The community of scholars studying Central Asia, eastern Europe, and Eurasia lost a marvelous young historian on June 16, 2021. Maya Karin Peterson left this world due to unexpected complications that arose during the birth of her first child, Priya Luna, who also passed soon afterward. Most painful for her closest friends and beloved family, including parents Indira Viswanathan Peterson and Mark Austin Peterson and partner A. Marm Kilpatrick, this tragic loss has also shocked and saddened her many treasured acquaintances and academic colleagues throughout the world who envisioned getting to learn from and engaging with Maya for many decades to come. Already an accomplished scholar, she had an exciting program of future research, part of which appears in this issue of Slavic Review.
A specialist in the environmental history of Central Asia during the late imperial and early Soviet periods, Maya was an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the author of the book Pipe Dreams: Water and Empire in Central Asia's Aral Sea Basin (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Born on April 19, 1980, she grew up in an academic family in western Massachusetts, where both of her parents (who hailed from Iowa and India) taught at Mount Holyoke College. Language-learning and travel shaped her early life, including attending a German school in Heidelberg for a year. Maya graduated with high honors in History and Phi Beta Kappa from Swarthmore College in 2002.
After a year as a Fulbright Fellow in Berlin and a master's degree in Russian, Eastern European, and Central Asian studies at Harvard University, Maya began a PhD in History at Harvard. The research that formed the basis for her dissertation and first book took her to archives and libraries in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, sometimes for many months or on multiple trips. She received another Fulbright and multiple awards from the Social Science Research Council to conduct this original, valuable, and painstaking research. After completing her PhD in 2011 and beginning a tenure-track position at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2012, Maya earned two residential fellowships to support her writing in Germany: one at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society and the other at the Eberhard Karl University of Tübingen.
Pipe Dreams focuses on state efforts to control water in the arid deserts of Central Asia from the era of Russian conquest in the middle of the nineteenth century through the Stalinist 1930s. It follows bureaucrats, engineers, local elites, and laborers through efforts to transform dry lands into productive landscapes, with applied irrigation technologies and dreams of agricultural fields. Sweeping in the comparative perspectives it brings to the examination of a territory more defined by hydrology than national borders, the book reveals the Aral Sea Basin's ties to transnational modernist projects and explains how cotton became major cash crop in Central Asia under the forced labor regimes of Soviet socialism. A major contribution to global environmental history, Pipe Dreams also demonstrates the under-acknowledged reach of water's potency in histories of empire. The colonialism that united tsars and Soviets depended on it.
In addition to giving more than thirty in-person presentations in twelve different countries, Maya published two significant articles connected to her research on water in Central Asia. One in Environmental History analyzed the role of agricultural experts from the United States who traveled to the Soviet Union during the Stalinist Great Break (1929–1931) and aided in imposing colonial visions on the place despite insisting that they were apolitical actors. In another article in Cahiers du monde russe, Maya narrowed in on a similar dynamic of transnational exchanges of technology and expertise in an earlier era of the imperial transformation of Central Asia.
This current issue of Slavic Review includes the final work of scholarship that Maya was able to complete. It concerns the international history of kumys (fermented mare's milk produced by pastoralist populations of the steppe grasslands). The article shows the vital role of kumys in shifting imaginaries of the steppe as a zone of danger and conquest into a terrain of climatic revitalization. A network of health resorts and other institutions in the steppe arose to administer kumys therapies to outsiders afflicted with tuberculosis and other ailments. The belief of advocates that the effectiveness of the treatment depended on the characteristics of the climate as well as the consumption of the substance itself helped the steppe become reimagined as a curative place even as imperial and modernist encroachment continued its heedless remaking. We are fortunate to have some of Maya's posthumous insights as a testament to her brilliance.
Maya's zest for adventure, her love for diverse cultures, and her explorations of the natural world shaped and informed her scholarly interests. A dedicated teacher, she was celebrated as an outstanding mentor. Her colleagues at the University of California, Santa Cruz, as well as in wider professional circles, valued her gift for community building. Maya's friends cherished her as much for her endearing personal qualities as her accomplishments: her sheer passion for life, her keen sense of humor, and her innate kindness of spirit and empathy for others, regardless of status.
The many who admired Maya have already responded with numerous efforts to honor her memory. These include a scholarship at Swarthmore College, a speaker series at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and other initiatives. With the remarkable support of Maya's family and estate as well as contributions from over ninety individuals, the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies has also been able to establish the Maya K. Peterson Dissertation Research Grant in Environmental Studies. During her life, Maya often spoke of wishing that there were more resources available to support young scholars wanting to conduct environmental research in the region. The hope is that this grant might help the light of her legacy burn on among future generations of scholars in the field.
Kåre Hauge, 82, a plain-spoken diplomat and historian of Russia, died on November 7, 2021, following a distinguished career in the Norwegian Foreign Ministry (Utenriksdepartementet). Son of a local Lutheran village priest, Kåre undertook intensive Russian language training in the Norwegian Army, followed by graduate studies in Russian history at the University of Minnesota. His PhD dissertation on the Scandinavian career of the noted Soviet Ambassador Alexandra Kollontai included original first-person interviews with Kollontai's private secretary, Emy Lorentsson, who had repatriated to Moscow in 1945.
Although Hauge maintained his transatlantic scholarly ties and longtime AAASS/ASEEES affiliation following his studies in the United States, he returned to Norway to a significant foreign service career that brought him to posts in Moscow, Tokyo, Paris, Murmansk, Edinburgh, and Vilnius, the last as Norwegian Ambassador to Lithuania. His initial appointment to Moscow in 1973 was cut short when, in a Cold War response to the Norwegian arrest and imprisonment of Soviet spy and longtime Norwegian Foreign Ministry Russian translator, Gunvor Galtung Håvik, Soviet authorities expelled Hauge in 1977. Nevertheless, his engagement with Russian affairs continued into the post-Soviet era when, in 1992–94, he played a key role within the Utenriksdepartement's policy planning staff, spearheading the Euro-Arctic Barents Programme, a comprehensive, though not altogether uncontroversial, regional plan for building international cooperation, cultural exchange, environmental protection, and economic free trade for inhabitants of the Kola Peninsula and surrounding Barents Sea region.
Codified in the Kirkenes Declaration of January 1993, the plan included the establishment of a Norwegian consular office in Murmansk where Hauge would become Norway's first consul-general. At the high point in this regional interface, Kåre noted with some pride that it was easier to place a call from Murmansk to Moscow via Oslo than to do so directly from Murmansk to Moscow. Norway's Murmansk Consulate survives to the present as the only such western consular presence in the Barents region. Kåre Hauge remained a son of Innvik, where he grew up on Nordfjord and became a champion of Nynorsk (New Norwegian), one of two major modern Norwegian standards close to the spoken Landsmål most commonly found in rural parts of western Norway. He leaves behind his wife, Åshild, as well as a daughter and son and their families. He will be greatly missed by friends and colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic, and throughout Eurasia.
