Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the newly independent republics of Central Asia have been undergoing wrenching changes fundamentally affecting the lives of their citizens. Describing in detail the many failures of this transition that have derailed the Central Asians' initial expectations of a bright and prosperous future under capitalist democracy, Sievers offers his assessment of what went wrong.

Eric W. Sievers is an Associate at Harvard University’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. He received a J.D. from Yale Law School and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sievers authored The Post-Soviet Decline of Central Asia (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003) and spent almost half of the last decade living and working in Central Asia.

In eulogizing Marxism recently, The Economist concluded that intellectuals in the West will sustain the theory, but that peoples in the East who experienced Marxist-inspired governments will resist a resurgence of Marxism in practice.¹  This wishful conclusion is as ungrounded in the turbulent realities of the globe as was “the end of history.” While it is certainly true that there are naïve Western intellectuals blinded by ideological commitments, the affliction is no less common in the offices of some London pundits. Indeed, although The Economist’s editors may describe parts of the post-communist world in Europe well, their arguments find less support in modern Central Asia (the post Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan). There, ideological commitments are still very much up for grabs.

Opinion polls in Russia consistently show that a majority regrets the disassembly of the Soviet Union,² and similar polls in Central Asia produce consonant results.³  In conversing with these disenchanted individuals over the past decade, it has become increasingly clear to me that their regret is founded negligibly on ideological considerations and overwhelmingly on direct knowledge that post-communism has wreaked havoc with their standards of living and the personal security of their families.4  It takes little prodding to get Central Asians to acknowledge the failures of communism, and scant more effort to elicit assertions that they are worse-off after communism.

Had post-communism only been difficult, anti-communism would be the norm in Eurasia, but post-communism has been nothing short of a human disaster. It will, unfortunately, take years for the West to understand that this point is not ideological. Westerners, and in particular influential publications like The Economist, are still more driven by past ideological struggles and more invested in the rhetoric of the Cold War than are the people of Central Asia.5 

Since the Central Asian states are a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union, in Western minds Central Asia’s troubles and politics were considered in the 1990s only as an afterthought to transitions occurring west of the region. While Kazakhstan is the second largest state in the world ever to denounce communism (and the planet’s ninth largest state by area), it looks tiny when, as is always the case, it is pictured beside Russia.

Similarly, although Kazakhstan is the only de-nuclearized state in Asia (giving up its nuclear weapons several years before the India/Pakistan arms race exploded), its good faith effort to further global security has been overlooked in the wake of Russia’s continuing status as a nuclear power. Whereas Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan are all top-ten oil or gas states in terms of reserves or production, their hydrocarbon sector is usually lumped together with Russia’s. Despite the fact that Tajikistan suffered a devastating civil war, Chechnya claimed much more media attention. Although Turkmenistan’s Saparmurat Niyazov is possibly the world’s most insane dictator, post-Soviet political watchers have had little energy left after following Russian events to even notice his excesses. Finally, while Central Asia was in 1992 arguably the world’s most secular and highly educated Islamic region, it was rarely described as such. Indeed, the “-stans” were the tail end, intellectually, of Western thinking about post-communism and, empirically, of Western compassion for the post-communist world. To wit, although Eastern Europe and Russia brimmed with many private US charitable grant-making foundations, such was US society’s response to this poorest, least Christian, and least white area of post-communism that not a single foundation established an office in any state of Central Asia.6 

That, however, was the legacy of the 1990s. Since September 11, Central Asia has been reinvented in the West’s consciousness as part of the Islamic world. In particular, it is seen as part of a troubled Islamic world centered on Afghanistan. George Bush asserts that the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan is an extension of al-Qaeda. Tajik and Uzbek factions are part of the internal political landscape of Afghanistan. US military bases have opened in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. Accordingly, it is both tempting and easy today to assign blame for Central Asia’s problems to an amorphous malaise linking places as disparate as Ramallah in Palestine to Urumchi in Western China.

Truth be told, both before and immediately after the disassembly of the Soviet Union, several scholars and pundits warned that Central Asia, on attaining independence, could develop into a new locus of Islamic fundamentalism. However, this theory failed to marshal much of a following. It failed not merely because other scholars and policymakers were too busy viewing Central Asia as post-communist. Rather, it failed because Central Asia ten years ago did not have the ties to terrorist groups nor popular inclinations towards political Islam that are so evident today. These ties and inclinations were not inevitable, but rather are the result of the trends briefed in the next section. The point here is that, although the region may not have been well-understood in years past through the lens of post-communism, the region will be equivalently misunderstood by simply tacking it on to the tail end of the Islamic world.

It is so easy to tack the region on to other troubled regions because, at first glance, Central Asia is unremarkable. It appears to be one more place that should have flowered but for the social, economic, environmental, health, and political ills endemic to the developing world.

However unremarkable Central Asia’s ills may be from a static perspective, they are remarkable in terms of history. Many of them are very recent arrivals in (or returnees to) the region. Indeed, what is remarkable is how quickly this former territory of the Soviet Union has gone from being largely incomparable to the Third World to being an increasingly indistinguishable part of the Third World. Accordingly, a better understanding of Central Asia requires an appreciation of how Central Asia, over the course of only one decade, so decidedly moved out of the realm of Soviet exceptionalism to regress to the mean of the developing world.

1992 Outlier Region

The Central Asian states entered independence much in the same way that a sheltered talented rural youth in search of a better future would enter a big city – certain that his future lay in this new city, with ample enough talent to succeed, healthily wary but naïve, and very susceptible to new influences, positive and pejorative. When I first took up residence in Central Asia during the waning days of the USSR, the region had a charm and feeling of excitement now long lost.

