PolyMatter: Why Kazakhstan is Changing Alphabets

 

UnHerd: How Kazakhstan’s multicultural dream turned sour

Kazakhstan has never witnessed ethnic violence on this scale before, but the turmoil evoked traumatic memories of intercommunal clashes in Kyrgyzstan in 2010 between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz which left hundreds dead. [...]

Nursultan Nazarbayev, the president who ruled Kazakhstan for three decades until his resignation last year, made ethnic harmony a pillar of the nation, partly to avoid antagonising his powerful neighbour Russia, always on the look-out for discrimination against Russians abroad (they are Kazakhstan’s largest ethnic minority, making up 40% of the population at independence and now just under 20%). [...]

Under Nazarbayev, ethnic tensions were a taboo topic. The government steadfastly denied any intercommunal element to such incidents, even flying in the face of evidence on the ground. This time, Tokayev, the president, initially dismissed the violence as a “group brawl”, before obliquely acknowledging an ethnic slant by condemning “criminals” acting under the guise of shouting “pseudo-patriotic slogans”.

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The Guardian: When Soviets met Stans: the tower blocks of central Asia – in pictures (3 May 2019)

Shares 544 Two Italian photographers, Roberto Conte and Stefano Perego, documented Soviet-era buildings in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan – and saw how Eastern characteristics crept into the brutal USSR designs.

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Scientific American: Abortion Is a Problem to Be Solved, Not a Moral Issue (September 1, 2018)

Abstinence would obviate abortions just as starvation would forestall obesity. There is a reason no one has proposed chastity as a solution to overpopulation. Sexual asceticism doesn't work, because physical desire is nearly as fundamental as food to our survival and flourishing. A 2008 study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health entitled “Abstinence-Only and Comprehensive Sex Education and the Initiation of Sexual Activity and Teen Pregnancy” found that among American adolescents ages 15 to 19, “abstinence-only education did not reduce the likelihood of engaging in vaginal intercourse” and that “adolescents who received comprehensive sex education had a lower risk of pregnancy than adolescents who received abstinence-only or no sex education.” A 2011 PLOS ONE paper analyzing “Abstinence-Only Education and Teen Pregnancy Rates” in 48 U.S. states concluded that “increasing emphasis on abstinence education is positively correlated with teenage pregnancy and birth rates,” controlling for socioeconomic status, educational attainment and ethnicity.

Most telling, a 2013 paper entitled “Like a Virgin (Mother): Analysis of Data from a Longitudinal, US Population Representative Sample Survey,” published in BMJ reported that 45 of the 7,870 American women studied between 1995 and 2009 said they become pregnant without sex. Who were these immaculately conceiving parthenogenetic Marys? They were twice as likely as other pregnant women to have signed a chastity pledge, and they were significantly more likely to report that their parents had difficulties discussing sex or birth control with them.

When women are educated and have access to birth-control technologies, pregnancies and, eventually, abortions decrease. A 2003 study on the “Relationships between Contraception and Abortion,” published in International Family Planning Perspectives, concluded that abortion rates declined as contraceptive use increased in seven countries (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Bulgaria, Turkey, Tunisia and Switzerland). In six other nations (Cuba, Denmark, the Netherlands, Singapore, South Korea and the U.S.), contraceptive use and abortion rates rose simultaneously, but overall levels of fertility were falling during the period studied. After fertility levels stabilized, contraceptive use continued to increase, and abortion rates fell.

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The Calvert Journal: Letter from Bishkek

Walking central Bishkek in late afternoon sunshine, my initial impression was just how pleasant a space it was — a banal conclusion, but when it comes to post-Soviet cityscapes, this is nothing to be sniffed at; you could almost say there’s something utopian about it. Central Bishkek is a walkable grid riddled with parks and potholes, greener than any other post-Soviet city I’ve seen; there are leaves sprouting from every crack in mortar and the yawning natural awnings of oak trees casting shade on the streets. There’s a human scale to the whole thing, too, certainly in comparison with my only other experience of Central Asian urbanism — the scorched earth po-mo oddity of Kazakhstan’s new-build capital Astana. Contemporary Bishkek is pretty unchanged since the 90s, the Soviet plan largely undisturbed; Kyrgyzstan’s economic liberalisation didn’t exactly free up money for a radical makeover

The centre is largely made up of prefab brezhnevki from the 70s and 80s, unobtrusive concrete blocks of five or so storeys that reward closer inspection thanks to their “national” ornamentation: the usual practice in the Soviet periphery of adding “folkloric” reliefs and brise soleils to standardised buildings, a kind of rote local flavour. (Bishkek also has a particularly fine range of Soviet mosaics, including some borderline psychedelic offerings.) Dotted around are a handful of striking Brutalist landmarks — including the old Central Mosque, the first and only built in the Soviet Union — and the usual post-Soviet requisite of postmodern civic architecture, most notably the governmental ensemble of arcades, elevations and golden domes on Ala-Too Square, flanked by the concentric white cubes of the State History Museum. There are comparatively few of the kind of bizarro-Stalinist, classically-inclined high rises that you find in even middling Russian cities these days, and my companions told me that it was hard for locals to pin down who exactly could live in those that do exist. We do know, though, who lives in the hastily thrown-up, borderline shanty towns that line the city’s outskirts: the internal migrants who come to Bishkek from the countryside for work, outstripping any incentive towards new affordable housing even as they prop up the country’s nominally optimistic post-Soviet and post-2011 revolution economy. [...]

