Stalinism in Kyrgyzstan

This is a well-written - and rare - dispatch from Scott Horton, an American journalist visiting a former Stalinist gulag at Chon Tash in Kyrgyzstan. The message is simple: never forget the crimes committed by the dictators of the 20th century, but also do not lightly throw around comparisons where they are not due.

I think that the work of remembering the crimes committed by Stalinism in Central Asia are particularly important. As the article notes, in 1937 Stalin conducted a purge (ie a mass murder) of "bourgeois nationalists" in Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan included. These subversive elements were largely nationalist figures in the arts, sciences, government and politics who for the most part had reconciled themselves to communist rule. As such, in Stalin's paranoid mind they were suspect elements and needed to be treated as such. Their deaths helped to essentially cause a cultural and veritable civilizational collapse in Central Asia: all that comes after is largely Soviet colonialism.

I am happy that Kyrgyzstan so openly and officially recognizes this crimes, as it is a first step on a long road of healing. In my experience, most other Central Asian states could care less, beyond the perfunctory rehabilitation of these victims. The governing elites of these countries are largely Soviet holdovers, and the last thing that they would want to do is to help their people remember martyrs who believed in national independence, a strong culture, and even (gasp!) perhaps democracy. Kazakhstan's treatment of the Alash Orda movement, which established an independent Kazakh state during the Russian Civil War, and which promoted Kazakh nationalism, education, and scientific development, and whose leaders perished at the hands of Stalinist firing squads is a case in point. Likewise the Stalinist-caused famines of the 1930s, which killed half of the Kazakh population at the time (something like more than a million people) are mentioned only in passing. Far more energy is given to praising the Soviet victory of the Second World War, much as is done in Putin's Russia. Apparently a forthright examination of the past, and a grappling of its questions is too much of a social threat - it might lead to a developed, democratic society.