Drinking Camel's Milk in the Yurt – Expat Stories From Kazakhstan

by Monica Neboli

  “We don’t need a guide,” I said. “We’ll be fine looking around ourselves.”

  “Come this way, I’m your escort through the museum,” she replied briskly. “And remember, no photography allowed.” So much for my idea of pictures or a chance to tour the exhibit freely.

  Our tour of the museum started on the first floor with an exhibit of a life-sized yurt depicting peaceful statues of a Kazakh family, the vast steppe pictured on the wall in the background. Nomadic Kazakhs would set up their yurts for months at a time, then fold and transport these to their next seasonal location. This display was presumably to illustrate life before the area was taken over by the Soviets in the 1920s, when nomads were forced to live on collective farms; when a whole way of life that had existed for thousands of years was effectively destroyed in a generation. Further on, the museum’s introduction room provided documents and photos outlining the camps’ establishment in the 1930s, noting efforts to promote agriculture and industry throughout the region. Though the central administrative functions of the camps were controlled at Dolinka, the actual area of the camps stretched for hundreds of kilometers over the steppe into some of the most remote and bitterly cold swaths of land on earth.

  We followed our guide down a flight of steps to the basement. On the way down I noticed carved depictions of prisoners à la Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’ along the walls. Somber music began playing on cue.

  “This is an isolation cell,” said our guide. Peering in, I was slightly taken aback at the depiction of a life-sized prisoner wearing green clothing, standing alone in a dank and windowless room. “And next we’re going to see the underground cell.”

  Crossing the small corridor, I peered into a larger room to see another eerily life-sized mannequin staring up at me from a hole in the ground covered by latticed metal bars.

  “Oh my God,” I muttered. We then walked into the men’s and women’s cell rooms, both displaying straw-matted bunk beds, minimal furniture and thin, shabbily dressed mannequins. Though the ‘prisoners’ looked old, who knows how many years of their lives were taken away by the camps.

  “And finally, here’s the torture room,” our guide stated in a matter-of-fact way, as if she’d just told us about the temperature outside.

  I walked inside the room and noticed handcuffs hanging from ceilings and red paint representing blood on the walls. I fought the urge to vomit, and didn’t have the heart to ask how many people had passed through this room, and what crime – if any – the punishments were for.

  We climbed back upstairs, the haunting music following us. Our first stop was the camp library – a dusty collection of books authored by Stalin’s predecessor and the ‘founding father’ of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin. Margilan picked one up.

  “May I?” he asked, to the guide’s strict reprimand. I asked if the residents had access to these books.

  “They could order two books a month, but most of them didn’t have time to read,” she stated in her flat-toned voice.

  “Why not,” I asked.

  “They were too busy working,” she said.

  “Doing what?” I continued.

  “Everything,” she replied, still without a flicker of emotion in her voice or eyes. “Some people were building or working at the factories, others were tending to animals, and others were involved in agriculture.”

  Posters on the walls of the library and reception room proudly boasted slogans such as “Join Lenin’s Plan for Socialism” or “Uncle Stalin is watching all of his daughters and sons from Moscow”. Maps depicting the progress of communism throughout the world provided a fascinating glimpse into a history that still influences countless peoples’ mentalities and actions today; even 20 years after the break-up of the Soviet Union.

  I was particularly interested in the rooms dedicated to political deportees and statistics regarding different ethnic groups. KarLag and Kazakhstan were literally dumping grounds for ethnic groups from all over the Soviet Union and beyond. From 1936 to the early 1940s, nearly half a million ethnic Germans and over 100,000 ethnic Koreans, who had been living in the far east of Russia, were transported in cattle cars and left on the steppe. Those who survived the journey were joined by Chechen, Ingush, Baltic, Ukrainians, Poles... and the list goes on. I was surprised to learn that nearly 90,000 Lithuanians were exiled to Kazakhstan during this period. I knew that many Lithuanians had been sent as political prisoners to Russian parts of Siberia (my own great-grandfather among the ranks for whom the arduous work and living conditions proved fatal), but didn’t know that so many were in Kazakhstan. I scanned the walls of deportees’ names for Lithuanians – particularly trying to find the last names of my mom’s relatives with whom the family had lost contact during the Cold War. I looked at the life-sized cattle cars on display and tried imagining how people could have made the journey in the bitter cold of winter with little more than the clothing on their backs.

