Picnic at the Iron Curtain: A Memoir: From the fall of the Berlin Wall to Ukraine's Orange Revolution

by Susan Viets

  Kiosks at the meeting site displayed local goods but sold none. Charlotte admired tall white felt Kyrgyz hats with black velvet trim. “They’re just like fairy princess hats,” she said. “I’d like to buy some.” We investigated and soon learned the name of the factory that made the hats. When the meeting finished, we left for the factory.

  The guard at the gate had gone; the entrance stood deserted. We walked in and climbed the central staircase. We heard the steady clatter of sewing machines; the women who operated them filled a large room. Pleased, even excited, by overseas visitors they took our orders and asked us to return the next day for the hats.

  Next we visited the American embassy. The ambassador, an intelligent and kind man, briefed us on local politics. He also spoke at length and enthusiastically about mountain climbing. He recommended that we visit the Tien Shan range. I told him about my trip into these mountains on the Chinese side a few months earlier. I travelled with a group of Hong Kong tourists whom I’d met in Urumqi. A sheep had been slaughtered for a barbecue dinner held in our honour. Later, the Hong Kong tourists and I spent a night in a yurt. I remembered the still mountain air and silt green lakes and told the ambassador about a horse ride at dawn. I sat on a sturdy local horse, behind my guide. The horse carried us down steep cliffs. All we heard was the sound of birds and the trickle of a mountain stream.

  “Let’s go into the mountains near here,” Charlotte said. We did not venture high. We remained in a forested alpine landscape filled with icy streams. Charlotte stripped down for a dip. She dreamed of a swim in the Oxus (Amu Darya) River, but said this would do for now. We enjoyed our brief, hassle-free stay in Kyrgyzstan so much that we felt certain our luck had changed and the rest of our trip would proceed smoothly.

  After our hike in the mountains, we returned to Bishkek. We went to the Aeroflot office to buy tickets to our next destination, which was Tashkent. An efficient agent served us. She sold us the tickets and never mentioned a word about fuel.

  We saw colleagues from London at the Tashkent airport. One lived in the city. He invited us to stay. Not wanting to impose, we said that we would find a hotel. Our colleague looked worried and insisted that we write down his address and contact number.

  No hotel would check us in. A man followed us everywhere we went. One receptionist whispered that we had “a friend.” A security services agent had appeared once before. When I landed in Almaty, Kazakhstan, on my way back from China a tall, personable, fit man took my suitcases at the airport, flagged down a car and asked whether two hundred roubles was an acceptable fare. I agreed. He told the taxi driver to take me to a hotel in the centre. I thanked him and boarded the taxi.

  “Do you work for the KGB like your friend?” the driver asked. Offended, I asked what he meant, especially as the KGB did not even exist anymore and its Russian successor technically should not function in an independent Uzbekistan.

  “He showed me his identity card – he’s from the KGB.” KGB or not, I appreciated the hotel tip. Boris Manço, a Turkish pop star, was staying there. I bumped into his brother in the elevator and he invited me to join them for dinner. Saudis flooded the region with religious books and money. Turks mounted a cultural charm offensive. They forged ties through music.

  Charlotte and I hoped that this security agent would prove equally helpful and direct a receptionist to check us in. He did not. His presence sabotaged all possibility of accommodation. Everyone seemed afraid.

  After several hours, we gave up. Fortunately we had our colleague’s address. When we rang the doorbell, he did not look surprised to see us. He already had beds made up. He told us that the political climate in Uzbekistan had deteriorated since our springtime visit; the country had slid into authoritarian rule. The next day we confirmed this through interviews with leaders from government and opposition parties. Then we shopped.

  Neither of us wanted to leave the market, but soon we could carry no more merchandise. Shopping bags did not exist in this part of the world. Vendors helped us find sacks. Between us we carted away twenty-four glazed earthenware dinner plates, two full Uzbek tea sets, one medium-sized Bukhara rug and two silk wedding gowns that resembled those on display in a museum (fortunately not pilfered). When we visited local museums, the cashiers offered us items that may well have come straight from the display cases.

