UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS, Homelands of some of the many peoples of the Soviet Union are indicated. Since peoples of any Soviet nationality are free to live anywhere in the USSR, and the Soviets are very mobile, large numbers of every nationality live and work far from their traditional homelands.
UNION (Full Ethnic) REPUBLICS
The nation for which each Soviet Socialist Republic is named is a majority within its borders except for the Kazakhs and Kirgiz, who are less than half the population in their native territories.
With one exception, the "other" peoples described are not minorities in the American sense. They arc majorities or in two cases pluralities in the territories in which they developed over the centuries. That explains the name of the country: Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or Soviet Union for short. It does not include the neighboring Communist-governed countries such as Poland.
In the USSR, the Russians are one-half the population. The others arc native to languages other than Russian. One-quarter of the entire population does not even claim to know Russian well, their census tells us. These are chiefly among peoples whose languages do not belong to the same family as Russian.
People of any nationality may and do live all over the country. When outside their ancestral territories, they do form minorities in our sense. The Russians themselves are minorities, sometimes large, sometimes very small (as in Armenia), outside the Russian Republic of the USSR.
This book provides separate chapters on the major and some smaller but particularly distinctive geographic nations of the Soviet Union. Other chapters treat related nations grouped to make it possible to relate to them from an American frame of reference. Because of the large Jewish population in the United States, there is a very substantial chapter on the Soviet Jews, although they are less than one percent of the people of the USSR. Not being a majority or plurality anywhere in that country, they are a true minority. There are many other true minorities — Germans, who outnumber the Jews; Poles, outnumbered by the Jews — but public interest in them does not justify separate treatment in a book designed to be read, hopefully studied, but not meant to be an encyclopedia on this subject.
My writing is grounded upon 10 visits to the USSR, beginning with a year of residence, 1931-32. 1 was United Press (UPI) Expert on Russia during World War II, have been a Hoover Institution Fellow at Stanford University, and have taught at U.C. Berkeley, San Francisco and San Jose State universities, and Golden Gate University Law School. My view of what North Americans want to know about the USSR is based largely on the questions put tome by listeners to my radio program on that country, now in its 27th year, students' queries in class, and readers' letters prompted by my earlier books about that country.
My travels, taking me to all 15 ethnic republics, most of them more than once, have included such means as a rented Soviet car in which I taped hitch-hikers of all ages.
When words have the exact flavor of the manner of a living human being, it is hard to disbelieve them even if they are contrary to everything one's education and the media have conditioned one to believe is true. But the moment they show signs of processing by an intermediary, one's prejudices take over and one can relax into the comforting thought that the intermediary is selling a bill of goods, even though he has simply cut and re-arranged for logical sequence and third-person English. Joyce and Faulkner discovered that a long time ago in the field of imaginative writing. The success of Studs Terkel's documentary books is that they present their tape transcripts as they were spoken.
As a consequence, I will make much use of that style. Today that is recognized as sound anthropology.[0. 1] I first started using tape recorders in the Soviet Union in 1966, and have done so on six visits. Some people there are mike-shy, exactly as here. Some will object to being taped but will then say, off mike, essentially the same things others are willing to say into it. Less educated individuals are often, not always, less articulate, which is why I have fewer workers and farmers to quote, relatively. But my intellectuals and professionals are almost always people born at the bottom of the social heap, who moved up thanks to affirmative action or simply the abolition of discrimination.
Although I had both students and travelers very much in mind in the writing, this book does not follow the normal rules for academic texts and certainly not for tourist guides. While a reader's ethnic background may cause him to be most interested in some particular chapter, the book is written to be read through.
My space allocation per country is not in proportion to population, but to Western interest arising out of ethnic backgrounds, and to the richness of my own eyewitness observations or those of highly qualified and vivid authors who knew the situation before my time. 1 have had colorful contact with writers in the Soviet East, South, and West, but social attitudes proved to be much the same, so to reproduce what was said in each case would be boring. The most gripping material about the life of the peasantry in the early Soviet years is from Belorussia. It applies equally to the Ukraine and Russia proper, except for nuances that are purely technical to anyone who is not a specialist on one of those nationalities. The differences among the Soviet countries will appear readily enough. The life of a nomad was obviously not that of a farming peasant. A people that lived in dispersion all over the world, like the Armenians, views matters differently than one very few of whose members have ever emigrated. Peoples with long histories of organized government differ in psychology from those whose first geographic ethnic administrations arose only as a result of Soviet policy.
In this as in all my writings, I am deeply indebted to my wife, Tanya, for research, criticism, and first editing. She too knows Russian and has been virtually all over the Soviet Union, repeatedly. The most detailed criticisms by others are those of Laura X (as she is publicly known), my son David, Drs. Shura and Sidney Saul, and Dr. Stephen Dunn. Particular thanks are due to Jon "Paka" Meachum, who made meticulous comments under the difficult circumstances of a prisoner sharing a cell in a state penitentiary. My colleague at radio station KPFA, Michael Butler, and Prof. Lynn Turgeon, also read an early version of the entire manuscript, and offered comments. An American anthropology graduate of Moscow University, Paula Garb, my daughter Phyllis, and my friends George David, Daisy Goodman, Louis Laub, and Sol Zeltzer, read and offered opinions, some at great length, on individual chapters. All those listed will have to forgive me where I did not accept sound advice for reasons of space, time, or feeling that I had simply done all that I had the energy to do. All are free to offer criticism of the finished product, in print if they desire.
Notes
↑William Mandel among others, "Comment on Ivan Polunin, 'Visual and Sound Recording Apparatus in Ethnographic FieldworkV Current Anthropology, XI, No. 1 (1970). pp. 18-21.
Overview
"How will I recognize you?" I asked Dr. Lily Golden Hanga over the phone. We were arranging to meet in the lobby of my Moscow hotel. A peal of contralto laughter accompanied her answer, in English with a heavy Russian accent. "I'm big and black and fat!"
She turned out to be regal in bearing, large, and most definitely black.[footnote 1. 1][1. 1] A historian, whose doctoral studies focused on the history of African music, she is now a researcher at the Africa Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. She was writing a paper on Black nationalism worldwide when we met. Since then she has assisted an isolated village of a Soviet sub-Arctic ethnic minority to get the community center promised them but delayed by bureaucratic neglect.
Her name is not Russian, obviously. The Golden is from her father, who in 1931 organized a group of sixteen Black families — the men were all graduates of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama — to move to the Soviet Union and teach modern farming to, in her words, the "people of color" in Uzbekistan near Iran, in the Asian part of the country. That is where she was born and grew up. "Some Uzbeks are much blacker than I am." Her own daughter, a Moscow University graduate, is half African.
Actually, there are very few persons of African descent in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics — old Russia didn't need to import slaves, since the landowning nobility kept their own fellow Russians in a very slavery-like condition called serfdom. However, over 30,000,000 people (nearly an eighth) don't look "white," but more like Mexicans of Indian heritage or like Orientals or a mixture of both. One such is Tolomush Okeev, Kirgiz film director born in a Soviet village on the Chinese frontier. The story of his assistant, a Kirgiz woman, contains elements of the Soviet "minorities" story in almost classical form. ("Minorities" is placed in quotes, as the Kirgiz are a plurality and, with related Asian people, a majority in the Kirgiz Republic.)
"My name is Rakhia. 1 was born in the family of the very first to be a Communist." — the word is used in the USSR only to describe actual members of the party. "My father was 19 when they gave him his membership card in 1927."
Like most Kirgiz, her parents were nomadic peasants, but "In 1925, they joined a collective farm. My father was the chairman of the farm, then head of the county committee of the Communist Party. Now he's retired, with a personal pension." That is a high honor, something like the result of a private bill in the U.S. Congress.
"I too am one of the 'children of wartime.' I was born in 1942. I saw my father very infrequently because he was always away at work, but my mother was always there by my side. Among us Kirgiz, all children are treasured dearly by their parents, whether there is one in the family or 15.
"And so that's how I grew up, held very dear, the only daughter in the family, and mama always said, 4Be whatever you want, but the most important thing is to respect people. If a person comes into your house, do not ask him questions. Give him water, give him bread. Then ask him, Have you come a long way? From where? If he's from far away, give him your last horse'."
Immediately after graduation from high school, she went to work at the film studio, and later graduated from the USSR Institute of Cinematography in Moscow. "So that's been my work. I'm very happy in it. My husband, Arshan, assists me a great deal. Sometimes I'm away filming for three months at a stretch. We have two little boys, and he takes care of them. In my work, there are times when one works day and night, paying no attention to time. So I'm fortunate that he gives me support, and understands me.
"I regret only that my children did not see how my parents lived, how they were never lazy, and never begrudged anything to anybody. Somebody wanted tea, they always found time for that. They were accustomed to working all the time. I grew up that way; I don't know how to sit around not doing anything. I would like our children's generation to grow up with a love for work. That is our happiness."
At least one film on which she has worked is shown on the art and college circuit in the United States — The Ferocious One, sometimes titled Wolf Kokerek, a moving story of human relations.
Most people don't become anthropologists or movie directors. Nor does everyone have understanding parents who are eager for change. For that very reason the values that seem to have reached the younger generation in the most remote places are particularly impressive. In a park in Dushanbe, capital of Soviet Tajikistan, near the Afghan border, I talked with a young man of 23 who was born not very far away in one of the most desolate and isolated pieces of the Soviet Union, in mountainous country where a peak rises to 25,000 feet. He is a Tajik, some of whom are the dark brown color of most of the peoples of India. There are twice as many Tajiks in Afghanistan as in the USSR.[1. 2]
In the 1960s, he had said to his father: "I'm going to school. I want to be a real person when I grow up, and not a slave in your hands." My father said: 'What do you mean, you don't want to be here and be in my hands? I want it.' But I said to him: 'Now we have Soviet laws. I want to be a person. I love my whole people, no matter what nationality. There's more. I want to be an educated person, and not a worker on a collective farm or a state farm.' Well, he cursed me and I ran away from home again. I graduated from high school. I went to a trade school. I studied there for a year and became an electrician." There could be no thought of not finding work, as guaranteed full employment is built into the system. This one fact has done more to reduce ethnic prejudice than all other measures combined. No one need protect his job by convincing himself that he has more right to it than someone of different appearance or language or religion or gender.
Soviet Turkmenia is the southernmost Soviet republic. On a collective farm there, only 25 miles north of Iran, there is a gallery of paintings commissioned by the farmers to record their lives, past and present. My guide explained that the people on the farm had started at the level of Iran today.
"You see, this one has experienced every hardship, and those people's child is dying, and yet they have to pack up and leave the area," because the landlord wanted them no longer. "Over there you see a peasant: he ploughed the land himself, sowed it himself, threshed it himself, and what's left for him? The ruling khan took his share, the mullah [clergyman] took his, others took theirs, and he's left with a few sacks. That's his share. But this painting is already the period of collectivization, farming getting on its feet. The next one is simply a horse-racing scene, something very popular among Turkmen."
A second large room is lined with portraits. The subjects here do not look defeated, ragged, hungry. An elderly local farmer explained, "These are the people who founded our collective farm, that solid core. This man is one of our brigade leaders— he still is." Waving his arm at the whole gallery and beyond to the farm outside, he went on: "They made all this, starting in 1943. I started working on this farm in 1943. I ploughed a lot of land side by side with them, with horses, with camels.[footnote 1. 2]
"They all worked out in the fields. I worked with them every day. That one over there was an active worker, our first brigade leader. He died only three years ago, still young."
That portrait was distinctly larger than the others, a special distinction because, "He was the first to use water from the Kara-Kum Canal." That canal is the only one on earth with dimensions comparable to California's Central Valley Project: for 250 miles, it is wide and deep enough to be used for barge transportation through the desert it irrigates. But because its trace chemicals are different from those of well water, the pioneer in using it for cotton could have been taking a big risk.
The Kara-Kum Canal and California's Central Valley Project canal are the only human works astronauts can see with the naked eye.
One portrait is of a woman. The farmer explained. "When our collective farm was established, she was our first village mayor. She died not long ago. These paintings were done by very prominent artists," he said, pointing to one by Izzat Klychev, a furkmenian. and "People's Painter of the USSR, an artist very well known throughout the entire Soviet Union." It depicted a local wedding "in accordance with our customs."
So a country where painting was forbidden by religion (Turkmenia is Islamic by heritage) now has painters of USSR-wide prominence, and people whose fathers were medieval sharecroppers not only enjoy art but encourage it financially. When we left the village, after dark, it was obvious that there was electricity in every home. (Iran, just over the nearby mountains, produces only a fraction as much power per head of population and the half-million Turkmenians [Turcomans] there, still semi-nomads, are demanding the simplest elements of self-government.)
In 1977, in Moldavia, the European Soviet republic bordering Romania, I spoke with a woman of the Gagauz people, who are about as numerous as Indians in Arizona. She said, "Now, as a people that has only recently acquired a written language," — they adopted an alphabet, based on the Russian, for the first time in 1957 — "we are developing our culture."
"There are some 125,000 Gagauz in Moldavia; about 200,000 in the Soviet Union altogether. The bulk of the Gagauz villages are ethnically pure, though there is now some mixture, due to professional people from the outside who help raise the level of our people's culture, teachers and physicians. But we already have our own people in all the professions that serve a population at a modern level of development.
"We have artists, we have composers, we have our own poets and writers: those who write on the basis of folk themes, legends and those who collect our folklore. Among scholars we have linguists, historians. The anthropology of the Gagauz is being studied by Stepan Karoglu and me. He is researching the intellectual culture of the Gagauz, and I the material culture. Each of us has already written a book — I took my PhD this year. Then in Moscow we have Comrade Guboglo."
I admit I was surprised to learn Guboglo is a Gagauz; I had translated articles of his into English for the American journal, Soviet Anthropology and Archeology. So one of the Soviet Union's leading anthropologists, a man who theorizes on matters far beyond the bounds of his own nationality, is a member of a people who did not even have an alphabet little more than 20 years ago.
