Collectivization Generation: Oral Histories of a Social Revolution in Uzbekistan by MarianneKamp. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2024. 300 pp. $36.95. ISBN 978‐1‐5017‐7950‐3

Oral history plays a crucial role in investigating life in the former Soviet Union, where censorship meant that many topics were never discussed in print. Interviews are especially important in capturing the memories of the oldest generations of Soviet citizens before they pass from the scene. Marianne Kamp’s new monograph provides a marvelous example of the value of such research in Central Asia, where collectivization, like Soviet history more broadly, is understudied compared to other regions. It is astonishing that a book published in 2025 would contain interviews with people who actually remember collectivization, which occurred nearly a century earlier. This is partly thanks to the fact that this long-term oral history project was first launched around 2000. Even so, it must have been hard to find octogenarians with unimpaired memories who could recall details regarding their youth in the 1920s and early 1930s. Kamp’s respondents have almost all passed away by now, making this book a rare treasure trove of irreplaceable information. This information is doubly valuable because the people interviewed are those whose voices are most often lost to history—peasants and rural dwellers, who leave few written records about their lives. Their recollections provide a complement and a contrast to histories of collectivization based on archival documents. The contrast with archivally based histories provides the basis for some of Kamp’s most important conclusions. Kamp’s oral history interlocutors call into question several aspects of conventional scholarly wisdom about this period. These have to do with how collectivization was received by Uzbek rural society, class conflict in the Uzbek countryside, and the Bosmachi rebel movement. The central argument of the book is that collectivization was not as uniformly negative for peasants in Uzbekistan as the documentary record suggests. Most works of history represent collectivization as a period of unremitting misery and chaos. Kamp’s interviewees often recalled the period quite differently. Many joined the kolkhoz voluntarily, due to incentives and promised benefits, and took pride in their work there. Kamp speculates that people remembering collectivization years later may focus on the ultimate outcome rather than on the violent ups and downs of the process itself. Eventually, life on the kolkhoz came to seem normal and remains so in people’s memories. Of course, recollections of collectivization also depend on one’s social class at the time. Kamp argues that class distinctions were not simply imposed by the Soviet regime but had real resonance with the Uzbek peasantry. Historians have tended to emphasize the invented and arbitrary nature of Soviet categories such as “kulak” and “poor peasant.” Kamp’s interviewees, by contrast, recalled prerevolutionary social classes as very real. Many of them came from poor or landless families and had worked as servants or sharecroppers to the rich, whom they resented. The poor gained land through Soviet land reform and benefitted by joining the kolkhoz. Those who had grown up in affluent families had very different memories—of exile, losing their land, and seeing their fathers imprisoned or worse. Kamp’s interviews also challenge existing narratives about the Bosmachi, armed groups that fought against Soviet rule in the 1920s. Views of the Bosmachi have shifted over time, with the Soviet image of counterrevolutionary bandits giving way to post-Soviet portrayals of heroic independence fighters. In contemporary Uzbekistan, descendants of the Bosmachi prefer to remember their ancestors as freedom fighters who never hurt ordinary people. However, Kamp’s interviews belie these sanitized memories. Nearly half of her respondents vividly recalled Bosmachi violence during their childhood, not all of which was targeted at communist officials. There were major gender differences, with women much more likely to recall fear, violence, and rape. Overall, Kamp finds that collectivization was less disruptive in Uzbekistan than in neighboring Soviet republics. Uzbeks were not relocated or forced to grow new and unfamiliar crops. Soviet class categories seemed to fit the settled rural regions of Uzbekistan better than they did nomadic societies, which generally featured a rough form of tribal democracy and collective land ownership. Certainly, the distressing accounts of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan in this period, which include mass flight, armed rebellion, and severe famine (especially in Kazakhstan), are quite different from the stories Kamp tells. With historians today insisting on the need to transcend the “national” in Central Asia, perhaps future researchers will analyze Uzbekistan more systematically within the context of the region as a whole. Sadly, they will be unlikely to have access to oral history evidence from other countries like that collected in this remarkable book.