Every day it becomes more apparent that Putin is losing his prestige and bullying fear-hold on the near abroad. When in a multipolar world one of the poles weakens a geostrategic ripple effect realigns the power contours far and wide. Local conflicts are now breaking out anew as they did after the Soviet collapse. This column has repeatedly observed that Central Asia will shake loose as the Kremlin bogs down in Ukraine. Conversely, the more the Stans grow independent, the more will the Kremlin panic over its paralysis in Ukraine, not least because it spells the end of empire all the way to China – a blunder Putin’s nationalist supporters won’t soon forgive. Central Asia is now the determinant of the global future: if allowed to grow rich and influential the region will distract China from Taiwan and Russia from Europe, putting pressure on both behemoths and challenging them from their blind spots, especially if trade connections are made to the wider world.
But first quick a recap of conditions when Putin announced mass mobilization. President Tokayev of Kazakhstan has ruled that his country will not break sanctions and will accept any draft-dodgers from Russia. Armenia and Azerbaijan go at it again while US Speaker Pelosi shows the American flag personally in Moscow’s back yard by visiting Armenia, a hitherto unthinkable event. Tajikistan and Kyrgystan also go at it again in something more than a border war. Meanwhile as earnest of the region’s building significance two global conferences took place there recently. In Kazakhstan’s capital, retro-named Astana again, the world’s religious leaders met September 13 – 15 for a conference attended by the pope at the VII World Religions Congress. (The full title is Congress of The Leaders of World and Traditional Religions.) Almost simultaneously, in Samarkand, Uzbekistan’s ancient civilizational center, the Shanghai Co-operation Organization (SCO) held its summit – where Putin was often shunned and virtually humiliated by other leaders. They individually and repeatedly kept him waiting in front of the cameras as he always did to them in the past.
In real terms, China signed a deal with Uzbekistan and Kyrgyztan to link rail lines through to Afghanistan. The first containers left Kashgar in Western China (East Turkistan) on September 13 on a two-week journey that used to take several months. Other lines are being built that will use trans-Caspian routes optionally excluding both Russia and Iran. And these are not exclusively or even mainly for Chinese through-trade but ways in which Central Asia can access European and global markets while bypassing problem countries (including Pakistan). The trans-Caspian route, for example, arrives at Turkish ports via Turkmenistan, then Azerbaijan or Georgia. In the future, the world will hear a great deal about this budding trade artery aka The Middle Corridor or TITR (Trans-Caspian International Trade Route.)
Here we see the specter of a pan-Turkic alliance that can strategically challenge the embottling grip of Moscow on the region. (And equally tempt the Turkic Uyghurs of China’s Sinjiang to dream of uniting with their cousins in Central Asia.) Pan-Turkism is a nightmare that has haunted the Russian imagination since the early Czarist conquest of the ‘Stans. Under Putin, it may come to pass. If you consider the idea remote or fanciful or overblown consider the Mongolian equivalent, now also rearing its head. The most respected statesman of (independent) Mongolia, the former Prime Minister and President, just made a speech appealing to his ethnic cousins within the Russian Federation not to fight in Ukraine. The Buryats, Tuva and Kalmyks being disproportionately dragooned into serving as cannon fodder – he offered them asylum.
A number of observers commenting on the Samarkand SCO summit and Moscow’s fading leverage prematurely announced the advent of China’s domination of the region instead. This seems misguided, to say the least. The Stans are not about to accept one hegemon controlling their fate in place of another. Which is why they’re reaching out in multiple separate directions – to China, to Israel, to the Turkic continuum, while still engaging with Russia. Meanwhile, Kazakhstan has signed a security understanding with Turkey, and Uzbekistan has done the same according to a top Uzbek official interviewed by this columnist on a recent trip to that country – meaning weapons, military advisors and intelligence information which hitherto came only from Moscow. What most readers won’t realize is the extraordinary sea-change all this implies in a vast chunk of the earth’s landmass.
Until very recently, the last five years perhaps, Moscow effectively exercised a stranglehold on the ability of the Stans to trade with or profit from contact with the world. Uzbekistan is literally the most landlocked country on the globe. Kazakhstan’s oil had to go through Russian pipelines to reach the world – that is to say, Moscow determined the price and volume, and therefore Kazakhstan’s revenues and rate of growth. Russia finally allowed pipelines to China, but nowhere else. This meant, for example, that industrial production (pace of development) and national income was throttled up or down according to Moscow’s wishes. Military supplies and security strength also depended on Russia. All that is changing, and faster now due to the Kremlin’s increasing loss of prestige, thanks to the indomitable Ukrainians.
