Part III - Vaclav Havel's speech, January 1, 1990
Part IV - Ivan Klima - The Spirit of Prague
Here are some excerpts from Ivan Klima's wonderful collection of essays "The Spirit of Prague". Klima's a great novelist, too. I highly recommend his work. Here he talks about Prague itself, he talks about Havel, about Kafka, about the "velvet revolution". Don't miss these excerpts, and check out that book if you ever get the chance.
Klima on Prague:
The Prague of past eras is gone. No one can bring the murdered back to life, and most of those who were driven out will probably never return to the city. Nevertheless Prague has survived and has, finally, tasted freedom again. Its spirit is intact as well. This manifested itself vividly during the revolution that opened the way to freedom in 1989. Revolutions are usually marked by high-sounding slogans and flags; blood flows, or at least glass is shattered and stones fly.The November revolution, which earned the epithet "velvet", differed from other revolutions not only in its peacefulness, but also in the main weapon used in the struggle. It was ridicule. Almost every available space in Prague -- the walls of the buildings, the subway stations, the windows of buses and streetcars, shop windows, lampposts, even statues and monuments -- were covered, in the space of a few days, with an unbelievable number of signs and posters. Although the slogans had a single object -- to overthrow the dictatorship -- their tone was light, ironic. The citizens of Prague delivered the coup de grace to their despised rulers not with a sword, but with a joke. Yet at the heart of this original, unemotional style of struggle there dwelt a stunning passion. It was the most recent and perhaps the most remarkable paradox to date in the life of this remarkable city.
Klima on Kafka
What you call the dream world was, for Kafka, the real world -- the world in which order reigned, in which people were able to grow fond of each other, make love, raise families, be orderly in all their duties -- but for him, with his obsessive truthfulness, this world was unattainable. His heroes suffered not because they could not realize their dreams, but because they were not strong enough properly to enter the real world, to fulfill their duty.The reason Kafka was banned under communist regimes is explained in a single sentence by the hero of my novel Love and Garbage: "What matters most about Kafka's personality is his honesty." A regime that is built on deception, that asks people to pretend, that demands external agreement without caring about the inner conviction of those to whom it turns for consent, a regime afraid of anyone who asks about the sense of his actions, cannot allow anyone whose veracity attained such fascinating or even terrifying completeness to speak to the people.
If you ask what Kafka meant to me, we get back to the question we somehow keep circling. On the whole Kafka was an unpolitical writer. I like to quote the entry in his diary for 2 August 1914. "Germany has declared war on Russia. -- Swimming in the afternoon." Here the historic, world-shaking plane and the personal one are exactly level ...
Kafka's metaphors were so powerful that they far exceeded his original intentions. I know that The Trial as well as "In the Penal Colony" have been explained as ingenious prophecies of the terrible fate that befell the Jewish nation during the war, which broke out fifteen years after Kafka's death. But it was no prophecy of genius; these works merely prove that a creator who knows how to reflect his most personal experiences deeply and truthfully also touches the suprapersonal or social spheres. Again I am answering the question about political content in literature. Literature doesn't have to scratch around for political realities, or even worry about systems that come and go; it can transcend them and still answer questions that the system evokes in people.
This is the most important lesson that I extracted for myself from Kafka.
Klima on Havel
Havel's candidacy for president and his later election were, in the first place, an expression of the precipitate, truly revolutionary course of events in this country. When I was returning from a meeting of one of the committees of Civic Forum [the organization Havel formed in November, 1989, to investigate police brutality] one day towards the end of November, my friends and I were saying to each other that the time was near when we should nominate our candidate for the office of president. We agreed then that the only candidate to consider, for he enjoyed the relatively wide support of the public, was Alexander Dubcek. But it became clear a few days later that the revolution had gone beyond the point where any candidate who was connected, if only by his past, with the Communist Party, was acceptable to the younger generation of Czechs.At that moment the only suitable candidate emerged -- Vaclav Havel.
To a certain sector of the Czech public, Havel was, indeed, more or less unknown, or known as the son of a rich capitalist, even as a convict, but the revolutionary ethos that seized the nation brought about a change of attitude. In a certain atmosphere, in the midst of a crowd, however civil and restrained, an individual suddenly identifies himself with the prevailing mood and state of mind, and captures the crowd's enthusiasm. It's true that the majority of the country shared in the doings of the former system, but it's also true that the majority hated it just because it had made them complicit in its awfulness, and hardly anyone still identified himself with that regime which had so often humiliated, deceived and cheated them.
Within a few days, Havel became the symbol of revolutionary change, the man who would lead society out of its crisis.
Klima on fear and power
If power becomes so total that it can commit any arbitrary act, can falsely accuse anyone, arrest, try and sentence him for imaginary crimes, confiscate his property, his job, his freedom and, on top of it all, publicly dishonor him with insults, then fear can also become so total that almost none of those things need actually be done to maintain it. The powers that be need only occasionally demonstrate that they are willing and able to behave arbitrarily. We live in a world in which the powerful govern by means unlike anything humanity has ever known. They can control and exterminate individuals and entire peoples. As long as these means exist, our world will remain a world of fear.The fear that sleeps in the beds of the powerless gives a strong impetus to their dreams and their actions. The powerless person longing to escape his anxiety usually sees only two ways out: to flee beyond the reach of the hostile powers, or to become powerful himself. Fear engenders dreams of power.
...Power is soulless and it is derived from soullessness. It builds on it and draws its strength from it. Soullessness keeps company with fear. People who have given up their souls have only a body, and it is the body they are terrified for ... People who have not given up their souls can overcome fear because they know that in the end, fear comes from within and not from without. The person who has let anxiety from the external world replace his soul can never drive out his fear. Anyone who has defended his soul, his inner integrity, and is prepared to surrender everything, to risk even his freedom of movement and, in extreme need, even his life, cannot be broken by fear and is thus beyond the reach of power. He becomes free, he becomes a partner of power, not as a competitor in the struggle for control of the country, people and things, but as a living reminder of the mendacity and the transcience of everything power defends and represents ...
A person who, out of inner need, consistently stands up to the powerful, risking everything, has a single small hope: that by his actions, he will remind those in power where that power came from, what its origins are and what their responsibility is, and perhaps he will make them a little more human.
Klima on the 1968 invasion
The invasion of my country in August 1968 was a singular act in modern history: it was the only time a foreign country had intervened militarily in the peaceful affairs of a neighbor to which it was allegedly tied with bonds of friendship. The invasion was, of course, traumatic for most citizens ... But the shameful nature of the invasion indelibly tarnished all those whose intention it was to renew the old-style totalitarian power.As I have said, the appearance of being cultured and civilized is particularly important in Czech lands, where centuries of national and cultural repression have made culture, and especially literature, popular and highly respected. The powers-that-be needed poets to cloak their intentions and actions in verse ... But they needed them pliant, or even broken ... The powers-that-be were usually able to win over a part of the intellectual elite through promises, bribery, concessions and sometimes even by force.
But how could a power that was indelibly tarnished win them over? It could not. It sensed its own isolation and therefore decided to use compulsion. The early 70s were a turning-point for both the powers-that-be and for Czech culture. The regime decided to break those who, in their eyes, represented that culture, even at the cost of destroying the culture altogether. For their part, the members of the intellectual elite decided that they would rather be destroyed than have anything to do with this indelibly tarnished power.
Klima on the 1989 velvet revolution
The authorities frequently used police brutality to break up memorial assemblies to commemorate the country's national holiday or the memory of Jan Palach ... Those who came to pay their respects to a person who symbolized the possibility of individual protest taken to its furthest extreme became the object of a violent attack by special units who used truncheons, water-cannons and tear-gas. People, mostly the young, decided not to give way to violence.For 5 consecutive days the peaceful assemblies were repeated, and on four occasions the police used violence to break them up. Several people were arrested, Vaclav Havel among them.
During these events, which aroused the emotions of the whole country, the cruel truth about power was publicly revealed for the first time. At this critical juncture, the government could not find a single person with sufficient authority to address the nation. No one was willing to give public support to the regime, but many could be found to protest against police brutality, against imprisoning the innocent. Among the protestors were actors, filmmakers, and writers who, until then, the regime had believed to be on "its side".
In this critical situation, the authorities -- and it is hard to say whether this was out of stupidity or desperation or arrogance, or the awareness that they were indeed indelibly tarnished -- refused all invitations by the cultural opposition to take part in a dialogue. The deep chasm between totalitarian power and all the "shaken", to use Patocka's term, became unbridgeable. It was clear that any further error, any further act of arrogance, might be fatal.
What happened in November 1989 is well known. As an eyewitness and a participant, I wish to emphasize that this revoltuion, which really was the outcome of a clash between culture and power, was the most non-violent revolution imaginable. In the mass meetings attended by up to three-quarters of a million people, no one was hurt, not a window was broken, not a car damaged. Many of the tens of thousands of pamphlets that flooded Prague and other cities and towns urged people to peaceful, tolerant action; not one called for ciolence. For those who still believe in the power of culture, the power of words, of good and of love, and their dominance over violence, who believe that neither the poet nor Archimedes, in their struggle against the man in uniform, are beaten before they begin, the Prague revolution must have been an inspiration.
Amen!
Vaclav Havel made a speech on January 1, 1990, immediately following all of the extraordinary changes which had occurred in his country. This speech along with many many others made it into the book I have of "Speeches of the 20th Century".
The first time I read it, I was sitting on a crowded subway. By the end, tears were rolling down my face. In retrospect, I think that is hysterical. If anyone noticed I was crying, I am sure they would never have guessed the reason - and would have thought I was insane if they had asked:
"Ma'am, are you all right? Why are you crying? Did your boyfriend break up with you?"
"Oh ... uh ... no. I'm crying because of Vaclav Havel's speech to the Czech people in 1990."
".....Oh..."
Havel's speech, broadcast on the radio, set the tone for all that was to follow. It is referred to as "the contaminated moral environment" speech. After decades of double-speak, decades of being lied to by their own government, decades of muffling their true sentiments, Vaclav Havel stood up and told the truth. He had been preparing for this moment since the 1960s.
And that's another thing. We, as human beings, can recognize truth when we hear it. We know when we're being lied to, deceived. Truth is unmistakable, and Havel knew that. And Havel did not let the Czech people off the hook - another reason why the "velvet revolution" was so amazing. It was not about pointing fingers, screaming, "YOU DID THIS TO US". Havel encouraged the Czech people to take responsibility in their destinies, to take responsibility for having endured the tyranny for so long. The "contaminated moral environment" is not only addressing the Communist regime. He addressed that comment to every Czech person who had tolerated living under tyranny. No passing the buck, no blame. Take responsibility.
Imagine. How many leaders ever speak to their people in such a way? This speech is one of the myriad reasons that Vaclav Havel is one of my political heroes.
Quotes from his extraordinary speech - (the last line makes me want to cheer):
But all this is still not the main problem. The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore each other, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility, or forgiveness lost their depth and dimensions, and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous ...
The previous regime -- armed with its arrogant and intolerant ideology -- reduced man to a force of production and nature to a tool of production ... It reduced gifted and autonomous people, skillfully working in their own country, to nuts and bolts of some monstrously huge, noisy, and stinking machine, whose real meaning is not clear to anyone ...
When I talk about contaminated moral atmosphere ... I am talking about all of us. We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all -- though naturally to differing extremes -- responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery; none of us is just its victim: we are all also its co-creators ...
We have to accept this legacy as a sin we committed against ourselves. If we accept it as such, we will understand that it is up to us all, and up to us only, to do something about it. We cannot blame the previous rulers for everything, not only because it would be untrue but also because it could blunt the duty that each of us faces today, namely, the obligation to act independently, freely, reasonably and quickly ... Freedom and democracy include participation and therefore responsibility from us all.
If we realize this, then all the horrors that the new Czechoslovak democracy inherited will cease to appear so terrible. If we realize this, hope will return to our hearts ...
In the effort to rectify matters ... we have something to lean on. The recent period -- and in particular, the last six weeks of our peaceful revolution -- has shown the enormous human, moral, and spiritual potential and civil culture that slumbered in our society under the enforced mask of apathy. Whenever someone categorically claimed that we were this or that, I always objected that society is a very mysterious creature and that it is not wise to trust only the face it presents to you. I am happy that I was not mistaken. Everywhere in the world people wonder where those meek, humiliated, skeptical, and seemingly cynical citizens of Czechoslovakia found the marvelous strength to shake from their shoulders in several weeks and in a decent and peaceful way the totalitarian yoke...
There are free elections and an election campaign ahead of us. Let us not allow this struggle to dirty the so far clean face of our gentle revoltuion ... It is not really important now which party, club, or group will prevail in the elections. The important thing is that the winners will be the best of us, in the moral, civil, political and professional sense, regardless of their political affiliations ...
In conclusion, I would like to say that I want to be a president who will speak less and work more. To be a president who will ... always be present among his fellow citizens and listen to them well.
You may ask what kind of republic I dream of. Let me reply: I dream of a republic independent, free, and democratic, of a republic economically prosperous and yet socially just, in short, of a humane republic which serves the individual and which therefore holds the hope that the individual will serve it in turn. Of a republic of well-rounded people, because without such it is impossible to solve any of our problems, human, economic, ecological, social, or political.
People, your government has returned to you!
This is mercilessly long. Just a little heads-up. It's the story of Czechoslovakia throughout the tumultuous 20th century.
World War II
But all of that became meaningless with the outbreak of World War II. Czechoslovakia's location was disastrous for them. I mean, in actuality, their location was strategically fantastic for them in other times. They sat right on one of those most significant land routes in Europe, which was all very good for shipping goods in and out, for their military to move in and out, for trade to travel. But with all of Europe gone to hell, Czechoslovakia was caught right in the middle.
Look at a map of Czechoslovakia, and take a look at the countries surrounding them (at the time, Slovakia was part of the nation though, of course). It is obvious how trapped they were. It is like they are trapped in a vise: Germany chomping on them to the West like a big Pacman, Austria yawning beneath them like quicksand.
Czechoslovakia had millions of German-speakers, who got caught up in the nationalistic fever happening in the Pacman-country to the West. They wanted to join their country-men. They NEEDED to join their German countrymen. Hitler agreed. This is the whole "Sudetenland German" problem. The first terrible moment of appeasement.
The Munich Agreement, the betrayal of the Allies
And this is where Czechoslovakia was sold down the river in the Munich Agreement in 1938. Hitler demanded that the Sudetenland be returned to him. And then (famous last words): "That will be my last demand! All I want is the Sudetenland!" It was given to him. Czechoslovakia was handed to Germany by the countries of Europe.
There was a Czech underground, there were protests, there was some preparation for going head-to-head with Hitler all on their own, since the big leaders of Europe seemed willing to let them be chewed up and spit out. Europe basically said to Czechoslovakia in the Munich Agreement, "Buh-bye. We are feeding you to the lions. Sorry. We just can't fight this guy." Most of the Czech intelligentsia were killed (and this is very important to remember: resistance in Czechoslovakia has always been at the hands of the intellectuals). So the Germans, of course, knew this, and all of the intelligentsia were shipped off to concentration camps or just killed outright.
Ivan Klima, a Czechoslovakian writer was sent to a concentration camp as a small boy. There is a wonderful collection of his essays called The Spirit of Prague which I'm going to quote from later. He's awesome. He can describe the experience of living under a totalitarian fascistic regime, using no theory, no abstractions.
But anyway. Onward.
The Germans leave, the Soviets arrive
In 1945, the Czechs were rising up against the German forces, war breaking out, mini-battles, fighting for their lives. With no help from the Allies, who had abandoned them in the Munich Agreement. Meanwhile, the Soviets were closing in on them from the east.
On May 5, 1945, the Czech resistance in Prague rose up so fiercely against the Germans, that the German troops retreated out of the country. By that point, the German army was a rag-tag bunch of terrified starving soldiers, trying to do their best for the Fuhrer, but losing, losing, losing. They had already lost. This was a big victory for the Czechs, but then, on May 8, 1945, three days later, the Soviets rolled into town.
Under the Soviet umbrella
Czechoslovakia was established as an independent state in the Soviet sphere. There were large-scale deportations of German and Hungarian populations. The Germans who were deported following World War II, are still, to this day, demanding the return of their property. The country was permitted the freest multiparty democracy in Eastern Europe. This was mostly because there was genuine sympathy for Communism already existing in Czechoslovakia. In Czechoslovakia you didn't see the kind of harsh enforced Communism the way you saw in Poland or Lithuania or many other places.
An interesting factoid that I pulled off the CIA website (and take these statistics - like all statistics - with a grain of salt): the religious breakdown in the Czech Republic goes like this:
39% atheist
39% Roman Catholic
4% Protestant
That really stood out for me - I haven't encountered any other country in the Factbook with religious statistics like that, and so it got my attention. Atheists are tied as the largest religious group in the country. If this number is true, then it would make sense that the Communists didn't have as tough a time. In other countries, seriously Catholic countries like Poland, atheism had to forced down the people's throats, and the Poles fought back HARD against this. Catholicism was an essential part of their identity - it was the receptacle of their collective spirit. This intensified with Pope John Paul II - a Pole. They looked to HIM for guidance, not to the Politburo. The Communists, to punish the Poles, would turn their cathedrals into "Museums of Atheism". This would not have outraged the Czechs as much as it did other more religiously faithful countries.
They had elections in 1946 and the Communist candidates won the majority of the popular vote. This was one of the only instances where a country occupied by the Soviet Union willingly chose Communists to run their country. But by 1948, with the economy still suffering, the country going bankrupt, support for Communism was definitely waning.
The Communists could feel that they might be losing their grasp, so in 1948 they organized a coup d'etat, and seized absolute power, through the unions and the police. And Czechoslovakia fell. And fell. And fell.
After 1948
It soon became one of the most repressive regimes in Eastern Europe. People imprisoned, executed, sent off into exile, sent off to prison camps, the gulag ... All dissent was squashed, through fear and terror. Only the intellectuals kept the identity of Czechoslovakia alive. Only the intellectuals tried to keep the Czech language alive. Only the intellectuals tried to maintain the memory of the country. Everybody else was cowed. Beaten.
Then along comes:
The 1960s
Czechoslovakia started waking up. I suppose it must have been the tenor of the times, but there were other factors as well. The 1960s was a fever, spreading all over the world. The Czechs experienced a cultural awakening, they started remembering who they were.
But along with the Zeitgeist of the time, a lot of this awakening had to do with who was in charge of the country: Alexander Dubcek. He was a Communist, he was one of the founders of the Czech Communist Party actually. But he had different ideas from Moscow. He began making moves to liberalize the country. He wanted to end censorship. He wanted to open up dialogues again. His motto was: "We will show the world Socialism with a Human Face." Socialism with a Human Face. He wanted to prove to the world that Communism need not be synonymous with Dictatorship. He dismantled any vestige of a personality cult around himself (a necessity for all other Communist leaders). He promised the Czechs "rule of law".
It's hard to imagine what it must have been like for the people of Czechoslovakia at that heady time. I can only try. I can only read what they write, the memoirs of that time - Kundera, Klima, Havel, and others. Hope rising up, happiness, freedom, being able to SPEAK, being able to feel like they are joining the rest of the world again, after decades of repression, hope, hope, all of this hope coming from their LEADER. Who seemed to hear what they were saying, expressing their own desires.
All of this was going on without the blessing of Moscow. Dubcek, a die-hard Communist, assumed that the Soviets would not care. He trusted the leaders in Moscow. He underestimated them.
He, maybe even more than the Czech people themselves, was devastated by what happened next.
1968: The Prague Spring
The Prague Spring refers to the cultural awakening coming to a real head through the early months of 1968. There was a sense of possiblity, of hope.
Moscow was alarmed by what was going on in Czechoslovakia. They had no interest in promoting Socialism with a Human Face. Freedom of the press means that people can criticize the regime, can criticize Communism, and if people can criticize then the cracks in the entire facade will widen. Moscow felt that they must have an unbroken Red Wall of Unity to present to the rest of the world. Nobody can deviate from the party line.
Moscow demanded that all of the Warsaw Pact allies participate in an invasion of Czechoslovakia to crush Socialism with a Human Face, to crush what was also called "the Czech Experiment". (An interesting sidenote: Nicolae Ceausescu, dictator of Romania, refused to join in the invasion, and because of that, the West LOVED him, and ignored the fact that the man was a villain, a despot, a crackpot. He was wined and dined all over the West for not stepping in line with the rest of the Warsaw Pact, and hailed as a maverick leader. Yeah, he was a maverick all right! So maverick that he starved his own citizens in order to built dams, he turned off heat and electricity in the middle of the winter so he could pay back the country's debt ahead of schedule, he criminalized birth control ... you remember those horror images of starving Romanian orphans strapped to their beds in the late 1980s? That's his doing.)
In early August of 1968, the entire leadership of Czechoslovakia was flown to Moscow, to be scolded by Brezhnev. Actually, no, it wasn't a scolding. He was warning them. "Cut this shit OUT." Dubcek (a real hero) refused to cut the shit out. Dubcek refused to turn his back on his ideas that Socialism did not have to mean cruelty and tyranny. He would not denounce the Prague Spring. But Dubcek still did not believe that Moscow would invade. He did not believe that Moscow would turn on him. And so - in a way - he was brainwashed by the Politburo as well.
On the night of August 20-21, 1968, the Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into Prague and took the city back by force. By the next day, 58 people had been killed.
Wenceslas Square, in Prague, was the focal point of the resistance to the Soviet invasion. (See the movie "Unbearable Lightness of Being" for an incredible look at what it must have been like.) Chaos. Horror. Grief. And utter betrayal. The "Czech experiment" was over.
The world was horrified. But nobody did anything. Nobody stopped it. The Czechs, once again, were thrown to the wolves.
Dark dark days ahead.
The Crackdown
After the invasion, Gustav Husak was responsible for whipping the country back into shape. He himself had been a victim of Stalinist repression and had spent 8 years in prison. That, to me, is one of the most insidious things about such tyranny: the persecuted become the persecutor. Nobody escapes.
Husak whirled through the country like a tornado. He did a major purge of the Czech Communist Party, getting rid of anybody who might have sympathized with the idea of Socialism with a Human Face. Anybody who might even be on the FENCE about it was gone. And major Stalinist hard-liners were brought in to replace them.
And once again, nothing changed in Czechoslovakia until 1989 when everything fell apart in two weeks time.
The country was completely closed off from the rest of the world. Prague became a Communist backwater, as opposed to one of Europe's premier cities. Nobody could travel, nobody could leave. Censorship was imposed. All liberalization programs introduced by Dubcek were cut off.
Oh, and what happened to Dubcek?? The father of Czechoslovakian Communism was forced to resign, obviously, in 1969, and then he was kept under house arrest from 1968 until 1987. And he wasn't allowed to communicate, or write, or let the Czech people know he was alive, and still around. The Communists, in the words of the Mafia, "disappeared" Dubcek. I am so glad they didn't "disappear" him forever, because once the Soviet Union started collapsing, suddenly Dubcek emerged again, and the Czech nation was able to express, openly, to him just how much he meant to them. Just how much they appreciated his sacrifices. How much, basically, that they loved him. Nobody had heard from him in decades. They thought he was dead. And then ... like a ghost ... he came out from house arrest, accompanied by Vaclav Havel, and the people of Czechoslovakia, waking up once again, could not believe their eyes. Dubcek! The man who tried to set them free! His emergence made them remember who they were. And then they fought back like hell, and toppled the house of cards. At last.
1968 - 1989
But up until 1989, the Czechs suffered under a hardline Stalinist regime. Who knows what was going on in the privacy of Czechoslovakian homes, but on the outside: they became a drab backwards silent Communist country. The borders closed, the trade unions shut down, everything got very reactionary, and extremely rigid.
GLASNOST
Gorbachev's idea of glasnost was a huge threat to Gustav Husak. Husak LIVED in the shadow of the 1968 invasion. He did not want the humiliation of Dubcek, being rejected by his former Communist friends. Husak refused to take on glasnost as a concept, even though Gorbachev was encouraging all of his "clients" to do so. Husak held on, and held on tight, to the old way.
And again, it was as though the Czech people were under a cloud. Glasnost did not infect the Czech nation. The 1968 invasion had been so devastating, so painful.
The only people protesting, and demanding that Husak start adopting glasnost, were the intellectuals. The writers. Vaclav Havel, most of all. Vaclav Havel had been there the whole time, stirring up shit, creating human rights organizations, writing plays, getting arrested, getting in trouble ... but it was never enough to make the population, as a whole, rise up. It was more like a "cafe" revolution. Tortured intellectuals talking about a better world over cups of coffee, while outside, all the normal people slogged off to work, unaware, uncaring.
As the astonishing changes started sweeping through Eastern Europe, during 1988 and 1989, the Husak regime became more and more alarmed. Their response was to crack down harder and harder, isolate their country even more. Idiots. You can't keep out life!
Oh, and I forgot to tell about one important thing:
Jan Palach ... and what he meant
The year after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, in 1969, Jan Palach, a young student in Prague, burned himself to death in the middle of Wenceslas Square to protest the invasion of his country. He killed himself on January 16, 1969.
In the years after, the decades after, nobody was ever allowed to memorialize Palach. People would secretly gather together on the day of his death to remember him, but any public sentiment of mourning for Palach was punishable with prison time. This was one of Havel's raison d'etres: every single year he would stage some sort of public memorial service for Palach, and every year he would get arrested. But this never stopped him, this never shut him up. Palach WOULD be remembered.
Today, the spot of his death is marked with a cross and a plaque. People every year gather around to remember this martyr for the cause of a free Czechoslovakia.
So back to glasnost.
Glasnost 1988, 1989
Suddenly, unbelievably, during 1988 and 1989, without Moscow's "permission", without Husak's "permission", Czech people started flaunting forbidden things: the Czech flag, photos of Dubcek, photos of Palach. They were, in the words of Havel, "behaving AS IF they were free in an unfree nation". It was a quiet rebellion, though. No demands for change were made, and Husak had created an environment that barely let the Czech people breathe on their own.
On November 17, 1989, the Communist youth movement in Prague organized a demonstration, a peaceful demonstration, to memorialize 9 students killed by the Nazis in 1939. A peaceful crowd of 50,000 people gathered. Mostly students and intellectuals. The workers of the country remained slumbering. Rip Van Winkle. The Husak regime brutally crushed this peaceful demonstration. 500 people were beaten by the police. 100 people were arrested.
And this, suddenly, was the spark. The straw. The galvanizing moment when the entire Czech nation woke up. When the entire Czech nation suddenly HEARD what Havel had been saying for so many years, and stepped in line beside him.
Instead of crushing the rebellion, the regime, through its own actions, exploded it into an inferno.
The Velvet Revolution
Let me try to describe it to you from an uber-perspective, so you can get just how fast this all happened. It stuns me.
In 1988: Czechoslovakia remained a place of repressive calm. The only loudmouth was Vaclav Havel. And nobody was listening, except for people in the West. His own country ignored him.
In 1989: a movement began, a student movement. The students began calling for a change in government, they began calling for change.
Oct. 1989: 10,000 students demonstrated, calling for change. There was a massive show of force from the government. Heavily armed police put down the demonstrations, and the tyrants stayed in power. (Here's something else: by December, 2 months later, the entire Communist Party in Czechoslovakia had resigned. I mean, this is stunning. But I get ahead of myself.)
Nov. 17, 1989: The memorial demonstration for those killed by the Nazis, people arrested, people beaten ... This was the spark I have spoken of.
The days following Nov. 17: Instead of backing down, the students kept demonstrating. Every single day. Every single day the crowds got larger, and larger, and larger. The students, the intellectuals, kept begging the workers to join them. They needed their support. It was a difficult fight, it took a lot of persuading over the days following Nov. 17, but the workers, so long asleep, finally left their jobs, went on strike, and joined the students. Constant demonstrations. Husak had no more authority.
More in November, 1989, it was a big month: Vaclav Havel, at the forefront, created an organization called the Civic Forum, to investigate charges of police brutality on November 17. He was relentless. And every day, the crowds got bigger. And louder. Vaclav Havel not only was calling for investigations, he was also calling for the entire Communist Party to resign.
And...
on November 24, 1989 They did. The entire Politburo resigned, in one shot.
From November 17 to November 24 is just 7 days. Unbelievable.
AND: (it gets better, it gets even more breathtaking)
On December 29, 1989, Vaclav Havel is elected president of the new free Czechoslovakia. And Dubcek emerged from hiding, at Havel's side, and was elected speaker of the national assembly.
A peaceful transition of power. A so-called "velvet revolution". The Communists basically gave up, and walked away.
There was not one casualty in Czechoslovakia, following the Nov. 17 demonstration. Compared to other countries in Eastern Europe, this is phenomenal. A tribute to the Czech people, I would say.
In 1993, the nation experienced what they called "a velvet divorce" from the Slovaks. They split into two national components: the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Havel was president of Czechoslovakia for 10 years. He stepped down in February of 2003, and Vaclav Klaus is now the President. The Czech Republic is now a member of NATO, and were invited to join the EU in 2002. It is expected that they will be ready to join in 2004. Their economic policies have been working for them, and they have made an amazing economic recovery, after decades of Soviet mismanagement. Tourism is booming. The industrial base (completely decrepit and outdated through the years of Communism) has been updated, and is functioning at a very high level. There are goods to buy, the cities are blossoming, Prague is back. They've still got problems, of course. Every country does. They suffer from severe pollution, much of the land was destroyed during the decades of Communism, there's a lot of crime ... but these are the basic problems for every city. The Czech Republic has joined the world again.
It's one of my favorite stories of the 20th century. The story of their "velvet revolution".
Per my dad's request, here are my "Czech Republic" pieces, hijacked over from my old blog.
To all the historian readers I have - please feel free to interject at any time - and let me know if my interpretation is faulty, or if I'm missing certain elements. I am not an expert. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
Also - I have a love for Czechoslovakia, primarily through its art - a deep love - and so I am completely biased, and this may color how I talk about things.
Let me know if this is the case!
This first piece is on the long history of what is now called The Czech Republic.
This first essay takes us up to World War I.
Back in the day
Czechoslovakia has never stayed in the same form for too long.
