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Of the Russian, - who can say?
When the night is gathering, all is grey.
Kipling The
ballad of the king’s jest
I cannot forecast to you the action of
Russia.
It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.
Winston Churchill 3rd
October 1939
Never under-estimate the Russian.
Menachem Ben Yami
(former
soldier in the Red Army Jewish Brigade)
The vast and populous land
of Russia, and its past empire, or the later Soviet Union, have always
carried a mystique and an attraction to most western observers. From the
wild snowy wastes of Siberia to the arid deserts of central Asia, and from
the Baltic and Arctic ports to Vladivostok on the Pacific, and Sebastopol
on the Black sea, the region and its peoples have been too extensive to
regard as a single entity. Ancient tales and records of fur-clad Tsars
and Tsarinas, of strange hypnotic characters like Rasputin, the ‘mad
monk’, of Emperors like Peter the Great, of the medieval cities of Moscow
and St. Petersburg were raw material for fairly tales and legends. The
Greek Orthodox faith with its bearded priests and onion-domed churches,
added to the mystery as did the impression of a land mostly gripped by the
severe weather of long winters.
Hakluyt’s Voyages
give us a glimpse of the Russia of the middle ages. Richard Hakluyt was a
clergyman and geographer in the time of Queen Elizabeth, Walter
Raleigh and
Francis Drake. He took a life-long interest in the voyages of early
explorers and captains of merchant ships, and collected the accounts now
published in the classic book that bears his name. Much of the record
consists of the actual voyage logs and reports by those intrepid sea
captains. Hakluyt untiringly assembled information and minutely detailed
sailing directions for various parts of the globe. Some of the
expeditions of English merchant ships to Russia border on the incredible.
Those relatively small sailing boats went north past Norway and east
through the Barents Sea to Archangel, and from there up-river to near
Moscow, then overland to the Volga river, then south to the Caspian Sea,
and across it to trade with eastern merchants. After all that, the whole
journey had to be repeated in reverse. In one of the accounts, a captain
who suffered all sorts of dangers, several times nearly losing his life
and all the cargo, says at the close of his report, in massive
under-statement, that he “hoped his employers appreciated all he
endured to ensure a profitable investment for them” !
Page from Hakluyt’s
“Principall Navigations”, 1589, his book of voyages of
exploration and early
trade routes by English ships.
The Russian people and
their satellite citizens have come through long periods of severe hardship
from the elements, from famines, from wars and from oppressive rulers, -
first the Tsars and Emperors, and later the Soviet dictators, - Lenin,
Stalin, Bulganin, Kruschev, Brehznev, and others. Kruschev I have a soft
spot for. He was different from the staid, sullen, doctrinaire leaders of
Russia’s communist governments, and actually began the process of de-Stalinisation
of the country. But no doubt he was guilty of much also.
From my youthful
fascination with aircraft, I was to develop a strong interest in space
flight and recall the news we received in October 1957 that the Russians
had successfully launched the world’s first artificial satellite,
“Sputnik 1”. The Daily Express headline next day said it all :
“Midnight - and London hears the first signal – Space Age is Here !”
On the 12th
April 1961 (on a fine day) we were fishing on Stormy Bank to the
west of the Orkney Islands. The cook served up lunch and when we went
below, my father announced that the Russians had put a man in space. I
asked with some concern how they were ever to bring him back to earth
again, but was assured that he had already returned safely. The spaceman
was Yuri Gagarin, and his craft was called Vostok 1. The spaceship
had made a single orbit of the earth and was brought down in Kazakhstan.
The event caused world-wide excitement, and some consternation in the USA
where President Kennedy committed substantial funds to the American space
flight programme. Sadly, Gagarin himself was to die in an
airplane crash in 1968 while training for the Soviet space station
programme.
Yuri Gagarin, first man in
space, April 1961
The Russians launched
Vostok 2 four months later, with Gherman Titov on board. This craft
orbited the earth 17 times. The following year Vostok’s 3 and 4
were launched. They remained in orbit for 3 and 4 days respectively.
