasis in the years after Stalin's death in 1953 away from heavy industry and towards the production of consumer goods brought renewed focus on the Soviet textile industry.
	While other countries shifted consumption towards synthetic materials for clothing, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev emphasized cotton, which was encouraged in Central Asia through the setting of artificially low prices. At the same time, Khrushchev's failure to achieve the promised increase in the production of grain, meat and milk in other parts of the Soviet Union resulted in increased pressure on the Soviet Central Asian republics to simultaneously become more self-sufficient in food production.
	By the early 1970s, Soviet estimates of the amount of land suitable for irrigation in Central Asia had been quadrupled. Production of cotton in the Karakum Canal Zone, also increased four and a half times between 1958 and 1990. The story of the Karakum Canal, thus, fits with typical stories of the disappearance of the Aral Sea. A quick search for recent articles on the disappearance of the Aral Sea, for instance, will bring up articles such as this one from The New York Times, which talks about how, in the 1960s, the Kremlin ordered a colossal task, to turn Central Asia into an irrigated cotton plantation.
	And here's another one from National Geographic from 2014, according to which, in the 1960s, Soviet engineers decided to make the vast steppes of Central Asia bloom. This article also points out how the newly constructed system was leaky and inefficient, and it's true. To this day, unlined, the Karakum Canal loses large percentages of water to seepage, while the water it diverts for irrigation is deposited in the desert, where it evaporates or forms small swamps and ponds in old river beds and other depressions, what has been rather euphemistically described as a Karakum Venice, rather than returning to the Amu Darya. 
	Similar problems are also visible in other parts of the region, and this collection of drainage water in the deserts of Central Asia contributes to this deterioration of the soil due to salinization. So salinization degrades soil. It limits plants' ability to absorb water, and it, thus, inhibits growth.
	In addition to the leaching of soluble salts to the surface that comes with irrigating soils in arid lands, the oversaturation of these soils, which is sometimes is sometimes an intended corrective to surface salinization, has resulted in waterlogging and a raising of the groundwater table, compounding the problems, resulting from the depletion of soil nutrients due to extensive cotton production. 
	If you grow too much cotton, that already degrades the soils. Growing it in arid regions, right, brings these additional problems, and waterlogging and salinization are the first two steps toward desertification, so that's why we're seeing a desert now where once the Aral Sea existed.
	Another symbol of the mismanagement of resources is the Sarygamysh Lake, which is right here. It's a salinized body full of pesticides and defoliants, the result of irrigation and soil washing runoff and the chemicals used in cotton agriculture that formed as the Aral Sea rapidly shrank. And I promised Bob that this would not be all doom and gloom, but it kind of is starting to sound like it, right? 
Male:	[inaudible 00:19:41].
Maya Peterson:	Unfortunately, this is case. The Sarygamysh Lake expanded in area from 12 to almost 4,000 square kilometers in the years from 1962 to 2006. So basically, it didn't exist, and now there's a lake, which you can see on this map. Salinization and pollution have posed challenges to potential solutions to the disappearance of the Aral Sea. Without ground cover, desertification spreads, and toxic sands blow across Eurasia. Polluted irrigation runoff water cannot be returned to the rivers or the sea, and so the sea has continued to shrink, and the desert has continue to expand.
	As I mentioned at the beginning of this talk, however, this story is not entirely satisfactory to me. The decisions to expand the irrigation networks of Central Asia in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as the decision to plant more cotton, were not decisions without precedent, nor were they the brainchild of the Kremlin or Stalin's plan for the transformation of nature or even the whim of a handful of Soviet engineers.
	So to explain what I am talking about here, I'd like to go back now and fill in some of the details about that century between Butakov's first exploration at the Aral Sea in 1848 and 1948, Stalin's Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature, which really sets into the motion the processes which directly resulted in the sea's disappearance.