A dozen years ago, median levels of educational attainment in Central Asia exceeded those of Southern Europe, and standards of living put the region far ahead of most areas of the developing world. Half of Central Asia’s youth graduated from university-level institutions, and the bulk of these majored in the technical and natural sciences, giving Central Asia a much higher per-capita ratio of scientists and engineers than Europe. There were nearly as many Ph.Ds in the sciences per capita in Tajikistan as in the United States, even despite the fact that immigration accounts for inflated numbers of US scientists.7 While the shortcomings of the Soviet educational system cast a cloud on these figures, Soviet primary and secondary schools were excellent. Indeed, rates of functional literacy in Central Asia put the region ahead of the United States. Moreover, the curriculum in the natural and technical sciences in university-level institutions was also very solid.8 

Since much of the Soviet economy was not monetized, it is both impossible in practice and misleading in principle to look at average incomes in the region as indicators of standard of living. Almost all Central Asians enjoyed good general access to free higher education, very good (by developing world standards) health care, and decent housing. I would argue that the average annual per-capita income in Central Asia in 1991 was equivalent to $3,000, but there were more important indicators of general welfare that even this relatively high number hides. By the mid-1980s, diseases such as malaria, polio, and tuberculosis had been largely eradicated, average lifespans were nearing 70 years, and the ambitious social safety net of the Soviet Union left very few people without subsistence levels of housing, food, and medical care. However maligned the Soviet system was for inhumanity, the former Soviet government mobilized immense resources to prevent starvation and to provide rural populations with social services; indeed Soviet developmental and social policies penetrated very deeply and remarkably uniformly into society. Rural schools and health care facilities may not have been on par with those in larger cities, but the gap was, looking at other areas of the world, the West included, small.

The Soviet system also managed to produce low (although not as low as many in the West believed) crime rates. Most people also enjoyed state-paid vacations that included annual trips to resorts outside of their home republic. Indeed, even though Central Asia was especially hard hit by pre-World War II Soviet policies of collectivization, political purges, and other forms of terror, the last decades of the USSR ushered in a lifestyle that, for the overwhelming majority of Central Asians, was comfortable, secure, and far more dynamic than that imagined in the West.

It was dynamic because of the existence of substantial social mobility (good students could expect generous latitude in choosing to pursue highly paid or prestigious professions in the sciences) and a wide range of leisure and intellectual possibilities. Children interested in mountaineering, flying, or sports were supported in these and similar endeavors by generous state-sponsored programs, including summer camps and after-school activities.

On the other hand, while most families owned refrigerators and many owned cars, small summer houses (usually one or two room huts) and televisions (half of Kyrgyzstan households owned a television), Central Asians on average did not own many luxury goods. Late Soviet life may have been comfortable, but it was far from lavish, although ownership rates of consumer goods in Central Asia (especially Uzbekistan) were higher than in Russia.

Here, the counterpoint with pre-Soviet Central Asia is important. At the beginning of the 20th century, Central Asians lived an average of only 40 years, perhaps only 5% were literate, and the local sovereigns of the region had failed to produce any government success stories in centuries. Even though Central Asia was once a center of world trade and culture, it declined into one of the true backwaters of the world after the advent of the global sea trade.

Accordingly, with the counterfactuals of China, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran on Central Asia’s doorstep, Central Asia was an Asian and Islamic developmental success story by the time that Gorbachev assumed power. To wit, thousands of advisors from the Central Asian states traveled the world to provide technical assistance to recipients of Soviet developmental aid. Nursultan Nazarbaev in 1982 noted that each year Kazakhstan sent “hundreds of specialists” to provide “scientific and technical assistance to peoples in countries of Asia and Africa, Europe and Latin America.”9 

The comparative successes of the Soviet Union notwithstanding, there was a general mood in the region by the end of the Soviet Union that a reunion with the rest of the world, either through a renewed Union or otherwise, would work in Central Asia’s favor and yield substantial rewards. Accordingly, as the USSR disassembled, most people in Central Asia assumed that the ensuing decade would see an appreciable accrual of wealth to the region thanks to its abundant natural resources and human capital endowments.

2002 Third World

These expectations of wealth have been largely frustrated. Moreover, it is now clear that, with the possible exception of Kazakhstan, Central Asia was not suffering in the 1990s only from the temporary economic downturn common to all post-socialist states. Central Asians today are substantially worse off than a decade ago, and prospects for reversal of their slide towards poverty and ill health are not good. However, this deterioration of Central Asia is not universal. For example, Almaty, Kazakhstan, is a booming city, and a phone call that would have been improbable a decade ago in rural Uzbekistan is now simple to make. The contradictions implicit in Central Asia’s first decade of independence bear examination.10 

Global Language and Modern Education

A decade ago, it was rare to find fluent English-speakers in Central Asia. Even professional interpreters often had very limited facility in English given the region’s isolation from the rest of the world and the lack of any kind of interaction with native speakers of English. For Westerners visiting the region, the lack of quality interpretation and interlocutors in English unfortunately gave the false impression that the region lacked education and sophistication across the board. Today, however, due both to a local fascination with English and to substantial numbers of Central Asians who have studied abroad (usually thanks to US and European aid), it is now easy to find fluent English speakers. Accordingly, Central Asia’s younger generations differ little from their peers in other developing countries in evidencing commendable facility in English. To the extent that global culture is tied to English, an emerging generation in Central Asia is now better-equipped to participate in the modern world.

On the other hand, while a young Central Asian is now likely to know more English than her parents, she is less likely to be well-read in her native language. Worse, numbers of functionally illiterate youth are now skyrocketing, for a number of reasons that also evidence Central Asia’s regression to developing country norms. In Turkmenistan, the educational system has been truncated, with formal schooling now only lasting nine years. Across the region, the best schoolteachers have left their jobs, both because of below subsistence compensation and because, as among the better-educated of their compatriots, they were likely to emigrate.11 Rural schools are increasingly likely to offer dismal education, and young people are more apt to abandon school at an early age in order to put bread on the table.

