russian elites in competition

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After t he Kolkhoz: rural el it es incompetitionTom m aso Trevi saniVersion of record f irst publ i shed: 06 Aug 2007.

To cite this article: Tommaso Trevisani (2007): After the Kolkhoz: rural el i tes in competit ion,Cent ral Asian Survey, 26:1, 85-104

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After the Kolkhoz: rural elites incompetitionTOMMASO TREVISANI

Introduction

Caught between predictions of Islamist upheaval and the menace of regional frag-

mentation,

1

current understandings of the social dynamics in rural Uzbekistancontinue to be trapped by discourses of danger2 that make it difficult to recognisewhat is really happening on the ground. Clans and patronage networks arewidely used terms to address local political dynamics, while some authors stressthat the key political processes are informal and evolve around relationsbetween clans and regimes.3 Yet attention to the underlying social and politicalconfiguration has seldom been accurate. Uzbekistan is still portrayed as an essen-tially immobile country in which, unlike most post-Socialist nations, rural areashave been very minimally impacted by substantial reform.4 As a result, mostliterature dealing with rural social developments in Uzbekistan implicitly or expli-citly maintains an image of continuity between the kolkhoz of the Soviet periodand todays superficially reformed equivalents of the kolkhoz.

The central argument of this paper is that, contra these assumptions, recentreform intensification has produced a significant shift in the patterns of politicaldynamics in rural Uzbekistan. Research conducted in Khorezm tells us that bothassumptions of socio-political immobility, as well as the analytical inferencesdrawn from it, have to be reconsidered in the light of empirical evidence. Thispaper addresses significant changes in the relations of power and of productionand claims that a changing scenario is producing a new dynamic that has so farnot received adequate attention.

The reforms that have led to decollectivisation also had the unforeseen conse-

quence of affecting the implicit and official rules through which local producersand local elites conducted their interactions within the rigid framework of stateagriculture. In the absence of other viable forms of political participation, theserules were the expression of a voice from below in a context in which thelocal peoples councils and assemblies, rather than being veritable bodies ofself-governance, were made to acclaim and follow centrally commanded instruc-tions and policies. Despite Soviet (and post-Soviet) centralism and its institutionalanimosity towards genuine political participation, power politics never ceased toalso have a local expression, manifest in local struggles around the distribution of

Central Asian Survey (March 2007) 26(1), 85104

Correspondence should be addressed to Tommaso Trevisani, Center for Development Research, University ofBonn, Germany (E-mail: [email protected]).

0263-4937 print/1465-3354 online/07/010085-20# 2007 Central Asian SurveyDOI: 10.1080/02634930701423509


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resources and in the shaping of community life. In this respect the coping andappropriation strategies adopted by the rural communities vis-a-vis the centrallyset political frame should be considered as a surrogate, albeit opaque and indirect,form of participation, which so far the central government contained successfully.

This is the locus of the transformation I want to address in this paper. Taking theexample of a rural district, I argue that local struggles and local forms of copingdevelop a dynamic that only partially matches the scenarios implied by thecentre periphery narratives of power relations employed to describe socio-politi-cal ferment at a more general level. In an attempt to understand the centre periph-ery struggle in a specific district, I analyse the evolution of the mechanismsthrough which new inequalities are created and uncover some unsuspecteddynamics that create challenges and resistance to state control. Not clans, but indi-viduals responding to new sets of constraints and opportunities are at the core of

these mechanisms.

Centreperiphery dynamics in Uzbekistans rural sector

The notion of an all-encompassing state has been frequently invoked to character-ise state society relations in Uzbekistan. Nevertheless, according to Ilkhamov, thedominance of the Uzbek state over society only hides the frailty of its power. Theabsence of an independent public sphere does not render state power more stable,as stability remains based on continuous negotiations between layers of the statethat largely leaves out society.5 In such a context the centreperiphery dynamics

represent the motor of the social and political transformation: they replace statesociety relations in the role usually ascribed to them in other modernisingcountries.6 Ilkhamov writes of this centre periphery dynamic in antagonisticterms. It is characterised by the paradox of a strong centre permanently endangeredby the destabilising claims of a locally rooted periphery. His argument is furthersubstantiated by what he calls the battle for cotton,7 in which an only seeminglystrong centre, represented by the top executive power, struggles to fully imposeitself on a recalcitrant periphery, represented by regional elites within the stateapparatus. The argument is that because the loyalty and acquiescence of theregional elites largely depends on the centres (in)ability to satisfy their budgetary

demands, the latter end up posing a real threat to the centre.Looked at from a general perspective the battle for cotton originates in thediverging economic and political interests between central government, local pro-ducers and the regional elites in respect to an agricultural system once built up toserve the demands of the Soviet textile industry8 and now in evolution towardsnewly defined domestic concerns.9 During the Soviet period the central govern-ment implemented a cotton quasi-monoculture in the areas suitable for thiscrop. Local producers became employees integrated in the kolkhoz system, forwhich the Soviet government, via the local administrators, allocated consistentbudget resources. The regional elites gained some discretion over the statebudget devoted to agriculture. Their technique consisted in over-reporting the

cotton production, a device that enabled state enterprises and organisations to

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obtain higher budget and resource transferrals from the central administration.Local elites used these rents to satisfy their needs and those of their clients, andsucceededin part by means of the cultural complicity that linked them to theircommunitiesin developing a pervasive system of patronage, ranging from thehigher echelons of the state and party system, down to the kolkhoz staff, andtheir local constituencies.10 According to Ilkhamov this legacy of the past liveson in current relations:

more often than not, kolkhoz chairmen find patrons among local authorities with whom they enter

into mutually beneficial clan-like relationship. This patronclient network pulls in other influen-

tial forces, such as heads of law enforcement agencies, bazarkoms (administrators of local

bazaars), and even sometimes people from the central government. . . . Ordinary rural households

are also in some way involved in these patronclient networks. The role of patrons towards them

is played by kolkhoz chiefs. From this point of view such kolkhozhousehold relationships can

be considered as a sort of social archetype inherited from the pre-Soviet past.11

After independence the government privileged a conservative course of reform,whose aim was to enhance the condition of a poorly performing and deficitridden agricultural economy, without loosening its grip over the returns of agricul-ture. Stability concerns were prioritised over the need to reform the inefficienciesof the state controlled collectives. Superficially reformed into cooperatives andlater into farmer unions, they maintained their most important characteristics.12

However, now the government was unable to ensure the regular payment ofwages and to provide for those social services and investments that in the past

effectively counterbalanced its extractive cotton policy. Budget cuts also aimedat reducing regional elites capacity to ensure their rents from agriculture.13

These measures naturally clashed with the consolidated web of interests, collu-sions and tactics developed by the stakeholders at various levels that in the pasthad already led to the so-called Uzbek affair.14

