"Fasten your seatbelts," Gleb Pavlovsky, a former policy adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin who is now one of his opponents, posted on Facebook after Karimov was reported dead on Monday night. The reports, which first surfaced on the Fergana News portal -- a Russian-language site that is probably the best source of day-to-day information on the authoritarian black-box state -- were later denied by the Uzbek authorities. The latest available official information is from the presidential press service, which says that Karimov is in the hospital, and from Karimov's younger daughter Lola's Instagram account, which says he's had a stroke and is in intensive care. [...]
According to the Soufan Group, about 500 Uzbek citizens were fighting with Islamic State in Syria and Iraq late last year. That's the highest number of all ex-Soviet republics except Russia, and it doesn't include the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan since most of its fighters have long lost any ties to Uzbekistan. [...]
Karimov kept Uzbekistan secular by the sheer force of his security apparatus and military, which is, depending on the source, either the strongest in Central Asia or the second strongest after Kazakhstan's. Russia has been aiding Uzbekistan, training its officers and providing its military with modern weapons, because the country is an important buffer between the boiling cauldron of Afghanistan and Russia's sphere of immediate interests. Now that Karimov's grip on power is weakening and succession is not assured, all the pent-up tension -- some of it of the jihadist kind -- may erupt in violence that could involve some of Russia's Uzbek population. If Uzbekistan becomes unstable, Islamic State will be encouraged and empowered. [...]
Beyond these obvious tactical considerations, though, the tension accompanying Karimov's stroke is a reminder that in a large part of the former Soviet Union, including Russia's two major allies, Kazakhstan and Belarus, there are no reliable democratic methods of power transfer. In Russia itself, should Putin fall seriously ill or die, the transition is unlikely to be smooth. The whole vast region is kept relatively peaceful by a handful of aging men, most with Soviet leadership experience, who have turned into authoritarian nationalist leaders. Should any of them go, instability arises immediately. The bloodless revolution of 1991, which destroyed the Soviet Union, is unfinished in many ways, but perhaps primarily in this one: The current regimes are placeholders for true statehood and, as such, ticking time bombs.
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