Paradise in a time of war: Central Asia’s tracks still point north

Is the railway the mere obligatory thread of connection by which Russia desires to hold together… her loosely scattered and heterogenous possessions in Asia; or is it part of a great design that dreams of a wider dominion and aspires to a more splendid goal?

Curzon, Transcaspian Railway, 1889

 

I woke early on the third day of the slow train. Again, nothing could be seen outside of the window except a thousand miles of grass, still empty after its people were collectivized a century ago. Razilman, my devout cabinmate, snored loudly, having questioned me for hours late into the evening. There was the strong smell of dried sweat and increasingly fermented camel milk. In the cramped cafe car, the drunks were already rolling around in the booths, harassing the provodnitsa, being slowly baked by the coal fire.

 

In 2025, Maggie Shipstead wrote about riding the tsar's imperial railway, but on a very different train. It is easy to revel in Shipstead’s pleasure aboard the Golden Eagle train. Surrounded by sanitized “Sovietana”, the train doles out scallops on silver plates, with cocktails and Wi-Fi and crimped blue jackets. Polite guides describe the wonders of Turkestan, with gentle accounts of their post-independence history, only venturing down to the Tashkent Metro for a socialist-realist photo op. So it is for a generation of influencers and content creators.

 

Luxury trains are booming across Central Asia, with routes from Uzbekistan through to the Uyghur lands in China. Infrastructure has passed a critical point, from difficulty into comfort – so long as there is careful choreography. And so, passengers are handled like precious vases, passed delicately from point to point, viewing the world through polished windows.

 

From that view, the “Silk Road” narrative becomes easier to digest: riders melt into folktales amongst onion-dome mosques. The passengers are like the Silk Road as it mostly was: a tiny number of precious objects being passed, infrequently and irregularly, from oasis to oasis by enterprising merchants, doted on by elaborately uniformed courtiers in surroundings of splendour. It is Central Asia in a light perfectly designed to please western visitors. Parts of the historical portrait are covered by gloved hands. What remains is an image of intricate turquoise tiling, warming earthy-coloured rugs, and khans and camels. Behind that choreography are modern communities shaped by rail, tied together by a technology of extractive colonization and military power.

 

 

Ordinary travel in Central Asia is, in a word, uncomfortable. It is unremarkable and close, a mundane world that the Golden Eagle hides behind white tablecloths and gold-rimmed coffee cups. Though still half-blind to the stranger, a story of a people leaks through on the everyday trains.

 

The region’s recent history has a clichéd drumbeat: tsarist annexation, Soviet occupation, and neo-Soviet strongmen. Each beat changed the rails, tying the nations together with tracks, then suddenly cutting them apart. Metal tendrils first reached out from the Caspian at Uzun-Ada, a semi-accidental byproduct of a military occupation. By 1888, the railway had extended into the Emirate of Bukhara, a tsarist protectorate, at the furthest reaches of Moscow's power. Shortly into the new century, the ultimate track was laid: the Trans-Aral, a direct route from Tashkent to Moscow, binding colonial Turkestan and the Steppe Krai to the imperial centre. By the mid-1920s, when the Soviets finally embedded in Central Asia, the main routes were already well-established. A thin web of routes grew across the region, but never more than that. It was then, and still is, a place of week-long journeys across grasslands and deserts, with few stops.

 

 

Independence came unexpectedly, and in some cases, reluctantly. It was chaos for the rails. There was not the emergent multinationalism seen further west. Borders were jealously guarded, and tracks, which crossed back and forth between the new nations, became fragmented. Tajikistan’s northern network was entirely cut off from the south-central one. The Kyrgyz network, once famed for cutting the horse route from three weeks to three days, withered. The eastern Uzbek mountains were severed from the central heartlands, in turn split from the western Karakalpakstan autonomous republic. Even Shipstead’s Uzbek mainline had been laid with juts into Kazakhstan. The track itself was not spared. During the chaos of the nineties, the railways fell into disrepair in the Turkic nations, and the network of Tajikistan was damaged in the civil war, with routes running through minefields.

