these election inspectors and executives.
Now it is time to open the envelopes. Three members of the commission take scissors. The chairman rises. The tellers have their copybooks ready. The first envelope is slit. All eyes are directed to it. The chairman takes out two slips— white [ for a candidate for the Soviet of the Union ] and blue [ for a candidate for the Soviet of Nationalities ]— and reads loudly and distinctly,“ Comrade Stalin.”
Instantly the solemnity is broken. Everybody in the room jumps up and applauds joyously and stormily for the first ballot of the first general secret election under the Stalinist Constitution— a ballot with the name of the Constitution’ s creator.
This mood would have captured the suspense surrounding the reelections of Karimov, who appears an apt pupil of Stalin when it comes to repression and political control and seems to organize elections that compete with those of Stalin in their surrealism.
Under Karimov, Uzbekistan is a country with very extractive political and economic institutions. And it is poor. Probably one-third of the people live in poverty, and the average annual income is around $ 1,000. Not all the development indicators are bad. According to World Bank data, school enrollment is 100 percent … well, except possibly during the cotton picking season. Literacy is also very high, though apart from controlling all the media, the regime also bans books and censors the Internet. While most people are paid only a few cents a day to pick cotton, the Karimov family and former communist cadres who reinvented themselves after 1989 as the new economic and political elites of Uzbekistan have become fabulously wealthy. The family economic interests are run by Karimov’ s daughter Gulnora, who is expected to succeed her father as president. In a country so untransparent and secretive, nobody knows exactly what the Karimov family controls or how much money they earn, but the experience of the U. S.