Tag: Uzbekistan

The American Dream: A cliché?

Part 3

 From Gogoosha’s  Country

For the record, I personally do not know any  blond woman named  Gogoosha. And if I did, I will never tell you.

Gogoosha  (real  name Gulnara) had it all .  A Bachelor’s degree in international Economics, a degree in Design from New York Fashion Institute of Technology,  a Master’s degree in Regional Science from Harvard University (!),  a  Ph.D.  in political science from a university in Tashkent , and  on the side, a B.A. in Telecommunications.  She was the country’s leading fashion designer and displayed her creations in Europe frequently.  She owned  the biggest  company that sold fashionable clothes in her small and poor country. By the way, she also owned a monopoly of the only cellphone company  in her country and had a controlling interest in the country’s  healthcare and media sectors.  She was of course a Professor in Political Science and  a senior bureaucrat in the country’s government.  If this is not enough, she was an accomplished rock and roll artiste  and held concerts in Europe occasionally when she was not too busy. And did I mention that she had a hot body, and a great smile,  wavy blond hair and ample  natural endowments? She lived in many different mansions that she owned all over the world.

Are you saying WTF? Hold on!

The country’s name is Uzbekistan, and she is the daughter of its erstwhile first president Karimov. The degrees of course were obtained surreptitiously, the business ventures were acquired by appropriation  and extortion,  and you can draw your own conclusions about her other talents! She could be found swaying to her own music on Youtube – check it out!! Karimov was grooming  her and her husband for an eventual succession. BTW her net worth at its peak was about a billion dollars although I am skeptical about the valuation.

I never went to Uzbekistan although I taught in a private American style university in neighboring Kazakhstan, in a city named Almaty. My Kazakh students were rich kids, children of  the network that governs and plunders the Kazakh people. However, scholarships were offered to meritorious students  from average families from neighboring countries. So I came in close contact with quite a few Uzbek students. I mentored two of them  through undergrad and grad programs, helped them profusely with  studies, advised them  on personal matters and provided substantial financial assistance. There were many others, all men, that I hung out with, offering them different degrees of friendship and assistance  over the years.

 I would like to say that the Uzbeks  were nice, warm and honest people. They are , if you mingle with them superficially.  Underneath, for at least some of them,  there is a trait of religious and moral hypocrisy,  dishonesty and generally  opportunistic behavior.  Maybe I had  bad samples! Nevertheless, all my students, hypocrites or not,  were very bright and well-read. I learned a lot from them about Uzbek institutions, customs and their personal frustrations with the Uzbek society.

The Uzbek government and the network that controls the country, though, are  not nice and warm. They are certifiably vicious and nasty.  More about this later.

Unlike from India and Korea, there are three interesting  tiers of immigrants from Uzbekistan to USA.

Lets’ do some numbers first. Uzbekistan is a small country , with a total population of  35 million (India’s population is 1350 million!!). The total number of Uzbek  immigrants and ethnic Uzbeks who are US citizens is less than 100k. Ethnic Indians in USA  number about 4 million!  So we are talking about something of a much smaller dimension !

I never met any Uzbek immigrants in USA. However, I have met  many from Russia and Central Europe. So my diatribe is based on my experience with the above immigrants,   on  my discussions with Uzbek Students in Almaty, and on  an excellent informative article I read in the New Yorker a few years ago.  

The first group escaped the highly oppressive communist regimes after WW2. Many  were persecuted and ended up as refugees in USA , some came with some assets, some penniless.  Later, some  families  arranged a tri-lateral asset transfer and got out. They mostly started working as small businessmen.  Eventually they or their children became established professionals, some actually became very wealthy.   Most of them are now at least in their late sixties , many a lot older.

I met both working class and middle class immigrants from East Europe from this generation. What distinguished them from the others was their seething, intense hatred of the Soviet system . They hated everybody and everything associated with everything Soviet, with a vengeance.  

Perhaps  one single   example will prove my point. In 1977, when I was doing my Ph. D. in the University of Rochester, the chess club organized a simultaneous chess match with the ex-world champion, Tigran Petrosian from Soviet Russia.  This  was a time of my life when I had  quit playing chess temporarily,  but I went to see the match and enjoyed watching  an elderly Petrosian playing about 20 players simultaneously and kicking their butts in no time.  Apart from the students, there were a lot of older people in the audience, many of them were speaking in foreign languages.

The chess club organizers, mainly young graduate students,  wanted to act as  gracious hosts  and wanted to entertain Petrosian with food and drinks after the match. The problem was that Petrosian’s English was seriously limited to the chess vocabulary : he could say  “this is checkmate” or “mate in five moves”  but very little else.

 Undaunted, the organizers  made an announcement , asking for a native Russian speaker to volunteer  as his companion for the evening.  The response was a stony silence from the native Russian speakers! Somewhat desperately , the organizers then asked for someone only to translate a few questions for Petrosian about his personal preferences – it will take only  few minutes to do it .  Again,  a stony silence.  The young men then asked the Russian speakers personally to help. One by one they went to get their coats and left  the auditorium. All of them loved chess, but abhorred people like Petrosian who was assumed to be  a shameless proponent for the Communist regime!

