Central Asia: In Search of a New Political Identity

In the aftermath of the break-up of the former Soviet Union, the Central Asian leadership began formulating new policies and creating a new ideology. Basing itself on the secular, republican, Kemalist model of Turkey, it attempted to emulate Turkey's economic development policies as well. Some of the ideas of Sultan Galiev, the Muslim Marxist leader of the 1920s, were also adopted in order to link this newly created state model to the Central Asian states' communist, and precommunist past, and to help those states make the transition to the present. The former communist elite of the republics of Soviet Central Asia viewed the disintegration of the Soviet Union, in 1991, as an undesirable and dangerous phenomenon. Its hopes that president Boris Yeltsin, the elected president of Russia, would pursue a policy of preserving the Soviet Union in some form, did not materialize. The plans of Russia's new democratic reformers, aimed at rapprochement with the West and at accelerated capitalist development, did not include the participation of the less-developed Central Asian republics. Local communist leaders were left facing a dilemma: they either had to quit the scene, or, if they chose to remain in power, they had to adopt new economic policies, a new political ideology, develop new allies and seek new sources of financial assistance. It was fortunate for the leaders of the Central Asian republics that the internal opposition confronting them, which consisted of nationalists, Islamists and democrats, was too weak to take advantage of the political crisis that took place following the coup attempt against Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, in August 1991. THE TURKISH MODEL Changing symbols and names proved to be easy, but finding a new ideology was a much more difficult problem for Central Asia's former Communist party elites. MarxismLeninism had been discredited, and the new Russian leadership had no clear ideology, political program, or mass political organization that could take the place of the banned Communist party. Upon achieving full independence in 1991, the Central Asian republics turned toward Turkey as a model of a modern state. What the leaders found appealing in the state model of Kemal Ataturk, the founding father of the Turkish republic, was its fundamental principles: nationalism, which was lacking in Marxism-Leninism; secularism, a sine qua non for the preservation of their own power; etatism, which included control of the economy; and republicanism, which ensured against a return to the absolute forms of rule practiced by the Central Asian khanates (rulers) of Bukhara, Kokand and Khiva. In addition, the Kemalist emphasis on national character and revolutionary change allowed for the development of a populist, somewhat demagogic ideology familiar to the people of the ex-Soviet republics. Finally, the Kemalist economic system, which had changed to include principles of a mixed economy, and means to attract foreign capital to accelerate the development of a capitalist economy, provided the model for the transition to capitalism of the socialist economies of the Central Asian states.' From a political point of view, the Central Asian leaders had a natural affinity for the Kemalist form of democracy: controlled and directed, as it was, from above, it fitted well both with the ways of traditional Central Asian society and the deep-rooted norms of the old Soviet system. Finally, for the leaders of the Turkic Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, another significant factor was Turkey's ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and religious closeness. Kemalist ideology was originally both anti-imperialist and anti-communist, and rejected the exploitation of Islam and any involvement with pan-Turkism. The present leaders of the Central Asian republics, on the other hand, are unable to engage in anti-imperialist or anti-communist rhetoric. Their flirtation with Islam contradicts the consistent Kemalist policy of secularism, and the presence of the Russian army on Central Asian soil is inconsistent with the Kemalist principles of national sovereignty. …

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