As a consequence, post-independence agro-policy created resentment and hard-ship among primary producers. In order to compensate its incapacity to maintainpast living standards in the rural areas starting from the 1990s the governmentenlarged the share of land for household use and reduced the overall share ofland grown with state order crops,15 but with little success. Local elites, deprived

of their share of rents from the business with cotton and the other state crops, werecompelled to find alternative sources of income, which they found at the expenseof the rural population. The result was to further penalise the primary producers,now forced to endure a double burden imposed on them by the centralgovernment and their local bosses.16 In the colonial17 context of late socialistUzbekistan local elites were appreciated as supportive patrons of their commu-nities. Their capacity to divert and allocate resources to their patronage networkscould even find a moral legitimacy by figuring as a sort of passive form of resist-ance against the centrally imposed cotton programme. In this sense, the local elitesdemonstrated their loyalty by stealing from Moscow to give back to the com-munities. In the context of independent Uzbekistan, by imposing an additional

burden on the communities they lose the legitimating Robin Hood bonus: the

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moral support rural elites enjoyed in the past now fades away and gives way to apost-independence legitimacy crisis.18

Despite this, the position of the rural elites retains some ambivalence, as theirinterests and loyalties can move back and forth between the political centre andtheir (former) local constituencies, depending on the situation.19 An interest theregional elites have in common with the local producers consists in expandingthe sector of agriculture not devoted to cotton production, as this is the sectorthat they can control autonomously and that allows them to earn the materialresources that are no longer available through the governmental budget. Thecentres reaction against this strategy results in augmented pressure in the formof periodical staff reshuffles and intensified controls on the production processas a mean to guarantee their control over the situation. While this reconstructionof the political and economic dynamic around the cotton sector is plausible in

general terms, little is known about how these dynamics impact concretely uponlocal elites and producers in the rural areas. In the following section, I attemptto transpose this model to a rural district in order to see how far the paradoxcreated by the centreperiphery dynamics is also reproduced at a lower level ofthe agricultural production hierarchy and if it does, which particular form itassumes.

The battle for cotton transposed to Yangibozor

Ilkhamovs model of the centreperiphery relations in Uzbekistan is based on his

understanding of the dynamics between top level state hierarchy and regionalelites. Seen from within the cotton growing district in which I conducted my field-work20 the scenario described in the battle for cotton is not immediately recog-nisable. With a population of 63.4 thousand, 57.3 of which registered in the ruralcouncils around the Raizentrarea, Yangibozor is a truly rural district,21 represen-tative of other densely populated and intensively cultivated areas in Uzbekistan,where centrally administered irrigated agriculture has a similar importance forthe livelihood of people. Among the university students of Khorezm the districtis well known because, having fewer residents than other districts of the viloyat,at harvest, ever since the Soviet period the university faculties used to be allocated

to the cotton growing collectives to support the yearly cotton harvest campaign.More importantly, this district is a trail-blazer of the Uzbek decollectivisationpolicy. Anticipating a nation-wide trend, the shirkats of the district werealready disbanded by January 2003. By then 18,656.8 of the ca 20,000 hectaresof agricultural lands once managed by the 11 shirkats were transferred to 1164

fermer enterprises.22 In 2006 the remaining tenth of land grown with state cropswas finally transferred to the fermers, whose number reached 1406.23 Researchcarried out in this district aimed at studying the way in which national agriculturalreform policies were perceived and implemented locally and how they impactedproduction, social organisation and community life.24

While in Ilkhamovs model the emphasis is on the rivalry between the regional

elites and the central government, in Yangibozor the district establishment seems

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to be genuinely loyal and does not represent a challenge to the government. Also,local producers are much less passive than portrayed in Ilkhamovs account.Yangibozor has in the past mostly matched the cotton production targets set bythe government, although at the cost of many sacrifices and hardship for thedirect producers involved in cotton growing, who represent the overwhelmingmajority of Yangibozors population. In a context characterised by a reagrariani-sation and a demonetisation of agriculture25 rural inhabitants became moredependent on their produce. For this reason rice, which unlike cotton can bedirectly consumed by the households or freely sold for cash in the bazaars,increased in its importance both for the small producers (more oriented to growit for their subsistence) and for the large farm holders (inclined to grow rice asa cash crop). Already under the state collectives the opportunity to make profitswith rice, which district authorities try to limit in order not to endanger the

cotton production, but also to keep it under their exclusive control, has been attrac-tive to local producers. Now, with the changing conditions of land usage availableto the fermers, it has even increased its appeal. The hokims and the other districtlevel staffs attempt to keep this sector under their control has not remainedunchallenged locally. Portraying post-reform Yangibozor as a scenario of conflictor of social unrest would surely be mistaken. However, relations between districtauthorities and recently established private farms ( fermers) were a continuoussource of tension rooted in the latters determination to manage their farms inde-pendently and expressed in various forms of locally circumscribed phenomena ofresistance against the authorities.26 In June 2004, one year after the lands of the

former rice growing sovkhoz Amudarya27

were entirely transferred to fermers,these tensions poured out in an exceptional and locally circumscribed, thoughemblematic, uprising against the authorities. A casual spectator described theevent to me in these words:

Yesterday around 1011 in the morning in Amudarya people gathered on the bridge and stopped

the circulation, approximately 300 people, most of them dehqons [peasants], ca 50 of them

fermers, the rest people working for the fermers, all were from Amudarva. . . . To calm down

the crowd, who were protesting because the rice growing had been banned, also A. [Head of

Regional Agricultural Department] had to come from Urgench to support the hokim. The

people were shouting at the hokim! An angry woman saying: We have already paid for the trac-

tors, bought the seeds, made everything ready, why you tell us only now to stop? Then A. had tospeak [explain the reasons for the ban] to calm down the people while the hokim sat aside. In the

end the authorities promised that rice could be grown again. But after the people went home the

authorities took back their promise and stuck to their no to rice. Now there is no electricity in

Amudarya, the hokim today has stopped the supply [so nobody can run the electric pumps to take

the necessary water for the irrigation of the rice fields from the channels]. Without the water, in a

few days the rice paddies will dry and all be gone . . . .28

While relations between district authorities and producers only rarely deteriorateso overtly, the episode is telling of the type of constraints local producers haveto face and of the asymmetric relations of power between them and the state auth-

orities, hence their volatility. Moreover, it portrays the top down implementation

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of policies as a far more complex and contested process than is usually recognised,and points at some of the means of coercion utilised. In this account localproducers speak against the hokim through the one voice of an angry peasantwoman, erroneously suggesting that local producers constitute a clear frontagainst the local establishment. However, the reason for their anger, the interdic-tion of the rice cultivation, brings us closer to the heart of the matter: triggered bythe ambiguity of the reforms that, on the one hand, generate more space for entre-preneurship while, on the other, maintain constraints on the entrepreneurial free-doms, the contested issues in their essence are the possibilities and the modalitiesof gaining profit in agriculture. Rural producers are not a homogenous class,29

and not even a we-group in Elwerts minimalist sense.30 However, in theaftermath of decollectivisation these tensions are the by-product of a new socialdifferentiation with a still uncertain outcome. Transposed to a lower rung of

the agricultural command hierarchy (rayon/tuman level) Ilkhamovs centreperiphery battlefield scenario unfolds here between the district authorities andthose (newly established) producers who do not wish to comply with theirorders and abuses.

