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Frishta Qaderi
Map of the Amu River
Source: United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, Second Assessment of Transboundary Rivers, Lakes, and Groundwaters, 2011, http://www.cawater-info.net/amudarya-knowledge-base/index_e.htm.Imaginary Rivers: An Environmental History of the Amu River, 1920-1970
As the boundary between the USSR and Afghanistan, the Amu River straddled two competing modernization visions championed by the political entities it demarcated: communism and capitalism. These trajectories of modernity and progress, however, were not only articulated through slogans, posters, and speeches, but also expressed through environmental narratives espoused by distant metropoles. Drawing from archival research at the British Library and the Library of Congress, this thesis explores how promises of modernity were articulated through Kabul and Moscow’s respective rhetorical productions of the Amu River over 1920-1970. Both Kabul and Moscow attached imaginary histories and geographies to the Amu River, refashioning the river to serve individual goals. In my honors thesis, I argue that environmental imaginaries were imbued with ideas on how the Amu should be valued, distributed, and re-arranged, ideas that shaped perceptions of nature and influenced development interventions and public policy. In the 1950s, western and Soviet visions met and mixed in northeastern Afghanistan on a cotton farm along the banks of the Amu River. There, I ultimately argue, the contours of Soviet and western visions of modernity blurred, their similarities in nature management overshadowing ideological differences.
These photos present the view of the Amu River from both Afghanistan and the Soviet Union in the 20th century. By juxtaposing Afghan (British) and Soviet representations of the river from the same period, I depict how one river existed in multiple imaginations. I challenge the viewer to unravel representations of nature and to consider how social, economic, and political aspirations are imbued within them.
The Amu. Hayratan, Afghanistan, June 2018. Digital photo taken by iPhone.
The Amu River is a 2,500 kilometer river that meanders across southern Central Asia. In a rapidly shifting environment, its presence is a source of stability. The Amu River reflects the region’s experiences over many centuries of history, for better and worse: the architectural achievements of the Timurid Empire, Mongol destruction, the development of the world’s first monotheistic religion. The more recent century was the most painful: an aggressive Soviet cotton production campaign, the bloody Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and catastrophic environmental destruction stemming from resource mismanagement.
After the Amu was cemented as the political boundary between Afghanistan and the Russian Empire in the 19th century, and later the USSR in the 20th century, a formerly unified cultural space was divided by the borders of modern nation-states. Nevertheless, whether the inhabitants of the Amu River basin think about it or not, they share the river with one another as not only a water source, but also the fuel for the electricity that heats their homes over winter, the driver behind their agricultural-based economies, and the muse for local literature and art. It is their river and whatever awaits the region in the future, will be seen through the Amu.
The View from Imperial Britain. UK, c. 1900s. Web image from Library of Congress Prints and Drawings Online Catalog. https://blogs.loc.gov/maps/2019/07/the-great-game-and-the-boundaries-of-afghanistan/.
This is a Great Game-era map of Afghanistan produced by a British publishing house in the early 1900s. It depicts two British soldiers perched in the map’s lower right-hand corner observing Afghanistan from British India. Within their lines of sight is Russian territory, denoted by a red dotted line running across the Amu River. This image demonstrates how the river was the source of international geo-political anxieties over Russian aggression for the British in the late 19th to early 20th century and the Americans during the Cold War.
Water, Submission, and Soviet Aspirations. Tajikistan, May 1961. Printed image from Tajikistan magazine.
“Communism: Soviet governance plus electrification is the basis of the entire country.”-Lenin
This is a photograph of a hydroelectric station from Tajikistan, a Soviet magazine that was published by the Tajik Ministry of Education. In pursuit of textile independence, Moscow aggressively promoted cotton across southern Central Asia and tasked the Amu with watering this goal.
Through cultural production such as Tajikistan magazine, the Soviets claimed that the Amu’s wild and unruly nature was the cause for historical backwardness. Against this history, they argued that to be modern was to subdue the Amu by building more hydroelectric stations, more irrigation canals, and more cotton farms.
Map of the Oxus. UK, 1926. Printed report from Political Department, India Office.
This map is an early 20th century British drawing of Urta Tagai, an island that was disputed between imperial Russia (later the Soviet Union) and Afghanistan over the 1880s and 1940s. The Amu, in all its geological and social complexity, was reduced to a few lines.
The British held a long-term fascination with Afghanistan’s northern river-border that spans as far back as the 1820s. They knew the river not as the Amu, but as the Oxus (the Greek name for the Amu), a river of legends, adventure, and imagination. Infatuation with the Oxus radically shaped British efforts to survey the river in the 19th and 20th centuries. After Afghanistan gained independence from Britain in 1919, the British inserted themselves into northern Afghanistan’s boundary making process in an effort to maintain power. Due to Britain’s emotional attachment to the Oxus, the Amu was inscribed as an environment that was not empirically knowable. As demonstrated by the simplicity of the map, the officers could hardly perceived the “Oxus” as a real place in real time.
Cotton, Modernization, and the Ideal Soviet (Central Asian) Citizen. Tajikistan, September 1961. Printed image from Khorposhtak magazine.
"Instead of coming to work, where are you headed on that donkey?""To the store. They say because of communism everything is free."
This is the cover of a 1961 Soviet Tajik satirical magazine by the name of Khorposhtak (Hedgehog). The cover juxtaposes the profile of a committed and driven Soviet worker with a less than ideal citizen. The picture shows men and women, identifiably Central Asian by their traditional clothes, picking cotton. The cotton fields serve as the foundation for industrialization, as demonstrated by the factories in the backdrop and the spaceship in the sky. Trotting past them on an overburdened donkey is a comically stout man heading for the market for free goods rather than joining the cotton harvest. Since Khorposhtak is a locally-produced Tajik-language satirical magazine, it demonstrates how Soviet Central Asians were part of the Soviet modernization project.
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