Patryk Reid

University of Pittsburgh, Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Associate

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I am a historian of environment and economic life, specializing in Russian, Central, and Soviet Eurasia.

My research centers on intersections of nature, economy, and governance in Eurasia. I look at these junctions of material and power in terms of their dynamic, environment-society relationships, embodied in landscapes and waterscapes, mobility and logistics, and state building.

My primary project is my first book, Managing Nature, Constructing the State: The Material Foundation of the USSR in Tajikistan. It is an environmental history that examines Eurasian transportation and supply chains to assess how the Soviet Union created Tajikistan—physically as well as politically. I argue that socialist transportation and supply chain enterprises were postcolonial state building projects that depended on altering the material world: changing native landscapes and waterscapes to facilitate mobility; and importing capital, including humans and animals, to create a desired physical context for supporting political and cultural endeavors. This form of environmental management involved responding to nature by replacing plans based on Russian conditions with projects suited to Tajikistan. From this material perspective, the USSR is unfamiliar, and it leads me to new findings on socialist and postcolonial economy, geography, modernization, and time. Most importantly, I challenge still pervasive, obscuring narratives of Soviet failure, and instead show what did happen.

Research for this monograph has yielded numerous related projects and collaborations. I have published on Soviet shipping markets, on the connection between transportation infrastructure and geography, and on the value of multidisciplinary approaches to rivers for understanding Eurasian history. The book deepened my interest in water studies, which led me to several exciting activities, including: organizing the international symposium, "Modern Rivers of Eurasia"*; and acting as Project Consultant for the University of Pittsburgh’s “Water in Central Eurasia”** curriculum project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (USA). As well, I have initiated two article-length projects examining international relationships converging on Soviet river borders, which focus primarily on how environmental dynamics can provide new understandings of socialist economic life and security.

Employment. Presently, I am a Policy Analyst at Trade and Labour Affairs within the Government of Canada's Labour Program. In 2016-19, I was UCIS Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at the University of Pittsburgh (USA).

I hold a PhD in History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2016).

* http://mre2018.hcommons.org
** https://www.waterincentraleurasia.pitt.edu

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Articles by Patryk Reid

The Lands Beyond the Rivers: Directions and Potentials in Riparian Histories of Russian and Soviet Eurasia

Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 2021

The rivers of Eurasia offer new perspectives on the lands beyond them, and on their human occupan... more The rivers of Eurasia offer new perspectives on the lands beyond them, and on their human occupants. This article examines a multidisciplinary literature on river-society relationships and the contributions it makes to the historiography of Russia and the USSR. It also proposes avenues for further research.

Tajikistan’s Turksib’: Infrastructure and Improvisation in Economic Growth of the Vakhsh River Valley

Central Asian Survey, 2017

This article analyses the paradoxically central role of a railroad in Soviet economic growth in s... more This article analyses the paradoxically central role of a railroad in Soviet economic growth in southern Tajikistan’s Vakhsh River valley during the 1930s. Constructed as a secondary service road of the Vakhshstroi agro-industrial complex, it was not meant to support enterprises throughout the region. Because of the republic’s lack of roads, however, unrelated freightage operations gravitated to the Vakhsh Railroad and made it the unintended mediator of the developing geography of Soviet movement. By examining how the narrow gauge line was used in unplanned ways, I find that state building under Stalin was characterized by improvisation in labour and mobility. Furthermore, the material conditions of transportation limited the locations of economic possibility in unanticipated ways. This case demonstrates that studying the use of infrastructure can further historical understanding of causes, effects and chronologies of economic life in the Stalin era.

Everyday Shipping: A Market in Early Soviet Tajikistan

Soviet and Post-Soviet Review , 2016

This article analyzes the Tajikistan SSR’s commodity chains in the early 1930s. I argue that a ma... more This article analyzes the Tajikistan SSR’s commodity chains in the early 1930s. I argue that a market for shipping services was instrumental to Soviet economic growth in the republic’s southern regions. Dispersed and ad hoc operations dominated goods exchanges vital to development at a time when the administration in Moscow was working to further centralize control of societal change. This analysis of the relationships between shipping agencies and economic organizations in southern Tajikistan shows that individuals put the transportation of cargo ahead of concerns about conforming to government mandates, including economic and nationalities policies. Importantly, the centralizing state often licensed such activities because they supported large-scale plans.

Book Reviews by Patryk Reid

Review of Maya K. Peterson, Pipe Dreams: Water and Empire in Central Asia's Aral Sea Basin (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

H-Diplo, 2020

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Review of Sunil Amrith, Unruly Waters: How Rains, Rivers, Coasts, and Seas have Shaped Asia's History (New York: Basic Books, 2018).

Environmental History , 2020

Review of Nigel A. Raab, All Shook Up: The Shifting Soviet Response to Catastrophes, 1917-1991 (Montreal and Kingston, Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017).

Canadian Slavonic Papers , 2019

Review of Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015).