Reproducing dependency patterns

At the time of my fieldwork the district hokim was a machine engineer, originallyfrom neighbouring Gurlen district, who upon his arrival to Yangibozor served ascity hokim in the nearby regional capital Urgench, where he still resides. His

arrival to Yangibozor coincided with the start of decollectivisation, one of themost wide-ranging measures of the recent governmental reform agenda, whichthe hokim accomplished successfully. Nationwide Yangibozor was among thefirst four districts where all collectives were disbanded. The end of the shirkats 31

created space for the emergence of private farms ( fermers) as the predominantform of agricultural production. The lands of the former collectives (kolkhozesand sovkhozes, later turned into shirkats) were transferred to newly established

fermerenterprises on the basis of individual long-term land leases linked to a com-pulsory production plan.32 While fermerenterprises already started to make theirappearance within the framework of the kolkhozes and shirkats in the 1990s, with

decollectivisation the novelty lies in the fact that the agricultural production planof the collective enterprises is now entirely handed over to the individual fermers,who also gain access to opportunities for profit and exposure to economic risks in away unknown to them within the framework of the collective farms. The collectivefarms as such ceased to exist. The hierarchy of the administrative structure basedon the repartition in districts, shirkats, brigades and working units, however, ismaintained by the district authorities even after the end of the collectives,because of the need to support and monitor the fermers state crop production.

Fermers welcomed the end of the shirkats: to them, although in the form of aconditional land lease, decollectivisation entailed a legal claim on land and theend of their dependency on the former kolkhoz bosses. In practice, however, the

conditions did not change so radically. This is because by law they still depend

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on a network of nominally privatised but de facto still state controlled input- andmarketing services that make them fall easy prey to state officials. It is preciselythe inadequacy of the conditions above and around their farm enterprises thatrenders fermers so vulnerable to unpredictable factors of risk. The consolidateddependency patterns that were established under collective agriculture have sur-vived decollectivisation and are now being transposed to the new scenario afterthe collectives. In line with Christophes analysis of the Georgian state, in ruralUzbekistan the creation of insecurity, be it via structural system shortcomingsor through outright intimidation of the producers, appears to be a calculatedmeans of state building.33 Uzbekistans regime of agrarian transition is reminis-cent of contexts for which Verdery has developed the notion of fuzzy property.At the end of the Romanian decollectivisation process she observed that theimportance of the external conditions in which legal titles are embedded are

more important than the ownership titles in a narrow sense, as these conditions,on which producers have limited capacity of influence, define what ownershiprights ultimately entail.34 Uzbekistans situation is similar: often misunderstoodby Western-minded reform agendas, the fuzziness of these surrounding con-ditions, including the persistence of pseudo-collective structures, the socialembedding of work, the necessary web of personal relations, infrastructure andthe availability of markets, have become the critical pressure points in the de-collectivised production process. Therefore, these factors (more than secureownership titles) end up being what really matters to the producers.

As Rasanayagam put it, in Uzbekistan rights over land are even likely to be

more fuzzy.35

This is only because private property on land has still not beenintroduced, causing different actors to having asymmetrical influence over theaccess, use and control of land as compared to the context Verdery analysed.Legislation36 also lacks clarity and gives rise to a number of interpretative difficul-ties, which are often used as a last resort to makefermers comply with the orders ofthe authorities. In Yangibozor, the fuzziness of the fermers right over land is aresult of three main factors. One more technical consideration consists in the lackof equipment in the institutions that are interposed between the district adminis-tration and the fermers, meaning that the officially privatised but de facto stillstate-regulated services are very unreliable. The other reason is that the district

authorities manipulate these institutions for their own ends. As a consequence,the FDA (Fermer and Dehqon Association), established as a republican levelorganisation with regional and district level branches, with the declared aim ofsupporting the development and the strengthening of the private farms, de factosidelines the district department of agriculture in the coordination of the statecrop planning. The eleven MTPs (motor traktor parki) that comprise the stillunprivatised machinery of the shirkats, although officially independent serviceenterprises, are de facto to be considered follow-ups of the kolkhozes, controlledby the hokim who appoints the managers (raislar). The banks, the agencies for thesupply of agricultural inputs, the MTPs and the district department for agricultureall form the indirect levers through which the hokim can make the fermers com-

pliant to his will. Wealthy fermers with their own technical means are less

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dependent on the MTP services, but can still be intimidated through the periodicalchecks and controls of the procurators office and of the militia. This legaladministrative realm of sanction is a third factor of uncertainty for the fermers.

These instruments are used by the officials of the district agricultural departmentto impose centrally determined cropping arrangements on the fermers, whileaccording to law the fermers can freely decide what to grow on a significantshare of their land leases.37 As a key instrument that determines the profitabilityof an agricultural enterprise, the imposition of cropping arrangements representsthe political lever that empowers district officials in their dealings with the

fermers. Although legislation and norms prescribe equitable treatment of farms,district officials have a margin for discretion, which they use to turn these arrange-ments into a commodity. In the past this was a prerogative of the kolkhoz bosses,as they would assert private claims over land as a valuable resource under their

control from which to obtain personal profit through the illegal transfer of rightsover it.38 Now, with the dismantling of the collectives, the hokim emerges asthe only one entitled to grant land leases to the fermers and struggles to keepthese transactions under his control. The logic of the transaction is that ofselling land cropping patterns in exchange for cash or a share of the harvest.Cropping arrangements are negotiated individually and differ in the share allo-cated to each crop from farm to farm. Agreements that include rice and othernon-state order crops are confidential and are settled secretively. State officialsdealing with this data keep them secret because a comparison of the croppingschemes of different farms in a district (yer balans) would reveal that the state

plan is unevenly applied to the fermers. To some extent, these opportunities forprofit are used as a reward to compensate individuals for their loyalty and theirrole in the command chain in a context in which, after the end of the shirkats,local officials have maintained their obligations towards the command hierarchy,but have also lost the direct instruments to ensure the fulfilment of the crop pro-duction targets. By law, it is not possible to be head of a farm and at the sametime an officer in a state administration. However, various forms of indirectfarm control are common. In 2004 de facto in Yangibozor all MTP managersand other high ranking district officials made their living with their own largefarm enterprises. In this sense, in line with past practice, privileged land deals

are granted to particular fermers with a role in the local state apparatus, as ameans to ensure that the plan from which the political survival of the local auth-orities depends is fulfilled.39

Beyond the fulfilment of the plan, the concern of the district heads seems to bethe control over the sources of wealth of the district. Because of their assumedwealth, especially well-to-do fermers are targeted with continuous requests forpayments, contributions and chakana nalog (one-time taxations, as they arecalled in the Khorezmian context) that can be requested by the district officialson the pretext of any public concern such as the renewing of public buildings,donations to the poor, contributions to public celebrations and other expendituresfor which the district is short of money. In Yangibozor, a percentage of the

harvest of the wheat state crop and of rice every year is donated by the fermers

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to an ad hoc philanthropic foundation for service such as the renovation of thedistrict hospital or the stadium. While these requests signal that there is anoverall attention on behalf of the district authorities to make fermers aware oftheir social responsibilities towards their communities, fermers complain aboutthe coerciveness and the lack of transparency of these operations. In a discussion40

with Egambergan, a wealthy rice fermer from Amudarya, it was evident that thepressure exerted by the district authorities, even if unspoken, has a strong capacityof intimidation:

TT: What will happen if you dont give money, if you dont help for the hospital, if you resist

chakana nalog? These things have no legal basis.

Egambergan: You have to give. These are people with whom you cannot play: they will call the

militia, they will find something, for example they will beat up someone and say you did it, or

they will find narcotics on you, they will send you to jail, or take your land. You have to give.

