Tashkent: Forging A Soviet City, and City Forging You

In contrast to Tsarist policy shown in Chapter 2, the Soviets aimed to break down the geographic, ethnic, and cultural segregation in Tashkent between the Uzbek Old City and the Russian newer area. Besides the squalid conditions endured in the Old City compared to the newer area, Soviet officials were also concerned by the regressive practices of Uzbek city dwellers, such as the segregation of women and the keeping of single family homes with apparently no entrances or welcome gate. To do this, the Soviets drafted numerous reconstruction plans for the city for many decades, with some projects coming into being, and others drying up. Some of these plans involved retouching and upkeeping what structures were already there, while other plans necessitated the destruction of parts of the city (even residences) in order to accommodate the vision of the architects.

But little effort was paid to mind the Tashkent natives’ own plans for the city; the Soviets pushed a Russian idea of urbanization and modernization onto the Uzbeks, whether they liked it or not. The failings of these programs the author details, such as food shortages, building material shortages, outbreak of disease, and destruction of buildings due to natural disaster.

Some questions to ask: How did the Soviets plan to balance the urgings of ideology for progress and the needs of the natives’ in tradition? What did the Soviets stand to gain, or achieve, by enforcing the planning and construction of the city with such input from the locals as they did? What were their failings, and where did they go wrong?

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9 Responses to Tashkent: Forging A Soviet City, and City Forging You

  1. Isaiah says:

    I think it is important to note that Stronski attempts to destabilize the opposition between tradition and progress in Tashkent’s architecture. Specifically, he makes clear that “squalor” was not only a product of pre-Soviet planning and utility not only a product of Soviet planning. Two examples of this stood out to me. First, as they arrived to the city in large numbers during the late ’30s, “Soviet era Slavic migrants lived in worse physical conditions than the Uzbek neighbors whose lives they had intended to ‘improve’; the Soviet system could not meet the needs of the increasing number of new residents in the city, while longtime residents remained in traditional homes and neighborhoods where their families had lived for generations. Water pumps, public baths, and other essentials of life might not have been “modern” in these traditionally Uzbek areas, but at least they existed, which was not necessarily true in the new Soviet sections of the city” (51). Like we have seen many times before, the Soviet planning raced ahead the material capability to execute such plans, especially those as complex as the reconstitution of a city. Second, in the image gallery we see that many parts of the old city were purposely designed with narrow streets and plentiful vegetation in order to maximize shade. We can see that this strategy was completely abandoned by the Soviets. So I wonder, how does our understanding of a “modernization” project change when we recognize its nearsightedness in both logistics and design?

  2. Teo Rogers says:

    There are two places that stood out to me regarding how Soviet redesigns of Tashkent seem to have failed because of their inability to account for feasibility and the local’s concerns. In chapter 2, as different successive urban planners’ designs are described, I couldn’t help but notice how often each new plan involved expanding streets, making more parks and gardens, and widening the canal. I think the third time more parkland was proposed, on page 39, I thought to myself “soon the whole city of Tashkent will just be one big park and canal.” Joking aside, I think that there’s an important thing to recognize in the Imperialist and Soviet fixation on light and openness replacing “filthy” “dark” “narrow” streets. This is where I see two failures of the Soviet government. The first is that in creating wider streets, more and more parks, gardens, and plazas, the planners focused to much on ideological implications of urban design and too little on people’s lives, i.e. where they’d live. Parks are nice, but people also need houses.
    The second failure can be pointed out on page 113 where a caption of an Old Tashkent neighborhood writes “the narrow roadway and trees provide shade for pedestrians, something many Soviet buildings did not do.” I wonder why this isn’t emphasized more in the early chapters when describing how often imperialist planners looked down on “dark and narrow” Old-City streets, but in the hot desert, shade is extremely important. Also, it’s possible that the narrow streets served as wind tunnels that helped cool the city (I’m thinking of Southwest US Native American adobe cities which are known for doing this). In insisting that the Uzbek city was backwards, primitive, and filthy, Imperial and Soviet planners didn’t consider that there was something to be learned about how they designed their cities.

  3. lernerm says:

    I think we should check our anti-Soviet biases, especially in the formulation of the last question (which I hope is a typo) “What were their failings, and where did they go wrong?”, as to imply that the Soviet Government could do nothing good. The thing that I picked up from the reading is that Soviet policy was constantly in flux. At one point, traditional single-story where considered bad as they increased urban sprawl, while at another point, they were considered good as they were less likely to cause major destruction in case of an earthquake, and while it is true that most plans for Tashkent were of a imperialistic, Western nature, there was that moment after the purging of the original planners in which Kuznetsov declared that future plans for the city should incorporate the input of the native Uzbeks. Lastly, the plan to mix Russian and Uzbek Tashkent didn’t fail only because of government action, but because of the prejudices of Russian workers who did not want to live in the Old City.

