Kirghizia, Self-Proclaimed ‘Island of Democracy,’ Has a Long Way to Go : Soviet Union: Although its first election is this weekend, Communists remain powerful in the Central Asian republic.

Alexander Moisiyev, one of the most powerful officials in Kirghizia, ushered two uninvited visitors into his city hall office one recent morning with a broad smile, a firm handshake and a greeting that was revealing in this deeply troubled part of the fallen Soviet empire.

“Welcome to our island of democracy,” said the deputy mayor, leading his visitors to a conference table built for 20.

Quickly, if with some exaggeration, Moisiyev explained his claim:

Kirghizia, he contended, was the first Soviet republic to drop the words Soviet Socialist from its official name. It was the first to ban the Communist Party and seize all of its assets. It was the first to legalize democratic parties, doing so in a decree issued well before the failed August coup in Moscow unleashed forces of democracy elsewhere in the Soviet Union.

And on Saturday, Kirghizia (it now calls itself Kyrgyzstan) will set the most important precedent when it becomes the first of the newly proclaimed independent Soviet republics to hold a national election.

This presidential election should confirm the enormous popularity of the father of all of this democracy, Askar Akayev, Kirghizia’s acting president.

The deputy mayor said that it was Akayev who almost single handedly destroyed the authoritarian forces whose counterparts continue to rule dictatorially in the three other Central Asian republics that surround Kirghizia.

In terms of the old Soviet Union, Kirghizia might not always have been the first (the Baltic republics generally paved the way), but desperate attempts of Communist regimes to cling to power in neighboring Tadzhikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan set this republic apart as Islamic rebellion grows throughout the region.

“The real change had to come from within us,” said Moisiyev, a lifelong Communist who for decades helped implement what he now calls “Russian colonialism” in remote republics such as Kirghizia.

“For 40 years, I lived not only in this system but for this system. . . . I had to defeat something inside of myself. It was like slaying a dragon. And this was the greatest triumph of my life.”

But just outside Moisiyev’s halls of power, in the streets and bazaars of this ethnically mixed city of 700,000, it was clear that Kirghizia still has many more dragons to slay before democracy takes a firm hold.

Signs showing the hammer and sickle are visible at every street corner. A 50-foot statue of V. I. Lenin stands high over Bishkek’s downtown square. And the remnants of Bishkek’s Communist government are as substantial as they are symbolic.

The republic’s Parliament, more than 90% of whose members have been dedicated party members, remains the republic’s most powerful force after it recently defeated a proposal to abolish itself.

Human rights abuses by police and Communist district leaders who have yet to be replaced are still a daily affair in the Kirghiz countryside and in the capital.

And even the presidential elections this weekend are emblematic of the long road that lies ahead on Kirghizia’s march to democracy.

Akayev is running unopposed, the result of a hasty election schedule that gave no other candidates time to prepare.

“Democracy? We don’t understand anything about democracy here,” said Lyubov Gruzova, who sells animal fat by the pound at the city’s Osh Market, echoing the sentiments of many residents.

“We’re used to just applauding without thinking, voting without choosing. Look, even now, there is only one candidate. For us, this is just a formality.”

Even the leaders of the populist democratic movement that helped bring Akayev to power last year and staged hunger strikes to lobby for most of the republic’s recent reforms agreed that Kirghizia’s island of democracy is still far from secure.

“We are dealing now only with the infancy of democracy, and perhaps the most difficult obstacles lie ahead of us,” said Tonchubek Turgjunaly, chairman of the Democratic Movement of Kirghizia, which had unified all of the republic’s democratic and nationalist groups under its umbrella organization by May, 1990.

In an adjacent office, Tursunbek Akunov, head of the movement’s human rights committee that continues to receive and investigate at least one serious complaint each day, readily agreed.

“From the outside . . . (Kirghizia) looks like this great oasis of democracy, but when you look on the inside, it is a different picture,” Akunov said, detailing cases that ranged from Communist Party officials illegally hiring and firing rural schoolteachers to corrupt judges and police officers.

“Akayev is a great humanitarian,” Akunov continued, “and he has replaced all of the top-echelon leaders with democrats, and at the bottom level there is now a grass-roots democracy.

“The problem is in the middle levels of our society. Here, we still have old guard Communists running the regional and local offices of almost everything. And this, I would say, is a big danger.”

There is a potentially greater danger facing Kirghizia as it struggles to shrug off seven decades of communism and the many earlier years of Russian czarist colonization.

Everyone here euphemistically calls it “the nationalities problem”--the constant daily tension between ethnic Kirghiz natives, descendants of Chinese nomads who settled here centuries ago, and the largely white Russian descendants of forced migration and colonization, who now constitute about half the city’s population as well as a sizable minority in the countryside.

Last year, the problem exploded in ethnic riots in the republic’s second-largest city of Osh, where ethnic Uzbeks clashed with Kirghizes, trapping Russians in the cross-fire. Although the official death count was in the hundreds, Turgjunaly’s movement places it at more than 1,200.

In a move to defuse the tension, Akayev, who so far has managed the nationalities problem masterfully, invited Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin for an official visit, during which Yeltsin secured guarantees for Russians living in Kirghizia.

Under mounting pressure from long-repressed Kirghiz nationalists after the republic declared its independence in August, Akayev gave in to demands to make Kirghiz the official national language. But Akayev, himself a Kirghiz, ensured that the change will be phased in gradually.

It is almost impossible to find a Russian in Bishkek who speaks Kirghiz. Moisiyev is a rare exception. During the interview in his city hall office, he provided a candid insight into just how the Russian Communists ruled distant lands such as Kirghizia for so long.

In all such republics, the Communist Party leadership in Moscow regularly permitted the top posts of president, local party leader and mayor to be held by members of the local ethnic majority. But, as Moisiyev confirmed, the party made certain that all No. 2 positions were held by ethnic Russians, who had the real power.

At the same time, Russian was strictly imposed as the official language. As a result, the Kirghizes’ language and rich ancient heritage, which includes a 1,000-year-old, million-line epic about a warrior king named Manas, were restrained.

Moisiyev said he studied Kirghiz “as a show of respect to my friends and their parents who didn’t know Russian very well. And I now realize that the nationalities problem, whether it’s in the language or land ownership, is directly connected with democracy. In a democracy, the majority rules, and here the majority are Kirghiz. It is now our responsibility to learn and speak this language, whether we like it or not.”

Leaders such as Moisiyev are those whom most analysts mention in expressing optimism about the republic’s future.

Even democratic activist Turgjunaly said that he believes Kirghizia will find its way through the many obstacles that lie ahead.

“In our republic, never have we had a great influence of Islam,” said Turgjunaly, whose ancestors managed to resist the religion of their ancient Islamic invaders for nearly two centuries until the faith finally took hold in moderate form in the 1700s, making this the last of the Central Asian republics to embrace Islam.

“Maybe there are some special national features that set us apart from our neighbors,” Turgjunaly said,” citing the “positive role our republic can play in a region greatly threatened by pan-Islamism and fanaticism.”

When asked about Kirghizia’s potential to play a regional role, Moisiyev would not answer directly but instead told a story--a Chinese legend about a dragon who carries off a village woman to his castle. A village boy, armed with an angel’s sword, slays the dragon but ignores the angel’s warning to leave the castle immediately.

Luxuriating in the castle’s riches, the boy lifts a shiny golden plate--and sees in it not his own reflection but the dragon’s.

“Akayev, you see, held up that golden plate for us,” Moisiyev concluded. “He made us see what we had become. Now, I think, someone has to hold it up for our neighbors. Only then will there be real peace in Central Asia.”