by Tim Cope
As the days wore on, it seemed that my internal battle between clinging to optimism and being tempted to fall into dejection was mirrored in the city around me. Everywhere I looked burgeoning wealth from oil that spoke of a bright future collided with sectors of the economy that had been left behind. The Ministry of Agriculture was clearly not part of the economic boom—it was situated in a gloomy building cast among other Soviet-era structures, all in a state of decay. Staff wages were pitiful, and many had to come up with other ways of earning money to support their families. By contrast, the city center showcased upmarket apartment complexes and new office buildings. The city square had recently been rebuilt, and opposing it was a newly constructed mosque of palatial proportions. All around, billboards boasted advertisements by mining companies, banks, and investment groups. Among these the face of President Nazarbayev was unavoidable. A presidential election had been announced for December, and his lavish campaign was in full swing. “Forward with Nazarbayev!” his slogan read, as if claiming credit for all the visible affluence.
Two weeks passed, the miniature budget I had allowed myself for rent had run out, and there was still no whisper about permits. I had nowhere to go.
Then, as I was sitting in a cheap cafe having lunch, a young man dressed in stylish designer clothes approached and introduced himself in English. “I was just curious to know why a Westerner would be eating in this kind of cheap place and wearing such bad, worn clothes. I thought you were reaching out for communication with people, so I thought I would come to talk,” he said.
Azamat, as he was known, was my age and worked for a local oil firm. We exchanged stories for a couple of hours and I learned that he was a devout Muslim, and yet almost exclusively spoke in Russian.
“I feel ashamed that there are Kazakhs who do not understand Russian language. I love Russia. I can’t understand that there would be people interested in Kazakh culture,” he said.
It was a curious perspective that I had observed in other cities like Almaty, but which I had never heard being articulated. For Azamat, Russian culture represented modernity and sophistication, while nomadic life was as alien as it would have been to a city dweller anywhere in the world. “I think you are the only man still wanting to be a nomad in my country! Why would you want to leave your home and come here?” he said, a little aghast.
While he could not quite identify with my journey, he was fascinated and could see I was in trouble. His aunt owned the cafe, and so he made a generous offer: “You are welcome to eat for free here as often as you like for as long as you need!” The only condition was that I would meet with him so he could practice his English. Later that evening he turned up at my rented apartment with a solution for my accommodation. Azamat’s friend Dauren was a soft-spoken man who worked in security at Tengiz-Chevroil’s head office.9 He had just bought a new apartment near the city center. “It’s unfurnished, and you will be alone, but you are welcome to stay,” he said.
In the coming weeks my friendship with Dauren and Azamat not only gave me immeasurable comfort and support but provided an absorbing insight into the multiple realities of Atyrau. On occasion Dauren invited me to visit him at work in Tengiz-Chevroil’s headquarters. A modern office block fronted by immaculate green lawns ticking twenty-four hours a day with sprinklers, it was an environment far removed from the brutality of Kulsary. Opposite the headquarters lay a secure living compound for Western workers that boasted row upon row of two-story cottages complete with double garages. The only life on its dust-free streets appeared to be security guards and company vehicles shuffling workers safely to and from the compound. Through Dauren’s contacts I was invited inside to spend an evening with a Canadian engineer and his family. Over dinner the sense of insulation from the outside world was complete. We sat at a table using knife and fork and dined on broccoli shipped frozen from Canada. Afterward we drank beer on the couch in front of a wide-screen TV. At one stage the engineer’s son came tiptoeing down the stairs in his pajamas to ask about a problem with his homework.
Back at Dauren’s office, the reality of the oil business was less masked. During my first visit, he was irritated and stressed. “They’ve just found a murder victim at one of the Tengiz accommodation villages … and there has been another terror threat against the compound here in the city,” he complained.
Violence among Kazakh workers at Tengiz was an ongoing problem, and there were some elements within Kazakh society, particularly of the Muslim faith, who were ideologically opposed to Western companies working on Kazakh soil. Kazakh security guards working outside the gates of the Atyrau compound were frequently threatened for working for the Americans and sometimes warned of potential bomb attacks.
