Maya K. Peterson's Pipe Dreams contributes to our developing knowledge of Central Asian environmental history by exploring tsarist and Soviet attempts to re-engineer the hydrology of the arid lands to the Russian south. Peterson contends that these plans were inextricably bound to the larger imperial project, in that Russians used dams and canals to justify external control to Central Asians, as well as to themselves. Although as the title adumbrates, Peterson views tsarist and Soviet plans as similarly doomed to failure because of their disregard for Central Asian natural conditions, she also discerns an important populist dimension to Soviet development that tsarist programs lacked. According to Peterson's interpretation, both tsarist and Soviet managers engaged in harmful and romantic fantasies when attempting to remake Central Asia, but Soviet efforts took social conditions into account and sought to generate popular enthusiasm for “people's construction projects.” Ultimately, though, nineteenth- and twentieth-century results were similarly disappointing.

Peterson's narrative of sustained failure begins in the 1840s, when the boundaries of the Russian Empire expanded to embrace what was then called Turkestan, but accelerates rapidly after the arrival of disgraced and exiled Grand Duke Nikolai Konstantinovich Romanov in 1881. Nikolai Konstantinovich, drawing upon scientific surveys conducted before his arrival as well as local legends of a verdant past, used his connections to promote hydrological reclamation projects. But as Peterson describes it, the grand duke's underlying rationale was always imperial, if not imperious: bringing water to the lands of Turkestan served as “the best way to show off the power of the Russian Empire,” and “provide a model of civilization for the indigenous population” (107, 120). When implemented, however, the desire to recoup the costs of irrigation, and the natives’ preference for traditional water usage practices, required the seizure of land for Slavic settlers, the planting of cash crops like cotton rather than food, and sometimes lethal clashes between immigrants and locals. As the imperial period came to a close, the irrigation schemes had produced much more social conflict than anyone, including the grand duke, had anticipated, although Russian cotton production increased dramatically.

The irrigation programs of the early Soviet period continued along the same lines as the late-tsarist—poorly planned, haphazardly built and maintained, and heavily weighted toward the production of cotton rather than food—but eventually the many failures of shock industrialization led the Soviets to change course and develop “new kinds of irrigation projects built with new kinds of labor” (264). Specifically, Peterson contends that by the late 1930s, the Soviet government was shrinking from utopian promises about a mechanized future and instead arguing that manual labor was the foundation of Soviet development: more precise, more efficient, and more grounded in mass mobilization. Rather than providing a foreign example to follow, irrigation programs would “at last provide the water for which the people had clamored for centuries” and in doing so would employ massive numbers of manual laborers, using methods “no different from those ostensibly used by the pharaohs of Ancient Egypt” (311–12). Peterson leaves unclear the degree to which this pivot enjoyed popular support; on the one hand, she calls it a “clever strategy that the Soviet state continued to invoke in decades to come,” “projecting a vision of the future in which happiness had at last settled on Central Asian lands,” but on the other, she notes that the new approach “could not conceal the fact that people's construction projects essentially used conscripted labor” (317–18). For the most part, the propaganda is allowed to speak for itself.

The rhetorical shift from paternalism to populism aside, Peterson underscores continuity across the 1917 divide. Throughout the narrative, Russians use water-engineering projects to remake Central Asia in in service of their imperial objectives, disregarding secondary considerations. (In the epilogue, this trend culminates in the destruction of the Aral Sea.) Although this contention is perhaps not altogether surprising, Peterson marshals an impressive array of archival materials and introduces a colorful cast of characters from around the world to advance her claims. Her book will help inform the social ramifications of environmental manipulation in Central Asia for years to come.