Where Stalin Lives

TEN YEARS after the aborted coup that presaged the fall of the Soviet Union, the results in Russia are mixed. As Masha Lipman writes on the facing page today, most Russians find nothing to celebrate after a decade of attempted reform. Although the material lot of many Russians has improved, for many others a kind of secure poverty has been replaced by an insecure one. Meanwhile those who most championed reforms are dismayed by the government's brutal war against Chechnya and a creeping return to influence of KGB men and methods. Yet unquestionably the news in Russia is not all bad. The country is far more democratic than ever in its history; religion is freer; a generation is growing up without fear.

The same cannot be said of all parts of the Soviet Union. A few former Soviet republics -- notably Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, whose inclusion into the Soviet empire the United States never recognized as legitimate -- are full-fledged democratic success stories. Others struggle between democracy and corrupt autocracy. And in still others, life is as tightly controlled as ever. In the latter category certainly belong the Central Asian states of Turkmenistan and, as a new Human Rights Watch report reminds us, Uzbekistan. In that nation of about 24 million people, dictator Islam Karimov relies on many of the same methods that kept Joseph Stalin in power for so many years.

Torture, forced confessions, group trials, show trials: These were hallmarks of the Soviet Union at its worst and they are hallmarks of Uzbekistan today. So is arresting children, parents and wives of suspected enemies of the state simply because they are related: "The fathers who have brought them up will be brought to account together with their children," Mr. Karimov has declared. Like Stalin's secret police, Uzbekistan's agents travel to foreign countries to kidnap expatriates and bring them home for torture. As in Stalin's day, the regime's judges are shamefully compliant. "When they were asked, they couldn't name their torturers," one judge said in dismissing the claims of victims brave enough to complain in open court. And as in Stalin's day, when people die from torture the relatives are lied to (one victim died of "acute failure of the left stomach") or told nothing at all.

Many of the victims of President Karimov's repression are Muslims who choose to worship outside institutions approved by the state. They are nonviolent, arrested for their beliefs, yet the United States has been reluctant to condemn their oppression as forcefully as their suffering warrants. When the Soviet Union fell, many people predicted the United States would no longer defend unsavory dictators; Cold War allegiances, the theory went, would no longer act as a shield against the truth. That theory proved naive. The United States still finds reasons to treat some oppressive regimes (such as Iraq's) more harshly than others (such as Saudi Arabia's). In Central Asia, the Bush administration, like the Clinton administration before it, weighs concern for human rights against other factors: a desire to block Russian expansion, a fear of Islamic fundamentalism, a hunger for the vast oil and gas deposits of the region.

In the end the United States' practical goals will not be furthered by tolerating odious leaders like Mr. Karimov. On the contrary, the likely result of his repression will be a growth of Islamic radicalism, just as his corrupt and centralized economy has produced only poverty for most of his compatriots. Ten years on, the people of Central Asia can feel only envy as they look across the border at Russia.