Walking central Bishkek in late afternoon sunshine, my initial impression was just how pleasant a space it was — a banal conclusion, but when it comes to post-Soviet cityscapes, this is nothing to be sniffed at; you could almost say there’s something utopian about it. Central Bishkek is a walkable grid riddled with parks and potholes, greener than any other post-Soviet city I’ve seen; there are leaves sprouting from every crack in mortar and the yawning natural awnings of oak trees casting shade on the streets. There’s a human scale to the whole thing, too, certainly in comparison with my only other experience of Central Asian urbanism — the scorched earth po-mo oddity of Kazakhstan’s new-build capital Astana. Contemporary Bishkek is pretty unchanged since the 90s, the Soviet plan largely undisturbed; Kyrgyzstan’s economic liberalisation didn’t exactly free up money for a radical makeover
The centre is largely made up of prefab brezhnevki from the 70s and 80s, unobtrusive concrete blocks of five or so storeys that reward closer inspection thanks to their “national” ornamentation: the usual practice in the Soviet periphery of adding “folkloric” reliefs and brise soleils to standardised buildings, a kind of rote local flavour. (Bishkek also has a particularly fine range of Soviet mosaics, including some borderline psychedelic offerings.) Dotted around are a handful of striking Brutalist landmarks — including the old Central Mosque, the first and only built in the Soviet Union — and the usual post-Soviet requisite of postmodern civic architecture, most notably the governmental ensemble of arcades, elevations and golden domes on Ala-Too Square, flanked by the concentric white cubes of the State History Museum. There are comparatively few of the kind of bizarro-Stalinist, classically-inclined high rises that you find in even middling Russian cities these days, and my companions told me that it was hard for locals to pin down who exactly could live in those that do exist. We do know, though, who lives in the hastily thrown-up, borderline shanty towns that line the city’s outskirts: the internal migrants who come to Bishkek from the countryside for work, outstripping any incentive towards new affordable housing even as they prop up the country’s nominally optimistic post-Soviet and post-2011 revolution economy. [...]
It was Georgy who took me to the western edge of town to see what’s left of the Interhelpo commune. A cluster of modest streets, weary in the heat, around the overgrown Josip Fučik Park, near the railway on which the first Czechoslovak volunteers arrived. In the seven years after it was founded, 1,081 people joined the collective. In the 1930s, it housed a factory, a tannery, a smithy, a carpentry, a cobbler and a tailor, as well as hosting theatre groups, sports teams and an orchestra. During lunch breaks, the commune’s newspaper Ilichevka would be read out over a loudspeakers for all to hear. In 1939, Interhelpo was broken up and its manufacturing parcelled out to various state ministries. You can still visit the old House of Culture and sit its the musty, homely theatre, built by and for workers, trying to imagine what it must have been like to get on a train in Bratislava and end up here, beneath Tian Shen, with the conviction that an entirely new way of life was not only possible but urgently necessary.
