the mountain tribes became known as Kara-Kyrgyz (black Kyrgyz) to distinguish them from the steppe-dwelling Kazakhs, who were called simply Kyrgyz because “Kazakh” sounded too much like the name of another group, the Cossacks. Although the Russians seemed confused, the Kazakhs knew perfectly well who they were, and that they were not Kyrgyz. They were members of a tribe that was part of either the Great, Middle, or Little Horde, each of which had its own khan. In 1926, most of present-day Kyrgyzstan became the Kara-Kyrgyz Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) and a full Kyrgyz SSR in 1936. In the same year, the Kazakh SSR was formed. And so, through the miracle of Soviet ethnic engineering, the Kara-Kyrgyz were no longer black but true Kyrgyz, while the people who had been called Kyrgyz for over a century turned out to be Kazakhs after all.
While promoting new national loyalties, the Soviets realized that too much nationalism could be dangerous. In a parallel effort to solidify control, they shifted around ethnic groups to ensure that none was dominant in a specific area. Thousands of Central Asians were moved to other parts of the Soviet Union. Russian and Ukrainian farm workers and factory workers were settled in Central Asia, while Volga Germans, Chechens, Koreans, and other ethnicities were deported to the region. The policy of divide and rule, intended to suppress ethnic unrest and militant Islam, created artificial borders between ethnically mixed SSRs. The medieval cities of Samarkand and Bukhara, historically major centers of Tajik culture and with large ethnic Tajik populations, ended up in the Uzbek SSR. Osh was a classic case of ethnic gerrymandering. As the Central Asia scholar Madeleine Reeves points out, if the Soviets had drawn boundaries exclusively along national lines, the nomadic Kyrgyz would “end up with a Kyrgyz republic that had no cities of its own: a worrying prospect for a state preoccupied with thrusting ‘backward’ populations into Soviet modernity.”8 Their solution was to make Osh, with its predominantly Uzbek population of traders and arable farmers, the republic’s southern city.
Independence came suddenly to all Soviet republics. Unlike liberation struggles in Asia or Africa, there was no army emerging from the mountains or jungles to be cheered by flag-waving crowds, no government in exile, no heroes or martyrs to freedom. Citizens of each SSR suddenly found themselves citizens of an independent country. As the journalist Ahmed Rashid recalls, the five future Central Asian presidents who met at Ashkhabat in Turkmenistan on December 12, 1991, were reluctant to assume leadership of independent nations:
Four days earlier Boris Yeltsin, president of Russia, and the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus had signed a treaty dissolving the Soviet Union. The five republics were now suddenly independent but nobody had consulted the Central Asian leaders themselves. Angry, frustrated, fearful, feeling abandoned by their “mother Russia,” and terrified about the consequences, the leaders sat up all night to discuss their future. It was strange to see the heirs of conquerors of the world—Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, and Babur—so cowered. They were tied to Moscow in thousands of ways, from electricity grids to road, rail, and telephone networks. Central Asia had become a vast colony producing raw materials—cotton, wheat, metals, oil, and gas—for the Soviet industrial machine based in western Russia. They feared an economic and social collapse as Yeltsin cast them out of the empire. That night a deputy Turkmen foreign minister told me, “We are not celebrating—we are mourning our independence.”9
The next day, the leaders agreed to join Russia and other former SSRs in the newly formed Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). That was pretty much the last time they agreed on anything. Despite periodic summits and high-minded talk of regional integration, more issues divide than unite the Central Asian republics. They’ve disagreed over borders, trade and tariffs, water, gas and oil resources, environmental issues, religion, terrorism, and drug traffickers.
Achieving independence is one thing; creating national identity is another. At independence, ethnic Kazakhs were a minority (albeit the largest one) in Kazakhstan, making up about 41 percent of the population. At the same time, almost one quarter of Tajikistan’s population was ethnically Uzbek. With the possible exception of Turkmenistan, all republics have a rich, but potentially volatile, ethnic mix. The region, noted the New York Times, looked like “a medieval map” where power is defined by ethnicities and clans, not by borders. Former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski famously referred to Central Asia as “the Eurasian Balkans.”
The balkanization is illustrated by the Fergana Valley. Although most of the valley is in Uzbekistan, the northern panhandle of Tajikistan (Sughd province, with a population of over two million) juts into the valley, physically, economically, and culturally separated from the rest of the country by the Pamir Alay. Uzbekistan literally bisects southern Kyrgyzstan, the frontier zigzagging in and out of the foothills of the Fergana and the Pamir Alay; most of the route from Osh to Djalalabad, Kyrgyzstan’s third largest city, lies in Uzbekistan. The frontier cuts through the middle of villages and the market town of Kara Soo near Osh. Uzbekistan has five territorial enclaves within Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan one in Kyrgyzstan and one in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan one in Uzbekistan. When tensions between Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan run high (as they often are over water, gas, electricity, and politics) frontier guards sometimes shift their posts a few yards up the road, symbolically extending national territory. In January 2000, Uzbekistan unilaterally seized a thirty-eight-mile stretch of Kyrgyzstan; it also laid mines along its borders with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, ostensibly to keep out Islamic extremists. The Economist described Uzbekistan’s Islam Karimov as “the regional bully” and noted that “good neighbourliness is in short supply in Central Asia.”10
Cursing the Future
A man waits in line outside a food shop in Moscow. Finally, he’s had enough and tells his friend: “That’s it. I’m going over to the Kremlin to kill that Gorbachev.” Two hours later he comes back. “Well,” says the friend, “did you do it?” “No,” he replies, “there was an even longer line over there.”
Through the 1990s, in cities, towns, and villages throughout the former Soviet Union, industrial workers gathered in bars, restaurants, chaikhanas, and bazaars to “curse the future.” I credit the phrase to my friend Asqat Yerkimbay, describing growing up in the central Kazakhstan mining town of Zhezdy. But I had heard a similar story from many other people.
For seventh-five years, industrial workers were folk heroes, lauded in speeches, newspapers, books, movies, and wall posters for their efforts to make the Soviet Union a world power. Although agricultural production was vital, Soviet industry seemed more glamorous, and definitely more photogenic. Newsreels and propaganda films recorded the whirring machines of the factory assembly line, the intense heat of the steel furnace, the jagged face of the coal seam, the electricity pylons stretching into the distance. Each product coming off the line, each steel ingot, ton of coal, or megawatt of electricity represented the growing strength of the USSR, the fulfillment of the great socialist dream. And the dream makers were Lenin’s proletariat—the engineers, coal miners, steelworkers, engine drivers. Industrial jobs paid better than most professions, and often came with perks such as apartments and vacations to summer resorts in the Kyrgyz SSR. They also helped reinforce the status of women in society. The Soviet Union never needed a Roza the Riveter because women were always in the industrial workforce.
And then it all ended. Despite Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika (literally restructuring or rebuilding), most citizens had no idea of what was coming or how it would change their lives forever. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the central planning system that had supported the economy collapsed too. In every sector, production had been determined by targets and quotas, which usually had little or no relationship to demand. Factories, mines, and collective farms had to meet targets, even if what they produced was not needed and piled up in rail cars or rotted in warehouses. Managers were rewarded for exceeding targets, fired or demoted for falling short—a system that provided ample incentive for cooking the books on cotton or steel production.
In the factories of Central Asia, workers continued to show up, but the targets and subsidies from Moscow had ended, and there were few new customers. Some factories tried to adapt to the
