Word: soviet
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...region of Jalalabad. Bakiyev, who came into office in 2005 as a champion of democracy and reform, has been accused of corruption and rigging elections last year. Foreign observers also see the hand of Russia in recent events - with Moscow eager to reassert its traditional influence over a former Soviet republic that happens to house a key U.S. air base. (Did Moscow subvert Kyrgyzstan, a U.S. ally...
...original form for nearly a thousand years. It tells of a heroic warrior, Manas, as he united the Kyrgyz and smote enemy invaders upon the steppe. It's a tale that has been actively propagated within the republic of Kyrgyzstan since its 1991 independence from a crumbling Soviet Union - in 1995, the fledgling state marked Manas' supposed 1,000th birthday with widespread celebrations. (Manas has also lent his name to the air base that Bishkek licensed to the U.S. to serve as a strategic transit hub for military operations in nearby Afghanistan...
Aleksei Levshin, a 19th-century Russian traveler, wrote sneeringly that the "Kirghiz manner of life is a living picture of the age of the Patriarchs... they live almost solely for their herds." Heavy-handed Tsarist and eventually Soviet rule saw the migration of a significant population of Russians as well as the dilution of Kyrgyz culture. New tree-lined urban centers like Bishkek as well as spas along the land's salt lakes became popular destinations for Russians escaping the industrial grimness further north. As in elsewhere in Central Asia, Cyrillic is the adopted script and vodka shops abound...
...Soviet policy of gerrymandering borders to better control populations of ethnic minorities has left the independent states of Central Asia a mess of territorial disputes. The populous and staunchly Muslim Ferghana Valley, where Osh lies, had been fragmented over the decades by Moscow and, after 1991, fell within the borders of independent Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. This has led to all sorts of confusion and conflict. Bloody riots in Osh in 1990 between ethnic Uzbeks and Kyrgyz marred the run-up to independence; political spats over everything from border troop movements to the sensitive issue of water access blow...
Initially, Kyrgyzstan stood out among the newly independent Central Asian republics for its sound, multi-party democratic system. While its neighbors returned to authoritarian rule, built on networks of patronage run by Soviet apparatchiks of old, Kyrgyzstan became relatively open, buoyed in particular by an outspoken civil society. However, by the mid-1990s, Askar Akayev, president since the republic's inception, took an autocratic turn. He shielded business monopolies owned by friends and family and cracked down on journalists who pried into allegations of corruption - all the while, Kyrgyzstan's economy floundered, its Soviet-era industry and agriculture withering away...