I am also thinking about whether to stay or leave [agriculture]. . .

.

Old established vs newly emerging rural elites

If in Yangibozors battle for cotton the centreperiphery antagonism takes theform of a tug-of-war between the local authorities and non-complying fermers,then so far this story has not revealed anything paradoxical about the centresstrength. However, fermers are less weak and defenceless, and the agents of thestate less pervasively powerful than so far portrayed. The regime of fuzziness,invoked before as a reason for the fermers submission to the district authorities,is more ambivalent and, in various ways, can even turn out to be a beneficialresource to the fermers. The subsidised context that makes it possible for thecotton gins to buy the fermers cotton cheaply, also causes one hectare of ricepaddy to become on average 8 10 times more profitable and less labour intensive,thus more attractive than its equivalent in cotton. On the side of the authorities thiscreates a strong need to monitor that the subsidised inputs (fertilisers especially)do not end on the wrong fields, a task that calls for more capacities than the districthokimiyatcan dispose of. Every year, rice bans proclaimed at the beginning of theseason, often on the pretext of (real or pretended) water shortage, are then recon-sidered later in the season and finally drastically revised. Fermers plan their field

activities and their cropping strategies accordingly. The eventuality of interferenceby the district authorities or the militia is a calculated risk that fermers try tomitigate with their personally available strategies and resources. This sort ofarm wrestling between planners and farm managers is not restricted to croppingdecisions only, but also extends to the use and the yield of farmland. In thiscontext I found the term sponsor as applied to a form of indirect control ofa farm, which bears the marks of a patronage relationship. In an interview,Komilbek, fermer and university teacher, explains:

. . . there is a person who is officially in charge (the official leasehold owner) and there is some-

body who is really responsible for the fermer, who is really the head. For instance: if you dont

have enough fertilizers, or if you cant rely on the work of your own tractor, what will you do?

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Who will help? . . . So for instance there we have K.H., owner on paper of a farm of almost 70

hectares, but M.H., Secretary (muovin) of the MTP, is the sponsor or real owner. He uses the

tractors of the MTP as he pleases on the farm, and so he makes a very good deal. Normally,

the machinery of the MTP is very unreliable: you cannot be sure to get it in time, sometimesto get it at all. So, if you have a good connection with the MTP you can rely on it, otherwise

you have to use your own! So you have a person who is legally registered and a person who

controls and factually owns the farm.41

Informed by a literature that postulates the centrality of clan-like patronage net-works in the relations between centre and periphery,42 my expectation to findsuch structures as local carriers of resistance or as vehicles of some sort of politicalcounter-claim was disappointed. Instead, hidden farm sponsoring emerged as anambiguous practice: apparently, it is a strictly speaking illegal but a widely toler-ated coping strategy. In reality it rather appears to be a proactive profit seeking

strategy. The law prohibits land subleasing and land transactions must be officiallychannelled through the district heads. In Khorezm hidden farm sponsoring is awidespread way to circumvent these restrictions. External farm sponsoring is anelite phenomenon, mostly involving large farmland areas, which are subleasedunder a sharecropping arrangement or sold unofficially to the tillers, with amutually advantageous deal between the contractors. As a patronclient relation-ship it is eminently business oriented and thus different from family, clan, orother sorts of solidarity groups based on a shared identity. Fermer enterprisesare officially registered by individuals but always run as a joint enterprise of theextended family, involving several households. Therefore they always have a

degree of informality.43

The sponsoring practice, however, is different: as an infor-mal practice with a degree of impersonality, it must be distinguished from theinformality of family farming. Finally, as a sponsor is exposed to potential legalretaliation, which he must be able to avoid or resist, sponsoring necessitatespolitical skills in the sense that economic success directly emanates from thesponsors de facto power.

For Baxtiyor, a language teacher from Yangibozor who in the past occasion-ally has illegally sub-rented land from a fermer to grow rice on a sharecroppingbasis, fermer enterprises can be distinguished along their management structureinto two different types: in the first type the owner sits in Urgench, never comes

to see the farm, and takes the profit. Owners of this kind can be for instance:prokuror, militsiya, tashqilot [state organisation]. The second type is thegroup of the ordinary persons. As soon as he becomes fermer, he will try tomanage everything by himself in order to save money.44 This division intodifferent types develops along the separation of two spheres of farming into amanagerial, dealing with paperwork and bureaucracy, with increasingly politicalovertones, and the agricultural labour process. In Yangibozor, in the aftermathof decollectivisation most fermers have just started their enterprises and facestrained or even difficult conditions. In contrast, big farms are exceptional.Their presence often indicates the existence of a sponsor, because of thehigher capital inputs they require. In a situation in which the conditions for

overall profitability depend so much on factors external to the farm, formal

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ownership is less important than the de facto control over the farm as a genera-tor of profit.

In Yangibozor, being a fermer is acquiring increasingly political overtones inthe sense that a successful fermer must have the strength (kuch), the capacitiesand the capital to impose himself on the endemically adverse circumstances ofthe local agricultural setting. With the end of the shirkat, land has become moreeasily accessible to wealthy people with no links to the former collectives,because now land is centrally redistributed through the district centre. Emergingpolitical entrepreneurs (sponsors), bypassing the role of the MTP managers, inthis way can more easily access land and sidestep the former kolkhoz/shirkatadministration. In the past, these kinds of arrangements would have required themediation of the shirkat manager and the use of the lands of a collectivefarm. Although asymmetric power relations persist, today these new actors are

determined to achieve lucrative cropping arrangements and are unwilling toretreat before of the paternalistic reprisals of the district authorities. In Egamber-gans perception, the wealthy rice fermer from Amudarya, todays fermers arereverting to the time of the beys, as they submit to their bosses (yoshulli)who pretend to rule as did the beys in the past.45 The conflictual relationbetween authorities and their challengers is expressed through the question ofwho exerts paternity (otalik qilmoq) over the fermers and their resources. Inthe local dynamic of competition the sponsors claim over the paternity offarm yields threatens the exclusivity of the hokims primacy in the district. Inter-estingly, by referring to otalik46 the terminology of this competition invokes the

language of traditional politics with reference to eldership. Although traditionalpolitical terminology is revived, this does not imply, however, that a return to tra-ditional political structures is underway. In the same way that todays sponsors arenot clan elders, todays otalik have nothing traditional about them except theorigin of their name.

The fortuitous discovery of an official document commissioned by the procur-ors office to the district level department for agriculture was revealing of thesestruggles between otaliklar. The document listing farms allegedly controlledby external sponsors that had to be checked on the regularity of their farm activi-ties, comprised 118 farms that were well above the average size (at that time

approximately one tenth of the total farms of the district). It included the namesof the registered titular leasee and, in separate columns, of the suspectedsponsor with his professional affiliation. According to Komilbek, and for twoother interviewed officials who, in the past, worked in the district department,the list has been deliberately compiled to make trouble for the hokims potentialenemies, in order to make them compliant with his requests:

The hokim orders the preparation of such lists to the agricultural department for the prokuratura.

. . . He orders it because these are people who have another protector [sponsor] and dont pay to

him. Everybody pays, but these people dont pay so much. For instance: here we have a fermer

controlled by a guy from the militia. The hokim says to him: give me 2t of wheat [at the end of

the harvest]. The man from the militia says: dont give it to him. There is competition on this.

