So the winner is a country Herman Cain, an American presidential candidate, once dismissed as “Ubeki-beki-beki-stan-stan”. Three years ago Uzbekistan was an old-fashioned post-Soviet dictatorship, a closed society run with exceptional brutality and incompetence. Its regime allegedly boiled dissidents alive, and certainly forced legions of men, women and children to toil in the cotton fields at harvest time.

When Islam Karimov, the despot for 27 years, died in 2016, he was succeeded by his prime minister, Shavkat Mirziyoyev. At first, little changed. But after dumping the head of the security services in 2018, Mr Mirziyoyev began reforms that have accelerated over the past year. His government has largely ended forced labour. Its most notorious prison camp has been closed. Foreign journalists are let in. Bureaucrats are banned from calling on small businesses, which they previously did constantly, to bully them for bribes. More border crossings have opened, helping unite families divided by Central Asia’s crazy quilt of frontiers. Foreign technocrats have been invited to help overhaul the state-stifled economy.

Uzbekistan is to hold parliamentary elections before the new year (see article). Although it is far from a democracy—all of the parties support Mr Mirziyoyev and some critics remain behind bars—some of the candidates have offered mild criticisms of the government, which would previously have been unthinkable. Ordinary Uzbeks, too, feel free to lampoon the campaign and grumble about the political class, without fear of being dragged off in the middle of the night. Uzbekistan still has a long way to go, but no other country travelled as far in 2019