Eight Pieces of Empire

by Lawrence Scott Sheets

  Then the icons (some swore they excreted a sacred perfume, a phenomenon they maintain occurs only with icons of extremely venerated saints) started appearing in dozens of churches, as the faithful demanded canonization for “Saint Zhenya,” as they referred to him. Zhenya had not been formally canonized, the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church arguing that canonization is a very long process, as well as other ecclesiastical obscurities. This stopped no one. Prayers were composed and recited:

  Thy martyr Yevgeny, O Lord, in his sufferings has received an incorruptible crown from Thee, our God, for having Thy strength he has brought down his torturers, has defeated the powerless insolence of demons. Through his prayers, save our souls.

  Indeed, some of the icons erected in Orthodox churches were life-size and placed next to the likes of icons of Jesus Christ. The number of times Zhenya’s followers used the word “martyr” made it clear to me they had elevated this unlikely young man to practically such a status. The issue practically led to a split in the church between its mainstream leadership and elements demanding Zhenya be made a saint; an enormous debate continues to this day, with part of the church hierarchy maintaining there is yet not sufficient proof about Radionov’s case, that someone killed in battle had never been canonized, and citing an obscure precept that naming “new martyrs” had ended after the Bolshevik takeover. The church and the patriarch instead formally “honored” Radionov, the real reason for the refusal to canonize the result of very understandable worries among some in the church (and doubtless the government) that such a step could lead to anti-Muslim hysteria in a country with a large Muslim minority.

  AS A COLD wind blew, Radionov’s mother and I walked down the few hundred meters from her house to Zhenya’s grave, which she visited daily. She caressed the right side of his grave marker and whispered something to the tombstone above her son’s body. I asked her if the idea of his canonization was important to her.

  Her response was surprising. “I suppose it is important to some people,” she said. “But for me it is not the most significant fact. I was not even a churchgoer. I was a Communist Party member for twenty-five years. All I know is that I lost my only son, and that means I have lost everything.”

  It is not his mother who needs her son’s canonization. It is the elements within the Orthodox Church, which needs a new symbol to rouse the flock. It is elements in the state, which in turn needs the church for support, and vice versa. It is the army, which needs some sort of creed or ideology to replace Communism. It is the faithful themselves, being given back their “opiate of the masses” in exchange for the Marxist utopia that never materialized.

  Many of them were on their way to becoming some of the most quirky countries on earth—some arguably more repressive than under the Soviets. Tajikistan, the poorest of the Central Asian countries, had torched itself in the early 1990s with a senseless civil war that killed tens of thousands. By the mid-2000s, it was little more than an opium crossing point for “exports” from Afghanistan.

  Kazakhstan was building an oil powerhouse, but also a repressive dynasty dominated by the family of Communist-turned-capitalist-leader Nursultan Nazerbayev.

  In Turkmenistan, one of the most flamboyant personality cults in the world was under construction. Saparmurat Niyazov—Turkmenbashi, or “Head of all Turkmen,” “President for Life” of a desert country sitting on some of the largest gas reserves in the world but most of whose citizens were dirt poor—was master of the absurd. Whimsical, and in the estimation of many, demented, he renamed the days of the week after himself and his mother, outlawed opera and ballet as un-Turkmen, and even banned TV presenters from wearing makeup because he declared that the cosmetics made it difficult for him to discern between male and female anchors. In his late fifties, he dyed his hair alternately bleached blond, then soon after jet black. Billboards of Turkmenbashi coiffed in both hues competed with one another on the streets of the capital, Ashgabat. I dreamed of making it to Turkmenistan—the most bizarre corner of the former empire, its most twisted fragment. I filed for a visa, haggling over the phone with various Turkmen Foreign Ministry folks whose telephone numbers seemed to change by the week as some sort of hiding tactic. The answer was always the same: Ring back tomorrow. Finally, one call put them over the edge: The voice on the other end told us to “draw our own conclusions.”

