Vinegar Hill

Unfortunately, I don't get many chances these days to write poetry, but I can't let another year go by without having a crack. I know what you're thinking: still using rhymes, at your age? It's a bit rum, I agree. But beggars can't be choosers, and it's the best I could do at short notice. I've decided not to use rhymes again, though.

Spat out each evening through the glass
revolving doors, he speeds like a dog-track hare
between shivering fronds and dripping shrubberies,
fleeing glaze-eyed through the urban square
the duff reggae as the festival crowds disperse;

glaze-eyed he slips down a narrow thoroughfare,
avoiding the outcasts in winter macs
who, standing in solitary pub doorways, stare
into ragged puddles as though at treasure maps:
mimicking vents, they wheeze an atmosphere

that chases him once more up Vinegar Hill;
again from a flowerbed bordering the fence
come pebbles flung by the grabbed handful
as if by a skulking, unseen malevolence:
the day's humiliations rain down like hail,

though if images wobble as on a screen
in front of him to roll like ripened pears
down into gutters and over the cobblestone,
the lines of the bards of despair are the bars
he grabs for his treadmill's steadying frame,

which means his gaze won't break, composure
sustained by the zesty scent of the limes
that line the walkway to the top, where
he's just in time to see in the mind's
intense Greek sunlight a galley disappear

over a blue sea between carnivorous rocks,
which doesn't ruffle the oarsmen, who are skilled
and determined—though this vision drapes
like a turf-green tablecloth over scaffold
hauled taut by a system of pulleys and knots

so that shaving each morning in the dim
half-light pre-dawn, it’s the jackdaw's caws,
ironic, mocking, cut through the illusion:
as he's plunged back down, the spectres
of the hellish tomb-world come back to him.

(December 28th 2008, Holborn)

One hand washes the other

This is the first chapter of a novel that I finished last Christmas (2007) but was never really happy with. I will try, at some point in the future, to rewrite it, perhaps taking a leaf out of the book of the Simsonian hamster: starting at the end and working backwards. In my mind, I called it My House is on the Outskirts, which is a Ukrainian proverb that means the equivalent of the English "see no evil".

Chapter 1
The armed guard stood at the entrance to the steam-baths as Arkady puttered up on his motorbike-sidecar was dressed entirely in black. He seemed to have modelled his outfit on the Spetsnaz, the Russian special forces, but it was as though he’d received the kit instructions over the telephone, on a poor connection, so that the effect was scruffy and ragged rather than menacing or sharp—a bit shabby, provincial, second-hand. Recognising the newcomer, the security man stepped aside to let him in. The steel door creaked on its hinges and a flake of its khaki paint helicoptered to the ground, unobserved.
Arkady’s contact with the “Donetsk Fellas” was Valentin Kulyeba, a petite Ukrainian who worked for the Russian crime clans. Arkady had dealt with him once before, “helping out” as the front man for a certain pyramid investment scheme. He hadn't exactly enjoyed the experience, but Arkady's attitude was “needs must when the devil rides”. Kulyeba was clever alright, but in the same way as a clockwork mechanism, or an elaborate statistical proof; he was a gifted minor administrator who would have been equally at home as a zealous official in a ministry of one of the totalitarian regimes of the previous century.
At the far end of the corridor Arkady Shapiro came to a heavily padded door, and a shiver of dread shot through him. Relax, relax, he told himself, and he knocked on the door and strolled into the room as breezily as he could manage. Kulyeba was sitting behind a low desk on the far side. He had a creamy white jacket draped over his shoulders, Napoleon-style. Hunched up over some paperwork, which seemed to absorb all of his attention, he looked for all the world as though he was doing the firm's accounts. On the desktop, to one side, was a black coffee steaming away in a white cup and saucer; on a large plate beside it, there was a selection of cold meats and pickles from which, from time to time, Kulyeba would pick out a morsel to munch. Under the desk, his leg shook obsessively. He seemed to breathe exclusively through a half-smoked panatella that had fizzled out some time before.
“Come through,” he said as he stood to his feet, gesturing to a low wooden chair in front of him. As he spoke, he stood up and wheezed phlegmatically into a hanky. “Come in. Come in and shut the door—stop those damned mosquitoes getting in.” Next to the refreshments on his desk there were two neat stacks of documents; a series of biros, laid out in parallel; three pads of yellow post-its, fanned out slightly; a metalworker’s rasp. Kulyeba was no more than five feet six, slim, with narrow shoulders. His movements were as staccato as his pattern of speech, conveying more irritation than anxiety—in no way compromising an implacable sense of self-belief. His dark eyes were emotionless, as if he was never fully engaged with anyone around him, looking over their shoulder for the next opportunity or risk. His hair was messy, like a sunburst in negative, and he was just starting to go grey at the temples. These elements combined to produce a crow-like impression about him, something of the scavenger.
On Arkady’s left, three of Kulyeba’s men were sitting at a round table playing cards. The youngest, jug-eared and shaven-headed, had on a long-sleeved paisley shirt in red and black. He looked the new arrival up and down, but, most likely judging him a negligible threat, went straight back to the poker game. Arkady pulled himself together and crossed over the cold stone floor. Kulyeba’s handshake was swift, limp, damp.
“We got your call,” said Valentin. “I’m only sorry we couldn’t get back to you sooner.”
“No problem, no problem,” said Arkady, bearing his uneven teeth.
“We heard that you were in trouble,” said Kulyeba, and he brought together his palms with a savage slap, surprising an unlucky insect out of existence. The three men looked up from their card game and Arkady jumped. With an index finger, Kulyeba poked at a gap in his teeth to dislodge a shred of pork. Then he got round to the real reason he had called Arkady in.
Kulyeba, it turned out, had had a bit of a bust up with Irakliy Sashukian, "the Armenian", a rival leader from their home town of Utansk, where Kulyeba still took care of metals exports for Donetsk. A convoy of Kulyeba's trucks carrying steel pipes to China had been hijacked, and he blamed Sashukian. One of Sashukian’s men had been “picked up”—but hadn’t held up “under questioning”. The dead man was Misha Karbak, Sashukian’s cousin. Kulyeba couldn’t see what the fuss was about—except it was bad for business. Of course, no one wanted a return to the “dog eat dog” of the mid-90s, no one wanted a return to the "good old days". For a moment Arkady rolled to and fro on the balls of his feet, nervily. Then he said he could help.

