Peter Hitchens: Communism Fell, but Liberty Has Yet to Arrive in Central Asia
[Peter Hitchens is a columnist for the London Mail on Sunday and is the author of The Rage Against God.]
Beyond, behind, mysterious and unvisited, the great expanse of what was once Soviet Central Asia sits ignored somewhere near the end of the world. Its single largest and most important segment is the Republic of Kazakhstan, a giant slice of virtually indefensible real estate, crammed with valuable minerals and bursting with gas and oil, and with a population of just 16 million. I think we will be hearing more of it in times to come. But apart from the facetious movie “Borat,” which had no relation to reality, the name and fame of Kazakhstan have not reached Western ears. As for the rest of the so-called Stans, a group of new and dubious nations clustered around the lakes and mountains of this landlocked region, we wrongly think it safe to remain ignorant of them too—with the exceptions of Afghanistan and Pakistan....
It has been my good fortune to have explored this part of the world over many years. First I traveled there as a correspondent in Mikhail Gorbachev’s Moscow, when the USSR still survived as one of the last great 19th-century land empires. In those days Kazakhstan was a colony in which Moscow hid those things which embarrassed it, or which it simply wished to keep from Western eyes. There were the remnants of the Gulag among the coalmines of Karaganda, where as recently as the 1990s many of Stalin’s purge victims still lingered, sharing the streets and shops with their one-time jailers. The former prisoners’ original homes and families had long ago vanished, so they had nowhere else to go. There was the secret and walled space city of Leninsk, near the rocket ranges of Tyuratam, on the banks of the Syr Daria river. This odd and disturbing settlement contained a monument to an event which—for most of the city’s existence—had never officially happened. It recorded the fiery deaths in October 1960 of scores of technicians and of the commander in chief of the Strategic Rocket Forces, when an ICBM ignited on the launch pad in an incident wholly typical of Soviet incompetence. The catastrophe was a state secret until 1989.
More hidden still was the neat little town of Kurchatov, built under the firm direction of secret police chief Lavrenty Beria for Stalin’s H-bomb project. It was not on the maps of the time. It was never intended to be seen by people like me. Its streets were hung with sensible pro-deterrence propaganda, the opposite of the disarmament drivel promoted by Communist front organizations in the West. The climbing frames on the children’s playground were in the shape of rockets. The bookshop on Main Street displayed a Geiger counter in its window. The officers’ club served an agreeable Georgian red wine, believed by Soviet nuclear experts to be a prophylactic against radiation. On the nearby plains, scorched and poisoned by years of atmospheric testing, huge towers of solid concrete stood at alcoholic angles, knocked sideways by the unimaginable blast. In the dirt lay millions of shards of black glass, remnants of a great sheet of this material that had formed for hundreds of yards around, immediately after a nuclear fireball had melted the topsoil.
Other earthshaking events also happened in this region. It was in the former Kazakh capital Alma Ata—now renamed Almaty—that the first violent tremors to affect the post-Stalin USSR were felt in 1986, when a newly-appointed Mikhail Gorbachev was still feeling his way towards reform and treasuring the delusion that the Soviet empire could survive it. The murky story of the Zheltoksan riots has yet to be told properly, as the archives are still closed and will probably remain so. Ostensibly, the protests followed Gorbachev’s dismissal of an ethnic Kazakh as local party boss, who was replaced by a Moscow-approved ethnic Russian. But there are insistent suggestions that the almost unprecedented disorder helped bring an ambitious apparatchik named Nursultan Nazarbayev to power, after a decent interval. Comrade Nazarbayev, as he then was, has never since relaxed his grip on Kazakhstan, which became independent of Moscow soon after he took over and has since elected and re-elected him president under increasingly North Korean rules....
Read entire article at American Conservative
Beyond, behind, mysterious and unvisited, the great expanse of what was once Soviet Central Asia sits ignored somewhere near the end of the world. Its single largest and most important segment is the Republic of Kazakhstan, a giant slice of virtually indefensible real estate, crammed with valuable minerals and bursting with gas and oil, and with a population of just 16 million. I think we will be hearing more of it in times to come. But apart from the facetious movie “Borat,” which had no relation to reality, the name and fame of Kazakhstan have not reached Western ears. As for the rest of the so-called Stans, a group of new and dubious nations clustered around the lakes and mountains of this landlocked region, we wrongly think it safe to remain ignorant of them too—with the exceptions of Afghanistan and Pakistan....
It has been my good fortune to have explored this part of the world over many years. First I traveled there as a correspondent in Mikhail Gorbachev’s Moscow, when the USSR still survived as one of the last great 19th-century land empires. In those days Kazakhstan was a colony in which Moscow hid those things which embarrassed it, or which it simply wished to keep from Western eyes. There were the remnants of the Gulag among the coalmines of Karaganda, where as recently as the 1990s many of Stalin’s purge victims still lingered, sharing the streets and shops with their one-time jailers. The former prisoners’ original homes and families had long ago vanished, so they had nowhere else to go. There was the secret and walled space city of Leninsk, near the rocket ranges of Tyuratam, on the banks of the Syr Daria river. This odd and disturbing settlement contained a monument to an event which—for most of the city’s existence—had never officially happened. It recorded the fiery deaths in October 1960 of scores of technicians and of the commander in chief of the Strategic Rocket Forces, when an ICBM ignited on the launch pad in an incident wholly typical of Soviet incompetence. The catastrophe was a state secret until 1989.
More hidden still was the neat little town of Kurchatov, built under the firm direction of secret police chief Lavrenty Beria for Stalin’s H-bomb project. It was not on the maps of the time. It was never intended to be seen by people like me. Its streets were hung with sensible pro-deterrence propaganda, the opposite of the disarmament drivel promoted by Communist front organizations in the West. The climbing frames on the children’s playground were in the shape of rockets. The bookshop on Main Street displayed a Geiger counter in its window. The officers’ club served an agreeable Georgian red wine, believed by Soviet nuclear experts to be a prophylactic against radiation. On the nearby plains, scorched and poisoned by years of atmospheric testing, huge towers of solid concrete stood at alcoholic angles, knocked sideways by the unimaginable blast. In the dirt lay millions of shards of black glass, remnants of a great sheet of this material that had formed for hundreds of yards around, immediately after a nuclear fireball had melted the topsoil.
Other earthshaking events also happened in this region. It was in the former Kazakh capital Alma Ata—now renamed Almaty—that the first violent tremors to affect the post-Stalin USSR were felt in 1986, when a newly-appointed Mikhail Gorbachev was still feeling his way towards reform and treasuring the delusion that the Soviet empire could survive it. The murky story of the Zheltoksan riots has yet to be told properly, as the archives are still closed and will probably remain so. Ostensibly, the protests followed Gorbachev’s dismissal of an ethnic Kazakh as local party boss, who was replaced by a Moscow-approved ethnic Russian. But there are insistent suggestions that the almost unprecedented disorder helped bring an ambitious apparatchik named Nursultan Nazarbayev to power, after a decent interval. Comrade Nazarbayev, as he then was, has never since relaxed his grip on Kazakhstan, which became independent of Moscow soon after he took over and has since elected and re-elected him president under increasingly North Korean rules....