History of Tashkent The Tashkent oasis lies

fragrant city", where "cherries ripen by the 1st of May, and 
strawberries are seven copecks a pound", yet colonialism had its 
downside: 
With the coming of the Russians, the angel of death has breathed 
on all that was once the grandeur of the Orient at Tashkent... as 
the fine Russian streets were laid down, and the large shops 
opened, and the cathedrals were built, and the gardens laid out, 
the old uphill-and-down dale labyrinth of the Eastern city 
changed to a curiosity and an anachronism. It faded before the 
eyes. . . Poor old Tashkent, slipping into the sere and yellow leaf, 
passing away even as one looked, always decreasing whilst the 
new town is always increasing-there is much pathos in its destiny 
... Now Turkestan and Russian Central Asia are extremely loyal, 
peaceful and happy colonies. 
Like most travellers, Graham was shielded both from Muslim 
anger at the neglect of Islam and the encroachment of Russian 
infidels, as well as from the seeds of revolution growing among 
the latter. The railway workers whose sweat had done so much to 
establish the Tsarist regime were among the first to respond to the 
Bolshevik clarion in November 1917. The provisional government 
was overthrown and Muslim opposition crushed! In April 1918, 

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Tashkent became the capital of the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet 
Socialist Republic, yet Soviet suzerainty remained under threat 
from White Russians and Muslim basmachi. In January 1919, 
Bolshevik commissar Ossipov shot his fellow commissars and 
declared for the counter-revolution, but drunkenness and poor 
organization gave him but a single day in power. Four thousand 
executions followed and pools of blood lay frozen on the winter 
streets. At this time, Britain's last Great Game player was hiding 
in the Chimgan mountains outside Tashkent. Colonel F.M. Bailey 
had been closely watched ever since his arrival from Kashgar in 
August 1918. The feared Cheka (secret police) even set spies on 
his dog Zep and Bailey only escaped death and fled to Persia by 
his mastery of disguise and remarkable nerve. At one point the 
Bolsheviks assumed him dead for he had left his toothbrush 
behind, as no Englishman would (in fact he had two). During 
Bailey's stay, the city reverted from farce-"an Englishman passed 
through with a troupe of performing elephants he was taking to 
Kashgar"-to terror-"one man who had his piano nationalized lost 
his temper and broke up the piano with an axe. He was taken to 
gaol and shot." The face of the city suffered too: "You were given 
a coupon for fuel on your ration card. When you asked for your 
share of fuel you were shown a tree standing in the street and told 
to take it. Fortunes in paper money were made by the lucky 
owners of saws and axes." 

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In time the trees were replanted, but architecture was less lucky: 
city walls and gates were demolished along with countless 
mosques, madrassah and mausoleums. In 1930, the city won from 
Samarkand the capitalship of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. 
Russian settlers, institutions andindustries flooded in, particularly 
during the waryears (1941-45), when evacuees from European 
Russia doubled the population to a million. 
As a Soviet capital, huge sums of money were invested into 
Tashkent's growth and industrialisation, a process which rapidly 
increased with the relocation of factories away from the Nazi 
advance in western Russia during World War II. The city's 
population swelled with migrant workers, evacuees and exiles: 
Tashkent would ultimately become the fourth-largest city in the 
Soviet Union, and more than half of its population was of Russian 
or Ukrainian origin. 
Physically, Tashkent was changed forever on 25 April 1966, when 
a massive earthquake levelled vast areas of the town and left 
300,000 people homeless. "Like living on the back of a beserk 
camel" was how one journalist described the earthquake (7.5 on 
the Richter scale) and over 1,000 subsequent tremors that 
devastated Tashkent. Casualties were relatively low, but 300,000 
were left homeless. The whole Union rushed to the task of 
reconstruction and the result is today's Tashkent, both the concrete 

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grandeur of Moscow's 'beacon of socialism in the East', and the 
old quarter to the west, alive with Uzbek tradition. As new 
construction gathers pace, its citizens brave the challenges and 
seize the chances born of capitalism and independence, while their 
mayor promises to rebuild those 12 city gates, symbols that this 
ancient caravan town is open for business once more. 
Since independence in 1991, the face of Tashkent has continued to 
change. The demographics of the city have shifted notably with 
the mass exodus of ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, Germans and 
Poles, and an influx of Tajiks and Afghans Hi ring their respective 
civil wars. President Karimov has actively encouraged ambitious 
building schemes, and Soviet symbols and statuary, notably what 
was nine the world's largest statue of Lenin, have been slowly 
replaced with images more closely aligned with the identity of the 
modern, independent republic