In the 5th and 6th centuries, the Slavs arrived in this region. The various tribes adopted Christianity soon after and eventually cohered into an empire. An empire that didn't last very long. It was called the Great Moravian Empire, and had its glory days from 830 to 906. It was a large empire, encompassing areas in Germany, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Silesia and Bohemia. Silesia and Bohemia are now regions in the Czech Republic.
At the end of the 9th century, the Czechs seceded from this empire to form the country of Bohemia. (A country named Bohemia clearly would eventually elect Vaclav Havel as president.) But the Czechs still were factioned off into little tribes, squabbling tribes, without any unification. So it was very easy for King Otto I (King of Germany) to stroll into Bohemia in 950 and conquer them. Bohemia was incorporated into the Holy Roman Empire, but still: King Otto gave the Bohemian prince (Otakar I) at the time the right to some degree of autonomy (again: this is a theme which also comes up again and again in Czech history) and self-rule. The son of the Bohemian prince (Otakar II) was more ambitious than was expected of him: he tried to claim for himself the title of Holy Roman Emperor, and he also tried to proclaim himself King of the Czechs. This all happened during the middle ages, the 1200s.
Otakar II was doomed for disappointment. The imperial crown instead went to Rudolph Hapsburg, which ushers in a whole new phase in Czech history.
The Hapsburgs were strong rulers. Tyrannical to some, benign to others. It was an empire, after all. The Czech people were subjects in this empire, subjects with a long memory, a memory of a grand past, when they had princes and kings. This past is symbolized (to this day) by Prague Castle, an undeniable reminder of the greatness of this nation once upon a time. During the long drab years under Soviet rule, their borders were closed off, and they were completely cut off from the rest of the world. But there ... in Prague ... was their castle. The memory of the country contained in its borders; the Soviets could not erase that memory, even though they tried.
Under the Hapsburgs, Bohemia flourished. They had strong protection from the empire, and so were able to blossom, and experience a Golden Age, since they didn't have worries about self-defense or keeping enemies at bay. Prague became one of the most important cities in Europe.
Moving along in history...
I know a lot of huge stuff went down in the 14th and 15th centuries, but it gets confusing, and I am not too sure of my facts, so I will not be vague, and pretend I understand it all.
I know there were revolutions, I know there was some sort of mass religious reform movement which alarmed the Catholics, and caused a lot of problems. The status quo of Catholicism in Europe was threatened by the reform. And then along came the Hapsburgs again. The Hapsburgs were, of course, a Catholic empire.
The Czech nation came under the Hapsburg sphere again in the 1500s. The Hapsburgs made promises to the Czechs, and did not follow through. (This is yet another theme in the story of Czechoslovakia.) They said that they would have religious tolerance for minorities, they promised freedom, and they also promised the Bohemian royal families that they would maintain their royal privileges. None of this occurred. The Bohemian Royal Estates revolted against this, violently. Two Hapsburg officials were pushed out of a window, and plummeted to their deaths. This event sparked the Thirty Years War. Well, no. That is an exaggeration. There was a hell of a lot of religious turmoil swirling all across Europe at that time. And THAT was what sparked the Thirty Years War ... but the Bohemians were so rebellious, and so angry, and actually killed some of the Hapsburgs, so the Hapsburgs felt they had no choice but to crack-down, and crack down HARD, on the pesky little Czechs.
But the real issue in Bohemia, is that the Hapsburgs wanted to stomp out Protestantism, squash it like a bug.
Like I said: I am tearing through this story. I am missing a lot.
The Thirty Years War
This war was crushing to the Czechs.
Here's a quote about what happened (one of those interminable quotes I collect - sometimes I remember to write down where it came from, sometimes I do not - This one, unfortunately, is un-attributed):
The Austrian Habsburgs had failed in their efforts to increase their authority in the Empire and to eradicate Protestantism, but they emerged from the war stronger than before. In Bohemia, they had stamped out Protestantism, broken the power of the old nobility, and declared the crown hereditary in the male line of their family. With Bohemia now firmly in their grasp and with their large group of adjoining territories, they were ready to expand to the east in the Balkans, to the south in Italy, or to interfere once more in the Empire.
So in the end, the Czechs lost everything. They lost all of their rights. They lost all of their hard-won freedom. They lost their property. They also then were put through forced Catholicization and forced Germanization. The Hapsburgs (again: sometimes benign, sometimes tyrannical) wanted to wipe out the concept of Czech national identity. They wanted to erase the individuality of the Czech people off the map forever. This was devastating. And they nearly succeeded.
What is so incredible, and hopeful, is that it did NOT succeed. You cannot do that to people. You cannot. They will, no matter what the hell you do to them, remember who they are, and where they came from. Sometimes, the worse the tyranny, the stronger the cultural memory. Milan Kundera writes about that so well.
But here's what's even more incredible:
After the Thirty Years War, the Hapsburgs kept Bohemia under such a strong thumb that nothing changed in that country for THREE CENTURIES. I mean, of course, people grew up, got married, died, had fun, cried, built buildings, tore buildings down. But I'm talking about evolution as a nation. That completely stopped. They were beaten. Defeated.
The Hapsburgs won.
Until ...
The mid-1800s
Tracy Chapman may think that revolution "sounds like a whisper", but the year of 1848 was a year of shriekingly loud revolutions, which caught on like a brushfire, leaping across borders, igniting in first this country, then that one. Not a hell of a lot of whispering going on. Empires, monarchies - all going up in flames.
Bohemia got caught up in it, too, despite the lead cloak of the Hapsburgs. They began to buck against the authority (the Czechs seem to have a talent for that). They may LOOK like they are being compliant, but underneath it all: they are ready to explode.
I read a great quote from Vaclav Havel about his many years living under Soviet oppression. And of course, he was a big loud-mouth trouble-maker, writing inflammatory plays (none of which were allowed to be performed in his own country), creating human rights organizations, ignoring the ban on public meetings of more than 10 people. Vaclav Havel, at one point, decided to "behave AS IF he were free, in an unfree nation". He was arrested countless times, he was constantly followed, spied upon ... but he behaved AS IF he were free. This seems to me to be a talent of the Czech people.
Anyway. Back to the story.
Slowly, slowly ... the Czech people began to contemplate being a free and independent state. This desire percolated for many years, as the Hapsburg Empire slowly deteriorated.
All of that ended when Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian student, stepped out of the crowd one day in Sarajevo and assassinated the heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Of course, this was the shot heard round the world. The shot that began World War I.
History was about to speed up again for the Czechs. Only to come to a shrieking halt once more.
Here are all my blitherings about Hungary, compiled:
This post is a simple version of the Hungarian revolt against Soviet Russia in 1956, the revolt which had such long-lasting implications, in terms of its effect on the psyche of Hungarians.
This is why, as the edifice cracked in the late 1980s, demonstrations commemorating fallen heroes were such a massive deal in all of the countries of the Soviet bloc. Heroes whose names had been erased from the public record, heroes the Communist Party wanted to wipe out of people's memory banks ...
The 1956 revolt in Hungary cost an estimated 30,000 lives.
The Soviet Army tried to control the protests, the demonstrations. They cracked down on the journalists, the academics, the students ... all to no avail. The revolt kept escalating, gathering speed and momentum.
The year was 1956. The Cold War was in full bloom. The Communists were not going to give an inch. So the Soviet Army feigned a withdrawal from all the hotspots in Hungary. People noticed the troops were gone, they noticed that they were no longer being watched and persecuted. So they relaxed. The dissidents and loud-mouthed intellectuals and journalists came out of hiding.
And on November 4, 1956, the Soviet Army launched a surprise attack and crushed the uprising, decimating the opposition. The tanks rolled through Hungary, terrorizing the population. There were Stalinist show trials, tons of people were hanged and tossed in unmarked graves. People were forced to rat each other out, people were tortured, murdered, executed. The spirit of Hungary was crushed (temporarily), along with the revolution. It's like the country went into a deep depression after that, a clinical depression which lingered, and lingered, and lingered.
Moscow then secretly put Janos Kadar in full charge of the country. He had actually been freed from prison by Mr. Nagy. Kadar dominated Hungary from 1956 until 1988, when he was deposed. It sounds to me like he was a Soviet puppet.
The long-delayed funeral service for Nagy in 1989 was one of the sparks which lit the match which ignited the entire world of Eastern Europe to throw off the Communist dominators. You cannot obliterate a people's memory. You cannot tell them who to care about. You cannot say, "No no no no, Nagy really wasn't for YOU ... he was a pawn of the Communists ... Love KADAR...LOVE KADAR." People are NOT that stupid.
I am thinking of Iran. The Shah (the last Shah, anyway) could not make the Iranian people love him and get behind his plans for their country. No matter how hard he tried, he had not captured the hearts and minds of his people. You cannot fake the kind of devotion and mania the Iranians had when Khomeini returned to Iran. This sort of devotion can be dysfunctional, and terrifying, like all of the Aryan youths marching around screaming "Heil, Hitler!", or it can take on a more benign form.
Imre Nagy, the prime minister of Hungary, a Communist himself!, did not want the country to be crushed and dominated by Communism. He did not want the citizens of Hungary to be dogged by secret police wherever they went. He stood up for them, he spoke up for them. He paid for this with his life. The Hungarians love him. He is their hero. Their voice.
The outpouring of love over 30 years later at Nagy's funeral was baffling to the Communist Party, which continued to try to control things in Hungary. But they were increasingly losing it. They refused to rehabilitate Nagy's memory.
But here is the New York Times article (or an excerpt from it), describing what happened at this memorial service in June, 1989.
Thirty-one years after he was hanged and his body thrown into a prison grave, Imre Nagy, who led the 1956 uprising against Soviet domination, was given a solemn funeral today ... The ceremonies were organized by the opposition, which worships the former Prime Minister as a national hero, but four leading members of the ruling Communist Party came to pay tribute ... The four top party officials ...left before a succession of eulogies to Imre Nagy that were unsparing in their condemnation of the Communist Party and its ally, the Soviet Union.Many in the crowd looked up in shock and seemed to be holding their breath to hear at so public a ceremony, in so sumptuous a setting, words of such astonishing candor ...
Victor Orban, a spokesman for the Federation of Young Democrats, paid tribute to Mr. Nagy as a man who, although a Communist, "identified himself with the wishes of the Hungarian nation to put an end to the Communist taboos, blind obedience to the Russian empire and the dictatorship of a single party." ...
Sandor Racz, who led the Budapest Workers' Council during the uprising and spent seven years in prison, condemned the Soviet Army and the Communist Party as "obstacles for Hungarian society". ... He said the party was "clinging fearfully to power," although it was clear that "what it failed to achieve in the last 44 years cannot be remedied now." He continued, "They are responsible for the past. They are responsible for the damaged lives of Hungarians."
Budapest experienced a day full of anomalies and contradictions. No state funeral could have been more solemnly and publicly marked or held in a more prestigious settling, but for the Hungarian Governemtn and the ruling party, Mr. Nagy and the four companions who were sentenced to death and now reburied with him remain traitors and counterrrevolutionaries...As recently as earlier this year, Mr. Grosz still ruled out Mr. Nagy's rehabilitation. On the 30th anniversary of the hangings last year, the police broke up with considerable violence a small tribute organized by dissidents on a Budapest square.
It was an anomaly also that the Soviet Union and Hungary's other Communist friends sent diplomats, but not their ambassadors, to attend the ceremony, although it had no official character that would have obliged them to be there. But other Communist countries -- China, North Korea, Romania, and Albania -- stayed away.
The Heroes Square ceremony was staged, in one more irony, by the son of another executed Communist, Laszlo Rajk, who was Interior and Foreign Minister. Mr. Rajk, a loyal Communist, was hanged after a show trial in 1949 at the height of the Stalinist period. The younger Laszlo Rajk, an architect and movie set deisgner, draped the neoclassical facade of the art museum and a tall column in the center of the square's vast expanse fully in black and white, traditional mourning colors among the Hungarians of Transylvania, annexed by Romania. He devised strikingly modern wood and metal structures as a setting on which to display the five coffins, as well as a sixth, empty one commemorating the more than 300 victims of judicial retributions after the uprising. Tall, flaming torches stood between the coffins, and a permanent rotation of honorary pallbearers -- including widows, children, and other relatives of the five victims being buried -- flanked them ...
Today, after the wreath-laying and eulogies, a procession of hearses, followed by cars and buses, set out for the huge public ceremony next to the prison where the hangings took place ... Beyond them, in an adjoining field full of mainly unmarked graves, a tomb had been dug for Mr. Nagy. His daughter had requested that he be laid to rest amid the bulk of those who paid with their lives for following his lead.
Two actors read in alphabetical order the names of the 260 victims, who were executed from 1956 to 1961, their occupations and their ages. At each name, a torchbearer stepped forward, held high the flame and replied, "He has lived in us; he has not gone."
When the name of one of the five was called, surname first, in the Hungarian fashion, like "Nagy Imre, Prime Minister, 62 years," his coffin was carried to the grave and a friend delivered a eulogy. Then, supporting one another, his nearest relatives stepped to the grave to put down flowers and stand, with bowed heads, allowed for the first time to mourn in public, together with those who share their grief.
Unbelievable.
After that funeral service, the power of the Communist Party continued to erode throughout the summer. The party leadership elected a four-man presidency, and then it stripped one of the four (who had succeeded Kadar as party leader) of all authority. The party liberals were rising, and suddenly: other parties outside the political system started sprouting up. Parties of dissidents, cultural activists, ecologists, cultural nationalists. These parties all started calling for pluralistic free elctions. They demanded that they occur in 1990. No more "some day", no more "we're working on it." It was 1989. They wanted the elections in 1990.
And indeed, elections were scheduled by 1990, and secretly the Communist Party members in Hungary began talking amongst themselves about how to liquidate the party's assets, and change its name (so they could participate in the free elections as well).
This post is made up of excerpts from Robert Kaplan's man-on-the-street reporting from the streets of Budapest. It is a mix of historical information, personal impressions, and quotes from a man he meets - Rudolf Fischer. Kaplan's books are never straight history, which is why I enjoy them, although they may be displeasing to history buffs because it focuses on the personal, and on somewhat anecdotal information.
I like the anecdotes. I like meeting the people of the country through Kaplan's eyes.
These excerpts are snapshots from that chapter.
Fischer unfurled his set of late-nineteenth-century Austrian army staff maps and a somewhat earlier German one. "These are the maps you must use at the start of your journey," he told me. "They are better than Cold War era maps. The maps before 1989 are, of course, useless. The Iron Curtain is still a social and cultural border. Do you know the real service provided by McDonald's in Hungary and the other formerly socialist countries? They are the only place where people -- women, especially -- can find a clean public lavatory."
Kaplan on the still reverberating echo of the Roman empire:
Very simply put, the split running through the Balkans between the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires to which Fischer referred reflects a much earlier division. In the fourth century A.D., the Roman empire divided into western and eastern halves. Rome remained the capital of the western empire, while Constantinople became the capital of the eastern one. Rome's western empire eventually gave way to Charlemagne's kingdom and to the Vatican: Western Europe, in other words. The eastern empire -- Byzantium -- was populated mainly by Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians, and later by Moslems, when the Ottoman Turks captured Constantinople in 1453. The border between the eastern and western empires ran through the middle of what after World War I became the multiethnic state of Yugoslavia. When that state broke apart violently in 1991, at least initially it echoed the division of Rome sixteen centuries earlier: The Slovenes and Croats were Roman Catholics, heirs to a tradition that went back from Austria-Hungary to Rome in the West; the Serbs, however, were Eastern Orthodox and heirs to the Ottoman-Byzantine legacy of Rome in the East.
Kaplan on the Carpathian Mountains:
The Carpathians, which run northeast of the former Yugoslavia and divide Romania into two parts, reinforced this boundary between Rome and Byzantium and, later, between the Habsburg emperors in Vienna and the Turkish sultans in Constantinople. Rudolf Fischer told me that the Carpathians, which were not easily traversed, halted the eastward spread of European culture, marked by Romanesque and Gothic architecture and by the Renaissance and Reformation.
A quote from Rudolf Fischer on the Carpathian Mountains and the divide between West and East:
"Romania -- because of the influence of the Renaissance and the Reformation in the northwest of the country -- had been more developed than Greece before World War II! It was only the Truman Doctrine -- $10 billion in American aid, in 1940s dollars no less -- that created today's westernized Greece. Let me go on in the same vein. The differences between the Hungarian Stalinist leader Matyas Rakosi and the Romanian Stalinist leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, and even more so between their successors, Janos Kadar and Nicolae Ceausescu, were the differences -- don't you see! -- between Habsburg Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey. Rakosi and Kadar may have been perverse Central Europeans, but as Hungarians, they were Central Europeans nonetheless. But Gheorghiu-Dej and Ceausescu were Oriental despots, from a part of Europe influenced more by Ottoman Turkey than by Habsburg Austria. That's why communism did less damage to Hungary than to Romania."
Fischer on the difficulty Hungary faces in escaping its communist past:
"Our whores in Budapest are Russian and Ukrainian; our money -- though it floats freely -- is still worthless in the West; our oil and gas are from Russia; and we have mafia murders and corruption just like in the countries to the south and east. Mafia shootings and the drug trade put pressure on the Hungarian government to make [entrance] visas compulsory for Romanians, Serbs, and Ukrainians, who are thought to be the culprits, but that will never happen, because it will separate us from the ethnic Hungarians just over the [Romanian] border. We are tied to the ex-Communist East, whether we like it or not."
Kaplan on the lingering effects of Communism in the Hungarian urban landscape:
...the hallway in his building was dark and untidy, like many that I had seen throughout the former Communist world, where decades of state ownership had given people no incentive to maintain property, an attitude that was changing slowly. There was, too, the building itself, and all the others in Fischer's neighborhood, whose unfinished look and poor construction -- plate glass and mustard-colored cinder blocks -- were more typical of buildings in formerly Communist Central Asia than those in Austria, just a two-hour ride away by train. The Berlin Wall may have fallen in November 1989, but for a traveler almost a decade later, its ghost was still present.
A conversation between Kaplan and Fischer about Hungary, NATO, and the EU:
Kaplan: "What about NATO? Will its new eastern frontier -- following the admission of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary-- mark the border of the Near East?" Fischer: "NATO doesn't matter. Only the EU is real. The EU is about currency, border controls, passports, trade, interest rates, environmental and dietary regulations -- the details of daily life -- which will change Hungary. For decades Austria was not part of NATO, but did you ever think of Austria as part of Eastern Europe or the Near East? Of course not."
Kaplan expanding on the new Near East:
Therefore, it appeared likely -- at least if the EU expanded into Hungary, Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Poland but took a decade to grant full membership to Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Turkey, and Russia -- that the Western alliance would be an eerie variation of the Holy Roman Empire at its zenith in the 11th century, and the split between Western and Eastern Christianity would be institutionalized once more, as it had been during the divisions between Rome and Byzantium and the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. The Near East would then begin on the border of Hungary and Romania. Completing the reemergence of this older map, Russia was now returning to the dimensions of 16th century Muscovy: a vibrant city-state within a chaotic hinterland.
A conversation between Fischer and Kaplan about the borders of Hungary:
Fischer: "Hungarians want to spiritualize the frontiers -- that is the word that they use here."
Kaplan: "You mean they want the borders to be filters: to protect, but not to divide."
Fischer: "Perhaps. What the Hungarians really want is to let ethnic Hungarians from the east into Hungary, but nobody else."
Fischer on modern-day Europe:
Fischer then railed against the "modern age" in Europe, in which democratic stirrings in the late 19th and early 20th centuries strengthened ethnic nationalism, while industrialization strengthened the power of states. The result was the collapse of multiethnic empires like Habsburg Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey and the rise of uniethnic powers like Germany and of nasty tribal principalities in the post-World War I Balkans, though they were in some cases called parliamentary democracies. Even the 1848 democratic revolutions in Central Europe, it seemed, were not so pure; they were based on ethnicity as much as on liberal ideals, and in Hungarian (Magyar) areas, at least, were opposed by the minority Croats, Serbs, and Romanians. For Fischer, with his background, the modern age had meant "Magyarization campaigns" and other forms of "ethnic cleansing", crucial to the establishment of petty states tyrannized by ethnic majorities.
A personal story from Fischer's past which illuminates the problems with Hungarian nationalism. It is the story of what happened to him on his 21st birthday, September 17, 1944:
"Because my father and I had fled Romania when World War II broke out and managed to get visas to Australia, I was in the Australian army on my 21st birthday. My commanding officer had given me a short leave. Thus, I spent my birthday alone, walking in the Australian countryside and thinking about who among my family and friends back in Transylvania were alive or dead. What had happened to them? Soon after the war, I learned that on that very day, Hungarian soldiers shot the entire Jewish population of Sarmas, a village east of Kolozsvar, in Transylvania. Those poor people. They had thought of themselves as Hungarian. They spoke Hungarian. They had managed to survive five years of fascism without being deported to concentration camps. It was as if they had been miraculously forgotten while every kind of horror reigned around them. Then their own Hungarian soldiers appears in Sarmas, and what did they do? They herded all the Jews into pigsties for several days and then took them to a hill and massacred them. Within the Holocaust, there were many little pogroms. This is why I remember so vividly walking alone in Australia on my 21st birthday. Because the memory of it was preserved by what I later found out had occurred on that same day in Sarmasu. You see, Robert, Hungarian nationalism, Romanian nationalism -- they're all bad. The boundary formed by the Carpathians was benign compared to these modern nationalistic boundaries, because the Carpathians divided empires within which peoples and religions mixed. I am a cosmopolitan. That is what every civilized person must now try to be!"
Fischer says to Kaplan: "We are going for a walk. I have something to show you which you must see before you start on your journey.":
Near Orczy Square, in the far-off southeast corner of Budapest, we came to an immense hodgepodge of metal-framed stalls and greasy canteens set up in abandoned Russian railway cars. I saw Chinese-manufactured high-top running shoes on sale for the equivalent of ten dollars, sweaters for four dollars, socks, clocks, jackets, cell phones, shampoo, toys, and just about any other necessity -- all cheap and made in either Asia or formerly Communist Europe. Many of the goods were Russian. The food at the canteens was Turkish. The merchants were Chinese, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, and other Central Asian nationalities, but mostly Chinese. i noticed bus stops for destinations in Romania and other points east, but never west. Hungarian policemen were ubiquitous, for there had been several murders here recently. Nobody was well dressed."People in Budapest call this place the Chinese market," Fischer told me. "It grew in the early 1990s, after the Soviet Union collapsed and China loosened travel restrictions on its own citizens. It is a real caravansary." Chinese families dominated a vast underground trading network that provided cheap goods for the overwhelming majority of people in Eastern Europe, who could not afford the new Western-style shops. Here, any language worked. Commerce was the great equalizer. "Yes, it is a bit violent, with gangland killings," Fischer said. "But is it any different from the backstreets of Odessa one or two hundred years ago, where my Jewish ancestors and yours were carrying on much as these people do now?"
"This is all I have to show you, Robert," Fischer concluded. "Remember that the Iron Curtain still forms a community. Just look at this market. Over four decades of the most comprehensive repression cannot be wished away in a few years." Fischer guided me onto a tram and rode with me for a few stops. "It is good that you will be passing through Transylvania. Ah, so much to see there," he said, his voice full of longing. Then he stepped off the tram and waved good-bye by lifting his walking stick.
This post is about the world-wrenching events of 1989, and Hungary's role in all of that.
The Berlin Wall came down in November. But that mind-blowing development was created by a crisis in Hungary. A crisis for the Communist Party and for the Soviet Union in general.
Basically, the edifice of the Communist Party had been crumbling for awhile, and suddenly, in a matter of a year, there was no mask left. Nobody cared, nobody listened to them anymore. There was no belief in the power of the Communist Party. It was a paper dragon. The slaughter in Beijing, under the eyes of the visiting Gorbachev, had something to do with it, but it also was a fever which spread across the world, in all places at once. Lech Walesa and Solidarity, the massacre of demonstrators in Tbilisi ... every single country began to explode, and the Communist Party was completely ineffective in dealing with all of these crises. There would be no Prague Spring this time. No one listened to the mouthpieces anymore. No one feared the Paper Dragon.
And here is what the Hungarians did: Let me make sure I get this straight:
For decades, Hungary was a popular vacation spot for people from behind the Iron Curtain. It was a summer "resort" spot, with lakes and cabins (as opposed to a wintry Alp-type atmosphere.) Knowing the holiday season in Hungary is important because it was when everyone started returning home for their vacations in late August, early September 1989, that everything started changing, cracking, accelerating.
East Germans and West Germans would use Hungary (a relatively open and relaxed Communist country ... as opposed to the more Stalinist Romania, or the wacky militant Bulgars) as a meeting spot in the summer months. Families would be reunited, would have vacations together on a yearly basis, and then return to their respective homes, on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain.
For forty years, the Hungarian border guards were fierce about making sure that the East Germans returned to East Germany. The border with Austria was one of the toughest and most harassing in the world, because it was the place where you could escape. Austria represented Europe, and the West. Hungary was Communist, so the poor East Germans didn't have a chance to escape because everybody had their eye on them. First of all, they were hated because they were Germans, part of the country that started two World Wars. Second of all, they were from a divided country. They still had enormous family connections on the other side of the wall. Of course they wanted the wall to be taken down, so that they could be with their relatives again, see their families again. This was just the sort of tight family bond that the Communist Party frowned upon. And the situation in Germany was extremely volatile because of this. The Berlin Wall did not make things easier for the Communists. It made things worse.
So anyway. Back to Hungary.
Hungary had a treaty agreement with East Germany, signed in 1968, saying that they would not permit East German citizens to travel to the West via Hungary.
And then suddenly, in the early autumn of 1989, the foreign minister of Hungary (Gyula Horn) decided to ignore his treaty obligations. He did so without any permission from Moscow, without any discussion with the politburo. This is just incredible.
But here's what led up to that autonomous decision which changed everything. What is so incredible is how quickly the massive Communist structure toppled. The rot within was so extensive. The East Germany refugee crisis was in September1989, the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, and it all was over by summer of 1991.
Phenomenal.
Hungary decided to let some of the East German refugees pass through to the West with their families and the border guards turned a blind eye. At first. So this is in itself incredible, and goes to show you how much things had relaxed, how the power had been crumbling bit by bit - until in one fell swoop, it no longer existed. But what began as a small trickle of people exploded, and quickly, into a massive refugee crisis. Once people heard that you could get to the West easily through Hungary, they all basically packed their bags, left East Germany, and poured into Hungary. This was an incredibly embarrassing situation for the Communists in Moscow, and for the politburo in Hungary. What should they do? There were thousands and thousands of people suddenly crushing up against the border with Austria. Tens of thousands of refugees. And this was not a refugee crisis of the kind we are accustomed to - poor bedraggled people, huddled in tents on a windy plain. These people were young, educated, and supposedly the future of the Communist Party.
Here's a quote from Michael Dobbs' great book Down with Big Brother:
Unbeknownst to either man, the foreign minister of Hungary made a decision, in the privacy of his Budapest home, that led inexorably to the fall of the Berlin Wall less than three months later. Gyula Horn was grappling with the kind of excruciating moral and political dilemma familiar to many Communist reformers that summer. Over the past few months Hungary had been transformed into a holding pen for tens of thousands of East German refugees. Very few were political dissidents. For the most part they were young people, fed up with the austerity of life under communism and the never-ending snooping of the secret police. They had given up on their dogmatic Communist leaders, who seemed allergic to the very idea of reform, and were voting with their feet. From Hungary they wanted nothing more than safe passage to the bright lights of capitalism in West Germany. "There is no future for us in the East" was a common refrain. The foreign minister had to decide whether to let them go or keep them penned up in the Communist East.
Now this is amazing: Yes, Hungary had this treaty with East Germany. Hungary did fear that the hard-liners in Berlin, in Moscow, would come down on them fiercely if they broke this treaty and let the refugees go through. Czechloslovakia's "Prague Spring" in 1968 had been a warning to all Communist countries everywhere of what could happen if you started ignoring Moscow.
HOWEVER: a few months before Hungary filled up with East German refugees it had also signed an international agreement pledging freedom of travel, and also "humane treatment" of refugees.
So this was Horn's dilemma. He knew the whole world was watching his country's behavior because Hungary had signed this international agreement, stating its commitment to human rights. Hungary was a Communist state. Was it possible for a Communist country to protect the human rights of its citizens, as well as people "visiting" their country? Beijing was an obvious debacle in this regard. The world was still shocked, stunned, and devastated (one more descriptive term, Sheila??) by the massacre in Tienamen Square. There had been hope that the Chinese government was changing: allowing the students to speak out, allowing forums on democracy, etc. But once they were confronted by an actual revolution, they crushed it like a bug.
Would Hungary go the same way? Would Hungary reveal itself to be as hypocritical and as afraid as China? Would it honor its agreement with Moscow? Or would it honor its agreement with the world?
Horn (a hero in my book) decided, on his own, without getting permission from the powers-that-be in Moscow, to stand by the international human-rights agreement, and NOT the agreement with East Germany.
Another quote from Dobbs:
After a sleepless night, pacing up and down his sitting room, the 57 year old foreign minister made up his mind. He decided to abrogate the treaty with East Berlin and let the refugees go. Hungarian leaders had earlier taken the precaution of informally testing the waters with Moscow. The Soviets appeared to have no objection."There was no other way," Horn recalled later. "We had to look for the humanist solution, no matter what sort of conflict might arise. It was quite obvious to me that this would be the first step in a landslide-like series of events."
And he was certainly correct. East Germans fled their own country in droves. They piled into Hungary, poured out through Austria, and then poured into West Germany to be reunited joyously with their families. This directly led to the Berlin Wall coming down a couple of months later.
"We had to look for the humanist solution, no matter what sort of conflict might arise" said Horn. God bless him. He may have acted out of a sense of his own political survival, and not out of any lofty goal. But still - in an uber sense, he did the right thing.
Unfortunately, my notes about Hungary start in the 800 ADs, and then skip to World War I. My apologies for that. One of the many cool things about doing this whole "Country of the Week" thing is that I get to see what I don't know, and the obvious gaps. I have no idea what Hungary was like in between the 10th century and the 20th century, and that's a pretty huge freakin' gap.
Here are a couple of general points about Hungary:
Hungary had always been way more influenced by Habsburg Austria than by Ottoman Turkey.
