Table of contents for December 2021 in Reason

TURKMEN PRESIDENT GURBANGULY Berdimuhamedov is many things: equestrian, pop star, collector of Guinness World Records, marksman, lifter, poet, race car driver, and brutal authoritarian. The last role is the most important. But it is also the one about which there is arguably the least information, as Berdimuhamedov’s Turkmenistan is one of the most secretive and repressive dictatorships on the planet. Berdimuhamedov isn’t so shy himself. The Turkmen president balances out his harsh governance with flamboyant public displays. In one popular video clip, he “plays” a white guitar clad in a pastel green sweater—though the fog creeping up from below, obscuring his hands, casts doubt on his musical chops. The crowd doesn’t seem to mind. In a different video, Berdimuhamedov shoots at targets while his ministers look on with adoration. In…

DURING ITS TWO years of independence before it was absorbed by the Soviet Union in 1920, Azerbaijan distinguished itself as the first Muslim-majority state with a parliamentary government and equal political rights for women. After Azerbaijan broke away from the Soviet Union in 1991, it initially looked like it might reprise its brief history as a liberal democracy. That promising start also came to a swift end. A 1993 military coup installed as president Heydar Aliyev, the former leader of Soviet Azerbaijan, and the country has not had a fair and free election since then. Today, Azerbaijan—which is essentially an autocracy controlled by Ilham Aliyev, Heydar’s son, and his extended family—retains the forms of constitutional government without the substance. Freedom House classifies Azerbaijan as decidedly “not free,” giving the country…

IF THE SOVIET Union was notoriously incapable of producing blue jeans, smokeable cigarettes, and durable cars in the numbers its citizens craved, it was unrivaled at producing world-class chess grandmasters. From the end of World War II until the Evil Empire dissolved in 1991, all but one world champion—the American Bobby Fischer, who claimed the title in 1972 from one Soviet and surrendered it to another in 1975 when he refused to defend his crown—represented the USSR. None was better than Garry Kasparov, who became world champion in 1985 at the tender, record-setting age of 22 and held the title until 2000. Widely considered the greatest chess player in modern history, he held the global top ranking for a total of 255 months between 1984 and his retirement in 2005.…

OF ALL THE countries to emerge from the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Tajikistan has arguably fared the worst. It ranks 149th out of 180 countries in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index, worse than every other former Soviet republic except Turkmenistan. It has the highest poverty rate of the former Soviet republics; a full 27 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) is the result of remittances sent home by Tajik migrants working mostly in Russia; and its GDP per capita for 2021 ($810) ranks 179th out of the 195 countries for which the International Monetary Fund has data. Why is Tajikistan so poor? It is landlocked, which means importing and exporting are more expensive and the country is more vulnerable to supply chain disruptions. And the violent civil war…

CENTRAL TO MANY of the thorny geopolitical issues that have surrounded Georgia since it gained independence three decades ago is what happened at NATO’s 2008 summit in Romania. President George W. Bush, attending his final NATO summit before leaving office, arrived in Bucharest intent on nudging his fellow leaders toward accepting Georgia into the fold. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Georgia had pursued closer ties with Europe and the U.S. It was a key American ally during the early years of Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, contributing hundreds of troops to the effort and allowing the U.S. to use its airstrips. Why not make the relationship official? German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy led the opposition. Inviting Georgia to join NATO or even suggesting…

What if the Soviet Union won the Cold War and American-style capitalism was all but wiped out? That’s the premise of alt-history master Harry Turtledove’s The Gladiator. Published in 2007, his Prometheus Award–winning novel places the fulcrum of its dark timeline somewhere around the Cuban Missile Crisis, setting up a communist cascade across Latin America, Asia, and Europe. The book is part of Turtledove’s Crosstime Traffic series, in which economically meddlesome chrononauts pop in and out of various parallel universes. In The Gladiator, they function as a time-traveling Nockian Remnant, guardians of markets in the multiverse. The young protagonists are languishing in shared squalor in Italy when they encounter a board game about railroads and free enterprise in a gaming shop secretly run by visitors from a parallel universe—an idea…

