With a clear conscience

Chapter 26

Day of Knowledge, Southern Cemetery.
Hauling himself up with difficulty over a high cemetery wall, Galkin dropped to the ground on the other side unsteadily, glanced left and right, then set off at a bulky trot across the unkempt Jewish plots. Puffing and wheezing as he neared the back wall of a primitive outhouse, above the entrances of which on either side, he noticed, were daubed crudely the letters for male and for female in thick red paint. For a few moments he leaned his heaving frame against the decrepit brick structure to catch his breath.
Composure regained, Galkin peeked out around the building's right-hand side. Through a ringed array of bunched-up silver birches, which helped to conceal his position, he was able to watch the funeral proceedings at a safe distance. Between the figures at the front of a band of dark-clad mourners, the tussled grey hair of Valentin Kulyeba could just about be seen like a stormy cloudscape. When some late-comers in heavy grey overcoats arrived, they shook hands discreetly with some of those at the back of the group, bear-hugged, laughed at some inaudible remark. The tubby priest seemed to be eking out the ceremony, prolonging his stint at the centre of the drama. After a while, one or two of the attendees sat down nearby at a wooden table and chairs fixed next to a mottled-pink marble headstone, sharing a drink from a chrome and leather flask.
For Chrissakes, was he ever going to get a shot at Kulyeba? The thought crossed Osip's mind that it might not happen, a surge of panic rising inside him momentarily, though after a while his concentration wandered, so that he found himself brushing the smudges of dirt on his pleated trousers with his fingertips, considering…. He poked at a small, neat rip in the fabric around the knee, which he must have got rolling in over the graveyard wall (it was set along the top with worn-down broken glass). The torn flap in the sea-green garment that rose on the hole in his trouser leg reminded him of a small pyramid casting its shadow, and by the time he checked back on the funeral gathering, Kulyeba was gone. "Oh, Christ!" the officer gasped. Had he let him get away again? What should he do? He found himself pulled in several directions at once.
He crept back along the rear wall of the toilet block. On the side path leading to the main exit, behind a clump of dense sedge thicket, a dark shape moved—he was in time to see Kulyeba pass through the cemetery’s huge cast-iron gates. A stillness infused Osip’s consciousness, underpinned with an unexpectedly firm sense of determination. It was as if he had changed his relation to physical space: his path was not just clear, but inevitable, almost, and he felt full of energy, a ball poised at the top of an arc, ready to roll. Everything was happening in slow motion, the details sharp and vivid.
One half of the gate was turned in towards him. Through the distorted perspective of its widely space bars, he could see Kulyeba come to a halt no more than two hundred metres in front of him, pull out a mobile phone to take a call. Osip advanced, trying to carry himself lightly, all the time keeping to his left, close to the cemetery wall, so as to make his approach out of the line of sight. At the gate post, he peeked around: Kulyeba was pacing back and forth slowly along the narrow dirt pathway outside the graveyard, one hand flattened to his ear to listen more intently, gesticulating with the same hand agitatedly every now and then as he spoke.
Just then, pacing back, Kulyeba tripped, his shoes' smooth leather soles losing their grip on a loose rock or stone, so that the mobile slipped from his hand like a bar of soap, spinning in a descending curve through the air until it bounced down into an open manhole between him and the adjacent building site. Kulyeba's face reddened, and the veins in his forehead rose. His arms jerked in angry, staccato movements and a frothing stream of obscenities flooded over his lips. Behind gritted teeth, he restrained a gurgling howl of rage.
Osip stood rigid, held his breath, as Kulyeba with his back turned got down on all fours, stiffly, and crawled towards the drain; stretching his legs out behind him, knees bent, he balanced on the tips of his toes, hands placed either side of the opening, as if preparing for a sprint start. Then he lent forward and peered timidly inside.
A new plan came to Osip: he'd sneak up from behind, grab Kulyeba by the ankles and tip him in. Much less noise to attract attention. Also, with Kulyeba distracted, he'd have the element of surprise. If necessary, he could finish him off with a couple of caps, firing the gun inside the cavity to muffle the percussive sound of the shots. All these lines of reasoning went on simultaneously, in a flash.
He reached for the gun in his jacket, but it was stuck. Curling his left hand around inside his jacket to hold the ad hoc holster, he gave a good tug on the gun's grip, but by the time he’d managed to withdraw the weapon, this time resolved to use it, Kulyeba had again disappeared.
Galkin scanned a monotonous horizon. It took a second or two to realise what had happened: in front of him, a pair of well-made leather shoes were poking out of the ground, flailing: Kulyeba must have lost his balance and tumbled in, head first, so that the sides of the drain bound his arms tightly around him.
Without thinking, Galkin moved reflexively to aid the stricken man. But then, halfway, he stopped in his tracks. What was he doing? His thoughts swirled, adapted, curled themselves around him. Looking around furtively, he began to withdraw towards the cemetery gates. It wasn't as if he had pushed him in, so it couldn't be said he was to blame. The same thing would have happened even if he hadn't been there. Was he a killer? Not at heart, he knew. But did he really intend to save Kulyeba now, after tracking him for so long? Of course, he'd have shot him if it had come down to it, he reasoned: he wasn't a coward. But now that he didn't have to, couldn't he wash his hands of the matter? Continue to walk tall in front of his wife and his colleagues, his conscience clear?
The tan shoes flapped for a while in the sullen air weakly, as Kulyeba's lungs gave out. There were no cars or passers-by, and Maltsev's mourners had vanished, presumably for a well-oiled wake; even the gang of workers who were doing up the bungalow opposite seemed to have knocked off for a tea break. The officer pulled out a sky-blue Prima packet, but then thought better of it, wheeling about to creep back through the iron gate, back past the crumbling outhouse, across the Jewish plots, as if by retracing his steps he thought he was erasing them, removing any evidence of his having been there, and he hopped back up and over the cemetery wall, feeling horrified and relieved.