Hungary has a large Calvinist population, mostly in the eastern part of the country. Hungary also has a large Catholic population. Robert Kaplan describes the interesting (and potentially volatile) relationship between these two faiths, and also how these faiths have manifested themselves in Hungary in areas like economic development:
"In the mid-sixteenth century Debrecen [a city in eastern Hungary] was a hotbed of the Reformation, and Catholics were forbidden to settle. Here, a Calvinist college was established and local Calvinists made a pact with the ruling Moslem Turks to provide for the town's security. But the so-called Prussian work ethic did not invigorate the Calvinists of Debrecen. 'In eastern Hungary, Calvinism has been mere conservatism and fatalism, yet another element of ethnicity surrounded by religious walls, proscribing innovation,' Laszlo Csaba, a Hungarian economist and social critic, had told me in Budapest. It has always been the Catholic areas of Hungary that displayed economic dynamism. (Csaba had added that the 'Prussian work ethic,' based partly on Protestantism, was also misunderstood. 'The Prussian work ethic was not entrepreneurial, but fitted to bureaucracy and mass industrialization. It functioned only if somebody else supplied the jobs and told people what to do. In a postindustrial entrepreneurial age,' he continued, 'don't expect the formerly Prussian parts of Germany to be economically impressive. Budapest and the rest of Hungary are closer to Catholic Munich than to Prussian-Protestant Berlin, and in a new Europe of region-states, the region oriented toward Munich may be stronger.')"
Now, this is just me personally, but a paragraph like that completely turns me on. I can read it 10 times in a row, and I have, and still feel like I have only scratched the surface of what is going on. I have my eye jammed up against a tiny hole in the wall, trying to see the whole world beyond. And I have only that paragraph to go on. It is just one man's interpretation of events - but it provides me with avenues of inquiry, it tells me some of the right questions to ask.
In the next post, I'll talk about Hungary's role in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Before the Berlin Wall ever came down, Hungarians were already dismantling the empire in their own country. In a very sneaky and entrepreneurial way. Very cool.
More essays from the "Country of the Week" thing I did on my old blog. Here are the other essays, for those of you new to me, or for anyone who is interested.
I had done a bunch of them, focusing on Turkmenistan, Macedonia - and I got a random email from someone: "Could you do Hungary?"
Uh ... Could I "do" Hungary? In what way, might I ask?
But anyway, I took on the challenge.
All errors of facts or interpretation are my fault, if any come up.
This is a long way of saying geography is destiny.
It makes a lot of sense if you check it out on a map. I actually just spent 15 minutes searching the Web for a good topographical map of the area, and came up lacking. Frustrating. If you have access to a globe, just look at Hungary, and look at the inverted "C" of the Carpathians, cutting a swath through Romania. See how those mountains block Romania off from surrounding areas, and also see how the Great Plain on the eastern side of Hungary runs right up to the Carpathians, spreading upwards into the foothills of the mountain range, leaving the plain open to the north.
Such a simple thing, but crucial to the development of nations. A huge open plain, surrounded by a curving mountain range, with foothills to the north, provided easy access to the nomadic tribes and wandering people in the Middle Ages and before. This is how Hungary was born.
In 896 A.D. (how in the world do people come up with such specific dates??) seven "Magyar tribes" entered what is now modern-day Hungary, through the Great Plain, after being on the move for more than a thousand years. The Magyars are the ancestors of Hungarians. Who were they? To be honest, I'm not sure. Please feel free to illuminate me. Here is all I know, and this is basically regurgitated from one of my books: In the 9th and 10th centuries, the Magyars, along with the Finns, were the first Ural-Altaic peoples in Europe. (Those are two regions in Siberia, by the way.) They were horsemen of the Asian steppe, distantly related to the fantastic Uighur Turks. I have an endless fascination with these ancient little-known equestrian tribes.
The Magyars spent a thousand years migrating from the western edge of Siberia. Who knows why. They passed through the Caucasus, where they encountered Bulgars and Turks before coming in to Hungary.
Here is one of the things I have picked up about the Magyars. They had a genius for assimilation. Their culture was enormously flexible and expansive. Well, perhaps "culture" is not the correct word for a tribe who basically lived on their horses, with no country to call their own, without even the concept of "country" or "nation-state" in their collective consciousness. But this assimilative talent is very important to keep in mind, if you want to understand Hungary and present-day Hungarians. It seems that the open intelligence of the Magyars, their willingness to transform, their willingness to add words to their language taken from the Bulgars and the Turks, is one of the keys to the character of Hungary today.
I love that. The thought that an ancient tribe's personality can course through the culture of the generations to follow, 600 years later. It seems to me that this view may not be a very politically correct one, but it also seems to me to be true. Why else would my heart rise up out of my chest when I hear the beat of a bodhran or the sound of Uilleann Pipes? Why else would the stamp of riverdancing feet make me feel like I am remembering something? I personally did not grow up in Ireland, I was not part of a Celtic tribe, I cannot speak Gaelic ... but there is something familiar about the entire thing. I go to Ireland and there is something about it that feels like home. Is this just a trick of the mind? As in: I know that my ancestors are Irish and so I relate to the Irish experience? Maybe. But I think that that is just part of what is going on. Perhaps it's a Jungian view of the world. That there is such a thing as a collective unconscious. In my case, I tap into the collective Irish unconscious in a way which does not feel intellectual, or analytical, or understood in any normal way. It is like a memory. Only these memories are not my own, personally. They are of "my people".
Tangent over.
Anyway, what is known of the Magyars is that they had a genius for evolution and assimilation. They came to Europe from Siberia, they were primitive people who lived on their horses, who were buried with their horses, and within a century, a CENTURY, had completely adopted European manners, and a European mindset. This is extraordinary. A century is a blip on the radar screen of history. But the Magyars accomplished this. They must have been an amazing people.
Hungarian is a Finno-Ugric language, with many words of Turkish. A bizarre mix, and it is one of the legacies of the nomadic Magyars.
The Great Plain of Hungary had been important long before the arrival of the Magyars. Way earlier, it had been the northeasternmost frontier region of Rome, and like all frontier regions, it was filled with chaos and conflict. The order provided by the Roman empire dissolved a bit the further away you got from the center, and the Great Plain was filled with tribes, fighting for supremacy.
The Magyars were not the first tribes to pass through this area. For centuries, nomadic tribes with fascinating ancient names (Scythians, Huns, Avars, Tartars, Kumyks) migrated here. But they did not have the staying power of the Magyars, who arrived, settled in, and prospered. These other Central Asian tribes came, left a genetic imprint of one kind or another, and then disappeared off the face of the earth.
I love the idea that ancient history is a better guide to current events than the major newspapers of our day. Apparently, in Hungary now, Inner Asian studies has become enormously popular, because the country (after decades of crushing communism) is now interested in understanding its ethnic roots.
The other thing I have mentioned here which continues to be important in Hungary today, is the topography of the country. It is a small and very flat country. Budapest is in the center. Because there are no physical barriers (like the Carpathian mountains in Romania) it makes it very easy for ideas, movements, influences to move out from Budapest into the rest of the country. Things like Western investment (now a big big deal in Budapest) is fanning outwards, and the entire country is benefiting.
Take a look at Romania - again, on a globe if you have one. You can't get topographical maps online, obviously. Romania is filled with enormous mountain ranges, cutting one side of the country off from the other, and the rest of it is thick forests. It must be incredibly beautiful, but perhaps it makes it difficult for Romania to cohere. Eastern and Western Romania may as well be two different countries.
Hungary remains open, assimilative, flexible, expansive. Maybe partly due to the ancient Magyar culture coursing in the collective unconscious of the country to this day.
That's just a guess, though.
I will close with a couple of quotes from Colin Thubron's book Among the Russians. (It's part of his awesome Russian trilogy. Other titles in this trilogy: In Siberia and The Lost Heart of Asia.)
Among the Russians was published in 1983, and it was based on Thubron's travels through Russia (western Russia), Georgia, Armenia, Latvia, Estonia, and the Ukraine. The Soviet Union was still a behemoth at the time, albeit a rotting one. But all of these countries were still under the thumb of Moscow.
Thubron drove around these countries in his car, camping in camp sites, and talking with people. It's kind of a depressing book, actually. There is next to no intimation of the cataclysmic changes which would rock the world a mere six years later.
And more than anything - you can feel the lingering shadow of Stalin.
The entire Soviet system is just maintaining. Like that joke about all of Russia on a broken train, and the Soviet leaders pull the shades down and demand that everybody on the train pretend that they are still moving.
The first describes Thubron's vodka-soaked experience at one camp ground in Zaporozhye, in the Ukraine. He ends up hanging out with a group of 20 year old students. Music is playing, and he dances with one girl:
She was a 19 year old student from the local polytechnic ... She looked embarrassed and lost. "You're English?" She jigged in my arms with her head turned away, blushing. "You're not really English?" She answered my questions in rushed, flat monosyllables. The polytechnic was quite nice. Dancing was all right. Zaporozhye was quite nice. But I wasn't really English?I settled with the students round our table, talking about poetry; one was eloquent on Blok, another passionate about Yesenin. Albert got fed up. He tried to join in, but he was irreversibly of the Jack London generation. In a moment, I thought, he would quote Burns. "They're just students," he said. "They don't know anything. They've no experience of life." And they seemed indeed to be of a different race. Alternately my gaze focused on them and on Albert through the deepening pool of my inebriation. I was not sure if I were looking at a generation gap or at some other, deeper human division. "You're my guest," Albert mumbled, "not theirs ..."
They were gentle with him, as with a child. They refused to take offense. His petty vanities and ritualized hospitality seemed to be as foreign to them as to me. When his talk turned crassly to politics, they deflected him. "No, no, no," they said. Politics threatened differences; they were less important than the flesh and blood of my presence. When Albert tried to force drinks on me, they tactfully dissuaded him.
I was dimly aware that I was witnessing two Russias. I hoped that one was the future and the other the past, although even in my drunkenness I realized that nothing was as simple as that. Yet Albert was typical of his deprived generation. He was practical, tough, and narrow. To him these others were too pampered and easy. They were, I sensed, apolitical. He resented them; and they, in turn, looked on him not only with the old Russian respect for seniority but with a feeling that he was somehow irrelevant, and belonged to a world of absolutes which was forever past.
"They're too young," he said.
I'll take a couple of more quotes from his book, on the major cities of the Ukraine (it's very interesting, especially for an armchair traveler like myself).
On Odessa:
I imagined the gossipy pre-Revolutionary port which I had read about somewhere: the Grrek, Jewish, and Italianite cosmopolis with its polyglot interchange of wares and ideas, its tang of French architecture. But morning disclosed a city quieter, tamer, more uniform. Its trade, once the highest in the Soviet Union, has been deflected to the satellite port of Ilyichovsk ... leaving Odessa becalmed among its 19th century streets and plane trees. It rises above the sea in terraced avenues fringed with old business houses ... The Odessans show an old humor and entrepreneurial cunning. One in every three families is employed by the sea, and a desultory life still revolves around the cafes.
On Yalta:
Once these shores were the evening playground of the tsarist aristocracy. Their lush slopes gleam and bristle with the architectural fancies of western Europe and the Orient. But now the palaces have been turned into sanatoria for the people (as inscriptions on the base of every Lenin statue remind you). Confections in the Moorish or Ottoman taste, overblown Swiss chalets and Renaissance palazzi, sprout and ramble among parklands or botanical gardens fat with oak and arbutus ... Yalta itself has doubled its size in twenty years; but its alleys still twine through a 19th century heart of parks and verandahed mansions, and its quay tinkles with a children's funfair; while higher inland, in a stone house and a garden jungly with lilies, Chekhov wrote The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard.
On The Crimea:
The Crimea, like the Caucasus, is darkened by a displaced people. On a thin suspicion of collaboration with Germany, its two hundred thousand Tartars were deported en masse to Central Asia by Stalin in 1944, and their role in the partisan fight against Nazism was systematically distorted or suppressed. In 1967 the charges against them were withdrawn; but thousands had already died in the hardship of exile, and their efforts to filter back into the Crimea have been harassed ever since.
On Kiev:
Kiev, "the mother of Russian cities," still keeps the unrest, the size and a trace of the refinement of a great capital. From the 9th to the 12th centuries it was the heart of a Russia which flowered in the sunlight of Byzantium, standing where the Dnieper headwaters gathered the Viking traffic before flooding south united to the Black Sea. Now, on one bank, the apartments sprawl in a colder-than-usual rhetoric -- within 15 years the population has doubled to two and a half million -- while opposite, where the Church of St. Andrew rises like a trumpet-blast from the old city, the boulevards are plump with spaced gardens and parklands ...Kiev is still the capital of the Ukraine, and was a strategic lodestar for the Germans in 1941. War memorials reach a deafening crescendo: mounds of immortality, obelisks of glory, parks of eternity. I noticed more than ten which had been built as late as the 1960s and 70s. Russians and Germans between them destroyed much of the central city, and in the rambling complex called the Monastery of the Cross, once Russia's holiest shrine, the 11th century cathedral was reduced to a shattered body upholding a single dome. Far down the monastery's gardened slopes, a covered way plunges to a little square and a church. The place has been disused for two decades. Nothing gives you to expect what is coming. But within the church the plaster-smooth walls suddenly close around the monks' catacombs. For hundreds of yards, past dimly gleaming chapels and down water-dripping steps, the corridor beetles and bifurcates through a ghastly mausoleum. Robed in white silk, their faces covered by purple velet or black embroidery and their feet slippered in silk, the abbots lie in their glass-topped coffins, with a single claw-like hand exposed on the breast. The cell-shrines are stacked with bones. Blackened skulls gape in their powder or leer from glass jars. Eight centuries of skeletons and mummified cadavers lie in their niches, hung with anti-religious plaques -- the intolerance of Marxism hounding them even in their dust -- until the defiled labyrinth washes you up again before the church's tarnished icon-screen...
You would not know, from its exterior, that Kiev's cathedral of Haghia Sophia contained a pure 11th century core, built at the zenith of Russia's early power...Inside, the Byzantine glory breaks like an ocean in wave upon wave of fresco and mosaic, embracing for ever the divine and earthly order of things, engulfing arches, pillars and galleries in its petrified and self-existent splendour. In the dome hovers the soft mosaic presence of Christ the Ruler... He looks unfit to rule...
The tourist groups were attending doggedly to their guides, and were being dealt a Marxist interpretation of theocratic art ... Once this Byzantine world had exercised so profound an appeal to the Russian spirit that despite all persecution its decline would be inexplicable had not its power so clearly been deflected into a new redemption on earth. Sometimes in the past months I had almost envied this entirety of vision. Now, wandering in the forest of pillars, I felt old and alienated ... And as I walked through these aisles of faded certainty, it seemed that after even the most tragic failings had been counted, despite the public tyranny and private dissimulation, the travestied history and the sallow men on the edge of crowds, there yet remained a bruised grandeur about this race who could still dream, however faintly, of a perfectible community on earth.
But all around me the frescoed ancestors of this foolishness were thinning away. The blemished saints and Church fathers no longer held the heart and gaze. They were draining back into the paster, into their unimaginable centuries.
"It was just superstition," a guide said. "Primitive daydreams..."
Thubron was tailed by the KGB his entire time in Kiev. He was afraid to visit the friends he had there, because it would have gotten them into trouble. His room was searched, his diaries gone through. He writes:
It seems foolish, in retrospect, that Kiev should be so contaminated for me. I thought it a handsome city, but it remains discolored in my mind. I remember staring into foodshops whose stock was wretchedly little and expensive: in one only a heap of decapitated chickens, in another some crates of aubergines. And this was the capital of the Ukraine, of the Black Earth!
Thubron meets up with Julian in the Crimea. Julian lives in the Ukraine. He is Russian. They travel together for a couple of days. This final anecdote brings tears to my eyes.
It was our last evening. He had bought a bottle of Caucasion dessert wine -- we never normally drank much together -- and we celebrated a somber farewell. From time to time his gaze wandered uneasily to the restaurant television. "You've heard the news?"It came non-committally from the television announcer: the outbreak of war between Iran and Iraq.
We stared at one another, wondering where the Soviet and Western governments would stand, what we would be told to feel. "It looks like Moscow and Washington are hanging back," Julian said. "It's not time for us to report for duty." He tried to laugh. But we touched glasses unhappily, as if already clothed in invisible battledress. The news had momentarily reduced us.
"Sometimes I think of my father," Julian said, "and of that whole war generation, and I think: 'Let the dead bury their dead.' " He grimaced. "Is that in the Bible or Longfellow?" Then out of his schoolboy memory, he began to quote Burns. I suppressed a moan as My Heart's in the Highlands came up. But the words rolled out of him with a kind of ponderous wonder, restoring the poem to itself ...
Dusk had turned to night, and the wine glasses empty. Above us, as we wandered back to our huts, the one crag stood out in moon-streaked solitude from the consensus of the rest. "In the Kruschev years, the golden years," Julian said, "I managed to buy a copy of Richard Aldington's Death of a Hero -- the book of a pacifist. Have you read it? It had a deep influence on me." We stopped in front of our hut doors. The noise of a radio sounded in the trees: Iraqi advance, Iranian casualties, American silence. We listened. "I don't know how to talk about our meeting like this" -- he was suddenly fumbling for phrases. "It's important, you and I ... like two people meeting in outer space ... " He ran his fingers over his face, as if to order its expression, his thoughts. Outer space. His country immaterial.
As we said goodbye, he clasped my hand and said, "If in some future time I see you in the sights of my rifle -- I'll miss."
"And I won't fire at all."
We laughed, but with deep emotion. I've never felt so brief a friendship more.
Another essay on The Ukraine, this one about the extraordinary events of 1991.
For example:
In January, 1990, thousands joined hands to celebrate that first independence in 1918. This would have been unheard-of, even two or three years before. But the tone of the world at that time was one of upheaval, change, hope. Countries breaking free of their chains. Pope John Paul ratified the structure of the Ukrainian Catholic Church.
Once we hit 1990, history starts speeding up again. After decades of silence.
In March of 1990, elections are held throughout the republic. The democratic opposition comes to power.
On June 16, 1990, there is a Declaration of Parliament stating that the Ukraine will be neutral and nonatomic.
In autumn of 1990, there were student strikes, and miners' strikes. The students were demanding the resignations of all the Soviet leaders (many who had been incorporated in this new government.) The country was sliding into chaos.
In August, 1991, there was the infamous coup d'etat attempt in Moscow. Which is interesting on 5,000 different levels, but basically what the coup d'etat did was reveal (once and for all) the indecisive incompetence of the leaders in Moscow.
The Ukraine decided immediately to choose its own destiny, and the Supreme Council proclaims the Ukraine's independence on August 24, 1991.
Since then, the Ukraine's executive branch has basically been taken over by gangsters. Many of the former countries of the USSR have nearly identical experiences following the collapse.
The governement is like a mafia. It embezzles cash. It manipulates elections, appropriates businesses, destroys the media, blackmails people it doesn't like. It's a netherworld of vaguely criminal activity.
More and more Ukrainians are emigrating.
I have to admit I don't know the steps in between 1990 and now, which would lead to this development (except for the fact that it's the same old story in all the former republics -- they have no experience with representative democracy, the Soviets crushed the infrastructure of the government, there is a power vacuum and so these gangster mafia types have a very easy time filling up the gap).
There is also the little matter of ethnicity and ethnic cleansing, which is such a common theme in these former republics. In the 1980s and the 1990s a virtual war was fought in the Ukraine over language. 350 years of Russification had obliterated Ukrainian. There was a ban on printing books in Ukrainian. Etc. Well, the Ukrainians started rebelling. There was a desire to get rid of all Russian. To go back to their roots.
A lovely theory, no? The only problem is is that there are millions and millions of Russians who live in the Ukraine, and who have lived there for generations, and who consider themselves Ukrainian. They speak Russian, but they think of themselves as belonging to the Ukraine, as well. The Ukrainians beg to differ. This is the same old "we belong here, you don't" bullshit which causes so much trouble all over the world.
It is like the colonists who ended up fleeing Angola when the revolution occurred. These were Portugese people, yes. They were the "colonizers". Whatever. These people had lived in Angola for generations. Angola was their home. But the natives disagreed and rode them out of the country on a rail. As it turns out, of course, the Portugese were the only people in the country who knew how to do the things which would keep a country running. But the natives weren't thinking logically. They were thinking ethnically.
So now, the Ukraine has been described as two countries: Eastern and Western. These two sides have almost completely different characters. None of this has been resolved yet, by the way. The nation has not cohered, or worked it all out. The current president, Kuchma, was re-elected in 1999 by intimidation and fraud. The Ukraine is losing it, quite frankly.
The Western side of the Ukraine belonged to Poland before the war. It is definitely more Ukrainian than the eastern side of the country. They speak Ukrainian here. The soul of the country and the people survived here, through the Soviet tyranny.
The Eastern side of the Ukraine is a different story, resting, as it does, right up against the Soviet Union. 13 million native Russians live here. The "Russification" campaign was brutal on the eastern side of the Ukraine. The entire Ukrainian intelligentsia was murdered by Stalin, in the 1930s, and, of course, the country has not yet recovered from that loss. It will take generations more.
Somehow, it's all been about Communism today. Along those lines - here are three short pieces I wrote about the Ukraine, on my old blog. Actually, the third piece is a compilation of excerpts from Colin Thubron's wonderful book Among the Russians.
The first piece is on the horrific famine in the Ukraine, engineered by the Soviets in the 1930s. My piece barely scratches the surface at all. Robert Conquest's book The Harvest of Sorrow is the most thorough explanation of exactly how this man-made famine occurred.
But for now:
Until 1917, the Ukraine was one of the world's tapestries of culture, religion, and language. Peoples overlapped here. Then the Bolsheviks conquered the nation. The Ukraine was one of the countries most severely damaged by Communism, the people were some of the most trapped and terrorized: mainly because the Ukraine was the most valuable commodity the Soviets had. The Ukraine fed the entire empire. There was no way on earth that the Ukraine would ever break free of the Soviet Imperium. They had no independence, no freedom of movement, no slack was ever given (like was given to some of the other more remote republics). The Ukraine was crushed like a bug under the thumb of the Imperium.
They declared independence in 1918, directly following being conquered. This was very short-lived, of course. And then the relentless crushing began.
The Great Famine was caused by the collectivization of the farms, a "program" (or a pogrom) implemented across the Soviet Union. Tens and tens of millions (this is not an exaggeration) died as a result of collectivization. And the world did nothing. Anne Morrow Lindbergh and Charles Lindbergh traveled to Russia in the middle of this great hidden famine. I have her journals from that time, and she writes in glorious positive terms about the "busy" Russians. She loved seeing everybody so "busy", so productive. She had never been in a country which had such industry, such commitment to public works. It's disgusting to read her journals now (at least her journals during World War II), because of 20/20 hindsight. They were willfully lied to. The happy productive Russians were trotted out for their benefit. And 200 miles away, the fields of the Ukraine were piled high with corpses.
In brief: collectivization began in 1929. Lenin was long gone. Trotsky was long gone. Stalin was now king. All of the USSR had to be moved off of their own little farms into kholkozes (collectivized farms). People were herded into barracks, there were armed guards around the peripheries, there were gates outside the collective farms with lovely slogans like: Work is Beautiful. Or whatever. Communist bullshit. The peasants resisted this move. They did not want to go. They hunkered down.
Stalin sent hundreds of thousands of people into the gulag, the massive prison camp structure he erected throughout Siberia, and none of these people were ever heard of again.
The rest of them he decided to starve out. This was a conscious decision. Public policy.
The famine began in 1930 and lasted seven years.
Moscow determined the quotas that each village had to deliver to the state. These quotas were purposefully greater than whatever the land could yield. Authorities confiscated everything that was edible. Schools were closed. Three year olds had to work in the fields, to try to squeeze the quotas out of the land. No one was allowed to leave the villages. People who tried were shot.
The main element of Ukrainian identity is the peasantry. The Ukrainian spirit resides in the peasantry. So Stalin had to destroy that peasantry.
In 1932, a terrifying edict came down called The Law of the Blade of Grain. It's a heartless law. One could be shot or sent to prison for life if one stole one blade of grain.
Meanwhile, the famine is reaching massive proportions. There were villages which resorted to cannibalism. There were not enough graves to contain all the dead. People lay in the streets, in the fields, in their own beds. Entire families dead from starvation in their own homes. Howling filling the streets, people crazed from hunger.
The Law of the Blade of Grain was Stalin's final screw. Outside each village were enormous grain fields. Every single blade of grain, due to the unrealistic quotas, was "earmarked" for Moscow. Within the village, people were starving. They had to work these fields, they had to harvest this grain which could conceivably save their lives and the lives of their families, but the punishment was not just severe, it was basically the end of your life. Nobody came out of the gulag. Soldiers and secret police were posted on watchtowers around the fields, to make sure nobody stole even ONE BLADE of grain.
Desperate mothers would send their toddlers into the field, to see if they could steal a couple of blades, in the hopes that their size would keep them better-hidden than an adult. Of course, many toddlers were shot dead because of this.
It is estimated that 30 million people starved as a result of collectivization and the Law of the Blade of Grain. This estimate may even be low.
Today, in the Ukraine, the collectivized farms still exist, but they are now abandoned. Derelict barracks, gates swinging on the hinges, peeling murals of sickles and clasped hands ... The ghost of the famine still exists in the Ukrainian psychology, in the same way it does in the Irish psychology, but it also exists because of these falling-down buildings haunting the countryside. Relics from that brutal time.
A compilation of all of the essays posted below on Uzbekistan.
I. The People
III. Bukhara
IV. Tashkent
V. The Aral Sea
VI. Uzbekistan Today
This will be my last piece on Uzbekistan. I just wanted to give a brief picture of what is going on there now, since I have spent so much time back in the dark ages with Genghis Khan and Tamerlane.
Islam Karimov is the president of Uzbekistan, and has been so since 1990, when he was elected by the still-in-power Supreme Soviet. It says a lot about who the people of Uzbekistan are that Karimov, emblematic of the old regime, a symbol of the Communist state which wrecked their country, continues to be elected as their leader. Other countries, Eastern European countries, (the Czech Republic is a perfect example) had purges of their entire government. Anyone connected with Communism at all had to GO.
Uzbekistan is not really a country yet, not really a nation. They don't know what it really feels like to be free citizens, to participate in the government of their country ... there is a disconnect between the leadership and the citizenry, which, of course, existed during Communism, but it continues today.
The regime in Uzbekistan is run by former Soviet-Brezhnev-style bosses, and Karimov heads up a sterile dictatorship which, so far, has kept the country from fracturing. Democracy would be useless here, at the moment, since there is no infrastructure, nothing set up to support and uphold democratic institutions.
Karimov is a very isolated leader. He came up through the ranks of the bureacracy, very much insulated within the Communist hierarchy. He is a Communist, for God's sake. What that means, in a practical sense, is that he doesn't understand economics AT ALL. He has been unable to help the country modernize, or integrate into world markets. He doesn't get it.
On the flipside, however, he is not averse to allowing businessmen come from all over the world to set up businesses here, to get things going. Some of the other "stans" take a "we can do it on our own" attitude (Turkmenistan), and because of that, their people are starving and ignorant. Uzbekistan at least has interaction with other cultures in this way. Karimov is also very authoritarian, very uncompromising. He doesn't really behave like a Western leader. His regime is very tribal. He looks out for his tribe. He sees the Uzbeks as his tribe, he is responsible for them. They need a strong hand.
Uzbekistan also has the worst human rights record of any of the former Soviet republics.
The police are completely corrupt. The mafia is everywhere. It is a completely unsafe place for Westerners to travel. Westerners have to shack up in the local fleabag hotel, and must carry all their money on them at all times, and never leave anything of value in the room, because it will not be there when they return. A Westerner coming to town is still a relatively rare thing, and word is out on the street in a matter of moments. The Westerner is prey, here. The criminal element is highly visible. Everyone is broke, poor, with no prospects, and many people are raging alcoholics. This is a powder-keg.
In the early 1990s, as I mentioned in another post, there was a mass exodus of Russians from Uzbekistan. The Uzbeks had harassed them into leaving. However, this had a result which could have been foreseen if the Uzbeks had thought about it at all: the Russians leaving decimated the ranks of professionals in the republic, and institutions and businesses were left empty, with nobody there who could train the Uzbeks, nobody knew how to do anything.
From their history, the people of Uzbekistan assume that the government is not there to serve them. They have no experience with representative government. They were not ready for nationhood.
Karimov's dictatorship became less severe throughout the 1990s ... but at all times it is a modern-day version of Genghis Khan's and Stalin's regimes of absolute power.
Some of the issues for present-day Uzbekistan:
Chaos is breaking out all around them. In Afghanistan, in Tajikstan. There is a worry in regards to Tajikstan, which has a massive Uzbek population. (Tajikstan is an ally of Iran, due to ethnic similarities, and Iran is a mortal enemy of Uzbekistan from way back when, when the Persian empire conquered them. People have very long memories here) The fear is that Tajikstan could become a base for Iranian influence in Central Asia. And Uzbeks fear that Iran is trying to promote a "Greater Tajikstan", which would include the millions of Tajiks in southeast Uzbekistan and 4 million in Afghanistan.
I've said this before and I will say it again: anytime any leader talks about wanting to create a "greater" anything, know that what that basically means is war and ethnic cleansing.
Uzbekistan is a bit of an expansionist threat itself. There are millions and millions of Uzbeks who live outside the borders. Uzbekistan covets territory in Tajikstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan.
Karimov, a secular man, uses the "Islamist threat" from Afghanistan as his rationale for authoritarianism. He refuses to countenance any organized Muslim piety, and persecutes Muslims. Which could end up being a big ol' boomerang, eventually, dressed up like a suicide bomber. In 1998, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan was formed, and they stated as their aim the overthrow of the Karimov government. So far this has not occurred, but it is a potentially very dangerous situation. Karimov becomes more authoritarian, the Islamic Movement becomes more vocal, there are more despotic crackdowns ... it is very bad and could easily get much much worse.
The whole place is chaotic, enigmatic, contradictory. The Communist rulers persist in power here, only they are under another name, the regime pays lip service to Islam and yet cracks down on militants, the economy has continued to loosen up, which is good, but there is absolutely no promise of democracy here. At least not yet.
