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.
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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