1963 saw Vostok 5 and 6 launched, the latter containing the
world’s first woman astronaut (or cosmonaut), Valentina Tereshkova. The
Vostok programme was then terminated and replaced by the Voshkod
programme that involved a 3-man spacecraft.
The first American orbital
space flight was in February 1962 when John Glenn took his Friendship 7
Mercury capsule on a 3 orbit flight. The previous year there were two
sub-orbital flights of 15 minutes duration that reached a height of 116
miles above the earth. By May 1963 there were 3 more Mercury
flights, the longest lasting 34 hours. The Gemini 2-man capsule
programme began next and between March 1965 and November 1966 there were
ten Gemini flights, the longest one lasting nearly two weeks. The
Russian Soyuz space staion programme began in 1967 and lasted till
1977. The American Apollo programme started in 1968 and continued
till 1975. Six Apollo flights successfully landed men on the moon
(in 1969, 1971, and 1972).
Russian progress in
science and technology lay in contrast to the brutal control of the Soviet
satellite states, and was becoming evident in the suppression of all kinds
of dissent within Russia. The gulag prison camps that stretched all over
the continent from around Moscow to inside the Arctic circle, and east
across Siberia, were full of political prisoners and other dissidents
whose only crime was to express their sincere thoughts. There were also
thousands of innocent victims of the system who were given ten year hard
labour sentences on trumped up charges, simply to create fear or to
“encourage les autres”.
In 1956 Hungary attempted
to throw off the Soviet yoke. Growing resentment of the foreign control
erupted into a national uprising in October of that year. Within a few
days there were 2,000 Soviet tanks in Budapest and other cities. Hundreds
of citizens were killed, many imprisoned, and suspected leaders were
executed. Communist control was reestablished, though with a new
awareness that people’s aspirations could not be completely ignored.
Another East European
country tried to extricate itself from Soviet control in 1968 when a
liberalization programme was led by national communist leader Alexander
Dubcek. It was to be known as the “Prague spring”. But like the
Hungarian revolt, it also met with fierce opposition from Moscow, though
this time there was an attempt to downplay Russia’s role by the use of
Warsaw Pact forces to crush the liberalization movement and to restore the
“orthodox line” to Czech politics and government.
Map of Russia
I was to visit the Soviet
Union in 1965, participating in a United Nations FAO seminar and study
tour on fisheries education that took us to Moscow, Murmansk and
Kaliningrad. We were treated warmly by our Russian hosts, and shown
kindness and hospitality by all the people we encountered. Contrary to
western impressions there was no apparent attempt to restrict our
movements, and I was able to attend Sunday services at the large Moscow
Baptist church. Later in 1996, I spent some time in a former Soviet
State, then independent Turkmenistan, located just north of Iran and east
of the Caspian Sea.
Moscow and the Kremlin
In between those dates I
became an avid reader of the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, beginning
with “One day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, and on through
Matriona’s House, Cancer Ward, The First Circle, Lenin in Zurich, August
1914, and The Gulag Archipelago. I devoured all 3 volumes of
The Gulag, but have yet to meet another person who lasted the
distance. I found many who read Volume 1, a few who managed to read
Volume 2, but none who read all three. It is a pity as Volume three is
the best of the series. It is the one that paints the picture of the hope
and triumph of the human spirit against impossible odds. The most moving
chapter is “Truth under a tombstone; poetry under
a stone”.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn,
author of The Gulag Archipelago
|
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Just over 50 years ago, one cold night in a Soviet prison camp
outside of Moscow, a woman prisoner was being made to stand outside by
the barbed wire fence, for some minor infringement. Her pleas to be
allowed back into the barracks for shelter and rest were ignored by
the sullen guard. On the other side of the fence, in the men’s
section, a ‘zek’ or prisoner was sweeping up leaves and putting them
into a brazier fire. “Woman”, he said under his breath, “I swear to
you, by these leaves and this fire, that one day the whole world will
read about you!” The ‘zek’ was Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a former
artillery captain in the Red Army, who had been decorated for bravery,
but was imprisoned for criticizing Stalin in a letter to a friend in
1945.
