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Kyrgyzstan’s ongoing struggle for sovereignty
Writing from the central Asian republic, MARCEL CARTIER meets a nation positive about its future and openly proud of its Soviet past
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ARRIVING in Kyrgyzstan’s capital Bishkek, it is impossible not to immediately fall in love with this city of almost a million people. It’s profoundly green, and as I’m to be told by at least five people over the next few days, this is something residents are proud of. “Frunze was once the greenest city in the Soviet Union,” they all tell me as if they have been rehearsing the same script.
Within the first hour, I have found a statue of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Memorial to the Great Patriotic War, and a powerful statue of Vladimir Lenin himself. I am astounded at how Soviet it all feels, as if I’ve been brought back in time to the 1980s.
What isn’t Soviet is the name of the city. Renamed from Piskpek to Frunze in 1926 to honour Bolshevik military strategist and army officer Mikhail Frunze, it was renamed Bishkek in 1991 as the Soviet Union was being dissolved.
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