I woke up one morning to find my parents whispering and nothing on TV but Swan Lake. Then I heard someone say the words “the Soviet Union fell apart,” and suddenly my whole world changed.
In the last years of Soviet Communism, Anglophone media focused heavily on political developments in the USSR’s western regions, with an occasional glance at the Caucasus. It was events in Moscow that precipitated the final breakup over the course of 1991. But the Soviet Union was a vast, multinational territory, reaching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and the consequences of its disintegration were felt by countless Soviet citizens living thousands of miles from Moscow.
Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia was one of the smaller Soviet republics, with a population of about 3.5 million in 1991 (out of nearly 290 million across the whole federation). Its capital, Bishkek, much closer to Beijing than Moscow, contained a little over six hundred thousand people. Approximately one-fifth of those living in Kyrgyzstan were ethnic Russians.
