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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Kyrgyzstan
Index
As the capital of a Soviet republic, Bishkek (which until 1990 had been
named Frunze after the Soviet general who led the military conquest of the
Basmachi rebels in the mid-1920s) was endowed with the standard cultural
facilities, including an opera, ballet, several theater companies, and an
orchestra, as well as a Lenin museum, national art and craft museums, and
an open-air sculpture museum. Since independence, funding for those
institutions has decreased dramatically, and the cultural facilities have
also been hard hit by the departure of local Russians. It also is unclear
whether younger Kyrgyz will continue their parents' substantial interest
in classical music, which in the Soviet era led several generations to
support the national orchestra.
In the Soviet-directed propagation of "all-union culture,"
Kyrgyz actors, directors, and dancers achieved fame throughout the Soviet
Union. Chingiz Aitmatov, the republic's most prominent writer, became one
of the best-known and most independent artists in the Soviet Union in the
1980s. The Kyrgyz film industry, which had been very productive while
supported by Soviet government funds, essentially vanished after 1991.
Film projects that survive, such as a large-scale production on the life
of Chinggis Khan directed by noted Kyrgyz director T. Okeyev, do so
through foreign financing (an Italian film company has supported
production of the Okeyev film).
Perhaps the best indicator of the condition of the fine arts in
postcommunist Kyrgyzstan is the fate of the open-air sculpture museum in
Bishkek, which began suffering a series of thefts in early 1993. Because
the targets were all bronze, presumably the sculptures were stolen for
their value as metal, not as art. When a large statuary group
commemorating Aitmatov's Ysyk-Köl Forum (a notable product of the
early glasnost period) disappeared, the museum's remaining
statues were removed to a more secure location.
Data as of March 1996
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