I. The Silence After the Engines Stopped When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it left behind silence and steel. Across Central Asia and the Caucasus, hundreds of old Tupolev and Yakovlev jets sat abandoned on runways. The TAMAC factory in Bishkek, once the pride of Soviet aviation, fell quiet. Engineers left, machinery rusted, and airports became graveyards of a vanished empire. The new republics—Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan—were landlo