Kira Shamsutdinova
On July 27, 2026, during the 48th session of UNESCO held in Busan, ten Soviet architectural structures in Tashkent were added to the UNESCO World Heritage List, becoming the newest items on the list and the first architecture from the twentieth century from Central Asia to be nominated. In fact, the nomination was arranged by the Uzbekistan Arts and Culture Development Foundation – the state organization founded by the presidential decree of 2017. The nomination of these structures was a cultural achievement as well as a very political one.
The Soviet government was not only governing Central Asia – it was rebuilding the region. There were the borders which were changed, languages which were being standardized, as well as pre-Islamic or pre-Russian heritage which was either being suppressed or subordinated to the Soviet cultural discourse. Thus, when in 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed and became four independent states, they had to face a common question: what is the story and who can narrate it? The answer for this question was mostly political rather than the historical.
The Tashkent modernism initiative is one of the best examples in terms of international visibility. In the period from 2019 to 2024, twenty-one buildings of the modernist architectural movement became part of the State Cadastre of Cultural Heritage of Uzbekistan. Moreover, Uzbekistan participated in the Venice Architecture Biennale of 2025 and is currently building a new state history museum designed by Tadao Ando in Tashkent. This nomination becomes the result of an intentional strategy of recasting the Soviet architecture, which was built during the occupation, as an important aspect of the national civilizational heritage of Uzbekistan.
Kazakhstan is following a similar path through the legacy of being a nomadic nation. The 5th World Nomad Games, hosted in Astana in 2024, featured contestants from various Turkic nations in contests that had almost died out during the Soviet era. Furthermore, Kazakhstan has been transitioning from Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet as a deliberate symbolic break from the Soviet past, and has put forth eleven additional nominations for UNESCO heritage designations.
The case of Kyrgyzstan is the most overtly political. In September 2025, President Japarov signed a law renaming Jalal-Abad — the country’s third-largest city — to “Manas”, in honor of the main character in the epic poem that laid the foundation for Kyrgyzstan’s national identity. The decision to change the name was adopted unanimously by parliament “to enhance national ideology.” Manas festival has escalated in reaction to the UNESCO inscription in 2009 of Manas-related heritage of the Kyrgyz in China. Heritage is a geopolitical tool as well.
The use of Nowruz in Tajikistan has the same motive behind it. President Rahmon has framed it as “It’s heritage of the Aryan nations,” which has a history of six thousand years, making Tajikistan an ancient civilization based on its pre-Islamic Persian heritage. Nowruz and the rubab instrument have been included in the UNESCO list of intangible heritages in 2024.
On March 31, 2025, Rahmon used an international Nowruz festival to sign a landmark border treaty with Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan – turning a cultural event into diplomacy. The narrative of Persian heritage also makes it unique from other Turkic cultures and separates it from the Shia nation of Iran, thus safeguarding a Sunni Persian civilization.
Similarities of these four states are strong enough to define a regional phenomenon. Cultural revival can serve at least three purposes simultaneously: filling an ideological gap left behind the collapse of the Soviet Union, establishing distinctiveness from neighboring countries and from previous colonizers, and projecting cultural influence on the international arena. They are not grassroots projects; they are policies of respective governments that are financed by state institutions and are planned in political and diplomatic terms.
This does not make them illegitimate. Revival of the oppressed culture is a reasonable policy, and recognition by the international community of the cultural heritage of Central Asian nations is a step to be made indeed. But when a city of 180,000 people is renamed via parliamentary decision, or a state institution creates a museum in Tadao Ando style for the presentation of one definite version of history of the nation, the line between cultural revival and political power consolidation becomes blurred. That was never a difference in Central Asia. The only issue worth raising is: which past is revived and why?
Kira Shamsutdinova researches post-communist transitions, soft power, and urban governance in Central Asia. She holds a degree in International Relations from Webster University in Tashkent.
