by Tim Cope
It is unclear when the identity “Kazakh”—a term that means “free rider”—emerged, but in the eighteenth century, three Turkic hordes, known as the Ula Juz (Elder Horde), Orta Juz (Middle Horde), and Kishi Juz (Junior Horde), united to form what would become the modern nation of Kazakhstan. Riding through their country would be to ride through the nucleus of the nomad’s world—the original steppe melting pot.
In a foreshadowing of the complex bureaucracy I would have to deal with as I traveled west, just getting to Kazakhstan proved difficult. As previously noted, the borders of China and Russia were closed to foreigners in western Mongolia. I’d tried nonetheless to wangle some way to transit the small stretch of Russia that lay between Mongolia and Kazakhstan by horse, presenting my visa invitation to an official at the Russian embassy in Ulaanbaatar. But he held up my invitation in anger and growled, “You understand Russian? The border is closed! And you know what? This invitation is toilet paper. That is what it is!”
With little choice, I bought a ticket on a charter for the short flight from Olgiy to the city of Oskemen (also known by the Russian name Ust-Kamenogorsk) in eastern Kazakhstan. My plan from there was to drive east, deep into the Altai—home of the mythical shambala, a paradise on earth that, according to Buddhist beliefs, will reveal itself upon the destruction of humanity—and as close as possible to the Mongolian border, to look for tough mountain breeds. From there, I hoped to quickly descend from the mountains before the winter hit and begin the long ride west toward the Caspian Sea. The complete crossing of Kazakhstan from east to west amounted to more than 3,000 km in a straight line—much more by horseback—and I estimated it could take anywhere between six months and a year.
I landed in Oskemen, a small industrial city that had once been a Russian fort town, during the first week of October, when the mountains were dusted in fresh snow. A couple of weeks later, a taxi driver known as Meirim was awash with excitement as we loaded his car in front of a central Oskemen hotel. With the trunk full and the backseat loaded to the ceiling, I handed over half of the agreed-upon sum of money—about $100—for him to drive me out of the city and begin searching for horses.
Meirim’s eyes were alight like those of a young boy plotting an adventure. “I have told my wife that I will be away for just two days,” he said. “When we are out there, I will call and explain we have been delayed.”
It was not without reservations that I had agreed to hire Meirim. I had come to know the middle-aged father of two after accepting a ride in his taxi from the Oskemen airport. On the way into the city a speeding car had run down a pedestrian right before our eyes, and instead of stopping to help, Meirim had mouthed off at the traffic holdup, tooted his horn in fury, and then driven up over the curb and around the scene. There was a tough survival instinct just behind his disarming friendliness, and I wasn’t sure I could trust him.
On the other hand, I had learned that Meirim was a Kazakh from Bayan-Olgiy province in western Mongolia. During Soviet times he had served as a tank operator in the Gobi Desert and gone on to become a professional translator for the Soviet army, specializing in Mongolian, Russian, and Kazakh. With the fall of the Soviet Union, he had spent several years trading marmot furs between Siberia and Mongolia before taking the opportunity to emigrate from Mongolia to the “motherland” in search of a better life.
Because I spoke Russian I could communicate freely with Meirim, and I was hoping his knowledge could help me reestablish a sense of continuity between Mongolia and Kazakhstan that had been broken not just by my plane flight and modern political boundaries but also by more than two centuries of dramatic social and political change. Although Mongolia and Kazakhstan might once have resembled each other as pastoral, nomadic societies, the Russian Empire had been encroaching on the Kazakh steppe as early as the latter half of the eighteenth century. By the 1880s most Kazakh lands were firmly under Russian control, and Russia’s designs were such that the Russian commander in chief of the Kazakh headquarters in Almaty had the audacity to declare: “There is a requirement to admit with sincerity that our business here is a Russian one, first and foremost, and that land populated by Kazakhs is not their own, but belongs to the state. The Russian elements must force them off the land or lead them into oblivion.”2
In the twentieth century Stalin initiated an intense industrialization of Kazakhstan that included the forced settling of nomads in collectives, the plowing up of steppe for grain production, and a process of cultural russification. Kazakhstan’s remoteness also made it his favorite dumping ground for enemies. Some of the better-known prisoners of Kazakhstan’s many gulags included Trotsky and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.3 By 1989, the Kazakhs had long become an ethnic minority in their own lands, eclipsed by Russians, and it was estimated that 40 percent—mostly those living in urban areas—had lost proficiency in their native tongue.
