Category Archives: Society

I haven’t done an update on Kyrgyzstan in several days.  While things seemed to have calmed in the southern part of the country, tensions are high, the humanitarian crisis is deep, and the political outcomes are uncertain.

Two questions have been occupying most commentators:  Why the violence, or, specifically why didn’t we see it coming? and What are the international ramifications, particularly for the US and Russia?  I’m personally less interested in the second question, and for the most part discussion on this has ranged from the ludicrous (for how ludicrous see Michael Hancock’s undressing on Registan), the paranoiac and uninformed, the all too typical, to the regurgitated.  Basically, I’ll leave it to the foreign policy wоnks to untangle this mess.  I just hope to hear something new as they do.

The “why” question, however, is the thing that seems ..read more

From Ferghana.ru.

h/t Lyndon.

The more I educate myself about events in Kyrgyzstan, it’s becoming apparent that people who actually know something about the place are skeptical of the “longstanding ethnic strife” narrative.  Michael Anderson, a Dutch journalist who covers the region, put it this way in an interview with Ferghana.ru., “Unfortunately, Western media fall back on stereotypes, describing events in Osh such as “interethnic violence” and “interethnic problems”, although you and I know that that is not really what is happening.’  He went on to add this: “I am ashamed that western media pay so little attention and produce such poor coverage. This is bad. Another bad thing is the constant use of stereotypes – often wrong.”  For an example, see this piece on Slate which goes with the deep seeded ethnic strife thesis.

Not all are taken with the marketable stereotypes ..read more

Kyrgyzstan, the small Central Asian country which sprung onto the global scene in April, boggling the minds of American news anchors, has returned.  What I then called the “red revolution” has turned redder as ethnic violence swept through the southern city of Osh and Jalal-Abad this weekend.  On Thursday, marauding gangs began rampaging, attacking Uzbeks, burning government buildings, banks, cafes, and even an Uzbek theater first in Osh and then in Jalal-Abad.  Uzbeks locked themselves in their homes as rumors spread they would be killed on the street.  Uzbeks, being the minority, fled over the border in the tens of thousands into Uzbekistan.  Interim president Roza Otunbayeva declared a state of emergency and countrywide curfew, dispatched troops with shoot-to-kill orders, pleaded to Russia for help, and blamed supporters of ousted president Kurmanbek Bakiev for the violence.  President ..read more

Contrary to what most people think, I see few signs of the neo-Sovietization of Russia.  What I have observed, however, is a return to Russian traditionalism, even a kind of re-embrace of Tsarist symbolism.  I’ve noticed this in several areas of Russian daily life: Christmas cards with the recently canonized last Romanov family, icons of the last Tsar sold in kiosks, large portraits of Petr Stolypin and Sergei Witte at the entrance of the International University, and book after book reevaluating the late Tsarist period, newly published volumes of Stolypin’s collected works, and the memoirs of not only Witte, but the diaries and biographies of princes and princesses in bookstores.

Let us also not forget the growing assertiveness of the Orthodox Church in cultural and political life, or the fact that Dmitri Medvedev’s inauguration looked like a Tsarist ..read more

Russia’s Far East has always been an unruly place.  Tsars and Communists alike dumped its criminals and politicals there.  In the interwar period it was a hot bed for lawlessness and banditry, where gangs and holdouts of the White Army made life difficult for the new Soviet state.  There is one historical artifact that always stands out in my mind when it comes to the Russia’s Far East.  I tend to give it to my students so they can get a flavor of the heady days of the Russian Revolution.  The document is an anonymous letter to Lenin dated 15 January 1918.  After lambasting Lenin for not keeping his promise to deliver “peace, bread, land, and liberty in three days’ time” the complainant ended with this warning: “If you’ve picked up the reins [of power] then go ahead and drive, and if you can’t, then, honey, you can take a ..read more