The Gur-i Amir Mausoleum and the Soviet Politics of Preservation

In the Soviet Union preservation was intimately connected to the goals of the Communist Party and employed in the struggle to build the legitimacy of the Communist state, even in periphery. In the earliest years of the Soviet state, preservation was used to compare the new order with the tsarist regime, and in the relatively prosperous and stable postwar period it helped to construct the optimistic vision that history marched toward human liberation.