This unique work provides the only sustained political history of independent Kyrgyzstan, explaining events in the context of its society and the broader international order. Drawing on three decades of personal encounters with ordinary citizens and leading public figures, Eugene Huskey takes readers on a journey through the unlikely birth and tumultuous development of Central Asias most open society. Starting with the heady, romantic first days of independence and moving through the popular uprisings and inter-ethnic violence of recent years, he chronicles the struggles of a new state to establish a democratic order and to find its place in the international community, while caught between China, the Middle East, and the Russian world. At the center are the very human stories of leaders and citizens trying to navigate the transition from communism, where identities, property, and the rules of the political game were constantly in dispute. With citizens of independent Kyrgyzstan stripped of their Soviet identity, the book illustrates how alternative loyalties based on kinship, geography, statehood, and religion competed for prominence in ways that often complicated the new countrys political, social, and economic development.

Eugene Huskey is William R. Kenan, Jr., Chair in Political Science at Stetson University. His research on Kyrgyzstan first took him to the country in 1992, six months after Kyrgyzstans emergence as an independent state. He has been back to Kyrgyzstan ten times since then to conduct research, teach at the American University of Central Asia, train Kyrgyzstani political scientists, and participate in a mission for the International Center for Transitional Justice.

List of Figures

Preface and Acknowledgments

Note on Usage

1Conversations with Bolot

2From Moscow to Bishkek (or Kirgizia, Kirgizstan, Kyrgyzstan)

3The Present Is History

4Hope Abounds

5Traveling the Chu Valley: Last Stop, the Presidents Office

6The Power of Words

7Kyrgyzstan Goes to the Polls

8Central Asia through Students Eye

9Falsification and Conciliation

10Borders and Regions Bedevil a President

11The Tulip Revolution

12The Revolution Betrayed

13Fear Stalks the Land

14Talk of Kinship, Gender, and Islam

15Taking the Lonely Road Home

16The Netherworld of the Opposition

17Bakiev Falls, Washington Reacts

18Revolutionary Legality versus Transitional Justice

19June 2010: The Month That Remade a Country

20We Either Have Fair Elections, or We Have Violence

21First Steps on the Parliamentary Road

22Without Abuse, Power Loses Its Charm

23Goodbye to Manas

24In Osh the Past Is Never Dead

25Preparing for a Presidential Afterlife

26A Stan Like No Other

Notes

Selected Bibliography

About the Author