oil pipe in kazakhstan
(Oil) was a very useful device to talk about the whole stretch of former Soviet republics on the two sides of the Caspian.

It’s an incredible story, and gets you behind the scenes in a revealing way that you otherwise probably couldn’t manage. Photograph by James Hill



About the Author | Interview with Steve LeVine

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Interview with Steve LeVine

Q: What drew you to Central Asia and the Caucasus, and what made you stay so long? Eleven years is a long time.

A: There was some pragmatism to the decision to go there. At the time – we are talking the end of 1991 – I was living in Pakistan, writing for Newsweek about Pakistan’s political soap opera and Afghanistan’s seemingly never-ending violence.

I had been in Pakistan for three years, and interest from editors was very much hot and cold. At the same time, the Soviet Union was the biggest story in the world. You couldn’t do any better than be part of that story.

But there was also the romantic aspect: the whole foreign community living in Pakistan was caught up in the Great Game – a lot of us had read Fitzroy McLean and Peter Hopkirk. We all loved Afghanistan, and we all thought from the books that Uzbekistan would be a lot like that.

So a lot of us, meaning foreign correspondents, NGO types and diplomats, dreamed of a Central Asian assignment. Some of us made it. Of course, Uzbekistan turned out to be nothing like the books. As for why I ended up living there for so many years, I didn’t know I was going to. I probably would have laughed at anyone who suggested it.

Q: You didn’t mention the Caucasus – was the draw the same there?

A: Another pragmatic decision. The decisions on free-lance assignments to a large degree were made by bureau chiefs in Moscow. They had this vast, largely uncovered territory to their south – eight new nations – and almost no manpower to do so.

So when I showed up offering to Newsweek to cover Central Asia, the then-bureau chief, Carroll Bogart, asked whether I wanted to cover the Caucasus as well. In just a few months in 1992, I opened up offices in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, and Tashkent, the Uzbek capital, which gave me logistics on both sides of the Caspian Sea. Then The Washington Post and the Financial Times asked me to cover for them as well.

But to answer your question – yes. The Caucasus in fact in a way is more romantic as a place to live and work than Central Asia because for a variety of reasons it has retained its cultural heritage, well anyway that of the dozens of peoples there.

Q: Did you mainly cover oil?

A: Not in the beginning; that was later. In the beginning, that was very much under the radar screen. The first two or three years were a blur of civil wars – Nagorno-Karabakh, Tajikistan, Ingushetia and North Ossetia, Abkhazia, not to mention the continuing trouble in Afghanistan, where I had to keep going as well.

Governments kept falling in Azerbaijan. Islam Karimov, the Uzbek president, was already breaking heads in Uzbekistan. So really until well into 1994, the main story was all this turmoil. And trying to find an overarching theme that made the big region as a whole more understandable to a readership having a real wrestling match with all the unfamiliar names. That’s when editors gave up and began calling them collectively “the ‘Stans.”

Q: When did you decide to write a book and why?

A: I decided very early on that the region needed a book, and that I wanted to write it.

For the first few years, we – meaning the journalists covering the region – were almost totally in the dark about what was sitting right in front of us. At the time of course there was no Internet, no cell phones, no access to Western newspapers, and no in-depth coverage of the republics. We were literally starting from scratch. And the thing was, a diplomat, say, would serve his or her two or three years and move on, and his or her replacement would start over from the beginning, because as I say there was no reliable current record of events, no contextual base, and nothing certainly pulling everything together comprehensibly.

This is not to diminish the importance of the academic books that were out there, like the Hoover series out of Stanford. But these were very academically oriented, and mostly about single nations and peoples. There really did need to be something that pulled together the events of the whole region, factually and contextually.

Q: Does The Oil and the Glory do that – pull together the events and the region?

A: It goes a long way toward doing that. It’s through a certain prism – oil. That’s a very useful device so as to be able to talk about a number of the former Soviet republics. It’s an incredible story, and allows you to get behind the scenes in a revealing way that you probably wouldn’t otherwise be able to.

It doesn’t get at everything, not by a long shot. For instance, it doesn’t work for getting at very important subjects like the human rights situation in Uzbekistan, or the impressive struggle for nationhood in Armenia, and Kyrgyzstan. But it goes a long way. No doubt someone will do a second volume down the road that gets comprehensively at these matters.


About Steve LeVine

Steve LeVine covers foreign affairs and energy. He is based in Washington, D.C.

He was chief foreign affairs writer for BusinessWeek. Previously he was based in Central Asia and the Caucasus for 11 years — starting two weeks after the Soviet collapse through 2003. He ran The Wall Street Journal bureau for the eight-nation region, and before that covered it for The New York Times.

From 1988-1991, LeVine was Newsweek's Pakistan-based correspondent for that country and Afghanistan. Before that, he covered the Philippines for Newsday from 1985-1988.

The paperback of his latest book, Putin's Labyrinth, a profile of Russia through the life and death of a half dozen Russians, was published in 2009 by Random House.

LeVine is married to Nurilda Nurlybayeva. They have two daughters.

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