Tajikistan: From de facto Colony to Sovereign Dependency

Empire and After: Toward a Framework for Comparing Empires and Their Consequences in the Post‐Imperial Middle East and Central Asia

“…The economy was still centrally run, the plan and budgets controlled from Moscow, with key industries controlled by all‐union ministries that gave little care to the local environment. For example, the cotton mono‐crop exported to Russian factories and sold back to the periphery resembled Egypt under Britain (Atkins ), even if local leader Sharaf Rashidov managed to successfully cream off more profits than his Egyptian counterpart. Yet there was less straightforward exploitation of the region and by some calculations, the centre may have subsidized the CA periphery, the reverse of the normal Western imperial practice in MENA; Bunce (), for example, argues that the social contract instituted, notably under Brezhnev, between Moscow and the populace and regions, turned the USSR, inadvertently, into a “redistributive” empire in which the centre ceased to extract from the periphery.…”