Postcards from Stanland

by David H. Mould

  Kyrgyzstan’s casual tolerance of its Soviet past—as demonstrated by the longevity of the Lenin statues—is illustrated by the preservation of Frunze’s legacy. Around the thatched cottage where he was born, the Soviets constructed a two-story museum with military artifacts and memorabilia. In this historical narrative, Frunze is a brave military leader and loving father and husband, not the ruthless commander who suppressed nationalist movements in Central Asia. Although the Soviet names of many streets in Bishkek were changed to politically correct Kyrgyz names after independence, Frunze’s name remains on one of the main east-west streets. There’s a bronze statue of Frunze on a horse opposite the railroad station. And airline passengers cannot avoid Frunze because the International Air Transport Association (IATA) retains the code FRU for Bishkek. That can be confusing for first-time travelers who wonder if their baggage is going to a different city. In terms of acronyms, FRU is perilously close to airports in Botswana, Chile, Guatemala, and Papua New Guinea.

  Bishkek was laid out on a grid pattern, with broad north-south and east-west streets. Orienting yourself is easy as long as you remember the cardinal rule: the mountains are always south. In Almaty, where the same rule applies, it’s of limited use in some areas because tall buildings block the view, but Bishkek is still a low-rise city. Water from two mountain rivers, the Ala-Archa and Alamedin, flows in channels to a canal north of the city, and on to the Chuy River. In mid-September, Bishkek felt more like a sleepy country town than the capital of a country. Compared to Almaty, the traffic was light. People strolled along the tree-lined streets, stopping to buy an ice cream or gazirovka (gas water), a syrup-based carbonated drink, from sidewalk vendors. Children played and rode bicycles around the Lenin statue in Ala Too Square. Police directing traffic at the main intersections smiled as they ineffectually waved their arms in the air. Horse-drawn wagons slowed down traffic near the Osh bazaar, the large market on the west side of the city. Babushkas squatted on the sidewalk, selling apples, tomatoes, cherries, and raspberries from their dachas. On a patch of land next to the National Library on Sovietskaya, one of the main north-south streets, sheep were grazing.

  We rented a spacious though sparsely furnished apartment on Pervomayskaya (1st of May Street) in the city center. Officially, the street was called Razzakova, renamed for Ishak Razzakov who briefly headed the government of the Kyrgyz SSR in the mid-1940s. Razzakov was hardly a well-known historical figure, and no one we met (including the neighbors) used the new name. Taxi drivers had certainly never heard of it, so we sacrificed political correctness for convenience and stuck with Pervomayskaya. In Soviet real estate parlance, the apartment was a khrushchevka, named for the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev. Faced with a severe housing shortage after World War II, the government encouraged technologies to provide low-cost, easy-to-assemble housing. Unlike the earlier stalinkas, which were built on site and sometimes even boasted neoclassical details, the prefabricated concrete panels of the khrushchevkas were mass produced and shipped by truck. Elevators were considered too costly and time consuming to build so almost all khrushchevkas had five stories—the maximum height of a building without an elevator under Soviet health and safety standards. Ours was a standard, three-room apartment with a small kitchen and bathroom in a block of thirty units. It was in a prime location—about a twenty-minute walk to the university and two blocks from the USIS office, where I reported to the Public Affairs Officer. It was one block from the central Panfilov Park, close to a market on Jibek Jolu (Silk Road) and a short walk from Ala Too Square. Today, this is the high-rent district where government officials, business people, and foreign contractors pay top som for an apartment. In 1996, we rented it for $300 a month (plus modestly priced utilities). We put up with minor inconveniences—the small refrigerator, the lack of working electrical outlets, and the rickety furniture. We bought a VCR, a toaster, and kitchen utensils. And we started going to the bazaar to buy fruits and vegetables. We knew that by November fresh produce would be scarce so we joined other apartment-dwellers in the annual ritual of canning.

