by Jim Rogers
Here was the result of bureaucracy and arrogance run amok. The Russians had thought they could use the water to turn the area into a cotton plantation. But they had treated the land the way they treated the oil fields we had passed: They stripped it and moved on. In the United States, if you were to go out and buy a hundred thousand square miles of farmland, and then go to the bank and get several billion dollars to cultivate it, sooner or later even a banker would say, “Whoa, this ain’t working. We’re not going to go on throwing money at this; it’ll collapse.” There would be some discipline. But not in Communism. You could ruin a resource by gutting it without anyone saying, “Halt.”
China had the same problem back in the sixties and seventies, when after centuries of self-sufficiency it became a net importer of cotton. In the late seventies the Chinese government finally admitted its way wasn’t working. It deregulated agriculture, turning it over to the peasants. It allowed farmers to lease land for a long time and, in some places, actually to buy it. Since direction from the top wasn’t working, and communes weren’t working, the people in the countryside were allowed to do whatever they wanted. Just as important, the government didn’t insist that farmers sell their corn and cotton to the state at some artificially low price, but allowed them to sell it for what they could get on the world market.
The farmers went wild. That’s one reason China is so capitalistic right now. Within five years these farmers began to export cotton. China also went from importing to being a major exporter of grain. When I rode through there in 1986 and 1988, I noticed that every field was planted and cultivated, every item reused, nothing wasted. The farmers didn’t strip the land; it was theirs and they had to plant it next year and the year after that. In Russia, however, the land was nobody’s, and it didn’t matter. Next year we’ll move on to the next acre, the thinking went, and we’ll get some more water, and who cares? If I’m a commissioner, I’ll make my grain quotas for ten years so I’ll be promoted to Moscow.
Of course, many, many of these agriculture commissars were lying. The local Party chief, Sharaf Rashidov, was famous for inflating the cotton harvest in the seventies and eighties, but he wasn’t the only one. None of the officials were producing their quotas, but they said they were. They were faking it, just lying—and there were no accountants, no checking, no bankers, no accountability. As long as the cotton factories got cotton, they didn’t know or care; it was none of their business.
This is one of the primary things wrong with Communism—no accountability, no responsibility, no incentive.
As we drove through town after town and these scenes were repeated, it dawned on me that the Soviet Union had fallen apart. The idea was startling—this was mid–1990, and the coup wouldn’t come for another year. The Soviet Union looked like nothing more than a Third World country with a big army and a space program. Nothing seemed to work here. Though much of what we saw was new, everything got old and seedy the minute it was built. Most of the hotels we stayed in, unlike the rare Intourist places for travelers, looked like bomb sites: busted elevators, broken plumbing, no soap, no towels, no toilet paper, not even toilet seats. Only for foreigners did the Soviets provide clean linens, but you always had to make your own bed, Comrade.
The other thing Tabitha and I noticed throughout the Central Asian Republics were the number of Muslims.
In America we tend to think Muslims are a people centered in the Middle East, not realizing that they run from Morocco to the Philippines, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. There are as many Muslims in the world as there are Christians. The fourth-largest country in the world is Indonesia, and it’s Muslim. There’s Pakistan, and then Bangladesh with more than 100 million people. India alone has something like 90 million Muslims, a population which, if spun off into an independent country, would be the eleventh largest in the world. In the USSR, 15 percent of the population was Muslim, and they weren’t happy being dominated by Russians.
With Tabitha still leading, we moved on through the Kara Kum Desert, which was huge. It stretched hundreds of miles from the Caspian Sea across Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan to Samarkand. I’d been in other deserts, in the American Southwest and across the Taklamakan desert in China, but this one was plainer, simpler, scrubbier. Here, too, we ran into farmland, which I rarely did in other deserts.
Tabitha’s bike had constant mechanical problems, which caused both of us to pay almost as much attention to it as to the countryside. I hoped this wouldn’t take too much out of her, but she was becoming apprehensive about completing the trip.
