Uzbekistan

• 1. Introduction

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  Uzbekistan sits at the very center of the world's largest landmass, and it touches no ocean, no sea, and no coast of any kind. Stranger still, every country that borders it is itself landlocked. That makes Uzbekistan one of only two places on Earth described as doubly landlocked, sharing that rare distinction with Liechtenstein, a nation you could fit inside Uzbekistan tens of thousands of times over. With more than 38.2 million people, it is the most populous country in Central Asia. Its cities, Samarkand and Bukhara chief among them, were once among the wealthiest on Earth, watered by the Silk Road and crowned by the scholarship of the Islamic Golden Age. Yet the great inland sea that once gave life to the region has nearly vanished, and the cotton fields that drank it dry still define the economy. Who built these cities, who destroyed them, and what shape did the land take after the Soviet era ended? Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. Ancient Crossroads

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  Scythian nomads from the Eurasian Steppe were among the first settlers to leave a record in what is now Uzbekistan, arriving sometime during the first millennium BC. When they put down roots, they built elaborate irrigation networks along the rivers, and from those canals grew cities. Bukhara and Samarkand emerged as centres of government and high culture, drawing wealth from every caravan that passed between East Asia and the Mediterranean world. Sogdian merchants, who dominated the trade routes of the province known as Transoxiana, became, according to the historical record, the wealthiest of all the intermediaries on what became the Silk Road.

  By the fifth century BC, the Bactrian, Sogdian, and Tokharian states had carved the region into competing spheres. Achaemenid emperors Cyrus the Great and later Darius the Great extended their reach to the Amu Darya, absorbing Bactria and Chorasmia as administrative satrapies. In 327 BC, Alexander the Great pushed through Sogdiana and Bactria as well, though the resistance he encountered was fierce enough to bog down his army for years. The kingdom Alexander's successors held was eventually displaced by the Kushan Empire, and after that the Hephthalites and Sassanids each took their turn governing a region that seemed always to attract the ambitions of distant powers.

• 3. Islam and the Golden Age

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  Arab forces under the commander Qutayba ibn Muslim swept through Transoxiana in the eighth century, and the conversion of the region to Islam began in earnest. The territory between the Amudarya and Syrdarya rivers became a focal point of the Islamic Golden Age. Trade wealth and religious energy combined to turn Bukhara and Samarkand into centres of science, theology, and literature. In the ninth and tenth centuries, the Samanid Empire drew those cities deeper into a Persian-inflected Islamic culture, followed by the Turkic Karakhanids and their Seljuk overseers.

  The Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century erased much of what had been built. Genghis Khan's forces sacked Bukhara, Samarkand, Urgench, and other cities, carrying out massacres and destruction that left parts of Khwarezmia completely razed. After Genghis Khan died in 1227, his empire was divided among his sons and descendants. Control of most of Transoxiana passed to the line of Chagatai Khan, the second son of Genghis Khan. For several generations, orderly succession brought a measure of prosperity and internal peace to the region, and the broader Mongol realm remained unified under what became known as the Golden Horde.

• 4. Timur's World

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  From the struggles of the 1380s, one figure emerged to dominate Transoxiana: Timur, known in the West as Tamerlane. Though not a descendant of Genghis Khan, he conquered all of western Central Asia, then Iran, the Caucasus, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, and the steppe north of the Aral Sea. He invaded Russia and died in 1405 while marching on China. The sources describe his conquests as accompanied by genocidal massacres in the cities he took.

  Timur's method of building was equally total. He gathered artisans and scholars from the vast territories he conquered and brought them to his capital, Samarkand, filling his empire with what the sources describe as a rich Perso-Islamic culture. His patronage extended to physicians, scientists, and artists from neighbouring countries including India. Under his grandson Ulugh Beg, Samarkand became a centre of astronomy, and the Timurid capital gave birth to what the sources call the Timurid Renaissance.

  It was during this dynasty that Turkic, in the form of the Chaghatai dialect, became a literary language in its own right. The greatest writer in that tradition, Ali-Shir Nava'i, was active in Herat in the second half of the fifteenth century. The Timurid state began to fracture after Timur's death, and that internal fighting drew the attention of Uzbek nomadic tribes living north of the Aral Sea. In 1501 those forces launched a wholesale invasion of Transoxiana, and the Timurid era ended.

• 5. Russia, Cotton, and Soviet Rule

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  Throughout the nineteenth century the Russian Empire pushed steadily into Central Asia. By 1912, census figures recorded 210,306 Russians living in Uzbekistan, and Tashkent had become the political capital of Russian Turkestan. On the 27th of October 1924, Soviet authorities created the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. The decades that followed were shaped, above all, by cotton. Moscow treated the republic as a supplier of the crop, and the irrigation demands of those fields set in motion what the sources call one of the world's worst environmental disasters.

  The Aral Sea was once the fourth-largest inland sea on Earth. Since the 1960s, when the overuse of its water began in earnest, it shrank to roughly 10% of its former area and split into separate bodies of water. The soil around the remaining southern lobe became saturated with salinity and heavy elements, particularly in Karakalpakstan. Farming still accounts for nearly 84% of Uzbekistan's water use.

