Urban Life in Post-Soviet Asia

Catharine Alexander, Victor Buchli, Caroline Humphrey, Catharine Alexander, Victor Buchli, Caroline Humphrey

• Publisher: UCL Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781135392086
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Diritto
• Subtopic: Teoria e pratica del diritto

Capturing a unique historical moment, this book examines the changes in urban life since the collapse of the Soviet Union from an ethnographic perspective, thus addressing significant gaps in the literature on cities, Central Asia and post-socialism.

It encompasses Tashkent, Almaty, Astana and Ulan-Ude: four cities with quite different responses to the fall of the Soviet Union. Each chapter takes a theme of central significance across this huge geographical terrain, addresses it through one city and contextualizes it by reference to the other sites in this volume. The structure of the book moves from nostalgia and memories of the Soviet past to examine how current changes are being experienced and imagined through the shifting materialities, temporalities and political economies of urban life. Privatization is giving rise to new social geographies, while ethnic and religious sensibilities are creating emergent networks of sacred sites. But, however much ideologies are changing, cities also provide a constant lived mnemonic of lost configurations of ideology and practice, acting as signposts to bankrupted futures. Urban Life in Post-Soviet Asia provides a detailed account of the changing nature of urban life in post-Soviet Asia, clearly elucidating the centrality of these urban transformations to citizens' understandings of their own socio-economic condition.

1
INTRODUCTION

Catherine Alexander and Victor Buchli

The four cities in our study were chosen to represent contrasting aspects of urban life in the former USSR.¹ Our research focused on the wider results of the overarching socialist system’s collapse by considering not the metropolitan centre (Moscow), but pivotal points of the provincial structure. For this reason, we chose cities in the Central Asian provinces in order to examine the links between the engine of modernisation, ‘the city’, and the diverse cultures, societies and religions of these former socialist spaces. As a comparative project, our studies aimed to contrast cities of different scale and economic prosperity, from the flourishing cities of Almaty and Astana to the socially and economically depressed Buryat city of Ulan-Ude, and to encompass cities of varied political status.² One further key point of contrast is the juxtaposition of cities located in Islamic (Tashkent, Almaty and Astana) and Buddhist (Ulan-Ude) regions. Similarly, as this was a collaborative project involving researchers from the Anglo-American, Soviet and post-Soviet traditions, the range of concerns is varied, as well as the analytical styles. It is hoped that this eclectic approach will convey to the reader the broad range of approaches that have been brought to bear on these post-Soviet Asian cities and thereby provide the possibility to begin to establish a common horizon of research topics and approaches.

In our cities, as elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, a multitude of alternative practices and second economies supported the failing Soviet system. Nevertheless, there was at least a broad consensus as to what a city should be – even if only as an aspiration. By the same token, it was clear what it meant to be an urban citizen and thereby located in the very engine of social progress, which was especially potent for the discourse of Soviet regional development. However, conditions have now changed considerably. Thus, Ulan-Ude in Buryatia is largely poor and undergoing great hardship with the end of its connection with Moscow. Tashkent, once the principal city of Central Asia and a thriving cultural centre, has given economic primacy to Almaty and Astana in Kazakhstan and, though undeniably still a prosperous city, reflects the government’s inward turn. Almaty and Astana are, in many ways, unrepresentative of the plethora of collapsed cities in Kazakhstan, yet vividly illustrate the symbolic as well as economic and social importance of cities in the post-socialist era. The political capital has moved from Almaty to Astana where an elite vision of a contemporary Eurasian future is being played out through the creation of a new capital, bright with shimmering buildings designed by foreign architects.

These four cities demonstrate markedly different responses to the end of the Soviet Union. As Soviet understandings of the relationship between the state and citizenry unravelled, so the gaps, cracks and disjunctions between the planned system and the lived experience began to dominate, both in terms of economic collapse and also as regards how cities and what they stood for could be imagined. The initial, common response was simply to declare a state of chaos (see Nazpary 2001). The 14 years that have elapsed since the end of the Soviet Union now afford a perspective that has allowed us to analyse how other urban practices, orders and materialities have begun to appear alongside new ways of imagining the city. Apart from anything else, we have tried to combine in this volume a range of perspectives on the city that has not previously been attempted: from imaginative and cosmological landscapes through shifting political economies and administrative viewpoints to changing architectural forms and the homeless who have most clearly suffered most in the post-socialist regimes. Taken as a whole, these perspectives suggest the complexity of city living at a time of crisis.

In the rest of this introductory chapter we provide an overview of the relationship between anthropology, and theories and practices of the city and planning, especially in the context of socialist cities. Then, after a broad background to the region, we examine the core questions and themes that wind through the book from the vexed issues of ever-changing legitimate orders to social and material transformations in the cities’ geographies as privatisation of public space and the influx of rural migrants radically change the experience of the city. We end with an exploration of the symbolic potency of cities as they serve to express emerging elite views of national futures.

