The magnitude 5.2 quake struck at dawn, its epicenter directly beneath the city, destroying tens of thousands of homes built largely of mud brick and clay. Remarkably, official casualty figures stayed low, around a dozen deaths, though the destruction displaced some 300,000 people. The Soviet government used the disaster as an opportunity to rebuild Tashkent as a showcase socialist city, drawing construction brigades from across the USSR.
At 5:23 a.m. on October 8 (some sources give April 26 for the main shock; the aftershock sequence continued into subsequent days), the ground beneath Tashkent convulsed violently. Because the epicenter sat almost directly under the city at shallow depth, the shaking was extraordinarily destructive relative to its magnitude, tearing through neighborhoods built largely from traditional sun-dried clay brick that offered little resistance to seismic force.
Despite flattening large sections of the old city and leaving an estimated 300,000 people without homes, the official Soviet death toll remained remarkably low, attributed partly to the early hour, when many residents were still in single-story homes rather than crowded workplaces, and partly to the relatively low population density of the affected quarters.
Moscow seized the rebuilding effort as a propaganda opportunity, dispatching construction brigades from all fifteen Soviet republics to raise a new Tashkent of wide boulevards, modernist apartment blocks, and monumental public buildings. The rebuilt city became an emblem of Soviet central planning and multi-ethnic solidarity, its skyline still bearing the imprint of that hurried, ideologically charged reconstruction decades after the USSR itself collapsed.