I stayed at that hotel a couple of times shortly after it opened in 1974. We were on a tour of Soviet Central Asia and used Tashkent as something of a hub from which we visited Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva, and Dushanbe in Tajikistan (then Tajik SSR.)

What was memorable about our stay at the hotel was that several members of our Intourist tour group spent a somewhat drunken evening (cheap and nasty Uzbek champagne) in the company of some SAS flight crews (who were all way more attractive than we were.) SAS had traffic rights across the USSR for Copenhagen -Tokyo travel with a stop in TAS; all the other European carriers had to go via Anchorage on their polar routes (none of the planes had the nonstop range at the time.)