ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 reaches back into the late Soviet era and the 1990s to locate the beginnings of Kyrgyz bazaar traders in the Russian city of Novosibirsk. It follows how these pioneers of trade navigated informalities and risks, faced cultural stigmatization and other hardships while chasing high-profit margins by channelling consumer goods from China, Kyrgyzstan or elsewhere to Novosibirsk during the times of a post-Soviet ‘wild capitalism’. The chapter emphasizes that ‘to pick up trading’ was more than an economic transformation, i.e. an initially unwanted and unexpected adjustment to a diametrically opposed imagination of a non-commercial Soviet future. It was furthermore a relocation, from southern Kyrgyzstan to Siberian Russia, which demanded an effort to socialize into a new urban fabric and to detach oneself from an ethno-historic essentialization that depicted trading not to be ‘in the blood’ of a Kyrgyz. The chapter sets a baseline for the remainder of the book by establishing an understanding in which ways localities, their relatedness and varying time horizons matter along capitalist value chains.
