Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan by Artemy M. Kalinovsky

Author:Artemy M. Kalinovsky [Kalinovsky, Artemy M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2018-05-14T22:00:00+00:00

The Sharipov Family

Perhaps the most storied laborer in the history of Nurek is brigadir (brigade leader) Muhabbat Sharipov. Handsome and photogenic, by the early 1970s he had become a minor media star, a local boy who had made the path from a childhood on a collective farm to leading a model brigade on the construction site. The story of Sharipov and his family allows us to explore in some more detail the meanings of local celebrity, of leadership, and of the importance of social ties that were formed as a result of construction.

One of Sharipov’s first profiles appeared in Norak in December 1971, the year he graduated from the local technical college and was elected to the Supreme Soviet of the Tajik SSR. It begins: “A slim young man stood over a cliff and looked thoughtfully into the distance. Below him ran the Vakhsh, now tame. Muhabbat Sharipov remembers when it was different. Powerful and angry, it carried water far away, noisily rustling and rattling as it went. And now here it was—quiet and calm, tamed by the hand and mind of man. There was a lot of his own labor in that affair. And the heart of Muhabbat swells with pride for those who came here first.” Thirteen years earlier, the article explained, Muhabbat saw the first expeditions studying the Vakhsh in preparation for the dam and offered to work for them. Then he became one of the first builders on the dam itself. His enthusiasm “infected others.” Within two years he became a brigadir, but felt that his eight years of schooling were inadequate. So he went to the “school of young workers” and completed the final years of school he had been missing. In 1964 he was drafted into the army, but “dreamt of his native Nurek and the construction [of the dam].” Two years later he was back at work and studying in the newly opened technical college. He was raising his own family as well as his younger siblings, two of whom had already become workers. He was “growing together with his city which he helped build and was setting an example that attracted others.”43

FIGURE 6.2. Muhabbat Sharipov, 1970. Courtesy of the Tajikistan State Archive of Photo and Video Documentation.

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