The Soviet period, 1918 - 1991
The Soviet revolution in late 1917 led to major changes in the built environment. The three-quarters of a century of Soviet rule in Central Asia also led to a major divergence in development between the part of Central Asia north of the Amu Darya (the present-day Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) and the part that lay to the south of it, Afghanistan. Although the Soviet Union attempted to bring Afghanistan into the Soviet realm and occupied and ruled it under a puppet government for the decade of the 1980s, those ten years had virtually no impact on Afghanistan’s built environment. Some steps were taken to transform the agricultural sector and thus rural life but otherwise existing patterns of private residential life and public life continued with minor changes for the vast majority of the population. But to the north of the Amu Darya, the khanates of Kokand, Bukhara, and Khiva underwent revolutionary change in the twentieth century.
The ideology of Russian socialism and the way in which the Communist Party of the Soviet Union applied that ideology to the organization of space and the built environment, dramatically changed the appearance of Central Asian cities north of the Amu Darya. Certain early policies, such as communal housing and architectural preservation, helped shape the development of the now-Soviet cities. Communal housing at first meant the forced sharing of existing residential space by unrelated families and individuals. How well the indigenous population resisted these dictates is not known but they would have been deeply contrary to ideals of family life and especially of the private space needed for women.
Communal housing
Communal housing soon came to mean the building of blocks of flats in which citizens could more easily be kept under the surveillance of the state and which could more efficiently house a growing population without intruding on precious and limited agricultural land. This kind of communal housing went through different phases, most notably after World War II, as the Soviet Union slowly began to rebuild its infrastructure. Pre-war urban planning which had been in abeyance with the invasion of the country in 1941, was reconstituted along with a push to Russify Central Asia both by requiring the teaching of Russian (and making any career advancement impossible without it) and by encouraging Russian emigration to the cities of Central Asia, cities which already had substantial Russian populations from the pre-Soviet period. Urban planning focused on the creation of identifiably Soviet modes of life in types of dwelling places, in sport, in commerce, and in industry. The epitome of the Soviet city plan was the mikrorayon (micro-region) an area that was designed to be self-sufficient, to have residences (in apartment buildings), schools, food stores, retail shops, a community center, cafeteria, and often a factory in which the residents of the mikrorayon were expected to work. Several mikrorayons would be combined into a rayon (region) at the center of which there would be a stadium, schools, parks, and movie theaters.
Early on, the standard communal block in the mikrorayon was a five-storey pre-built concrete apartment house that could be assembled quickly with cranes. Eventually, seven- and nine-storey concrete modular apartment buildings became the norm. Routes for plumbing and electricity were carved out with jackhammers after construction or were laid on the surface of the walls. For Russians and other Europeans in Tashkent moving into such units was an improvement over crowded kommunalkas. For indigenous peoples—Uzbeks, Tajiks, Kazakhs, Kirghiz, and Turkmen—living in traditional compound houses, the move to a kvartira (apartment), often forced to do so by the razing of whole residential neighborhoods of howlis, meant the loss or at least considerable reduction in private open space (a large courtyard replaced with a balcony) and the forced mixing with people outside one’s own kin group. In Central Asia where the continental climate means extremely hot summers, the new dwelling style was completely inappropriate. Whereas the compound house was often sited to maximize solar gain in winter and minimize it in summer, the concrete apartment blocks were built without regard for climate. Generally well-heated (though poorly insulated) in winter because of the availability of natural gas, in summer, without air conditioning, the apartment buildings, especially on their upper floors, baked their inhabitants. The Soviet authority could, however, make life unpleasant enough in the older parts of the city, without actually razing houses for urban renewal, so that people would voluntarily move to the mikrorayons. Deliberate failure to provide running water, steam pipes, sewer lines, and street paving to the older sections and the difficulty of finding building materials to restore and renovate compound houses sometimes made moving to the mikrorayon attractive. However, it was usually the loss of one’s home through eminent domain for street building or some other public project that would occasion such a move.