Anthropology and the city

Despite the constant need to shore up the unwieldy structure of the Soviet Union, its collapse nevertheless shattered an overarching ideological framework, an economic structure and a system of relations between people, their natural and built environment and nations. The effect was profound ontological and epistemological uncertainty which, to some extent, still continues. Without a clear, common understanding of how connections are achieved, the possibility of social reproduction is curtailed; this encompasses those connections which range from temporal and spatial orientation, through kin relations to political, economic and cosmological affiliation. Since 1991, the painful and uncertain process, in part documented here, of (re)forging links and trying to create a new social consensus, has been unfolding.

The role of cities in this process of material, systemic and cognitive coming apart and then re-connecting is vital. In the Soviet Union, cities were the cradle of progress, the place of modernity and, after the 1930s, quite distinct from a rural way of life. In previously largely un-urbanised Kazakhstan and Siberia, the contrast between the promise of urban life and ‘traditional’ ways was even more pronounced. Though major cities had existed in Uzbekistan for several centuries, it was their Sovietisation that transformed them into generative nodes of transformative modernity. The ultimate failure of the underlying system thus provoked a crisis of knowing that played back directly into understandings of the self. Changed property relations and newly restricted spaces after privatisation, visible social and ethnic segregation, the ‘blurring’ of urban and rural, the emergence of sacred urban topologies, and the physical crumbling of both old and contemporary buildings – all of these social, material and cognitive transformations after 1991 raised the question of how to recognise ‘a city’ and, along with that, what it meant to be an urban citizen and modern.

The following brief overview of developments in the ideas and practices of the socialist city – and subsequently the post-socialist city – shows (perhaps unexpected) parallels with the methods and theoretical developments in urban sociology and anthropology. In the first place, both socialist planning (inspired by Marx and Engels’ privileging of daily economic life) and anthropology have a commitment to the small-scale, perceiving, in the minutiae of the everyday, the seed of the macro-scale and the extended system: the kitchen was just one end of a continuum that extended to the city and the nation (see for example Buchli 1999). The differences should be emphasised too. Socialist planning was also by its nature interventionist and instrumental in seeking to extend this understanding to implement broader social reforms and a degree of rationalised uniformity.³ These beliefs were given full expression in the planning manifestos of Modern Movement theoreticians, most completely in works dedicated to the creation of the socialist city such as Nikolai Miliutin’s Sotsgorod (Socialist City). Significantly, figures such as Miliutin were also in touch with key proponents of the Garden City Movement.

Twisting through the trajectories of urban anthropology and socialist planning alike are the influential and pervasive effects of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City Movement. Established at the turn of the twentieth century and inspired by Howard’s seminal writings (1946), the movement aimed to address the worst evils of rapid urbanisation and industrialisation through a network of small conurbations that combined the best that the city and the country had to offer. His ideas on social organisation (and their materialisation) inspired early socialist planners and architects, but also indirectly fed into a strand of ethnographic enquiry that valorised the small community over the centrally planned and sought to find and explain systems of local order amid apparent chaos. The irony perhaps is that, according to some accounts, Howard was at best a synthesiser of other people’s ideas, at worst just a hard-headed Victorian businessman with an eye to making a sound investment in undervalued rural land. Whatever the final judgement of Howard’s originality, his genius undoubtedly lay in linking earlier utopian socialist writings with his experience of a recently rebuilt Chicago City Beautiful and contemporary social concerns.

The problems and challenges encountered by planners in realising a city that matched socialist expectations of social and industrial harmony in toto have been mirrored in theoretical attempts to gauge ‘the city’ in all its complex diversity. Just as socialist cities in practice usually lagged far behind their plans, so different theoretical approaches have tended to foreground one aspect of the city at the cost of others. Anthropology, as discussed below, has only recently moved to consider the full intricacy and experience of the city as something to be studied sui generis, as well as a framing for social fields or communities within it.

The four cities of the book

In this section we give a brief background to each city together with an overview of how each one is attempting to re-connect itself temporally and spatially both to the new state and to the wider world. Of the four cities, Almaty and Astana can broadly be said to have been founded in the nineteenth century as Russian trading and militarised outposts.⁴ By contrast, Ulan-Ude dates back to the late seventeenth century and, although Tokhtakhodzhaeva’s chapter largely deals with Tashkent from the Russian Tsarist presence onwards, the city had in fact registered its urban presence several centuries earlier. As one of the great trading cities of the Silk Road linking China and Europe, there are claims that Tashkent’s origins go back as far as the second century BC. With more confidence, Tashkent’s presence can be identified from the ninth century onwards as a hub of commerce and government. In terms of more recent status, all four cities either are, or have recently been, Republican capitals. Tashkent and Ulan-Ude were the capitals of Uzbekistan and Buryatia during the Soviet Union – and continued as such afterwards, Tashkent as the capital of the independent Republic of Uzbekistan and Ulan-Ude the capital of the Buryat Republic within Russia. Soviet Alma-Ata⁵ was made the capital of the Socialist Kazakh Republic in 1929, and continued as the main city of Kazakhstan after 1991 with its name changed to Almaty until, in 1997, the government moved the capital to a small town, Tselinograd, in the middle of the steppe, renaming it first Akmola, after an earlier name of the town, and then changing it to the current name: Astana. Of all the cities considered here, therefore, Astana is the only one that was not a capital city during the Soviet Union.

