A dancer and singer from the Fergana Valley and one of the founders of Uzbek professional dance, she was among the first Uzbek women to perform unveiled. Her Tashkent home is now a museum.
Tamara Khanum, born Tamara Artyomovna Petrosyan, came into the world on 29 March (16 March Old Style) 1906 into an Armenian family; sources give her birthplace as New Margilan (today's Fergana) or the Gorchakovo railway settlement near Margilan. Her father was a fine player of the Armenian tar and the Uzbek tanbur. Drawn to dance and song from childhood, she performed from 1919 in Hamza's agitprop troupe and in the early 1920s worked at Tashkent's Russian opera and ballet company. She became soloist of Mukhitdin Kari-Yakubov's troupe and acted in the musical drama theatres of Samarkand, Kokand and Andijan, in “Farhad and Shirin” and other productions.
Taking Uzbek dance to the world
In the years of the Hujum, when appearing on stage was dangerous for a woman, Tamara Khanum became one of the first Uzbek women to dance unveiled. In 1925, with Mukhitdin Kari-Yakubov, she presented Uzbek art in Europe for the first time at the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts in Paris, and in 1935 she took part in the first International Folk Dance Festival in London. She brought Uzbek lapar and yalla songs to the stage and created the song-and-dance miniature, with a repertoire spanning the songs and dances of many nations. During the Second World War she performed on the home front and at the front. She was the first woman to be named People's Artist of Uzbekistan (1932) and became People's Artist of the USSR in 1956. She died in Tashkent on 30 June 1991.
The house-museum
An exhibition of her stage costumes opened in her Tashkent home in 1986, and in 1994 it became a memorial museum displaying the vivid outfits she wore around the world, photographs and posters. The street where she lived bears her name, and her centenary was widely celebrated in 2006. For anyone interested in dance and theatre it is one of Tashkent's most distinctive museums.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries a reform movement took shape in Turkestan: the Jadids, advocates of usul-i jadid, the “new method”. Inspired by the Crimean Tatar educator Ismail Gasprinsky, Mahmudkhoja Behbudiy, Munavvar Qori, Abdulla Avloniy, Is'hoqxon Ibrat, Abdurauf Fitrat and others opened schools teaching literacy by the phonetic method and wrote textbooks. From 1906 Uzbek-language newspapers such as Taraqqiy and Khurshid appeared in Tashkent, and Behbudiy's play “The Patricide” (Padarkush), staged in 1914, launched a national theatre. The Jadids sought to renew society through education, the press and reform. Many were repressed in the 1920s–1930s; their legacy is being rediscovered today.
On 25 June (8 July) 1916, at the height of the First World War, Nicholas II decreed the conscription of Turkestani men aged 19 to 43 for labour behind the front. Issued at harvest time and enforced through unfair lists, the decree provoked mass unrest. In July there were protests in Khujand, Tashkent and towns of the Fergana Valley; in Jizzakh the rising turned into armed fighting and was crushed with great brutality by punitive detachments, which left the old town badly damaged. The revolt also spread across Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Tens of thousands of labourers were eventually sent to the front zone regardless.
After the October Revolution of 1917, power in Tashkent passed to a Bolshevik-led soviet that excluded the local Muslim majority. In response, the Fourth Extraordinary Congress of Turkestan Muslims, meeting in Kokand on 27 November 1917, proclaimed a Turkestan Autonomy within a Russian federation. Its government was led by Mukhamedzhan Tynyshpaev and then Mustafa Chokay, with Jadids among its members. In February 1918 Red Guard units sent from Tashkent stormed Kokand; much of the city was destroyed and thousands of civilians were killed. Short-lived as it was, the autonomy is seen as a milestone in the region's pursuit of national statehood.
After the Turkestan Autonomy was crushed, an armed movement against Soviet rule spread through the Fergana Valley from 1918. Soviet sources called it the Basmachi movement; Uzbek historians today more often describe it as a struggle for independence. It was led by local commanders, or kurbashi, such as Ergash, Madamin Bek and Shermuhammad Bek (Kurshermat). After 1920 the fighting shifted to Eastern Bukhara and the mountains of Kashkadarya and Surkhandarya, where Ibrahim Bek was a leading figure; the Ottoman general Enver Pasha joined in 1921–1922 and was killed in 1922. Large Red Army forces had largely suppressed the movement by the mid-1920s, though isolated bands held out into the early 1930s.
In February 1920 the Red Army and Young Khivan forces ended the Khanate of Khiva: the last khan, Said Abdullah, abdicated, and in April the Khorezm People's Soviet Republic was proclaimed. On 2 September 1920 the Red Army under Mikhail Frunze, together with the Young Bukharans, took Bukhara after a bombardment that set the Ark and parts of the city ablaze; Emir Alim Khan fled to Eastern Bukhara and in 1921 to Afghanistan. In October the Bukharan People's Soviet Republic was created, headed by Fayzulla Khodjaev, with Fitrat among its ministers. Both republics were dissolved in the national delimitation of 1924.
In 1924 Central Asia underwent national-territorial delimitation: the Turkestan ASSR and the Bukharan and Khorezm republics were replaced by new republics drawn largely along ethnic lines. On 27 October 1924 the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic was formed, with the Tajik ASSR inside it until 1929. Its First Congress of Soviets met in Bukhara in February 1925. Samarkand was the first capital; in 1930 the capital moved to Tashkent. The borders drawn then largely define today's Uzbekistan, but in mixed areas such as the Fergana Valley they left complicated frontiers and enclaves.