	So if we go back to 1923, for instance, one year after the establishment of the Soviet Union and before Soviet power had even been consolidated in Central Asia, engineer Fyodor Morgunenko wrote in the Irrigation Herald, a new journal in Tashkent, the Central Asian capital, "After putting into motion the entire above-mentioned program, using almost completely the waters of the Amu and Syr Darya, the level of the Aral Sea no longer receiving waters from the rivers, will quickly begin to drop at the rate of one meter a year. In light of the fact that the sea is 20 meters deep at its deepest point, it follows that the Aral Sea will completely dry up in 20 years." 
	Seems logical, right? The article was titled The Fate of the Aral Sea. Morgunenko went on to write, "Instead of the Aral Sea, a new sea will form in the Sarygamysh Depression, with an area seven times smaller. It will be somewhat smaller than the Aral Sea, but the new sea will have much greater significance." As we have already seen, this is what came to pass, although we could debate the significance of the polluted Sarygamysh Lake.
	We cannot say that Morgunenko had a particularly Soviet mentality or a communist disregard for the environment. This is one year after the establishment of the Soviet Union. Most Russian engineers in the early Soviet period were not communists. Like many engineers in the Russian Empire and beyond, however, Morgunenko was inspired by the utopian possibilities of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and the Bolshevik emphasis on science and technology as a panacea for the world's problems.
	We also have Arthur Powell Davis, one time head of the United States Reclamation Service. He was far from a communist sympathizer, but he, too, was intrigued by the irrigation schemes of these early Soviet engineers. As he observed on his visit to Soviet Central Asia a few years later, "The Aral Sea would likely recede as a result of Soviet irrigation schemes in the region. But a positive aspect of this process was that it would expose a considerable area of alluvial land, which will add materially to the irrigable area of the desert."
	So, we won't have a sea, but we'll have more land for cultivation, which is great. Nor were Morgunenko and Davis the first to lay out such practical and unsentimental terms in such practical and unsentimental terms, the desiccation of the Aral Sea. Six decades earlier, in an 1867 article entitled The Disappearance of the Aral Sea in inner Asia, the German popular geographical publication [Globis 00:23:29] claimed that as soon as the tributaries of the Aral were redirected away from the sea for a period of time, the sea must dry up over the course of only a few years and, thus become again, what it actually is, a depression in the desert.
	As this passage indicates, mid-19th Century scientific research on the Aral Sea had concluded that not only had the sea level fluctuated over the centuries but that it had, at times, perhaps even disappeared all together, leaving behind nothing more than a depression in the desert. 
	In particular, many observers in the 19th Century believed that the Amu Darya had not always flowed into the Aral, but rather had found its end in the Caspian Sea. Redirecting the river away from the Aral would be simply helping to fulfill a natural process. Some even believed that this diversion had happened relatively recently due to the cunning art of the natives in the Aral region.
	So I'd now like to spend a few minutes exploring this idea of historical change in the course of the Amu River because it might help to explain why there was so little concern for the potential disappearance of the Aral Sea long before the 1960s. 
	19th-Century enthusiasts for diverting the Amu to the Caspian pointed out that Peter the Great had thought about the possibility of increasing trade with India by linking the Amu with the Caspian and, thereby, to Russia's great Volga River, one of the main trade arteries of the empire. So the Volga River flows into the Caspian. If the Amu could also flow into the Caspian, it would connect the East, right, with the West via these two great rivers.
	In the 1860s when the British construction of the Suez Canal had greatly shortened the distance of shipping between India and Europe, fantasies about returning the Amu River to the Caspian, instead of the Aral, sparked Russian imaginings of a grand Eurasian waterway that would restore some of the glory of the ancient overland silk routes and allow Russia, as well as Britain, to benefit from trade with the East.
	Foreign observers read about such schemes with interest. As the Germans put it, redirecting the Amu River to the Caspian would result in a waterway that would penetrate the heart of inner Asia, a continuation and enlargement of the Volga, a navigable street that would begin in St. Petersburg and have its end at the feet of the Hindu Kush.
