I have no one to blame but myself for not working harder to make relatives and friends, all of them good and sincere people, think or care about what I had seen and learned. About shattered families where husbands, robbed of their jobs and the dignity of work by the collapse of the Soviet economy, turned to the vodka bottle. About babushkas and children, begging at the bazaar. About declining social and medical services, schools without heating or textbooks. About ethnic unrest, and the breakdown of the rule of law. But also about the resilience, spirit, and hospitality of people who, after many years of Soviet certainty, had suddenly seen their world turned upside down.
After years of media coverage of famine and conflict, the problems of the developing world can seem relentlessly wearying. Poverty, suffering, and conflict are comfortably encapsulated in five-paragraph or ninety-second narrative chunks, with the requisite quotes or sound bites. You could not understand southern Kyrgyzstan in 1995 from the occasional media coverage or even from my photos and stories. You simply had to be there.
I was there, and then I left. That was perhaps what disturbed me most. I had the freedom to travel, to move between the worlds of southern Kyrgyzstan and suburban Maryland. Most people in Central Asia were simply stuck, trying to survive. That Christmas Eve made me see my own world, career, and life in a new way.
Come Again, Mr. Secretary?
As a US citizen and taxpayer, it’s my duty not only to criticize government officials but to recognize when they do something useful. I happily acknowledge the contribution of US Secretary of State John Kerry to this introduction.
Kerry is probably unaware of my debt, because it was unintentional. On the eve of his first foreign trip as Secretary of State in February 2013, Kerry, in a speech at the University of Virginia, praised the staff of the State Department and US Agency for International Development (USAID) for their work in the “most dangerous places on Earth.”
They fight corruption in Nigeria. They support the rule of law in Burma. They support democratic institutions in Kyrzakhstan and Georgia.1
Come again, Mr. Secretary? Kyrzakhstan? Aren’t you confusing volatile Kyrgyzstan, where popular protests overthrew two authoritarian leaders in less than five years, with its stable neighbor Kazakhstan, where President Nursultan Nazarbayev has ruled almost unchallenged since independence in 1991?
The State Department transcript of the speech helpfully clarified matters, replacing “Kyrzakhstan” with “Kyrgyzstan.” But not before reporters picked up on the gaffe. Kerry was teased for “creating a new country.” The flub was “all the more awkward,” said the British newspaper The Telegraph, “because Kyrgyzstan is a key ally in the US-led war in Afghanistan and a major recipient of US aid.”2
Russians poked fun in online forums. Among the comments: “I think we need to restore the USSR, so that the American Secretary does not confuse the names.” “Well, if the USA decided so . . . Let there be Kyrzakhstan.” “So what? Kyrzakhstan is a regular country. It’s to the east of Ukrarussia and south-east of Litonia. Not far from Uzkmenia. You should learn geography.” A cartoon depicted Kerry, cell phone to his ear, looking intently at a globe. “Where is that Kyrzakhstan? I’ve been trying to call there for three days.”
The gaffe was fodder for TV talk shows and the late-night comics. Stephen Colbert picked up on a comment Kerry made the next day in a lecture on freedom of speech to students in Berlin: “In America, you have the right to be stupid if you want to be.”
“Yes, in this country we are endowed with the inalienable right to be stupid,” said Colbert. “It’s right there in the Constitution between the peanut doodle and the ranch dressing stain. Folks, John Kerry doesn’t just talk the dumb talk, he walks the dumb walk. Here’s what he said last week [excerpt from speech at University of Virginia].”
Yes, Kyrzakhstan. And there’s just one thing about Kyrzakhstan. It does not exist. Of course, he’s got some ribbing in the press for making up a new country. And folks, it is well deserved. I mean, how could anyone ever confuse Kazakhstan [shows map] with its neighbor when everyone knows that in Kyrgyzstan [shows picture of yurts, the traditional tent-like dwellings] they play a fretless stringed instrument called the komuz which is nothing like Kazakhstan’s dombyra, also a fretless stringed instrument with a slightly thinner neck. And what are you going to do, Kerry? Go to downtown Bishkek and use a bunch of tenge to buy a new kolpak [shows picture of kolpak, traditional Kyrgyz men’s felt hat, and Kazakh tenge bills]. Not without first exchanging into soms [shows Kyrgyz currency], you’re not. Quit embarrassing yourself, John Kerry.3
Of course, Kerry was not the first US official to be, as the Telegraph put it, “tongue-tied by post-Soviet geography.” “Stan-who?” President George W. Bush is reputed to have asked when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice briefed him about Uzbekistan. In August 2008, he mixed up Russia and Georgia, which at that time were at war, when he warned against possible efforts to depose “Russia’s duly elected government.”
I’m prepared to forgive Kerry’s gaffe, but I can also use it to make a point. The confusion is symptomatic of a more general geographical malaise, caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the proliferation of countries whose names end in -stan. Kerry is not the first and will not be the last public official to become lost in Stanland.
Lost in Stanland
So where is “Stanland?”
The imprecise reference is to a vast swath of Asia, stretching from Turkey to the western border of China, populated by a bewildering assortment of ethnic groups that give their names to an equally bewildering collection of provinces, autonomous republics, and countries. Remembering them all—not to mention finding them on a map—is a challenge, even for people who are supposed to know these things, such as diplomats and international relations experts.
I don’t claim to be an expert, but, after traveling to Central Asia many times since the mid-1990s, I have a sense of place. I pity those world leaders doing the airport tarmac press conferences on the ten-Asian-countries-in-ten-days tours. It’s Tuesday, so this must be Tajikistan.
It’s similar to the geographical confusion brought on by the end of European colonialism in Africa a half century ago. It wasn’t enough for the imperial powers to surrender their political and economic dominance. They also had to learn postcolonial geographical vocabulary. It’s not Upper Volta any more. It’s Burkina Faso, and its capital is—get ready to roll those vowels—Ouagadougou.
“As a generality,” writes the Central Asia scholar Karl E. Meyer, “Americans think of the world in terms of seaports and airports, whereas Central Asians and their neighbors look inwardly to a vast realm tied together by caravan routes, rails, mountain passes, rivers and nowadays oil pipelines. Americans commonly dwell in a perpetual present, while inhabitants of the Asian heartland and their imperial former masters inhabit a gallery where whispering voices never cease recalling past triumphs or prior humiliations.”4 To travel writer Colin Thubron, one of the first Westerners to travel in the region after the breakup of the Soviet Union, it was intangible, a historical and geographical paradox:
Even on the map it was ill-defined, and in history only vaguely named: ‘Turkestan’, ‘Central Asia’, ‘The Land Beyond the River’. Somewhere north of Iran and Afghanistan, west of the Chinese deserts, east of the Caspian Sea . . . this enormous secret country had turned on itself. Its glacier-fed rivers . . . never reached the ocean, but vanished in landlocked seas or died across the desert. The Himalaya cut off its mountains from any life-giving monsoon where the Pamirs rose in a naked glitter of plateau, so high, wrote Marco Polo, that no bird flew there and fire burnt with a pale flame in which you could rest your hand.5
We all construct mental maps of essential information, and our maps are shaped