That interview was near the Black Sea, at the southernmost end of the European Soviet republics. At the northwestern end, on the Baltic Sea across from Sweden, lies Lithuania, the only Roman Catholic country in the USSR. In the Department of Philosophy, Law and Sociology of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, 1 asked about the origins of the scholars I was taping. The department head, Jonas Macevicius, said he was of peasant birth. Another OVERVIEW 19 answered: "Peasant," a third: "workingclass." Dr. Macevicius said: "A majority are from the peasantry. We all started in life by taking cows to pasture. Then we gained the opportunity to study," in Soviet times, which for Lithuania began in 1940. He spoke of his own life before that:
"My family had 14 acres. Naturally it was impossible for us all to go to school. To begin with, you had to pay and then you needed what to live on. Only rare individuals broke through this barrier. True, I personally did study. First I graduated the six-year elementary school, and then from a technical high school. But those were under terrible conditions of semi-starvation, when I had to ration myself. Hanging on was terrible, terrible, awful. But the mass of the people, the mass just didn't make it through school."
Many did not make it even to school. Macevicius had twelve brothers and sisters. "Most of them died. The doctor wasn't called. Only folk remedies. Those who got past the illnesses survived, and those who didn't died. To call a doctor cost five leetu. That was a lot — on five leetu I lived seven days, sometimes more."
Great numbers of American Jews whose parents or grandparents emigrated from the Russian Empire before the Revolution have their roots in Lithuania. Its capital, Vilnius, was a traditional focus of European Jewish culture (they called it Vilno or Wilna). During the Nazi occupation in World War II, nearly all the Jews there were exterminated. Only two categories escaped: those who accepted the Soviet offer of priority evacuation eastward (many refused because they could not believe the Germans would really murder everybody), and those who fought as guerrillas. The latter were led by Henrikas Zimanas, today a national hero of Lithuania. This one-time teacher of Yiddish is listed four times in the history of Lithuania published by its Academy of Sciences in 1978.[1. 3]
I sought him out for an interview largely because in an article in the best Soviet newspaper of nationwide circulation, he reminded his millions of readers that "The Hitlerites . . . sought to exterminate the Jews and the overwhelming majority of them were in fact wiped out" and explained that of 6,000,000 Jews in the United States, only 200,000 belong to Zionist organizations,[1. 4] a distinction not known to the general public in the USSR or here.
When we met I asked him why 40 percent of the 25,000 Lithuanian Jews who had survived Hitler had emigrated to Israel or the U.S. in the 1970s, while only two percent of those living in pre-war Soviet territory had done so. (Lithuania has been Soviet only since 1944.)
He replied, "In Lithuania the Jewish population consisted of big capitalists, comprising a small percentage; middle-level businesspeople, and professionals — there was virtually no Jewish peasantry. I come from the Jewish peasantry." On a map he indicated that part of the country which once belonged to Prussia. "Here the Code Napoleon applied, and Jews had the right to own land. My grandfather, my great-grandfather, my father all worked the land. In that country there was some number of Jewish peasants, and landlords as well.
"Most of the towns were entirely Jewish. The Jews lived in a milieu of their own. Their principal occupation was trade — the Jewish proletariat was very small. The principal cause [of emigration] was not ethnicity but class. They know that in the capitalist world there are those on top, and those on the bottom. And they hoped to be among those on top. Simply, as between capitalism and socialism, they chose capitalism. And we did not succeed in re-educating them in the years available to us.
"During the war years, I was First Secretary ftop leader] of the underground Southern Regional Committee of the Communist Party of Lithuania, which included both Vilnius and Kaunas IKovno]. I did everything possible to get the Jews out of the ghetto into the woods, into the guerrilla struggle. The head of the Vilnius ghetto was a man named Genz, who knew me well; in Kaunas it was Elkus, a physician. He too knew me well — he couldn't help but know me; he had been in my home a couple of times. I wrote him a letter, in Yiddish, saying we would get the young people out, we would get the old people out — we would get everybody out. If there were little children and women unable to bear arms, we would place them in villages.
"They responded: maybe that would be good, but we can't take the chance. You will expose us all, and they will kill us. And they held to what is called in Hebrew Havlaga, restraint. We said: 'Escape. We will take every caution.' And the fact is that we got hundreds out, despite the fact that they were blocking our activity. The Zionists thus helped the Nazis in the extermination of the Jews. Objectively. It was we who organized the escapes from the Ninth Fort . . . "[footnote 1. 3]
Zimanas' wartime headquarters is now a national monument; the dugouts and underground field hospital have been rebuilt! When I visited it, alone, I saw a busload of schoolchildren, brought A bastion in the old city wall. there as part of their civics course. Nearby is the ethnically Lithuanian village of Priciupis, which the Nazis had burned down with all its inhabitants, alive, because it had sheltered Jews at Zimanas' request. There, because the Lithuanians are Catholic, the Soviet government has erected three enormous crosses in traditional local design, as a monument. There is also a memorial stained -glass window in the secular community center.
It was not only in Lithuania that peasants saved Jews. My mother came from near Lvov (Lemberg) in the western Ukraine. On a visit in the '70s a retired organizer of theater for children told me of his time in World War II.
"I was not drafted but, having been under the [Nazi] occupation for a period, I escaped and joined up, in view of what they had done to my Ukrainian people, and personally to me." He was reluctant to explain his personal circumstances, saying only "Well, I had had to hide." The woman seated next to him, black-haired and darker in complexion than most Ukrainians, joined me in urging him to explain, but he added only; "There were reasons." Pressed, he conceded, he had to hide "Mainly because I had married a Jew. I changed my residence 16 times, and wound up with a whole briefcase full of I.D.s."
The woman who had asked him to explain was his wife, and she took up the story. "It was Ukrainians who hid me during the war. They were so wonderful about it, I was never given to feel that I was benefiting from an act of kindness." She recalled the day when "A visitor from Lvov came to the village and she said: 'Oh, that Jewess is here. Now, what will happen! MmV . Her cousin ran to me, and he said: They're saying you're a Jew,' and he laughed. I said: 'This is no laughing matter. I have to get out of here.' I asked him not to tell his mother, because she was very attached to me. 'She is deeply religious, and this will be a shock to her.' He said: 'I see that you don't know my mother,' and ran off. In minutes, the old woman came toward me — he had told her — and she picked up my little baby, who was in his carriage, and hugged him: 'My dear one, my little dove, you aren't going anywhere! You have to live!' I said: 'And do you know what that threatens you with? It threatens you with death. Better that I should go away?' She: 'No, you may live here, and this little angel too'."
Ukrainian is a very emotional language. Recalling the conversation, the Jewish woman had switched totally to Ukrainian, but she went on in Russian for my sake, "The mother said, 'You aren't going anyplace. Either we'll all die or we will all survive. Things cannot be like this!' They had been good to me before that, but after that they were even better.
"It was Ukrainians who saved me. Of course it would not be true were I to say that all were people as good as this. Those who ran away to your country, their hands were deep in blood. But the majority — we were always on friendly terms."
Questioned, she repeated 'The majority." And went on, "Our family is international. Our son is a Ukrainian on his father's side. His wife is a Tartar. The children converse in more than one language, each as it wishes. And when that began to happen, no one was surprised."
I have heard Ukrainians speak with respect of Jews as much as the other way around. A journalist told me of writing articles which resulted in a street being named for a Jew — a man who fought in the International Brigade for the Spanish Republic and then returned and died fighting for his native Ukraine.
I have been at pains to describe the Lvov-centered region as the "west Ukraine." With some 10,000,000 people, it has a distinct history, having been under Polish rule between World Wars I and 11. In that time, three Ukrainian-language academic high schools igimnazia) were closed down in a policy of Poionization; even small village schools were converted to Polish or — where this would have prevented all understanding — to bilingual education, and churches were required to conduct services in Polish. The landlords had been Polish from time immemorial. This period is not forgotten: when I visited in 1982 I found great bitterness against the Solidarity movement in Poland because one of its demands was that the west Ukraine be restored to Polish rule.
As these brief accounts show, language, not color, is the greatest delineator in the Soviet Union. As in the U.S., most of the people are "white." Yet there are marked differences. In the capital of Lithuania, for example, parents can choose among public schools taught either in Lithuanian or Russian or Polish. Children who study in Lithuanian are taught Russian as a second language, or vice versa.
Children's schools offer similar language choices in the cities of Armenia, the Ukraine, and elsewhere, and often in the countryside as well. In Daghestan, a tumbled Soviet mountain fastness of only a million and a half people, northwest of Iran, school is presently taught in nine languages.[1. 5] This recognition that each people has the right to education in its own language — USSR-wide, instruction is in 52 distinct tongues[1. 6] — has eliminated defensiveness from the national psychology of the various groups, and made them willing, even eager, to learn Russian as the language giving them mobility in careers outside their native territory.
Five different major alphabets are in use: Latin like ours, Cyrillic like the Russians (the most widespread, naturally), Hebrew (for the Yiddish magazine, newspaper, and over 100 books published in that language since 1968 alone), Armenian, and Georgian. In addition, Korean is used for the 400,000 people of that nationality, while Islamic religious bodies publish in Arabic.
Although race does not play as important a role as it does in the United States, physical differences among European Soviet peoples in complexion, eye and hair color, size and shape of features, and mannerisms, are sufficient to enable them usually to spot each other by nationality without saying a word — or at least so they think.[1. 7]
As in most countries, religion goes with nationality. The vast majority of Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians and Moldavians are of Orthodox Christian background. Religious Estonians are Lutherans; Lithuanians, Catholic; Latvians (Letts), both; while 35,000,000 people are of Moslem [Muslim] heritage, mostly in Central Asia and the Caucasus.[1. 8] Religious Jews practice Judaism — there were 92 synagogues in 1978.[1. 9] There are lamaist Buddhists of Kalmyk nationality in the European part of the country, and in Soviet Asia that is the traditional religion among the Buriats and Tuvans. Religious Koreans divide among animists, Confucians and Christians. Armenians and Georgians have distinct Christian denominations — even atheistic Armenians are proud that, at Echmiadzin, they have the oldest Christian church in the world, functioning since 303 A.D.
The contribution of religion to ethnic cultures is fully recognized. The government puts enormous sums into the restoration and maintenance of architecturally significant churches and mosques. In the "USSR" volume of the official Large Soviet Encyclopedia [Great Soviet Encyclopedia], plates titled "Sculpture of the Peoples of the USSR" include a St. George from an Orthodox church and a "Madonna and Child" from a Catholic church. The level of religious belief varies tremendously, from probably 50 percent among the Moslem Central Asians and Catholic Lithuanians to 30 percent among Armenians, 10 percent among Latvians, and less than 5 percent among Jews who, world-wide, are generally the least religious ethnic element in any country. This relates to the fact that they are urban, and urban people everywhere are less religious than rural. There are probably well over 20,000,000 Orthodox Christian believers — an impressive number, though it probably represents not much more than 10 percent of those nationalities that once had this as their religious heritage.
At that dinner in Kirgizia, where I spoke with Rakhia, one man mentioned that he was a Moslem believer. I asked him to elaborate in view of the fact that there are few religious Moslems among Soviet intellectuals. He did:
"My name is Doron-bek, surname Sadyrbaiev. I was born and raised in the family of a Party official, an unshakeable Bolshevik who, in the years of the Revolution and then in the 1930s here in our Kirgizia suffered a great deal [in Stalin's purge, he explained later], but remained a Communist to the end of his days, and even died at his post, at work.
"I was educated in the Soviet schools, traveled to Leningrad [3,000 miles away], entered the Leningrad Institute of Theater and Cinematography, majored in directing. Graduated and went to work. I don't belong to any organizations, to any party, and I have neither sympathy nor hostility toward any. The motto of my life, my striving, my goal, is to be a human" being, simply a human being. I love — I am terribly in love — with art. I work at the Kirgiz TV Film Studios, where I write the scripts of my own films. 1 also write a lot of humor: stories published both in Russian and Kirgiz. locally and USSR-wide. I cast ridicule on no one; I laugh only at myself, at my own shortcomings, of which I have more than enough."
He did not look at all introspective: square-faced and healthy, 37 years old, with a Groucho Marx moustache and a broad and open smile, he wore the medal of an Honored Worker of Culture, "the highest recognition in our structure."
Rakhia stands in the corner, Arshan next to her. Doron-bek stands far left; Bek-Sultan stands between them. His wife sits to his left. Chokmorov picks his ear, museum director far right. Okeev's actress mother sits left, Mrs. Mandel center.
Still, I was curious as to why he considered himself a Moslem.
"I don't do those prayers five times a day. I don't pray either by myself or in a mosque, but, just as I write by myself, so I believe by myself, and in the Moslem religion there are matters, concepts with which I do not agree. There are a great many of its propositions that I edit in my own way, to suit me."
A playwright broke in: "In that respect I agree with him. To a certain degree we're all Moslems because, as you understand, our fathers, mothers, were adherents of that religion. This doesn't mean that there's any fanaticism involved. Some of its provisions in the realm of ethics are necessary, necessities."
Doron-bek resumed:
"There are very many Moslems — our Kirgiz, Kazakhs, and Uzbeks — who, while not understanding the Arabic language, the routine call to prayers, the Koran, nevertheless perform rites. I know all the prayers, although only in translation. I have read the fanatical things there — there's nothing worth adopting in that. But I found fragments of love poems, of writings on education, facts from history. I understand a little Arabic. [The playwright interjected: "We took Arabic in school."] So if the occasion arises, for the sake of paying respect to custom, I am capable of reciting a number of passages from the Koran without difficulty. Although I got 'A' grades in philosophy [meaning dialectical materialism] and in the history of Marxism-Leninism, that doesn't prevent me from adhering to Islam, in which, however. 1 select only certain progressive aspects."
At different times, I have talked to the mullah of a historic rural mosque, to the second-ranking Islamic religious figure in Soviet Central Asia, and to the head of its seminary. All disagreed totally with Doron-bek's attitude. They are fundamentalists, as are the leaders of all organized religions in the USSR. But I strongly suspect that these attitudes of first-generation Kirgiz intellectuals — like our Unitarians, or Quakers, or the Reformed Judaism or Roman Catholic beliefs that have developed in the past 20 years — are quite widespread among people of all religious backgrounds in the Soviet Union.
Kazakh historian whose father was illiterate; the author; PhD obstetrician-gynecologist; their musician daughter.
