Students met with language coaches today. Things are going normally.

Let me tell you, metronidazole is great for curbing the runs abroad. My previous favorite drug was ibuprofen, but I don't get headaches very often nowadays, so maybe metronidazole is my favorite now. :) My current course of treatment will run out soon. I'm half tempted to buy a second course for the way home, just in case.

A subgroup of our students has to do some extensive testing due to their scholarship requirements. Today they did the listening and reading tests. There was only one time slot available for today, 2-5 p.m. Exhausting. Particularly since the testing room is on the west side of the building. The AC in that room has ceased to function. I saw a few students were nearly nodding off. Still, they all completed today's test, with the exception of the student who had food poisoning and didn't make it.

Our second wave of students today had the privilege of visiting the Honorable Richard Miles, former ambassador to Turkmenistan and current chargé d’affaires to Kyrgyzstan. (In other words, he is effectively the acting ambassador until the new ambassador arrives.) The students loved the visit. Ambassador Miles (we can still call him Ambassador since he previously fulfilled that role) has a lot of experience in the countries of the fUSSR, so his opinions have a certain weight to them.

One of those opinions was quite interesting to me. Current relations between the US and KG have decayed quite a bit recently, and the putative reason was the granting of a human rights award to Askarov, who is currently serving a life sentence. When I first heard this, it struck me as a profound overreaction. KG could hardly say no to the millions of dollars in US aid simply because they were upset by a human rights award. The award is simply not significant enough. I concluded that the award was not the motivating factor, that Russian influence or the desire to appease Russia was the actual cause.

Ambassador Miles contradicted that opinion. He said that he had seen no evidence so far that the Russians were the causal force behind the current spat. That very much surprised me, but of course the ambassador has a wealth of personal experience here, and his opinion is definitely weightier than mine here.

That said, he did agree (and cited the opinions of other ambassadors to the fUSSR) that the reaction was excessive.

He also noted that certain representatives of the Kyrgyz government seemed to be acting on a fairly immature/primitive set of reactions. This comment rang true to me. It doesn't take much to see old alpha-male behaviors in much of Russian politics, so it is no surprise to see the same thing in the politics of those who were trained by the Russians. Certain American and European politicians have a complexity to them (an openness to rational thinking and to the goals of plurality and environmental sensibility) that many representatives of less-advanced nations lack. When a politican reverts to motivations of personal offense or fear of economic loss to himself or his kin, this is no surprise. But we Americans and Europeans need to bear in mind that this is still entirely possible.

One interesting encounter: an attendee at the event asked me whether I thought whether the hierarchy of human needs was applicable to nation states. Wow, that was an unexpected question. First I had to ask him whether he meant Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which he affirmed. I'm not sure that Maslow is the best way to measure nation-states and politics, but as a topic for conservation it was certainly intriguing. First I said I didn't have the complexity to answer the question... then three seconds passed, and I changed my mind. I responded that, yes, in a certain sense it does apply. A government has to be able to respond to its citizens needs for food before it could respond to things like equality for despised minorities.

I then asked the attendee to answer his own question. He responded with an analogy about girlfriends that suggested that KG was responding somewhere in the love/belonging level of Maslow's hierarchy. That's a unique way of thinking about the situation. Myself, considering how close Russia is and how weak KG's military is, I would more likely assign the issue to the ‘safety’ level. I doubt I'll have time before the grave to consider the question seriously, though.

Nothing special to report.

Katya and I met to discuss next week's schedule. Things will be hectic. We head home nine days from now.

I'm currently having breakfast at кафе «То да сё». Overpriced, but close to the school with good wi-fi. I'm the only customer at this hour; Russians do not commonly go out for breakfast. You would think that with four waitrons on duty, one of them would actually check up on me on occasion. The definitely do not deserve the service charge on the bill. And why the hell do you have to play loud music in the morning? Loud music means one thing to me: the person who turned it on is too uncomfortable with his own thoughts to actually hear them and needs to drown them out.

KG is the last member of this block. For reasons I don't quite understand, Kazakhstan held up KG's becoming part of the union. I believe they cites border security reasons as the primary reason, which I heard interpreted the other day as meaning that KZ didn't want migrant laborers from KG.

The capital of KZ is Alma-Aty. The other day I heard the city described as “twice as nice as Bishkek at thrice the price.”

After months of stops and starts, Kyrgyzstan is finally becoming a full-fledged member of the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union.

With that, the country has entered what boosters of the bloc hope will be a period of economic recovery. Everybody else seems uncertain of what to expect.

“We’ll live and we’ll learn,” said Azim, a resident of Kara-Suu, a southern market town whose prosperity has for years relied on the sale and trade of imported goods. “As for me, I think it will be good, because the flour from Kazakhstan will be cheaper.”

