The Politics of Bishkek’s Malls

IMall, Bishkek’s newest shopping center, opened in early September without any fanfare. The mall’s Instagram account has been silent since mid-June, and the quiet passing of IMall’s grand opening is strange, given Bishkek businesses’ love affair with social media.

The silence around IMall’s opening day is especially curious when compared with other shopping centers in the city. In the past, other malls have carefully aligned their launch days to correspond with major holidays – Nooruz and Independence Day – to maximize crowds. Sometimes there has been too much publicity: A crowd of shoppers stampeded the entrance of Asia Mall when it opened its doors in August 2017.

Despite IMall managers keeping its inauguration quiet, the shopping center still attracted media attention that challenges the axiom that all publicity is good publicity. Earlier this year, it came out that the shopping center’s construction was not entirely legal. Further investigative reporting by Kaktus revealed that current deputy of parliament Marat Amankulov is connected to IMall. 

Several of Bishkek’s shiny new shopping centers have similarly shadowy links to political bigwigs. Caravan, with life-size camel statues guarding the entrance, was built in 2006 by Nariman Tyuleev before he became mayor of Bishkek. After Tyuleev was arrested in 2012 on corruption charges, the government seized the shopping center, which Tyuleev insisted his father owned. 

Concealing ownership ties through family members is not uncommon practice; many see Asia Mall as belonging to former presidential candidate and opposition leader Omurbek Babanov, but it actually belongs to his wife Rita Birbaeva. 

Attempts to hide ownership and skirt zoning laws and construction regulations hint at the high-stakes nature of commercial development in Kyrgyzstan. Malls, which seem like nothing more than frivolous consumerist hellscapes to many in the West, are experiencing a boom in Bishkek: Four malls have gone up in the last two years alone, while several of the city’s other shopping mainstays have rebranded and relaunched in the same period. 

Regine Spector, a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, advocates for careful study of commercial spaces to understand complex political and economic processes. 

In her 2017 book Order at the Bazaar, Spector challenges the notion that bazaars represent the absence of order — more in the sense of government authority and control than potential overstimulation from sparkly fabric, the smell of freshly slaughtered sheep, or high-decibel bargaining. Spector compares Bishkek’s two main bazaars to argue that different institutional arrangements — such as property rights, employment structures, and taxation — affect the degree to which elites can control and profit from these commercial spaces. In her account, average workers and shoppers can assert their agency individually and collectively for economic and social leverage. 

Shopping centers don’t feature in Spector’s analysis, which makes sense given that she was conducting fieldwork several years before malls boomed in Bishkek. The intrigue around IMall suggests that Bishkek’s rapidly expanding mall scene could offer an interesting extension to Spector's analysis of bazaars as spaces of political contestation and consolidation, however. 

This can be framed as infighting between political elites for access to land and capital, but commercial spaces and shopping habits can also play a role in bottom-up processes of identity formation. 

Rohit Varman, a professor of marketing at the Institute of Management in Calcutta, has argued that “postcolonial shopping malls combine the consumer’s quest for being Western, modern, and developed.” This explains why malls in Bishkek are super popular, while they are decaying – figuratively and literally – in the United States. 

Kyrgyzstan is one of the world’s most remittance-dependent economies, and systemic corruption and a deep rural-urban divide block access to whatever economic growth is happening in the country. Despite the precariousness of Kyrgyzstan’s economy, the capital is shifting to a service economy. Spending disposable income on food and leisure is one way to project middle class status and perform modernization. 

IMall is the latest mall to pop up in Bishkek’s city center, and it certainly won’t be the last. Whether the city’s shopping center bubble is sustainable is a pressing question. But for now, Bishkek’s mall scene warrants attention and appreciation as an alternate stage of political and economic development.