Interhelpo: Modernizing Soviet Frunze in the Interwar Years

• In Event: Urban Histories of Central Eurasia: Memory, Mobility, and Modernization

Abstract

This paper examines the contribution of the Czechoslovak industrial cooperative Interhelpo to the urban and industrial development of Frunze, contemporary Bishkek. In 1925, the first train carrying a few hundred members of Interhelpo—comprising trained planners, technicians, educators, factory and construction workers, along with their families—arrived at Pishpek station to start a new life in a country that promised liberation from capitalist oppression, only to find themselves amidst a semi-desolate steppe covered with wormwood and reeds, occasionally interrupted by wooden huts and mud sheds built along the city's dusty roads. The cooperative members immediately embarked on an ambitious industrialization project. Within two decades of their arrival, they opened factories and workshops, developed residential and cultural facilities, and constructed municipal buildings.

Author

• Kasiet Toktomusheva, Columbia U