Central Asia Frequent Flier

CUSTOMER DISSERVICE

    When the Soviet Union broke up, its national airline Aeroflot suffered the same fate.  From Baku to Bishkek, the governments of cash-strapped new republics seized the aircraft sitting on the tarmac, repainted them in the new national colors and hoped they could round up enough spare parts to keep them flying.  National airlines have since modernized their fleets, adding Boeings and Airbuses for long-haul flights, but Soviet-era planes are still the standard on most domestic and regional flights and travelers still struggle with bureaucracy at ticket offices and airports.  

Postcards from Stanland: Journeys in Central Asia (Ohio University Press, 2016) is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million and other online retailers. Read excerpts at www.davidhmould.com (Travel Blogs) or Facebook /PostcardsFromStanland/ or view readings and interviews on YouTube

    In the early years after independence, foreigners had to pay the “foreigner’s price” for tickets.  It was usually at least 50 per cent higher than the regular fare and often had to be paid in Western hard currency.  The only advantage, as far as I could tell, was that you entered the terminal through a separate “foreigners’ entrance,” waited (usually alone) in an area with an overpriced souvenir shop, had your passport inspected multiple times, and then were escorted to the plane by a uniformed official.  At least you could choose your seat and stow your hand luggage before the other passengers boarded.  Special treatment had nothing to do with being nice to foreigners.  It was a holdover from Soviet times, when foreigners were segregated for undisclosed security reasons.  

    In July 1998, I needed to fly from Osh to Bishkek.  The Kyrgyzstan Airlines ticket office was inconveniently located in a suburb, a 20-minute cab ride from downtown.  The agent told me she could not sell me a ticket.  “Only Gulmira is authorized to sell tickets to foreigners,” she announced, “and she is at the airport today.  You will have to come back tomorrow.”  I asked if I could buy a ticket at the airport.  “That is impossible,” said the agent.  “Tickets are only sold here.”  I went to the airport anyway and found Gulmira who sold me a ticket at the foreigner’s price with, um, a small commission.  It was cheaper than another trip to the ticket office.

    Foreigners’ prices and entrances have largely disappeared, but buying tickets can still be a travel adventure.  Although all international carriers and some national airlines offer online booking, most tickets are still bought from travel agents or airline offices.  In 2010, I needed a ticket from Astana to Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi.  The only direct flight was on “Air Company SCAT,” a Kazakhstan regional airline with a few international flights and a booking service to match its ill-chosen name.

    Although several travel agents displayed the SCAT sign in their windows, none could sell me a ticket.  It was unclear why: either SCAT did not issue electronic tickets or its computer system wasn’t working.  I ended up at the large central ticket agency on Prospekt Respublika to buy a paper ticket.  Several agents were serving customers and I joined the shortest line.  When my turn came, the agent said she could not help me.  “Only agents 1, 3 and 5 can sell SCAT tickets,” she informed me.  “But you’re number 5!” I protested.  “There’s a chair missing—I’m number 6,” she replied.  It was back to the line, until agent number 1 was available.  

PRE-FLIGHT SHAKEDOWN  

    Customs and security officials at Central Asian airports have gained a reputation for trying to shake down weary travelers by inventing airport taxes, selling transit visas you don't need, and charging for excess baggage both on departure and arrival. Some travelers have had luggage impounded for weeks by customs officials demanding thousands of dollars in import duties or fines.  Other scams involve currency controls.  Because of capital flight, Central Asian countries imposed strict limits on the export of currency.  However, the official inquiry “How much money are you carrying?” can be the prelude to a search and an on-the-spot and undocumented fine.  

    Fortunately, most attempted shakedowns are minor, and often played like a game.  Arriving at Almaty for a flight to Europe, I was stopped by two policemen who inspected my passport.  One noticed that my OVIR registration stamp had expired two days earlier.  “That’s a $100 fine,” he declared with triumph.  I figured that fines in the Kazakhstan Civil Code were denominated in tenge, not dollars, so I asked him to show me the regulation.  As he skimmed through papers, failing to find the one that described my offense, I became impatient.  “Even if you’re right, I don’t have $100,” I said, not entirely truthfully.  The policemen looked crestfallen.  “How much money do you have?” the other asked.  “One thousand tenge [at that time, about $8],” I replied.  “That will do,” the first policeman said.  “Have a nice flight, and if anyone else in the airport asks, please don’t say this happened.”  I handed over the money, shook hands, accepted a shot of vodka and went on my way.  In a country where police do not earn a living wage and routinely stop drivers to extract small fines, it was an additional, and not unexpected, travel expense.  

