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Book Review: Sovietstan by Erika Flatland

Sovietstan

Author: Erika Fatland
Publisher: MacLehose Press

You can't tell a book by its cover, but the back blurb of Sovietstan got my attention straight away, detailing what seemed an intriguing journey taken by Norwegian Erika Fatland into the heart of "the Stans" - those five, mysterious and generally unspellable countries that were once deep in the yolk of the Soviet Union empire.

And Fatland delivers in spades with a witty, poignant, evocative and never-dull account of her travels through Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.

Kazakhstan, of course, is now fairly well-recognised as the origin of comedian Sacha Baron-Cohen's alter ego Borat; but Borat was never meant as a vehicle to explore the mysteries of Kazakhstan, rather he was a "trojan horse" to mercilessly skewer the attitudes and prejudices of some of the more straight-laced sections of Western society.
Fatland, on the other hand, delivers a thoroughly engaging account of the real Kazakhstan and its neighbours.

But this is no tiptoe-through-the-tulips travelogue; a lot of Fatland's reportage makes pretty uncomfortable reading; for example "bride kidnapping" in the dictatorship of Uzbekistan, the extreme poverty in Turkmenistan, the environmental catastrophe of the Aral Sea and much more...

Under Soviet control, individual cultures in the region were suppressed and the landscape suffered tremendously under wacko Soviet schemes to irrigate the desert to produce cotton, let alone the detonation of more than 400 nuclear weapons during the Cold War.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Stans grabbed independence - but civil war and strife was rampant. And even today, few of these nations are truly democratic.

Fatland cuts through the waffle and by the book's end you feel you've been on the journey with her and met some great characters as well.

A great read.

- Norman Burns

The Write Stuff Media


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