On the Trail of Genghis Khan

by Tim Cope

  In truth, though, Ruslan’s news that he could guide me for just two more days was a mutually convenient way of parting with our rapport intact. I was already tired of trying to understand the world as it was filtered through his eyes, and I was looking forward to a new chapter.

  The remaining time with Ruslan was just long enough for us to cross the Irtysh onto the open steppe farther west, where my hopes of finding someone to travel further with me rested on locating a stranger I had met briefly during a taxi ride in Oskemen, and whose address I had scribbled on the back of an old cigarette box. Aset, as he was known, lived in the small village of Zhana Zhol, which happened to fall along my route.

  7

  ZUD

  “Those who suffered as we did wept bitterly for their losses and cursed those who had introduced such inhuman laws: for people whose lives revolved around their animals, it was worse than being invaded by Genghis Khan’s hordes. Their suffering was shared by their relatives in the aul, and the tears continued for weeks in these communities.”

  —Mukhamet Shayakhmetov,

  The Silent Steppe: The Memoir of

  a Kazakh Nomad Under Stalin

  Across his kitchen table, without the pitchfork in hand and heavy coat he had been wearing outside, Aset resembled the soft-natured man I remembered from our brief meeting in Oskemen. His face was broad and full, framed by a crop of silver hair above and patchy bristles that skirted his chin below.

  He spoke in a husky, gentle voice that seemed poised to break into laughter.

  “Ah, Tim! Tim! Don’t be shy—drink, eat! This is Kazakh potato. Best in the world!”

  It wasn’t until I had filled my belly that I broached the subject of finding a guide to ride with me for a couple of weeks. He was excited and proudly recounted working as a horse shepherd for a collective farm in his youth.

  “I used to work twenty-four hours moving with the herd to keep wolves and thieves away. At night I slept in the open holding the tethering rope of the lead stallion.”

  He recalled his experience nostalgically and suggested that although he hadn’t ridden much in recent years and now worked as a laborer on demolition sites in the city, he was more than qualified to ride with me.

  What impressed me more than Aset’s credentials as a horseman were his qualities as a father. Aset’s only child, Guanz, was a ten-year-old boy afflicted with cerebral palsy. When Guanz hobbled into the kitchen, Aset lifted his atrophied, buckled-looking frame into the air in an almighty embrace. Guanz giggled, and Aset’s almond eyes squeezed into slender crescents, mirroring Guanz’s own expression of joy. Over dinner Guanz clung to Aset’s arm, stealing glances at me whenever I wasn’t looking and burying his face in Aset’s shoulder when I smiled back. Later, as he became a little emboldened, he attracted my attention by picking up the family cat and rubbing it against his cheeks, closing his eyes and laughing. In the grim reality of post-Soviet Kazakhstan it was hard to imagine a bright future for the young boy, yet Aset’s visible love and affection seemed to transcend all else.

  The evening took on a festive atmosphere as Aset’s home crowded with villagers, and I spent hours sharing my photo album from Australia and telling stories. When it became late we went outside to mingle on the street. Guanz and many other children giggled, and dogs from all over the village brushed past my legs in the dark. It was only after most visitors had left that I felt two warm paws on my chest. The moist breath of a dog reached my cheek, and for a protracted moment the animal was still. I glanced down in time to see two white paws vanish into the night.

  “He likes you,” murmured Aset.

  When the children began to tire, we returned inside, and Aset, his wife, and I settled in around the kitchen table. A little earlier Aset had told me that I needed to ask permission from his wife to have him accompany me. Now, when I put the question to her, she put on a serious face and replied with conviction: “You can take him all the way to Hungary if you like!”

  Two days in Zhana Zhol were set aside for preparations but became filled with leisurely hours drinking tea with villagers and visits to speak to students at the local school. In the company of Aset, who was a teetotaler with none of the coarseness or immaturity of Ruslan, I used the opportunity to slow down and let my nerves recover from the edgy, alcohol-fueled chaos of the past few weeks. A couple of long sleeps were enough for me to wake with a more measured eye and view my surroundings less through the prism of my own challenges and more in light of the recent history through which Kazakh society had passed.

