Warm and colorful pictures of everyday life in Uzbekistan in 1956

In 1956 , Jacques Dupakier went to Tashkent, the capital of the Uzbek SSR, where he filmed the daily life of the city and its inhabitants. Here 's what the photographer himself told about his impressions of the trip:

"After a few days in Moscow, we flew to Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. We flew on old propeller planes that did not rise above 3,200 meters. I spent hours looking at Soviet Central Asia with bated breath. Tashkent was a large earthen city with a single avenue built in the Stalinist fashion (although they did not dare to build the famous Stalin skyscrapers on it) in the middle of the city. However, ten years later all this was destroyed (by the earthquake of 1966.).

I walked around the city a lot, saw a market where women were wrapped in veils, visited a mosque, met with officials, each of them was accompanied by a Russian. It gave the impression that they were being looked after more than us."

"During the flight from Moscow to Tashkent, I took a bunch of photos through the porthole. At some point we flew over the concentration camp and the stewardess came out to say that filming is prohibited here. Then she returned to the cockpit, and I continued shooting. The translator or anyone else did not interfere with me," recalled Dupakier.

"I saw Virgin Land — a grandiose, but poorly implemented project. All these young Komsomol members were camped in the steppe. There were huge fields where machines worked, but there were no hangars - grain, as in The Middle Ages, stored in pits. There was no protection from the weather and rodents. After seeing this, I understood why the project failed."

"I saw how cotton was picked in the field. People worked with their hands, there were no such machines, which always flashed on the frames of Soviet news agencies."

"The Uzbeks were lovely. There was peace and tranquility in Uzbekistan, which probably disappeared after a few years."

The value of Dupakier's photographs, which, in fact, differ little from the pictures of an ordinary tourist, is that all this simply disappeared after a dozen years as a result of the devastating earthquake of 1966. Tashkent was rebuilt from the ruins, making it more Soviet.