A leaked video from Tashkent province's Chinoz district — showing local mayor Sherzod Salikhov ordering "Disgraceful Mahalla" signs be posted on an entire neighborhood, and threatening individual households with "House of Shame" placards over untidy yards — has drawn attention not just for its harsh tone, but for how closely it mirrors a governance technique with deep Soviet roots.
A familiar mechanism
What Salikhov describes — publicly labeling underperforming individuals, households, or entire communities to pressure them into compliance — has a direct historical antecedent in the Soviet Doska Pozora, or "Board of Shame." Soviet enterprises paired a red "board of honor" for model workers with a black "board of shame" to call out those who drank, slacked off, or otherwise fell short of expectations, to highlight high-performing workers and call out those who drank, dawdled or otherwise shirked their duty. In its harshest form, the mechanism went well beyond individual reputation: in Ukraine and the Kuban province, a related practice known as the "black board" (chorna doshka) functioned as a tool of Communist Party propaganda, and is considered one of the instruments used during the Holodomor, the same blacklisting method later applied in Soviet Kazakhstan as well, before it evolved into an outright instrument of repression against peasants.
Why the comparison matters
Placed side by side, the resemblance is hard to miss: the same instinct to convert a bureaucratic shortfall — grain quotas then, weedy courtyards now — into public humiliation, and the same assumption that shame, rather than resources or dialogue, is the most efficient lever of local governance. For critics, an elected or appointed official reaching for that toolkit, even for something as mundane as landscaping, raises legitimate questions about whether decades-old habits of top-down social control are resurfacing in new packaging across the former Soviet space.
Other side of the argument
That said, officials employing this approach would likely draw a sharper line than the comparison allows. Unlike the collectivization-era boards — which were backed by the machinery of the Soviet state, carried real financial and even criminal penalties — the Chinoz signage, as described, carries no formal punishment beyond public embarrassment, and is aimed at a narrow civic goal (cleaning up yards and streets) rather than political loyalty or economic extraction. Whether that distinction makes the tactic merely tone-deaf rather than a genuine step "backwards," or whether normalizing public shaming as a governance tool is itself the concern regardless of stakes, is likely to remain a matter of debate.
