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How Do You Say “Rump Roast”?

The Twelve Suitcases

In June 1996, the news I had been waiting for finally came. I would be going back to Kyrgyzstan in September for a one-year Fulbright Fellowship to teach journalism and mass communication at the state university in Bishkek, guest-lecture at other universities, and work with journalists and the new commercial TV stations that were starting up. Stephanie gamely agreed to join me for the year.

Fulbright scholar awards are typically made in the spring. That leaves enough time to apply for an academic leave, find a renter and pet-sitter, sort out the bills and bank accounts, and figure out what to pack. Unfortunately in 1996, politics intervened. I really can’t blame House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the Republican Congress, or President Bill Clinton. They were fighting over the federal budget and funding for Medicare, education, and the environment. Sending me to Kyrgyzstan did not require raising the federal debt limit. Nevertheless, the two government shutdowns (six days in November 1995 and twenty-two days in December 1995–January 1996) had a knock-on effect as spending bills and appropriations were delayed. Among the casualties was the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars (CIES), which administers the Fulbright Program. My Fulbright had been approved, the program officer assured me, but CIES did not yet have the money. I should certainly not do anything foolish, such as rent the house or buy an air ticket, until funding was confirmed.

When it was, CIES hurriedly arranged an orientation session in Washington, DC, for scholars and student awardees heading for Asia. It was standing-room only for India and China but less than a dozen gathered for the Central Asia briefing. It had taken a couple of years for the Fulbright program to get going in Central Asia, so few scholars and students had been there. An anthropologist who had done research in Kyrgyzstan presented a slide show of ancient sites and talked about nomadic culture and oral traditions. A nursing professor who had been in Uzbekistan talked about her attempts to educate her students about bad cholesterol. Her teaching included public health movies; the students’ favorite was called Killer Fat. No one discussed the higher education system, told us what to pack, or what we could buy at the bazaar in January.

In the mid-1990s, there were few resources for Westerners who were going to live in Central Asia for an extended period. For historical background, I could read about the Great Game with evocative descriptions of mountains and steppe by British and Russian explorers and military envoys. However, I was planning to arrive in Bishkek by plane, not on horseback from Delhi with wagons, porters, and formal greetings from the viceroy to the local khan. There were books on the Soviet era, but in the early 1990s, before the blossoming of Central Asia scholarship, there were few studies of the region in the post-Soviet era. Today, it seems that every Peace Corps volunteer teaching English in a Kyrgyz village blogs about the experience, but there were no such tales in 1996. Thankfully, the first edition of the Lonely Planet Guide came out in summer 1996, just in time to help us plan the trip.

Because new luggage is a target for thieves, we decided to travel with beat-up, yet sturdy, suitcases. We added to our collection of well-worn travel pieces with some thrift store $2 specials. Then we worked on packing lists. We simply didn’t know what to expect, so it all went in—winter and summer clothes, books and papers, aspirins and antibiotics, Ziploc bags, duct tape, a pressure cooker, cookbooks, and the contents of the kitchen spice rack. Someone had told Stephanie there was no basil in Kyrgyzstan; instead, it was one of the first things she saw at the bazaar. The Fulbright grant included a generous excess baggage allowance. It is almost embarrassing to admit, but we exceeded it. When everything was assembled, we had twelve suitcases—a total of 490 pounds.

Our flight from Washington to Frankfurt was delayed, and the Delta agent said we would not make the connection in Istanbul for the Turkish Airlines flight to Bishkek; we would have to wait two days for the next flight. The only option was to fly via Moscow to Almaty in Kazakhstan, and make the last part of the trip by road. The agent booked us on Transaero, a new Russian private airline.

We staggered up to the Transaero check-in in Frankfurt, our bodies sagging from the five heavy carry-on bags. “That looks like more than five kilos,” said the agent. “Oh, they’re not heavy, I’m just weak,” said Stephanie in her excellent German, trying to disguise her panting. A dispute was averted by the news that we had been bumped up to business class where there was no carry-on limit. We settled down for a glass of champagne, and wondered how we’d make the transfer to the Almaty flight in Moscow.

Moscow’s Sheremetyevo is, in my experience, one of the least welcoming airports in the world (unless you’re Edward Snowden, and you have to hole up in the transit area) with overpriced (even by airport standards) shops and restaurants, and few seats for transit passengers. In 1996, the arrivals hall was a soulless room with faded Soviet-era decor. Because we were taking another Transaero flight, we expected our luggage to be transferred. Our hearts sank when the first of our twelve bags emerged on the carousel. As we heaved them off the belt, other passengers stepped in to help. One pulled another bag off the carousel and added it to our stack. “Not ours,” said Stephanie. “Oh, we thought they were all yours,” the passenger replied with a wry smile.

