Our Good President is only trying to prevent them from ruining their lives and the honour of their families.
The Door to Hell
Eleven thousand and six hundred days later, more than three decades, in other words, the crater is still burning furiously. The locals used to call it the “Door to Hell”.
Turkmenistan
Once I was in the actual waiting area, I understood: almost every one of the passengers had far too much hand luggage, and the airline staff guarded the entrance to the gate armed with bathroom scales and fierce faces. But as soon as the passengers were through they pulled off even more packages that they had taped to their bodies.
There was apparently no limit to what these women had managed to hide under their long dresses. Laughing, they unburdened themselves, without seeming to care that the flight attendants could see them. They were through now.
“They’re business women,” she explained. “They come to Istanbul at least once a month to buy things which they then sell at a profit at the market in Ashgabat. Nearly everything that is sold in Turkmenistan is made in Turkey.”
From such general, but often not especially dangerous problems, the author then moved on to cover a number of more alarming situations that one might encounter, from Stop thief! and Call an ambulance! to more critical phrases: I did not do it! and I did not know it was wrong! And finally a short but vital chapter on the theme of checkpoints. I taught myself Don’t shoot! and Where is the nearest international border? Then put the book away.
Despite this common suffix, the five Stans are remarkably dissimilar: Turkmenistan is more than eighty per cent desert, whereas more than ninety per cent of Tajikistan is mountains. Kazakhstan has become so wealthy– thanks to oil, gas and minerals– that it recently put in a bid to host the Winter Olympics. Turkmenistan, too, has vast oil and gas reserves, whereas Tajikistan is poor as a church mouse. In many towns and villages in Tajikistan, inhabitants have electricity for only a few hours each day in winter. The regimes in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan are so authoritarian and corrupt that they are comparable with the dictatorship in North Korea: there is no free press and the president is omnipotent. In Kyrgyzstan, on the other hand, the people have deposed two presidents.
You are never alone in Turkmenistan. No matter how deserted the streets may be, the presidents see you.
The New President gazed down at me with gentle, inscrutable eyes from the walls of buildings. I briefly felt I had been transported back fifty or sixty years to the heyday of the Soviet Union, when it was Stalin who had watched his good comrades on the street. The artists of the time had a particular knack for capturing whatever good qualities the dictator had: despite Stalin’s harsh nature, paranoid personality and absolute hold on power, they always managed to make him look kind and sensitive, almost paternal. The photographer behind the portraits of the New President clearly shared this talent. The man in the enormous, framed photographs had round, generous cheeks, but did not look fat or overweight. On the contrary, he exuded good health as he looked out over the streets with his caring eyes and mysterious smile.
Saparmurat Niyazov, better known as Turkmenbashi, a man who is recognised the world over as one of the most bizarre dictators ever,
“The first was perhaps even better, because petrol was free then as well. Now we have to pay a little. But before, we didn’t have the Internet, which we do now. You see, it’s hard to compare. Both have their good points.”
“That’s to protect the young people. Lots of girls post naked pictures of themselves on Facebook. They’re young and don’t think about the consequences. Our Good President is only trying to prevent them from ruining their lives and the honour of their families.”
“Isn’t it?” Aslan looked at me, dumbfounded. “But then why has Our Good President blocked Facebook?”
Most Turkmen farmers, like the families of Peach Blossom and Ogulnar, live from what the ground, camels and goats can give them, and are not really part of the country’s gas- driven economy. These poor farmers live and die in their villages, detached and cut off from the rest of the state, which is centred around the towns, gas works and the political elite’s marbled luxury lifestyle.
Even though we had no shared language, I was welcomed like a long- lost daughter wherever I went. With bright smiles, they waved me into their yurts and simple mud houses, and shared what little they had: a cup of tea, a bowl of soured camel milk, a piece of dry bread.
What is more, his arguments were not unfounded. One of the reasons that the regime in North Korea is faltering is that the state cannot provide its people with basic provisions. It is hard to believe you live in the best country in the world when you go to bed hungry, night after night. Everyone in Turkmenistan has access to free goods such as gas and salt, and subsidised petrol, so the people, even the poorest, feel that the state cares about them. And most important of all: no- one need go to bed hungry.
“Dictatorships are good,” he declared out of the blue. We were talking about eagles. “We’re in a transition phase right now, so we need a strong leader. There are five major tribes in Turkmenistan, and lots of smaller ones. Had- it- not- been- for- our- president they would all be at war with each other. Thanks- to- our- president there is peace and prosperity in our country.”
“But is it really necessary to have pictures of him everywhere?” “Our Good President has such an ordinary appearance that it could be anyone on the photographs. His face represents the people in general.”
