The fugitive

1
We didn't know he was in his death throes
as he lay all afternoon on the flatbed trolley in A&E,
the furtive little Woody Allen doctor
glancing back over his white-coat shoulder guiltily,
answering the nonchalant young nurse rattily
as she folded her plastic apron for disposal—
there was nowhere for him to send him to—
phoning around again for a free space,
but with no luck.

2
And we didn't realise, as the chrome bars
of the trolley-bed locked around him,
and he mustered his last strength
for a break through a gap in the fence
he'd spotted in the bed's lower left corner,
that a burst main in his capital
was flooding its streets slowly,
the rising waters unhooking gently
from the walls of the emptying terraces
the frames of sepia portraits, washing them
with curled, bright holiday snapshots,
black doormats, brown leather jackets,
with betting slips and pay packets,
with race meetings and nightshifts,
down the affluvial street.

3
Again he was a boy in grey shorts
and a school cap, collecting like seashells
the spent and unspent bullet casings
washed up on the shores of dockland ruins,
the deconstructing victualling yards,
igniting with a spyglass and the sun's
weak rays the lined-up rows of cartridges
for a transgressive whiff of cordite,
as the engine overhead of a doodlebug
made way for a mortifying silence.

4
The ambulance cornered the unfamiliar
junction unsteadily, its siren trumpeting
wearily its one pop hit. From a window,
we watched the late September leaves
fall silently from trees that lined the streets
of a sludgy twilight. With diligence,
the green-dressed paramedic consulted
displays of liquid crystal, made clipboard notes,
as he writhed, moaned softly, his good arm
trying weakly to snap out of the straps.

5
Captured at last, and with the torrent
now breaching the walls of the dog-track,
lapping the steps to the Chinese takeaway,
he watched impassive as his hopes sank
with the outlines of the city—but a scent
of sea salt was in his nostrils; on his cheeks,
the sting of a coastal wind. From where?
Bobbing for a while as the rising waters
sucked up to the lip of the high stockade,
he slipped off his body like a wet suit
to push out over a tall perimeter fence-post
into a featureless ocean, an expert breaststroke
propelling him now with ease and speed
over the surface a noiseless deep, without
the burden of a life to slow him down.

(November-December 2009)

My house is on the outskirts

Chapter 27

At Klava’s. Miners’ Day, two years later.
Headlights lit up in binocular shape the planks of a dilapidated fence, a mid-section of lamppost, the small green hump of a rusty telephone relay box, as the car turned into a dirt path off Red Dawn Road. The car tyres scrunched over gravel stealthily. It must have been getting on for 11 o’clock.
Vita had been out for the evening, catching up with an old friend who was over from England to visit her mother, who now lived in a big house on the edge of Utansk, all alone. In fact, Galkin's wife had been fretting about the meeting ever since she’d taken the call a few days before, because the friend had been her great school rival—especially for the attention of boys. Her clothes, as she pawed through them, looked so tatty, so provincial. What was she going to wear? She’d fended off the friend’s suggestion that they meet up at Vita’s: although since Osip's promotion they'd moved into a bigger flat on Lenin Avenue, it was still being done up—a seemingly unending process—and was covered with musty canvas tarpaulins, cluttered up with step-ladders, buckets, brushes, stacked bags of plaster by the entrance door. Projecting onto the visitor her own sense of her belittlement, she feared eliciting the pity for those who have stayed behind. She found herself checking her appearance more carefully in the hallway mirror, noting especially the lines that splayed out from the corners of her eyes when she grinned (she admonished herself not to do this), the appearance of one or two unruly grey hairs. But at least she'd had children—unlike her former rival. She was very proud of her two boys. Neither was it a small achievement that she was now in charge of the antenatal ward. At one of the town's new boutiques, she picked up a pair of jeans the colour of pink grapefruit, a high-necked crimpelene top in peach, had her hair re-hennaed.

The mother's house was on the far edge of the town, just before the wilderness took over. It had been a long time since they’d all met there, as they’d used to quite often in the days just after college, before they’d gone their separate ways. Soon after, Osip and Vita had got married.