Poverty

That putting bread on the table became an uncertain proposition in the 1990s was an unprecedented situation for most Central Asians younger than 40. Even less prone to deficits of basic foodstuffs than their compatriots in Russia under the Soviet Union, Central Asians for decades had enjoyed little risk of being left without subsistence levels of food, no matter what their personal economic situation. A bland but adequate basic diet of bread, milk, potatoes and other staples could be had for about 15 rubles per person per month, and even the worst jobs paid at least 50 rubles,12  not to mention fallback welfare programs of various sorts.

However, by the late 1990s, average family incomes across Central Asia had fallen to under $100 per month. In many areas, state salaries were as little as $5 per month, and were often not paid for months at a time. Compounding this situation, real unemployment skyrocketed, and the social safety net all but disappeared.

Of course, a small portion of the population thrived due to well-targeted (or well-connected) business ventures, but, for the average Central Asian, real income fell by roughly 10% per year over the 1990s. In several states, humanitarian aid from abroad managed to provide some relief. While such aid helped stabilize local economies, it reminded Central Asians on a daily basis that the door that had opened for them to the wider world was not the one they had expected.

Despite the obvious fact that endemic corruption was at the heart of the region’s failed transition, the West leveled scant criticism at the post-Soviet governments of the region. Rather, Western (primarily US) interests in the region were, especially in the first years of independence, to ensure that Russia’s influence not be re-exerted, that the region’s hydrocarbon development be increasingly pursued for the benefit of the West, and, especially in recent years, that Central Asia facilitate Western agendas of restricting the spread of weapons of mass destruction (considering Central Asia’s stock of Soviet-era weapons and weapons scientists), narcotics corridors (given  that Central Asia is an important conduit for Afghanistan’s Europe-bound drugs), and Islamic fundamentalism. In exchange for assurances on these points, the United States in particular continued to support the region’s regimes and turn a blind eye toward increasingly blatant violations of elections, religious freedoms, and constitutions.

For their part, the Central Asian states steadily sought to undermine each other, all while closely watching each other’s governments for insights on just how far they could go without risking loss of Western support. Probably fueled by early US emphasis on the risk of Islamic fundamentalism, each state began to stress to internal constituents the need for increasingly brutal measures to thwart Islamic fundamentalists. While these justifications preceded palpable signs of fundamentalism in the region and were only sometimes directed at their ostensible targets, a number of anti-state religious movements had become part of the landscape in southern Central Asia by the close of the decade. Not advocating violence for the most part, these religious movements starkly contrast with the moribund state-sponsored Islamic institutions and the widely publicized pilgrimages to Mecca by the region’s presidents.

In each state, the president aspired not just to fill an office, but to cast himself as a neo-Ataturk for his people. Turkmenbashi (as President Saparmurat Niyazov prefers to be called) continues to provide salt to the entire population free of charge, President Islam Karimov’s prescient sayings adorn Uzbekistan’s public places, and portraits of Oli Somon (the legendary “founder” of the Tajik State) look suspiciously like President Emomali Rakhmonov with a beard. However, legends are not made in a day, and so tenure in office is a pressing priority for these neo-Ataturks. After civil war effected a turnover of power in Tajikistan in 1993, governments pursued and perfected mechanisms over the rest of the decade to eliminate risks to the presidents’ tenure in office. Where political opposition existed, outright persecution of opponents (increasingly by attempting to tie them to Islamic fundamentalists), co-option of interests, and fixing of elections were pursued. Where term limits loomed, constitutions were replaced, with the effect that a decades-long office holder could suddenly be serving a first term.

Supporting these endeavors in each state, a vibrant spoils system arose (or, more aptly, expanded). Whereas in the United States context, a spoils system awards offices to party loyalists and therefore facilitates turnovers in power, the Central Asian spoils system operates to keep a small group in power and therefore works against fluidity of power. The Central Asian spoils system also distributes political and economic influence so as to limit the risk that elites will attempt to arrogate political power either by force or by elections. Most participants in the spoils system stand to lose much by an opening of the political or economic system of their country, and so they, despite internecine disagreements, have a vested interest in continuing the spoils system itself. Accordingly, the head of state in each country sits atop and endeavors to ensure the stability of a system whereby an essentially static group of families controls key ministries, hydrocarbon revenues, and other sources of political and economic wealth. While the spoils system means that the president in each Central Asian state is probably not as free to maneuver as would be a true autocrat, it also points to the fact that true reform in Central Asia will require much more than simply getting the sitting president out of office.

Although threats to the spoils system occasionally arose from within its own ranks, at times presenting significant threat of effecting regime change, the system has remained in place to this day. To their credit, various human rights campaigners, environmental activists, and investigative journalists have also challenged the increasingly entrenched culture of corruption. From a historical perspective, these challenges were less potent than could have been hoped; during the Perestroika period the region boasted an impressive collection of independent groups that managed to get their candidates elected to local and national offices during the comparatively free elections of 1989-1993. These groups included upstart newspapers, rule of law-oriented grassroots organizations, organizations critiquing Soviet repression, and movements for social, religious, and ethnic freedoms.

While the USSR’s policies of establishing nature reserves and requiring some pollution abatement controls on industry found ample application in Central Asia, an overriding concern with expanding industrial agriculture and heavy industry in the region led to serious pollution of the region’s air, water, and soil by the time of independence.

Accordingly, environmental improvements were a major and very popular promise of independence. Over the course of the decade, the Central Asian states acceded to most global environmental conventions and actively encouraged development agencies to provide environmental aid. However, in the end, the post-Soviet environmental experience in Central Asia has been a failure.