Despite the broadest of common histories,⁶ however, the contemporary directions being taken by each city are dramatically different, both in terms of how politicians, administrations and citizens are variously choosing to ally and align themselves geographically, and also in relation to the particular temporal narratives that are being drawn upon to explain, legitimate and direct national and metropolitan policies. This section focuses on how and where these cities are choosing to make affiliations following the collapse of the Soviet Union with all the relational systems that had been so entailed. Nevertheless, it is worth emphasising that these new strategies for connection and thus social reproduction differ between urban constituencies and are still shifting. Kazakhstan’s relationship with Russia, for example, over the last decade has been decidedly coy from early assertions of independence, to celebrating the year of Russian and Kazakh friendship in 2004 – both of which occurred alongside a distinct process of Kazakhification: encouraging the placing of Kazakh nationals in prominent positions and using the Kazakh language in place of Russian.

Ulan-Ude is the capital of the Republic of Buryatia in Russia, a region with an indigenous Buryat-Mongolian population but dominated numerically by Russians. Located in an area with few resources, it does not attract foreign interest or investment. Ulan-Ude, the city studied from most directions in this book, is by far the most impoverished, isolated and backward-looking city. Here, the collapse of Soviet central planning and new uncertainties in relations with Moscow have not resulted in many links being made elsewhere. Despite being a formerly important commercial and industrial region of eastern Siberia, there is little foreign investment and almost no open foreign presence other than curious tourists. The politics and social realignments that are played out in the city are more concerned with re-configuring internal roles and struggles for access to scarce resources (see Humphrey, this volume). The conservative, backward-looking ethos of the city is epitomised by the giant statue of the Head of Lenin that still dominates the physically unchanged main square. Meanwhile, the drab industrial townships on the outskirts, clustered around mostly defunct factories, continue to maintain highly localised subcultures. At the same time, the city is experiencing an efflorescence of varied religions. Here, unlike Kazakhstan where overseas interest is evident, the new shamanic, Buddhist and Russian Orthodox sacred sites are local creations with only tentative links to the wider world. As with all the cities written about in this book, social distinctions have become much sharper – gulfs that are physically mirrored by the separate locations of rich and poor, Buryat and Russian, rural migrants and established city-dwellers.

In some ways Tashkent could be categorised as being between Ulan-Ude and the old and new capitals of Kazakhstan. The old part of the city with its rabbit warren of tiny streets, enclosed dwellings and largely self-contained quarters could be described as being resistant to new forms of social and economic organisation. Certainly, there is little in the external appearance of the old city’s mahallas (neighbourhood quarters) to suggest an enthusiastic embrace of new modes of relating to the wider world. Tashkent’s citizens from the more open, grander New City explicitly play up the difference, pointing to the old city as ‘another world’, ‘dangerous’ and shut-off. The irony is that, in another aesthetic, the old quarters are also seen as picturesque and, as a consequence, some eighteenth-century dwellings have been sold off to make way for the gleamingly new houses of the rich who wish to enjoy the ‘setting’ of the old city: effectively orientalising their environment into a timeless, static other. Charming or no, such new houses are invariably ringed by high spiked iron railings.

Otherwise, temporally, Tashkent, as Uzbekistan’s capital is playing a similar game to Kazakhstan’s cities. The Uzbek presence⁷ has been increasingly emphasised: Timurlane, as heroic founder of the nation, is literally given central place in Tashkent’s main park; museums celebrating Uzbek heritage are given state sanction, funding and prime locations. The past, in other words, is being manipulated to suggest a single genealogy of Uzbek glory that was temporarily overshadowed by the Soviet regime. As Tokhtakhodzhaeva suggests in her chapter, however, there are conflicting views about temporal affiliations. While nationalist planners and architects downplay the Soviet period, others (as in Ulan-Ude) mourn the loss of Socialist enlightenment, the effects on the city of migration from rural areas and the brasher manifestations of new wealth in the city. Despite potential wealth in the energy and other sectors, slow development in implementing market reforms, together with a reluctance to privatise the more lucrative state assets, means that external involvement in Uzbekistan is limited, and this is reflected in Tashkent. Significantly larger⁸ and more imposing in sheer scale than any other city in Central Asia, as well as having a past as the Soviet Central Asian centre for the highest excellence in culture and education, there is none the less a sense in Tashkent of carefully moderated engagement with the external world.

Kazakhstan’s old and new capitals, Almaty and Astana, are markedly different again in terms of their orientation to global markets and influence. One brief explanation is the huge mineral and energy resources of the country that have acted as magnets to major foreign investors. Of equal importance, however, was the government’s early decision to adopt the ‘shock therapy’ approach to implementing wholesale market reforms, restructuring and privatisation. This included allowing foreign nationals to buy enterprises foundering through lack of subsidies. One result is that while the distinctions between social classes again became sharpened and identifiable...