architecture and settlement patterns in the US Midwest, the techniques can be applied to any region. Without his inspiration, I would not be asking questions about Central Asia’s gerrymandered borders, Soviet public architecture, or the impact of Stalin’s mass deportations on the ethnic mix.
By the mid-1990s, I was looking for a new challenge. Drew McDaniel, a faculty colleague, asked if I would be willing to travel to Kyrgyzstan to set up a media training center in Osh, the main city in the south. Drew had been to Kyrgyzstan a few months earlier and said he found it fascinating to observe the changes in the country as it emerged from over seventy years of Soviet rule. I said I’d love to take the opportunity. I didn’t admit to Drew that I had no idea where Kyrgyzstan was.
Since the mid-1990s, I’ve traveled to Central Asia, mostly to Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, more than a dozen times to teach at universities, lead workshops for journalists and educators, consult with TV and radio stations, and conduct research. My visits have lasted from a couple of weeks to three months, with longer stints for Fulbright Fellowships—sixteen months in Kyrgyzstan in 1996–97 and six months in Kazakhstan in 2011. I’ve made three trips to Uzbekistan, and two to Tajikistan; unfortunately, I haven’t had the opportunity to visit Turkmenistan.
As I traveled, I made notes on everything from landscape, culture, history, politics, environment, media, and universities to the challenges of communicating and staying warm. Recording first impressions was important because what struck me as interesting on first encounter would, after a week or two, seem commonplace. Every week or so, I assembled the notes—recorded in a cheap tetrad (school exercise book) from the bazaar or, less systematically, on napkins, credit card receipts, ticket stubs, and pages ripped from airline magazines—and wrote a rambling e-mail letter to a growing circle of family, friends, and colleagues. These letters were the inspiration for this book; they documented what I experienced while the memories were still fresh. I’ve also written op-eds, essays, and features on Central Asia for the Christian Science Monitor, Times Higher Education, Transitions Online, the Montreal Review, and other print and online media, some of which are reproduced here, in whole or in part. The book also draws on research on journalism and media for academic papers. Thus it presents Central Asia from several perspectives, from the wide-angle views of geopolitics—the contest for political and economic power—to the close-ups of travel, work, eating, and shopping.
A note on spelling. Language is a sensitive issue in Central Asia, and there’s no way that I will satisfy everyone with my choices because we are dealing with three language groups: Russian is a Slavic language; Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Turkmen, and Uzbek are Turkic languages; and Tajik is a Farsi (Persian) language. When a word or person’s name has a clear origin, I use a transliterated spelling that approximates how it would sound in the original language. For example, my friend Asqat Yerkimbay prefers to use “q” in his name because it is closest to the guttural “қ” sound in Kazakh; the Russian spelling of his name is “Askhat” with the “kh” a transliteration of the consonant “x” which does not exist in English or Kazakh. However, to apply that principle to the name of the country, Қазақстан, and people, Қазақ, gives you Qazaqstan and Qazaq, names that might confuse some readers. In this instance, I sacrifice consistency and correctness for convention, while noting that the “kh” was a colonial convenience, used by the Russians to distinguish the Казах of the steppe from the similar-sounding Cossack people. I use Russian names for places such as Karaganda (Kazakh—Qaragandhy) and Kostanai (Qostanay), simply because the Russian spelling remains widely used. There’s less linguistic confusion in Kyrgyzstan, where most places have Kyrgyz names.
This book, combining personal experience, interviews, and research, is not intended as a travel guide. It’s not an academic study or the kind of analysis produced by policy wonks, although it offers background and insights. Think of it as a series of scenes or maybe oversized postcards (with space for one thousand rather than one hundred words) that I might have sent to friends and family if the postal system in Central Asia had been reliable enough. They feature observations of places and people, digging into an often complex and troubled past and, on occasions, offering an educated guess on the future. Postcards to ponder.
Charleston, West Virginia, November 2014
one
Travels in “Kyrzakhstan”
From the Osh Bazaar to Maryland Malls
On Christmas Eve 1995, my wife, Stephanie, picked me up at Washington’s Dulles airport. I had been traveling for almost two days and was exhausted. I had arrived at Almaty airport in southeastern Kazakhstan at 11 p.m. after a six-hour drive on icy roads across the border from Kyrgyzstan. Although my flight to Frankfurt did not leave until 4:30 a.m., the US embassy advised me to allow enough time to navigate the Soviet-era airport bureaucracy and, if necessary, pay a small bribe. It was good advice. The journey through the airport was almost as stressful as the road trip, and I barely made my flight.
Stephanie and I planned to spend the holidays with her sister and family at their home on the Maryland shore before driving home to Ohio. After almost a month in Central Asia, I looked forward to returning to the United States. Instead I experienced, for the first time in my life, reverse culture shock. We drove past brightly lit suburban malls, crowded with shoppers buying last-minute presents and stocking up on holiday food and alcohol. Billboards and neon signs were already advertising the postholiday sales.
One of the blessings—but also one of the curses—of international air travel is that in the space of a few hours (or, in my case, about forty hours) you are transported from one world to another. The place you leave and the place where you arrive differ not only in the predictable ways—the skin color and features of the people, the landscape, architecture, language, food, and money. More fundamentally, the everyday concerns of people are usually completely different.
In the malls, people were making standard American consumer choices. “What should I buy for your mother? She’s so difficult!” “Which video game do the children want?” “How large a turkey? “Will anyone notice if we serve boxed Chardonnay?”
It was a stark contrast to the world I had just left. In suburban Maryland, the shops were open, and open late. In Osh in southern Kyrgyzstan, where I’d spent most of the past month, almost all the shops were closed, and had been closed for several years; what was left of the retail economy had moved to the bazaar and street corners.
In suburban Maryland, lights blazed from malls, streetlamps, and Christmas house and lawn displays. In Osh, the lights were off for at least several hours each day. No one was sure why there were power outages in a country with enough hydroelectric capacity to be a net exporter, but the usual culprits were named—corrupt government ministers, incompetent local officials, the mafia, the International Monetary Fund, or some cabal of all of the above.
In suburban Maryland, the restaurants were crowded; in Osh, the few restaurants that were still open had only the occasional customer and most of the items on the menu were not available.
In suburban Maryland, people were spending their Christmas bonuses and maxing out their credit cards. In Osh, teachers, civil service workers, and others who had not been paid for months were wondering when (or if) they would ever get a paycheck again.
In suburban Maryland, people were buying gifts for the holidays. In Osh, some people were selling all they had to buy food; in subzero temperatures, they squatted on the broken concrete sidewalks, their possessions—kitchen utensils, auto parts, school textbooks, old clothes, Soviet memorabilia—spread out on blankets. I don’t know who was buying because most passersby were just as poor as the sellers.
In suburban Maryland and throughout the United States on Christmas Eve 1995, people were looking forward to the new year with hope. In Osh and throughout Central Asia, people were simply hoping that 1996 would not be as bad as 1995.
Not in the Holiday Spirit
When we arrived at Stephanie’s sister’s home, the party was in full swing. I was not