Kyrgyzstan Love Diary

Summer Romance in Bishkek

(My daybook page from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan; Summer 2026)

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Kyrgyzstan Diary

Bishkek August 2026

I have spent the last several weeks of this sweltering summer in my native Central Asia.

The Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek is somehow both drably provincial and exceedingly glamorous at once.

My mother and aunt would spend their 1970s summers with our Russian relatives here when the city was still called Frunze. When it was still named for the Soviet revolutionary and general who was born here when the city was an important outpost of the Russian empire. And never returned after leaving town at the age of twelve.

The tidy capital was undergoing a growth spurt - a few dozen construction cranes silhouetted against the distant Ala-Too mountain range.

The cranes were lazily erecting the usual assortment of post-Soviet architectural confections and monstrosities.

The vulgar hodgepodge of tasteless, brutalist, Greco-Deco towers that will be familiar to anyone who has ever traveled through the former Eastern Bloc.

Coming from Ukraine and the post-post-post-Soviet part of Eastern Europe, I found myself astonished at how deeply soviétique the easygoing and imperial-planned capital remained.

Bishkek is in dire need of a properly frenetic bout of decommunization.

Thirty-five years after they ought to have been pulled down, the statues of Lenin and Felix Dzerzhinsky (my Jewish interior ministry officer grandfather was named for him my NKVD commissar great grand father the year that the Polish Jew hater died) remain sinisterly in the middle of the city center.

A Soviet obelisk from1963 commemorates the 100th anniversary of the “peaceful integration of the region into the Russian Empire”.

The most captivating architectural specimens were the classic 1960s Soviet modernist buildings - I really liked the Bishkek city circus.

I found the Kyrgyz to be direct, elegant, helpful and affable -

- very likely the most straight forward people in Central Asia.

My sojourn to the leafy and dusty town had began as a kind of film noir assignment.

One that I will only be free to discuss in future dispatches. Or perhaps in my memoirs.

The work, however, was merely a pretext.

Journalism, travel, making art, and espionage are merely ways to pass the time.

The real reason for my excursion was both utterly mundane and infinitely grand:

a love affair.

Over the previous months, I had grown deeply fascinated with a well - known Central Asian artist. An aristocratic bad girl of Kyrgyz-Tatar descent whose artwork, social activism and insouciant antics were carefully catalogued on her popular Instagram account. The daughter of a prominent politician, she possessed a fierce, haughty, and sultry aura. I instinctively knew that she would be mine from the second that I had stumbled upon her account. The intense correspondence that followed blossomed into a full-blown courtship. Conducted in the grand and courtly Central Asian style.

My first real-life encounter with my paramour took place at a high-end steakhouse the evening when I arrived. I presented her with a massive suitcase that I had stuffed with several thousand dollars of art monographs that I had selected in various New York bookstores before my flight.

Motherwell, Kiefer, Gorky, Rauschenberg, Johns, Duchamp, Katz, Morandi and Hesse.

She was as infatuated as I was.

After dinner, I swore on my Central Asian honor that I would help her become a great artist.

I swiftly inked my promises in my calligraphic script onto a leaf ripped straight from one of the volumes of French symbolist poetry that I had brought her.

Without missing a beat, she called the maître d’ over and requested the sharpest steak knife be brought from the kitchen.

I offered up my left hand.

She scanned my face for fear and hesitation before delivering a violent slash across my palm and left thumb.

I slammed my bloody left paw print theatrically onto the table.

Smearing the contract with blood and wine.

The artist was both excited and embarrassed by how deeply she had sliced open my hand.

She commenced licking the blood off the cleaver and my hand with intoxicating grace and performative savagery.

Kissing my wound tenderly, she proceeded to take a selfie of our vow for the edification of her hundreds of thousands of dedicated Instagram followers.

I staunched my bleeding thumb with a vintage silk Japanese handkerchief that I carried in my left pocket.

I had gotten exactly what I had flown to Central Asia for.

At the exactly correct moment, the former President of Estonia Toomas Ilves called …

I was intoxicated with excitement and wanted to show off my new crush.

I put Ilves on the speakerphone to introduce my new beloved.

The ever wise and elegant Ilves proffered up a graceful and welcome assist:

“Well… you do know that Vlad is a great guy… but you also do know that he is crazy, right? Is he your boyfriend now?”

“Time will tell,” the artist riposted with a laugh.

“And I know that he’s crazy…

I thought I was crazy… but then I met him!”