by Tim Cope
3 In retrospect, this concept of mine might have been a little unfair. In a tradition known as tuvar, nomad families in Mongolia are still known to leave their grazing lands and move out on extended horseback journeys with their herds in search of better pasture. This is particularly true of nomads from Uvs Aimag during times of drought. Tuvar dates back to the very earliest of nomads, whose eternal journeys in quest of better pastures took them across the breadth of the Eurasian steppe. Whether coincidence or not, the word tuvar is still used by Crimean Tatars; it means “cattle” or “livestock.”
4 Hints of this can be found in the term Oirat itself, which some historians believe originates from an earlier name, Dorben Oord, meaning “the allied four.” The Mongol tribes farther east, meanwhile, sometimes referred to themselves as the Dochin Mongols, meaning “forty Mongols.”
5 In a possible throwback to this historical division, it is nowadays common to hear Mongolians from the central regions insult the Durvuds, who form the majority in Uvs Aimag, by calling them Khun Bish, meaning “inhuman.”
CHAPTER 5: KHARKHIRAA: THE ROARING RIVER MOUNTAIN
1 Hun, pronounced “khun,” is modern Mongolian for “person,” and this has been used as evidence by some historians to prove the Mongolian origins of the Huns. In 2011, Mongolia officially celebrated the 2,200th anniversary of the Hunnic (Xiognu) empire.
2 This border between Uvs Aimag and Kosh Agach in Siberia was, ironically, opened for the first time to foreigners later the same year I was traveling. In 2011, the border with China in the southwest was opened for foreigners. China would have been my preferred route to Kazakhstan.
CHAPTER 6: STALIN’S SHAMBALA
1 The Golden Horde is also known as the Kipchak khanate or the Ulus of Jochi.
2. From Tom Stacey’s introduction to Mukhamet Shayakhmetov, The Silent Steppe: The Memoir of a Kazakh Nomad Under Stalin (New York: Overlook/Rookery, 2007), ix.
3 This was not a policy unique to the Soviet era. Dostoyevsky was also sent to prison in Semipalatinsk in 1862, where he wrote Memoirs from the House of the Dead. The Ukrainian artist Shevchenko also served a term in Orsk in 1847.
4 A kurultai historically was a political and military council of ancient Mongol and Turkic chiefs and khans. The root of the word means “meeting” in Mongolian.
5 Claire Burgess Watson has since written a book about her journey from Mongolia to Turkmenistan, Silk Route Adventure: On Horseback in the Heart of Asia.
6 By contrast, at that time a horse in Mongolia started at $80, and a good horse there was no more than $150.
7 According to the formula I have used elsewhere in the book for transliterating Kazakh terms to English, Taskonir would more correctly be Taskonyr (Tas meaning rock, and konyr meaning brown). But in the interests of pronunciation, given how centrally this horse featured on my journey, I have stuck with Taskonir.
CHAPTER 7: ZUD
1 It is with an irony not lost on many Kazakhs, then, that it was Lenin’s recognition of ethnicities—attachments that he thought would dissolve over time with the brotherhood of Soviets—that eventually heralded the independent state of Kazakhstan.
2 Many historians believe that if the initial policy had confiscated animals from just the bai, and not the middle class and poor, the famine would not have occurred.
3 The Kazakh professor Talas Omarbekov, who worked on the 1997 senate commission into the famine, came across a telegram sent in 1933 from the administration of Kostanai Oblast to the central government: “We cannot fulfill our quota of meat supply of pigs. In the entire oblast there is left just one pig.”
4 Collectives run by ethnic Russians and Cossacks tended to have a much lower attrition rate, because their heritage as agrarian farmers allowed them to adapt to the conditions much better than Kazakhs, who knew only nomadic life.
5 Official figures from the time suggest that cattle numbers declined from 6.5 million to fewer than one million. Sheep declined from 18.5 million to just 1.5 million.