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Therefore these people are rivals of the hokim, and the hokim ordered the list for the prokuratura

in order to give them trouble.47

In Ilkhamovs national battle for cotton the centres pressure exerted on the localelites . . . has resulted in shirkats being frequently visited by representatives fromthe prosecutors office and the state militia who have been charged with enforcingcotton and wheat land quotas and preventing farms from growing crops that aremore lucrativefor them as well as for regional elites.48 On the contrary, seenfrom the district perspective, such checks and controls often follow local ratio-nales that can be totally different from those from which they nominally originate.They can start off from personal rivalry or be used and manipulated for purposessuch as intimidation, blackmailing, or (as in this case) the attempt of the hokim toaffirm his paternity over the whole district, in the knowledge that if he does

not, sooner or later, his authority will be challenged by the individualism ofthe emerging fermers.

Changing patronage patterns

The new prospects of achieving wealth through agriculture have attracted thosewho in Yangibozor are called the yangi fermerlar (new fermers). These new-comers to agriculture are people who, rich with capital acquired in other sectors(militia, business, state organisations), and struggling to find sectors where toinvest their money securely and lucratively, enter agriculture with the idea of

obtaining considerable material gains through informal deals on profitable landcropping schemes. In the words of a land surveyor of an MTP with whom Iworked, these new actors see the growing crops as if they were banknotes, butare otherwise not knowledgeable about agriculture.49 These actors mobilisetheir social and political capital to ensure profitable farming conditions, withoutdirectly getting involved in farming. Typically, the structure of the farms ofthese newcomers are reminiscent of a form of absentee landlordism, in thesense that the farm owners exercise external control on the farm, while theyoutsource the management of the farm to local workers on the basis of a share-cropping agreement.

The emergence of these yangi fermerlar can be traced back to a more generalphenomenon. Reverting a trend that was strong during the Soviet period, thetown is gaining advantage over the village.50 Before independence the villagehad become a reservoir of autonomy (political, cultural, economic), as the kol-khozes could be run as relatively autonomous fiefdoms in which external interfer-ence was low and mediated by the central hierarchy embodied by the rais. Afterindependence the town regained control over the village by refining the mechan-isms of squeezing the surplus produced in and around agriculture. This resourceextraction is now easier and more efficient than before. As a result, cash shortageafflicts rural households at a time when cash cannot be so easily replaced bymanipulable resources51 as in the past. The kolkhoz society52 has lost its econ-

omic basis; its decline is evidenced by the decline of status of the rais, as its

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symbol of authority. Big fermers, newcomers to agriculture, and village outsiderswho obtain the land by paying bribes and then grow rice, mostly have a base intown: they are businessmen, doctors, militia-men, employees of administrativedepartments or of the hokimiyat. Even in agriculture, many among the newbosses are construction engineers, architects, or buchgalter (accountants) withan experience in administration, who have supplanted a generation of rais edu-cated as agronomists and who now find themselves as managers of MTPswithout an adequate educational background. Conversely, the villages depen-dence on the town has increased: sanitation, higher education, the bazaar andall the administrations are in the town, and the villagers, unable to find the necess-ary cash, . . . sell their cows to satisfy the citys appetite.53

In Yangibozor, against all appearances of weak reform decollectivisation hasbrought about significant transformations both in the substance and in the modal-

ities of the ongoing struggle between central assertions of power vs local formsof resistance (see Table 1). Among the actors able to influence resource flowslocally, in the shift from a mostly subsidised to a mostly taxed agriculture54 aredirection of the local political game has taken place: the rationale of politicalaction moves away from the control over the budget resources accessed by theactors by virtue of their affiliation to the quasi-state collectives and allocated bythem to their constituencies, towards the possibility to produce for and to gainaccess to markets. Under the kolkhoz system, the source of competition wasover control of the budget and its repartition that outside control aimed atkeeping on predetermined tracks. Today, local entrepreneurs seek the opportunity

to make profits and face constraints from local authorities that try to keep theemerging market dynamics under their oversight. The shift is from a politicalgame governed by a redistributive logic to a more market oriented logic ofaction. This shift to the market, although still imperfect, has wide ranging conse-quences. It modifies the economic basis of the patronage relations that now losemuch of their past appeal, and therefore need to be re-established on a new con-sensus building mechanism. As a result, the monolithic patronage systemcentred upon the kolkhoz and its network is replaced by a more diffuse practiceof indirect control over the means of production, which finds an importantexpression in the practice of farm sponsoring. While in the national battle

Table 1. The local political game: changing forms and contents

During collective agriculture After decollectivization

Main contested resource budget allocation freely marketable crops (rice)Competing actors kolkhoz staff vs external

controllersfermers (old producers and

newcomers) vs local authoritiesForms of resistance underreporting of production diversified struggle for political

conditions over farmingModalities of resistance monolithic patronage pattern hidden practice of farm sponsoring

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for cotton . . . rebellion takes place in the form of underreporting of resource use(such as land) and hiding a share of locally acquired wealth from the centres strictfiscal accounting,55 in todays Yangibozor rebellion patterns are extended to adiversified struggle around the political conditions over farming.

Local political entrepreneurs

In the aftermath of decollectivisation, the MTP Guliston counted 134 fermerenter-prises.56 Here, with its 10 hectares of land, Bozorboys farm is representative of aclass of small fermers for whom their new status seems to entail more liabilitiesthan opportunities. Since 2000, the year of the establishment of his farm,Bozorboy never managed to fulfil his production target for cotton. In the spring,in which I first met Bozorboy, he complained that, given the high soil salinity,

the production plan for his land had been set by the district authorities in atotally unrealistic way. Even in the unlikely event of plan fulfilment his profitswould be low: according to him if they let him grow one hectare of vegetableshe could earn almost three times as much as for his 10 hectares of cotton: atharvest a net amount of US$1000 in 2003. On the question of how he seeshimself in 10 years time as a fermer, Bozorboy answered: not in 10 years, in2 years I will be bankrupt and lose the land. They dont care about bringingpeople to bankruptcy. It is like a feudal system!57 This is an attitude he woulddiametrically change later on.

The son of local notables (his grandfather was rais of a forest compound, the

father, a militia officer and Second World War veteran), after having studiedlaw in Tashkent, Bozorboy returned to his native kolkhoz to marry a half Tatarwoman. He served in the militia until early 1990s whenfor reasons thatremained unclear to mehe was discharged after a trial. After that Bozorboyended up working as legal advisor of the district branch of the Fermer and

Dehqon Association (FDA). Additionally, for an unofficial payment of land heacquired a land lease under the name of his wife in 2000 and established acotton and grain farm which he named after his father. He agreed with aformer leader in a work brigade on the kolkhoz living closely to the plots of hisfarm on a sharecropping deal. Bozorboys eldest son, aged 22, works there as

farm supervisor. Asked why he started getting involved in agriculture he answeredthat it has been the lack of alternatives that made him take the risk of privatefarming.

In 2003 Bozorboy was undoubtedly a very low profile yangi fermer. Eitherbecause his land was really unsuitable for cotton, or because the sharecroppersfamily did not put enough work in his fields, the farm was giving poor results.In the FDA, his situation was also precarious: as a result of cash shortage in thedistrict the yearly salary consisted of two sacks of wheat, while most fermers inthe district were not paying the membership fee. The high turnover of theappointed managers, former raislar and high district officials, originated in thelack of adequate returns for their engagement and reflected the FDAs weakness.

