Tashkent: Forging a Soviet City, 1930–1966

Preface and Acknowledgments

vii This study draws mostly on archival sources in Tashkent and Moscow. In Uzbekistan, I used collections of the Uzbek SSR branch of the State Planning Agency, the Uzbek Writers and Architects Unions, the Plenipotentiary of the Evacuation of the Sovnarkom of the Uzbek SSR, and other republiclevel organizations from the Central State Archive of the Republic of Uzbekistan (O’zRMDA). At the Tashkent City Archive (TShDA), I used collections from the Tashkent City Council (Gorispolkom), the archives of various Tashkent industrial factories, and the City Architectural Bureau. Documents from Tashkent Oblast Archive (TVDA) concern Tashkent Oblast Council (Oblispolkom) documents, while the Ministry of Health and urban planning agencies were the focus of my work at the Central State Archive for Scientific-Technical and Medical Documentation of the Republic of Uzbekistan (O’zRI-TTHMDA). Party-level documents in the manuscript are mostly from Russian archives, as scholars cannot gain access to the Presidential Archives of the Republic of Uzbekistan. In Moscow, material from the following institutions was incorporated into this study: the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI) and the Russian State Archive of Contemporary History (RGANI) for documents from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the Russian State Archive of Art and Literature (RGALI) for materials for union-level organizations of art, literature, and architecture, and the Russian State Archive (GARF) for information from the Procurator General (Office of the Public Prosecutor) of the Soviet Union, the NKVD, GULAG special settlements, and the Supreme Soviet. Additional information on urban planning and statistics came from the Russian State Archive of Economics (RGAE). In the United States, I consulted collections at the Hoover PreFaCe and aCKnowLedgmentS stronski text i-350/3.indd 7 6/25/10 8:53 AM viii O PreFaCe and aCKnowLedgmentS Institution, the New York Public Library, and the Library of Congress. The majority of archival sources for this period of Tashkent history are in Russian , with some limited Uzbek-language material. When it existed, however, Uzbek-language material most often came from the Tashkent City Archive. Information from published Uzbek-language sources—newspapers, travel guides, Uzbek-language publications of the era, and current monographs— has also been incorporated into this study. Party communiqués, NKVD reports, and documents from the Procurator General add insights into the general mood of the population and the difficulties that officials had in implementing state and Party decrees or in sculpting new identities across the Soviet Union. However, I read these reports largely as documents that were produced by elite officials for specific purposes. The authorities who wrote to Party and state security organizations had precise concerns that they sought to highlight, often revealing institutional agendas or personal biases against Soviet ethno-national groups or social classes. In addition, these documents often concentrate on what went wrong in the Soviet state, not necessarily on the successes of specific policies or proposals. So, while some documents convey instances of largescale resistance to Soviet initiatives, others show how, for better or worse, local residents began to accommodate and adapt the new urban infrastructure of Tashkent to their own lives, even if some of their actions did not always seem ideologically correct. On the other hand, newspapers clearly conveyed the official interpretation of Soviet achievements; they helped to create the image of the type of society and city that Soviet leaders envisioned for Tashkent. Hence, they, too, are vital for improving our understanding of how the Soviet regime strove to fashion urban areas and modern citizens. Newspaper articles occasionally attacked the Sovietization process in Uzbekistan but almost exclusively focused on the inability of city leaders or local institutions to bring about social change. Therefore, while it celebrated Soviet Tashkent, the official press also exposed a great deal of information on the difficulties that the state encountered in forging this socialist city and new Soviet identities for its residents. Memoir sources have been interwoven into the text of this story. While memoirs are problematic sources due to the passage of time between the events and writing, they add to our understanding of daily life during a time of tremendous difficulty for the Soviet people. They also provide a glimpse into the reality of life that Party documents do not. Many more Russian-language memoirs have been preserved. As a result, these sources often reveal Russo-centric biases, particularly in their orientalist descriptions of the Central Asian lifestyle and culture, but they nonetheless prostronski text i-350/3.indd...