6 Aul was originally used for Kazakh settlements, as opposed to those founded by Russian settlers, which are known as derevnye (village), and separate from collective farms. Up until the 1950s there was a substantial difference in living conditions between a village and an aul. Russians, with their history as cultivators, were much more easily able to adapt to running state-owned farms, while Kazakhs had neither the same equipment nor the experience and were given less-arable land, so their auls were much poorer. Therefore there was a stigma attached to the word aul, which still persists in some ways to the present.
From here on, for the purposes of the book, I will refer to any small Kazakh settlement based on agriculture as an aul, no matter whether it was initially a former state farm or collective, Russian-founded or not.
It is also worth noting that at the time of Soviet collectivization, anyone whose family was branded kulak or bai were forbidden to reside in collectives. Aul therefore also came to mean the forced settlements of Kazakh nomads outside the collectives.
7 Frederick Burnaby—a British soldier, writer, and undercover spy agent in the era of the Great Game—was told of a similar phenomena in 1875 during his horseback journey from Russia, south through the Kazakh steppes to Khiva. He wrote: “A tartar who is a rich man can find himself a beggar the next. This comes from the frequent snowstorms, when the thermometer sometimes descends to around −40 to −45°C; but more often from some slight thaw taking place for perhaps a few hours. This is sufficient to ruin whole districts. The ground becomes covered with an impenetrable coating of ice, and the horses simply die of starvation, not being able to kick away the frozen substance, as they do the snow from the grass beneath their hoofs.” From Burnaby’s A Ride to Khiva: Travels and Adventures in Central Asia, 148.
8 Since I finished my journey, Mongolia has been hit by another severe zud. In the winter of 2009–10, about 80 percent of the country’s territory was covered with a snow blanket of 20–60 cm, and in Uvs Aimag a period of extreme cold, with nighttime temperatures as low as −48°C, endured for almost fifty days. Nine thousand families lost their entire herds, while an additional thirty-three thousand suffered a 50 percent loss. The Ministry of Food, Agriculture, and Light Industry reported 2,127,393 head of livestock lost as of February 9, 2010 (188,270 horses, cattle, and camels and 1,939,123 goats and sheep). The ministry predicted that livestock losses might reach 4 million before the end of winter. But by May 2010, the United Nations reported that 8 million, or about 17 percent of the country’s entire livestock, had died.
9 Note that the famine in Kazakhstan under Stalin is known in Russian language as Veliki Dzhut (Great Zhut), but in Kazakh the famine is officially known as asharshylyk.
10 Later I heard that the Hazara of Afghanistan—descendants of Mongols who conquered the region in the thirteenth century—have the same horse care method, although the same can’t be said for Pashtuns and other non-Mongol peoples in that country.
11 The most infamous flight for survival occurred in the spring of 1723 when the Zhungars—Oirat Mongols—nearly wiped out the entire Kazakh population of the Talas region in the middle of a seasonal migration. Those who survived fled to refuge in the overcrowded oases of Bukhara and Samarkand in present-day Uzbekistan. To this day the events are remembered as Aktaban Shubyryndy—“running” (fleeing) to “the bone” (of the foot)—a saying sometimes used in reference to the exodus of Kazakhs to China in the twentieth century during Stalin’s collectivization policies and the subsequent famine.
12 There is a legend about the dombra that is linked to the Mongol Empire. The story goes that Jochi, the eldest son of Genghis Khan, promised to pour melted lead down the throat of whoever brought bad news about his son. His son was killed on a hunt by a stampeding wounded ass (known in Kazakh as a kulan and in Mongolian as khulan). Although everybody was afraid to tell the news to Jochi, there was one musician who agreed to advise of the accident by composing and playing a piece on a dombra. Jochi understood every detail and ins
tead of pouring the lead down the musician’s throat ordered it to be poured over the body of the dombra. The hot lead made the soundhole on the instrument that it has today.
13 In Mongolian, the name Tarbagatai translates to something like “marmot mountains.”
CHAPTER 8: TOKYM KAGU BASTAN
1 Reflecting the blend of old beliefs with the more recently adopted Muslim customs, these days “mounting ashami” is often practiced in auls at the time of circumcision. The boys are paraded around the village on horseback to symbolize their coming of age.