In this region gas cost forty kopecks per liter. A gallon was about fifteen cents at black market rates, thirty cents at bank rates.
Every now and then we’d cross the Kara Kum Canal—fifty yards wide, full of muddy water—part of the irrigation system the Russians had set up. In a capitalist country there wouldn’t have been all that dirt in the water, because it meant you were losing land, and no capitalist was going to let his land get eroded. We also ran into scores and scores of wild camels, as well as signs that warned BEWARE OF WILD CAMELS, just as in the States road signs warned of deer crossings.
Finally we reached Bukhara, where we were laid low and made wretched by food poisoning.
At the hospital the doctor asked if we had any medicine.
“No, that’s why we came here,” I told him.
“We don’t have any medicine,” he said. “Maybe you should call an ambulance.”
I felt dizzy, confused. “But I’m already here at the hospital,” I said. “Why would I need an ambulance?”
“Maybe they have some medicine,” he said.
Dumbfounded, we left and treated ourselves with the patent remedies we’d brought with us.
A day later, we were better, well but tired. Tabitha was enthusiastic about Bukhara. Recalling her academic studies, she explained that it had been one of Central Asia’s great early cities. Here there were lots of domes and minarets, the first signs of power and money we’d seen for a long time.
We went to the Soviet May Day parade, which involved long exhortations by political brass and a couple hours of paraders passing the reviewing stand. Red banners were everywhere, thousands and thousands of them. If the Soviets had put their banner facilities to work making cloth they could have exported clothes.
We drove on to Samarkand, one of the world’s most ancient cities and the oldest of Central Asia. Although outside its graceful old-world center Samarkand was no more than the usual colorless Soviet city burdened by polluted air and traffic congestion, the ruins at its core dated back to between 3000 B.C. and 4000 B.C. After conquest by Alexander the Great, the city became a meeting point of Western and Chinese cultures. It reached its greatest splendor as the capital of Tamerlane’s empire in the fourteenth century, when the Turkic conqueror also made it Central Asia’s cultural epicenter. In the eighteenth century the city fell into decline, but it was later brought back to life by the Trans-Caspian Railway.
Despite its Communist yoke, Samarkand seemed to be the most prosperous city we had come across since Baku, a thousand miles back. In its bustling market we found good produce, including fresh cloves with an intoxicating fragrance that delighted Tabitha. We learned that few travelers came to Samarkand.
The centerpiece of the city’s ancient splendor is the Registan, an ensemble of three madrasas, or Islamic schools. Majestic in their soaring lines and cobalt-blue mosaics, they made us gape at their beauty, for these magnificent schools are a sight as breathtaking as the Taj Mahal. There are a few things in the world that should never be photographed, because pictures cannot do them justice. The Taj Mahal and Samarkand are two that should be seen only in person.
Under the corner domes of the Ulug-bek Madrasa, completed in 1420, were lecture halls, and in its rear was a mosque. The Tiger Madrasa flouted the Islamic injunction against showing pictures of live animals by boldly displaying glorious tilework devoted to its namesake. Between these two was the Gold Madrasa, inside which lay an impr
essive broad courtyard.
Drinking in all this splendor, I remembered that as recently as a hundred years before, the Taj Mahal itself had just sat there, abandoned. Nobody went there, nobody cared. Some traveler stumbled upon it, started publicizing it, and now it’s one of the great wonders of the world. But a hundred years before you could have bought it for five hundred dollars, the whole damn thing.
Samarkand was like the Taj Mahal in that way, if not even more extraordinary. I believed somebody was going to make a fortune opening a Hilton here, because once informed, people would stream to this city the way they stream to the Taj Mahal. Dusty Samarkand is a delicacy just sitting out there waiting to be discovered, a comely back-country-farmer’s daughter not yet discovered by prosperous city suitors.
