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1997

Route in China (KYRGYZSTAN)

Bec
2004-09-19 17:23:28

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Kyrgyzstan
I had no problem getting here, it was just a 5 hour bus ride from Almaty and a short city bus hop from the bus station to the city center where Lenin was trying to hail a taxi on Ala Too Square.

After the fall of the Djungarian Empire to the Manchu, Central Asia was divided between the three feuding Khanates of Khiva, Bukhara and Kokhand. The Kyrgyz tribes occupying the Tian Shan plateau resisted Kokhand's domination but their tribes were not united and submitted one by one to the advancing Russians in the mid 19th century and were incorporated in the provinces of Ferghana and Semireche.

I found a nice room at the Bishkek Business School and had time to call my internet contacts and walk around the city center. A couple of hours later, Lenin was still trying to hail a taxi in front of the State Historical Museum. The stupid bugger should have taken a city bus as I did.

Resentment against Russians settling in nomad lands led to an uprising in 1916 sparked by massive requisitions of Kyrgyz and Kazak cattle for the russian war effort. It was put down brutally as whole villages were slaughtered. The advent of the Bolsheviks only made things worse with the forced collectivisation of the traditionally free roaming Kyrgyz nomads.

This marble "White House", much younger than the other better known "White House", is the seat of the Government of the Kyrgyz Republic which came into being in August 1991.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the now independent Kyrgyz republic could be in any of the 15 ex-soviet countries that make up the CIS. So could all of Bishkek for that matter, it has the same huge central plaza, the same mass produced apartment blocks and the same tramways and busses.

Dubrovy Park in the city center was depressingly conformist with its bust of the Tcheka boss Dzerzinsky on the right.

The proud Kyrgyz people are presently at a low ebb but they ...