“He was stark raving mad, and got madder and madder. He didn’t realise that people were laughing at him behind his back. People named schools and villages after him because they knew they would be given money.”
“Luckily, the New President is better than the old one,” Murat said, as he let the car roll back once more. “Not only has he given the old names back to the days and months, but he also belongs to the Soviet generation. He copies Putin in every way he can, and is supposed to be so sporty and athletic. I wonder when someone’s going to tell the emperor that he’s not wearing any clothes…”
Over time, the craftsmen in Merv learned how to produce silk, and by the tenth century, Merv had surpassed China to become the greatest exporter of silk to the West.
Irrespective of where the river ran, we know for certain that inhabitants of Merv had an ample supply of water: a carefully designed, underground pipe network provided the city with fresh, cold water from the Murgab river. In the twelfth century, as many as twelve thousand people were employed in maintaining this advanced water system. There were ice houses with suitably thick walls outside the city, so the inhabitants could enjoy a refreshing ice lolly on hot days. Merv was truly an oasis.
The Mongols were brutal warriors, but as rulers they were relatively tolerant and did not interfere much with the lives and culture of the people they conquered. There was religious freedom throughout the empire and many Mongols converted to Christianity. Since they were nomads, the Mongols left no buildings of their own behind, but they did finance the construction of churches in China and Buddhist stupas in Persia. Their single most important contribution to the history of the world is perhaps the extensive exchange of ideas and inventions between East and West that the empire facilitated. The Mongols brought German miners to China and Chinese doctors to Baghdad. They paved the way for the modern cannon by combining different inventions such as Chinese gunpowder, Muslim flame- throwers and European bell- founding techniques. Genghis Khan’s grandson, Kublai Khan, who ruled the eastern section of the empire, introduced paper money as a universal means of payment.
in 2012 the state broadcaster (and there are no other media organisations) announced that Turkmenistan has entered the Era of Supreme Happiness.
Several of the soldiers had crowded around us now. The questions came thick and fast. What about petrol? A flat? A car? A house? A kilo of butter? Eggs? Sugar? Salt? Electricity?
Kazakhstan
Damiar then seamlessly switched to complaining about the Kazakh president.
Why do we travel? Why do we put ourselves through all the discomfort that moving across great distances and staying in faraway, foreign lands usually entails? My theory is that nature has equipped us with deceitful, flawed memories. That is why we forever set off on new adventures. Once we are home again, the discomfort transforms itself into amusing anecdotes, or is forgotten. Memory is not linear, it is more like a diagram full of points– high points– and the rest is empty. Memory is also abstract. Seen from the future, past discomfort seems almost unreal, like a dream.
The economy was based on bartering, and the better- off families with lots of animals were morally obliged to help and support less privileged relatives. In other words, with their nomadic customs and traditions they were closer to the communist ideals of equality and solidarity than the Bolsheviks ever were.
“I’m twenty- nine, and yes, I’m married,” I said. My partner and I had even bought a proper wedding ring to support this practical little lie. They gave us a very strange look at the jewellers when they realised we only wanted one ring.
“In its time, the Aral Sea was the fourth largest inland sea in the world. It was 428 kilometres long and 234 kilometres wide, and covered a total of 68,000 square kilometres,” Jedige told me from the back seat. He had all the figures in his head. “Now it is ten per cent of its original size.”
“How could the authorities just sit back and watch the world’s fourth largest lake all but disappear?” It was an absurd question. The Soviet authorities had certainly not spared any resources when it came to achieving their goal of becoming an industrial superpower. The good old adage that the ends justify the means must have been repeated daily, like a mantra, in the Kremlin.
Perhaps Aral is not fighting a losing battle after all, I thought. I had expected to find the lake full of lifeless water, surrounded by fields of salt and depleted soil, but instead I was met with swans and the cry of seagulls. The North Aral Sea is living proof that man- made environmental disasters can be reversed, up to a point, if the authorities have the will and the resources to invest. The Kazakh government has taken steps, and succeeded.
The Poles were among the first to be deported, but by no means the last. Not a few nationalities were declared to be “enemies of the people” and deported to Siberia or Central Asia, chiefly to Kazakhstan, home of endless steppes and not many people.
To this day, there are more than a hundred different nationalities in Kazakhstan, a legacy of Stalin’s brutal regime.
“Polish,” he said, then pointed at someone else. “Polish as well. Ukrainian. Polish. Russian. Polish. Korean. Kazakh. Russian. Polish.”
