Travel Notes. Tashkent - New York: America - Uzbekistan

Anyone who has lived in New York City should be able to adapt to life in Uzbekistan's capital, especially West Siders (East Siders tend to have high-paying jobs). New Yorkers live in blocks of flats, take the subway and buses, and eat from street vendors, so do residents of Tashkent. New Yorkers feel they are more sophisticated than anyone else in the country, so do Tashkent's inhabitants. New York is the center of intellectual life for the USA, Tashkent plays the same role in Uzbekistan. New York has Lincoln Center, Tashkent the Navoi Opera House; New York has the Astoria Film Studios, Tashkent, UzbekFilm; New York has its Broadway, Tashkent has its own Broadway. To better understand Uzbekistan, just think about its similarities to America.

In his travel book about Central Asia, Robert Kaplan wrote a harsh description of Tashkent's tower blocks, and gave a negative review to Tashkent and Uzbekistan. But Kaplan only saw the high-rises from the outside. From the inside, things look different. When I lived in Tashkent, in a standard apartment in Center-1 off Pushkin Street (the Central Park West or Park Avenue of Tashkent) and read Kaplan, I thought to myself: Kaplan has never been inside. Tashkent apartments are nicer than their equivalents in Manhattan. Like New York, Tashkent has a great deal of culture available, ranging from floor shows to high art.

While in Tashkent, I regularly enjoyed ballet and opera at the Opera House, visited the film studios, went to concerts of traditional Uzbek music and European classical symphonies at the music conservatory, toured the art galleries, and especially enjoyed the range of theatres, both Russian and Uzbek. I attended experimental and avant-garde plays; for example, Tashkent's longest-running musical, an adaptation of John Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat which has been playing for ten yearsas well as Uzbek folk melodramas. Not to mention the puppet theatre and youth theatre.

Transportation, although old-fashioned, is better in Tashkent than New York. I rode the metro, the buses, the trams, and trains. They are on-time and inexpensive. More crowded than in Manhattan, but far cheaper. And when I lived in Tashkent, you could get from anywhere, to anywhere by taxi or private carforonly a dollarortwo.

Although it has a Broadway, Tashkent does not have a Wall Street, yet. But the stock exchange building is sitting downtown waiting for the capitalist system to be unleashed. If the economy opens up, I am confident that Tashkent will become a business and economic center as well. I have never met more enterprising businesspeople. A walk down Navoi street's row of electronic shops gives a hint of a very rich future to come, when barriers to trade are removed.

Like New York , Tashkent is an urban oasis amidst an agricultural landscape. New York State is primarily agricultural. So is Uzbekistan, outside the capital region. And in the countryside, the social structure perhaps resemble. This rural Uzbekistan was visited by the renowned America poet Langston Hughes in the 1930s. Hughes stayed in what is now the Meridien Hotel in Tashkent before touring the countryside, and wrote about this experience in his autobiographyit wasn't as nice then as it is today! Yet, during the Great Depression and Jim Crow era in America, the Soviet system looked more promising than capitalism to some, and Hughes wrote an account of his trip to collective farms. There he encountered African-Americans from the South who had come to help develop the cotton industry. And it was while traveling in neighboring Turkmenistan (also a major Soviet cotton producer) for a book he called An American Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia, that Hughes met Arthur Koestlerand Koestler observed the terrifying Atta Kurdov show trial in Ashkhabad that inspired his rejection of communism, the basis for his anti-communist novel Darkness at Noon.

At that point, Hughes was not so critical, and wrote movingly of his experiences. "I saw the Cotton College. I visited the big building of the Cotton Trust at Tashkent. I studied charts. I looked at statistics. But I shall always remember what the natives themselves told me: 'Before, there were no schools for Uzbek childrennow, there are. Before, we lived in debt and fearnow, we are free. Before, women were bought and soldnow, no more. Before, the land and the water belonged to the beystoday, they are oursand we share the cotton." He spent Christmas on a collective farm with graduates of Tuskegee Institute, Hampton College, and cotton farmers from Dixie who were introducing American seeds and cultivation techniquessome of which are still used today.

Because of this agricultural base, Uzbekistan has been able to support to an educated elite for hundreds of years. City life, with all its cosmopolitan attractions, is a feature of Uzbekistan. Before the collapse of communism, it was the third most populous Soviet republic and Tashkent the fourth largest city in the USSR after Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev. Prior to the 1917 Revolution, Tashkent had been a leading Russian city. Among its most famous residents was Alexander Kerensky, who moved there in 1889, when his father became superintendent of schools. A man from Tashkent, not Lenin (interestingly, Kerensky's father was Lenin's teacher elsewhere, but that is another story), overthrew the Tsar.