“And how’s the family?” asked Kulyeba, escorting his visitor back out onto the dusty street. “I trust they are well”—perhaps intending to bolster an impression of concerned cordiality, though without going so far as to wait for a reply. Vazgen, his jug-eared associate, left with them, heading out for a bite to eat with his sallow-faced girlfriend, whom Arkady thought he recognised—but from where? She had long, black, shiny hair, and the imprints of dark half-circles under her eyes, as if she hadn't slept for days. Vazgen nodded to the scruffy guard at the building's entrance and made off in the direction of a café on the corner, arm-in-arm with his paramour. Kulyeba, meanwhile, had ventured as far as the kerb. At the sight of Arkady’s motorbike-sidecar, an ancient black Dnipr K-650 parked there, Kulyeba almost choked on his own glee. “What’s this?” he spluttered. “What happened to the Fabia?” Arkady didn’t feel like explaining that he’d sold the car to pay for his father’s trip abroad. “It's a long story,” he said.
“I hope you’re not going to turn up at the Armenian’s on that thing,” said Kulyeba. “We can’t have that,” and he pulled from a calf-skin wallet a slim green wad of $100-bills. “Here,” he said, “live a little, why don’t you? Get yourself something with a little more class,” and he pressed some cash into Arkady’s hand, which seemed to extend itself of its own volition, without consulting his will.

On the two-lane highway from the city, Arkady shivered. Interrogating the afternoon’s events, he had his gaze fixed firmly on the road ahead, scanning for potholes.
Could he deliver?
Changing gear, he overtook a struggling red Zhiguli.
Would he be able to deliver what he’d promised? Of course he would, no question, no question. Hadn’t he’d always been lucky?
But the low, hypnotic growl of the bike’s engine failed to reassure him, and the sidecar rattled, unutterably empty now he’d seen his father off for the flight to Kiev. (Through the double-glass windows from the first floor of Donetsk Airport he’d watched the "internal" short-haul passenger planes taking off and unsteadily landing, and when he’d looked down, he’d caught sight of the old man shuffling along the tarmac towards the airport’s shuttle-bus, with almost no luggage. He was probably in Kiev already—perhaps in the air on the way to Tel Aviv. Had Arkady seen his father for the last time? This thought pierced him sharply.)
Tall rows of poplars sprouted from a flat horizon that seemed to posses them in inexhaustible supply, with only the odd field of wilting sunflowers or a coal-pit's spindly winding gear, turning slowly, to relieve the monotony of the scrubby steppe. A wind stream whipped over Arkady's cheeks and pushed back his unkempt, curly hair. And if a militiaman were to stop him for riding without helmet, so be it (he kept a few 100-hryvnya notes in his back pocket for bribes), because the deal with Kulyeba seemed to offer a way out of a tight spot he'd got himself into with the tax department, who were now investigating his business affairs. Feeling lighter than he had in months, he steered the bike onto a slip road: it seemed to handle more easily now. As he drove past the football stadium, the artificial lake, he felt almost wholly calm, coming to a halt steadily at a red light ahead of a crooked, narrow bridge. Just over the bridge, at the centre of a roundabout, he eyed a huge glossy poster for New Superslims, the purple waves of its silky backdrop, the stylish arrangement of the delicate cartonettes somehow seeming to welcome him home. He pictured the dinner for two he had planned for later that night with his mistress, Mila. Above him, the sky seemed blue and hopeful, and there was no cloud cover. “Whatever happens, happens,” said Arkady to himself, as if to throw any remaining anxieties off the scent, the bike wobbling a little as he pulled away.