Along with bakers, better times may be coming for anybody whose costs will be reduced by the disappearance of import duties on goods from the other four EEU members – Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Armenia.

But a desire to foster trade may not have been the primary consideration as Kyrgyz leaders mulled accession to the EEU. Speaking at a discussion panel in Bishkek in late July, Temirbek Azhykulov, executive director of the International Business Council, an informal association for the foreign investor community in Kyrgyzstan, said that membership appeared primarily motivated by politics.

Azhykulov said his organization has spent the last year reaching out to officials and entrepreneurs to address a knowledge gap on how the new raft of regulations will affect the business sector, but to little avail. “As of now, we don’t have the kind of information that could help us give guidance to companies that, say, work in trade. To tell them: ‘These are more or less your prospects,’” Azhykulov said.

The immediate impact of accession will be felt along the border with Kazakhstan, where customs controls are to be lifted imminently. Kyrgyzstan’s Economy Minister Oleg Pankratov said on August 6 that nothing will change until August 11-12 due to some final bureaucratic issues.

Once that happens though, freight will sail through, bringing an end to the sight of long lines at the border. “It won’t be necessary to fill out any customs declarations, there won’t be any more customs procedures,” Pankratov was quoted as saying by Vecherny Bishkek newspaper. “Exporters will simply have to go through a simplified form of registration carried out by the border service.”

It will be a different story with imports from non-member countries, which account for much of the stock in Kara-Suu market: shoes and clothes from Turkey, cleaning goods from the Middle East, nuts from Iran.

And, of course, there is China. Trucks loaded with anything from electronics to car parts and fabrics to toys rumble 250 kilometers to Kara-Suu down a steep and freshly paved road from the high-altitude Irkeshtam border crossing. Prices for all those Chinese wares stand to go up, which has fostered concerns the EEU is little more than a vehicle to service Moscow’s economic interests. “This will be a Russian market, they’re just opening a market for themselves,” said Shavkat Kasimi, an Afghan-born import broker based in southern Kyrgyzstan. “They won’t let anybody else in.”

Kasimi said goods intended for import may sit idle for weeks at customs points as Kyrgyz officials get up to speed on how to properly process them under EEU rules.

Russia has been eager to cast Kyrgyzstan’s accession to the EEU in a positive light. Sputnik, a Russian government-owned news website that acts as a platform for often strident state propaganda, carried an article in early August citing a Kyrgyz businessman as saying the lifting of customs controls would have instant, positive effects. Rustam Matkadyrov told Sputnik that as soon as he is able to cheaply import high-quality flour from Kazakhstan, the pasta factory he has built will be able to get going. “The cost of production will be greatly reduced and the removal of customs barriers will open up a huge market,” Matkadyrov said.

Pankratov, the economy minister, said government coffers will enjoy a windfall as Kyrgyzstan stands to receive 1.9 percent of customs fees gathered collectively by the economic bloc. “This is a very good figure, which will earn the budget a lot of money. The figure of 1.9 percent is set for three years, after which it will expire and be revised depending on what kinds of goods were exported,” Pankratov said.

Officials with the Eurasian Economic Commission – the regulatory body of the EEU – are more sanguine about the developments to come. Addressing several government representatives at a roundtable in Bishkek in mid-July, the deputy head of the commission’s macroeconomic policy department, Andrei Lipin, said it would take five years to fully assess the impact of Kyrgyzstan’s EEU membership on trade. Weak data-gathering has made evaluating long-term economic impact problematic, Lipin said. “The lack of quality information is very strongly felt,” he said.

There is some consensus about some of the more immediate effects.

With the introduction of an EEU common external tariff, prices across the board are likely to increase. Prime Minister Temir Sariyev predicted last year, while he was serving as economy minister, that average retail prices could increase by 10-15 percent following EEU accession. That rise will be above the average figure for automobiles and electronic wares.

Were there broad support for EEU membership, authorities might be confident in riding out the political fallout of such an effect, but opinion polls are discouraging. An annual survey on Eurasian integration conducted by the Eurasian Development Bank in 2014 showed that support for EEU accession in Kyrgyzstan had fallen to 50 percent from 67 percent in the space of a year. “The level of negative attitudes has doubled, which is a worrying sign,” the bank said in a statement detailing the survey results.

The next few months are likely be a politically sensitive time for Kyrgyzstan, as parliamentary elections beckon. Such a vote would be a formality in most Central Asian nations, where the executive branches of government tend to dominate the legislative. But Kyrgyzstan is ostensibly a parliamentary republic, and rival political forces in the country are sure to try to politically capitalize on any downturn in quality of life.

The man on the street is content for now to shrug his shoulders. “They’ve made their plan and it’s according to that plan that they’ll operate,” said Kasimi at Kara-Suu market. “In the end, we’ll see if it works.”