The Lost Heart of Asia

by Colin Thubron

First published 1994

Amazon

4.2(280)

Soon after the break-up of the Soviet Union, Colin Thubron travels through the newly independent republics of Central Asia. Deserts, steppes and mountain routes carry him through places such as Bukhara and Samarkand, where conversations with officials, families, religious believers and people displaced by Soviet policies reveal societies trying to define themselves outside Moscow’s authority.

Independence does not erase the region’s earlier histories. Thubron sets the new borders against the caravan routes of the Silk Road, the conquests associated with Genghis Khan and Timur, and the demographic and political transformations imposed under Stalin. The book examines the uneasy return of Islam and national memory alongside economic disruption and authoritarian government, capturing Central Asia at the moment when Soviet institutions were becoming the inherited structures of five new states.