While there has been a notable decrease in pollution from industry and agricultural chemicals in the post-independence period, this decrease has little to do with reform. Economic collapse, not a change in policies, has shuttered factories and limited acquisition of fertilizers and pesticides. Where the West and UN agencies have been willing to foot the bill and hurdles have been low, some progress has been achieved; for example, Central Asia’s production and use of ozone depleting substances (ODS) has plummeted. However, despite these subsidies, Turkmenistan is arguably the worst medium-size ODS state in the world in terms of compliance with its international legal obligations. Likewise, while the Central Asian states have cut their emissions of greenhouse gases by almost half over their 1990 baselines, they view these reductions as, in the aggregate, a problem. By and large, they hope either to recover to 1990 baselines or to be paid by the West to forego such emissions.13 

Moreover, the past decade has been an unqualified disaster in terms of biodiversity and desertification, despite the fact that all of the Central Asian states are parties to the Biodiversity Convention and the Convention to Combat Desertification. Nature reserves, where they still exist, have been sites of rampant poaching and resource extraction. Species have been extirpated, and deserts have continued to spread, due in large part to Central Asia’s refusal to implement meaningful reforms in agriculture.

Ironically, where the region has suffered most directly from serious environmental catastrophes, reform is least evident. The Central Asian states entered independence vocal about their suffering at the hands of Soviet developers, most notably in the case of the desiccation of the Aral Sea.14 Expecting the developed world to commit billions of dollars to engineer a high-tech fix to problems (either through the expensive infrastructure of drip irrigation or through massive water re-allocation schemes involving sources of water outside the region), when actual amounts of aid amounted to only a few million dollars, the Central Asian states opted to forego meaningful changes. Instead of introducing structural reforms to curtail wasteful uses of water, shifting from cotton to wheat, or employing far-sighted regional planning based on international water law,15  the Central Asian states engaged in aggressive zero-sum competition with their neighbors and fell back on Soviet modes of using natural resources, albeit without even Soviet norms of self-restraint or good-faith regional cooperation.

It is thus illustrative that rampant poaching within the spoils system of caviar has led to a crash in the sturgeon population of the Caspian Sea, depriving the governments of the region of a billion dollar annual export trade. Likewise, the situation in the Aral Sea region has further deteriorated, making the only rational solution in the adjacent region a permanent evacuation of local populations.

Not surprisingly, the Central Asian states continue to advance unrealistic Stalinist-era fixes – “projects of the century” advertised as laying the basis for great leaps forward, but supported by the spoils system for opportunities they provide to divert state funds into private pockets. Turkmenistan is nearing completion of a massive artificial lake first proposed in Soviet times, larger than the Great Salt Lake, using waters that formerly flowed into the Aral Sea, despite the fact that independent assessments agree that the project will both fail to produce environmental or agricultural improvements and will demand billions from the state’s coffers.16   In turn, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan continue to push for a diversion of Russia’s Ob River to Central Asia, a project abandoned by the USSR in 1986, although no cost-benefit analysis and no outside source of funding supports the plan.17 

Because these environmental mishaps coincide with a sustained lack of attention to even Soviet levels of environmental management, local populations are increasingly disadvantaged. While the countries boast immense bodies of water (four of the twenty largest inland bodies of water in the world) and, within their immense mountains, some of the planet’s largest glaciers, fewer and fewer people have access to potable water, and sanitation-related diseases thought eradicated during the Soviet era are now returning in force.

The treatment of disease highlights a general ambivalence in post-Soviet development. Whereas during the Soviet period, a family might have had trouble finding a phone to call for emergency medical assistance or transportation to a hospital, the next stage of medical treatment was better; Soviet Central Asia had very large numbers of doctors, many of whom were highly skilled. If prescription medicine was needed, it was affordable if available.

Today, especially in large cities, phone systems are far superior to those of the past (and in much of the region, decent dial-up Internet and excellent cellular coverage is available), and some of the roads and many of the private taxi services are very good. However, hospitals are in dismal condition, both in terms of physical infrastructure and medical staff. As with their peers in other highly-educated professions, doctors have emigrated in higher numbers than average. While Jewish doctors commanded much local respect, as the bulk of the Jewish (and German) population has emigrated, the demographic composition of the medical profession has also shifted. Moreover, although private pharmacies abound, expense keeps many medicines out of reach. Illustrating how synergies between declines in health care, infrastructure, and science impact Central Asians, as this article was nearing completion, all 88 schools in Kyrgyzstan’s capital were closed for ten days due to the health sector’s inability to handle an outbreak of the flu.18 

Another paradox of post-Soviet development is that Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan contain some of the most significant hydrocarbon deposits on the planet, but the residents of these countries often find themselves without heat or electricity. The same is true of their compatriots living in hydropower rich Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. All the aforementioned contrasts in post-Soviet development are especially visible in a widening gap between major cities and rural areas. In an extraordinary number of cases, rural hospitals, courts, and schools operate with the same (now obsolete) supplies, furniture, and textbooks as a decade ago.

Accordingly, Soviet pathways of social mobility for rural youth have eroded. While most Soviet children traveled somewhere within the Union on the state’s dime and almost none traveled to the West, now children of the wealthy travel to Turkish resorts and London schools, while their rural compatriots may spend decades without traveling further than a few miles from home. Compounding this trend, rural youth are increasingly less able to secure places in universities.

Even if they can get to a university, today’s youth face an ironic flip in opportunity. During the Soviet period, universities offered curricula and resources in the technical and natural sciences that were laudable for their quality and rigor. In contrast, graduates in literature, economics, history, journalism, and political science spent five years in moribund curricula mediocre in terms of creativity, writing skills, and analytical thinking.

Today, however, thanks in large part to foreign aid, the prestige disciplines are no longer physics, math, and chemistry, but economics, law, and business administration. The new textbooks, career opportunities, and foreign trained (usually through foreign aid programs) teachers in these disciplines contrast sadly with the Soviet textbooks and dispirited professors (many of their colleagues having emigrated or left teaching) of the natural science faculties, which have received almost no support, financial or moral, from aid programs.

