Baku, April 28 – The rapidity of social and political change in
the traditional societies of Eurasia has created something none
of them had experienced in the past: the simultaneous co-
existence of radically different generations that not only
struggle among themselves but also compete for influence over
younger age cohorts who will form the future. Not only does that
alter the effectiveness of inter-generational transmission belts
that had kept these societies stable, but it makes their future
course more difficult to predict because they face both the
usual problems of fathers and sons and the more complicated one
of grandfathers, uncles, fathers and brothers, on the one hand,
and sons, on the other. This complexity and its consequences,
more often the subject of novels than scientific research in
larger and more modern societies, have now been studied in
detail in Tuva, a republic “at the center of Asia” as its
residents proudly say but one little known elsewhere except to
specialists in geographic curiosi