  Margilan and I continued our museum tour with two more rooms. The first was dedicated to the Kazakh intelligentsia who had suffered during the Soviet period – and there were plenty.

  “Look at that photo,” said Margilan, clicking his tongue in sadness.

  I gazed up the wall to see a photograph of a young Kazakh professor wearing bifocals and a suit.

  What could this man have possibly done, I thought, that changed his fate from professor to camp laborer and prisoner? Where was the justice for the thousands of people like him shipped to labor camps – or killed – just for being educated? I wondered if this exhibit so critical to Kazakh history would ever go on tour to the capital city of Astana or cultural and business capital of Almaty, or if it would always intentionally remain isolated here on the Kazakh Steppe.

  The last room of the KarLag museum was a decidedly bright and pointed effort to look ahead – a space dedicated to the 20 years of Kazakhstan’s independence. Here, one could see books lauding President Nazarbayev’s social, political and economic achievements; photos of the president depicting a modern, tolerant and confident Republic of Kazakhstan. Even our guide looked a little more relaxed – whether it was because she was nearly done with one more group of tourists, or whether she’d received some good news from whomever she’d been texting furiously throughout our visit, I couldn’t say.

  I wasn’t entirely satisfied with this room. I wanted to learn more about how KarLag closed and what happened to the prisoners and their descendants – as well as the fate of those who had worked at the camps. Later on, Margilan told me that many of the surviving children and grandchildren still live in the surrounding area. I wondered if the museum employees were among their ranks – and how they had come to terms with their family pasts.

  Exiting the museum, Margilan started the car. We were determined to find the nearby cemetery dedicated to the victims of KarLag. We had been told by the museum guards that it was a straight-shot five kilometers down the main village road. Margilan stopped at one point to double-check.

  “Do you know where the KarLag cemetery is?” he asked a girl, who was bundled in fur, walking down the street.

  “The what?” she asked with an incredulous tone. My search for history on this cold December day clearly wasn’t at the forefront of local people’s minds. We decided to keep driving. A few kilometers outside the village and driving further into the expanse of the steppe, we came across a small road that was all but buried by snow and saw what looked like the gates of a very small cemetery in the distance.

  This can’t be it, I thought in disbelief. Walking to the cemetery gates, we noted a wooden sign that said, “Cemetery dedicated to the children and prisoners of KarLag, 1930–1940.” A number of simple iron crosses jutted halfway out of the ground into our line of vision, and I wasn’t sure what lay under the foot or so of snow in terms of tombstones or monuments.

  I snapped several photos at the cemetery, the rusting crosses providing a striking contrast to the blue sky and glittering snow on the ground. Margilan and I didn’t talk �
�� the somber effects of the morning magnified the chill of my already cold body. We were both lost in our own thoughts. I reflected on what could possibly drive people to organized acts of mass cruelty such as this. I tried connecting memories of conversations with my grandparents about their relatives’ experiences in Siberia with the physical landscape surrounding me. I was sad to realize so many details of my own family history are lost to the Siberian plains, and shuddered as I stood in a space dedicated to children for whom arduous camp conditions proved fatal.

  At the center of the cemetery several large gravestones stood in close proximity. One bore a Russian Orthodox cross, but they were all covered in snow that hid the engravings.

  “Stanley, I’m going to go warm up the car,” Margilan said. “Come whenever you are ready.”

  I started to follow him, then stopped. Running back to the gravestones, I dusted the snow off one of them. Scanning the words, I read in Kazakh and Russian: “In memory of the innocent victims. This should not be repeated.” Blinking back tears, I followed Margilan’s footsteps through the snow and joined him for a silent drive back to Karaganda.