  There would be no visa for me to “slander our president,” and I had to settle for a happenstance incident to claim my presence in the country. My Moscow–Baku flight had been diverted to Turkmenistan because of bad weather, and we sat on the tarmac for two hours and weren’t allowed to disembark. I peered out the window for any hint of what life was like, as if on an exo-planet. But at least I could say that I’d “been” in the country. Well, in a way at least.

  But it was Uzbekistan, the most populous of the Central Asian “-stans,” that was the most intriguing. Home to the religious citadels of Central Asian Islam—Samarkand, Bukhara, and Khiva—it had also created a brand-new ideological pseudosystem to support the continued rule of “Papa” Islam Karimov, the former Soviet Communist Uzbek chieftain turned independence leader. The reality was that by 2007, Uzbekistan ranked as one of the world’s most corrupt countries, and almost half the population was scraping by, earning $1.25 a day or less.

  Despite these imperfections, Uzbekistan opened up briefly owing to a warming of relations with the United States because of the war in neighboring Afghanistan. For a short while, this made it easier for foreign correspondents to visit, and I used the chance as much as I could before Papa Karimov slammed the door shut once again.

  UZBEKISTAN: I CANNOT ANSWER THAT QUESTION

  The red message button on the room phone was flashing. There were three messages from NPR (National Public Radio) in Washington, DC, demanding I call in. I did so.

  “We have been bombing Afghanistan for two hours now and we have no reaction from you in Uzbekistan. What are you doing?”

  I tried to point out that Uzbekistan was a special case to the extent that the Orwellian government could afford to ignore things like the start of an all-out international war on its border. It was a Sunday night, and all of my calls to the country’s ministries went unanswered. I tried a few contacts to see if Papa Karimov’s secretive machine had at least whispered an acknowledgment that the war was on. No one knew or professed to know anyone who knew anything.

  There would be no public outcry over the silence. An editor sighed grudgingly and told me to keep trying.

  When morning came, I descended the stairs and asked for a newspaper in the lobby and was told that there were no newspapers in the overpriced two-hundred-dollar-a-night hotel. Next I walked about a half mile down the main drag before I came to a kiosk selling the main state-run newspapers, sure there would be at least a blurb about the war having started. Instead, on the front cover I found pictures of workers being sent into the fields by the government for the annual ritual of collecting Uzbekistan’s cotton crop. It was as if news simply did not exist here.

  I headed back to the hotel to make some calls. Surely I could get through to at least some of the ministries by now. I started with the Foreign Ministry Press Service, asking for comment on Uzbekistan’s position regarding the start of hostilities in Afghanistan.

  Someone actually picked up the line!

  “I’m sorry, I cannot answer your question, as I do not possess the necessary information,” the voice on the other end calmly replied. This was even more worthless than a “no comment.”

  “Well, then can you just confirm that there is US military activity going on just over the Uzbek border with Afghanistan?”

  “I’m sorry, I cannot answer your question, as I do not possess the necessary information.” I wondered if I was speaking to an automated answering machine, but this was 2001 and the phones barely worked with any proficiency in Uzbekistan, let alone sporting such leaps as voice-activated technology. Nope, it was a real person, all right.

  I kept dialing.
Next I tried the Defense Ministry. I repeated the same question about the Uzbek reaction to the start of the war. “I am sorry, I cannot answer your question as I do not possess the necessary information.” It was obvious by now that all the country’s officials were reading from identical index cards.

  I kept trying, this time the Interior Ministry. At first there was no answer. Then a voice at the other end. Would this be my pay dirt? This time the voice at the other end put the receiver down. You need to call the Foreign Ministry, said the voice. “I’ve already done that,” I said. At least I got a slightly different “answer.”