There were no luggage carts, but Stephanie spotted a man with a dolly. “U menya dvenatsat’ chemodanov (I have twelve suitcases),” she announced. He broke into a smile; I was half expecting cartoon-like dollar signs to pop up in his eyes. Somehow, he loaded all twelve cases onto the dolly. It was a short walk to the terminal, but we felt he well deserved his $20. The Transaero agent was not welcoming. “You must pay $500 for excess luggage,” she said. We showed her the receipt from Delta. “That was in Washington. Now you are in Moscow. You must pay,” she insisted. We refused. Supervisors were called. The Delta paperwork was scrutinized, discussed, held up to the light, photocopied. Eventually, the agent gave up. “Have a nice trip,” she said, handing us our boarding cards.

In Almaty, we emerged from the arrivals hall into a clutch of tough-looking characters shouting “taxi, taxi.” The words “dvenatsat’ chemodanov’” and “Bishkek” gave us instant celebrity status, with drivers competing for what would definitely be the best-paying fare of the day. We needed two cars and decided to travel separately so that we could keep an eye on the luggage; we had been counting bags at each transit point. I rode in a comfortable, dented Mercedes; Stephanie had a more challenging trip in a right-hand-drive Toyota. No one has ever explained to me how right-hand-drive Japanese cars manufactured for the domestic market ended up in Central Asia in the 1990s, but they were pretty common, and among the more dangerous vehicles on the road. The two cars weaved through the midday city traffic, avoiding collisions by important inches. At one stoplight, the Toyota pulled up on the right side of the Mercedes. Stephanie and I wound down the windows, held hands for a moment, and glanced nervously at each other. “Have a safe trip, darling,” I said, without any sense of irony. Out on the two-lane highway to Bishkek, her driver kept pulling out to pass trucks and buses. “Nyet, nyet,” shouted Stephanie, who was always the first to see the approaching vehicle. The Toyota swerved back into the right-hand lane before the driver attempted his next suicidal maneuver.

The highway parallels the northern slope of the Zailiysky Ala Too range, a branch of the Tian Shan, running southwest along the treeless plain before dipping south through a serpentine pass to the Chuy Valley and Bishkek. Bathed in the late afternoon sun, the mountains, some with snow-capped peaks, were spectacular. Our adventure had begun.

The Mountains Are Always South

The first permanent settlement on the Chuy River at the site of present-day Bishkek was a clay fort built by the khan of Khokand in 1825 along one of the Silk Road routes across the Tian Shan. By the 1860s, the khanate was facing a double threat—the tsar’s armies advancing from the north and west, and Kyrgyz tribes who resented Khokand’s taxes and military conscription. The fort was in a strategic location on the road from Verniy (now Almaty) to Tashkent. In 1860, it fell to a Russian force after a seven-day siege, but the Russians inexplicably returned to Verniy, leaving the location undefended, and Khokand sent troops to rebuild the fort. In 1862, Kyrgyz horsemen joined a Russian force of 1,400 troops with cannon to retake the fort. After a ten-day siege, it fell again. This time, the Russians stayed, and the town of Pishpek was founded sixteen years later. The fertile soil of the Chuy Valley attracted Russian and Ukrainian settlers, swelling the population of the region.

As with many places in Central Asia, the name of the city changed with the prevailing ideological winds. There’s an unresolved debate over the origin of Pishpek, its first name. In Kyrgyz, pishpek or bishkek describes the wooden instrument used to churn fermented mare’s milk (kumys). As Lonely Planet remarks, “Numerous legends—some quaint, some rude—explain how a town came to be named for a wooden plunger.” A more prosaic version has it that pishpek is a corruption of a more ancient name that means the “place below the mountains.”¹ The issue became moot in 1926 when the Soviets changed the name to Frunze, in honor of the Red Army commander, Mikhail Vasilevich Frunze, who was born there in 1885. After the 1917 revolution, Frunze led forces in the civil war, eventually being given command of the Eastern Front. In Central Asia, he recaptured Khiva and Bukhara, driving the White Army out of the region and the basmachi guerrillas into the mountains. Although his death in 1925—from an excessive dose of chloroform during routine surgery—was suspicious, raising speculation that Stalin was involved, Frunze retained his place in Soviet iconography, with a military academy, rifle division, two metro stations (in Moscow and St. Petersburg), and a battleship named for him, as well as the town of his birth.

Kyrgyzstan’s casual tolerance of its Soviet past—as demonstrated by the longevity of the Lenin statues—is illustrated by the preservation of Frunze’s legacy. Around the thatched cottage where he was born, the Soviets constructed a two-story museum with military artifacts and memorabilia. In this historical narrative, Frunze is a brave military leader and loving father and husband, not the ruthless commander who suppressed nationalist movements in Central Asia. Although the Soviet names of many streets in Bishkek were changed to politically correct Kyrgyz names after independence, Frunze’s name remains on one of the main east-west streets. There’s a bronze statue of Frunze on a horse opposite the railroad station. And airline passengers cannot avoid Frunze because the International Air Transport Association (IATA) retains the code FRU for Bishkek. That can be confusing for first-time travelers who wonder if their baggage is going to a different city. In terms of acronyms, FRU is perilously close to airports in Botswana, Chile, Guatemala, and Papua New Guinea.