      The secret to shakedowns is to apply (or invent) obscure regulations.  On another departure from Almaty, customs officials emptied the contents of my two suitcases, pulling out the three large Soviet-era school maps I had bought at a bookstore in Bishkek. “It is forbidden to export rare cultural artifacts, including historical maps,” declared the customs official.  I pointed out that maps like this hung on the walls of schoolrooms all over the Soviet Union.  They were neither rare, nor valuable.  “Show me the regulation on historic maps” I insisted.  I unfolded the map pinpointing the sites of labor unrest in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century.  “What am I going to do with it?  Invade the United States?” I asked rhetorically. That seemed to settle the issue.

THE FOREIGNERS’ LINE

      Soviet-era airports were not built to handle large numbers of arriving passengers, and certainly not passengers with passports.  There’s usually a long line at the one or two foreign citizens’ passport booths.  And the line can sometimes turn ugly.

     Until the late 1990s, Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, was not on the business (and certainly not the tourist) itinerary.  A five year-long civil war meant that the airport was periodically "closed for fighting" (about as routine in Tajikistan as "closed for construction" anywhere else.)  With the return of peace, if not prosperity, the airport is open, if not exactly ready, for business.

    The arrivals hall, a ramshackle building separated by a few city blocks from the main airport terminal, has limited staff and a single baggage carousel.  When three flights (including mine) arrived within a half-hour period, the fragile infrastructure was quickly overwhelmed.  Only one passport booth for foreigners was open, and it took the officer at least five minutes to review and stamp each passport.   And there were many foreigners—most of the passengers on my flight from Almaty were Kazakhstan citizens.  Occasionally, a policeman climbed over the barrier, waded into the crowd and pushed some people around but it seemed to make no difference.  Apparently the only way to get ahead was to slip a few bills to a policeman who would go into the booth and have the officer process the passport (while the person at the booth waited).  

    The foreigners’ “line” became more unruly when a group of Tajiks, tired of waiting in their equally slow-moving nationals’ line, decided to join us (but at the front, not the back of the line).  People clambered over barriers and passed papers back and forth.  Meanwhile, baggage from all three flights was arriving on the single carousel.  All bags had to pass through a scanner; however, it was not connected to a computer, so no one actually inspected what was inside.  Two airport staff collected baggage tags, but did not match them to the bags you were carrying.  The trip had taken four hours—a two-hour flight and a two-hour ordeal in the arrivals hall.

Cursing the future

 A man waits in line outside a food shop in Moscow. Finally, he’s had enough and tells     his friend: “That’s it. I’m going over to the Kremlin to kill that Gorbachev.” Two hours later he comes back.  “Well,” says the friend, “did you do it?”  “No,” he replies, “there was an even longer line over there.” 

          Through the 1990s, in cities, towns and villages throughout the former Soviet Union, industrial workers gathered in bars, restaurants, chaikhanas (tea houses) and bazaars to “curse the future.”  I credit the phrase to my friend Asqat Yerkimbay, describing growing up in the central Kazakhstan mining town of Zhezdy.  But I had heard a similar story from many other people.

Postcards from Stanland: Journeys in Central Asia (Ohio University Press, 2016) is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million and other online retailers. Read excerpts at www.davidhmould.com (Travel Blogs) or Facebook /PostcardsFromStanland/ or view readings and interviews on YouTube

          For 75 years, industrial workers were folk heroes, lauded in speeches, newspapers, books, movies and wall posters for their efforts to make the Soviet Union a world power.  Although agricultural production was vital, Soviet industry seemed more glamorous, and definitely more photogenic.  Newsreels and propaganda films recorded the whirring machines of the factory assembly line, the intense heat of the steel furnace, the jagged face of the coal seam, the electricity pylons stretching into the distance.  Each product coming off the line, each steel ingot, ton of coal or megawatt of electricity represented the growing strength of the USSR, the fulfillment of the great socialist dream.  And the dream makers were Lenin’s proletariat—the engineers, coal miners, steelworkers, engine drivers.  Industrial jobs paid better than most professions, and often came with perks such as apartments and vacations to summer resorts in the Kyrgyz SSR. They also helped reinforce the status of women in society.  The Soviet Union never needed a Roza the Riveter because women were always in the industrial workforce.

           And then it all ended.  Despite Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika (literally restructuring or rebuilding), most citizens had no idea of what was coming, or how it would change their lives forever.  With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the central planning system that had supported the economy collapsed too.  In every sector, production was determined by targets and quotas, which usually had little or no relationship to demand.  Factories, mines and collective farms had to meet targets, even if what they produced was not needed and piled up in rail cars or rotted in warehouses.  Managers were rewarded for exceeding targets, fired or demoted for falling short—a system that provided ample incentive for cooking the books on cotton or steel production. 

