Uzbekistan

Uzbekistan is the only doubly landlocked country in Central Asia. It shares borders with Kazakhstan to the west and to the north, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to the east, and Afghanistan and Turkmenistan to the south.

9 Most Beautiful Places in Uzbekistan

Before 1991, it was part of the Soviet Union. The earliest Bronze Age colonists of the Tarim Basin were people of Caucasoid physical type who entered probably from the north and west and spoke languages that could be classified as Pre- or Proto-Tocharian, ancestral to the Indo-European Tocharian languages documented later in the Tarim Basin. These early settlers occupied the northern and eastern parts of the Tarim Basin, where their graves have yielded mummies dated about 1800 BC. They participated in a cultural world centered on the eastern steppes of central Eurasia, including the modern northeastern Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan.

The country is wealthy in natural resources, yet most of the money is distributed into the president's ruling elite, and much of the country still remains quite poor. Little power exists outside of the president’s family or his close allies. The country remains as the most corrupt out of any former USSR state.