No- one knows for sure why Nazarbayev chose to move the capital. Not only is Astana far from the populous regions in the south and surrounded by steppe, it has one of the most unforgiving climates in the world: it is the second coldest capital in the world after Ulan Bator in Mongolia. In winter, the temperature can fall to -40 ° C.
No visit to Astana is complete unless you have laid your own hand in the gold impression of the president’s right hand, closed your eyes and made a wish. But first you have to wish him well, the guides explain, or your own wish will not be fulfilled.
Compared with Turkmenbashi– a comparison which is favourable for most– Nazarbayev has adopted a moderate leadership style.
In every town, there are big posters of Nazarbayev, emblazoned with 2050, the magical year when all will be well. The obvious problem is, however, that Nazarbayev, who was born in 1940, is likely to be long dead by then. But instead of ensuring a smooth transfer of power after his death by naming his successor, Nazarbayev has donated substantial sums to Nazarbayev University in Astana for research on life- prolonging medicines.
One of the Cold War’s darkest chapters was played out on the empty plains outside Semipalatinsk: it was here that the Soviet Union carried out most of its nuclear testing. They detonated, on average, one nuclear bomb a month, 456 in total.
And every explosion had an echo on the other side of the world, in the Nevada Desert and the Pacific Ocean, where the Americans did their testing; the two superpowers carried on like this for nearly forty years. A slow dance of sorts, a war of shadows in the shape of white mushroom clouds.
“Those were the days. Everyone had work, there were no differences. Everyone was a comrade!”
“I knew you would ask that! People think it’s so dangerous here, but there is only high radioactivity in a handful of zones. Most of the areas are perfectly safe.” He got out a Geiger counter, which hovered around zero. “There you go, no radiation.”
The test was a success, and the military top brass were invited to a banquet the same evening. Sakharov, the hero of the day, proposed a toast: “May all our devices explode as successfully as today’s, but always over test sites and never over cities.”
Having looked at the human cost in detail, both Sakharov and Kurchatov became active opponents of nuclear weapons and nuclear testing. Their protests had some impact, and, in 1963, the U.S.A., Great Britain and the Soviet Union signed a multilateral agreement banning the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, outer space and under water.
In many ways, Los Alamos is Kurchatov’s twin city– it was built in the desert in New Mexico during the Second World War, with one purpose: to develop the world’s first nuclear bomb. The town’s existence and location were top secret. Like Kurchatov, it was not marked on any map and did not have a name, only a number. Leading scientists from the U.S.A. were sent there with orders to use their spare time to develop the atom bomb, under the code name the Manhattan Project. To make living in the middle of a hot desert more attractive, the town was equipped with every possible modern comfort and facility: swimming pools, air- conditioned buildings, well- stocked supermarkets and excellent primary schools.
In autumn 2012, a group of Russian, Kazakh and American scientists gathered at the foot of Degelen Mountain in Polygon to celebrate. Fourteen years and 150 million dollars later, the super- secret project was finally completed and the tunnels had all been filled with a special cement. The scientists raised their vodka glasses and unveiled a three- sided stone monument. Engraved in English, Russian and Kazakh, it read: “The world has become safer.”
He was arrested during a research trip to Ukraine in 1940, and sentenced to death. Two years later, the death sentence was commuted to twenty years imprisonment, but on January 26, 1943, Nikolai Vavilov, a man who had dedicated his life to eradicating hunger, died of starvation in prison.
Thanks to Vavilov’s dedicated colleagues, the seed bank miraculously survived the 28- month siege of Leningrad. The authorities had not given any instructions to protect the two hundred and fifty thousand seeds, but the employees at the institute took it upon themselves to do this: they put a selection of the seeds into a large chest and hid it in the cellar, taking turns to guard it. Not one of those guarding the collection was tempted to eat any of the seeds, even though nine of them died of starvation before the siege ended in spring 1944.
The belief that acquired qualities could be inherited by the next generation was also a central axiom of the Communists’ treatment of “enemies of the people” and their children: they believed that the father’s sins would literally be inherited.
Tajikistan
The fact that oil- rich nations such as Azerbaijan, Dubai, Turkmenistan and Saudi Arabia can afford to compete for the tallest flagpole should come as no surprise. But where do the Tajik authorities get the money?
Not far from the presidential palace is another massive building: Tajikistan’s national library, the biggest library in Central Asia. It opened in 2012 and covers an area of forty- five thousand square metres over nine floors. It has room for ten million books and, in order to fill all the shelves, each household was asked to donate books for the opening. Journalists who have been inside have said there are only books in one of the halls; in the rest the shelves stand empty.
“But it’s not even half past ten,” I objected.