THE SOVIET STORY of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania begins in August 1939. German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov came together to sign the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which granted their respective countries partitioning and annexation power over several Eastern European nations. Nazi Germany split Poland with the Soviets, and the Baltic states went to the USSR. Decades of brutal Soviet rule would follow. On the 50th anniversary of the pact’s signing, the nationalist movements of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania decided to issue a collective call for independence. They organized the Baltic Way—a continuous human chain comprised of 2 million people, spanning 675 kilometers, traversing the three nations in a display of solidarity and peaceful resistance. That unity continued as the Soviet Union fell. Where one Baltic…

KAZAKHSTAN STRETCHES OVER 1 million square miles in Central Asia. It is richly endowed with oil, gas, and hard mineral resources. The country has 30 billion barrels of proven petroleum reserves, the 12th largest in the world, and produces some 1.8 million barrels of oil per day. Hydrocarbon output constituted about 70 percent of exports in 2020. Yet those vast natural riches have not stopped the country from slipping into kleptocracy. As the last former republic to declare independence from the collapsing Soviet Union in December 1991, Kazakhstan was led for nearly 30 years by President Nursultan Nazarbayev. Nazarbayev stepped down in 2019 and was followed by his hand-picked successor, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev. But Nazarbayev retains the crucial post of chairman of Kazakhstan’s Security Council and remains head of the ruling…

KYRGYZSTAN WAS ALREADY breaking away from the Soviet Union before the latter officially collapsed. A Kyrgyz opposition movement formed in June 1990 and declared full independence in August 1991, four months before USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev stepped down. Still, the aftermath of Soviet ethnic policies led to violent upheaval decades down the line. Former physicist Askar Akayev was Kyrgyzstan’s first president. He built a reputation for striving to create a real liberal democracy but shifted into a more autocratic stance as parliament resisted some of his economic policies. Akayev’s rule lasted until 2005, when his administration fell amid a violent revolution. His successor, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, was toppled by another uprising in 2010. Tribalism, nepotism, corruption, and the meshing of government with organized crime—the nation produces and is a transit point…

IN 1979, LESS than a year after ascending to the Catholic Church’s highest office, Pope John Paul II returned to his home country, then under communist rule. He disembarked at the airport, knelt, and kissed the Polish ground. That moment was arguably the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union. In an officially atheist country, millions of people—more than a third of the population of Poland—showed up to see the first ever Slavic pope during his nine-day trip. “John Paul was walking among vast, enthusiastic crowds,” writes John O’Sullivan in his 2006 book The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister. “The pope proclaimed not only religious but also patriotic and political hope.” While celebrating Mass at Warsaw’s Victory Square, John Paul drew the crowd’s attention to the nearby…

In Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, the only obstacle to peace is the forces that would profit from war. From its inception in the 1960s, Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek had always been a thinly veiled Cold War metaphor, with alien Klingons acting as stand-ins for the Soviet empire, and with the Federation that the show’s heroes belonged to an obvious match for the Western democratic world. But The Undiscovered Country expanded on that metaphor, resulting in a high point for the franchise and a picture that still feels relevant today. Released in the winter of 1991, the movie tells the story of how the Klingon empire collapsed, due to mismanagement, resource shortages, and a cultural emphasis on preserving appearances to outsiders—even when doing so was disastrous to citizens. The…

FOR TWO YEARS in the 1930s, the people of Ukraine were forced to starve in service of a political idea. Some 5 million people died preventable deaths, victims of poisonous ideology, political vanity, and state power wielded in an attempt to destroy a national identity. Almost 90 years later, a form of that struggle continues. To understand post-Soviet Ukraine and its ongoing tensions with Russia, you have to understand the Holodomor, the program of mass starvation forced on Ukrainians by the Soviet regime. In the late 1920s, Soviet leader Josef Stalin sent Communist Party officials and activists out into the countryside with orders to convert private, family-owned farms into collective enterprises. Ukranian farmers resisted, and party leaders resorted to torture, threats, and graphic public shaming. In one Ukrainian province, according…