  In mid-September, the Osh bazaar was groaning with fresh produce, and prices were low. We filled a box with over five kilos of Roma tomatoes for a couple of dollars. A large bucket of raspberries was $4.80, a bucket of plums $1.20, and about seven kilos of apricots $5.20. A Kyrgyz colleague came over to the apartment, armed with pots, pans, and canning recipes. The system—or the technology, as she called it—was different from the one Stephanie had used in the United States and we struggled to fit the lids on the jars with a device that worked like a reverse-action can opener. Still, by the end of the day, we had canned several jars of tomatoes and plum jam and two jars of adjika—a relish made from tomatoes, carrots, peppers, apples, hot chili peppers, vinegar, oil, salt, and sugar. Our colleague said the recipe came from a Bulgarian version of Good Housekeeping that circulated in Bishkek in Soviet times.

  MAP 3.1 My Bishkek (map by Brian Edward Balsley, GISP)

  A Walking City

  It was a 1-1/2-som (9-cent) ride home on the bus from the Osh bazaar with our buckets of fruit and box of tomatoes. Bishkek residents, especially those who live in the outer suburbs (microraions), depend on public transportation—the buses, trolley buses, and marshrutkas (minibuses). The buses varied in size, age, and mechanical condition; most of the older ones sounded as if they needed a clutch job. The newer buses were visible examples of foreign aid. They were German-made, with German-language ads on the side, and apparently still heading for destinations in Berlin, Essen, or Wiesbaden. You learned not to pay attention to destinations such as the Hauptbahnhof or Goetheplatz; if the bus was heading west on Kievskaya, you could be pretty sure it was going to the Osh bazaar.

  Public transportation was cheap but often crowded, so we developed tactics, as well as elbow muscles, to deal with the crush. If the bus or trolley was full, we started pushing to the front a couple of stops before we wanted to get off. On the trolleys, the only advantage to crowding was the soft human padding. When the driver took a corner too tightly, the conducting rods detached from the overhead cables; the trolley immediately lost power and stopped abruptly, throwing everyone around. Then you were glad the trolley was packed. There was a short delay while the driver climbed up a ladder to the roof of the bus, lifted the rods and restored the current.

  The marshrutka (short for marshrutnoye taksi which literally means “routed taxi”), common throughout the former Soviet Union, costs a few som more than the bus or trolley but is much faster. Like the African “bush taxi,” it follows a route, picking up and dropping off passengers anywhere along the way. A marshrutka has twelve to fourteen seats, but on local routes it sometimes takes as many as twenty passengers. There’s no schedule—a marshrutka leaves when it’s full of passengers and luggage, or when the driver figures he has enough fares to make the journey viable.

  Most of the time, we walked. To the university, the local bazaar, to shops and restaurants—most of the places we needed to reach were within ten to fifteen minutes by foot along tree-lined sidewalks, boulevards, and parks. Apart from the traffic, the main hazards were the uneven sidewalks. In places, they were even missing. By “missing,” I do not mean that there was no sidewalk, as is often the case in US cities. It was there, but you had to step around a gaping hole in the ground. Although some were the result of seasonal cracking and expansion of the concrete, most appeared where a manhole cover should have been, since many had been stolen and melted down for scrap. In daylight and good weather, you could avoid the holes. At night, walking became riskier. Walking in winter, you learned to keep an eye out for geometrically shaped depressions in the snow; if it was a circle or rectangle, you could be pretty sure there was no sidewalk under it.

  One of our favorite local walks was to the US embassy, which was housed in a modestly sized but elegant nineteenth-century Russian-style house on leafy Prospekt Erkindik (Freedom), about two blocks from our apartment. Most of the time, we did not have official business but st
opped by to read week-old newspapers and magazines, borrow a video or book from the ambassador’s collection, or check on expat social events. The office of the ambassador, Eileen Malloy, was just off the main entrance, and she would stop to chat in breaks between meetings. The place bustled with visitors. Security was thorough, but unobtrusive.

  Today, the US embassy is located on a flat, open area of land on Prospekt Mira in the south of the city with no other construction permitted nearby. Its thick, high walls are topped with spikes and monitored by security cameras. It’s a long bus ride from downtown, so no one just stops by any more. It looks like a prison, not a diplomatic mission.