	Henry Lansdell, an English clergyman, was jokingly told on his trip through Russian Central Asia in 1885, "When you come to pay us your next visit, and the Oxus ..." That was the other name for the Amu River. "When the Oxus is open, you will be able to take your ticket from London Bridge to Petra, Alexandros in the heart of Asia and come all the way by water."
	In the 1890s, the expedition organized by imperial order for exploring the ancient beds of the river Amu Darya between the Aral and Caspian seas was featured at the World's Colombian Exposition in Chicago. The display featured maps of the Amu Delta, the supposed ancient beds of the Amu River, drafts of two potential routes for waterways linking the river and the Caspian and photographs of the region.
	Though the plans to connect Amu and Caspian were never taken out, tsarist-era reports were revived at a Soviet state planning commission meeting in June 1925 to discuss just such a possibility, and the new Soviet government invested a million and a half rubles into these investigations. 
	From all of this, we can see that although the direct cause of the disappearance of the greater part of the Aral Sea was the later Soviet diversion of the Syr Darya and Amu Darya for irrigation purposes, the notion that the Aral Sea had naturally appeared and disappeared over the centuries, coupled with its uselessness in the eyes of Russians who contrasted it to the Caspian, with its outlet to the wider world, led to the possibility and perhaps even the inevitability of the Aral Sea's demise in many minds long before the late 20th Century.
	The desire to reroute the course of the Amu Darya was also more than just a fantasy to increase Russian commerce in the region. The mid-19th Century was a time in which many educated Russians were debating the relationship of Russia to both Europe and Asia and were searching for the essence of a Russian national spirit.
	The idea of Russia as having a special geographical role to play as a mediator between Europe and Asia, fit neatly into such debates, and consequently, the role that redirecting the Amu River to the Caspian might play in helping Russia to realize its special geographical destiny garnered much interest. Soviet visions for releasing the Amu Darya from its transport duties to bring life, instead, to the Central Asian deserts also seemed to have been grounded in these older fantasies about Russia's special role linking Europe and Asia. 
	In assigning to themself the task of redirecting the region's rivers, for instance, both tsarist and early Soviet technocrats evoked the legendary image of an Assyrian queen named Semiramis, who supposedly had confined the river Euphrates to its bank near Babylon, triumphantly proclaiming, "I made the rivers flow where I desired them to flow, and I desired that they would only flow where they would be of use. I transformed the barren land into fertile land, irrigating it from the rivers, with the rivers."
	If anyone has any idea where this comes from, I would love to know because it keeps cropping up in my sources. Semiramis, there's not really much at about an actual Assyrian queen, but she's associated with the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. And for some reason, the Russians really latched onto this idea, and it seems that by invoking the words of this legendary Oriental despot in connection with their irrigation works in the arid lands of the empire, Central Asia's Russian and Bolshevik rulers alike seemed to be declaring their imperial mastery over their own Orient.
	Part of Russia's role in this fantasy was to play the role of a civilized European empire in Asia. As this quotation also suggests, the redirection of Central Asia's rivers for irrigation rather than transportation purposes became increasingly central to Russian visions for the transformations of Central Asia. Because both the Syr and particularly the Amu River are shallow and carry heavy loads of silt, they are difficult to navigate and frequently change their course. Diversion of large amounts of water for irrigation and the construction of hydropower dams makes rivers even less navigable.
	In the mid-19 Century, Admiral Butakov had established a fleet on the Aral Sea and investigated the possibility of river transport on the Amu and Syr, but by the late 19th Century, the possibility of river ... Or, sorry. As railroads replaced waterways as the main arteries of transport in the region, Russians began to abandon schemes of a great Eurasian waterway in favor of harnessing the waters of the Amu and Syr for irrigation.
	Besides railroad construction, another catalyst in the shift away from waterways, commerce and navigation and towards water for irrigated agriculture was the American Civil War. In his recent book, Empire of Cotton, Sven Beckert wrote, "With its shocking duration and destructiveness, the American struggle marked the world's first truly global raw materials crisis and proved midwife to the emergence of the new global networks of labor, capital and state power. The outbreak of the Civil War severed in one stroke the relationships that had underpinned the worldwide web of cotton production and global capitalism since the 1780s."
