Politics, Identity and Education in Central Asia
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Politics, Identity and Education in Central Asia

Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan

Pınar Akçalı, Cennet Engin-Demir, Pınar Akçalı, Cennet Engin-Demir

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Politics, Identity and Education in Central Asia

Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan

Pınar Akçalı, Cennet Engin-Demir, Pınar Akçalı, Cennet Engin-Demir

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About This Book

Focusing on the areas of politics, identity and education, this book looks at some of the most pressing and challenging issues that Kyrgyzstan faces in the post-Soviet era. It argues that Kyrgyzstan is challenged with oscillations between the old and the new on the one hand, and domestic and international on the other.

The book analyses the process of post-Soviet transition in today's Kyrgyzstan by focusing on the political elites, some of the major identity problems and educational issues. It discusses how Kyrgyzstan's first president in the post-Soviet era had already been an exceptional leader even prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union in terms of his democratic and liberal tendencies. The book goes on to look at how identity is a major factor in the country, shaped to a large extent by genealogical factors and patron-client mechanisms on the one hand, and religious considerations on the other. Finally, it highlights how education has been perceived as a very influential agent of socialization that develops not only literacy and other skills, but also common attitudes and values that are considered essential to any society.

By evaluating these three areas, the book argues that Kyrgyzstan cannot isolate itself from the demands, priorities and pressures of international actors, which sometimes are in conflict with the country's domestic conditions. It is of interest to students and scholars of Asian Studies, Politics and International Relations.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2013
ISBN
9781135627676

Part I

Politics

1Patterns of elite consolidation and rivalry in Kyrgyzstan between 1960 and 20101

Irina Morozova
Kyrgyzstan is often characterized as a “failing” or “failed” state, revealing conflict potential for further disintegration along territorial and clan lines. In 1990, social and economic development in the Kyrgyz SSR was not sufficient to meet the challenge of increased rural migration into the cities, causing social deprivation. Against such a background of a collapsing economy and social deprivation, ethnic diversity was exploited to divide rather than consolidate several communities living in the country, and bloody clashes occurred among Uzbek, Kyrgyz and Slavic populations living in the south of the republic, specifically in Osh and its surrounding territories. Despite a number of pessimistic prognoses, further escalation of ethnic conflict did not take place, although the drastic systemic change that came with the USSR's disintegration and dismantling of socialism in December 1991 caused disorientation and apathy among the people, and the socio-economic ground for conflict escalation remained acute and even deepened throughout the 1990s. Against this background and the sharp competition for resources, institutional voids and coup d’états became typical for Kyrgyzstan's political life in the first decade of the new millennium. In June 2010, violence again erupted in the cities of Osh, Jalalabad and Bishkek. Ethnicization of the conflict was encouraged by major input from various international and local media agents, who suggested that ethnic differentiation had been the main cause of the conflict.2 The subsequent alarming predictions of a further increase in bloody clashes “on an ethnic basis” proved to be baseless, as the legitimizing process of the new government went ahead peacefully. However, the large of number of deaths and victims and the brutality of the conflict deepened polarization between the Uzbek and the Kyrgyz, the two major groups in Osh, and increased the probabilities of the continuously discussed and imagined disintegration of the country. In people's narratives, the massacre of June 2010 is imaged as the “war” and is often dangerously justified by one side of the conflict against the other as a struggle for social space.3 As long as three specific conditions continue to exist in Kyrgyzstan, the possibilities for further escalation of the conflict remain acute: (1) Kyrgyzstan's current situation in the middle of a complex multi-level competition among various global, trans-regional and trans-local actors, (2) persistence of social polarization and deprivation and (3) the reproduction of memories of the “war”.
Historically having been largely dependent on the Soviet budget, after proclaiming independence, Kyrgyzstan, a country with few resources, was in need of foreign assistance to cope with its collapsing economy and a drastic fall in living standards in the post-Soviet era. The adoption of IMF reforms in 1991 led Kyrgyzstan to experience shock price liberalization and hyperinflation, and soon the country found itself in the list of states with high levels of poverty. In July 1998, the country became the first of the former Soviet republics to acquire membership of the WTO. The Kyrgyzstani government was forced not only to let the international markets, financial institutions and companies in, but also to open the public domain to international human rights organizations and various NGOs. With a high degree of interference from the external powers and a vivid coverage of its domestic affairs by national as well as international media, Kyrgyzstan had become one of the most favourite transition cases to be studied.
The overthrow of President Askar Akaev with the so-called Tulip Revolution in March 2005 was perceived by other Central Asian governments (and certain groups in China and Russia) as a destabilizing and threatening power transition scheme and a turning point in the course of the economic reform process. The new president of the country, Kurmanbek Bakiev, fostered yet another privatization campaign and attempted to join the new millennium energy boom by bargaining with Kyrgyzstan's strategic resources, mainly gold, water and hydroelectricity. In April 2010 President Bakiev, accused of serious corruption and increasing his family's fortunes, had to leave his post in Bishkek as a result of civil unrest against his rule. The scenario of his removal was reminiscent of the overthrow of his predecessor Akaev.
This chapter aims to trace the continuously repeated (or reproduced) patterns of elite consolidation in Kyrgyzstan before and after independence. Viewing the formation of elites within a broader social and socio-cultural context, as well as the changes in the international environment, it is possible to trace the continuity of power models and to depict how rapid social transformation happens in periods of crisis (such as the social disarray during the time of perestroika and after the disintegration of the USSR). When exogenously generated change causes disruption to social systems by breaking traditional economic ties and social networks, and threatens certain groups with marginalization or elimination, the existing normative social order launches mechanisms of resistance. Social systems undergo a process of restructuralization in which certain latent elements, such as a basic mode of production and communal institutions, including social hierarchies, albeit modified, are preserved. As such, the establishment of a new political elite accompanies a radical social transformation and both individual and collective actors search for new alliances and networks.
For the purposes of this chapter, a distinction is made between the elite groups in power that directly control and/or participate in the process of accumulation and redistribution of wealth within the society on the one hand, and other competing groups that also seek legitimacy from various sources, including ethnic, national and religious identities on the other. I focus on the ruling elites and analyse their claim for additional, non-essentialist sources of power that include, above all, noble lineages, kinship and various local identities. I argue that in a crisis period of radical social transformation, the priority of the elites is often to manage material assets (as was the case during privatization campaigns). Thus, the chapter will focus on, first, the patterns of elite adaptation in terms of the shift from the high nomenklatura (those holding key administrative posts in the Soviet power structure) positions to the new business elite; second, the ways in which this newly transformed elite secures its access to and distribution of national resources; and, third, the ability or strength of the elites in centralizing resource redistribution in the country.

