Kapuscinski has an outstanding piece on both of these projects in his book "Imperium". Basically, the real purpose of these projects was to remove all the priva

Kapuscinski has an outstanding piece on both of these projects in his book "Imperium". Basically, the real purpose of these projects was to remove all the private fruit gardens and replace them with state-owned cotton farms. State-owned in this case really means "owned by the families that ran the Soviet republic", of course, since these were largely independent of Moscow.