This paper aims to pin down changes in living standards (in particular, nutritional standards) in Central Asia in the first quarter of the 20th c. It utilises a relatively large corpus of published and unpublished rural household budgets of various provenance and post-stratification on the basis of data on ownership of land (peasants) or livestock (nomads). First, this reconstruction allows the assessment of the impact of the revolution and civil war (which brought the end of the colonial regime, but also socio-economic upheaval and famine) and of the land-and-water reform of the mid-1920s, as well as to define from which baseline the great Kazakh famine of the early 1930s took place. Second, this study is meant to situate the nutritional standards of Central Asian peasants vis à vis their Russian counterparts, thereby participating in the discussion on living standards on the eve of the revolution. Third, the study of HHBs leads to a definition of the ‘bare bone basket’ à la Robert C. Allen (e.g. Allen et al. 2011) for the region. Last but not least, a discussion of the history of household budgets surveys in Central Asia (as distinct from the rest of the Russian Empire/early USSR) is provided, with some reflections on the policy priorities that underpinned choices about sampling and variables to be included.