I'll close with an anecdote from Colin Thubron's book The Lost Heart of Asia. Thubron visits the tomb of Tamerlane (the terrifying warrior of long ago who conquered the entire area, and made his capital in Samarqand). He has an encounter with a caretaker.
...from the emperor's skull the Soviet scientist Gerasimov painstakingly reconstructed a bronze portrait-head, before sealing Tamerlane back in the tomb. Under the sculptor's hands there emerged a face of hardened power, compassionless, bitter and suble. Perhaps some Slavic prejudice heightened the epicanthic cruelty of the eyes; perhaps not ..."He was a hero," said a voice behind me. I jumped. The caretaker had entered noiselessly and was looking down at the tumult of calligraphy on the slab. "What a history!"
"Perhaps he should have done less," I said.
"Less? No. Timur [Tamerlane] turned us into one country." He seemed light-hearted, but a reticent evangelism tinged him. "Yes, he was cruel, I know. People come to this grave from Iran and Afghanistan and they hate him. They say, 'He destroyed our land, he enslaved us!' And of course it's true. He smashed Isfahan and Baghdad." He smiled charmingly. "He was ruthless."
I said, "Ulug Beg might be a better hero for your nation."..
The caretaker laughed ... "He was only a teacher ... But Timur was world-class! If I was an Iranian, I'd hate him too!" He was laughing at himself a little ... "But Timur was not a savage. He knew about Alexander of Macedon, and the slave leader Spartacus and ... "
"Spartacus?" This was a Soviet cult leftover. "Did he?"
"...and he'd read the great Persian poet Firdausi, who claimed that the Iranians were natural rulers and the Turks were natural slaves ... Our two worlds have always been at war. And when Timur overran Persia and came to Firdausi's tomb he shouted: 'Stand up! Look at me! A Turk in the heart of your empire! You said we were slaves, but look now!'" ...
He glowed with vicarious triumph. Tamerlane for him was the unifier and recreator of his national fatherland, of the Pan-Turkic dream. He said, "The Persians were here once, you see. You've been to Afrasiab? You've seen those Sogdian paintings, Persian things? They were our conquerors."
"Those paintings are extraordinary..."
"So Timur avenged us. He created a Turkish empire ... He's our hero."
I said: "But he was a Mongol."
"No, Timur was not a Mongol, he was a Turk."
I stayed silent. Everyone was claiming Tamerlane now. Uzbeks and even Tajiks whom I met would debonairly enroll him in their nations. In fact Tamerlane had been a pure Mongol of the Barlas clan, infected by Turkic customs. But this pedantry could not staunch the caretaker's sense of ownership or belonging.
"I may be an Uzbek," he said, "but above all I am a Turk. Most people have forgotten their tribes now, but I know my father was a Kungrat, my mother a Mangit -- these are Turkic tribes."
"They're Uzbek tribes too."
"But you can't feel Uzbek." He was losing the infant Uzbek nation in a Turkic sea. "Look at our ancesors! We have Navoi, we have Mirkhwand, we have ... " His list spilt into the unknown for me. In fact his people were ethnically too complex to shelter under any name. Even his Turkic umbrella was full of Persian holes.
The hero of Uzbek literature, the 15th century Timurid poet Navoi, had written of Uzbeks only to disparage them. Yet his name and image were ... ubiquitous in Uzbekistan ... Young in their state, Uzbeks and Tajiks were suddenly annexing poets or scientists out of the past, steeping their nation in the magic of great men. The Tajiks were even appropriating Saadi and Omar Khayyam, any Persian at all. To challenge such claims was to wander an ethnic labyrinth until the concept of a country became meaninigless.
The caretaker got to his feet, still reeling off names ... "And we have Timur!"
He switched off the sad bulb and locked the narrow door behind us. In the sanity of daylight he relented a little. "Well," he said, "occasionally somebody does feel quite strongly 'I'm an Uzbek' " -- he feebly thumped his chest -- "but you don't hear it much."
We walked around the mausoleum in the sun. Some ease and lightness had returned to us. Uzbek independence had freed him into pride, he said, instead of condemning him to some Slavic sub-species. "Of course I'm pleased by it. Everyone I know is pleased. You've found some not? Well, those are the uneducated ... Some people don't know what to feel. They can't see beyond their faces. They just know that things are bad now. But I'm thinking of my children, and the world they'll grow into. I want it to be their own."
...I was gazing into the crypt. it was a vent for whispered prayers. I straightened and moved away, shaking off the notion that some dreadful authority lingered in those shreds of gristle and calcium under the stone.
The man went on eagerly. "How can anyone regret the Soviet Union falling to bits? They bled us. In the old days they gave us five kopeks for a kilo of cotton. Just five kopeks. One factory in Russia used to make two shirts out of a kilo and sell them for forty roubles each. Moscow said we were partners, but what kind of partnership is that?" He clasped my hand in illustration. "Partnership should mean friendship, shouldn't it?"
We had circled the building now,and the handclasp turned into farewell. As I walked back across the courtyard, his shouted optimisms followed me to the gate. "Enjoy our country! Everything will get better!"
Above him the great dome made a lonely tumor above the ogre-king.
There are a couple of other things I want to talk about.
I want to talk about what the Soviet Imperium did (ecologically) to the region. And I also want to talk about the Uzbek people now ... how they are trying to adjust to independence, how they feel about their government (a secular regime ... basically old Communists are in the government, just under another name), and who they align themselves with (Turkey? Iran? Russia?)
So I will start with the story of the Aral Sea, in the northwest corner of Uzbekistan.
Ryszard Kapucinski describes the contrast thus, in his book Imperium:
Central Asia is deserts and more deserts, fields of brown weathered stones, the heat from the sun above, sandstorms.But the world of the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya is different. Arable fields stretch along both rivers, abundant orchards; everywhere profusions of nut trees, apple trees, fig trees, palms, pomegranates...
The waters of the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya, as well as of their tributaries, allowed famous cities to arise and to flourish --Bukhara and Khiva, Kokand and Samarqand. This way, too, passed the loaded-down caravans of the Silk Road, thanks to which the markets of Venice and Florence, Nice and Seville, acquired their importance and color.
Heads up: Kapuscinski has written an incredible essay, included in his book Imperium called: "Central Asia -- The Destruction of the Sea". I will quote from it extensively, because he says it all. It is a horrible story. And completely irrevocable. Nothing can be done to reverse the destructive process. It's over.
Blame Brezhnev.
He decided to turn all of Uzbekistan into one large cotton plantation. Brezhnev wanted Uzbekistan to be a showpiece of Bolshevik ingenuity.
One of the worst and most unintelligent things about Communism is that it treats nature and the natural world as just another element of production, to be controlled, dominated, manipulated. So that is what Brezhnev set out to do in Uzbekistan: no longer would the people along the two rivers grow fruit, and figs and apples (things they could actually survive on). All of their orchards and green fields were appropriated by the Soviet state, and planted with cotton. The repercussions of this ill-thought-out move were apocalyptically disastrous. You cannot treat nature that way. It will rebel. It will punish you, harshly, for thinking that you can control things.
But Brezhnev was obsessed with the idea of Uzbekistan being turned into the Land of Cotton ... a place where the Soviet system of Communism could work miracles, could transform desert nomads and oasis merchants into cotton-growers, could make the desert bloom with cotton plants. Nobody ever said, "Y'know what, Brezhnev? Let's look at the long term ... I don't think this is such a good idea." Nobody ever said "No" to these despots. So Brezhnev was free to move forward on this crackpot illogical scheme ... (Can you tell I'm angry? He ruined the ecology in Uzbekistan, perhaps forever.)
So anyway: Uzbekistan is not a natural for cotton plantations. It's a DESERT, for God's sake. The people along the two great rivers lived in careful equilibrium with nature, growing things to support their communities, carefully handling the water supply, carefully monitoring how many people lived in each oasis ... because oases are not meant to overflow with people. One too many camels, and suddenly your water supply dries up. Brezhnev and his Communist goons had no understanding of this, didn't want to have any understanding of this, so blind was their faith in the Communist utopia, that they bulldozed through Uzbekistan, upending all of the orchards, all of the fields, and forced everybody to plant cotton.
Kapuscinski describes this process:
First, bulldozers were brought in from all over the Imperium. The hot metal cockroaches crawled over the sandy plains. Starting from the banks of the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya, the steel rams began to carve deep ditches and fissures in the sand, into which the water from the rivers was then channeled. They had to dig an endless number of these ditches (and they are still digging them now), considering that the combined length of the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya is 3,662 kilometers! Then along those canals, the kolkhoz workers had to plant cotton. [Kolkhoz is the name for collective farms.] At first they planted upon desert barrens, but because there was still not enough of the white fibers, the authorities ordered that arable fields, gardens, and orchards be given over to cotton. It is easy to imagine the despair and terror of peasants from whom one takes the only thing they have -- the currant bush, the apricot tree, the scrap of shade. In villages, cotton was now planted right up against the cottage windows, in former flower beds, in courtyards, near fences. It was planted instead of tomatoes and onions, instead of olives and watermelons. Over these villages drowning in cotton, planes and helicopters flew, dumping on them avalanches of artificial fertilizers, clouds of poisonous pesticides. People choked, they had nothing to breathe, went blind.
The rivers Amu and Syr Darya had been doing their thing for millennia. By diverting the waters of the rivers, by imposing an artificial restriction on them, the delicate balance of the desert land changed ... and it changed rapidly.
Kapuscinski:
The fields of rice and wheat, the green meadows, the stands of kale and paprika, the plantations of peaches and lemons, all vanished. Everywhere, as far as the eye could see, cotton grew. Its fields, its white drowsy sea, stretched for tens, hundreds of kilometers ...
Grigory Reznichenko wrote a book in 1989 called The Aral Catastrophe, which is such upsetting reading that I was barely able to get through it. He elaborates:
Around 20 million people live in the countryside in Central Asia. Two-thirds work with cotton and really with nothing else besides. Farmers, gardeners, orchard keepers have all had to change profession -- they are now employed as laborers on cotton plantations. Coercion and fear compel them to work with cotton. Coercion and fear, for it surely isn't money. One earns pennies harvesting cotton. And the work is tiring and monotonous. To fulfill his daily quota, a man mustbend down ten to twelve thousand times. An atrocious, forty-degree heat [Celsius], air that stinks of virulent chemicals, aridity, and constant thirst destroy the human being, especially women and children ... people pay with their health and their life for the personal well-being and power of a handful of demoralized careerists.
The "careerists" in Moscow would agree upon, beforehand, the amount of the coming cotton harvest. It was always a number which was completely unattainable. Then when the smaller harvest came in, Brezhnev and his goons would inflate the numbers and spread positive propaganda about the miracle they had worked in Uzbekistan. It is now called "the cotton mafia". The mafia got rich off of the completely imaginary massive cotton harvests. And the people working the cotton starved, because no longer could they feed themselves with their own orchards.
But all of this is pretty much just the normal tragedy (with different details) of all of the republics in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The Communists raped the land, enslaved the citizens, and closed the borders. This is all par for the course.
What makes the tragedy in Uzbekistan stand out is the Aral Sea, the once-beautiful and vital Aral Sea, a sea which, in a matter of 25 years, has dried up off the face of the earth, creating global ecological issues.
The Soviets never thought long-term about the environment. You want to build a highway? Hack down the forest. You want to create a city out of nothing? Bulldoze down the peasants' wheat fields and cover them up with concrete.
So the Soviets over-taxed the Amu and Syr Darya rivers, they cut tributaries into the desert, to divert the water where they wanted it to go. And almost immediately (the balance of nature is so delicate in any desert), both ancient and great rivers began to dry up, and shrink to nothing. Amu and Syr are what feed the Aral Sea. So the drying up of the two rivers had massive consequences for the Aral Sea, which began to shrink. It shrank so rapidly that if you look at satellite photographs of the sea, from 1967 to 1997, you see it almost completely disappear. It makes me sick to my stomach.
Kapuscinski again, describing the crux of the issue:
The waters of the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya, instead of flowing into the Aral Sea, were, according to man's will, sqandered along the way, spilled over fields, over unending deserts, along an immense distance of more than 3000 kilometers. For this reason, the calm and broad currents of both powerful rivers -- the only source of life in this part of the world -- instead of swelling and intensifying in the course of their journey (as is customary in nature), began to decline, to shrink, to get narrower and shallower, until, short of reaching the sea, they were transformed into salty, poisoned, and muddy pools, into spongy and foul-smelling ditches, into treacherous puddles of duckweed, finally sinking below ground and disappearing from view.
So the rivers shrink. Because the river shrinks, the sea disappears. And then there's the issue with salt. Here's some info about what the Aral Sea once was (I got this from the Aral Sea homepage):
The salt deposits rising to the surface because of the shrinking of the rivers destroyed the land, and because of all the windstorms and duststorms common to deserts, these salt deposits also ruined the atmosphere. This was exacerbated by all of the pesticides which had soaked into the land over the decades, so the pesticides are stirred up by the windstorms, and spread, ruining the air for miles and miles around.
Kapuscinski on the salt problem:
It is a known fact that a dozen or so meters below the surface of every desert lie large deposits of concentrated salt. If water is conducted to it, the salt, together with the moisture, will rise to the surface. And that is exactly what happened now in Uzbekistan. The concealed, crushed, deeply secreted salt started to move upward, to regain its liberty. The golden land of Uzbekistan, which was first cloaked in the white of cotton, was now glazed over with a lustrous crust of white salt.But one doesn't have to study the ground. When the wind blows, one can taste the salt on one's lips, on one's tongue. It stings the eyes.
More:
The Aral Sea and its tributaries provided sustenance for 3 million people. But the fate of this sea and its two rivers also impinges on the situaion of all the inhabitants of this region, of whom there are 32 million..The Soviet authorities have long worried about how to reverse the disaster -- the destruction of the Aral Sea, the ruination of half of Central Asia. It is after all well known that the unprecedented increase in cotton cultivation has led to a tragic shortage of water, a shortage that is destroying a large part of the world (a fact which to this day continues to be concealed.
Then, of course, the USSR collapsed. Although the USSR was an ungainly bohemoth, an "evil empire", and although this whole frigging mess was their fault in the first place, they still were the only ones aware enough of the problem to try to find solutions. Granted their "solutions" were insane: bombing glaciers in the Tienshan and Pamir mountains, so that the run-off would flood the land again (what?? I'm no environmental engineer but even I know that this would not work), or redirecting the rivers of Siberia (thousands and thousands and thousands of miles away) to come down into Uzbekistan, so that Brezhnev's crazy dream of a Land of Cotton could be realized. This, if they had followed through with it, of course would have meant the ruination of Siberia.
But they had screwed up, and the Soviets were desperate for a solution. As crackpot as the schemes were, at least they were schemes! Once the USSR collapsed, Uzbekistan was completely abandoned. All of the Russians who knew how to do anything fled the country, leaving it in the hands of a down-trodden uneducated populace, who know nothing about anything. And so the Aral Sea has died.
Environmental groups all over the world have stepped in, to try to save the situation. But certainly it's not the Uzbeks spearheading anything. The Soviets had enslaved them, had given them no sense of agency in their destinies, they just harvested the cotton and tried to live their lives, while the environmental disaster in their own country intensified almost on a minute to minute basis. People die much earlier there. People get weird unclassifiable diseases. People are poisoned.
It's a lost cause.
So the Aral Sea is shrinking, and a process of "desertification" is taking place. The sands growing more and more insistent, taking over more and more acreage ... the entire region drying up, and cracking shut.
Here's a final (and terrible) image to leave you with. Kapuscinski, on his travels, visits Muynak, which was, only a couple of years ago, a fishing port on the Aral Sea. I can't get these images out of my head:
[Muynak] now stands in the middle of the desert; the sea is 60 to 80 kilometers from here. Near the settlement, where the port once was, rusting carcasses of trawlers, cutters, barges, and other boats lie in the sand. Despite the fact that the paint is peeling and falling off, one can still make out some of the names: Estonia, Dagestan, Nahodka. The place is deserted; there is no one around ...It is a sad settlement -- Muynak. It once lay in the spot where the beautiful life-giving Amu Darya flowed into the Aral Sea, an extraordinary sea in the heart of a great desert. Today, there is neither river nor sea. In the town the vegetation has withered; the dogs have died. Half the residents have left, and those who stayed have nowhere else to go. They do not work, for they are fishermen, and there are no fish. Of the Aral Sea's 178 species of fish and frutti di mare, only 38 remain. Besides, the sea is far away; how is one to get there across the desert? If there is no strong wind, people sit on little benches, leaning against the shabby and crumbling walls of their decrepit houses. It is impossible to ascertain how they make a living; it is difficult to communicate with them about anything. They are Karakalpaks -- they barely speak any Russian, and the children no longer speak Russian at all. If one smiles at the people sitting against the walls, they become even more gloomy, and the women veil their faces. Indeed, a smile does look false here, and laughter would sound like the screech of a rusty nail against glass.
Children play in the sand with a plastic bucket that's missing a handle. Ragged, skinny, sad. I did not visit the nearest hospital, which is on the other side of the sea, but in Tashkent I was shown a film made in that hospital. For every 1000 children born, 100 die immediately. And those that survive? The doctor picks up in his hands little white skeletons, still alive, although it is difficult to tell.
Here are some pictures of Muynak ... and there is the terrible sight of a fishing boat sitting in the middle of the desert.
The whole thing makes me feel hopeless and mad.
Uzbekistan, rather than being a modern nation-state, as we understand it, is still a collection of "oasis cities", made famous and prosperous by the Silk Road - cities with names famous round the world: Samarqand, Bukhara.
The following post is about Tashkent:
In the 1st century A.D. it was an oasis settlement.
Throughout the following millennium, Tashkent was conquered and released and re-conquered over and over again. Persians, Mongol hordes, Turkic khans swept through, owned it, and passed it back and forth between them over the years.
And then, on June 15, 1865, the Russians arrived. And basically they never left. They are still there. In 1990, the population of Tashkent was 40% Russian. After the Soviet collapse, the Russians were a lost and sad community, abandoned by the motherland, adrift in a society wracked with upheaval and a Muslim revival. They were the old oppressors, trying to live with the conquered people, who were now trying to take back their country. So Tashkent has a Russian overlay, unlike Bukhara, which is a Muslim center. It is a very religious town, filled with fundamentalists. Tashkent is also a Russian outpost.
Tashkent, in the years after 1865, became Russia's base of operations for further conquests in Turkestan. The Russians built a colonial city here which swallowed up the medieval Turkic city.
Thubron says, "The Russians had captured Tashkent in 1865, not on orders from St. Petersburg but by the adventurism of local generals. Wiithin a few years it became the capital of Russian Turkestan, and there grew up beside the native town a pleasant, nondescript cantonment, where water channels trickled and great trees bloomed. Its first governor-general, the vain and chilly Kaufmann, ruled like a petty emperor. His army and administrations were filled with exiled bankrupts and adventurers. Far from home, local society became inward-looking and licentious, while beside it the Uzbek community continued almost unstudied, as if it would one day fade away."
Finally, with the advent of the Bolsheviks and their terrible aesthetic sense, the old Tashkent disappeared forever. Stalinist architecture (massive homely buildings, dauntingly wide concrete boulevards) stamped out the medieval nature of the desert town ... there isn't much left to be seen of the old Tashkent.
And then in 1966 there was a tremendous earthquake which gutted half of the city. Soviet builders rushed in to fill the vacuum and rebuild the city according to their own disgusting sensibilities.
Tashkent, judging from the pictures, is one of the ugliest places on earth. Everything is grandiose, inflated, with massive gaunt spaces meant to make the citizens feel tiny and insignificant. The avenues are 6 lanes wide, the squares are massive vistas watched over by mammoth statues. It looks oppressive. Like someone is always watching, or like the city is always waiting for something terrible to happen.
Stalin's legacy persists here, not just in the architecture, but in the population of Tashkent. Tashkent is filled with Russians and Armenians. Taskent still has very strong ties with Moscow ... much stronger than other areas in Uzbekistan. This adds to the regional divides in the country; it is very difficult for the nation to join together, unify, and agree on who they are as a people, as a place. Nobody agrees. Everybody battles for power.
The Russians, while they were the leaders of Tashkent, erected a state playhouse, a ballet, a circus. So Tchaikovsky was introduced to Uzbekistan, to a disgruntled Muslim populace (who, quite frankly, have no curiosity about other cultures in general. They could not GIVE a shit about what Western culture might have to offer. Meanwhile, we translate all of their top novels and poets into English or French or German or Italian, we watch their films, we give them Oscars ... but the exchange is almost completely one-sided. Well - except for the proliferation of Leonardo deCaprio T-shirts in Tehran).
And Tashkent today? Over a million people live in the city. There is much crime; it is not safe for anybody. It is very polluted. There is no work. And the youth population has exploded, so the city is crowded with drunken young men, filled with vague senses of grievance, who have nothing to do. The suburbs continue to spread. Everything looks the same. There is no traditional Uzbek community here. Everyone yearns to be part of the West, and yet they live in a poverty-struck and dangerous society, where they basically have to leave in order to live productive lives. The mafia is ever-present, their influence in everything.
It's a bad situation, a powder keg. Islamic fundamentalism on the rise, reacting to the youthful population who want nothing more than to have access to Western music and Western movies.
These people have had their histories, their indigenous culture, amputated. There is no memory, no sense of who they are. The Russians who still live here live in fear, hiding out in their houses, dreaming about the good old days of Stalin.
Kind of a sick scenario, no?
This post is about Bukhara, another of the famous cities of Uzbekistan.
There are bazaars in Bukhara which have been operating, nonstop, for a thousand years. There are madrassahs in Bukhara, built in the 1500s, which still have students today.
Bukhara was once seen as one of the centers of the world. There was a Sufi religious center here, built in the 1300s ... a major mecca for Sufi scholars and pilgrims. Everyone passed through Bukhara, and the Silk Road helped establish Bukhara's position as one of the premier city-states in the known world.
I don't know much about the Samanids, but they were a dynasty in the 10th century, and under their reign, Bukhara blossomed. They built a great library here that had 45,000 manuscripts in it. The Samanids were eventually destroyed by the Mongols, everything destroyed, nothing survived of that brief great era.
An interesting fact: The Samanids had built a wall around their oasis. But during the time of prosperity, the Samanids let down their guard ... they relaxed ... they let the wall fall to bits, they did not maintain their wall ... so when the Turkic invaders came along in 999 A.D., they easily captured the town.
First off, a quote, from Colin Thubron's great book The Lost Heart of Asia:
Across this region, for some two thousand years, the Silk Road has nourished caravan-towns -- Samarqand, Bukhara, Margilan -- whose populace had spoken an Iranian tongue. The Uzbeks were latecomers, migrating south at the end of the 15th century. They took their name froma khan of the Golden Horde, for their origins were Turkic, but already their blood was mixed with Iranians', and they added only the last layer to a palimpsest of peoples identifying themselves less by nation than by clan. On my map Uzbekistan made a multi-colored confusion. It was shaped like a dog barking at China. A country of 20 million -- more than 70% of them Uzbeks -- it butted against the Tienshan and the Pamir mountains in green-tinted lowlands and a sudden spaghetti of roads. But it remained an enigma: a land whose Communist rulers had persisted in power under another name, offering only lipservice to Islam, and loosening the economy without promise of democracy.
Thubron rhapsodizes about what the word "Bukhara" has always meant to him:
Bukhara! For centuries it had glimmered remote in the Western consciousness: the most secretive and fanatical of the great caravan-cities, shored up in its desert fastness against time and change. To either side of it the Silk Road had withered away, so that by the 19th century the town had folded its battlements around its people in self-immolated barbarism, and receded into fable.
So the Mongols sacked the joint in 1220, and trashed the entire town. But then along came Tamerlane the Terrible, and in the 16th century the mosques and madrassahs were rebuilt. They still stand today, but nothing older than that survives.
Once the sea route to India and to China was discovered, Central Asia was done. In a matter of 100 years, the place closed shut like a trap, forgotten by the rest of the world. Bukhara (and Samarqand, and others) fell into wretched decay. Nobody passed through. For hundreds of years, Uzbeks never saw someone from the West. The cultural exchange stopped. Technological advances stopped passing through the area. They were forgotten by history.
In 2001, when Uzbekistan let us operate from their bases (Russian-built), during our attacks on Afghanistan, that was the first time that Western soldiers had operated in this area since Alexander the Great passed through in 329 B.C. Incredible, no?
Colin Thubron, who traveled through the region during the first summer and spring of independence from Moscow, describes Bukhara's own journey (because, like I said, Uzbekistan is not a real country yet. At least not like we would define. People in Uzbekistan, for millennia, have identified themselves as citizens of Bukhara, Samarqand, etc. Now, they are starting to identify themselves ethnically ... "We are Uzbeks. Everything good comes from Uzbek culture!" So far, they do not have an identity as a coherent nation yet.) So Bukhara's own story definitely can stand in for the whole, to some degree.
It was the failure of water, as well as conservative ferocity, which hurried on the isolation of Bukhara. The Zerafshan river, flowing 500 miles out of the Pamirs, expends its last breath on the oasis, and is withering away. To north and west the sands have buried a multitude of towns and villages which the exhausted irrigation could not save.Even in the 19th century, the accounts of travellers were filled with ambiguity. To Moslems Bukhara was "the Noble, the Sublime". It was wrapped round by eight miles of walls and fortified gates, and its mosques and medresehs were beyond counting. The Bukhariots, it was said, were the most polished and civilized inhabitants of Central Asia, and their manners and dress became a yardstick of oriental fashion ...
Even in decline, the bazaars were rumoured magnificent, and teemed with Hindus, Persians, Jews, and Tartars.
Yet this splendour barely concealed an inner wretchedness. Men who walked abroad like kings returned at night to hovels. The city gates and walls were a gimcrack theatre-set, and the famed medresehs in decay ... Ordinary people seemed inured to cruelty and subterfuge. Scarcely a Westerner dared enter before the 1870s.
The decline had begun in earnest during the end of the 18th century. And in the 19th century, there were two vicious and degenerate emirs who were brutal, and terrifying. Their behavior alienated them from their own people. The discontent and anger of the citizens of Bukhara made it relatively easy for the Russians to sweep in in the mid-1800s, and reduce Bukhara to a client state. This was part of the famous "Great Game", played by Russia and England in the middle of Central Asia.
Here's a passage about the czarist triumph:
In all their Central Asian wars, between 1847-73, the Russians claimed to have lost only 400 dead, while the Moslem casualties mounted to tens of thousands.The ensuing years brought the ambiguous peace of subservience. The czarist Russians, like the Bolsheviks after them, were contemptuous of the world which they had conquered. They stilled the Turcoman raids and abolished slavery, at least in name, but they entertained few visions of betterment for their subjects. As for the Moslems, who could stoically endure their own despots, the tyranny of the Great White Czar insulted them by its alien unbelief. "Better your own land's weeds," they murmured, "than other men's wheat."
Yet there would come a time when they would look back on the czarist indifference as a golden age.
In 1918, Mahomet Alim, the last emir of Bukhara, repulsed the (now) Red Invaders, booting out the Bolsheviks. This wasn't altogether a great thing for the people of Bukhara because the last emir was a tyrannical lunatic, with a massive harem, who sent tax collectors out to basically terrorize the populace. He wasn't a great guy. But he did defeat the Russians. However, 2 years later, in 1920, as General Frunze, in the Red Army, advanced again on the oasis, the last emir flipped out, and fled with his harem, leaving the populace to fend for themselves.
And then followed six decades of communism. Stalin closed down all the mosques. He criminalized private property, and entrepreneurship ... Uzbekistan was crushed beyond repair. They have still not recovered.
The story of what has happened to the Aral Sea is one of the most disturbing and devastating legacies left by the Russians. It has been described as "the world's greatest environmental disaster". It makes me sick to my stomach.
Thubron again, on strolling through the ancient bazaars in the early 1990s:
A hesitant free enterprise was surfacing, but the inflation raging through the old Soviet empire had turned everyone poor. Sad traders peered from their kiosks like glove-puppets, or threaded the bazaars with a predatory vigilance. But they had almost nothing to sell. Once the name 'Bukhara' had been synonymous with lustrous dyed silks and the crimson rugs of the Turcomans who traded here, and carpets of Persian design were woven on domestic looms all over the city. But under Stalin, home industries became criminal. Mass production laid a dead hand on all the old crafts. I trudged through the market quarter until dark, but found no trace of handmade silk or rug.
Nobody alive today can know what the ancient Bukhara was like. It's lost. Lost for good.
Here are some pictures of modern-day Bukhara. I can see why everyone refers to the oasis as "monochromatic". Everything is the color of chalk.
If you take a look at the lower left picture, you will see the old city gate, which still stands. Part of the remaining wall that has always surrounded the oasis. And the top left, the emir's summer palace, is the residence of the last emir who flew the coop when he was threatened by Frunze. He and all his many many many lovely ladies. Additionally, in the last post I talked about the Kalyan minaret, erected in 1127, the only surviving structure from Genghis Khan's attack in 1220. It is 148 feet high, and actually kind of homely, in my opinion, but there was a time on this planet, when that minaret (pictured in the right hand column, second photo down) was as famous a sight as the Eiffel Tower. I have never seen the Eiffel Tower but I know exactly what it looks like. The camel caravans on the Silk Road kept their eyes open for that minaret, knowing exactly what it would look like, counting on it to be there.
Oh, and also notice the bottom right hand picture: the Ulugh Beg madrassah. He was the grandson of Tamerlane, who took over the empire after his grandfather's death. But Ulugh Beg was a scientist, an astronomer ... and actually, quite brilliant. He built observatories and sponsored scientists visiting Bukhara. He wanted the place to be a cultural center, not just a hotbed of fanaticism, and a place to rest in between military ventures and wars. The madrassah you see in the picture was completed in 1420. It was one of the places shut down by Stalin, but now it is open again, and filled with students.
I am a little afraid of what they may be learning in there these days ("And today's lesson ... Americans are Satan." "Don't forget to do your homework ... write an essay on why you think the Zionists are taking over the world."), but still: the Ulugh Beg madrassah is an amazing structure, and actually was built by quite an enlightened and educated man. A curious man.
So perhaps that legacy will rub off. I can only hope.
