Anyone flying into or out of Manas airport in Bishkek could be excused for being confused.

Their ticket will contain the airport code FRU, and this seems to be such an odd choice for the code because none of these letters even appear in the name, “Bishkek”, nor in the name of the airport,
“Manas.”

These codes are allocated by IATA, (the International Air Transport Association) which represents some 240 airlines  about 94% of all the international air traffic.  There are almost 18000 different three letter combinations, (actually 17576), and some of them are hard to understand, although with a little knowledge of local history and geography the logic behind the choice reveals itself.

The choice of FRU is in fact historical and is derived from one of the city's former names, (Bishkek has not always been called Bishkek). 

The modern city grew out of the settlement which grew up around a fort established by the Kokand Khanate to protect the trade routes on the borders of its territory: Pishkek. 

In 1926, Pishkek received a new name: Frunze, after the Red Army General Mikhail Vasilievich Frunze, who subdued much of Central Asia for the newly established Bolshevik regime following the 1917 revolution.  Frunze, the son of a Moldavian doctor's assistant, was born in what was then called Pishkek.    

When the order to rename the city after its famous son after his death on the operating table, the city fathers voted to name the city Frunzegrad, in the same fashion of Leningrad and Stalingrad.  The story goes that “Uncle Joe” was not amused, having seen the glorious general as a potential rival, and the epithet “grad” was duly dropped.

As well as having the city named in his honour, there is also a Frunze Street, and a statue of him sitting astride a horse at the head of one of Bishkek's grandest streets, Erkindik Boulevard, opposite the main railway station and a Museum displaying memorabilia connected with him. 

The city of Frunze received its first airport in 1933, it was located in the South of the city, near the present Ak Keme hotel, but proximity to the mountains limited its potential use and so in 1974 a new airport was built on the flatter land some 25 kilometers to the North of the city  the present Manas airport. 
When IATA introduced its airport codes in the 1930's, FRU would have been the obvious choice for the airport code  even if nowadays it seems an odd choice.  It is, in fact, one aspect of the Soviet heritage of this thriving modern city.

The statue of Mikhail Vasilievich is one of the more tangible marks of the seventy four years of the Soviet Union left in the city.  There are many such examples of Soviet monumental art to be found in the city.

Perhaps the most famous is the statue of Vladimir Illych Lenin which stood for many years overlooking the main Ala Too Square.  In many capitals of the former Soviet Union, effigies of Lenin were removed following the dissolution of the USSR, but in Bishkek his statue remained in its prominent location, (depicting him in a classic pose with arm outstretched delivering a speech to the masses), for over a decade until he was replaced by a symbolic Statue of Liberty: Erkindik.  Although removed from the main square, the statue was not discarded, but placed in a site overlooking the country's parliament building, which used to house the Council of Ministers of the Kyrgyz SSR.

Other examples of Lenin's legacy have not fared so well: Lenin Prospect was renamed Prospect Chui; Lenin Square as Ala Too Square and the Lenin Museum as the State Historical Museum, although the grand displays on the second floor remain as a fine example of Soviet hagiography.

Not far away, to the left of Lenin's statue sit Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, sitting on a bench deeply engrossed in debate on some finer point of dialectical materialism. 

There are other monuments to Soviet personages, such as the playwright Maxim Gorky (in Bishkek's Gorky Park, smaller and quieter than its Moscow namesake) and even the statue of the notorious Dzerzhinsky, (founder of the NKVD, forerunner of the KGB) was not discarded, but relocated to a site near the Ministry of Internal Affairs.  

Perhaps the largest statue in the city is on the corner of Sovietskaya and Prospect Chui.  High on a plinth stands the revolutionary heroine Urkuya Salieva, with a montage of revolutionary heroes of the awakening proletariat flanking it to the right and the left.  

There are also monuments to those who fell in combat, whether in the Civil War, (The Martyr's Monument in Oak Park); the Second World War, known locally as the Great Patriotic War, (the War Memorial in Victory Square, the Statue of General Panfilov in Oak Park; the Avenue of Heroes and the Komsomol monument  complete with the inscription: “We went to fight for Communism”  at the intersection of Molodaya Gvardia and Prospect Chui) and the Afghan war (in Ataturk Park).
Perhaps, however, the most poignant of all the monuments depicting Kyrgyzstan's Soviet heritage, however, lies in the foothills of the Kyrgyz Krebet mountain range, a few kilometers to the South of the city: Ata Beyit.  A simple monument and small museum commemorates the 137 victims of the Stalinist purges who were buried there in 1937. 

Apart from the number of monuments dating from and commemorating the Soviet period, Bishkek is also rich in Soviet architecture.

Several regions of the city, known as the Chastniy Sector, (or “private sector”) comprise small, single storey, Russian style buildings, often with a small yard or garden, similar to those that could be found throughout the Soviet Union.  These tend to date from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century.

For the newly established Soviet Union, the development of modern housing and public buildings was an important priority and the results of several phases of development can be seen when walking around the city.

There are early apartment blocks, offices, and public buildings built in the classical style such as the Opera and Ballet Theater near to the present day Hyatt Regency hotel on Sovietskaya.  The colonnades, ornate façade and portico offer a glimpse of the splendors contained within the recently renovated and refurbished interior.  The ceiling painting in the auditorium represents the gathering of the various nationalities of the Soviet Union at a wedding celebration.  

Other examples of this classical style of architecture include the Town Hall on Prospect Chui, the railway Station, the old airport terminal, the Parliament Building and the building of the Supreme Soviet (which now houses the American University in Central Asia) in the Old Square.

As the city grew in size, the small private houses were replaced by large, rectangular blocks, some in the city center and others in the rapidly expanding suburbs.  Apartments are still referred to, sometimes, by the nicknames “Stalinskiy” or “Krushchevsky” to indicate if they are in one of the older, classical style, buildings or one of the more modern blocks.

During the 1970's and 80's the city of Frunze saw a series of grandiose monumental building projects such as the Government House (the “White House”), the Philharmonia Concert Hall, the Lenin Museum, the Kyrgyz and Russian Drama Theatres, the Museum of Fine Arts, the National Library and the public baths presented a new, monumental, marble façade to the world.    

If the airport designation code FRU is one of the intangible aspects of the city's Soviet heritage, then there others, for example: its status as a capital city. 

Pishkek was already a regional administrative center during the Tsarist regime. When the Russians subsumed the territory into their expanding empire at the end of the nineteenth century, they based their administration at Tokmok, some 60 kilometers further East, but in 1877 a disastrous flood persuaded the authorities to relocate, and Pishpek was chosen as the new base for the empires officials and the following year it was granted the status of a city. At that time, however, Kyrgyzstan did not exist as a country as such. It was only in 1936 when the Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic was established as a constituent republic of the USSR that, it assumed the mantle of a capital city.

The city was renamed Bishkek in 1991. There are a number of legends about the origins of the name – most cantering on the wooden stick used to stir the national drink, Kumys – fermented mare's milk.
One of the city's distinguished features is the modern urban development with streets criss-crossing each other at a 90% to each other, the construction of new apartment blocks and shopping centres, spreading microdistricts (suburbs) and recently imported buses to travel around the city. Bishkek is not, however, all concrete, steel and glass. The city is famous for its shady boulevards and tree lined streets, and is known as the "greenest city in Central Asia", with more trees per head of population than any other - and in Bishkek, alone, you'll find over 150 different kinds of trees and shrubbery.