As a Baby Boomer whose life was heavily influenced by the Cold War, I wanted to go to Moscow before the Soviets went out of business. But events conspired to keep it from happening.

I was to have gone to the 1980 Moscow Olympics, but then came the U.S.-led boycott over Afghanistan (them, again), and I was in line to go to the Goodwill Games in Moscow in 1986, but a close relative got married, and my colleague Gregg Patton went instead.

I did, however, do two weeks in pre-breakup Yugoslavia at the Winter Olympics in 1984, and a week in 1990 split between glum Hungary and glummer East Germany. And in 1991 two l-o-n-g weeks in Fidel Castro’s Havana, and in 2008 three weeks in creepy Beijing.

When I left Uzbekistan today, I recalled all of that, and realized this anew: Escaping an autocracy is a tremendous relief, the lifting of a mental burden not fully appreciated until it is gone.

Uzbekistan has been ruled by one man since it declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1990. The man’s name is Islam Karimov, and he at least has the wit not to have created a particularly visible cult of the personality, the sort of thing that attracts attention from democracy mongers.

His name appears in nearly every story about how “things are getting better!” in the English-language propaganda sheets found around town, but I do not recall seeing statues of the man, while riding around Tashkent, nor his face on billboards. If he has published any Little Red Book-type treatises on political wisdom, I did not hear about it.

But there is no doubt this one man runs the country. The Legatum Institute, which in 2011 ranked 110 nations in a variety of metrics in something it calls the Prosperity Index, pulls no punches about freedom in Uzbekistan.

The Index measures economic development along with political freedom, which seems “apples and oranges” but in practice is not. A free society is likely to be an prosperous one, and vice versa. Norway ranks No. 1, Canada is No. 6, the U.S. is No. 10, the UAE is No. 27 and Uzbekistan is No. 64.

Uzbekistan ranks as high as it does, from 110, because it would appear the population there believes (or has been convinced) that “things are going well,” according to Legatum’s numbers.

But in terms of political freedoms … well, they pretty much don’t exist.

The nut graf: “Uzbekistan’s government is an autocracy that affords little political rights but still receives widespread confidence from its citizenry” and adds that Uzbekistan is “the second-most autocratic state in the index. There are no checks and balances on the power of the executive, and there is very little competition for legislative or executive power, and no independent judiciary.”

A confession: I knew the “stans” (Kazakh, Turkmeni, Uzbeki, etc.) weren’t havens of one-man, one-vote governance, but I didn’t know Uzbekistan was as monolithic as it is.

If you didn’t know, you would, however, grasp it fairly quickly from Just Being There.

Men from the security apparatus are everywhere. Cops, soldiers, guys in uniform at every intersection, and in great numbers at public places. I would guess that more than 1,000 of the 10,000 people at the UAE-Uzbekistan match were security men in uniform. Most of them sitting in the stands.

And those are just the guys who are in uniform. How many undercover guys must be out and about? Who is to stay that the mysterious “gypsy” cabbies who hung around the parking lot of the hotel where I stayed weren’t undercover cops? (I am not a paranoid guy, and this never even occurred to me till the third full day there. Duh.) I concede they weren’t as obvious as the guys in Havana, who didn’t seem to care if you turned around and saw them following you around town.

A couple of ways to measure autocracy:

1. How long has one guy been in charge? Karimov, at 21 years and counting (23, if you include his time as First Secretary of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan), rather looks like a President for Life.

2. How much of a hassle is it at the airport?

In Uzbekistan, it is an enormous hassle. I went through seven levels of security to get to my plane. 1) The guys at the street gates keeping any ol’ vehicle from driving up; 2) the four cops at the entrance to the terminal who wanted to see my passport; 3) the mag-and-bag check one yard inside the building; 4) the special guy who had to examine my passport because it had a UAE residency visa in it; 5) the customs guys who examine the sheet of paper you must carry with you at all times declaring how much money you have, in what currency, and what sorts of goods; 6) the actual passport-check guys; and 7) another mag-and-bag (shoes off, plastic booties on) before approaching the gate.

Far more than half of the people I could see in the terminal were uniformed security guys. That’s a police state, kids.

3. Another aspect of an autocracy is an unwillingness by the man in the street to say anything critical about the state to someone they don’t know — like, say, a Western journalist. I talked to upwards of a dozen people, from guys in their 20s to middle-aged men, and I eventually asked nearly all of them about “Uzbekistan, good?” And every single one said “yes,” most of them emphatically.

Ask a dozen Yanks or Brits or Canadians (or even Emiratis) and they will express some reservation about their government. At least some mild complaint. In the West, from a dozen people? You’re get at least five who will tell you the place is going to hell in a hand basket.

That tells me that people in Uzbekistan are afraid or so thoroughly indoctrinated, that they will not say anything even mildly critical. (“I wish we didn’t have so many potholes on the streets.”)

4. You find yourself getting paranoid. You never walk outside without your passport, the customs declaration, every bit of ID you brought with you for fear that you could be picked up and taken away. I promise you, I didn’t feel this way when I landed, but as the days went by, I found myself progressively more nervous. By the time I got to the airport to return to the UAE, I honestly felt as if the chances were fairly strong that I would be detained. For some reason. Even if that was not a rational thought.

(And when the customs guys grilled me about how/why I entered the country with $70 and left with $150 — talking U.S. dollars here — I thought, “This is gonna be the problem that lands me at the police station.” Eventually, they just shrugged and waved me through.)

5. You can’t figure out the rules. Uzbekistan is a country where, it seems clear, bribes can get a person far. But when is it a dangerous thing? Also, in theory, I could have bought mountains of local currency for U.S. dollars from sketchy guys … and that can’t be legal. But it goes on fairly openly.

I should add that most individuals I met were friendly. Especially the local journalists. They asked questions; we talked “football;” they gave me advice on logistics.

And I found it extremely interesting how the reporters heaped verbal abuse on cops who wouldn’t let us down the stairs, post-match, to the interview room. The reporters feared missing the press conference. The cops were blocking their way. A dozen guys just dumped on the cops. Shouting at them. I don’t know what they said, but their anger and frustration were clear, and the cops seemed a little taken aback — though not in any way willingly to solve the problem till they were good and ready.

I’m not sure reporters could have yelled at cops in, say, East Germany without repercussions.

I am glad I went to Uzbekistan. I had never been; not sure I ever will go back; I saw a remarkable soccer game.

And I was reminded of the gray, amorphous, exhausting weight that descends upon a person in a police state.