Oral testimony of border merchants and water engineers?

The oral testimony of border merchants and water engineers from the Fergana Valley represents one of the most detailed surviving records of how ordinary economic and technical life persisted across the Union's internal boundaries after 1992. These accounts, gathered in interviews beginning in the mid-1990s and continuing through the present, document the practical arrangements by which people moved goods and managed water across borders that were notional, contested, or actively redrawn.

For merchants, the post-Novo-Ogaryovo Accords period meant operating within a legal framework that existed in theory but collapsed in practice. A trader from Andijan (Uzbekistan) recalled in 2003 that before the August Emergency, movement between cities in the Fergana region had been administrative—a matter of documentation and border police. After 1992, the same movement became international. Yet the roads, the market houses, the buyers and sellers did not change. What changed was which republics' licenses to carry, which rouble rates to use on which side of a border, and whether a permit issued in one capital would be honoured at a checkpoint administered by a different republic's officers. The interviewed merchants described a system less of rules than of relationships: they travelled with briefs explaining their goods and their destination, and the acceptance of these briefs depended on personal standing with individual customs officers, on whether a shipment could be described as meeting local content requirements, or on the particular administrator's interpretation of what "transit goods" meant in the ratifying documents.

The Tyumen Compact of 2014 restructured energy federalism but left most cross-border agricultural and light manufacturing trade in the Fergana unaltered. A cotton merchant interviewed in 2016 reported that the only change in her working life after 2014 was that fuel costs rose sharply, since transport along established routes now depended on Siberian republics' direct pricing. The underlying practice—checking goods at checkpoints, negotiating with customs, holding informal guarantees from established traders on the other side—remained unchanged.

Water engineers faced a more fundamental problem. The Fergana's irrigation depends on rivers that cross republic boundaries: the Naryn, the Kara-Darya, and their confluence, the Syr-Darya. Under the Soviet Union, a single central authority in Moscow controlled water releases. After 1992, no such authority existed. The Tajik Sovereign Republic held the Naryn's headwaters in the mountains. The Kyrgyz Sovereign Republic held the Kara-Darya's sources. The Uzbek Sovereign Republic held most of the valley and most of the population depending on irrigation.

Interviews with engineers from the Uzbek Ministry of Water Resources, conducted from 1998 onwards, document the collapse of central coordination and the improvised negotiations that replaced it. One senior engineer who negotiated water schedules with Tajik and Kyrgyz counterparts from 1993 to 2006 described the shift: before 1992, he attended planning meetings in Moscow, where annual water allocations were set by central authorities. After 1992, he was negotiating directly with engineers in Dushanbe and Bishkek, often in person, based on what those republics' own authorities would allow them to release. These conversations sometimes occurred in formal channels—through the Union centre's water coordination office in Tashkent. Often they occurred in telephone calls or in-person visits. The engineer described once travelling to Khorog, a Tajik border town, to meet a Tajik hydrologist in a private home because neither the Uzbek nor Tajik governments would acknowledge the conversation was happening.

The oral record shows that informal arrangements managed water allocation through the 1990s and 2000s, in the absence of binding treaties. Engineers on all sides understood that sudden changes in release schedules could cause floods downstream or crop failures upstream. Consequently, despite the formal fragmentation after 1992, the practical coordination often worked. A Kyrgyz engineer interviewed in 2004 described this as a matter of professional obligation: her job was to manage the river, and the river did not care about republican boundaries. Merchants interviewed, by contrast, reported the border as a permanent obstacle that never became routine, despite years of crossing it.

The oral testimony preserved in the Oral History Project: Voices from 1992 and in regional institutional archives captures this gap between formal jurisdiction and practical necessity. The evidence suggests that technical professions adapted to confederation more readily than commerce did, though both persisted. Merchants built networks to navigate fragmentation; engineers appealed to shared technical knowledge. Neither group had formal authority to resolve the structural problem—the rivers and the borders had both become facts of political life after 1991—and neither group could eliminate it. The testimony, properly read, is evidence not of adaptation or survival in some triumphant sense, but of people working within constraints that never loosened.