ENTERING MOST COUNTRIES is already an overly bureaucratic process. But if you have to do a lot of paperwork to leave a country, that’s when you know the fix is in. Exit visas have long been a hallmark of authoritarian regimes. The Soviet Union was no exception, requiring its citizens to get explicit permission to leave the country. It was thus with great fanfare that the 1993 constitution of the new, post-communist Russian Federation abolished this requirement, allowing citizens to travel abroad without permission. Most former Soviet republics quickly followed suit. Not Uzbekistan, however. It has the dubious distinction of being the last post-Soviet republic to abolish its system of exit visas—in 2019, a good seven years after Cuba managed to do the same. For nearly 30 years, Uzbeks could…

IF YOU HAVE ever heard of Moldova and you are not Romanian or Russian, chances are near certain that it was as the country of origin of an earwormy 2004 Eurodance global No. 1 song whose Romanian-language chorus, made most famous by a viral, fish-mouthed lip-synching YouTuber, sounded something like “numa numa yay.” If you think you’ve heard of Moldova, but maybe not quite with that spelling, you might well be remembering the fictional post-communist country of Molvanîa, whose motto in pre-Borat guidebooks and a comical Web 1.0 website was “a land untouched by modern dentistry.” Alas for the really-existing post-Soviet republic, Moldova has been no laughing matter these past three decades. A landlocked clump between troubled Romania and Ukraine, it suffers from the historical subjugations all too common among…

ON AUGUST 25, 1991, Belarus formally gained its independence from the Soviet Union. But in many ways, the country is stuck in the USSR. Streets are still named after famous Communist figures, and a statue of Lenin sits in the capital city of Minsk. The state intelligence agency is still called the KGB. And callbacks to Soviet times go much deeper. Democratic governance, freedom, and flourishing in Belarus have long been hampered by Alexander Lukashenko, a demagogue and dictator who took power in 1994. In the country’s first and only open election, Lukashenko—who ran on an anti-corruption platform—was elected president. But once in office, he proved reluctant to let go of power or tolerate dissent. “Openly nostalgic for Soviet times,” as the Associated Press put it in 1996, Lukashenko was…

IN 2002, THE United States sent 22 Uyghur men to Guantanamo Bay, where they joined more than 700 other detainees living beyond the comforts of the Geneva Convention. The men were Chinese citizens who U.S. intelligence believed had received weapons training in Afghanistan, and the U.S. military had advertised $5,000 a head for their capture on leaflets circulated among bounty hunters in Pakistan. After their camp in Afghanistan was bombed in the early days of the American invasion, 18 of the men spent months hiding in the caves of Tora Bora, hoping to return to China. When they finally made it across the border to Pakistan, their mountain guides lured them to a mosque, where they were turned over to U.S. forces and flown to Gitmo. Years passed. After a…

Soviet culture officials in the late 1940s attempted to downplay the accomplishments of Europe and America by renaming imported foods to make them seem Russian and by claiming credit for various innovations. Camembert was renamed zakusochnyi (“snack cheese”) to disguise its French origins. A newspaper declared that the Palace of Versailles was a knockoff of palaces built by Peter the Great. Soviet encyclopedias incorrectly attributed the first successful airplane flight not to the Wright brothers but to Russian inventor Alexander Mozhaysky. Following World War II, Josef Stalin approved the expansion of car production for individual purchase. But with only 6,000 produced in 1946 and 10,000 produced in 1947, there weren’t enough to go around. Trade unions organized waiting lists that stretched as long as 6 years. In 1970, a Soviet…