On a recent morning in Bishkek’s 12th “microdistrict,” a neighborhood of Soviet-era housing blocks a little past their prime, a small beauty salon was overflowing with chiseled young men sporting carefully cultivated stubble and statuesque women in short shorts.
Why does a surgical facemask cost the Kyrgyz government $4.63, while it costs the United Nations $0.87? What about an HIV test for which the government has paid $547, but costs the UN only $20?
The pump hand at Pinta, a draft-beer kiosk in central Bishkek, is having a busy summer. He estimates that the shop where he works, one in a chain of seven, has moved over five tons of beer this month, most of it produced by Kyrgyz brewers. Business is booming. “It is hot, so people want to drink beer,” Alibek, 25, says.
Tatyana Baksheeva, a resident of Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, is a young woman with a solid business idea and the drive to make it happen. To succeed, she first needed to shed some Communist-era baggage in order to let her sense of individual initiative flourish. But now she’s finding that Kyrgyzstan’s sketchily regulated capitalist system is giving rise to a different set of problems.
Kyrgyzstan was renowned during the Soviet era as a producer of milk products, meat and produce, but food self-sufficiency in the Central Asian nation is a thing of the past. The growing dependency on imports is fast emerging as a national security issue.
In a small office on the second floor of the Kyrgyzstan Stock Exchange, a lone administrator checked the time and looked up from the computer: “Two o’clock. No applications received. Auction for sale of Zalkar Bank is declared invalid.”
