Famous pre-revolutionary Prokudin-Gorskiy photos of Uzbekistan

If you haven't had the money, time, or will yet to visit the Bukharan citadel and peruse the black and whites taken by the famous tsarist photographer, Sergey M. Prokudin-Gorskiy, that hang throughout the massive complex of intricate passageways and rooms, then here is a smattering of some of my favorites retouched in color. These come compliments of the website, Fergana.ru, which has the distinction of being perhaps the most filtered website in Uzbekistan these days. More of Prokudin-Gorskiy's colorized photos of the Russian Empire can be seen the US Library of Congress' online exhibit, The Empire that was Russia.

Below is my most favorite of all the pictures. It's a picture of the last emir of Bukhara before socialist revolutionary fervor and Turkic pan-nationalism swept through the region upending for once and for all the privilege of the Central Asian khans of antiquity. I could seriously kill for this guy's lapis lazuli, silk chupan (Central Asian overcoat). It's got to be one of the most beautiful articles of clothing ever made by human hands. It's also a striking contrast to the Bukharan brown the pervades the city and to what everyone else could afford to wear in Bukhara circa 1910. As flawed as the Russian Revolution may have been, it did bring certain benefits, particularly to the Central Asians who, though not the equivalent of Russian serfs, were the subjects of greedy and dictatorial monarchs, nonetheless.



One such revolutionary benefit bestowed upon Central Asian women was the right to cast off the traditional burqa as depicted in the picture below. This picture should serve as proof enough that modern-day Uzbekistan was, not too long ago, much closer to modern-day Afghanistan than to Imperial Russia in culture and world view. Of course, many older Central Asian women continued to prefer this manner of dress, even many years after the Russian Revolution. That said, I have no doubt that some of the Soviet-organized "burqa burnings" in the city centers of Samarkand and Bukhara emanated from a genuine desire of Central Asian women to see and hear what lay outside the realm of the home and to be elevated to a social and political position in life somewhat more comparable to that of their male counterparts.

Perhaps it's my judgmental, western bias that I make such normative statements, but I would remind the reader that traditional high Turkic/Mongolian culture elevated women to a much higher social standing than that of the competing Islamic culture. Moreover, each of these cultures has an equal and just as long-running claim to the modern-day agnostic/atheistic Soviet -stans, koran-thumping fundamentalist Afghanistan, liberal-nationalist Turkey, and the not-so-Islamic Republic of Iran. Whether any of these countries wishes to celebrate its Mongolian, "Wild East" connection to an equal degree as its Islamic connection is another complex question of identity given the historical legacy of such infamous Mongols as Genghis (Chingiz) Khan and his four filial successors.



Here's a beautiful and noble-looking picture of what a traditional, nomadic Kipchak or northern Uzbek woman would wear in public. To continue the argument started above about the status of women in nomadic Turkic versus city-dwelling Islamic culture, notice how much less Islamicized (colorful Turkic motifs, hat, unseen necklace, etc) and how more functional her dress is, and what that means for her physical ability to both accomplish her duties and appreciate the world outside her home, as well as be appreciated by others.



The word "Uzbek" as it relates to the ethnicity has seen a tortuous journey through the long-line of Soviet ethnographers who have sought to describe the numerous ethnic groups inhabiting Central Asia. In its narrowest of meanings, Uzbek meant a nomadic member of he Oz'bek (oz = self, bek = noble) tribe that moved into the Syr Darya (northern) region of modern-day Uzbekistan in the 16th century. This was contrasted with the word "Tajik" or "Sart" who actually could be of Turkic, Persian, Jewish or Arab descent or some combination thereof, yet who lived in one of the ancient city-states of Bukhara, Khiva, or Kokand in a traditional, mud-brick assembly with rooms facing inward toward a central Roman/Persian courtyard.

