Tashkent: A Guide to Soviet Modernist Architecture, 1955–1991

Tashkent, the fourth megalopolis in the USSR and the largest city in the Soviet Central Asia, was an inviting location for a variety of large modernist developments.

However, along with the size of the city, they were also a product of political will. The Soviet government, supported by local elites, envisioned the city as the “capital of the Soviet East,” a showcase for socialism to be presented to the countries of the Non-Aligned Movement. This meant that much more was expected of Tashkent’s architecture than of that of any other Soviet city. The capital of Uzbekistan had to maintain its southern or, as the late Soviet generations saw it, “eastern,” character, yet it was supposed to look dynamic and modern in comparison to the ancient capitals of Central Asia, such as Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva, and Kokand. 

Guided by these imperatives, the urban planners of Tashkent decided to build a new modernist capital not near but in the center of a city that dated back thousands of years. This vision predetermined the urban planning and the typology and character of Tashkent’s key buildings of the 1960s to 1980s. Discussing fifty modernist buildings in the city, the authors trace the general evolution of Tashkent’s architecture, with its protagonists and the various (sometimes conflicting) cultural contexts that shaped these impressive buildings in one of the most unusual of the world’s modernist capitals.

About the Authors

Boris Chukhovich (b. 1962, Tashkent) is an art and architectural historian and a curator. He graduated in architecture from Tashkent Polytechnic Institute in 1984, worked as an architect, and, after defending his thesis in art history (1992), as a researcher in the Sociology Department of the Institute of Art History (Tashkent). After immigrating to Canada in 1998, he worked with various universities in Montreal, Quebec, and Toronto and was a guest researcher at Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme (Paris, 2014) and the Polytechnic University of Milan (2022–2023). His projects as a curator include Retour de la métaphore (Montreal, 2007) and Lingua Franca/франк тили (with Georgy Mamedov and Olga Shatalova, Central Asia Pavilion, 54th Venice Biennale). He is the co-creator of the project Tashkent Modernism XX/XXI, which aims to preserve the city’s modernist architecture. Recent publications include the book Usto Mumin's Love, Friendship, Eternity (2023).

Olga Kazakova (b.1983, Moscow) is an architectural historian. She graduated in Art History from Moscow State University and worked as a senior researcher at the Department of the History of Modern Architecture at the Research Institute of the Theory and History of Architecture and Urban Planning at the Russian Academy of Architecture and Construction. Her thesis examined Soviet architecture of the Khrushchev Thaw. Since 2017, she has been a lecturer in the Art History Department of the Higher School of Economics (Moscow). She is a co-founder and director of the Institute of Modernism, an independent non-profit organization for architectural research  (2018). She has curated exhibitions on Soviet architecture and applied art. She is the author of over 30 articles and co-author of books on the history of Soviet modernist architecture, including Aesthetics of the Thaw: The New in Architecture, Art, and Culture (2013), Leonid Pavlov (with Anna Bronovitskaya, 2015), and The Architecture of Soviet Diplomacy (with Felix Novikov, 2021).