The United States has immigrants and dissidents of most of the Soviet nationalities, religious and racial groups, and all have publications which express various complaints about the ethnic situation in the USSR. But none claim that there is anything anywhere in the Soviet Union resembling the warfare in Northern Ireland (with its terrorist extension into England), the tribal slaughter m several African countries, the holocaust in Lebanon between Christian and Moslem Arabs further complicated bv Israel, the Palestinian armed struggle for independence in their'native land the murder of a provincial cabinet minister by Quebec terrorists over the English-French division, the riots in Belgium over whether universities shall teach in French or Flemish Dutch, and the Basque terrorist effort to win self-determination from Spain by assassinations that have averaged over one per week since 1977.[1. 10]
Nor do any of these anti-Communist emigre publications claim that anything in the USSR can compare to things reported regularly in the United States. In 1980, in Oroville, California, three whites pleaded guilty to killing a Black when they "couldn't find a deer or even a cow to kill" on a hunting trip — and a Black school official, who had escaped death in a similar incident in the same town a few years earlier, said she saw no reason to leave, because things were no worse than in her native Chicago.[1. 11] In Dayton, Ohio, a convicted killer told police in 1977 that he and two others killed 25 to 30 Blacks randomly; records showed that number of unsolved cases.[1. 12] That same year killings of Blacks by police themselves work out to one every six hours somewhere in the country, based on data of the PoIice Foundation.[1. 13] Over half the deaths at the hands of police are Black, and the most respectable of Black organizations — the Urban League, the NAACP — have long insisted that fact is a consequence of racism.
Neither is the Soviet Union alleged by anyone to have situations like Filipino waiters being given a separate menu from whites, consisting of spoiled and leftover food, and being forbidden to speak in their native tongue;[1. 14] Latino-populated East Los Angeles having only one-tenth the ratio of physicians to residents as that in major California urban areas in general;[1. 15] a U.S. Court of Appeals judge expressing the belief that "there is a rise in Ku Klux Klan type of activity that we didn't see much of in the '60s or '70s. Although a lot more of it has been directed toward Jews and blacks, there has been some targeting of Asians."[1. 16] An official commission of the State of California reported late in 1984 that "students of Asian background have been ridiculed, attacked and killed by white students."[1. 17] All items in this paragraph appeared in the single year before this book went to press.
Not even the most stridently anti -Soviet Jewish publication alleges that there are ghettoes or housing discrimination in the Soviet Union, although that was general in prerevolutionary Russia. None claims that pogroms — mass beatings and pillage of Jews, usually accompanied by murders and rape — have occurred in Soviet-controlled territory for half a century, although the old Russia was notorious for that. An American reporter in Moscow writing about a Jewish dissident there reminds us of something long forgotten: "During World War II, his family, tike many other Jews, was sent to Central Asia ahead of The invading Nazis. "[1. 18] [Emphasis added] "Many" is an extreme understatement — most Soviet Jews had lived in the part of the country Hitler overran, and a majority, nearly 2.000.000[1. 19] were evacuated eastward. This was under Stalin. No Western government organization or individual Jewish or otherwise, rescued remotely as many.
The editor of the Jewish-language (Yiddish) magazine published in Moscow has agreed with me (on tape and for the record) that certain Soviet journalists have published anti-Semitic materials in recent years. His own office had bas-reliefs of Jewish writers killed in a purge 35 years ago. But he was editing a literary magazine in Yiddish, now in its 24th year, and spoke proudly of very young new novelists writing in Yiddish, which they learned from lessons he had printed in the magazine, and of artists on Jewish themes who had been encouraged by his publishing reproductions of their work. He was also proud that a friend of his who is one of the two Jewish cabinet members is personally steeped in Jewish culture.
This editor, his approximately 100 contributors, his artists, the author of the grammar he is serializing, arc success stories specifically as Jews, not simply as Soviet citizens who happen to be of Jewish origin. The number of Soviet Jews who are success stories in the general world — in science, technology, management, medicine, in all the arts, in law — is many times higher than their ratio to the population, higher proportionately rhan any other ethnic group, including the Russians themselves.
The levels of ethnic tension that have expressed themselves so explosively elsewhere in the world simply do not exist any longer in the USSR. One historical fact makes that strikingly clear. When the Russian Revolution took place in 1917, much of the world belonged to empires: British, French, Portuguese, Dutch, Belgian. Austro-Hungarian. German, Spanish, Russian. Each had colonics and/or other countries incorporated in them. Today, the pressures of nationalism, often violent, have pushed every one of those empires back to a fraction of its former size, with a single exception: the Soviet Union. It is smaller than the old Russian Empire, but not by much — it lost only Finland, whose economic and governmental systems are essentially identical to those of Western Europe, and Poland (where farming is almost entirely private and the church holds a degree of power unimaginable in the USSR). Yet the Russian Empire suffered greater human losses, greater stresses, in World War I than any other participant.
The Revolution of 1917 was followed by years of civil war and foreign intervention, including U.S. troops in the north of European Russia and also in Siberia. In World War II Soviet losses were again the largest by a very wide margin, because most of the fighting took place on that front: 20,000,000 Soviet soldiers and civilians died, by comparison to 400,000 Americans — fifty to one. Most of the fighting was in non-Russian countries of the USSR: the Ukraine, Belorussia, the Baltic states, Moldavia. All were under German occupation for three years. Hitler expected the Soviet Union to break into pieces along ethnic lines, yet the vast majority of the non-Russians remained loyal. Soviet Armenians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and Jews have all recited to me the names of generals of their nationality who commanded Soviet divisions, and entire armies, against the Nazis.
Such cohesion in such extreme conditions would not have been possible unless all these peoples had been treated in a way that was fundamentally different under the Soviets than in the Westerncontrolled world empires and, of course, in pre revolutionary Russia — where World War I brought a massive revolt of the Central Asians. The essence of the matter is that, since the Revolution, non-Russians have had real power, not merely recognition of their languages and cultures.
Jews played an extremely large role in the Revolution, and the early post-revolutionary government. Trotsky, organizer of the Red Army, was Jewish, as was the first chief of state, Jacob Sverdlov. After Lenin's death, a man who was not Russian or even European actually ran the country for 30 years: Joseph Stalin (Jugashvili), a Georgian from the Caucasus. His very closest associates until his death included not only Russians but an Armenian, Mikoyan, and a Jew. Kaganovich, both members of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party, which is the day-to-day seat of power. Today that small body includes members from Soviet Asia and the Caucasus as well as Europe, two from peoples of the Turkic language group and Moslem religious heritage, a Georgian, and several non-Russian Slavs: Ukrainians and Belorussians. The most impressive aspect of this is that there has never been any claim, from any source, that voting in the Politburo divides along ethnic lines.
Like the policy-making Political Bureau, the government's cabinet, which conducts actual operations, is supposed to consist of the most competent people and therefore has no formal rules of ethnic representation. But it, too, contains several nationalities, including two Jews.
Because the tsarist empire had come into being through Russian expansion into the lands of others, Russians are only one-half the population of the Soviet Union. In 14 countries — one-quarter of the immense area of the USSR — the Russians are minorities. In those places, store and street and institutional signs are bilingual (except in Armenia, where Russian is often totally omitted in unofficial billboards and the like). In prerevolutionary times, the policy, by and large, was Russification. Indeed, the very existence of some peoples was flatly denied, in an attempt at forced assimilation. This was true of the very largest non-Russian nations, the Ukrainians and Belorussians (peoples far more numerous than the overwhelming majority of countries in the United Nations). Since they are Eastern Slavs, like the Russians, the tsarist government sought to force them to be Russians, and treated their languages contemptuously as dialects. Imagine forcing the Irish to be English, though most speak the same language, or Danes and Norwegians to agree they are Swedes, or Spaniards and Italians to define themselves as French.
Furthermore, there was a state religion in the Empire. Orthodox Christianity. Moslems were infidels, Jews were pariahs, Catholics represented a conquered past enemy (Poland with Lithuania), but all Christian nationalities were favored over non-Christians.[1. 20] However, minority Christian sects of Russian ethnic origin were treated as heretics, and often either exiled en masse to Siberia or the Caucasus, or hounded until many moved to other countries: Dukhobors to Canada, Molokans to San Francisco, and so forth.
In the Russian Empire, the language even of local government offices was Russian, although at least a third of the population didn't speak it. There was a crazy-quilt of ethnic policies before the Revolution. The Baltic peoples — Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians — were permitted schools in their own languages, but only in the primary grades; beyond that instruction was in Russian. Schools in Georgia were allowed to teach the native tongue only as a second language. Moslems and Jews were permitted to have their traditional schools for teaching religious subjects and did create small numbers of modern schools in the years just before the Revolution.
Although old Russia was an absolute monarchy, there was a system of elective government at the local level. Asian and Caucasus peoples had no right to vote in it, but some of the other non-Russians did.[1. 21] Divide and rule. An unsuccessful revolution in 1905 forced the tsar to grant an elected parliament, the Duma, although it had little power. Again divide and rule: the major Moslem peoples had no right to vote for it, while the Christian nationalities did, somewhat like today's differing levels of discrimination between Blacks, Coloureds, and whites in South Africa.
Elimination of blatant discrimination of these types does not of itself bring ethnic equality or peace. If a sprinter is given a ten-yard lead over an opponent of the same class, he'll win the race. The Soviets recognized this. It was they who, for all practical purposes, invented the policy we call "affirmative action," and they pursued it consistently to eradicate the historic lag in education, economic development, and knowledge of governmental affairs. (Rakhia and Doron-bek are examples of this.) Because the Central Asian nationalities were, at the time of the Revolution, recently-conquered peoples in exactly the same state as the Islamic peoples south of the border — in some cases precisely the same peoples — comparing those two groups today provides a clear picture of what has happened among the masses, not merely a small elite.
Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and China flank the formerly colonial areas of the Soviet Union. In 1928 they, and the Islamic Soviet areas, were essentially still in the Middle Ages in terms of industrialization, agricultural techniques and education. Even by that very early date — when guerrilla fighting by former ethnic nobility and tribal leaders was still going on — the Soviet territories had doctors and hospital beds in quantities that Turkey did not reach until forty years later. By 1969 the Soviet peoples of this area were totally literate (99.7 percent to be precise), the Turks only one-third. The Turkic-and-Farsi-speaking [Turkic-and-Persian-speaking] peoples of the USSR had, in that year, four-and-a-half times as many college students, fourteen times as many newspaper readers, nearly five times as many physicians, seven times as many hospital beds as Turkey, in proportion to population.
When, in 1977, a Soviet atomic-powered icebreaker became the first surface vessel in history to make it to the North Pole, its captain was a man born into a mountain tribe in the North Caucasus — the Near East. At the International Congress of Historical Sciences in 1975, the head of the Soviet delegation was an Oriental, a Korean. The recently-retired prima ballerina of the Bolshoi Ballet, Maia Plisetskaya, is Jewish — a member of an ethnic group as totally barred before the Revolution as Black prima ballerinas arc from classical ballet in "white" companies in the U.S. today. Jewish names predominate among the Soviet musical performers who travel the world: pianists Lazar Berman and Emil Gilels, the immortal Oistrakh, and many more. They have not "defected."
Turkmen founder of a collective-farm just outside Ashkhabad
This pattern, the idea that success is limited only by one's individual talent and effort, explains why those I interviewed in all fifteen countries of the USSR for this book, spoke of their personal progress and that of their peoples, but not in terms of having overcome obstacles of an ethnic nature. They simply don't feel there are any today. There is one exception: because Jews are greatly overrepresented in posts of status in research and technology — itself a policy of Soviet door-opening — individuals have been passed over in favor of members of underrepresented peoples. Some of these individuals feel the same resentment voiced by some American whites who were denied admission to medical schools in favor of Black applicants under quota-type "affirmative action" programs that existed in the U.S. a few years ago.
These could be his grandchildren in Ashkhabad, right on the border with Iran.
The loyalty of the non-Russians to the Soviet Union is based on what they have gained, economically and in dignity, as peoples. A U.S. government survey has found that Blacks are currently discriminated against three times out of four when they seek to buy or even rent living quarters. Imagine a total end to that- That is what has happened to housing discrimination in the Soviet Union. Imagine an end to the three-out-of-five unemployment rate among Black youth, the even higher rate among Indians, and nearly as high among Latinos. Imagine that Third World people in the U.S. were employed in the mass media in proportion to their number in the population, one in five — eight times their present representation — which is one in forty. Imagine a Black governor of Mississippi, statues of Dr. W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Robeson, Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X on the State House lawn in Richmond, Virginia — instead of the generals who fought for slavery — which stand there now. Imagine the children of Spanish -speaking farmworkers not being taken out of school to follow the crops. Imagine an Eskimo woman as governor of Alaska, like the Chukchi woman who governs the Soviet territory that faces Alaska across the Bering Straits.[1. 22]
These are the realities of the changes in the USSR. Visitors who have lived with discrimination have no difficulty in seeing the difference in the Soviet Union. The first group of Latinos to visit the Soviet Union were students and staff from the University of California, Berkeley, in the early '70s. They had never been abroad. When they changed planes in London, the scene was very familiar — the British had found people of color to do the dirty work at the airport. When they got to Moscow, those jobs were being done by whites, although they saw plenty of darker people in the USSR.
Footnotes
↑"Contrary to popular belief, the Soviets are not a 'white' monolith."
↑Ibid May 16 1977. The situation is not improving. For example, in Uakiana, California, there were 25 police killings in the decade 1969 to 1979. but 20 more in only the 4'/2 years that followed. Berkeley Express, September 7, 1984. p. 8.
This chapter will be difficult, complicated — even irritating, if the reader has ethnic roots or associations with peoples who live in, or once lived in, the Soviet Union or what was the Russian Empire. (Poland and Finland were part of the Russian Empire but do not belong to the Soviet Union.)
Virtually everyone with such associations has a tendency to defend "one's own" When outsiders criticize points of view existing in one's ethnic group, the criticisms are resented, and characterized as prejudice—anti-Semitic, white racist, etc.— even if one happens to agree with such criticism oneself. But those who aspired to lead a countrv like the Russian Empire— consisting of many real territorial nations, plus dispersed minorities, all wracked by ethnic conflict — could not take such a narrow attitude. They had to try to develop or adopt a theory that would explain the reasons for that conflict, and a program to eliminate it.
