Central Asia: In search of a new political identity

In the aftermath of the break-up of the former Soviet Union, the Central Asian leadership began formulating new policies and creating a new ideology. Basing itself on the secular, republican, Kemalist model of Turkey, it attempted to emulate Turkey's economic development policies as well. Some of the ideas of Sultan Galiev, the Muslim Marxist leader of the 1920s, were also adopted in order to link this newly created state model to the Central Asian states' communist, and pre-communist past, and to help those states make the transition to the present.