2 Above the ranks of akyn were the jyrau, who represented an entire people and were advisers to the great khans. They performed kui or terme (musical recitatives) in everyday life, some of which were many thousands of lines long. Many of these kuis recall such events as Alexander the Great’s arrival on the Syr Darya (classically known as the Jaxartes River), the Mongols, the Zhungars, and the arrival of Russians on their land.
3 Their observation was not without reason. They told me about a fisherman who had recently died of thirst after his motorcycle broke down during a poaching trip to the lake somewhere nearby. And in the afternoon that day two Russian men turned up briefly looking for water. They had been stuck out on the lake edge for more than a week after their motorcycle broke down. Emaciated and exhausted, they told stories of drinking the saline water, which had made them more and more thirsty, until they had miraculously gotten the bike going again.
4 For some time now I had been sensing that Oralman was a derogatory term, as if they considered these people an impure underclass who weren’t genuine Kazakhs.
5 In a strange twist, three years later I met an Australian who cast some light on these rumors about police that I would hear time and time again during my travels in Kazakhstan. This Australian had set up a company in Azerbaijan and had once sent a Scottish employee to Kazakhstan on business. According the Scotsman, he had been arrested while near Aktau in western Kazakhstan, driven into the desert, and strangled before the police took off with his wallet. It was apparently only by feigning death that he had survived at all. He managed to wander back into an aul for help.
6 Most of the emissaries of the Tsar were Cossacks.
CHAPTER 9: BALKHASH
1 Over vodka I learned these policemen worked as security guards at a nearby abandoned military base. A year earlier the weapons storage facility at the base had exploded, very nearly killing the workers inside. I later spoke to a man who managed to rescue several military employees by car in the nick of time. For kilometres around there was still debris to be found, and many of the local people had discovered that shards of an orange substance could be used effectively as fire lighters. This was a reminder of hundreds of Soviet military relics that remain in the steppes of Kazakhstan, where military zones occupy vast stretches of country.
CHAPTER 10: WIFE STEALING AND OTHER LEGENDS OF TASARAL
1 It is also true that existing Slavic settlers from colonial times already made up an estimated 40 percent of the population in 1917.
2 The loss of the Kazakh language was consequently rapid—by 1989, it was estimated that 40 percent of Kazakhs no longer had a proficient grasp of their own language, and three-quarters of Kazakh urban dwellers did not use their native tongue in daily life. Russian, as Dave Bhavna explains, was “more than just a survival tool; it also became a source of personal and collective empowerment and an emblem of becoming ‘cultured’ and ‘civilized.’”
3 In Mongolia it is nine generations.
CHAPTER 11: THE STARVING STEPPE
1 The maps I primarily relied on were tactical pilotage charts that I had managed to buy from a map shop in Adelaide, Australia.
2 This is recounted by Peter Hopkirk in Foreign Devils on the Silk Road: The Search for the Lost Treasures of Central Asia.
CHAPTER 12: THE PLACE THAT GOD FORGOT
1 Saksaul was scarce and the wood so dense and twisted that the only way to split it was by smashing it on rocks in winter, when the frozen wood would shatter on impact.
2 According to Ron Stodghill’s article for the New York Times, “Oil, Cash and Corruption,” Nov. 5, 2006, the money was also allegedly channeled to the head of the oil ministry.
3 The autumn slaughter, known as kuzdyk, is also celebrated. In summer the slaughter is known as szhazdyk, although it is not usually celebrated with ceremony, as in summer dairy products become the staple.
4 CuChullaine O’Reilly regards this as the first international meeting of long riders in history, with riders traveling from all five continents. I was the first to be made a fellow while still on an expedition and “in the saddle.”
CHAPTER 13: OTAMAL
1 There was a subtle warning about this in the saying “By spring, fat stock grows thin, and by spring thin stock’s nothing” (from Mukhamet Shayakhmetov’s book The Silent Steppe).
2 I later understood that long farewells, gazing after the departing guest, or the traveler looking back was considered bad luck. In western and central Kazakhstan in particular, I was regularly abandoned and left alone on the day of departure, and until I understood this lore, I felt that I had offended my hosts in some way.