This meant, first, independently examining the real situation. Secondlv, it meant considering proposals from each nationality, debating them, and arriving at conclusions. This was necessary even though an Armenian, or Estonian, Jew, or Ukrainian might greet any disagreement with anyone speaking for any element in his own group by saying: "why pick on us?"
In this chapter the reader will find Lenin, the man who set the course of the Russian Revolution, debating, as well as agreeing with, Jewish, Ukrainian, Polish, Armenian, and Russian spokespersons, some representing parties far to his right, others representing socialists, and still others even members of his own Bolshevik (Communist) wing of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party. The discussion here is focused more on the interests of American and Canadian readers than on what concerned peoples and political figures in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. There, the question of what to do about subject peoples who had lived from time immemorial in their own territories — Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Armenians, the Asian peoples — was, and is, by far the more important issue. Canada has some understanding of this, because of French-speaking Quebec. In the U.S., only reservation Indians and Puerto Ricans on that island itself clearly fall into that category. Among Blacks and Latinos, there is a point of view, presently a small minority, holding that a large string of counties with Black majorities in several states of the deep South comprise an embryonic Black nation and a large area in the Southwest with Latino majorities comprise an Aztlan nation. But the great majority of Blacks and Latinos, and virtually all whites, think of the ethnic question in terms of minorities living dispersed among, and surrounded by, the white population. In old Russia, that situation applied above all to the Jews, who. although white, lived under circumstances that can only be regarded as discriminatory in the worst sense. For example, Jews were forbidden by law to live anywhere but in the westernmost corner of the empire. They were simply forbidden to own land. Mass physical violence against them was so commonplace that a special word, "pogrom," attached to it, just as lynching almost automatically referred to a Black in the United States.
Therefore this discussion of the prerevolutionary debate over ethnic problems will be illustrated disproportionate by reference to the Jewish experience, because it pertains to a dispersed minority resembling those in North America, and also because Jews outnumber any other single group in the English-speaking world with roots in what is today the Soviet Union.
This chapter will be complex because it deals with the overall ethnic history of the Russian Empire; employment patterns by nationality, hostilities among non-Russian peoples, housing segregation, social stratification, religious differences, "native state" versus direct-Russian-rule arrangements, tribalism, the role of social class oppression and struggle, language rights and education, political organization, assimilation, values in ethnic cultures self-determination and secession rights for subject areas, landownership as the key to equality for pre-industrial peoples, the leveling upward of formerly underdeveloped peoples, size criteria for independent territorial recognition, immigration and emigration, distortion of census figures to justify oppression.
Why so many elements in one chapter? Because all were either part of the prerevolutionary reality, or factors that had to be considered before any solution could be attempted. True, each topic could fill a chapter, but that would have resulted in a specialized textbook. Here it is simply the historical introduction to a book on the individual nationalities. And those who find the subject matter too formidable can skip this chapter, or skim it, or return to it if the rest of the book rouses interest in these subjects.
Ridicule of minorities is one of the surest and most universal signs of ethnic oppression. In 1919, Lenin reminisced about his youth along the Volga River: "We nationals of a big nation . . . commit . . . insult an infinite number of times without noticing it. . . . Poles are not called by any other name than Polyachishka, . . . the certain way to mock at a Tatar[footnote 2. 1] is to call him Prince, . . . the Ukrainians are always Khokhols and the Georgians and other Caucasian nationals always Kapkasians."[2. 1] Jews were called Zhid, the Russian equivalent of "kike" or, for Blacks, "nigger."
The ideology underlying this was that of Great-Russian superiority, and Russifieation. ("Great-Russian" is the term used to distinguish Russians as such from Ukrainians — "Little Russians" — and Belorussians; under Russifieation, the tsarist government sought to force these people to abandon their own Slavic languages for Russian.) In common -sense terms, this view seemed to have every support: The Russian tsars had managed to gather under their rule the largest unbroken territory on earth, so presumably their way was better.
But the colossus had feet of clay. Not long after the Russian Empire reached its greatest size, it was defeated in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, a defeat which shook up all elements of society. This stimulated disobedience, and even emigration by oppressed minorities. My father's oldest brother, a draftee, was killed in that war. thousands of miles from his home. The family reasoned: why should Jews fight for, or remain in, a country that then would not even let them live outside a fixed line? The monarchy did not even try to enroll in its army the peoples of Central Asia and most of those of the northern Caucasus, brought into the empire in the 19th century, some as late as 1881.
The reasons for Russia's conquests were diverse. There was the desire— as with America's taking of Indian territory-to gain land for agricultural settlement, which also meant, in Russia's case, throwing a bone to some of its own dissatisfied peasantry, including Ukrainians and Belorussians, by giving them land seized from nomadic Asian peoples. A second reason was to gain raw materials, such as cotton from Central Asia. A third was simply dog-eat-dog competition with other empires: for example, to control parts of Central Asia by advancing southward before the British moving north from India, could get them. This has left its mark! To this day, as in Africa, boundaries established by competing European empires a century ago mark the frontiers between independent states, cutting right across ethnic lines and putting people of the same language and culture under different governments. For example there are nearly as many Azerbaijanis in the Soviet republic of that name as in the northern portion of Iran right across the border, a situation that reflects centuries of wrestling for territory between the old Russian and Persian empires.
In old Russia, as elsewhere, oppressed peoples did the menial jobs. One-third of the Tatars were janitors, porters, and rag-pickers.[2. 2] It took time for such situations to disappear twenty years after the Revolution, an observer could still write: "In Moscow, . . . every shoe-black at every street corner claim(s) to be an Aisor (the Aisors declare that they are the descendants of the ancient Assyrians, some of whom immigrated to the Caucasus) . . . "[2. 3] in countries that havg been socialist only since World War II, one still finds ethnicallyassociated "businesses" such as shining shoes -in Bulgaria that's a Gypsy occupation — but that is no longer true in the USSR.
"Divide and rule" is a natural tactic for any rulers, particularly where different minorities lived side by side. (The situation was similar to that in which Blacks, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans have to scramble for the same jobs, and the educated among them compete tor the small number of status posts available.) The Caucasus Mountain for example, are inhabited by the Azerbaijanis, of Moslem heritage and Turkic language, and by Georgians and Armenians, both Christian, each with a distinct language. There during the unsuccessful revolution of 1905, Russian ultraconservatives incited the Azerbaijanis against the Armenians, while these Russians themselves directly attacked Georgians and engaged in pogroms against Jews.[2. 4]
Ghettos existed, both spontaneous and forced. Because minorities in the Russian Empire were identified by their distinct languages, which they used as much as possible, and frequently worked for employers of their own nationality, living in ethnic neighborhoods often made sense. In addition, the ghetto offered protection against hostile actions by others. A Moslem cottongrower, reminiscing years later about one Central Asian town, said: "The past was a stairway of years carpeted with pain. The Uzbeks feared to go along the street of the Arabs; the Tajiks carried sticks when they walked through the Uzbek quarter. "[2. 5] Yet all were Moslems.
Russians were half the people of the towns of Central Asia, although only one-tenth of the total population there. This is like Mississippi and southern Alabama, where the countryside is overwhelmingly Black, the cities heavily white.
College education was nearly unknown, in some areas literally unheard-of. except among the Russians, who were therefore the doctors, lawyers, teachers, and the clergy of the official church. By and large, they also had the money, although there were some very rich traditional native rulers, land and livestock barons. Even Russian workers, miserably poor and working outrageous hours under awful conditions, with practically no rights to organize, were skilled in comparison to the indigenous peoples. Consequently, the Russian laborers earned a bit more and held somewhat steadier jobs.
Religion complicated prejudices. Every church — Christian, Jewish, and particularly Moslem, frowned strongly upon marriage out of that particular faith, and virtually everyone was religious.
In a few places, the Russian Empire, like European empires in Asia and Africa, ruled through indigenous royalty so long as they were loyal, and even where the Russian structure of government existed, it was general policy to function through the local nobility and elite. The Emir of Bokhara, a principality in Central Asia, was made a general in the Russian Army, and allowed to invest in Russian industry, but, except in such "native states," police were Russian.
The nearly universal illiteracy — three-quarters of the Russians and nine out of ten non-Russians could not read or write — tended to isolate peoples even further, and to maintain ignorant prejudices. A literate person could read a story, novel, or poem by someone of another nationality, and conclude that other people, although different, had human feelings like his own. But with no ability to read, the most vile superstitions and fears about "strange" peoples could spread easily.
In very many cases, peoples were divided within themselves along tribal lines. The most famous of all Georgians, Joseph Stalin, wrote of his own people's situation 100 years ago: "split up into a number of disconnected principalities, . . . for centuries they waged war against each other and pillaged each other, each inciting the Persians and Turks against the other."[2. 6] This was not unlike the wars between Indian tribes in America and, just as the U.S. government used such hostilities to obtain guides from one Indian tribe to make war against another, so the Russian Empire often simply exploited existing hostilities.
Some of the countries swallowed up in the empire had themselves consisted of dominant and subjected ethnic groups, again, a situation similar to that in some places in Africa, such as Nigeria. And there were oppressed nations whose strongest hostility was not toward the Russians. The Ukrainians — by far the largest "minority." numbering tens of millions — were most hostile to Poles, because their landlords were Polish before that territory came under Russian rule. They were also hostile to Jews because, centuries earlier the Poles had brought Jews in to manage their estates.
The Marxists argued that these hostilities were rooted in competition among propertied classes, not among peoples as such: the richer Ukrainian peasants versus Polish landlords; the capitalists and prosperous market farmers of Poland, Lithuania and the Ukraine against the Russian nobility whose privileges and laws kept them from expanding. With this understanding. Jewish, Polish, and Latvian (Lettish) Marxist parties sought to affiliate with the Russian; they saw a common interest of workers and peasants of all nationalities. They also pointed to many occasions when the wealthy cooperated across ethnic lines because the poor became too restless.
Stalin was a prominent member of the party led by Lenin which sought to develop a policy that would create unity across ethnic lines, unity strong enough to overthrow the monarchy and open the way to socialism. Others, also regarding themselves as Marxists, wanted to organize workers along ethnic lines within the overall Social-Democratic Party. The major advocate of that policy was the socialist organization of Jewish craftsmen and workers called the Bund. Lenin had the deepest appreciation of the oppression of Jews in the Russian Empire, and the highest respect for their contributions — in a 1913 article, he described them as "the most oppressed and persecuted nation," and added, "the great features of Jewish culture, progressive on a world scale, have clearly made themselves felt: its internationalism, its responsiveness to the advanced movements of the epoch (the percentage of Jews in the democratic and proletarian movements is everywhere higher than the percentage of Jews in the population as a whole)."[2. 7]
Today no government except that of South Africa adheres to e idea of inborn racial superiority as official policy. But at the :ginning of this century that ideology was professed by the United States, England, Germany, and all "civilized" countries. Segregation, justifying itself by that theory, was the law in the American South, and enforced in nearly all respects in the North without benefit of law. In light of that it is remarkable to read the statement of principles adopted— on Lenin's initiative — by the Social-Democratic Party as early as 1903. Clause 7 calls for: "Complete equality of rights for all citizens, irrespective of sex, religion, race or nationality." In 1914, just before the outbreak of World War I and just after an unsuccessful attempt by the tsarist authorities to frame a Jew, Mendel Beilis, on a charge of ritual murder,* Lenin drafted a bill to be presented in the Duma (or parliament, though with very limited powers) titled "A Bill for the Abolition of All Disabilities of the Jews and of all Restrictions on the Grounds of Origin or Nationality." In his introduction, he wrote:
This Bill aims at abolishing all ethnic restrictions against all peoples: Jews. Poles, and so forth. But it deals in particular detail with the restrictions against the Jews. The reason is obvious: no nationality in Russia is so oppressed and persecuted as the Jewish. . . . It is sufficient to recall the anti-Jewish pogroms and the Beilis case. . . . The voice of the Russian workers must be particularly loud in protest against ethnic oppression. . . . We hope that the Russian workers will give particularly strong support to our Bill by their declarations.
When formally submitted, the Bill was to have a list of all the regulations and laws to be rescinded, including "about a hundred such laws affecting the Jews alone." The most important passages of his proposed law read:
1. Citizens of all nationalities inhabiting Russia are equal before the law.
2. No citizen of Russia, regardless of sex and religion, may be restricted in political or in any other rights on the grounds of origin or nationality. *Ritual murder is killing humans as, or as part of, religious observance. It has never been part of the Jewish religion.
3. . . . All and any restrictions of the rights of Jews as regards residence and travel, the right to education, the right to governmental and organizational employment, electoral rights, military service, the right to purchase and rent real estate in towns, villages, etc.. are herewith abolished, and all restrictions of the rights of Jews to engage in the liberal professions, etc., are herewith abolished.[2. 8]
In that stacked parliament the bill was not passed, of course. But the revolution put its principles into force only three years later.
Conservatives often attack attempts to achieve equality as being "Communist." These charges are based on historical fact: When the Russian Revolution raised these egalitarian ideas to the level of government policy they moved from the level of a dream to the status of reality. As the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during the Carter administration, Donald F. McHenry, put it: "The Soviets are on the side of motherhood when it comes to racial equality. . . . they identify with it."[2. 9] Since 1917 this has raised the question in numerous countries — if in Russia, why not here?
The same may be said of Clause 8 of the 1903 platform of Lenin's party: "the right of the population to receive education in their native languages, this right to be ensured by the establishment of schools for this purpose at the expense of the state and of local government bodies." This program of education in the native language was to make it easier to educate, not to isolate nationalities from each other.
The language issue was a practical matter, not simply one of theory or a hoped-for future. When the tsarist government made some concessions to quiet the people following an immense revolutionary movement in 1905-07, and allowed Marxist papers to be published legally, the Bolsheviks began to publish not only in Russian but also a paper in the Tatar (Tartar) language. This reached people of the Turkic nationalities living along the Volga River, in the Ural Mountains, in the oil-producing Caucasus range, and in Central Asia, as their languages, like Tatar, fall into the Turkic family, and are closely related. But to understand the paper they had to be able to read, which they could obviously learn to do more quickly in their own language. Not only did they not know Russian, many hated it as the language of their oppressors and exploiters.
