page_title: Dushanbe
section_title: Later development
hierarchical_section_title: Dushanbe / History / Capital of the Tajik SSR / Later development
caption_attribution_description: Русский: Почтовая марка СССР из серии «20-летие Таджикской Советской Социалистической Республики», выпущенная в декабре 1949 года. На ней изображены Медицинский институт имени Авиценны и педагогический институт, оба — в Душанбе. Художник — В. Андреев. Номер — 1477 (ЦФА). Тираж — 1 млн экз. Описание — по изданию «Каталог почтовых марок СССР 1918—1974», М., ЦФА, 1976.
context_page_description: Dushanbe is the capital and largest city of Tajikistan. As of January 2020, Dushanbe had a population of 863,400. Until 1929, the city was known in Russian as Dyushambe, and from 1929 to 1961 as Stalinabad, after Joseph Stalin.
  In ancient times, what is now or is close to modern Dushanbe was settled by various empires and peoples, including Mousterian tool-users, various neolithic cultures, the Achaemenid Empire, Greco-Bactria, the Kushan Empire, and the Hephalites. In the Middle Ages, more settlements began near modern-day Dushanbe such as Hulbuk and its famous palace. From the 17th century to the early 20th, Dushanbe began to grow into a market village controlled at times by the Beg of Hisor, Balkh, and finally Bukhara. Soon after the Russian invasion in 1922, the town was made the capital of the Tajik Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in 1924, which commenced Dushanbe's development and rapid population growth that continued until the Tajik Civil War. After the war, the city became capital of an independent Tajikistan and continued its growth and development into a modern city.
context_section_description: In the years that followed, the city developed at a rapid pace. The Soviets transformed the area into a center for cotton and silk production, and tens of thousands of people relocated to the city. The population also increased with thousands of ethnic Tajiks migrating to Tajikistan from Uzbekistan following the transfer of Bukhara and Samarkand to the Uzbek SSR as part of national delimitation in Central Asia. Industry during the time period was limited, focused on local production. The first bus line began operating in 1930. and in 1940, Komsomolskoye Lake was constructed in the city.
  Many of these projects occurred under the mayoralty of Abdukarim Rozykov, one of the first mayors of Dushanbe, from 1925-1932, who sought to transform it into a "model communist city" through modernization and urban planning. Mikhail Kalitin continued the industrial development of Dushanbe, building the Komsomolskoye Lake and promoting industry in the city.
  Several architects played a major role in the city's construction in a group headed by Peter Vaulin. He drew up a piece of legislation called "On the construction of the city of Dushanbe" which the city adopted on April 27 1927. He implemented a constructivist design, learned from his meeting with Le Corbusier in Moscow in 1929. In 1934 and 1935, the Griprogor Institute, based in Leningrad, created a master plan for the construction of Dushanbe. It was approved on March 3 1938. The city center during the reconstruction shifted to Red Square and Frunze Park, the location of many workers demonstrations and military parades into the forties. The first skyscraper in Dushanbe, the hotel Dushanbe, was erected in 1964. High-rise buildings began to be developed in the mid-70s against the wishes of the Tajik Institute of Earthquake Engineering and Seismology, which viewed such developments as dangerous in an earthquake which they predicted would occur in the near future.
  During World War 2, the population of Dushanbe and Tajikistan swelled with 100,000 evacuees from the front that led to the deployment of 17 hospitals in the city. The city's industry also greatly increased during the war, as the Soviets wanted to move critical infrastructure far behind enemy lines, and industries like textile manufacturing and food processing began to grow.  In 1954, there were 30 schools in the city, a medical institute named after Avicenna, the Stalinabad Academy of Sciences, the University of Stalinabad, which was founded in 1947 and had 1,500 students, and the Stalinabad Pedagocial Institute for Woman, established on September 1 1953.
  In 1960, gas supply reached the capital through a gas pipeline opened from Kyzyl to Tumshuk to Dushanbe. On 10 November 1961, as part of de-Stalinization, Stalinabad was renamed back to Dushanbe, the name it retains to this day. In the 1960s, under the leadership of Mahmudbek Narzibekov, the first zoo was built in the city along with a plan to end the housing shortage and provide free apartments. The Nurek Dam, which would have been the tallest dam in the world, was started 90 kilometres south east of Dushanbe during that time period. It was a megaproject meant to showcase Soviet innovation and development in Tajikistan, but the project was cancelled in the 1970s because of stagnating Soviet economic growth. 
  On August 2 1979 the population of Dushanbe reached 500,000.
caption: 1949 depiction of the Avicenna Medical Institute and the Pedagogical Institute
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