Public architecture
In terms of the earlier public architecture, two somewhat contrary streams of thought in Soviet ideology quickly developed. One was that the “culture of earlier centuries was the expression of the feudal mode of production.” Consequently, a town’s history symbolized in its public monuments was feudal and should be if not eliminated at least re-configured. Countering this idea was that if those structures were stripped of their history, function, and economic roles, the buildings of the past could be turned into examples of the material culture of a people, and thus celebrate the artistic heritage of the proletariat that labored to bring the mosques, madrasas, Sufi hostels, and shrines into being. As early as 1918, Lenin issued a decree requiring the identification and preservation of all historic monuments in Soviet Russia although it is somewhat doubtful that he was thinking of the Muslim buildings of Central Asia when he issued it.
As a result, once Soviet control was firmly established in all the cities of Central Asia by 1924 or 1925, commissions went to work to classify and prioritize buildings for preservation. Purely religious structures like mosques or other places of worship such as shrines tended to get less attention if they were not on the grand scale of the great congregational mosque of Bukhara, Masjid-i Kalan, or the Gur-i Amir, Tamerlane’s tomb in Samarqand. Many lesser mosques were demolished but some survived, either overlooked or zealously protected by the residents of the neighborhood or by someone in authority from the neighborhood. Madrasas, valued as educational centers, fared somewhat better. In general, if a building were well-advanced in dilapidation and lacked an ideological reason to preserve it, it was probably razed. On the other hand seriously endangered structures which usefully promoted an appropriate ideological message (like the madrasa of Ulugh Beg in Samarqand, one of whose minarets had nearly toppled and whose founder was hailed by Soviet ideologues as one of the great progressive thinkers of medieval Central Asia for his sponsorship of mathematical and astronomical studies), were allotted the scarce resources available in the early Soviet period for building preservation.
Ultimately, as in times past, economic conditions produce the greatest impact on the built environment. Although the Soviet government was able to marshal the instruments of coercion successfully enough to see the built environment develop in accord with the ruling ideology, their seventy-year rule over Central Asia should probably be seen as something aberrant. Climate, traditional religious and social values, and above all economic constraints have determined the evolution of the built environment and will continue to do so in future.
Afghanistan
To a much lesser degree and with much less steadiness of purpose, twentieth century ideology also played a part in the planning and preservation of the built environment south of the Amu River. In Afghanistan, in part because of the influx of German technicians and engineers seeking work after the end of the First World War, Pashtun elements in policy-making circles, latched on to the ideas expressed by promoters of the ideology of Aryanism, that an ancient warrior people had come from the Asian steppe into Afghanistan and ultimately settled India. The Aryan movement in Germany, whose aim was the racial privileging of Teutonic types, sponsored expeditions to Central Asia, Tibet and Afghanistan seeking “pure Aryan types.” Pashtun chauvinists who came to have the dominant voice in Afghan politics in the period after 1929, promoted the idea that although all Afghan citizens were of Aryan origin, only the Pashtun had preserved a pure Aryanism (evident in their manly sense of honor and their bellicosity) while Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras were degraded remnants. For reasons still not clear, these ideas, as in other parts of the world meshed with the notion that city planning and urban develop ment along certain kinds of lines was the road to progress and modernization. In Afghanistan ambitious projects were planned to create modern cities through using concepts from the Russian “garden city” of broad avenues with intersecting streets (the Jade Maywand was bulldozed through the heart of Kabul to create a broad avenue of modernity, for example) or the radial street pattern of Washington or Paris. But planners also saw in Afghan cities the home of Aryans, and they wanted to re-make those cities in a way that produced order and discipline on what they saw as the unplanned and therefor uncontrolled way in which the interiors of cities had evolved. Mostly these projects died stillborn for lack of money. One, however, left its mark on the landscape and that was at Balkh in the north, which was identified by Aryanists as “the cradle of Aryanism” and where a concentric pattern of streets linked avenues radiating from a central point was actually bulldozed out of the landscape. Money ran out there too and other than the street pattern, still visible from the air, nothing further was developed. Balkh, one of the four greatest cities of Central Asia (along with Bukhara, Samarqand, and Herat) of the medieval and early modern Islamic world, had been eclipsed by the nearby Mazar-i Sharif nearly a century before and offered something of a tabula rasa for development but the lack of government funds for investment and little interest in Afghanistan’s small group of private investors doomed the project.