A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

286 A history of Inner Asia
that the city recovered its Kazakh name.On 9 June 1998 the Fifth Turkic
Summit was held there, and the next day, 10 June, was marked by a celebration
inaugurating Astana as the new capital of Kazakhstan – for that
is the new and presumably final name of this city.“Astana” simply means
“capital city” in Kazakh and one must thus conclude that it has become
the republic’s city par excellence.
Nevertheless, the leading theme in relations between Central Asia and
Russia is cooperation, not confrontation.This includes a whole gamut
of economic and professional aspects, but two deserve to be singled out.
One is the location of the former Soviet, and now Russian, missilelaunching
ground and space program center at Baikonur in
Kazakhstan.Baikonur, situated in west-central Kazakhstan, was chosen
in the Soviet era for strategic, logistical and climatic reasons, and it has
retained most of these aspects to this day.Its continued use, against an
initial payment of $1 billion and a lease fee of $115 million annually
(both to be deducted from Kazakhstan’s debt to Russia), is likely to be an
asset or a liability – or both – for Kazakhstan.
The other aspect is defense.Before independence, the republics’ military,
from raw recruits to generals, were integrated in the Red Army.
Now all five are striving to create their own armed forces, but it is a laborious
and costly process, so that reliance on those of the CIS or of Russia
has proved unavoidable.Our definition is deliberately vague or confusing,
because the situation itself is fluid and incompletely reported.Thus
when Islamic fundamentalists, drawing on help from the mujahideen of
Afghanistan, seemed able to prevail in Tajikistan during 1992, it was the
CIS troops commanded by General Piankov who saved the situation, to
the great relief not only of the fundamentalists’ Tajik opponents but also
of Tajikistan’s Uzbek and Turkmen neighbors and even of the other
Central Asians, the Kyrgyz and Kazakhs; the CIS troops continue to
guard the Tajik–Afghan border, thus in fact the Central Asian–Afghan
border.A more recent agreement in 1993 between the Turkmen and
Russian governments garrisons Turkmenistan’s strategic points along
the Afghan and Iranian borders with Russian armed forces, and entrusts
the training of the Turkmen ones to Russian officers.We witness here
one of history’s paradoxical but not infrequent paraphrases of itself: the
Tsarist empire’s Turkestan was once guarded by Russian troops along
these frontiers against a perceived threat from the British empire, with
an undercurrent of a wish to push toward the Indian Ocean; this undercurrent
resurfaced, or was perceived to do so, with the recent Soviet