Revolutionary Russia , 2018

Papers by Patryk Reid

Managing nature, constructing the state: the material foundation of Soviet Empire in Tajikistan, 1917-1937

This dissertation is a geographic and environmental history of Soviet state building that examine... more This dissertation is a geographic and environmental history of Soviet state building that examines how the Tajikistan Soviet Socialist Republic was made. In the mid-1920s, the USSR created republics in Central Asia that endure today as nation states. Tajikistan, however, lay on land that is almost entirely mountainous, where there was no physical legacy of modern economy. To build socialism here, the regime needed to import capital, people, and animals along with plans and ideals. This, in turn, required the establishment of transportation and commodity chains. These material implications of political and cultural projects are routinely left out of histories of Soviet power. My work instead illuminates the material and economic operations that fueled and sometimes confounded socialism, and connects them to global patterns of economic growth. The dissertation draws on archival and library sources from Dushanbe, Moscow, and North America to make three major scholarly contributions. First, my focus on tangible context and the hows of region-making puts political, social, and economic factors into conversation where they converged on the physical connections of state building that were literally transnational. Doing so bridges usual separations of sectors and geographies that are characteristic in histories of the early USSR. It furthermore contests conventional portrayals of Central Asia as an indistinct yet enormous cotton colony by highlighting the built and environmental conditions that made Tajikistan's Soviet experience unique. Drawing on human geography and landscape studies, I show that the construction of the first railroads and highways in Tajikistan was a distinctive form of Soviet state-building and nation-making. Second, I comment on the nature of Stalinism. This eponymous period is known for the centralization of power and planning in Moscow and the violent promotion of a modern, industrial society. My study of the operations of material economy in commodity chains spanning the USSR shows that real economic life was under-planned, and characterized by decentralized authority. In Tajikistan, utopian visions of technological prowess were implemented mainly by horses, camels, and human hands, often challenged by the rugged physical environment. Third, I compare Stalin-era enterprises in Tajikistan to other instances of postcolonial economic growth. I find that insights from global patterns of infrastructure and commodity chain management can help ascribe concrete causes, effects, and chronologies to mobilizational projects across the USSR. I also argue that this unfamiliar case of "international development" offers opportunities for new understandings from beyond the Euro-American imperial world. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank the many individuals and institutions that supported my work on this dissertation. I know that I have not noted them all-and I apologize to those that I missed. My first thanks go to my extraordinary dissertation committee members who all helped me improve my scholarly abilities and guided my work beyond anything I could have expected. They will remain models for me to emulate throughout my career. Diane Koenker, my advisor, guided my progress through the PhD program and supported my dissertation project with rare wisdom, intellect, and reliability. Her uncommon eye for clarity helped me improve the dissertation's groundedness, focus, and analytical rigor. Tariq Ali helped me consider new ways of relating my project comparatively to other global histories while refining its translatability. Mark Steinberg's energy and acumen as an interlocutor and mentor inspired greater sophistication in my work, and helped me refine its relevance to other Soviet histories. John Randolph introduced me to, and pushed me on, many of the approaches to space and mobility that I grapple with in my work, and led me to interpretations I would otherwise have struggled to arrive at. My work on this dissertation also benefitted greatly from interactions with other scholars and experts who contributed to my project through comments, suggestions, questions, or other forms of support. At the University of Illinois, they include

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The Lands beyond the Rivers: Directions and Potentials in Riparian Histories of Russian and Soviet Eurasia

Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 2021

Everyday Shipping: A Market in Early Soviet Tajikistan

The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review, 2016

This article analyzes the Tajikistan ssr’s commodity chains in the early 1930s. I argue that a ma... more This article analyzes the Tajikistan ssr’s commodity chains in the early 1930s. I argue that a market for shipping services was instrumental to Soviet economic growth in the republic’s southern regions. Dispersed and ad hoc operations dominated goods exchanges vital to development at a time when the administration in Moscow was working to further centralize control of societal change. This analysis of the relationships between shipping agencies and economic organizations in southern Tajikistan shows that individuals put the transportation of cargo ahead of concerns about conforming to government mandates, including economic and nationalities policies. Importantly, the centralizing state often licensed such activities because they supported large-scale plans.

‘Tajikistan’s Turksib’: infrastructure and improvisation in economic growth of the Vakhsh River valley

Central Asian Survey, 2016

ABSTRACT This article analyses the paradoxically central role of a railroad in Soviet economic gr... more ABSTRACT This article analyses the paradoxically central role of a railroad in Soviet economic growth in southern Tajikistan’s Vakhsh River valley during the 1930s. Constructed as a secondary service road of the Vakhshstroi agro-industrial complex, it was not meant to support enterprises throughout the region. Because of the republic’s lack of roads, however, unrelated freightage operations gravitated to the Vakhsh Railroad and made it the unintended mediator of the developing geography of Soviet movement. By examining how the narrow gauge line was used in unplanned ways, I find that state building under Stalin was characterized by improvisation in labour and mobility. Furthermore, the material conditions of transportation limited the locations of economic possibility in unanticipated ways. This case demonstrates that studying the use of infrastructure can further historical understanding of causes, effects and chronologies of economic life in the Stalin era.