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Sacred Mountain and Silly Borders
Deconstructing Lenin
Statues of Lenin, although not yet on the endangered species list, are not as common in the former Soviet Union or Communist bloc as they once were. As the Soviet political and economic system fell apart, reformers made sure that its founder took a symbolic fall too. In central squares from Tallinn to Tbilisi, crowds cheered as statues of Lenin were unceremoniously pulled down and bulldozed.
However, Lenin still stands tall in what was once a distant outpost of the Soviet empire—the city of Osh in southern Kyrgyzstan. In the broad, fertile Fergana Valley, between two great mountain ranges, the Fergana and the Pamir Alay, Lenin looks out on a sprawling, multiethnic city still struggling to adjust to the post-Soviet world.
Like Stalin, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin was his nom de plume) remains a controversial historical figure. Indeed, the presence or absence of a Lenin statue tells us something about how ready a country or a people is to shake off cultural and ideological links to the Soviet era. In Eastern Europe, the Baltic States, and the Caucasus, the break came quickly and decisively, and the Lenin statues fell almost as fast—in 1989 in Krakow, in 1990 in Bucharest, in 1991 in Tbilisi and Yerevan, and so on. Yet in Russia, Belarus, eastern Ukraine, and some Central Asian republics, Lenin statues still stand in many public squares and parks.
In 2012, Russian lawmakers proposed relocating Lenin monuments to museums or side streets, or selling them to collectors, ostensibly to reduce vandalism and maintenance costs. But the debate in the parliament (Duma) revealed an ideological agenda. One deputy claimed that the presence of Lenin statues in most Russian cities and towns meant the revolutionary leader still exercised a stranglehold on history, and that was unfair to other Russian historical figures. Didn’t Ivan the Terrible or Catherine the Great deserve equal historical billing? Predictably, the Communist Party did not like the idea. As one senior party member put it: “Lenin is the founding father of the Russian Federation. Same as George Washington in America.”1
Kyrgyzstan, like other Central Asian republics, has a schizophrenic relationship with its Russian and Soviet past—a mix of resentment against military conquest and repression, political and economic control, and nostalgia for a time when everyone had housing, education, medical care, and a job, even if pay was low, the lines at the shops were long, and there wasn’t much on the shelves once you got inside.
In 1984, to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the creation of the Kyrgyz Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR), a new Lenin Square was built in the capital, Bishkek, along the main east-west street, Leninsky Prospekt. Its focal point, in front of the new historical museum, was a statue of Lenin in one of his more dramatic poses, his right arm raised in the direction of the Kyrgyz Ala Too mountains to the south.
At independence, Leninsky Prospekt became Chuy Prospekt, and Lenin Square Ala Too Square, but Lenin remained, his arm outstretched. Locals jested that he was trying to direct traffic or hail a taxi on one of the city’s busiest streets. In August 2003, the authorities moved the statue to a more discreet location—a park on the other side of the historical museum. To mark what the government described, in something of a historical stretch, as “2,200 years of Kyrgyz statehood,” the statue of Lenin was replaced by a statue of Erkindik (Liberty)—a winged female figure on top of a globe, holding a tunduk, the circular frame that forms the top of the traditional Kyrgyz nomadic dwelling, the yurt. As the Lenin statue was dismantled, protesters filed a lawsuit and marched with “Hands Off Lenin!” banners. The Communist party leader and parliamentary deputy Absamat Masaliev claimed officials wanted to convert a bomb shelter under the statue into an underground retail complex. “Who gave the small nation of Kyrgyzstan its statehood? Lenin!” said another opponent.2
The removal was supported by a coalition of NGOs. “Lenin did not offer anything except violence and dictatorship,” its leader, Edil Baisalov, said. He claimed that there were about four thousand Lenin statues in towns and villages in Kyrgyzstan. “Isn’t that rather too many for a person who never even visited Kyrgyzstan, and didn’t say a word about our country anywhere in his works? For Kyrgyzstan to still have so many monuments to Lenin is like Germany preserving statues of Hitler. If we really want to build a democracy and a new civil society, we must tear such things down.” Other commentators were more cynical. “If the authorities don’t like Lenin anymore, why don’t they just remove the statue’s head?” asked one parliamentary deputy. “That way, each new leader could simply screw a model of his head onto Lenin’s body. Just think of the money that could be saved.”3 The government ended up spending more money. In 2011, reportedly because some Kyrgyz believed that a woman holding a tunduk was a bad omen, Erkindik was supplanted by Manas, the national folk hero.
Although some Kyrgyz nationalists in Osh would support the removal of the Lenin statue, the city has escaped a public spat on the issue, probably because it faces more pressing challenges—a stagnant economy, declining social services, a high crime rate, and periodic bloody conflicts between ethnic Kyrgyz and Uzbeks, the most recent in 2010 when more than 470 people were killed and 2,800 properties damaged. However, the statue’s reprieve does not denote nostalgia for Soviet rule; it’s simply (and Lenin would understand this) a matter of economics. The city does not have the money to tear down or move the statue, let alone put up something more politically correct in its place. Today, it’s a local landmark, a place where visitors pose for snapshots, kids ride skateboards, and lovers scrawl their names. If Lenin stays, it will be for that best capitalist reason—because he’s good for business.
Lenin statues come in many varieties. There’s Lenin with his head raised, looking to the skies or stars, Lenin the action figure rallying the masses, Lenin deep in thought, Lenin looking resolute. There’s even a Lenin looking rather uneasy outside a taco joint in Seattle. Kyrgyzstan’s two most prominent Lenins do look different. Bishkek Lenin, with his right arm outstretched towards the mountains, is the dynamic leader, pointing towards some mystic, communist, egalitarian future. Osh Lenin holds out his arms as if to greet people. He seems kinder, gentler, more human. Considering Osh’s troubled history, maybe the Lenin statue is a symbol worth keeping.
Mountain Barriers
From the so-called Pamir Knot in Tajikistan, the great mountain ranges of Asia extend in all directions—the Himalayas and the Karakoram to the southeast, the Hindu Kush to the southwest, the Kunlun to the east, and the Tian Shan to the northeast. In Kyrgyzstan, the Central Tian Shan range forms a natural border with China’s Xinjiang Province, rising to Pik Pobedy (Victory), at 24,111 feet the second-highest point in the former Soviet Union. South of Bishkek, the Kyrgyz Ala Too range runs east-west to the deep mountain lake of Issyk Kul; the Kungey Ala Too range north of the lake forms the border with Kazakhstan; the Fergana range straddles the middle of the country; the Pamir Alay range dominates the south. More than 90 percent of Kyrgyzstan’s land area—the size of Austria and Hungary combined, or the US state of Montana—consists of mountains, with 40 percent higher than 3,000 feet.