During his 8 years in the Gulag prison camps, and 6 years in exile
in Kazakhstan, Solzhenitsyn collected thousands of pieces of evidence
from documents, oral testimonies, eyewitness accounts and other
material, on the brutal injustices of the Soviet regime. Much of the
material he put into verse since he could not be sure that written
notes would not be found. When he finally left prison, he was
thoroughly searched, but the guards could not see or remove the poetic
evidence in his mind. After his exile he settled in a lonely Siberian
village of Riazan where he worked as a teacher.
While there he began to document the evidence on paper, eventually
compiling the 3-volume Gulag Archipelago 1918 – 1956. One of the
first short stories he managed to get published in Moscow was
‘Matryona’s House’. During this time he also wrote ‘One day in the
Life of Ivan Denisovich’ which was published in 1962, surprisingly at
the instigation of Nikita Kruschev who had decided the time was ripe
to start telling the truth about Stalin. ‘The First Circle’ and
‘Cancer Ward’ followed in 1968, but Leonid Brezhnev’s government was
less sympathetic. They had him expelled from the writer’s union in
1969, and deported from the USSR in 1973. He had been awarded the
Nobel prize in literature in 1970, but was not able to collect it till
1974.
Some in the West have difficulty understanding Solzhenitsyn, - his
fierce moral outrage, and his skepticism towards aspects of western
liberalism and materialism. He is a Russian patriot in the tradition
of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Like them, he is a chronicler, a witness
whose experience is part of the way to approach truth and judge
events. Much of Western democracy he regards as spiritually
exhausted, and claims that the sufferings of the Russian people under
communism have taken them through a spiritual training far in advance
of Western experience.
Solzhenitsyn believes that mediocrity triumphs in the West under
the guise of democratic restraints. He also criticizes Russia’s
embrace of the worst aspects of capitalism, and calls his country back
to its spiritual roots. These are typified in the story of the
peasant woman Matryona whose life of toil had been full of
disappointments but who maintained her integrity through it all. In
the book he says that it was long after she died before he realized
who she really was. “We had lived side by side, and never understood
that she was that one righteous person without whom, as the proverb
says, no village can stand. Nor any city. Nor any country.”
For those who find
Solzhenitsyn a bit heavy, there is another Russian dissident who conveys a
similar message, but with a beautiful innocence of heart, and complete
lack of hatred towards the perpetrators of institutionalized cruelty. She
is Irina Ratushinskaya, a poet, who spent years in prison for simply
writing about truth and beauty. Her two books are “In the Beginning”,
and “Grey is the Colour of Hope”. [Grey
is the Colour of Hope, and In The Beginning, by Irina
Ratushinskaya, translated by Alyona Kojevnikov, and published in
1988 and 1990 by Hodder and Stoughton, Sceptre Books, Sevenoaks, Kent,
England.]