The car tyres scrunched stealthily along the gravelly lane. Up ahead, Osip could make out the dingy yellow lights from the windows of a few irregularly spaced little houses as he searched for a spot to park, pebbles springing up sporadically against the car’s underside with a sharp metallic clink. At the gate in the high fence, he rang the piercing electric bell and waited. After a time, he could hear multiple bolts being undone from the inside and then Klava Rustadze let him in. As he followed her down wide steps into the cool lower floor of the building, which served as a kitchen and pantry, in the gloom Osip just managed to navigate the sticky flytraps that uncurled vertically at even points from the doorjamb.
Inside, with her back to him, his wife was leaning into the wooden kitchen table, eagerly relating the details of the latest unbelievable news to Zhenya Rustadze, her old school friend. Zhenya had on a tight T-shirt and jeans, all green, and her hair was cropped—quite different from how he remembered her. But her dark-skinned, pretty face was unmistakable, almost childlike in its naivety as she patiently listened to his wife, nodding in agreement and encouragement at judicious intervals. It must have been ten years since he'd met her, though they’d always got on. Maybe he'd even had a bit of a crush on her. Sat beside her at the table was Zhenya's new English husband, bespectacled and a little overfed, bearing a weak, discomfited smile. There were drinks and snacks laid out on the table. Behind them, on the kitchen sideboard, a metal-blue keg of Baltica beer was tipped sideways in a large enamel pie dish, drowning in a pool of its own juice.
“Osip, how are you?” said Zhenya, and she cracked open a can of beer and handed it to him.
Osip nodded in silent greeting, took a slurp of the beer and pulled up a chair next to his wife—who, he now noticed, with some approval, was a little drunk. It was so rarely these days that she got a chance to let her hair down. Klava sat back in a chair a short distance from the table, as though awaiting permission to join in.
“How are you, Osip,” repeated Zhenya. “You look well.”
But before he could speak, Vita interjected: “He’s been promoted. He’s head of material investigations."
"She thought I’d be stuck on the bottom rung for good,” said the officer, with a laugh. Then Vita added: “But he’s taken up smoking again.”

“How long are you back?” asked Osip.
“A couple of weeks," replied Zhenya, "more than enough for anyone.” But she regretted the jibe even as it was leaving her mouth. They'd already been to visit her step-dad’s grave, she added quickly. In fact, they'd taken a wrong turn in the cemetery—it was so overgrown and unkempt there now—and had stumbled across rows of fresh gravestones: all those cocky young men who’d strutted about the town when she'd been a waitress, ten years before. One of them once spat in her face when she’d asked him to pay for his beer, and she'd even been out on a couple of dates with another—Arkady Shapiro, the lawyer's son. She hadn't even known that he'd died.
“A terrible business," said Klava. "Poor Arkasha. Such a funny little boy. Don’t you remember?” (She was speaking to Vita.) “Not even his wife could recognise him.”
“You knew Arkasha, didn’t you, Osip?” Vita said.
“Yes, I knew him.”
“They never found out who it was,” said Klava. "Soon after that, old Shapiro died in Israel. A stroke. (He always dressed so smartly.) The son’s death can’t have helped.” Then she brought her hands together in a mighty clap, squeezing the spirit of a mosquito out of its skin and making the jittery foreigner start.
“O, what a morbid conversation,” said Vita. “Can’t we talk about something more cheerful? Did you go into town today for the celebration? It was a lovely, bright day. All the young cadets were out in their dress uniforms.”
Klava said: “I saw Sashukian on the TV. He was giving away flats to crippled miners. It was a nice gesture.”
“The Armenian?” said Zhenya.
“He’s our new deputy,” said Vita.
“Got in on an anti-corruption ticket,” Osip added softly, almost under his breath. All of them, except Klava, burst into laughter.
Klava fumed. “At least he’s kept the mines open,” she said.
"But if he doesn't keep the mines open," said Vita, "he'll go broke."
At this, Osip took the opportunity to go outside to roll himself a cigarette.

It was a muggy night in late August. From the low wooden bench in Klava’s yard, beside a lattice screen of creepers, as he licked the gummy edge a cigarette paper he could see glowering over the back fence at the end of the long garden the silhouette of a huge slagheap on the grounds of the Utansk Metallurgical Works. Turning in the opposite direction, as if to escape its glare, he gazed up at the night sky, which was salted with the clusters of innumerable stars—the Great Pan and the Little Pan, that stubborn stain of the Milky Way—and inhaled.

