ABSTRACT
The former military dictator of Pakistan, Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, once said, “Sometimes I get confused with all these stans, but as long as I don’t say Hindustan [India], I’ll be OK.”1 The tendency to confuse and confound the five post-Soviet countries together is a convenience some Westerners also find hard to resist as well, though the commonality is rapidly disappearing, as it has in other poor areas we find troublesome to study in detail. The otherwise distinguished Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin memorably dismissed the whole region in a 2002 review in The New Republic as: “a dreadful checkerboard of parasitic states and statelets, government-led extortion rackets and gangs in power, mass refugee camps and shadow economies. Welcome to Trashcanistan.” Unlike Sacha Baron Cohen’s satirical Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, filmed in Romania, this reproof was probably not meant for light entertainment.