Part of the Socialist Studies Seminar series 

During the Socialist Education campaign and Cultural Revolution, Communist Party in Xinjiang broke the previous promise of “No Struggle, No Division, No Classification of Classes” made to the pastoral regions in the early 1950s. Mao’s anti-capitalism, anti-Soviet revisionism, and Learn from Dazhai movement in combination led to a rapid pace of landscape transformation through constructing infrastructures such as water conservation, permanent stalls, and artificial grassland forage bases. Based on oral history interviews with the individuals and Party historical materials, Guldana Salimjan examines how land and labor transformation led to a second dismantlement of the Kazakh political structures and an emergence of grassland degradation on the steppe.

The Socialist Studies Seminar is co-sponsored by the Carnegie Mellon University Department of History and the University of Pittsburgh Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies. For further information, contact Wendy Goldman (goldman@andrew.cmu.edu) or Alissa Klots (alissaklots@pitt.edu).