The mountains are both a blessing and a curse. Their natural beauty offers potential for tourism, but “Switzerland of Asia” campaigns have so far failed to contribute significantly to the economy, mainly because of the remoteness of the country and poor roads and tourist facilities. It’s great trekking terrain, but the so-called resorts—most of them former summer camps for Soviet industrial workers—are short on both modern facilities and après-ski ambience. There are mineral deposits, many of them unexploited because of the cost and difficulty of mining in remote regions. Hydroelectric plants have the potential to provide all the country’s electricity supply, with some left over for export. However, as the glaciers continue to recede, scientists worry about the sustainability of the country’s water resources. For centuries, the mountains have provided summer pastures for herds of sheep, goats, and horses, but most of the land cannot be cultivated.
Few roads cross the mountains, and they are often blocked by avalanches and mudslides; cash-strapped local authorities struggle to maintain or improve them. Building new roads to improve commerce and boost the economy in rural areas means moving massive quantities of earth and rock and constructing bridges and tunnels—a major investment that usually requires help from foreign donors. It is difficult and expensive to transport goods, deliver the mail, or provide medical services; in winter, a trip to the town market or the hospital may be impossible. At higher elevations, the first snows come in October; some settlements are cut off from November to May.
The mountains are as much a cultural and political as a physical barrier. The major concentrations of population are in two large valleys—the Chuy in the north, with the capital Bishkek, and the Fergana in the south, with Osh and Djalalabad, the second and third largest cities. About half the country’s population of 5.3 million live in the south. The Ala Too and Fergana ranges separate the valleys, splitting the country and its major urban centers into two distinct regions. In Kyrgyz society, where identity and loyalty are still defined by family, clan, and village, the government in Bishkek can seem very distant. The north is more industrialized and secular, oriented to Kyrgyzstan’s larger and more prosperous Central Asian neighbor, Kazakhstan, and to Russia and the West. The south is more agricultural, conservative, and Islamic, looking to Uzbekistan and further west to Iran. Some northerners fear separatism, Islamic fundamentalism, and the influence of Uzbekistan in the south; some southerners believe the government in Bishkek exploits their region, while shortchanging it on tax revenue and social services. Polls show that most people in Kyrgyzstan consider the differences between the north and south to be the major challenge to national unity.
MAP 2.1 Kyrgyzstan and the Fergana Valley (map by Brian Edward Balsley, GISP)
Landing in Osh
It’s a one-hour flight from Bishkek to Osh over a rugged landscape of rocky, treeless mountain slopes, with fast-running rivers, patches of green pasture, and the occasional settlement. Even in summer, there’s snow on the mountain peaks. On my first flight in early December 1995, snow covered most of the valleys. From the window of the Soviet-era, twin-prop Yak-40, I felt as if I could almost step out onto a summit. The pilot flew low to avoid the cloud cover, trusting his view from the cockpit more than his navigation instruments. Flying into the wind, the plane shook and rattled but held its course. My traveling companion, Kuban Tabaldiev, assured me we would be safe. He said he had taken this flight many times. The plane might be old, but the pilots were well trained. They had experience flying in bad weather across all kinds of terrain, taking off and landing at small airports throughout Central Asia and Siberia.
Kuban was the media specialist for the United States Information Service (USIS), the agency which in the 1990s administered US-funded educational and cultural programs. In 1995, USIS partnered with the UNESCO regional office to provide training and resources for journalists in Kyrgyzstan. A media center was planned at the National Library in Bishkek. My assignment was to establish a center in Osh for Kyrgyz, Uzbek, and Russian-language journalists in the south.
USIS and UNESCO staff assured me that they had successfully negotiated space for the center at the oblast (provincial) library. My job was to meet with local journalists and media owners to assess training needs, hire a manager, compile a list of equipment, and write a report. The tasks were enumerated in the usual bureaucratic language. On the ground in Osh, it didn’t work out quite as smoothly.
Kuban and I checked into the Hotel Intourist (post-independence, it was renamed the Hotel Osh, but no one seemed to use the new name) for three nights until I found an apartment for the three weeks I was to spend in the city. Like all Soviet-era hotels, the Intourist was centrally located, but that was about its only competitive advantage. When we arrived, the lobby was dark, and the elevators weren’t working; the clerk said that the electricity would come on at 5:30 p.m. It did, but the elevators still didn’t work, and there was no heat or hot water that night. The first edition of the Lonely Planet guide to Central Asia, published a few months later, warned travelers to stay away from the hotel restaurant with its “ear-splitting music and no customers beyond a few pinstriped thugs.”4 Fortunately, when dinnertime arrived, it was closed. We went out to buy bread, cheese, and fruit, ordered tea and extra blankets from the cheerful dezhurnaya (the floor lady who was a fixture in all Soviet-era hotels), and made it an early night. After 10:00 p.m., the second-largest city in Kyrgyzstan was dark and quiet. The only nightlife was the occasional car on the main drag, Kurmanjan Dakta, a few barking dogs, and some Russians down the hallway complaining about the economy over a bottle of vodka.
Ethnic Tension on the Silk Road
At least from the fifth century BCE, Osh has been a crossroads city, a trading center attracting people of many races, religions, and cultures. It lies in the east of the largest and richest agricultural region in Central Asia, the Fergana Valley, where the Ak Burra River, flowing out of the Pamir Alay, emerges from its gorge and flows into the once-mighty Syr Darya, on its way to the Aral Sea. Osh was on a branch of the Silk Road that ran east along the Fergana Valley, crossing the Pamir Alay to Kashgar in China. From as early as the eighth century, Osh was known as a center for silk production and for its huge bazaar. According to archaeological data, the city with its citadel and mosque was surrounded by a fortified wall with three gates. The Mongols razed the city in the thirteenth century, but because of its strategic location Osh soon revived. By the sixteenth century, it was a religious and trading center with mosques and madrassas, markets and wealthy merchant homes. As the tsar’s armies advanced through Central Asia, Osh was annexed in 1876. In the Soviet era, it was the administrative center of an oblast (province) in the Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR), and its demographics began to change. Like other trading cities in the Fergana Valley, most of its population was ethnically Uzbek. From the 1960s, as the Soviet Union began building textile and other industrial plants in the south, authorities encouraged ethnic Kyrgyz to move from the countryside to take factory jobs. The growth in the Kyrgyz population contributed to social tension with the Uzbeks. As long the Soviet authorities maintained tight control over the region, tensions remained largely dormant. When the empire began falling apart, they exploded.