  Zhana Zhol—the name means “new road”—was a huddle of fifty or so tired timber homes cast in a sea of dreary gray steppe. Its one muddy street was lined with poplar trees that stood like skeletons against the opaque, clouded-in skies. Autumn was turning, and while in Mongolia nomadic families were no doubt preparing to migrate to winter pastures, Kazakhs here were instead gathering coal, firewood, and hay to see out the long months of cold. Most families had a milking cow, chickens, and even a horse or two, but there were none that boasted the kind of herds I’d been accustomed to in Mongolia. It was a life that closely resembled that of hundreds of Russian villages I had seen on previous travels.

  At the school we met with young, wide-eyed children who had never seen the inside of a yurt and had only ever known the tumult of life in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. There were, however, others in the village, including Aset’s elderly mother-in-law, who were just old enough to recall a time when Kazakhs lived and breathed a horseback life, moving with the seasons. For her generation, the collapse of the Soviet Union was just one of the many cataclysmic events that had not just changed the course of their individual lives but shaped the future of the country.

  By any standards, the twentieth century was one of immense upheaval and tragedy for Kazakhs. It began on the back of more than a century of Russian colonization. In 1916, 150,000 Kazakhs—mostly nomad herders—were killed during a widespread but doomed rebellion against their colonial rulers, triggered by tax hikes, expropriation of livestock, and an order for men between the ages of eighteen and forty-three to be conscripted into the imperial army.

  Only a year later, the Bolshevik revolution—which led to the formation of the Soviet Union in 1922—fanned hope that communism might bring equality and independence, but successive Soviet leaders came to see the steppe as an uncivilized backwater to be exploited, and the nomads as itinerant wanderers.1 The seventy years of Soviet rule would prove an assault on almost every aspect of nomadic culture, the landscape of the Kazakhs, and ultimately their way of life.

  For many Kazakhs, nuclear tests carried out at the Semipalatinsk test site, some 400 km northwest of Zhana Zhol, were indicative of the open disregard with which Kazakhs were treated. In 1947 a piece of land chosen for testing by the Soviet Atomic Agency was officially deemed “empty” although the area was home to nomads. During the first detonation in 1949 local teachers were ordered to take children outside the schools to watch the explosions, so their bodies’ reaction could be observed and studied. A total of 116 atmospheric explosions were conducted before ground tests were banned, and another 340 underground tests had been carried out by the time the site closed in 1991. The United Nations believes that between 1947 and 1989 one million people were exposed to radiation, leading to high suicide and cancer rates, infertility, and deformities. Aset had grown up in a village adjacent to the testing zone and had only recently moved to Zhana Zhol. He believed that his disabled son, Guanz, was just one of untold thousands of children in the towns and villages of the region still being born with genetic abnormalities.

  There were many other tribulations wrought by politicians in faraway Moscow, such as the decision to dam and siphon off the main river arteries of Central Asia—the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya—for cotton production, which led to the calculated death of the Aral Sea. There was also the so-called Virgin Lands Scheme announced by Nikita Khrushchev in 1958, which involved plowing up the steppe of northern Kazakhstan for wheat fields in one of t
he Soviet Union’s biggest agricultural experiments. The steppe is a fragile environment, and although many of the wheat fields were initially productive, many eventually became abandoned dust bowls.

  All of these calamities led in one way or another to an erosion of the traditional way of life, but ultimately none was as far-reaching as the early policies of Stalin. Above all, it was the collectivization that took place between 1928 and 1931 that spelled an abrupt end to nomadic life, a national tragedy from which Kazakhs have still not recovered. Although I couldn’t yet grasp the scope of the upheaval, over the many weeks and months ahead I would come to realize that without an understanding of events that transpired in those years, any insight into modern Kazakh society was hollow.