The security guard looked around surreptitiously. “We don’t have electricity today,” he said very quietly. “Try again another time. Perhaps we’ll have electricity tomorrow.”
When a person moves into the presidential palace of a Central Asian republic, it is very hard to get them to move out again of their own free will. True to tradition, Rahmon has stayed there, and, having led the country into the twenty- first century, has continued to tighten his grip on power.
The Tajik state cannot provide its citizens with sufficient electricity in winter, let alone vaccinate its babies against the most dangerous childhood illnesses. And yet there were more luxury cars to be seen here than on the streets in Ashgabat and Astana.
Only once I was back in Norway did I find the answer– not to where the money came from, but to the mystery of the cars. They came from Germany. A thorough investigation and the use of modern G.P.S. equipment enabled the German police to trace two hundred stolen luxury cars, including many B.M.W.s and Mercedes. The police had assumed that the cars had been sold on to criminal gangs in Eastern Europe or Russia, but, to their surprise, they discovered that the new owners of the cars were in fact senior officials in the Tajik presidential administration, as well as friends and family of President Rahmon.
“I’ve explained to her that they come to see our majestic mountains, but she thinks that’s ridiculous. For her, the mountains are a nuisance.” He smiled. “I used to think the same, but now I see our country through the tourists’ eyes. It’s not always easy to understand that what you see every day is beautiful.”
Nature had reclaimed the village. There were trees and bushes growing in all the kitchens and bedrooms.
“Other than our language, there’s no difference between the Yaghnobis and the Tajiks,” said a toothless man beside me.
But why was it so important for the Yaghnobis to be like the majority?
“No, no, she didn’t take any medicine. Where would she get that? If she did, I wouldn’t mind some myself,” the friend said, pointing to a little girl with short, curly hair. “She’s my seventh child. I didn’t want her. I took medicines and herbs, anything to avoid having more children, but she came all the same. Our men won’t leave us alone.”
“If a baby is stillborn, or dies, we cry,” Umrimoh said. “We don’t grieve for long, as life goes on. But we do cry and that helps.”
When she was pregnant with him, her husband had done what so many Tajik men do: he had gone to Russia to earn money. Between one and two million of Tajikistan’s eight million inhabitants are at any one time working in Russia. The money they send home accounts for half of Tajikistan’s gross domestic product. No other country in the world is so dependent on the wages of migrant workers.
Many of the Tajik migrant workers find themselves Russian wives. However, this does
not stop them from coming back to their village once a year and making their Tajik wife pregnant, perhaps even giving her an S.T.D., before returning to Russia. But then the visits and money transfers become less and less frequent, until they take the final step and apply for Russian citizenship and stay there. As it is sufficient in Sunni Islam for a man to repeat talaq, the word for divorce, three times for a couple to be divorced, many Tajik women have received the following text message from their husbands in Russia: “Talaq, talaq, talaq”.
“A man who has been bitten by a snake will fear a coiled rope and cables,” he said eventually. “A child who has burned himself on the teapot takes care not to do it again. I’m done with politics now. I never draw the president or any other politicians, I’m happy with everyday situations. There’s enough inspiration for me there.”
As the pilots have to fly without radar, they are dependent on good visibility over the mountains. And for the pilots to be given the go- ahead for landing, there has to be almost no wind. The slightest gust can be fatal, as the small aircraft that are used on the route fly at a maximum height of 4,200 metres, and many of the mountains they pass are higher than 5,000 metres. In other words, we were going to fly between the peaks and not over them. In the Soviet era, this was the only route on which Aeroflot pilots were awarded danger money, and not without reason.
There are a number of striking similarities between the British attempt to conquer Kabul and the Soviet Union’s invasion in 1979, more than a century later. The Russians also wanted to install a regime- friendly leader in Kabul. As a result, fourteen thousand Soviet soldiers were killed in the nine- year war. More than one million Afghan civilians lost their lives and at least as many were forced to flee. When the Soviet tanks withdrew in 1989, they had achieved nothing.
Pamir is often called “the Roof of the World” and stretches over an area of 120,000 square kilometres covering five countries: China, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan and Tajikistan, which is home to the greater part of the mountain range. Three of the mountains in Pamir are higher than seven thousand metres– the highest is Kongur in Xinjiang in China, at 7,719 metres.
The border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan is 1,206 kilometres long and follows the river Panj. Ergash, my local driver, took me south along the river. There were no soldiers or barriers to be seen. The border between the two countries is as leaky as a sieve: literally tons of cigarettes and opium are smuggled over the river every year, then on to Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, and from there to Russia and finally Europe.