Since my arrival in Yangibozor the FDA office moved three times, before 2006

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the district branches were combined into one single regional level office. ForBozorboy, the FDAs only attractiveness was that of being a platform thatenabled him to deal with documents of the state administration and to have anofficial pretext to relate to the agricultural hierarchy. The authorities knewabout the illegal sharecropping agreement through which Bozorboys farmingwas conducted. However, there is a degree of tolerance for the farms that fulfilthe cotton plan. For this reason, because of harvest shortages, in 2001 and 2002he had to find ways to adjust the production plan of his farm with the districtdepartment officials and buy cotton undercover to deliver it back to the cottongin, in order to avoid sanctions. To cover his expenditures Bozorboy, who had15 cows before starting his farm, sold three cows each year in the city bazaar.In Yangibozor this represents a remarkable capital.

Things started to improve in 2004, thanks to his links with the district depart-

ment of agriculture. Short of personnel trained in jurisprudence and with an aug-mented need for legal expertise derived from the sudden increase in the number ofthe fermer enterprises Bozorboys skills were increasingly demanded. Bozorboyhelps out in the preparation of trials in which fermers are involved, prepares dos-siers on farms that have legal disputes with administrative bodies and habituallyfollows district staff in their rounds in the former kolkhozes of the district. Withhis job Bozorboy is continuously involved in the juridical counselling of

fermers in everyday life, however, in contrast with the ideal mission of theFDA, his primary concern slowly turned into the safeguard of the hokims inter-ests: hokim buyurgan shu ishni man bajaraman.58 During farm inspections, a

photo camera, lists of farms with details on their balance sheets and their businessplans, correspondence with the court and prosecutors office figure among thehabitual work instruments, which testify the acquaintance with a methodologyof local governance based on a distorted understanding of law and public insti-tutions. Spying for the hokim on the real condition of the farms in the district,he has gained his favour, a precondition for later rewards and success. In latespring 2004, after a meeting with the deputy hokim, Bozorboy managed to turnthe cropping specialisation of his farm from cotton and grain into poultry,paving the way to the suspension of the mandatory state order quota on cotton.Thanks to this subterfuge, which the law allows when the unsuitability of a

given land plot for the cotton cultivation has been certified by the administration,Bozorboy has acquired the possibility of legally turning his cropping scheme into10 hectares of rice. In 2004 he became one among the handful of farms in the dis-trict that were legally exempted from the rice ban. In the end Bozorboy informallyturned over an agreed part of his rice harvest to his district bosses, keeping a goodprofit for himself.

Bozorboy has managed to change his situation and to turn the bad initial con-ditions of his farm into an asset, thus, realising what in theory is legally possible,but inaccessible to most: reverting cotton land into free cash cropping land. Whatwere the conditions for his success? Various factors seem important: the plas-ticity of the law, namely the arbitrariness of legal processes, that a small caste

of insiders can easily manipulate for the own purposes; the wealth of contextual

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knowledge over many fermers and state officials, which transformed Bozorboyinto a useful asset for the powerholders in the district; the knowledge of therules and tricks of a non-transparent and overregulated agriculture, that held theprospect of the privilege of state crop exemption as something legally achievable.Bozorboys story is indicative of the current transformation in Uzbekistans agri-cultural world. In a context in which the market is not yet totally liberalised and theplanned economy not totally overcome, Bozorboy represents the transitory modelof agency best adapted to the scenario emerging from Yangibozor: a new marketof political protection around the conditions of farming, in which, besidescapital, agricultural knowledge, or access to markets, successful entrepreneurialskills have to take power into account. Equally distant from the centre and theperiphery, he resembles neither the big man of the early political anthropolo-gists,59 for which, after the decline of the rais, there seems to be no real replace-

ment below the level of the hokim, nor does he resemble the colonial broker, withits dual allegiances and its double burdens towards the state and his community.60

Unlike the latter, Bozorboys is not a loyalty dilemma, but rather a strategicswitching of conformity to and subversion of the rules of officialdom, an attitudewhich he sees legitimated by the perceived insecurity of his personal future. LikeWebers political entrepreneur Bozorboy has everything to gain (or to lose) frompolitics.61 As an individually driven manager/manipulator of the political con-ditions around farming it is maybe to this role that he comes closest.

Conclusion

Has the post-Soviet transition reinvigorated an informal system of governancebased on clan-like patronage networks, as posited by Collins?62 Do the patronagenetworks at work indicate the perpetuation of Soviet (or even pre-Soviet) patterns,as tacitly assumed by many? Post-reform Yangibozor, where the past informalstructure of the steering- and control-system has opened up in parallel with thereforming of the production system, is a good vantage point to follow up thesequestions. Empirical findings seem to minimise the usefulness of clans63 andof solidarity groups64 as appropriate analytical categories for the understandingof informal political processes. Attention to more territorially linked dynamics

better captures a too often misinterpreted and misrepresented local dynamism.Radniz acknowledgement of the power of the local65 or Fumagallis attentionto local authority figures66 in this sense seem to better address such processesand comes closer to what I found in Yangibozor. Yet the novelty emanatingfrom Yangibozor is that the kolkhozdespite attempts to reanimate it by somescholars and some governmentshas really come to an end, in Uzbekistan aswell as in Central Asia.

Sociological and anthropological analyses of socialism and of post-socialismoften highlight that the kolkhoz has always been more than just a large-scale col-lective agricultural enterprise.67 It pervaded the life of its rural inhabitants as atotal social institution that encompassed the whole range of their political,

cultural, and economic relations. As an emanation of an ideology and of a

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state-building project, the kolkhoz acquired the characteristics of a system ofgovernance, able to impart a uniform trajectory upon the most disparate localrealities of the socialist sphere. In practical terms the system of governancerepresented by the kolkhoz was the reality of socialist rule: it socialised therural citizen through the propagation of an implicit model of power relationsnominally egalitarian but de facto stratified hierarchically. For many theorists of(post-) socialism the specificity of this system of governance lies in its operatingprinciple. Different from capitalist relations, the kolkhoz was governed by a redis-tributive dynamic, the motor of which is what Verdery has called the bureaucraticallocation, referring to the capacity of individuals to exert control over the distri-bution of resources by virtue of their affiliation to the apparatus of state bureauc-racy.68 The socialist model of redistribution is not that described by Polanyi,69 butthe resemblances are fairly strong: In the redistributive system commonly

described by anthropologists, chiefs redistribute goods to their followers, just associalist bureaucrats allocate social rewards.70 Verdery further observes thatLike chiefs in such redistributive systems, bureaucrats are constantly underpressure not to be outdone by other bureaucrats: they must continue to strive forinfluence, amass more resources, and raise the standing of their segment ofbureaucracy,71 as if the engendering of a specific dynamic of competitionamong chiefs/bureaucrats was an intrinsic characteristic of the system sheoutlined.

In this respect as well, the kolkhoz seemed to display a remarkable degree ofuniformity across the socialist world. The Central Asian kolkhoz was no exception

to this, and was not the only kolkhoz that developed such dynamics. With the endof collective agriculture and the switch to progressively more market orientedeconomy, this is also having repercussions on the vacuum that the kolkhoz leftbehind in the local organisation of politics. My research results from Khorezmindicate that we can speak of a switch from a straightforward system of patronageduring the kolkhoz, to a more open but not less restraining market of politicalprotection, in which those who were controllers of agricultural resources before,now get more closely involved in the process of production.