Bishkek was laid out on a grid pattern, with broad north-south and east-west streets. Orienting yourself is easy as long as you remember the cardinal rule: the mountains are always south. In Almaty, where the same rule applies, it’s of limited use in some areas because tall buildings block the view, but Bishkek is still a low-rise city. Water from two mountain rivers, the Ala-Archa and Alamedin, flows in channels to a canal north of the city, and on to the Chuy River. In mid-September, Bishkek felt more like a sleepy country town than the capital of a country. Compared to Almaty, the traffic was light. People strolled along the tree-lined streets, stopping to buy an ice cream or gazirovka (gas water), a syrup-based carbonated drink, from sidewalk vendors. Children played and rode bicycles around the Lenin statue in Ala Too Square. Police directing traffic at the main intersections smiled as they ineffectually waved their arms in the air. Horse-drawn wagons slowed down traffic near the Osh bazaar, the large market on the west side of the city. Babushkas squatted on the sidewalk, selling apples, tomatoes, cherries, and raspberries from their dachas. On a patch of land next to the National Library on Sovietskaya, one of the main north-south streets, sheep were grazing.

We rented a spacious though sparsely furnished apartment on Pervomayskaya (1st of May Street) in the city center. Officially, the street was called Razzakova, renamed for Ishak Razzakov who briefly headed the government of the Kyrgyz SSR in the mid-1940s. Razzakov was hardly a well-known historical figure, and no one we met (including the neighbors) used the new name. Taxi drivers had certainly never heard of it, so we sacrificed political correctness for convenience and stuck with Pervomayskaya. In Soviet real estate parlance, the apartment was a khrushchevka, named for the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev. Faced with a severe housing shortage after World War II, the government encouraged technologies to provide low-cost, easy-to-assemble housing. Unlike the earlier stalinkas, which were built on site and sometimes even boasted neoclassical details, the prefabricated concrete panels of the khrushchevkas were mass produced and shipped by truck. Elevators were considered too costly and time consuming to build so almost all khrushchevkas had five stories—the maximum height of a building without an elevator under Soviet health and safety standards. Ours was a standard, three-room apartment with a small kitchen and bathroom in a block of thirty units. It was in a prime location—about a twenty-minute walk to the university and two blocks from the USIS office, where I reported to the Public Affairs Officer. It was one block from the central Panfilov Park, close to a market on Jibek Jolu (Silk Road) and a short walk from Ala Too Square. Today, this is the high-rent district where government officials, business people, and foreign contractors pay top som for an apartment. In 1996, we rented it for $300 a month (plus modestly priced utilities). We put up with minor inconveniences—the small refrigerator, the lack of working electrical outlets, and the rickety furniture. We bought a VCR, a toaster, and kitchen utensils. And we started going to the bazaar to buy fruits and vegetables. We knew that by November fresh produce would be scarce so we joined other apartment-dwellers in the annual ritual of canning.

In mid-September, the Osh bazaar was groaning with fresh produce, and prices were low. We filled a box with over five kilos of Roma tomatoes for a couple of dollars. A large bucket of raspberries was $4.80, a bucket of plums $1.20, and about seven kilos of apricots $5.20. A Kyrgyz colleague came over to the apartment, armed with pots, pans, and canning recipes. The system—or the technology, as she called it—was different from the one Stephanie had used in the United States and we struggled to fit the lids on the jars with a device that worked like a reverse-action can opener. Still, by the end of the day, we had canned several jars of tomatoes and plum jam and two jars of adjika—a relish made from tomatoes, carrots, peppers, apples, hot chili peppers, vinegar, oil, salt, and sugar. Our colleague said the recipe came from a Bulgarian version of Good Housekeeping that circulated in Bishkek in Soviet times.

MAP 3.1 My Bishkek (map by Brian Edward Balsley, GISP)

A Walking City

It was a 1-1/2-som (9-cent) ride home on the bus from the Osh bazaar with our buckets of fruit and box of tomatoes. Bishkek residents, especially those who live in the outer suburbs (microraions), depend on public transportation—the buses, trolley buses, and marshrutkas (minibuses). The buses varied in size, age, and mechanical condition; most of the older ones sounded as if they needed a clutch job. The newer buses were visible examples of foreign aid. They were German-made, with German-language ads on the side, and apparently still heading for destinations in Berlin, Essen, or Wiesbaden. You learned not to pay attention to destinations such as the Hauptbahnhof or Goetheplatz; if the bus was heading west on Kievskaya, you could be pretty sure it was going to the Osh bazaar.

Public transportation was cheap but often crowded, so we developed tactics, as well as elbow muscles, to deal with the crush. If the bus or trolley was full, we started pushing to the front a couple of stops before we wanted to get off. On the trolleys, the only advantage to crowding was the soft human padding. When the driver took a corner too tightly, the conducting rods detached from the overhead cables; the trolley immediately lost power and stopped abruptly, throwing everyone around. Then you were glad the trolley was packed. There was a short delay while the driver climbed up a ladder to the roof of the bus, lifted the rods and restored the current.