By the late 1980s, economic disparities between the Uzbek and Kyrgyz populations were becoming sharper. The Uzbeks, traditionally traders and arable farmers, benefited from the market conditions of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika. The Kyrgyz, most of whom were animal herders, suffered as the collective farms were broken up and they lost their jobs and housing. Uzbeks feared for their future in an independent Kyrgyzstan where ethnic Kyrgyz would dominate politics; although Uzbeks accounted for over a quarter of the population of southern Kyrgyzstan in 1990 (and about half the population of Osh), they held only 4 percent of official posts. In the spring of 1990, an Uzbek nationalist group petitioned the oblast government for greater representation and freedom for Uzbek-language schools, publications, and culture. Meanwhile, a Kyrgyz nationalist group called for the redistribution of land from an Uzbek collective farm. The authorities decided to reallocate most of the land to Kyrgyz farmers with little compensation to the Uzbeks.
Clashes between gangs of Kyrgyz and Uzbeks, many of them young and some intoxicated, began on June 4, 1990, in the town of Uzgen, and soon spread to Osh, thirty-five miles away. The local militsiya (police) stepped in, sometimes with excessive force; some policemen supported their own ethnic group by taking part in the riots. In the countryside, Kyrgyz herders on horseback terrorized Uzbek farmers and attacked chaikhanas, the traditional Uzbek teahouses. Under orders from Gorbachev, army units moved in to Osh and Uzgen, and closed the border with the Uzbek SSR to stop Uzbeks joining the conflict. Official estimates from the three days of fighting put the death toll at more than 300, although unofficial estimates claim it was closer to 1,000. In 1991, the government of newly independent Kyrgyzstan held trials for 48 accused, most of them ethnic Kyrgyz, on charges of murder, rape, arson, destruction of property, and other crimes; 46 were convicted and sentenced.
Despite their symbolism, the trials did not mark a new phase in ethnic relations in the south. Under President Askar Akayev, ethnic Kyrgyz dominated both the national government in Bishkek and the regional and local administrations in the south, including the police and the tax authorities. Although Uzbeks remained dominant in business and trade, they suffered along with the Kyrgyz and other ethnic groups in the economic collapse of the 1990s. In such a volatile situation, government-owned and private media outlets had a crucial role to play. If they succumbed to nationalist or ethnic rhetoric, they could exacerbate tensions. If they served as a voice of reason, they could help build bridges between the ethnic groups. The 1990 riots had unnerved Western governments who feared that Central Asia could descend into the kind of ethnic and religious conflict that wracked the former Yugoslavia. Foreign aid came flowing in to Kyrgyzstan—to develop a market economy, to privatize state-owned property, to draft laws and train legislators and judges, to build civil society, and to support media and raise professional standards in journalism. The Osh Media Resource Center was one of these initiatives.
Let’s Make a Deal
Kuban and I spent two days visiting newspapers and TV stations. The media owners were concerned about staying in business: the economy was in a slump, businesses were not buying advertising, and local government officials and the mafia were squeezing them for payoffs. The journalists were concerned about poor pay and working conditions. Most earned less than $50 a month, and needed two or three jobs to put food on the table. Both groups welcomed opportunities for training, agreeing that standards in the profession needed to be raised. Everyone said it was important for Kyrgyz, Uzbek, and Russian media to work harmoniously together. Memories of the June 1990 clashes were still vivid.
After Kuban left, I hired a student from Osh State University as my interpreter and began planning for the center. The library director, Ismailova Ibragimovna, was proving to be a tough negotiator. The library’s budget had been slashed, and she was struggling to pay the staff and maintain the building. There was no money for books and newspaper and magazine subscriptions. A new center with computers, radio equipment, satellite TV and—perhaps most exciting of all in 1995—an Internet connection, promised to bring in new patrons and raise the profile of the library with the oblast administration. UNESCO and USIS had agreed to fund the newspaper and magazine subscriptions. I expected Ibragimovna to enthusiastically support the project.
Instead, she held out for more. Perhaps she thought the donors had deep pockets; perhaps she thought she could play hardball with a green Westerner on his first job in Central Asia. The agreement with USIS and UNESCO was not in writing, and did not specify the size or location of the room for the center. Ibragimovna started by showing me a windowless second-floor room, not much larger than a broom closet. She claimed all other rooms in the library were occupied. Even a casual visitor would have concluded otherwise because several rooms were, if not exactly unoccupied, at least underused. When you opened the door, a couple of staff members invited you to join them for tea; there were no shelves, typewriters, and certainly no books in the room. I decided to call Ibragimovna’s bluff and said that the room she offered was unsatisfactory. The center had to be located in a larger room with windows on the first floor. The donors would pay for repairs and painting, new desks and furniture, and install a security system.
Ibragimova thought for a moment. “Maybe I can find such a room,” she said. “But it will not be easy. I know you need to hire a manager for the center. My daughter needs a job.”
I suppose I should not have been shocked, but this was the first time I had come face-to-face with an attempt to parlay influence into a job. And the request needs to be put into cultural context. In Kyrgyz society, kinship ties are the ones that really bind. Your family comes first, then your tribe or clan. In a traditional nomadic society, there’s a duty to help a family member who falls sick or loses livestock in a winter storm. However, when this value system moves from the yurts and mountain pastures to the city, to government agencies, universities, and private companies, it can breed corruption and nepotism—jobs, government contracts, and sweet business deals for relatives, bribes for university admission and diplomas, and payoffs to officials and the police. In the city, the extended family grows to include political supporters and business associates.
Politicians in Central Asia are regularly accused of corruption for using their positions to enrich themselves and their relatives. Often their response, at least in private, is that they are upholding traditional values. Because they had the ability or good fortune to attain power and wealth, it is now their responsibility to help less fortunate family members. How far this responsibility goes is another matter. Is it a moral duty to find a job for a family member who lacks the basic qualifications? To bribe a judge to get your brother off on a drug-trafficking charge? To award a government contract or a commercial network TV license to your daughter? Still, the conflict in value systems is real enough. Conduct that in the West would be considered corrupt or at least ethically questionable may be regarded as a moral duty in Central Asia. In other words, not doing whatever you can to help relatives may be unethical.
I agreed to meet Ibragimovna’s daughter. She was a second-year university student with no background in journalism and no interest in the field. I gave her as much advice as I could muster on a career in retail fashion. I promised to revise her résumé and have it translated into English. She told her mother how helpful I had been and said she wasn’t interested in the manager job after all. The next day, Ibragimovna was able to find a spacious first-floor room with windows for the center.