Notes and references

1. On this see, for instance, H. Fathi, Islamisme et pauvrete dans le monde rural de lAsie centrale post-sovietique. Vers un espace de solidarite islamique?, UNRISD paper, No 14, 2004; A. Ilkhamov, Impover-ishment of the masses in the transition period: signs of an emerging new poor identity in Uzbekistan,Central Asian Survey, Vol 20, No 1, 2001, pp 3354; B. Petric, Pouvoir, don et reseaux en Ouzbekistan

post-sovietique (Paris: PUF, 2002), p 235ff.2. C. D. Thompson and J. Heathershaw, Introduction: Discourses of danger in Central Asia, Central Asian

Survey, Vol 24, No 1, 2005, pp 14.3. K. Collins, The logic of clan politics. Evidence from the Central Asian trajectories, World Politics, Vol 56,

2004, p 230.4. On this, see International Crisis Group, The failure of reform in Uzbekistan. Ways forward for the inter-

national community, Asia Report No 76, 11 March 2004. More focussed on the reforms of the agriculturalsector: Z. Lerman, C. Csaki and G. Feder, eds, Agriculture in Transition. Land Policies and Evolving FarmStructures in Post-Soviet Countries (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004); S. Wegren, ed., Land Reform inthe Former Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe (London: Routledge, 1998).

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5. A. Ilkhamov, The limits of centralization: regional challenges in Uzbekistan, in P. Jones-Luong, ed., TheTransformation of Central Asia. States ad Societies from Soviet Rule to Independence (Ithaca, NY: CornellUniversity Press, 2004), p 162.

6. Such as understood in J. S. Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States: StateSociety Relations and StateCapabilities in the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).

7. Ilkhamov, op cit, Ref 5, pp 162 170.8. Cf. B. Rumer, Soviet Central Asia: A Tragic Experiment (Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1989); G. Gleason,

The Pakhta Programme: the politics of sowing cotton in Uzbekistan, Central Asian Survey, Vol 2, No 2,1983, pp 109120.

9. D. Kandiyoti, The cry for land: agrarian reform, gender, and land rights in Uzbekistan, Journal of AgrarianChange, Vol 3, 2003, p 227.

10. A. Patnaik, Central Asia: Between Modernity and Tradition (Delhi: Konark Publishers, 1996), pp 155173;J. P. Willerton, Patronage Politics in the USSR (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

11. A. Ilkhamov, Divided economy: kolkhozes vs. peasant subsistence farms in Uzbekistan, Central AsiaMonitor, Vol 4, 2000, pp 514.

12. Ibid. Also, see A. Ilkhamov, Shirkats, dekhqon farmers and others: farm restructuring in Uzbekistan,Central Asian Survey, Vol 17, No 4, 1998, pp 539560.

13. Cf. P. Jones-Luong, Institutional Change and Political Continuity in Post-Soviet Central Asia (Cambridge,UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp 131132.14. T. Gdlian and N. Ivanov, Kremlevskoe delo (Rostov na Donu: AO Kniga, 1994).15. Z. Lerman, Land reform in Uzbekistan, in S. Wegren, ed., Land Reform in the Former Soviet Union and in

Eastern Europe (London: Routledge, 1998), p 144.16. Ilkhamov, op cit, Ref 5, p 168.17. See: S. Akiner, Social and political reorganization in Central Asiatransition from pre-colonial to post-

colonial society, in T. Atabaki and J. OKane, eds, Post-Soviet Central Asia (London: Tauris, 1998).18. W. Fierman, Political development in Uzbekistan: democratization?, in K. Dawisha and B. Parrot, eds,

Conflict, Cleavage and Change in Central Asia and the Caucasus (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1997), p 393.

19. Gleason describes this dual allegiance of local officials in G. Gleason, Fealty and loyalty: informal auth-ority structures in Soviet Asia, Soviet Studies, Vol 43, No 4, 1991, p 614.

20. Research was carried out in 2003 (2 months) and in 2004 (9 months) within the framework of the ZEF/

UNESCO Khorezm project on Economic and Ecological Restructuring of Land and Water Use in theRegion Khorezm (Uzbekistan). My acknowledgements for funding go to the German Ministry for Educationand Research (BMBF; project number 0339970A). The Italian Ministry for Education and Research (PRINresearch project La penetrazione russa in Asia centrale e nel Caucaso, Universita degli Studi di Venezia/Universita degli Studi di Torino) funded a short research trip in SeptemberOctober 2006. The viewsexpressed in this paper are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my funding institutions.

21. Oblstat Xorazm, 1 January 2004.22. Interview at the Yangibozor District Land Measurement Office, March 2004. According to this source at that

point in time 1339.5 hectares of agricultural land remained to be transferred to the fermers.23. Source: Yangibozor District Land Measurement Office, October 2006.24. Research is based on interviews with local officers, fermers and peasants, and with other residents of the dis-

trict. Interviews were integrated with participant observation, field experiments and the collaboration withdistrict staff, which enabled me to access local statistical sources. Data on the district history (19602002) was collected in the district archive (see T. Trevisani Kolkhozes, sovkhozes, and shirkats of Yangi-

bozor (19602002): note on an archival investigation into four decades of agricultural development of a dis-trict in Khorezm, in H. Fathi, ed., Les islamistes dAsie centrale: un defi aux Etats independants?, CahiersdAsie Centrale, No 1516, 2007, pp 354365.

25. Kandiyoti, op cit, Ref 9, p 251.26. See on this: C. Wall, Peasant resistance in Khorezm? The difficulty of classifying non-compliance in rural

Uzbekistan, in P. Sartori and T. Trevisani, eds, Patterns of Transformation In and Around Uzbekistan(Reggio Emilia: Diabasis, forthcoming 2007).

27. Names of places and of persons have been substituted by pseudonyms to protect the anonymity ofrespondents.

28. Interview in Yangibozor with Muhammad, aged 45, former shirkat rais, 10 June 2004.29. T. Trevisani, Rural communities in transformation. Dehqons, fermers and the state in Khorezm, in Sartori

and Trevisani, op cit, Ref 26.30. G. Elwert, Nationalismus und EthnizitatUber die Bildung von Wir-Gruppen, Kolner Zeitschrift fur Sozio-

logie und Sozialpsychologie, No 3, 1989, pp 440464.

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31. See on this, Ilkhamov, op cit, Ref 12.32. Law on Dehqons and Fermers, 1998.33. B. Christophe, Understanding politics in Georgia in O. Norgaard and L. Johannsen, eds, DEMSTAR

Research Report, No 22, 2004, available online at http://demstar.dk/papers/Georgia Understand.pdf(accessed 8th June 2007).

