by Tim Cope
In the wake of collectivization, dramatic transformation of the ethnic landscape coupled with unprecedented urbanization had had an incalculable impact on Kazakh society. The migration of foreigners to Kazakhstan—such as the 1 million people from European Russia resettled during the Virgin Lands Scheme—meant that by 1959 Kazakhs constituted just 30 percent of the population.1 In the fast-developing towns and cities, where there were more opportunities to be found than in auls, Kazakhs found themselves not only in the minority but with nomadic traditions largely incompatible with urban life.
The corrosive effects that these changing demographics would have on Kazakh culture were not necessarily intentional, but Soviet authorities concurrently painted traditional culture as “backward” and “nationalistic”—and therefore counterrevolutionary—and sought to supplant it with Russian culture and values under the rubric of “internationalism.”
The decline of the Kazakh language and the uptake of Russian is an example of how this doctrine played out with long-term effect. As early as 1949 Russian became the official tongue for all party meetings, and in the 1950s it was the mandatory language for university entrance examinations. According to research undertaken by Dave Bhavna for his book Kazakhstan: Ethnicity, Language and Power, even speaking Kazakh in public became socially frowned upon, as “it could invite allegations of nationalism and tribalism.”
Within a generation of the Bolshevik revolution, the Kazakhs found that the language that had carried the heritage of their ancestors for centuries had become largely useless and even disadvantageous—without Russian-language skills, one could simply not climb the social or political ladder.2
In the present era of independence and “nationalism” into which Shashibek had been born, the climate had somewhat turned around. In the 1990s the Kazakh language was given official status alongside Russian, and as non-indigenous citizens emigrated, the population of Kazakhstan dropped by more than two million, leaving Kazakhs in the majority. Even as a sense of cultural identity and empowerment was emerging, however, a deep-set stigma of backwardness and disadvantage remained associated with traditional culture. Moreover, the fractious divide between rural and urban Kazakhs cultivated in Soviet times had calcified. The urban, russified life represented privilege, opportunity, wealth, and prestige, while to those in the towns and cities, the auls, where Kazakh was the predominant language, represented poor living standards and a relic of the past from which they had moved on. As I would later discover, there were Kazakhs in remote areas, particularly in the south and west, who could not speak Russian at all, and many Kazakhs in the cities who did not have any handle on their native tongue.
In Tasaral, nomadism was no longer a viable way of life, and many traditions associated with it had been lost, never to be reclaimed. In a society grappling with what appeared to be insurmountable hurdles to cultural revival, however, auls such as Tasaral were still a relative stronghold of indigenous language, knowledge, and culture where the old ways hadn’t been completely displaced by the new. In this sense, it wasn’t the degradation of Kazakh culture that came to define Shashibek and Tasaral for me, but the resilience of the people in maintaining pride in their heritage and, despite the odds, keeping the flicker of tradition alive.
All day while hunting, Shashibek’s friends had been discussing wife stealing. “It’s time for Shashibek to get hitched! His mother needs someone to talk to in the evenings! Who is going to cook for his poor parents when they are old?” they had teased.
As the youngest son, Shashibek was bound by tradition to inherit the family home and take care of his parents. The wife of the youngest son was also traditionally responsible for all the housework. Having an unmarried thirty-year-old son, especially one who was the son of the akim, generated some sympathy for his mother and father.
I had of course dismissed the talk as empty ranting, but by dusk the plotting to steal a wife had turned serious. A Tasaral girl whom Shashibek was courting would be invited to meet me—the “Australian bait”—and someone would be sent to pick her up by car. Shashibek’s home was a trap, where Shashibek’s relatives and friends were gathering to watch him ask for her hand in marriage. The process was part of a tradition in which men could kidnap their desired future wife, with or without her agreement or prior knowledge. Shashibek and his friends joked about one woman whom they said had been stolen from America and was the sister of the boxer Mike Tyson—a tribute to her feistiness. Another woman had been stolen from Mongolia: “Here we have a real Mongolian girl! Look at her, she is so wild!” they said, pointing.