Similarly, on at least one occasion the Bolsheviks published a major statement in translation into Yiddish, with a special introduction by Lenin as a way of paying special attention to the largest socialist organization in the Russian Empire. The Russia-wide Social-Democratic Labor Party, including Lenin's Bolshevik and the moderate Menshevik wing, accepted people of all nationalities, and had 31,000 members; the Polish Social-Democrats had 26,000; the Latvians 14,000, but the Jewish Social-Democratic Workers Party, the Bund, had 33.000.[2. 10] At that time, 1906, all three ethnic parties had joined the empire-wide organization. (In proportion to population, the Latvians were the most revolutionary, followed by the Jews.) The Bolsheviks feared a repeat of the kind of situation that then existed in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where labor unions were organized along ethnic lines: a Czech union would break a strike conducted by a union of German workers, or unite in municipal elections with other Czechs however wealthy, rather than with workers of other ethnic origins.
Lenin and his followers cited such stories in their writings as horrible examples of nationalism dividing workers living within one and the same country. They were equally outraged when speakers at a Bund conference demanded Jew-ish hospitals on the ground that "a patient feels more at home among his own people" and "the Jewish worker will not feel at ease among Polish workers, but will feel at case among Jewish shopkeepers." Such issues probably arose most strongly among the Bundists because theirs was the organization of a dispersed nationality.
To Marxists this was absolutely unacceptable. Their purpose was to teach class solidarity to labor regardless of ethnic lines, while such proposals would focus the workers' attention upon members of his nationality who had "made it," as examples to be emulated.
That the real cause of ethnic hostility among workers was capitalism as a system seemed proved by the effects of unemployment, which exists under no other economic system. One consequence was that Polish workers forced Jewish workers out, justifying this in their own minds by anti-Semitism, in precisely the same manner in which certain skilled trades keep Blacks out in the U.S. to this day, justifying it to themselves by racist beliefs. Employers welcome and encourage this division in the ranks of labor. Another speech at the Bund conference responded to this: "We regard the Polish workers, who are pushing us out, as pogromists. as scabs; we do not support their strikes, we break them. Secondly, we reply to being ousted by ousting in our turn: we reply to Jewish workers not being allowed into the factories by not allowing Polish workers near the [craftsmen's] benches. . . . If we do not take this matter into our own hands the workers will follow others."
Lenin's followers argued that if workers were not organized into separate ethnic unions, as in Austria-Hungary or the self-segregated Bund in Poland, such attitudes would not have existed. U.S. labor experience confirms this. Black efforts to organize lasting segregated trade unions as a means of combating all-white organizations have never worked. However, where they and anti-racist whites won them admission into white unions or organized from the outset on an interracial basis, as in the auto, steel, mining and rubber industries, unions have been vastly more effective.
Lenin's party learned these lessons early in this century when it won the support of workers in the oil city of Baku, by overcoming the friction between Armenian Christian and Turkic-speaking Moslem workers, friction often characterized by massacres and shoot-outs. Such experiences had a strong influence on the policies of Lenin and his followers, then as well as later, during and after the Revolution.
Lenin continued to oppose nationalist demands that sought to advance the interests of one oppressed people at the expense of others. In 1913 a bill was proposed to permit teaching in the Ukraine in the Ukrainian language, to appoint Ukrainian teachers, to teach that language and its history, and to permit Ukrainian associations. Lenin agreed with the ultra-conservative Ukrainian Orthodox bishop, Nikon who said, in support of that bill: "the rich, beautiful, talented, flourishing and poetic Ukraine is being condemned to degeneration, gradual stultification and slow extinction" and that the issue "is one of outstanding importance." But the bishop then added that Ukrainians should be given the rights proposed in the bill because they "are not people of foreign origin -unlike "the Jews, Poles. Georgians and others, who actually are people of foreign origin." To this Lenin responded: the Ukrainians cannot be protected from oppression unless all peoples without exception, are protected from all oppression, unless the concept 'people of foreign origin' is completely expunged from the life of the state, unless complete equality of rights of all nationalities is upheld."[2. 11] He wanted these rights administered by an internationalist government, not by organizations of the various ethnic communities that would inevitably fight over turf.
In hammering out the policy regarding nationalities, a policy he would have the responsibility of carrying out only five years later Lenin also had to combat the liberals, who were also critical of tsarism. but were contending for leadership of the Russia-to-be. A major difference between them was over the issue of whether or not there should be a single official language. A liberal Moscow newspaper with the standing and much of the quality of the New York Times wrote, in 1913: "It is doubtful whether even an opponent of Russianization will deny that in a vast state like Russia there must be one common state language and that the language . . . can be only Russian."
Lenin objected furiously to the notion of giving Russian "any privileges whatever."[2. 12] Yet some members of his own party, themselves from oppressed peoples, rejected nationalism and adopted internationalism in a way that made them "more Russian than the Russians." One was the outstanding Armenian Bolshevik, Stepan Shahumian. whose name is perpetuated all over the Soviet Caucasus today — he w as killed soon after the Revolution by the British who invaded from Iran and temporarily overthrew the government of Soviet Azerbaijan. He did not want to deprive his own people, or any other, of the right to speak their native language, but he believed there should be an official language, Russian, which "has been and will be of great progressive importance."
Lenin replied. "I disagree emphatically. . . . The Russian language has undoubtedly been of progressive importance for the numerous small and backward nations" of the empire, but, he asked: "is not an 'official' language a stick that drives people away from the Russian language? Why will you not understand the psychology that is so important in the national question and which, if the slightest coercion is applied, besmirches, soils, nullifies the undoubtedly progressive importance of centralization, large countries and a uniform language?"[2. 13]This has been an issue of importance in American life as well — it took nearly 50 years for Puerto Ricans to win official status lor their own language, Spanish, on their own island, along with English — a quarter century after Armenian had been recognized as the official language of Armenia thanks to the revolution in the "backward" tsarist empire. (Russian is also an official language, but only in the Russian Republic of the Soviet Union.)
Five years after the Revolution. Lenin bitterly criticized his fellow-Communists Stalin (a Georgian by nationality), and Dzerzhinsky (who was Polish), for what he termed their "truly Great -Russian nationalist" insensitivity to the ethnic feelings of the peoples of the Caucasus (including the Georgians) on these very matters.[2. 14]
The complexity of the entire problem is nowhere illustrated better than in Lenin's views regarding assimilation. He favored it, despite all his stress on the righits of ethnic groups to their own languages. He cited two nationalities:
The best of the Jews, those who are celebrated in world history, and who have g.ven the world foremost leaders of democracy and socialism, have never clamored against assimilation. Only those who contemplate the backside of Jewry with reverential awe shout against assimilation. . . . An approximate idea of the . . . process of assimilation that is taking place under the present conditions of advanced capitalism can be obtained . . . from the immigration statistics of the United States. . . . New York State . . . is like a mill which grinds up national distinctions.
. . . A well defined process of accelerated economic development has been going on in the South, i.e.. the Ukraine, and this is attracting . . . peasants and workers from Great-Russia. . . . The "assimilation" — within these Jimits — of the Great-Russian and Ukrainian proletariat is an undoubted fact. And this fact is certainly progressive. Capitalism replaces the dull, bigoted, stick-in-the-mud muzhik [peasant] of the Great-Russian and Ukrainian backwoods with a mobile proletarian whose conditions of life break down . . . ethnic narrowmindedness. both Great-Russian and Ukrainian. Let us assume that in time there Will be a state frontier between Great-Russia and the Ukraine.[footnote 2. 2] In such a case, too, the historically progressive nature of "assimilation" between the Great-Russian and Ukrainian workers will be beyond doubt just as the grinding together of nations in America is progressive.[2. 15]
Several of the present Soviet leadership, chief among them Chernenko, are products of this process. Of Ukrainian name, his tamily s assimilation took place in Siberia, to which it had moved.
Assimilation is a living issue in the USSR to this day. On the one hand, urban nationalities, such as the Jews, have assimilated to a very high degree in the past 50 years, including much intermarriage, something they once rejected to protect their ethnic existence In the Ukraine, Ukrainians who have moved to town now tend to speak Russian in the areas which have been Soviet since the Revolution, but in the countryside they retain their own language as do city people in the West Ukraine, which has been Soviet only since World War II.
In Armenia, on the other hand, the native language remains universal, because Armenians are the overwhelming majoritv in the cities as well as in villages. Nationalists — Ukrainian, Jewish and other — believe this proccesses endanger the existence of their nationalities. To which anthropologists reply that assimilation has always occurred in world history and always will, so long as nations exist. The real issue is the extent to which the assimilation may be forced. This always engenders some degree of nationalism in response. Current Soviet scholarship seeks to grapple with this problem.[2. 16] and the political leadership is trying to formulate guidance, as indicated by a Chernenko speech on the revision of the Communist Party platform ("Program") underway in 1984.[2. 17]
Before the Revolution, another issue was that of maintaining ethnic culture. This was argued with particular vehemence by certain Ukrainians. Lenin's reply was. in essence, which Ukrainian culture? " There arc two nations in every modern nation. . . . There are two national cultures in every national culture," an idea advanced half a century earlier by the British Prime Minister Disraeli in a novel which spoke of the nation of the rich and that of the poor. Lenin sought to stress everything in culture that would unite workers across ethnic lines, and attacked whatever would strengthen nationalist antagonisms. Anthropologists today recognize the concept of sub-cultures, but debate on this issue has continued throughout the history of the Soviet Union. It even cost lives on the eve of World War II and again when the Cold War began, when Stalin worried whether nationalists would be loyal. In its crudest form, the argument ran: if a cultural figure had not come from the working class or the peasantry, how could his work reflect their interests?
Lenin quite often used the word "barbarism" to describe the Russians' own level of civilization before the Revolution. Afterward, he argued that the working people, to raise themselves from that level, should make themselves the heirs of all that was good in human achievement. It made no difference, he said, if the great art works of the Renaissance, for example, had been financed by religious or other wealth obtained by squeezing the poor. But the question remained: what was "good"? Folk epics, from Homer onward, describe wars with neighboring peoples. But what if those peoples live side by side, within a single multi-national state?
Suppose a figure is a hero to his own people but a monster to another? This was the case with the Ukrainian Cossack Bohdan Hmelnitsky, who led that people against the Polish landowning nobility — but also conducted pogroms against the Jews. Or consider a people that has been told it had no history or achievements, or that it is "primitive." What mix of emphasis upon its own creative culture to support its self-esteem and that of others is needed to produce diversity within unity, and not nationalism? The post-revolutionary Soviet Union has dealt with these issues in different ways at different times; Marxists hold that truth is never abstract, always specific. The USSR has also dealt differently with different nations or ethnic groups at the same time. In the U.S., what Latinos need is not precisely the same as what Blacks need, but they share a history of ethnic oppression and neglect of their needs and rights.
As cultural figures from the different nationalities of the Russian Empire are not familiar to us, it helps to consider more familiar personalities. When Leadbelly, the Black musician, sang "It's a Bourgeois Town" about Washington, D. C, that was tine by Lenin's criterion; "Yaller Gal" was acceptable because it dealt with personal life in an ethnic framework. But in film, there was Stepin Fetchit — the very name ridiculed Blacks — who was always cast as a character that shuffled and scratched his head and was afraid of the dark and snakes. Should Blacks be proud that otic Black had made it in a medium otherwise closed to them, or should they be outraged because he reinforced white feelings of superiority, and Black feelings of inferiority? The same issue continues to face minority peoples, most recently in TV comedies.
Perhaps one internationally understandable example from Soviet experience will do. Shakespeare is extremely well-known and performed in theater, opera, and film in the USSR, in dozens of languages. There is one exception, however: The Merc hum of Venice has been prohibited since the Revolution because of its stereotype of the Jewish usurer demanding a pound of flesh.
While Lenin's objective for dispersed minorities was equality of rights, his target for oppressed geographic nations was self-determination, up to and including the right to secede. Pre-revolutionary Poland was divided among Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary. The Polish Social -Democrats opposed the notion of self-determination because they feared that nationalist elements would use it to establish a government that would maintain capitalism. Poland later had such a regime for a quarter of a century. Lenin argued against this holding that human progress depended upon destroying imperialism and colonialism, and that self-determination as a goal would move colonial and other subject nations to action in their entirety as nations. His view was that if this were led by Marxists of such nations, it would also bring them to socialism.
The Poles, Jews, and Latvians — the nationalities among whom socialist organization was strong — together were little more than one-fifth of the non-Russian peoples of the empire, and only a ninth of its total population. Marxist convictions were disproportionately strong among them because Poland and Latvia were the most industrialized areas, and the Jews were almost totally urban. Most of the other peoples had hardly entered the industrial era, had no wage-earning class to speak of, and were overwhelmingly peasant. Socialism in the Marxist sense, which conceives of power passing from the hands of essentially industrial capitalists and the banks financing them to a government acting for the workers employed in industry, was an abstraction to peoples who had neither capitalists nor their workers. For them, the economic aspect of their ethnic oppression lay in deprivation of land.
The unsuccessful 1905-1907 revolution did result in the establishment of a parliament, the Duma. That Duma was powerless, but members could at least place their complaints on the record. After 1905, a representative from the Bashkirs (a Moslem people at the south end of the border between Europe and Asia) said the government had stolen 5,400,000 acres of land from that nationality alone, and demanded it back. He complained that individual Russian officials and high police officers had been granted as much as 5,000 to 15,000 acres each, and that the governor-general ot the region had told a Tatar applying for land that only persons of the Christian faith could homestead.
Complaints such as this made Lenin's party recognize that, in the agricultural Russian Empire, the nationalities issue was, in its economic aspect, fundamentally a question of landownership. For American Indians, and Blacks in the rural South the relationship between ethnic oppression and land is equally clear.
The analogy is not just my own. Lenin followed the status of American Blacks very closely. In 1913 he wrote a very brief article that is worth reproducing in full:
RUSSIANS AND NEGROES
What a strange comparison, the reader may think. How can a race be compared with a nation?
It is a permissible comparison. The Negroes were the last to be freed from slavery, and they still bear, more than anyone else, the cruel marks of slaverv — even in advanced countries — for capitalism has no "room" for emancipation except as a legal matter, and it curtails even the latter in every possible way.
With regard to the Russians, history records that they were freed, "almost," from the bondage of serfdom in 1861. It was about the same time, following the civil war against the American slave-owners, that North America's Negroes were freed from slavery.