The drunken bath

I've always liked poems of journeys, perhaps for the same reason that, in a detective novel, I like a good description of the scene—urban or rural, I'm not bothered—in which the action takes place. I want to take in the sights, noises, smells, have a peek over the shoulder of the characters—especially if it's somewhere exotic in time or space, where life is lived differently, and where I'm unlikely ever to go—medieval Italy, for instance, or California in the 40s, or ancient Rome, or Tsarist Russia. As poems are a cross between music and words, for the senses as well as the mind, they can be particularly successful in this endeavour.

Yesterday, I got in touch again with my old mate from university, Burt, with whom I went on a number of travelling holidays around Europe—one fairly wild one, if I remember, to Hungary in about 1992 (I think), where I wrote this poem, which is a pastiche of Rimbaud's Le Bateau ivre (in those days, it had a compelling significance for me, and I wrote two or three things that were inspired by it).

The air in the bedsit was damp
and cold and smelt of gas, but it was home.
She dropped her bag as the front door slammed
and chose the yellow bathsalts saved from the fallout zone.

She poured herself into a bath and never
noticed as the chipped enamel bathtub filled
and the day, a beast immensely cold and clever,
dissolved on the bathtiles where the yellow bathfoam spilled.

Her face in a sodden flannel's shade,
she never saw the bath detach itself and float
as the citizens in the flooding districts prayed
and the bath slid from the window like a chipped enamel boat.

As the clawmarks in her skin healed over,
one more city sank in the sea. Alone,
she never saw the cliffs dissolve at Dover
or the Channel gulping the poison yellow foam.

And the Netherlands and Bohemia could not escape,
and Belgium held its nose as it went down
as a girl in a bath sailed through a sunken town
and an oilslick in hammer & sickle shape.

And Europe dropped from her mind that day
as the rich drop food from their plates.
Little she thought of why the ceiling had gone grey
or of escalating water rates.

Still more continents fell from the world that night
like clay pots from a windowsill,
but she never asked: Who turned off the light?
And she never said: Who ran up this bill?

And Death asked: Who dares at this ungodly
hour to creep in my room?
But all that remains of him is a cape and, oddly,
a wisp of smoke shaped like an ostrich plume.

(Rose Hill, Budapest, 1992.)

Europe in a coma

I was the only child on that plane, apart from the children:
the jets powered up and I braced myself for the climb
as passengers up in business class were getting to grips
with the price of zinc in Die Welt or Frankfurter Allgemeine,
but I just studied the nicks on the flexible armoured wing—
what were they for? Well, I wasn't exactly sure, but felt
reassured by the captain's polite Etonian intonation
("safe pair of hands") and the phrase "precision engineering".

Inwardly I whooped at the excellent sights below me—
whole rows of town roofs wound like African braids,
then fawn and ochre farms laid out as abstract art,
and on the coast, sports complexes curled like hearing aids,
as even nature began to put on a pretty good show,
eg with her fascinating light/dark 4:30 tremulations
as we swooped up over the greeny undulous sea.
Under us—mermaids, dolphins. (A dream? I don't know.)

Great clouds over Vienna, the misty tarmac: one thinks
of sinister gasses, the flight control an aussichtsturm,
or Freud with his dreambook doing a runner; one sees
the plague cathedrals, blue plumes on state bureaucracies
(Marxist senses tingling under the superstructural weight);
one uses the word "one" for the first time ever
and one's sentences move firmly to their inexorable conclusion,
apparently civilised and sedate.

And there in the charming half-light beerkeller,
you drink ein schwarzer Kaffe and, spying the LUKoil
office, the Soviet monument, your mind stares back and east—
gangsters in both directions hurtling over the good black soil,
forests and barns on fire in your eyes amid the harmless (?) talk:
"So, what do you think of this Haider thing?" (you overhear)—
consider then "the racial question", and stroke your beard,
noticing now on the menu a disturbing fixation with pork.

(Vienna, April 2000)

Spontaneous wishes

Thanks be to whatever-it-is that is
the nuclear fuel at the core of this
calm but nervy hunger I now
feel, restoring me to poise and power.
What high ideals are they I wish
as I sit on a broken bench one sad July
by grotty litterbins where the wishbone road divides?