I found some descriptive quotes of Bukhara in Thubron's book that I wanted to share. It makes me feel as though I can see this famous city with my own eyes. Which is, after all, why I read all of these historical travelogues. I want to see the world. And not just Paris or Rome, although I'd love to go there, too. The places I really want to see are the so-called backwaters of Central Asia and the Middle East. Samarqand, Bukhara, Shiraz (in Iran), the Fergana Valley (in Kyrgyzstan), Herat (in Afghanstan)... all of Alexander the Great's old hangouts.
Thubron strolls through Bukhara:
...I entered a dust-filled wasteland fringed by a pale host of mosques and medresehs. The din and pall of restoration shook the air. The earth dazzled. The buildings glared in a blank, shadowless uniformity. Dressed in cement-colored brick, they had not the rich plenitude of the tiled mosques of Iran, but were patterned only sparsely with a glaze of indigo or green. For the rest, they were the color of the earth beneath them: a dead platinum. It was as if the dust had hardened into walls and turrets and latticed windows. Everything-- even the clay-colored sky -- shone with the same bleached stare.But above, in radiant atonement, hovered a tumult of turquoise domes. Beyond the high gateways and iwans -- the great vaulted porches-- they swam up from their drums like unearthly fruit, and flooded the sky with the heaven-sent blue of Persia. From a distance they seemed to shine in unified aquamarine, but in fact the tiles which coated them were subtly different from one another, so that they spread a vibrant, changing patina over every cupola: eggshell, kingfisher, deep sapphire.
These mosques and medresehs were mostly raised by the successors of Tamerlane or by the 16th century Sheibanids, the first and most glorious Uzbek dynasty that succeeded them. Little that is older survives...
The blanched aridity all around oppressed me inexplicably, as though the city were dying instead of being restored. Even the dust seemed to have been leached by some ghostly peroxide. But in fact Bukhara was being resurrected indiscriminately: walls rebuilt shoddily en masse, tilework reproduced wholesale. Work had started in the Soviet period, but events had overtaken it, and the mosques which had been reconstituted cold in the service of art or tourism were stirring again with a half-life of their own.
The following descriptive passage is also very interesting because it captures what appears to be the inherent contradictions not only in Bukhara but in all of Uzbekistan. They don't really fit in with the rest of Central Asia ... they are not homogenous, they practice Islam but with elements of shamanism and Sufism, they don't subscribe to fundamentalism (at least not yet) ... They try to resist being sucked into the issues plaguing Afghanistan, the civil war next door in Tajikstan, the tyrannical dictatorship in Turkmenistan next door ... They are a milder people. But this struggle is difficult. Very difficult. Because, of course, there are many radical elements in the populations. There are millions of Uzbeks who do not live in Uzbekistan proper, who live in Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, China, Tajikstan ... and these people bring home radicalism, fanaticism.
Thubron discusses the glorious Renaissance that Bukhara experienced in the10th century, a great era of art and literature, and although it was back in the Middle Ages, the tensions he describes in the society still exist, and still simmer beneath the surface.
He visits "The Tomb of the Samanids", a 10th century mausoleum that stands on the outskirts of the city.
The tomb is all that survives of the precocious Samanid dynasty, the last Persians to rule in Central Asia, whose empire pushed south of the Caspian and deep into Afghanistan. The tomb escaped the Mongol sack because it lay buried under windblownsands, its builders half forgotten, and it perhaps finds its architectural origins in the palaces and fire-temples of pre-Islamic times. But its sophistication -- the lavish, almost playful deployment of its brick -- betrays an age more daring, more intellectual, than any which succeeded it.For over a hundred years, until the end of the 10th century, a creative frenzy gripped the capital. Alongside the moral austerity of Islam, there bloomed an aesthetic Persian spirit which looked back to the magnificence and philosophic liberalism of the Sassanian age, extinguished by the Arabs more than two centuries before. As the Silk Road spilt into and out of Bukhara -- furs, amber and honey travelling east; silks, jewellry and jade going west -- the Samanids sent horses and glass to China, and received spices and ceramics in exchange.
An era of peace brought men of letters and science crowding to the court, and the Persian language flowered again in a galaxy of native poets. It was an ebullient age. Iranian music, painting and wine flourished heretically alongside Koranic learning, and the great library of Bukhara, stacked with 45,000 manuscripts,became the haunt of doctors, mathematicians, astronomers, and geographers.
The short era produced men of striking genius: the polymathic al-Biruni, who computed the earth's radius; the lyric poet Rudaki; and the great Ibn Sina, Avicenna, who wrote 242 scientific books of stupefying variety, and whose 'Canons of Medicine' became a vital textbook in the hospitals even of Christian Europe for 500 years.
The following post is about the storied city of Samarqand and the horrors of Timur.
But, for me, the really gripping history in the area goes way way back, to medieval times, when this section of the planet was one of the centers of the world, if not the center. An amazing thing, to have that in your cultural memory.
Uzbekistan was part of the old Persian empire, and things did not change much here from the 6th century BC to the 19th century. In the 4th century B.C., Alexander the Great passed through (that boy certainly got around), and married the daughter of a local chieftain near Samarqand. This connected the region to the outside world. The Silk Road propelled the region to the center of the world. The Silk Road was a peaceful connector, a trade-driven connector. Regions did not have to be conquered by outsiders anymore in order to learn about innovations in other cultures. Camel caravans brought news and technology and inventions to these remote areas, and the world got a bit smaller.
In the 6th century AD, Western Turks galloped into the region from the vast steppes and brought Islam with them. They also brought a written alphabet. This changed everything.
Uzbekistan is one of the crossroads of the world. Everybody passed through here in those days, avoiding the Himalayas, avoiding the deserts, following the great rivers. Oases and towns sprung up, people became rich, civilization flourished. The Turks moved on, and the Persians took over again.
City-states were passed from leader to leader over the centuries. For example: Tashkent: in the 1st century AD, it was your basic oasis settlement. And then Persian armies, Mongol hordes, and Turkic khans swapped it back and forth through the medieval centuries. One despot would subside, leaving room for another. By the middle ages, Tashkent, Samarqand and Bukhara were not just desert oases. They were centers of learning and culture. They were the Pragues of the 12th century.
Genghis Khan comes along in the 13th century and sacks the entire region. Every oasis was destroyed. I'm not sure what exactly his point was ... Genghis didn't seem to be a typical conqueror as in: I will come in, kick you all out or enslave you, and take over all your buildings. He was more like: I will come in, kill everybody, and burn all of your cities to the ground. Then I will decapitate the intelligentsia and I will put their heads on stakes outside of your libraries, and I will smash all of your mirrors. And then he would ride on to the next oasis. Not sure what that accomplished. But that was his deal. Ha ha ... such an oversimplification! I don't even really know what I'm talking about, but all I DO know is that the history books describing the 13th century in this area are peppered with the following sentences: "And they flourished until Genghis Khan." "And then Genghis Khan sacked the city." "All was well until the terror of Genghis Khan came from the north." Who knows. He was a destroyer, not a builder. The same is true, and more so, for Tamerlane.
An explanatory quote about Mr. Khan (unfortunately, I have no idea where this quote came from - it's on one of my "Uzbekistan"index cards ... sorry.)
The Mongols were illiterate, religiously shamanistic and sparsely populated, perhaps no more than around 700,000 in number, living in good-sized felt tents. They were herdsmen around an area called Karakorum. They had been moving across great distances on the grassy plains -- steppe lands -- north and east of China, frequently fighting wars over turf. Before 1200 they had been fragmented ... In the late 1100s and early 1200s a Mongol military leader named Temüjin was creating a confederation of tribes, Mongol and non-Mongol but which would be called Mongol. He was a good manager, collecting under him people of talent. And, when necessary, he warred ... In 1206, at the age of 42, Temüjin took the title Universal Ruler, which translates to Genghis Khan.Like others, Genghis Khan's subjects saw themselves at the center of the universe and the greatest of people -- favored, of course, by the gods. And they justified Genghis Khan's conquests in previous years by claiming that he was the rightful master not only over the "peoples of the felt tent" but the entire world.
More on Genghis Khan right here. It's mind-boggling, how much territory he conquered, on horseback. Genghis Khan described himself as "the punishment of God".
And then there was Tamerlane (or Timur). Tamerlane was a Muslim and has routinely been chosen as one of the most ruthless warriors of the millennium. (At least, Time Magazine voted him so in 2000.)
Tamerlane was a brutal warrior, the terror of the land, but he also loved and appreciated art and architecture ... So when he would capture a town, he would enslave the best artists in that town, capture them, spare them from execution, and drag them to Samarqand (the oasis he chose as his capital). He then made these prisoners of war build him the perfect city. A very contradictory mix, that Tamerlane. Samarqand became one of the most famous Islamic cities in the world while Tamerlane was around.
Ulugh Beg (1394-1449) was Tamerlane's grandson, and he took over when his grandfather died. He wasn't a ruthless murderer like his grandfather. Ulugh Beg was an astronomer, and also a great patron of scientists and astronomers. He built observatories. Another unattributable quote about the fascinating Ulugh Beg:
He was certainly the most important observational astronomer of the 15th century. He was one of the first to advocate and build permanently mounted astronomical instruments. His catalogue of 1018 stars (some sources count 1022) was the only such undertaking carried out between the times of Claudius Ptolemy (ca. 170 A.D.) and Tycho Brahe (ca. 1600).
Blows the mind. Ulugh Beg only ruled for two years, because he was assassinated, but in that time, he was able to supervise the building of astronomical observatories, the ruins of which still stand. Fascinating man. There are madrassahs in Uzbekistan named after him today. He is one of their cultural heroes.
The history of the oases of Uzbekistan tells the story of the whole area. This post is about Samarqand. I'll do Bukhara tomorrow.
Samarqand is one of those cities which has never NOT been inhabited, since its inception, two thousand years ago.
In the 6th century B.C., ancient Samarqand was called Maraconda. It was the capital of the Sogdians (who were, basically, Iranians ... the forefathers of Iranians, anyway.)
In the 4th century (329 B.C.), Samarqand was captured by Alexander the Great, during his push east. The Sogdians outlasted Alexander's rule, however. (Those resourceful Iranians ... they cannot be completely conquered!)
In the 2nd century B.C., Samarqand was made into an essential junction point of the Silk Road by China. Chinese merchants chose it because of its location, and its nearness to a river, a perfect combination. Samarqand flourished. Became a very wealthy and cosmopolitan medieval city throughout the centuries that followed.
In 712 A.D., Samarqand (Maraconda) was conquered by the Arabs.
In the 13th century A.D., Samarqand was, you guessed it, sacked by Genghis Khan. The entire city was wrecked. And then built back up.
In the 14th century A.D., Samarqand was chosen as Tamerlane's capital, which made it famous. Samarqand became Tamerlane's showpiece, his pride and joy. It was a mud city, but underneath the guidance of Tamerlane, the place bloomed. Artists and architects from Persia were captured and brought there to build it up, silk weavers from Syria, jewellers from India. It once was a mud city, but under Tamerlane the place exploded: tiled mosques, minarets, towers.
From 1407 - 1449, Samarqand was ruled by Ulugh Beg (Tamerlane's grandson).
In the 14th century, the Mongol tribes who called themselves "Uzbek" began moving south, and they eventually conquered all of Tamerlane's empire. By 1510, they controlled everything in the area (and the descendents still control that very same area today, the area known as modern-day Uzbekistan).
I'll close today with Ryzsard Kapuscinski's discussion of Samarqand, Bukhara, and Tamerlane:
Bukhara is brownish; it is the color of clay baked in the sun. Samarqand is intensely blue; it is the color of sky and water.Bukhara is commercial, noisy, concrete, and material: it is a city of merchandise and marketplaces; it is an enormous warehouse, a desert port, Asia's belly. Samarqand is inspired, abstract, lofty, and beautiful; it is a city of concentration and reflection; it is a musical note and a painting; it is turned toward the stars. Erkin told me that one must look at Samarqand on a moonlit night, during a full moon. The ground remains dark; the walls and the towers catch all the light; the city starts to shimmer, then it floats upward, like a lantern.
H. Papworth, in his book The Legend of Timur, questions whether the miracle that is Samarqand is in fact the work of Timur, also known as Tamerlane. There is something incomprehensible -- he writes -- in the notion that this city, which with all its beauty and composition directs man's thoughts toward mysticism and contemplation, was created by such a cruel demon, marauder, and despot as was Timur,
But there is no denying the fact that the basis of Samarqand's fame was born at the turn of the 14th and 15th centuries and hence during Timur's reign. Timur is an astonishing historical phenomenon. His name aroused terror for decades. He was a great ruler who kept Asia under his heel, but his might did not stop him from concerning himself with details. His armies were famed for their cruelty. Wherever Timur appeared, writes the Arab historian Zaid Vosifi, "blood poured from people as from vessels," and "the sky was the color of a field of tulips". Timur himself would stand at the head of each and every expedition, overseeing everything himself. Those whom he conquered he ordered beheaded. He ordered towers built from their skulls, and walls and roads. He supervised the progress of the work himself. He ordered the stomachs of merchants ripped open and searched for gold. He himself supervised the process to ensure they were being searched diligently. He ordered his adversaries and opponents poisoned. He prepared the potions himself.
He carried the standard of death, and this mission absorbed him for half the day.
During the second half of the day, art absorbed him. Timur devoted himself to the dissemination of art with the same zeal he sustained for the spread of death. In Timur's consciousness, an extremely narrow line separated art and death, and it is precisely this fact that Papworth cannot comprehend. It is true that Timur killed. But it is also true that he did not kill all. He spared people with creative qualifications. In Timur's Imperium, the best sanctuary was talent.
Timur drew talent to Samarqand; he courted every artist. He did not allow anyone who carried within him the divine spark to be touched. Artists bloomed and Samarqand bloomed. The city was his pride. On one of its gates Timur ordered inscribed the sentence: IF YOU DOUBT OUR MIGHT -- LOOK AT OUR BUILDINGS! and that sentence has outlived Timur by many centuries. Today Samarqand still stuns us with its peerless beauty, its excellence of form, its artistic genius. Timur supervised each construction himself. That which was unsuccessful he ordered removed, and his taste was excellent. He deliberated about the various alternatives in ornamentation; he judged the delicacy of design, the purity of line. And then he threw himself again into the whirl of a new military expedition, into carnage, into blood, into flames, into cries.
Papworth does not understand that Timur was playing a game that few people have the means to play. Timur was sounding the limits of man's possibilities. Timur demonstrated that which Dostoyevsky later described -- that man is capable of everything. One can define Timur's creation through a sentence of Saint-Exupery's: "That which I have done no animal would ever do." Both the good and the bad. Timur's scissors had two blades -- the blade of creation and the blade of destruction. These two blades define the limits of every man's activity. Ordinarily, though, the scissors are barely open. Sometimes they are open a little more. In Timur's case they were open as far as they could go.
Erkin showed me Timur's grave in Samarqand, made of green nephrite. Before the entrance to the mausoleum there is an inscription, whose author is Timur: HAPPY IS HE WHO RENOUNCED THE WORLD BEFORE THE WORLD RENOUNCED HIM.
He died at the age of 69, in 1405, during an expedition to China.
I must go and see Samarqand one day. I really must.
Here is an archive of the past countries I chose to focus on ... writing a brief essay a day, providing book excerpts, etc.
Now - before I head back to Manhattan - I am going to post the essays I wrote about Uzbekistan, a country which holds much fascination for me. I feel that I must go there some day.
The first essay I wrote is about the Uzbeks themselves.
As always, readers, please chime in, to add to this discussion, or to help me out on stuff I may be missing.
All of this stuff comes from my reading of other people, having never been there myself.
Uzbekistan is the heartland of Central Asia. It has borders with all of the other "stans", as well as a small border with Afghanistan.
There are two ancient rivers flowing through Uzbekistan: the Amu-Darya and the Syr-Darya. Because of these two great rivers, oases were able to spring up left and right throughout the desert country, where people flourished and survived, in the middle of nothingness. Another example of geography as destiny. Bukhara and Samarqand would never have been so important without those two rivers.
Who are the Uzbek people? How the hell should I know ... I've never met an Uzbek. But here is what I can glean: They are of Turkic origin, but they also have genetic connections with Iranians. This makes for a very interesting mix, because Iranians are, historically, looked down upon throughout this area, because they are of Indo-European stock, not Turkic, and they are also Shiites, not Sunni. So the Uzbek people bridge that gap, uneasily at times. The Uzbeks were latecomers to the area, having migrated south at the end of the 15th century.
Uzbeks trace their lineage back to Uzbek Khan (1312-1340), from whom they take their name. Uzbek Khan was the great-grandson of the feared and infamous Genghis Khan. Uzbek Khan's forebears were part of Genghis' original Turko-Mongolian horde.
You don't have to be a rocket scientist to get that because of all this, Uzbek society is based on clan traditions. The notion of a nation-state is still very weak here. These people are desert nomads, they traveled throughout the centuries from oasis to oasis ... and the oasis was the center, the oasis was the basis of your identity. You did not say, "Yes, I am an Uzbek." You said, "I am from Samarqand." I think to some degree that this is still true. Stalin's repressive programs in this region certainly did not help! Russians poured into Uzbekistan, as colonizers. There are a ton of them still there.
But I'll get to that later.
Uzbeks are, traditionally, Sunni Muslim, but they have some interesting twists in it. There are elements of shamanism in their practice (anathema to traditional Sunnis ... you can be killed for this stuff in Saudi Arabia). They have a deep undercurrent of Persian philosophy in their faith, of Sufism (the whirling dervishes, you will recall). Uzbeks are a very proud and independent people, as desert nomads always are. They don't accept central authority. But they have handled being dominated in an interesting way: it's like they take on the attributes of their oppressor, as protective coloring, while underneath they remain committed to their own traditions, their own ways.
I have an awesome passage which illustrates this. Ryszard Kapuscinski, one of my favorite authors, traveled all through the "Soviet Imperium" throughout his life as a Polish foreign correspondent. Kapuscinski lived under Soviet domination. He suffered. So he wrote books about the tyranny of the last Shah in Iran, of Haile Selassie in Ethiopia, of revolutions in Central America, as a way to criticize the terrible regime Poles lived under at home. But he could not have gotten away with writing about his own country. He went at it another way. Finally, with the breakup of the Soviet Union, Kapuscinski wrote Imperium, a panoramic view of the USSR over the years. From 1939, when the Soviet tanks rolled into Kapuscinski's home town when he was a small boy, to the incredible years of 1989-1991. I can't recommend this book highly enough!
But back to Uzbekistan, and the trait of the Uzbek people I was talking about: their ability to take on the protective coloring of the dominant power:
Kapuscinski travels through all the "stans" in 1967. The Soviet Union has these republics on a short leash. But the leash is never short enough, as it turns out. And here is Kapuscinski's description of a town square in Bukhara, during the Soviet years:
It is noon. I go out of the fortress onto a large, dusty square. On the opposite side is a chaykhana. At this time of day the chaykhanas are full of Uzbeks. They squat, colorful skullcaps on their heads, drinking green tea. They drink like this for hours, often all day. It's a pleasant life, spent in the shadow of a tree, on a little carpet, among close friends. I sat down on the grass and ordered a pot of tea. On one side I had a view of the fortress, as big as Krakow's Vavel Castle, only made of clay. But on the other side I had an even better view.On the other side stood a glorious mosque.
The mosque caught my attention because it was made of wood, which is extremely rare in Muslim architecture, whose materials are typically stone and clay. Furthermore, in the hot, numb silence of the desert at noon, one could hear a knocking inside the mosque. I put aside my teapot and went to investigate the matter.
It was billard balls knocking.
The mosque is called Bolo-Khauz. It is a unique example of 18th century Central Asian architecture, virtually the only structure from that period to have survived. The portal and exterior walls of Bolo-Khauz are decorated with a wooden ornamentation whose beauty and precision have no equal. One cannot help but be enraptured.
I looked inside. There were six green tables, and at each one young boys with tousled blond hair were playing billiards. A crowd of onlookers rooted for the various competitors. It cost eighty kopecks to rent a table for an hour, so it was cheap, and there were so many willing customers that there was a line in front of the entrance. I didn't feel like standing in it and so couldn't get a good look at the interior. I returned to the chaykhana.
Blinding sun fell on the square. Dogs wandered about. Tour groups were coming out of the fortress ... Between the fortress-turned-museum and the mosque-turned-billiards hall sat Uzbeks drinking tea. They sat in silence, facing the mosque, in accordance with the ways of the fathers. There was a kind of dignity in the silent presence of these people, and despite their worn gray smocks, they looked distinguished. I had the urge to walk up to them and shake their hands. I wanted to express my respect in some way, but I didn't know how. In these men, in their bearing, in their wise calm, was something that aroused my spontaneous and genuine admiration. They have sat for generations in this chaykhana, which is old, perhaps older than the fortress and the mosque. Many things are different now -- many, but not all. One can say that the world is changing, but it is not changing completely; in any case it is not changing to the degree that an Uzbek cannot sit in a chaykhana and drink tea even during working hours.
Russians moved into their country, and turned Uzbek mosques into billiard halls. Hard to comprehend. Terrible. Stalin closed down 26,000 mosques and only allowed 22 people to study in the madrassahs, when before they overflowed with people. Islam dove way underground.
The other thing Stalin attacked (which he did everywhere else as well) was the Uzbek language. Their language is Turkic, and was was born during the 16th century, and has survived through all of the chaos that has followed. Stalin prohibited the language to be used starting in 1937. This was an assault on the identity of the Uzbeks. History was cut off. Young Uzbeks today, kids who are 20 years old or whatever, have absolutely no sense of the ancient history of their culture. They are now trying to re-invent the past, mythologizing themselves, making up heroes out of nothing. Creating a glorious past that never really existed, because no accurate information has survived and people are ignorant and illiterate.
The Uzbeks, traditionally, like their great-great-great-granddaddy Genghis, were warriors. Nomadic warriors. They disdained trade. They were not sedentary. They were always on the move. They have a lot of ethnic pride, a ton of it, but that pride has not coalesced or transformed into a nationalistic thing.
I have compiled the five short essays I wrote about Macedonia, and "the Macedonian problem" - so they are all in one place. Macedonia is one of my overriding passions - but there's always still so much to learn.
Part III - Competing territorial claims
This is my last post on Macedonia. This one is about all of the wars of the 20th century, wars where Macedonia and its position in the region played crucial parts - not just on the war-stage but in people's imaginations as well.
This war ended with Turkey's influence dissolving. Serbian troops occupied Skopje (the capital of Macedonia, which, to this day, apparently, has a very Turkish feel to it: mosques, minarets, bazaars). The Greek army occupied their precious Salonika. And suddenly, Bulgaria found itself locked out of the region and couldn't collect the spoils of war.
Bulgaria completely believed (and perhaps still believes) that "Macedonia" was a fabrication. The way Palestinians think of "Israel" and do not include it on their maps. To Bulgarians, Macedonia belongs to Bulgaria.
But Serbia and Greece ganged up on Bulgaria, and shut them out of Macedonia. In the aftermath of the First Balkan War, they attempted to wipe out all Bulgarian influence in Macedonia.
Macedonia filled up with Greek or Serb publicists, who began bombarding the population with a propaganda war. "You are REALLY Serbs..." "No, you are REALLY Greeks..."
Not only was this a war of words, but it was also coercive and violent. The Serbs gave the Macedonians 24 hours to renounce their nationality and proclaim themselves Serbian. The Greeks did the same. People were murdered who refused to choose.
The Bulgarian population in the country was terrorized. Bulgarian priests were given the choice: convert or die. Colonists from Serbia and Greece poured into the country. People in Macedonia pretty much spoke Bulgarian; however now the Serbs and the Greeks quickly started printing their own newspapers in their own languages, insisting that people bury their Bulgar tongue. Not even admitting that it could be a problem.
To Greece, also, Macedonia was made-up, a fabrication. To Greeks Macedonia was actually REALLY part of Greece, so the fact that everybody spoke Bulgarian in the country was something to be ignored and covered up.
Meanwhile, of course, Bulgaria, right next door, was enraged. They did not negotiate, they did not say "We are going to declare war on all of you", they did not give any warning. On June 13, 1913, Bulgaria invaded Macedonia. This was the start of the Second Balkan War.
The Second Balkan War: 1913.
This war did not last long. The Serbs and the Greeks helped each other out, reinforcing each other's troops against the Bulgarians. The Romanians joined the war, on the side of the Serb-Greek alliance, and invaded Bulgaria from the north. The battle was over very quickly, with Bulgaria the clear loser.
There was a peace conference a couple of months later, in which Bulgaria lost everything it had gained in the First Balkan War. It had gained an outlet to the Aegean, it had gained lands in Thrace, it had enveloped all of Macedonia. All of this was taken back. It was a humiliating defeat which would end up having global consequences.
World War I:
Bulgaria enters the war on the side of Germnay and Austria-Hungary in 1915. Its main goal was (surprise, surprise) to gain back all of Macedonia from Serbia. (Okay, Bulgaria, I think it's time to just let it go...)
Serbia had allied itself with Russia, Great Britain, and France.
The Habsburg army advanced through Serbia from the north while the Bulgarian army marched through Macedonia in the east. The Serbian army was trapped, with no backup supplies, no ammo, no vehicles. It was winter, too. The Serbs retreated into the freezing Albanian mountains.
Robert Kaplan has this to say about that retreat:
It was one of history's most harrowing winter retreats, ranking with those of Napoleon's soldiers from Russia the century before and of Xenophon's Greek troops from Mesopotamia in 401 B.C. into the mountains of Anatolia.
The remnants of the Serb army had retreated to Albania's coast on the Adriatic, where they were rescued and transported away to Corfu by French and Italian ships. We are talking about over 125,000 Serbians. This was a devastating defeat for them, humiliating, all of them fleeing for their lives from the Habsburgs and the Bulgarians.
So from then on, throughout the rest of World War I, trench warfare raged up and down Macedonia, with the French/Greek/Serb alliance, along with the British, warring against the Habsburgs and the Bulgarians. Things went on in this way for over two more years.
Then the war ended, with basically nothing changed for the Bulgarians: They lost all of Macedonia to the Serbs and the Greeks. All of these wars were like the movie "Groundhog Day" for Bulgaria. They kept starting wars to regain Macedonia, and they kept losing these wars, no better off than when they began.
World War II:
This war, of course, was a reply to World War I. Nothing had been resolved, no one was at peace with the outcome, everyone was dying to start the whole thing up again. And so they did.
Bulgaria (whaddya know) joined up with the Germans so that they could crush the Serbs and take back Macedonia. So this time, the Germans occupied Serbia from the north, and the Bulgarians occupied Macedonia from the east. And, in typical "Groundhog Day" fashion, the Serb and Greek alliance (with the help of Britain) fought the hated Bulgarians, and drove them back to the "hated borders" established at the end of the Second Balkan War.
But before the Bulgarians were driven out of Macedonia, and before the Russians swooped in, making all of this irrelevant, the Bulgarians and their occupation troops in Macedonia, began a brutal process of "Bulgarization" of the Macedonian population. Now, one more voice was added to the clamor, trying to tell the Macedonians who they are: "You are Serbs..." "You are Greeks...don't listen to them!!" "You are Bulgarians!" The Bulgarians were particularly savage in this arena. First of all, they gladly rounded up the Jewish population for the Germans and shipped them off. In all of the other wars, while all of these wackos were arguing over Macedonia, like kids playing tug-of-war on the playground, the Jews remained protected. There was no question.
With World War II, the gloves came off.
Now this is interesting: Because of how the Serbs and the Greeks had behaved during the First Balkan War, there had always been a pro-Bulgaria sway to the Macedonian population. With World War II that tide turned.
However, Macedonia did not sway back to the Serb or Greek side of the argument. They suddenly discovered their "Macedonian-ness". They began to feel like Macedonians, rather than people separated from whatever homeland they related to. Now, this is a debatable matter. Bulgarians, Greeks, and Serbs all scorn this "Macedonian-ness". It is made up, according to them. There IS no indigenous Macedonian culture or identity. It is all Bulgarian, or Serbian, or Greek. But this fierce "Macedonian-ness" continues to this day.
With the madness of World War II, the Macedonians finally had HAD it with their country being invaded, chopped up, argued over. They went on the offensive, for the glory of "Macedonia", and they demanded territory back from Bulgaria and Greece.
Skip ahead to 1989, and the disintegration of the Yugoslav Federation:
Macedonia feels cheated. Macedonia is pissed. There are huge populations of Macedonians who live outside their borders, in Bulgaria, or Greece. They want to liberate their countrymen. They want to be united with their kind. This is the dangerous powder keg sitting here in the Balkans. It is just a matter of time before it ignites. These people are used to hating. They have long long memories, and they NEVER forgive.
And it seems, too, that the Macedonians are slipping off into fantasy-land a bit. (But then again - who am I to say - it is a bit unfair of me to judge them - when I do not know what it is like there, and where they are coming from.) But here's my opinion: they have "rediscovered" a Macedonian language, which is, basically, a version of Bulgarian, but they can't call it that, because then they would have to admit that their ethnicity is a mix. This is unacceptable. These Macedonian nationalists believe that Istanbul was once a part of Macedonia, etc. All these other fantasies about that beautiful and perfect time in the past when Macedonia was not a victim of all of these greater forces, but the victimizer.
And I'll close with a quote from Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts, my primary source for all of this.
And on the walls near the Greek Consulate in Skopje [capital of Macedonia], I noticed the grafitti: 'Solun is ours!'Solun is the Macedonian word for Salonika, Greece's second largest city. Such demonstrations of irredentism were to unleash a wave of hostility in Greece -- so much so that, even when the new Macedonian state that declared its independence from Yugoslavia officially renounced all claims to Greek territory, it still wasn't enough for the Greeks, who feared that the very word Macedonia on the lips of these Slavs was a sign of future irredentism against Greece. When Greece demanded that Macedonia change its name in order to receive official recognition from Greece, the rest of the world laughed. The heart of the Greek argument, however, was better explained in the articles written by the scholar Kofos than it ever was by the Greek government through the media. Kofos writes that Macedonianism was an invention of Tito to serve as a cultural buttress against Bulgaria, which coveted the area. According to Kofos, this part of former Yugoslavia is actually southern Serbia. True, perhaps; but rightly or wrongly, these Slavs now consider themselves Macedonians, not Serbs, and both the Greeks and the Serbs must come to terms with that fact.