On the recent trip to Uzbekistan, one that included meeting Bokharan (aka Bukharian) Jewish leaders from the US and Israel, it was abundantly clear how determined are the Uzbeks to open to the world. And how, accordingly, they are striving to facilitate business and investment from abroad. The potential pitfalls seemed self-evident, same as the traditional problems found in so many post-Soviet states and especially those in this region – questions of transparency, rule of law, oligarchic forces and the like. In one conference, formerly-local-now-emigre Bukharan Jewish businessmen were able to address ministers and officials bluntly on such issues. They asked about guarantees for their possible investments – how could they be sure that the state, local oligarchs or nepotistic forces wouldn’t commandeer any businesses the emigres might build. They were handed printed matter itemizing the legal reforms that addressed such concerns but, just as importantly, the officials each painstakingly and earnestly gave them personal assurances that they stood behind the guarantees.
Predictable and unconvincing, a skeptic might say, but to an outside observer there was no doubting the zeal and sincerity of Uzbek intentions to bring in business. Most notably, the attending foreign-based Bukharan Jewish businessmen were, in turn, mollified, enthused and determined to participate. You could sense, manifestly, deeper forces at play than merely those of legal guarantees or money, to do with historical memory and homecoming. A word here about Uzbekistan’s ‘Bukharan Jewish’ community, a term coined by early European visitors to the Emirate of Bokhara, though local Jews lived all over the Uzbek-Tajik area and spoke Judeo-Persian. During the Soviet Jewry emigrations of the 1970s and 80s, most of Uzbekistan’s Jewish community fled to Israel or the US, forming vigorous emigre communities there. But this is a community that abided and prospered in the now-Uzbekistan since the Babylonian exile, literally thousands of years.
They served as the financiers of the ancient Silk Road, being expert at upfront and transfer-financing in a far-flung peripatetic trade. Even after the Soviet exodus many of them, often actually from Samarkand, never lost that sense of belonging to Uzbekistan. What they knew and remember is the religious and ethnic tolerance, traditional and long-established at the hub of the Silk Road, despite the repressive Soviet conditions. After all, anti-Semitism was rife in other parts of the Soviet Union. These days perhaps their most audible single voice comes through the New York publication, The Bukharian Times. a weekly color-print newspaper in Russian dedicated to the community and its extensions worldwide. The editor, Rafael Nektal, as colorful as his paper, is a tireless advocate of re-engagement with Uzbekistan. And indeed he seems to be making headway, so much so that an official re-opening of an old Jewish cemetery in provincial Kokhand gathered in Rabbis from New York and around the world, some not even Bukharan, and included a ceremonial mini-Uzbek-armed-forces display of welcome with twirling rifles and chants.
An additional factor enhanced the benign nature of the historical Uzbek-Jewish mutual experience. During World War II, Moscow transferred large amounts of industry, personnel and intellectual expertise to the Uzbek zone from the European theater to be safe from Nazi depredations. Many were Jewish, some even under the political shadow of being too intellectual or questioning, therefore in semi-exile. The Uzbeks received them warmly, as an infusion of development, as fellow sufferers under the Stalin-Hitler world of horrors, and above all as a puncturing of the vacuum imposed on the area since the Czars. That memory of mutual tolerance still actuates Jewish exiles. Equally, it resonates among Uzbeks because their Jewish community embodied a valued cosmopolitanism associated with the centuries-long Silk Road era, one that the area’s general population still feels in its bones. Contact with the wider world was an essential part of everyone’s identity. Until the Czars, then the Soviets, then the post-Soviet Karimov period imposed isolation. Things have improved radically under the current leader Mirziyoyev.
The region’s history of relations between faiths has been sui generis, utterly different from anywhere else in the world. Afghanistan aside, that is, which suffered a separate experience as the war-front, first in the Great Game, then in the Cold War, then the Soviet invasion-and-retreat with its Islamic fundamentalist outcome. The other Stans largely inherited a Genghizite (Mongolian) and Turco-Mongolian religious curiosity and semi-neutrality (however bloody their actions in forging empires). Shamanism endured into the 20th century, mixing with Zoroastrian residues to create, over the centuries, a kind of mystical syncretic Islam now known as Sufism. A far more tolerant version of the faith than elsewhere. The Czars left it largely untouched. Hence the great outflow of such ideas westward in the 1920s via once world-famous metaphysical savants like Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. Stalin suppressed all faiths equally thereby reinforcing their mutual goodwill.
This environment where Moslem, Jew and Christian lived amicably for centuries (Uzbekistan even had a large Mennonite community) is making a come-back. Hence the World Religions Congress occurring in Kazakhstan this time. The delegates’ aspirations included such soothing official declarations as the wish to respect the “richness of religions and cultural diversity” while “condemning the creation of hotspots of interstate and international tension in the world” – a sure dig at Moscow as are a number of the other declarations. But especially intriguing was the little-known fact that the Congress was financially underwritten by a remarkable Israeli-Kazakh businessman and philanthropist named Alexander Mashkevitch. He has also been responsible for financing synagogues, churches and yes mosques in the country. Read the sentence again. Now that’s something you certainly won’t see everyday. In fact, not at all. But the Stans are a different world.
