Uzbekistan, rather than being a modern nation-state, as we understand it, is still a collection of "oasis cities", made famous and prosperous by the Silk Road - cities with names famous round the world: Samarqand, Bukhara.
The following post is about Tashkent:
In the 1st century A.D. it was an oasis settlement.
Throughout the following millennium, Tashkent was conquered and released and re-conquered over and over again. Persians, Mongol hordes, Turkic khans swept through, owned it, and passed it back and forth between them over the years.
And then, on June 15, 1865, the Russians arrived. And basically they never left. They are still there. In 1990, the population of Tashkent was 40% Russian. After the Soviet collapse, the Russians were a lost and sad community, abandoned by the motherland, adrift in a society wracked with upheaval and a Muslim revival. They were the old oppressors, trying to live with the conquered people, who were now trying to take back their country. So Tashkent has a Russian overlay, unlike Bukhara, which is a Muslim center. It is a very religious town, filled with fundamentalists. Tashkent is also a Russian outpost.
Tashkent, in the years after 1865, became Russia's base of operations for further conquests in Turkestan. The Russians built a colonial city here which swallowed up the medieval Turkic city.
Thubron says, "The Russians had captured Tashkent in 1865, not on orders from St. Petersburg but by the adventurism of local generals. Wiithin a few years it became the capital of Russian Turkestan, and there grew up beside the native town a pleasant, nondescript cantonment, where water channels trickled and great trees bloomed. Its first governor-general, the vain and chilly Kaufmann, ruled like a petty emperor. His army and administrations were filled with exiled bankrupts and adventurers. Far from home, local society became inward-looking and licentious, while beside it the Uzbek community continued almost unstudied, as if it would one day fade away."
Finally, with the advent of the Bolsheviks and their terrible aesthetic sense, the old Tashkent disappeared forever. Stalinist architecture (massive homely buildings, dauntingly wide concrete boulevards) stamped out the medieval nature of the desert town ... there isn't much left to be seen of the old Tashkent.
And then in 1966 there was a tremendous earthquake which gutted half of the city. Soviet builders rushed in to fill the vacuum and rebuild the city according to their own disgusting sensibilities.
Tashkent, judging from the pictures, is one of the ugliest places on earth. Everything is grandiose, inflated, with massive gaunt spaces meant to make the citizens feel tiny and insignificant. The avenues are 6 lanes wide, the squares are massive vistas watched over by mammoth statues. It looks oppressive. Like someone is always watching, or like the city is always waiting for something terrible to happen.
Stalin's legacy persists here, not just in the architecture, but in the population of Tashkent. Tashkent is filled with Russians and Armenians. Taskent still has very strong ties with Moscow ... much stronger than other areas in Uzbekistan. This adds to the regional divides in the country; it is very difficult for the nation to join together, unify, and agree on who they are as a people, as a place. Nobody agrees. Everybody battles for power.
The Russians, while they were the leaders of Tashkent, erected a state playhouse, a ballet, a circus. So Tchaikovsky was introduced to Uzbekistan, to a disgruntled Muslim populace (who, quite frankly, have no curiosity about other cultures in general. They could not GIVE a shit about what Western culture might have to offer. Meanwhile, we translate all of their top novels and poets into English or French or German or Italian, we watch their films, we give them Oscars ... but the exchange is almost completely one-sided. Well - except for the proliferation of Leonardo deCaprio T-shirts in Tehran).
And Tashkent today? Over a million people live in the city. There is much crime; it is not safe for anybody. It is very polluted. There is no work. And the youth population has exploded, so the city is crowded with drunken young men, filled with vague senses of grievance, who have nothing to do. The suburbs continue to spread. Everything looks the same. There is no traditional Uzbek community here. Everyone yearns to be part of the West, and yet they live in a poverty-struck and dangerous society, where they basically have to leave in order to live productive lives. The mafia is ever-present, their influence in everything.
It's a bad situation, a powder keg. Islamic fundamentalism on the rise, reacting to the youthful population who want nothing more than to have access to Western music and Western movies.
These people have had their histories, their indigenous culture, amputated. There is no memory, no sense of who they are. The Russians who still live here live in fear, hiding out in their houses, dreaming about the good old days of Stalin.
Kind of a sick scenario, no?