Smashed

"Have no fear," I said as I strode over the flooded park.
School kids were ganneting chocolate bars, hooting like wildfowl,
while the wildfowl were motionless, desolate, stark,
and just stared at the lake like Oliver at his bowl.
It was winter and the lake was beginning to ice
as the Canada geese, reviewing the situation,
the thin and fuzzy rushes, completing a quick analysis
ticked off the pros and cons of economic emigration—
though the sun still managed a spark on a muddy bottle,
reminding me of my own mind, on the blink
(also, we were broke, both drained, both a bit brittle;
both of us once had been up to our necks in drink).
"If the fates would see us ragged and shattered, that's fine!
Just have no fear"—this urged from behind a jagged smile.
But the pep-talk felt ancient as, in truth, I'd lost my shine:
neurosis, you see, had been at my teeth with its file.
Was anyone free of anxiety? How should I know!
Bleak birds hung like my own doubting hmms on the huge
gusts of wind over the trees lined up as suspects in a row
as the estate rose on the horizon like a prison barge
and I turned away. But in doing so, in the mud and ice
the smashed glass turned kaleidoscopic in the sun
and the light on the fractive lines looked up like lively eyes
so I thought of a place, a bright space, where children
in attentive groups are a delighted audience who focus
on the bright red balls of the miseries we juggle.
There was plenty of room for enjoyment in that locus
and the tricky enterprise was easy, no trouble.

(Grahame Park, Barnet, Winter 2000)

Caledonian Road daydream remembrance

I should really be writing some new poems, but I need a new, perhaps more prosy, style, and I haven't found it yet. This one, which I wrote about ten years ago, I've copied out of my notebook—with some difficulty, since my handwriting is so bad—reconstructing it as best I could according to the spirit of those days, and leaving unchanged its slightly idiosyncratic punctuation.
If I remember rightly, I had a thing about Shakespeare, blank verse and "the line as a unit of measurement" back then—all of which seems a bit quaint to me now. Nor would I be so tempted to use the device of the "fictional I" anymore, I think.

A warm wind tickling my features
as I rose on the escalator staircase,
I closed my eyes like a child enjoying affection,
at home in the moment for once,
emerging from the depths of a dark mood
as I emerged from the underground.
The ticket machines I leapt, no problem;
all inward insuperable cowardices I also cleared
easily, or mentally belted like Super Mario
so that they shattered to fragile shark teeth
briefly, before exiting harmlessly the screen.

Rain fell in the swallowing gutters
as I leaned on the Piccadilly railings to see
the numerous, hatted office workers scuttling
in mackintoshes through the slanting rain,
refreshing lights of the Carlsberg billboard
fill and empty, green beams of the lettering
igniting the drizzle into little green flecks of flame;
the wrinkles in the yellowed rainwater
that trickled in the guttering completely absorbed me
so that my mind swam like a curious fish
through the white ruins of a crinkled moon.

What would it matter, said my free-wheeling
brain, if I woke on a blustery night that's dark
to find a new flood rapping at my door?
An elegant lady angel, I had the feeling,
would be dispatched to the disaster scene
with nails and toolkit to knock up an ark
and, gathering clean and unclean thoughts
in pairs, she and I would sail safely
over the submerged pubs and clubs of Soho—
taking time out, maybe, for a relaxing cruise
until the worst of it had blown over.

(1998)

Winter ode

Weak wind through a Soho passageway
just manages to lift
a couple of fluffy seedlings,
a lost, erratic foodbag,
a mad black rook with a quiff.
All afternoon I watch clouds drift, consciousness drift,
from behind the glass in a chrome and brass café
my mind filled up with leaves
and deceives,
and, broke, ignoble-feeling,
in trance, in dream reflection
absolving myself of ground-bound grieves:

the time, for instance, I swept
without a sound
around the knotted oak
outside my first-year student room (inside, I half-slept):
in soft light flooding golden, supernatural
I could see
the brilliant, living markings of the tree
—its wisdom—
with me in love, a curling bridegroom from Chagall;
or my mind that stark November with the white gulls sailing free,
on currents cold and invisible, clear—
I looped the loop and hit the brakes,
I did a u-turn in mid-air.
O, it was fine, it was lovely—so much better than ecstasy!

But the waitress, black-clad and sneakered, who sees me
blankly staring
as she brings to my table
3rd-ordered black coffee,
double strength,
what does she know of the chain-smoking stranger
from whom, misunderstanding his clumsy remark about her accent,
she wheels in apprehension?
As clouds drift and consciousness drifts
and I light up another year to smoke I wish she knew
—I sip the bitter drink—
I wish she could have seen me when I flew.

(November 30th 1998)

More Tulips in the spring?

Prospects for political instability in Central Asia
Outbreaks of unrest, as far apart as Vladivostok and Kiev, Latvia and Bulgaria since the end of 2008 seem likely to be only the first stirrings of far greater eruptions of social protest in the year to come, as the full impact of the global economic crisis is felt. These events thus raise starkly the question of the possible implications that the global economic crisis might have for political stability in the region—that is, not just for the continued rule of incumbent governments, but also for the continued existence of established political systems.