Entire villages on either side of the border are dependent on smuggling. The network probably extends up into Tajik government echelons, which would help to explain both the luxurious cars and extravagant buildings in Dushanbe.
In other words, the first British and Russian explorers exposed themselves to great personal risk in order to fill in the white spaces on the map. The greatest danger, however, was not hostile tribes or capricious khans, but nature itself. The cities and towns in Central Asia were protected by some of the highest mountain passes in the world and enormous deserts that were savagely hot in summer and could plummet in winter to -50 ° C.
It turned out to be the worst winter in living memory. In January they lost on average a hundred camels a day. After three months, Perovsky admitted that they would never make it to Khiva and ordered a retreat. When they got back to the Russian garrison in Orenburg on the border of what is today Kazakhstan, a thousand soldiers had died. And of the ten thousand camels, only fifteen hundred survived. Not a shot had been fired.
The tsar’s diplomats appeased the British by telling them that the Turkmen themselves had wanted to become part of the Russian empire. They had wanted to end the anarchy, so they could enjoy the benefits of civilisation. And what could the British say to that? They had themselves given similar explanations to justify their presence in their own colonies.
Russia turned her sights further east. The Trans- Siberian railway was being built, so claims were made on territories in Mongolia and a big port was built on Korean territory. The Japanese kept an anxious eye on developments, and in 1904 they launched an attack. The war with Japan was catastrophic for Russia, and indirectly led to the revolution and downfall of the tsar thirteen years later.
“Other Muslims pray five times a day, whereas we only pray once or twice. It’s enough. We don’t fast during Ramadan, as the climate here is too harsh. It’s not good to walk around in the mountains all day when the sun’s beating down and you haven’t had anything to eat or drink. And the Aga Khan believes in education. That’s the key, he says. Girls, in particular, should be educated, so they can get a job and not just sit at home with the children. The Ismailites are modern Muslims!”
A fat customs officer waddled out and demanded to see our passports and vehicle registration papers. Ergash popped a Kyrgyz 200- som banknote in his passport (equivalent to a couple of pounds or so) and handed it over to the fat customs officer. He took the banknote and handed back the passport.
We were shown over to the passport controller’s house. On a sticker by the door, it said: “Let’s fight corruption together and work towards a better Kyrgyzstan!”
“He was upset, because tourists aren’t supposed to know about the bribes,” Ergash told me when he came back. “I assured him that you hadn’t seen anything.”
Once three banknotes had disappeared into three different pockets, we were allowed through the open barrier and into Kyrgyzstan, the only relatively free and democratic country in Central Asia. The people here have rebelled and twice deposed the president. It is also the only country where western tourists do not need a visa.
Kyrgyzstan
Kyrgyzstan is the only post- Soviet country in Central Asia where a sitting president has stepped down of his own volition. The country also holds the Central Asian record for the number of presidents, even if it is not very many. By way of contrast, the leaders in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan were both appointed by Gorbachev in his time, and even though they are now greyer and have more wrinkles, the overwhelming majority of people still support them, if their election results are to be believed.
All maps illustrating freedom and democracy rankings show Kazakhstan’s smallest neighbour in a different colour from its surrounding countries. Kyrgyzstan is the most democratic country in Central Asia. Not only does it allow its press the greatest freedom in the region, but the tiny, impoverished, mountainous country also makes the top one hundred with regard to economic freedom, way ahead of its autocratic neighbours. And it is the only Central Asian country to have introduced parliamentarianism, thereby limiting the power of the president. All the other Stans are autocracies, albeit, in the best cases, enlightened.
No, the freedom is just there, without any great fuss. It is not so much the freedom that is noticeable, rather the absence of fear.
Bishkek is the greenest capital in Central Asia. The meltwater from the surrounding mountains supplies its many parks and trees with fresh water, giving the city a friendly, almost rural feel.
Secret diaries and documents have since been found that reveal just how corrupt the Akayev government was: detailed price lists show that a seat in parliament could be had for thirty thousand U.S. dollars and an ambassador’s post in a nice, western capital cost close to two hundred thousand dollars.
In order to ensure that the next president would not be as bad as the previous two, Kyrgyzstan introduced parliamentarianism– a first in Central Asia. The president is accountable to the parliament and prime minister, and has limited powers. Roza Otunbayeva took over from Bakiyev as interim president until the next election in 2011. She was not only the first female president in the region, she was also the first to step down voluntarily, as agreed.
And this is another important factor: the regime’s ability and willingness to resort to violence. Kyrgyzstan’s first president, Akayev, gave orders not to shoot the demonstrators in Bishkek. His successor was less principled, but then dropped everything and ran when he realised the battle was lost. The Uzbek president, on the other hand, has already used tanks and automatic weapons to deter demonstrators and is unlikely to hesitate to do so again.
