Soviet Узбекистан and Казахстан

a Soviet-era solar furnace outside Tashkent

Over lunch in Samarkand, we interrogated our guide, a Samarkand native, about Uzbek politics. Finally, he stopped, let out an uncomfortable laugh, and said, “there are a lot of ears around here.” I'm not publishing this essay until after I leave Kazakhstan, just to be safe. This should give you a hint about the political climates in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

They are certainly safe countries, especially for tourists, but I wouldn’t say they’re all that free. They haven’t shed their authoritarian pasts. Because sure, Central Asia has been at the crossroads of civilization for two thousand years, but to really understand modern Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, you also have to look into the eyes of the Soviets.

I promise this isn’t going to be a dry post filled with names of politicians and committees and political parties. I know that’s not very interesting—lots of the reading I’ve done about the Soviet Union has been unusually acronym-heavy and I can’t say it was riveting. Everything has “Democratic” or “Republic” or “People” in front of it. That’s always a bad sign.   

The Soviet Socialist Republic of Uzbekistan was created in 1924 when Stalin, at the time Lenin’s “Commissar for Nationalities” redrew political borders in Central Asia along what he decided were appropriate ethnic boundaries. The capital was moved from Samarkand to Tashkent. The Kazakh SSR was created according to modern borders in 1936, after a lot of reorganizing and ethnic reclassifications. I read something that said that the difference between the Kyrgyz people and the Kazakh people is basically in name only; the two peoples share the same nomadic past and language.

Ethnic minorities from other parts of the empire were shipped to Central Asia, including Germans, Greeks, Crimean Tartars, and Koreans. At one point, Kazakhs became an ethnic minority in their own republic.

I went to a very nice Korean coffee shop in Tashkent two days in a row.

The cities of Uzbekistan had always been important places of Islamic learning, but no more under the dear Russians, although they did refurbish lots of the big, beautiful mosques and madrasas (but that was mostly for tourist purposes). Karl Marx said that “religion is the opiate of the masses” and the Soviets wanted the people to be working, not high. So—crack down on Islam. This was framed at the beginning as modernization! Liberalization! Freedom for women!

a Soviet-era memorial to earthquake victims in Tashkent

Now, Kazakhstan hadn’t been an urban culture for very long; the Kazakhs were nomads who traveled across the steppe all year long in search for fresh pastures for their livestock. It was the Russians then the Soviets who established Kazakhstan’s biggest cities. Modern Almaty was only founded in 1854; before that it was a Russian fortress and before that a sort of trading post.

I’ll spare you the sad story of the slow, painful decline of the Soviet Union. All you need to know for our purposes is that shit hit the fan, and on August 31, 1991, the Soviet Socialist Republic of Uzbekistan snipped “Soviet Socialist” off of its name and declared independence from the USSR. Kazakhstan was the last republic to declare independence, on December 16, 1991, ten days before the USSR’s dissolution.  

Modern Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan are babies; barely older than me. They’re not like Estonia or Latvia, which existed as sovereign states before the Soviet Union and so had some idea of what to return to. Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan in these iterations—including these cities and these people—never existed before.

Democracy is difficult for nascent states, and there are lots of quotation marks involved in the governance of modern Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. “Elections” are “fair.” Corruption is “not real.” Constitutional “amendments” are introduced to allow for third, fourth, and fifth terms.

Islam Karimov, the first president of Uzbekistan, henceforth to be referred to in this essay as Uncle Karimov, did not want baby Uzbekistan to go the way of mujahidin-led Afghanistan or post-revolutionary Iran, so he all but outlawed the practice of Islam in the country. The hijab was illegal, children were not allowed into mosques, etc.

He succeeded in saving the country from becoming an Islamic republic, that’s for certain. All the Islamists—this is a direct quote from our Uzbekistani guide—“left and became terrorists.” But the problem is that Uncle Karimov was also a terrible, brutal person who presided over a regime that tortured and killed its own people (Google “Andijan Massacre”). He killed at least two people by boiling them alive.

Still, the state owns almost all media outlets, and Uzbekistan ranks number 148 out of 180 countries on the Global Press Freedom Index, just above Sudan.

Things have gotten a little better since Uncle Karimov died in 2016, but the new president appears to be settling in for a long winters’ nap, if you know what I mean.

Now, Kazakhstan was in a similar, but slightly nicer and less leaky boat. Nur-Sultan Nazarbayev, the first president of independent Kazakhstan, came up through the ranks of the Communist Party. He became president of the Republic of Kazakhstan after winning 98% of the vote. I never understand why leaders like this project such unrealistic numbers. If you’re going to rig the elections, okay, I can’t stop you, but at least pretend to make it look fair. Win by 68%. 74%. If you win by 98%, everyone’s rolling their eyes behind your back. Political science students in the U.S. laugh at you.

a movie theater in Almaty built to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Communist Revolution in Russia

Nazarbayev went on to give himself more and more power by amending the constitution through “referendums.”  He probably stole more than a billion dollars of Kazakhstan’s oil revenue for himself in Swiss bank accounts. Protests are illegal unless government sanctioned. On that very helpful Global Press Freedom Index, Kazakhstan ranks number 142.

But Nazarbayev’s name never appears on lists of modern dictators. You’ve probably never heard of him before now. I think this is because his foreign policy strategy consisted of making and keeping as many friends as possible—necessary because of Kazakhstan’s location in one of the world’s more unfriendly neighborhoods, sandwiched between Russia, China, and Iran. So, western politicians weren't going around talking about how terrible he was. Also, Kazakhstan’s economy isn’t doing too bad thanks to all of the country’s natural resources; there was plenty of oil wealth to keep Kazakhstan afloat in the post-Soviet slump and through the 2008 financial crisis.

Shockingly, Nazarbayev stepped down in March of 2019 after two years of protests. His successor is Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, who was elected with a more-believable 70% of the vote.

In January 2022 protests rocked Kazakhstan for about a week. You may have heard about them while they were happening—I remember reading about them. The reported trigger was a sharp increase in gas prices, but my new friend, a Kazakh girl about my age, told me she thought something else was going on.

“I go to protests a lot,” she told me. “And it’s usually some old people and some liberal kids like me. But this crowd was different. It was mostly men, and they were all around the same age.”

She said that the police refused to do anything to dispel the protestors, so Tokayev called in help from a Central Asian security coalition. On the third day of the protests, she said, these soldiers were given the shoot to kill order. The official death toll was 227, but she told me that in reality it was much higher.

What I’ve written here is based on conversations with a few locals, an hour or so of research, and some time pondering while walking. But I have seen enough to know that the authoritarian legacy of the Soviet Union runs deep, and to be very grateful that I was born an American. The U.S. is by no means perfect, but we do have freedom in ways that so many people don’t. An American passport gets you into 189 countries with very few questions asked. I can write anything I want on this blog about the American government…or any government. The U.S. government will not try to stop me from reading what I want, living where I want, thinking what I want. And I don’t take it for granted. Whatever you think of the American government—and don’t worry, I think a lot of the same things—you shouldn’t take it for granted either.