Joanna Lillis, "Silk Mirage: Through the Looking Glass in Uzbekistan" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

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**Nicholas Gordon** (0:20)
Hello, I'm Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast done in partnership with the New Books Network. In this podcast, we interview fiction and non-fiction authors working in, around, and about the Asia-Pacific region. In September 2016, Islam Karimov, the first president of a post-Soviet Uzbekistan, died at age 78 His death ends an oppressive dictatorship that had governed the Central Asian country for decades, which led to corruption, environmental damage, and political repression. Karimov was replaced with Shavkat Mirziyoyev, who instituted a tentative program of reforms.
These years are the subject of Joanna Lillis' book, Silk Mirage Through the Looking Glass in Uzbekistan, just out from Bloomsbury. Lillis tells the stories of both the Karimov and Mirziryoyev regimes based off of many conversations with activists, journalists, and other opposition leaders in the country. Joanna is a Kazakhstan-based journalist and author writing about Central Asia who has lived and worked in the region since 2001 in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Her reporting may feature in outlets including The Economist, The Guardian, The Independent, Eurasianet website, and Foreign Policy and Politico magazines. Prior to moving to Central Asia, she lived in Russia and worked for BBC Monitoring, the BBC World Service's global media tracking service. She is also the author of Dark Shadows, Inside the Secret World of Kazakhstan. So, Joanna, thank you so much for coming on the show today to talk about your book, you know, Silk Mirage is all about Uzbekistan. And, you know, before we talk about like the time period you're covering, you know, like what's your history with this country? I mean, what kind of brought you there as a reporter in the first place and kind of what were the sorts of major events that you reported on that you saw when you were kind of covering this country?

**Joanna Lillis** (2:07)
Thank you for the invitation. It's an absolute pleasure to be on the podcast. So, I moved to Uzbekistan in 2001, so a long time ago now. And I came to Central Asia to Uzbekistan, and like many people, certainly at that time, many journalists, via Moscow. I'd been living in Moscow. I studied Russian at university in the UK, and I moved to Moscow in the 1990s, very exciting time, just after the collapse of the Soviet Union, very chaotic and very exciting times. And I lived in Moscow for a while, and I started to work at a department of the BBC called BBC Monitoring, which monitors and translates and analyzes news from the foreign media. And after a few years in Moscow, I wanted to move on. And so I moved to Uzbekistan, when I worked at BBC Monitoring. So that's what actually took me to Uzbekistan in 2001 And I lived there and I worked there until early 2005 So I was there for about four years.
And it was very, I mean, for me, it was a big eye opener, I have to say, moving to Uzbekistan from Moscow. Because, you know, you expect certain similarities when you move between different, you know, former Soviet countries, especially at that time, it was only 10 years after the Soviet Union had collapsed. And while there were always similarities between post-Soviet countries, and even that even holds true today, you know, I found myself, I found that it was quite a culture shock, in actual fact, moving to Uzbekistan from Moscow. Because the real reason for that was that, you know, Moscow was very kind of rambunctious, politically. It was very chaotic, and it was far from democratic, but it was very rambunctious. It had a very lively political scene, and it had a very lively media that would cover that political scene. And then when I arrived in Uzbekistan, it was a real shock to realize quite, quite how repressive the environment was at that time. And, you know, Uzbekistan, and this is what I talk about in my book, Silk Mirage. Uzbekistan was at that time and for many, many years, one of the world's harshest dictatorships. And, you know, that's partly what I've written my book Silk Mirage about. I've written the book about, you know, what Uzbekistan was like under that dictatorship, under its first president, whose name was Islam Karimov, and about what happened after he died in 2016, and his successor, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, came to power. Now, I guess we'll get into all of that during this podcast. But that is what my book is about. It's a portrait of modern-day Uzbekistan under these two presidents.