  One country remained on our travel itinerary – Tajikistan. It bordered Uzbekistan. In the spring we crossed with ease; now, every visit to the Aeroflot office was an exercise in frustration. I could not purchase one ticket for any of the multiple destinations on the Tajik side of the border. We assumed no tickets meant more fuel shortages. After several trips, we succeeded and bought tickets for a tiny border town flight later that week. The Aeroflot agent also offered us cheap tickets for the next day to the Uzbek tourist town Khiva. An urban jewel on UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites list, Khiva seemed as good an interim destination as any.

  We had not yet learned one simple lesson. Travelling in an authoritarian regime is hell. In the departure lounge at Tashkent airport, we met a Canadian couple from Moscow. They were pale and had bags under their eyes and wrinkled clothing. They had been stuck there for two days. The deflated young man and his wilted blonde partner had planned a romantic getaway to Khiva, but the airport guards would not allow them to board any flight, even though they had valid visas and airline tickets. Bewildered, they gave up and returned to Moscow.

  Sure enough, the guards also refused us permission to board our flight and offered no explanation. A six-hour showdown began. Then the guards changed their minds and allowed us onto a flight. I had no energy left to even ask them why. We buckled ourselves into our seats, fully expecting the guards to change their minds again and drag us off.

  We landed, but faced another battle at the hotel. Charlotte saved the day. After we had spent hours pleading with the receptionist to check us in Charlotte threw her arms back and let out a howl. Compassionate after all, the receptionist ran to put the kettle on and made us tea. Then she found us a room on a deserted floor.

  “A British documentary filmmaker is staying in this room but he’s away for a few days,” the receptionist told us.

  “Which filmmaker?” Charlotte asked.

  “Michael Palin,” the receptionist said.

  Khiva, beautiful in that arid, dusty, Central Asian way, is a city museum and therefore pristinely maintained. An ornery camel stood tethered by a small ladder, fitted with a saddle blanket, a puffy cushion and a large stick, presumably there to help passengers maintain control. Colourful minarets and domes jutted up from an otherwise sand-baked beige cityscape. The usual cauldron of plov (a rice and meat dish) simmered away outside one café. Khiva lacked tourists; I blamed the guards at Tashkent airport for this. But we enjoyed the peace, at least until we visited the city walls, which were one of Khiva’s historic sites.

  We purchased our entrance tickets for the walls, climbed up and admired the view from the top. Soon a group of children circled us. They ranged in age from about six to fourteen years old. We stood in the middle; the children surrounded us. We understood from preliminary chit-chat that these were not curious youngsters interested in meeting foreigners; their motives seemed more malign. As we stood there, Charlotte and I debated what to do.

  “We can’t possibly hit them,” Charlotte said. “They’re just children” Perhaps a security guard might appear. Or, we could wait until the children grew bored and drifted away. After a while, we realized this would not happen. The children enjoyed trapping us like prey.

  “Should I swear at them?” We agreed that I should try. I only knew one expletive in Russian, which was an insult to mothers. As soon as I said it, I realized I had made a mistake and that I had probably uttered the worst possible insult. In retaliation, the children attacked us, their small hands and legs lashing out in fury. The boys seemed most interested in pinching our bottoms and breasts. One tried to take our bags. We were scared and managed to break through the circle and ran
for the stairs, still receiving the odd slap along the way from children positioned nearby. A few of them tried to push Charlotte down the stairs.

  Once off the wall, we found the premises security guard and reported the children. “Sometimes they’re there,” he said. “Sometimes they aren’t.” That was it. I wondered if he ran the gang. Once again we had paid for a ticket to a state-run tourist site ticket only to face assault.

  One other Uzbek museum visit was nearly just as bad. Much Soviet nuclear testing took place in Central Asia. We accidentally wandered into a museum of mutants. We saw a multi-legged chicken and ran out screaming. The woman in charge came after us shouting “Wait, wait, you haven’t seen our sheep.”