The marshrutka (short for marshrutnoye taksi which literally means “routed taxi”), common throughout the former Soviet Union, costs a few som more than the bus or trolley but is much faster. Like the African “bush taxi,” it follows a route, picking up and dropping off passengers anywhere along the way. A marshrutka has twelve to fourteen seats, but on local routes it sometimes takes as many as twenty passengers. There’s no schedule—a marshrutka leaves when it’s full of passengers and luggage, or when the driver figures he has enough fares to make the journey viable.

Most of the time, we walked. To the university, the local bazaar, to shops and restaurants—most of the places we needed to reach were within ten to fifteen minutes by foot along tree-lined sidewalks, boulevards, and parks. Apart from the traffic, the main hazards were the uneven sidewalks. In places, they were even missing. By “missing,” I do not mean that there was no sidewalk, as is often the case in US cities. It was there, but you had to step around a gaping hole in the ground. Although some were the result of seasonal cracking and expansion of the concrete, most appeared where a manhole cover should have been, since many had been stolen and melted down for scrap. In daylight and good weather, you could avoid the holes. At night, walking became riskier. Walking in winter, you learned to keep an eye out for geometrically shaped depressions in the snow; if it was a circle or rectangle, you could be pretty sure there was no sidewalk under it.

One of our favorite local walks was to the US embassy, which was housed in a modestly sized but elegant nineteenth-century Russian-style house on leafy Prospekt Erkindik (Freedom), about two blocks from our apartment. Most of the time, we did not have official business but stopped by to read week-old newspapers and magazines, borrow a video or book from the ambassador’s collection, or check on expat social events. The office of the ambassador, Eileen Malloy, was just off the main entrance, and she would stop to chat in breaks between meetings. The place bustled with visitors. Security was thorough, but unobtrusive.

Today, the US embassy is located on a flat, open area of land on Prospekt Mira in the south of the city with no other construction permitted nearby. Its thick, high walls are topped with spikes and monitored by security cameras. It’s a long bus ride from downtown, so no one just stops by any more. It looks like a prison, not a diplomatic mission.

Supply Thread

Business people and economists like to talk about the supply chain, the intricate, interlinked system of organizations, people, information, and resources that it takes to move a product or service from supplier to customer. In Kyrgyzstan in the mid-1990s, there wasn’t so much a supply chain as a supply thread; at best it was tangled and frayed, and sometimes it just broke until someone knotted it together again.

The Soviet economy, although based on the artificial creation of supply and demand, at least had a supply chain of sorts. The cotton, wheat, or mutton from your collective farm or tractor tires from your factory were shipped somewhere else. You received a modest salary, free housing, medical care, and education. The cotton or tires might sit in a warehouse or railroad siding because they were not needed, but that didn’t matter as long as Moscow kept sending the money. The collapse of the Soviet economy shattered the supply chain because no one was going to pay for cotton or tires they didn’t need. Now the challenge for all the Central Asian republics was to produce goods and services that people would pay for and get them to market—in other words, to create a supply chain.

To take the economic pulse of Kyrgyzstan in the mid-1990s, you didn’t go to the government ministries where they’d give you the dubious statistics they compiled to keep the foreign donors happy. Instead, you went to the bazaar where most of the economic activity took place. Although there were small street bazaars all over the city, Bishkek had three large daily markets—the Osh bazaar on the west side, Alamedin in the northeast, and Ortosay in the south. About six miles north of the city center—a twenty-minute bus or trolley ride—was Tolchok (which means “push” in Kyrgyz), a sprawling, crowded weekend market with imported consumer goods, and a livestock bazaar, where horses, sheep, cattle, and goats were bought and sold, and traditional Kyrgyz horseback games held. Close by was the auto bazaar, where you could buy a used Lada, Niva, Volga, or Moskvich and maybe also the parts to keep it running.

Stephanie and I frequented the Osh and Alamedin bazaars. They illustrated, better than any statistics, Kyrgyzstan’s uneven progress toward a market economy. Let’s start in the geographic center, in the covered market halls where meat, dairy goods, and dried fruits and nuts were sold. Here, the vendors had established business relationships with farmers. There were separate sections for mutton, beef, and horse. The Volga Germans sold pork. You could buy a fresh chicken (and pluck it yourself if you knew how), but by 1996 frozen chicken had arrived, reportedly from the United States and Europe. We were told the breast meat went to domestic markets, so all we could buy were legs, backs, and thighs. Dairy vendors had regular supplies of milk, butter, cream, yogurt, smetana (sour cream), kumys (fermented mare’s milk), the yogurt-like kefir or airan, and local cheese. Dried fruit (apricots, red and white raisins, cherries) and nuts (walnuts, pistachios, almonds, apricot pits, sunflower seeds) were available year round, most shipped by truck from the Fergana Valley. You could go to the market halls any day of the year, and be pretty sure of finding what you needed. Here, the supply thread was at its strongest.