Since then, of course, the Soviet Union had unraveled, and I was entering a country going through incalculable upheaval as it made the difficult transition to both independence and a free market economy. In these times of change it seemed likely that Kazakhstan’s emerging identity would have less to do with its renown as the birthplace of horsemanship than as a resource powerhouse. The discovery of massive oil reserves on the Caspian Sea had attracted billions of dollars of foreign investment since the breakup of the Soviet Union, and some analysts were predicting that Kazakhstan would be among the world’s top five oil producers by 2015.
If there was any chance of getting beneath the multiple layers of change that had coursed through Kazakhstan and reconnecting with the spirit of the horseback nomad, then Meirim, I reasoned, was surely a good start.
On the edge of the city a dacha village gave way to the open steppe—an undulating sea of pebbly earth sprinkled with hardy tufts of sun-bleached grass. The sky was gray and stagnant, casting dreary light onto the earth, which seemed to be resigned to the coming winter. I wound down the window, letting the cold air whisk away the mental cobwebs that had gathered around my senses in the city.
Meirim began to tell stories about the land around us. There was a mountain pass called Ayultai, which means “dangerous” in Mongolian. “When you ask the locals if they know what these names mean, they just say, ‘Oh, there was a man called Ayultai.’ They don’t realize that so many of the places here have Mongolian names.” As if to prove the point, we dropped into a valley thick with a pall of wood-fire smoke and came into a village hugging the bend of a shallow river. It was named Targyn—according to Meirim, a corruption of the Mongolian word targan, which means “fat” and is often used in describing horses.
“There are many Mongolian Kazakhs living here,” said Meirim. “I lived here to start with for the first year as well, with relatives.” He explained that many families occupied overcrowded homes while they searched for work and a new beginning.
The wooden homes were dark and gray, and the streets largely deserted. Among the locals, there were few if any Russians to be seen. Barely a soul acknowledged our car as we roared through.
The mass exodus of Kazakhs from Mongolia—and from other regions including China and Iran—to Kazakhstan began in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. In 1992, in a move to increase the native population, the president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, convened a kurultai, or council, and adopted a resolution appealing to all Kazakhs to unite under a single flag on the soil of Kazakhstan.4 While sixty thousand Kazakhs had left Mongolia for Kazakhstan over the next few years, many had since returned to Mongolia, disenchanted. Many more likely wound up in impoverished villages such as Targyn.
An English long rider (equestrian traveler), Claire Burges Watson, who knew the area, had given me the name and address of a man who I hoped would be able to help me in Kazakhstan.5 Ruslan was a herder and fisherman in his mid-twenties who at one time had traveled with her on horseback into Kyrgyzstan. Late in the evening, we arrived at his home in the village of Slavyanka.
Still smelling of fish, Ruslan and his brother met u
s with open arms. Ruslan was an athletic-looking man with coarse hands, thick eyebrows, and a strong jaw. Unlike Meirim, who had a classic, open face, Ruslan’s was more chiseled, and he had a large, almost Russian nose. His charisma and strength must have made him popular among village girls, and when he spoke in his gentlemanly manner, I imagined he charmed the hearts of little old ladies. Meirim, by contrast, was a short, wiry little man with delicate hands who seemed to speak loud and gesticulate with his arms in order to enlarge his presence.
After a night in Ruslan’s family home, we spent a day searching for horses in the nearby village of Terektbulak, to no avail. The horses we inspected were either old and scarred or untrained and dangerous. Without exception, they were also expensive, averaging $500.6 Because I had been banking on a budget of $10 a day, the prices made my blood run cold. Ruslan did everything but soothe my concerns.
