An Ode to the 'Stans

Tomorrow I'm taking the day off work to fly to Dubai to hopefully pick up my visa from the Uzbek Consulate for my trip to Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan in three and a half weeks (!!!). And man, what an ordeal it has been getting visas and letters of invitation for my dad and me for this trip. Given the headaches of getting there and the fact that everyone thinks I'm making a Borat joke when I tell them where I'm going on my next trip, I figured it would be worth sharing why this trip made my traveling bucket list.

 

 

To explain my fascination with Central Asia we're going to have to go all the way back to middle school or thereabouts. I was a nerdy kid who read a lot (and turned into a nerdy adult who still reads a lot) and at some point some wise person (probably my dad) handed me "Brave New World" and "1984" and I instantly became obsessed with the idea of failed utopian societies. By 8th grade, this fascination with dystopias had led me, unsurprisingly, to Ayn Rand, who mostly wrote fiction novels attacking principles of communism and socialism due to her experiences growing up in the Soviet Union. Which obviously then led me to researching the Soviet Union.

 

 

 

 

As a kid who loved dystopian science fiction books, the Soviet Union was like the perfect example of a failed utopia...except it wasn't fiction. The crazy shit that the Soviets did actually happened and millions of people either believed in the utopian vision or just accepted it and didn't fight the system. By the time I was ready to go to college, majoring in Russian History seemed like getting a degree in science fiction ideology (aka my dream major).

 

 Except my university had one Russian history professor and I couldn't stand her. I also visited Russia the summer after my freshman year of college and absolutely hated it, which pretty much sealed my fate that Russian History was not going to be my focus. As luck would have it I also happened to have a fabulous Middle Eastern History teacher, so I switched my focus pretty much on the personality of professors (but I still secretly loved Soviet history more). The summer after my sophomore year I went to summer school at Berkeley and took a class on terrorism from another phenomenal professor - as part of the class we covered the rise of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism in Uzbekistan and it was like a giant light bulb went off in my head. I suck at math, but here's what the formula looked like for me: Muslim countries (Middle East history + minor in Islam) + former Soviet countries (love of all things Soviet) = Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan). It was pretty much the most exciting discovery of my entire university career and launched me into a 2+  year obsession with the region and my current job.

 

I decided to write a senior thesis for fun (see above note about me being nerdy) and spent my entire senior year and the summer between junior/senior year researching and writing my magnum opus on the creation of nationalism and alternate identities in Central Asia. I won't bore you with the specifics (unless you ask nicely and then I'll totally be happy to launch into a long diatribe), but the gist of it is this: prior to the Soviet Union, most of Central Asia was tribal and practiced a moderate form of Islam and didn't really give two shits about nationalism or pride of country since it was pretty much historically just part of other empires and most of the people were nomads anyway (except Uzbekistan, but there the cities were generally each little khanate kingdoms). Once the Soviets rolled in and applied their evil utopian ideology, they basically created fake nations with the goal of consolidating their control by pitting the new countries against each other in a divide and conquer mentality (i.e., pre-communism you were a nomadic goat herder and you and your family moved around a 100 square mile area - if someone asked you where you were from, you might name a tribe or a mountain range; with communism, you were now the proud inhabitant of [Kazakh/Kyrgyz/Uzbeki/Tajiki/Turkmeni]stan, with a fancy new flag, a national anthem, a new alphabet for your language, new words in your language and, oh, ps, you totally hate [insert every other -stan] because they think they're better than you/were stealing your water/were just dicks in general).

 

As a wannabe scholar of all things dystopian, I was fascinated by how the Soviets created nations from scratch and, more importantly, why they did it. And how it totally screwed up an entire region. But the second part of my thesis was what happened after communism fell - turns out the Soviets did such a good job creating fake nations that it stuck, even after there wasn't a Soviet overland cracking the whip. Except now they also had the freedom to explore alternate identities (like radical Islamist or liberal democrat), which made Central Asia a really fascinating place in the 90's and 00's, especially as the new rulers (former KGB henchmen) cracked down on anything they perceived to be against their rule. And some, at least in the case of Turkmenistan's former president Saparmurat Niyazov, were batshit, certifiably insane.

 

As college wrapped up, I was faced with the choice of going to law school or getting a Master's Degree in Central Asian Studies. But also around this time I attended a seminar on oil and gas exploration activities in Central Asia and I marched off to law school with the dream of becoming an oil and gas lawyer working in Central Asia (and considering I am an oil and gas lawyer working in the Middle East, I did pretty well with the first part of the promise, which is probably pretty unusual to mostly live up to the expectations of your 20 year old self).

 

So anyway, you can imagine that most of my college friends' eyes glazed over with boredom the minute I even mentioned my thesis topic and there wasn't a single one of them who wanted to listen to me blather on about some great new idea I had or how to write about some specific topic (in fact, the guy I was dating at the time's main goal in life was to either become a rock star or a porn star - it's fair to say I didn't discuss anything school-related with him). So for better or worse, my parents bore the brunt of my impassioned Central Asia musings - while I don't think either of them was particularly interested in the region or the topics I was studying,  they were happy to listen because (a) I probably sounded really smart, which meant their money wasn't going to waste, (b) I was really passionate about something school-related, and (c) at least I was picking an area where I might be able to earn an income, as opposed to my previous idea of getting a master's degree in folklore (seriously, that was my original plan in college). I also forced them to read my 100 page thesis when it was done, which wasn't exactly light reading.

When my dad and I began planning a trip together, his criteria was that it had to include adventure, it had to be someplace hot and my mom required that we go somewhere she didn't want to go (which limited us to either trips to places without adequate toilets or, more generally, "shithole" countries). After whittling down the list of countries that met the criteria and me generously dropping hints about how Central Asia and the Silk Route met all our criteria and would be awesome, I finally got my dad onboard with a two week trip to Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Since then he's been reading my old library of books on the region and I think he's actually pretty excited to see the ancient history of Uzbekistan and the creepy communist futuristic city of Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, even if it means camping for a few days in the deserts of Turkmenistan.

So there you have it - my really long and painfully boring explanation of why I'm so excited for this most unusual of trips.