Moving Forward/Backward

Reading the Kyrgyzstan Kid's observations about the post-Soviet Kyrgyz countryside reminded me of Mongolia:

Outings into the Kyrgyz countryside provide mini-adventures into the past. But the chapters of Kyrgyzstan’s recent history read more like vignettes after the apocalypse than epic tales of nomadic clans warring for land. Although the curtain never fully closed on the genetic memory of the Kyrgyz during last century’s Sovietization, the re-emergence of their own culture plays out on an eerie stage—as if the props from the previous play were only partially removed and the set director for the new show decided to work around them.

Relics of the modern world anachronistically litter Kyrgyzstan’s landscape. Shepherds bring their sheep to pasture under power lines that have long ceased to illuminate their homes. A driver training course cracks like drying mud, submitting pavement to the encroaching field. Foundations of buildings no more than fifty years old whisper out of the ground—crumbling ghost towns of a lost civilization.

If Kyrgyzstan is anything like Mongolia, the people who witnessed the encroachment of Russian influence didn't share Russia's fascination with the "modern world" and its acoutrements. Mongolians were largely nomadic when Russia rode in, and the only skills shared broadly among Mongolians were the nomadic arts of herding and the like. The new and modern Mongolia that sprang from the steppe did so exclusively because of the Russian bulldozer, Russian engineer, and Russian city planner. When Russian influence and financial support slipped away as their empire crumbled, so did those bulldozers, engineers, and city planners. What was left was a shell of a modern infrastructure with people who little knew how to sustain it and build upon it. Rarely has so much been invested and so little immediately "returned" as in the former Russian satellites.


When old and new meet: The first Russian bulldozer that came to Erdenet in 1976, the year that the Russians and Mongolians decided to build what is now one of the five biggest cities in Mongolia (pop. 80,000).

This is not to say that Monoglia does not want to stay on a modernizing trajectory. Au contraire. But it is a comment on the social and technolocialy environment in which modernization must take place. When you give a nomad a hydro-electric dam, what exactly is he supposed to do with it? When you give a herder a telephone grid, can we realistically expect him to maintain it? Mongolians are bravely doing their best, and the next generation of Mongolians looks to be more savvy in the ways of city-life and technological advance. In the mean time, it's good for those of us in the west to appreciate just how far Mongolia and other countries like it have to advance for them to take flight as as modern nations in the modern world.