Agonising overthought, paralysis:
these I'd side-step, these I'd give a miss,
have my desires negotiate, shake hands, or
see my spirit get up from the floor
cool and collected, wearing sunglasses.
What is there I've got to do but be?
How much I'd like to lose what's left of me

and just enjoy the clink of keys,
the dark green mass of trees
that shimmer above the underpass—
even the black bins lined up on the grass,
bolt-upright like buzzbied sentries,
bored stiff as me by rubbish duty
(hang in there comrades I say and give them a workers' salute).

O, why point the finger or be bitter?
Just sit and watch a piece of litter
blown free like a crumpled swallow—
there is the thought that you should follow
as it blusters over the perimeter
of bushes—shorn as for intensive care
last autumn, each now with a full head of hair!

(Blackheath, 1997)

Off the top of my head

Needless to say, I've had a bit of an interest in revolutions—and even The Revolution—for quite some time. What counts as a revolution? What are the different kinds? What are the common causes, trajectories and consequences? Of late I have found my interest turning to these issues again. My main interest is in contemporary political situation around the world, especially in eastern Europe. However, it seems to me best to start with "the classics". I have therefore begun to study the English, French and Russian revolutions, as well as state breakdowns in the Ottoman Empire, pre-modern China and Japan. Before I get too far into that, I had occasion to jot down some thoughts on the possible implications of the wave of political rebellion in the former Soviet Union in recent years known as the "colour revolutions".

Are colour revolutions a thing of the past in CIS countries?
The colour revolutions in a number of former Soviet countries in the early years of the present decade—the Rose in Georgia in 2003, the Orange in Ukraine in 2004 and the Tulip in the Kyrgyz Republic in 2005—came as something of a surprise to observers, many of whom thought that the cause of democratic development in these countries was either intractable or hopeless.

To understand the potential future relevance of this model of popular political rejuvenation, it is necessary to understand the features and processes that the separate events had in common. All of the political regimes then in existence in these countries might described as semi-democratic at best, in which elites from the communist era were in an alliance of convenience with business factions who had been able to enrich themselves by taking advantage of the market distortions that develop in the transition from planned economies. Additionally, each of the upheavals was sparked by fraudulent national elections, although in all cases extensive violence was avoided.

Operationally, the "colour revolutionaries" faced a weak or divided authority, headed by an unpopular leader who was linked in the public mind with corruption; crucially, the fault lines ran through competing branches of the security services, which made the use of force against the demonstrators more difficult. The revolutionaries were well organised, and used the media—which in all cases remained largely free—as well as modern technology, such as mobile phones and the Internet, to spread information quickly—for example, of the variance between exit polls and official vote results.

Another vital, but controversial, element in the mix was that of technical help from outside. This came not just from Western election-monitoring teams or non-governmental organisations (NGOs), but, notably, from the leaders of the Serbian student movement, Otpor! (Resistance!), which was instrumental in mobilising the opposition that brought down the regime of Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia in 2000. (For example, they ran workshops on how to raise funds, and how to "brand" the revolution.)

Not least, the colour revolutions came as a surprise to the region's incumbent governments—which is probably one of the main reasons for their success. We know now, however, that in the wake of the Orange Revolution, Russia's leaders and their political advisers held several high-level meetings to address the question of how to respond systematically to the challenge to their positions represented by these popular disturbances in the "near abroad". The actions of the Russian government since then—its crackdown on domestic opponents, the resubordination of most of the media, and the sparing of no effort to allow any semblance of real competition disturb the desired outcome to the parliamentary and presidential elections of 2007-08—testify to the likely conclusions of these meetings, and are behind the rise of the popular description of Russia's polity under Vladimir Putin as a "managed democracy".

There is some evidence that the "counterrevolutionary" methods so developed have been disseminated to other incumbent governments in the CIS—most recently, perhaps, in the practice in the Kyrgyz Republic in December 2007, where, for all the show of a vibrant and inclusive the parliamentary election, a comprehensive package of electoral, registration and security measures appear to have been in place to prevent the population opting for the wrong result.
Therefore, the short answer is that, yes, colour revolutions are likely to be a thing of the past in the CIS, because the same combination of circumstances is unlikely to recur in just the same way again—not least, because specific measures have been developed to prevent just such an outcome. This does not mean, of course, that the problem of political stability has been solved by the increased authoritarianism that has characterised many CIS regimes in the recent past—this would not be possible until the conditions giving rise to the instability are abolished—but, rather, that any popular, successful political convulsions in the future are likely to happen in creative and unexpected ways, reacting against the reaction.