  The era of collectivization, which affected societies across the Soviet Union, began with the expropriation of property from the wealthy in the mid-1920s and was driven by Joseph Stalin’s push for industrialization. The Soviet Union needed grain, plus gold and other minerals in order to buy foreign machines and tools. In 1927, when the grain supply dropped, Stalin blamed the wealthy peasants, or kulaks, for hoarding, and ordered them to increase supply. There began a terrifying period when anyone found with the tiniest quantity of bread was sent to prison—a policy that led to an artificial famine in Ukraine in the early 1930s, known as the Holodomor, that claimed the lives of five million.

  For Kazakhs confiscation of land and the imposition of grain quotas did not have the same initially productive result as it did in Russia and Ukraine, largely because nomads did not own land. To remedy this, Fillip Isaevich Goloshchekin, a Russian dentist turned politician, was named secretariat for the Kazakh republic. He attempted to solve the problem by declaring that livestock was the equivalent of land for nomads, and in 1928 ordered animals confiscated from the rich (known in Kazakh as bai). The truly wealthy nomads—the real bai—had been dispossessed or incarcerated several years earlier, prior to collectivization, and so instead the middling nomads, and even poor ones, were accused of hoarding and forced to hand over their animals.2 Around this time local Kazakh Soviet authorities—mostly Kazakh political activists who had sided with the ideals of communism, and were known as belsendi—became notorious for their pillaging. They often took everything from families, right down to blankets, clothing, and cooking utensils. Nomad families were left with barely enough animals to warrant traditional migration in search of pasture. Officially, the confiscated goods and animals were to become the property of state-owned collectives, but the real intent was for Kazakhstan to supply meat to the cities of the Soviet Union. From every region a quota was demanded, in some cases right down to the last animal.3

  The scenes of mayhem during these times are difficult to fathom. Train stations across Kazakhstan became mass holding and slaughter yards, where livestock was jammed into rail cars to be sent to Moscow, Leningrad, and other large centers. There was no veterinary control, and an epidemic of brucellosis and tuberculosis broke out. In some cases, the carcasses of animals slaughtered in winter were not transported until spring, by which time they had begun to rot. As an indicator of how poorly Goloshchekin and his government understood the conditions of the steppe, wool quotas were demanded on the eve of winter, which led to entire herds freezing to death. Many nomads destroyed their animals rather than turn them over to authorities, and even animals in collectives died en masse because of mismanagement.4

  The result of Goloshchekin’s policy meant that from 1928 to 1932, cattle and sheep numbers declined by around 90 percent.5 People began to go hungry in 1930, and it is believed that by 1933 somewhere between 1.7 and 2.2 million nomads—around a third of the Kazakh population at the time—had starved to death and another estimated 653,000 had fled to China. Simultaneously, most nomads ceased their annual migrations, and by 1933, 95 percent of Kazakhs had settled in collective farms. The term aul, which once had referred to a community of nomads who moved together from pasture to pasture, now meant little more than a permanent Kazakh settlement.6

  Zhana Zhol was one such aul—a community anchored permanently on the steppe where their forebears had once roamed. And yet, although the events of collectivization had created the underpinning realities of everyday life, it was an era largely unspoken of. For Aset’s mother-in-law and others her age, memories of the famine and dispossession were too painful to be recounted. Aset and others of his generation also spoke little about the subject, perhaps partly out of respect for their elders, but also because the effects of the more recent Soviet collapse for them overshadowed the difficulties of the past.

  The very nature of the famine nevertheless remained one of raw contention. Academics, ordinary citizens, and politicians across Kazakhstan and abroad continue to debate whether the famine was accidental, a consequence of Goloshchekin’s gross ignorance, or an intentional genocide of the Kazakh people. One traditional school of thought among internationalists—those Kazakhs who supported Sovietization—is that the heavy loss of human life, culture, and language under Stalin, while regrettable, was an inevitable part of modernization. But I couldn’t help thinking that for the people in Zhana Zhol, such gross human sacrifice must have been all the more abhorrent, given that it was for a system that would ultimately fail its own people within just a couple of generations.