For the Kyrgyz Republic, this question takes the form of whether the political system that has developed since September 2007 is sufficiently robust to face down any possible surge in political and social unrest, stoked by the economic downturn, or weather it would be more prudent to expect a re-enactment of the "Tulip Revolution" of 2005, in which perceptions of corruption and electoral falsification led to mass demonstrations and the removal of the previous president, Askar Akayev.

To this end, the Economist Intelligence Unit has developed a Political Instability Index to facilitate comparison of countries' vulnerability to unrest, conceived as a product of the interaction of underlying social and political factors brought into sharper relief by economic distress. For this reason, the overall index is made up of two component indices: one that tries to capture underlying vulnerability, and a second that measures economic distress. (For the full results and methodology, see here and here.)

Table: Political Instability Index for Russia and Central Asia in 2009

Although the Kyrgyz Republic does not rate as the east European country most vulnerable to political instability in 2009—that accolade goes to Ukraine—within Central Asia, it vies with Tajikistan for this position, with the two ranked in joint 33rd place globally, along with countries that include Myanmar and Argentina, on an overall score of 7.1, out of a maximum possible instability score of 10. This marks the two Central Asian states as slightly more susceptible to unrest than Columbia, but slightly less susceptible than Sierra Leone.

In our index, the Kyrgyz Republic, along with Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, starts off at greater risk from the impending economic stress, on the assumption that poorer countries are less well-equipped to cope with it. However, the overall political instability scores for all countries in the region, and Russia, worsen significantly in 2009 relative to 2007, reflecting a large increase in their scores for economic distress. This is because, in light of the intensification and spread of the world economic crisis to the region, all of them face a significant risk of a fall in real GDP per head this year—of more than 4% in the case of Russia—and all except Kazakhstan are at significant risk of the rate of unemployment rising above 10%.

For all of the countries in question, corruption is rated as high, and all of them, except Russia, have only become independent states in recent years—that is, since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Tajikistan is scored as slightly more vulnerable to the underlying causes of unrest than the Kyrgyz Republic, partly because it has a greater number of large-scale episodes of political instability in its recent past (an estimated 50,000-100,000 people were killed in its five-year civil war in the 1990s), and partly because its infant mortality rate is higher than expected for its level of income level, a measure that stands in as an indicator of the level of social provision. The Kyrgyz Republic, however, is more vulnerable as a political regime that is neither fully democratic nor wholly authoritarian, whereas all the other Central Asian countries (but not Russia) have the advantage, from the point of view of state stability, of being authoritarian regimes. Additionally, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Russia are more ethnically homogeneous.

Consequently, the least we can say is that for a young, semi-democratic state in a "bad neighbourhood", mired by corruption and enjoying a low level of public trust in its institutions, the expected earthquake of falling living standards and rising joblessness has a high chance of shaking the foundations of the country's political institutions, even if, on its own, this would not necessarily be enough to bring these institutions down.

Turkeys voice concerns about Christmas

For both Keynesians and monetarists, the main flaw that prevents the capitalist machine from running without a hitch is the workers. For Keynes, this is because, unlike him, a selfless and urbane intellectual with plenty of cash for speculation—or, rather, with plenty of wealth to distribute between asset classes of varying liquidity—they are narrow-minded and greedy. It is their unwillingness to volunteer for wage cuts in a recession, for fear of an erosion of wage differentials, that clogs up an otherwise perfectly good system. This "downward rigidity of prices" is responsible for amplifying the impact that exogenous shocks (such as a rapid decline in demand for a country’s exports) have on output and unemployment, which is one of the main reasons that the economic authorities so fear deflation at the moment. For Milton Friedman, in contrast, the main fault of the workers is that, unlike him, they are a bit slow-witted, and so can easily be fooled into mistaking changes in the nominal wage for movements in the real wage. As a result, they sometimes supply the "wrong" quantity of labour to equilibrate with long-run "natural" level of goods that firms are willing to supply. What neither of them is able to describe—or even bothers to ask—is how such an economic system comes to be. It just is, and that's the end of it. As natural as light on leaves. (As Marx writes of the French anarchist Proudhon, “M. Proudhon the economist understands very well that men make cloth, linen, or silk materials in definite relations of productions. But he has not understood is that these definite social relations are just as much produced by men as linen, flax etc.”)

It seems reasonable to observe that one version of the so-called "neo-classical synthesis" (roughly, the mix of Keynesianism and classical theory that dominates mainstream economics), in the form of the unregulated growth and mutation of the instruments of finance capital, out of kilter with developments in the real economy ("neo-liberalism"), is on the retreat politically. However, it might be a bit complacent to conclude that neo-classicism itself has been intellectually defeated—not least because, in my experience, not that many people on the left (or at least on the “hard” left) have much acquaintance with its arguments and evidence. In my view, this is mainly explained by laziness.