Whereas Central Asia entered independence with an impressive endowment of capable nuclear physicists, molecular biologists, and organic chemists, these professional communities began to disintegrate in the early 1990s. In such fast-moving disciplines, a period of stagnation of only a few years was enough to shunt even the best scientists into obsolescence. Accordingly, while Turkmenistan’s 1998 shuttering of its Academy of Sciences elicited mild international censure, the abolition of the institution was merely a coup-de-grace. The more important assault on science occurred across the entire region as funding for research, education, and infrastructure dissipated. For example, budgets for fundamental research are now far less than 10% of Soviet levels; Kazakhstan’s 1997 research budget of $1 million  works out to around $100 per Ph.D.19

In the same year, the international community ably elegized the death of Central Asian potential; Kazakhstan’s Yesen Bekturov won the Niels Bohr Prize, for work done in the Soviet period. While thousands of the region’s best scientists have found new homes in Russian and US institutions, or as business leaders at home, it is now unlikely that any scientist working in Central Asia (with the exception of some field biologists) will garner international recognition for several more decades.

Thus, even if 1992’s optimists were naive regarding the pitfalls of economic development amid wrenching structural change, they were not wrong in identifying unusual potential in the region at independence. This potential is today largely lost, which places the region at a more serious disadvantage developmentally than a decade ago. Moreover, it is in the details of this loss of potential that Central Asia’s current dilemmas are best viewed, rather than in simplistically assigning Central Asia to inevitable failure due to local culture or a malaise of the Islamic world.

Indeed, Central Asian culture has only recently evinced overt hostility to American and Western cultures. At the dawn of independence, it is true, a good amount of party-line anti-imperialism existed in the region, but it was far from vocal. For someone familiar with the region’s mood in the early 1990s, it is painfully obvious that if the past ten years had not been such a failure, if Central Asia had managed to maintain its human welfare and human capital edge over the rest of the developing world, there would be a healthy critique of the American lifestyle, but no considerable support for anti-Western movements.

Four Sources of Central Asia’s New Directions

The past decade has dashed many hopes in Central Asia and led astray many hopeful starts; there is no single cause for Central Asia’s failures. Moreover, there is no guarantee that if the counterfactual situation of the Soviet Union remaining intact had prevailed, things would not be even worse.

So, instead of asking where to assign blame for failures, I want instead to highlight the four primary factors that, in my opinion, have shaped regional trends of the past decade. These are Soviet apostasy, the economic dislocations of Soviet collapse, the relationship of the region to the West, and unaccountable governments.

Soviet Apostasy and Economic Dislocations

Soviet apostasy refers to the fundamental change in worldview, values, and assumptions that resulted from the collapse of the Soviet Union or, more accurately, from the realization that the Soviet Union had disassembled and that no renewed union based on communism or Soviet development paradigms would emerge. I refer to “apostasy” because this sea change in worldview, values, and assumptions has not been a simple or uniform movement towards a new ideology (e.g. an “end of history” embrace of the West) as much as it has been a ripple effect of the Soviet collapse involving more than political ideology. Not really a progression towards a distinct new ideology, Soviet apostasy has been a hodgepodge of results issuing from the de-legitimation of Soviet modalities, with roots not all in political ideology.

Thus, Soviet apostasy has not been, nor could have been, as simple as a rejection of historical materialism and state planning in favor of some (nonexistent) universal Western worldview and free markets.20 It must be understood that, while historical materialism was one pillar of Soviet ideology, the other was dialectical materialism, the Marxist theory of the natural world, as opposed to historical materialism’s concern with the human world. While historical materialism is largely rejected by Western social scientists, dialectical materialism is very congruent with the basic beliefs of most Western scientists.21 

Simply put, the “Soviet” worldview’s understanding of science and technology in the 1980s (as well as the link between economic growth and science) was not discordant with Western views. While the USSR recognized the need for technological innovation, however, the Soviet system was not capable of providing the needed economic incentives for innovation, although it certainly possessed both the intellectual resources and educational systems needed for innovation. To wit, the prestige academic disciplines in the USSR were in the natural sciences, and scientists and engineers occupied most leading positions in government.  For example, Askar Akaev, a physicist, was president of the Kyrgyz Academy of Sciences before becoming head of state. Appreciating this role of science in the Soviet order is crucial, because Soviet apostasy contains strong elements of anti-modernism, especially where science has been concerned.

Scientific secularism was a component of Soviet ideology that has fared poorly in the Soviet apostasy. It would be too simplistic to note merely that official Soviet frustrations of religious faith led to religious freedom being a cornerstone of the struggle against communism. Just as the late Soviet (and early independence) period saw greatly increased Russian Orthodox Church attendance and grassroots mosque construction in Central Asia, it also saw (in common with the rest of the Soviet Union) a tremendous new interest in mysticism, UFOs, the martial arts, and astrology, including among a large number of leading scientists. Both the Quran and Daniil Andreev’s Roza Mira, a mystical cosmological Russian work, were runaway bestsellers in the late Soviet period.

While classical definitions of modernism would identify these new magnets for attention as anti-modern, because capitalism demands nothing in the way of a uniform view of the human experience or physical causality, general manifestations of anti-modernism attracted little attention and no concern in the West, save for the increasing force of grassroots Islamic interest. The West wanted to see free markets in Central Asia, and these markets were (and continue to be) the sine qua non of progress and Westernization, be they for oil, cars, mystical literature, useless products, Christian icons, high-technology, or charitable donations, but not if they facilitate Islamic faith.