“Tim, if you want a really good horse, you will need $1,000. The price you are being offered is purely meat value.” He explained how trucks from slaughterhouses in the city often came around to the villages. Whoever was in need of money sold their horses.
I wasn’t ready to accept the high prices, so we set out early the next day east along the Kurchum River to a remote mountain valley near an alpine lake called Markakol. Meirim’s spirits rose as we snaked through the rocky slopes. The territory had lain beyond the reach of Stalin’s plans for Kazakhstan’s north and looked more like the untamed environment of Mongolia. Ruslan, on the other hand, was becoming more anxious, perhaps because we had now gone well beyond his network of loyal friends and family.
The gentle slopes became sheer ridges that blocked out much of the low sunlight and the road gradually deteriorated. It was in the village of Maraldy that Meirim decided his city car could not go on. There we negotiated with a local who owned a Russian Niva with four-wheel drive to take us to Pugachevo—the end of the road and the last place in the valley where I might find horses.
The Niva lurched through puddles of snow and mud, often on the edge of a sheer drop down to the river. Eventually we pulled over a rise onto a wide, open stretch of the valley, revealing a vista of peaks rising seamlessly into brooding gray clouds. Pugachevo, a village of about 160 homes, lay nestled below, among the gentle slopes on the river’s edge.
Our party was now four—me, Meirim, Ruslan, and our driver—and in Pugachevo, this became eight. The idea was to find someone who knew someone. We stopped at every second house, asked questions, then rolled on. Those who approached the car were obliged to shake each passenger’s hand, which was becoming difficult, since we all had to lean through the driver’s window. The standard greeting used by the nominally Muslim Kazakhs, “As-salam aleikum,” was followed by the standard response, “Wa aleikum as-salam,” and sometimes by “Zdrast-vuy-tye”—“hello” in Russian—when they realized there was a white man in the car.
Nurkhan, a short, robust man with a clean crew cut, wearing camouflage and Russian army boots, considered us his personal guests. He made sure word circulated that a horse buyer was in town. There was something tough yet fair about him. His long, slender Mongolian eyes set into a broad, open face conveyed the maturity of a patriarch. He bonded quickly with Ruslan, the two of them talking avidly in Kazakh; I could still understand much of their conversation, though, because they often swore fluently in Russian midsentence.
With Nurkhan yelling out demands to anyone who crossed our path, it wasn’t long before the horses began to line up. There was an old nag, “the best in the village,” that had a back sunken like an old couch. A mare that had open back wounds and a foal by its side was touted as “the perfect horse for the job.” When I said that I couldn’t possibly ride such an injured horse, they told me, “Tim, you can sell this horse for twice the price when you get down to the steppe and buy yourself another!”
Nurkhan promised better horses and after lunch took me to a man renowned for his workhorses, which regularly lugged 70 kg loads of fish from Lake Markakol for trading. The man seemed reluctant to sell, but Nurkhan and others urged him to consider. I was led to a white gelding in a yard, followed by half of the village men. The horse’s withers and spine were thick with muscle, his legs tough and sinewy. Like Mongolian horses, he was a stocky, heavily built horse. With feigned confidence, I took a close look in his mouth—I had been given a crash course in reading horse teeth, but in reality had little experience—and took him for a ride. He seemed to have stiff legs. Perhaps the gelding was recovering from work, but more likely was very old. I was sure he was at least fifteen.
“He is ten,” said the owner.
“But how could that be? I can see he is much older!” I replied.
A man from the crowd vouched for the owner.
“I remember when this horse was born. The horse is no more than ten.”
I took another look at the teeth, then at Ruslan and Meirim. They were silent. After much mediation by Nurkhan and others, I accepted that I was probably mistaken and was offered a price of 65,000 tenge (about $550). But I wasn’t buying yet.