As you moved outside the covered halls, the bazaar became more chaotic and the thread weaker. There were stalls with fruits and vegetables, alongside others selling lipioshki, fresh eggs, cigarettes and candy, household goods, cleaning products, paper and school supplies, electrical parts, and imported clothes. Most of the clothes came from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Turkey, with fake, misspelled, sewn-in designer labels—the Calvert Kleins and the Tommy Hilsburgers. Cheap electronics came from China and Southeast Asia. Although some goods were shipped by road, most high-priced items were purchased on so-called shopping trips to Moscow, Krasnoyarsk in Siberia, Urumchi in Western China, Istanbul, or Bangkok. Here the supply thread became tangled, and often broken; whether or not a particular item was available depended on whether someone had made a recent shopping trip.

This section of the bazaar was also the service area with barbers, money exchangers, shoe and watch (and today mobile phone) repair shops, food stalls and fortune-tellers squatting at small tables with tarot cards and magical stones. It was where the official and informal economies met with itinerant vendors selling plastic shopping bags, cigarettes, sunglasses, fake Rolexes, and pens. You didn’t want to inquire too closely about their supply chain.

In the open areas outside the bazaar proper, trucks and vans were parked, their owners selling goods directly from the tailgate. One day, you could find truckloads of potatoes, onions, or cabbages; on another, cases of beer, wine, or vodka. The inventory was unpredictable, depending on what had been shipped. This was the supply thread at its simplest and weakest.

On the fringes of the bazaar and in the streets leading to it, people squatted on the sidewalks, selling home-canned goods and fruits and vegetables grown at their dachas. Saddest of all were the families or babushkas with their household belongings spread out on blankets. They were literally selling what they owned—clothes, pots, pans, kitchen utensils, personal memorabilia—to survive. This was the supply thread at its most desperate.

FIGURE 3.1 Uzbek bread stand in Osh

FIGURE 3.2 Kyrgyz komuz player at Osh bazaar, Bishkek

FIGURE 3.3 Consumer electronics aisle at Osh bazaar, Bishkek

FIGURE 3.4 Decanting cooking oil into soda bottles at Osh bazaar, Bishkek

FIGURE 3.5 Shirdaks for sale at Osh bazaar, Bishkek

Stephanie and I adopted a simple shopping rule: if we saw an item and we either needed or liked it, we bought it because we might never see it again. One Sunday (the main market day) in November 1996 at the Alamedin bazaar illustrates the buy-it-when-you-see-it principle. We began outside the bazaar proper in the hardware section where people lay out sheets, blankets, and newspapers with new and used car tires, batteries, radiators, alternators, bicycles, hand tools, electrical, plumbing and gas fittings, nuts, bolts, screws, and nails. We bought a drain hose for our arthritic washing machine, which had been dripping on the bathroom floor for two months, then a pair of slippers, some chopsticks, and a small, sharp, hand-forged cleaver. We made one babushka happy by buying her entire inventory—three small rag rugs. She immediately packed up and headed home, presumably to make some more. The catch of the day was a collection of commemorative lapel pins. I’d seen people selling these pins, issued in the Soviet era to mark many occasions, including holidays and sporting events. With the Soviet Union gone, I figured they were worth collecting. One woman had a large collection pinned to two worn red wall hangings with a faded picture of Lenin. She was asking one som (5 cents) for each pin. It was going to take too long to select those I wanted, so I went for a bulk purchase. How much for the whole collection of almost three hundred pins, plus the wall hangings? Although it’s traditional to bargain, the price was so low that it seemed mean-spirited to haggle.

The supply thread included recycling. Bishkek did not have a city recycling program, and any public appeals to reduce waste and protect the environment would have likely fallen on deaf ears. People recycled because it saved money, and because there was often no alternative. You couldn’t buy some items such as milk and cream at the bazaar or on the street unless you brought your own container. Beer, soda, and milk bottles were returned for a refund. Empty glass and plastic bottles, some retrieved from dumpsters, were resold at the bazaars. Tin cans were used as planters. Fast food such as samsa, piroshki, and roasted sunflower seeds came wrapped in scrap paper torn from a ledger or an old textbook. Once we were rewarded for our volunteer editing for the Kyrgyzstan Chronicle, the weekly English-language newspaper, with 30 kilos of onions. One of the newspaper’s advertisers was going through a liquidity crisis and had settled the bill with half a truckload of onions. We wondered how to store them. Our Russian teacher, Galina, said that Russian women keep old stockings around for such contingencies. Stephanie pulled out some old runny pantyhose; we filled them full of onions and hung them from a line on the balcony. Galina was impressed. “You’re a good Russian woman,” she told Stephanie.