I had been in Kyrgyzstan for more than a week and still did not know what Almazbek Atambayev, the president, looked like.
“When I had my youngest, I stopped thinking about leaving him,” Roza told me. “I knew then that I had to stay with him, for the children’s sake. I no longer had a choice. And where would I go, anyway? I don’t have a job, I have no education, no money of my own. And he’s not a bad man, really. He doesn’t drink. He doesn’t hit me. He respects me.”
Ala kachuu, “snatch and run”, is what the tradition of bride kidnapping is called in Kyrgyz. There are no reliable statistics for how many young women are abducted and forced into marriage in Kyrgyzstan each year. Russell Kleinbach, professor emeritus of sociology and one of the founders of the Kyz Korgon Institute, an organisation that aims to end this practice in Central Asia, has researched the phenomenon for many years, and estimates that around one third of all marriages in Kyrgyzstan occur in this way. The figure rises to fifty per cent in rural communities, in other words, 11,800 young women every year, or thirty per day. More than ninety per cent of these wives stay with their kidnapper.
According to the Kyz Korgon Institute’s figures, only one in 1,500 men are sentenced for bride kidnapping, and to date only two men have been imprisoned in line with the new law: in one case, the young woman committed suicide, and, in the other, a divorced man kidnapped a sixteen- year- old girl three times. He raped her on the first night. Her parents did not want her to marry a man like that, and came to get her. Then he kidnapped her again. In the end, her parents reported it to the police. During the trial, the girl had to answer questions from the prosecutor as to why she had said no to a secure life with the man and his family. Was he not good enough for her?
“As long as they had a good house, why not?” Talgarbek shrugged. “Daughters have to be married anyway. But since ala kachuu was banned and you can end up in prison, it’s become less common. Some men are frightened of talking to women. So now that the law has been introduced, they may never get married.”
“An eagle is only with me for ten to fifteen years,” he said. “Then I have to release it. That is the tradition. They also have to have the opportunity to find a mate, build a nest and have young. Contrary to what you might read in books, they soon become wild again and forget me. Even when they have lived with humans all their lives, they know how to build a nest. There are tears, of course, because it’s always sad to say goodbye. But they have to get married. That’s the tradition.”
“The Germans felt they were better than us Zuwanderer. Before I went to Germany, I thought I could speak German, but when I got there I couldn’t even understand what was being said on television. The Mennonites had not had any contact with Germany for several hundred years, so the language we spoke was ridiculously old- fashioned. Unlike the Germans, we pronounce words as they are written. And with all the abbreviations they use now, I could not work it out.”
The Russians knew perfectly well that the people of Central Asia belonged to different clans and cultures, but saw no reason to complicate things further. It was difficult enough as it was. People often did not know which nationality they were. In the 1926 consensus, people could name their tribe and family, but could not always answer if they were Uzbek, Kyrgyz or Tajik.
If you are travelling from Kyrgyzstan to Uzbekistan, it is recommended that you cross the border during the cotton season. Usually the queues stretch for miles, and if you are unlucky you can look forward to hours of waiting, endless formalities and yet more waiting. In the cotton season, however, you will have the border more or less to yourself.
I entered one of the world’s worst dictatorships. Well, not quite yet. The customs check is the real challenge, not passport control. Having gone through my luggage, the customs officer then wanted to know what I did. I had to lie again.
Uzbekistan
What I really wanted to say was that it sounded like pure dictator propaganda to me, but instead I heard myself saying: “That’s wonderful. Burgeoning entrepreneurship is positive for a country’s economy and growth, and helps to keep unemployment down. I’ve just been to Kyrgyzstan, where unemployment is very high and young people have to go to Russia to get work. That is so sad.”
The authorities have done nothing to adjust the difference between the black market and official exchange rate, and have instead exploited the discrepancy to the full in terms of export and import. In other words, they sell goods at the official exchange rate, and then they exchange the money on the black market.
On black- market corners in central Andijan, currencies are whispered like monetary poetry.
Like many of his Central Asian colleagues, Uzbekistan’s president has had a remarkable career. He was born to a very poor Uzbek- Tajik family in Samarkand in 1938. He was able to complete his schooling thanks to scholarships, and graduated from the Central Asian Polytechnic Institute with a degree in mechanical engineering. The path from engineering to lifelong dictator is obviously very short in Central Asia.
Two thousand kilos of white mulberry leaves are required for the production of one kilo of silk.