The emancipation of the American slaves took place in a manner less like a "reform" than that of the Russian slaves.
That is why today, half a century later, the Russians still show many more traces of slavery than the Negroes. Indeed, it would be more accurate to speak of institutions and not merely of traces. But in this short article we shall limit ourselves to a small illustration of what we have said, namely, the question of literacy. It is known that illiteracy is one of the marks of slavery. In a country oppressed by pashas, Purishkeviches [a proto-fascist and anti-Semitic rabble-rouser] and the like, the majority of the population cannot be literate.
In Russia 73 percent are illiterate, exclusive of children under nine years of age.
Among U.S. Negroes. 44½percent were illiterate in 1900.
Such a scandalously high percentage of illiterates is a disgrace to a civilized, advanced country like the North American republic. Furthermore, everyone knows that the position of the Negroes in America in general is one unworthy of a civilized country — capitalism cannotgive either complete emancipation or even complete equality.
It is instructive that among the whites in America illiterates number no more than six percent. But if we divide America into what were formerly slave-holding areas (an American "Russia") and non-slaveholding areas (an American non-Russia), we shall find 11-12 percent illiterates among the whites in the former and 4-6 percent in the latter areas!
The proportion of illiterates among the whites is twice as high in the former slave-holding areas. It is not only the Negroes that show the vestiges of slavery!
Shame on America for the plight of the Negroes![2. 18]
Returning to Lenin's opening question, "how can a race be compared to a nation?", it is interesting to look at a list of the forms of national oppression drawn up by Stalin in the same year, which clearly applies to Blacks as slaves, and, in many respects, for a hundred years after emancipation: "Restriction of freedom of movement, repression of language, restriction of franchise, closing of schools, religious restrictions, and so on."[2. 19]
In the East, among most of the Turkic and Iranian-speaking peoples in the Russian Empire, where capitalism was not yet so widespread, class struggle between workers and employers was far less important than feelings of resentment against Russian rule. Consequently, a Pan-Islamic movement arose which took the Moslem religion of many different peoples as a binding factor, opposing them all to tsarism, and to its official Orthodox Church.
In short, because Russia was an empire, ethnic equality was much more a question of the right of self-determination and secession for geographic nations than equality of rights for people living intermixed among others. This question is still very much alive in Puerto Rico — independence, statehood, or the present commonwealth status. Lenin provided his answer in another part of his 1913 letter to Shahumian, whose position was "statehood.":
"We are in favor of the right to secession (and not in favor of everyone's seceding). . . . In general we are opposed to secession But we stand for the right to secede owing to reactionary, Great-Russian nationalism, which has so besmirched the idea of national coexistence that sometimes closer ties will be established after free secession! The right to self-determination is an exception to our general premise of centralization."[2. 20][footnote 2. 3]
With a centralized union of republics, the Soviets have been able to place the common interests of geographic nations above factors that might divide them, and to influence development so as to raise more backward republics up toward the level of the more advanced This has avoided a situation like the one which exists . . . Yugoslavia. Thai is also a federation of geographic nations, but it allows them to compete with each other economically, and also allows the workers to own an enterprise independent of the central government. As a result, the living standard in the most advanced ethnic republic is three times as high as in the most underdeveloped. The workers in the former quite literally exploit those in the latter by building branches of worker-owned industries in them and paying the very much lower local wage.
There is a tendency everywhere for numerically larger oppressed peoples to be so intensely conscious of their own problems that they look with disdain upon, or ignore, smaller ones. Rosa Luxemburg. pre-revolutionary leader of the Polish Marxists, demanded autonomy for Poland — but not for the Lithuanians. Census figures showed the Lithuanians to be a minority in each existing province, so she concluded that there was no Lithuanian nation. but only a dispersed minority — a rural equivalent of the situation ot the Jews. Lenin replied that if she had studied the statistics, not for entire provinces but for "counties" whithin them, she would have found solid blocks of counties neighboring each other across "state" lines in which Lithuanians were a majority, a situation similar to that now existing in states of our Deep South.
American Indians will be interested in Lenin's rejoinder to a Bundist named Medem, who argued, before the Revolution, that peoples numbering half a million to two million were "too small" to enjoy territorial rights. "Why there cannot be autonomous national areas with populations not only of half a million, but even of 50,000 — why such areas cannot unite in the most diverse ways with neighboring areas of different dimensions in one autonomous krai (region) if this is convenient . . . remains the secret of the Bundist Medem."[2. 21] That is precisely the way the USSR is organized today: prerevolutionary "state" lines were disregarded in order to give geographic peoples stretches of territory providing self-rule on matters of interest to them. In one case, a territory with an Azerbaijani majority which is separated from the bulk of Azerbaijan by Armenia has nonetheless been made part of the Azerbaijan Soviet Republic. This "island" has only a quarter million people; had it been made part of Armenia for the sake of geographic convenience, there would have been no end to the hostility between the Turkic-speaking Moslem Azerbaijanis and the Christian Armenians. Today one gets no sense of any such feeling in visiting either of those republics. Some "National Areas" have fewer than 50,000 inhabitants, though none are internally segregated or limited to people of any ethnic affiliation.
The Soviet example has affected other countries, even totally non-socialist ones, in many ways. Perhaps ihe most visible is the United Nations, which includes as members many countries smaller than the national areas of the USSR. In the pre-Soviet era of world-wide imperialism that was unthinkable, except for freak situations left over from feudal times, such as Andorra, a tiny principality between France and Spain.
Armenians will recognize Lenin's foresight to have been quite remarkable. In the same article, he wrote: "It is extremely important to create autonomous areas of even the smallest dimensions . . towards which the members of the given nationality scattered in different parts of the country, or even of the world, could 'gravitate'." About 220,000 Armenians have /mmigrated to Soviet Armenia from foreign countries, including some from the U.S., and hundreds of thousands more have come from other parts of the Soviet Union. Yet a million more are sufficiently assimilated to life in Russia proper, in the Ukraine, etc., to prefer living there. The same factor has been operative among Jews; from most countries, including the U.S. and USSR, only a small minority have gone to Israel. The great majority want to remain where they are, though they are interested in what happens in Israel, and some, especially in the U.S., give Israel political and other support. The Soviet support for a separate Palestinian state reflects its own experience at the time of the Revolution, and the success of solutions such as that for the Azerbaijanis encircled by Armenian-populated territory.
Lenin's party was a small minority in pre-revolutionary Russia. We focus on his views because the Soviet Union of today has been shaped essentially on them. Parties that had vastly more influence than Lenin's proved unable to deal with Russia's crisis and disappeared from the scene. The most important in the pre-war years was the Constitutional Democratic Party, which advocated liberal capitalism and ruled immediately after the tsar was overthrown. On the fundamental issue of the colonies and semi-colonies that comprised half the population of the Russian Empire, its newspaper stated that members of the party "have never pledged themselves to advocate the right of 'nations to secede' from the Russian state,"[2. 22] but only freedom of languages. Lenin did not mince words in responding:
"Herein lies one of the root causes of your chauvinism and of your ideological and political alliance with the Purishkeviches. . . . The Purishkeviches and their class inculcate in the ignorant masses the 'hard-line' belief that it is 'right' to 'grab 'em and hold 'em"[2. 23] the non- Russian peoples.
Reading the records of that far-off time and place, it is amazing to see how closely the acts of governments seeking to maintain the dominance of one ethnic group parallel each other. It has now been established in response to persistent protests and research by U.S. Black and Latino organizations that census gathering techniques through 1970 deliberately under-counted those groups, for both economic reasons (to reduce the amount of federal aid) and political ones. Here is Lenin, in 1914, complaining about exactly the same thing:
"In Russia, even according to official, i.e., palpably exaggerated statistics, which are faked to suit the 'government's plans,' the Great-Russians constitute no more than 43 percent of the entire population of the country."[2. 24] He attacked the government for seeking to rule on behalf of what was, by its own admission, a minority — but he never failed to point out that it was not the Russian people that gained by this but primarily the landlord class. The government tried to overcome this problem by forcing the Ukrainians to regard themselves as Russian. For example it sought to ban celebrations in honor of the hundredth anniversary ot the birth of Taras Shevchenko, a poet, painter, and revolutionary democrat whose picture hung in every Ukrainian home. Lenin waxed merrily sarcastic over this gross insensitivity:
The ban on the celebrations in honor of Shevchenko was such an excellent, splendid, exceptionally happy and well-chosen measure as far as anti-government agitation is concerned that no belter agitation could be conceived. I think that none of our best Social-Democratic agitators against the government could ever have achieved such sensational success in so short a time as was achieved by this measure in rousing opposition to the government.[2. 25]
Four months after this was written, World War 1 broke out. Within a year, just south of Russia's border, a million and a half Armenians had been exterminated or starved to death by the Turkish Empire in the first mass genocide of the 20th century. Another year, and Russian manpower losses in the war were so great that the tsar tried to draft colonial Central Asians — for labor service, as he didn't dare put modern weapons in their hands. They revolted, spontaneously and without organization, over a huge area. And although they were put down by massacre and cruelty, this was the handwriting on the wall; one more year, and the Russian armies themselves were in revolt, joined by starving soldiers' wives and the workers of the cities. The monarchy was overthrown in March 1917. On November 7 of that same year, the Communists came to power. The time for talk was over. Now they had to prove to the non-Russian majority of the people that they meant what they said.
Footnotes
↑"Identical to "Tartar." which is incorrect but used occasionally in this book because "Tatar" is so unfamiliar as to be confusing.
↑Under his leadership such a frontier was instituted in response Ukrainian demands five years later
↑An American Black, who supports the idea of a Republic of New Africa, which demands the Deep South as a Black homeland, read this passage and found himself in agreement with this 70-year-old idea of Lenin's. Blacks free from the dominance of U. S. racism in a territory of their own, he reasons, might very well choose closer ties with the rest of what is now the U. S. in what would then be a voluntary association
Notes
↑V.I. Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow: Progress, 1966). XXXVI. pp. 607-608.
Beginnings: Medical Technical School, Turkmenia, 1937.
The Provisional Government that took over upon abdication of Tsar Nicholas II in March 1917 did not act decisively to solve the problems that had come to a head.[3. 1] Most important of these was how to seek peace in World War 1, then in its third year, a war in which the backward Russian Empire had lost more millions killed and wounded than any of its allies or its enemies. Next was the demand of the peasants, in that overwhelmingly agricultural country, that landowners' land be turned over to those who worked it. A third was simply providing bread to feed a population starving — partly because the country's meager resources had been diverted to the army, but increasingly because the absence of men and horses from the farms meant that production could not be kept up. The fourth was the demand for independence or restoration of rights by the conquered nations within the Russian Empire, and for equal rights by minorities dispersed therein.
Of the Ukrainians, Lenin wrote at this time: "Accursed tsarism made the Great-Russians executioners of the Ukrainian people, and fomented in them a hatred for those who even forbade Ukrainian children to speak and study in their native tongue."[3. 2]
With respect to the massive stealing of Bashkir land, described in the previous chapter, he had written: "This is a tidbit of colonial policy that will stand comparison to any of the feats performed ... in . . Africa."[3. 3] That indictment is borne out by the fact that in some counties the Bashkir death rate reached genocidal levels.
The Ukraine is on the western frontier. Bashkiria is in the Ural Mountains separating Europe and Asia, Kirgizia deep in Central Asia, on China's westernmost border. Just a year before the overthrow of the tsar, the Russian Army had taken hundreds of thousands of sheep from the nomadic Kirgiz, and paid in rubles. But in that subsistence economy, large sums of money were meaningless: there was nothing to buy. Sheep's wool provided clothing and shelter, sheep's milk and meat were food, sheep's intestines became bags, their sinews served as cord. With the inefficiency of that day, of that country, and of armies in general, the sheep had been slaughtered by the tens of thousands before provision for storage was made, and the Kirgiz had seen them rot uselessly, while they themselves hungered. On top of this came the decree conscripting Central Asians for unarmed labor service at the front, thousands of miles away. A rebellion broke out which "took the form of an indiscriminate slaughter of Russian peasants."[3. 4] As a Russian geologist told Anna Louise Strong in Kirgizia, a dozen years later, perhaps 10,000 were wiped out. The Russian colonial occupation army, plus divisions moved from the front, responded ruthlessly. About a million of the nomadic Kirgiz and Kazakhs — one-out-often people in the affected area — tied to Chinese Turkestan, where they were sold into slavery.
At the very opposite end of the country, north of Leningrad, bordering Finalnd, live the "white" European Karelians. Their language resembles Finnish, but "To sell a Bible written in Finnish was punishable by exile. . . . Children were punished for speaking Karelian even in the schoolgrounds."[3. 5] (Native Americans have had that experience in Bureau of Indian Affairs schools, and Chicanos did until very recent years.) Those Karelian children were lucky simply to be in school at all: in Bashkiria, of 4,778 children in secondary schools in 1910, only ten had been Bashkirs.[3. 6]
This was the reality when the tsar was overthrown. When, after eight months, the Provisional Government failed to move on these issues, and refused to withdraw from the world war, the people lost patience. Among the industrial workers in the major cities, and also among the soldiers and sailors, who were still being killed, the Communists (then the Bolshevik wing of the Social-Democratic Party) won great support. This was based on their argument that nothing had changed because continuation of the war, of landlordism, and of food hoarding were in the interests of the capitalist and landlord classes. They also pointed out that even the most Left of the governing parties thought Russia was not ripe for socialism, and was therefore committed on principle to seeking only reforms within the existing socio-economic system.
On November 7, 1917, the Communists seized power with the aid of armed workers in the capital, sailors and vessels of the Baltic Fleet, and soldiers in urban garrisons. They proceeded literally overnight to deliver the land to the peasants, bid for peace in the war, and distribute what bread was available. As a consequence, in four months time their rule spread over nearly the entire immense empire, though they had no army of their own, and there were millions of armed men who could have opposed the regime.
