I was there as a student and when I returned in 2023, to teach, a great deal had changed. The air base was long gone — it had been shuttered under Russian pressure in 2014 — and the US presence in nearby Afghanistan had vanished as well. The swaggering military contractors were getting drunk in some other bar somewhere else in the world. And the NGO sector that, as one interlocutor put it to me in the 2000s, was “growing like mushrooms after the rain” had all but disappeared. I currently live next to the old Soros Foundation building — which closed its doors in 2024 following the passage of a Russia-inspired “foreign agent” law. It’s a large complex and it looks beautiful, but I’ve never seen anybody go in or out; it feels like a mausoleum for a whole generation of hopes about Westernization and liberal democracy.

My experience living here has largely been about pondering an absence, one which has become all the more striking since Trump’s re-election, the closure of USAID last year and the near-termination of US soft power in the region — even before the White House made explicit their focus on the Western Hemisphere with this week’s daring raid on Venezuela. I can count on one hand the number of Americans I’ve met who live here and, probably on two, the number of Americans I’ve met who’ve even passed through. It’s a part of the world that is about as far away from the contiguous United States as it’s possible to get but that had at one point seemed integral enough to the Pax Americana for a base to be set up and for a certain amount of soft power to flow through here, both to lend logistical support to operations in Afghanistan and to radiate power deep into the territory of the former Soviet Union. Now that the tide has gone out, the question is: what does a society look like if it’s basically untouched by direct American influence?

Why the US should be expected to have any contact with a country like Kyrgyzstan is a fair query to start with. Look at a map zoomed out and the country seems to be swallowed in an embrace by China to the east and by Kazakhstan and — more distantly — Russia to the north. The country is poor, with a nominal GDP per capita of under $3,000, and has limited natural resources. It’s mountainous and largely rural, with proud nomadic traditions, a culture taking in elements from the Russian, Chinese, Arabic, and Turkic worlds, and its history couldn’t be more remote from America’s. But spend time here and a certain US influence becomes obvious enough. I am able to teach my journalism course in English at an international university with good comprehension from my students. My students routinely make fun of me for how behind the curve I am in following P. Diddy’s trial or not quite being able to explain who Charli XCX is. Many of them fantasize about living in the US. If I’m in a cab, it’s routine for the driver to suddenly put on speakerphone a brother or cousin who’s living in the States so that we can trade pleasantries with one another. Bishkek is filled with malls that give me flashbacks to the time I spent living in Los Angeles. And, as an American, I am treated with a respect and an interest that I don’t think I’ve quite experienced anywhere else in the world — there’s just a curiosity about Americanness that I think much of the rest of the world has moved past. Actually, my number one complaint living here is about the tinny American music played in coffeeshops that I am forever asking waiters to change or at least adjust the volume on.

If that influence seems superficial — just the flotsam of 21st-century pop culture — it can also deeply influence people’s life choices. Agnieszka Pikulicka, a Polish journalist who has published widely on Central Asia and writes the Turan Tales Substack, certainly thinks so. “Thanks to US involvement, a whole generation of Central Asians — not only Kyrgyz — had a chance to build their own NGOs and media, study in English according to Western curricula, travel abroad and absorb democratic values,” she tells me.

It’s not always so easy to know where to assign attribution, but those democratic values seemed connected to a relatively open culture where crime and corruption have steadily decreased and the economy has for years had reliable growth. The quiet but effective tourist slogan “You’ll Like Kyrgyzstan” gives a general idea. Meanwhile, in the region as a whole, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan finally, in the last decade, transitioned out of their Soviet-era authoritarian leaders — the latter in particular has undergone an eight-year period of striking liberalization.