It’s almost a cliché to say that you can buy anything at the bazaar, including a few things that probably should not be for sale, such as hard drugs, Kalashnikovs, and samogon, the Russian moonshine, which, depending on the vintage, chemical composition, and distilling process can give you a warm and fuzzy feeling, leave you with a nasty hangover, or kill you. Unregulated, questionable or illegal activities usually took place on the fringes of the bazaar. At weekends, an informal sobachiy (dog) bazaar was held in a field by a creek, a couple of blocks from the Osh bazaar. Dogs of all breeds and sizes were on sale, no questions asked about pedigree or shots. There were litters of puppies in the trunks of cars; others peeped out from under the coats of their owners. The seamy side of the sobachiy bazaar was down on the creek bed where dog fights were held; crowds gathered along the creek wall to watch and place their bets. Dogfighting was illegal, but the police and market officials quietly let the fights go on.

Sign Language

Stephanie and I had taken two Russian classes to prepare for our stay, but for the first three months we struggled to communicate. We could exchange simple greetings, ask for directions, shop at the bazaar, and read street and bus signs, but not much more. One problem with being able to speak a little in any language is that people think you know more, and try to start a conversation. Stephanie was often targeted; with her friendly, outgoing manner, she looked like a willing conversation partner. Besides, with her shoulder-length red hair, she looked Russian. “Ya Sibiryachka [I’m a Siberian woman],” she joked, a reference to the fact that her grandparents had once lived in Krasnoyarsk in Siberia before fleeing to Manchuria ahead of the advancing Red Army.

A dubious Russian heritage and a few basic Russian phrases were of less use to Stephanie than her experience in amateur dramatics and improvisational comedy classes. When she didn’t know how to say something, she acted it out. For the first week, we didn’t have any dishwashing detergent and had no idea which cleaning product to use. Stephanie put on an elaborate performance (without props but with sound effects) for a vendor; she finished off a meal, licked her fingers, put down her knife and fork, carried the dishes and utensils to the sink, and turned on the faucet. Then she reached for an imaginary bottle of detergent and looked puzzled. The vendor applauded, showed her the product, and knocked a few som off the price for the free show.

Buying meat was another challenge. Parts of carcasses hung from hooks at market stalls, and customers ordered in quantities of 100 grams. Unless you knew animal anatomy, you were never sure which part of the animal you were buying. This was not good enough for Stephanie, who had recipes for different cuts. How could she buy a rump roast? She started by holding her hands to her ears, pointing her index fingers forward, and making a “Moooo!” sound. It would have been easier to learn the Russian word for beef, govyadina, but that would have ruined the first act. “OK, so what part do you want?” asked the butcher. He led her into the freezer room where the carcasses were hanging. She repeated her impression of the head and then traced her hand along the back of the imaginary steer, pretending to wiggle the tail. The butcher seized one carcass and wiggled a real tail. “Tochno! [exactly!],” said Stephanie.

A Turkish friend, Mustafa, recommended a Turkish butcher’s shop on Sovietskaya. It was more expensive than the bazaar, but it was clean and the quality reliable. The first time, Stephanie went through her usual routine; when she came in again, one of the butchers would lean over the counter, put his index fingers to his ears, and go “Mooo,” to the amusement of his colleagues. Stephanie added props to her routine and showed up with a cookbook. “Look here,” she said, pointing to one of the diagrams that showed the cuts from cattle and sheep. “I’m doing a rib roast. This is what I need.” The language barrier disappeared; she and the butchers were talking meat. After a couple more visits, the butchers borrowed the book, made copies of the diagrams, laminated them and put them on the counter so other customers could order cuts. One small step toward a market economy where the customer comes first.

The $2.50 Phone Bill

Even for those with good language skills, getting things done in Kyrgyzstan in the mid-1990s was a challenge. A seemingly straightforward task, such as banking or paying a utility bill, often turned out to be a complex, time-consuming activity that required visiting several offices, filling out forms and slips of paper, and obtaining signatures and stamps. Sometimes, it involved waiting around for the only person authorized to conduct the transaction to return from lunch. A case in point was our phone bill.

Living in the central district, our phone number began with the number 26. We were told we were fortunate to have that number. Bishkek’s Soviet-era telephone system was more reliable than most, but some exchanges in the city were notorious for dropped calls and crackly lines; by contrast, the 26 exchange usually worked. It’s all relative, because there was always noise on the line, occasionally interrupted by mysterious clicking sounds; it could have been the secret police checking on our dinner plans, but more likely it was simply the creaking and groaning of the arthritic switching system.

Although claiming we had a working phone seemed a stretch, we still had to pay for it. The phone had already been cut off once because the bill hadn’t been paid, but the landlord took care of it. We had just received a recorded phone message and figured it was a reminder to pay the phone bill, so we brushed up on bill-paying phrases and headed off to the main post office. To pay the bill, you first need to know how much you owe, and that’s recorded on a printout on a table. We scanned through it but could not find our number; apparently, another customer had removed that page rather than make a note of the bill. The post office staff said they did not have another printout; they just took money and gave receipts, but had no records. We were directed to the building next door where the records were kept, but the office was closed for lunch. We came back later, went up to the window for our station (number 26), and had the clerk enter the amount. Then we went back to the post office to pay and get a receipt and the obligatory official stamps. We had spent almost two hours to pay a 41 som ($2.50) bill.

Where Does All the Money Go?

