Snapshot from Samarkand, winter of 1991. Everyone here fights over palov (meat pilaf), the Central Asian monodish. The deeper issue? Stunning Timurid-dynasty Samarkand, the tourist pride of Turkic-speaking Soviet Uzbekistan with its blue-tiled fifteenth-century mosques, is in fact a city populated mostly by Farsi-speaking Tajiks.
Pre-revolution this region was a bilingual khanate. People intermarried, ate the same pilaf, and called themselves Sarts. Unlike the Lithuanians (theirs an actual, pre-Soviet country) neither the Tajiks nor Uzbeks ever had anything resembling a separate national consciousness. Not until Stalin, fearing a pan-Turkic insurgence in the late 1920s, split Central Asia (then known as Turkestan) into five Union republics. Obsessive Bolshevik social engineering supplied each with a semifabricated history, a newly codified written language, and freshly minted ethno-identity. Nifty nationhood package aside, Tajikistan got stuck with some scrappy mountains; Uzbekistan drew the gorgeous Tajik cultural centers of Samarkand and Bukhara. Uzbekistan also scored Amir Timur—a.k.a. Tamerlane the warrior king—who was designated an Uzbek national hero. Funny, since Timur was actually a Mongol who fought against the Uzbeks.
Along came glasnost, and old scores long muzzled by the Kremlin’s heavy centralized hand were back, in full fury.
“Uzbek pilaf! Vile and greasy!” raged an elderly Tajik nationalist professor when we paid a call on him at his boxy low-rise apartment. The Tajik pilaf on his table—“Delicate! Reflective of our ancient Persian heritage”—had been assembled into a cumin-scented mound by his gorgeous young unibrowed wife. Talking to the local Uzbek minority, we learned, of course, that Tajik pilaf was pathetic: “Tasteless! Bland!”
These declarations were completely bewildering, because the Tajik and Uzbek pilafs of Samarkand tasted identical.
Our hosts in Samarkand were an aged Bukharan-Jewish couple, Rina and Abram. “Interesno.” Abram squinted from his third-party perspective. “Tajiks here listed themselves as Uzbeks on their passports when it helped with their careers. Now suddenly they remember their heritage?”
Rina and Abram had their own grief. “When they finish killing each other,” hissed Rina, “they’ll turn on us Jews.” Rina sat by her mulberry tree weeping tears into a bowl of tannic green tea. She and Abram had applied for an exit visa to Israel. “But how to leave this behind,” lamented Rina, gesturing at their palatial private house with a fully cemented backyard (a proud Bukharan-Jewish-Soviet tradition).
“Oi vai, oi vai,” cried Abram from the back door. “Tajiks, Uzbeks, Jews—under Brezhnev we all lived as one muhallah (community/neighborhood). Gorbachev bud’ on proklyat (be damned)!”
Spectacular wails and ululations awoke us our last Samarkand morning. The wailers were our hosts. Storming into our bedroom, they began frantically slashing the mattress on which we still lay. “OI OI OI!” The decibels of their shock nearly cracked the palatial walls painted with crude rococo landscapes.
“VAI VAI VAI!” resounded the entire neighborhood.
Soviet tanks? I gasped. A Jewish pogrom?
“WORSE!” Rina screamed.
The morning’s radio had just announced the government’s latest economic shock measure. All fifty- and hundred-ruble banknotes were to be withdrawn from use. Citizens were given three days only to exchange their old bills—maximum amount, one thousand rubles. Some forty dollars at black market rates. In catastrophic silence we sipped our green tea as Rina and Abram slashed fake-rococo chairs and striped cushions. Their entire life savings fluttered around the rooms in a morning breeze. Most of it in banned fifties and hundreds.
Just another day on the road, 1991. On the crumbling Imperium’s fringes.
Snapshot from Tashkent, Uzbekistan’s capital, later that same winter. At the Alay Bazaar the January sun angled across mottled-green Kokand melons. Men in skullcaps thronged around carts piled high with indented non flatbreads the size and shape of soup bowls. The biggest trade this season? Little red horoscope booklets. The future. The future. What does the future hold?