So, although the colossal scale of the present economic-financial crisis—which has yet to run its course, and, in some places in eastern Europe, for example, looks set to trigger output falls on a scale perhaps comparable with those set off by the collapse of the Soviet Union—seems to have opened up an ideological space for the left, all-but closed down since the triumph of Thatcherism 30 years ago, to make use of it would require a culture of self-criticism, as well as an appreciation of the strengths of its opponents.

Unfortunately, after Iraq and the retreat of many into the safety of the broad, sclerotic "anti-imperialist" dogmas of a bygone age, or the self-protective narratives carefully honed to block out their own unpleasant complicities and shortcomings, it would be an exercise in self-deception not to conclude that, for large parts of the left—or at least the most vocal/ least knowledgeable part—the reverse is the case: they really see their opponents as cartoon-style villains, while they are themselves are clean as a whistle, beyond reproach.

As the London G20 summit approaches, therefore, I hope that people protest in large numbers, that they stand up for themselves. But I also hope that the opened-up ideological space isn't simply a wormhole leading back to 1974 and the Bay City Rollers.

The everlasting jump

This is the final chapter, or rather the epilogue, from my "lost novel".

Chapter 28
“The Scythians, as I said, take some of this hemp-seed, and, creeping under the felt coverings, throw it upon the red-hot stones; immediately it smokes, and gives out such a vapour as no Grecian vapour-bath can exceed; the Scyths, delighted, shout for joy.”
Herodotus, Histories.

