Paper short abstract:

This paper assesses Wittfogel's claims in light of the desiccation of the Aral Sea, which dried up as a result of Soviet irrigation policies in Central Asia.

Paper long abstract:

Wittfogel's work elides two seemingly unconnected theses, one about the hydrosocial nature of 'despotism', the other about the totalitarian exercise of power in the 'total managerial economy' of the USSR. But these two theses are in fact connected in a way Wittfogel did not recognise, for in many ways the USSR itself can be construed as a hydraulic state, especially in the Central Asian periphery, where expansion of irrigation for cotton both depended on and further cemented the power of the apparatus which controlled it. The environmental consequences of this famously include the desiccation of the Aral Sea - which was subject to a economistic rationality prioritising cotton over a sea. I draw on archival research, and ethnographic research in the former port of Aral'sk, Kazakhstan, to assess Wittfogel's theses. Archival data contradict the image of hierarchical bureaucratic control, showing instead a picture of a bureaucracy divided against itself, and weak central control over local water usage - which challenges both Wittfogel's theses. But some contemporary local narratives in Aral'sk about the desiccation of the Aral seem to concur with Wittfogel's claims: some cast it as the outcome of the arbitrary exercise of power by the apparatus, while others suggest that there was not enough exercise of power, claiming that had the state's hydrological capacity been stronger, the sea would have been saved. In such narratives irrigation acts as a 'state effect', playing a role in imagining a particular sort of strong, centralised state.