THE KHRUSHCHEV AND BREZHNEV ERAS 151
and there were still few skilled workers. Work stoppages were common and pro-
duction remained uneven.
76
No sector of the economy was more directly affected by Khrushchev’s fall and
the rise of Brezhnev than agriculture. A decree issued by the Communist Party at its
1965 Plenum meeting put a firm stop to Khrushchev’s experiments in the agrarian
sector. Collective farms moved from payment in kind to cash payments, the prices
the state paid for agricultural produce were raised, and the agricultural sector was
offered better material and technical support.
By 1972 cotton growers in the Izbaskan region of Andijan province became the first
in the valley to fulfill their quota for raw cotton. Mechanized picking, which was now
used for more than half of the crop, helped achieve this increase.
77
Soon mechanical
cotton harvesters would account for 90 percent of the crop in some areas.
78
Another change was the growing attention paid to the personal farmsteads of
collective farmers. This was especially notable in Leninabad province, where 50
percent of Tajikistan’s gardens and vineyards were situated.
79
In the winter months,
the Frunze Collective Farm near Leninabad allocated more than 180 tons of alfalfa,
hay, and sorghum to families raising cattle on their private plots. The Leninabad
Milk and Dairy Combine opened a receiving office for the purchase of milk from
private farmsteads, and the province’s rural consumer society sold formula feed to
private dairy farmers.
80
Such measures marked an important step away from Stalin’s
tragic collectivization of agriculture and in the direction of privatized farming.
Irrigation developed robustly in the Ferghana Valley under Brezhnev. A trial run
of water through the Kyzyl-Tyubin canal, the largest waterway in the new lands of
central Ferghana, took place in January 1961. In May of that year construction also
commenced on the Kerkidon reservoir and the Frunze pump shelter station, which
made possible the cultivation of an additional 5,000 hectares of virgin Ferghana lands.
In 1970 water was first released into the Great Andijan Canal, while other canals and
irrigation works were commissioned in the following years. It now appeared that the
ever-expanding cotton crop’s thirst for water might actually be quenched.
After independence, the supplying of water to this ever-expanding irrigation
system would become the focus of major international tensions, and the irriga-
tion system itself would be condemned for its profligate wastefulness and gross
inefficiency. For now, though, the Ferghana Valley presented itself as the living
embodiment of the future of agriculture everywhere. In August and September
1979, Uzbekistan became the venue for an international conference on “Measures
to Increase Irrigation Efficiency at the Farm Level.” Over the course of two weeks,
awestruck representatives from eleven countries studied how the virgin lands of
the Ferghana Valley had been transformed into a sea of green.
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