I then proposed that we draft a job description for the manager, translate it into Kyrgyz, Russian, and Uzbek, distribute it to media outlets, NGOs, and government offices, and run an advertisement in the local newspapers. Ibragimovna seemed surprised. “That’s not the way we do things here,” she said. “Why don’t you just go ahead and pick someone you like? That’s how I choose my staff.” I said that I was dealing with donor funds, and we had to follow the rules—an open search process, with written applications and interviews. With a mild protest, but also with a sense of curiosity, Ibragimovna joined me and a UNESCO representative in interviewing eight of the twelve applicants. The unanimous choice was Renat Khusainov, a twenty-eight-year-old university teacher with a background in journalism and computers, who was fluent in Russian, Kyrgyz, and English. He was a Tatar, a member of an ethnic minority. At the end of the discussion, Ibragimovna looked me straight in the eye. “Is ethnic origin an issue in this appointment?” she asked. “Well, it’s not an issue for me if it’s not one for you,” I shot back. She smiled. “This is a very good day for the library,” she said.
On the Road to the Sacred Mountain
After three nights at the grim Hotel Intourist, I moved into an apartment a few blocks south on Kurmanjan Dakta. The apartment was sparsely furnished but within easy walking distance of the library. Most important, the heating was working. In almost every Soviet city, a central thermal plant supplied heated water to radiators in houses, apartments, businesses, and public buildings. Or at least it was supposed to. Lack of fuel, maintenance, or some combination of the two meant that the system was notoriously unreliable. In winter, parts of Osh were without heat for days because of frozen pipes and equipment breakdowns. Most government officials lived in the city center where the system was better maintained. I was lucky to be in the right neighborhood.
Unfortunately, the heat never came on in the restaurants, where the few diners huddled in overcoats and fur hats. Even though soup and a main course cost as little as $1.50, and it was difficult to pay more than $4, few could afford to eat out. Apart from the occasional wedding reception, the restaurants were almost deserted. At the Ak-Burra Restaurant, a lonely attendant sat by the huge empty cloakroom. The cavernous upstairs dining room probably hadn’t changed much since the Soviet era when the local party brass went out to celebrate—ornate pillars, heavy red drapes, chandeliers, long mirrors, and paintings in fake gold frames. At 8:30 p.m. on Friday, only one other table was occupied. A sad-faced waiter handed me a five-page menu, but when I tried to order he told me that the kitchen could serve only kotelet (ground meat) with noodles, flat lipioshki bread, and green tea. On other nights, there was beef stroganoff with mashed potatoes and garnish and, sometimes soup and funchosa, a cold, spicy noodle salad. Most restaurant patrons came to drink and dance. Almost every restaurant had a stage for a live band, which belted out pop tunes at a decibel level that made conversation almost impossible. Because there was no heat, patrons danced in overcoats, boots, and fur hats. The music was a cross-cultural mix—a soulful Turkish pop ballad segueing into an American oldie, rendered in a thick accent, and usually without the definite articles: “Heavy bo-dee in whole-sale block, wuz dancin’ to jailhuz rock.”
After a week or so, I had learned enough Russian to greet the neighbors, shop for food at the bazaar, and tell a cab driver my destination. In 1995, communication and travel in Osh were daily challenges. The telephone switching system was antiquated and overloaded. You could usually get a local call through on the second or third attempt, but to call another city meant dialing a complex series of digits; making an international call required a trip to the city telephone exchange where you waited in line to book the call. The major challenge was finding the number. The library staff, journalists, and media owners (and anyone else who had to make calls on a regular basis) kept numbers in well-worn pocket organizers. Osh, the second largest city in the country, did not have a telephone directory.
There was also no city map—or at least no one I asked could remember ever having seen one. Even if it had existed, it would have likely featured Soviet-era street names that were fast disappearing as the city authorities dug into history and changed them to the politically correct names of Kyrgyz leaders and literary figures. Ulitsa Pionerskaya (Pioneers’ Street) was renamed for the painter Gapar Aytiev, Ulitsa 25 Oktyabrya (October 25th Street), marking the date of the Bolshevik Revolution, for the writer Kasym Bayalinov. The main one-way south street, Ulitsa Lenina (Lenin Street) became Kurmanjan Dakta kuchasi, named for the Queen of the South, the tribal chief who ruled the region after her husband was murdered in a palace coup in Khokand in 1862.
Even for fervent Kyrgyz nationalists, the name changes were confusing, and many people continued to use the old Russian names long after they disappeared from the street signs. Lenin was a particular source of confusion. Even though he was usurped by the Queen of the South on the main one-way south street, he simply moved one block east to take over the main one-way north street, pushing aside his one-time Bolshevik comrade-in-arms Yakov Sverdlov, as Ulitsa Sverdlova officially disappeared into street-sign history.
The city buses and marshrutkas (private minibuses) plied both the old and new Lenin Streets, but I did not know the city well enough to know where they would take me, so I took cabs for most trips. In Central Asian cities, the taxi business is still the most visible part of the informal economy. Although there are commercial taxi services, many drivers in private cars pick up passengers on the street. There’s a brief negotiation over the fare, although experienced passengers know the going rate between most points.
Apart from the occasional Mercedes, Audi, or BMW driven by a government official or crime boss, there were few vehicles in Osh in December 1995 that should have been on the road at all. The problem wasn’t just the bare tires and noisy mufflers. It was the streets, which had received little maintenance from a cash-strapped city government since independence. Cold winters and sizzling hot summers had buckled the road surfaces and created huge potholes. To avoid them, vehicles weaved and swerved, statistically increasing the chance of accidents. The Soviet-era Moskvichs, Volgas, and Ladas with their dented doors and shattered windshields looked like casualties of a fender-bender war, and a few were flamboyantly out of alignment. There were few auto repair shops, and parts were in short supply. If you needed a radiator or a distributor, you headed for the bazaar to scour the used parts laid out on tarpaulins and old blankets. A shortage of auto parts can spur innovation, and drivers routinely made repairs with scraps of metal and wire or a part salvaged from a different type of car. In 1995, gasoline cost about the same as in the United States (making it expensive by local standards), but there was no quality control. Because there were few gas stations, most drivers filled up at the roadside from roving tanker trucks called benavoz that sometimes dispensed a mechanically injurious blend of diesel and gasoline.
