Chaos, Violence, Dynasty: Politics and Islam in Central Asia

Preface

ix Mine is not the first study of post-Soviet Central Asian politics. I have benefited greatly from first-generation comparativists who blazed paths intellectually and, no less important, institutionally in their study of post-Soviet regime change. That I break from many of these scholars and, rather than focusing on transition and democratization, explore those causal factors that produce substantive variations in patronage politics does not mean that I reject the many valuable insights these scholars have offered. In chapter 1, I explore these insights in greater detail and offer my alternative approach to post-Soviet Central Asian regime change. Chapter 2 turns to the Soviet patronage model and its evolution from Lenin to Gorbachev. Here I begin with the perennial challenge confronting Central Asia’s would-be rulers: establishing centralized control in distant lands. A key insight that emerges from chapter 2’s analysis of governance and attempted governance in Central Asia is that attempts at transformative rule—from Stalin’s attempt to create a “surrogate proletariat” through unveiling campaigns to Khrushchev’s attempts to transform Central Asian agriculture through the so-called Virgin Lands program—have either failed or have been prohibitively costly. In contrast, less interventionist policies of patronage politics and proxy rule, strategies Lenin and Brezhnev pursued, met with comparative success. This pattern of success and failure held for Gorbachev as well. His attempts to transform Central Asia during the early perestroika years brought Moscow little increased leverage. Critically important for the future of Central Asia, though, Preface McGlinch_pages.indd 9 8/2/11 3:44 PM x Preface Gorbachev’s interventions—and in the case of Kyrgyzstan, noninterventions—did prompt the emergence of markedly different patterns of elite unity and disunity in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. Perestroika unsettled state and society relations in all three Soviet republics in the late 1980s, and tragically the economic uncertainties that perestroika produced led to deadly ethnic riots in Kazakhstan (1986), Uzbekistan (1989), and Kyrgyzstan (1990). The Central Communist Party leadership cleaned up the mess it created in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, carefully choreographing Nursultan Nazarbaev’s and Islam Karimov’s replacement of perestroika figureheads and the return to indigenized Central Asian rule. Gorbachev and the Communist Party, for reasons that had little to do with Central Asia, did not step in to manage Kyrgyzstan’s leadership crisis in 1990. This decision led to the fragmentation of the Kyrgyz political elite—a legacy that continues to shape governance in Kyrgyzstan today. The Kyrgyz, Uzbek, and Kazakh case studies in chapters 3, 4, and 5 respectively explore how these inherited patterns of elite unity and disunity have fared in the post-Soviet context. Chapter 3 demonstrates how Kyrgyzstan’s inherited legacy of a small and fragmented political elite has led to political chaos and executive turnover. Chapter 3 also explores why, despite the relative ease with which the Kyrgyz political elite can overthrow the executive, President Askar Akaev was able to hold on to power for fifteen years, while his successor, President Kurmanbek Bakiev, was ousted after only five years. I argue that the shifting nature of financial flows to Kyrgyzstan has played a critical role in shaping variations in executive tenure. Before 2001 the bulk of resources available to the Kyrgyz executive came from international aid. Critically, Akaev could not readily capture this aid. What he could do, though, was place his supporters in positions of power— in ministries and organizations that were the targets of international aid—so that these supporters in turn might benefit from foreign assistance. Paradoxically, this diffuse nature of economic and political reform aid to Kyrgyzstan helped Akaev maintain authoritarian rule throughout the 1990s. Following the post– September 11, 2001, opening of the U.S. air base just outside the Kyrgyz capital, however, the executive suddenly had access to readily exploitable economic rents—to lucrative fuel supply contracts that he and his family could control. Akaev, and later Bakiev, began outright expropriating these new U.S. government financial flows to Kyrgyzstan, and this brazen expropriation was met with elite revolt. As I argue in chapters 4 and 5, Uzbek and Kazakh elites are considerably less likely to challenge executive authority than are their counterparts in Kyrgyzstan. This comparative Uzbek and Kazakh elite passivity owes directly to the fact that Karimov and Nazarbaev, in contrast to Akaev, began the post-Soviet period with McGlinch_pages.indd 10 8/2/11 3:44 PM Preface...