It never ceases to amaze me, that even in cruel
totalitarian regimes, with their extreme efforts to control information
and free thought, that there arise men and women who refuse to submit to
political idolatory, or to eat its meat. They rise like rare flowers
in a desert, or as Solzhenitsyn described them, like heads bobbing
up to the surface of a misty sea after a storm. We are yet to
hear from most of them, but I am sure there are many, living or
dead, who have borne witness to the truth despite brutal repression,
in China, North Korea, Burma
and
other dictator-ruled
states that through much of the last century have
sought to keep the people subject to their control, and ignorant or
misled
about the true situation. |
Irina Ratushinskaya,
Russian dissident poet
Ratushinskaya’a poetry
does not translate too well, but here are two extracts from her book,
Grey is the Colour of Hope, written in 1986:
“In the (convict railway) carriage, the fact
that I am a ‘political’ arouses much interest. I have to explain
everything from scratch yet again : about human rights, about my poetry,
then read my poetry – to the whole carriage. The guard is clearly
interested, too, for he makes no move to stop me. … I read on : what
price I and my poems if I can’t get through to this audience ? Too many
of us have been too far ‘removed from the people’ already. …
The guard (they’ve changed shifts again)
utters a word of caution : “Be quiet for a bit, the boss is about due
to come around.” And once his senior has been through, he prompts me,
“Go on, what else is there?” I do go on. Who needs this more than
you in uniforms, be they zek [ “Zek” is the Russian
term for a convict.] uniforms or
military ones? Not all of you are lifelong thieves and bandits.
Your lives have been disfigured, but your
souls are intact. How do your souls fare, hammered by the machinery of
lies and violence from early childhood ? How wonderful if they do not
succumb, but is there any chance of that ? I continue to hope that there
is. … … …
You must not under any circumstances allow
yourself to hate. Not because your tormentors have not earned it. But if
you allow hatred to take root, it will flourish and spread during your
years in the camps, driving out everything else, and ultimately corrode
and warp your soul. … If you can spot no spark of humanity in (the KGB
and Gulag guards), no matter how hard you try, remind yourself that
cockroaches are exterminated without hatred, rather with a feeling of
revulsion. And ‘they’ – armed, well-fed and belligerent – are like vermin
in our big house, and sooner or later we shall get rid of them and live in
cleanliness. Is it not pathetic that they have designs on our immortal
souls.
All this in sum brings about one marked change
in your physical appearance : by the end of your first year, you will
have what are known as ‘zek’s eyes’. The look in a zek’s eyes is
impossible to describe, but once encountered it is never forgotten. When
you emerge, your friends embracing you, will exclaim : “Your eyes !
Your eyes have changed !” And not one of your tormentors will be
able to bear your scrutiny. They will turn away from it like beaten
dogs.”
Unlike the works of the
dissidents, Russian novels can be heavy, and some of the music can be a
bit dull. But the Cossack dancing, - now that is something exciting. I
am sure that it must be the most exhausting form of group dance of any in
the world. And there is one musical instrument that can be excruciatingly
beautiful to listen to. I was in the Kremlin theatre with our group,
attending a variety show that had a bit of most kinds of Russian culture.
Towards the end a well-known local musician came on stage and sat down to
play his balalaika. The lights went out and a single beam focused on the
minstrel. He started to play, the strings vibrating so softly and at such
high pitch, you could scarcely hear, then the volume increased as he
developed the melody, and the music filled that large theatre to the
delight and appreciation of all present.
Russia in 1965 was still
living very much in an immediate post-war atmosphere. To me it resembled
Britain of the 1945 – 49 period. There was a lot of visible war damage
around still awaiting repair, and the people regarded Germany as the enemy
to be feared. The word ‘enemy’ was used to me by the interpreters only of
Germany and China, not interestingly then, of the USA. The post-war
atmosphere was also evident in their showing us a propaganda film of the
war, and taking us in Kaliningrad to a bunker where the last few SS
soldiers held out till they were all killed. It had been preserved
exactly as it was found.
Myself in Russia with an
international group, 1965
Murmansk
in the frozen north of Russia
On our return to Moscow
from Kaliningrad and Murmansk we were put into a different hotel which I
was told by those who knew, was standard practice for foreign visitors.
The first night our group was invited to a ballet performance. I declined
together with a Singapore colleague, and one of the interpreters agreed to
stay with us. There was an East German chemical exhibition being held near
the hotel.