At the bazaar I gravitated again and again to the rows of Korean ladies hawking their prodigious pickles: shredded carrots laced with garlic and coriander; fiery cabbage kimchi they called chim-che. The Koreans were socialist Central Asia’s model farmers. At their prosperous, orderly kolkhozes with names like Politotdel (Political Department) they grew wonder onions and overfulfilled every Five-Year Plan by 500 percent. Koreans also farmed most of the rice for the pilaf Uzbeks and Tajiks argued about. But behind the Koreans’ golden success story lurked another sort of tale …
After we’d bought several rounds of her pickles, Shura Tan, in her late sixties, told us her story. She spoke in halting Russian dotted with Uzbek words. When she got nervous she flattened her shredded carrots with a strangely shaped ladle and meticulously reassembled them into perfectly triangular mounds.
Like most Soviet Koreans of her generation, Shura was born in the Russian Far East. The diaspora had been there since the 1860s, swelling after refugees from the 1910 Japanese invasion of Korea crossed over to the future USSR. The Korean comrades grew rice and fished; the Bolsheviks gave them Korean-language schools, theaters, clubs. “We Koreans were happy,” said Shura.
Then, in the fall of 1937, men in uniforms came to their kolkhoz. The Koreans were given three days to pack. Panic swept through their villages. Where were they being taken? Wrenched by despair, Shura’s mother assembled a huge sack of rice and wrapped in cloth a handful of earth for her garden plot. “Why take the earth?” protested the family. Shura’s mother took it all the same. It was her earth.
The Koreans were told to bring food for a week, but the journey lasted a month, maybe longer. Packed into sealed cattle cars, the panicked deportees traveled almost four thousand miles west across frigid Siberia. Old people and babies died from hunger and illness, their bodies dumped from the moving train. All the way Shura wept. She was then a small child.
At last the train stopped. As far as the eye could see were reeds, mud, swamps—the endless plains of Central Asia. The Koreans began building mud huts, sometimes without window or doors
“Scorpions fell on my bed from our walls,” Shura recalled, raking her carrots. “And black snakes as long as this”—she opened her arms wide. But the worst killer was the muddy, diseased swamp water—the only drinking water available. That’s when Shura’s mother remembered her earth. She filtered the poisoned water through it.
“And that’s what saved us,” said Shura. “The earth.”
Koreans became the first Soviet ethnicity to be deported by Stalin in its entirety. More than 180,000 strong, down to the last child. Accusation: potential pro-Japanese espionage during Soviet-Japanese tensions over Manchuria, even though most Koreans hated Japan. Another motive for their deportation: the hard-toiling Koreans could farm the barren Central Asian steppes.
Between 1937 and 1944 these steppes served as Stalin’s dumping ground for scores of other, smaller ethnicities he charged with treason. Sealed cattle cars—“crematoria on wheels”—ferried in Chechens, Ingushi, Karachai, Kalmyks, and Balkars. Also Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans, Ingrian Finns, Kurds, Poles from the Ukraine. The Koreans assimilated and stayed. Others, like the Chechens and the Ingushi, returned to their Northern Caucasus homeland under Khrushchev’s Thaw, only to find their houses occupied by Russians and neighboring ethnic minorities, and the stone tombs of their ancestors employed as construction material. Mountain nations venerate their ancestors. The insults were never forgiven. Gorbachev’s glasnost reawakened the memories.
Nation builder and nation destroyer—simultaneously—is how the historian Terry Martin describes the Soviet State. As whole ethnic populations drew Stalin’s black marks, the officious encomiums to Union minorities rang out undiminished. Propaganda reels after the Great Patriotic War showed happy Korean collective farmers at their glorious socialist toil. There were even well-financed Korean theater productions. A Korean-language newspaper—Lenin Kichi (Lenin’s Banner)—was imposed on
every Korean kolkhoz, representing yet another socialist irony.
Deprived of Korean schooling by Stalin, the generation of Shura the pickle maker could no longer read hangul script.
“I know Russian, a little Uzbek,” sighed Shura. “Korean? Nyet. No language—no homeland.” She sighed again. “But at least we have this.” She pointed down to her pickles. After mixing some kachi red chile paste into a tangy salad of cabbage and peppers, she scooped some into my hand. The heat of her chiles left my face numb.
Update: Moscow, August 19, 1991. Tanks rumble up the bombastic thrust of Kutuzov Prospect. Soviet TV plays Swan Lake … over and over. Party hard-liners announce control of the government. Gorbachev? Under house arrest at his Crimean dacha. Officially the “state of his health” doesn’t permit him to continue as president. The right-winger vice president Comrade Yanaev is taking over. Comrade Yanaev’s hands tremble visibly at his press conference. Not quite sober for history’s call.
Hello, Avgustovsky putsch—the August coup.