If I were writing this piece a year or two years ago, that’s probably where I would have ended it — with America’s direct influence on the region ebbing away but with the region making progress on its own terms and in a way that was not incompatible with liberal democracy. Now, though, I am far less sure. Kyrgyzstan has, since I have been here, arrested opposition figures; closed the leading independent media outlet; fallen into a pattern of repossessing private property based on a reading of arcane laws; installed new “firewall” systems for controlling web access; and fallen deeper into “not free” status in Freedom House’s annual report. The notion of Kyrgyzstan as an “island of democracy” — flung around in international circles just a few years ago — is giving way, under President Sadyr Japarov who came to power in 2021, to a creeping authoritarianism. To give a very small but telling example: when I first came here, I really enjoyed jogging in the main sports stadium — the one also used by the national football team. The track would always be full of people, and it would be a really nice time — people jogging or working out in the exercise park. When I would talk about what I liked about Kyrgyzstan, that would be the kind of thing I would point to — I never in my life in America had the opportunity to go for a jog in Yankee Stadium. About a year ago, though, when I went to take my usual run, the gate was closed and an intimidating guard shouted at the high school team who had come for their workout that the stadium was now closed to the public and closed for good.

More from this author

How psychedelics blew my mind

By Sam Kahn

I don’t want to draw too many inferences from events that are tied to Kyrgyz domestic politics, and it’s not as if there’s a clear cause-and-effect between, say, Trump’s election or the end of the war in Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan’s authoritarian turn in the 2020s. But what clearly is true is that a sort of ideological vacuum showed up with the waning of US influence in this part of the world, and I suspect, in many other parts of the world that are in a similar place of choosing their geopolitical identity. The sense in the 2000s was that the future lay in the direction of capitalism and liberal democracy — as an irresistible trajectory for a developing country like Kyrgyzstan. That was far from seen as unequivocally a good thing — I remember concerns about “runaway capitalism” and about the loss of traditional culture — but it just seemed like a fact. That’s now far from the case. When I first returned to Kyrgyzstan in 2023, I was struck by how many more hijabs I saw around than I had noticed in the 2000s. The most visible manifestation of soft power in Bishkek is a gleaming mosque built and funded by Turkey. Chinese influence can be felt above all in large-scale infrastructure projects, such as roads and railways, financed by the Belt and Road Initiative. Russian influence is, not surprisingly, ubiquitous in a country that was part of the Soviet Union, with Russian widely spoken and Russian state media popular particularly among older people, but becomes distinctly more noticeable in the recent adoption of foreign agent laws or the Putinesque consolidation of political power around the President.

The deeper point I would make is that, in the battle to conceptualize the future, it now looks far less like an episode of American TV. One of my students, when we were going around the room introducing ourselves at the start of the semester, said as his kind of statement of purpose that he was “opposed to the LGBT agenda”. The phrase “human rights”, which seemed to be making its bid towards universalism in the 2000s, now — under the barrage of Russian state media — is understood as being inextricable from Western soft power. The US and its gold-paved streets might still figure in my students’ airy post-graduation plans, but they’re as apt to say something about Dubai or China — and the difficulty of getting student visas under the Trump administration has shifted their attention away from the US. Whatever the US was supposed to stand for — even if J. Lo can comfortably sell out her Kazakhstan tour, and the Back Street Boys can “get nothing but love” on theirs — is now in recession.

Suggested reading

The CIA: patron of the arts

By Ryan Ruby

Whether you think this is a deep loss or not reflects, of course, your underlying point of view. For Pikulicka, America’s inward turn directly undermines Central Asian civil society. “With Donald Trump taking a more authoritarian turn himself, those [NGO] groups have also lost arguments in their struggle against authoritarianism and local regimes, all of which have been tightening the grip over freedom of speech and — in the case of Kyrgyzstan — small but hard won democratic achievements,” she says. For Peter Leonard, a long-time editor at Eurasianet who now writes the Central Asian-themed Substack Havli, Trump’s reassessment of priorities may paradoxically lead to closer ties to Central Asia. “His vocal rejection of ‘woke’ politics is particularly appealing to conservative leaders in the region,” he tells me. “The president of Kazakhstan recently invoked Trump’s coolness toward LGBT values in an approving manner. This strongly suggests that US influence under Trump actually has room for growth, at least in political-cultural terms.” That new affinity with Central Asia seemed to produce surprising results at the end of last year in the C5+1 Summit in Washington where all five Central Asian countries signed far-reaching agreements with the US, including the eye-popping pledge for Uzbekistan to invest $100 billion in the US rather than the other way around.