These resurgent Islamic schools around the square were part of a developing pattern. For decades there had been only one madrasa in all of the Soviet Union, and now they were opening everywhere. Every time we turned around in this part of the world, in Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, or Uzbekistan, a new school was opening up, an Islamic school. We discovered that forty mosques had opened in Uzbekistan alone in 1989, and at least one was being built in every town we passed through—Ashkhabad, Mary, Bukhara.
The culture was shifting, too. One night in Dzhambul we went out to a restaurant with a lot of outdoor tables. It didn’t have a wine list, and we asked the owner if we could bring our own. He shrugged; why not? We went back to the hotel and bought a bottle of wine and came back to our table. We put the wine on the table and had dinner. About three quarters through our meal the manager came out screaming, “Get that goddamn wine out of here. You can’t come in here and drink.”
Putting it right on the table was a big faux pas. We really were in a center of Islam, which forbids alcohol—and this in the belly of the Soviet Union. Muslim people, Muslim monuments, Muslim schools, Muslim customs.
Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, was more evidence of the vitality of these Muslim regions. A modern, glistening city, it had a major international airport and first-class hotels. Over the previous twenty years this regional capital had blossomed the way Los Angeles and Atlanta had in the United States, becoming the Soviet Union’s fourth largest city.
The closer we got to Alma-Ata and the Chinese border, the more signs of ethnic unrest we saw.
Central Asia is a huge melting pot of Turkic and Persian ethnic groups. Many are Muslims with strong ties to Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Xinjiang, the Chinese province. At this point the newcomers, the Russians, outnumbered the Muslims in some areas, but the Muslims were multiplying at a furious rate, and to me the handwriting was on the wall.
We tend not to understand that a large part of Western history over the past thirteen hundred or fourteen hundred years has been Muslims against Christians—the Crusades, the gates of Constantinople, the Spanish Inquisition. The Muslims were always trying to come into Europe through Austria, through Hungary, through Spain. The Christians beat them back several times. During the centuries of the Dark Ages in Europe the Muslims were much more dynamic than the Christians. They expanded geographically, spreading their culture and religion from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In fact, if the Europeans hadn’t come to the New World, hadn’t brought Christianity to it long before anybody ever gave a hoot about the western hemisphere, the number of Christians today probably wouldn’t come even close to the number of Muslims.
They’re not over yet, these global battles. It may not be Communism versus capitalism next time: One of the thrusts of the future could well be the revival of Islam versus Christianity. All the Muslim areas are resurgent, not so much because they want to be Islamic, but because they need a vehicle to help them get more. If people are prosperous, they tend not to fight. What they’re reaching out for is Islam, the only unifying thread they have, to help them achieve their own prosperity and identity.
As these Muslims move toward autonomy, clashes will occur, because the Muslims won’t be able to blame their problems on the Communists anymore—they’ve all been swept out; they’ll blame them on the Christians, for lack of a better scapegoat.
The Soviet Union, with its one hundred twenty-eight different ethnic, national, language, and religious groups, struck me as many civil wars waiting to happen. The economy would continue to collapse, and politicians always need somebody to blame. All these groups were going to be at each others’ throats, and the Union would keep fragmenting into smaller and smaller pieces. There might be, say, fifty states, a hundred states, before it was done.
The USSR was one of the largest empires the world has ever seen or ever will see, both in terms of area and peoples. It was put together by force of arms and still contains many discontented people. When a political entity of such vastness comes apart, the process continues for years, even decades. Our journalists and bureaucrats thought the USSR would take only a year or two to dismantle, that after a little transition, things would be okay. This isn’t the way history works. Witness the slow breakups of the Roman, Turkish, Ottoman, Chinese, Spanish, and British empires, and the aftershocks and reverberations that lingered for many decades after their demise.
Will these conflicts be dangerous to the United States, or to our trading partners in Western Europe? Do we need to continue to spend $150 billion to defend our allies against the threat from the former Soviet Union?