The butterfly itself emerges between twelve to sixteen days after chrysalisation, but very few larvae live to experience what it is like to have wings. As soon as the silkworms have stopped spinning, the cocoons are lowered into boiling water or left in hot steam, so that the larvae die. The cocoons are then left in the sun to dry before being sent to the silk factories where the fibroin is transformed into colourful silk shawls.
Savitsky exploited to the full the fact that censorship was more relaxed in the Sixties than it had been in Stalin’s day. He started to visit the studios and relatives of dead artists in search of forgotten works from the Twenties and Thirties.
Some of the paintings were in terrible condition and needed extensive restoration, a job that Savitsky often did himself.
The museum would certainly never have survived in Moscow or Leningrad, but things were more lax in Nukus. Whenever an inspector from Moscow paid an occasional visit, Savitsky removed the most controversial paintings. He put on his only suit and gallantly showed his guests around. Some works of art were captioned “Artist Unknown”, for tactical reasons. And when the museum exhibited Nadezhda Borovaya’s drawings from the gulag where she spent seven years in the 1930s, the text in the brochure said that the drawings were of imaginary scenes of daily life in the Nazi concentration camps.
And, he warned, once you started to sell, it would be hard to stop. Babanazarova was loyal to this philosophy, even though it meant that she often did not have enough money to pay the staff a decent wage. Fortunately, the women of the museum (almost exclusively women work there) have been as dedicated as the director and see it as their moral duty to keep the museum in Nukus going.
In the desert, water is more valuable than gold. It was the Amu- Darya and its tributaries that made it possible for the nomads to live in old Khwarazm more than two thousand years ago. To the frustration of the settlers, the Amu Darya was a capricious river that often, without warning, changed course. And the people could do nothing but follow. Entire towns and cities uprooted and moved with the water. Eventually, people learned how to harness the water. They started to build water systems that could supply hundreds of thousands of people with clean, cold water. Thanks to these ingenious canals, oasis cities such as Merv, Khiva, Bukhara, Samarkand and Kokand were able to flourish in the middle of the desert.
A sign with a large blue fish on it welcomes visitors to Moynaq, a reminder of its former heyday. Moynaq is three or four hours’ drive from Nukus, and, until the 1970s, was Uzbekistan’s only seaside town, with beaches, waves and a thriving fishing fleet. Now the sea is two hundred kilometres away. Uzbekistan is not only a country without a coast, it is surrounded by other countries that are themselves landlocked. So Uzbekistan has lost the only maritime connection it had.
For a short period, the Soviet authorities did succeed in transforming the desert into fertile cotton plantations, but, as a result, the sea is now permanently a desert, with all that that entails.
The lake, which lies in the middle of the Karakum Desert, will hold 132 billion cubic metres of water, cover two hundred square kilometres and be up to seventy metres deep. President Berdimuhamedov’s great idea is that the lake will change the climate in the desert by generating more rain in the region, thereby making the desert more fertile. The excavation work is almost finished, thanks in part to the efforts of prisoners, whom the authorities have used for free labour. The old communist dream of making the desert green and profitable is still alive in Ashgabat.
The slim, elegant Islam Khodja minaret, Khiva’s highest building, was not completed until 1910. The reason that the town feels so old and timeless is that the architects and builders continued to build in the same style over centuries and were not influenced by fashions and trends. The buildings rarely lasted very long, as they had poor foundations. Travellers here in the nineteenth century wrote about walls that did not meet, cracked corners and leaning minarets. Frequent fires also helped to keep the craftsmen busy. And the town was built from one of the least durable materials possible:
One of the things that contributed to this flourishing intellectual life in Central Asia at the time was the availability of paper. Paper was invented in China about two thousand years ago, and the art quickly spread from there to Central Asia. The Chinese used fibres from the mulberry tree and bamboo to make paper, but craftsmen in Samarkand soon discovered that it was possible to make an even finer and thinner paper from cotton cellulose. And not only was their paper cheaper, it was also easier to come by, so Samarkand soon took over as the primary exporter of paper to the West.
The Silk Road could equally have been called the Paper Road. For several hundred years, paper from Samarkand was one of the most important and lucrative goods to be loaded onto camels’ backs and transported west along the caravan routes. Even when paper production was developed elsewhere such as in Damascus, Cairo and Muslim Córdoba, the demand for high- quality paper from Samarkand continued until the thirteenth century, when the Europeans started to produce paper themselves.