  Supply Thread

  Business people and economists like to talk about the supply chain, the intricate, interlinked system of organizations, people, information, and resources that it takes to move a product or service from supplier to customer. In Kyrgyzstan in the mid-1990s, there wasn’t so much a supply chain as a supply thread; at best it was tangled and frayed, and sometimes it just broke until someone knotted it together again.

  The Soviet economy, although based on the artificial creation of supply and demand, at least had a supply chain of sorts. The cotton, wheat, or mutton from your collective farm or tractor tires from your factory were shipped somewhere else. You received a modest salary, free housing, medical care, and education. The cotton or tires might sit in a warehouse or railroad siding because they were not needed, but that didn’t matter as long as Moscow kept sending the money. The collapse of the Soviet economy shattered the supply chain because no one was going to pay for cotton or tires they didn’t need. Now the challenge for all the Central Asian republics was to produce goods and services that people would pay for and get them to market—in other words, to create a supply chain.

  To take the economic pulse of Kyrgyzstan in the mid-1990s, you didn’t go to the government ministries where they’d give you the dubious statistics they compiled to keep the foreign donors happy. Instead, you went to the bazaar where most of the economic activity took place. Although there were small street bazaars all over the city, Bishkek had three large daily markets—the Osh bazaar on the west side, Alamedin in the northeast, and Ortosay in the south. About six miles north of the city center—a twenty-minute bus or trolley ride—was Tolchok (which means “push” in Kyrgyz), a sprawling, crowded weekend market with imported consumer goods, and a livestock bazaar, where horses, sheep, cattle, and goats were bought and sold, and traditional Kyrgyz horseback games held. Close by was the auto bazaar, where you could buy a used Lada, Niva, Volga, or Moskvich and maybe also the parts to keep it running.

  Stephanie and I frequented the Osh and Alamedin bazaars. They illustrated, better than any statistics, Kyrgyzstan’s uneven progress toward a market economy. Let’s start in the geographic center, in the covered market halls where meat, dairy goods, and dried fruits and nuts were sold. Here, the vendors had established business relationships with farmers. There were separate sections for mutton, beef, and horse. The Volga Germans sold pork. You could buy a fresh chicken (and pluck it yourself if you knew how), but by 1996 frozen chicken had arrived, reportedly from the United States and Europe. We were told the breast meat went to domestic markets, so all we could buy were legs, backs, and thighs. Dairy vendors had regular supplies of milk, butter, cream, yogurt, smetana (sour cream), kumys (fermented mare’s milk), the yogurt-like kefir or airan, and local cheese. Dried fruit (apricots, red and white raisins, cherries) and nuts (walnuts, pistachios, almonds, apricot pits, sunflower seeds) were available year round, most shipped by truck from the Fergana Valley. You could go to the market halls any day of the year, and be pretty sure of finding what you needed. Here, the supply thread was at its strongest.

  As you moved outside the covered halls, the bazaar became more chaotic and the thread weaker. There were stalls with fruits and vegetables, alongside others selling lipioshki, fresh eggs, cigarettes and candy, household goods, cleaning products, paper and school supplies, electrical parts, and imported clothes. Most of the clothes came from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Turkey, with fake, misspelled, sewn-in designer labels—the Calvert Kleins and the Tommy Hilsburgers. Cheap electronics came from China and Southeast Asia. Although some goods were shipped by road, most high-priced items were purchased on so-called shopping trips to Moscow, Krasnoyarsk in Siberia, Urumchi in Western China, Istanbul, or Bangkok. Here the supply thread became tangled, and often broken; whether or not a particular item was available depended on whether someone had made a recent shopping trip.

  This section of the bazaar was also the service area with barbers, money exchangers, shoe and watch (and today mobile phone) repair shops, food stalls and fortune-tellers squatting at small tables with tarot cards and magical stones. It was where the official and informal economies met with itinerant vendors selling plastic shopping bags, cigarettes, sunglasses, fake Rolexes, and pens. You didn’t want to inquire too closely about their supply chain.

  In the open areas outside the bazaar proper, trucks and vans were parked, their owners selling goods directly from the tailgate. One day, you could find truckloads of potatoes, onions, or cabbages; on another, cases of beer, wine, or vodka. The inventory was unpredictable, depending on what had been shipped. This was the supply thread at its simplest and weakest.