No. First, many of the previously much-feared Soviet weapons were junk from the start. We often saw broken-down missile launchers just sitting alongside the road. Vast numbers of trucks, tanks, and other mobile vehicles have been scavenged, and their parts have been used for myriad purposes in the private sector. Yes, there are still weapons, but large numbers of them do not work anymore.
Second, most of the remaining armaments will be used in the local civil and guerrilla wars that will be common in the former Soviet Union for years to come. The various warlords are going to have their hands full fending off encroachments and attacks from other warlords. There have been constant local wars in this area since before the days of Genghis Khan and nothing’s changed, but this warfare will have little or no effect on us unless some meddling politician feels he has to make something of it.
Some of the remaining weapons will be sold in the international armaments market. This is not a big change; there has been a vast global trade in arms for decades—nay, centuries.
For a while there will also be the deterrent effects of Saddam Hussein’s failure in Kuwait. None of these areas will provoke the combined interests of the developed world even if they had the military capacity—which they don’t and won’t.
The Soviet Union is actually headed toward a system that will resemble feudalism: the economic, political, and social system of medieval Europe after the breakup of the Roman Empire, in which there were innumerable and ever-changing fiefdoms.
V-E Day in Alma-Ata was still a major holiday, with parades, military displays, hundreds of banners, and lots of propaganda about World War II—all part of the effort to build up the image of the Communist Party and the state.
Lots of new buildings and heroic monuments, including of course the ubiquitous monument to the Soviet World War II dead. One sixth of the Russian population—about 25 million people—had died defending Mother Russia from Hitler. The battle for Stalingrad alone had cost the lives of a million Soviet troops. Awesome statistics. If the United States today were to suffer a similar loss, 45 million of us would perish defending our country. The war was the only thing the Communists had ever done right, and they never tired of celebrating it.
The Soviets had won the war, but they hadn’t done anything since. Communism would have collapsed sooner if it hadn’t been for the Second World War, and they knew it. As part of their ongoing propaganda movement, in every Soviet town stood a heroic monument to the war effort, often a single piece of granite twenty yards high and wide, along with an entire park of marble soldiers and workers battling fascists. Everywhere, an eternal flame. God knew what the Soviet
Union was spending on eternal flames. When a bride got married, she would go to the eternal flame and honor the war-dead with flowers. Sure, you expected such monuments in Washington or Moscow, capital cities, but out here every little town had one. They were about the only things that were maintained. If the Communists had spent all the money on roads that they spent on monuments to Lenin and the Second World War, they would have had a hell of a road system by now.
It reminded me of the War Between the States here at home. Until 1914 the largest travelers’ attraction in America was Grant’s Tomb. Aging soldiers and their relatives kept visiting it, reliving their youth, their nostalgia, their glory, even though the war had been over for fifty years.
Tabitha and I had seen a few old guys wearing medals in many places in the USSR, but on the big day itself everybody came out in full regalia. We came across several people who were falling-down drunk. We tried to help some, even called the police, who came because it was the exotic Americans who wanted them, but they would say, “Oh, hell, it’s just another drunk on V-E Day.”
And everywhere there were babushkas—sweeping, doing laundry, selling little plates of onions, tomatoes, and meat in the market. They were widows from the war, left by an entire generation of lost husbands.
By now we’d racked up six thousand miles and were making steady progress. From Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan we approached the Chinese border.
I had driven across China two years before, a year before Tiananmen Square, and I’d had a spectacularly delightful time. I wondered how much the country had changed. I had read the American press on the troubles, but I knew they wouldn’t get it right. Describing the surface, usually with little training in history or economics and none in geography, journalists rarely understand what goes on inside foreign countries. From my previous trips I had a grounding in recent Chinese history that was at variance with the ideas parroted endlessly by the Western press. I also knew the Chinese were now understandably nervous about foreign opinion in general and foreign visitors in particular, so I wasn’t sure how we’d be received.