Leonard’s is a very subtle point of view — that it’s not so much as if America’s influence in the region has waned as that the “brand” has shifted. Trump has a certain alignment with Central Asia that the more progressive NGO sector often didn’t. But living in Bishkek, where the volume of American influence is turned far down from where it was even a few years ago, I find myself reflecting on a vacuum— on the sense of something or other having been lost. What it is, I suppose, is some notion of the US as a force for good on a global scale. It’s not always so easy for me to tell if that’s something that Central Asians actually saw in the US or just what I hoped Central Asians saw, but there’s no question that propaganda from Russia has had its effect in depicting America as the origin point of various global conspiracies, while, especially with the closure of USAID, there is very little soft power initiative emanating from the US to counteract that impression. As Leonard thoughtfully says, there is a constructive role that the US could in theory play in the region. “It stands to bring investment with fewer political strings attached,” he says. “It brings knowledge transfer. And the US is legitimately, if self-interestedly, committed to advancing institutionalized integration among Central Asian states, which would make the region more sovereign and less dependent on China and Russia.”

There was a point in time when, no matter what else it might be, America was it — the future. Now that it’s become clear that capitalism no longer necessarily ushers in democracy and that the “American way of life” is not everybody’s cup of tea, there is a great lacuna in values on the international stage. Russia has been very aggressive in framing a vision of the future around conservative values; and China in doing so around a kind of state-managed technocracy. It’s far less clear now what the US stands for or why anybody should buy what it’s selling.

Despite all this, Moscow by means fair and foul continues to find soldiers to cover its losses. The Russian state’s biggest challenge remains not replacing men but equipment, and its army continues to hold a significant manpower advantage over its Ukrainian opposition. But the Kremlin’s recruitment strategy is not limited to forcing its own citizens into uniform. It has found a way to marry an imperial Soviet tradition and 21st-century global capitalism to make joining the Russian army an appealing choice for many foreigners. Soldiers from Somalia, Syria and other friendly nations are an occasional sight at the front, but the largest contingent of foreign fighters hail from the Central Asian nations of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.

Russia has long been a draw for Central Asian immigrants. As many as five million Central Asians may currently be residing in Russia compared to 1.3 million in the next most popular destination, Germany. The history of Russia-Central Asian military enlistment, moreover, is a long one. Prior to the collapse of the USSR, when Moscow ruled the entirety of Central Asia, millions of soldiers from the region served in conflicts on behalf of their Soviet masters. From the Second World War to Afghanistan, Soviet Russia used its Central Asian population as a source of disposable military material. And Central Asian soldiers tended to die more often than their Russian peers: Kazakhs were one and a half times more likely than Russians to be killed in the Second World War, a fact never mentioned in today’s jingoistic Putinist war propaganda.

After independence in 1991, post-Soviet Russia’s wars in Chechnya and Georgia had to be fought without troops from its neighbours. But since February 2022, Moscow has been seeking to bolster its ranks with Central Asian immigrants. Terrified migrants received povestki on the first day of the full-scale invasion, and many sought help from all but powerless local lawyers and NGOs. Media reports — and heavily publicised scandals back home in Central Asia — have drawn attention to the Russian army’s brutal press ganging of new arrivals and to numerous cases of workers tricked into enlisting.

And yet, foreign soldiers tend to cause less trouble politically. While the Kremlin’s mass mobilisation of its citizens in September 2022 was successful in terms of recruitment numbers, it sparked disquiet among privileged and hitherto “safe” residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Since then, efforts to recruit Central Asians have become more frequent and more violent. Any migrant who sets foot on Russian soil risks being hastily rounded up and packed off to the front in Ukraine, ready to join the ranks of the fallen in an early grave.

The irony is that Russia’s war is portrayed in propaganda as an ethnonationalist crusade to reunite Muscovites with their Ukrainian “brothers”. It is, according to the rhetoric, a war fought to save white Russians from the “epidemic” of Westernism — with all its connotations of queerness, blackness, and other “non-traditional” values — emanating from Ukraine. The heroes of the war feted on television and at official ceremonies are, almost to a man, white Russians. Meanwhile, ethnic minorities — Muslims recruited at home and abroad — bear the brunt of the worst fighting. Yet despite it all, Central Asian migrants keep coming to Russia. And, more bizarrely still, they keep choosing to enlist in the Russian army.