The grappling hook

I write this poem for survival,
flinging upwards the grappling hook
as the ground gives under me: I still hope
for a spectacular, minute-to-midnight arrival
at the gates of bliss. Calm detachment is vital,
I've heard, if you want to get through intact.
That's why my reasoning floats in a white tunic
above my shoulder; for luck I've named him Virgil.
The ferocity of our attackers frightened me
as we both peered back at the hellhounds below us.
"I think it's the optimism they found offensive,"
laughs Virgil with the pastoral charm of a wise peasant—
his look assuring me we'd once again be stretching our toes
on the pleasant shorelines of enlightenment.

The lady with a dog

As part of my Russian course, we've been translating one of Chekhov's short stories, The lady with a dog. Below is my loosish translation of the first part. The picture to the side is of Chekhov with his wife, Olga. They look, I must say, surprisingly cheery and wry.

I

It was said that someone new had appeared on the promenade: a lady with a dog. Dmitry Dmitrych Gurov, who had already been in Yalta two weeks and who was settling in there, also took an interest in the new arrivals. Sitting in Vernet's Pavilion, he saw as a young lady, a diminutive blond in a beret, passed along the promenade; behind her ran a white Pomeranian dog.

And then he would meet her in the municipal park and the urban gardens several times a day. She would stroll alone—always, however, in that beret, with the white Pomeranian; no-one knew who she was, and they would call her simply “the lady with a dog”.

“If she is here without her husband and without friends,” mused Gurov, “then there wouldn’t be any harm in making her acquaintance.”

He was not yet 40, but had a daughter aged 12 and two boys in grammar school. He had married early, when he was still an undergraduate, in the second year, and now his wife seemed to be half as old as him again. A tall woman with dark eyebrows, she was upright, important, solid and—as she herself put it—intellectual. She read a great deal, in letters did not use the hard sign, and articulated her husband’s name “Di-mi-try” rather than “Dmitry”—while he secretly considered her shallow, limited, graceless, was afraid of her, and loathed to stay home. Long ago he had started to cheat on her; he cheated often, which is probably the reason that he almost always spoke about women derisively, and when they came up in conversation in his presence, he referred to them thusly:

“ A low race!”

It seemed to him that he had learned enough from bitter experience to name them as he pleased, but all the same, without the “low race” he would have been unable to survive even two days. In the company of men, he was bored, not himself; with them he was taciturn, cold, but when he found himself among women, then he felt free, and he knew what to talk about—with them, it was even easy to be silent. In his appearance, character, in his whole nature there was something attractive, indefinable, which predisposed women to him, lured them; he knew of this, and he was also drawn to them by some sort of power.

Repeated experience, in fact bitter experience, had taught him long ago that any attachment, which initially so pleasantly relieves the monotony of life and appears to be a precious and carefree adventure, for respectable people—especially for Muscovites, who are sluggish and irresolute—inevitably turns into the whole problem, extraordinarily complex, and in the end the situation becomes burdensome.

At any new meeting with an interesting woman, however, this experience somehow slipped his mind—he wanted to live, and everything seemed so simple and amusing.

And so one day, towards evening, he was dining in the garden when the lady in the beret, without rushing, approached to take the adjacent table. Her appearance, gait, dress and hairstyle told him that she was from respectable society, married, in Yalta for the first time and alone, that she was bored here…

In the tales of the immorality of local mores, much was untrue: he hated them and knew that such tales in the main are invented by people who themselves would willingly have sinned, if they could; but when the lady sat down at the next table, no more than three steps from him, he recalled these stories of easy victory, of trips to the mountains, and the tempting notion of a quick and fleeting liaison, of an affair with an anonymous woman whom you did not know by first or family name, suddenly gripped him.

Softly, he beckoned the dog to him, and when it came he wagged a finger at it. The dog began to growl. Gurov wagged again.

The lady glanced at him and instantly lowered her eyes.
"He doesn't bite," she said, and blushed.
"Can he have a bone?" And when she nodded in assent, he asked politely:
"May I ask if you've been in Yalta long?"
"About five days."
"And I've been here two weeks already."

They remained silent for a while.

"Time flies, and yet it is so boring here," she said, not looking at him.
"That's just what people say, that it is boring here. Your average fellow lives in his anywhere in Belyov or Zhizdra—and he is not bored, but arrives here, and it's: 'O, it is boring! O, the dust!' You'd think that he'd come from Grenada."

She burst into laughter. Then they both continued to eat in silence, like strangers; but after dinner they walked side-by-side—and began the playful, easy conversation of people who are free, happy, with whom it is all the same where they go and what they talk about. They strolled and talked about how strangely lit the sea was; the water was of such a soft, warm lilac colour, and along it from the moon ran a golden strip. They talked about how stuffy it was after a hot day. Gurov said that he was a Muscovite, a philologist by education, although he worked in a bank; that he had once trained as a singer in a private opera, but had given up, that he had two houses in Moscow…And from her he found out that she grew up in St Petersburg, but left to marry in Saratov, where she had already lived for two years; that she was to stay in Yalta another month, and that possibly her husband, who was also in need of a rest, would come for her. She couldn't for the life of her explain where her husband worked—in the provincial government or in the provincial district council, and this was comical to her. Gurov found out further that her name was Anna Sergeievna.

