This engaging book describes the Norwegian author’s travels round the five Central Asian Stans — a region where toponyms still make the heart beat faster: Samarkand, Bukhara, Tashkent.
Fittingly, given the means by which foreign powers have harmed the Stans, Erika Fatland begins her story with the disastrous methane spill which Soviet geologists caused in Turkmenistan in 1971. But it seems that however malign exterior forces have been, these countries are perfectly capable of — if not experts in — producing ghastly politicians themselves. Saparmurat Niyazov, known as Turkmenbashi, emerges top of a hotly contested field of nutters. He declared himself a prophet, and banned dogs from Ashgabat because he didn’t like their smell. When he died in 2006, his dentist took the helm.
These Stans became independent for the first time in their history when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Fatland’s five sections summarise their past, national myths, development and setbacks, while quoting widely from people she meets on her travels (she uses mostly cars, and a few trains and buses). She speaks Russian, as many do in the Stans. Born in 1983, she made her journeys in her late twenties.
Teasing out the differences between the five countries, Fatland acknowledges that while they are ‘usually lumped together’ in the western press and imagination, they are in fact remarkably dissimilar. What they do share, of course, is 70 years of Sovietisation. These days, China looms large in the jostle for power and influence — another Great Game. The role that cash sent from abroad by migrant workers plays is significant. Mountainous Kyrgyzstan depends on that for half its GNP.
Kazakhstan, the ninth largest country in the world, has the strongest economy, but also a unique set of problems. The pages on the disappearance of the Aral Sea (partly in Uzbekistan) after the Soviet Union diverted water for its cotton plantations are harrowing (Fatland refers to visiting foreigners as ‘disaster tourists’), as are details of the nuclear testing site the author visits — it’s where the Soviet Union set off its first atomic bomb, followed by 455 more.
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