After what seemed like a long trip away, Igor Nastanovich was coming down through a beautiful blue morning, but slowly, as though through a mass of water, a warm blue sea, and he could sense on his descent, as the outlines of the town were approaching—the house shapes, the streets, the statues, as though zooming in on a living urban map—that one or two of his organs were packing up, and he knew, without panic or self-pity—and in fact with a touch of relief—that he would probably be gone before he hit the ground.
He’d been squatting for months now in one of the derelict apartments along Industry Street. He and a couple of acquaintances had been living off what they could lift from the market, though one of their number had recently been given a pasting in the cells down at the militia station, and so Igor had been keeping a low profile. Of course, he’d thought about returning to his mother’s, who lived only a few streets away. The argument between them seemed so stupid now. What could she have done about the baby, anyway? But, in the end, an attempt at reconciliation was beyond the sum of his strength—it would have involved an obscure defeat which he could not stomach, even if he’d been conscious of it. He hadn’t been to see her in three years, and now it would stay that way.
Slumped up against a stunted lime tree outside a padlocked mechanic’s workshop, he leaned into a pile of food wrappers, washing powder cartons, plastic beer bottles, a crumpled pink packet of New Superlims, becoming one with the rubbish around him. In the cold of the early morning, under a huge open sky, a stray mongrel had curled up silently beside him, making the most of his dissipating warmth. Thinking over his life for the little that remained of it, Igor conceived of it—yes, that was it, he was sure of it now—as a falling sensation, queasiness, a lifelong feeling of unease. Then he turned to face his fate with fortitude—and at least he wasn’t alone.
Fading in an out of consciousness, in front of him appeared the fuzzy outlines of animated human shapes across a liquid border, a window into another world, the figures coming more into focus the longer he stared, as after a knock on the head. Soldiers—he could now make them out—in great coats and puttees stood about, strapped into their round tin hats. One of them, with stooped shoulders and spindly legs, was repeating in Italian (which Igor could understand) the punch line of a joke, approaching it each time with the same circumlocutions, the same dramatic pauses. Each time, the others in the group would laugh uncontrollably, rubbing the tears from their eyes, fresh each time, as if caught in a video loop.
"So we go in there and I said to the waitress…'Get the tinnies in!' Yeah, yeah, really, that's what I said."
Past and behind them, an emaciated peasant woman crept. Agitated and jittery, she sniffed this way and that. She kept asking if anyone had seen her baby, though she was holding it in her arms. From the opposite direction, rode a cavalryman of one of the steppe’s ancient nomad tribes, wearing a brown padded jacket and a black-spotted red cape. His keen, bird-like eyes flashed erratically. He was looking about desperately for something he’d lost. Mila too walked past, and Arkady, his famous curly locks singed and on end absurdly, as after a comic electric shock, the absence of eyebrows giving him a look or permanent surprise; with his hands planted firmly behind his back and locked together, studiedly informal, as if he was preparing to launch into speech, as if the two of them were out on an invigorating holiday stroll in the municipal park. Sherbakov was hanging about there, still wearing the noose that they’d dressed him in after 1905, although the tail of the noose was turned around so it hung down his shirt like a tie. He peered about warily, as if someone might still be after him, as if he had no intention of becoming a monument. Nearest the kerb, a pair of short legs, shod in expensive foreign shoes, were sticking out of an uncovered manhole, flailing incessantly. “Why can’t I feel it? Why can’t I feel it?” the owner of the legs was saying, over and over, his voice echoing inside the manhole but still audible, and Igor, becoming accustomed to the new reality, answered, as if it were the most natural thing in the world: “Because you no longer have a head.”
Igor was floating now, rising gradually above the town where he had lived, mostly uselessly, and died for no purpose—as if he had simply bounced off the world, leaving no impression on it—and he could see laid out below him the lucid, pulsating map of the shrinking town as he tried to follow intently the meandering journey of the fretful Scythian soldier as he led his pony to water in the nearby crystal stream.
Dismounting, the cavalryman knelt beside the little clear stream, breaking up the ice at the edges with the small dagger he kept in his belt, hacking a hole, so that his companion, his horse, might be able to nose her way, after the day's long ride, to a well-earned drink. The warrior too was thirsty, weary, so that he had to lean with a palm on the horse’s neck to steady himself as he got up, his head beginning to throb a little, become heavy.
That morning, before leaving camp on patrol—which they did almost daily now, ever since the strangers had been spotted—their troop leader had called all the soldiers into his tent, throwing a few stones into the pot over the log fire, along with a handful of the precious seeds, which, burning, produced the sweet, thick smoke that was good to inhale on a freezing day, as it helped to sustain morale. This offering for their dead leaders, they believed, would make certain that the spirits were with them, and they’d left there purified and reassured.
Now, as he stood almost motionless in front of the icy stream, drinking from a cupped hand, he stared over towards the opposite bank, out into the snowy, featureless landscape. Strange things he perceived there: a giant snake, very angry, rattling across the plain; tall stone buildings of a fortress city such as men had never seen—great power and great misery he perceived there. And all this time, though he was unaware of it, he must have been fiddling with the stag-shaped silver brooch that fastened his cloak at the neck; giving it a quick tug clumsily, the pin must have broken, and something had hit his hand, but only the dull plop of the object dropping into the stream brought him out of his reverie.
He was horrified—even petrified—because the brooch had been dear to him since he’d won it on a raid some years before. Its antlers curled freely, as in a dream where he'd once encountered the spirits of the other world wrapping around one another, as in a dance-like fight, in flight, or as in the reports of the shaman when he returned from a trance. Had he really lost the stag’s power for good?
As much as he dare without also losing his balance, the horseman dipped his ankle boot delicately into the slow-flowing water beyond the ice-edged riverbank. How deep was it there? He feared the tricks of the water spirits—who might easily pull him in—and he withdrew his boot, got back into the pony saddle, gripping tightly with his knees to hold himself in place. Slinging his cloak over his shoulder, he made for the shortest route back to camp, which was just over a small hill. On the hill’s top, he stopped for a while to consider the meaning of what had just happened, its enormity: no good could come of it, that much was certain. But what could he do? The implications of the incident scuttled away from him and off into the brush. He looked east: there was the vast emptiness of the plains. To the west, down to the pure flowing river, he could see his people, small as ants at that distance as they went about their work. How long could their happiness last? He felt woozy—as if the stag’s power were draining from him. He had a headache and began to feel afraid. He dug his heels into his mount and sped home.

When you walk through a storm

How will the global economic crisis affect the Kyrgyz Republic?
Up until recently, the view was widely held that countries such as the Kyrgyz Republic would to a great extent be protected from the effects of the global credit crunch by their lack of integration with international financial markets. In late 2008, however, the global financial and economic crisis, having surfaced in the US property market a year earlier, deepened and spread rapidly across eastern Europe. From September the crisis swept over Russia, the region's largest economy, as investors withdrew, and the Russian Central Bank (RCB) was forced to make massive drawdowns on its reserves to increase liquidity in the banking system and to try to prevent a rout of the rouble. Kazakhstan had been an earlier casualty of the drying up of the international credit markets. Because of their size, the spillover of the world financial crisis into the real economies of the two countries has sharply worsened the short-term outlook for regional economic growth. The question of the likely impact on the Kyrgyz Republic has thus become more pressing, and has already forced an adaptive reformulation of Kyrgyz economic policy. At the same time, the country continues to grapple with the aftermath of a number of severe economic shocks from an earlier phase. By tracing some of the knock-on effects of these developments, the scale and complexity of the problems confronting Kyrgyz economic policymakers becomes apparent.

