ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on one such critical space: Tashkent—the capital of Soviet Uzbekistan and the largest city of the "Soviet East." It argues that Moscow's concerns about the optics of decolonization were reflected in the reorganization of Tashkent's different types of space. The chapter aims to answer Harvey's call for more critical examinations of the modes of thinking about space and space-time in socialist planning practices and to challenge Henri Lefebvre's thesis about the "sterility" of socialist space after the 1930s. It also aims to use Harvey's conceptualization to pose new questions about Soviet power, decolonization, and the Cold War during the "long 1960s." Nineteenth-century Russian imperial officials had deliberately looked to establish European models of empire building when planning the city's dual structure. At the Afro-Asian Film Festival relative, and absolute space in ways that suggested to some that, at least within the confines of the festival, Tashkent might have temporarily become an anti-colonial utopia.