Economic crisis in Central Asia and the Transcaucasus

Some notes from May 2009

In many of the economies of Central Asia and the Transcaucasus, the low level of development of their financial sectors and their low level of participation in the international capital markets were thought likely to insulate them from the impact of the global financial and economic crisis, which surfaced in the US property market in the second half of 2007.

With the escalation of the crisis since in September 2008, however, two clear channels of transmission of the crisis to the region have emerged. The first is directly, through precipitous declines in the prices of the region's main commodity exports—most notably hydrocarbons, but also metals. The second is indirectly, through the impact of financial turmoil on the real economies of Russia and Kazakhstan.

These two factors will have a differential impact, depending on the extent that each economy depends on Russia and Kazakhstan for sources of economic growth, as well as on whether they are net exporters of hydrocarbons (Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan) or importers (Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Georgia and Armenia). These factors will condition the likely severity of the impact of the global crisis on the economies of particular countries, as well as their response to it.

For many countries in the region, economic growth held up reasonably well in 2008. In the case of the hydrocarbons exporters, this was because of very high prices for oil in the first half of the year. In other cases, the continued strength of neighbouring economies until the final months of 2008 helped to sustain the inflows of workers' remittances on which they heavily depend (the IMF estimates that remittances to the Kyrgyz Republic equalled around 25% of GDP in 2008, and for Tajikistan the figure was 50%). The increased price for gold was an additional factor sustaining foreign earnings for Uzbekistan and the Kyrgyz Republic, for which gold is a leading export item. However, the final quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009, very sharp falls in trade and industrial output across the region—in part, as nervous businesses drew down on stocks—signalled that the crisis has arrived.

For the main hydrocarbons exporting countries, the fall in oil prices presented not only the prospect that the severe deterioration in the terms of trade would have a strong negative impact on domestic demand growth, but also that it would greatly reduce current-account surpluses and put pressure of fiscal revenue. Nonetheless, for many of these countries, including Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, the oil boom of the past eight years has allowed them to build up a financial buffer, in the form of oil windfall funds, with which to tackle the effects of the crisis.

In contrast, for the hydrocarbons importing countries, the benefits of falling oil and food prices—two of the main factors behind the year-long inflationary surge across the region from the second half of 2007—are unlikely to make up for the multiple impacts of the regional economic downturn.

In Russia, the downturn was triggered by rising risk aversion globally, with a very rapid reversal of capital flows forcing an expensive defence of the rouble and, in January 2009, an eventual exchange-rate devaluation. In Kazakhstan, the foreign lending to domestic commercial banks, which was used to fund a credit boom in the non-oil sector, came to a halt much earlier, in late 2007, precipitating a sharp fall in property prices and a rapid slowdown in the construction sector—previously two of the drivers of Kazakh GDP expansion.

In the years since Russia's 1998 financial crisis, the region's trade dependence on Russia has declined, although for some countries—Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and the Kyrgyz Republic—trade with Russia was still equal to 4-5% if GDP in 2008. More important perhaps this time around, according to a study by the IMF, is the likely negative impact on growth of a fall in financial flows from the region's largest economies. More tangibly still, especially for the Kyrgyz Republic and Tajikistan, but also for Georgia and Armenia, is the likely swift cut back in remittance inflows. This will not only affect consumption and poverty levels, but also investment demand, through the cut back in demand for residential construction and small business start-up capital.

Broadly, the responses of the various government's have been as follows:

• to try to protect the financial sector (especially important in Kazakhstan);
• to attempt external stabilisation and, if necessary, exchange-rate adjustment;
• if possible, to initiate fiscal measures to counter the impact that the drop in demand has on living standards; and
• to try to continue with measures to improve the business environment so as to put the economy on a better footing to attract investment once the worst of the global crisis passes.

Using either their own resources or those of foreign donors, this combination of strategies has a chance to allow the economies of the region to avoid severe destabilisation in the short term. However, threats to maintaining broad economic stability will depend on the length and depth of the crisis—in particular, whether Russia and Kazakhstan are able to resolve the problems in their domestic banking sectors. It could also depend on an absence of major outbreaks of social and political unrest, which would disrupt the implementation of anti-crisis measures, but to which the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan and Georgia look acutely exposed.

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.