Life in the Stans: Left Behind

I remember when growing up in Washington State, seeing cars with bumperstickers that read, "In case of the rapture, this car will be unoccupied." I was raised in the ELCA, the liberal arm of the Lutheran church in America, where the concept of the rapture was not seen as theologically valid, so this bumpersticker seemed very bizarre to me. Why God would pull a small percentage of true believers out of their cars while they were driving them and swoosh these people into the air, up into heaven, on some random summer afternoon seemed inconceivable to me. The rational Lutheran in me figured that if God was all-powerful certainly he'd be able to figure out a way to wait until the people he wanted to pull up into heaven had safely parked their cars in the Walmart parking lot before commencing. I mean, why would a loving God create a catastrophe of auto wrecks and airplane crashes across the world? It didn't seem Godly to me. There just had to be a kinder and more orderly way to begin the End Times.

It turns out, even though I hadn't realized it until I moved to Kyrgyzstan, a rapture of sorts has already taken place in the world. Actually, it's happened here in Kyrgyzstan. The date of the End Times was August 31, 1991 and the "Kyrgyz Rapture" didn't happen instantaneously, no one was pulled out of their cars into the sky, but it was a slower rapture that took place during the months after August 31. On that date in 1991 is when the Kyrgyz people declared independence from the Soviet Union. What disappeared from Kyrgyzstan at first wasn't people, but the entire structure of the Soviet government: all the Soviet mythology, culture, and ideology gone in an instant. Very quickly after that all the money and resources from Russia had vanished, as if God himself had pulled billions of rubles into the sky. Then the ethnic Russians living here realized that they suddenly no longer had the power of God behind them, in this case the Holy Father being Moscow. The floodgates of ethnic Russians pouring back into Russia had started and it was truly as if the Rapture had begun.

Before the rapture, in 1991, there were about a million ethnic Russians in Kyrgyzstan representing about a quarter of the population. Today, there are only about 370,000 Russians here, less than 7% of Kyrgyzstan. In essence, they are a little like the sad people from the depressing Kirk Cameron movies; they have been Left Behind.

In my workplace, the vast majority of the positions of prominence in the organization are held by North Americans, Europeans, and those of Kyrgyz ethnicity. The few ethnic Russians we have in our organization are primarily employed as drivers of our university vehicles or on the housekeeping staff; in fact, the one ethnic Russian in my department left last month for America. After years of trying, he finally obtained his Green Card and is now living in Brooklyn. When you do see ethnic Russians, you will probably observe them working in small businesses, driving taxis, and waiting tables. Conversely, highly-educated ethnic Russians, doctors, educators, and most anyone who had reasonable employment prospects in Russia fled back to the motherland as quickly as possible, while the Kyrgyz began to reassert their culture which had been suppressed during Soviet times.

I haven't spoken much with those left behind, but I have gathered a few clues. I remember one of my Russian drivers from work playing the radio as we were driving back from Lake Issyk-kul; he was listening intently to Vladimir Putin giving a press conference from Moscow rather than tuning in to the Kyrgyz news. Even though he was a Kyrgyz citizen, he was somehow still more closely tethered to Russia, even though he had seldom visited there. Another ethnic Russian person has briefly mentioned to me a disconnect from Kyrgyz life. There definitely does seem to be a disconnection as I can only remember seeing one or two mixed-ethnicity couples since I have been here: the Kyrgyz and the Russian do not seem to connect with each other on "Kyrgyzmatch.com" or "Kyrgyzmingle." I am an outsider in this land and even I can almost feel the separation and loss of those who have been left behind in this human-initiated version of the rapture.

I wonder what the future offers for the ethnic Russian of Kyrgyzstan. Will their fate be that of the 100,000 or so ethnic Germans who were here before August 1991? Now there are about 1,000 left in the country and I am guessing that soon there will be none in Kyrgyzstan as they too have been fleeing. When walking down the streets of Bishkek, one sees older ethnic Russians, but the sight of young Russian school children causes one to pause because it is such a rarity. When one calculates the passing of older Russians and the low birth rate of new Russians, the conclusion seems to be that at some point this process will be complete.

Despite my Lutheran skepticism of things rapturous, I have no idea what the End Times might look like, and I suppose I am not able to categorically reject any notion of how the Earth might end. Perhaps, I will be walking through Bishkek one day and see the two rapture-believing Christians in the city fly upward out of the taxi they are riding in, while the rest of us in Kyrgyzstan watch, scratching our heads. Or if Donald Trump is elected President, I may suddenly decide to believe in the rapture and pray that I will be taken quickly to heaven (or anywhere otherworldly) so that I won't have to witness the hellish End Times his presidency might bring to our planet. However, as I entered a taxi cab last night driven by an aging Russian who has been left behind, I realized the most-likely scenario is that the only "rapture" I will ever experience is the aftermath of the one that began in 1991 in Kyrgyzstan.