  THREE WEEKS AFTER September 11, 2001, the day I arrived in Moscow to begin as NPR’s bureau chief, my editors gave me four hours to pack before I was dispatched on an overnight flight to that never-never land of Uzbekistan. It was to be a temporary stopping-off point before going on to neighboring Afghanistan. I had not been to Uzbekistan before; knew almost no one in the country; and had no idea about how to go about reporting there, only that the place was renowned as a hotbed of terrified, stonewalling bureaucrats. Their robotic “I cannot answer your question” one-liner monologue confirmed this in short order.

  I touched down early that October morning amid an endless steppe covered in those cotton fields. It felt good to be back in the warm world of Asia, despite the inevitable impending war in Afghanistan. I had left Moscow with freezing rain already falling.

  Tashkent, at first sight, evoked squeaky-clean Eastern order, but with a warm, relatively cosmopolitan relaxedness. As I rode in a taxi toward the city center, old women in bright, colored head scarves emblazoned with impossibly oversized roses sold flowers at street corners, men in traditional robes yawned as they sat around on park benches, and young women in miniskirts strolled casually along wide, sun-drenched boulevards.

  Uzbekistan did feel like it was still in the Soviet Union, even though the statues of Lenin had been removed. His iconic replacement on pedestal after pedestal throughout the land was Tamerlane, the fourteenth-century Turkic conqueror who ruled over most of the Middle East from his capital at Samarkand, in present-day Uzbekistan (but was not Uzbek himself). Despite this, there were statutes of him going up just about everywhere in the country. Official propaganda eulogized him despite his bloodthirsty résumé.

  I checked into my overpriced, state-owned hotel and took a walk through the central pedestrian boulevard to get a feel for the town. The boulevard was lined with mom-and-pop cafés serving chicken shish kebab, rice plov served with chunks of fatty mutton, and spicy Korean-style carrot salad. But when I took out my long black NPR microphone and started asking questions about Uzbekistan and the possible effect of the inevitable American bombing campaign in Afghanistan, people turned their heads or silently waved me away with their hands.

  “Politics, no,” said one man, selling cheap cassette tapes of Turkish pop-music stars. Other rote responses to questions about Karimov, in public at least, included “Our president is golden” and “He provides everything for our country’s needs.”

  • • •

  UZBEKISTAN’S NEW, POST-SOVIET leadership was actually not new at all. It resisted most reforms of any kind, keeping a type of state command-model economy in place. There was no privatization of state-owned factories. Repetitive propaganda slogans loomed from Tashkent’s major buildings—Soviet sounding, like “Uzbekistan is a country with a great future.” People snuck around behind buildings to trade dollars for the Uzbek som at practically double the “official” rate—long after all ex-Soviet republics had abandoned artificially set exchange rates. This outmoded practice was far from ideological—it was kept in place to let cronies connected to the government of President Islam Karimov exchange their som into hard currency at the preferential “official rate.” The rest of the population was forced to risk arrest by trading on the black market on much less profitable terms.

  Karimov didn’t pretend to be a democrat. He and his government had—alone among ex-Soviet republics—even invented a pseudoideology, replete with Marxist-Leninist-style volumes of unreadable psychobabble, to justify its existence. This was the “ideology of national independence,” a deliberately vague synthesis of North Korean–style “Juche” (self-reliance), rigid state control over every official facet of economic and social life, and total trust in Karimov. Just as the Soviet system had supported an army of Marxist-Leninist “philosophers,” the Uzbek system provided ample employment opportunities for its own theoreticians. The main elements were and are (1) distrust of the outside world and “enemies” of Uzbekistan; (2) autarky, meaning a closed economic system; and (3) most important, a justification for authoritarianism—in essence prostrating oneself to the full acceptance of the regime’s ultimate wisdom in defining what is right for the nation. As one of the regime’s theoreticians writes:

  The national interest is identified from the top of the pyramid of the governing of society in the process of integrating the strategic needs of national development, which often cannot be identified as distinct from the structures of power, knowledge and individuals.

