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Kyrgyzstan
Contemporary Culture
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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