    • Alystair Augustin says:

      I’m still not seeing the good though? I’m personally approaching this more from an anti-imperial standpoint but just because someone eventually decided to get input from the native population doesn’t make it good or helpful, especially after such a long period of not taking Uzbek input and demarcating them as dirty and unmodern. Like, I don’t think moralizing the Soviets as good or bad is useful but as far as an imperial project goes they were definitely often failing, and as far as the violence of imperialism goes they were often failing at not dehumanizing people (though I don’t know if that is a failure of an imperialist project or something else).

  4. shaswitz says:

    It seems like one of the bigger failings the Soviets had in their project in this area was that they expected the Asian SSRs to behave in the same way that the European SSRs did, so modernization practices that may have been fairly successful in the Western part of the Soviet Union were failing in the Eastern part and the Soviets were too stubborn to really try and tailor their practices for the region. This can be seen in the Soviet’s response to local communists attempting to blend their identities, “attempts to decrease the impact of Islam and transform native traditions met with difficulty, as Central Asia’s local communists often remained unaware of the goals of the Soviet transformation and frequently tried to combine their identities as both Muslims and communists, a phenomenon that would would prove lasting” (Stronski 2014, 29-30). Instead of embracing these people who weren’t ready to give up their culture but wanted to be communists, the Soviets insisted on trying to force a particular image of progress upon them. This can also be seen architecturally when the Soviets decided that Tashkent should follow the model of Moscow and tried to use the same reconstruction methods that worked there without any thought about the differing contexts or populations between the two cities.

  5. Alystair Augustin says:

    The Tsarist attitude towards “modernization” is contextualized early on by the acknowledged inability to forcibly Russify or Christianize native Uzbeks and passively attracted Uzbeks to “modernity” by showing them what modern amenities were possible, like medicine and clean water systems. I’m suspicious of the idea that Uzbek people wouldn’t want access to clean water and health care just because it was associated with Russians and I feel like part of their hesitancy must have been how Uzbeks were conceptualized as dirty and disease bearing. The idea that Uzbeks and Central Asians in general are dirty didn’t disappear with the rise of Soviet power, and the transition of spaces from religious and cultural into secular with the persisting narratives of cleansing spaces for modern use perpetuated the idea that Uzbeks were dirty, historic(– or, more dramatically, primitive) figures. I think that is one of the failings of the Soviets, that they didn’t see Uzbek people and Central Asians as a whole as capable of modernity without massive transformation.

  6. whitec says:

    Your first question is interesting because it didn’t seem to me that the Soviets made any real attempts to balance their ideological goal of “modernizing” Tashkent with the needs or desires of the indigenous population of Tashkent. The Soviet’s overall view of Tashkent and its inhabitants as “unclean” and “uncultured” would make it nearly impossible for them to defer to Uzbek tradition at any point in their project. The only part of the project that I noticed which seemed to indicate any real consideration for Central Asian traditions was the idea of Red Teahouses (63-4, Stronski) which seemed to be a regional variation on a workers club more than an embrace of Uzbek customs, as we can see by the Soviet frustration with how Uzbeks used the Red Teahouses (64, Stronkski).
    As for what Soviets hoped to gain, it would seem that the project was in large part ideologically motivated, providing a model for “post-colonial” cities based in European urban planning. The potential gain being expanding into other areas with the consent of the population, mostly thinking about the speech Stalin gave to the University of Toiler of the East in which he spoke about providing a model for other nations “resisting imperialism”. Moreover transforming a city known before the revolution as the “Crime Capital of Central Asia” (51, Stronski) into a “modern” Socialist city would be a major accomplishment for Soviets to use as an example of Soviet greatness.

  7. Corey says:

    In regard to the last question, one thing that stuck out to me was some of the continuity from the imperial period to the soviet period. Although a lot of things were different, some of the rhetoric or ideas were similar. For example, the idea of modernization is common in both, and in some ways, the Soviets advanced this further. This could be seen through things like the change in family structure and how architectural policies related to gender roles and the hujum. This could also been seen in the buildings themselves. A lot of the buildings pictured look similar to a Russian imperial style of building in some ways, which seems to conflict with the anti-imperialist goals of the soviets.

  8. Isa Velez says:

    I focused on this question that you posed: “How did the Soviets plan to balance the urgings of ideology for progress and the needs of the natives’ in tradition?”

    I immediately thought to one very literal example of the balance referenced in the question. Chapter 3 mentions that for many buildings, Soviet officials planned for the outside of the building to be Russian in design and the inside to have elements of Uzbek culture. This literal example, I think, is helpful in understanding how Soviet’s understood this balance of progress and tradition. We see this through inside and outside in this example. Half of the building is Soviet and half is Uzbek. This seems like its a 50/50 split but it is significant that the Uzbek elements are for the inside of the building instead of the outside. The outside of the building is the most immediately visible to a passerby and is captured more often in photographs of buildings than the inside; there are no photographs of the insides of buildings in the gallery section of the book. To me, this seems significant. And it seems to be privileging Soviet design over Uzbek design based on this positioning of the two styles. It seems like an even balance, but it isn’t, I am inclined to think from the reading and the photographs.

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