Ibn Sina was a qualified doctor by the tender age of sixteen. He himself remarked: “Medicine is not one of the difficult sciences.” His best- known work is The Canon of Medicine, an encyclopaedia of medicine, anatomy and diseases. He discusses and describes the effects of various medicines based on his own experiments and clinical experience. He also explains how alcohol can be used as an antiseptic and advocates the boiling of water to prevent the spread of tuberculosis. The book discusses the importance of physical activity, cold baths, sleep and a healthy diet, as well as the positive influence a good marriage can have on health. The Canon of Medicine was translated into Latin in 1180, and for five hundred years was the standard work on medicine in both the Arab world and Europe.
Was life on earth created at a given point in time, or had it developed gradually? The two philosophers agreed that the world had been created by God, to say otherwise would have been pure heresy, but they both believed that life must have developed gradually. This was almost as heretical. The fact that Biruni and Ibn Sina survived despite making such claims can be attributed to the open, intellectual climate at that particular time in the history of Central Asia and Islam.
In his writings on the different religions, Biruni was careful to describe each religion in its own terms, in more or less the same way that he had approached the calendar systems. His purpose was not to find “fault”, but to explain the logic behind each religion. Today, he is recognised as one of the leading pioneers in comparative religion.
As always, he did his utmost to understand the logic underlying Indian society and Hinduism, and whenever he found something hard to understand, he dug a bit deeper until it made sense. Biruni believed that all cultures must share a number of features, as they are all human constructs no matter how alien and exotic they may seem. This thought is one of the cornerstones of modern social anthropology.
“Anything that was left by the Arabs was then destroyed by Genghis Khan, and anything he had failed to destroy was then destroyed by Timur Lenk,” was Rustam’s pithy summary. “We’re not supposed to say anything bad about Timur Lenk to tourists, because the president has made him the national hero of Uzbekistan. But the truth is that he killed just as many people as Genghis Khan. And after Timur came the Uzbeks, then the Russians
This practice continued under the Russians, who were pragmatic in their approach to their colonies: so long as the locals paid their taxes and did not rebel, they generally left them in peace. It was only when the more ideological Bolsheviks came to power in the 1920s that both the executions and the
In June 1941, a group of Soviet archaeologists opened the grave to inspect Timur Lenk’s remains. His coffin bore the following inscription: “When I rise from the dead, the world shall tremble.” It is said that they found another inscription inside the coffin: “Whosoever opens my tomb shall unleash an enemy more terrible than I.” Two days after the archaeologists opened the tomb, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union.
Ulugh Beg was loved by the students of Samarkand. He often taught and gave financial support to the students. The mullahs, on the other hand, were less enthralled by the ruler’s love of numbers, science and wine. They believed that Ulugh Beg was a danger to Islam and that he was leading people down the wrong path. When his father, Shah Rukh, died in 1447, Ulugh Beg was unable to maintain a firm hold on power. After only two years as sultan, he was murdered by his own son in a carefully planned ambush. It did not take long for religious fanatics to destroy the observatory and ensure the closure of Ulugh Beg’s school.
There are policemen and video cameras on every street corner, as is often the case in a dictatorship, so hailing a taxi is seen as entirely safe, even for women on their own. For a few thousand som, I could get a lift wherever I wanted in the city. But how representative were these men who drove around in old, tired cars in the hope of earning fifty or sixty pence? And how truthful were they?
In her heyday, Karimova had lucrative deals with or substantial shares in all the main businesses in Uzbekistan. She was without a doubt the country’s richest woman and owned everything from cotton plantations to gasworks, gold mines, hotels and restaurants. She and her business partners stopped at nothing to get their hands on new companies and businesses. The typical strategy was as follows: if Karimova was interested in taking over a company, she got the tax authorities to undertake a detailed investigation of the company, following which the company was closed down and had its assets confiscated, or was forced to sell them at well under the market value.
“Gulnara monopolised entire sectors of the economy,” he said in an interview with the BBC. “She started interfering in sales of natural gas, gold trade, logistics. She was sucking away so many resources that she single- handedly created a budget deficit.” xv
The opinion of the people may be sacred, but they are never asked.
Illustrations Insert
The old town in Khiva is one enormous outdoor museum.
Afterword – The Death of a Dictator
But it is almost unheard of for an autocrat to step down of his own volition, which is why it caused such a stir when Nursultan Nazarbayev, the then president of Kazakhstan, announced in a speech broadcast on television on March 19, 2019 that he was stepping down with immediate effect. In 2015 he had been re- elected for another five years, with a solid 97.7 per cent majority, but he was not going to complete the term.
When I travel around and give talks on Sovietistan, I am often asked what I think will happen to the countries of Central Asia. And that is a very good question. But, to paraphrase Peter Hopkirk, the author of The Great Game, I am neither bold enough nor foolish enough to attempt an answer.