From Countryside to Factory: Industrialization, Social Mobility, and Neoliberalism in Soviet Central Asia and Mexico

This article traces the rise and decline of state-led industrialization as a tool of social mobility in the second half of the twentieth century. It examines ideas of transforming primarily agrarian societies into industrial states in the USSR and developing countries, and then considers how these ideas were applied in two cases: Mexico and Soviet Central Asia. In both cases, state-led industrialization achieved some important social goals, but ultimately proved disappointing and was abandoned in the 1980s. Politicians and planners increasingly emphasized individual entrepreneurship and a more limited role for the state as a path to achieving greater social mobility. The article argues that while external ideological and economic factors were important in both cases, attention must also be paid to the way scholars and planners reflected on the shortcomings of the industrialization program conceived in the post-war decades.