We stare at our television in a seaside suburb of Melbourne, where Mom happens to be visiting me and John from New York.
“Vsyo, eto vsyo,” Mom is crying. “This is the end!”
I keep dialing my father in Moscow. And getting through.
“Da, putsch, putsch …” Dad giggles sardonically.
“Ma, Ma,” I keep reasoning, nine thousand miles away from the scenes. “If things were that bad they’d have cut the international phone lines!”
They’d have cut Yeltsin’s phone too. Instead, there he is in all his bearish populism, defiant atop a tank outside the White House, the Russian parliament building. In popular elections that June he’d become Russia’s first freely elected leader in a thousand years. Now he rallies Muscovites to resist the takeover. Crowds cheer him on. Citizens weep and complain openly for imperialist cameras. The plotters’ script has been botched: Is this any way to run a putsch?
Over the next two days the coup goes phhht, and in such a pratfall style that to this day Russian conspiracy theorists question what really happened. Things move at shocking speed after this. Yeltsin bans the Communist Party. More republics head for the exit. Gorbachev clings on in this crumbling world, still devoutly for the Union, even in its now hobbled form. The friendship of nations: no longer only a cherished ideological trope for Comrade Gorbachev. Without it he’s out of a job.
“I’m not going to just float like a lump of shit in an ice hole,” he informs Yeltsin in December, after 90 percent of Ukrainians icily vote to secede from his Union.
That December of 1991 my Derridarian and I returned for our final road trip—south via Ukraine to the rebellious Georgian subrepublic of Abkhazia, wedged in between Georgia and the southern border of Russia. What with the chaos and gasoline shortage, nobody wanted to drive us. Finally we found Yura, a thirty-something geology professor with a Christ-like ginger beard. “I refuse to give bribes—out of principle,” he informed us quietly. This was bad news. On the plus side: his rattletrap Zhiguli operated on both gas and propane, slightly increasing our chances of actual motion. The propane stank up the car with a rotten-egg smell. On the road Yura pensively cracked pine nuts with his big yellow teeth; his cassette tape whined with semiunderground sixties songs about taiga forests and campfires. Geologists—they were their own subculture.
Yura’s Zhiguli was a metaphor for the disintegrating state of our Soyuz. Innocent tourist side jaunts metastasized into days-long quests for accelerator components. Every fill-her-up of black market gas cost five monthly salaries. Meantime all around us they were renaming the landscape. Kharkov in Ukraine was no more; it was Kharkiv now, in Ukrainian. Lenin and Marx streets clanged into dustbins.
By the time we sputtered into Abkhazia’s civil-war-torn Black Sea capital of Sukhumi, I no longer knew whom to side with in ethnic conflicts, whom to trust. I now put my faith in anyone who put out a hot meal. I trusted and loved the wiry young Abkhazian driver lent to us by the local writers’ union to help fix our sardine can on wheels. The kid proudly took us to his parents’ village house for a meal. We ate bitterish, gamy wild duck shot that morning—smothered in a thick, tomatoey, fiery sauce. It might have been the most memorable dish of my life. Then the excellent youngster stole Yura’s last gas canister.
To Sukhumi we carried an introduction from our Moscow acquaintance Fazil Iskander, the greatest living Abkhazian writer. During an electrical blackout we called at the darkened flat of Alexei Gogua, chief of the Abkhazian Writers Union. We found the gray-haired Gogua writing in his pajama pants by a flickering candle. What terrible straits we’d landed him in! Abkhaz hospitality demanded a resplendent welcome. We were visiting foreign writers—sent by Fazil, the Abkhaz Mark Twain. But Sukhumi’s infrastructure was shattered. Which is how a Zhiguli convoy of separatist culturati accompanied us to the well-lit country house of a prominent winemaker.
Shortly before seven p.m. I slipped out to the kitchen.
“Due to the situation which has evolved …”
The inevitable/impossible was finally happening. At seven p.m. on Christmas Day, 1991, Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev was giving his resignation speech.
The situation had developed further and fatally for him. Several weeks earlier, his thorn-in-the-side Yeltsin had secretly met leaders of Ukraine and Byelorussia at Brezhnev’s former hunting lodge in a Byelorussian forest. The troika’s advisers and lawyers cooked up a devilish plan: As founding members of the 1922 Union Treaty, the three republics had the power to annul it—to simply dissolve the USSR! In its place they formed the Commonwealth of Independent States. Byelorussian herbal vodka lubricated the signing. Before bothering to inform Gorbachev, Yeltsin telephoned the news to George H. W. Bush. (“Dear George,” he addressed him now.) At a subsequent meeting in Kazakhstan, eight more republics went ex-Union. Clearly Gorbachev was finished.
