The Atlantic – Joshua Foust: In Central Asia, a Soviet Past Recedes as New Influences Fill In
Source: The Atlantic, 10/18/2011
ASP Fellow Joshua Foust is a featured author.
Excerpt:
“BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan — Kyrgyzstan is the low-hanging fruit of Central Asia. Its leaders are not eccentric buffoon-monsters, as Presidents Niyazov and Berdimuhamedov have been in Turkmenistan. It does not have any significant stores of oil like Kazakhstan (or natural gas like, again, Turkmenistan). It is not famous for torture, massacres in the street, or hosting ethnic boogey-terrorists like Uzbekistan. And it was not the sight of a horrifying civil war, like Tajikistan. No, Kyrgyzstan is just Kyrgyzstan — small, humble, sort of functional, but still maddeningly Central Asian.
What’s most striking about this place, even on the 30 kilometer drive from Manas airport to downtown Bishkek, the capital, is the sharp disparity between the relatively small enclave of well-off people in this city and the truly appalling poverty in the countryside. The famously beautiful Kyrgyz countryside is also desperately poor: no electricity, rundown shacks for houses, muddy ruts where there should be a road, and sometimes-extreme isolation. Bishkek, on the other hand, is leafy and dense; downtown is an endless parade of Mercedes Benzes, Lexuses, and Audis. The buildings are newer, mostly, despite a few Soviet-era monstrosities.
Bishkek is gearing up for the October 30 presidential election, the first since April 2010 protests ousted President Kurmanbek Bakiyev. The hotels are filling up with Europeans who’ve arrived to monitor the election. The streets are crowded in by gigantic billboards featuring a half dozen faces of presidential candidates, with their websites (and, occasionally, their twitter feeds) listed underneath…”
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