	Beckert's book details the impulses of European imperialists to find new sources of cheap cotton in Africa and Asia in the second half of the 19th Century. Russians, too, were part of this movement. Russian protective tariffs and government subsidies helped, by the 1890s, to establish American cotton as one of the main crops in Central Asia. 
	By the eve of the First World War, Russian technocrats were dreaming of doubling the irrigated land in Central Asia to create new cotton fields and settlements for Russian colonists. Expanded irrigation networks were seen as necessary for increasing the cotton crop. The ultimate vision of independence from the world cotton market was one that only increased after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
	Over the seven decades between the 1890s and 1960s, Central Asians were increasingly subjugated, both to Russian rule as well as a cotton monoculture. It was, thus, decades of scheming about increasing cotton production, which culminated in the diversion projects of the 1960s, not the seemingly sudden decision of Soviet engineers or the Kremlin. 
	In the years leading up to the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution, small holders in Central Asia had been provided with incentives to replace more and more of their crops with cotton, and Central Asia had become heavily dependent on imported food. This fact became particularly evident when the region was cut off from the rest of Russia during the civil war which followed the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917, further compounding the situation with the fact that by 1921, central and southern regions of Russia were undergoing a severe famine, brought about by Bolshevik policies and exacerbated by severe drought.
	It is well documented that million of people in central and southern Russia suffered in this famine, but the fact that many more tens of thousands of Central Asians may have died as a result of the effort to save the lives of their neighbors to the north is less well documented, though Bolshevik officials privately admitted that there were deliberate and ongoing measures on the part of the new Soviet government, which favored the Slavic over the indigenous population.
	At the end of the summer of 1921, the Central Soviet government requested that Turkestan accept 200,000 starving migrants from other parts of Soviet Russia. Foreign aid organizations relying on Bolshevik reports assumed that Turkestan had surplus grain for export. The American Relief Administration, for instance, under the direction of Herbert Hoover, sent $60 million to Soviet Russia in aid. While Central Asian officials informed Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin in late 1921 that the financial situation of Turkestan, this Central Asian province, is catastrophic, no monetary aid came there, and no soup kitchens were established.
	In the spring of 1922, The New York Times published a report by The Reverend Julius Hecker, who, when touring famine-ravaged Central Russia, found that the situation surpassed even his worst expectations. "I have seen refugee trains," Hecker wrote, "That, for four months, were creeping toward the Southeast, to the promised land of Turkestan. How many of these unfortunates will survive the privations of the long journey? I do not venture even to guess."
	As the civil war came to an end and the Bolsheviks consolidated power in Central Asia, first the restoration of cotton to its pre-war levels and then the expansion of cotton acreage to ensure independence from global markets became top Soviet priorities for the region. American engineers, including Arthur Powell Davis who came to the Soviet Union during the worldwide Great Depression to serve as consultants to the Soviet Cotton Committee, observed the strict rationing of foodstuffs and the fantastic prices of basic necessities in the Central Asian capital of Tashkent.
	Nor were things better in the countryside, where in 1928 and '29, the Soviet Secret Police reported the existence of an anti-cotton mood. After passing through an area which Davis reported as being wretchedly poor and a village where no food could be obtained besides melons, the American engineers arrived at a boat launch on the Aral Sea. 
	Engineer Lyman Wilbur described the scene matter of factly for the National Geographic Magazine. "Here, the commune was at the dock taking on a load of wheat from Orenburg and Samara to feed to Uzbeks, Karakalpaks and Turkamans," or Turkmen "of Khorasam," which is the same as Khiva, "whom the government is encouraging to grow cotton instead of food." Therefore, long before Khrushchev's failures to provide the Soviet people with enough food, Central Asians were suffering.