In a nomadic aul, abduction involved luring the girl from another community, or simply kidnapping her by horse. Once she was at the kidnapper’s family home, a messenger would be sent to the parents, who would then send their oldest son and his wife, or oldest daughter and her husband. Across the steppe’s nomad societies it had always been essential to marry someone who was not related along the paternal line for at least seven generations back.3 Once it had been established that this was indeed the case and the girl had freely agreed to marry, then began the fierce negotiations for a kalym—a bride-price. This ordinarily involved livestock paid by the groom’s family to the bride’s, and it could be the cause of much contention, since an unpaid kalym was seen as grounds to wage reprisals including the use of barimta. Only once partial payment of the bride-price had been made did the groom have the right to begin discreet visits to the bride. From the bride’s family a dowry was also expected, but this was negotiated later and usually paid in the form of a yurt.
These rituals had been a mainstay of nomadic society, but in the late 1920s and 1930s, as Kazakhs were collectivized, the paying of a bride-price had been specifically outlawed and used as a pretext to accuse families of being kulaks or bai—wealthy peasants who hoarded wealth rather than hand it over to the authorities. Regardless of whether a bride-price had been negotiated or not, in some cases merely having a married daughter had been enough evidence in itself to brand a family as an “enemy of the state,” with the men sent to prison, their children denied schooling, and animals confiscated. As a result, ceremonies for betrothal and marriage in the aul went underground or were canceled altogether.
This was, needless to say, not the case today in Tasaral.
At eleven that evening the plan swung into action. Along with twenty or thirty of Shashibek’s relatives and friends, I hid in another room as the girl entered the home. We gave her time to talk with Shashibek before breaking out and forming a huddle around them. It wasn’t long before it was intimated that she had accepted Shashibek’s proposal, and a woman stepped forward to place a white scarf on her head—a symbol that she had been embraced as part of the family. Then came a stampede as fistfuls of confectionery were showered on the couple and everyone fought for a turn to shake their hands. The old women were the most frenetic, fighting their way to the front amidst both tears and laughter. Children, meanwhile, raced to pocket chocolates and other sweets that had fallen to the floor.
I was nearly run down by the rush of people, and by the time I had collected myself, they had moved into another room, where the bride-to-be, a pretty girl who looked no older than eighteen or nineteen, was sitting with Shashibek on a shumudrak, a special settee-cum-bed adorned with curtains. As the realization of what was transpiring hit her, she alternated between tucking her hair behind her ears and drawing her hand over her mouth. Had she been expecting this? Did she love Shashibek? It was hard to tell, and I didn’t get to ask her. Later in my journey, in southern Kazakhstan, I had the opportunity to speak with two young newly wedded women who had become betrothed through the process of kidnapping. Both of them had hardly known their husbands, and one of them had been taken 300 km by car to the groom’s herding station before her parents were informed. They explained that they had had the right to say no but had willingly agreed, and they maintained they lived happy married lives. If they later decided to leave, they had a right to separate, known as kizdi alip kashu.
Back in Tasaral, the intensity of celebration ascended with each step of the ritual, and when the signal was given, the bride-to-be stood up and led the crowd to the entrance of the house, where a special collection of twigs called a baiyalish was set alight. Cheering went up as she poured oil onto the leaping flames in a custom meant to bring warmth and luck into the home. Back inside, vodka bottles were decapitated with a symphony of cracking seals.
Things toned down again when the girl’s older sister and her husband arrived to negotiate with Shashibek’s relatives. While most people were asked to leave the room, including Shashibek and his new fiancée, I was allowed to stay.
In modern Kazakhstan, kidnapping was said to be more theater and symbolic ceremony than anything else, of course—technically, bride kidnapping was illegal—and when I later told the stories about what had transpired in Tasaral and other places to city Kazakhs in Almaty, they looked at me angrily. “You are wrong! We live in a civilized Kazakhstan now! That does not exist!”
