Under Solomon's Throne: Uzbek Visions of Renewal in Osh

3. Divided City and Relating to the State

74 Osh appears to tell a tale of two cities. It is often seen as a city divided into two distinct halves: an ancient Central Asian core (mahalla neighborhoods, hand-built houses, narrow streets, bazaars) and a modern Soviet city (boulevards ,shops,governmentbuildings,institutions,parks,Leninstatues).Indeed, a walk through the city reveals the decisive shift in architecture, street life, and sensorial qualities as one moves between the “old” city and the “new” city. Osh residents of every ethnicity, whether living in mahalla houses or apartments, talk about the mahalla as a special kind of place, one that is physically, socially, culturally distinct from the rest of the city. They also treat mahallas differently than the rest of the city in everyday practice: as home, where a resident has a special set of obligations within the mahalla, or as an alien, possibly threatening place, one that many non-Uzbek outsiders avoid. Thought, talk, and action are thus predicated on Osh being divided in this manner. The division might appear to simply reflect the city’s duality: a basically conservative society with a modern veneer or (from another point of view) a mostly Soviet society with faint vestiges of tradition. The narrative of the dual city is in that sense the tale of what Central Asia became under Soviet rule, a way to schematize the Divided City and Relating to the State 3 Divided City and Relating to the State 75 Soviet–Central Asian encounter using the city as a kind of metaphor in concrete. Using the cityscape to think about Osh’s Soviet experience may yield insight , but we need to be careful. There is a need to question the direct correspondence between people, culture, and place that many readily assume. We must be wary of claims that sociocultural characteristics and mentalities map onto urban districts and that “traditional” and “modern” form oppositional categories of analysis.1 The problem here is not merely that Osh’s population is in part spatially mixed within the city (with some Uzbeks living in apartments and some non-Uzbeks, in mahallas). The issue is more fundamental, because if we take as natural Osh’s bifurcation into traditional city and modern city, we perpetuate the concealment of the processes that maintain that split. One objective of this chapter is to uncover those political and social processes that have to do with how the Soviet and Kyrgyzstani states administered their urban populations and how the Uzbek communities have responded. Because Osh’s duality has made its way into the everyday thinking and activity of its inhabitants, we identify this phenomenon as an idiom, a configuration of ideas and practices organized around a theme. Osh as a divided city becomes an idiom through which the state and citizen encounter each other. It frames or helps set the terms of their mutual relation. From the side of the state, cities were central to the strategic goals of the Bolshevik Revolution, and leaders saw them as “epitomes of progress” and “bulwarks for the existing order” (Kotkin 1995, 18).2 Particularly in a region like Central Asia, the Soviet state invested great resources to develop the cities of what had been a mainly agrarian and nomadic-pastoralist region, thus enabling its integration into the Soviet Union’s urban-centered economic networks , hierarchies of administration, and sociocultural production.3 Osh held great importance as the key urban anchor and administrative capital in southern Kirgizia, and the rapid twentieth-century development of its infrastructure and institutions stand as materializations of a Soviet vision of progress. State urban planning resulted in the encirclement or replacement of mahallas as part of the effort to develop industry, cultivate a labor force, and make the population more visible to the state’s administrative apparatus. Colonial cities were generally divided cities. The division itself was a technique of rule, an effective way of both organizing administration and displaying power. Colonial elites lived in and administered their own districts, either commandeered from the former rulers or built anew.4 The social separation and power differential between the governing and governed were built manifestly into the urban fabric. When the Russian Empire expanded into Central Asia in the late nineteenth century, it built its own administrative centers in or adjacent to the existing cities, just as the French were erecting their villes 76 Divided City and Relating to the State nouvelles by the Arab medinas of North...