I had decided to stop in Tashkent only on my way back from Samarkand but a missed connection now gave me several hours there. It was nearly midnight when I started out to explore. In the old town the dimly lighted chai-khanas (tea-houses) opening on the street were still filled with squatting Uzbeks and from all sides the flat native drums throbbed rhythmically in the warm Eastern-smelling darkness. Two or three hours before dawn I returned to the station and boarded the Samarkand train without having been asked my business by anyone.
The last stretch was the worst. There was no room anywhere on the train and for hours I squatted, swaying dangerously, on the little iron platform between two coaches. Then, just as I was beginning to wonder whether it was worth it, the train stopped at a little wayside station and I saw the name in black letters on a white ground: ‘SAMARQAND’. A truck, picked up outside the station, took me at break-neck speed through the long tree-lined avenues of the Russian cantonments and deposited me, without further ado, in the middle of the old town. I had arrived.
Before me, in the early morning sunlight, lay a paved square, the Registan, open on one side to the street and enclosed on the other three by the lofty arched façades of three ancient madrassehs or Moslem colleges. At each corner of the square a slim minaret points skywards. The buildings are of crumbling sun-baked bricks, decorated with glazed tiles of deep blue and vivid turquoise that sparkle in the sun. Each madrasseh is built round a central courtyard surrounded by cloisters. Into these open the cells once occupied by Moslem scholars and now inhabited by various local inhabitants. On the northern side of the square is the Tillah Kari or Golden Mosque Madrasseh, called after the great mosque which forms part of it. On the western side stands the smaller and more beautiful Madrasseh of Ulug Beg, Tamerlane’s grandson, who built it in 1417; opposite it, the Shir Dar. Across the top of the central arch sprawls the form of the great golden lion which gives it its name: Shir Dar — Lion bearing. On either side of the façade rise splendidly proportioned twin domes. After passing through the central arch and exploring the cloisters beyond, I climbed by a narrow twisting stairway to the top of the Shir Dar and from there looked down on the sun-baked Registan and beyond it on the fabled city of Samarkand, on the blue domes and the minarets, the flat-roofed mud houses, and the green tree-tops. It was a moment to which I had long looked forward.
Then, leaving the sunlight of the Registan, I plunged into the semi-darkness of a covered bazaar, where Uzbek merchants offered their goods for sale. From these, as I passed, I received tempting offers for my greatcoat and even for my trousers. Presently, I came to an open air chai-khana, or tea-house, where scores of turbaned and bearded worthies squatted on raised wooden platforms strewn with fine carpets, gossiping and sipping bowls of green tea.
Here I sat for a time drinking tea like the rest of them, and then, walking on through the outskirts of the town, came suddenly upon the splendid ruins of the Bibi Khanum mosque, built as the chief ornament of his capital by Tamerlane a year or two before his death in 1405 and named after one of his wives, a Chinese princess. Its great blue dome is shattered, some say by Russian shell fire when the town was captured in 1868, but one immense crumbling arch still remains, poised perilously above the surrounding buildings. From it one can still picture the noble proportions of the original structure.
According to a legend, the Persian architect who built the mosque fell in love with the princess and imprinted on her cheek a kiss so passionate that it left a burn. Tamerlane, seeing this, sent his men to kill his wife’s lover. But the Persian fled before them to the top of the highest minaret and then, as his pursuers were about to seize him, sprouted wings and, soaring high above Samarkand, flew back to his native town of Meshed.
Near the Bibi Khanum two or three incongruous modern buildings in the Soviet style have already made their appearance and will no doubt be followed by others. Passing by these and along the main street out in the country I came to a dusty hillside, littered with graves and gravestones all crumbling into decay. Down it ran a walled stairway with, on either side, a row of small mosques of the most exquisite beauty. In these lie buried the friends and contemporaries of Tamerlane. From some, the blue tiles have disappeared completely, leaving a rough crumbling surface of pale sun-baked clay sprouting here and there with tufts of grass. At the top of the stairway stands a larger mosque, the tomb of Kassim Ibn Abbas, a Mohammedan soldier-saint, who, it is said, is only sleeping and will one day rise again sword in hand to perform great exploits. After him the mosque, for centuries a place of pilgrimage, is called Shah Zinda — The Living King. Climbing over the wall, I wandered in and out of the mosques until I was eventually turned away by an angry Uzbek woman ably seconded by an idiot boy. Sightseeing, it seemed, was not encouraged in Samarkand.