And yet his TV announcement caught me by total surprise, there with my uneaten spoonful of Abkhazian corn mush. Reading from a paper, often awkwardly, the last leader of Sovetsky Soyuz spoke for ten minutes. He lauded his own democratic reforms. Admitted mistakes. Took credit for the elimination of a totalitarian system and for “newly acquired spiritual and political freedom.” About the new freedom and such he wasn’t fabulizing exactly, but the ladies around me gently waved him off. His phrases rang meaningless, false—simply because after all his flip-flopping, who’d ever believe him?
The USSR’s dying minutes still replay in my mind in dazed, elegiac slow motion.
I recall the exact words that Gorbachev mangled in his crass provincial accent (so at odds with his suave international image). I taste the salty cheese in the corn mush, inhale the kitchen’s garlicky pungencies; I hear the thudding splat of a pomegranate heavy with seeds that—another metaphor for the Imperium?—fell on the kitchen floor and cracked open.
The Abkhaz women had been watching impassively for the most part, chins propped in hands. But as the resignee thanked his supporters and wished his countrymen best, the lady of the house whispered:
“Zhalko, a vse-taki zhalko.”
“Zhalko,” echoed the others: “A shame, a shame, in the end.”
“Zhalko,” I murmured along, not sure what we were wistful about. The sudden humanity of a tone-deaf reformer—hero abroad, villain at home? The finis, the official, irrevocable curtain falling on our fairy-tale communal lie, the utopian social experiment for which millions of lives had been brutally sacrificed—now signing off in the most undramatic fashion imaginable? Empires! They weren’t supposed to gurgle away in ten badly colorized minutes. The locomotive carrying citizens into a brighter tomorrow wasn’t meant to just run out of gas and die in the middle of nowhere, like one more woebegone Zhiguli.
As Gorbachev later wrote in his memoirs, he got no farewell ceremony, no phone calls from presidents of former Soviet republics. They didn’t believe in the friendship of nations. Were there any murmurs of “a shame” from them at the end?
When the speech was ov
er, the blazing red Soviet banner was lowered for the very last time in history, and a peppy Russian tricolor rose in its place.
A new day in a new state, said the announcer, and the TV reverted to regular programming. A cartoon, I think it was, or maybe a puppet show.
I know you’ll wonder how it felt to wake up next day in a new state. Only I didn’t wake up—not till two whole days later. My brain pounded violently against my temples. My blurred vision registered white-coated people bending over me with expressions of saccharine Soviet concern. “How is our golovka, our little head?” they cooed, waving smelling salts under my nose. Where was I? Ah, yes … the only place in darkened Sukhumi with its own electrical generator. The Sanatorium of the Russian Armed Forces, where we’d been lodged on arrival by the hospitable Abkhazian writers. After the USSR ended on TV there’d been toasts, many toasts—flowery prodigies of Caucasian eloquence laboriously translated from Abkhaz to Russian to English (for the sake of the Derridarian, who was now sprawled beside me, ghostly pale and grunting). Dimly I recalled the ritualistic pouring of homemade Izabella wine onto the roof of our decrepit sardine can around four a.m. The equally ritualistic guzzling down of a farewell kantsi, a horn filled with 1.5 liters of the same such Izabella. Gogua, the elderly writer-in-chief, collapsing softly into the arms of his secretary.
“Golovka, the little head, how is it?” pressed the white-coated people.
The golovka pounded and hammered and throbbed. Passed out from epic alcohol poisoning. That’s how, since you asked, I greeted the dawn of a new historical era. Ah, Izabella.
Ah, dawn; historical hungover dawn …
The Zhiguli’s engine finally expired somewhere near Kiev, and in exchange for a bottle, a GAZ truck towed Yura the Christ-like geologist eight hundred miles to Moscow. John and I took the overnight train with its red-carpeted corridor. Back in Melbourne again, where it was summer, we sat on a green hill leaning on our two massive suitcases, homeless and miserable—the sublet we’d arranged had fallen through. Soon I left my Derridarian in Australia and returned to New York. Our relationship sank under the strain of the USSR’s dying days—though it took us a few more long-distance years (he moved to California) to break up officially. His travel book never came out.
Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking Page 28