Yet, based on the dark, angry look of the bride’s brother-in-law and the uncontrolled sobbing of her sister, the wife steal was clearly anything but a staged event. Each person present said his or her piece gravely, followed by a toast. The emotions on display by the bride’s family were apparently to be interpreted not as a disagreement, but as the grief of a family preparing to let go. Although I wasn’t privy to the details since they spoke in Kazakh, a kalym was agreed upon, and planning for the wedding got under way—a celebration that, if it resembled even remotely what I had witnessed in Tansyk, promised to be of epic scale, lasting a full three days.
During the planning I was invited to give a toast of my own, and it dawned on me that I was being treated like an honored guest that they had long planned to be part of the events. Perhaps the theater of the kidnap was no less real than the role-playing of my journey—at some point it became much more than symbolic homage to ancient convention or nostalgic cravings for the past.
Indeed, that night as the vodka hit like a tremor from the gut, the actual and the acted, history and the present, seem to marry into one. The nomad life might have gone, but an opportunity to forge identity anew had been born. Customs carried through from history might have been juxtaposed in the chaos of modern times but were still every bit authentic.
11
THE STARVING STEPPE
Unbeknown to Shashibek, his wife-to-be, and the other revelers who had partied into the early hours, a stealthy freeze had moved in under the cover of darkness. As I rode out at dawn, the ground underfoot felt as hard and cold as steel, and a sprinkling of snow, light as dust, brought a dull glow to the steppe. It was a promising development, given that in just 100 km I planned to turn west into the Betpak Dala, the “starving steppe,” where I would need to rely on snow for hydration.
For the first day out of Tasaral the temperature hovered around −25°C. A headwind whipped up a pall of serrating snow. To meet the shift in conditions required yet another adjustment of my gear and riding routines. I pulled on all but my thickest down jacket and donned a balaclava and a pair of crude ski goggles I had picked up in a market. Even with thick mittens, my fingers quickly grew numb when gripping the rein, and so I held the reins one handed, alternating hands every few minutes. Fortunately, I had grown accustomed to the lead rope from the packhorses being threaded through a carabiner on my saddle, over my right leg, and under my butt, enabling me to ride with one hand free. Tigon delighted in chasing foxes and hares, but when he stopped his paws swiftly became painfully cold.
For three days we traveled south from Tasaral, settling into our new winterized routine. Just as I rode through an ever-changing terrain of hills and salt pans, so did my emotions go through highs and lows. When in the saddle and moving forward, I felt like I was floating, gunning toward the empty horizon as if in a dream, but when one or another of the saddles loosened and needed time-consuming refitting, frustration set in. Aset’s saddle was still a constant hassle, and its narrow gullet had begun to irritate Taskonir’s wither.
At night the tent offered more psychological warmth than real heat, and in the mornings the journey felt like a game of survival. To utilize daylight meant working by flashlight for two or three hours before the sun brought relief. The inner tent would be laden with hoarfrost, and ordinarily simple tasks such as pulling stakes and tent pegs out of the frozen earth became epic.
It was one of these mornings, as I lay in the cocoon of my sleeping bag, that I made a phone call to Kathrin in Germany. She was working eighteen-hour days in her teaching job and was boarding in the basement of a home near the city of Karlsruhe. I caught her, she told me, as she was stepping out of the shower. I imagined her standing there in a towel with her wet hair, and it reminded me of the cozy ritual of drying off and slipping into fresh clothing. She felt very far away.
It was about this time that a vision of the end of my journey crept into my mind, where it lingered for many months. When it was all over in Hungary, I imagined, I would pack Kathrin’s little Opel station wagon with my green boxes and saddles. I could see myself closing the trunk, climbing into the passenger seat, and taking a deep breath. Then we would drive out, first into Austria and then Germany, and only with the steppe far behind would stories about my journey begin to trickle out.
The irony of contact with Kathrin, as with others in the outside world, was that while having the satellite phone was a luxury, even a godsend, it sometimes made the feeling of being alone and remote more acute. At the same time the phone could all too easily become a crutch—allowing me to vent and share feelings in moments of challenge that I would have otherwise had to overcome alone.