	The Soviet government, however, did not openly address the replacement of food with cotton in Central Asia. Rather, in the first decades of Soviet power, official rhetoric increasingly stressed that only under Soviet power did it become possible to fulfill the cherished dream of the peoples of Central Asia to overcome the opposition of nature. According to the article from Around the World that I mentioned earlier in 1948, "And this new railway in the Karakum desert that they were planning to build by taking over the duties of transport from the Amu Darya would bring the unruly river to flow where the people wanted it to."
	And so, if that's reminiscent, right, of that earlier quote I read to you supposedly of that Assyrian queen Semiramis, and this subtle shift towards invoking the people, right, rather than the Oriental despot, reflects a more general shift in Soviet rhetoric towards one of liberation. Whereas 19th-Century observers had equated an unruly or capricious river with the unruly people occupying its banks, Central Asia's Soviet rulers were not only taming a river, they were liberating a people.
	According to this kind of thinking, Central Asians were unable to care for themselves and needed Soviet assistance. This kind of thinking built on decades of considering Central Asians inferior stewards of the land, helpless at the hands of corrupt rulers and ignorant of the virtues of European science and technology. 
	And whereas tsarist engineers had found themselves unhappily dependent on indigenous systems of water management, Soviet engineers took a bolder stance. As one engineer put it, already in the 1920s, nature had set up a barrier. Native technology was not capable of surmounting it, and only the aid of the Soviet Union makes it possible to eternally tear asunder the many chains of slavery with which nature has fettered an entire people.
	In the late 1930s and early 1940s, the building of huge canals, such as the Great Fergana Canal, by employing tens of thousands of collective farmers in so-called people's construction projects was accompanied by the idea that the Soviet government was at last fulfilling the age-old desire of the Central Asian people for water. And I was really excited to find this photograph because these workers are reading a newspaper called People's Construction, and I can talk more about this, these People's Construction projects in the Q & A, if you want.
	Basically, from emphasizing modern technology and the use of excavators to build these huge new concrete-lined canals with steel sluice gates, all of a sudden, as you saw in this other photograph, right, the Soviet government is just basically coercing tens of thousands of collective farmers to take their shovels and hoes and build these huge canals in a matter of days, but claiming that it's the Soviet laborer, right, that is able to achieve this feat, that this is the only way that people have been able to be organized this efficiently and construct these canals. 
	And so, for the first time ever, they're finally getting the water that they've always desired. So it's a totally bizarre phenomenon. Projects to harness the water. The waters of Central Asia's rivers were also to serve as models for other seemingly benighted peoples of the East in places like Afghanistan, British India and beyond. 
	So to sum up what I've said so far, the river diversion projects of the 1950s and '60s were the culmination of a process to transform Central Asia into a cotton-growing colony already in the last decades of the Russian Empire. So the process has started already in the last decades of the Russian empire. 
	The Soviet Union had not only solidified that process but made a claim to freeing the oppressed peoples of the Soviet East by liberating them from their dependence on a harsh environment. The Aral Sea was one feature of that harsh environment and one, which in this thinking, had never served a particularly important purpose. Even before Russians began to expand cotton cultivation in the region, there was widespread belief that the Aral Sea was more of an impediment to Russian visions for the region than it was an asset. 
	With global concern over crisis and the supply of cotton in the late 19th Century, and the desire of European imperialists to become less dependent on American cotton, the fate of the Aral Sea suffered a further blow. From now on, the region's rulers would consider the primary role of the region's rivers to serve as sources of irrigation water, and later, hydropower, rather than transportation.
	After the establishment of Soviet power in the region, the calls to make Central Asia the cotton base of country, which would once and for all ensure independence from the world cotton market, became even more strident. And by the 1950s, damming and diversion projects sealed the fate of the Aral Sea. It was not a forgone conclusion that the sea would disappear, but these factors, as I have outlined them, made it highly probable even before the 1960s.
