Galina Pugachenkova

Galina Anatolyevna Pugachenkova was born on 7 February 1915 in Verny (now Almaty). In 1932 she came to Tashkent and entered the architecture department of the Central Asian Industrial Institute, graduating with distinction in 1937. She stayed on as a postgraduate in 1938–1941 and in 1941 defended a candidate’s thesis on the architecture of Navoi’s age.

Already as a student she took part in expeditions led by the archaeologist Mikhail Masson, who later became her husband. In 1942–1960 she taught archaeology at the history faculty of the Central Asian State University (SAGU) as a docent. In 1959 she defended a doctoral thesis on the architecture of southern Turkmenistan, and in 1962 she was made a professor.

From 1946 to 1961 she headed the seventh, architectural, detachment of the South Turkmenistan Archaeological Complex Expedition (YuTAKE). In 1958 she moved to the Hamza Institute of Art Studies, where she founded the department of the history of art and architecture and ran it in 1960–1984; in 1959 she also set up the Uzbek Art-Historical Expedition at the institute and led it until 1984.

The expeditions under her direction excavated Khalchayan, Dalverzin Tepe, Jiga Tepe and the Orlat burial ground, and she took part in digs in Afghanistan, among them the Kushan camp at Zadian, and in surveys of Islamic monuments around Herat. She published more than 700 works in six languages. Her best-known books include the “History of the Arts of Uzbekistan” written with L. I. Rempel (1965), “Khalchayan” (1966), “The Art of Bactria in the Kushan Period” (1979), “The Art of Gandhara” (1982) and “The Architectural Heritage of Temur” (1996).

She was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan in 1968 and a full member (academician) in 1984; in 1986–1989 she served as academician-secretary of the Social Sciences Division of the Uzbek SSR Academy of Sciences, and from 1983 she sat on the editorial board of the journal “Sovet O‘zbekistoni”. In 1964 she received the title Honoured Scientist of the Uzbek SSR, in 1966 the Hamza State Prize of the Uzbek SSR and in 1992 the Beruni State Prize; later she was awarded the Order “Do‘stlik” (1995) and the Order “For Outstanding Merit” (2002).

Galina Pugachenkova died in Tashkent on 18 February 2007 and was buried at the Dombrabad cemetery next to her husband Mikhail Masson. Her personal scholarly archive, 342 folders of documents, has been digitised and published on a dedicated website.