This remark was made by a Kyrgyz woman from the Soviet-educated intelligentsia in 1995. Chingiz Aitmatov wrote much the same in a story about a clan village on a kolkhoz in Talas in the 1940s. Probably the same was often said by oqsoqols in the early Soviet and pre-Soviet days. Kin relations have powerful meaning, yet they are not purely social or cultural. One student, a citizen of the Kyrgyz Republic (with a prestigious U.S. degree), told me that if you do not have the right kin relations, then you will not find a good job. So, like so many other qualified young people, she wants to leave. Kin and clan have powerful aspects, both positive and negative. Why and how they affect the social and elite level of politics, even after the post-Soviet transitions, is the subject of this chapter.

Formal and informal regimes in the post-transition period

From 1991 to 1995, as Chapter 6 has shown, the Central Asian regime trajectories were clearly distinct. They differed both in terms of (1) their durability (the regime's ability to survive, that is, to avoid collapse or civil war during transition), and (2) their regime type (the ideological and institutional nature of the new post-Soviet regime). Subsequently, however, these political trajectories increasingly converged along the same two dimensions.