It was Georgy who took me to the western edge of town to see what’s left of the Interhelpo commune. A cluster of modest streets, weary in the heat, around the overgrown Josip Fučik Park, near the railway on which the first Czechoslovak volunteers arrived. In the seven years after it was founded, 1,081 people joined the collective. In the 1930s, it housed a factory, a tannery, a smithy, a carpentry, a cobbler and a tailor, as well as hosting theatre groups, sports teams and an orchestra. During lunch breaks, the commune’s newspaper Ilichevka would be read out over a loudspeakers for all to hear. In 1939, Interhelpo was broken up and its manufacturing parcelled out to various state ministries. You can still visit the old House of Culture and sit its the musty, homely theatre, built by and for workers, trying to imagine what it must have been like to get on a train in Bratislava and end up here, beneath Tian Shen, with the conviction that an entirely new way of life was not only possible but urgently necessary.

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Nautilus Magazine: When Climate Change Starts Wars

This has been the situation in this borderland since March, when Uzbek troops cut off the road to the town of Ala-Buka, near the reservoir. This move was sparked after Kyrgyz authorities denied an Uzbek request to repair the reservoir in Kyrgyz territory using Uzbek engineers. The security situation escalated from there and culminated in August with the seizure of a Kyrgyz communications relay tower on a disputed mountaintop by helicopter-borne Uzbek police, who detained a number of Kyrgyz technicians.  [...]

But this is all in flux. Climate change will continue to increase the area’s “environmental insecurity,” with the densely populated Fergana Valley being the most vulnerable, reads a 2014 report by the World Bank, which is funding economic research into how climate change will alter how people live around the world. Some 22 million people in the valley depend on irrigation for their livelihoods, and shortfalls in water—due to increased evaporation caused by higher temperatures and because glaciers are disappearing—are predicted to become a bigger problem. [...]

“We keep telling these guys about climate change,” Kadyrov, the USAID agricultural specialist, said. “There are some good farmers who understand they need to worry about it, but they do nothing.” Because their plots are small, most farmers in the Fergana do not have the money to invest in new equipment or infrastructure, and they are not trained in water conservation. [...]

Besides ethnicity, evaporation, misuse, population, and poverty, the issue of water is further complicated by the borders in the region. Before the Soviet Union’s breakup, water ran through a united country. Now the water courses through independent countries, crossing disputed borders. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan control most of the sources, while Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan have to either accept what their upstream neighbors give them, pay, negotiate, or try to take it.

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Bloomberg: Why 'Color Revolutions' Can't Be Exported

Such conclusions are based on the superficial similarity of the scenarios. People rise up against a corrupt authoritarian regime, usually provoked by an event like a stolen election or a new unpopular policy. They unite around a simple symbol (like a rose in Georgia in 2003 or a white ribbon in Moscow in 2011). The protests and the new government formed if they succeed immediately get U.S. support. [...]

If Saakahsvili is in possession of some sort of "color revolution" toolkit, he's been remarkably unsuccessful at applying it in Ukraine -- and not because this time around, he didn't enjoy U.S. support. He has excellent connections in Washington, especially in conservative circles, and the Atlantic Council crowd is largely indignant at Poroshenko's lawless, authoritarian treatment of a critic and political rival. If Saakashvili managed to mobilize enough popular support in Ukraine, he probably would have gotten some sort of U.S. political backing given his strong anti-corruption credentials and the growing Western fatigue with sly and grasping Poroshenko. [...]

The Chinese regime's political scientists, according to a 2010 paper by National Chengchi University's Titus Chen, came to the conclusion that "raging domestic grievances" and the institutions of electoral politics, which fostered a political opposition and gave it opportunities for seizing power, were more important causes of "color revolutions" than any foreign interference. In response, the regime has made an effort to punish corruption and avoided political liberalization, as well as to make it more difficult for Western actors to influence people in China. Putin's regime, of course, is doing all that too -- but its focus appears to be on the foreign aspect. That's a mistake that could eventually lead the Putin system to ruin -- if Russians ever get angry enough, they won't need a playbook to mess it up. No U.S. interference will be needed.

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The Washington Post: Putin will make Russia’s elections this Sunday the most tightly controlled in 16 years. Here’s why.

Most observers see Putin as someone who, in New Yorker editor David Remnick’s words, seeks “power for power’s sake.” It’s not so. Putin is a potentially insecure leader who reacts defensively to domestic threats, not a hungry autocrat who lusts for ever more power. Since he became Russia’s president in 2000, as I show in a forthcoming article, most of Putin’s anti-democratic policies, reforms and actions have been put in place defensively, as reactions to real and perceived threats to his political security and survival. [...]

Putin feels threatened by individuals and organizations that have, first, the ability and resources to undermine his political control of Russia, and, second, the intent and motive to do so. And Putin sees those threats in many places. That’s why he has steadily moved to defend his power from the media, oligarchs, regional governors, the upper and lower houses of parliament, opposition political parties, foreign and domestic NGOs, and eventually the citizens themselves. [...]

But in December 2011, widespread reports of fraud sparked mass protests in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other Russian cities. Here’s how we know that Putin and his ruling circle were genuinely caught off guard by the election and its aftermath: Their party, United Russia, pulled in only 49 percent of the popular vote. That was still a plurality — but the 15-point drop startled observers and embarrassed the regime.

Why didn’t Putin’s sophisticated electoral engineers deliver a stronger result for the regime? Here’s the problem: Rigging results to hit a comfortable target requires knowing how much you have to add to the real vote. That requires a good estimate of how many legitimate votes you’re likely to get. In coming up short of 50 percent, Putin and his United Russia allies revealed that they had lost touch with Russian society and misjudged their true level of public support.

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