The Soviet Influence

Lyndon at Scraps of Moscow has been discussing how President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan has been heavily influenced by his days rising through the ranks of the Communist Party. 

In particular Karimov has adopted a policy of depriving Uzbek citizens of information, a policy which Lyndon argues is doomed to failure:

So, the authorities in Uzbekistan have been doing their best these past few days to prevent news from the outside world from reaching citizens - their goal is something similar to the media environment in the Soviet Union. As I’ve seen noted somewhere on the internet… it’s socially destabilizing to and in the long term bad for any government to prevent people from getting news from trusted and credible public sources. … This is because they will still get their news from trusted and credible sources, but they’ll be private ones with no public feedback mechanism - their neighbors, their relatives, etc. This (1) eradicates people’s trust in the government, (2) provides the potential for damaging/destabilizing rumors to spread, and (3) means there is no public forum for people to express views about news they’ve heard, since all "trusted" news was heard in private.

I’d guess that there is hardly a single person in Uzbekistan today that doesn’t know about the violent crackdown in Andijon over the weekend, so clearly Karimov can’t really be trying to stop the news of the crackdown from reaching his people.  One of the few sensible reasons for the news blackout that I can think of is that Karimov hopes that rumours about the crackdown actually will spread unchecked.  For, if rumours of the deathtoll continue to increase every time the story is passed on, chances are that other potential protesters throughout Uzbekistan might decide that coming out onto the streets simply isn’t worth the risk.

Tagged as: Central Asia