The distinction, of course, between "Sart" and "Uzbek" was not ethnic at all originally but rather comparable to the words "urban" and "rural". One group roamed the Central Asian steppes free from any and all physical encumbrances playing the role of the raider/aggressor, while the other sought to free itself entirely from the harsh realities of the uncivilized, nomadic world by remaining firmly entrenched in its urban sanctuary behind thick, defensive walls that had seen and withstood the passing through of many other such nomadic groups. One group reaped what others had sown for it, while the other reaped only what it had sown.

The Soviet ethnographers, in an attempt to create a more unified Turkic identity so that their political leaders could force categorical identities upon the non-Russian peoples of imperial Russia and so that Soviet ideology could coalesce around these newly created identities and weaken whatever traditional spheres of political and social connections had survived the tsarist conquest and Russian Revolution, corrupted the meaning of Sart or Tajik to mean someone who was of Persian descent. Now, anyone of Turkic descent in Uzbek SSR was to be known as Uzbek, regardless of where or how he or she chose to live. Sart, at some point following the Russian Revolution, took on a negative or derogatory connotation in the Soviet political/ethnographic lexicon. Consequently, the word has all but disappeared from Central Asian vocabularies, except to be found in the original Russian descriptions of pictures such as these.

The picture below depicts "Sarts" or modern-day "Tajiks" in Samarkand. Notice how European-looking the two boys squatting on the ground appear. In terms of race, Tajiks who reside in the foothills of the Pamirs in Uzbekistan and in the mountain passes of Tajikistan have only had limited contact with other Central Asian ethnic groups, including invading Turks from the north and Arabs and Persians from the South. As a result, Tajiks often appear very northern or western European, and it's not all that uncommon to find someone with blond hair and blue eyes or red hair and green eyes as a racial outlier in this group. However, most urban Tajiks in cities like Samarkand have mixed extensively with Arab and Turkic populations, so they more often resemble the two men standing nearby.



You may have noticed above that I mentioned Jews in defining the traditional meaning of "Sart". There was up until the collapse of the Soviet Union a thriving Jewish population in Samarkand, Bukhara, and Khiva that spoke in Tajik yet educated their children to read Talmudic texts in Hebrew. There are still synagogues in these cities, though most are no longer operational due to the sad reality that Israel and the United States have made it financially advantageous for anyone of Jewish descent to emigrate from Uzbekistan. Although I understand Uzbekistan's government and abysmal economy share equal blame in compelling Uzbekistani Jews to emigrate, I find it sad that two of the most diverse countries in the world -- Israel and the United States -- have increased their diversity at the expense of the history and culture of countries like Uzbekistan that cling to their history as affirmation of their importance to the world.

Below is a picture of a rabbi teaching religious texts to a group of boys in Samarkand. I would have loved to have shown this picture to the Hasidic Jews I worked with in Brooklyn this past summer, in part, because for all their devout religiosity, they were almost entirely clueless about Jewish minorities within their faith that have been pushed aside by their European Ashkhenazi and Sephardic brethren in such Jewish meccas as the United States, Brazil, and Israel. Samarkandi Jews would be the equivalent of the Arab or Persian Jews, which most Americans still have difficulty comprehending due to the confusing ambiguity of the word "Jew" in English to denote both a religion and ethnicity.



Lastly, here are two pictures to remind people, that as atrocious as some of the Central Asian political leaders may be when it comes to respecting human dignity and the integrity of the body when a person is in state custody, you don't exactly see pictures like these in the streets of Bukhara anymore.

Perhaps these activities take place behind the walls of former-KGB interrogation/detention facilities far away from the wandering eyes of German and Italian tourists. Nonetheless, I still feel that as much as many of the Central Asian countries under Soviet/Russian influence may have assimilated the ends-justifying-means principles of non-Russians like Stalin and Beria, they also learned a few good things, too, such as how not to chain prisoners around the neck like human chattel or how not to throw a bunch of prisoners together in a small, dirt room exposed to the harsh Central Asian elements with little food or water.