To be more specific, the West hoped for markets combined with liberal (meaning, in the conceptions of US development planners, imbued with civil society and rule of law) democracy (meaning free elections). This aspiration was ambivalent towards science, although the West has been inconsistent in its views on movements away from scientific secularism. While the Soviet Union was relatively consistent in its take on both Christianity and Islam, the West has singled out Islam as problematic. Christianity was an unquestioned good for many Western planners, and at least not a major concern for many others. Yet, Islam is no more “anti-modern” than Christianity (as America’s own fundamentalist Christian groups amply demonstrate), and traditional Central Asian Islam, a point I cannot stress strongly enough, offers up little to suggest that it is not amenable to free enterprise, democracy, human dignity, and rule of law. Moreover, a millennium ago, Central Asia was the source of the best scientists in the world, the cream of the Baghdad Academy.

Further, since support for science both as education and for research was almost entirely a state enterprise in the early 1990s, it fell on the wrong side of the fence politically. The Western rhetoric was that free enterprise was desirable and state enterprise pernicious. So, as no free enterprise support for science (or new textbooks, or new medical equipment, or biotech R&D) existed in the region, science withered quickly, notwithstanding the curious fact that half of R&D funds in the United States come from government or that, worldwide, investments in scientific education and research tend to yield excellent returns on capital.22 

Concurrent to Soviet apostasy, Central Asia suffered two debilitating economic shocks, the impacts of which had no ideological component. First, Central Asia lost the Soviet subsidies that gave it a disproportionately favorable edge in covering its human welfare programs. While Central Asia certainly did the equivalent of paying its taxes to Moscow, the amounts it received back from Moscow were greater. Second, since almost all of the customers for Central Asia’s “foreign” trade were in the Soviet bloc and since so many of its industries (including much of its energy infrastructure) were integrated across several Soviet republics, the disassembly of the USSR caused many industries to crash and basic utilities to falter.

The Role of the West and Unaccountable Governments

In this milieu of Soviet apostasy and economic collapse, the Western voice had automatic authority and often influenced local events and opinions on a scale far out of proportion to its actual importance, qualifications, or intentions. For example, when I, as a scruffy 22 year old toting a backpack, flew to a large northern town in Kazakhstan in 1993 to meet with a small local environmental NGO, I wondered with interest for an hour whom the ten car motorcade headed by the mayor was meeting, and later one official admitted to me that they had been expecting someone taller and more dapper. At about the same time, an environmental group in Turkmenistan posted a notice on a listserv asking for fax protests against a new law allowing hunting of endangered animals by foreign tourists, a law backed by the spoils system. When the presidential administration received about a dozen faxes from concerned US citizens and Japanese schoolchildren, it quickly annulled the law.

These anecdotes illustrate the early susceptibility of Central Asia to admonitions and advice issuing from the West. I was intimately involved in the provision of US development assistance to Central Asia in the early 1990s, and so I am confident in saying that the United States had no desire or intention to weaken the Central Asian states, but neither were the administrators of US aid knowledgeable about the region or much inclined to be self-critical of their own activities and their consequences. However, they were especially unwilling to recognize some fundamental contradictions of Western aid to Central Asia that, in retrospect (especially considering current willingness to recognize US errors in Russia), were amazing.

These contradictions fall into two general categories, an economic category in which ignorance was bred of lack of introspection, and a political category in which mistakes ensued from lack of integrity. In the economic category, the West poured tens of millions of dollars into programs to assist the Central Asian states to reform their economies from state enterprise to free enterprise. That these programs involved tens of millions of dollars is an important point; these sums were so small as to be insignificant on the donor side, but they were enough on the donee side to produce immense impact, including acting as a magnet for rent-seeking spoils systems. Paradoxically, all of this aid to build free enterprise was delivered by a system that was, to be blunt, little different from Soviet norms. This aid was allocated by state bureaucracies, delivered by non-free-enterprise contractors, and bereft of any sort of meaningful outside (i.e., civil society or rule of law) controls of implementation or oversight, save what was created for symbolic accountability. While I do not want to suggest that these endeavors lacked any value, it bears notice that the programs involved waste typical of state enterprise and were premised on (corruptible) foundations of bureaucratic accountability that local spoils system officials were well-prepared to co-opt, thanks to the expertise they had acquired under the Soviet Union’s own wasteful state enterprise welfare programs.

Sergei Duvanov has pointed out that Western aid was deftly co-opted by local elites to their own advantage.23   Whereas these elites entered independence with political power, they then only boasted relatively modest amounts of wealth, since the Soviet system placed an effective upper limit on corruption. Duvanov, whose impressive qualifications include being one of the most prominent social activists of the late 1980s, an investigative journalist harshly critical of US mistakes in Kazakhstan, a cornerstone of Kazakhstan’s democratic opposition, and now the most visible political prisoner in Kazakhstan, views the post-Soviet elite of Kazakhstan as facilitating Western reform policies only to the extent that these policies further their own interests. Namely, the elite has supported the privatization efforts that allowed them to put their political hegemony at risk in exchange for acquiring vast sums of wealth. However, this elite has frustrated concurrent reform admonitions to truly liberalize the economy and managed, with the spoils system’s integration of political and economic interests, to reassert political control. Thus, US programs actually enriched the oligarchy, protected oligarchic business against private competitors, and helped kill democracy.

Duvanov’s contention finds ample support in the track record of Western governments vis-à-vis political reforms, the second category of Western developmental folly in Central Asia. While employed in USAID’s Rule of Law program for Central Asia, I witnessed US embassy efforts to frustrate attempts by private US groups and even experts employed by US development programs (including my soon-to-be-unemployed colleagues) to state the obvious when Central Asian governments foiled free elections, trampled civil and religious rights, and violated their own constitutions in the early 1990s. In doing so, the US government sent a clear message to the regimes of Central Asia that it would not take them to task for failings of democracy. Later, while practicing law in the region, I sat in closed meetings in which US diplomats stressed to their Central Asian counterparts that furtherance of US business interests was the overriding mission of the embassy.

Yet, the US continued to advance itself publicly as deeply concerned about rule of law and human rights, so the lack of US protest against actions in violation of rule of law and human rights had the knock-on effect of greatly dispiriting social and political activists in each state who had been encouraged to view the United States as a principled ally in the region.