As we wandered down the
road, we were accosted by a small but very drunk Russian man who demanded
to know if we were German. We had difficulty convincing him we were not
as he realized that we were definitely not Russian. He said that the
Germans had killed his father and he was going to take his revenge on
them. He had difficulty identifying the country of my Singaporean friend
but then associated him with the only Indo-chinese country he knew –
Vietnam! He threw his arms around my startled colleague and began to
apply full-blooded Russian kisses on his mouth. We pulled them apart and
ran up the road, ducking into a side street till our little drunk friend
passed, then we walked briskly back to the hotel. The group bus had just
arrived back from the ballet. The party came out in leisurely fashion and
stood in the fore court getting some fresh air. We ducked inside a
doorway as we saw our amorous acquaintance come staggering back. He went
up to the group, who were blissfully unaware of his intentions, and picked
out a dusky Pakistani officer who he must have thought was Vietnamese. As
we beat a hasty retreat inside, the last we saw was two strong colleagues
vainly trying to prise our friend off the astonished Pakistani who was
being kissed as never before in his life!
Our conversations with
interpreters and other Russians left me with some interesting
impressions. One interpreter, Vassily, had been trained as an artillery
officer during his national service. He told me, “David, I hope I
never have to use that skill”. Russians love to joke, and their
humour is very earthy. In some ways they resembled Aberdeenshire Scots to
me. They discussed politics and world affairs with surprising frankness
since the country was still under totalitarian rule. And they also
displayed an eager interest in religion and the Christian faith in
particular. Most of the interpreters at one time or another, came to my
room and asked if they could see my Bible. They said there were many
believers in Russia, including some in high position, naming a few, but
they were not people with whom I was familiar. One Sunday we were invited
to watch Moscow Dynamo versus Spartak in a local derby football match. I
asked if I could attend a church instead. This was readily permitted,
only they said I would have to find my own transport, and they could not
spare an interpreter. However, the hotel kindly gave me the address and
time of service, and I got a taxi to take me there. It was a moving
experience to be in the Moscow Baptist church with two thousand local
worshippers including a surprising number of young people. The church
provided me with an interpreter, and even had my greeting read out to the
congregation. The service continued for two hours, and I was given a lift
back to the hotel by two of the members.
Nikita Khrushchev had been
replaced as Soviet leader, a year before my Moscow visit, by Brezhnev and
Kosygin who ran the Soviet Union for more than a decade till Brezhnev was
replaced after his death by the aging Andropov, who was to be succeeded by
the aging Chernenko. Despite his histrionics at the U.N., and his often
bellicose statements, I warmed to the bluff, peasant-like Khrushchev who
at least exhibited some colour, in contrast to the dreary line of
post-Stalin leaders. He also was the first to publicly denounce Stalin
for his dreadful purges, and to permit a degree of press freedom that led
to the emergence of dissident writers like Solzhenitsyn who till then
could only publish under the samizdat underground informal press.
On taking power, Leonid Brezhnev soon stamped on the fragile shoots of
freedom that Kruschev had permitted.
I believe it was in late
1984, when my wife and I were walking through Edinburgh’s west end, that
we were surprised by an unusual event in Scotland, - a very large
motorcade of police cars and motor-cycles coming from the direction of the
airport. Two or three limousines drove past with the police escort, and
headed into Princes Street, but we were unable to recognize the
occupants. Later we discovered in a surprisingly brief news item, that
the visitor given such large police protection, was a Soviet politician by
the name of Mikhail Gorbachev. He of course went on to become the Soviet
leader, and was described by Mrs Thatcher as “a man with whom we can do
business”. He was to be the architect of the modernization and
opening up of the Soviet Union with his policies of glasnost and
perestroika. Surprisingly, Gorbachev did not appear to realize
himself what the policies would lead to, or how they would open the door
to forces he could not control. I personally was sure he committed
political suicide when following the attempted coup that involved his
abduction, he defended the Communist Party. His failure to read events
accurately, or to fully appreciate the public reaction, led to his fall
from power, and the rise of Boris Yeltsin. This brought an end to the
mighty Soviet Union, and ushered in the Russian Federation, leaving a
number of satellite states to pursue their own course.