What might be driving one of the most downtrodden ethnic groups in the region to voluntarily risk their lives in Moscow’s war? The chance of earning a life-changing sum of money is the obvious motivation. Moscow promises volunteers more than $2,000 a month in wages. When the average salary in Kyrgyzstan is less than $400 a month, that offer might give any young Kyrgyz pause for thought — even if their country’s authorities officially forbid them to take up the offer and Moscow does not always pay out.

But, more than a short-term pay-out, Moscow promises to make good on the old immigrant dream. Over the past two years, the route to Russian citizenship — and long-term socioeconomic security, assuming the fighting in Ukraine can be navigated safely — has become easier and easier for volunteers. In its desperate hunt for bodies, the Kremlin has binned more and more rules preventing Central Asians from becoming citizens. Today, a volunteer has a path to a passport after just a few months spent in the Russian army: a simple quid pro quo that suits both parties, even if the power imbalance is self-evident. Moscow, the old imperial centre, is still a land of unrivalled economic opportunity in the region.

It’s impossible to say how effective these tactics have been in terms of raw numbers, as Moscow does not release official statistics about the size and composition of its army. However, the evidence suggests that plenty of Central Asians are, by force or choice, landing in the ranks of Putin’s army in Ukraine. Hundreds are dying, but still their compatriots keep coming, with 1.3 million arriving in the first quarter of 2023 and similar numbers since.

In this way, Moscow has established a new type of capitalist imperialism. In some ways, its hold over its regions resembles the old Soviet system, when citizen-comrades dreamed of coming to the imperial metropolis of Moscow to realise dreams of upward mobility in a rigid social hierarchy. But this old-fashioned relationship between the empire and its peripheries is married to a 21st century globalism. In the Soviet era, movement between and within nations was tightly controlled. Today, though, sovereignty is no boundary to a greater power siphoning off the human resources of a neighbour. This is taken to a new, brutal extent by Moscow’s military recruitment tactics, which turn Central Asians into mercenaries-cum-economic migrants. In Europe, such free movement is an opportunity for richer Western nations to draw on their Eastern neighbours for cheap labour; in Russia, it provides the manpower for a 20th century “meatgrinder”.

Suggested reading

Putin's ruthless new plan to win

By Ian Garner

Ironically, Central Asia itself has become the recipient of an outflow of Russian migrants. Educated and wealthy young Russian exiles are setting up cafes, IT firms and other businesses in what were once the imperial peripheries of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, where visas are easily available and Russian is still widely spoken. The Kremlin is getting a raw deal: in return for a flood of bodies to be sacrificed in war today, the best of its young generation are leaving and taking tomorrow’s economy with them.

However, a growing number of Central Asians are increasingly disgruntled with this untenable situation. As their governments vacillate over relations with the Kremlin, sections of society are buoyed by anti-Russian and national pride movements. Indeed, it’s likely that many of the young immigrants in Russia itself are only there for the money and would much rather be at home. In the years ahead, perhaps, the youngest Central Asian generation will follow in the footsteps of their Ukrainian peers and thoroughly reject not just Russian influence at home but the lure of the imperial metropolis as an immigration destination. Moscow cannot count on Central Asia as its recruit reservoir forever.

Still, despite the fact that Stalin was a) obviously clever and b) highly successful as far as evil despots go, the idea that he was some kind of grey nonentity persisted for decades. And I think that we still have a habit of belittling tyrants and authoritarians. It makes us feel better whenever they run circles around us at some geopolitical game or other, which is quite often these days.

Suggested reading

The liberals are falling into Putin's trap

By Peter Franklin

Take Putin, for instance. When he was first elected, a lot of coverage focused on this bland, faceless nonentity, an ex-KGB officer of middling rank leading a decrepit ex-superpower. They kept that up for a while, then switched to mocking him for posing shirtless. Next thing you know, he’s annexed the Crimea. Similarly, Gaddafi was barely coherent, yet he was pretty good at charming Blair and Mandelson — and might still be up waving his golden gun about if we hadn’t gone and dropped a pile of bombs on Libya.

Being a dictator is a difficult job, then, and those who succeed at it should not be underestimated. There is more going on behind those dead eyes than we think, even when they seem unhinged, weird or boring. Yet there is perhaps one exception, a dictator so profoundly mediocre that it would be difficult to underestimate him: Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, the leader of the ex-Soviet republic of Turkmenistan. Recently turned 63, he is a man without qualities, and even, it seems, a bit dim. However, 13 years into his reign he remains firmly in power. So how has he achieved this feat, and what can we learn from it?