          In the factories of Central Asia, workers continued to show up, but the targets and subsidies from Moscow had ended and there were few new customers.  Some factories tried to adapt to the market economy, but most lacked the money to invest in new equipment and compete for quality and price with industries in other countries.  Compared with other Soviet republics, the industrial base of the Kyrgyz SSR was comparatively small because Moscow considered the region too remote to become a major industrial producer.  However, factories for agricultural processing, textiles and household goods employed thousands in the Chuy and Fergana Valleys.  By the mid-1990s, most had closed.  Almost all the canned goods, clothes, shoes, pots and pans on the bazaar were imported from China and other Asian countries.

           Kyrgyzstan struggled to adopt the reforms that donor countries and the International Monetary Fund said were needed to qualify for loans and aid and to build a market economy.  The government abandoned subsidies and price controls, and replaced the Russian ruble with a new currency, the som. The pace of reform caused massive economic dislocation; in one year, inflation ran close to 1,000 per cent, devastating people on pensions and fixed incomes. With international support, the government eventually stabilized the currency and brought inflation down to manageable levels, but economic recovery remained slow and poverty rates increased.

           Official reports tell the story of Kyrgyzstan’s economic collapse in sanitized, bureaucratic terms—the language of economists, policy-makers and development experts.  The calculations were at the macro level--cold measurements of Gross Domestic Product, consumer price indexes, output by economic sector, government debt, foreign direct investment, reforms of the financial services sector. In the mid-1990s, it’s questionable whether Kyrgyzstan even had a financial services sector to reform.  The som had been devalued, inflation remained high, and almost no one trusted the banks to keep their money safe.  With few deposits, banks had little money to lend and when they made loans, it was at ruinous 30 per cent interest rates.  If you wanted to start a new business, you asked your family to lend or give you the money.  Even the loan sharks at the bazaar charged less interest than the banks.  

           The economic statistics were sometimes based on questionable data.  One year the government, in an attempt to convince foreign donors and investors that the economy was picking up, declared that the unemployment rate had dropped below 10 per cent for the first time since independence.  Even government supporters were incredulous.  It turned out that in its sample the statistical agency had included every tout hawking cigarettes, pirated cassettes and homebrew on the streets as a “self-employed market vendor.”  The real rate was probably at least 40 per cent. 

            None of the reports and statistics told the human stories of dislocation, especially for industrial workers.  Their skills were not needed in the new economy, and there were few opportunities for retraining.  Some left for Russia, hoping to find jobs, but the situation in many Russians regions was as bad as in Central Asia.  A few started private businesses or worked as drivers.  Some just gave up.  It was not only the loss of income, devastating though that was.  It was the loss of purpose, dignity and respect.  They had been the breadwinners for their families; now they had no jobs and no prospects.  In some families, women became the main wage earners, but while they kept the family fed, their husbands sometimes felt the loss of status even more intensely. Back in the good old days, industrial workers could afford a bottle of vodka or cognac for a party or holiday celebration.  Now some turned to the bottle to try to forget their plight.  Official reports on the economy do not figure in the social costs of alcoholism, depression, broken marriages, domestic violence, and suicides.  It is not surprising that the engineers, miners and steelworkers were nostalgic for the Soviet Union.  They denounced Gorbachev the traitor, and cursed a future that seemed to offer them nothing.  

Soviet gerrymandering

When the Soviet cartographers sliced and diced Central Asia in the 1920s, someone must have said, “The Kyrgyz.  Aren’t they all nomads?  Let’s give them the mountains.”

Postcards from Stanland: Journeys in Central Asia (Ohio University Press, 2016) is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million and other online retailers. Read excerpts at www.davidhmould.com (Travel Blogs) or Facebook /PostcardsFromStanland/ or view readings and interviews on YouTube

             Before the Soviet era, there were no national borders between the peoples of the region, and identity was defined by religion, family, clan and place. The Soviets feared that such muddled loyalties could help Islamic, social or political movements gain popular support, as Pasha’s rebellion had shown.  Educated Central Asians and religious leaders still talked privately of a Greater Turkestan or a Central Asian caliphate.  The Soviets attempted to counter pan-Islamic and pan-Turkic tendencies by constructing nationalities, giving each a defined territory with national borders, along with a ready-made history, language, culture and ethnic profile.  Your loyalty was no longer to your tribe, village or faith, but to your nationality as a Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Turkmen or Uzbek and to its Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR). 