  Reflections atop Almaty’s Blue Ceiling

  by Kristina M. Gray

  It was a June morning in 2008, and I spent it with my Minnesota friend, Kim, on the top of Kok Tobe, overlooking the city of Almaty. The day promised to turn hot and humid, so we knew to start out early.

  This particular time on Kok Tobe, or ‘Blue Ceiling’ (in some translations, ‘Blue Hill’) was significant for two reasons. First, I had climbed this foothill in front of the Tian Shan mountain range in the summer of 1993, when the serpentine route up was merely an unpaved, dusty switchback. I had been based here as a Peace Corps trainer – the first year we established Peace Corps in Kazakhstan – and our training site had been housed at the former Communist Party school, further down the hill and to the west of these rolling, green hills. I had regularly gazed into the distance from my fifth-floor balcony to the Blue Ceiling on the horizon, where a broken down, post-Soviet cable car had dangled uselessly. It was also in Kazakhstan that I had met Ken, my future husband. I’d had a love-hate relationship with this formerly communist capital (known then as Alma-Ata) and after I had finished training the 30 Peace Corps volunteers, I hadn’t thought I would ever return.

  This day was also special because I was reunited with Kim. The two of us had come a long way since graduating on the same day in June of 1990, from the Minneapolis campus of the University of Minnesota. Back then we had shared similar interests, talking long hours on the phone, the usual girl talk. We had lost contact though, our lives taking diverging paths. I had lived in the Washington, D.C. area for three years and then in Kiev, Ukraine for seven years, with summer vacations spent in my hometown.

  After being separated by countries and continents for almost 15 years, Kim and I were together again, just like old times. She and her husband had started a family – Kim’s life was consumed with raising four children ranging in ages four to 14 – and had lived in a remote village north-west of Almaty in the first half of their stay. Both had learned to speak and write in the Kazakh language. In fact, they had published a book in the language on Kazakh children’s tales with morals. Erik was simultaneously pursuing his Ph.D. in anthropological studies with an emphasis on Kazakh cultural proverbs.

  I was busy teaching my own Kazakh ‘charges’ at the KIMEP University, who had taken over the buildings of the former Communist school. The irony of coming full circle, to the same institution where I had trained Peace Corps volunteers 14 years earlier, did not escape me.

  The refurbished cable car starts moving its passengers up and down Kok Tobe from 11 am, except on a Tuesday, when it opens at 4 pm – which happened to be the day Kim and I had chosen to go up. We had the Blue Ceiling practically to ourselves.

  We turned down a taxi that would have taken us to the top for a hefty fee. As we walked up from the parking lot, we took photos along the way. I captured the vibrant 3-D billboard that warned us to keep the environment clean. We were surrounded by lush green vegetation and peeked at intervals through branches to see Almaty’s skyline continue to shrink below us. Coming from the flat-as-a-pancake plains of Minnesota farm country, Kok Tobe seemed like a small mountain to me.

  Elementary school children painted with tempera paint on the restraining wall towards the top. They showed off their talents in different themes: horses, flowers, anything that they felt like, and all in bright, festive colors. Totally absorbed in their work, they ignored the American foreigners’ chatter becoming louder in the thinning air.

  It took a leisurely 45 minutes to climb the foothill, though admittedly I was breathing heavily as we completed our final ascent. Kim and I then sat for hours looking over the valley of Almaty below us, while eating our picnic lunch… an idyllic setting for us to share stories about the Kazakhstan we know and love.

  Kazakh superstitions

  Kazakh author Mukhamet Shayakhmetov writes in his memoir The Silent Steppe that the Kazakhs are a superstitious people. Kim, who has also read the book, could vouch for this and shared some of the superstitions she had encountered while living for over a decade in a small Kazakh village. This experience had given her first-hand knowledge of Kazakh living – very different from the big city life of Almaty, with its glossy veneer. In contrast to this Russified and modernized city, an authentic village (aul) consists of a mass of yurts. The Kazakh people traditionally were sheepherders, their livestock grazing the lands hundreds of years ago.

