interior Asia and Eastern Europe, the so-called Eurasian heartland, was the strategic center of the “World Island.” For more than a century, imperial Britannia had ruled the waves, but Mackinder, despite his imperialist views, warned of the decline of sea power in the twentieth century. As the heartland rose, Britain would become part of the subordinate “maritime lands.” Since the first millennium BCE, the landlocked steppes of Eurasia have provided the staging ground for horse-borne invasions. Shielded by the Arctic Ocean to the north and mountain ranges to the south, armies from the heartland could strike east to China, west to Europe, and southwest to the Middle East.7
Developing his theory after World War I and drawing on his experiences trying to unite White Russian forces in the civil war that followed the Bolshevik Revolution, Mackinder warned of the dangers of German or Russian domination, and foresaw the NATO alliance by calling on North America and Western Europe to offset the power of the Eurasian heartland. Although the “geographical pivot” theory is well known to academics and policy wonks, it has not percolated into popular understanding. Many Westerners are still lost in Stanland.
FIGURE 1.1 “New Yorkistan,” New Yorker cover, December 10, 2001, Maira Kalman and Rick Meyerowitz (Condé Nast collection)
So are some of the citizens of these republics, which, more than a quarter of a century after independence, are still struggling to establish national identities. The problem is that, despite recent nationalist revisionist historiography, the five republics, each named for an ethnic group, are new countries created by Soviet cartographers in the mid-1920s. Stalin’s policy of divide and rule, intended to suppress ethnic unrest and militant Islam, created a crazy-quilt pattern of borders between ethnically mixed Soviet Socialist Republics. These became de facto political borders in 1991.
Those who still yearn for the social and ideological certainties of the Soviet Union and curse Gorbachev for messing up their lives may never accept their “stan.” But for those born after independence the Soviet era is now just a heavily edited chapter in the school history textbook. The new generation that will dominate politics, business, and intellectual life has a stronger sense of national identity and history.
That means that the West needs to better understand the “stans.” I still have much to understand myself. Despite traveling and working in the region for many years, I can never expect to have the same understanding, particularly on cultural issues, as those who were born, brought up, and live in Central Asia. By the same token, I may be better prepared than they are to explain the “stans” to Westerners precisely because I am an outsider. What seems normal or unexceptional to people in Central Asia often strikes me as interesting and worth noting. It goes both ways. For twenty years, Stephanie and I lived in a nineteenth-century farmhouse in the rolling hills south of Athens, Ohio. Academic colleagues from Central Asia who visited were puzzled. “Is this your home or your dacha?” they asked. Most Central Asians live in apartments, and some have a modest dacha where they grow fruit and vegetables. But you don’t live at the dacha. Our visitors also wondered why we spent several hours a week mowing the grass. What seemed normal to us surprised them.
A Map Is Worth a Thousand Words
That cultural conundrum—how we look at other people and their cultures, and how they look at us—has always fascinated me. In elementary school in the mid-1950s, I innocently asked my teacher why so much of the map of the world was colored pink. The question surprised him. “It’s the British Empire, of course,” he said, stiffening his back (and maybe also his upper lip) as if he were going to salute and break into “God Save the Queen.” Instead, he told me I should be proud to be a subject of an empire on which the sun never set. I soon began to doubt his faith. The BBC was reporting trouble on the Malay peninsula, the Mau Mau insurrection in Kenya, civil war in Cyprus. Obviously, not everyone was proud to be a subject of the empire. The sun set more quickly on the Soviet than on the British empire, but for more than seventy years Soviet citizens were also told—by teachers, politicians, and the media—that they should be happy to live in a country free of the evils of Western capitalism.
On my first trip to Kyrgyzstan in 1995, I bought several Soviet-era maps, the heavy-duty glossy cloth-backed versions used in schools, at a bookstore in Bishkek. One is a historical map of the United States from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. Its most prominent features are red flags scattered across the northern United States. I didn’t know much Russian at the time, so could not read the scale, but I figured out the significance of the flags from the dates beside them. Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Louisville, St. Louis, Chicago, and other cities in 1877—the great railroad workers’ strike. Chicago in 1886—the Haymarket Affair. Near Pittsburgh in 1892—the Homestead steelworkers’ strike. Colorado in 1913—the miners’ strike and the Ludlow Massacre. And so on.
US history and geography were presented to Soviet schoolchildren as a series of bloody labor disputes, the proletariat rising against the oppressive mine and factory owners. An inset map depicts “Imperialist Aggression, late 19th to early 20th Centuries,” a cluster of black arrows in the Caribbean thrusting toward Mexico, Cuba, Guatemala, Panama, Puerto Rico, and Colombia, in the Pacific toward Hawaii, Western Samoa, Guam, and the Philippines.
The history of the United States told through red flags and black arrows. I imagined that the Cold War period was similarly depicted with black arrows targeting Cuba, Chile, Venezuela, and Nicaragua and red flags marking the racial conflicts of the civil rights era—Montgomery, Selma, Watts. No wonder many Soviet citizens feared and loathed the West, even as they bartered for Levis and listened to the Rolling Stones.
And then, almost abruptly in 1991, it was all over. The Soviet Union collapsed, and the republics of Central Asia were now numbered among the so-called Newly Independent States. It was a convenient, if misleading, label because they lacked both economic independence and political institutions. The ideology of Marxist-Leninism was replaced by a new civil religion whose creed included “democracy,” “the free market,” “structural reform,” and “civil society.” The old school maps came off the walls to be replaced by more positive cartography, courtesy of “democracy building” NGOs funded by the United States and other foreign governments.
Changing the name of a country, the maps, and school textbooks does not change culture, even with heavy doses of foreign aid, the privatization of property, and an army of foreign consultants with advice on elections, the rule of law, and capital markets. It takes many years for people who grew up, lived, and worked in a system to start looking at the world and themselves in new ways. In many respects, Kyrgyzstan in December 1995 still seemed stuck in a Soviet time warp, cut adrift from Moscow’s economic and social safety net yet not willing to embrace an uncertain future.
Although some people in Central Asia continue to cling to the past, it’s been clear for many years that change is the new norm. The Soviet Union, or anything like it, is not coming back, and the certainties that underpinned its society have disappeared. This book is about this process of change.
My relationship with Central Asia is a personal one. And, like any relationship, it’s complicated. There is much that I love and admire about the region and its peoples, and, at the same time, much that I find troubling. It’s that tension between the positive and negative that makes Central Asia worth writing about. My goal is to add the “stans” in all their complexity to the mental maps of readers. This has been my personal mission since December 1995. And it all began on the fabled Silk Road in the medieval city of Osh.
two
Sacred Mountain and Silly Borders
Deconstructing