Impact of the regional economic slowdown
Reduced foreign demand. Between them, Russia and Kazakhstan bought around 40% of Kyrgyz exports in 2007. Most obviously, therefore, the regional economic slowdown will substantially reduce the growth in external demand for Kyrgyz goods, making the domestic economic growth rates achieved during the past couple of years more difficult to sustain. By tightening the limits on revenue growth to the budget, it will also constrain the ability of the government to deal with the multiple consequences of economic deceleration.
Reduced foreign investment. Russia and Kazakhstan are both heavily dependent on oil. Until the recent past, they were both also significant players in the international bond and syndicated loans markets. With these capital flows to the region drying up or declining significantly, and the price of oil plummeting from its mid-year peak, it would be prudent—based on purely commercial rather than geo-strategic grounds—to expect a scaling back of foreign investment. On preliminary figures from the National Statistical Committee (NSC), for 2008 as a whole, fixed capital investment from all sources, at Som29.2bn, was already down by more than 5% on 2007. In turn, a reduction in investment will have a negative impact on economic growth and add to difficulties in covering the widening external imbalance.
A slowdown in remittance inflows. Russia and Kazakhstan have been the main sources of inflows workers' remittances to the Kyrgyz Republic. At US$715m in 2007, according to the World Bank, remittances equalled almost one-fifth of the country’s GDP in that year, and were assessed at approximately the same level in 2008. At the beginning of November the head of the Kyrgyz State Committee for Migration and Employment estimated the figure for 2008 at between US$800m and US$1bn. Curiously, local press reports suggest that there has as yet been no large-scale return home of migrant labour from these destinations, but a slowdown in the growth of remittance inflows, particularly as the economic crisis takes its toll of the Russian and Kazakh property and construction sectors, is certain. This will restrain the expansion of household disposable income, and thus the pace of growth of private consumption. It could also add to unemployment and wage competition if migrants begin to return home in large numbers.
Spillover from the Kazakh banks. Although the Kyrgyz financial system has been protected by its underdevelopment and relative lack of international integration, the impact of the crisis in international credit markets on Kazakh banks—which own about half of the Kyrgyz Republic's commercial banks—has already seen a steep slowdown in the growth of "credit to the economy", which peaked at above 110% year on year in late 2007, according to the IMF, but slowed to annual growth rates of 20-30% a year later. The sharp deceleration in credit growth, in combination with a likely tightening up of lending criteria, will affect businesses that had been planning to expand by using resources from outside the firm, as well as the borrowing of households, thus subduing the expansion of private consumption and domestic investment demand.

The effects of other economic shocks
The inflationary surge. In the year from the middle of 2007, a surge in global prices for food and fuel was the main factor behind a rise in inflation, which peaked at 32.5% year on year in July 2008, although it has since tumbled, in line with falling commodity prices, to below 17% in October. According to preliminary figures from the NSC, consumer price inflation crept back up 20% in December 2008, probably under the impact of currency weakening. This compares with a target range originally set for the year of 12-15%. The Kyrgyz Republic’s peak rate was high even for the region. This is mainly because the Kyrgyz economy is heavily reliant on external sources for these items. Thus, as well as boosting inflation, the increased cost of food and fuel significantly raised the country's import bill in 2008, opening up the current account to more than 6% of GDP in 2008. The same development also put additional pressure on budget revenue, as the government tried to replenish its reserves of food and fuel, and to cushion the impact of the prices rises on the population.

A shortfall hydroelectric power. In 2008 a shortfall in domestic production of hydroelectric power because of low water levels in the Toktogul Reservoir constituted a second major economic shock. This necessitated further fuel and electricity purchases from within the Central Asian region (November 2008, Economic policy), at an additional cost of US$60m, on IMF estimates (the then minister of energy, Mr Balkibekov, put the figure at US$88m), widening the trade gap further, taking international reserves uncomfortably close to the "safe" level of three months of import cover, and adding again to unplanned government spending. The power shortages already appear to have had a direct impact on industrial production, which, excluding production from the booming Kumtor gold mine, contracted in real terms by just over 2% in 2008, according to NSC figures, compared with growth of over 10% in 2007. Over the same period, electricity output shrank by more than 20%.