If you want things to stay the same, everything has to change

In her recent book, Central Asia’s Second Chance, Martha Brill Olcott attempts to address an apparent contradiction at the heart of contemporary US foreign policy in the Central Asian region. This contradiction is that the failure of the current Bush administration to encourage democratic development more actively—instead relying on partnerships with authoritarian regimes out of short-term expediency linked to the prosecution of the so-called war on terror—risks reproducing long-term security threats to the West because of the potential for ongoing political, social and economic discontent to catalyse anti-Western terrorism.

She argues that the attention and resources of the US administration have been diverted from vital long-term democracy-promotion projects by the war on terror itself, and that this is shown by the low and declining level of US regional funding, which was just US$210m in 2004 (compared with US$1.9bn and US$2.7bn for the more significant US allies, Egypt and Israel, in the same year).

A second important theme of the book is that the nation-building approach adopted by international bodies may have been counterproductive for the region—in particular, in view of the interdependent histories, transport infrastructure, and energy and water resources of the countries involved, the country-specific approach may have encouraged rivalry and protectionism, hindering the development of a regional market.

In some ways, this is a frustrating book, since the author seems to share uncritically the terms and perspectives of the US policy establishment, so that the reader has the feeling of wading through quite a lot of policy-wonk material before getting to a discussion of the details of what has happened regarding the political systems of the Central Asian states themselves (the book might thus more accurately have been called America’s Missed Second Chance in Central Asia).

However, in relation to these political systems, the author makes the points that the countries' leaders were all products of Soviet political structures, and that their emergence, practically intact, from the wreckage of the Soviet Union following the failed Moscow coup of 1991 meant that they lacked the legitimacy that might have been conferred upon them had they risen to power as leaders of independence struggles. Although none of the region’s citizens enjoy as full a range of political rights and civic freedoms as those of the formerly communist countries of central and eastern Europe, there is some variety in the types of political systems that have obtained in Central Asia in the independence period, running along a line from “semi-democratic” to fully authoritarian, with the Kyrgyz Republic usually conceived of as the most democratic and Turkmenistan as the least.

The thesis that US funding was insufficient to allow it to influence positively the political outcomes in the region (in particular, to minimise the chances of political instability by helping to pave the way for the smooth, democratic handover of power) is illustrated by the case of the Kyrgyz Republic. Here, the author argues, such a policy had the best chance of success in the early years of the present decade, because of the country's experience of rapid democratic development in the early 1990s, and because the desire of the then president, Askar Akayev, to compete for prestige with other Central Asian leaders would have predisposed him to accept a high degree of conditionality in return for grant assistance for political reforms already under way, such as of local government, electoral mechanics and anti-corruption programmes. However, the sums involved were too small to yield any decisive influence (funds from the Freedom Support Act for democracy-building were just US$1.16 per head for the Kyrgyz Republic in 2002, although this was the highest per-head level of funding from the US for any country in the region). Instead, therefore, Akayev’s increasing authoritarianism went unchecked, and the chain of events leading up to the Aksy killings of 2002 and resulting in the president’s ouster in the Tulip Revolution of March 2005, while illustrating the greater political influence of public protest in the Kyrgyz Republic relative to its Central Asian neighbours, also began a curious phase of political instability and constitutional struggle that is probably not yet over. Indeed, the regime of Kurmanbek Bakiyev, which replaced Akayev’s, appears to have reproduced many of the features of its predecessor, re-employing many of its personnel, and adopting many of its operation and control techniques.

Oh moon of Alabama

The girl at the front who mid-song turned to discuss
the more compelling nuances of that day's soap instalment,
was it her or the players' plummeting conviction, kerplonk,
in the sincerity of their venture that began the wave
of indifference that soon engulfed the entire audience
who, tight-scarfed and back-packed, started in groups
to abandon the performance by way of the corkscrew stair?
The bass is holed below the waterline
and the band are blow-up lifebuoys rapidly leaking air.

When the singer looks round, he's lost at sea;
as if to the valve of some last-hope dinghy, he blows
with desperation into an unresponsive mic.
But his voice cracks like glass and the sharp notes jag,
deflating expectation, piercing the dinghy's skin
so that the hissing punctures now are legion
and the penetrating melodies buckle or lose their point.
The thump from the toms is that of a doomed galley.
All non-essential personnel make gratefully for the alley,

although stalwarts in the remaindered audience hold tight
to meet the end-set silence with relieved applause.
The cellar drains. Songs twitch like fishes on the floor
and the weary writer, thankful of the darkness,
slumps on his amplifier, wondering what went wrong.
He hardly recalls his earlier buoyant spirits
and it's only the face of his loved one—
brought to his remembrance ideally bright and shining—
keeps him afloat as he too skulks quietly to the door.