Accordingly, it became increasingly apparent regionally that the West would not call the Central Asian states to task, that gutting of constitutions, at least, was within Western limits of tolerance. Seemingly, as long as the local governments continued discursive support of liberal values, did not create conditions too harsh for Western commercial interests, and promised to aid Western security interests in containment of weapons of mass destruction and Islamic fundamentalism, they could count on support, save for a symbolic slap on the wrist in the form of State Department annual reports noting shortcomings in human rights. Noting that containment of Central Asian weapons of mass destruction has been a foreign policy success for the United States, I do not mean to suggest that derailing democracy was not an acceptable trade-off. That point is debatable. However, America’s hypocrisy in presenting itself as unconditionally committed to democracy and human rights is to be deplored.

Illustrating the depth of this emerging modality of US-Central Asian relations, the United States even quietly aided the Kazakhstan government to provide a politically expedient (but wholly implausible) explanation for the murder of an American aid worker who threatened the regime in the mid-1990s, and the West ignored the fact that the Central Asian states empirically fell below the standards of democracy and human rights ostensibly required for receipt of foreign aid under bilateral agreements and for participation under, inter alia, the treaty regime of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.

Of course, the spoils system in each republic thrived in this new environment. It was, in fact, more congenial to the spoils system than the Soviet regime had been. Soviet Moscow had, it is distressing to admit, far less tolerance for overt violations of the political process, for political violence, and for personal arrogation of state assets.

Not surprisingly, the spoils system has had a chilling effect on local populations and local economies. The cult of Turkmenbashi, which includes massive amounts of public spending on gold monuments and presidential portraits, Uzbekistan’s continuing lack of foreign exchange convertibility, and closings of successful private businesses by the sons-in-law of Kazakhstan’s president have all led to contractions of the economy that, simultaneously, enrich a few elite families.

Accordingly, the long-term result of these four factors of post-Soviet development (Soviet apostasy, economic dislocations, Western development modalities, and corruption) has been to effect a fundamental change in the region as a whole. The region has lost its character, and potential to regain its status, as an island of high-technology and industry in the Islamic world and has increasingly devolved into an impoverished source of commodities for the West.

Conclusion: Who Lost Central Asia?

To the best of my knowledge, the policy world has not asked itself “who lost Central Asia” with anything like the introspection that followed debates about who lost Russia. Indeed, from the perspective of realpolitik, airbases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan appear to belie the very contention that Central Asia has been lost to the West. However, if human welfare and liberal values like democracy are markers of the modern West, Central Asia is far more lost than Russia. Today’s median Russian enjoys more wealth, democracy, and well-being than the median Central Asian, and the gap is widening.

The region’s problems are homogeneous enough to make “who lost Central Asia” a better question than who lost any of the individual states of Central Asia. Yet, both Kazakhstan’s relative wealth and Tajikistan’s pluralistic government deserve recognition as exceptions in the region. Of these, the Tajikistan exception is the easiest to explain; it has come at the cost of a devastating civil war that ended only with a power-sharing peace accord.24 

On the other hand, the increasing gap in wealth between Kazakhstan and the other Central Asian states presents a more complex issue. Democratic government seems an unlikely explanation. Kazakhstan’s remarkable recent successes coincide with a rapid slide towards despotism, and its relatively democratic contemporary, Kyrgyzstan, appears to share few of Kazakhstan’s successes.

A more plausible explanation is that hydrocarbon development has replaced massive canals, virgin lands, and collectivization as the “projects of the century” that may have, at great social cost, fueled the rapid economic growth in the Stalin and Khrushchev eras. None of the other states of the region has attracted the kind of investment that Kazakhstan boasts in its Tengiz, Kashagan, and Karachaganak fields.

However, this supposition runs afoul of two realities. First, several billion dollars received by the republic for these projects have ended up in private Swiss bank accounts controlled by the Kazakhstan oligarchy, a condition long suspected and now proven thanks to criminal investigations in Switzerland and the United States. Second, the Kazakhstan population does not acquire its current relatively high incomes through state-connected welfare subsidies, but through business enterprises that make the country’s standard of living, overall, look nearly identical to that in areas of Russia outside Moscow.

In the end, Kazakhstan’s success is probably due primarily to pre-independence conditions. It entered independence with a demographic endowment like Russia’s (and, like Russia, has been substantially depopulated in the past decade), a governmental infrastructure like Russia’s in terms of professionalism, and geographical pressures less destabilizing than those faced by its Central Asian cohorts.

The issues described in this article could be merely a lament over a lost decade or an attempt to acknowledge the sufferings of tens of millions of people who happened to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time. However, I believe that attention to these issues has a special relevance today.

Putting aside Tajikistan for the moment, the regime in each Central Asian state is arguably more wobbly today than at any time in the past decade. In Kyrgyzstan, the government cannot quell popular outrage over recent police killings of peaceful demonstrators, nor quell an increasingly vocal movement to oust Askar Akaev for corruption, for an alleged unconstitutional territorial treaty with China, and for locking up principal opposition politicians. In Kazakhstan, widespread understanding that the President’s American advisor, James Giffen, helped the inner circle shunt billions to Swiss bank accounts (thus apparently violating America’s Foreign Corrupt Practices Act) and increasing irritation even within the elite over the cruel excesses of the sons-in-law have led to a sophisticated resistance. The government has been unable to put to rest the commotion caused by the political arrest and sentencing of two young leaders of this resistance (both former ministerial-level personal appointees of the president) and by the recent trial of Sergei Duvanov, allegedly for rape, but almost certainly for penning an exposé of the Swiss billions. In Uzbekistan, spontaneous uprisings by rural populations who are beginning to starve and the shake-ups that will be caused by an IMF-demanded floating exchange rate threaten the regime’s monopoly on power. Finally, in Turkmenistan, where the president’s insanity is fueled by his delusions of being a prophet, the last year has seen a slaughter of high government officials, an alleged attempted coup, and a new martyr in the form of the former Foreign Minister, who is now in jail for masterminding the attempted coup while “high on heroin” in Russia.