Reading between the lines one detects the overall message of the region’s determination to progress in harmony without interference from foreign forces stoking disunity. Let us not forget the widespread January rioting in Almaty that claimed over 200 lives. The authorities blamed it on outsiders, a standard political response you might think, which might this time be true. There was and is a pervasive feeling that Moscow possibly stoked the disturbances, as if to show it can destabilize the situation any time if the country doesn’t stay dependent. Unquestionably, there was also a coup attempt from within by possibly the old guard. Cleverly, the Kazakh government called in Russian peacekeepers to quell the disturbances and sent them back briskly after order was restored. Since then Moscow has faced consistent pushback from new-era Kazakh President Tokayev in public to any noises of overweening power emanating out of the Kremlin, especially after the Ukraine invasion. The Uzbeks have not been so bluntly anti-Putin. They do have over a million migrant workers toiling in Russia and sending money back home. Nevertheless, the Uzbek government did issue a stern warning to those citizens not to enlist in the Russian military as did the Kyrgyz authorities.
With such threats of destabilization from abroad directed at the Stans, it’s no good expecting a blinding overnight rush to Western standards of democratization, free speech and human rights. We have seen what Moscow does to any former part of the empire attempting it. No, the future seems focused on a kind of Singapore model, stability and prosperity first, openings to outside investment, education of the population and the like while democratic processes kick in by stages (as indeed happened in Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan). The approach to religion gives a clue. One of the declarations in the Almaty Congress calls for “recognizing the value of education and spirituality for personal and inter-religious development”. In other words, social conservatism, discipline, family, piety, industriousness etc first, freedom and untrammeled self-expression after.
The great fear of destabilization comes not just from the imperialist hegemons roundabout but equally from extremist religious forces equally close by – Afghanistan and Iran for example. Uzbekistan had those terrors with violent salafist incidents during Karimov; he responded by self-isolating the country and imposing steely controls within. The Soviet era stifling of faith had created a vacuum of ignorance into which extreme doctrines could steal in and take hold. The new approach now by both the Uzbeks and Kazakhs is to cultivate religion in the populace from early on of the more moderate indigenous variety so outside elements can’t infiltrate explosive alien ideas. In a largely pan-Islamic region, no doubt the goal is also to re-introduce the citizens to their own traditions to foster identity, separate from the erasure and cultural indoctrination formerly imposed by the Soviets. Religion offers a solid, if risky, way forward. As does language – hence the gradual conversion to Latin script.
It’s easy to aim for the Singapore model in all its interlocking layers but much harder to achieve. Transparency, meritocracy, uninterrupted increase of prosperity for the entire populace. Too often, the actual outcome is wealth associated with political power and little for anyone else plus rule of law only for the elite. Kazakhs and Uzbeks both endured exactly such conditions in the Nazarbayev and Karimov regimes respectively. So did outside investors. Since then, both countries are making great strides forward under new leaders. Corruption under the previous regime is being prosecuted severely. Karimov’s eldest daughter still serves time for her power abuses in Uzbekistan. A nephew of Nazarbayev has just earned a six-year sentence for embezzlement in Kazakhstan.
There are, nevertheless, all manner of pitfalls. Examples like the ‘Tristangate’ case in Kazakhstan don’t help foreign investor confidence. Back in 2010, under then Prime Minister Massimov, Nazarbayev’s henchman and Secret
There are additional pitfalls. Modulating freedom of speech is a thankless undertaking, something that plagues even Western countries (cf Snowden et al). But it gets even harder while outside forces breathe down your neck. In Kazakhstan, there’s the extra complication of internal struggles between the pro-West Tokayev reformers and the entrenched Nazarbayev/Massimov old guard faction. Arbitrary police harassment of a foreign journalist at home, as allegedly happened to author and Kazakhstan expert Joanna Lillis recently in Almaty, is not a good look The country gets blamed as does the current administration. No one notices that it might be part of a domestic power struggle in which one side is trying to embarrass the other, a kind of hidden shot across the bows. Some allege that law enforcement is still riddled with Massimov’s people.
All that said, the Stans are hovering on the brink of a horizon-wide renaissance, the first intoxicating moment of real independence in over two centuries. On the whole, they are handling it with nuanced wisdom, especially Uzbekistan as the leading populous central hub. The Silk Road is about to be reborn. The benefits will accrue not just to the region but across the globe and specifically to the western bloc – if they have the foresight to stand behind it.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/melikkaylan/2022/09/27/as-central-asias-stans-break-free-moscows-empire-dissolves-if-the-west-helps-heres-how-the-world-benefits/