Although Dauren worked in the oil industry, he was nevertheless sympathetic to many of the concerns of his fellow countrymen. “The oil industry is destroying our natural environment,” he told me. “Bribes are paid to government agencies to cover up bad practices. The air is so bad at Tengiz that westerners are not given permission to work there for more than a year before they are sent home … but Kazakh workers stay there for years on end.”
His views about President Nazarbayev and the looming election were equally cynical. “Nazarbayev considers himself the father of Kazakhstan. His political party is the Kazakhstan brand. The only true opposition is in exile in London, and Nazarbayev has a monopoly on the media. Yes, we will have a democratic election … but do you think that the government doesn’t take note of which party people vote for? Anyone working for the state who chooses to vote for the opposition will lose their job.”
When the election was over, Nazarbayev would prove to have won around 99 percent of the vote. Given this iron grip on power and his popularity, I wondered why he had bothered spending so many millions campaigning.
After more than five weeks in Atyrau, I had a greater understanding of this urban society, but I had little to celebrate in terms of a break-through for crossing into Russia. With two weeks left on my Kazakh visa, a permit had been faxed through from Moscow but was quickly followed by a qualifying phone call from the border: “If Australian Tim Cope arrives on horseback we will turn him back. The permit only allows him to transport his horses and dog by truck or train through Russia.”
My only success in Atyrau had been to convince the head of customs for western Kazakhstan to guarantee smooth passage out of the country. Technically, to send Kazakh horses abroad required a wild-animal export license, but to overcome this he had ordered his assistant to classify my horses as “house pets.”
Now, with just five days remaining on my Kazakh visa, I lay on the floor of Dauren’s apartment with the small of my back knotted up. It was Wednesday, December 7, my twenty-seventh birthday, and I felt more like sixty.
If, by the end of the working week, Moscow hadn’t issued a new permit specifically allowing me to ride horses across the border and through Russia, then all hope was lost. I would have to give away my animals, but I didn’t have the money to buy new horses in Russia. It was surely the end of my journey.
Friday, December 9, permit or no, would be my last day at the agricultural ministry. Like every day, I was there starting at eight in the morning, on the fax and the phone. By lunchtime there was no permit and my frustration was boiling over. I refused to let Kosibek’s secretary leave on her lunch break. “Please, let’s just call Moscow one last time,” I begged. “If we don’t get it now, then we will never get it.”
She looked at me with a small smile, trying to keep the tears out of her eyes. Like everyone else in the office—which was labeled, in English, “Exsperts Room”—she had battled my problem every day for six weeks. Everyone from Kosibek down had given it their all.
“Tim, I’m sorry, we have done everything we can.”
I reluctantly exited the office, and she locked the door on her way out to lunch.
I had a miserable last meal at Azamat’s aunt’s café. Azamat had remained upbeat and believed I would get the permit someho
w, and now I had to disappoint him. The many meals his aunt had provided me had all been in vain. I called Muftagali in Kuegen and explained we would need to find new owners for the horses. Then I spoke with Dauren and promised to be moved out within a day.
Finally I made my way back to the ministry. I needed to say goodbye to Kosibek and the other staff who had put their hearts into helping me.
As I reentered the building I noticed something odd. Lunch hour was not yet finished, but the door to the “Exsperts Room” was ajar. I pushed it open, and there, looking pale and sunken, was Kosibek’s secretary. She looked up at me, and though there were tears in my eyes, I approached to console her. She whispered something.
“What?” I asked.
“I got it.” She held up a fresh fax in her trembling fingers: This is to certify that in addition to the permit of the 29th of November Australian traveler Tim Cope can transport his three horses by riding them. His one dog can be carried by its four legs.
Russia
16
LOST HORDES IN EUROPE
When in the steppe I stand alone
With far horizons clear to view,
Ambrosia on the breezes blown
And skies above me crystal blue,
I sense my own true human height
And in eternity delight.
