Fifty years ago, two mayors took vodka shots atop the Space Needle — inspiring a sister-city connection that has outlasted the Soviet Union.

In 1973, Seattle and Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, formed an unlikely association: They created the first sister-city bond between U.S. and Soviet cities during the depth of the Cold War.

That bond outlived the Soviet Union, and to this day connects the two cities. Through more than 100 exchange programs, doctors, technologists, dancers, chefs, farmers, orphanage workers, alpinists, teachers and professors, students, business representatives and traders, dentists, poets and writers and even zoo animals have traveled between the cities.

The significance of Seattle and Tashkent’s bond, and others like it, is more than symbolic. Through the decades of shifting and complicated relations between the U.S. and former Soviet states, citizen-level organizations counter the us-vs.-them thinking that takes over during times of war or animosity.

Last week, a delegation from Seattle traveled to the Central Asian city to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Seattle-Tashkent Sister City Association. This trip aligns with Uzbek Independence Day, Sept. 1, a celebration marked by concerts, military parades and a fireworks show in the evening in Tashkent’s Mustakillik Square.

From the beginning, the anti-war spirit has been a driving force for the Seattle/Tashkent bond, said Dan Peterson of Seattle, who recalls those concerns growing up during the Cold War.

“I remember my family being sent by our government plans for how to build a bomb shelter in our home, emphasizing we could survive a nuclear blast. Of course, that was not true,” said Peterson, co-president of the Association for seven years and a board member for several more. “It spurred us on who are older to work to reduce the possibility of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union.”

Though the Soviet Union is long gone, the Seattle/Tashkent relationship is still active. Last year an Uzbek agricultural scientist came to Seattle to discuss how the country has adapted to Soviet-era environmental damage and climate change, and hundreds of people in the Seattle area join the group’s annual celebration of Navruz, the Persian New Year on the spring equinox.

Lola Zakharova, who moved to Seattle from Tashkent in 2006 and was co-president of the Association from 2017 to 2018, said that the Uzbek community in Seattle sees the Association as their “connection with home.”

“This is an opportunity for them — especially people who feel homesick, but people who just want to maintain ties to their culture,” Zakharova said. “It’s always a very warm feeling in my heart after those delegations because it reminds me of home very much, and the people.”

Ilhom Miliyev, a linguist who lives in Tashkent and has been with the Association for 16 years, called it “one of the best parts of my life.”

Source: Crosscut

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A film catches amazing views of the remains of a space program from the Cold War.

Tucked into a lonely hangar at Baikonur Cosmodrome on the Kazakh steppe, two Soviet-era space shuttles are quietly gathering dust, bird poop, and rust. They’re also attracting photographers eager to sneak around the ruins, such as Alexandar Kaunas, who recently filmed part of his journey into the cavern where the derelict shuttles are housed.

One shuttle, named Ptichka, never left Earth. The other, a test vehicle, was never meant to fly.

It’s a rather unceremonious end for these abandoned icons of a once-proud space program. The space shuttles were designed and built during the 1970s and 1980s as part of the USSR’s attempt to outdo the U.S. winged orbiters. As envisioned, the Soviet shuttles would not only be able to fly themselves, they would also lift vastly heavier cargo into space that could then be used to build space stations and weapons.

That didn’t happen.

A casualty of the waning days of the Cold War and a collapsing Soviet economy, the shuttle program never took off — despite the successful flight in 1988 of an unpiloted orbiter named Buran, which loosely translates to “snowstorm” or “blizzard.”

Buran would be the only Soviet orbiter to leave Earth. In 1993, Boris Yeltsin canceled the program entirely, leaving some vessels to rot in a hangar while others were put on display in such places as the Sydney Summer Olympics and Moscow’s Gorky Park.

Buran, the shuttle that actually flew, was destroyed in 2002 when its hangar collapsed after an earthquake, killing eight people. Ptichka and this other test shuttle remain at Baikonur, beckoning those who enjoy visiting moldering relics of the Cold War and yesterday’s quests to send humans to space.

In 2015, photographer Ralph Mirebs ventured into the complex and captured images of the forgotten monuments to a bygone space race.

Six months ago, Russian photographer and film director Alexander Kaunas and a companion hiked 24 miles through the desert, gained entry to the site through questionably legal means, then spent three nights among the decaying space shuttles.

Next door to the blast-proof shuttle hangar, another lonely cavern contains the remains of the enormous Energia rocket meant to boost the shuttles into space.

If this were a Hollywood flick, Kaunas and his buddy would revive one of those shuttles with a bit of engineering hocus pocus, fly the thing straight into the heart of an intergalactic battle, and save humankind in the process. But this is not a movie, and the shuttles will likely remain covered in the detritus of decades, waiting for the next photographer to sneak into their realm.

Source : National Geographic

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