 

But detours were built and neighbours came to transit agreements. Still, there are ripples. The divided Kyrgyz network forces weary travellers to avtostop (hitchhike) from one muddy settlement to the next. Passenger trains in Tajikistan are considered little more than a joke. More than once, I was deposited in a godforsaken station, in the ice, with nothing around for hundreds of miles, and told that “the trains go no further”. This reduced me to bartering with alleged government officials for passage to a creaking Soviet hotel.

 

So much for the tracks. The people themselves fared little better. Throughout the Soviet period trains were split into classes, from obshchi (cramped, open cartridges of wooden benches) to myagkiy (two-person couchettes for party officials). In the early period, there was little except the obshchi. Later, fast trains, like the 5/6 Uzbekistan Express from Moscow to Tashkent, were almost entirely plush, East German carriages, and almost entirely off-limits to ordinary citizens.

 

What about interlopers? In the first eighty years, most of the rare foreigners had a consistent experience: being alternatingly roasted and frozen, covered in ticks, hounded by the KGB, or just pestered by bored officials. Not that it mattered for the most part, as they were routinely blocked anyway. Moscow initially banned all foreigners, and many of its own people, from visiting the far southern reaches. While in 1875 there was a “special order” prohibiting visitors, in 1930 it was a “military zone”. Even in 1959, a century after the tsar’s annexations, the Soviets arbitrarily closed the whole region on an apparent whim. But the fears that Turkestan could not be Sovietized were shown to be overly dramatic. The Timurid wonder-cities of the area were pacified into museum pieces, adjoined to identikit new towns, and a trickle of visitors were allowed in. These vanishingly few would recognize the experience of the Golden Eagle. Intourist, the Soviet tourism agency, housed them in the relative comfort of a myagkiy vagon, carefully watched. Then, as now, an insulated egg of pleasantness was transplanted into this world, away from the dust and disorder.

 

 

The Golden Eagle is a strange repeat of this past, with minders attempting to occlude the present. After independence, with the carrot of European integration, the leaders of Eastern Europe often reformed or were discredited. Not so in Central Asia. Here, the communist leaders managed to maintain power, by charm or violence. It was, on the whole, continuity. “All this freedom… did not come easy,” says Nematov, Shipstead’s Tajik guide. Perhaps he is being kind to Shipstead, not wanting to relive the painful past. Or perhaps he is being careful. Trains allow for a liminal “privacy with strangers” effect. With their failing railways, that liminality is squashed into shared taxis. There, away from the oppressive portraits of the life-president, some Tajiks could whisper the quiet pains: the repression of minorities and the opposition, and cities falling into the hands of modern princelings.

 

Modernity still pushes itself through the dimmed Silk Road spectacles. Authoritarianism and war hide in the half-shadows of Shipstead’s account, the guides and minders trying desperately to shift her gaze. She sees the influx of "new Russians", now common on the Kazakh rails. In Kazakhstan, still 15 per cent Slavic, the Kremlin preserves its right to “intervene” on the remaining Slavs’ behalf. On one train, I spoke to a young Kazakh engineer, on his way to make his Hajj journey to Mecca. After hours of talking, he closed off the compartment so that we were alone. After looking about to see if, somehow, someone was listening, he continued quietly.

 

“Let me tell you a story. One time, I was with a Russian engineer. It was late, and he was drunk – you know, alcohol. Anyway, he says to me, “I am afraid. If the old president [Nazarbayev] dies, Putin will invade, and take Russian Kazakhstan.” Don’t you see? The engineer was against Putin, and he still called it “Russian Kazakhstan”.”

 

A mountain climber in the south was even more plain with me. We walked together up the snow-bound hill on the Kazakh-Kyrgyz border, between the ancient wild apple orchards. She looked down at the towns in the valleys.

 

“I expect an invasion soon,” she said, between puffs, “after Ukraine, maybe a year or two.”

 

In the post-independence chaos, the lines taking cotton and coal to the old mother country endured. The mountains full of apples had once been bypassed by an intra-union track, one that I had been blocked from using a few days before. But the mainlines still pointed north, and they were ready.

Ned Wontner is a researcher and policy professional based in Scotland, working on Islamicate Asia.