Our next stop was the Arbob Palace, the site of a large Soviet collective farm out east of Khujand. I remember thinking “palace” and “collective farm” probably didn’t belong in the same sentence. I was wrong.

The Voroshilov State Collective Farm had a leader named Urukhojaev. He was a very large mustachioed Tajik man. He evidently loved everything Soviet but not as much as he loved being a Tajik. He refused to wear soviet style clothing but instead, dressed as a Tajik, always. He even wore his plain Tajik clothing with Russian dignitaries, even Khrushchev.

Urukhojaev was evidently a good leader with the support of his people and he ran a top notch soviet collective farm. At some point, they needed a collective farm headquarters. Most people might have expected some collection of small huts and buildings. But Urukhojaev had been to Russia many times and also to St. Petersburg. He decided to build his collective headquarters modelled after the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. Consequently, it looks like a Russian style palace building filled with fountains and gardens. It has over 100 rooms. It was built between 1951 and 1956. So in essence, this is a rather grand and elegant farm collective administration building, built under the Soviet Union.

We are at the bottom of the collective building’s grounds in the first photo. It was a bit of a walk to get up to the building but the fountains were very cooling.

The second photo was taken most of the way up to the building. The grounds were very nice and they had enough roses for a king and a queen and their court.

We met lots of school kids here at the palace. Many seemed eager to engage with us, mostly through our guides translation. This was part of a class and their teachers seemed to encourage this exchange. There are just as many boys in the class but the girls were up front and the boys in back and off to the sides.

Is anything starting to say “collective farm” in these photos? We are closer still in the fourth photo.

In walking up to the building, there was a long line of young women. They lined the pathways all the way to the door as you see in the last photo. An event was taking place with a presentation by the mayor of Khujand. My guess is that it involved other dignitaries as well since the long line of welcoming young women weren’t there for us.