Moving out of Moscow's orbit: the outlook for Central Asia

Many disaster scenarios exist for the successor states of the former Soviet Union. One of President Yeltsin's chief advisers warned darkly in I99I that Kazakhstan could soon degenerate 'into one thousand Yugoslavias'. The apocalyptic visions range from permanent chaos and civil war to violent Islamic revolution and genocide. It is the purpose of this article to explore the internal and external factors which are likely to determine the course of events in the ex-Soviet Central Asian states, and in their relations with the outside world. The southern Muslim republics stretch from the Caspian Sea to China. They have to contend with many problems, not least that they have fast-growing populations with administrative structures that are poorly prepared to face independence. Natural resources are considerable, but uneven development and terrible environmental pollution present serious difficulties which as yet have scarcely been confronted.' That these are land-locked states, with severe constraints forced on them by geography and economics, may be a truism, but it cannot be ignored. The four Central Asian republics of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan account together for I.3 million square kilometres (500,000 square miles). Kazakhstan dwarfs them in area at 2.7 million square kilometres being twice the size of the four combined and as large as India, but has only 17 million people. Standard Russian definitions of the Central Asia region, (Srednyaya Aziya, or 'Middle Asia'), exclude Kazakhstan from it as a separate entity, though the Kazakhs are, of course, a related Turkic people. In this article