‘Building the Internationalist City from Below’: The Role of the Czechoslovak Industrial Cooperative “Interhelpo” in Forging Urbanity in early-Soviet Bishkek
David Leupold
‘Building the Internationalist City from Below’: The Role of the Czechoslovak Industrial Cooperative “Interhelpo” in Forging Urbanity in early-Soviet Bishkek - Volume 100
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The paper explores the historical trajectory of Interhelpo, an industrial cooperative from Czechoslovakia, and its role in forging urbanization “from below” in early-Soviet town of Pishpek (now Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan). In light of scarce literature available on the success and failures of Western internationalist communes in the early Soviet period, this paper draws from intensive field work in Kyrgyzstan and understudied sources in Czech, Kyrgyz, Slovak and Russian to offer a novel, bottom-up narrative on the socialist city in Central Asia.

Founded 1914 by Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, German internationalists and Ido-learners around the mountaineer and Bolshevik Rudolf Pavlovič Mareček in the Czechoslovakian town Žilina, the cooperative actively shaped urbanization in what would be become known as the capital of Soviet Kyrgyzstan. From 1925 until its liquidation during WWII, the cooperative built from scratch a whole district including the first electric power station of the city, textile and furniture factories, workshops for tailors, shoemakers and joiners, a school, a kindergarten, a tannery, a brewery as well as unique residential district. In the process, the cooperative forged an organic patchwork language referred to as spontánne esperanto to secure translocal collaboration between internationalists from Central Europe, on the one hand, and a heterogeneous mix of workers including Armenians, Kyrgyz, Dungans, Uygurs, Uzbeks, Russians and Ukrainians, on the other.

Transcending a purely historical analysis, the paper ultimately turns to the urban landscape of present-day Bishkek. There it argues that while the district built by Interhelpo corresponds today to an exiled site dislocated by the hegemonic ethno-national memory regime, its materiality harbors relicts of another future capable of mobilizing alternative narratives on the city and her socialist and multi-ethnic past.

23. The first group that requested emigration to the Soviet Union from Czechoslovakia was a group of peasants around a man called Josef Blažej from Hořice u Hradce Králové in the beginning of April 1923. The first commune that was actually resettled from Czechoslovakia was Pragomašina, a cooperative of locksmiths and repairmen [machinists? technicians?]. Already in 1923, they were resettled to Tbilsi (Georgia) and collaborated with the local cooperative Gruziya in the building of a factory for the production and repair of agricultural machinery. However, due to lack of support, the activities of the cooperative lasted for only three years. See Pollak, Pavel, “Die Auswanderung in Die Sowjetunion in Den Zwanziger Jahren,” Bohemia 10 (1969): 298–300Google Scholar, and Robert Gale Wesson, Soviet Communes, 113. For other historical case studies, see Bernstein and Cherny, “Searching for the Soviet Dream,” Lam, “Forging a Socialist Homeland From Multiple Worlds,” Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile, and Robert Gale Wesson, Soviet Communes.