Tashkent

I was in Tashkent (Toshkent in Uzbek) for a few days in late October. I found it a rather uncomfortable place. Problems started at the airport, where it was necessary to negotiate an enormous undisciplined crowd to inch through passport control—and then wait an hour for baggage, and finally face another crowd at customs. Even at Incheon, where my trip to and from Tashkent started and ended, Uzbekis found it impossible to queue up. The Korean security guards were made so uneasy by massive Uzbeki line-cutting that they disappeared. It is tempting to speculate that a life lived in an exceptionally authoritarian and kleptocratic state leads to a tendency to disobey rules and ignore other peoples’ needs whenever the chance arises, but that would surely be simplistic.

My only previous trip to Tashkent had been in the fall of 1970. Neither of my trips lasted long enough to make me quite sure of my judgments, but it’s clear that quite a lot has changed since 1970.

Some of the changes are pretty trivial. Statues of Uzbek heroes have replaced statues of Soviet heroes. The former Revolution Square, which once held (in turn) statues of Lenin, Stalin, and Marx, has been renamed Amir Timur Square, and now features a statue of Amir Timur (Tamerlane), who is remembered more fondly in Uzbekistan than in the many lands to which his armies laid waste.¹

Statue of Amir Timur in Amir Timur Square.

There are also a fair number of new highways and overpasses. Rising levels of car ownership, as in most places, have made things harder for pedestrians.

Sebzor ko’chasi, a major north-south highway, which cuts right across central Tashkent.

Much of Tashkent used to be made up of traditional, one-story, Central Asian buildings on irregular streets. Many of these buildings were badly damaged in a major earthquake in 1966, and it’s likely that the government was rather embarrassed by them anyway. While some such neighborhoods away from the center have been reconstructed, many traditional inner-city neighborhoods have just been levelled. There’s now a huge amount of unbuilt-on land, bordered by green metal fences.

Green fence, hiding remnants of a traditional neighborhood in central Tashkent that has been largely obliterated.

In parts of the central city, however, urban planning has created a completely new kind of landscape with government buildings and parkland connected by wide streets, a few of which are closed to traffic part-time and used for recreation and informal markets.²

Open-air art market in central Tashkent.

The most appealing parts of Tashkent for me were the remaining Soviet-era residential neighborhoods. Soviet housing doesn’t enjoy a very positive reputation, and for good reasons. It was not built to last, and in most places including Tashkent it hasn’t been maintained very well. Furthermore, the towers-in-a-park designs are frowned on in urbanist circles, although of course in Soviet times the spaces between buildings were set up for pedestrians, not cars. Nonetheless, on a beautiful fall day in Central Asia, the Soviet-era neighborhoods, with their generous tree cover, looked pretty good to me

Soviet-era neighborhood, practically hidden under a canopy of trees. The condition of the sidewalk is typical.

except where they’ve been redesigned to allow parking.

Former open space devoted to parking in a commercial center in a Soviet-era neighborhood.

Then there’s Tashkent’s subway, which is impressively decorated in the ponderous Soviet style. If Tashkent had more tourists, the subway would be a major tourist attraction—except for two things. First, photographs are strictly forbidden. Second, to enter the stations one must not only subject oneself to a thorough bag search but also show identification and undergo an interrogation. When the security guards discovered that I could communicate with them in Russian, they didn’t want to let me go. Our conversation was of the standard banal sort that everyone travelling in untouristed areas gets used to. I was asked not only “Where are you going?” and “How long will you be in Uzbekistan?” but also “Are your married?” and “How much money do you make?” This might have seemed like simple friendly banter had the questions not been asked by well-armed, uncosmopolitan, and somewhat bored young men whose job was to intercept terrorists. I pretended not to know a word of Russian on my second and third subway trips, but I was still not made to feel very comfortable. Perhaps the need to undergo an interrogation partly explains the fact that the subway appears to have relatively few passengers.³ The emptying out of parts of the central city surely hasn’t encouraged Metro use either. The Metro does take you to quite a few places in Tashkent, however.

Map showing the Tashkent Metro with the street network in the background. GIS data modified from the BBBike.org version of OpenStreetMap. This data set clearly shows only a small proportion of Tashkent’s parkland, but I don’t have the resources to correct it.

Tashkent seemed to me too visibly authoritarian a place to be very appealing, but visiting it was enormously satisfying.