The legacy of the Soviet rule: formation of regional elites

Among the power-regulating schemes that have had the most impact on the current development of Central Asian political institutions and the composition of elites, the Soviet supra-legal institutions of political control and police, whose activities could not be constrained by any legal code,4 centre-periphery relations and state-party hierarchies still remain the basic factors both at the national and regional levels. The mechanisms of redistributing wealth and authority between the capital and the regions with their four-level administration structures – republic, province (oblast), region (raion) and local authorities (ail) – are either a copy or a deviation from the previous Soviet model.
During the Soviet era, the competition among the elite groups inside the Central Asian republics often went along regional lines, and, although alliances were often made at trans-regional and trans-local levels, various agents as heads of oblast and raion party committees and industrial-economic departments were reproducing rivalry by claiming or emphasizing their territorial and kinship affiliations. The centre-periphery power conflict was essential, but not structural, in Soviet Central Asian republics. The complex mosaic picture of peoples, ethnicities (or what was believed to be ethnic), migrated groups and religious elites was an object for positivist case studies of modernization with its scientific classifications applied to local communities by the Soviet policy makers (as well as by the Russian Tsarist administration in earlier periods). The already existing conflicts were not only consciously and unconsciously being escalated, but also modelled by means of socio-political and socio-economic reforms that were launched by the Soviets, and spurred social disarray in the 1920s–1930s. These reforms, on the one hand, followed the pattern of relationships that had been practised during tsarist times: outside authority, preservation of local identities and normative social order. During the first decades of Soviet rule, the new political centre in Moscow was perceived as something foreign and distant to the people at local level. On the other hand, Soviet reformist politics in Asia was based upon a stronger idea of modernization, scientific progress and internationalism, and in many ways contrasted to the tsarist policies, for instance, in relation to the indigenous population of Central Asia and the migrants from the European part of the Empire. The new social model developed by Soviet architects aimed at the construction of new social groups and identities, regardless of ethnic origins and previously existing social hierarchies. However, these goals of the Soviet reformers were never achieved. The introduction of a new taxation system by the Soviet government in the early 1920s and the land reform of 1926–1928 followed by collectivization led not only to the elimination of the formerly privileged social groups and elites, but also to the destruction of social relations and networks at grass-roots level. Analysis of the recently published documents from the political police (OGPU) archive (“Sovershenno Sekretno” 2001, 2002, 2003) shows that the reform purposely intensified social and ethnic conflict to hasten the process of formation of the new classes, while the selectiveness of the OGPU data itself reflected an attempt by the policy makers to frame the ongoing social processes as a suitable concept to continue the reform.5 In this general framework, Soviet Kyrgyzstan also became an example of a society integrated along titular-national lines in an affirmative way. The Bolsheviks locally rooted the new type of republican nationalism by promoting Kyrgyz national communist cadres and by creating the new ruling strata – the national nomenklatura.