Although today's Uzbek national culture is a self-conscious project to replace a Soviet identity with a national one, it is not inauthentic. Some peculiarities result from an attempt to create a national multiethnic state based on geography rather than language, religion, or race. But the multiculturalist project of the independence era, to make geography rather than language or ethnicity the determining factor, goes beyond Soviet fashions, towards an American sense of identity rooted in place rather than time. Anyone born in the land of Uzbekistan is counted as a citizen of Uzbekistan, just as anyone born in the United States can be an American citizen. Uzbekistan's multicultural spectacles can be understood in the context of American extravaganzas and variety shows (though ours are on a smaller scale) that feature a mix of Salsa, Hip-Hop, Rock and Roll, Country-Western, Bluegrass, Folk, Broadway show tunes, etal.

The land between the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers has been cultivated, by many civilizations, for some two-and-a-half millennia. Its rulers have included Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, and Tamerlane (whose statue now takes the place of Karl Marx in the center of Tashkent). Alexander's legendary wife Roxana was born in what is now Uzbekistan. Whether Greek, Persian, Turk, or Mongol, the warriors of the steppe who settled in the farmlands of Transoxiana left remnants of their cultures, which have been absorbed, adapted, and recycled by those following them. Buddhist stupas, buried in sand, dot a landscape of mosques and madrassas that repeat Buddhist forms, Islamic tombs are decorated with Pythagorean geometrical designs, the Persian New Year of Navruz is a state holiday of Uzbekistan. Uzbeks drink from Chinese-style teacups, wear Turkish-style skullcaps, keep up Arab religious traditions, blended with an Eastern mysticism of dervishes and shrines.

Not to mention centuries of Jewish settlement, and the influx of traders from across the Eurasian continent who traveled the Silk Road over the centuries. The European visitor to Uzbekistan most famous in the West, of course, remains Marco Polo. This adaptability is a characteristic of Uzbekistan that bears some resemblance to "American ingenuity".

Although the land has had many masters, Uzbeks recognize Uzbek Khan as the founder of the nation. He is known for converting the Mongol Golden Horde, ancestors of today's Uzbek nation. Eventually, three khanates emerged: Khiva, Bukhara, and Kokand. They dominated the region even through the first period of Russian colonization, which began in the 1860s. Only the Bolshevik revolution led to their demise, as it had the Czars. Although there are some 97 tribes that make up the peoples of Uzbekistan, according to Iraj Bashiri, professor of Central Asian Studies at the University of Minnesota, most have been assimilated into the Uzbek majority, known to the Russians as Sarts, and lost their tribal identities. Two exceptions are the Turki and Quipchac, who maintain tribal connections, but they are the exception, rather than the rule. Uzbekistan is not a tribal society, though it does have clans based on geographic origin, roughly comparable to regionalism found in the US. Think of the Kennedys of Boston, the Daleys of Chicago and the Bushes of Texas and Florida, and you have some idea.

As a historical entrepot, literally an oasis of civilization on the Silk Road through the Central Asian deserts, Uzbekistan has traditionally been a cosmopolitan world trade center, as well as a center of learning, a combination of Hong Kong and Cambridge. The madrassas of Bukhara were legendary throughout Islam, until the Soviet period. For example, the most significant collection of Hadith was composed by the Imam al-Bukhari. This tradition revived with the establishment of the Uzbek Academy of Sciences in 1943.

Over time, the Uzbek language has been written in different alphabets. Until 1928, it was in Arabic; until 1940, like Turkey's, in Latin; and until independence in 1991, Cyrillic. After the collapse of the USSR, Uzbekistan reverted to Latin, rather than Arabic script, casting its lot with the West. Thus, despite closed borders during Soviet times, the civilizations of Uzbekistan have a long history of cosmopolitanism, legacies of desert oases, camel caravans, and ancient trade routes which have been preserved to this day. Even today, among the most prestigious elements of any Uzbek wedding is the presence of a foreigner, preferably from another continent. (In the 1930s, Langston Hughes attended an Uzbek wedding as an honored guest.) While rooted in their land, the citizens of Uzbekistan are, simultaneously, citizens of the world. And the historical and geographical link to Tamerlane, who married a daughter of Genghis Khan, is not a pure concoction. For example, Bukhara was ruled by descendants of Genghis Khan until the Soviets deposed the Emir. They were Tajik-speaking Uzbeks, and the last Emir had been educated in Russia.

Tashkent was seen as an international city of "friendship of peoples" and is portrayed in those terms in Sharaf Rashidov's propaganda text, The Banner of Friendship. The book documents his travels abroad as a goodwill ambassador on behalf of the USSR, including a memorable description of a long flight to Havana, Cuba followed by an international conference. This role of Uzbeks, as representatives of the Soviet Union to the Americas, Africa, and Asia, cannot be underestimated. Such visits, which involved the artistic and cultural intelligentsia as well as bureaucrats, were in keeping with an internationalist cultural orientation. When I lived in Tashkent, there was a new nightclub called "The Che Guevara" frequented by NGO staffers, as well as locals, a reminder that Uzbeks were in the vanguard of the USSR's outreach to the Third World.

All of this cultural history is still on view in Tashkent. Like the layers of a geological formation, the past is preserved underneath the present, providing a fascinating context for Uzbek-American relations. Tashkent is as interesting a city to visit, and to live in, as New York, if one takes the time to.