Record of a Meeting of the Social Sciences Section of the USSR Academy of Sciences on the Current Problems of the Development of Social Sciences in Kazakhstan and the Central Asian Republics (Excerpt)

Record of a Meeting of the Social Sciences Section of the USSR Academy of Sciences on the Current Problems of the Development of Social Sciences in Kazakhstan and the Central Asian Republics.

1 December 1965

Aminov, Deputy Chair of Economics Department of the Tashkent Institute of Economics

…At the beginning of this year in Tashkent we held an international economics seminar for the countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where we were supposed to tell the representatives of these continents about the historical experience of the socialist construction of these republics, Central Asia and Kazakhstan, about the experience of forming and developing industrial complexes, industrial-territorial and sectoral complexes, about the experience of industrializing our republics. And the representatives of these countries showed great interest in our experience and asked us: give us materials, books, that we could read, in simple language, to draw on the rich experience accumulated in Central Asia and Kazakhstan, regarding the non-capitalist path of development of these countries.

And to our embarrassment we could not offer them anything that would truly give them something useful to generalize from [our] historical experience. They said “you have achieved enormous technological progress, industrialization, tell us, how did you achieve this, what methods were used to create industrial complexes in Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and other republics, how did you make this happen, how did you start” and so on. (21)