As darkness fell, a man arrived on a young chestnut horse that he had brought down from a herd in the mountains. Named Ogonyok—which meant “small flame” in Russian, but was also the namesake of a local wildflower—it had short, stocky front legs and a powerful chest. Although the animal was flighty, I liked him, and the owner invited us home for dinner.
Messages were run to relatives near and far before they decided it was in fact for sale, and in the process vodka began to flow. It began as a three-shot toast, but whenever the bottle of vodka was near empty, another replaced it, and I lost count. Somewhere in the midst of broken flashes of detail, I agreed to buy the chestnut horse and return the following day with payment.
Before leaving Pugachevo, Nurkhan secretively ushered us into his home, where he pulled up a trap door under a rug and produced a glass bottle filled with a dark red liquid. “This, my friends, is a secret, worth a fortune. It is blood from deer antlers. You know, good for …” He pantomimed that it was an aphrodisiac. The three of us raised a toast and swilled down a shot of the stuff, followed by more vodka, then bundled into the Niva. It wasn’t until we were sitting in the car that I wondered what good an aphrodisiac might do at that particular moment.
The Niva bucked and swayed in the night, and my head began to swim. I couldn’t work out whether it was motion sickness or vodka, but I was overcome with nausea by the time we reached Maraldy and stepped out of the car into the freezing air. Meirim slumped into position behind the wheel of his own car, and Ruslan spread out on the backseat and fell asleep.
After negotiating just two bends, during which we very nearly veered off the edge of the road, I took over the wheel and guided the car down the winding valley road into the foothills. Meirim passed out, his head on the dashboard, where it rattled and rolled.
I must have been driving for a couple of hours when the shuddering of the car in the gravel suddenly became so violent it woke Meirim from his stupor.
“Stop!” he yelled. We stumbled out.
“Fucking Australian! If you were riding a horse and it had a broken leg, would you notice? This wheel is square! Don’t you know they are meant to be round?”
The front right wheel had but a few shreds of tire remaining.
“Yeah, well, you didn’t notice either, did you?” I retorted. “Because you are so drunk you can hardly stand up!”
Meirim took the tire off, threw it off the roadside in a rage, and fitted the spare.
“I will never let you drive again!” he shouted, handing the keys to Ruslan.
It was well after midnight by the time we neared Slavyanka, but the night for us was only beginning. Eleven kilometres short of home Ruslan veered away to a ferry crossing point on the Irtysh River, where his wife-to-be worked twenty-four-hour shifts at a café. Inside, Ruslan greeted the patrons—mostly sleep-deprived truck drivers and local drunks—with a handshake, then announced to Meirim and me that we were his guests. I told h
im angrily that we needed to get home and back to Pugachevo by midday, but this only strengthened his resolve. On our table landed a bottle of vodka, which he and Meirim quickly finished … then another.
When Meirim began casting a steely stare at an aggressive-looking drunk in a soldier’s uniform, I knew things were hurtling out of control. The soldier came and sat next to me, his breath heavy with alcohol. Ruslan stalled the face-off with a fresh round of vodka. I dragged Meirim outside.
“You know, Tim, I feel like I am young again! Those fuckin’ Russians, these Russian Kazakhs, they know nothing! I just want to fight! You know that feeling, when you just want to break someone’s nose?” I could only hold him out there for so long before he went back inside. It was the first of many close shaves when Meirim decided to pick a fight. Ruslan, meanwhile, ended up arguing with his girlfriend, then stealing her away in Meirim’s car.
It wasn’t until eight o’clock in the morning that we were back on the road, and upon pulling in at Ruslan’s home I was so tired I could barely stand. I went straight to sleep, and when I woke, both Meirim and Ruslan had left.
A day passed before Meirim sheepishly showed up. I’d promised the villagers that I would be back within a day with the money for the horse, so by now they had probably given up on me. I had been paying Meirim a generous daily allowance, plus covering the fuel and food bills, and, sensing that I was ready to heap him with abuse, Meirim refused to look me in the eye, all the while protesting that he saw the situation differently.