Beyond the Shah Zinda stretches the dusty expanse of the Afro Siab, the former site of the ancient city of Maracanda, founded by Alexander the Great. Now it is a desolate undulating plain, sprinkled with crumbling ruins.
At the far end of the old town stands the blue-ribbed dome of the Gur Emir, where the great conqueror Tamerlane himself lies buried. In front of the great entrance arch an old man had set up his bed under a mulberry tree. Rousing him, I induced him to open the gate for me. Inside, the walls are wainscoted with alabaster and adorned with jasper. Tamerlane’s tombstone is of polished greenish-black nephrite, carved with Arabic lettering. His body lies in a vault below.
Though the Gur Emir was empty many of the smaller mosques scattered about the old town were in use, and the mullahs seemed still to command the respect of the population. In character the old town had remained practically unchanged by the Russian invasion of 1868. Few Russians were to be seen in the streets. The Uzbeks wore their national dress, long striped quilted coats and turbans or embroidered skull-caps, while many of the women were still enveloped in their traditional thick black horsehair veils, entirely covering and hiding the face and most of the body. The houses were built in the native style of sun-baked mud bricks with flat roofs. There were few windows in the outside walls, though some of the larger houses had balconies. Through open gateways I caught glimpses of courtyards and gardens, and here and there I came on square ponds surrounded by trees. The shops of the merchants were open to the street and their owners sat cross-legged in them manufacturing their goods on the threshold. In the open bazaars great heaps of fruit were offered for sale: melons, apples, apricots and grapes. Life seemed easy and the inhabitants seem to spend most of their time talking and drinking tea out of shallow bowls in the innumerable chai-khanas.
But it is only a question of time before all there remains of a bygone civilization is swept away. Chancing to look into the courtyard of a house in the old town, I was not surprised to see some twenty little Uzbek girls of three or four years old being marched briskly up and down in fours and made to sing hymns to the glorious Leader of the People.
Tashkent, the centre of the Soviet cotton industry, is, with its population of half a million or more, a vast city in comparison with Samarkand. It also has a tremendous reputation for wickedness. Returning on the train from Samarkand I was taken aside by the ticket-collector, a comfortable motherly middle-aged female, and solemnly warned against the dangers and temptations to which I was about to be exposed. She could see, she said, that I was young and inexperienced and not accustomed to life in great cities.
After a trying night in a crowded hard carriage, I was glad to find a bench in a garden near the station on which to go to sleep. But I had scarcely closed my eyes when I awoke to find my neighbours on each side shaking me and asking me in agitated tones whether I realized that I had fallen asleep. On my replying that that was what I was trying to do, they seemed profoundly shocked and explained that if you were foolish enough to go to sleep out of doors in a city like Tashkent anything might happen to you. And so, I set out unreposed to explore this latter-day Babylon.
The old town, which is intersected by a network of tortuous narrow streets running between the hig
h walls of the flat-roofed mud-built native houses, has no monuments which can be compared with those of Samarkand. Life, as usual in the East, centres round the teeming bazaar in the centre of which is a vast open space, ankle deep in mud and filled with a seething crowd of Uzbeks packed shoulder to shoulder, each engaged in trying to sell something to his neighbour. The goods offered for sale range from embroidered skull-caps and Bokhara carpets to second-hand trousers and broken-down sewing machines. Once again I received many tempting offers for my overcoat and indeed for everything I had on, although my clothes, which I had slept in for several nights running, were not looking their best. Clearly, wearing apparel had a scarcity value in Tashkent.
The streets leading into this arena are lined with shops, all of which overflow into the street, and are filled with a jostling, shouting crowd, continually being pushed apart to make way for strings of camels or donkeys, or for arbas, the high-wheeled native carts.
In Tashkent as in Samarkand the national dress and customs had been largely retained, and many women still went veiled. But while in Samarkand life had seemed a leisurely affair, in Tashkent it was full of noise and strife. A queue had only to form outside a bread-shop for a free fight to begin which generally ended in the shop being taken by storm and in any member of the Militia (a force for the most part recruited locally and treated with scant respect), who was unwise enough to intervene, being left seated in the mud, trying to collect his wits.