Since then the Russian
Federation has withdrawn somewhat from the rather chaotic measure of
democracy and transparency brought in by Yeltsin’s government. A former
KGB chief, President Vladimir Putin, now maintains an iron grip on Russian
institutions and the Federation states, just I suppose, as in the USA, a
former CIA Director, George Bush senior, and now his son, George junior,
has led the United States back down an extreme right wing and imperialist
path. Putin’s absolute refusal to countenance any form of self-rule for
Chechnya has resulted in a blood bath both inside and beyond that state.
Russia’s political and economic decline may have bottomed out as the
Federation begins to discover the power it can wield from its massive gas
and oil reserves, its proximity to the Middle East and Central Asian
states, and the overhaul of its nuclear arsenals. But there are sinister
repeats of past brutality being seen in the ruthless and brazen murders of
brave news reporters and dissidents – even beyond Russia’s borders.
One of the worst and most
blatant acts of suppression of free speech was the murder of newspaper
reporter Anna Politkovskaya. This brave and determined investigative
journalist had exposed much of the brutality, torture and injustice in
Russian suppression of Chechnya. She was gunned down in her apartment
block in Moscow in October 2006. Together with the murder of Alexander
Litvinenko in London the following month, it was indicative of a callous
tough new attitude to dissent by the Kremlin authorities, reminiscent of
the worst periods of Soviet rule.
Anna Politkovskaya,
investigative journalist, murdered in October 2006
While welcoming the demise
of the Soviet Union and its record of cruelty, dictatorship and
mismanagement of the economy and the environment, some informed observers
believe that the emergence of the USA as the world’s sole super-power is
not a healthy situation. It has lead to the GW Bush government invading
foreign states imposing its will, and ignoring human rights and
international justice, while neglecting the less affluent of its own
people at home. Since the fall of the Soviet empire, the salaries of
corporate executives have risen ten times more than those of the lower
paid in the USA. There have been huge tax reductions for the most
wealthy, windfall profits for the big corporations, and a relative decline
in health entitlements, welfare allowances and social services for the
poor. There have also been a surprising number of financial scandals
involving the theft or illegal manipulation of billions of dollars of
investors and taxpayers money. However those factors are genuinely
related or not, it would appear that the fear of communism or socialism
reducing support or rationale for the capitalist system, seemed to place a
check on the excesses of the USA while the Soviet Union continued to be a
global super-power. Now that the threat is gone for the present, we see
re-emerging the behaviour of some of the worst or most extreme elements of
U.S. capitalism.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . .
At the southern border of
the former Soviet Union, and facing both Iran and Afghanistan to the
south, lies the state of Turkmenistan. It was made a member of the Soviet
Republics in 1925, and stayed within that orbit till it obtained its
independence in 1991 after the break-up of the USSR. I was to assist a
team that had been provided by the European Union Tacis programme to help
the former soviet satellite on the road to privatization. Two strong
impressions remain with me from that assignment. The first is the
character of the ancient Turkmeni people whom one could not help admiring,
and the other was the nature of the independent government, - centrist,
totalitarian, and built around a personality cult. My Turkmeni driver,
Kurban, a strong, energetic and reliable man, wept like a child when we
said goodbye at the airport on my final departure.
Ashgabat, capital of
Turkmenistan
The country is an enormous
desert, the Kara-kum (black sand) desert, stretching from the Caspian Sea
to the Amu Darya river. The population of just under 5 million is mainly
Turkmen, with perhaps 10% of Russians, and a sprinkling of Uzbeks and
others. The natural resources include petroleum, gas, sulfur and salt,
and its agriculture produce is mainly cotton and rice. Fish, both
kilka sprat and sturgeon, are produced from the Caspian Sea where the
country has a port, formerly Krasnovodsk, now Turkmenbashy after the
invented national name of President Saparmurat Niyazov. The capital city
Ashgabat, is a mixture of soviet and central Asian architecture, some of
it bizarre to western eyes. It was built on the site of a Russian
fortress dating from 1881. Ashgabat was destroyed by an earthquake in
October 1948. Over 120,000 of its inhabitants perished in that disaster.