Berdymukhamedov came to power in 2007, after his corpulent, megalomaniacal predecessor, Saparmurat Niyazov, dropped dead of a heart attack. Niyazov, a.k.a Turkmenbashi (“father of all Turkmen”) had become famous due to his extravagant personality cult. He literally renamed the month of January after himself, and renamed bread after his mother, while also authoring a truly atrocious “holy book” that he called The Ruhnama, or “book of the soul”.

That level of totalitarian excess is quite rare, and so it seemed that the Turkmen were due a break. Surely it was time for a normal dictator, less given to erecting gold statues of himself that rotated to face the sun?

Suggested reading

The irresistible rise of the civilisation-state

By Aris Roussinos

At first Berdymukhamedov was very dull. A former dentist who had risen to the position of deputy prime minister, he was made interim president when Niyazov went to his eternal reward. This was in defiance of the constitution — the job should have gone to the speaker of parliament — so perhaps some powerful forces thought he would prove to be malleable. And Berdymukhamedov was cautious at first, making only vague statements about change, while adding that the country would walk rather than run.

Definitely a bit dull, then, and perhaps in more ways than one. Months later, I interviewed some Turkmen emigres in Moscow, and one of them said this to me:

“The new president? I know someone who studied at the medical school where he was the principal. They said he was an idiot. And that the teachers said it openly, about him, and to his face — you’re an idiot, an idiot. What can we hope for from him?”

At the time I thought this was an exaggeration; emigres can be pretty bitter about the countries they have left behind, especially when they are repressive dictatorships. But as the years rolled by, and Berdymukhamedov grew more comfortable in his new job and started to adapt the structures his predecessor had left in place to his own use, well, I started to wonder.

More from this author

Who are you calling a dictator?

By Daniel Kalder

Berdymukhamedov’s cult was strikingly derivative and pedestrian. Niyazov was “Father of All Turkmen”; Berdymukhamedov was “protector”. Niyazov was leading Turkmenistan into the “golden age”; Berdymukhamedov was spearheading the “renaissance”. Clearly, he did not have too many ideas. And nowhere was that more obvious than in the books that he put his name to.

While Niyazov’s cult was grotesque and obscene, it was, at least, ambitious. Similarly, The Ruhnama was terrible, but its author at least knew what ought to be in such a book — history, myth, moral teachings, God, the people and his own personal story. Berdymukhamedov’s books were a lot less complicated. One of the emigres had predicted to me that since he was a medical professional his book would follow that theme — and sure enough, a series on the Turkmen herbal remedies appeared under his name. With that out of the way, he cast around for other themes, but he didn’t cast far. Turkmen were famous horse riders, so there was a book about horses. Then he produced a book about his dad. Running low on national motifs, he eventually put his name to a tome about drinking tea. The books were strikingly literal, strikingly pointless, oblivious to their own bathos. They were unselfconscious and kinda dumb. Here was a dictator with no depth at all.

Don’t just take my word for it. In 2010, Wikileaks published diplomatic cables from a US diplomat who, after referring to the Turkmen president as a “practiced liar” and “micromanager” made this memorable observation: “Berdymukhamedov does not like people who are smarter than he is. Since he’s not a very bright guy, our source offered, he is suspicious of a lot of people.”

This lack of sophistication gives Berdymukhamedov’s propaganda an impressively transparent quality. Classic cults of personality, like those of Stalin or Mao, usually serve to efface the characteristics of the leader, who is always a universal genius and superlative leader. Even Niyazov, who built his own traumatic childhood into the cult, remained a remote, aloof figure.

Suggested reading

How Kazakhstan's multicultural dream turned sour

By Joanna Lillis

Berdymukhamedov, however, is a simple sort. He enjoys his hobbies and they are reflected in the cult. He likes horses and racing cars and shooting guns and fishing and is often filmed engaged in one of these pastimes. But most of all, it seems, he likes playing music and singing. He isn’t the first musical dictator — Kim Jong-il wrote opera librettos, while Stalin was a decent tenor who liked to sing Georgian folk songs, though only for the inner circle. But Berdymukhamedov is surely the first dictator DJ, the first dictator to bust a rhyme in public, and also the first dictator to serenade his people on New Year’s Eve.

