What comes to mind when you think of tourist destinations? Nepal might evoke images of vast mountains, Paris of course has the Eiffel Tower, and Australia might make one think of deserts, beaches and dangerous animals. Images like these are considered to be destination images, a term that is generally defined as encompassing one’s preconceived visual notions associated with travel to a place. Ideally, the destination images that would bring the most tourists to a country would be promoted, but sometimes the very things that bring in tourists are the things that countries don’t want associated with themselves. In Uzbekistan, this is clear to see. Despite the fact that the Soviet Union is 30 years in the past, and the Aral Sea is even longer gone, I found myself most interested in these very things that the country hopes to put in its past. On one hand, my interests seem to reflect the interests of other tourists. On the other, my act of showing images of these remnants of the past to other people perpetuates a view of Uzbekistan that is negative and already antiquated.
Uzbekistan is a post-Soviet country, and yet, when I got there, I found very little sign of this. I wanted to see the juxtaposition of Soviet and ancient Islamic architecture, perhaps to see golden Lenin heads next to mosques. And yes, there were hints of this–monolithic iron towers that made no architectural sense surrounded by the mud brick walls of an ancient city, and I did actually get to see a golden Lenin head, albeit in a parking lot somewhere. However, for the most part the only remnant of nearly a century of Soviet rule was the fact that many people spoke Russian. Indeed, this is one of the conclusions that Fayzullaev et al came to in their paper titled “Destination image in Uzbekistan – heritage of the Silk Road and nature experience as the core of an evolving Post Soviet identity”. The authors claim that “this is because [post-Soviet countries] have been trying to proclaim that they have departed from the state of socialism and have been opened up for connections with countries all over the world” (Fayzullaev et al. 2021, 450). Because this part of the past is associated with being closed for tourism and generally being unfriendly, they are trying to distance themselves from it. Unfortunately for them, as a tourist generally interested in Soviet history, I sought out examples of this and took pictures of it. Ice-cream made by the old Soviet standards was everywhere, and the striking Soviet architecture of the Hotel Uzbekistan was so cool that I had to share it with my friends. In doing so, I created what is known as user-generated content, i.e., media that was created not by the operators of some tourism service but by its users, and it is seen as very powerful in influencing other potential tourists. This is because it can be seen as more authentic, and can also be done on a scale far greater than a tourism operator can manage. However, leaving the control up to tourists means they can generate content that the government might not like.
The Soviet architecture of Hotel Uzbekistan
Another piece of Soviet legacy that we managed to see was the Aral Sea, or rather, the lack of it. This is another thing that interested me about Uzbekistan, as it is a monument to our human fallacy of underestimating our impact on the natural world. The study authors say “this part of the country and this specific dramatic landscape is not shown on any of the images at the official website, […] perhaps because of the environmental disaster that the dried sea mainly represents internationally” (Fayzullaev et al. 2021, 456). Clearly, the government has made a conscious decision not to depict this extremely significant disappearance, and I’m not making it any better by obsessively taking pictures of the dusty remains of rusting ships and posting them on my Instagram story. This disconnect between what the government wants people to see (a modern country with ancient history) and what people are interested in (environmental disasters) is reflected in the conclusions that the study authors come to:
“A very large area of salty desert contains many old, abandoned ships and is quite spectacular; however, this part of the country and this specific dramatic landscape is not shown on any of the images at the official website. The Instagram sample contained several photographs of old, abandoned ships in dried parts of the Aral Sea under open blue skies, so obviously this area is an attraction for visitors” (Fayzullaev et al. 2021, 456)
Old rusting ships from the Aral Sea
So, in conclusion, I did the exact thing that the government doesn’t want to happen: continue to depict Uzbekistan to my friends as a country full of old Soviet memorabilia and environmental disasters. I didn’t show pictures of the well-maintained roads in Tashkent or tall, bright apartment buildings in Samarkand, and so my friends might not understand that Uzbekistan is more than just some old Soviet ruin of a country. But on the other hand, because my friends are the kind of people who are interested in exactly that old Soviet stuff, they are probably more likely to come in the future and contribute to the economy. Perhaps a balance could be struck, where more acknowledgement is given to this past, but it is paired more closely with improvements in Uzbekistan since then.
Uzbekistan is quite green and pretty!
Fayzullaev, Kamoliddin, Susanna Heldt Cassel, and Daniel Brandt. 2021. “Destination Image in Uzbekistan – Heritage of the Silk Road and Nature Experience as the Core of an Evolving Post Soviet Identity.” The Service Industries Journal 41 (7–8): 446–61. https://doi.org/10.1080/02642069.2018.1519551.