On days when I had to visit several newspapers or TV stations, I hired a car and driver for about $30 a day. My regular driver Babur, a broad-shouldered grinning Uzbek with a perfect set of gold teeth, fearlessly gunned his Volga through the rutted side streets, dodging pedestrians and farm animals, shouting (in English) “No problem!” It turned out that he was a police driver who took time off work because I paid more than the police did. Whenever we got stuck behind other vehicles he put a flashing light on top of the car and bellowed orders through a small speaker mounted on the hood. The cars magically parted in front of us.
Babur’s favorite, but absolutely unverifiable, claim was that he was a lineal descendant of King Zahiruddin Babur (1483–1530). Official histories describe Babur as a great poet and prose-writer, but he didn’t get to be head of the most powerful Moghul state in the world by penning rhyming couplets; he did a lot of fighting along the way. Babur (the name means “lion”) had both the lineage and role models to become a warrior king; he was a direct descendant of Tamerlane (Timur) through his father and of Genghis Khan through his mother. In 1497, as the newly crowned king of Fergana, he built a shelter and private mosque on the eastern promontory of Suleiman’s Mountain, the rocky outcrop that rises above the city of Osh. In 1504, his small army entered what today is Afghanistan and captured Kabul, where he established himself as ruler. In 1525, he set out to conquer India, using heavy guns to defeat the numerically superior forces of Sultan Ibrahim Lodi and capture Delhi. He went on to defeat other armies and by his death in 1530 had established the Moghul dynasty in India.
It’s a steep thirty-minute climb to Dom Babura, the rebuilt version of the small house on Suleiman’s Mountain where Babur came to pray. The formation, with its five peaks, is the result of glacial movement, but it is easy to see why travelers believed the mountain, rising majestically from the middle of the wide, flat valley, was the work of God. For centuries, it has been a place of pilgrimage for Muslims. It is said that the Prophet Muhammad once prayed there and that a shrine marks the grave of Suleiman (Solomon), a prophet in the Qur’an. Women who ascend to the shrine and crawl through an opening will, according to legend, give birth to healthy children. As in other parts of Central Asia, Islam is casually mixed with older belief systems, particularly animism—the belief that natural physical entities including animals and plants, and often inanimate objects such as rocks, possess a spiritual essence. The trees and bushes on the mountain are draped with prayer flags. UNESCO, which added Suleiman’s Mountain to its list of World Heritage Sites in 2009, has recorded more than 100 sites with petroglyphs representing humans and animals, and 17 sites of worship, linked by a network of ancient paths. Each is reputed to have a medical specialty—to cure barrenness, headaches, or back pain, and even to give the blessing of longevity. According to UNESCO, the mountain is “the most complete example of a sacred mountain anywhere in Central Asia, worshipped over several millennia.”5
The Russians Are Coming
The Russian push into Central Asia began in the early 1700s with the first of several costly missions to subdue Khiva, the most western of the khanates. In 1735, having defeated the three major Kazakh tribal groups (the Great, Middle, and Little Hordes), the Russians built a forward base at Orenburg in the southern Urals. From the 1850s, in a close parallel to the advance of the American frontier (although in the opposite direction), Russia’s armies and railroad builders, followed by settlers seeking farmland, relentlessly pushed east from the industrial cities of the Urals into Siberia and southeast into Central Asia.
What motivated Russian expansion or, as Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac eloquently put it, “the prodigious projection of power over an interminable solitude”? Was it the fear of a revived Mongol empire that could threaten Europe or an impulse for historical revenge? Or a strategic calculation, almost two centuries before Sir Halford Mackinder advanced his theory that the Eurasian heartland was the geographical pivot of history? Meyer and Brysac suggest there were several reasons.
For an empire lacking natural boundaries, space itself formed a wall. The Yale scholar Firuz Kazemzadeh has pointed to Russia’s abiding horror vacui, the fear that a hostile power might populate the empty steppe. Nor can one ignore the Russian ambition to secure an overland passage to India, for purposes of commerce and possible conquest—the abiding British nightmare. Other analysts, judging these explanations inadequate, claimed the key lay in the recesses of the Slavic soul. “Russia was as much compelled to go forward,” Lord Curzon [the Viceroy of India] maintained, “as the earth is to go around the sun.”6
The more prosaic explanation is economic. In 1861, the Civil War in the United States cut off exports of American cotton, forcing Russia to turn to other regions to supply its growing textile industry. The climate and soil of the Fergana Valley were considered ideal for cotton growing. Russia also looked to the region for other raw materials and mineral resources, and as a new market for its manufactured goods.
As Russia pushed southward, the British in India were pushing—or rather probing—northward. For half a century, the two colonial empires competed for influence and trade in a vast region stretching from Afghanistan to Tibet in what became known to historians as the “Great Game.” The term came from a letter by a British army officer, Captain Arthur Conolly, serving in Afghanistan. Conolly was an extreme example of the Victorian Christian soldier, melding imperialism with humanitarian and missionary zeal. He believed his destiny was to unite the khanates of Central Asia under British protection to stem Russian expansionism and promote commerce with India, persuade their rulers to abandon slavery, and spread Christianity. In 1841, he set off for Bukhara where the emir had imprisoned and tortured another British officer, Colonel Charles Stoddart. The mission failed, with the emir having both officers executed, so Conolly’s main legacy was to name the contest between the two great powers. He wrote that he wanted to play a leading role in “a great game, a noble game” in Central Asia. The military historian Sir John Kaye, quoting from Conolly’s letters, was the first to use the term. It was popularized by Rudyard Kipling in his 1901 novel Kim about Kimball O’Hara, the orphaned, street-smart vagabond who foils a Russian plot in British India.
The pawns in the Great Game were the khanates. Conolly’s nemesis, the emir of Bukhara, and the khans of Khiva and Khokand were throwbacks to medieval despots, with lavish palaces and courts, harems and slave markets. More important, the khanates controlled trade routes, agricultural lands, and natural resources, and could send large armies into the field. Fortunately for the Russians, they were almost always fighting each other. One by one, they were conquered, annexed, or co-opted by the tsar’s generals. Between 1839 and 1895, Russia annexed approximately 1.5 million square miles of territory in Central Asia. It was, writes the historian Alexander Morrison, “an example of European expansion that in speed and scale is matched only by the ‘Scramble for Africa’ or the British annexation of India.”7 By World War I, the Russian Empire encompassed all of what today are the five republics of Central Asia.
