Unsolved Mysteries of Kyrgyzstan

We took a bit of a breather in the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek after many consecutive days travelling or hiking in the mountains. It was pretty much capital city stuff: looking at monuments, walking in parks, visiting an art gallery and the museums, eating a few meals for which no sheep had to die and (finally!) getting a decent cup of coffee.

The State Museum threw up a question or two. Like…

What do you get for the extra money?

Just like in Uzbekistan, we were charged the tourist price, (5 times the locals’ rate) and then found no signs or labels at all in Latin script. “Don’t be such a bleating tourist, Jim”, I hear you shout, “Get over yourself and learn the Cyrillic script or just make do with looking at the stuff!”

Why do they keep all that Lenin hero worship stuff?

We got the usual prehistory, followed by the nomadic 7th to 18th centuries, strong on yurts, saddles, milking kit, weapons, etc., understandably non-existent on cities, architecture and irrigation systems. Then the period of Tsarist Russian colonisation 1860 to 1917. Great photos of Kyrgyz nomads, Russian settlement and a reasonably well-presented collection of objects and documents.

Every ceiling in the building is painted, on an enormous scale, with a representation of events in the unfolding Bolshevik revolution from 1905 until the Red triumph in the civil war by about 1926. Everyone therefore spends half the time staring straight up, mouths open, partly in awe at the technical achievement of the wonderful painting, partly at the sheer weirdness of the pictures. It isn’t easy, you know, depicting the noble union of worker, peasant and intellectual, all instantaneously enlightened by reading the first issue of Pravda, around the revolutionary programme of the 3rd International , in a strictly realist style.

So the museum is stuck with the ceiling, whatever the current take might be on all that Soviet stuff. It might, however, have been a policy decision to leave all the cult of Lenin stuff where it is. There are enormous statues, busts and pictures of the bossy old fart everywhere you look. The view I took after an afternoon in the appalling Museum of the History of the Uzbek people in Tashkent is that possibly no-one has yet summoned up the energy to kick out the great backlog of official Soviet exhibits—perhaps it’s all just what they got left with in 1991 and so there it still sits thanks to Apathy and Inertia – those two influential curators.

What’s happened to Joseph Stalin?

But there’s something much harder to forgive, or understand. In neither Tashkent nor Bishkek is there one single, solitary image of Joseph Stalin. Nor, as far as I can tell, is there a single reference to enforced collective farming in the 20s and 30s. Of course, it was Soviet policy to delete Stalin from the records, as well as the profound and tragic consequences of rural collectivisation. These huge gaps must be a Soviet legacy, along with the Leninabilia, the awesome and ridiculous ceiling, the disappearance of Trotsky and more surprisingly even Khrushchev from the record. But you’d think there would be some effort in these now independent nations to at least refer to Stalin, who held complete power of life and death over every single Uzbek and Kyrgyz for nearly 30 years. The war leader who, amongst other things, sent a million men from these parts to die at Stalingrad and in other battles.

As for the collective farming policy, it more or less abolished the Kyrgyz way of life.

What went on here in Soviet times?

A friend we made near Lake Issyk-Kol told us about his father and grandfather, horsemen and shepherds in the mountains. Before collectivisation, the family led a nomadic life with their animals. Afterwards, grandfather continued to work as a shepherd, but now alone, as did our friend’s father. The animals were all deemed to be owned by the state; so they worked for wages paid by the state. The rest of the family lived and worked on the collective farm.

We saw photos taken by Soviet anthropologists in the 1950s of villages which now had names like “Collective Farm Maxim Gorky 17” or “Collective Farm Lenin 33”. Imagine using such a name to describe where you live!

The physical structure of the collective farm system is still very apparent in some rural areas of both Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, especially in the lowlands. They’re like square suburban blocks, or slums, many of them, stuck in the countryside. Barracks or prisons at first glance, because the dwellings are so uniform. They haven’t, like real villages, grown over the years, with buildings of different ages and sizes, organic focal points like mosques or tea shops and straggly additions here and there. Luckily, many places have since regained a more human style of organisation.

Whatever became of 30,000 sheep?

Our friend told us that when the state- owned animals in his village/collective farm were returned to the locals in 1991, 6,000 sheep were shared out. Local shepherds estimated there should have been around 36,000. The rest, apparently, were sold off by born-again capitalists who now owned most of the shares in the privatised livestock business. Guess who this new breed of entrepreneurs were? Yes, none other than the Communist bosses who’d been managing the collective on behalf of the people just a few months earlier!

Does Stalin get a mention in school?

Back in the museum, I was wondering if the middle decades of the 20th century would get a mention and whether Stalin and collectivisation were taught in schools history lessons. Bearing in mind the ethnic problems in the South, It wouldn’t hurt for all Kyrgyz citizens, Uzbek and Kyrgyz alike, to know that Stalin deliberately designed the borders to break up the ethnic groups amongst the Central Asian republics. The reasoning was that resistance to Soviet communism on nationalist lines would be that much harder to organise. Then an interesting exhibit began to grab my attention.

What did happen in Bishkek on 7th April 2010?

Five columns showed large photographs of mostly young men, 88 in all. They were very ordinary photos, some family snapshots, some probably from ID cards, captioned only with a name. Perhaps 25 were of older men (all were men) one or two in uniform. After this came dozens of photos of a series of demonstrations and confrontations. These had all been taken recently; some were dated 7/04/10, the date I knew, of the demos that led to the downfall of the last president, Bakiev. I began to feel shock, a sort of frozen fascination.

The pictures had mostly been taken in the square right outside the museum where I stood. There was one of soldiers taking aim at the crowd from the steps of the Government building on the other side of the street, another of a prone man in a Kyrgyz hat with a bloody hole where his left eye should have been— the cloud over his other eye showed clearly that he was dead.

Another part of the exhibition was devoted to the personal memorabilia of each of the 88 who died. There were school photos of the young ones, some with their mates or brothers and sisters and of middle aged men with their kids. There were surprising items such as medals, some from Soviet times, that had,perhaps, been the pride and joy of one or two of the older ones. There was a train driver’s union card; there was evidence of peoples’ military service (no trouble-making casual radicalism there, you’d think).There were ties, hats, tickets to football matches, a dead teenager’s skateboard, school reports.

Why was this memorial given such a prominent place in Bishkek’s main museum?

The feelings elicited in me were of a different order than any I can remember having in a museum before. Those who turn up at a demo do so for so many different reasons. Obviously youthful idealism, some for the excitement, some for very serious and personal reasons. Fed up with corruption, hypocrisy and the manipulation of the long-awaited democracy, the older ones were probably well aware it could turn out very risky. The almost intimate encounter with the dead was successfully realised. Everyone in the room was transfixed, Kyrgyz or not. My tears started, but were held back by the sense that my emotions might seem pretty cheap in the eyes of the bereaved or those who had run the same risks as the victims.

Of course, in a way, it’s just as much a piece of propaganda as the painted ceiling and the erasing of Stalinism. It did, though, honour and value the individuals. In this respect, at least, it’s pretty much the opposite of the Soviet approach.

This was only one of a number of ways that this city and country have disclosed themselves to me way beyond what I was expecting. I’m getting more food for thought than I had bargained for when we first looked at the map and realised we’d have to go through somewhere or other between the fabled silk route cities of Uzbekistan and the Chinese border. And the somewhere or other was apparently called Kyrgyzstan.