His musical oeuvre is quite broad. In 2015 Berdymukhamedov entered the Guinness Book of Records when over 4,000 of his adoring subjects (no pressure) joined him in singing a Eurodisco number he had written himself. Berdymukhamedov enjoyed the experience and he has since performed in public many times, though without so large an ensemble to share the spotlight.

On International Women’s Day, he serenaded the ladies (and some gents) with a cover version of Karakum, a Soviet rock song about the Turkmen desert. More recently, he laid some beats on the populace during Turkmenistan’s televised 2019 New Year’s Eve celebration. He has also been filmed demonstrating to soldiers how to play guitar, though often the camera mysteriously cuts away from his face whenever it comes to difficult bit.

My favorite performances, however, are his duets with his beloved grandson Kerimguly. The themes are powerful and moving: in one song, the intergenerational duo hymn the praises of his favourite horse, while in another Kerimguly sings in English while his grandpa delivers a rap dedicated to the glory of the nation. Indeed, Kerimguly appears to be getting a mini-cult of his own. Opposition sites report that he appears on TV more often than his father, Berdymukhamedov’s only son; a state news website reports that he recently won the “Golden Age” artistic award and received a gold chain and some cash.

Suggested reading

Why the best bands are dictatorships

By Richard Godwin

So clumsy and naïve is Berdymukhamedov’s cult that it serves as a particularly potent reminder of Anthony Daniels’ famous observation that the purpose of propaganda is “not to persuade, much less to inform, but to humiliate”. But while Turkmen citizens, condemned to live in a repressive police state run by a dullard, have little choice but to play along with Berdymukhamedov’s fantasy image of himself, the truly impressive thing is the way in which the president sometimes succeeds in getting foreign diplomats and organisations to abase themselves before him.

For instance, the regime’s response to the coronavirus pandemic is extremely stupid, even by Berdymukhamedov’s standards. The authorities deny that Turkmenistan has any Covid-19 cases but say that there might be a problem with “dust” — and so insist that everybody wear masks and gloves and practice social distancing. Apparently there’s quite a lot of dust about. And also “pneumonia”.

The mendacity, goading in its transparency, is almost impressive. But it isn’t, not really; rather it’s ridiculous, worthy of contempt. Yet Eurasianet reports that the British ambassador, after tweeting a selfie of himself wearing a face mask and urging others to do the same subsequently denied in a Twitter exchange that he was implying that Turkmenistan had the virus. Instead he urged people to “pay attention to the findings of WHO and Turkmen government experts, who are the experts here”. That’ll be the same WHO that recently sent a delegation to the country, praised the government for its high level of preparedness, didn’t say whether Covid-19 was on the loose, but then advised the Turkmen authorities to act “as if” the virus was circulating and adopt the standard protective measures.

More from this author

How Europe's Last Dictator survived

By Daniel Kalder

Thus Berdymukhamedov, despite being a “not very bright guy” gets away with it.

Sometimes, when I read about evil regimes and go looking for small consolations, I remind myself that it is not, in the end, all that enjoyable to be a dictator. Yes, you have a lot of power, but the trade-off is isolation, paranoia, a loss of humanity and a life spent looking over your shoulder. As far as punishments go, it never fits the crime, but it’s something. Yet when I look at Berdymukhamedov, I just don’t see a whole lot of angst there. Maybe he’s worried about the economy; maybe, deep down, he’s a bit nervous about Covid-19. But he long ago started to believe in his own luck and looks as though he’s enjoying himself a lot of the time.

The only comparison I can think of for dictatorial ebullience is the footage of Kim Jong-il from years ago, when he managed to get Bill Clinton to come to North Korea and eat a shit sandwich in exchange for the release of some American journalists. Kim was really enjoying himself that day; but that was a very complicated pleasure to arrange. All Berdymukhamedov has to do to feel good about himself is call up Kerimguly and sing a few songs for the cameras and he’s happy as Larry. Not quite stupid enough to mess up the repression machine he inherited from Niyazov and his Soviet predecessors, Berdymukhamedov carries on dictating with a song in his heart, and — as often as not — on his lips too.