This same violence, which, after the stolid patience of Russian crowds, I found rather refreshing, is encountered in acute form on the Tashkent trams, which can be boarded only after a hand-to-hand fight. Fists, teeth and feet are used freely. Once one is on board, however, the trams, which run to every point of the new town and for considerable distances out into the country, provide a most convenient means of seeing Tashkent.
The Russian town, which like Alma Ata and the modern portion of Samarkand, is laid out in broad avenues of poplars, was for the most part built after the capture of the town by the Russians in 1865 but before the Revolution, though there are the usual square white factories, Government offices and blocks of flats in the strictly utilitarian style of modern Soviet architecture. I was not surprised to be told that the best block of flats was reserved for ‘specialists’, i.e. highly paid technical workers. In the station buffet an extremely ‘hot’ band with a good sense of rhythm played fairly recent jazz from New York. An institution inherited from the old regime is a formidable turreted and machicolated prison, the crenellated walls of which are continually patrolled by N.K.V.D. troops. On the way from the old town to the new I saw another heavily guarded and apparently fortified enclosure which I took to be the Headquarters of the Central Asian Military district, but not wishing to be arrested as a spy, I kept well away from it. Outside the town, the villages in the surrounding country are purely Uzbek, their inhabitants working for the most part in the cotton fields or in the mills.
I had seen Alma Ata; I had seen Tashkent; best of all I had seen Samarkand. I had done what I had set out to do and, having done it, immediately I conceived new ambitions.
First of all, there was Bokhara, not more than 200 miles southwards and westwards from Samarkand, but harder to get to, and further removed from Western influence, scarcely changed, it seemed, since the downfall of the last Emir. Now that I had come so far, might I not go a little further?
Then, over the mountains from Alma Ata lay Chinese Turkestan or Sinkiang, as it was called, an outlying province of China, which Soviet intrigue and the turbulent nature of its inhabitants had thrown into an uproar, temptingly near and temptingly inaccessible. Might it not be possible to slip across the passes of the Tien Shan to Kashgar, or join a caravan, travelling eastwards along the new road from Alma Ata to Urumchi?
But already I had exceeded my leave, and, if I exceeded it still further, I might well be granted no more. Besides, lucky as I had been so far, I could scarcely hope to reach either Bokhara or Sinkiang without running into trouble with the N.K.V.D. And, with an eye to future enterprises, I wanted to avoid an actual show-down with them for as long as possible. And so, reluctantly, I turned my back, for the time being at any rate, on both these alluring projects, and after spending an entire night from dusk till dawn standing in a queue, I secured a ticket and boarded a train bound for Moscow by the most direct route.
My journey home was uneventful. I made it in a ‘soft’ carriage on a train with a well-stocked dining-car. The other berths in my compartment were occupied by one of the inevitable railwaymen and two youthful and extremely affected intellectuals from Leningrad with horn-rimmed spectacles and carefully trimmed beards who knew better than to talk to a foreigner and were too class-conscious to talk to a railway man. The result was that the railwayman and myself, thrown together and having exhausted all possible topics of conversation at an early stage in the proceedings, filled up the rest of the four-day journey with ceaseless games of chess. I had not played since I was seven, and so my opponent invariably won, much to his delight.
The first part of the return journey lay through the Kazakh steppe, this time further to the west, the train following the course of the Jaxartes or Syr Daria as far as the Sea of Aral, seen briefly as a glittering expanse of water stretching away into the distance. The second stage, by way of Orenburg, Kuibyshev and Penza to Moscow lay through a typical Russian landscape. All that remained of Asia was the crowd of Uzbeks and Kazakhs in the ‘hard’ carriages travelling to Moscow on business or for pleasure.
A few miles outside Moscow we passed a long prison train, eastward bound. It was composed of reinforced cattle trucks. At the end of each truck was a guard of N.K.V.D. troops with fixed bayonets. Through cracks in the sides one could see the prisoners’ faces, peering out. It served as a reminder that travel in the regions from which I was returning is not always undertaken at the traveller’s own wish.