  The Soviet era also left Uzbekistan with the largest electricity-generating capacity in Central Asia, with industrial facilities stretching from oil refining to chemical production. During the Second World War, 1,433,230 people from Uzbekistan fought in the Red Army against Nazi Germany; 263,005 died on the Eastern Front and 32,670 went missing. In a later conflict, about 65,000 Uzbek troops served in Afghanistan during the Soviet-Afghan War, and at least 1,500 lost their lives.

• 6. Independence and Contested Reform

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  On the 31st of August 1991, Uzbekistan declared independence after a failed coup attempt in Moscow. Islam Karimov, who had served as first secretary of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan since 1989, became the country's first president on the 29th of December 1991. He won re-election in 2000, 2007, and 2015, each time with more than 90% of the vote; each time, most international observers declined to participate and dismissed the results as failing democratic standards. Non-governmental organisations including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International consistently described his government as an authoritarian state with limited civil rights, noting widespread torture, arbitrary arrests, and restrictions on religious practice, speech, and assembly.

  In the 2005 unrest centred on the city of Andijan, government troops fired on crowds of protesters. Official reports counted 187 dead; witness accounts put the toll in the hundreds. When the United States joined calls for an independent investigation, Karimov moved the country's alignment toward Russia and China and ordered American forces to vacate the airbase at Karshi-Khanabad within 180 days. The last US troops left in November 2005.

  Karimov died on the 2nd of September 2016. His longtime prime minister, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, was appointed interim president by the Oliy Majlis and then formally elected in December of that year with 88.6% of the vote, sworn in on the 14th of December. Mirziyoyev replaced most of Karimov's officials, opened dialogue with human rights organisations, and scheduled the abolition of Soviet-style exit visas for 2019. Analysts drew comparisons between his leadership style and that of Deng Xiaoping and Mikhail Gorbachev, describing his tenure as a potential "Uzbek Spring." In February 2020, the United Nations announced that Uzbekistan had made "major progress" on stamping out forced labour in cotton harvests, reporting that 94% of pickers worked voluntarily that year.

• 7. Economy and Environment Today

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  Uzbekistan mines 80 tons of gold each year, ranking seventh in the world, and its uranium production also ranks seventh globally. The national gas company Uzbekneftegaz places eleventh in global natural gas output, producing 60 to 70 billion cubic metres annually. Cotton remains central: in 2011 the country was the world's seventh-largest producer and fifth-largest exporter of the fibre. The crop's global reach has had unexpected consequences; Uzbek cotton is used to manufacture banknotes in South Korea, and after February 2022, Uzbekistan significantly increased exports of cotton pulp and nitrocellulose to Russia, components used in the manufacture of explosives and gunpowder.

  Cotton's environmental toll continues. Air pollution has worsened steadily throughout the twenty-first century. A dam collapse at Sardoba Reservoir in May 2020 flooded 35,000 hectares, killed six people, forced 111,000 to evacuate, and caused damage extending into neighbouring Kazakhstan; recovery estimates exceeded 1.5 trillion som. By the period 2020-2025, the combination of transport emissions, domestic heating, dust, and meteorological inversions had turned Tashkent into one of the most polluted cities in the world, with average annual pollution levels more than six times the World Health Organization's recommended ceiling of 5 micrograms per cubic metre.

  The digital economy represents a sharper departure from that extractive model. By 2024, information and communication technologies accounted for around 2.1% of GDP, with IT service exports reaching about one billion dollars. That same year the digital platform Uzum became the country's first technology company valued at over one billion dollars, a valuation that rose to 1.5 billion dollars by 2025.

• 8. Culture and Daily Life

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  Classical music in Central Asia takes the form of Shashmaqam, which arose in Bukhara in the late sixteenth century when that city served as a regional capital. The name translates as "six maqams" and describes a structure built on six sections in six distinct musical modes, with interludes of spoken Sufi poetry woven between them. Shashmaqam begins at a lower register and gradually climbs to a climax before descending to its opening tone.

  At the table, the country's signature dish is palov, a main course of rice, meat, carrots, and onions that was not available to ordinary people until the 1930s. Cooking palov was historically a task reserved for men; the Soviet era opened the kitchen to women, though the sources note that the older gender roles have since been largely restored. Green tea serves as the national hot beverage. Tea accompanies every meal and is also a drink of hospitality offered automatically to every guest, whether green or black.

  The Tashkent metro, opened in 1977 and expanded in 2001, runs four lines and is promoted as one of the cleanest systems in the former Soviet Union. Its stations are ornately decorated; Kosmonavtlar station, built in 1984, uses a space travel theme to honour Vladimir Dzhanibekov, the Soviet cosmonaut of Uzbek origin, and a statue of Dzhanibekov stands near its entrance. On the rails outside the city, Uzbekistan launched the first high-speed railway in Central Asia in September 2011, linking Tashkent and Samarkand with a Spanish-built Talgo 250 train called Afrosiyob, which made its first run on the 26th of August 2011.