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100			_aWheeler, William _939763
245			_aUSSR as a hydraulic society: Wittfogel, the Aral Sea and the (post-)Soviet state
260			_bSage, _c2019.
300			_aVol 37, Issue 7, 2019 (1217-1234 p.)
520			_aWittfogel’s Oriental Despotism is not only a scholarly exposition of the ‘hydraulic hypothesis’ but also a political polemic about Soviet ‘totalitarianism’. Wittfogel does not mention that these two themes are connected: the USSR itself may be construed as a hydraulic state, especially in the Central Asian periphery, where expansion of irrigation depended on and cemented the power of the apparatus. The environmental consequences famously include the regression of the Aral Sea. This article first explores irrigation in Soviet Central Asia: while there was a connection between the centralizing tendency of Soviet bureaucracy and water’s susceptibility to political control, environmental problems were exacerbated by relatively weak control from the centre and by material qualities of water which escaped control. I then draw on my ethnographic research in Aral’sk, Kazakhstan, to examine the role of hydraulic infrastructure in imagining the strong, centralized state. I take Wittfogel’s particular constellation of connections between water, infrastructure and power as a Cold War artefact, which I compare with accounts of Soviet hydraulic projects from inhabitants of the Aral region today. Finally, I examine post-Soviet projections of statehood through a recent dam which has restored part of the Aral and mixed local reactions to it. Hydraulic infrastructure may project centralized authority, but I show that readings of the relationship between the two depend on contextual factors.
650			_aAral Sea, _946490
650			_a Kazakhstan, _946491
650			_a infrastructure, _946492
650			_a post-Soviet, _930217
650			_aWittfogel _946473
773	0		_08872 _915873 _dLondon Pion Ltd. 2010 _tEnvironment and planning C: _x1472-3425
856			_uhttps://doi.org/10.1177/2399654418816700
942			_2ddc _cART