Description

Located in Soviet Central Asia are three ancient, world-famous cities - Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva containing priceless gems of architecture.

These monuments are of so high an artistic level and are so unique, that they arouse as much admiration today as centuries ago. In the history of every nation there have been times of prosperity and of ordeal.

Which is true of the Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Kirghiz, Tajiks, Turkmens and other peoples of Central Asia, though hundreds, if not thousands of years ago, they had already attained pinnacles of social and cultural achievement. Among the oldest written alphabets to be found within the territory of the USSR are those of Bactria, Sogdiana and Chorasmia. One could likewise mention the runes of the Turkic peoples, artifacts with inscriptions in the Orkhon script that were found along the banks of the Yenisei River, or the Kiul-Teghin inscriptions carved on rocks and cliffs.

Many other relics of early Turkic written sources could also be listed.

However, the descendants of these peoples experienced numerous tribulations, with generation after generation compelled to struggle for national independence right up to the 20th century. Time and again their very existence hung by a slender thread, and it remained for the cleansing storm of that great Revolution which rolled over a sixth of the Earth's land mass to decide their destiny.

Art enables us to preserve the memory of the past. By arresting the instant, it perpetuates what would have otherwise receded into oblivion, and at the same time sustains the flame of the present day. Along our by no means royal road of ascendance we have come an unbelievably long way in our artistic cognition of reality. We have created that unprecedented multinational amalgam of Soviet art which has imbibed the finest achievements of all the associated peoples, big or small.

Soviet culture exercises a distinctively magnetic appeal by virtue of its never repudiating the gains of previous cultures. The multiplicity of human life styles, the national traditions and mores consequent upon specific historical, geographical and cultural contexts, always evoke our admiration.

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