The upshot of this mess is that the Balkans have, in the 1990s, reverted to the same system of alliances that existed in 1913, at the time of the Second Balkan War: Greece, Serbia, and Romania versus Bulgaria and the Slavs of Macedonia.
The boomerang of history.
The fascination Macedonia holds for me so far does not equal a ton of knowledge (as opposed to, say, my fascination with Uzbekistan, which has led to me owning an entire small bookshelf of material on the republic). But that's all right, I suppose. Now I know that I need to learn more about Macedonia. I can feel the gaps in my mind, questions arising, wanting to flesh out the scenario a bit more for myself.
The post below is about the Turkey-Macedonian connection.
Again, from what I have read, things that happen in Macedonia send out shock waves with global consequences. This has been true since Alexander the Great launched his ships of conquest from Salonika. Macedonia was the place from which world events sprung. So here's how I understand the connection between Ataturk (who basically equalled Turkey) and Macedonia:
In 1903, IMRO began a violent uprising against the Turks and the entire Ottoman Empire. IMRO took over some villages at the top of a mountain in Macedonia and proclaimed it an independent republic called the "Krushovo Republic". This republic lasted 10 days, and then 2000 Turkish troops marched in and completely massacred everybody. One of the stories told is that forty of the guerrillas, instead of surrendering, kissed one another goodbye, and shot themselves in the mouth. Another story is that the Turks, as they took back the area, raped 150 women and small girls. There are other horror stories. Of the Turks complete inhumanity and cruelty.
There was a worldwide protest against the Turkish Sultanate for this behavior, led by Great Britain and the West. The British prime minister, the Russian czar and the Habsburg Emperor (Franz Joseph) all put tremendous pressure on the Ottomans to call off the dogs, so to speak, and to calm the hell down about Macedonia. Just CALM DOWN.
The pressure became so great, the outrage so pronounced, that an international peacekeeping force marched into Macedonia in 1904, to keep an eye on the situation. (Of course, history has proven how useless peacekeeping forces are, in places as volatile and violent as Macedonia. I read a wonderful interview with Philip Gourevitch, the author of the amazing book about the genocide in Rwanda, and he said in the interview, "One of the things I have learned is that if you find yourself living in a UN 'safe zone', just know that your life is in danger. It is the most dangerous place on the planet to be....in a UN Safe Zone. Run for your life.")
And now for Turkey/Ataturk:
Mustapha Kemal Ataturk was born in Macedonia. (Of COURSE.) Additionally, the "Young Turk Revolution", which ended up toppling the Ottoman Empire (which had lasted for 400 years or something like that) originated in Macedonia.
The Young Turk revolution originally demanded "liberty, equality, fraternity, justice". They wanted to force the Sultan to draw up (or accept from them) a liberal constitution. They wanted to preserve the empire, but they wanted to loosen up the iron-fist a bit. (A precursor to Gorbachev....) However (as with so many revolutions), the Young Turks didn't really have a plan. They didn't know how to go about creating a government, or re-creating Turkey into your basic normal country, which also happens to be a massive empire. They also were coming from a place of ethnicity, nationalism, and racial hatred. A terrible mix. CLEARLY.
The problem, as always in the Balkans, was the confusing ethnic mix of peoples. Orthodox Christians were enraged at the thought of a Muslim-run confederation, where perhaps they had constitutional safeguards as protected minorities. Remember that Turkey had been a dreaded and brutal nation for 400 years. Nobody trusted them, nobody believed them when they said "No, we promise to take care of you." Everyone in the Balkans knew, firsthand, what horrors the Turks were capable of.
The Young Turk Revolution, just like Gorbachev's perestroika and glasnost, accelerated the shattering of the Ottoman Empire. That was not their intent at all. They wanted the empire to open up to change, to stop resisting transformation. But by introducing minor changes, by discussing modern-day ideas like constitutions, and protections of minorities, etc., all hell broke loose. The door was cracked open a teeny bit by the Young Turks, then the entire population of the Balkans, sick to death of the Ottoman tyranny, pushed open the door the rest of the way. Violently.
1908 was a big year in which Turkey clearly began losing control):
--Bulgaria declared its complete independence from Turkey.
--The island of Crete (which was part of Turkey at the time) voted for union with Greece.
--The Habsburgs annexed Bosnia-Hercegovina (which they had been administering since The Treaty of Berlin)
That last bit there, with the Habsburgs, is the cause of World War I. Puts a chill up your spine, no?
Came across the following passage about all of this mess in (where else) Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts, which breaks it all down:
Put another way, Bulgarian-financed guerrillas in Macedonia had triggered a revolution among young Turkish officers stationed there, which then fanned throughout the Ottoman Empire; this development, in turn, encouraged Astria-Hungary to annex Bosnia, inflicting on its Serbian population a tyranny so great that a Bosnian Serb would later assassinate the Habsburg Archduke and ignite World War I.
But before all of this: Turkish Muslims were enraged by the Ottoman Empire's disintegration. Everyone in Turkey began revolting: army units, theological students, clerics. They began demonstrating for "sharia" (Islamic law, of course, which the Taliban perfected). As always, with Muslim fanatics, they wanted to go backwards. They wanted the Ottomans to crack down on all these uppity minorities, crack down HARD, and go back to the perfect time when the Turks ruled the world.
The Young Turks crushed this counterrevolution. They forced the Sultan into exile in, where else, Macedonia. That would be like forcing Hitler into exile in a Jewish ghetto in Warsaw. The Sultan had to hide, terrified for his life, in this land of people who hated him and wanted him to pay for what his empire had done.
Then, the Young Turks fell off the deep end. They perpetrated the century's first genocide against the Armenians in 1915. It was a mass murder of 1.5 million Armenians, orchestrated by the government. The Armenians threatened the Turks demographically and religiously. They were Christians, there were large numbers of them, and they were right in the middle of the Turkish homeland. In order for Turkey to be great and unified again, then the Armenians had to disappear.
This genocide occurred on the world stage. Nobody protested. Nobody did anything. There is a story about Hitler, planning Germany's genocide thirty years later, and answering the feeble protests ("What will people say? Won't they notice and try to stop it?") of the sycophants around him. Hitler's response to their concerns was: "Who remembers Armenia?"
Okay, so this is now becoming way too long, and I have strayed far from Macedonia....However, it is all connected.
The Young Turks becoming so terrifying and so brutal forced the Balkans to do something which had never happened before, and which has never happened since: they united. They buried the hatchet in the face of such a clear enemy, and formed an alliance. After all, none of the Great Powers out there were intervening in any of this. They realized that no great warrior from the West was going to lead a cavalry charge and save them, so Serbia, Greece, and Bulgaria joined up together, and fought for themselves. Incredible. These historic enemies...people who literally are still in a rage about what happened in 612 AD, or whatever.
In 1912, this alliance declared war on the Ottoman Empire. (A very very ballsy thing to do.) Their principal goal was to liberate poor forgotten important Macedonia.
Next: 20th century wars
This essay (or, rather, excerpts from others' brilliant works) has to do with why Macedonia is such a flash-point- why people are obsessed with Macedonia. I could never describe this situation in my own words because, as I said in the Intro - I get a bit bogged down trying to get the complexity of Macedonia.
Here is quote #1. This describes perfectly the essence of the Balkan chaos:
Macedonia, the inspiration for the French word for 'mixed salad' (macedoine), defines the principal illness of the Balkans: conflicting dreams of lost imperial glory. Each nation demands that its borders revert to where they were at the exact time when its own empire had reached its zenith of ancient medieval expansion. Because Philip of Macedon and his son, Alexander the Great, had established a great kingdom in Macedonia in the fourth century BC, the Greeks believed Macedonia to be theirs. Because the Bulgarians at the end of the tenth century under King Samuel and again in the thirteenth century under King Ivan Assen II had extended the frontiers of Bulgaria all the way west to the Adriatic Sea, the Bulgarians believed Macedonia to be theirs. Because King Stefan Duhan had overrun Macedonia in the fourteenth century and had made Skopje, in Dame Rebecca [West's] words, 'a great city, and there he had been crowned one Easter Sunday Emperor and Autocrat of the Serbs and Byzantines, the Bulgars and the Albanians,' the Serbs believed Macedonia to be theirs.In the Balkans, history is not viewed as tracing a chronological progression as it is in the West. Instead, history jumps around and moves in circles; and where history is perceived in such a way, myths take root. Evangelos Kofos, Greece's preeminent scholar on Macedonia, has observed that these 'historical legacies ... sustained nations in their uphill drive toward state-building, national unification and, possibly, the reincarnation of long extinct empires.'
And here is quote #2. This reiterates what I described in the post about IMRO, only going into a bit more detail about what went down between the two World Wars.
After starting and losing two wars over Macedonia, Bulgaria's King Ferdinant abdicated in 1919. For the next twenty years, until the outbreak of World War II, his son, King Boris III, presided over a political system in Sofia that was riven by coup attempts and other violent conspiracies connected to the loss of what Bulgarians considered their historic homeland. IMRO, radicalized by the defeats of 1913 and 1918, became a terrorist state within a state, and, helped by its skull-and-crossbones insignia, became synonymous in the outside world with hate and violent nihilism. Opium profits financed the purchase of IMRO's weaponry. The standard fee for an IMRO assassination was twenty dollars, so Bulgarian politicians walked around with trains of bodyguards...The terrorists, aided by Orthodox clergy, came from the Macedonian refugee population of Sofia's slums. By the 1930s, Macedonian terrorists were hiring themselves to radical groups throughout Europe -- in particular, to the Croatian Ustashe, whose chief paymaster was the fascist dictator of Italy, Benito Mussolini. A Bulgarian Macedonian nicknamed 'Vlado the Chauffeur' assassinated King Alexander of Yugoslavia -- the crime that initiated Dame Rebecca's passion for that country.
World War II provided another sickening reply of World War I and the Second Balkan War. Again, as in World War I, Bulgaria joined a German-led alliance against a Serb-dominated Yugoslavia in order to regain Macedonia. Again, while forces of a German-speaking power occupied Serbia from the north, Bulgarian troops invaded and occupied Macedonia from the east. And again, Serb and Greek resistance forces, aided by the British, drove the Bulgarians back to the hated borders established in August 1913 at the conclusion of the Second Balkan War. At that point, Communist totalitarianism stopped history until the century's final decade. Nothing of all this has yet been resolved.
Next: The Young Turks
The second essay about Macedonia is about the formation of the terrorist group known as IMRO. My understanding of the history of this group is a wee bit shallow - As always, chime in if you know more.
The country is poor, ethnically divided, filled with hatred, and with historically weak government institutions. The ground was fertile for terrorism.
IMRO disappeared once Macedonia was sucked into the Yugoslav Federation post World War II. A lot of things (ethnic warfare, guerrilla tactics, raging hatred) disappeared from view under Tito, but these things did not vanish or dissolve or resolve themselves. They merely subsided into silence, underneath the water, waiting for the time when it would be right to emerge again. And "emerge" they did. More like explode. Once Yugoslavia fell apart, all of these undercurrents exploded to the surface again, as though the 40 years of silence meant nothing.
IMRO surfaced again after the collapse of Yugoslavia, only this time it took on the character of a fairly moderate political party. The extremists have been pushed to the side. Most moved to Bulgaria, where everybody is nationalistic, extremist, intense (at least when it comes to the Macedonian Problem).
There is, I am sure, more to learn about IMRO.
Next: Competing territorial claims
I am riveted by Macedonia.
These essays are more from my old Country of the Week feature on my old blog - slowly I am migrating them all over here. They're interesting, if I do say so myself (although I cannot take any credit for the information therein - It's all from the great authors I have read.)
Other countries discussed here.
I have read multiple books about the Balkans. Macedonia is really the key to the whole area. Always has been, always will be. But could I explain to you WHY? Occasionally I will have a bright-white "A-ha!!" moment, in terms of getting what is going on with Macedonia, but then the cloud cover comes down again. Sometimes I get the sense, too, that Macedonia is like one of those sub-sub-sub atomic particles in the world of quantum physics, where the only way you can tell that they exist, is by the effect these teeny particles have on OTHER particles. This is not to say that Macedonia does not exist. (Although, I suppose if you spoke with a nationalistic Bulgarian that is exactly what they would say: "Macedonia?? There IS no Macedonia! It is ALL BULGARIA!") It is just that you can really only "get" Macedonia in relation to all the other countries in the Balkans.
Any context or clarifiations to the rambling discussion below would be greatly appreciated. My readers are, categorically, well-read, well-spoken, and damn smart.
Let's begin with this:
TWO TREATIES HEARD ROUND THE WORLD
1. The Treaty of San Stefano
Macedonia is the Balkans in miniature. It is an old country, with memories of glory centuries ago. Alexander the Great, after all, was a Macedonian, and set out from Macedonia to conquer the world. Macedonia is filled with a mix of races and languages and religions and cultures, and nobody mixes with each other. They never have mixed and they don't mix now.
But before I talk about generalities, let me try to describe what is known as "the Macedonian problem", because it is the key. This problem has not disappeared and will definitely appear again one day to the forefront of world events.
Historic Macedonia overlaps Bulgaria and also Greece. Claims on this soil are legion. It's like Armenia. There is a centuries-old question surrounding the issue: Is Macedonia a real country? What are its borders? It has been cut up and carved up and divided so many times that nobody seems to know, although everybody has a fierce opinion about it. And, at this point, everything is so mixed up and ethnically divided that no matter how you divided Macedonia, each state would be left with unruly pissed-off minorities.
So here's a bit of history. The whole Balkan area was part of the Ottoman Empire. In the early 19th century, the Ottoman Empire began to show the first signs of a crack-up. Greeks, Serbs, and Montenegrins won a struggle for self-rule. In 1877, Russian troops arrived to liberate Bulgaria from Turkey. The Turks were defeated, and the Russians moved into the Bulgarian capital as an occupying force.
In March, 1878, the Russians dictated the Treaty of San Stefano to the Turks. The Treaty of San Stefano has been called "the first fuse of the Balkan powder keg". It is one of those devilish things from the past which cannot be undone. It seemed like a good idea at the time to the Russians who dictated it, but here we are, over a century later, and people are still bemoaning the Treaty of San Stefano, and how it fucked them over, etc.
The Treaty awarded Macedonia to Bulgaria. The purpose of the Treaty was to recreate Bulgaria, along the lines of the medieval Bulgarian kingdom's borders. So the treaty enlarged Bulgaria, creating a "Greater Bulgaria" which encompassed present-day Bulgaria, all of Macedonia, parts of Albania, and a huge chunk of Greek land surrounding the northern city of Salonika.
So what the Russians basically did with this treaty, was create a powerful pro-Russian state in the Balkans. It swept away the needs or desires of Macedonia and Greece. All that mattered was Bulgaria, and the population of Bulgars. The other big powers at the time (Britain, Germany, the Habsburg Empire) could not accept the Treaty, as written, and demanded that it be amended. Germany and England made it clear to Russia that creating a "Greater Bulgaria" would mean war with Great Britain.
So here we are seeing the roots of World War I. Russia capitulated.
2. The Treaty of Berlin
So basically, Greater Bulgaria was dismembered before it even had a chance to exist. A second treaty was drawn up. The Treaty of Berlin. The northern half of Greater Bulgaria became free (Bulgaria), and the southern half became a Turkish province in the Ottoman Empire (Macedonia). Macedonia was completely abandoned to the brutal Turks, as though the Treaty of San Stefano had never existed. It's like what the Allies let happen to Czechloslovakia in WWII. They tossed the country to the dogs. No hope for them, nobody would invade and save them. They were on their own.
The Treaty of Berlin basically passed around Balkan chunks of land as though nobody actually lived there, it was merely territory. But it created such confusion and such anger that we are still living in the aftermath of that treaty today. Here's the puzzle pieces of the treaty:
--Bismarck gave Russia lands in Bessarabia and Northeast Anatolia, to compensate them for the loss of Macedonia
--Serbs were given full independence
--Bismarck transferred Bosnia from Ottoman rule to Habsburg rule (this is the immediate cause of WWI). Bismarck did this to compensate the Habsburgs for the loss of Macedonia.
--Great Britain received Cyprus from the Turks.
Can you see how misguided all of this is? How crazy? How it solves nothing, and just plants the seeds of insanity for generations to come?
Also: see how Macedonia is the key?
This Treaty sparked an orgy of violence in Macedonia. The Turks brutally suppressed the uprisings.
Macedonia is, historically, an Eastern Orthodox nation. So refugees (ethnic Turks, Muslim Bosnians) flooded into Macedonia to terrorize the Christian population. In 1878 there was a guerrilla uprising against the Turks. That uprising led to a century-long guerilla war. Macedonia is the birthplace of modern-day terrorism. They invented many of the tactics which we see so often now. Their rage at being tossed to the Turks and losing everything continues to this day.
The 1890s brought spreading terrorism and violence, no central government, no concept of nationhood. And the outside powers just used this country to play out their rivalries. The mountains were filled with gangs of mercenaries and murderers, waging 15 different terrorist wars.
Then (I'm skipping way ahead here), Macedonia was incorporated into the Yugoslav Federation which, although awful to some degree, also helped tamp down a lot of the ethnic hatred and violence. But the question continues: Who, actually, does Macedonia belong to? Bulgaria is convinced that there IS no Macedonia. That Macedonia is, and always has been, part of Bulgaria. Greece feels the same way about southern Macedonia, which used to be part of Greece. Greece has never ever given up their claims on that area.
In the books I have read, people lose their minds when they start to talk about Macedonia. Screaming, tearing their hair out, everybody convinced they are right. It's a mess. It's one of the most intense "flashpoints" on this planet. There are certain areas which seem destined, somehow, to make people go nuts. Jerusalem, Armenia, Poland (how many times can Poland be invaded??), the land bridge into Turkey where Istanbul/Constantinople stands ... These are places which, geographically, nobody can be neutral about. If you even just look at their placements on a map, it is obvious why.
The Macedonian Problem will rise again. I'm sure of it.
I hope I explained that okay. It's all very confusing. But interesting, no?
Next: IMRO
And for the last small piece on Turkmenistan (see the other posts below) - here's something on the cultural identity of the people there.
This comes from books I read - I've never been there myself. So I'm not an expert - just someone curious about that region of the world.
Alexander the Great (HIM AGAIN) marched across the Kara Kum desert in 329 B.C. and left behind him traces of Macedonia and Greece. The ancient ruins of Turkmenistan reveal a culture filled with a fusion of different influences. Islamic, Persian, Hellenistic, Parthian ... all sometimes showing up in the same damn building.
Now think about this mish-mash and the beautiful cultural past, something actually to be proud of and embrace, and imagine Mr. Turkmanbashi insisting that, ACTUALLY, in the past, it was all about "Turkmenness", and there was a homogenous Turkomen society back then when you could be proud of being a Turkomen, and Oh, if we could only go back to the good old days when it was JUST US TURKOMENS here...All fabrications.
There is no homogenous Turkomen identity. It doesn't exist. In actuality, it's something much more interesting, but it is too dangerous for Turkmanbashi to allow people to embrace it. He counts on people to keep the flares of ethnic suspicion and hatred alive.
I will close with an anecdote, which kind of describes what I'm talking about here.
Turkmenistan is NOT what you would think. It is a hot dry oil-filled Islamic country, but it is NOT Saudi Arabia.
This anecdote is from Colin Thubron's awesome book The Lost Heart of Asia. This encounter takes place in the ancient Turkomen city of Merv:
I saw an old man touching an elfin hammer to a little anvil. In front of him lay a miniature lathe and a box of gouging and chipping tools -- all as intricate and fragile-looking as he -- and with these he was creating miniature jewellry and the unearthly, silvery music whenever his hammer struck.He lived here, I discovered ... As I came in, he asked me to sit by him. Tentatively I enquired after the saints buried here, and wondered if he was their guardian.
His voice came thin and musical: "They were soldiers, martyrs. When? I don't know, but in the century of the great sultans. Their history is written in Arabic and Persian. You can't find it in Russian." He added in faint reproof: "People should learn the holy languages. You can learn one in a few months if your will is strong enough, and if your heart is right." He massaged his heart with a tiny fist. "Look." He rummaged among his tools and from a carefully beribboned cloth picked out a Koran in Arabic. "People should read this!"
Yet his own eyes twinkled over it unseeing; he could no more read it than I could. It was a talisman only. In the Stalin years a whole generation of educated Turcomens, the Arabic speakers, had been despatched into oblivion.
I took it from him and turned the sacred pages. "Where did you get it?"
"From Iran. Sometimes they come here, those people, and from Afghanistan."
"You favor that system, that ..." -- the word whispered like a secret -- "fundamentalism?"
For a moment he went on chipping at the ivory in his hands. Suddenly I realized how I hung on his reply. Here, if anywhere, among the poor and pious, must be the breeding-ground for an Islamic resurgence.
But he answered simply, finally: "No. We don't need that here." He jerked his chin to the south. "That's for people over there."
It was strange, I thought. Superficially the soil for fundamentalism was perfect here: the deepening poverty and sense of historical wrong, the damaged pride. But in fact the old man's response was typical of his people. The idea of religion as a doctrinaire moulder of society seemed shallow-rooted among them, and their faith to thrive somewhere different, somewhere more sensory and pagan.
"All those laws and customs ..." The old man resettled his grimy skull-cap. "They don't matter. What matters is underneath this!" -- he plucked at his jacket -- "What matters is the heart!" ... He said, "Our country's had enough of other people's interference."
I must give hats off to Colin Thubron - who wrote one of my favorite travelogue books: "The Lost Heart of Asia" - in which he travels through all of the former Soviet republics of Central Asia directly following the collapse of the USSR. He tries to take the pulse of the entire area, which, obviously, is very difficult.
But man, can he write. Beautiful book.
Ryzsard Kapucinski also wrote a wonderful book called Imperium - which sparked my interest originally in Central Asia.
This is a short post on the nomads of Turkestan.
The whole nomad existence is something I would like to know more about. I mean, I've never met an actual nomad. If I did, I would be able to ask him questions about his life, what it's like, what goes on in his mind, how his experience may differ from mine.
In one of the many books I've read on the topic, I came across a description which I loved. I would cite the source, but unfortunately, I have no idea where it came from. It's coming directly off my "Turkestan" index card, (I'm autistic, I guess - and maintain 2 fat boxes of index cards with information/quotes/etc. I have compiled on most of the countries in the world - If I ever get recruited to be a spy, or a Gertrude Bell type, I will be all set) Anyway, the quote is: "Nomads mastered the art of conquering space." I love that.
Nomads created the first global system of mass communication long before anyone even knew what exactly was "out there", and what the "globe" may have looked like.
Centuries ago, it was the nomads who helped cities like Bukhara and Tashkent rise up and become famous and prosperous and cosmopolitan. They helped spread information and technology around the world. Incredible.
I read one essay about "The Death of the Uzboj", which was a river in the Kara Kum Desert. The Uzboj dried up and disappeared over 400 years ago, and the writer of the essay surmised that this was the beginning of the end for the Turkomens. Fascinating. Here is the theory. And it sort of fits in with the whole "what the hell is a nomad and what is his life like?" thing I was talking about a moment ago.
The Kara Kum Desert is huge. It is 800 miles long. The temperatures regularly reach levels like 172 degrees Farenheit.
The Turkmens lived here in scattered huts. The desert is endless. A complete wasteland.
The Kara Kum is the largest desert not just in Turkmenistan but in all of Central Asia, which is, obviously, a region of deserts.
Turkestan was receptive to Islam, when it arrived. Islam seems to be the religion of desert people, of people who live in hot unforgiving climates. I wonder about that sometimes and if some theologian could explain why that might be, or even if I'm way off the mark here. The descriptions in the Koran of paradise are all about: running water, green fields, moist lush lands (not to mention 72 virgins...or was that 72 raisins? Well, either way...72 yummy somethings-or-other). Paradise filled with things in direct contrast to the harsh bleakness of the desert landscapes.
The Uzboj was a river which flowed through the Kara Kum monotony. Needless to say, oases sprang up along its banks. This is how civilization grows.
400 years ago, the Uzboj dried up and disappeared. And the dying river took the equilibrium of the Turkmens with it.
Tribes were sent into exile, whole oases had to find other places to live, so people were suddenly on the move.
An oasis is a very fragile entity. It can only hold so many people before things get out of whack. So this is what happened to the Turkomens. Wandering desperate people tried to squeeze their way in to other oases, and were turned away. Sometimes violently.
And this is how the wars of the Turkomens began. Over water.
They never knew unity, as a people. Their first contact with one another, with the Turkomens outside their own oasis, was violent. This is life and death stuff: fighting over water in a deadly desert. This is not a silly reason or a trivial reason to go to war. LET ME IN to this oasis...I have a wife (or maybe 2 or 3), and 15 children, and we are DYING. There is NO WATER. We live in a DESERT, remember?? Let me IN.
When the Russians arrived two and a half centuries later, it was a piece of cake to subdue the Turkomens. It is easy to conquer a divided people. (Now, I know you all know that I did not make that concept up myself!) Well, the Russians didn't even need to worry about the first part of the theory. They came across this desert, and found an already divided scattered people. No big deal to completely conquer them.
For those of you with the time, who want to read on, here's a passage from Ryszard Kapuscinski's book Imperium.
I'm going to quote specifically from his passage on The Death of the Uzboj. Anyone who has been reading this blog will probably think that I only read one book. And that is Kapuscinski's Imperium. I understand how I might give that impression. To me, that book holds it all. It was also the beginning of it all, for me. I read that book, on a whim, years ago, because I was fascinated by the COVER of all embarrassing things. But the book opened up my world, my mind...I had no idea what the hell the man was talking about but I knew I wanted to know more. Now I look at my book shelves and I have more books on Central Asia than I do poetry, or fiction. A strange transformation.
Anyway, here is a bit more on the Death of the Uzboj:
Everyone tried to live as close to the Uzboj as possible. The river carried water; it carried life. Along its banks ran the trails of caravans. In the currents of the Uzboj the army of Genghis Khan watered its horses. To its shores journeyed the merchants of Samarkand and the Yomud -- slave traders.The river's agony, said Rashyd, began four hundred years ago. Having appeared suddenly on the desert, the river now just as suddenly began to vanish.
The Uzboj had created a civilization in the very heart of the desert, had sustained three tribes, linked the west with the east; on the banks of the Uzboj stood dozens of cities and settlements, which Yusupov would excavate. Now the sands were swallowing up the river. Its energy began to weaken, its current to wane.
It is not known who first noticed this.
The Ali-Ali, Chyzr, and Tivedzij gathered on the banks to watch the river, the source of life, departing; they sat and they watched, because people like to observe their own misfortune. The water level fell from one day to the next; an abyss was yawning before them ... People ran to the mullahs, ran to the ishans ... Nothing helped. The fields were drying up and the trees withering. For a skin of water one would buy a Karakul sheep. Caravans, which before stopped here and there, now passed by in a hurry, as if an epidemic had befallen this land. The bazaars grew deserted; merchants closed their shops.
Yusupov, who excavated the former oases of the Uzboj, claims that there is a great disorder among the objects found there. People just abandoned everything they had. Children abandoned their toys; women abandoned their pots. They must have been seized with panic, hysteria, fear. No doubt the most fantastic rumors circulated. Perhaps prophets and fortune-tellers appeared. People felt the band of the desert tightening around them; the sand was whistling at their door.
This post is about Niyazov, the "president" of Turkmenistan. Actually, he has renamed himself Turkmanbashi, which means "Chief of the Turkmens".
The guy is nuts.
Turkmenistan, throughout the millennia, was not a unified place. It still is not. 55 nationalities alone live in the capital city. It is a place of nomads, and wanderers. Desert people.
But Niyazov wanted to inflame in the Turkomens a sense of ethnicity and unification. He set out to re-invent the past.
The truth of the matter, the FACTS of the past, did not suit his purposes, so he made stuff up, to make the Turkomens feel better about themselves.
The local scholars, the intelligent people left in the country, know the truth: that the Turkomens are not the source of everything wonderful and innovative on the planet, the Turkomens did not discover America, etc...but they must parrot the regime's version of the truth.
Niyazov's father was killed in World War I, and his mother died in the 1948 earthquake in Ashgabat which basically swallowed up the entire city. 110,000 people died. The entire medieval city disappeared off the face of the earth.
Niyazov was then raised in an orphanage. Some scholars surmise that being abandoned (twice) like this in his childhood is the primary source of his personality cult. He has turned himself into the golden child of the country. He has put himself on all the currency. He has named months after himself.
Ashgabad is clogged with golden statues of himself. Also, Times-Square-size billboards of his face fill the entire country. I read one travelogue where the writer describes riding through the devastatingly bleak Kara Kum Desert which makes up most of Turkmenistan, and seeing Niyazov billboards looming up out of the empty distance. Even in the middle of nowhere, Niyazov wants to make sure his presence is omniscent.
Niyazov was a member of the Communist Party since 1962. He rose through the ranks to the highest level. In 1990 (just before all hell broke loose across the Soviet Union...or, actually, during the hellfire) he became Chairman of the Supreme Soviet, the top dog. Then the Soviet Union shattered, ethnic warfare broke out, the economy collapsed - It was a time of utter confusion, especially in these nomadic Central Asian Islamic republics...republics with no prior history of centralized government or democracy.
In 1991, Turkmenistan declared itself independent. A new constitution was drawn up, a democratic constitution, which set in motion a presidential election. The first in Turkmenistan's history.
And hey, whaddya know, Niyazov was elected president.
There is a ludicrous aspect to his regime, which actually is rather dangerous. I say that because it seems rather easy for us to make fun of it all, how stupid it is, how ridiculous he obviously is. Niyazov has come out with a line of cologne, for example. Turkomen cologne. He has published his own poetry which is always #1 on Turkmenistan's best-seller list. He also, a la Qaddafi, has published books of his own philosophical musings. Musings on "Turkmenness", and ethnicity, and how to create a government, etc. etc.
