Sovietistan: Travels In Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, by Erika Fatland

In this book, a generally clueless European crypto-journalist finds herself traveling among the wreckage of Soviet Central Asia vainly seeking to understand its people, its history, and its land. In some ways, this book is familiar to those who travel off the beaten path, with an appreciation for simple acts of kindness and a desire to understand the unfamiliar ways of other people, along with a sense of sadness in looking at the destruction and misery that one finds in parts of the world that struggle with the aftereffects of historical tragedies. The author finds herself disguising her identity to avoid problems in a part of the world marked by authoritarian rulers who remain in office for interminable periods of time in most cases, and also dealing with the mistrust and suspicion of those who have been exposed in the past to the dishonest attention of journalists, as was the case with one German village that gives her a generally cold shoulder. The author deals with unwanted romantic advances as a traveling solitary woman (who has a partner at home whose presence here is shadowy as well), while also wrestling with the fate of women in a world where grinding poverty and the struggle for well-being put a great deal of strain on marriages.

In the larger sense, this book struggles with the myriad problems of empire, in poorly defined national borders that do not reflect either historical states–various khanates long ago forgotten–or the ethnolinguistic realities of the present-day. The five surviving nations of Central Asia find their development, such as it is, still geared in external ways, connecting them to Iran (in the case of reclusive Turkmenistan) or to Russia (in the case of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan), but seldom to each other in any meaningful sense. The shrinking Aral Sea and the poisonous relationship between water, cotton, and the local human and physical environment is symbolic, as is the artificial nature of the region’s pervasive deserts and the isolation of many of its areas, including a remote valley where the speakers of a language (Sogdian) long thought extinct struggle in the absence of modern conveniences with the seemingly inevitable loss of their identity and culture. At all points the burden of the past and the difficulties of the present are brought together in ways that point to the fragile nature of national economies and identities, and the struggle of ordinary people to get by in a harsh and unforgiving world where insecure rulers gaze at their imprisoned citizens from posters on the walls of every home and business in isolated and separated cities within unhappy nations of struggling people.

This book is between 450 and 500 pages of material divided into a large number of generally short and unnumbered chapters by the country in which the events occurred. The book begins with a map of central Asia, along with a discussion of names, a list of illustrations, and the author’s experience traveling to an area aptly titled the road to hell. This is followed by a discussion of the author’s travel experiences in Turkmenistan, which begin with a math and then discuss her exploration of the nation’s underground people, the marble capital, the nature of dictatorship in the region and its relationship with posters. The author explores Turkmenistan’s deserts, the literal fall of the nation’s dictator from a horse, as well as the borderlands and their isolation. This leads into the author’s travels in Kazakhstan, which begin with a map, a discussion if isolated and scattered cities, the vanishing of the Aral Sea, horse polo, the building of a new capital, the influence of Stalin on the local population, and the inevitable tradition of people to exaggerate their history. The author’s travels in Tajikistan involve more maps, a capital full of stolen Mercedes Benz cars, the aftermath of civil war, the legacy of the Great Game, and the ironies of anti-corruption politics in one of the most corrupt nations of the world. The author’s travels in Kyrgyzstan are a strange discovery of relative freedom in the weakness of a nation’s governments, an exploration of the generational traumas of bride-stealing, the competition among various eagle men, the suspicion of the Germans of Rot-Front, and grimly humorous observations of a nation that is poor but relatively free. The last chapter examines the author’s travels to authoritarian Uzbekistan, with an examination of nations and infrastructure that seem to be falling apart, the glorious art museum in the desert, the destructive effects of cotton on the local environment, as well as the end of the author’s travels in an out-of-the-way city that time seems to have forgotten. The book contains an afterword dealing with the fall of a dictator, acknowledgements, notes, a bibliography, and information about the author and translator.