Inflationary outlook. Although falling commodity prices and a slowdown in the economy has eased upward pressure on the price level from these sources, in 2009 other factors will work in the opposite direction. Thus, the new year saw another steep rise in the price of gas imports from Uzbekistan, to US$240 per 1,000 cu metres in 2009, from US$145 per 1,000 cu metres in 2008. Other factors likely to boost inflation include the raising of utility tariffs as part of the programme of energy sector reform, and the impact of imported prices through the sharp nominal depreciation of the som.

The path of despair

Hegel argues somewhere that an awareness of the inadequacy of our conceptions is what propels us towards self-criticism, making intellectual progress—which, for him, is the same as progress per se—possible. He calls this "the path of despair". Amid the current fad for shallow self-help books and studies of the "economics of happiness", it might be worth remembering that happiness is not the main goal of progress, freedom is. From the vantage point of enhanced freedom, people might be in a better position to hammer out whatever happiness is for them.

After the Iraq war, it became clear to me that, whatever the mainstream of Western left is, I'm not really a part of it, either in terms of philosophical outlook or political inclination. However, I do still consider myself a Marxist of sorts—in the sense that most of my political "starting points" come out of that tradition—and I still think that progress should be possible in extending the areas of popular political an economic control. I think of this as "socialism", although I don't suppose it really matters what its called. Is there an economics possible that raises living standards for most people on the planet and gives them greater control over their own lives? This has been our Holy Grail for some time, of course, but is still probably the most important question facing the left in this generation. There can’t be any socialism unless we get a plausible answer on this. But it is a huge task. To get anywhere would require a large number of like-minded, flexible-thinking, knowledgeable and talented people working closely together over many years. After Iraq, however, and the apparent retreat of many into the safety of the broad political dogmas that existed beforehand—most obviously, an oddly reactionary brand of "anti-imperialism"—it doesn’t seem as though the conditions are in place for the "ruthless criticism of all that exists". This would be only the starting point for such a programme, which would also have to turn its sceptical gaze in multiple directions, towards itself as much as to the outside world. Perhaps one reasons that this doesn’t happen very readily is that, for many, the left is something like a family, and, at the social-psychological level, not many family members want to risk becoming an outcast by speaking out of turn.

Right at the beginning of The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel says this:“The more the ordinary mind takes the opposition between true and false to be fixed, the more is it accustomed to expect either agreement or contradiction with a given philosophical system, and only to see reason for the one or the other in any explanatory statement concerning such a system. It does not conceive the diversity of philosophical systems as the progressive evolution of truth; rather, it sees only contradiction in that variety. The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant's existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom. These stages are not merely differentiated; they supplant one another as being incompatible with one another. But the ceaseless activity of their own inherent nature makes them at the same time moments of an organic unity, where they not merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other; and this equal necessity of all moments constitutes alone and thereby the life of the whole. But contradiction as between philosophical systems is not wont to be conceived in this way; on the other hand, the mind perceiving the contradiction does not commonly know how to relieve it or keep it free from its one-sidedness, and to recognize in what seems conflicting and inherently antagonistic the presence of mutually necessary moments.”

And, if you can get past the fancy language and the romantic metaphor, I think it’s the same with, say, Hayek, or neo-liberalism, or whatever is the left's current demonic totem. We should be asking: What in these outlooks is useful? What can be usefully absorbed? What remains after an all-out criticism to be absorbed? That is, there has to be an appreciation and a firm grasp of Hayek and of neo-liberalism, of their strong points and achievements, as well as their weaknesses and faults, before they can be superseded. The same applies to all previous intellectual and practical efforts towards developing a socialist economics, including the holy-of-holies, Capital. From the point of view of empirical investigation, it means distinguishing capitalist propaganda from results. For example, where have their development efforts or their standard macroeconomic policies been successful, and why? And where have they been unsuccessful? Do they have any tools that we can reuse? Despite the colossal scale of the current financial-economic crisis, I personally haven’t yet seen anyone coming close to grasping the nettle. Certainly not the so-called "hard" left, whose ham-fisted/ hare-brained attempts to oppose the injustices of capitalism somehow always reek of injustice themselves, appear not to have picked up any tips from the disasters of the 20th century and, somehow, intimate the preparation of something worse than run-of-the-mill late liberal/social-democratic capitalism. (Sometimes—who could have conceived it?—even the imperialists appear to be more progressive.) But also, if a bit more depressingly, not even intelligent Marxists such as Robert Brenner (to judge by his organisation's website), who otherwise looks pretty much correct, so far as I can see, about the causes of the current crisis being found in the monetary response to the problem of long-term decline in profitability in the advanced capitalist states.