The reason I say "dangerous" is that I have read articles which treat this regime humorously. The tone of the articles is: Ho ho, look at this crazy man!! Ha ha, isn't it funny...blah blah blah. When, actually, what he has created is a society with no freedom of speech. A completely un-free society in every way. Not only is there no freedom of speech, but there is no freedom of thought. Niyazov hijacked the entire country. The people are trapped by their own leader.
Every building built is built to glorify Niyazov and humble the population. This was Stalin's tactic as well. Stalin's architecture was inhumanly sized massive buildings, and impossibly wide streets. The urban landscape was built specifically to make people feel miniscule and helpless. Dwarfed. Niyazov does the same. He is a complete and utter megalomaniac who never ever ever hears someone say "No", or "You know what, Saparmurat? I don't think that is such a good idea." Or "Well, we have a lot of problems in this country...unemployment, anger, poverty...maybe focusing on a line of cologne is not the best use of your energy??"
Nomads, historically, are very suspicious people. Suspicious of outsiders. It is not hard to imagine why.
Typically, an outsider who shows up in the nomad world, is a thief, a Genghis Khan-type, a raider, a pillager. Your life, and your trust, is placed with your CLAN. The outside world is not to be trusted. Only the clan matters. Two generations ago, Turkmenistan was a nation of nomads. This suspicion of outsiders, in their nomadic blood, has now been transferred into their government.
Niyazov's regime is xenophobic. Suspicious. Defensive. The populace finds tremendous obstacles in their way if they want to travel. A vast bureaucracy has been created to make Visa applications nearly impossible. Niyazov wants no outside influence, he doesn't want the citizenry to get any funny ideas.
However he has NO problem with "hiring out". Turkmenistan is a land with vast oil wealth and they have no idea how to capitalize on this wealth. They don't know the technology, they don't have any experts in the country. So Niyazov hires armies of experts from other countries (many of them Israelis) to come and build the infrastructure of the country FOR him.
Niyazov has a massive secret police force. Which he learned how to utilize during his days in the Communist Party.
Journalists who come to the country to find out what is going on will often be followed, trailed, watched like a hawk. They will be assigned a "guide" who is really a government spy. All typical despotic tyrannical stuff.
Who knows how it all will end. It cannot go on like this indefinitely. This nation of people have had no chance to figure out their own way. They are crushed under an iron fist, once again. From Communism to Niyazov-ism.
But then again: perhaps - coming from a xenophobic nomadic clan-based culture themselves - they see nothing wrong with the government.
Niyazov is definitely one of those evil leaders out there.
The regime is "stable", but only because no dissent is allowed. Political parties are outlawed. Nobody can make a move. The entire country is paralyzed. Something's gotta give, and Niyazov will not give up easily. He's a psychological case study, which is kind of terrifying to have in a tyrant. Someone who is working out his childhood abandonment issues ON the country he is leading. A terrible mix.
In the following post - I talk about the ancient history of Turkmenistan. History is an odd concept for the lands of Central Asia - The land has been inhabited forever, crossed over by marauders on horseback, by nomads, by the Silk Road ... but "history" as in - written-down-history of a nation doesn't exist here.
All of these "stans" were not known as nations during their heyday in the Middle Ages.
People were identified with the oasis they lived in: Samarkand, Bukhara, Tashkent, whatever. The area was inhabited by Turkic people (which comprises many many sub-divisions: Turkomans, Uzbeks, Kyrgyz, Kazakhs, Uighurs), and Persian people, and Caucasian tribes and Tibetans and mongoloid races, and other forgotten subgroupings. We are talking about a mecca of multiculturalism. They were always at war with one another, as well.
Turkestan was a very complicated collision zone of identities and races.
The famous medieval "Silk Road" traveled through Turkestan, making the cities along the way internationally known, in an age before mass media.
As a matter of fact, for centuries, Turkestan was essential. Over this vast steppe and desert-land, the caravans would come, bringing goods, and information, and technology from China.
If Turkestan had been made up of Himalayan-tall mountain ranges, the Silk Road could not have evolved. It is impossible to over-estimate the impact the Silk Road had on the human race and Turkestan's string of city-states was one of the reasons why this occurred.
If I had a time machine, one of the places/times I would KILL to visit would be an oasis along the Silk Road. Samarkand, Tashkent. They were Islamic cities, when Islam was at its height. Islam, at that time as opposed to now, was an incredibly assimilative religion. The Islamic warriors would conquer a land, and immediately begin to assimilate all the best from that conquered culture: literature, scientific discoveries, inventions, philosophies. People came from all over Turkestan and beyond to study in the theological centers set up in the cities. Turkic and Persian cultures fused together, which still is reflected in the architecture in these cities today. (Wherever the Russians didn't destroy the buildings.)
Then came 1498.
And an incredible discovery was made. Wonderful for the human race in a "macro" sense, but a disaster for Turkestan. The sea route to India was discovered. And basically, with that discovery, Turkestan slipped out of history and disappeared completely. The Silk Road withered up and died, and the famous city-states fell into decay. Turkestan lost its reason for being.
Four centuries later, the Russians "discovered" Turkestan.
The Turkomans, who had been completely left in history's dustbin suddenly, once again, were sitting on the most valuable piece of land on earth.
Russia and Great Britain began their "Great Game": the struggle for control of Central Asia. The two superpowers of the 19th century battled it out with one another on the deserts and steppes.
I am just so curious what that must have been like for them. For the Turkomans who, for centuries, had lived in their desert oases, ignored by the rest of the world, ignoring the rest of the world, completely self-contained, silent, absolutely unknown.
And then ... boom. Here come two massive superpowers wielding weaponry such as they have never seen, fighting wars over the land on which they lived. Who were these people?
The Turkomans are ancient people of pretty much unknown origins anyway - Through their oral history and epics, they knew that long long long ago, their land was talked about in books, was revered, mythologized, dreamt of. And they knew that they, once upon a time, were the greatest warriors on the planet. But they were not cut out to be a modern people. Their glory days occurred seven centuries ago.
I am very curious about people with such long memories. What could they tell us? Who knows, maybe I'm romanticizing. I probably am.
I will now move onward with my "Countries" feature - and post my old essays about Turkmenistan. For those of you are interested in this kind of thing.
You can see the other Countries featured here.
Turkmenistan holds me in thrall. I don't know why. It just does.
Turkmenistan is 90% desert with vast quantities of oil beneath.
In the 10th and 11th centuries, the Turkmens (or Turcomans...it's spelled differently in every book I read) started to migrate here from Mongolia. Nobody is sure why. Not even the Turkmens of today know why. These ancient people were nomadic raider types of the Genghis Khan variety. Very good raiders. Not so good nation-builders. Also, the landscape of Turkmenistan does not at all lend itself to any kind of centralized government. It's just one big huge desert, with most of the population living in 5 oases, spread out, and disconnected.
In the mid 1700s, the Persians subdued the Turkmens (who had been continuously raiding Persia for centuries).
In the early 1800s, the Russians arrived. A portentous event. They started erecting forts throughout the desert. The Russians wanted to break Persia's hold on Central Asia, and they did just that. The Russians began warring with the Turkmens who, understandably, wanted them to pack up their damn forts and trot on back to Moscow.
In 1916 a Turkmen leader came along, the first one to unite this land, which was little more than a massive desert, scattered with tribes and clans who had nothing to do with each other. But along comes Mohammed Qurban Junaid Khan, who instilled in the Turkmens a sense of nationhood, a sense of pride...and they ejected the czarist forces and began a war with the Red Army. Quite a ballsy move, and doomed to failure.
The Turkmens were nomadic farmers and wanderers. They were no match for the Russians.
The Soviets won, naturally. They immediately changed the Turkmen alphabet from Arabic to Cyrillic. They sealed the borders with Iran and Afghanistan. Stalin came along, and there were tons of purges and executions. The Russians began to "resettle" in Turkmenistan. The Soviet leadership needed there to be more Russians in these wild backwards Central Asian places, so tons of Russians were sent to Turkmenistan to settle in. The few educated Turkmen that existed were completely annihilated.
Turkmenistan became independent in 1991. But this basically happened against their will. They were forced to become a nation. Turkmenistan was the LEAST prepared of all the Central Asian republics to become a state. Statehood has always been an indistinct and abstract concept in this area. So the Turkmen people inherited a complete void. Which is a perfect situation for a power-crazed dictator to rush in and take over. This is exactly what has happened. A madman is now in charge of Turkmenistan, but that's a story for another post.
And lastly (after the Intro, after war with Armenia, after oil, after government, after ethnic hatred) ... a post on the hodge-podge culture of this country.
A couple of quotes on this issue:
"In the past Azerbaijan was more of a geographic and cultural concept than a political one. There never really was a centralized state of Azerbaijan, and in this its history differs from that of Georgia and Armenia. It differs in other respects as well. By way of the Black Sea and Anatolia, Georgia and Armenia maintained contact with ancient Europe, and later with Byzantium. They received Christianity from there, which created within their territories a resistance to the spread of Islam. In Azerbaijan the influence of Europe was weak from the onset, at best secondary. Between Europe and Azerbaijan rise the barriers of the Caucasus and the Armenian Highland, whereas in the east Azerbaijan turns into lowlands, is easily accessible open. Azerbaijan is the threshold of Central Asia." -- Ryzsard Kapuscinsky, Imperium"This culture was deepening, even if nationhood was indistinct. Outwardly, it was becoming as if the Russians had never been here ... Turkish kebab stands were appearing ... Ramiz, Reza's friend, declared a fourth vodka toast to Azerbaijan, the hearthplace of Turkish literature ... But Azeri culture wasn't simply Turkish. Ramiz's very manner, the tender, cloistered expression in his searching eyes, and the fetid dining room full of vodka, rotting cheeses, old photos, and perspiring, very lightly drunken men and women -- as if they were in one evening-long communal hug -- proclaimed an atmosphere similar to what I had experienced in Eastern Europe during communist rule -- places where political life had been so sterile that the vacuum, perforce, had been filled by a personal life, making the latter far richer than people in Western Europe and North America could imagine...There was also much Persian influence." -- Robert Kaplan, The Ends of the Earth
And one last thing to cap it all off:
"Azerbaijan was not merely an eastern extension of Turkey, but a grey, shaded area where the Turkish, Russian, and Iranian worlds overlapped. Because of seven decades of totalitarianism, which buried this rich legacy, this cultural eclecticism had become a confusing void." -- Robert Kaplan, The Ends of the Earth
Azerbaijan is one of the first countries I ever became curious about in that region. Azerbaijan ushered me into a new world - my curiosity about Azerbaijan led me to Turkmenistan, to Georgia, to Armenia, to Kurdistan ....
So I have a soft spot in my heart for Azerbaijan.
Not that anybody cares, but I thought I would share that.
This post focuses on the ethnic hatred between Azeris and Armenians.
With a couple of choice observations, Kapuscinski shows how hopeless such situations can be, especially when the enemies live in such close cramped quarters. Right on top of each other, basically. Sound familiar??
Imperium, by the way, was published in 1994. In the Azerbaijan chapters, he describes not only his trip through the Caucasus in the 1950s, but he also tells of his visit to Azerbaijan and Armenia during the years of 1989 through 1991. So this is just as the situation was exploding between the two peoples, simultaneous with the collapse of the entire edifice of Communism, which had, to some degree, muted the ethnic violence in all of the republics. Once that edifice no longer existed, all bets were off. People were free to hate each other all on their own, and on their own terms. My point, too, is that the following excerpt is from before the ceasefire in 1994:
Azerbaijanis, like Armenians, divide mankind into two opposing camps.For Armenians, an ally is one who believes that Nagorno-Karabakh is a problem. The rest are enemies.
For Azerbaijanis, an ally is one who believes that Nagorno-Karabakh is not a problem. The rest are enemies.
The extremity and finality of these positions is remarkable. It isn't merely that among Armenians one cannot say, "I believe that the Azerbaijanis are right," or that among Azerbaijanis one cannot maintain, "I believe that the Armenians are right." No such stance even enters the realm of possibility -- either group would instantly hate you and then kill you! In the wrong place or among the wrong people even to say, "There is a problem," (or, "There is no problem") is enough to put oneself at risk of being strangled, hanged, stoned, burned.
It is also unimaginable to make the following speech in either Baku or Yerevan: Listen. Decades ago (who living among us can even remember those times?), some Turkish pasha and the savage Stalin threw our Caucasian nest this terrible cuckoo's egg, and from that time on, for the entire century, we have been tormenting and killing one another, while they, in their musty graves, are cackling so loudly one can hear them. And we are living in so much poverty, after all, there is so much backwardness and dirt all around, that we should really reconcile our differences and finally set about doing some work!
This person would never make it to the end of his speech, for the moment either side realized what he was driving at, the unfortunate moralist and negotiator would be deprived of his life.
Three plagues, three contagions, threaten the world.
The first is the plague of nationalism.
The second is the plague of racism.
The third is the plague of religious fundamentalism.
All three share one trait, a common denominator -- an aggressive, all-powerful, total irrationality. Anyone stricken with one of these plagues is beyond reason. In his head burns a sacred pyre that awaits only its sacrificial victims. Every attempt at calm conversation will fail. He doesn't want a conversation, but a declaration that you agree with him, admit that he is right, join the cause. Otherwise you have no significance in his eyes, you do not exist, for you count only if you are a tool, an instrument, a weapon. There are no people -- there is only the cause.
A mind touched by such a contagion is a closed mind, one-dimensional, monothematic, spinning round one subject only -- its enemy. Thinking about our enemy sustains us, allows us to exist. That is why the enemy is always present, is always with us. When near Yerevan a local guide shows me one of the old Armenian basilicas, he finishes his commentary with a contemptuous rhetorical question: "Could those Azerbaijanis build such a basilica?" When later, in Baku, a local guide draws my attention to a row of ornamental, art nouveau houses, he concludes his explanations with this scornful remark: "Could Armenians construct such apartment buildings?"
This post talks about the Azeri government.
It very quickly became clear that the only people in the country who knew how to do anything (and by that I mean, anything having to do with creating or maintaining a government) were the old Communists. People so long subjected to overbearing rule like the Azeris can't just bounce back into a multiparty democracy in a year's time, although this was basically the expectation all across the former Soviet Union.
Actually, "bounce back" is completely the wrong term since Azerbaijan wasn't exactly known for being a flourishing democracy before Communism. This is even more of a struggle, since the Azeri's memory did not encompass any memory of democracy. They had no idea what to do.
The Azeris attempted to create a democratic government (and in light of the events of the early 21st century, I say "GOOD FOR THEM"), but the new state did not work at all. Criminals and gangsters had the run of the country. The democratically elected president was Ebulfez Elcibey. Poor man, he didn't stand a chance. He eventually fled Baku when militia leaders marched on the capital, demanding change.
Elcibey disappearing left a power vacuum which needed to be filled immediately. And, amazingly, after seven decades of crushing communist rule, the Azeris welcomed back to power the former Soviet party chief Geidar Aliyev. Aliyev was also an ex-KGB man. This all occurred in 1993.
It's an incredible story (and it didn't just happen in Azerbaijan). In many of the countries freed so suddenly from the yoke of the Soviet Union, the first tentative attempts at democracy were disasters. People weren't ready yet. Militias and gangsters and criminals easily ignored the rules, and ran these countries like their own personal fiefdoms. So eventually, people cried out for the return of the Communist leaders. To come and at least help them keep things orderly. They did not want a return of Communism, but they wanted a strong leader. They needed a strong leader. So these ex-Communist guys, ex-Communist Party chiefs, returned to the countries where they had ruled during Communism, and became "democratically" elected Presidents.
Aliyev returned to power in Azerbaijan. He very quickly started ACTING. He was able to get a ton of things done. He arranged a cease fire with Armenia. He dismantled all of the unofficial roadblocks which were terrorizing the populace, and also adding to the criminal atmosphere of the country. He established (of course) a nice personality cult around himself. You kind of cannot stop a diehard communist leader from creating a personality cult. They cannot help themselves.
So he basically snapped everybody into shape, but he didn't create any institutions. He didn't focus on the micro-management level of government. He didn't try to figure out ways to get people back to work, to heat up the economy, to fix all the damn potholes. I suppose he had other more pressing concerns immediately: like all of the homeless wandering war refugees, and the warlords and militia leaders trying to run the country themselves.
Aliyev is still the President of Azerbaijan today.
This post talks about the unresolved issue of oil in Azerbaijan.
Alexander the Great, as he waltzed his way through the region way back in those B.C. years, noticed methane gas, as well as Zoroastrian temples. Zoroastrians were fire worshippers from Persia, mostly.
In the 10th century, Arab writers were referring to Baku as the place where oil comes from. Oil would be shipped from this area out to the rest of the known world, using the Silk Route across Asia.
In the 17th century, Turks describe the area around Baku as having "burning ground". One of my favorite images is from a Turkish writer who says the ground is so hot from the burning fuel beneath it, that you could put a cauldron of water down directly onto the ground, and it would start to boil within minutes.
In the 1860s, the first oil derricks go up. In 1873, the derricks strike oil big time. Azerbaijan quickly became a Kuwait or a Saudi Arabia of this earlier time. Baku grew into a cosmopolitan city, as opposed to a Turkic backwater, perched on the edge of the Caspian Sea, tipping off into Central Asia. People made massive fortunes in Azerbaijan. In the 1870s and 1880s Baku was one of the world's richest and most populous cities.
In 1920, the city of Baku was overrun by Bolshevik soldiers and history pretty much stopped. They endured seven decades of collectivisation and poverty under Communist rule. Additionally, during this time, Azerbaijan has been completely destroyed by pollution from the careless oil drilling. Oil lies pooled up in the streets. The beach on the Caspian Sea apparently looks like a post-apocalyptic disaster zone.
In 1997, Azerbaijan had another oil boom. There was talk, as well, of building an oil pipeline below the Caspian Sea, in order to transport all the oil from all the "stans" (Kazakhstan, especially) to Baku, and then to be shipped out from Azerbaijan. If this plan was completed, Baku could potentially become one of the most important places on the planet. Azeris were exhilarated, thrilled. (And so begins the devastation of societies brought about by big oil.) Foreign businessmen started coming to their country. They had to install credit card machines in the run down Stalinist hotels in Baku. Nightclubs were built. Baku was trying to modernize itself and clean itself up in a year, where other cities go through such transformations over generations.
The oil boom went bust in 1998, with a drop in oil prices. The hopes for the massive oil fields in the Caspian Sea (the estimates of what people hoped to find were mind-boggling) were dashed. Russia collapsed financially, an event which had worldwide implications.
And by 1999, Azerbaijan was back to a Caucausus backwater, with no hopes for the future. Oil would not "save" them from having to develop a working society. This is the insidiousness of oil societies. The populations make a deal with the Devil. Okay, okay, the regime can do whatever it wants, as long as that oil keeps flowing, and keeps the money coming in, and we don't have to look at what needs to be fixed, what isn't working.
Azerbaijan had hoped (of course, subconsciously) to skip the necessary stages of nation-building: forming a government, setting up a banking system, helping a middle class to flourish...all that stuff...by having oil spurting out of the Caspian and into their pockets. So far, this has not happened.
The first post is your basic introduction to Azerbaijan.
This next one is an overview of the war between Azerbaijan and Armenia.
The whole Nagorno-Karabakh thing is a continuing story - everything has changed - but this post talks about the events of the early to mid 1990s.
This war between the two countries is over a place called Nagorno-Karabakh. It is officially part of Azerbaijan, yet it is basically an ethnic Armenian enclave. Completely cut off from any access to Armenia proper. The ethnic dispute over this small bit of land hastened the breakup of the Soviet Union.
In the early 1920s, the Bolsheviks conquered the Caucasus, and made Nagorno-Karabakh an autonomous region within Turkic Azerbaijan. The population was something like 95% Armenian, so these kinds of "autonomous region" solutions never make any sense, but this is what the Bolsheviks did. Stalin knew damn well that Nagorno was ALWAYS going to be an issue between Turks and Armenians. He wanted to insure that chaos and hatred and darkness would not just exist in the present, but would stretch out into the future. So he did not unite Nagorno with Armenia (which would have made sense ethnically), but left it in the middle of Azerbaijan, under Baku (the capital of Azerbaijan) control.
So Nagorno became this teeny island of frightened Christianity surrounded by Turks. Don't forget, either, that just in 1915, the 20th century welcomed its first ethnic genocide. The Turks slaughtered over a million Armenians to "cleanse" the area so Armenians had good reason to fear the Turks. This entire area of Nagorno was surrounded by Azeri militia and Red Army troops, with no way in or out. This situation existed for seven decades. A complete DISASTER created by Stalin.
Then along comes Gorbachev, and glasnost and perestroika. By this time, the Armenian population in Nagorno had shrunk a bit and they were afraid that one day they would be minorities in this enclave. In 1988, Armenians started demonstrating in Yerevan for unification, at the very same time that Azeri authorities began a crackdown on Armenians. Armenians are always being "cracked down" upon. So the Soviet troops are sent to crack down on everybody, but ethnic violence kept breaking out...Azerbaijan blockaded all the Armenian communities in Nagorno, and Armenia is shouting about how Nagorno is and always has been a part of Armenia.
1991 comes. The Soviet Union collapses. Full scale war erupts between Armenia and Azerbaijan. In 1994 the war ends, with Armenia the clear victor. They drove out all the Azeri forces and annexed other areas, so that Armenia and Karabakh could be joined by a thin corridor. The outside world "recognized" none of this. And by that I mean, if you looked on a map, you would see no evidence of "Nagorno Karabakh" as being anything other than part of Azerbaijan.
Last week, I imported all my "Georgia" essays from my old blog ... It's kind of a good archive, although it is (as I fully admit) mostly regurgitated information from actual experts.
I'm pressed for time today, in terms of writing, so I am going to import the various posts I did on Azerbaijan, at my old blog.
It was Ryzsard Kapucsinski's astonishing book Imperium which opened me to the world of the Caucasus for the first time. It's a great book - one of my favorites of his. He evokes these ancient mountainous countries in such a way that you feel you are there yourself.
So ... here we go ... 6 short essays on Azerbaijan.
The Azeris are Shi'ite Muslims. For those of you who do not know, there are 2 main sects of Islam: Sunni Muslim (think Saudi Arabia), and Shi'ite Muslim (think Iran). This is an incredible oversimplification, but suffice it to say that there is an enormous painful split between these two "brands" of Muslims.
However, the Azeris are a mish-mash. They are Turkic (which is, traditionally, Sunni), and yet their religion is Shiite. They also are relatively secular (which is a no-no in both sects). Liquor overflows in Azerbaijan, as does pornography and prostitution.
One other fact, which I find completely fascinating: They have changed their alphabet three times in the 20th century. (This is evidence of the confusion in the country, as they try to congeal into some sort of cohesive nation.) Alphabets and languages have been imposed on these people for centuries. This country has been conquered and reconquered and conquered again countless times.
In the 1920s, Azerbaijan changed its alphabet from Arabic to Latin. In the 1930s they changed from Latin to Cyrillic. And in the 1990s they changed back to Latin from Cyrillic. I read a great article about what massive confusion this has caused. Street signs, newspapers, schoolbooks…all in different languages.
So you can imagine how confused the populace is, with all this shifting about. This is one of the reasons why Armenia was so able to kick their butt in the war over Nagorno Karabakh, in the 1990s, because Armenia has a strong (iron-strong) sense of national identity, and national personality, and the Azeris are still searching for theirs.
I am posting these in chronological order, which, unfortunately, means that you all will see them backwards. I credit the authors who have written about Georgia and from whom I got this information.
1. So the first thing I posted was in regards to Georgia's long long history.
2. My second post was about the collapse of the Soviet Union.
3. The third post is about Shevardnadze - the return of Shevardnadze to save the former Soviet republic from civil war. (The reason I have unearthed these posts is because of the recent chaos in Georgia ... I had gone back to read through them myself and thought I would bring them over from my old blog to share.)
4. This post is about the Georgians themselves.
And my last post on Georgia (printed below) is about all of the "breakaway regions" in the country. A lot of this information may be a bit out of date - things change so fast over there - but again: it is great context.
There are those stories (which have nothing to do with Georgia, but bear with me) about ancient ruins in Afghanistan which, due to the almost constant state of war in that country for the last thirty years, have never been fully excavated, but amazing initial discoveries were made. For example: ancient Hellenistic coins and artifacts were found in ancient ruins all over Afghanistan, which meant that Alexander the Great actually had moved farther east than anyone had ever realized. There are also, in the ancient ruins, buildings with Hellenistic features, columns and porticoes, etc. The ancient war leaving its mark.
Georgia is filled with such conqueror's legacies. Evidence of that history in the architecture, the street names, the ancient churches. Georgia has a long and complicated history with Turkey, with Persia. Both countries have left indelible marks on what Georgia looks like. "Georgia for Georgians" is all well and good, but one cannot deny that the history here is extremely multicultural. And always has been.
One of the most complicated things about Georgia is all of the "breakaway regions" and "autonomous regions" it has. There are people basically who live in one specific TOWN who say, "We do not like Georgia. Our ancestors were originally from blankity-blank so we now call our town BlankityBlank."
Shevardnadze certainly has his work cut out for him. (Note: I wrote these when he was still there.)
There's the region called Abkhazia, in Northwestern Georgia, which has declared itself autonomous from Georgia. Again, it really doesn't matter if Abkhazia announces to the whole world: "Hi, there. We are our OWN THING now." If this autonomy is not recognized by the world at large, then nothing will change, and maps will stay the same. There are many countries out there right now who have declared themselves to the world, and the world turns away. "Nope. You are not legitimate. We won't give you the time of day." Afghanistan under the Taliban was one example. Burma (or is it Myanmar??) is another.
So Abkhazia. Abkhazia is supposedly very beautiful and the people who live there have dreams of turning the place into a resort. It is on the Black Sea so the place has a very Mediterranean feel, with a lovely climate. But as long as they are attached to Georgia, and are somehow beholden to a government (a government which has not yet completely gained control of the country), they will be stuck. Trapped. Their dream is to liberate themselves from Georgia and go on and become the "Riviera of the Caucasus".
Georgia of course recognizes the potential tourist gold mine that is Abkhazia. It could be a cash cow for the country if they ever got their act together. Right now, it is still too dangerous and chaotic, but once the problems are resolved, then Georgia can build up Abkhazia, and let the tourist dollars start rolling in.
But Abkhazia wants none of this. They want to do their OWN THING.
In 1990, 100,000 Abkhazians declared their intention to separate from Georgia and form their own state. Georgia basically said, in the midst of the civil war, "In your DREAMS. You ain't goin' NOWHERE." Russia got involved, on the side of the separatists, which made things worse. Russia backed the rebellion, supplying arms and support. Full-out war ensued, leading to 10,000 deaths.
Additionally, the Abkhazians set out to "cleanse" their region of ethnic Georgians. I hate that word in this context. Cleanse. 200,000 Georgians were killed or displaced. The country was suddenly filled with internal refugees wandering around. Gamsakhurdia was president at the time. The refugees were kept from leaving Abkhazia by the main road due to Gamsakhurdia's road blocks. He had cordoned off "Abkhazia". The thousands of people, fleeing for their lives, had to detour through the Caucasus mountains, which are not gentle rolling hills. It is a daunting mountain range. Thousands of Georgians died in this attempt.
The ethnicity of the Abkhazians is Caucasian, but their tribe is older and stronger than most. They were the last people to be conquered by the Russians. There had actually been plans before Stalin's death to exile the entire Abkhazian population to Siberia because they were such troublemakers, so hard to govern and subdue.
Then there's another small breakaway region which is known by two different names, but the official one is Ajaria. The population here is mainly Muslim, but they speak a Georgian dialect. They feel very connected to Turkey, right over the border. Lenin created Ajaria in 1921, using the whole different religion thing as the perfect opportunity to divide and conquer. The people who live here, as Muslims, do not want to be part of Orthodox Christian Georgia. They want autonomy. Turkey, right next door, with a long hostile relationship with Georgia, supports Ajaria, and undermines Georgia's conciliatory attempts.
Ajaria consists of one town and the area surrounding the town: Batumi.
Batumi has an interesting history. It sits at the point where the Anatolian (Turkish) plateau meets the Caucasus mountains. Amazing how geography determines history. In ancient times, Batumi was a port on the Black Sea. It was either a Roman, a Byzantine, or a Persian port, depending on the year. Batumi was a jewel to be captured. Whoever controlled Batumi controlled the traffic on the Black Sea. So it kept changing hands throughout history, until it fell under the Ottoman Empire, which was like night falling. A perpetual night. Batumi then goes through centuries of Ottoman rule. In 1877 the Russians captured Batumi. In 1918, the Turks retook Batumi. After the armistice, 15,000 British troops replaced the Turks. Within two years, the Bolsheviks grabbed control again, and the British left.
Batumi's border was snapped shut for decades. Incomprehensible. This once cosmopolitan seaport, host to every culture, open to the Black Sea, in the land of the Golden Fleece, closed down. Like Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory: nobody every goes in, and nobody ever comes out. Batumi, a small city, was trapped between two massive regional superpowers: NATO-member Turkey on one side, and Communist Soviet Union on the other.
But in recent years, Ajaria is no longer called Ajaria, it is now called Aslanistan. Here's why (it's kind of like The Sopranos, Georgia-style). The region is now run by a warlord (a kind of cuddly benign warlord, but a warlord nonetheless) named Aslan Abashidze. Hence, "Aslanistan". This would be like Rudy Guiliani saying, "Manhattan is no longer Manhattan. It is now GuilianiLand. " Or "New York City, from this day forth, will be called RudyStan." Abashidze is a criminal. An extortionist, a bully. He has set up "customs" offices all along the border with Turkey, which bribes everybody coming in or going out. It is an openly criminal enterprise and it's how Abashidze subsidizes his power over the region.
Also, and here's where it gets dangerous and ominous: Aslan is a Muslim. He has packed his bureaucracy with Muslim officials. Batumi has a mosque on every corner, the construction of which was financed by Aslan, who wants to institutionalize the difference between Ajaria and Georgia. Georgia is a country of infidels. Aslan wants nothing to do with them.