The Communists' easy early success also came because the Provisional Government had brought little or no significant change from tsarist oppression. The Ukraine (with nearly 30,000,000 people) and Poland were the largest non-Russian countries in the empire. When the tsar abdicated, a Ukrainian congress, the Central Rada, came into being much like the Continental Congress during the Revolutionary War. But the Provisional Government claimed the Ukraine's richest industrial area, and much else, as Russia, and appointed an official as supreme authority over the Ukraine. Lenin argued: "Force will not check the Ukrainians. It will only embitter them. Accede to the Ukrainians, and you will open the way to mutual confidence and brotherly union between the two nations on the basis of equality!"[3. 7] A few weeks earlier he had spelled out his own program: "If there is a Ukrainian republic and a Russian republic, there will be closer contact and greater trust between the two."[3. 8]
A similar situation arose in Finland, which asked only for restoration of the rights enjoyed before annexation to Russia. The Provisional Government rejected this. Lenin said: "We are for giving the Finns complete freedom, because then there will be greater trust in Russian democracy and the Finns will not separate."[3. 9] They did secede in 1917, but remained separate only because after 1918, the Western allies of World War I left an enemy — German — division intact so it could help the anti-socialist element in Finland win the civil war. After its victory a rightist government under Marshal Mannerheim massacred the defeated local socialists much as Pinochet did in Chile in 1973.
In Central Asia the Provisional Government of March-November 1917 actually left in command the tsar's general who had slaughtered the indigenous rebels the previous year. In addition, that government's language policy was unacceptable. Language is a much greater natural barrier than race, People of different races can communicate if they speak the same language; people of the same race cannot, if their languages differ. The Provisional Government had extended recognition to non-Russian languages only in private affairs. Joseph Stalin, who was to be the Soviet Commissar for Nationalities, immediately took issue with this, in one of the earliest legal issues of Pravda after the overthrow of the tsar: "But what about the regions with compact majorities of non-Russian citizens whose language is not Russian (Transcaucasia, Turkestan, the Ukraine, Lithuania, etc.)? There is no doubt that they will have (must have!) their parliaments. ... Is it the idea of the Provisional Government ... to deprive these regions of the right to conduct 'affairs' ... in their native languages ... in their [own] institutions?"[3. 10]
But the Provisional Government could not live up to its pledges of ethnic equality because the liberals in power did not actually believe that the non-Russians, in most cases, were the Russians' equals. The Provisional Government had qualitatively the same attitude of Great-Russian superiority as the tsarist monarchy it had replaced. In the words of a Soviet anthropologist; "At that time things were interpreted as follows: everything Russian is good, everything Komi bad. Masterpieces of ethnic art were held to have no value."[3. 11] Referring to the judgment of a prerevolutionary anthropologist, Smirnov. she writes indignantly: "the Permiak (Komi), allegedly at the 'embryonic level of creativity.' was not quite the ignoramus Smirnov conceived him to be." When a certain motif was found to be shared both by Russian folk art to the west, and the Komi, it was taken for granted that the latter had learned it from the former. But the recent study finds: "there are no grounds for saying that the motif was taken from the northern Great-Russians." A similar neighboring people, the Mari, had gloves 500 years before the rest of Eastern Europe.
The Komi and Mari are perhaps more blonde and Nordic than the Russians, but the prejudice here did not need to be based on race: it was colonial and served to excuse exploitation.
While the Komi are somewhat fewer than American reservation Indians today, the millions of Turkic-speaking people along the Volga in the heart of European Russia are as numerous as Jews in the U.S. One of them, the Tatars, actually ruled over the Russians for 200 years, but the tables were turned several hundred years ago, and the general Russian belief was that this proved them superior. The achievements of the Volga peoples were put down, yet these nationalities had brick buildings with central heating about a thousand years ago. Some of the ancient churches of which the Russians are proudest were built of stone cut by ethnic Volga craftsmen and hauled to Russian territory.[3. 12]
The Tatars were nomads when they conquered the Volga peoples, but adopted the existing urban culture, with its thousands of towns, and it is possible that the Russians learned to build with brick from Tatars; the Russian word for brick is of Turkic origin, and Tatar is a Turkic language.[footnote 3. 1] The earliest Communist historian, Pokrovsky, held this view, even though the archeological proof was not yet available when he wrote.[3. 13][3. 14]
The Tatar, Komi, and other subject peoples were not familiar with these points of scholarship in 1917. They knew perfectly well, however, that the liberal government looked down upon their cultures as essentially worthless, primitive, and savage, and were therefore in no way moved to support that regime.
When the Communists took power, they were at first in no better position to command the support of non-Russians. Although they were not all Russians, they were, with very few exceptions, what the Moslem peoples classed as Europeans. When confronted with the accomplished fact of an autonomous Bashkir nationalist government, established between the overthrow of the tsar and the founding of the Communist government, Lenin recognized that, "in these remote places the name 'Great-Russian' means to the Bashkir 'oppressor,' 'swindler.' We have to consider this and we have to struggle against it. But this is a long-term proposition. This is not the kind of thing that anybody will eliminate by decree. We have to be exceedingly cautious in this matter."[3. 15]
On another occasion he had said: "We do not regard the Bashkir movement as a counterrevolutionary movement directed against us. ... We believe that the national [liberation] movements of the peoples of the East are entirely natural and very necessary. The peoples of the East come to the social revolution only through the national [liberation) revolution,"[3. 16] and "the Bashkir movement, if it is granted the autonomy it demands, will not be directed against the Soviets but will constitute a tremendous force in the struggle against Dutov," a Russian Cossack counterrevolutionary general operating in that area.[3. 17]
The Bashkirs were the first indigenous people living in an island of territory within Russia to have their autonomy recognized. But for those not surrounded or outnumbered by Russians, within their own traditional territory, the issue was not autonomy but actual independence and whether or not to secede, as Lenin had predicted in the endless theoretical battles of prerevolutionary years. Poland and Finland did secede, and the Soviet government recognized those acts as it had promised in its platform. Lenin granted Poland independence even before a Polish government was organized. When one appeared, it sought to regain as much of its 18th-century empire as possible. Armed and provided military advisors by France, after Germany surrendered in 1918, Poland took Lithuania's largest city and capital, Vilnius, and held it and large territories with Ukrainian and Belorussian majority populations until 1940. Poland's rulers were blind to the contradiction between independence for their own previously subject people and Polish rule over non-Polish areas.
All this was part of an enormously complicated struggle that also involved the Ukraine, the Baltic states (Latvia, Lithuania. Estonia), and the Trans-Caucasus (Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan). It involved pro- and anti-Soviet parties within those nations, divided more or less along lines of economic class. There was also military intervention by 14 countries, including both Russia's former allies in World War I (the United States, Great Britain, France, etc.) and her enemies (Germany and Turkey, chiefly) — all now joined by the desire to prevent the establishment of any government that would seek to prove people could live without capitalism. Finally, it came to involve the Soviet government itself, which argued: that if world capitalism could aid anti-communist forces, Moscow could aid pro-communists.
Entire libraries have been written about those struggles. The United States was confident that the Soviet government would not last, and wanted to have the inside track with whatever non-Communist Russian government might succeed as heir to the old empire. So Washington did not favor independence of Russia's former subject peoples for fear that would antagonize such a government. This attitude, and those taken by other Western countries, plus Japan, China, and Turkey — all of which put armies on Soviet soil — strengthened Lenin's position. He argued that the intervention proved that no abstract independence for the countries once under the tsar was really possible: they had to choose between what we would now call nco-eolonialism under capitalist powers or association with Russia to develop socialism. He promised that in the latter case exploitation of one nation by another would cease, and that the language, culture, and territorial boundaries of each would be respected.
The results in each case depended upon the complicated combination of forces involved, domestic and foreign. There were not, and could not be, any nice, clean, honest elections, supervised by impartial honest ballot associations. The fighting, which lasted three years in most places (and didn't totally end until 1931 on the mountainous Afghan border), was as bitter and cruel as in the U.S. Civil War. The very real memory of this struggle is the historical origin of the impenetrable guarding of Soviet and East European borders that exists today.
We have already described what happened in Poland and Finland. When the Civil-War-and-Intervention ended, essentially in 1920, Latvia and Estonia were independent, thanks to the work of that German division which the Allies allowed to operate in the region, in cooperation with the British Navy. Those countries remained greatly dependent upon England until World War II. Lithuania was in the same general situation, except that Poland occupied her capital. Bessarabia, today called Moldavia, had been taken by the Romanian monarchy which treated it as a colony. But most of the Ukraine, most of Belorussia. nearly all of the Caucasus (though the larger part of Armenia was taken by Turkey) — Georgia, Azerbaijan — and nearly all of the former Central Asian Moslem colonies of the tsar wound up Soviet.
Russia proper was quite literally starved during the Civil War. The bread ration — there was nothing else at times — went down to four ounces a day in the biggest cities. It had no friend or ally — the West refused to permit even medical instruments and drugs to enter Soviet territory. The Soviet government was able to organize an army only because the peasants wanted to defend the land they had been given. Industry slowed to a standstill because its raw materials bases were in enemy hands for long periods. Many workers who were not Communists fighting at the fronts drifted back to their home villages in the hope of finding something to eat.
Geographically crazy as it may seem, Siberia was for a period in the hands of a Czechoslovak anti-Communist army consisting of former war prisoners. The other anti-Communist armies were also all led by professional officers, backed by British or French military advisers, and equipped by those countries with U.S. aid. The Red Army, on the other hand, was led by a complete civilian, Leon Trotsky and another civilian, Joseph Stalin, was in charge of various fronts while still another, Lenin, made the final decisions. Not one of them had ever been even an army private, although they all listened carefully to those professional officers who were loyal. By the time the fighting was over, a one-day railroad trip took eight to ten days, so great had been the destruction of bridges, tunnels, signals, locomotives, cars.
In all. 65,000,000 non-Russians, most living as compact territorial majorities bordering the outside world, wound up Soviet in the 1920s. Under the conditions described, the only rational explanation for this is that the great bulk of them wanted it that way. Those decisions were not made quietly under Robert's Rules of Order or by consensus, but with a stupendous amount of debate — family by family, village by village, regiment by regiment, town by town — probably to a degree without precedent in human history. The arguments were usually not over broad concepts of political theory, although there was a surprising leaven of that. The American Revolution stimulated the whole people of that day to make up its mind about Tom Paine's Common S&tse, which sold half a million copies in a population of no more than 3.000,000, including babies and the illiterate. After the Communists took power, the same rolewas played by the "Declaration of Rights of the Peoples of Russia," whieh was issued within one week of the formation of the Soviet government, and later by the appeal "To all the Working Population Among the Moslems of Russia and the East." which was adopted at a conference in Baku.[footnote 3. 2]
The Declaration proclaimed all peoples equal and sovereign. It said that each could secede or not as it chose, that all privileges or restrictions based on nationality or religion were abolished. For peoples not comprising majorities in their native territories or with no territories of their own, it guaranteed: "freedom of development for the national minorities and ethnographic groups inhabiting the territory of Russia ..." The very first Soviet cabinet, established the day after the Revolution, included a department (Commissariat) of Nationalities. It was headed by Joseph Stalin, not Russian, but a Georgian, who had authored the accepted Communist analysis of this subject four years earlier.[3. 18]
Paranja-wearing Central Asian bride before unveiling movement of 1927.
Russian oppression was only one obstacle to establishing harmonious relations with the other nationalities and to overcoming underdevelopment. Their own differing levels of development was another. Opium addiction was widespread in Central Asia.[3. 19] A scholar of Kazakh nationality has described the condition of his people before the Revolution when they numbered 4,000,000: 15 percent of the people had 60 percent of the livestock, and these were nomads for whom livestock was everything. "Blood vengeance, raids to seize herds, attacks on grounds of tribal and clan hostility were frequent phenomena, and persons committing such deeds believed that they, in defending clan and personal interests were engaging in acts 'permitted by custom and tradition'."[3. 20] Under adat and shariat, Moslem customary and religious law, the marrying of minors not even in their teens, polygamy, and compulsory marriage of a widow to her husband's nearest surviving male relative "were not only not regarded as crimes but were sanctified and legitimized. . . . Attempts to violate the norms of the adat and to challenge backward customs . . . were punished in the very crudest fashion," like stoning to death for adultery, as is still the case in Saudi Arabia and Iran. This legitimized oppression of women was universal among all Moslem nationalities in the Empire, who then numbered 15,000,000. As a problem tor the new government, the situation was made more difficult by the fact that these women themselves accepted it. A female Uzbek poet reminiscing about that period wrote in 1970:
"The centuries of oppression, the Koran and Shariat placed their dark imprint upon the psychology of women themselves. Being sequestered in women's quarters seemed to many of them a norm of life, submission to the will of fate. It was necessary to overcome the internal inertia of the woman herself."[3. 21]
When a mass movement among women to take off their veils developed a decade after the Revolution, hundreds were murdered or seriously injured.[3. 22]
The persistence of habitual beliefs and notions led to some truly ludicrous situations in the early postrevolutionary period as the desire for social change — or, in some cases, a self-serving adaptation to change — combined with habitual notions. In 1925 a young Ukrainian (later to become a distinguished historian) took a job as village librarian among the Islamic Adygei people in the Caucasus. (Libraries were one of the first means of bringing enlightenment to the countryside.) He had also been appointed to head the local Young Communist League. When he entered the room for the first meeting, a virtual brawl was going on. Through a translator, he learned that Adygei society had had castes, as in India: there was a caste of slaves, one of peasants of various status, one of nobility, and one of princely clans. Children of all of these castes belonged to the Young Communist League, and those from the nobility had tried to grab the front benches in accordance with their ancient privilege, but their ex-slaves and general peasantry resisted, and he was witnessing what amounted to class struggle inside a Communist organization![3. 23][footnote 3. 3]
The same historian recalls another meeting, when a heated discussion was under way until the muezzin's call to prayer was heard, and the most zealous Moslems dashed out to perform their devotions. He also witnessed weddings involving mock armed clashes between squadrons of mountaineers on horseback and pre-lslamic shamanist cures with witch-doctors driving out the devil by music and dances.
His work involved helping to establish membership organizations consisting of persons of their own ethnic groups and conducted in their own languages. This is why, as appointed temporary leader, this Ukrainian outsider needed an interpreter — no one would have come to a meeting in his language because they knew only their own. That is also why, in the early years, members of different castes and classes were allowed to join the Young Communist League. There was a wall of hostility against Russians, whose conquest of them was within living memory — he met a man in his eighties who personally remembered the war in which the Russians had seized the Caucasus, and had himself been in raids burning Cossack villages and taking captives. In this atmosphere, any indigenous person who saw merit in the new society was welcome to join, though none yet understood its principles well enough to head its local branch.