By 1850, the Kazakhs, who had reluctantly agreed to Russian “protection” in the mid-eighteenth century, were subdued after a short-lived revolt to prevent Tatar and Cossack farmers from taking over their pasture lands. The khans of the three Kazakh hordes became puppet rulers in a Russian colony. To the south, Kyrgyz tribes, descendants of herders from the Upper Yenisey basin of what today is southern Siberia, were scattered throughout the mountains. From the thirteenth century to the seventeenth, successive waves of Mongol invaders had pushed them south, first into the Tian Shan and then to the Fergana and Pamir Alay. Although the khanate of Khokand was still the dominant regional power, the more serious threat came from the Russian armies advancing from the north. To protect their tribes, chiefs such as Kurmanjan Dakta decided to back the Russians. In 1862, a Russian army with support from Kyrgyz irregulars captured the Khokand fortress of Pishpek (now Bishkek); the fortresses of Turkistan, Zhambyl, and Shymkent fell in 1864, Tashkent in 1865, Samarkand in 1868, and finally Khokand in 1876. With the conquest of the khanates, the northern mountains became part of the Russian imperial province of Semireche (Seven Rivers) while the south, including Osh, was absorbed into the province of Fergana.
MAP 2.2 Russian conquest of Central Asia (map by Brian Edward Balsley, GISP)
For almost a century, Russia’s southern frontier attracted a gallery of heroes and villains—rogue army commanders who willfully ignored orders from St. Petersburg and whose adventures ended in famous victories or utter disasters, intrepid explorers, railroad builders, entrepreneurs, missionaries, exiled writers, spies, and adventure-seekers on the run from the law, their families, or society in general. The frontier was the place where fame and fortune was won or lost. Central Asia offered the same mix of danger, adventure, and opportunity as the American West in roughly the same period, prompting some scholars to apply Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis to the region.
Russia’s hold on the region was always precarious, because its strength depended largely on forts and armies, not on commerce, history, language, or culture. Even though the khans had ruled despotically, sending armies to plunder neighboring kingdoms, extorting tolls and taxes, torturing and executing opponents, and maintaining a lucrative slave trade, at least they were local despots who spoke the language of their peoples and understood Islam and tradition. Russia was the invader, the colonial power. The lands of Central Asia were always on the borderlands of empire and their allegiance to the central power fragile and suspect.
Resentment against Russian rule rose during World War I. Cattle were requisitioned from herders in Semireche, food and cotton from Fergana. In 1916, the authorities began conscripting men into noncombatant labor battalions. An armed uprising that began in Tashkent was joined by Kazakhs and Kyrgyz, exasperated by the loss of their lands and heavy taxation. Although the intended targets were Russian military and government installations, roving bands on horseback attacked Russian colonists and burned their villages. Russian troops retaliated, razing Kazakh and Kyrgyz settlements, killing the inhabitants or forcing them to flee. In the middle of winter, an estimated 50,000 tried to escape over the Tian Shan to China, but many froze or starved to death on the journey.
In the turmoil that followed the Bolshevik Revolution, with civil war raging between the White and Red Armies from the Urals to the Far East, political leaders took advantage of the power vacuum and declared independent republics in Central Asia. Most revolts were short-lived and brutally suppressed by the Red Army. In early 1922, the charismatic Ottoman Turkish soldier Enver Pasha launched a “holy war” to establish a new pan-Turkic caliphate. The revolt attracted thousands of recruits, including bands of basmachi guerrillas. After a string of successes in which his army took Dushanbe and recaptured most of the former emirate of Bukhara (whose ruler, exiled in Afghanistan, was bankrolling the campaign), the self-styled “Commander in Chief of All the Armies of Islam” saw his support wane. The Bolsheviks adopted a carrot-and-stick strategy: Moscow cut taxes and returned confiscated land while sending 100,000 more troops to the region. Pasha died in August 1922, just nine months after his revolt began, reportedly cut down by Red Army machine guns while leading a suicidal cavalry charge.
Soviet Gerrymandering
When the Soviet cartographers sliced and diced Central Asia in the 1920s, someone must have said, “The Kyrgyz. Aren’t they all nomads? Let’s give them the mountains.”
Before the Soviet era, there were no national borders between the peoples of the region, and identity was defined by religion, family, clan, and place. The Soviets feared that such muddled loyalties could help Islamic, social, or political movements gain popular support, as Pasha’s rebellion had shown. Educated Central Asians and religious leaders still talked privately of a Greater Turkestan or a Central Asian caliphate. The Soviets attempted to counter pan-Islamic and pan-Turkic tendencies by constructing nationalities, giving each a defined territory with national borders, along with a ready-made history, language, culture, and ethnic profile. Your loyalty was no longer to your tribe, village, or faith, but to your nationality as a Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Turkmen, or Uzbek and to its Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR).
The Uzbek and Turkmen SSRs were created in 1924, the Tajik SSR in 1929. It took the Russians longer to sort out the Kazakhs and the Kyrgyz, who share similar physical features, traditions, and language. Indeed, in the nineteenth century, they were all referred to as Kyrgyz. As ethnographic research began to reveal differences, the mountain tribes became known as Kara-Kyrgyz (black Kyrgyz) to distinguish them from the steppe-dwelling Kazakhs, who were called simply Kyrgyz because “Kazakh” sounded too much like the name of another group, the Cossacks. Although the Russians seemed confused, the Kazakhs knew perfectly well who they were, and that they were not Kyrgyz. They were members of a tribe that was part of either the Great, Middle, or Little Horde, each of which had its own khan. In 1926, most of present-day Kyrgyzstan became the Kara-Kyrgyz Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) and a full Kyrgyz SSR in 1936. In the same year, the Kazakh SSR was formed. And so, through the miracle of Soviet ethnic engineering, the Kara-Kyrgyz were no longer black but true Kyrgyz, while the people who had been called Kyrgyz for over a century turned out to be Kazakhs after all.
While promoting new national loyalties, the Soviets realized that too much nationalism could be dangerous. In a parallel effort to solidify control, they shifted around ethnic groups to ensure that none was dominant in a specific area. Thousands of Central Asians were moved to other parts of the Soviet Union. Russian and Ukrainian farm workers and factory workers were settled in Central Asia, while Volga Germans, Chechens, Koreans, and other ethnicities were deported to the region. The policy of divide and rule, intended to suppress ethnic unrest and militant Islam, created artificial borders between ethnically mixed SSRs. The medieval cities of Samarkand and Bukhara, historically major centers of Tajik culture and with large ethnic Tajik populations, ended up in the Uzbek SSR. Osh was a classic case of ethnic gerrymandering. As the Central Asia scholar Madeleine Reeves points out, if the Soviets had drawn boundaries exclusively along national lines, the nomadic Kyrgyz would “end up with a Kyrgyz republic that had no cities of its own: a worrying prospect for a state preoccupied with thrusting ‘backward’ populations into Soviet modernity.”8 Their solution was to make Osh, with its predominantly Uzbek population of traders and arable farmers, the republic’s southern city.
