While youngsters in the west scour the Internet, rummage through newspapers and seek the advice of guidance counselors, for Uzbekistan’s youth it is every man for himself. Anyone who thinks the state will protect them in their pursuit of integrity and a job well done is doomed to disappointment and ruin. Careers are chosen these days not on the basis of professional ambition or denying oneself for the greater good of socialist humanity, but increasingly on the extra-curricular benefits accruable to an individual or his clan. With every social safety net in tatters, post-communist-era citizens are left to weave their own dubious webs of protection from the ravages of Central Asian-style democracy and new found freedoms.

Good jobs are expensive to come by. The going rate for a customs officer in the drug-rich south is $8,000. The unspoken message is that once you have your feet securely under the table of your new career, this money is recoupable either by selling on a job in the same field or through kickbacks "earned" in the course of duty. The price of a job increases with its potential returns. Jobs in the laboring sector where for example materials can be "requisitioned" for private jobs, come cheaper than those for train conductors or airport staff which command a hefty premium through their potential for back door ticketing. Detectives demand "gifts" for the extra work involved in solving crimes, traffic police rent out their badges to relatives and in so doing can earn more than a month’s wages in an afternoon, and customs and excise sit on a bottomless gold mine.

Teachers have been particularly let down by democracy and the infiltration of the hated capitalist ideals they were brought up to despise. The truly unscrupulous can make it big in teaching, especially in higher education. Such teachers "guarantee" university entrance to no-hopers and accept students on the basis of their parents’ potential usefulness. Perhaps the most lucrative paybacks come from allowing the same no-hopers to survive repeated failures by charging them an unofficial US$ 200 for each flunked subject. Teachers, whose jobs are so badly paid that to date they pay nothing to enter, are forced in the end, unless they have morals and wills of steel, to wheel and deal with the rest to survive a $10 salary when and more often if it is given.

Doctors, able to hold an ailing population to ransom by unethical charges for their often incompetent treatment, have to pay big bucks not only to qualify, but to continue their training. On-the-job apprenticeships for aspiring surgeons involve a $1,000 unofficial down payment for a hospital post that is the equivalent of 15 years on a state salary. The law and order sector is riddled with every kind of scam going and by definition one of the most costly to enter. But now all the wheeling and dealing in the world will not bring the good Soviet years back. But with the wheeling and dealing comes an even more sinister threat. Perhaps the ill-gotten gains in particular will cripple not only the students, but the tentative republic Uzbeks are struggling to build. The wheeling and dealing may in the end be too high a price to pay, even for them.

Jennifer Balfour is a long-term educator is former-Soviet Central Asia.