Lenin Boulevard (Blue Domes Boulevard)

It is worth starting with the fact that this boulevard is not a boulevard. A European boulevard is a wide street where the walking strip either divides the roadway or runs alongside it. Here, the distance between the two streets was a whole city block, the width of the green strip itself exceeded one hundred meters, and the distance between the flanking nine-story buildings was more than two hundred. A newspaper in March 1969 described the future more simply: exactly one kilometer of greenery, one hundred meters wide. The word used by the designers sounded different - esplanade. In 1964, it was this very word that helped the Tashgiprogor team win the all-Union competition for the center of Tashkent: according to the conditions, it was necessary to connect the historical cores of the old and new city, and the people of Tashkent proposed connecting them with a green walking axis. The problem became clear later: the esplanade turned out to be four kilometers long, that is, the length of Central Park in New York, and it proved to be beyond the republic's budget. By the collapse of the USSR, several landscaped fragments with a total length of up to a kilometer existed. But the perpendicular axis running from north to south did take place, and Lenin Avenue became that very esplanade, only smaller and therefore real. The task facing the architects was not a gardening one, but a political one. The Tashkent of the sixties hosted conferences of Asian and African writers, an international film festival, symposia of "developing countries", the Tashkent Declaration was signed here, and after the 1966 earthquake, the city became a showcase of "fraternal mutual assistance". The boulevard was supposed to reflect this image. At one pole, a monument in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the Soviet state was intended, at the highest point - a monument to peace and friendship, later specified as a monument to Tashkent's role in international meetings. The design of the monuments never actually happened, and the multicultural theme faded into the greenery. Yuri Khaldeev proposed stringing four gardens along the main alley, styled after different park traditions: Japanese, Russian, Uzbek, and, at the southern termination, French. An empty spacious square was left in front of them - in case the monument still appeared - and it is thanks to this emptiness that the boulevard from the Tashkent Hotel did not look like a park wall: vistas opened up one after another. The main alley was covered with high metal pergolas, the transverse sidewalks were paved, and the paths between the gardens were laid freely. Where valuable old trees stood, the strict rhythm of the areas was broken for their sake: a large, mature mulberry tree was preserved at the entrance to the garden zone. What this was supposed to be like was best described by "Pravda Vostoka" on March 8, 1969, a year before the opening. The Russian garden: white-barked birches, oaks, maples, jasmine, elderberry, snowberry, and in the center a pond with pink and yellow water lilies framed by weeping willows, pines, rowan trees, and firs. The Uzbek garden: hauzes and arbors draped with grapevines, and among the trees those most commonly found in Uzbekistan - jujube, oleaster, pomegranate, apricot, elm, weeping mulberry, walnut, cherry. The Japanese garden, according to the newspaper's promise, "will be located on hills", with rock piles in the form of cliffs, streams bordered with yellow sand, ailanthus, catalpa, sophora, quince, mountain pine, and climbing shrubs. The French garden - juniper, red-leaf plum, boxwood, euonymus, clipped bushes; and here the newspaper formulates it best: "The French garden will remind us of Peterhof in miniature". Where the very idea of stringing gardens along the alley came from is not known for certain, but Boris Chukhovich has a convincing suggestion. Shortly before that, Tashkent architects had read Galina Pugachenkova's work on the garden and park art of Central Asia during the time of Timur and the Timurids, which describes the khiaban - an extensive alley planted with trees in one or two rows, with kiosks and teahouses between them, playing the role of a large public boulevard where people came on holidays and in the evenings. The layout of Lenin Avenue repeats this structure. It is also amusing that the Uzbek garden was designed not from impressions of the old city's gardens, but from book descriptions of the ideal Islamic garden: it was divided into four parts, like a char-bagh, and each had its own reservoir with running water. And the teahouse on the boulevard was built according to the design of L. Dzimas, one of the authors of the boulevard itself.

In the summer of 1969, Pravda Vostoka published a poem about this construction site in its "Our Readers' Poems" section. It begins with the fence: "The fence is a colossal announcement. Letters a meter high: 'Lenin Boulevard is being built by Vysotstroy'". Next, the author cannot resist and goes inside: "And there was no boulevard: ditches to the right and ditches to the left, and everywhere lie in heaps crushed stone, slabs, and poles". He smokes with a painter, who climbs back up to the height, and in the finale the boulevard finally turns green - in a dream. The reader's poem turned out to be the only description of the boulevard from inside the construction site known to me, and from it, by the way, we know the contractor. By April 1970, the work was completed. That same 1970 was the centenary of Lenin's birth, and the 1969 newspaper insert tied the future boulevard precisely to this date. Tashgiprogor transferred the working documentation for planting to the landscaping department of the Tashkent City Executive Committee's improvement directorate, and the group was led by the institute's chief architect Yuri Khaldeev together with landscaping engineer Nina Sofronova. By that time, Khaldeev was already the author of a competition proposal for the Central Committee building and one of Tashgiprogor's architects whose team won the 1964 competition for the city center. Then begins what is usually not written in books. In May 1976, Pravda Vostoka listed the symbols of the friendship of peoples as follows: "As a symbol of the brightest and most beautiful, we perceive the Russian birch on Tashkent's Lenin Boulevard, the Ukrainian oak in the Hungry Steppe, the Uzbek grapevine in Belarusian Polesye". That is, the birches from the Russian garden over six years became a state metaphor. In April 1983, the newspaper wrote about the boulevard differently: a manhole in the middle of the sidewalk, without a lid, with a gaping hole, and there are several such, the author notes, "while you just cross one of the paths on Lenin Boulevard". And in November 1986, a naturalist reader reported seeing a family of thrushes in Kafarov Square, on Lenin Boulevard, and in Victory Park, and that before flying away these birds live in the city for a couple of weeks, and sometimes longer. Over a decade and a half, the boulevard went from an ideological assignment to a place where thrushes are counted. Plans for the southern terminus remained plans. In the 1970s and 1980s, they intended to build something public there, up to the House of Scientists, and even extend the esplanade across the southern border to the next block, but it did not reach working design, and the amateurishly built children's playground in the middle of the 1980s turned out to be squeezed between avenues: gassed and unsafe. Current appearance of the boulevard took shape in the early 2000s, when the roadway of Lenin Street with its trolleybus line was filled in, and the greenery of the C-7 microdistrict merged with the esplanade. The boulevard became a park. The historical landscaping was lost: the concrete gates of the Japanese garden were first demolished and then replaced with a crude fake. But it turned out that the townspeople consider this place their own. When in the early 2020s the mayor's office proposed to install the thirty years of independence stela in the entrance square, that very empty space once left for the unrealized monument, the residents of Tashkent jointly achieved the relocation of the monument to another place. The square remained empty - just as it was conceived in 1969.