Independence came suddenly to all Soviet republics. Unlike liberation struggles in Asia or Africa, there was no army emerging from the mountains or jungles to be cheered by flag-waving crowds, no government in exile, no heroes or martyrs to freedom. Citizens of each SSR suddenly found themselves citizens of an independent country. As the journalist Ahmed Rashid recalls, the five future Central Asian presidents who met at Ashkhabat in Turkmenistan on December 12, 1991, were reluctant to assume leadership of independent nations:
Four days earlier Boris Yeltsin, president of Russia, and the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus had signed a treaty dissolving the Soviet Union. The five republics were now suddenly independent but nobody had consulted the Central Asian leaders themselves. Angry, frustrated, fearful, feeling abandoned by their “mother Russia,” and terrified about the consequences, the leaders sat up all night to discuss their future. It was strange to see the heirs of conquerors of the world—Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, and Babur—so cowered. They were tied to Moscow in thousands of ways, from electricity grids to road, rail, and telephone networks. Central Asia had become a vast colony producing raw materials—cotton, wheat, metals, oil, and gas—for the Soviet industrial machine based in western Russia. They feared an economic and social collapse as Yeltsin cast them out of the empire. That night a deputy Turkmen foreign minister told me, “We are not celebrating—we are mourning our independence.”9
The next day, the leaders agreed to join Russia and other former SSRs in the newly formed Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). That was pretty much the last time they agreed on anything. Despite periodic summits and high-minded talk of regional integration, more issues divide than unite the Central Asian republics. They’ve disagreed over borders, trade and tariffs, water, gas and oil resources, environmental issues, religion, terrorism, and drug traffickers.
Achieving independence is one thing; creating national identity is another. At independence, ethnic Kazakhs were a minority (albeit the largest one) in Kazakhstan, making up about 41 percent of the population. At the same time, almost one quarter of Tajikistan’s population was ethnically Uzbek. With the possible exception of Turkmenistan, all republics have a rich, but potentially volatile, ethnic mix. The region, noted the New York Times, looked like “a medieval map” where power is defined by ethnicities and clans, not by borders. Former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski famously referred to Central Asia as “the Eurasian Balkans.”
The balkanization is illustrated by the Fergana Valley. Although most of the valley is in Uzbekistan, the northern panhandle of Tajikistan (Sughd province, with a population of over two million) juts into the valley, physically, economically, and culturally separated from the rest of the country by the Pamir Alay. Uzbekistan literally bisects southern Kyrgyzstan, the frontier zigzagging in and out of the foothills of the Fergana and the Pamir Alay; most of the route from Osh to Djalalabad, Kyrgyzstan’s third largest city, lies in Uzbekistan. The frontier cuts through the middle of villages and the market town of Kara Soo near Osh. Uzbekistan has five territorial enclaves within Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan one in Kyrgyzstan and one in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan one in Uzbekistan. When tensions between Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan run high (as they often are over water, gas, electricity, and politics) frontier guards sometimes shift their posts a few yards up the road, symbolically extending national territory. In January 2000, Uzbekistan unilaterally seized a thirty-eight-mile stretch of Kyrgyzstan; it also laid mines along its borders with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, ostensibly to keep out Islamic extremists. The Economist described Uzbekistan’s Islam Karimov as “the regional bully” and noted that “good neighbourliness is in short supply in Central Asia.”10
Cursing the Future
A man waits in line outside a food shop in Moscow. Finally, he’s had enough and tells his friend: “That’s it. I’m going over to the Kremlin to kill that Gorbachev.” Two hours later he comes back. “Well,” says the friend, “did you do it?” “No,” he replies, “there was an even longer line over there.”
Through the 1990s, in cities, towns, and villages throughout the former Soviet Union, industrial workers gathered in bars, restaurants, chaikhanas, and bazaars to “curse the future.” I credit the phrase to my friend Asqat Yerkimbay, describing growing up in the central Kazakhstan mining town of Zhezdy. But I had heard a similar story from many other people.
For seventh-five years, industrial workers were folk heroes, lauded in speeches, newspapers, books, movies, and wall posters for their efforts to make the Soviet Union a world power. Although agricultural production was vital, Soviet industry seemed more glamorous, and definitely more photogenic. Newsreels and propaganda films recorded the whirring machines of the factory assembly line, the intense heat of the steel furnace, the jagged face of the coal seam, the electricity pylons stretching into the distance. Each product coming off the line, each steel ingot, ton of coal, or megawatt of electricity represented the growing strength of the USSR, the fulfillment of the great socialist dream. And the dream makers were Lenin’s proletariat—the engineers, coal miners, steelworkers, engine drivers. Industrial jobs paid better than most professions, and often came with perks such as apartments and vacations to summer resorts in the Kyrgyz SSR. They also helped reinforce the status of women in society. The Soviet Union never needed a Roza the Riveter because women were always in the industrial workforce.
And then it all ended. Despite Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika (literally restructuring or rebuilding), most citizens had no idea of what was coming or how it would change their lives forever. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the central planning system that had supported the economy collapsed too. In every sector, production had been determined by targets and quotas, which usually had little or no relationship to demand. Factories, mines, and collective farms had to meet targets, even if what they produced was not needed and piled up in rail cars or rotted in warehouses. Managers were rewarded for exceeding targets, fired or demoted for falling short—a system that provided ample incentive for cooking the books on cotton or steel production.
In the factories of Central Asia, workers continued to show up, but the targets and subsidies from Moscow had ended, and there were few new customers. Some factories tried to adapt to the market economy, but most lacked the money to invest in new equipment and compete for quality and price with industries in other countries. Compared with other Soviet republics, the industrial base of the Kyrgyz SSR was small because Moscow considered the region too remote to become a major industrial producer. However, factories for agricultural processing, textiles, and household goods employed thousands in the Chuy and Fergana Valleys. By the mid-1990s, most had closed. Almost all the canned goods, clothes, shoes, and pots and pans at the bazaar were imported from China and other Asian countries.
Kyrgyzstan struggled to adopt the reforms that donor countries and the International Monetary Fund said were needed to qualify for loans and aid and to build a market economy. The government abandoned subsidies and price controls, and replaced the Russian ruble with a new currency, the som. The pace of reform caused massive economic dislocation; in one year, inflation ran close to 1,000 percent, devastating people on pensions and fixed incomes. With international support, the government eventually stabilized the currency and brought inflation down to manageable levels, but economic recovery remained slow, and poverty rates increased.
