As long as Afghanistan and Pakistan were the only “stans” we had to remember, the map was reasonably manageable. Then Mikhail Gorbachev came along. The collapse of the Soviet Union gave us fourteen new countries (plus Russia) including the five “stans” of Central Asia—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. We can be grateful the Soviet Union did not break up any further, or we would have to deal with Bashkortostan, Dagestan, and Tatarstan (now Russian republics). Or that Armenia did not adopt its native name, Hayastan. Or that the Central Asian republics themselves did not splinter, with Karakalpakstan breaking away from Uzbekistan.
If we struggle to remember the “stans,” is it more helpful to think about “Central Asia”? It depends. In terms of geopolitics, it’s a more elastic region, partly because it is (apart from the Caspian Sea) landlocked, so has no coastline for demarcation. Since September 11, Afghanistan has often been classified as Central Asia. The north of the country, bordering Uzbekistan, has a large ethnic Uzbek population; in the east, Tajiks are a significant minority. By religion, culture, and language, the Uighurs of China’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region have more in common with the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz than with the rest of China, and Uighur nationalists dream of reuniting with their neighbors in a Greater Turkestan region. The Caspian Sea clearly divides the Caucasus republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, and the Russian republics of Dagestan, Chechnya, and Ingushetia, from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, although some policy experts lump them together as “Central Asia and the Caucasus.” What about Mongolia? Ethnically, Kazakhs and Kyrgyz are Mongols. Unlike other regions that can be neatly subdivided, Central Asia is amorphous, expanding and contracting as it is viewed through different political, social, economic, and cultural lenses.
MAP 1.1 Central Asian republics (map by Brian Edward Balsley, GISP)
In this book, I use the narrow political definition of Central Asia to refer to these five former Soviet republics—Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Since 1995, I have faced the challenge of trying to explain the region to colleagues, students, and friends. After one trip to Kyrgyzstan, a colleague insisted I had been in Kurdistan (which does not yet exist, except in Northern Iraq and in the maps of Kurdish separatist movements).
“No, K-oe-rg-oe-zstan,” I replied, trying to wrap my tongue around the challenging Russian vowel “ы” in the first and second syllables. I gave the ten-second profile. “Poor country, former Soviet Union, borders China, beautiful mountains and lakes, nomadic herders with sheep and horses, lots of meat in the diet, bad hotels, slow Internet, very hospitable people.”
You would have thought the conflict in Afghanistan would have focused the attention of Westerners on the countries next door, but unfortunately it hasn’t. Just as medieval European maps tagged vast regions of Africa, Asia, and America as terra incognita, the five Central Asian republics are a geographical blank between Afghanistan and Pakistan to the west and China to the east. To many Westerners, my travels in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan might as well have been on another planet. I had simply been in “Stanland.”
It’s difficult to know why we have so much trouble with the “stans.” The suffix, derived from a Persian word meaning “place of,” is similar in meaning to “land” in English, German, or Dutch. We have no problem distinguishing England, Scotland, Ireland, Iceland, Finland, Poland, and Switzerland, and maybe even Greenland, Friesland, Rhineland, and Lapland. So why can’t we find Turkmenistan, let alone Balochistan, the largest of Pakistan’s four provinces?
Maybe it’s because we’re not as globally minded as we suppose. American ignorance—or perhaps ignore-ance better describes it—of the geography of Central Asia was famously lampooned on the cover of the December 10, 2001, edition of the New Yorker magazine, three months after September 11 (see page 10). The “New Yorkistan” cover satirically depicted the five boroughs and individual neighborhoods, mixing local and Yiddish names with suffixes common in Central Asia and the Middle East. Starting from their original idea, Bronxistan, the creators Maira Kalman and Rick Meyerowitz took readers on a stroll in Manhattan’s Central Parkistan, hailed a cab at Taxistan (LaGuardia Airport), speculated in real estate at (Donald) Trumpistan, celebrated cultural diversity in Lubavistan (named for a branch of the Hasidic Jews) and Gaymenistan, and then ventured to the outer suburbs of Coldturkeystan and Extra Stan (traveling through Hiphopabad, passing by the Flatbushtuns and the district of Khandibar).6
Why are the “stans” important? In a 1904 paper, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” delivered at Britain’s Royal Geographical Society, the Oxford geographer Sir Halford Mackinder, now recognized as one of the doyens of geopolitics, argued that interior Asia and Eastern Europe, the so-called Eurasian heartland, was the strategic center of the “World Island.” For more than a century, imperial Britannia had ruled the waves, but Mackinder, despite his imperialist views, warned of the decline of sea power in the twentieth century. As the heartland rose, Britain would become part of the subordinate “maritime lands.” Since the first millennium BCE, the landlocked steppes of Eurasia have provided the staging ground for horse-borne invasions. Shielded by the Arctic Ocean to the north and mountain ranges to the south, armies from the heartland could strike east to China, west to Europe, and southwest to the Middle East.7
Developing his theory after World War I and drawing on his experiences trying to unite White Russian forces in the civil war that followed the Bolshevik Revolution, Mackinder warned of the dangers of German or Russian domination, and foresaw the NATO alliance by calling on North America and Western Europe to offset the power of the Eurasian heartland. Although the “geographical pivot” theory is well known to academics and policy wonks, it has not percolated into popular understanding. Many Westerners are still lost in Stanland.
FIGURE 1.1 “New Yorkistan,” New Yorker cover, December 10, 2001, Maira Kalman and Rick Meyerowitz (Condé Nast collection)
So are some of the citizens of these republics, which, more than a quarter of a century after independence, are still struggling to establish national identities. The problem is that, despite recent nationalist revisionist historiography, the five republics, each named for an ethnic group, are new countries created by Soviet cartographers in the mid-1920s. Stalin’s policy of divide and rule, intended to suppress ethnic unrest and militant Islam, created a crazy-quilt pattern of borders between ethnically mixed Soviet Socialist Republics. These became de facto political borders in 1991.
Those who still yearn for the social and ideological certainties of the Soviet Union and curse Gorbachev for messing up their lives may never accept their “stan.” But for those born after independence the Soviet era is now just a heavily edited chapter in the school history textbook. The new generation that will dominate politics, business, and intellectual life has a stronger sense of national identity and history.
That means that the West needs to better understand the “stans.” I still have much to understand myself. Despite traveling and working in the region for many years, I can never expect to have the same understanding, particularly on cultural issues, as those who were born, brought up, and live in Central Asia. By the same token, I may be better prepared than they are to explain the “stans” to Westerners precisely because I am an outsider. What seems normal or unexceptional to people in Central Asia often strikes me as interesting and worth noting. It goes both ways. For twenty years, Stephanie and I lived in a nineteenth-century farmhouse in the rolling hills south of Athens, Ohio. Academic colleagues from Central Asia who visited were puzzled. “Is this your home or your dacha?” they