Conversations with Bolot -- From Moscow to Bishkek (or Kirgizia, Kirgizstan, Kyrgyzstan) -- The present is history -- Hope abounds -- Traveling the Chu Valley : last stop, the president's office -- The power of words -- Kyrgyzstan goes to the polls -- Central Asia through students' eyes -- Falsification and conciliation -- Borders and regions bedevil a president -- The Tulip Revolution -- The revolution betrayed -- Fear stalks the land -- Talk of kinship, gender, and Islam -- Taking the lonely road home -- The netherworld of the opposition -- Bakiev falls, Washington reacts -- Revolutionary legality vs. transitional justice -- June 2010 : the month that remade a country -- "We either have fair elections, or we have violence" -- First steps on the parliamentary road -- Without abuse, power loses its charm -- Good-bye to Manas -- In Osh the past is never dead -- Preparing for a presidential afterlife -- A stan like no other.
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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 Asia's 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 country's political, social, and economic development.