https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-54581-8_10?fbclid=IwY2xjawEusZtleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHcnv_Fmjo984WgMK2RukL_6mJGaySea4X1_J4ngI79gpHjR1okm_SNA2tQ_aem_j2SiWsoXR4kUtggNra5kwwOn Tuesday, 26 April 1966 at 5:22 am, an earthquake with a magnitude of 5.2 struck Soviet Uzbekistan. The epicentre lay directly under Tashkent, the Uzbek capital and the fourth biggest city in the Soviet Union. 84,000 apartments were turned to rubble, hundreds of administrative buildings, schools, and medical facilities were razed, and some 300,000 people were left homeless. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev immediately vowed to rebuild the city ‘more beautiful’ than ever. Armies of workers arrived from across the Soviet Union to participate in the reconstruction effort. In the years that followed, not only was Tashkent comprehensively rebuilt, but the reconstruction project itself was portrayed as an unprecedented achievement of Soviet solidarity and technical prowess. Tashkent’s resurrection, in other words, was soon elevated out of the status of a mere ‘event’, and instead became something of a projection surface for the ideals of political leaders and socialist planners resident throughout the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The discussions about reconstructing the city that unfolded from the late 1960s, this chapter argues, are revealing of the problems posed by spatially specific questions of climate, geology, and ‘tradition’ in the face of the universalising pretences of urban modernism and socialist ideology.