The modern city was built with wider streets and buildings more spaced out
to minimise possible future damage from quakes.
The Kara-kum desert
Not far from the capital,
half-buried under desert sands, lie the remains of the once huge city and
fortress town of Nisa which was the capital of the Parthian empire from
around 300 BC till 300 AD. It may have been the site of an earlier
Persian fortress built 2,500 years ago by Darius the Great. Modern
Persia, Iran, lies only a few score of miles to the south. 90 kilometres
west and close to the border with Iran, at Bakharden, there is an
underground hot spring lake called Kov Ata inside a vast cavern. I found
it weird to be swimming down there in the warm sulfuric water, far below
the ground, together with my Turkmeni driver and Russian interpreter.
Following our subterranean bath, my Turkmeni driver took me and Ellena the
Russian interpreter, to a pleasant location by a stream in a mountain pass
where he lit a fire and grilled shish’ kebabs for our picnic meal.
Ruins of the ancient
fortress of Nisa
Only 3.5% of the land is
arable, and even that is cultivated only through water extracted from the
Amu Darya river, and led by canals to the cotton growing areas and small
farms. This is the source of huge environmental problems, not just for the
country, but for the whole region. Western industrialization and
agricultural mechanisation has created dust bowls in central America, and
areas of pollution around our cities and factories. But Soviet
industrialization and central control of agriculture has shown even less
concern for the planet’s life support system. The great Aral Sea located
between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan was once the fourth largest inland sea
in the world, covering over 25,000 square miles and supporting a large
fishing industry. It has now shrunk to less than a third of its size and
this reduction is bringing ill-health, unemployment, and food shortages to
the region. The salt content of the sea has doubled, and winds now carry
salt and sand from the dried-up areas, depositing it elsewhere within a
300 km radius, destroying pastures and extending deserts and toxicity.
Sturgeon from the Caspian
Sea
Even Turkmenistan which is
chiefly, but not solely to blame for the diversion of fresh water, is
suffering the consequences in salination of its surface water bodies,
residues of chemicals and pesticides in its soils, and pollution of the
huge Caspian Sea. In hindsight it is easy to see that cotton was a most
unsuitable crop for a region with so little fresh water; but it became a
major export earner, making Turkmenistan the tenth largest cotton
producer. So it is difficult for any administration to reverse the 40
year policy, to dismiss thousands of workers, and to substitute with other
environmentally friendly industries. Like most of the world’s
environmental problems, there are no short-term solutions, and few
governments are prepared to inflict the pain necessary to achieve the
long-term gains.
Turkmeni women in national dress in Ashgabat. (the picture had to be
taken surreptitiously as neither people nor police like foreigners to do
this).
The resilience of the
Turkmen people and the Russian residents, in struggling to make a life in
adverse circumstances is admirable. Their struggle is made all the more
difficult by a government that has retained most of the worst aspects of
Stalinist rule and controls. To take one example, the manager of the
processing plant and fishing fleet on the Caspian Sea, was working wonders
to pay his work force, keep the vessels operating and produce the canned
and frozen fish the country needed for food and exports. This was against
the background of restrictions placed upon the operation. No worker could
be dismissed, and the plant had to supply free fish to the army and the
hospitals. State supplied budgets were invariably inadequate. The
manager became an expert in robbing ‘Peter to pay Paul’. He bartered fuel
oil to pay Russian shipyards to overhaul his vessels, and bartered fish to
get metal plate to can the next lot of sprats. What was his thanks ? A
bureaucrat came down from the capital to inspect the books. He said that
the manager was not acting according to the rules and had him arrested and
imprisoned.
