This last week a numerous delegation of top-level officials and business folk from Uzbekistan paid a first-ever such visit to the US, initially to Washington DC for policy consultations then to New York for days-long conferences. The one I attended in Manhattan, geared to capital markets, was a real eye-opener, genuinely even surprisingly impressive. One watched in something like awe as frank, detailed, convincingly documented presentations (in English) about capital investment opportunities followed one another. By youthful Uzbek CEO's of industrial and banking concerns essentially to an audience of Wall Street finance companies. I canvassed the Americans and found the mood to be uniformly enthusiastic. They were going to do some serious business. I also spoke with the American-educated Atabek Nazirov, Director of Capital Markets Development Agency (CMDA), a ministry level post. Conclusion: Uzbekistan is thawing out and opening up.

If the above sounds hyperbolically positive, you have to understand how bad things were in that country until recently. The former SSR had become a grim, impoverished, virtual police-state for the entire post-Soviet era under former leader Islam Karimov. He ran a corrupt, isolationist regime with an iron fist in a slightly risible cult-of-personality style. Not far off the North Korean model. Fear was the staple commodity. If you had to hunt around and find one good thing about his era, you could say he, at least, stamped hard on the incipient radical Islamism seeping in from Afghanistan, and bubbling up indigenously in the Ferghana Valley region. He nipped it brutally in the bud but at a huge cost in human rights. Uzbekistan, with a population of thirty million people, became a kind of black hole of news. Foreign journalists were kept out. Nobody inside or outside the country knew what was going on.

Karimov died in 2016, somewhat mercifully for his country, a land otherwise abundant in historical wonders and natural riches (gold, cotton, gas, uranium etc..). Miraculously, his successor Shavkat Mirziyoyev has turned out to be something of a blessing, a reformer and modernizer and a man on a distinct mission to improve his country's lot economically. One says miraculously, because he served in the top echelons of Karimov's administration for years. He was, in effect, the appointed successor. He could have kept the same course. And yet, within a short few years, he has changed the country's direction and future, releasing political prisoners, allowing in foreign media, opening up the country to foreign trade and investment. Appointing new young talent to top positions often with training abroad. He has cracked down on the rampant corruption and nepotism of the Karimov era, some say too harshly.

A word about that. In past years I reported for various outlets from former Iron Curtain countries as they transitioned to liberal democracies. I noticed again and again that a too tentative approach to previous corruption, whatever its human rights virtues, allows elites to remain in place for years with all their webs of inside dealing intact. The populace tries repeatedly to throw off the yoke through people power but little changes. The economy stays hobbled. We have seen the phenomenon in numerous countries like Ukraine, Rumania, Bulgaria and the like. Only in Georgia did hope kindle for several years under Saakashvili for an end to endemic corruption and oligarchic power because he took an early and severe approach. He too opened the economy, appointed young talent and foreign-educated administrators, pushed a generational change in personnel. The problem, as he discovered, is that former elites and their vast networks of patronage, when disenfranchised, can destabilize you and end your project abruptly often with help from abroad.

Some have argued that, in authoritarian polities, the purging of former elites by a successor indicates not change but more of the same only with new incumbent's retinue in place. It rather depends what the new guy does. In Mirziyoyev's case the signs already bode well-ish. Central Asia remains a tough neighborhood so any reformist approach must of necessity be a gradualist one. There isn't much room for maneuver or risk-taking. One shouldn't expect any rushed Westernization, not with Moscow watching, Islamists waiting, neighbor countries ready to make trouble and the like. It's a matter of priorities. Think about Uzbekistan's geography, far from the West and closer to East Asia where the Singapore model looms larger than ours. Education, stability, affluence first – but only if corruption doesn't block or derail the process. To deliver those goals, you cannot avoid a high degree of transparency because investors won't engage in sufficient volume otherwise. So you inexorably launch a momentum towards liberalization that, badly managed, can go in any direction.

I was rather surprised, pleasantly so, by the candor of Atabek Nazirov, the director of CMDA. Did I mention how transparency was ubiquitous throughout the event – a real turn-around for Uzbek affairs. Even the US-based sponsor talked openly, Frank Muradov, adviser to CMDA and C.O.O of New York -based investment firm Park Rock Capital. He too noted the “blunt openness” of the speakers, “not sugar-coating anything, not arrogant or Soviet-style at all”. But back to Nazirov. We had a good long face-to-face interview during which he spoke quite directly about the past regime's awfulness, his hopes and worries for the future. I asked him why now? What made this the right time for Uzbekistan to open up despite all the challenges? He told me that it was a matter of responding to the people's needs because of pressure from the bottom up. The new President realized change had to come so it was a matter of steering, expanding, liberating dynamism, managing the risks. Mizriyoyev kicked off his rule with early visits to neighbor countries to settle border disputes and make commercial agreements. Uzbekistan is a landlocked country so trade begins with neighbors, namely Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan – a market of 300 million people in total. He plans to visit 36 countries this year.