Three Thousand Versts of Loneliness

In post Soviet politics, one man’s ‘vibrant democracy’ is another man’s ‘ fragmented, ungovernable mess ‘.  Kyrgyzstan held its first election under the country’s new parliamentary constitution on Sunday and the result makes Ukraine look like a straightforward two party system. These elections, which are being reported as free and fair, were an upshot of the ’revolution’ which ousted President Bakiyev. If the poll had a victor, however, it was the party sympathetic to the previous regime, Ata-Jurt, which came out top.  A proportional cohort of its candidates will take their place in the new parliament, alongside representatives from 5 other groups, which cleared the 5% threshold. Each of the ‘successful’ parties polled between 7.24% and 8.88% of the total vote.  That, of course, means that almost two thirds of the electorate cast a ballot for candidates from groups which did not make it into Parliament.                 The provisional President, Rosa Otubayeva, has the formida

Martin Amis is yet to visit Russia but he has written two books about the country.  For the latest, House of Meetings , he claimed to have read ‘a yard of books’, researching his subject.  Orlando Figes, whose poison pen subsequently attracted headlines, disagreed, claiming the novel was based on ’very modest’ reading. I’d have to agree that Amis’ book was poor and its predecessor, Koba the Dread , which purported to consider the skewed morality of western intellectuals’ infatuation with Stalin, was little better.  His failure reminds the casual observer, drawing on a modest collection of journalism and articles about Kyrgyzstan, that those sources are entirely insufficient to understand a hugely complex situation. The Ferghana Valley, an ethnic hotbed, where the borders of modern Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan converge, has witnessed the latest horrific outbreak of violence in Central Asia.  The information outlet with the greatest presence in the region, Ferghana.ru, on Mo