Loss of the House of Press

1930. This is what Dunganskaya Street looked like at the intersection with Boulevard before the start of construction of the House of Printing.

House of Printing. Architects Y. Dubov, A. Furshtat, 1931. Constructivist era building. It is distinguished by its straightforward forms, huge window openings, and a combination of simple geometric relationships of cubes, parallelepipeds and cylinders in its designs. The Kyrgyz Publishing House, Printing House No. 1, the editorial offices of the newspapers “Kyzyl Kyrgyzstan” and “Soviet Kyrgyzstan”, creative unions of Kyrgyzstan, and the headquarters of the 153rd Infantry Brigade were located here.

The House of Press did not survive into present-day Bishkek. The constructivist building at 45 Erkindik Boulevard, later known as Printing House No. 1 or Erkin-Too, lost its protected heritage status in 2015. Demolition began in October 2019. Contemporary reporting recalled that the building was erected in 1931, housed major republican newspapers and publishing organisations, and served as a formation site for a wartime military unit. The Bishkek-era tab therefore documents the loss of the monument and the change of the site rather than presenting the vanished building as still extant.