1992 Reports

The Future of Central Asia

Olcott, Martha Brill

The forces at work in the transformation of Central Asia are much the same as those at work elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, although they take on specific coloration from local social and cultural patterns. The collapse of the USSR was conditioned by the struggle for the enormous resources and potential wealth of the territory. The issues which that fight raised, but did not solve—control of natural resources, control of existing industrial capacity, and control of the right to negotiate hard-currency deals with foreign concerns—are now being reproduced on smaller scales, between the republics and within them.