All four presidents have been in office for more than a decade, and in no case is it likely that a change of power will involve anything like the smooth transition seen in Russia. Accordingly, when the changes in power do begin, new opportunities will arise to get each of these states back on a democratic footing and to mobilize remaining potential for the restoration of lost levels of education, health, and productivity in Central Asia. In turn, little would help Tajikistan, where the president has been in power for exactly a decade, more than to be surrounded by democratic transparent neighbors.

No doubt, the West will play a significant role in any transition. If it is able to do so in a more principled, sophisticated, and humane manner than in the past decade, this will in turn further the West’s own true long-term interests in the region. Stable democratic regimes concerned about the welfare of their own citizens provide the best chance of containing Islamic fundamentalism (or, better put, allowing for a flowering of Central Asia’s own Islamic culture) and ensuring access to Central Asian hydrocarbons. For the West, the benefits of such stable and accountable regimes will, in the long run, far outstrip the transient parochial benefits to be gained by coddling corrupt regimes.

Endnotes

1. “Marx after Communism,” The Economist, Dec. 19, 2002.
2. For example, results from an All-Russia Public Opinion Center poll in December 2002 indicated that 68% of Russians regret the disassembly of the USSR. Interfax News Agency, Most Russians regret USSR’s disintegration, say it could have been avoided – poll, Dec. 30, 2002.
3. See USAID, USAID’s Assistance Strategy for Central Asia 2001-2005 (2000), p. 2.
4. Indeed, it is one of the ironies of post-communism that the individuals who comprised the ideological elite of the old order have, in relative terms, prospered materially in the past ten years.
5. Partly for this reason, post-Soviets still know to stress their anti-communism in their interactions with Westerners, even if their true feelings reflect a deep ambivalence over broad ideologies. Since the Soviet period demanded that individuals adopt a discursive strategy of pro-communism that Doug Weiner calls “protective coloration” in order to navigate the Soviet system, post-Soviets have found it easy to adopt similar (although contradictory) protective coloration in order to secure the fruits of Western development programs and cooperation with Western businesses. On protective coloration, see Douglas R. Weiner, Models of Nature (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000).
6. Soros Foundations did appear in the region, but these were, thankfully I posit, neither in legal form nor in history part of the landscape of US private foundations such as Ford, Rockefeller, Kellogg, and Mott. US government-funded aid programs did spring up quickly (and with largesse) for each state.
7. Eric W. Sievers, The Post Soviet Decline of Central Asia (RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), pp. 61-62.
8. Ibid, pp. 50-69.
9. Nursultan Abishevich Nazarbaev, “Respublika v bratskoi sem’e,” Narodnoe khozyaistvo Kazakhstana 2 (1982), p. 2.
10. It bears noting that a recent Pew Center report suggests a rosy picture in Central Asia, with Uzbekistan the proxy for the region. Having myself conducted sociological research in Uzbekistan, I am unconvinced that Pew’s findings escaped political fudging, research was methodologically valid, or addressed the “protective coloration” problem described in note 5. See The Pew Global Attitudes Project, What the World Thinks in 2002.
11. Emigration’s impact on Kyrgyzstan schools is specifically discussed in UNDP, Kyrgyzstan Human Development Report (1995), Chapter 4. Also, for an overview of post-Soviet emigration, see Sievers, supra, note 7, pp. 66-67.
12. Converting these sums into dollars (whether at state-set or black market rates) would confuse the basic point here that families easily covered their basic needs, especially since most families had incomes several times higher than 50 rubles per month.
13. See Sievers, supra, note 7, pp. 173-77.
14. Once the fourth largest inland body of water on the planet and the second most important fishery in the USSR, because of near total use of the water resources of the Aral Sea’s two tributaries to fuel agricultural expansion, the sea shrank and died.
15. Eric W. Sievers, “Water, Conflict, and Regional Security in Central Asia,” New York University Environmental Law Journal, volume 10, 2002, pp. 384-93.
16. Niyaz Ataev, “The lake of the golden century,” Ecostan News, Vol. 7, No. 9-10 (2000).
17. The World Bank has refused to consider funding the proposed project, and environmental groups universally condemn it. Recently, the project was vocally supported by Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, but this support appears to be a bid for political support presaging Luzhkov’s run for national office and is countervailed by the vociferous protest of Governor Leonid Polezhaev of the Russian region of Omsk, which would be directly impacted. See  “Povorot sibirskikh rek grozit katastrofoi,” PrimaNews, Dec. 23, 2002. The project is always mentioned as demanding $20 billion in investment, but this figure appears merely to be the dollar equivalent of the ruble project cost as envisaged in the late 1970s, a figure that was even then mocked as grossly understated.
18. “Flu Epidemic Closes School in Kyrgyz Capital,” RFE/RL Newsline, Jan. 30, 2003.
19. Sievers, supra note 7, p. 64.
20. Historical materialism is the social science theory at the heart of communist ideology, which posits that human societies progress through distinct stages of development: from primitive societies, to feudalism, to capitalism, to socialism, to communism.
21. Loren R. Graham, What Have We Learned About Science and Technology from the Russian Experience? (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 13-14.
22. Eugene B. Skolnikoff, The Elusive Transformation: Science, Technology, and the Evolution of International Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 112-14.
23. Sergei Duvanov, “Demokratiya po-amerikanski?” (January 16, 2001).
24. While beyond the scope of this article, Tajikistan’s achievements are only relative. President Rakhmonov is now capitalizing on the importance of neighboring Afghanistan and Western military aid to invigorate an effort to rid his government of its pluralistic elements by identifying his opponents as Islamic fundamentalists.