Afghan village built on a Soviet dream collapsing into deadly power vacuum.
When Darwish looked out of his new living room window 40 years ago, he felt as if he'd left Afghanistan. Then, as now, it was one of the world's poorest countries, but in Shahrak paved roads curved between lawns and flowerbeds past an Olympic-standard swimming pool towards two cinemas, a clinic and low-rise apartment blocks.
It was a dream conjured up in the offices of Soviet bureaucrats who had dispatched engineers to build the country's largest hydroelectric plant nearby. In a social engineering project as ambitious as the 100-metre (328ft) dam, they also created a model village for its Soviet and Afghan workers.
"When we came here it felt like a foreign country, with the grass and the beautiful flowers," said Darwish, 72, a mechanic who started at the plant even before its giant turbines began spinning out electricity in 1967.
Today Shahrak is on the fringes of Taliban territory. Women rarely go out without burqas, the cinema is makeshift housing and the wrecked remains of diving boards are the only suggestion that the pool was once anything more than a rubbish pit browsed by muddy goats.
The vision of a new type of Afghan life, embraced by the Afghan engineers who came to live there then watched powerless as the village was torn apart by years of war, was abandoned long ago.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/03/afghan-village-soviet-dream-shahrak-hydroelectric-plant
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