  Even during doomed trips, moments occur when all goes to plan. Our plane reached Tashkent on time. Our shopping remained in our colleague’s apartment. Charlotte, who had spent the summer reporting from Bosnia for the Daily Mail, had experience in a war zone and understood the importance of travelling light. She suggested that we leave our shopping behind and collect it on our way back from Tajikistan.

  I felt shocked, even betrayed by this suggestion. I did not want to be separated from my shopping. In some way this crockery that had cost pennies, weighed a ton and might be decorated with poisonous lead paint represented my future life. I had decorated the living room of the house that I did not yet own with the carpet, hats and gowns. I looked forward to serving my friends meals on Central Asian plates and to brewing tea in the Tashkent pot.

  I tried logic. “Based on our experience with flights so far, if we leave the shopping behind, we might never see it again.” Charlotte, a non-Communist country resident and therefore less shopping deprived than I was, retained her common sense. We argued back and forth over the merits of travelling light versus laden down with the contents of an entire household. I won, probably only because I rarely fought and so my passion on this subject must have seemed unusual enough to indulge.

  Our flight took off as scheduled. We travelled with our usual luggage and our sacks of shopping. When we landed I realized, to my surprise, that although we had arrived near the Uzbek-Tajik border we remained in Uzbekistan. Even though I had studied a local map to match what Aeroflot tickets were available with an appropriate Tajik destination, I had made a mistake. I blamed this on poor quality paper and ink. The dot that marked our destination on the map was smudged, appearing to be in Tajikistan, but we were not.

  We took a taxi to the border. The driver said that he could not cross, so we would have to walk into Tajikistan. Others did the same. A group of men carried our bags and all of our shopping. They showed us the bus bound for the Tajik capital, Dushanbe. A short bumpy ride later we arrived there. The hotel receptionist gave us a room with no fuss, even without a reservation. Intourist check-in rules remained a mystery. The receptionist told us that another journalist had arrived earlier and gave us his name and room number.

  It took time to contact our colleague. We left a note inviting him to meet us for dinner. He did not respond. Eventually we bumped into him in the lobby. He said he had assumed that prostitutes had written the note, so he did not reply. He told us about reports of unrest in southern Tajikistan, near the Afghan border. An Islamic-democratic coalition currently held power. Reports said that the Russian army backed a pro-Communist tribal alliance to challenge the government. Nothing had happened yet, but we thought that we should travel south and investigate.

  We approached taxi drivers in the market. No driver would make the trip. I felt uneasy after the Tiraspol experience.

  One driver whom we approached suggested that we try a market vendor who sold car parts. The driver said this man had an apartment in a southern city called Qurgonteppa, not far from the Afghan border. We found the man and introduced ourselves. He immediately agreed to drive us to Qurgonteppa.

  “There’s been some fighting there,” he said. “I’d like to see my apartment and make sure that it wasn’t damaged.” Relatives had told the man that the fighting had stopped.

  The next morning, the driver met us at our hotel. A narrow ribbon of road comprised the main highway south. At first we encountered traffic typical of rural life. Men on bicycles drove a flock of sheep down the road. The sheep stretched across both lanes and moved slowly, so we inched along behind the flock until a shepherd guided it onto scrubby pasture land. For a while the traffic flowed well. We travelled behind boxy Ladas and trucks loaded with agricultural produce. Any scavenger who followed the trucks could assemble a good dinner of vegetables, grain or the odd chicken that fell off the backs.

  Then things began to look not so normal. We passed a tractor pulled over on the opposite side of the road. We thought that a large gas canister on the tractor hood signified that the driver needed gas. His tractor pulled a trailer with walls made of mesh metal that was filled with children and bundles of clothes, instead of the usual load of cotton. We did not immediately register the significance. We continued down the highway.

  Soon we saw a motorcycle on the opposite side of the road. A dozen passengers clung to a sidecar meant to carry one. No one would travel any significant distance like this for fun. Next came another tractor, with two cotton trailers hitched behind like a mini-train. Once again children, bundles and a few women filled the trailers – the driver was the only man on board. More and more passenger-laden agricultural vehicles that should have been used for the harvest inched up the road. I recorded two hundred. Then I stopped counting the exodus of refugees.