The New Yorker  article corroborates what I had seen about  this tier one  immigrants from Uzbekistan and other formerly communist countries. The New Yorker found the older Uzbek immigrants mostly affluent, some very rich. Some of their children who  speak Russian or Uzbek have very rewarding careers in the military or in  US government (CIA, maybe?). They have their own enclave in swanky neighborhoods in New York and they never visit the ethnic Central  Asian  residential areas or their stores and restaurants. To them, the people that did not leave Soviet  Russia (or its Satellite countries) are all communist bastards and should be disgraced publicly.

Well , the Soviet Union collapsed  in the early nineties.  Uzbekistan and other “stans” emerged soon afterwards. The second  tier of migrants came during the 1990’s which was a period of some major anarchy in Uzbekistan. These people were mostly educated and took advantage of the relatively lax exit restrictions and currency regulations in Uzbekistan during the period of anarchy.  Their stories are more straightforward. They came, struggled with English, worked jobs below their skill level and finally established themselves as professionals and Business people.  Again, I met a lot of Russians with the same background in USA, I am guessing the Uzbeks would  have the same experience. One of my Russian acquaintances in USA was a chemistry professor in Russia. He worked minimum wage jobs until his English improved, then he enrolled in college to get a diploma in Computer science. Afterwards, it was a matter of time before he reinvented  himself as an IT professional  earning an  American middle-class salary (no, not millions!).   

The third tier of immigrants was created, unfortunately,  by the repressive government of Uzbekistan. Karimov’s rule,  after he consolidated his power in the late nineties,  was a major Kleptocracy. Every single economic activity was restricted , a license was needed to import bananas  or  computers. The network (Gogoosha and associates) owned the only major wholesale distribution  center for consumer goods.  Everytime in Uzbekistan,  if you ate  a meal or rode a taxi,  some money went to the network.  For a while, Karimov had the balls to order that schools will be declared closed when the cotton harvest is ready , so that high school students and teachers will pick cotton that  will be exported abroad  –  the proceeds  will go the network, of course! 

The Uzbeks are proud of Timur (Temir Lane). Timur’s  mausoleum stands proudly in Samarkand ,as one of the most famous sites in Central  Asia.  I always wanted to visit!

This  greatest tourist attraction, Samarkand, was also a moneymaker for the kleptocracy . A foreigner can only come to Uzbekistan  if he  was invited by an  approved travel agency who will make all the travel arrangements.  Technically, you could go  the  Uzbek embassy in Almaty and apply for a tourist visa.  That’s what I tried.  But you will never get your visa. I was told to come back three times before I understood the implied message (that the visa will never materialize!).  So every tourist  that visits Samarkand paid  money to an  approved travel agency which was owned by (surprise!) the network.  Now you know why I did not visit Uzbekistan.

Every major business sector  was also controlled by the network.  Human rights was a joke. Religious freedoms were  non-existent.   After the Boston Marathon bombing  where the killer brothers were revealed to be from Uzbekistan, the government practically destroyed  all kind of religious activity,  afraid that the society would turn into a breeding ground for Islamic terrorists. Of course, political freedom remains only  a dream for the Uzbeks. Their  salaries were low even by Central Asian standards. Not only plundering, the government itself was also slowly choking its citizenry.  During the last fifteen years,  millions of men  have migrated to Russia, Turkey and other countries to eke out a living.

Karimov, the despot ,  thankfully passed away in 2016. The group that replaced his ilk  paid lip service to reform and  freedom, but ultimately turned out to be the same kind of anal retentives  as the previous regime. So the plight of the Uzbek people continues to this day.

Some of these people managed to flee to  America. They were unskilled and ill-suited for assimilation.  Many of them came as students and then became illegals when they dropped out of college.  They work at minimum wage jobs in hotels,  restaurants and factories in New York, New Jersey and elsewhere.  Some illegals get paid less than the minimum wage and get brutally exploited by their employers. Some drive taxis, some are petty criminals. In New York City, they live in Brighton Beach, the Russian ghetto, with five people stuffed  in a one bedroom apartment, and wonder whether it is better here or back at home.  This tier of immigrants remains in a sorry state even today.

 The first and the second tier of immigrants are shocked at the plight and misery of the third tier. They call them riffraffs, losers, morons and punks. They will not help them with jobs or money. In fact they  will have nothing to do with them whatsoever.    Thus, unlike the Indian diaspora, the Uzbek immigrants remain a fragmented bunch with no respect for the later arrivals and no cohesion at all.

The New Yorker article brings out a valid point.  It mentions that culture and religion bind the immigrant societies together.  I would go to the local Durga puja  in USA and hang out with the brash IT millionaire in my town as well as the “students” who never seem to finish  their studies  (illegals – yes there are some from India as well).  Not the Uzbeks, most of whom have no religion.

Very recently ,  famous  entertainers form  Uzbekistan are touring USA, their concerts are well-attended by Uzbeks from all three tiers. Maybe this bodes well for cultural integration in the future.

Finally, what happened to Gogooosha?  She divorced her husband   in 2005, her father was not very pleased with it . Ultimately she fell out with her father who put her under house arrest. The successor government accused her of corruption, extortion and many other things. The governments of USA, UK and France and Switzerland followed suit, since a lot of the ill- gotten gains were subsequently used for business or personal projects in these countries.  To cut a long story short, she remains under house arrest till today, serving a ten year prison sentence, all her millions frozen in foreign banks. From time to time she sends messages to the  world media about  her plight.

My heart breaks at her misery! Maybe a young security guard at her house will take pity on her and her considerable endowments  and sneak her out  of confinement!  One can always hope!!