                The Uzbek and Turkmen SSRs were created in 1924, the Tajik SSR in 1929.   It took the Russians longer to sort out the Kazakhs and the Kyrgyz, who share similar physical features, traditions and language.  Indeed, in the 19th century, they were all referred to as Kyrgyz.  As ethnographic research began to reveal differences, the mountain tribes became known as Kara-Kyrgyz (black Kyrgyz) to distinguish them from the steppe-dwelling Kazakhs, who were called simply Kyrgyz because “Kazakh” sounded too much like the name of another group, the Cossacks.  Although the Russians seemed confused, the Kazakhs knew perfectly well who they were, and that they were not Kyrgyz.  They were members of a tribe that was part of either the Great, Middle or Little Horde, each of which had its own khan.  In 1926, most of present-day Kyrgyzstan became the Kara-Kyrgyz Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) and a full Kyrgyz SSR in 1936.  In the same year, the Kazakh SSR was formed.  And so, through the miracle of Soviet ethnic engineering, the Kara-Kyrgyz were no longer black but true Kyrgyz, while the people who had been called Kyrgyz for over a century turned out to be Kazakhs after all. 

                While promoting new national loyalties, the Soviets realized that too much nationalism could be dangerous.  In a parallel effort to solidify control, they shifted around ethnic groups to ensure that none was dominant in a specific area.  Thousands of Central Asians were moved to other parts of the Soviet Union.  Russian and Ukrainian farm and factory workers were settled in Central Asia, while Volga Germans, Chechens, Koreans and other ethnicities were deported to the region.   The policy of divide and rule, intended to suppress ethnic unrest and militant Islam, created artificial borders between ethically-mixed SSRs.  The medieval cities of Samarkand and Bukhara, historically major centers of Tajik culture and with large ethnic Tajik populations, ended up in the Uzbek SSR.  Osh was a classic case of ethnic gerrymandering.  As Central Asia scholar Madeleine Reeves points out, if the Soviets had drawn boundaries exclusively along national lines, the nomadic Kyrgyz would “end up with a Kyrgyz republic that had no cities of its own: a worrying prospect for a state preoccupied with thrusting ‘backward’ populations into Soviet modernity.”  Their solution was to make Osh, with its predominantly Uzbek population of traders and arable farmers, the republic’s southern city.

               Independence came suddenly to all Soviet republics. Unlike liberation struggles in Asia or Africa, there was no army emerging from the mountains or jungles to be cheered by flag-waving crowds, no government in exile, no heroes or martyrs to freedom.  Citizens of each SSR suddenly found themselves citizens of an independent country.

                Achieving independence is one thing; creating national identity is another.  At independence, ethnic Kazakhs were a minority (albeit the largest one) in Kazakhstan, making up about 41 per cent of the population.  At the same time, almost one quarter of Tajikistan’s population was ethnically Uzbek.  With the possible exception of Turkmenistan, all republics have a rich, but potentially volatile ethnic mix. The region, noted the New York Times, looked like "a medieval map" where power is defined by ethnicities and clans, not by borders. Former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski famously referred to Central Asia as “the Eurasian Balkans.”

Lost in Stanland

On the eve of his first foreign trip as US Secretary of State in February 2013, John Kerry, in a speech at the University of Virginia, praised the staff of the State Department and US Agency for International Development (USAID) for their work in the “most dangerous places on Earth.”

They fight corruption in Nigeria. They support the rule of law in Burma. They support democratic institutions in Kyrzakhstan and Georgia.

            Come again, Mr. Secretary? Kyrzakhstan? Aren’t you confusing volatile Kyrgyzstan, where popular protests overthrew two authoritarian leaders in less than five years, with its stable neighbor Kazakhstan, where President Nursultan Nazarbayev has ruled almost unchallenged since independence in 1991?

Postcards from Stanland: Journeys in Central Asia (Ohio University Press, 2016) is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million and other online retailers. Read excerpts at www.davidhmould.com (Travel Blogs) or Facebook /PostcardsFromStanland/ or view readings and interviews on YouTube

The republics of Central Asia

The State Department transcript of the speech helpfully clarified matters, replacing “Kyrzakhstan” with “Kyrgyzstan.” But not before reporters picked up on the gaffe. Kerry was teased for “creating a new country.” The flub was “all the more awkward,” said the British newspaper The Telegraph, “because Kyrgyzstan is a key ally in the US-led war in Afghanistan and a major recipient of US aid.”

            Russians poked fun in online forums. Among the comments: “I think we need to restore the USSR, so that the American Secretary does not confuse the names.” “Well, if the USA decided so . . . Let there be Kyrzakhstan.” “So what? Kyrzakhstan is a regular country. It’s to the east of Ukrarussia and south-east of Litonia. Not far from Uzkmenia. You should learn geography.” A cartoon depicted Kerry, cell phone to his ear, looking intently at a globe. “Where is that Kyrzakhstan? I’ve been trying to call there for three days.”           

