After the Revolution

Call it giving up — or just plain practical.
Labor officials in Kyrgyzstan are encouraging vocational schools to teach students the skills they need to do manual labor abroad, according to an article from the Institute for War & Peace Reporting.
Despite the recent spate of hate crimes in Russia against these kinds of migrant workers [see previous post], the Kyrgyz […]

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Spend any amount of time in towns and villages in countries that were once part of the Soviet Union, and you will begin to wonder something.
Where are all the young people?
I’m not talking about the children. The children are there.
But many of them live with grandparents or a neighbor. Some live alone. It is fairly […]

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Let me take you on a bit of a side trip to the Republic of Moldova.
From 2004-2006, I taught English in the town of Calarasi, just an hour outside the capital, Chisinau.
There were three secondary schools in my town: two for Romanian speakers and one for Russian speakers. I taught at a Romanian school.
Many of my students told me […]

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Don’t like the government? Create your own.
That’s what an organization of opposition parties in Kyrgyzstan has done. Members of “Movement for Justice” have created their own “Public Parliament.”
The founders of the Public Parliament claim that it is not meant to replace the current parliament, the Jogorku Kenesh.
They say it is only a platform for them to express […]

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Focusing in this blog on three countries that simultaneously depend upon and rebel against Mother Russia, I tend to write entries that portray President Vladimir Putin as the bad guy.
Mark MacKinnon, author of “The New Cold War,” wrote an interesting blog entry a few days ago entitled “It’s not always Russia’s fault.”
MacKinnon argues that a new Cold War […]

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Why does so much news from the former Soviet Union remind me of “The Godfather”?
 I found this article this week:
“Severed ears and fingers have been sent in packages to three high-ranking government officials in Kyrgyzstan.
“The body parts were sent to the presidential administration chief, the director of the competition monitoring agency and a member of […]

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EurasiaNet.org has posted a collection of audio slideshows based on interviews with Kyrgyz citizens about the state of Kyrgyzstan since the Tulip Revolution of 2005. The interviews covered a variety of topics and in general expressed disappointment with the results of the revolution.

Andrei Tsvetkov
Executive Director, NTS Television
Tsvetkov discusses the misfortune of being robbed while trying […]

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The Freedom House Freedom in the World 2008 survey, covering events from Jan. 1, 2007, to Dec. 31, 2007, indicated that in Georgia, political rights and civil liberties had diminished since the previous poll for the second year in a row. According to the report, the government restricted political rights by calling a “state of […]

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Between 2003 and 2005, Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan all overthrew their leaders with mass protests held after disputed elections. These movements were some of the most recent in a wave of mostly non-violent revolutions in post-communist societies in Europe and Asia. They have been collectively called color or flower revolutions after the symbols protesters chose […]

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