3 Upon reading The Silent Steppe I was deeply moved by Mukhamet Shayakhmetov’s description of riding alone through a deserted valley the year after nomads had been forced into collectivization: “Until the previous autumn, the valley had been crammed almost full of the nomadic aul who regularly spent each autumn and spring there, to the extent that there could be arguments over whose livestock had the right to graze where. But now it was completely deserted and eerily silent. The people who used to live here had all joined collective farms, and were mostly living together in centralised winter stopping places or in make-shift camps on the ploughed fields; and as there was now enough pasture near these farm centers for the depleted herds of livestock, it no longer made sense to drive them to deserted pastures such a distance away.” Mukhamet Shayakhmetov, The Silent Steppe: The Memoir of a Kazakh Nomad Under Stalin (New York: Overlook/Rookery, 2007), 65.
4 In times past, anyone who could recount forty generations was held in particularly high status in society.
5 The Kazakh nation had emerged in the sixteenth century as a unity of three confederations of tribes or juzes: the Ula Juz (Elder Horde) in the Jeti-Su (Seven Rivers region) in southern Kazakhstan, the Kishi Juz (Junior Horde) of the arid deserts of the west, and the Orta Juz (Middle Horde) of the north, center, and east.
6 Statistics paint the scale of change in Kazakhstan through the twentieth century. In 1897—thirty years before Kazakhs were forced into collectives—only 7 percent of the Kazakh population had lived settled lives. Nowadays only 9.6 percent of Kazakhs worked on the land, roughly 5 percent of whom, like this family, were thought to carry on a nomadic or semi-nomadic way of life.
7 Beshbarmak is customarily followed by meat broth mixed with dried curd.
8 A fatty sheep tail is the equivalent of a modern-day pacifier and is still used that way among Mongolians as well. Kazakhs also believed that touching a baby’s body with a fatty rump will bring wealth.
9 In Mongolia today, it is still in fact the custom never to compliment a baby but to call it “ugly” so as not to cast a spell of bad luck.
CHAPTER 14: SHIPS OF THE DESERT
1 The Khwarezm Empire, which bordered the Mongol Empire, stretched across what is historically known as Transoxiana, which roughly includes the modern states of Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and parts of Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
2 Alexander the Great had in fact fought a famous battle on its banks in 329 BCE with Scythian nomads. Tamerlane (also known as Timur and “Timur the Lame”), of Turkic descent, attempted to evoke the legacy of Genghis Khan in the second half of the fourteenth century, restoring rule over much of the territory that the Mongols had earlier conquered, including the Chaghatai khanate in Central Asia, remnants of the Ilkhanate in Persia, and the Golden Horde on the Pontic-Caspian steppe as
far as Russia. He also attempted to reestablish rule over China.
3 In the summer heat it was also the case that injuries to the horses were more prone to infection, and this kept me additionally occupied. At this point of the journey Ogonyok had an infected cut above his left eye, and a pressure sore on his back—probably the result of heat, combined with tying down the pack load too tightly. I gave him an anti-inflammatory and antibiotics, made some adjustments to the saddle, and could only hope his condition did not deteriorate.
4 Although by 2005 most of these ships had reportedly been salvaged for scrap metal, some still stood as sad memorials in what had once been Aralsk’s busy port.
5 As some measure of the fallout caused by the shrinking of the Aral Sea, Anton Schneider, an ethnic German who grew up in Kazakhstan, has recently written to me, describing how, in the 1990s, desperate refugees from Aralsk—fleeing disease, and unemployment—turned up in his aul of lugovoy, about 1,200 km from the Aral Sea. From what Anton recalls, the Aral Sea refugees lived in tents on the outskirts of their village. Anton’s father and many others in the aul had great sympathy for these poor people. Eventually the local government gave them land to build new homes on.
6 To help address the situation from the Kazakh side of the border, in 2005 a scheme was under way to build a dam along the southern tip of the northern Aral Lake and hence capture all the outflow of the Syr Darya. This guaranteed some rebound in the northern lake and the potential for the limited reintroduction of the fishing industry.