Transition from Above or Below? (1990–1991)

Abstract

We wanted democracy and freedom. We read Jefferson and Madison. We knew more about democracy than Americans. We knew your history better than you. Yes, all that was forbidden, we read. And then we followed Sakharov, who led the way. An Uzbek intellectual and former political activist, Tashkent, 1997 The year 1991 meant different things to different people and groups in Central Asia. To some, like this Uzbek activist, it meant a chance for democracy. To others, it meant freedom from Soviet colonization, Russian dominance, or scientific atheism, and to many others it primarily meant an end to subsidies. Indeed, Central Asia experienced a far more complicated transition than states that had undergone this process in earlier waves of regime change in other regions of the world. Chapter 4 demonstrated that the nature and timing of the political pacts in the Central Asian cases were only the first element marking these cases as different from transitions in Latin America, Southern Europe, or even in Poland and Hungary, their former communist neighbors. The multilayered and multiphased nature of the Central Asian transitions, like those of the Eastern European and other post-Soviet cases, involved several almost simultaneous political processes – not only political liberalization, but also independence, decolonization, and nation and state building. At the same time, the Central Asian transitions were far less driven by mass ideological movements for democracy or nationalism than those in the Eastern European states or in the other former Soviet republics.