Postcards from Stanland

by David H. Mould

  A Map Is Worth a Thousand Words

  That cultural conundrum—how we look at other people and their cultures, and how they look at us—has always fascinated me. In elementary school in the mid-1950s, I innocently asked my teacher why so much of the map of the world was colored pink. The question surprised him. “It’s the British Empire, of course,” he said, stiffening his back (and maybe also his upper lip) as if he were going to salute and break into “God Save the Queen.” Instead, he told me I should be proud to be a subject of an empire on which the sun never set. I soon began to doubt his faith. The BBC was reporting trouble on the Malay peninsula, the Mau Mau insurrection in Kenya, civil war in Cyprus. Obviously, not everyone was proud to be a subject of the empire. The sun set more quickly on the Soviet than on the British empire, but for more than seventy years Soviet citizens were also told—by teachers, politicians, and the media—that they should be happy to live in a country free of the evils of Western capitalism.

  On my first trip to Kyrgyzstan in 1995, I bought several Soviet-era maps, the heavy-duty glossy cloth-backed versions used in schools, at a bookstore in Bishkek. One is a historical map of the United States from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. Its most prominent features are red flags scattered across the northern United States. I didn’t know much Russian at the time, so could not read the scale, but I figured out the significance of the flags from the dates beside them. Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Louisville, St. Louis, Chicago, and other cities in 1877—the great railroad workers’ strike. Chicago in 1886—the Haymarket Affair. Near Pittsburgh in 1892—the Homestead steelworkers’ strike. Colorado in 1913—the miners’ strike and the Ludlow Massacre. And so on.

  US history and geography were presented to Soviet schoolchildren as a series of bloody labor disputes, the proletariat rising against the oppressive mine and factory owners. An inset map depicts “Imperialist Aggression, late 19th to early 20th Centuries,” a cluster of black arrows in the Caribbean thrusting toward Mexico, Cuba, Guatemala, Panama, Puerto Rico, and Colombia, in the Pacific toward Hawaii, Western Samoa, Guam, and the Philippines.

  The history of the United States told through red flags and black arrows. I imagined that the Cold War period was similarly depicted with black arrows targeting Cuba, Chile, Venezuela, and Nicaragua and red flags marking the racial conflicts of the civil rights era—Montgomery, Selma, Watts. No wonder many Soviet citizens feared and loathed the West, even as they bartered for Levis and listened to the Rolling Stones.

  And then, almost abruptly in 1991, it was all over. The Soviet Union collapsed, and the republics of Central Asia were now numbered among the so-called Newly Independent States. It was a convenient, if misleading, label because they lacked both economic independence and political institutions. The ideology of Marxist-Leninism was replaced by a new civil religion whose creed included “democracy,” “the free market,” “structural reform,” and “civil society.” The old school maps came off the walls to be replaced by more positive cartography, courtesy of “democracy building” NGOs funded by the United States and other foreign governments.

  Changing the name of a country, the maps, and school textbooks does not change culture, even with heavy doses of foreign aid, the privatization of property, and an army of foreign consultants with advice on elections, the rule of law, and capital markets. It takes many years for people who grew up, lived, and worked in a system to start looking at the world and themselves in new ways. In many respects, Kyrgyzstan in December 1995 still seemed stuck in a Soviet time warp, cut adrift from Moscow’s economic and social safety net yet not willing to embrace an uncertain future.

  Although some people in Central Asia continue to cling to the past, it’s been clear for many years that change is the new norm. The Soviet Union, or anything like it, is not coming back, and the certainties that underpinned its society have disappeared. This book is about this process of change.

  My relationship with Central Asia is a personal one. And, like any relationship, it’s complicated. There is much that I love and admire about the region and its peoples, and, at the same time, much that I find troubling. It’s that tension between the positive and negative that makes Central Asia worth writing about. My goal is to add the “stans” in all their complexity to the mental maps of readers. This has been my personal mission since December 1995. And it all began on the fabled Silk Road in the medieval city of Osh.

  two

  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.