	I would also like to reiterate the colonial dimension to this story. Much the way European empires exploited overseas colonies for their natural resources, Central Asia was exploited for its potential as the best cotton growing region in both the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. As a result, Central Asians became less self-sufficient in food production and more dependent on the cotton harvest. They lost control of the management of regional water resources as these water resources become more centralized under first tsarists, then later, Soviet rule.
	The measures adopted by the Soviet government to address the Aral Sea crisis were late and ineffective. A resolution on the Aral Sea was adopted by the Supreme Soviet in March of 1991. After the Soviet collapse a few months later, the burden of dealing with the problems of the Aral Sea region devolved onto the newly independent states of Central Asia. Karakalpakstan, which was established in the Soviet period as an autonomous region for the Karakalpak minority in the region of the Aral Sea, remains a neglected minority region and is one of the poorest regions of Uzbekistan today.
	However, not only the Karakalpaks are suffering. With regional economy still heavily dependent on cotton, forced participation in the cotton harvest remains a fact of life for many people in the countries of the Aral Sea region, and these are just a couple of headlines that I pulled up during a very quick search the other day. One's just from last week.
	And, in fact, when I finally gained permission to access the Uzbek National Archives in the fall of 2009, I almost didn't get to go because the director and the vice director of the archives were, as government employees, putting their time in, in the cotton fields. So they were forced, as government employees, to be in the cotton fields picking cotton. So I thought, "Well, that's kind of ... That's interesting, right, very fitting." 
	Uzbek President Islam Karimov, who just died in September of this year, had been in power since before the Soviet collapse. So whether things are going to change now remains to be seen. But so far in the region, even where there has been regime change, not much has changed. So child labor, forced labor in the cotton fields remains a major problem. 
	So while the disappearance of the Aral Sea in recent decades is, indeed, an environmental tragedy, plans to save the sea from death have distracted us from this important human aspect to the history of this region and the ways in which this history is intimately connected with the histories of colonized and oppressed peoples all over the world. 
	The enthusiasm for technological fixes, restoration of the Aral Sea through pumping groundwater, building a canal to the Caspian that would use the Caspian's waters to refill the Aral, right, the opposite of those older plans or the plans for the diversion of Siberian rivers that has cropped up periodically since the 1970s. The Soviet government had finally put a stop to that discussion, but in recent years, the mayor of Moscow, Yury Luzhkov, wrote a book about it in 2009. And he said this idea, of all the Siberian rivers, most of them. So the Volga flows south, right, but farther to the East, the Siberian rivers flow northward into the Arctic Ocean. 
	There have been these crazy plans, right, to have some of them flow southward to fill up the Aral Sea, and they keep coming. But all of these plans, right, any of these sort of technological fix ideas fail to take into the account the fact that even were the sea to be restored to it 1960s level, it cannot make up for over a century of colonial violence that has, at its core, not only the human domination of power but power relations that have led some humans to suffer at the hands of others.
	As we lament the sight of ships rusting in the desert, right, what you saw on the poster, and this is actually a still from a recent Pink Floyd video. They should remind us not only of the water that once was there but the people for whom this water meant life and livelihoods. The ships should remind us not only of communist disregard for the environment but of the nationalist and imperialist impulses that led Russians to claim superiority over the peoples of this region, the global capitalist impulses and colonial polices that led to the subjugation of the Central Asian peoples and their enslavement to the cotton plant, long before the Aral Sea began to shrink.
	These reminders are important for understanding not only what has happened to the Aral Sea. Development projects continue all over the world and will continue to benefit some at the expense of others, and so this recent music video is for a song called Louder Than Words, which is a reminder, right, that actions speak louder than words. And it features the Aral Sea, so that's great. It draws our attention to this, but it's a call that we would do well to heed here in the United States as well.
	And so, preparing for this talk today, I was thinking about Standing Rock, right, as another example of perhaps some of the same kinds of lessons that we've learned from the Aral Sea. So I'm going to stop there, and I'll be happy to take any questions about anything I've mentioned here or anything else.