Eldor Shomurodov’s success making it into one of Europe’s most important national football leagues has generated a fresh flurry of ambition among young Uzbek players.
A new documentary on a Soviet soccer star also tells the story of Central Asia’s ethnic Korean community, which was deported en masse to the region by Stalin.
The roots of today’s revival are found in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, when circles of nonconformist creative youth emerged in cities like Kyiv and Lviv.