Heritage of the Red Orient : theories and practices of architectural restoration in Soviet Central Asia (1920-1991)

Abstract

By critically reviewing theoretical, methodological and practical approaches to the restoration of Islamic architecture in Soviet Central Asia, this dissertation reveals the mechanisms of transmitting ideologically predicated vision of the past into the physical fabric of historic monuments. It proceeds from unpacking the Marxist-Leninist concept of "progressive" heritage formulated within the discipline of historical materialism; in Soviet historiography of Central Asian architecture the category of progressive heritage was linked to the mathematics of proportioning and harmonization derived from Neoclassical architectural theory. Thus the progressiveness of architectural monuments was measured against the rises and falls of scientific rationalism in the history of the region while the Soviet stage of historic development was postulated as its ultimate triumph. The dissertation locates the "proportionalist" school of architectural historiography in Soviet Central Asia led by Mitkhat Bulatov, which united most of the practicing restorers in the region. It traces the history of proportionalist discourse from purely speculative schemes to efforts in grounding the mathematical relationships extracted from schematized measured drawing of architectural monuments in mediaeval geometric treatises. The careful textual analysis of Soviet scholarship (its key texts are translated and included in the appendix to the dissertation) testifies to the apparent anachronism of the proportinalist speculations, which in the Soviet Union were accepted as the successful reconstruction of medieval Islamic architectural theory and highly praised a triumph of Communist science by cultural authorities. Using Central Asian archives and published records of major restoration projects the dissertation documents the functioning of a mechanism that generated lost or never built parts of architectural monuments by treating them as mathematical equations of complex proportioning and harmonization. The scientific certainty achieved by Soviet restorers is reviewed in the context of international historic preservation standards to which they consciously resisted. Finally the materialization of Marxist-Leninist ideology in the medieval Islamic heritage of Central Asia is interpreted as an instance of de-conceptualization, which made ideology immediately accessible to the masses through non-reflective visual and corporal experience.