In 1970, the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic was preparing to celebrate the 2500th jubilee of the city of Samarkand. As part of the official celebrations, the Samarkand Theater of Opera and Ballet had produced an opera, “The Legend of Bibihanum,” based on a well-known local legend about one of the wives of the medieval ruler, Amir Timur (Tamerlane). The theater had chosen this theme because the legend had an epic quality well suited to opera, and because it resonated strongly with Soviet understandings of the importance of Samarkand's Timurid-era architecture. Samarkand's despotic history was problematic for Soviet ideology, but the symbols of civilizational achievements created by the despots (the name Bibihanum also refers to the architectural complex that is named after Timur's wife) were international icons of which the Soviet state was proud. Here, it would seem, was an ideal enactment of Soviet ideas about culture: the European high art genre of opera would facilitate the fullest expression of the cultural development of the local people, while the theme of the opera would synthesize perfectly the principle of “national in form, socialist in content,” by communicating Soviet values through the medium of a local legend. However, in spite of the seeming acceptability of this theme given the dual constraints of Soviet ideology and common knowledge about the significant monuments and historical events of Samarkand, there was a fatal flaw in the story that halted the opera's production in its tracks. The flaw in the story was that it could not avoid the topic of the world-conquering Timur himself.