boots, and fur hats. The music was a cross-cultural mix—a soulful Turkish pop ballad segueing into an American oldie, rendered in a thick accent, and usually without the definite articles: “Heavy bo-dee in whole-sale block, wuz dancin’ to jailhuz rock.”
After a week or so, I had learned enough Russian to greet the neighbors, shop for food at the bazaar, and tell a cab driver my destination. In 1995, communication and travel in Osh were daily challenges. The telephone switching system was antiquated and overloaded. You could usually get a local call through on the second or third attempt, but to call another city meant dialing a complex series of digits; making an international call required a trip to the city telephone exchange where you waited in line to book the call. The major challenge was finding the number. The library staff, journalists, and media owners (and anyone else who had to make calls on a regular basis) kept numbers in well-worn pocket organizers. Osh, the second largest city in the country, did not have a telephone directory.
There was also no city map—or at least no one I asked could remember ever having seen one. Even if it had existed, it would have likely featured Soviet-era street names that were fast disappearing as the city authorities dug into history and changed them to the politically correct names of Kyrgyz leaders and literary figures. Ulitsa Pionerskaya (Pioneers’ Street) was renamed for the painter Gapar Aytiev, Ulitsa 25 Oktyabrya (October 25th Street), marking the date of the Bolshevik Revolution, for the writer Kasym Bayalinov. The main one-way south street, Ulitsa Lenina (Lenin Street) became Kurmanjan Dakta kuchasi, named for the Queen of the South, the tribal chief who ruled the region after her husband was murdered in a palace coup in Khokand in 1862.
Even for fervent Kyrgyz nationalists, the name changes were confusing, and many people continued to use the old Russian names long after they disappeared from the street signs. Lenin was a particular source of confusion. Even though he was usurped by the Queen of the South on the main one-way south street, he simply moved one block east to take over the main one-way north street, pushing aside his one-time Bolshevik comrade-in-arms Yakov Sverdlov, as Ulitsa Sverdlova officially disappeared into street-sign history.
The city buses and marshrutkas (private minibuses) plied both the old and new Lenin Streets, but I did not know the city well enough to know where they would take me, so I took cabs for most trips. In Central Asian cities, the taxi business is still the most visible part of the informal economy. Although there are commercial taxi services, many drivers in private cars pick up passengers on the street. There’s a brief negotiation over the fare, although experienced passengers know the going rate between most points.
Apart from the occasional Mercedes, Audi, or BMW driven by a government official or crime boss, there were few vehicles in Osh in December 1995 that should have been on the road at all. The problem wasn’t just the bare tires and noisy mufflers. It was the streets, which had received little maintenance from a cash-strapped city government since independence. Cold winters and sizzling hot summers had buckled the road surfaces and created huge potholes. To avoid them, vehicles weaved and swerved, statistically increasing the chance of accidents. The Soviet-era Moskvichs, Volgas, and Ladas with their dented doors and shattered windshields looked like casualties of a fender-bender war, and a few were flamboyantly out of alignment. There were few auto repair shops, and parts were in short supply. If you needed a radiator or a distributor, you headed for the bazaar to scour the used parts laid out on tarpaulins and old blankets. A shortage of auto parts can spur innovation, and drivers routinely made repairs with scraps of metal and wire or a part salvaged from a different type of car. In 1995, gasoline cost about the same as in the United States (making it expensive by local standards), but there was no quality control. Because there were few gas stations, most drivers filled up at the roadside from roving tanker trucks called benavoz that sometimes dispensed a mechanically injurious blend of diesel and gasoline.
On days when I had to visit several newspapers or TV stations, I hired a car and driver for about $30 a day. My regular driver Babur, a broad-shouldered grinning Uzbek with a perfect set of gold teeth, fearlessly gunned his Volga through the rutted side streets, dodging pedestrians and farm animals, shouting (in English) “No problem!” It turned out that he was a police driver who took time off work because I paid more than the police did. Whenever we got stuck behind other vehicles he put a flashing light on top of the car and bellowed orders through a small speaker mounted on the hood. The cars magically parted in front of us.
Babur’s favorite, but absolutely unverifiable, claim was that he was a lineal descendant of King Zahiruddin Babur (1483–1530). Official histories describe Babur as a great poet and prose-writer, but he didn’t get to be head of the most powerful Moghul state in the world by penning rhyming couplets; he did a lot of fighting along the way. Babur (the name means “lion”) had both the lineage and role models to become a warrior king; he was a direct descendant of Tamerlane (Timur) through his father and of Genghis Khan through his mother. In 1497, as the newly crowned king of Fergana, he built a shelter and private mosque on the eastern promontory of Suleiman’s Mountain, the rocky outcrop that rises above the city of Osh. In 1504, his small army entered what today is Afghanistan and captured Kabul, where he established himself as ruler. In 1525, he set out to conquer India, using heavy guns to defeat the numerically superior forces of Sultan Ibrahim Lodi and capture Delhi. He went on to defeat other armies and by his death in 1530 had established the Moghul dynasty in India.
It’s a steep thirty-minute climb to Dom Babura, the rebuilt version of the small house on Suleiman’s Mountain where Babur came to pray. The formation, with its five peaks, is the result of glacial movement, but it is easy to see why travelers believed the mountain, rising majestically from the middle of the wide, flat valley, was the work of God. For centuries, it has been a place of pilgrimage for Muslims. It is said that the Prophet Muhammad once prayed there and that a shrine marks the grave of Suleiman (Solomon), a prophet in the Qur’an. Women who ascend to the shrine and crawl through an opening will, according to legend, give birth to healthy children. As in other parts of Central Asia, Islam is casually mixed with older belief systems, particularly animism—the belief that natural physical entities including animals and plants, and often inanimate objects such as rocks, possess a spiritual essence. The trees and bushes on the mountain are draped with prayer flags. UNESCO, which added Suleiman’s Mountain to its list of World Heritage Sites in 2009, has recorded more than 100 sites with petroglyphs representing humans and animals, and 17 sites of worship, linked by a network of ancient paths. Each is reputed to have a medical specialty—to cure barrenness, headaches, or back pain, and even to give the blessing of longevity. According to UNESCO, the mountain is “the most complete example of a sacred mountain anywhere in Central Asia, worshipped over several millennia.”5
The Russians Are Coming
The Russian push into Central Asia began in the early 1700s with the first of several costly missions to subdue Khiva, the most western of the khanates. In 1735, having defeated the three major Kazakh tribal groups (the Great, Middle, and Little Hordes), the Russians built a forward base at Orenburg in the southern Urals. From the 1850s, in a close parallel to the advance of the American frontier (although in the opposite direction), Russia’s armies and railroad builders, followed by settlers seeking farmland, relentlessly pushed east from the industrial cities of the Urals into Siberia and southeast into Central Asia.
What motivated Russian expansion or, as Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac eloquently put it, “the prodigious projection of power over an interminable solitude”? Was it the fear of a revived Mongol empire that could threaten Europe or an impulse for historical revenge? Or a strategic calculation, almost two centuries before Sir Halford Mackinder advanced his theory that the Eurasian heartland was the geographical pivot of history? Meyer and Brysac suggest there were several reasons.
For an empire lacking natural boundaries, space itself formed a wall. The Yale scholar Firuz Kazemzadeh has pointed to Russia’s abiding horror vacui, the fear that a hostile power might populate the empty steppe. Nor can one ignore the Russian ambition to secure an overland passage to India, for purposes of commerce and possible conquest—the abiding British