34. Fuzzy property, in the examples given here, consists of complexly overlapping use and revenue rightslodged in external conditions that give the holders of those rights incomplete powers for exercising them.The external conditions include such legacies of socialism as a systemic bias against individual ownershipand in favour of state or quasi-collective forms. For something more closely approaching exclusive individ-ual proprietorship to emerge would require not so much clearer legal specification of who has what rightsthese rights are fairly clearbut modifications in the surrounding economy that would permit individuals toacquire the means of cultivation affordably and to dispose of their product profitably while outcompetingquasi-collective associational forms, quoted from: K. Verdery, Fuzzy property: rights, power, and identityin Transylvanias decollectivization, in M. Burawoy and K. Verdery, eds, Uncertain Transition: Ethnogra-

phies of Change in the Postsocialist World (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), pp 6465.35. J. Rasanayagam, The moral contstruction of the state in Uzbekistan: its construction within concepts of com-

munity and interaction at the local level, Unpublished PhD dissertation, Cambridge University, 2002, p 18.

36. An example for such law inconsistencies can be found in: Law on Dehqons and Fermers (Ref 32), 30 April1998, the paragraphs 5 and 32, give contradicting reasons for farm closure. Information drawn from an inter-view with an official of the Fermer and Dehqon Association in Yangibozor, field notes, 11 August 2004.

37. At the time of my fieldwork, according to law only 30 per cent of the land of the farm leaseholds had to begrown with cotton, in theory the residual land could be cultivated freely.

38. Rasanayagam, op cit, Ref 35, p 19.39. Interview note, 4 September 2004.40. M. Thurman, The command-administrative system in cotton farming in Uzbekistan. 1920s to Present,

Papers on Inner Asia No. 32, Bloomington, IN, 1999.41. Interview with Komilbek in Urgench, 8 June 2004.42. E. Schatz, Modern Clan Politics, The Power of Blood in Kazakhstan and Beyond(Seattle, WA: University

of Washington Press, 2004); Collins, op cit, Ref 3.43. T. Trevisani The emerging actor of the decollectivization in Uzbekistan: private farming between newly

defined political constraints and opportunities, Paper presented at the international conference The

Cotton Sector in Central Asia, Centre of Contemporary Central Asia and the Caucasus, SOAS, Universityof London, 34 November 2005.

44. Interview in Yangibozor, 7.09.200445. Interview with Egambergan (same respondent as for Ref 39) in Yangibozor, 19 August 2004.46. This word derives from ota, meaning father, but also ancestor or progenitor. Historically, the term

otalik was used to define a guardian and tutor of a young prince and, in this capacity an actual governorof his appanage (Y. Bregel, atalik, in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, New Edition, P. J. Bearman, Th.Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs, eds, Vol XII, Supplement (KoninklijkeBrill, Leiden: 2004), pp 9698). Later on the term was gradually transformed and it came to intend theUzbek term for tribal leader, of the sort of beg or bey, or like the denominations for the military ranks,like mingboshi or yuzboshi (see: P. G. Geiss, Pre-Tsarist and Tsarist Central Asia. Communal Commitmentand Political Order in Change (London: Routledge Curzon, 2003)). While in everyday language the term haslost this meaning, today the term is used to express the paternity over something (otalik in Ozbek tiliningizoxli lughati, Vol I, Uzbek Academy of Sciences, Moscow, 1981, p 548).

47. Interview with Komilbek, Urgench, 8 June 2004.48. Ilkhamov, op cit, Ref 5, p 168.49. Interview note, 17 September 2004.50. C. Hann, Introduction, in The Postsocialist Agrarian Question: Property Relations and the Rural Condition,

C. Hann and the Property Relations Group, eds, Halle Studies in the Anthropology of Eurasia (LIT, Munster:2003), p 39.

51. C. Humphrey, Marx Went Away but Karl Stayed Behind (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,1998), p 195f.

52. O. Roy, Kolkhoz and civil society in the independent states of Central Asia, in M. Holt Ruffin and DanielWaugh, eds, Civil Society in Central Asia (Seattle, WA: Washington University Press, 1999), pp 109 121.

53. Field notes of 16 August 2004, after an interview with a land surveyor of a MTP in Yangibozor.54. Whether cotton is subsidised or not, however, still is a scholarly debated issue, cf. M. Guadagni, M. Raiser,

A. Crole-Rees and D. Khidirov Cotton taxation in Uzbekistan. Opportunities for reform, ECSSD WorkingPaper, No 41, vs M. Mueller, A general equilibrium approach to modeling water and land use reforms in

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Uzbekistan, PhD dissertation, University of Bonn, available online at http://hss.ulb.uni-bonn.de/diss_online/landw_fak/2006/mueller_marc/index.htm (accessed 2nd June 2007).

55. Ilkhamov, op cit, Ref 5, p 169.56. Of these 134 farms, 42 were orchards with each less than 5 hectares of land, 51 had 5 to 20 hectares, 29 farms

ranged between 20 and 40 hectares, 11 farms between 40 and 80 hectares, while the biggest farm, controlledby a former rais, amounted to 115.7 ha. Source: Yangibozor harvest balance sheet, year 2003. The otherformer shirkats of the district have similar patterns of land distribution.

57. Interview note, 19 April 2003.58. What the hokim commands, this is my job. Interview notes, 17 July 2004.59. See: M. Sahlins, Poor man, rich man, big man, chief: political types in Melanesia and Polinesia, Compara-

tive Studies in Society and History, Vol 5, 1963, pp 285303; see also: M. Godelier and M. Strathern, eds,Big Men and Great Men: Personifications of Power in Melanesia (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1991).

60. Such an attempt to explore the role of the local official in a reform socialist setting of Central Asia has beenundertaken by: I. Beller and C. Hann, Peasants and officials in southern Xinjang: subsistence, supervisionand subversion, Zeitschrift fur Ethnologie, Vol 124, 1999, pp 132.

61. Cf. M. Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft(Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1972 [192122]), pp.

840860. Elwert has recently revisited the concept of political entrepreneurs, although his description ofthe political entrepreneurs as catalysers of collective switching diverges from the reading of my casestudy. See G. Elwert, Boundaries, cohesion and switching. On we-groups in ethnic, national and religiousform, in B. Brumen and Z. Smitek, eds, Mediterranean Ethnological Summer School (Lublijana, 1995) p112.

62. Collins, op cit, Ref 3, p 224.63. Schatz, op cit, Ref 42; Collins, op cit, Ref 3.64. O. Roy, Groupes de solidarite en Asie centrale et en Afghanistan, Les Annales de lAutre Islam, No 4,

INALCO-ERSIM, Paris, 1997.65. S. Radniz, Networks, localism and mobilization in Aksy, Kyrgyzstan, Central Asian Survey, Vol 24, No 4,

2005, pp 405-424.66. M. Fumagalli, Informal (ethno-)politics and local authority figures in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, Ethnopolitics,

Vol 6, No 2, 2007, pp 211233.67. Rasanayagam, op cit, Ref 35; Petric, op cit; C. Humphrey, Karl Marx Collective (Cambridge, UK:

Cambridge University Press, 1982).68. K. Verdery, Theorizing socialism: a prologue to the transition, originally published in: American Ethnol-

ogist, Vol 18, No 1, 1991, reprinted and quoted from J. Vincent, ed., The Anthropology of Politics. A readerin Ethnography, Theory and Critique (London: Blackwell, 2002).

69. K. Polanyi, C. Arensberg and H. Pearson, eds, Trade and Markets in Early Empires (Glencoe, IL: Free Press,1958).

70. Verdery, op cit, Ref 67, p 372.71. Ibid.

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russian elites in competition

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