  “To keep their homes clear of evil spirits, the Kazakhs will collect a kind of holy grass from the mountains, then burn it and shake the smoke around the house,” Kim explained. “It is also considered essential to ensure the home is immaculately clean before going to bed because a messy place will only invite unwelcome evil spirits to come lodge during the night.” She added that placing a knife under the besik or baby cradle was also thought to ward off evil spirits.

  Kazakh versus American notions of mobility

  As a mother of four, Kim’s orientation naturally involves the home. She observed that, for Kazakhs, life events such as birth, circumcision, weddings and death were very important. Even though the Kazakhs come from a nomadic tradition, their homes or yurts were the center of their universe. That is why I suppose ‘leaving on a jet plane’ for lands faraway holds less significance for many Kazakhs, whereas for Americans like Kim and me, who come from a land of immigrants, a major life event is to depart for lands unknown to us.

  I recall when teaching as a Fulbright scholar at a westernized university in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan in 1993–1995, that my Kyrgyz dean could not understand the concept of jetlag and it messing up one’s sleep cycle. She would appear to be very put out.

  “Why can’t you Americans disembark from the plane and just jump right in to teach English the day after you arrive?” she would ask. “What’s wrong with you? Are you sick?”

  My illustrious dean painfully understood jetlag once she had visited the U.S., but this was only after several years of observing Americans sluggishly dragging their feet around her university in their first week of teaching.

  Kim also explained that the Kazakh practice of Islam does not take place in a mosque, but rather in the home. Shayakhmetov writes in his book of his mother’s eloquent mourning improvisation after the loss of a dear family member. Kim had witnessed first-hand how women memorialize a recently deceased loved one with their amazing musical abilities by inventing a song of grief. She had found the Kazakh women’s strains of music in their extemporized expressions of sadness hauntingly beautiful.

  Children, memorization and Kazakh proverbs

  Americans have their own well-worn saying of, “Children should be seen and not heard,” which perhaps harks back to our agrarian society of big families and in which children were disciplined to sit quietly while eating their meals. It was considered only fitting and proper that the adults do all the talking at the table. Kazakhs share this sentiment a
nd young children are encouraged to sit and listen to the older (and wiser) members of the family. In their formative years, Kazakh children are expected not just to listen and learn but also to commit stories to memory. It is also the duty of adults, aged 40 years or older, to use proverbs that they once memorized to explain life lessons to the children.

  My experience teaching for a year and a half at a Bishkek university showed me that the Kyrgyz students, who share a similar tradition of oral story-telling, picked up the English language quickly –despite the lack of Western-style textbooks. The young people were simply very good at memorizing and listening to intonation patterns of native English speakers. This is essentially what language learning is all about: listening, memorizing and imitating. I observed that oral skills prevailed over written skills, which require more reading.

  Something else Kim had observed was that her Kazakh housekeepers had no concept of how to put books away on a bookshelf. As all knowledge was committed to memory and traditional Kazakhs lived in yurts, moving from place to place according to the seasons, Kazakhs owned few, if any, books.

  “My Kazakh helpers would unknowingly put our books back on the shelves upside down,” explained Kim, “or with the spine to the inside and not facing out so you could read the title.” I suppose those of us who have grown up with access to libraries or books at home, don’t realize that people without books would not really concern themselves with how to ‘properly’ place a book on its shelf.

  Forbidden subjects among Kazakhs

  Apparently money is not spoken of, nor is a lack of it, although to talk about borrowing money is acceptable. Indeed, nothing regarding the home and personal affairs, such as a parent having trouble with a child or a wife who is beaten by her husband, is allowed to be discussed openly. These topics are forbidden outside the family, and even within the family such topics are hushed up.