Perhaps we could have shortened the wait time at the post office by offering a clerk a few som to look up our bill. In Central Asia in the mid-1990s, the line between tipping and low-level bribery to have people do what they were paid to do was a fine one. Of course, most of those who took small bribes—police, officials in government offices, university and school teachers, judges, lawyers, doctors, journalists—did so not because they were innately corrupt but out of sheer economic necessity. Many people working in the public sector earned less than $100 a month; even with a couple of part-time jobs, it was a struggle to put food on the table, and the occasional bribe to avoid a traffic ticket or to buy a grade made a difference.

The problem was that corruption occurred at all levels of society. The most corrupt were among the wealthiest and most powerful people in politics and business who didn’t need the money to feed their families. The government launched periodic anticorruption campaigns, partly to impress foreign donors. In a sweep in late 1996, President Akayev’s new anticorruption task force took action against officials accused of shady deals, plundering tax revenues and foreign grants, and soliciting bribes; one minister, two provincial governors, several members of the parliament, and several low-level officials lost their jobs, although only a couple ended up in prison. The more interesting question was whether the clampdown was partly political, with the government going after crooked political opponents and ignoring corruption in its own party and the president’s staff.

What concerned me was the hypocrisy of international organizations and foreign governments that publicly denounced corruption but privately connived in perpetuating it. In the early 1990s, Kyrgyzstan, more than any other republic in Central Asia, had embraced the economic and political reforms favored by the West. The donors responded by pouring in aid. Some was well spent on development projects, and some was simply wasted or stolen. Unfortunately, some donors, including UN agencies, regarded corruption as the cost of doing business, and found ways to conceal payoffs in the “Administrative Services” or “Logistical Support” line items in their budgets. I was told that the markup for graft ranged from 10 to 25 percent, depending on the project and which ministry or agency was the implementing partner. Fortunately, some donors—including, as far as I could tell, US government agencies and USAID—worked hard to monitor where the money went, even if they drove their grantees crazy with excessive reporting requirements.

Despite official denials, everyone knew that corruption went on. However, diplomatic niceties had to be observed. The United States had dubbed Kyrgyzstan an “island of democracy” in Central Asia, and no one in the US embassy was going to undermine the image by asking President Akayev where he got the money to buy his villa in Switzerland. Instead, Ambassador Eileen Malloy, a competent diplomat who understood Kyrgyz society and politics better than most of her successors, talked about “slippage.” In a speech to a conference held to mark five years of Kyrgyz-US cooperation, she said: “I cannot sit here and tell you that every cent of every dollar or every grain of wheat contributed by the United States has gone where it should. Inevitably, there is slippage.” She was brave to say as much, but the word glossed over the extent of corruption. So the university rector spent part of his US travel grant on a new wardrobe? Not to worry—it’s only slippage. So the agriculture minister who supervised the USAID-funded privatization campaign is driving a new BMW? It’s only slippage. Too many slippages turn into a slippery slope.

FIGURE 3.6 Chess game in park, Bishkek

Life in the Dvor

Most Soviet-era apartment blocks were built around a dvor (courtyard). This patch of land—dusty in summer, snow-covered in winter, muddy in spring—is a public space, a commons for apartment dwellers. In most complexes, apartment entrances are on the dvor, not the street side; you enter the dvor through a tunnel or driveway from the street. When you give directions, especially to a large block, it’s not enough to provide the dom (house) and kvartira (apartment) number, because there may be half a dozen separate entrances (podyezd), each with a staircase and, if you’re lucky, a working elevator. Unless you know the block, you’ll try a couple of entrances before figuring out which one leads to the apartment.

The layout of apartment complexes means that all traffic—people, vehicles, stray animals—passes through the dvor. There are swings and slides for the children, and benches under the trees where, on warm days, neighbors sit and chat. Car owners park on the roadway outside their podyezd, unless they’re fortunate enough to have a small garage at the back of the dvor. Residents cross the dvor to take garbage to the communal dumpsters. Although there’s sometimes litter, many residents take pride in keeping the dvor clean, sweeping the area outside their podyezd. Often, there’s a small grocery or convenience store, and sometimes a hairdresser or shoe repair shop. In our dvor, we knew it was time to get out of bed when we heard the call of the dairyman who sold milk, cream, and eggs from the trunk of his Lada; we went down with our banki (large glass jars), joining the short line of neighbors and children. In the depths of winter, it was a relief to put your coat on over your pajamas and spend a few minutes in the cold, rather than hiking through the snow to the market or store.