The Government was
committed on paper to de-nationalisation and privatization, but officials
appeared to have little concept of what that meant. We asked one senior
officer to explain how it would work out in practice. He said that the
State would retain 51% of the shares of any company. A private sector
firm buying into the industry would have to pay the State a high price for
the 49% of shares on offer. They would then be expected to invest heavily
to renovate the factory, though plants were in such bad shape, it would be
easier and cheaper to build new. The new managers would have to retain
all of the existing work force, and to continue to supply free food to the
army and the hospitals. On top of all that they would be expected to
produce a healthy profit for the government. Small wonder then that
privatization has proceeded at a snail’s pace in that land.
It is all so depressing,
and even more so when there are some possibilities to put the country on a
path to economic progress and environmental rehabilitation. The people
are hard working and willing to endure much deprivation to carve out a
future for their families in the rugged desert lands of central Asia.
During my stay I was privileged to share the hospitality of the Turkmen
people in their own homes. It was rather eastern in form. We sat on the
floor on Persian rugs, and helped ourselves to food from an array of local
produce and Turkmen cooking. On several occasions I was generously
entertained by my Turkmeni friends who made
shish’ kebabs on charcoal fires with mutton meat, onions, large peppers
and tomatoes, over which they poured vinegar as it cooked. On the Caspian
Coast my Russian hosts did the same with sturgeon meat.
In the nine
years since my time in Turkmenistan, the President for life continued to
reinforce his ruthless steely grip on power, practically isolating the
country from the rest of the world. His paranoid control of the country
extended beyond political dissent to social and religious activities.
Though he permitted the Russian Orthodox church and the small local Roman
Catholic church to continue to function (possibly because the Vatican was
seen as powerful politically), he suppressed other bodies. A Russian
baptist house church was bulldozed to the ground. The local population is
officially unaware even of events in neighbouring states, like the popular
uprising in Kyrgystan, that has deposed the former President there, and
his indifferent regime. Saparmurat Niyazov had become communist party
chief in 1985, and held the offices of President, Prime Minister, and
Commander in Chief till his death in late 2006. He had renamed himself ‘Turkmenbashi’,
meaning ‘father of all Turkmen’.
Now the whole
Caspian Sea region has acquired global strategic importance due to its
enormous reserves of natural gas and petroleum. These resources are
distributed in a region that is difficult to access and to export from due
to its remoteness and to the political tensions and differences of the
region’s states. Nevertheless, the USA, Europe, Russia and China, are
assiduously courting the governments of Azerbaijan, Kazakstan,
Turkmenistan, and others, to obtain supplies and to build pipelines that
would carry the oil overland and on to the Black Sea or the Persian Gulf.
One current proposal is for a pipeline from Turkmenistan to travel west
under the Caspian Sea. The gas reserves which exceed oil resources in the
region, are much more problematic to extract, store and transport.
My late
Icelandic friend Hilmar Kristjonsson who led our study tour visit to the
USSR, used to say that culturally the orient began on a longitude somewhat
to the west of Moscow, which I think sheds some light on aspects of
Russian life. It reflects a statement attributed to Napoleon,
“scratch a Russian, and you’ll find a Tartar underneath”.
Another
friend and colleague, Menachem Ben Yami, who fought with the Red Army
during the war, and spent some months in Moscow, used to say, “never
underestimate the Russian”. I often recall that statement as the vast
country goes through its current turmoil. The Russian people will endure,
they will persevere, and they will emerge from it all, hopefully, stronger
and progressing to a degree of peace and plenty.
During my
first visit to Soviet Russia, our group attended a series of receptions at
which there were the obligatory toasts. The first toast always was to
“Mir”, - to peace, and to friendship. It was the diplomatic norm, but
I often felt I detected genuine sincerity in the persons proposing the
toast. They were invariable prematurely aged from the efforts to re-build
the country after the war, with limited resources, and under a ruthless
regime, - but build it they did, and on meeting visitors from abroad, they
wished them only peace. |
