Bishkek

What do St. Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod (Lower New City), Volgograd, and Bishkek have in common? They each had a different name during Soviet times. In fact, they were all named after Soviet-era heroes: Leningrad, Gorky, Stalingrad, and Frunze, respectively. You’re probably thinking, “Okay, I’ve heard of the first three guys, but who on earth is Frunze?”

It seems clear that Mikhail Frunze knew exactly what he needed to do to get a city named after him. That is to say, be born in Kyrgyzstan, befriend Lenin, join the Bolsheviks, and lead many a Red Army campaign. But then he made the crucial mistake of crossing Stalin. To quote the Wikipedia entry on Mikhail Frunze:

Frunze died of chloroform poisoning during his surgery on 31 October 1925; the operation was considered very simple and routine even by the standards of medicine in existence at the time. It has therefore been speculated that Stalin arranged his death, but there is no hard evidence to support this.^[8] However, Frunze had been administrated a chloroform dose that many times exceeded the dose normally applied for narcosis.

Frunze was buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. All four doctors who had operated on him (Martynov, Grekov, Rozanov and Get'e) died one by one in 1934.

Is there anything more conspiratorial than a controversial Halloween death?

Like Ulaanbaatar, there wasn’t much to Frunze at the onset of Soviet rule. Most would argue this was bad news for both those cities. Once you let the Soviet architects loose on a empty canvas, who really knew what you would end up with. In Frunze’s case: brilliant architecture. Khrushchev and his concrete abominations are eerily absent from the cityscape. Instead you have four and five story apartment blocks lining the wide boulevards and a box-shaped national museum that would rival the world’s greatest mausoleums. The only the missing is a metro. It is said that Frunze was never big enough to justify a metro system.

1991 brought with it the independence of Kyrgyzstan and the change of the capital from Frunze to Bishkek. Bishkek is an ancient hero who is rumored to be buried in the area. The Soviet footprint is still largely intact; you can stroll down Kyrgyz SSR street or get of the bus at the Soviet street stop. Four blocks away from the organization and tree-lined streets is the chaotic Osh Bazaar. It’s a magical place with succulent beef kebab and fragrant spices. All those exotic stories you heard about Central Asia probably came from places like Osh Bazaar.

What the tourists come for, however, are the mountains. Bishkek has a beautiful mountain backdrop, however not quite as nice as Almaty. The next post should detail my foray into said mountains.