in the annual ritual of canning.
In mid-September, the Osh bazaar was groaning with fresh produce, and prices were low. We filled a box with over five kilos of Roma tomatoes for a couple of dollars. A large bucket of raspberries was $4.80, a bucket of plums $1.20, and about seven kilos of apricots $5.20. A Kyrgyz colleague came over to the apartment, armed with pots, pans, and canning recipes. The system—or the technology, as she called it—was different from the one Stephanie had used in the United States and we struggled to fit the lids on the jars with a device that worked like a reverse-action can opener. Still, by the end of the day, we had canned several jars of tomatoes and plum jam and two jars of adjika—a relish made from tomatoes, carrots, peppers, apples, hot chili peppers, vinegar, oil, salt, and sugar. Our colleague said the recipe came from a Bulgarian version of Good Housekeeping that circulated in Bishkek in Soviet times.
MAP 3.1 My Bishkek (map by Brian Edward Balsley, GISP)
A Walking City
It was a 1-1/2-som (9-cent) ride home on the bus from the Osh bazaar with our buckets of fruit and box of tomatoes. Bishkek residents, especially those who live in the outer suburbs (microraions), depend on public transportation—the buses, trolley buses, and marshrutkas (minibuses). The buses varied in size, age, and mechanical condition; most of the older ones sounded as if they needed a clutch job. The newer buses were visible examples of foreign aid. They were German-made, with German-language ads on the side, and apparently still heading for destinations in Berlin, Essen, or Wiesbaden. You learned not to pay attention to destinations such as the Hauptbahnhof or Goetheplatz; if the bus was heading west on Kievskaya, you could be pretty sure it was going to the Osh bazaar.
Public transportation was cheap but often crowded, so we developed tactics, as well as elbow muscles, to deal with the crush. If the bus or trolley was full, we started pushing to the front a couple of stops before we wanted to get off. On the trolleys, the only advantage to crowding was the soft human padding. When the driver took a corner too tightly, the conducting rods detached from the overhead cables; the trolley immediately lost power and stopped abruptly, throwing everyone around. Then you were glad the trolley was packed. There was a short delay while the driver climbed up a ladder to the roof of the bus, lifted the rods and restored the current.
The marshrutka (short for marshrutnoye taksi which literally means “routed taxi”), common throughout the former Soviet Union, costs a few som more than the bus or trolley but is much faster. Like the African “bush taxi,” it follows a route, picking up and dropping off passengers anywhere along the way. A marshrutka has twelve to fourteen seats, but on local routes it sometimes takes as many as twenty passengers. There’s no schedule—a marshrutka leaves when it’s full of passengers and luggage, or when the driver figures he has enough fares to make the journey viable.
Most of the time, we walked. To the university, the local bazaar, to shops and restaurants—most of the places we needed to reach were within ten to fifteen minutes by foot along tree-lined sidewalks, boulevards, and parks. Apart from the traffic, the main hazards were the uneven sidewalks. In places, they were even missing. By “missing,” I do not mean that there was no sidewalk, as is often the case in US cities. It was there, but you had to step around a gaping hole in the ground. Although some were the result of seasonal cracking and expansion of the concrete, most appeared where a manhole cover should have been, since many had been stolen and melted down for scrap. In daylight and good weather, you could avoid the holes. At night, walking became riskier. Walking in winter, you learned to keep an eye out for geometrically shaped depressions in the snow; if it was a circle or rectangle, you could be pretty sure there was no sidewalk under it.
One of our favorite local walks was to the US embassy, which was housed in a modestly sized but elegant nineteenth-century Russian-style house on leafy Prospekt Erkindik (Freedom), about two blocks from our apartment. Most of the time, we did not have official business but stopped by to read week-old newspapers and magazines, borrow a video or book from the ambassador’s collection, or check on expat social events. The office of the ambassador, Eileen Malloy, was just off the main entrance, and she would stop to chat in breaks between meetings. The place bustled with visitors. Security was thorough, but unobtrusive.
Today, the US embassy is located on a flat, open area of land on Prospekt Mira in the south of the city with no other construction permitted nearby. Its thick, high walls are topped with spikes and monitored by security cameras. It’s a long bus ride from downtown, so no one just stops by any more. It looks like a prison, not a diplomatic mission.
Supply Thread
Business people and economists like to talk about the supply chain, the intricate, interlinked system of organizations, people, information, and resources that it takes to move a product or service from supplier to customer. In Kyrgyzstan in the mid-1990s, there wasn’t so much a supply chain as a supply thread; at best it was tangled and frayed, and sometimes it just broke until someone knotted it together again.
The Soviet economy, although based on the artificial creation of supply and demand, at least had a supply chain of sorts. The cotton, wheat, or mutton from your collective farm or tractor tires from your factory were shipped somewhere else. You received a modest salary, free housing, medical care, and education. The cotton or tires might sit in a warehouse or railroad siding because they were not needed, but that didn’t matter as long as Moscow kept sending the money. The collapse of the Soviet economy shattered the supply chain because no one was going to pay for cotton or tires they didn’t need. Now the challenge for all the Central Asian republics was to produce goods and services that people would pay for and get them to market—in other words, to create a supply chain.
To take the economic pulse of Kyrgyzstan in the mid-1990s, you didn’t go to the government ministries where they’d give you the dubious statistics they compiled to keep the foreign donors happy. Instead, you went to the bazaar where most of the economic activity took place. Although there were small street bazaars all over the city, Bishkek had three large daily markets—the Osh bazaar on the west side, Alamedin in the northeast, and Ortosay in the south. About six miles north of the city center—a twenty-minute bus or trolley ride—was Tolchok (which means “push” in Kyrgyz), a sprawling, crowded weekend market with imported consumer goods, and a livestock bazaar, where horses, sheep, cattle, and goats were bought and sold, and traditional Kyrgyz horseback games held. Close by was the auto bazaar, where you could buy a used Lada, Niva, Volga, or Moskvich and maybe also the parts to keep it running.
Stephanie and I frequented the Osh and Alamedin bazaars. They illustrated, better than any statistics, Kyrgyzstan’s uneven progress toward a market economy. Let’s start in the geographic center, in the covered market halls where meat, dairy goods, and dried fruits and nuts were sold. Here, the vendors had established business relationships with farmers. There were separate sections for mutton, beef, and horse. The Volga Germans sold pork. You could buy a fresh chicken (and pluck it yourself if you knew how), but by 1996 frozen chicken had arrived, reportedly from the United States and Europe. We were told the breast meat went to domestic markets, so all we could buy were legs, backs, and thighs. Dairy vendors had regular supplies of milk, butter, cream, yogurt, smetana (sour cream), kumys (fermented mare’s milk), the yogurt-like kefir or airan, and local cheese. Dried fruit (apricots, red and white raisins, cherries) and nuts (walnuts, pistachios, almonds, apricot pits, sunflower seeds) were available year round, most shipped by truck from the Fergana Valley. You could go to the market halls any day of the year, and be pretty sure of finding what you needed. Here, the supply thread was at its strongest.
As you moved outside the covered halls, the bazaar became more chaotic and the thread weaker. There were stalls with fruits and vegetables, alongside others selling lipioshki, fresh eggs, cigarettes and candy, household goods, cleaning products, paper and school supplies, electrical parts, and imported clothes. Most of the clothes came from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Turkey, with fake, misspelled, sewn-in designer labels—the Calvert Kleins and the Tommy Hilsburgers. Cheap electronics came from China and Southeast Asia. Although some goods were shipped by road, most high-priced