Chapter VII
Winter in Moscow
BACK in Moscow the first snows had fallen and I put aside any further thought of travel until the spring. There was a lot of work to be got through in the Chancery; there was the endless round of official parties. But, with a little ingenuity and enterprise, life could be made agreeable enough.
Chip and Avis Bohlen and Charlie Thayer of the American Embassy had a dacha, a country cottage, ten or twelve miles outside the town, and there we kept some horses which we had bought from the Red Army and which, as far as we knew, were the only privately owned saddle-horses in the Soviet Union. On them we ranged far and wide over the green, rolling country round about. When the snow made riding impossible, we took to our skis and plunged inexpertly down the frozen slopes immediately behind the dacha. In the evenings, after a hard day’s exercise, we would congregate round a roaring open fire in the dacha and Avis would dispense frankfurters and peanut butter and corned-beef hash and other unaccustomed delicacies, washed down by plenty of good American coffee and equally good Scotch whisky. Then we would lie about and talk and play the gramophone until it was time to go home. As we drove back to Moscow the air was icy and the stars shone down frostily on the sparkling snow.
Sometimes, at night, we went to the Park of Rest and Culture, an immense amusement park on the outskirts of Moscow. In the winter the whole of it was flooded and on skates one could go skimming along for miles over brilliantly lighted frozen avenues to the strains of Vienna waltzes and Red Army marches, while vast illuminated portraits of Marx and Engels, Lenin and Stalin gazed benignly down on the whirling crowds beneath them. Sometimes, too, we would go to the Hotel Metropole, where the cream of the Red Army and of Soviet officialdom could be seen disporting themselves with their womenfolk beneath the same gilded candelabras that had witnessed the antics of their Tsarist predecessors.
But, of the various distractions that Moscow can offer, none surpasses the Theatre and Ballet. The tradition which they represent has endured unbroken from before the Revolution. They would, I think, play an important part in Russian life under any regime. I
t is in the foyer of the Bolshoi and of the First Arts that the ‘new proletarian aristocracy’ assemble, immaculate in uniforms and neat blue suits, their wives resplendent in sable and redolent of Soviet scent. In the former Imperial box Stalin and the members of his entourage make their rare public appearances. Round the persons of the leading ballerinas hangs an aura of glamour and romance shared by few save the greatest military and political leaders.
The Soviet authorities do all they can to encourage the Theatre and Ballet. Perhaps they see in them a relatively harmless outlet for a turbulent imagination. By a fortunate dispensation of providence, Russians possess a natural gift of make-believe. Listening to Chaikovski’s music and watching the transformation scenes of Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty unfold before them, they have the power to forget their troubles and miseries and transport themselves into a world of plenty, magnificence and romance, with nothing more frightening than an occasional witch or magician to take the place of the more substantial terrors of real life. For them, as for no other race, the real and the imaginary, the actual and the symbolic, the literal and the figurative, tend to overlap and become one. Even the foreigners, diplomats and journalists, sitting isolated in their stalls amid the serried rows of proletarian aristocrats, cannot but share the thrill of excitement that runs through the crowd as the curtain goes up, cannot but feel something of the rapt interest with which they follow every movement and every gesture until it goes down again.
But before the winter was out, the easy routine of our life was to be interrupted by an event which was to leave on me, at any rate, a more profound impression than any other experience during the years I spent in Soviet Russia.
By the beginning of 1938 no important State trial had been held in public for a year. Sentence had been passed on Tukachevski and the Generals behind closed doors; many other high functionaries of Army, Government and Party had been liquidated, as far as one could ascertain, ‘administratively’. People were beginning to think that the unfavourable reaction even of Left-wing circles abroad to the trials of Piatakov and Radek and other Old Bolsheviks, with the fantastic public confessions, orgies of self-abasement of the prisoners and the bloodthirsty ravings of the Public Prosecutor, had at last convinced the Soviet authorities that in the long run displays of this kind did more harm than good, and induced them to abandon the public trial in favour of more discreet methods of liquidation. Every week since the last trial the removal from office of public figures of varying importance had been announced and their names cited in the Press as wreckers and enemies of the people. But after that, in general, no more was heard of them, and their demise was assumed as a matter of course. It seemed likely that there would be no more public trials.
Eastern Approaches Page 9