  About three kilometres from Qurgonteppa, a truck driver who ferried women and children crammed in the open back flashed his lights at us. The truck had stopped on the other side of the road. Our taxi driver pulled over. Charlotte and I crossed the road and approached the truck. We could not understand what the women were saying. Some cried and many spoke at once. Eventually I thought they told us that tanks had just opened fire in Qurgonteppa and that some of their children had been killed. As the truck drove away, the women shouted, “Run, the tanks are coming.”

  Despite having bad knees, we both sprinted back to the taxi and told the driver what we had learned. He did a sharp U-turn and raced up the road toward Dushanbe. In the backseat, I said to Charlotte, “But we haven’t really seen anything for ourselves. We didn’t actually see the tanks.” We noticed a small guardhouse by the side of the road and asked the driver to stop. We spoke with half a dozen armed men stationed there.

  “Those look more like clarinets than guns,” Charlotte said. The guns had long barrels that flared into bell-shaped bottoms. When the bells tilted up, we saw rings of holes for bullets at the base.

  “I think they’re using guns that we left behind in Afghanistan,” said Charlotte, referring to a time when the British fought there. “They must be a hundred years old.”

  The men explained that an attack was under way in Qurgonteppa. They said the Russians had given tanks to the men’s enemies. The men prepared a defence in case the tanks broke through Qurgonteppa and tried to sweep up the highway to Dushanbe.

  Charlotte had been commissioned to write a shopping feature, not a war story, and I was on holiday, with no clear objective in mind and no deadline to meet. Driven forward by journalistic habit, a need to see firsthand what would occur, Charlotte and I decided to try to reach Qurgonteppa.

  I did not feel afraid. Charlotte and I left our driver behind and hitchhiked instead. We stood at the side of the road with our thumbs out. Soon a cotton truck stopped. The driver offered us a lift. A young couple already sat in the trailer. We joined them, all cross-legged, clutching the sides, as we rattled down the highway. We chatted briefly, but before long a car flashed its lights at us and the truck driver did a U-turn. He dropped us back at the opposition post. We stood by the road again with our thumbs out. This time a Lada carrying police officers stopped. They said they would travel through Qurgonteppa on their way to the Afghan border. We climbed into the car.

  We continued down the road. Every vehicle that we passed flashed its lights a
t us. Then we heard the sound of what might have been a shell exploding. “Nazad,” I yelped and hoped, as instructed, that the driver would turn back. He took us to the opposition post. That sound scared me. I felt a rush of adrenaline and realized a fast return to Dushanbe now was the obvious choice. Our original driver had waited and remained loyal to strangers who took a big risk.

  We joined the column of refugees that fled for safety. We glanced back at the guard post and saw some fighters running out, shouting, “What are we going to do?” What chance did clarinet guns have against tanks? We left with our driver, consumed with guilt, and felt certain the opposition fighters would be slaughtered when the tanks broke through.

  In Dushanbe we picked up our shopping and kept an appointment at the American embassy. We had booked it for a background briefing. The political officer interrupted us once we told him what we had seen. He ran to file a report.

  At the airport we found that all flights had been cancelled. We dragged our bags and looked for a taxi. One driver agreed on a fare to take us to the border. On the way, we stopped at a shop. Charlotte went in to try to buy water but came out with a plastic bag full of matches. I could not stop laughing.

  “But we can’t get them in Kiev,” she said. I told her that she had turned into a Soviet person, carrying fifty match boxes across Central Asia.

  When we reached the border, we paid our taxi driver and then joined hundreds of refugees who were crossing into Uzbekistan on foot. Weighed down with sacks of shopping, we faced a long walk. I felt guilty. Charlotte now struggled under the weight of packages that she had wanted to leave behind. We had no hands free to help refugees carry possessions from homes they had to leave.

  All flights at the local airport on the Uzbek side of the border had also been cancelled. Several taxi drivers queued by the border post. We booked a car for Samarkand, the nearest Uzbek city with a sizeable airport that might have flights to Kiev. I thought of home, but we still faced a sixteen-hour trip by car and uncertainty at the airport.