Tashkent - a history lesson

Flying into Tashkent is a little bit of heading into the unknown. This region is still frontier country, with a Wild West feel about it (complete with horses and dodgy hats); a place where gold is the currency you can trust, haute cuisine isn’t high on the priority list and no one trusts the government. Emerging out of a Post Communist world there is a sense of opportunity, tinged with melancholy for the pre communist times and the links with the cultural past that have been buried by Russia for so long.

Unusually, and in the realm of great pub quiz trivia, Uzbekistan is one of only two doubly landlocked countries in the world (the other is Liechtenstein). It shares borders with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan. Those sorts of neighbours are only going to help in propagating the Central Asian weirdness we were looking for…. The first civilizations to appear in Uzbekistan were Sogdiana, Bactria and Khwarezm (handy for Scrabble). The legendary Alexander the Great conquered Sogdiana and Bactria in 327 BC, marrying Roxanne, daughter of a local Sogdian chieftain.
As Uzbekistan is in the middle of Central Asia it has been trampled over by anyone in history invading from the east and then retreating back home – a bit like Poland with camels. It was conquered by Muslim Arabs between the 7th and 8thC AD with the Persian Samanid dynasty establishing an empire in the 9thC. The territory was then overrun by Genghis Khan and his Mongol tribes in 1220. In the 1300s, Timur (meaning ‘iron’), known in the west as Tamerlane, overpowered the Mongols and built an empire. In his military campaigns he reached as far as the Middle East, defeating Ottoman Emperor Bayazid and “rescuing” Europe from Turkish conquest. Timur sought to build a capital of his empire in Samarkand (largely a Tajik-populated city).

In the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire began to expand. The "Great Game" period is generally regarded as running from approximately 1813 to the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907. Following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 a second less intensive phase followed. At the start of the 19th century there were only 2,000 miles separating British India and the outlying regions of the Tsarist Russia. Much of the land in between was romantically unmapped.

By the beginning of the 20thC, Central Asia was firmly in the hands of Russia and despite some early resistance to the Bolsheviks, Uzbekistan and the rest of Central Asia became subjugated into the Soviet Union. On August 31, 1991, a somewhat bewildered Uzbekistan declared independence and stepped, blinking, from behind the iron curtain. In the subsequent ethnic tensions, two million Russians left the country for Mother Russia.

As for recent political strife, on May 13 2005, protests broke out in Andijan in the Fergana Valley over the imprisonment of 23 Muslims accused of being Islamist extremists. The protestors took thirty hostages. Soldiers started to fire on the protestors, leaving many of them dead. The number of dead is greatly disputed varying from 176 to 1,000. On the same day in Tashkent, a man mistakenly believed to be a suicide bomber was shot dead outside the Israeli Embassy. Ideal holiday material!

As you’d expect given that sort of pedigree Tashkent has “issues”. It is ancient city mired in turbulent history and was a major caravan crossroads on the Silk Road. It started life as an oasis near the foothills of the western Tien Shan Mountains. In the 7thC the capital was called Ming-Uruk ("Thousand Apricot Orchard"), and the area was famous for horses, cattle, gold, and precious stones. In 751AD, the Chinese invaded and provoked an Arab invasion in return. The Arabs were victorious at the Battle of Talas, and the region subsequently came under the sway of Islam.

Under the Samanid dynasty, the city came to be known as Binkath. However, the Arabs retained the old name of Chash, pronouncing it Shash instead. The modern Turkic name of Tashkent (City of Stone) comes from the Kara-Khanid rule in the 10th century.

The city was destroyed by Genghis Khan in 1219, although the great conqueror had found that someone had got there first - the Khorezmshah had already sacked the city in 1214. Under the Timurids and subsequent Shaybanid dynasties the city revived, despite occasional attacks by the Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Persians, Mongols, Oirats and Kalmyks. Not the friendliest neighbours then.

In 1809, when Tashkent was annexed to the Khanate of Kokand, the city was considered the richest in Central Asia. In May 1865, General Cherniaev, acting against the direct orders of the Tsar, and outnumbered at least 15-1, staged a daring night attack against Tashkent with her 25 kilometer long wall, 11 gates and 30,000 defenders. While a small contingent staged a diversionary attack, the main force penetrated the walls, led by a Russian Orthodox priest armed only with a crucifix, and a lot of faith…. Although defence was stiff, the Russians captured the city after two days of heavy fighting and the loss of only 25 men.

Cherniaev, dubbed the “Lion of Tashkent” by city elders eager to suck up to their conqueror, staged a “hearts-and-minds” campaign to win the population over. He abolished taxes for a year, rode unarmed through the streets and bazaars meeting common people, and appointed himself "Military Governor of Tashkent", recommending to Tsar Alexander II that the city be made an independent khanate under Russian protection. Although a popular approach with the people (he is lucky enough to have a tube station named after him today) the Tsar regarded him as a loose cannon, and soon replaced him with General Konstantin Petrovich Von Kaufman. Far from granting Tashkent its independence, the city became the capital of the new territory of Russian Turkistan, with Kaufman as first Governor-General. Tashkent was later a center of espionage in the Great Game rivalry between Russia and Great Britain over Central Asia.

With the fall of the Russian Empire, Tashkent became the capital of the catchily titled ‘Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic’ (Turkestan ASSR). The new regime was threatened by White forces, British spies, basmachi, revolts from within, and purges ordered from Moscow and unsurprisingly didn’t make it onto the tourist map.

On April 25 1966, Tashkent was destroyed by a huge earthquake (7.5 on the Richter scale). The Russians then had free hand to create a “model Soviet city” of wide shady streets, parks, immense plazas for military parades, fountains, monuments, and acres of apartment blocks. At that time residents of Tashkent began to realise that they were not being consulted in the planning, or necessarily being hired in the rebuilding. The problem exploded when Moscow announced that 20% of the new buildings would be given to the mostly Russian “volunteers”, who would be staying permanently. The subsequent riots were called the Pakhtakor Incident, after the stadium where the trouble began, and eventually the Red Army had to be called in to maintain order. Of course, some of this dissatisfaction may be directly connected to the appalling Russian architecture the Uzbeks were faced with. A whole city of Russified concrete boxes is enough to bring out the revolutionary in most aesthetically appreciative people.