(Summer 1999)

A sea of troubles

Economic transition in Central Asia
Richard Pomfret’s book, The Central Asian Economies Since Independence, is a clear and reasonably up-to-date account of the economic developments in the first 15 or so years since the collapse of the Soviet Union thrust independence upon the five former Soviet republics—Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan—that comprise the Central Asian region. Taking into account both the similarities and differences in their starting positions, Pomfret outlines the distinctive policies adopted by each of the new countries in response to common political and economic disruptions, and tries to relate these policies to the subsequent economic performance and prospects of each.

The broad picture
At the start of transition in 1991, the Central Asian countries inherited a number of shared features. They:

• began with very similar economic and political systems, based, respectively, on central planning and the constitutionally enshrined leading role of the Communist Party;
• were among the poorest republics in the Soviet Union, with around 30-50% of households living below the poverty line in 1989 (defined as a monthly income of less than Rb75), compared with a figure of 5% for the Russian republic;
• had relatively high levels of human capital for their income levels;
• had functioned as suppliers of primary products and minerals; and
• had a low indigenous capacity for economic management.

In addition, they faced a number of common deficiencies, disruptions and shocks, including:

• a lack of experience of independent nationhood, so that attempts at nation-building had to go hand in hand with attempts at economic reform, complicating reform;
• economic disorganisation, which was brought on by the shift from central planning and the split of the single Soviet economic unit;
• disruption of inter-republican trade links by new national borders; and
• the stoking of hyperinflation by the attempt to maintain the rouble zone, with prices in all five countries exceeding 50% per month in 1992.

These were the main factors behind the very steep output falls across the region at the start of the transition process, although other factors may be expected to have exaggerated or ameliorated the impact on living standards. First, there are valuation problems linked to the nature of the transition itself that make measurement difficult. For example, it is hard to value products for which demand dried up following the introduction of market mechanisms, or to account for changes in product quality or the introduction of new kinds of products. Second, the impact of output falls on living standards was likely to have been exacerbated by the cessation of transfers from the central Soviet authorities, as well as by the widening of income inequality. Third, in the Soviet economy energy products were undervalued and manufactures overvalued, so that a change in the terms of trade brought about by a shift to world market prices might have been expected to favour energy producers such as Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. Fourth, in Tajikistan, the exceptionally steep falls in output were the result of the destruction of the centrally planned economy by two bursts of civil war, which only came to an end in 1997.

In tandem with these steep falls in output, all of the new central Asian states suffered a loss in budgetary revenue, not only absolutely, but also relative to declining GDP, creating dilemmas of how to achieve both macroeconomic stability at the same time as maintaining social programmes (in most cases, this was not possible).

Bearing in mind that the region suffers from a number of common international trade data deficiencies, in 1994-97 the foreign trade of the Central Asian economies began to recover from the initial transitional shocks and disruptions, and, with high trade to GDP ratios, all may be said to have quickly developed into open economies.

A closer view
The Kyrgyz Republic. Policy choices: The Kyrgyz Republic embraced the standard Western advice concerning stabilisation and reform (often referred to as the "Washington consensus"), for which it received extensive multilateral support. Price liberalisation and enterprise reform took place rapidly. Later on, in 1998, the country was rewarded for its choice by becoming the first of the former Soviet countries to be allowed to join the Word Trade Organisation (WTO).

Stabilisation: The Kyrgyz Republic introduced a national currency, the som, in 1993 as a prerequisite to asserting macroeconomic control, and it was the first country to curb hyperinflation, bringing the average rate of monthly price increases below 50% in 1995.

Output performance: Description. As a result of the economic disruptions and shocks that affected the whole region in the early phases of transition, output in the Kyrgyz Republic fell by a cumulative 45% in 1991-95. Manufacturing output also dropped sharply, and the increase in the contribution of agriculture to GDP in these years is probably explained by the migration of the newly unemployed from the cities to the countryside to look for work. Following the years of recovery from the low base so created—that is, in 1996-97—economic growth has been moderate and subject to wide fluctuations.

Explanation. The radical reform and stabilisation policies probably contributed to the steepness of the fall in output in the Kyrgyz Republic in the early transition era. The failure of the expected gains of its radical policy choices to materialise is perhaps explained the republic’s paucity of readily tradable resources, in contrast to some of its neighbours. Also, low levels of initial income and human capital, exacerbated by emigration of skilled (often Russian) staff, perhaps hindered the establishment of well-functioning market institutions. The fluctuations in GDP output are linked to an overreliance on gold production of the Kumtor mine.

