But the aftershocks of the Soviet collapse rippled to the eastern frontiers of the former empire with equally momentous implications, although these went more unnoticed at first. The former Soviet Socialist Republics of central Asia—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan—had been joined only uneasily to European Russia. Once Moscow’s power evaporated, trace memories of an earlier culture, long submerged by European Communism, began to re-emerge.