Robert Kaplan, in his book, Eastward to Tartary says the following about Abashidze's obsession with having more mosques than churches:
In the ex-Soviet Caucasus, where religion was less a factor in ethnic identity than in the Balkans, this was a clear case of a modern politician inventing hatreds retrospectively.Abashidze was a small man with a large ego and a noble surname: his grandfather Mehmet had played a key role in brokering the agreement between Lenin and Ataturk that settled the border here. Aslan, as he was called, liked to receive visiting dignitaries in the new tennis courts he had built, which were the pride of his warlord fiefdom ... His offices were generic Communist style: massive white-marble hallways and dark red carpets that dwarfed a metal detector and a small cheap table. Around the latter stood a group of tough-looking young Georgians, who carried cell phones and sidearms and rubbed their unshaven cheeks as they inspected my Atlantic Monthly business card. Outside the office was a militiaman, also unshaven. His shoes were worn down to the soles, his uniform was missing buttons, and he was wearing one of those grandiose visored caps favored by the Soviet military. His breath stank, and he asked me for a cigarette.
The official face of government here was uncivil, untamed.
And last but not least we have Ossetia. Ossetia is a region of north-central Georgia. Ossetes are both Muslims and Orthodox Christians. They speak a language akin to Persian. Their religious diversity helped keep them neutral in czarist Russia's campaigns and pogroms against purely Muslim people: the Chechens, the Ingush, the Dagestanis.
Ossetia is also in a very important strategic position. It straddles the north and south slopes of the High Caucasus, halfway in between the Black and the Caspian seas.
Muslim/Christian Ossetia emerged as an ally (it's amazing how these things work) to the atheistic Soviet Union.
Both Lenin and Stalin adopted the Ossetes as favored people, not to be messed with or deported or slaughtered. Good of them, huh? So kind, so generous. They were given an autonomous republic on the northern slopes of the mountains, and also an autonomous region within Georgia.
The Ingush, on the other hand, were deported, en masse, in 1944. The entire population of Ingush was killed, imprisoned, shot, etc. In 1950, the Ingush who had survived all of that came back to Ossetia, their former home, to find all of the land taken up by the Ossetes. This (as I am sure you can imagine) ended up causing enormous problems. It causes problems to this day.
Then the Soviet Union collapsed. Civil war promptly broke out in Ossetia. In North Ossetia, ethnic war exploded between Ossetes and Ingush, now bitter enemies. In 1992, the Northern Ossetes expelled thousands of Ingush, adding to the number of war refugees staggering through the country. In 1993, South Ossetia declared its intention to leave Georgia and join North Ossetia in a new "Greater Ossetia."
Any time any country wants to call itself "Greater" anything, you can be sure that ethnic cleansing will follow.
Which is just what happened. War broke out. 30,000 ethnic Georgians were expelled forcibly from Ossetia. None of this has been resolved or cleaned up, but Ossetia does declare itself independent from Georgia and to get in and out you have to pay a fee. (Which is a complete racket. Picture drunken homeless soldiers, hailing cars to stop, and then forcing the people in the cars to hand over their wallets.)
There is no economy. There is no government, there is no infrastructure.
A highly volatile situation. To be watched closely.
In one of the posts below I describe my old "Country of the Week" thing I used to do on my old blog. Go read it for an introduction to what I am doing here right now. Then scroll up - I am posting these in chronological order, which, unfortunately, means that you all will see them backwards. I also credit the authors who have written about Georgia and from whom I got this information. (I have never been to Georgia - so after all, what the hell do I know?)
1. So the first thing I posted was in regards to Georgia's long long history.
2. My second post was about the collapse of the Soviet Union.
3. The third post is about Shevardnadze - the return of Shevardnadze to rescue the former Soviet republic from civil war. (The reason I have unearthed these posts is because of the recent chaos in Georgia ... I had gone back to read through them myself and thought I would bring them over from my old blog to share.)
4. And the following post is a compilation of quotes, basically, from various books, about the Georgians themselves.
From The Making of the Georgian Nation by Ronald Grigor Suny:
"Georgian society has its own networks and codes. It is a society dominated by men."
From Eastward to Tartary by Robert Kaplan:
"Corruption here was less a moral shortcoming than a survival mechanism by a people living in poverty and dominated for centuries by outsiders."
Quote from Lawrence Sheets, Reuters bureau chief who lived in Tbilisi throughout the civil war:
"Every night downtown, macho men with grenade launchers fired into the air at nothing in particular. The road between Batumi and Tbilisi was blocked for months at a time by battles that had no military or political purpose. Mini-rebellions broke out based on nothing really except male testosterone."
From Qu'est-ce qu'une nation? Scholarly Debate and the Realities of Eastern Europe in "The National Interest", Fall 1997, by Anatol Leven:
"The Georgians, with strong cultural traditions of individualism, machismo, and the cult of weapons, differ a great deal from the peaceable, gloomy, and obedient inhabitants of the cities of eastern and southern Ukraine. National character is not a concept much liked by contemporary political scientists, but it is necessary to explain why, all other things being equal, an ethnic dispute in Azerbaijan or Georgia would be much more likely to turn extreme and violent than would be one in Estonia or Ukraine."
From Eastward to Tartary by Robert Kaplan: Kaplan interviews Professor Alexidze, a former adviser to the nationalist wacko Gamsakhurdia.
" 'Georgians were passionate against the Soviets and passionate against each other,' said Professor Alexidze. 'Gamsakhurdia destroyed the Soviet spirit more than anyone, but in Georgia, a civil war was necessary because of the kind of people we are. The real cause of the war is our medievalness: our knights of the round table simply quarreled and fought each other.' "
From Among the Russians by Colin Thubron:
"I was in Georgia. The name defines a land whose inhabitants are ancient to it, a people of the black-eyed Armenoid kind, the self-styled offspring of biblical giants. For at least three thousand years they have held their mountain kingdom through disunion, invasion and prodigious bursts of independence, becoming Christian early in the fourth century and surviving conquest with a native glitter and resource ..."
From Eastward to Tartary by Robert Kaplan:
"Another Georgian intellectual described the Russians to me 'as Scythians, still unformed, unsettled, who in the 20th century rediscovered the art of laying waste whole tracts of territory.' Along with the hatred of communism that often spilled over into hatred of Russians went a dislike of Armenians, 'usurers who ruined Georgian families, who are now allied with Russia against Georgia and Azerbaijan.' 'The Armenians are always claiming that they are the best, that they are fighting with nothing, even while Russia supports them.' 'I don't like Armenians. The Azeris are nicer people.' 'The only good-looking Armenian is Cher.' Listening to Georgians talk about Armenians gave me the chilling sensation of what Old World anti-Semitism must have been like."
Again from Among the Russians by Colin Thubron:
"The high places of its pagan idols -- moon-god and fertility goddess -- were exorcised by Christian churches on the encircling hills and the foundation of its great cathedral is suffused with fables. Clenched in battlement walls, the building is typically Georgian ... It is strong, handsome. It belongs to a tradition grown from the far marches of the ancient Christian world, like the churches of Armenia. Its people show a peasant attachment to it and circumambulate its walls piously in the drenching sun, fondling its blond masonry and leaving flowers at its doors. For the Georgians the Church is the expression of the nation ... Everybody seems at home with God.
From Imperium, by my main man: Ryszard Kapuscinski:
"The splendour and excellence of Georgia's ancient art are overwhelming ... The most glorious period of this work spans the eighth to the thirteenth centuries. The faces of the saints, dark, but radiant in the light, dwell immobile in extremely rich gold frames studded with precious stones. There are icons that open, like the altar of Vit Stoss. Their dimensions are immense, almost monumental. There is an icon here on which several generations of masters worked for three centuries ... Then there are the frescoes in the Georgian churches. Such marvels, and yet so little is known about them outside of Georgia. Virtually nothing. The best frescoes, unfortunately, were destroyed. They covered the interior of the largest church in Georgia -- Sven Tschoveli, built in 1010 in Georgia's former capital, Meht ... They were a marvel of the Middle Ages on a par with the stained glass at Chartres. They were painted over on the order of the czar's governor, who wanted the church whitewashed 'like our peasant women whitewash stones.' No restoration efforts can return these frescoes to the world. Their brilliance is extinguished forever."
Again, from Robert Kaplan's interview with the Professor:
"Professor Alexidze told me: 'Our society is rotten, the mafiosi are strong, and while the West worships laws, we worship power. We leapt from the darkness in the late 1980s. We did not have the kind of social and economic development as in Central Europe. So our dissidents were never enlightened.' "
Robert Kaplan interviews a group of intellectuals in Tbilisi (this is in the late 1990s). Here are some of the quotes:
Kikodze: "The Russians built up Tbilisi in the nineteenth century as the capital of Transcaucasia. On this street, where I have lived since 1958, there used to be Kurds, Armenians, Jews, Russians, and others. It was a golden age. We thought nationalism did not exist. Then it destroyed us. The Jews left for Israel; the Armenians, for Armenia; the Russians for Russia; and so on. And now we are losing the Russian language which is a disaster for us. English is still only for a rarefied elite, while the loss of Russian cuts the average Georgian off from the outside world. All our books of learning, our encyclopedias on art, literature, history, science, are in Russian. Young Georgians can no longer communicate with Armenians and Ossetians. There is a new illiteracy promoting ethnic separation."Rondeli: "Georgians are a very old tribal entity, but we have no identity as a modern state. We are a quasi-state. All nations get what they deserve, so to see what kind of government Georgia will have in the future, it is merely a matter of dissecting our national character. We are nominally Christian, but really we are superstitious atheists. We know how to survive but not how to improve. Our church is pagan, politicized, part of the national resistance, and thus unable to move forward."
Again from Rondeli: "Remember, we had seventy-four years of political-cultural-economic emasculation under the Soviet Union; three generations of Georgians were destroyed. The West concentrates on the crimes of Hitler, but the Nazis ruled for only twelve years."
Saakashvili: "Sometimes very little is needed to survive. We don't need thirty thousand NATO troops or weeks of bombing -- just small, highly specialized security forces from the West to protect our president from assassination, to monitor our borders, to protect the new oil pipeline. If Washington pays attention and gives us advance warning and technical help, we may manage. Unemployment and other statistics are meaningless, because a huge black market helps Georgia survive ... because Georgians have always been corrupt and cynical, with mafias an old tradition, there is not a strong Communist opposition in parliament as in Russia."
From Eastward to Tartary by Robert Kaplan:
"NATO's air war against the Serbs in Kosovo coincided with my journey through the Caucasus. People here seemed to have two related reactions to it. They were much too impressed with the bold, naked display of Western power to be concerned over the Clinton administration's clumsy diplomacy and planning for the operation. But they also felt that the ten weeks of NATO bombing would never be replicated in the Caucasus, no matter what atrocities the Russians or anyone else perpetrated here."
Robert Kaplan approaches Zaal Kikodze, an archaeologist, living in Tbilisi, to see if he can get some answers about Georgia. Here is how the exchange went:
Kaplan: I was wondering if you could tell me what Georgian history says about Georgia's future.Kikodze: Such questions are best discussed over cheese and wine.
Kind of says it all, don't it?
In one of the posts below I describe my old "Country of the Week" thing I used to do on my old blog. Go read it for an introduction to what I am doing here right now. Then scroll up - I am posting these in chronological order, which, unfortunately, means that you all will see them backwards. I also credit the authors who have written about Georgia and from whom I got this information. (I have never been to Georgia - so after all, what the hell do I know?)
So the first thing I posted was in regards to Georgia's long long history.
My second post was about the collapse of the Soviet Union.
And the following post is about Shevardnadze - the return of Shevardnadze to rescue the former Soviet republic from civil war.
A military council ousted Gamsakhurdia in early 1992. He fled to Chechnya. The civil war continued. Gamsakhurdia still had troops of crazed supporters, more like followers of some personality cult than an actual army, and these troops were still battling it out with the new military council, and all of the rival mafias which had suddenly exploded throughout the country.
Eduard Shevardnadze was the Communist Party boss in Georgia, as well as the ex-secret police chief. He was also Gorbachev's foreign minister. The two of them would talk about Communism, and Leninism, and how to make it work, and what else could be done to bring about the glorious Communist society. They were both committed Communists.
However, in 1979, right before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Shevardnadze, in a moment of truth, blurted out to Gorbachev: "This entire country is rotten. We have got to see if we can salvage something out of this entire mess." Gorbachev continued to believe, almost until the very end, that Communism could still work, and that the Soviet Union could manage to stay together. Even with a new economy, and more freedom. Of course, he was proved tremendously wrong, but that was the level of belief he had in the right-ness of Communism.
Shevardnadze headed up the Communist apparatus in Georgia for many years. He represented the strong-hand of Moscow. As Mr. Secret Police Chief, he also was in charge of one of the most feared and despised institutions in all of Communist Russia.
But...amazingly, once Gamsakhurdia, the dissident, the idealist, took the country by the hand and led them into civil war, Shevardnadze (one of the truly great unsung heroes of the break-down of the "evil empire") was called back from Moscow to clean up the mess.
It is truly an extraordinary story, one which I can't really describe in too much detail.
But here is this man, this person who was once at the TOP of the Communist Party. He had all the perks of his position. And then, in a matter of 2 years, the entire edifice through which he has created his entire life, his entire philosophy, disappears off the face of the planet. Unbelievable. Many apparatchiks in the Communist Party could not handle the transition, and committed suicide. Others were completely lost when faced with the prospect of actually having to COMPETE in an open society for jobs, for raises, etc. Others leapt almost immediately into entrepreneurial pursuits, and others veered off into more criminal pursuits.
Shevardnadze kept his head. He let it go. He let the dream go, and immediately set about doing what needed to be done in Georgia.
So many of these ex-CP guys were called back to help run the countries who were now independent and floundering, and so many of them did so because they enjoyed the power so much. The ex-CP guys kept all of the facets of the Communist Party intact (one-party systems, personality cults surrounding the leader, no free press, secret police), and just called it by another name.
But Shevardnadze let go of Communism. Truly. And came back to Georgia, with the aim to rebuild the country, restore the economy, and get Georgia ready to join the modern world. He brought reformers into the government. He also kept many of the gangster-mafia types in high-level positions, so that they wouldn't be able to form a strong opposition. He included them in the process. He was very canny, very smart. He also survived countless assassination attempts during all of this.
Shevardnadze worked a mini-miracle in Georgia. It is quite a success story, albeit one in progress.
There is still a huge mafia problem in the country. There is still a huge criminal element. But throughout the 1990s, the economy has been growing by double digits. One of the best signs of how well things are going is the ubiquitousness of traffic jams in every major city. This may sound incredibly annoying, but add this to the picture: In 1991, there were NO drive-able roads in the entire country. Cars couldn't get anywhere. You could not leave your village, you could not get from here to there. Shevardnadze has created an infrastructure in the country which has raised the quality of life tremendously. Traffic jams!! How wonderful!
Shevardnadze is still the leader of Georgia today (I wrote this piece in November of 2002). Still battling off assassination attempts, still trying to rebuild the country, still putting down separatist movements all over the place, still trying to help foster a middle-class. A Communist man!! Committed to nurturing the bourgeoisie. I admire him very much.
Robert Kaplan, as always, has some very insightful things to say about Shevardnadze, in his book Eastward to Tartary. Check it out:
Shevardnadze, 71, was a burly man with white curly hair and, normally, a ruddy complexion. But now he was haggard and exhausted, and it was clear that helping to run the world as Soviet foreign minister had been a lot easier for him than running Grgia. His voice was deep and gruff, but he was patient, as though he were conducting a fireside chat with us -- 20 local reporters and myself ... One reporter asked the President why he was blaming the Russians [for the most recent assassination attempt] when the CIA was known to have ordered assassination attempts on Castro. This former Politburo member, used to limousines with the curtains drawn, symbolizing the power he had wielded in a vast tyrannical state, did not lose his temper at this. He smiled and enjoyed the exchange. In his own way, Shevardnadze had become a democrat ... Shevardnadze had a simple strategy: personal physical survival. If he survived a few more years without dying or being killed -- enough time, perhaps, for more political stabilization, more reforms, more institution-building -- then his personal survival, or that of his successor, might no longer be synonymous with the survival of the state itself.
If you have spent any time at all learning about Communism, and how the whole thing went down once it ended, you will know how unbelievable this is. To let the power go, and know that in order for Georgia to survive, it had to survive whether he was the leader of the country or not. All we have to do is look at Iraq, or Libya, or Syria to to see the sickness of societies completely bound to the personality of one specific leader. The entire country (like Turkmenistan) becomes an expression of the leader's ego. It's sick. Shevardnadze could easily go that way, like many of his colleagues did. He did not. He is a man of character.
One more quote (note: I am not sure where this quote came from ... forgive ...), and then I'll finish up:
Eduard Amvrosiyevich Shevardnadze was one of three famous Georgians in 20th century world history. The other two were Stalin and Stalin's feared secret police chief, Laventi Beria, a bespectacled man who combined the roles of Himmler and Eichmann in Stalin's death machine. There are many similarities between Shevardnadze and these two great criminals. They too were manipulators, able to take advantage of any situation; they both betrayed their best friends as they rose to power. None of the three was truly educated, but all were talented: Each man had the strong intuition of a good hunting dog, who could sniff the essence of every idea and situation and adapt it to his needs ...For example, after one assassination attempt, everyone expected Shevardnadze to fire his interior minister. But he didn't. What couldbe more useful than an interior minister who has been politically discredited, so that he cannot plot against you, because he is now dependent on your goodwill! Shevardnadze now runs the police directly through this man.
Morality is a funny thing. In the 1970s and early 1980s, it seemed that Gamsakhurdia -- the intellectual who had translated Shakespeare -- had been a moral man while Shevardnadze, the Communist hack, was an immoral one. But Shevardnadze, the Machiavellian hunting dog, had sniffed out the rot in the system he was a part of, and, along with his allies Mikhail Gorbachev and Alexander Yakovlev, tried to reform it for the sake of their own survivial. They failed and the Soviet Union collapsed. The peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union, perhaps the single most significant event of the 20th century, owes almost as much to Shevardnadze as to Gorbachev.
Meanwhile, Shevardnadze's survival game continued in Georgia, where the lessons of The Prince were the surest path to democratization.
It's certainly not a warm and fuzzy world and Shevardnadze is not a warm and fuzzy Jimmy Carter kind of guy.
In the post below I describe my old "Country of the Week" thing I used to do on my old blog. Go read it for an introduction to what I am doing here right now.
So the first thing I posted on Georgia was in regards to its long long history.
This is my second post about Georgia, and it is on the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Now the Soviets are gone (sort of), but the Georgians remain fixated on Russia.
They have a longing for the order the Soviets once provided, and yet they resent having been so dominated. As I said yesterday, their national character is intractable. They are intelligent, they are rebellious, they are schemers and wheeler-dealers (Georgians have taken the concept of a black market to a whole different level), they are deeply religious, and they also refuse to give up who they are. They speak their own language, etc.
However, once the Russians retreated, taking the Russian language with them, the Georgians were left hugely isolated in their mountainous country. They have no experience with needing to speak to the rest of the world. Someone else was always speaking for them. Now they have no way to communicate, no way to participate. They have never had the opportunity to join world events, the world economy, and they are completely unprepared. Russian was the only language that connected them to the world, so the collapse of the Soviet Union, although positive in some respects, left a massive void in Georgia which has yet to be filled.
In the late 1980s, the Soviet Union (of course) began to crack up and began to grant all of the various republics more autonomy. They were allowed to choose their own destinies, make their own way, tear down the Berlin Wall if they wanted to. Georgia, like all the other breakaway republics, immediately set about to become a modern democracy. Change was fast, furious, chaotic. Even reporters at the The New York Times seemed unable to keep up with everything that was happening.
Georgia raced to have elections. Of course, elections are just a symbol. We know that NOW, looking in. Elections mean diddly-squat if the country itself does not have the institutions to support democracy. America hashed stuff out, concepts, desires, ideals...creating the system of checks and balances which was necessary to the development of a democratic society. Georgia had none of this. So their first experiment with democracy was (just like it was elsewhere, all over the former Soviet Union) a complete and utter disaster.
The first democratically elected president in Georgia was Zviad Gamsakhurdia. He was the leading dissident during the Communist-era period. A very idealistic man. (I hate to say it, but being "very idealistic" is a terrible quality to have if you are going to be a President of anything. You need to have your feet on the ground and know how to get shit DONE.) Anyway, I know it's so easy to judge standing on the outside. Georgia needed to make its mistakes, and learn, and grow, in order to transform itself. This process is still going on.
But regardless: Gamsakhurdia completely friggin' destroyed Georgia. He walked Georgia right into civil war.
There are, actually, a lot of similarities between Gamsakhurdia and Slobodan Milosevic. Gamsakhurdia came along and fanned the flames of ethnic hatred, racism, xenophobia, and historical grievance. His entire "platform" had to do with needing revenge against what the Communists had done.
However: Georgia is a country overflowing with minority groups: Armenians, Ossetians, Abhazians, and many many others. Gamsakhurdia saw them as second-class citizens, and began a program of oppression and discrimination against them. His motto was "Georgia for Georgians". All this did was fill people with hate. You can't run a government efficiently on hate.
Here's a quote about Gamsakhurdia from Michael Dobbs' great book Down with Big Brother:
"Georgia is a unitary independent state, and therefore there can be no concessions to the separatists in Abhazia or southern Ossetia," [Gamsakhurdia] told the meeting outside the parliament building. "The representatives of all other nations are merely guests on Georgian land, who can be shown the door at any time by their hosts."In many ways, Gamsakhurdia's brand of xenophobic nationalism was as authoritarian and myopic as the Communist ideology it sought to replace. He convinced his followers that independence would lead automatically to prosperity, as the Kremlin would no longer have the opportunity to "exploit" Georgia economically. In his patriotic zeal he ignored the fact that Georgia relied on other Soviet republics for practically all its oil and gas, 94 percent of its grain, 93 percent of its steel, and 82 percent of its timber. His assumption that ethnic minorities would meekly accept the will of the Georgian majority turned out to be another fatal miscalculation, which laid the basis for a prolonged civil war.
In the emotional aftermath of the Tblisi massacre (in April 1989, when Soviet soldiers gunned down a peaceful protest in Tbilisi's main square, a la Tienamen) reason and common sense were in short supply. Revolted by the shedding of innocent blood, Georgians rallied around the leaders who denounced the Soviet "imperialists" the loudest. At this point the Communist authorities made a series of blunders that played right into the hands of the nationalists. They arrested Gamsakhurdia and other opposition leaders, endowing them with the halos of martyrs. Then, for almost two weeks, the army denied using toxic gas against the demonstrators. Panic swept the city as hundreds of people were admitted to local hospitals with symptoms of poisoning. Anti-Soviet sentiment reached a fever pitch. By the time Gamsakhurdia was released from prison several weeks later, the role of one of his father's heroes seemed ready-made for him. A year and a half after "Bloody Sunday", he was to win the first free election in Georgia's history, by a two-to-one margin.
Ah, what a mess, what a mess. It's obvious that all of this is going to go badly, but what happens next is quite surprising. Gamsakhurdia is, of course, ousted. Run out of Georgia on a rail.
And somebody appears to save the day from a most unexpected place.
On my old blog I used to have this "feature" that I called "Country of the Week".
I took countries I knew a bit about, or at least had 5,000 reference books on, and wrote an entry a day about each country.
Ah, I had a lot of energy those days in my blog-infancy. A long essay a DAY??
I have done so much reading and kept so many notes that I figured: Let's put this vague form of autism to use.
During the life of my old blog, the Countries of the Week were: Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Macedonia, Hungary, The Ukraine, Croatia, The Czech Republic, Uzbekistan, and Georgia. A lot of the entries were made up of book excerpts - and a lot of it I just rambled out myself.
"Okay, so here is what happened with the first Balkan War, as far as I understand..."
That kind of thing.
Anyway. Because of recent upheavals in Georgia, and Shevardnadze stepping down, I went back and looked at my 5 entries for Georgia. And I'm gonna post them here, for whoever is interested.
The tone of these posts rather amuses me, because I do sound like I think I am an expert. Please ignore how obnoxious that is - I am NOT an expert. But I do have a passion for the history of the Caucasus - (as well as the countries in Central Asia) - so while I am not an expert, and could not teach a class on the History of Georgia - there is definitely some good regurgitated information in these posts.
I must give a nod to Robert Kaplan, Colin Thubron, and Ryzsard Kapucinski - all of whom have covered Georgia in great depth, with tremendously beautiful writing. I quote from their books extensively.
So here we go.
The first post is entitled "HISTORY".
Georgia is an ancient country, with a largely Orthodox Christian population. The country also has a tremendous mix of ethnicities which has led to a very complex and bloody history. I'll start with the ancient history, and then move on to recent events. It's always good to put a country into context.
Georgia is a beautiful and fertile place, nestled in the Caucasus mountains, and also stretching along the east coast of the Black Sea. Russia fought very hard to keep Georgia under its control, and it is easy to see why. Georgia is a rich breadbasket of a country. The mountain range has allowed Georgia, over the millennia, to remain linguistically homogenous and intact. Which is phenomenal in an area of the world where the minimum amount of ethnicities/languages in any given city is 50. Georgians have been described as "a pocket people preserved in a dusty museum case."
4th century
In 330 A.D., Christianity was brought to Georgia by Assyrian monks. Georgian Christianity is its OWN THING; it has the passion of Orthodox rituals mixed in with flavoring from ancient pagan rites. Georgian Christianity is among the world's oldest form of the religion (along with Armenia, right next door). It mixes in rituals from the Greek pantheon, Zoroastrianism, Anatolian cults. The church holds the country together.
5th century
In the 5th century, A.D., the Georgians created one of the world's 14 alphabets. Incredible.
Georgia's positioning, on the Black Sea, has made it a prize to be captured over the millennia. It is another country (like Armenia, like Poland) which has a long history of being coveted. Empires marched over this land, retreated over it, marched back again, chopping it up, devouring it, ruling it, occupying it. From what I have read, though, there is something in the Georgian character which cannot be subdued. (I'm Irish, so this sounds a bit familiar to me!) Perhaps it is their passionate community-building brand of Christianity. But there is something intractable in Georgians which does not allow them to be psychologically conquered, even when their country is being ruled by an occupying force. They do not take their occupiers very seriously. The land has been ravaged by Arab, Byzantine, Turk, Mongol and Persian armies, and still: these people are Georgian.
Georgia was an ancient monarchy. As long as there was no threat from the outside, all went well. The population was so diverse, and so individualistic that it made things difficult. Diversity is a lovely ideal, but it can be extremely unwieldy when trying to fight off a foe. How do you come to agreement? How do you decide on goals? How do you identify yourself?
10th century
In the 10th century, A.D., that foe arrived in the form of the Byzantine army. The Georgian monarch was unable to unite all the different principalities and populations and ethnicities hiding in the mountains of his country, so the Byzantines easily took over.
11th/12th centuries
Then came the heyday of Georgian history which peaked in the 11th and 12th centuries. The Georgians easily adapted to Byzantine rule, and flourished. The culture thrived, the empire spread from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea, and also down into Persia. Georgia was a cosmopolitan mix of Byzantium, Seljuk Turkey, and Persia. The leader of Georgia at the time was David the Builder, who is one of Georgia's many folk-heroes. Georgians love heroes (which is a very important thing to remember....it is one of the keys to this country...their addiction to hero-worship). David the Builder spearheaded the expansion of Georgia. The Turks had conquered and occupied Tbilisi for 400 years, and David basically marched in and took it back.
13th century
The 13th century brought the Mongol invasions. Which were savage and divisive. The Georgian monarchy fell apart. The Mongols supported and promoted the provincial noblemen, in order to shut out the King's influence.
14th century
The 14th century brought the Black Death, which decimated Georgia. This was also the century when the feared Tamerlane conquered Georgia.
Meanwhile, during all of this, the Georgian people are hiding out in the mountains, resisting the outside influence of their conquerors. Yes, they assimilated some of the Persian or Turkic influences, but their alphabet stayed strong, their language stayed strong, their personalities stayed strong. Georgians can thank the barriers of the Caucasus mountains for that.
Georgia eventually was divided up, brutally, between the Turks and the Persians. It was a classic East-West division. (Which, basically, exists in this country until this day). Although Georgia yearns to join the West, yearns to be modern, looks to the West for its inspiration ... the East dictates the tenor of the politics here. It continues to be an internally divided nation. So the Ottoman Turks conquered Georgia from the West, and the Safavid Iranian empire conquered Georgia from the East. The oppression was extreme, from both sides of the coin.
17th century
In the 17th century, we have to add Russia's expansion into this mix. Russia began to creep its way south, keeping its eye firmly set on the jewel of Georgia.
18th century
By the time the 18th century rolled around, Russia and Persia were basically at war over Georgia. This small mountainous chunk of land on the shores of the Black Sea. But again, if you look at a map, you can see how crucial Georgia is to any empire looking to expand in that area. You must have Georgia if you want to have an outlet on the Black Sea. The Black Sea is what connects East to West. It is essential.
19th century
In 1801, Czar Alexander I forcibly incorporated Georgia into the Russian empire. Throughout the 19th century, the Russians hastened the pace in Georgia, forcing them to modernize, to catch up with the rest of the world. This was a jarring transition for the people of Georgia.
However, the Georgian Church continued to bond the people together, in a secret and passionate way. One of the goals of the Russians was to subordinate the Georgian Church to Russian institutions. They were never able to succeed with this. Apparently, some of the most gorgeous painted religious icons came from Georgia. The oppression of the Church catapulted religous art into greatness. I've seen some of those icons, and they bring tears to my eyes. It is faith, burning with a strong and steady flame. It is faith which digs its heels in, sets its jaw squarely. It is faith which does not need a BUILDING to contain it. It is faith which exists whether it is given permission to or not. It is faith which never has to scream about itself, or justify itself, or explain itself. Quite extraordinary. It is indestructible.
20th century
Then along comes the 20th century and slowly, Marxism starts to become very attractive to Georgians. Marxism, in its pure sense, in its naive beginning, was opposed to czarism, opposed to the "officialdom" of Russian society, opposed to the bourgeoisie. All of these elements were extremely appealing to the beleaguered poverty-struck Georgians. Georgia is the real historical birthplace of mass-movement socialism.
It is not surprising at all that such a country would be the birthplace of Josef Stalin. A country filled with peasants, a country bound together by faith (Stalin had studied to be a priest), a country obsessed with heroes, a country obsessed with its own past. This is the ground from which one of the greatest monsters of the 20th century sprung.