The obstacles to all my dreams
Now shrink, appear absurd, inept,
And nothing either is or seems
Except myself, these birds, this steppe …
What joy it is to feel all round
Wide open space that knows no bound!
—Unknown Kalmyk poet
On a blustery morning, when sleet and snow clogged the air and wind careened across the freezing waters of the Volga delta, I found myself once again at the Kazakh border post. The same workers who had given me such a hard time on the way back from my failed crossing were on duty.
“You cannot export the horses—you do not have the necessary permit. These are commercial export!” the official in charge told me.
I’d anticipated this and had a plan. I used the public phone booth to call the head of customs in Atyrau, who was waiting and ready. No sooner had I replaced the handset than the official in charge at the border post took a call and turned pale. Shortly he came cowering apologetically: “Don’t worry, everything will be done.”
Later that evening, with just a matter of hours remaining on my Kazakh visa, I rode through and made camp in no-man’s-land. Come morning the visa had expired and there was no way back.
This time around the Russian officials proved friendlier than their Kazakh counterparts, and within a couple of hours I sailed under the boom gate into freedom. Tigon led the way, chest puffed out, tugging hard on his lead, tail pointed high “like a pistol,” as the guards joked.
Once through, I refrained from looking over my shoulder and covered as much distance as possible before dark. Only from the safety of camp did I dare pull out my satellite phone to break the news to my family. It was the thirteenth of December, my father’s fifty-fifth birthday, and I could claim to be inside Russia.
For the next couple of days I was paranoid about still being within the web of influence of the border officials, and so I kept up a brisk pace. I seldom stopped during the day and hid my camp at night. It was only after I had crossed a few channels of the Volga that I began to relax. Liberated from the impasse, it was a luxury not only to be with my family of animals but to once again lift my sights to new horizons.
In the scheme of my overall journey, the Kazakh-Russian border was just the second of four international borders to be navigated on the way to the Danube, but it was a milestone greater than all the others. With time I would come to see that the Kazakh-Russian border demarcated two broadly different cultural spheres of the Eurasian steppe—and therefore split the experience of my journey into two distinct halves.
In the east were Mongolia and Kazakhstan—both countries deeply affected by the Soviet era and, before that, the Russian Empire (Kazakhstan to a much larger degree), but nonetheless self-ruling, sovereign nations where nomadic culture remained predominant. Even Kazakhs and Mongols who lived in cities were only a couple of generations at most removed from the saddle.
In the western portion of the steppe, from the Russian border to the Danube, the nomadic way of life had long since faded out. Hungarians had abandoned their nomadic way of life even before the Mongols’ appearance in the thirteenth century, and the so-called Pontic and Caspian steppes—encompassing the grasslands stretching from the Volga to north of the Black Sea—which had been a historical stronghold of nomad culture and a key to Mongol rule in Europe, had been subjugated long ago by the Russian Empire and was now incorporated into modern Russia and Ukraine. The many steppe peoples that lay ahead of me, including Kalmyks, Cossacks, Crimean Tatars, and even the Hutsuls of the Carpathians, formed ethnic minorities with only limited autonomy. Most of them had been singled out under Stalin, and some had shared the experience of mass deportation to Siberia and Central Asia. In post-Soviet times they were experiencing cultural revival—in the Crimean Tatars’ case, return from exile—and their lands were in varying states of stability.
The first of these formerly nomadic nations was one I had anticipated with particular intrigue. The Caspian steppe, which has at its heart the rich pasturelands of the lower Volga, had once been ruled by the Kalmyks, an ethnically Mongol people of the Oirat confederation of tribes, whose arrival in the region in the early seventeenth century heralded the last migration of a nomadic people from Asia to Europe. In 1771 there had been a catastrophic attempt by Kalmyks to flee en masse back to Mongolia to escape oppression under the Russian Empire. Almost two-thirds of those who set out had perished on the very Kazakh steppes through which I had ridden in the last twelve months.
