SOVIET CENTRAL ASIA 61 tions of existence of the peasantry. When the revolution broke out Turkestan had been fully assimilated as the "Cotton Colony" of Russian capitalism. The region also became an appendage of the industrial centre in Russia. At the superstructural plane, as the author points out, the changes in the economic basis was not reflected. The Russian government did not encourage any reform in the educational system of the area so that the needs, rather the limited needs, of the time could be satisfied. Economic dependence of the region needed a culture of its own. The author has clearly shown that the overwhelming dominance of the ^Khadimists^y the traditional elites in the cultural scene, ultimately satisfied this criterion. This was the situation on the eve of the October Revolution. Strategies of Development The author then takes up for analysis the conceptual questions relating to strategies of economic development of an erstwhile backward economy, with reference to Soviet Central Asia after the Revolution. The social backwardness of the region was, in the words of the outhor, "specifically based on tribal, feudal structures, sustained and reinforced by petrified traditional and cultural values and religion. The second major contradiction in the structural specificity was created by the Russian colonialists interlude of the pre-rcvolutionary period which had considerably distorted their traditional equipoise" (p 39). A solution out of this impasse was sought through a "non-capitalist path of development5* as a transition from a backward, predominantly pre-capitalist to a socialist mode of production. This path became a powerful conceptual category to Lenin in his resolution of the national and colonial questions. The most important element of this concept was the assumption that backward nations on their road ro socialism could by-pass capitalism (p 43). This path was no doubt the "least painful" form of transition from primitive conditions of existence to the highest culture of Communism. The idea of "revolutionary-democratic" instead of "bourgeois-democratic" phase in the "national revolutionary" mode emerged in this context as the author has clearly pointed out. The first step that was taken to translate this doctrine into reality was to create "socialist land tenure . . . and the socialist methods of agriculture" (p51). This, in itself, was inadequate without the development of a class consciousness. Therefore, a decision was taken, to form and organize party cells and peasant Soviets in the native Kishlaks so that anti-kulak and anti-i?^ policies could be strongly pursued and propagated. According to the author,