  Three days after my arrival in Zhana Zhol, Aset and I led the horses out onto the muddy street for a public farewell. The plan was for Aset and me to ride 250 km southwest across rugged steppe and hills to the town of Ayagoz. From there I would go on alone.

  Many of the villagers who had assembled considered the prospect of our ride a death sentence. “The frost! The cold! It will be here soon, and it will hit you! There will be snow up to your neck,” said one man, running his hand across his throat.

  “Yes, but the most dangerous of all are drunks,” an old babushka wrapped up in a shawl cackled. “We have many of them—don’t go near them!”

  This was too much for Aset’s wife, who broke down in tears. Despite her joke earlier about my taking him all the way to Hungary, she had been fretting over Aset for the past two days, and today she had spent all morning helping to dress and equip him. To me it now appeared that the poor man was more likely to die of constriction than cold. Up top he wore two thick woolen sweaters, a neck warmer, and a denim jacket stretched so tight it couldn’t be buttoned. For emergencies his pockets had been stuffed with sunflower seeds, pig fat, and garlic, and on the belt holding up his pair of thick Russian winter overalls was a knife big enough to chop down a tree. With only fractional movement possible at the knees and elbows, he waddled with great difficulty over to Ogonyok and heaved himself up.

  When finally we turned to leave, the old babushkas and children alike didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, and so most did both. The last image I caught before turning my attention beyond the village was of Guanz, standing with one arm hanging in a fixed clench and laughing ecstatically. He wasn’t worried about the dangers out there in the wider world; he was only filled with feelings of pride to see his father set off on such an exciting adventure. When we pulled away from the crowd, he lifted his better arm in an attempt to wave, and called out in stilted Russian: “Write to us!”

  From Zhana Zhol we headed for the open steppe, and within half an hour the drab timber homes had sunken into the creases of the land behind. The horses charged ahead, full of energy, and as the world around us seemed to expand with its wide, empty horizons, my own world shrank to the company of my animals and Aset. It was the kind of movement I had been craving. Bristling with impatience, I moved into a fast trot uphill.

  “We can go at a trot on the flat, but not up! The road is long. We need to save the energy of the horses!” Aset called out.

  “We also have to make the most of the good weather before winter sets in!” I replied.

  It was then I noticed the little black dog with white front paws like socks running behind us. I recognized him as the dog from my first night in Zhana Zhol and had since learned it was Guanz’
s puppy. All ribs on long matchstick legs, he had a skinny trunk and snout followed by a frenetic wagging tail. From the skeletal frame rose two large ears, rather like that of a hare.

  “Aset! What is this dog?” I demanded.

  “Traveling on horse without a dog is incomplete,” he replied.

  “No! How will you take him home after we part?”

  He said nothing, merely spitting out a few sunflower seed shells.

  The way the dog peered up at me with those innocent, loving eyes was infuriating. I didn’t know who was the more presumptuous, he or Aset.

  That evening the sky cleared, and as the last light retreated, the breeze slowed to a halt and cold fell like a heavy blanket. I found my calm once more in the quiet of camp, and reveled in the feeling that there was little separating us from the stars. As the temperature dropped, Aset, on the other hand, grew nervous and withdrawn.

  After dinner he looked worryingly into the food pot. “And for the dog?”

  I reluctantly pulled out a can of meat. “If he is going to eat, he has to earn his keep. He must be a guard dog and stay outside.”

  My argument was nonsense. The poor dog, barely six months old, was a short-haired variety of sight hound, known as a tazi. He looked as if he might struggle to stay upright in a stiff breeze, let alone cope with sleeping in frosty weather. Later I pretended to be asleep when Aset pulled the poor shivering dog inside the tent to sleep at our feet.

  In the morning, my hopes of making significant headway before winter were dashed. It was just the third of November, but when sunlight speared across the horizon it was hollow of warmth and splintered through a forest of hoarfrost on the entrance to the tent. A heavy panting from outside had woken me, and zipping open the door, I locked eyes with Aset, who was bundled up and jogging around the tent.