  On the fringes of the bazaar and in the streets leading to it, people squatted on the sidewalks, selling home-canned goods and fruits and vegetables grown at their dachas. Saddest of all were the families or babushkas with their household belongings spread out on blankets. They were literally selling what they owned—clothes, pots, pans, kitchen utensils, personal memorabilia—to survive. This was the supply thread at its most desperate.

  FIGURE 3.1 Uzbek bread stand in Osh

  FIGURE 3.2 Kyrgyz komuz player at Osh bazaar, Bishkek

  FIGURE 3.3 Consumer electronics aisle at Osh bazaar, Bishkek

  FIGURE 3.4 Decanting cooking oil into soda bottles at Osh bazaar, Bishkek

  FIGURE 3.5 Shirdaks for sale at Osh bazaar, Bishkek

  Stephanie and I adopted a simple shopping rule: if we saw an item and we either needed or liked it, we bought it because we might never see it again. One Sunday (the main market day) in November 1996 at the Alamedin bazaar illustrates the buy-it-when-you-see-it principle. We began outside the bazaar proper in the hardware section where people lay out sheets, blankets, and newspapers with new and used car tires, batteries, radiators, alternators, bicycles, hand tools, electrical, plumbing and gas fittings, nuts, bolts, screws, and nails. We bought a drain hose for our arthritic washing machine, which had been dripping on the bathroom floor for two months, then a pair of slippers, some chopsticks, and a small, sharp, hand-forged cleaver. We made one babushka happy by buying her entire inventory—three small rag rugs. She immediately packed up and headed home, presumably to make some more. The catch of the day was a collection of commemorative lapel pins. I’d seen people selling these pins, issued in the Soviet era to mark many occasions, including holidays and sporting events. With the Soviet Union gone, I figured they were worth collecting. One woman had a large collection pinned to two worn red wall hangings with a faded picture of Lenin. She was asking one som (5 cents) for each pin. It was going to take too long to select those I wanted, so I went for a bulk purchase. How much for the whole collection of almost three hundred pins, plus the wall hangings? Although it’s traditional to bargain, the price was so low that it seemed mean-spirited to haggle.

  The supply thread included recycling. Bishkek did not have a city recycling program, and any public appeals to reduce waste and protect the environment would have likely fallen on deaf ears. People recycled because it saved money, and because there was often no alternative. You couldn’t buy some items such as milk and cream at the bazaar or on the street unless you brought your own container. Beer, soda, and milk bottles were returned for a refund. Empty glass and plastic bottles, some retrieved from dumpsters, were resold at the bazaars. Tin cans were used as planters. Fast f
ood such as samsa, piroshki, and roasted sunflower seeds came wrapped in scrap paper torn from a ledger or an old textbook. Once we were rewarded for our volunteer editing for the Kyrgyzstan Chronicle, the weekly English-language newspaper, with 30 kilos of onions. One of the newspaper’s advertisers was going through a liquidity crisis and had settled the bill with half a truckload of onions. We wondered how to store them. Our Russian teacher, Galina, said that Russian women keep old stockings around for such contingencies. Stephanie pulled out some old runny pantyhose; we filled them full of onions and hung them from a line on the balcony. Galina was impressed. “You’re a good Russian woman,” she told Stephanie.

  It’s almost a cliché to say that you can buy anything at the bazaar, including a few things that probably should not be for sale, such as hard drugs, Kalashnikovs, and samogon, the Russian moonshine, which, depending on the vintage, chemical composition, and distilling process can give you a warm and fuzzy feeling, leave you with a nasty hangover, or kill you. Unregulated, questionable or illegal activities usually took place on the fringes of the bazaar. At weekends, an informal sobachiy (dog) bazaar was held in a field by a creek, a couple of blocks from the Osh bazaar. Dogs of all breeds and sizes were on sale, no questions asked about pedigree or shots. There were litters of puppies in the trunks of cars; others peeped out from under the coats of their owners. The seamy side of the sobachiy bazaar was down on the creek bed where dog fights were held; crowds gathered along the creek wall to watch and place their bets. Dogfighting was illegal, but the police and market officials quietly let the fights go on.