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 items were purchased on so-called shopping trips to Moscow, Krasnoyarsk in Siberia, Urumchi in Western China, Istanbul, or Bangkok. Here the supply thread became tangled, and often broken; whether or not a particular item was available depended on whether someone had made a recent shopping trip.
This section of the bazaar was also the service area with barbers, money exchangers, shoe and watch (and today mobile phone) repair shops, food stalls and fortune-tellers squatting at small tables with tarot cards and magical stones. It was where the official and informal economies met with itinerant vendors selling plastic shopping bags, cigarettes, sunglasses, fake Rolexes, and pens. You didn’t want to inquire too closely about their supply chain.
In the open areas outside the bazaar proper, trucks and vans were parked, their owners selling goods directly from the tailgate. One day, you could find truckloads of potatoes, onions, or cabbages; on another, cases of beer, wine, or vodka. The inventory was unpredictable, depending on what had been shipped. This was the supply thread at its simplest and weakest.
On the fringes of the bazaar and in the streets leading to it, people squatted on the sidewalks, selling home-canned goods and fruits and vegetables grown at their dachas. Saddest of all were the families or babushkas with their household belongings spread out on blankets. They were literally selling what they owned—clothes, pots, pans, kitchen utensils, personal memorabilia—to survive. This was the supply thread at its most desperate.
FIGURE 3.1 Uzbek bread stand in Osh
FIGURE 3.2 Kyrgyz komuz player at Osh bazaar, Bishkek
FIGURE 3.3 Consumer electronics aisle at Osh bazaar, Bishkek
FIGURE