Official reports tell the story of Kyrgyzstan’s economic collapse in sanitized, bureaucratic terms—the language of economists, policymakers, and development experts. The calculations were at the macro level—cold measurements of Gross Domestic Product, consumer price indexes, output by economic sector, government debt, foreign direct investment. These were often coupled with Pollyanna-like projections about foreign direct investment, government bond auctions and the reform of the financial services sector. In the mid-1990s, it was questionable whether Kyrgyzstan even had a financial services sector to reform. The som had been devalued, inflation remained high, and almost no one trusted the banks to keep their money safe. With few deposits, banks had little money to lend, and when they made loans, it was at ruinous 30 percent interest rates. If you wanted to start a new business, you asked your family to lend or give you the money. Even the loan sharks at the bazaar charged less interest than the banks.
The economic statistics were sometimes based on questionable data. One year the government, in an attempt to convince foreign donors and investors that the economy was picking up, declared that the unemployment rate had dropped below 10 percent for the first time since independence. Even government supporters were incredulous. It turned out that in its sample the statistical agency had included every tout hawking cigarettes, pirated cassettes, and homebrew on the streets as a “self-employed market vendor.” The real rate was probably at least 40 percent.
None of the reports and statistics told the human stories of dislocation, especially for industrial workers. Their skills were not needed in the new economy, and there were few opportunities for retraining. Some left for Russia, hoping to find jobs, but the situation in many Russian regions was as bad as in Central Asia. A few started private businesses or worked as drivers. Some just gave up. It was not only the loss of income, devastating though that was. It was the loss of purpose, dignity, and respect. They had been the breadwinners for their families; now they had no jobs and no prospects. In some families, women became the main wage earners, which led some husbands to feel their loss of status more intensely. Back in the good old days, industrial workers could afford a bottle of vodka or cognac for a party or holiday celebration. Now some turned to the bottle to try to forget their plight. Official reports on the economy do not figure in the social costs of alcoholism, depression, broken marriages, domestic violence, and suicides. It is not surprising that the engineers, miners, and steelworkers denounced Gorbachev as a traitor and cursed a future that seemed to offer them nothing.
At the Osh Bazaar
A man walks into a shop and asks, “Don’t you have any fish?” The shop assistant replies, “You’ve got it wrong. This is a butcher’s—we don’t have any meat. They don’t have any fish in the fish shop across the street!”
In the Soviet era, all shops—from the Tsum central department store to the small corner store—were state-owned and -operated and numbered, with fixed prices and limited selection. Shoppers complained of long lines and surly customer service. In some areas, seasonal shortages of basic foodstuffs—bread, meat, dairy products, fruits, and vegetables—were common.
An underground retail sector existed alongside the state-run shops. Prices were higher, but the quality was better, and some items were simply not sold in state-run stores. For Levis or Marlboros, you needed to talk to the guy in the leather jacket who hung around behind the Palace of Culture. In agricultural regions such as the Fergana Valley, some city dwellers had dachas where they grew apples, apricots, peaches, and cherries, and raised vegetables; they canned for the winter months and sold surplus to neighbors and friends. The police periodically cracked down on the underground economy, especially when it involved large shipments of alcohol, cigarettes, or consumer electronics. But it was not worth the effort to stop a babushka selling tomatoes or strawberry jam to her neighbors in the apartment block, or even to stop the production and sale of moonshine called samogon (translated literally as “self-run”), the homemade distilled alcoholic concoction usually made from sugar, beets, potatoes, bread, or fruit.
In many ways, the state shops were a Potemkin Village—impressive facades, with empty shelves inside. And so the Soviets quietly allowed business in the informal economy to keep running, especially at the bazaars. In Osh, the massive Jayma bazaar which sprawls along the western bank of the Ak-Burra River, winding up dozens of side streets and alleys, had been one of the great markets on the Silk Road since medieval times. Today, it is open seven days a week, and thronged on Friday and Sunday, the traditional market days. It is still primarily an agricultural market, with slaughterhouses and warehouses. One section is piled high with bales of hay; in another, live chickens are sold; in another, raw cotton and wool; nearby, blacksmiths forge horseshoes, nails, stovepipes, cooking pots, and traditional Uzbek ornamental knives. In the summer, the market bulges with fresh produce—peaches, apricots, oranges, cherries, grapes, melons, and vegetables. Even in winter, apples, pears, figs, pomegranates, potatoes, onions, and carrots are abundant, and dried apricots, raisins, pistachios, almonds, and walnuts are sold year round. Uzgen rice—the main ingredient of the Uzbek national dish plov, a lamb pilaf with carrots, onions, and hot peppers—is sold from open bags. Lipioshki (flatbread) is baked in tandoori ovens. Butter comes by the slab, sugar in huge yellow crystalline lumps. Shashlyk (marinated mutton or beef kebabs, served with vinegary onions), laghman (a Uighur spicy noodle and vegetable soup), manti (dumplings stuffed with diced lamb and onion), and samsa (pastry filled with spicy meat or vegetables) are sold from stalls.
Even for a seasoned traveler, the sights, sounds, and crush of people can be overwhelming. Ear-splitting commercials for local businesses blast out over the tinny speakers of the public address system, forcing the bootleg music vendors to crank up the volume on their boom boxes, playing the latest Turkish and Chinese pop hits. In the auto section, there’s a brisk trade in used alternators, batteries, worn belts and tires; engine oil, sold in mason jars, looks as if it’s already serviced a fleet of diesel buses. Although traditional silk, wool, and cotton fabrics are sold, the garment district has largely been taken over by vendors hawking cheap imports from India, Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey with fake (and often misspelled) designer labels. The unofficial money exchanges do brisk business. For the brave investor, there was even a financial services sector, of sorts—a group of burly men with shaven heads dressed in trainers hawking share certificates for newly privatized companies.
Leaving Kyrgyzstan
Three days before Christmas in 1995, I took the flight north from Osh to Bishkek to report in to USIS, and then fly back to the United States. After three weeks, I left the city with mixed feelings. I looked forward to spending the holidays with Stephanie, but worried about the future of the Osh Media Resource Center. And I felt a bond with the people with whom I had worked, who had helped me begin to understand their country and culture and the challenges they faced. I had no idea of whether I would ever see Kyrgyzstan again. Little did I know that, less than a year later, I would be returning to Osh. This time it was not on a Yak-40, but in a beat-up Lada with a case of vodka in the trunk.