Budget and debt: Anxious to maintain its social programmes, in the 1990s the Kyrgyz government did not allow expenditure to fall as far as revenue, keeping the government deficit fairly wide, at about 4% of GDP at least, until the early 2000s. To avoid inflationary financing, the authorities plugged the gap by borrowing from international financial institutions, building up a large external debt, which rose from zero at the start of transition to the equivalent of 139% of GDP in 1999, according to the World Bank. This was a negative development for at least two reasons: first, the borrowing was not used to invest in productive ventures that could later generate earnings from which government revenue could accrue and the original borrowing be repaid; second, debt repayments on the accumulated sum have acted as an ongoing drain on scarce public funds ever since.

Foreign trade: After a recovery, total trade turnover fell in 1997-2002.

Illuminati

A couple of years ago, I read a two-volume work by Peter Gay on the Enlightenment, which is itself a model of undogmatic humanist scholarship and prose. But it got me thinking about a few other Big Topics that seem to be relevant to the political questions of the day, and since then I've been thinking of composing a series of What Is...? studies--such as What is the Enlightenment? What is fascism? What socialism? Capitalism? What is imperialism?

Well, given the scarcity of time, you've got to start somewhere. Therefore, as a kind of a memo to myself and a spur, I've typed up a page from my notes on the chapter on the Enlightenment, the period and the broad philosophical-social movement, in Norman's Davies's workmanlike Europe: A History.

Enlightenment and absolutism: 1650-1789

• The age of absolutism is characterised by a much wider variety of political systems than just absolutism.


• The colonies and colonialism form a backdrop to the period.


• The Enlightenment outlook is distinguished by its emphasis on rational thinking, and an appeal to evidence. It aims to be undogmatic and tolerant. “The light of reason” shines particularly strongly in the fields of science, epistemology and moral philosophy. Rules and patterns in the arts: classicism. The mania for encyclopedias. In religious thought, it is epitomised by deism. In economics, mercantilism and the physiocrats. In political theory, Locke and Montesquieu. The question of historiography: How should history be written? Key figures include Voltaire and the transitional figure of Rousseau.


• Reacting against Enlightenment rigidity and reductionism, Romanticism emphasises the spiritual, the supernatural, the spontaneous; imagination and emotion. Vico, Kant, Haman , Herder.


• This is the period of French supremacy, primarily under the reign of Louis XIV, the sun king (r 1643-1715) in the seventeenth century, whose religious policy turned against the Huguenots and the Jansenists, and who conducted four major wars (the war of devolution; the Franco-Dutch war; nine-years’ war; the war of Spanish succession). In the eighteenth century: stagnation and hunting under Louis the XV; Louis the XVI: before the deluge.


• In the British Isles, it is the time of the Restoration, the Glorious Revolution, the Act of Union with Scotland (1707)—the basis of modern British identity. The Glorious Revolution enshrines parliamentary sovereignty, as against monarchical or popular sovereignty. Charles II lives it up. James II is seen as too soft on the Catholics. William and Mary are invited in. The reign of the Hanoverians: George I, II, III, IV (1714-1830). The American Revolution (1776-83).


• In rest of western Europe in the eighteenth century: the Bourbon kings in Spain and the auto-de-fe; in Portugal, John the priest king and the Lisbon earthquake; in Italy, rivalry between the House of Savoy in Turin, the Habsburgs in Milan and the Duchy of Tuscany: enlightened despotism.


• In central and eastern Europe: the last surge of the Ottomans and the siege of Vienna, along with a revival of Hapsburg fortunes: Maria Theresa and Joseph II, the “crowned revolutionary”; “Josephism” and education of the state elite; the incorporation of Hungary (1687) and the Rakoczy rebellion (1704-11); the rise of Prussia under the Frederiks, especially Frederick the Great (r 1740-86), said to be—nor least by himself—one of the wonders of the age. The expansion and consolidation of Russia (eg down to the Black Sea), especially under Peter I (r 1682-1725), who killed his son and initiated thoroughgoing Westernisation, and Catherine II (1762-96), who was German and killed her husband; succession by palace revolution; the war with Sweden; the construction of St Petersburg; the subjugation of Ukraine and the Hetman State. The decline of Poland-Lithuania.


• The deleterious role of Orthodoxy in the Balkans, as conservative, anti-Western: “none of the great civilising movements that shook the Western world…could effectively penetrate…Political traditions owed little to rationalism, absolutism or constitutionalism; kinship politics dominated at all levels; nepotism lubricated by bribery was a way of life.”


• Mozart.