Like everyone else, Stephanie and I used the balcony on the dvor side to hang out our washing. The climate of the region is continental, with no rain most days in summer, fall, and early winter; clothes hung out in the evening are dry by the next morning. One morning in late December 1996, as we took down the laundry, we noticed a group of men assembling two yurts in the dvor. The traditional Kyrgyz nomadic dwelling is a round, tent-like structure, about fifteen feet across; sheepskins or canvas are stretched over a wooden frame, and the floors and walls are covered with shirdaks, brightly colored felt rugs. Then the group began chopping wood and building a fire. On our way out to the university, we passed a horse tethered to the fence; when we returned, the carcass was roasting on the spit. We thought it was too early for a New Year celebration so Stephanie asked Ainura, a young neighbor girl who was watching, what they were celebrating. Her face fell, and she started crying. “My grandfather died,” she sobbed. The extended family had come to Bishkek to mourn and to bury the patriarch. By tradition the women of the family sit with the body inside the yurt and wail, while the men sit outside and talk about the life of the deceased. The whole affair lasts a couple of days, and then they bury the body. It is easy to see how this tradition evolved when the Kyrgyz were nomads, moving from winter to summer pastures with their flocks of sheep and horses, and living in yurts year-round. But it was now transposed to an urban setting; the ceremony took place just off a busy main street near shops, markets, and government ministries. It was another sign that although about one-third of the population lived in cities and towns, in some ways they hadn’t moved too far from their rural roots. The mourners likely informed the police of their plans in advance, but in 1996 a wake with open fires and slaughtered horses in the middle of the capital city seemed a normal occurrence. No one was going to tell a Kyrgyz where he could pitch his yurt.

Stephanie got to know the children who played in the dvor, including Dima who lived in the apartment above us and was about nine years old. He would often appear to be talking to himself; when we inquired, he said that in school he had to recite verses by the Russian literary greats, and he was practicing his Pushkin. One day in early October, Stephanie heard a child talking in English (with a Texas accent) in the dvor. “Can I hold your kitten?” asked six-year-old Laura Marie. Dima was holding up a scrawny tabby male kitten he had found. A group of children had gathered, and were passing the kitten around. Stephanie assumed it was Dima’s kitten, and said that he should take it back to his apartment to its mother. Dima said he had found it in the dvor. When he indicated he might wring its neck, Laura Marie burst out crying: “I’m going to ask my mother if we can keep the little kitty.” The answer was no: the family already had two cats and two puppies. “We’ll take the kitten for the night until we can find its owner,” Stephanie volunteered. Of course, no one was going to claim the poor creature, so he stayed in our apartment, happy to have warm food and milk and to curl up under the covers with Stephanie. We made half-hearted attempts to give him away. We placed a small ad in the embassy newsletter which got exactly the same number of responses as most of those “lovely kittens free to good home” ads: none. After a couple of weeks, we realized that the cat was here to stay, and we had better give him a name. We wanted it be culturally appropriate but short and memorable. Partly in honor of his nemesis Dima, we decided to call him Pushkin. When we told Dima, he thought it was the funniest thing in the world. He would ask “Kak Pushkin? [How’s Pushkin?]” and howl with laughter. Fortunately, we did not adopt any other cats or we would have felt obliged to use the names of other Russian literary greats. “Dostoyevsky, stop scratching the sofa.” “Chekov, it’s time for your flea medicine.”

Over the next few months, Pushkin grew healthy, strong, and good-natured. Some cats are lap pets, but Pushkin preferred shoulders. He climbed up Stephanie’s back and hung over her neck and shoulders, even when she was cooking. He would sit on my shoulders as I worked on the computer. Our Russian teacher, Galina, got the same treatment; our friend Nicholas who took care of Pushkin for a few weeks said that he hung around his neck while he played his drum set.

Nine months later, as Stephanie was preparing to leave Kyrgyzstan (I was to stay on for four more months) we faced a difficult decision: what would happen to Pushkin? We decided to bring him home, hoping he’d get along with our other cats. We contacted the embassy and asked what we needed to do to export a cat. This caused a minor bureaucratic crisis: apparently, we were the first Americans to take a cat out of Kyrgyzstan, so no one knew what regulations applied. The embassy made a few calls to government officials who were equally perplexed but decided that giving Pushkin a feline exit visa would not jeopardize national security. We signed a document attesting that the cat was not an endangered species or a valuable commercial commodity. A vet came to the apartment to give him shots and a medical examination. His clean bill of health was translated into English.

At the airport Stephanie faced down a Turkish Airlines agent who was insisting she pay $1,300 in excess baggage charges. Eventually, the agent relented. “But you must pay for the cat,” she said. Stephanie agreed, and Pushkin, who was unhappily constrained in his carrier and was crying, was duly weighed. “That will be $60,” said the agent. Stephanie handed her a $50 and a $10 bill. “I cannot accept this $10 bill, it’s too old,” said the agent, and handed it back. Stephanie didn’t offer any more bills, so the cat ended up traveling for $50. The agent asked whether the cat should travel in the cabin or in the baggage hold. “In the cabin, of course,” said Stephanie, as if taking cats on international flights was the sort of thing she did every day. The steward asked a passenger to move to another seat so that Pushkin and Stephanie could sit together. After a two-night stay in Frankfurt, both made it safely home, and Pushkin settled into life with our other cats at our home in rural southeastern Ohio.

Pushkin died from kidney failure on August 8, 2013, in Charleston, West Virginia. He was seventeen years old and had outlived all but one of our other cats. As far as we know, he never missed the dvor.