On the third day from Tasaral I was faced with a dilemma. I had reached the westernmost point of Lake Balkhash, from where I planned to head west into the steppe, but a 40 cm rip had appeared in my tent. The fabric was so threadbare that if a storm came, the winds would probably tear it apart. It was foolish to go on until I had fixed it, but sewing the fragile material would be possible only if I could first patch it with gaffer tape—but that kind of tape wouldn’t adhere in the extreme cold.
Erring on the side of caution, I headed into the raz’ezd of Kashkanteniz. It was the first time I had approached people on the railway since the attempted horse theft, and although this was a different line—the Almaty-to-Astana railway—my earlier dark impressions of its culture were reaffirmed. I moved from house to house looking for a place to stay but was met with glaring looks of aggression. Most of the workers kept stores of reeds and some hay but refused to sell even when offered a high price.
“No one knows how long winter will be. If I give you one bale, where will I get another?” a woman yelled.
By the time darkness fell, it was too late to ride out into the steppe, and I was hypothermic. A young railway worker let me inside his shack, which lay a stone’s throw from the rail tracks. He convinced a family to take my horses in—for which I paid $30—and I stayed up late fixing the tent. But then all night I lay awake with asthma triggered by cigarette smoke, listening to trains bearing down on us, shaking the mud-brick walls as they passed. Tigon was an unwelcome guest and had to fend for himself—I hoped he had found a warm hayloft somewhere.
In the darkness of the next morning, while I was preparing the horses, Taskonir took a bite out of my hand. When I pulled back my gloves, the skin between the first and second knuckles came off like a sheath, leaving a raw, bloody ring. I stared back at Taskonir in bewilderment, struggling not to cry.
It was −28°C as I caught my last glimpses of Lake Balkhash and left the raz’ezd. The lake’s blue waters were long gone. The ice had turned black, strangled in a web of frost. A week ago it might have been sad to say goodbye to this friend of mine, whose moods I had ridden out for more than a month, but now I felt no remorse.
From here to the west stretched the Betpak Dala. It was an immense swath of steppe stretching from Lake Balkhash toward the sands near the Aral Sea and as far south as the Ch
u River. Renowned as a desert of extremes, with little water, it was empty even by Kazakh standards—a reminder of the origin of its name, the “starving steppe.” My aim was to trek 220 km as the crow flew across its southeast corner to a village on the Chu called Ulanbel. This probably equated to 300 km or more by horse.
Even as I set the compass west and climbed up a snow-encrusted slope, I could feel the cold and remoteness ratchet up the stakes. As if the earth had run out of breath, the wind died, and in the intense stillness, sparkling ice crystals fluttered to ground like dead butterflies snapped frozen in flight. Ice rings formed around the horse’s nostrils and clouds of frozen breath blew back onto their necks and flanks, spraying them white. The few pieces of hair that dangled out from my balaclava turned into icicles, and with every inhaled breath my nose hairs became needles. Even my eyelashes gathered frost, fusing together until I pried them apart and put on the goggles.
Soon there were no sounds, no trails, no people. Over the sea of pearly white, awash with frozen troughs and crests, I watched the sun creep into the empty sky, a pale, sickly yolk. In fact, I felt, it wasn’t the sun at all, but earth, Australia perhaps. I was riding on an icy planet, drifting far away, flung out of orbit.
Later, as the sun dipped away, there came a phenomenon I had never seen. The sun squeezed vertically into an elliptical shape from which rose a golden column far into the sky. I could only assume that it was related to the particles of ice in the air.
There was much to think and digest, but little time for my mind to drift. One slip could mean trouble. My greatest fear had long been that one of the horses would lose its balance, sending me falling off, and that I would break a leg and be abandoned by the horses. Since there were no longer any functioning studs on my horses’ shoes, this now seemed like a distinct possibility. As a precaution, I carried hot tea, my satellite phone, and a down jacket in my backpack, but when Ogonyok fell to his knees on an icy salt pan, I decided it was safer to get off and walk.