  Karimov was genuinely terrified of the possible spread of extremism from Taliban-run Afghanistan. Now, in exchange for his support of the US-led war and access to a key air base, Washington warmly embraced its new friend. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made so many courtesy calls to Tashkent that I lost count. Press conference questions from journalists to Rumsfeld about the country’s abominable human rights record were sidestepped or ignored. The commander of the US Central Command, General Tommy Franks, was also a regular visitor. When journalists asked questions about the wisdom of jumping in bed with one of the most repressive regimes in the world, Franks simply smiled, gently stating that the United States was always supportive of human rights everywhere.

  The Karimov government’s record, according to numerous reports by human rights groups, included, among other things, instances where government opponents (usually those accused of radical Islamist tendencies, but not always) had been boiled alive, raped (women and men alike), or had been forced to watch as their relatives were raped or burned with lit cigarettes, amid other forms of sickly creative barbarity.

  Thus for a short time (the relationship would sour quickly and swing back and forth from good to bad to decent again depending on the circumstances) the leadership of Uzbekistan traded its status as a highly subsidized part of the Soviet Empire for a new “protector”—in the form of the United States—from Afghanistan and a possible Islamist insurgency. The US State Department continued to list a yearly litany of Uzbekistan’s appalling human rights abuses, but they were subsumed under the “strategic partnership” mantra, a concession to the need to fight the war in Afghanistan first and worry about grave human rights abuses later.

  SO YES, THE bombing had started, or so said the voice on the other end of the phone at the NPR foreign desk in Washington. NPR had correspondents in Pakistan, India, Tajikistan—almost every country bordering Afghanistan—and our marching orders were simple. The second the B-52s started dropping bombs on the Taliban, we were to get reaction from the various capitals. Islamabad, New Delhi, and even Tehran issued swift if oblique responses, often couched in diplomatic-speak, and expressing various degrees of “concern” and other vacuous political verbiage.

  But not Tashkent.

  I switched on the TV in my hotel room, first to CNN. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld was giving a rambling briefing about the start of the bombing campaign. Then the network turned to a slew of correspondents and analysts who rehashed every aspect of the story.

  Then I switched over to Uzbekistan’s state television, expecting some sort of official commentary on the nightly news. I hurriedly set up my recorder, hoping to get the official Uzbek take on the war breaking out just over its border. Instead, the broadcast concentrated on President Karimov’s activities for the day, such as a visit to a new factory, a story about Uzbek tennis players (Karimov’s personal obsession), some irrelevant economic statistics, and a very long
weather report.

  What? Nothing about the start of the bombing campaign? The start of the war in next-door Afghanistan?

  I set out for the streets to try to find something more cogent; perhaps people in the few open night bars in Tashkent would know something. I struck up a few worthless conversations, learned nothing relevant because everyone was in the dark about the war that had erupted over the border, and went back to the hotel and up to my room.

  It had taken the United States just three weeks to turn Uzbekistan into its biggest regional ally, with the Uzbeks agreeing to provide an air base outside the city of Karshi in the southern part of the country. The Pentagon tried to keep mum about this for some reason but had “unofficially” confirmed it as a fact. But even then, there was no admission on the part of the Uzbek authorities that the base was actually functioning. We understood the Uzbeks had legitimate security concerns about getting involved in a war with the Taliban, or with militants from the homegrown Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the IMU. But the entire denial game was becoming comical.

  Since there was no official “confirmation” that the United States had established a major military air base on Uzbek territory, just a hundred miles or so from the Afghan frontier, my local assistant Dima and I decided to see for ourselves what was going on.

  It was a long drive, mainly because of an inordinate amount of time spent at Uzbek checkpoints. By the time we reached the area near the “secret” air base, I had gone through about fifteen. At each, the questions were the same.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To the Khanabad airport,” I answered the first time. Later I got smarter and regularly lied, saying we was going to Samarkand to see its famous blue-tiled mosques. (We did actually have plans to pass through Samarkand, but only after we were at the worst-kept “secret” air base on the face of the planet.)