Rural History of Soviet Central Asia: Land Reform and Agricultural Change in Early Soviet Uzbekistan by BeatricePenati. Leiden: Brill, 2025. 690 pp. $194.00. ISBN 978‐90‐04‐69777‐5

Beatrice Penati has written the definitive study on the period of land reform in Uzbekistan. This ultimately short-lived reform has hitherto been neglected by scholars in favor of the more dramatic process of collectivization that followed it and the more traumatic turmoil of revolution and civil war that it followed. As Penati shows, however, land reform must be understood in dialogue with both of those other topics: first as a response to the state collapse from which it emerged and, second, as fundamentally distinct from the process of collectivization with which it has often been conflated. So thorough is Penati’s work that few, even among specialists, will read this tome cover-to-cover. The book is not syllabus-friendly, but it will undoubtedly become the go-to reference for anyone needing a solid, archivally grounded study of the difficult-to-grasp period of the mid-1920s. The book unfolds in roughly chronological order, beginning from the devastation wrought on Central Asian peasant economies by revolution and civil war and proceeding through a detailed analysis of the decision-making processes involved in formulating and enacting Uzbekistan’s land reform—the conflicted early phases, the rollout in the core economic zones of Tashkent, Fergana, and Samarkand and its effects on beneficiary household economies, the expansion of reform to the more peripheral regions of Zeravshan, Khorezm, Qashqa-Darya, and Surkhan-Darya, the coalescence of class identities, and concluding with the experimental push from land reform to collectivization. Chapter 7, an illuminating thematic chapter, considers irrigation, while the introduction situates Uzbekistan’s land reform in comparative context. Penati makes meticulous use of an impressive range of archival sources from both Uzbekistan and Moscow—the full range of sources any scholar of the period can be expected to consult given current restrictions. She combines these with a thorough study of the secondary scholarship in multiple languages spanning at least seventy-five years. Across the book’s nine chapters, Penati emphasizes the contingency of decision-making processes around the land reform, demonstrating convincingly that the reform can in no way be described as solely a Moscow-directed process. Instead, differing factions of republican and regional elites negotiated conflicting pressures from below—for example, peasant unrest—and above, such as cotton quotas, although these too, Penati shows, were negotiated on the ground rather than merely handed down from above. So thorough is Penati’s procedural narration of the planning and implementation of the reform that at times, it becomes difficult to see the forest for the trees. Yet certain clear patterns emerge. For one, Penati makes a convincing case that while land reform was ideologically justified in class terms, decisionmakers consistently counterbalanced the priorities of class warfare with the imperative to maintain cotton production. No land reform could be permitted to so disrupt Uzbekistan’s agriculture that the cotton harvest would fail, and this complicated the most ambitious efforts at class warfare during the reform. Here, the outsize importance of local elites, and the production of new hierarchies within Uzbekistan rather than merely between Uzbekistan and Moscow, has the potential to offer new insight into the “imperial” dynamics of Soviet rule, although Penati does not explore this question substantially. One of the most illuminating dimensions of Penati’s book concerns the components of land reform that did not strictly have to do with the land itself. As Penati emphasizes, land was useless without water to irrigate it and equipment to work it. With respect to the latter, land reform entailed redistributing draught animals, equipment, and capital to beneficiary households, or inventarizatsiia. Canal maintenance and construction, through the management of corvée labor, likewise become an essential component of the story Penati tells. As thorough as Penati’s work may be, she acknowledges the blind spots created by her source selection. Penati’s book can offer no substantial insight into the lived experience of these reforms among those most affected by them. As Penati concludes, “in this book, to mobilize has been more a transitive than an intransitive verb” (p. 639). How and whether peasants mobilized during land reform, intransitively, has yet to be discussed, and such scholarship would have to use the weak extant source base in an uncommonly creative way. Likewise, while Penati concludes that Soviet Uzbekistan must not be considered a “colonial” setting because many Soviet policies were employed universally, she does not deeply consider the disparate effects of said policies on different populations, including European settlers and indigenous peasants. Still, given the paucity of recent and comprehensive work on the topic and the difficulty of accessing the relevant sources, Penati’s book is a welcome contribution to the field and will undoubtedly be the reference of choice on the topic for generations to come.