This is Central Asia, remote, exotic, and harsh. These are the words of Chingiz Aitmatov, a native Kyrgyz and father of the “Turkestani” movement in Soviet literature. Aitmatov seeks to capture the barrenness and isolation of Soviet Central Asia, its physical and metaphorical distance from Moscow, even at the close of the 1970s, after six decades of Soviet rule. In his surreal fantasy The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years, Aitmatov vividly portrays a land and a people whose history, tradition, and identity were the victims of relentless Soviet purges but, paradoxically, the beneficiaries of Soviet development. From collectivization of the nomads' lands to the elimination of the tribal bai (wealthy), to Stalin's war on Islam and his 1937 slaughter of the Ferghana intelligentsia, to Khrushchev's disastrous Virgin Lands program and cotton campaign, Central Asia incessantly felt the heavy and destructive hand of Soviet rule.

And yet by 1980, as the Soviet grip began to relax, Central Asia remained at best only haphazardly penetrated by the Soviet system.