There's a joke about Leonid Brezhnev, the uni-browed and droopy-jowled party chief who ruled the Soviet Union for so long that he ossified into buffoonish senility, serving as a convenient symbol of the overall national stagnation. In the joke, a doddering Brezhnev asks his granddaughter, "So what would you like to be when you grow up?"
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The girl answers, "Why, grandfather, of course I'd like to be the chairman of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union." Upon hearing this, Brezhnev scratches his signature slicked-back hair and says, "Hmm, but why would the party need two chairmen?"
The vignette about the perils of the transfer of power in the 1970s Soviet Union also applies to the Uzbekistan of today. Central Asia's most populous country and an important U.S. ally in the Afghan war, Uzbekistan is also a police state with a derelict economy, a Gulag-style prison system -- and a deepening succession crisis, amplified by a recent rumor about the president's allegedly ailing heart and increasingly rare public appearances.
Islam Karimov, the shrewd and ruthless president, is 76 now, the same age Brezhnev was when he died in office. There are other similarities. Like Brezhnev, Karimov has piloted his country's economy into a dead end, with upbeat official growth statistics often belying a Soviet-style command economy where businesses succeed or fail based on their proximities to the regime's flunkies.
Like in the Soviet Union of the 1970s, the general absurdity of political and economic life goes dutifully unchronicled by Pravda -- the Russian-language paper still bears its communist-era name -- which might devote a page to the actuarial celebration of the latest cotton harvest while ignoring the forced labor responsible for it.
A career Communist party boss, Karimov also bears a political resemblance to another aging strongman, Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, before he was overthrown. Like Mubarak, Karimov has declared war on anything resembling organized Islam, jailing thousands of people on specious charges of Islamic militancy and subjecting them to horrific torture. These witch hunts risk turning the threat of extremism into a self-fulfilling prophecy and eventually strengthening the hand of political Islamists.
The defining political event of modern Uzbekistan was the 2005 massacre of protesters in the town of Andijan where the government had imprisoned a group of respected businessmen on trumped-up charges of Islamic conspiracy. When those merchants escaped in an armed jailbreak, hundreds of peaceful protesters flocked to the town's central square for an impromptu rally. Government troops shot and killed hundreds of civilians, including children, and the regime crossed the Rubicon. Since then, security services have seen their influence rise, while Karimov has grown increasingly mistrustful and focused on little more than his own political survival.
This frozen narrative of political senility and repression was suddenly cracked in March when an overseas opposition group claimed that Karimov had suffered a massive heart attack. Never mind that the sourcing was thin and the opposition leader -- Turkey-based Muhammad Solih of the People's Movement of Uzbekistan -- clearly has an interest in fomenting political upheaval in Tashkent. The rumor ignited anew the question of what comes after Karimov. "Even if he didn't suffer a heart attack, one would need to have invented one to forecast the possible scenarios in case the aging leader is unable to carry on," Daniil Kislov, the editor of Fergananews.com, wrote recently. The regime dismissed the rumors, and Karimov eventually flew to Moscow to meet with Vladimir Putin. His eldest daughter Gulnara said on Twitter that all reports of her dad's ill health were "pure craziness" considering that he danced for "20 minutes in a row" at an Uzbek holiday celebration.
In fact, it is Gulnara, often called "the princess," who has been a perennial frontrunner in the parlor game of guessing Karimov's successor. A businesswoman, poet, jewelry designer, diplomat, philanthropist and a pop singer, Gulnara is certainly unburdened by excessive self-doubt. (She has compared herself to Lady Gaga and recorded a duet with French tax exile Gerard Depardieu.)
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