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In April 1966, just months after the Central Asian capital of Tashkent had been in the diplomatic spotlight as host of a meeting between the heads of India and Pakistan, the earth's crust shook the city and demolished its core. The epicenter was right below downtown; tens of thousands of residents were immediately left homeless and hundreds of schools and public buildings collapsed.1 The army, student brigades and volunteers went to work as first responders. The earthquake was immediately reported in major media outlets and within days of the tragedy, Leonid Brezhnev, the General Secretary, and Alexei Kosygin, the Premier, visited.2 Kosygin was already well known in Tashkent because of his involvement in the diplomatic summit, while Brezhnev, who weeks before had been named General Secretary at the 23rd Party Congress, seized a golden opportunity to enhance his image.3 They arrived to a devastated landscape but few coffins as luckily not many people had died. To lift local spirits, Brezhnev gave a speech to local officials in which he guaranteed the reconstruction of the city in the shortest time possible. 4 Over the next twelve months, readers received regular updates in regional and central newspapers as the city began the recovery process.
The Soviet Union was renowned for monumental engineering projects. The Tashkent earthquake, however, offered the largest case of an entire city needing to be rebuilt from the ground up. Paradoxically, disasters provide some of the least authoritarian moments in Soviet history and give a glimpse into the haphazardness of the authoritarian state. The authoritarian state scrambled to prevent further political and social damage. It was not, however, just the state which was called to action. Scores of individuals took advantage of the tragic situation to craft opportunities of their own.
In broader studies of disasters, it has been common practice to isolate disasters as dis - crete events in the history of a given society. In "When the Planet Rages", CHARLES OFFICER focuses on disruptive volcanic eruptions and destructive earthquakes such as the one which ruined Lisbon in 1755.5 His analysis does not, however, look at the relationship between the destructive force of a natural disaster and local cultural procedures. In contrast, KENNETH HEWITT has argued that most natural disasters are characteristic rather...