The first I had known about the Kalmyks came from Oirat Mongols in western Mongolia who had claimed to be descended from Kalmyks who survived the exodus. “Thousands of kilometres from here in Russia near the Caspian Sea, you will meet our relatives who never came back. They are our Mongol brothers and sisters, and they are still stuck in Europe,” they had told me.
What remained of the once powerful Kalmyk khanate was a small, semi-autonomous republic known as Kalmykia, situated to the west of the Volga River and nowadays renowned as the only Buddhist republic in geographical Europe. Legend had it that Kalmyks there were descendants of those unable to cross the partially frozen Volga in the mild winter of 1770–71.1 Whether coincidence or not, the name Kalmyk originates from a Turkic root word that roughly means “to remain.” I’d been waiting to lay eyes on the fabled steppe of Kalmykia for what seemed an eternity, but even now, when it lay less than two weeks of travel in front of me, it was premature to set my sights on it. Before reaching the Kalmyk steppe, I first needed to cross through the labyrinth of bridges and towns that are dotted along the braided channels of the Volga River delta.
Crossing the main channel in particular proved difficult. The only bridge lay smack in the middle of Astrakhan, a Russian outpost city founded in the sixteenth century by Ivan the Terrible. The historic fortress walls that are still a feature of the old city center served as a reminder that for centuries it had come under attack by nomadic horsemen. In the modern era, though, Astrakhan was a bustling metropolis of more than half a million, and on horseback it was my turn to be terrorized. A marathon day saw us weaving a dangerous path through a sea of trucks, trams, and cars. At times when we were forced onto narrow sidewalks, there were hordes of pedestrians and lethal, ill-fitting manhole covers to deal with.
Upon reaching the far side of the city after dark, my horses were so spooked that no sooner had I dismounted to make camp than they bolted, still packed and saddled. I was left with nothing but my thermos, video camera, and satellite phone.
Local police and emergency services came to my aid, but after a fruitless all-night search we retired empty-handed to the police station. It was only due to the intuition of
a policeman of Kazakh descent that my journey was rescued. At 6:00 A.M. I was awakened by shouting and opened my eyes to see him leaning over me, his machine gun slung over his shoulder. “Wake up! You have to get in the car! I have had a dream that I went fishing and caught three fish—a brown, a gray, and a red one, the same color as your horses. I just know we are going to find your horses this time!”
An hour later we came across a long trail of equipment leading to my horses. It was a remarkable sight as the policeman, machine gun and all, strode over to Ogonyok and planted a kiss on his nose.
After pulling my caravan back together I spent a week riding from Astrakhan south along the banks of the Volga through a tangle of fishing villages. When the Volga’s waters began to freeze I crossed the last bridge and turned west, leaving the web of roads, towns, bridges, and traffic behind.
I was now on the western fringes of the Volga delta, and as I rode through a landscape of marshes, lakes, and broad flanks of open pastureland, my thoughts returned to the Kalmyks. It was precisely this combination of reed beds, open land, and low-lying pastures irrigated by spring overflow that had drawn the Kalmyks’ forefathers to the Caspian steppe. Those early pioneers had been war-hardened Oirat Mongols, who, like waves of nomads before them, had been prompted by conflict in their Inner Asian homeland to pick up and ride out across the steppe in search of new beginnings.
More specifically, the powerful empire ruled by the Oirats, known as Zhungaria, had begun to decline by the turn of the seventeenth century, and one Oirat tribe, the Torghuts, had sent scouts west to locate a refuge for their people.2 As early as 1608, encampments on the vanguard of this mass migration were spotted along the Zhem River. By the 1640s Kalmyks had driven out the nomadic Nogais from the Caspian steppe and established their own khanate, the center of which was located around the Lower Volga.3 In Zhungaria their Oirat brethren would mount a resurgence and hold power until the mid-eighteenth century, but the Oirats who had migrated to the Caspian steppe generally became known as the Kalmyks.