During the first Soviet five-year plan (1928–1932) monetary aid from the centre flew to the “underdeveloped” republics, accompanied by a strong modernistic ideology. The Central Asian republican elites successfully appropriated the rhetoric of backwardness to secure special financial help (Martin 2001: 130–131). The greatest progress of korenizatsiya (affirmative indigenizing cadres) and vydvizhenie (promotion), as proved with references to archival sources by certain scholars (ibid.: 24) was achieved in that period. In 1932 the percentage of titular nationals in positions of authority increased; however, in 1933, following the immediate devastating effects of appointing unqualified cadres for the ideologically imposed policy of ethnic group representation in administration and industry, as well as Stalin's politically motivated and repressive attitude in the quick rotation of cadres, there was an evident regress once again. As the local elites also adopted and used the political lexicon of korenizatsiya in their political competition, campaigns against “local nationalism” were rapidly alternated with campaigns against “great chauvinism” that had been first launched in Central Asia by the Bolsheviks at the start of the 1920s (ibid.: 137–138).6 Thus, korenizatsiya was run not solely by the policy makers from the Soviet political centres, but was principally supported by those whom it targeted – the newly promoted local cadres, who adapted this policy to compete against each other.
Soviet plans for Central Asia were clearly of a modernizing nature and the goal of creating a communist and/or socialist society was implicit in the views of its architects, although the definitions of such a society could change, depending on the political situation. In the 1920s, it was believed that social discontent rooted in ethnic conflict had to be produced in the masses in order to stimulate the creation of new social classes.
In the early 1920s, and especially before 1924, competition among political groups within the prospective Kyrgyz SSR (Soviet Socialist Republic) resulted in some sort of regional separatism. On the one hand, there were the leaders from the Bishkek, Karakol and Naryn regions who historically had had more interactions with the Russian settlers and managed to develop better cooperation with the Soviets; on the other hand, there were groups from the south, especially from Osh, Andijan and Namangan, who considered themselves to be closer to the former “centre” – the capital of the Turkestan krai, Tashkent.7 First, an attempt was made by a group of northern communists to establish the “Mountainous Kyrgyz Oblast”, which excluded the Fergana region; later, the same people were employed to work on drafting the proposals for national delimitation within the Central Asian Bureau attached to the Russian Communist Party of Bolsheviks (RCP(b)) Central Committee. These northern communists would have preferred ceding some southern territories of the prospective Kyrgyz ASSR to Uzbekistan in order to rid themselves of political competitors. However, this could not have been accomplished, as the central concern for the Bolsheviks was to liquidate any potential for consolidation among the regional elites who lobbied for the formation of a bigger Turkestan republic (the so-called “Turkestan project”) (Haugen 2003: 117–118, 206–209; Abashin 2007: 179–195). The Fergana area was therefore “divided” between the Uzbek SSR, Tajik ASSR and Kyrgyz ASSR. The Kyrgyz republic was finally mapped in its present borders, encompassing Issyk-Kul, parts of Semirechie, Tianshan and the Fergana valley, as well as adjacent mountainous areas. Immediately after the delimitation and establishment of the republican capital in Frunze (previously Pishpek) the northern groups found themselves in a more privileged position in comparison with the southerners and the authorities in Frunze were in charge of economic planning for the southern regions of the newly formed republic.8
Soviet rule and external control from Moscow introduced centralized structures9 into the newly formed Central Asian republics, as a result of which some regional and local groups gained better bargaining positions in terms of participating in decision-making processes and redistribution of resources as compared to others. The territorial-administrative reforms were targeted either at making smaller administrative units or re-merging them into larger units – the policy that was closely connected with the regular course of new elite formation.
The key line in Soviet cadres policy was the creation of a native political elite and consequent integration of wider sections of the local population into the new political system. In the decades following the Second World War, the new republican nomenklatura took a more clear-cut form, further institutionalized and developed. The isolation of the Soviet population from the outside world as a consequence of the Cold War led to belated post-colonial protest in Central Asian republ...

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