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