            Of course, Kerry was not the first US official to be, as the Telegraph put it, “tongue-tied by post-Soviet geography.” “Stan-who?” President George W. Bush is reputed to have asked when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice briefed him about Uzbekistan. In August 2008, he mixed up Russia and Georgia, which at that time were at war, when he warned against possible efforts to depose “Russia’s duly elected government.”

            The confusion is symptomatic of a more general geographical malaise, caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the proliferation of countries whose names end in -stan. Kerry is not the first and will not be the last public official to become lost in Stanland.

            So where is “Stanland?”

            The imprecise reference is to a vast swath of Asia, stretching from Turkey to the western border of China, populated by a bewildering assortment of ethnic groups that give their names to an equally bewildering collection of provinces, autonomous republics, and countries. Remembering them all—not to mention finding them on a map—is a challenge, even for people who are supposed to know these things, such as diplomats and international relations experts.

            It’s similar to the geographical confusion brought on by the end of European colonialism in Africa a half century ago. It wasn’t enough for the imperial powers to surrender their political and economic dominance. They also had to learn postcolonial geographical vocabulary. It’s not Upper Volta any more. It’s Burkina Faso, and its capital is—get ready to roll those vowels—Ouagadougou.

            We all construct mental maps of essential information, and our maps are shaped as much by culture and pragmatism as by physical features and political boundaries. Of course, we all know about other places, but they don’t appear in our mental maps, not even on the fringes, unless they seem relevant. Even though Afghanistan has been embroiled in conflict since the Soviet invasion of 1979—or, to take a longer historical perspective, since the first Anglo-Afghan War of 1839–42—it was not on most Americans’ mental maps before September 11, 2001.

            As long as Afghanistan and Pakistan were the only “stans” we had to remember, the map was reasonably manageable. Then Mikhail Gorbachev came along. The collapse of the Soviet Union gave us fourteen new countries (plus Russia) including the five “stans” of Central Asia—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. We can be grateful the Soviet Union did not break up any further, or we would have to deal with Bashkortostan, Dagestan, and Tatarstan (now Russian republics). Or that Armenia did not adopt its native name, Hayastan. Or that the Central Asian republics themselves did not splinter, with Karakalpakstan breaking away from Uzbekistan.

            If we struggle to remember the “stans,” is it more helpful to think about “Central Asia”? It depends. In terms of geopolitics, it’s a more elastic region, partly because it is (apart from the Caspian Sea) landlocked, so has no coastline for demarcation. Since September 11, Afghanistan has often been classified as Central Asia. The north of the country, bordering Uzbekistan, has a large ethnic Uzbek population; in the east, Tajiks are a significant minority. By religion, culture, and language, the Uighurs of China’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region have more in common with the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz than with the rest of China, and Uighur nationalists dream of reuniting with their neighbors in a Greater Turkestan region. The Caspian Sea clearly divides the Caucasus republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, and the Russian republics of Dagestan, Chechnya, and Ingushetia, from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, although some policy experts lump them together as “Central Asia and the Caucasus.” What about Mongolia? Ethnically, Kazakhs and Kyrgyz are Mongols. Unlike other regions that can be neatly subdivided, Central Asia is amorphous, expanding and contracting as it is viewed through different political, social, economic, and cultural lenses.

            In Postcards from Stanland, I use the narrow political definition of Central Asia to refer to these five former Soviet republics--: Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Since 1995, I have faced the challenge of trying to explain the region to colleagues, students, and friends. After one trip to Kyrgyzstan, a colleague insisted I had been in Kurdistan (which does not yet exist, except in Northern Iraq and in the maps of Kurdish separatist movements).

            “No, K-oe-rg-oe-zstan,” I replied, trying to wrap my tongue around the challenging Russian vowel “ы” in the first and second syllables. I gave the ten-second profile. “Poor country, former Soviet Union, borders China, beautiful mountains and lakes, nomadic herders with sheep and horses, lots of meat in the diet, bad hotels, slow Internet, very hospitable people.”

            You would have thought the conflict in Afghanistan would have focused the attention of Westerners on the countries next door, but unfortunately it hasn’t. Just as medieval European maps tagged vast regions of Africa, Asia, and America as terra incognita, the five Central Asian republics are a geographical blank between Afghanistan and Pakistan to the west and China to the east. To many Westerners, my travels might as well have been on another planet. I had simply been in “Stanland.”