Silk Mirage is veteran Central Asia correspondent Joanna Lillis’s compelling and deeply reported account of a nation in flux—one emerging from decades of suffocating authoritarianism yet still struggling to define what freedom means. The book centres on the turbulent period following the 2016 death of Islam Karimov, Uzbekistan’s first post-Soviet president and one of the world’s most repressive dictators, and the unexpected reformist turn under his successor, Shavkat Mirziyoyev.
Under Karimov, Uzbekistan was an international pariah. The dictator, writes Lillis, co-opted the legacy of the conqueror Tamerlane to legitimise his personal rule, while silencing dissent through violence, imprisonment, and fear. His regime oversaw a cotton industry that enslaved its own people—including children—to meet state quotas, devastating the environment in the process. Religious repression was equally severe: Islam, long suppressed under Soviet rule, was treated as a threat to state authority. In the post-9/11 years, Karimov exaggerated the spectre of Islamic extremism to align himself with the US-led “War on Terror”, securing foreign aid even as he massacred hundreds in Andijan in 2005 and expelled all free media from the country.
Lillis is clear-eyed about the obstacles to genuine transformation.
Joanna Lillis
Lillis devotes considerable attention to Karimov’s grotesque nepotism, particularly his daughter Gulnara Karimova—once a glamorous diplomat and pop star, later reviled as “the most hated person in the country” after plundering billions from national coffers. Her eventual downfall, and imprisonment, is emblematic of the moral rot at the regime’s core. Through interviews with exiles in Sweden, Turkey, and elsewhere, Lillis captures the lingering trauma of those forced to flee, many of whom remain sceptical that real change has arrived. As one exile remarks, “The president is different, but the rest of the government is still the same.”
And yet, under Karmiov’s successor Mirziyoyev, change has come—at least superficially. The new president, once Karimov’s loyal prime minister, surprised observers with sweeping reforms: the abolition of forced labour, the reopening of the media space, the return of the Islamic call to prayer, and the end of the despised exit visa system. The economy has grown, the arts have flourished, and Uzbekistan has cautiously re-entered the international community. But as Lillis shows, corruption and nepotism persist. Mirziyoyev’s own daughter, Saida, features prominently in the regime’s new public image, echoing uncomfortable parallels with Gulnara’s earlier prominence.
Lillis is clear-eyed about the obstacles to genuine transformation. The old elite still hold the levers of power, with little incentive to dismantle the system that enriched them. Political opposition remains practically impossible, the media largely self-censors, and new laws criminalising insults to the president suggest the limits of dissent. Mirziyoyev’s recent constitutional changes, extending his rule for up to fourteen more years, have raised fresh doubts about whether Uzbekistan’s “New Era” is anything more than a rebranding of the old.
Lillis offers an unflinching yet humane portrait of a nation still wrestling with its ghosts.
Silk Mirage ultimately portrays an unfinished transition—a country caught between autocracy and aspiration. In its final chapters, Lillis turns to the hopeful figures who embody Uzbekistan’s fragile progress: independent journalists, former political prisoners, artists and architects reclaiming cultural space. After so many pages of repression and brutality, these glimpses of resilience are powerful, if tentative.
Lillis does not offer a feel-good narrative, but she does deliver something more valuable: an unflinching yet humane portrait of a nation still wrestling with its ghosts. Silk Mirage is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand not only Uzbekistan, but the broader post-Soviet struggle to reconcile power, memory, and freedom.
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