Tashkent: Forging a Soviet City, 1930–1966

Chapter 6. The Postwar Soviet City, 1945-1953

145 tHe PoStwar Soviet City, 1945–1953 6 • The evacuation of defense and heavy industry transformed Tashkent into an industrial powerhouse with official markers of Soviet achievement— metallurgy, aircraft manufacturing, ammunitions production, and coal mining. During the war, Tashkent manufactured bombs but did not suffer from them. By the end of the conflict, the population bordered on close to a million, although the city soon lost some of its most qualified workers and intellectuals when many factories, cultural institutions, and evacuees returned home. Despite the Soviet ideological belief in the inevitability of war, the 1937–1939 reconstruction plan did not anticipate the chaotic wartime industrialization of this once distant capital of a largely agrarian Soviet republic. Tashkent’s “New Industrial Face,” the subject of many celebratory articles in Pravda Vostoka and Qizil O’zbekiston, had finally appeared , but the reality of life in 1945 was far from the Soviet ideal and the region was in shambles.1 In the early 1940s, most Central Asian cities expanded their urban infrastructure —public transportation, sewer systems, and electricity supstronski text i-350/3.indd 145 6/25/10 8:53 AM 146 O tHe PoStwar Soviet City, 1945–1953 plies—in the wartime effort to meet the tremendous increase in population , but these projects largely remained in varying states of disrepair. In Tashkent, tram tracks were now broken and underground pipes remained partially installed or severed, spilling waste and water into the streets and canals of the city. Unsanitary conditions, overcrowding, and industrial pollution caused disease rates to rise. Demobilized soldiers from Central Asia complained about the state of their home cities upon return: “We understand that less attention was spent on the urban economy during these years because of the war, but we mandate that everything be done to preserve what was completed before the war.”2 Recognizing Tashkent’s dismal postwar conditions, the union Sovnarkom published a decree on March 6, 1946, entitled “On the means for improving the urban economy of Tashkent.” It called for improvements in the standard of living and a transformation of the economy to meet peacetime needs.3 The decree was similar to those published for other cities of the Soviet Union and did not list any concrete measures to change conditions in the city. The mere fact that a decree was promulgated was meant to demonstrate that the state cared about Tashkent, although it lacked the resources or will to do much about the complaints of Tashkenters. The population increase during the war and the need to reestablish hastily evacuated industries in the city created distortions to its urban development project. During the war, the completion of the model avenue of Navoi Street had been put on hold, with half-completed building sites standing idle for years. Meanwhile, the city’s residents continued to live in cramped and unsanitary housing—dark underground basements, unheated worker barracks, stairwells or hallways of administrative buildings, and mud hovels .4 Although the Gorispolkom officially promoted the construction of apartment buildings for citizens in need of shelter, the state put a higher priority on monumental structures, worthy of an international power, as the means to show its “care” for the people. After the horror and hardship of war, the public areas of the Soviet city architecturally and rhetorically needed to evoke the bright future of a victorious state that had defeated fascism and was prepared to take the revolution around the globe. However, the needs of Tashkenters once again were secondary to other priorities and internal ideological battles as the Party sought to tighten its hold on postwar Soviet society in Central Asia. Uzbek Traditions Revisited On July 21, 1945, Pravda Vostoka published an exposé on the postwar condition of the Tashkent Central Telegraph building on Navoi Street. Although stronski text i-350/3.indd 146 6/25/10 8:53 AM tHe PoStwar Soviet City, 1945–1953 O 147 the building’s foundation was laid in 1935, construction was still not finished ten years later. The outside shell, radio receiver room, and main floor evidently had been completed before the conflict, but the structure had a variety of uses during the war. It served as a dormitory, a training school for accountants, and temporary facilities for numerous evacuated educational institutions. Each occupant adapted the building to suit its own needs, tearing down walls, ripping up floor boards, and removing valuable supplies and equipment to use for other...