From Burqas To Bureaucrats: The Soviet Reshaping Of Uzbekistan 100 Years Ago

A poster of Soviet leader Josef Stalin atop one of the first tractors photographed at work in the fields of Uzbekistan.

In early 1925, the region of today’s Uzbekistan was declared a republic of the Soviet Union. The Soviet takeover marked a period of ruthless transformation, which included executions of Uzbek political prisoners as well as literacy programs and industrialization.

A sportsman runs past women in burqas during the first years of Soviet Uzbekistan.

Early images of Soviet Uzbekistan are rare, but photographer Max Penson was there, on the farms and in the bazaars during the Soviet republic’s first days.

Max Penson

Penson was born into a Jewish family in western Russia in 1893. He relocated to today’s Uzbekistan in 1914 where he taught himself photography. From 1926, he worked as a photojournalist.

A workers' rally outside a textile mill in the Uzbek capital, Tashkent.

While restricted to capturing what the Soviet censors would approve, Penson was able to document the transformation of Uzbek life, described as “radical social surgery” that began a century ago.

A boy is used as a "live emblem" in a socialist march in central Tashkent.

The banner proclaims a readiness "for labor and defense!" Today, Penson’s archive is managed by his grandson Maxime Penson who lives in Tashkent.

A meeting of Uzbek men photographed by Max Penson in the early 20th century.

In a 2018 interview with RFE/RL, Penson's grandson Maxime reflected on what it must have been like for his grandfather to arrive in Central Asia more than a century ago. “Different smells, different colors, different people. Everything is different,” he said.

Uzbek girls during a sports event.

Max Penson worked for the Soviet outlets Pravda Vostoka (The Truth of the East) and TASS, the state news agency.

A young trumpeter heralds a children's group.

Penson’s work was used by the Soviet press to illustrate the “new Uzbekistan” being reshaped under Moscow’s leftist ideology.

Tamara Khanum (seen here in a photo by Penson), a dancer of ethnic Armenian heritage, was born in Central Asia and became the first woman in Uzbekistan to perform with her face uncovered.

Uzbek men holding portraits of Stalin.

The Soviets actively repressed Islam in the Uzbek S.S.R., attempting to replace religious faith with political zeal.

Women in burqas in the early Soviet years of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic.


Penson’s early photographs show women in full burqas during the early Soviet years, which later disappeared from the streets.

Construction of the Ferghana Canal in 1939.

Some of Penson’s most spectacular images capture pharaonic scenes amid the construction of the Great Ferghana Canal which runs for hundreds of kilometers through Central Asia.

Work under way on the Ferghana Canal. The irrigating waterway preceded Stalin’s “Great Plan For The Transformation Of Nature,” which together with later Soviet schemes to divert Central Asia’s rivers for agriculture contributed to the drying of the Aral Sea.

A worker rests on freshly picked cotton lint. Penson also focused his lens on the cotton industry in Soviet Uzbekistan. The republic provided 70 percent of all cotton used in the U.S.S.R.

A cotton harvest in the 1930s.

Unseen in Penson’s photographs are the repressions of those opposed to the Kremlin's reshaping of Central Asia. Hundreds of dissident Uzbeks were executed or died in prison under Soviet rule.

Elderly Jews in Bukhara. Penson also photographed the life of the Jewish community in Bukhara and other cities in Uzbekistan.

Fireworks in Tashkent.

Penson's life ended harshly.

In 1948, at the height of Stalin’s anti-Semitic purges, he was fired from Pravda Vostoka and lost his photographer’s accreditation. With his health worsening, and amid dwindling professional prospects, he died in 1959.

Max Penson photographed near the end of his career.

It has been widely reported that Penson committed suicide, but his grandson told RFE/RL that the photographer died of natural causes as a result of the “pretty difficult, pretty hard life he lived.”