Day 94: Kyrgyzstan

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

http://cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/kg.html

Discuss.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Probably the best off former Soviet republic in Central Asia now, which is interesting considering it's basically a bunch of nomads and sheep, nothing really important like it's neighbors. It managed to topple its tinpot regime and actually hold rather free and democratic elections afterwords.

[ag]

Actually, it didn't have a tinpot regime. In fact, the previous regime is responsible for it being the most democratic and least unstable of the countries in the region. It is true, that towards the end the regime did suffer from autoritarian hubris, but, as you know, power corrupts.

The old president, Askar Akaev was an accident. He had been a physisist in St. Petersburg most of his life (a fairly prominent one, if I am to trust some of his peers), and in the last years of the Soviet rule came home to Kyrgyzstan as the president of the local Academy of Sciences. There was no reason for him to become the country's leader, but for a strange turn of events.

Under the Soviet regime, the Union Republics were de facto headed by the leader (First Secretary of the Central Committee) of the local Communist Party (actually, frequently it was the nominal second in command - the Second Secretary - an ethnic Russian sent from Moscow, who would be, in fact, charge, but this was becoming less common in the very end, with the local nominal bosses asserting their authority). There would also be a pro forma Head of State (the Chairman of the local legislature, heading a powerless "collective presidency")  and a Head of Government (officially titled Chairman of the Council of Ministers) for day-to-day management.

In the last year of the Soviet regime, the party bosses started instituting a powerful executive presidency (modeled on the just-introduced Soviet Presidency, taken over by Gorbachev himself), which they intended to be occupied by themselves, as a secondary command post, in anticipation of a multi-party regime.  Following Gorbachev's example, they didn't intend to actually run for popular election, but rather stipulated that the President should be appointed by the local (and, in most cases, still hand-picked) legislature. This was exactly what the First Secretary of the Cenral Committee of the Communist Party of Kirgizia (as Kyrgyzstan was then known) Masaliev did.

What Masaliev didn't expect was, that his PM (whose name now evades me) would want to take the new job for himself. Even though the legislature was hand-picked, the PM had done some of the hand-picking, so the deputies loyalties were split fairly evenly. A small group of intelectual MPs proposed the Academy of Sciences chief Akaev as a third candidate, which was sufficient to deny both top leaders a majority they needed. After a few futile rounds of voting, behind the scene negotiations and outright miscalculations by both main camps, to everyone's surprise the minor candidate managed to obtain the requisite majority in a secret ballot. To Masaliev's consternation, it was Askar Akaev who got all the presidential authority he had written into the law expecting to hold the job himself.

If I have time, I will do a synopsis of Akaev's presidency later. Suffices to say, calling him a tinpot dictator is as far from an adecuate characterisation as one can be.