At this time— 1925— "USSR" was a new term. From 1917 to 1922, the striving for independence from Russia had been manifested in the founding of four separate Soviet republics: the Russian, the Ukrainian, the Belorussian, and a Trans-Caucasian Federation consisting of Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan. The four republics had treaty relations with each other, but, as Lenin had predicted, the granting of the right of secession caused a majority (by no means all) of these peoples to cease focusing on independence, and to turn instead to solving their internal problems.
What happened then was very well described by a Ukrainian from the very poorest strata of the peasantry, H.M. Odinets. He had been placed in the Secretariat, the most important body in the nationalist government of the Ukraine, to convince the mass of the people that the peasantry was in power. But he was a socialist, and he was imprisoned for that:
"When we socialists sat in a Ukrainian jail, we thought over what all that meant, and why, even though the letters over the entry read not tiur'ma [Russian for prison], but v'iaznitsia [Ukrainian, ditto], serving time in it was no different whatever."[3. 24]
But he still faced the question of what would happen to his freedom to be Ukrainian if he changed to the other side in that civil war. The Ukrainian Soviet Republic took as its principle that socialism could only really be built, under the circumstances of the day, in conjunction with Russia. He made that change, with misgivings, and was among the delegates of the Ukrainian Soviets to the congress in Moscow that joined the separate republics into the Union that exists today. At that 1922 gathering he said:
"We see that we now have our own schools, that Ukrainian schooling already exists, that no one is prohibiting such schools. The peasant sees: they really aren't forbidding them. If you want to read in Ukrainian, go ahead and read; if you wish, write in Ukrainian; if you want to speak it, speak it. That one can already do freely! A rumor was spread: they say that an end has been made to Ukrainian music, that its last notes have been played, that once again we've got that old 'indivisible' (Russian Empire). ... I can now say boldly and with a clear conscience: the idea that the Ukraine is being abolished is all a lie. . . . The Soviet government is guiding us along the right lines. Now I believe that and many besides me believe it."[3. 25]
I happened to be traveling in Soviet ethnic republics when the current Constitution was adopted in 1977. In Azerbaijan I watched a rehearsal of that people's songs and dances to be performed at the close of the "constitutional convention" in Moscow. It seemed to me an artificial and stagey show, set up purely for a governmental event, but it turns out to be a tradition dating back to that 1922 founding convention. One of its Central Asian delegates, reminiscing 50 years later, said:
"Actors and musicians of all the constituent and autonomous republics participated in a great entertainment after the closing of the congress. They not only performed for the delegates the fiery dances of the peoples of the Caucasus and the songs of the peoples of Central Asia, but displayed their 'wealth' right on the stage, including live camels, karakul lambs, the riches of the soil and mountains."[3. 26]
That assemblage needed no entertainers to provide ethnic flavor, another delegate recollected: "I recall one gathering of our Ukrainian delegation. Powerful choral singing got under way as we waited for the meeting to start. Delegates from other republics surrounded us on all sides. I remember the colorful national costumes of the Kazakhs, Kirgiz, Uzbeks, and the peoples of the Caucasus. They listened to us with eager attention, amazement, enraptured. A merry tune was sung, and suddenly a gray old uncle, a delegate from the Kharkov country, leaped out and danced the hopak" (the Ukrainian national dance).[3. 27]
This totally new kind of government consisted of people with no previous experience of power. The Communist Party was the glue that held things together. To make sure it would not be diluted by people who did not understand its principles, the Party admitted new members very carefully — in some underdeveloped areas, this meant that it had no organization whatever for a period. Looser rules of membership existed in the Young Communist League. At times, this produced an odd kind of vote of confidence. A man who had been a 19-year-old delegate from the mountaineer Daghestan Republic at that founding congress recalled:
"In 1922 I was at a Daghestan Komsomol (Young Communist League) Conference . . . and saw among the delegates bearded men pretty nearly 40 years of age. They said: 'You think age interferes with being a Komsomol, a delegate? But age didn't interfere with fighting in partisan units against the white jackals, did it'?" (White was the political color of the anti-Communists just as red was of the Soviets. It had nothing to do with race.) "'And age didn't prevent organizing a unit of the mountaineer poor in the village, did it? And age didn't prevent us from fighting for the new life against rich peasants and mullahs? So don't look cross-eyed at my beard'!"[3. 28]
Similarly practical, and totally non -theoretical, judgments governed people's behavior when it came to organizing the first collective farms. As late as 1929 in isolated near-desert country in Central Asian Turkmenia, when the Communist Party assigned a Russian urban industrial worker to convince the poor that they would be better off in a collective, he found only one man in the village who knew any Russian at all, a 21-year-old farmer. The Russian suggested the name "Socialism" for that farm. Nearly 50 years later the farmer recalled, "I asked him then what socialism meant. What I understood from his answer was: we will work jointly on our land, we will bring water to it, we will grow crops and divide our harvest equitably. And I reminded my fellow villagers that our life had always been bad. It had been bad for our fathers, and for the fathers of our fathers, and for their fathers before them. Socialism means a good life, a just life. So we called our collective farm 'Socialism'."[3. 29]
That man went on to get a higher education under the atfirmative action program, and became a school principal. His Russian organizer was one of 25,000 industrial workers assigned to this job by the Communist Party, two-thirds of them from the Steel and Metalworkers Union, the element of labor constituting the Party's single strongest source of support.[3. 30]
This method — which involved very careful individual selection — of sending manual workers who had known a lifetime of wage exploitation to help those who had lived under landowner exploitation was quite deliberate. Lenin had made the underlying reasoning clear in a 1919 speech warning that "measures must be immediately taken to prevent Soviet institutions from being flooded with Ukrainian urban petty bourgeoisie, who have no conception of the living conditions of the peasant masses and who frequently masquerade as Communists."[3. 31]
This was not at odds with the policy which allowed the offspring of both princes and slaves to join the Young Communist League in the Caucasus. Today we see the 3,000,000 recently-Stone-Age inhabitants of Papua New Guinea emerging into self-government, just as the industrialized Basques of Spain make similar demands. Soviet ethnic policy is instructive because the Russian Empire included peoples across that entire spectrum of development. While Ukrainians were overwhelmingly rural, feudalism was well behind them, tribalism a thousand years in the past, and castes had never been a factor. Ukrainian women, while not remotely equal to men, were a shade better off than among the Russians. Most important, except for what the peasants made for home use, processing in the Ukraine was in factories, relatively little by craftsmen. As a consequence, the Soviet government of the Ukraine could act from the very outset in accordance with its Marxist principles, and base itself on the urban wage-workers who were rid of private employers and the peasants who were rid of landlords.
Among the Moslem peoples, however, the only significant industry was in the oil city of Baku. Capitalism was not the dominant economic system. Lenin identified the problem there in two statements of November 1919. The first concerned Turkestan — the name given by the monarchy to those conquered areas in Central Asia it ruled directly. As we have noted, the Empire ignored geographic ethnic differences within that huge territory, and even called one people by the name of another. In a telegram to the Communists of Turkestan, almost all Europeans at that time, Lenin wrote, "Demonstrate to [the peoples of Turkestan] by your actions that we are sincere in our desire to wipe out all traces of Great-Russian imperialism."[3. 32] And in a speech to a Congress of Communist Organizations of the Peoples of the East, he said: "you must adapt yourselves to specific conditions such as do not exist in the European countries; you must be able to apply that [Communist] theory and practice to conditions ... in which the task is to wage a struggle against the survival of medievalism and not against capitalism."[3. 33]
Prior to this time, Marxist political activity had addressed itself solely to the notion that socialism was the solution to the problems of industrial countries. Even in Russia, a major wing of the socialists called Mensheviks, and later the Trotskyist current among Communists, held that socialism could not be established there because it was not primarily an industrial country. Now history was forcing a Marxist party in power to grapple with practical realities. The last quotation above from Lenin marked the beginning of what has since come to be known as the "non-capitalist" path to socialism from pre-industrial societies, and represents the Soviet view of what is desirable for African countries today.[3. 34]
The most important aspect of the early experience in Central Asia was the appearance of transitional governments that were not yet Communist. Tsarism had permitted two "native states" — the emirates of Khiva and Bokhara — to remain when it conquered Central Asia half a century before the Revolution. The Emir of Bokhara was granted the title of aide-de-camp to the tsar. He was also allowed to invest 100,000,000 rubles, a stupendous sum in those days, in Russian industry and finance. That money (and another $175,000,000 in bullion and gems with which he tied to Afghanistan in 1920), came from an age-old system of exploiting the tillers of irrigated farmland. Russia offered a tremendous market for cotton, and that had been one of the reasons for the conquest.
The emir was the biggest feudal lord, but there were also private landholdings and those of Moslem religious institutions. Sharecropping was the rule, and the peasant retained but one-fourth of the crop! The peasants also had to build and dredge canals, maintain roads and bridges, build and repair brick fortress walls. There was a very large class of artisans and tradesmen in the cities, as in the Arab countries today. Judges retained a percentage of the fines they levied; administrators received no salaries, but lived ott tolls and taxes they imposed. But the system was largely stable: the croppers at least owned the land on which their homes sat, a wooden plow, a working animal. After the Russian conquest, they continued to work for a member of their own nationality, and in a way hallowed by tradition. This, their sense of property, of clan loyalty — the man who took 75 percent of the crop was usually of the same clan — plus religious loyalty, created a firm wall of resistance to social change.[3. 35] At this writing, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Afghanistan are examples of persistence of similar traditions.
However, the cotton trade with Russia, the contact with a different world provided by the new railroad, and the building of local cotton gins led to the emergence of a non-traditional merchant class. A desire for a type of education more utilitarian than the traditional Mohammedan schooling arose, and some such schools were opened. In the most medieval areas, the very name for such schools was taken as a synonym for rebellion, and their advocates were flogged, often to death — this happened to one of the major Eastern poets of modern times, the Tajik, Sadriddin Aini.[footnote 3. 4][3. 36] He survived.
A few people in tsarist Central Asia were sent to higher educational institutions in Russia to train as veterinarians and the like. Some secular literature appeared, and modernization became a goal among the new class. This was the situation on the eve of the Revolution.
When Lenin came to power, the Soviets offered national independence without demanding a new economic or social order. Even in the directly Soviet territory in Central Asia — not the "native states" like Bokhara — no attempt was made to interfere with feudal ownership of land and water for several years. It was clear that the idea of taking the land of the bey (nobleman) or, even worse, that of the mosque, was foreign to the mind of the dekkan (peasant), as immoral by his standards as the tsarist conquerors' seizure of native lands. A period of education and practical elementary training in democracy would have to come first. In the Kazakh steppes outside the irrigated Uzbek and Tajik oases, the Communists granted amnesty to those who had been active in the nationalist movement that initially opposed them, when they lay down their arms.
Witnessing all this, the liberals of merchant background in Bokhara decided the time had come to revolt against this last enclave of feudalism. They rallied the poorest sections of their society by pointing to the improved position of the peasantry in nearby areas under Soviet rule and the increasing number of indigenous people in responsible government positions. They overthrew the power of the emir except in the capital city of Bokhara, where the inhabitants, roused by the Moslem clergy, resisted strongly, until Red forces from Tashkent, Soviet Turkestan, won the day. This was in August 1920.
The new governments in Bokhara and Khorezm (successor to another emirate in Khiva) called themselves Soviet but not socialist. The position of the rank-and-file improved only in so far as they shared in the property confiscated from the emir and his highest officials and the abolition of the old taxes.[3. 37] Russia was able to provide a new kind of help from without: 24 medical specialists, 136 general practitioners and 154 nurses were sent to Bokhara in 1923. Except for a single physician and perhaps four nurse practitioners (feldshers) serving the emir and high Russian officials, these were the only source of medical help for the entire population. Yet even these 300 people represented a sacrifice by Russia, for a very large proportion of her medical personnel had emigrated due to the hardships of life after the Civil War and Intervention. This in fact is what prompted the Soviet policy of barring free emigration. The population in 1922 was 7,000,000 less than in 1918. Millions had died of disease and starvation, 2,000,000 in the fighting, and 2,000,000 including a great many professionals, had emigrated.[3. 38]
The structure of Soviet nationality policy was put in place in the 20 years after the Revolution, and embodied in the Constitution of 1936. A form of territorial autonomy was devised for small tribal nationalities in 1926; larger tribal peoples consolidated themselves into nations, and were given the status of full republics of the USSR. Kazakhstan and Kirgizia were at first autonomous republics within the Russian Republic, but in 1936 were separated out to become the last two full republics on a par with Russia.
Because most Blacks and Latinos, a great many Indians, and all Asian-Americans constitute dispersed minorities in the United States, the Soviet experiences most pertinent to them are those of the Jews. Tatars, and Gypsies. Like the Ku Klux Klan here, old Russia had violent racist organizations of private citizens. The Soviet government outlawed such organizations, tried, imprisoned, and in some cases executed their leaders. That took care of that, because the conditions giving one a personal interest in maintaining racism or discrimination were abolished. Therefore the mass base for even secret revival of such organizations disappeared. But some mental prejudice persists, and very small illegal dissident groups of Russian nationalists crop up at rare intervals.
The change from a pro-racist government that encouraged pogroms to an anti-racist one made an end to the acquittal or failure to prosecute persons engaging in killing, maiming, or defrauding members of ethnic minorities. The regular police force of tsarist times, recognized as hopelessly racist and anti-working class, was totally disbanded, and its former members were denied the right to vote or hold office for many years after the Revolution. The very word, "police," has disappeared from the language. Public safety functions were performed by a new force, drawn from workers and peasants known to share the interests of their own social classes and to be opposed to racism. Today, in contrast to the situation in most American inner cities, the "militia," (as the Soviet public-safety force is now called) accurately reflects the make-up of the local population everywhere in the Soviet Union, both in terms of physical characteristics and languages.
Residential ghettoes in old Russia arose both out of legal prohibitions, in the case of the Jews, and out of economic factors. Confiscating rental property eliminated discrimination by landlords, and reducing rents to a very tiny fraction of income eliminated economic bars to housing integration. No complaints on this score are heard today even from the most bitterly anti-Communist emigrants from the Soviet Union.
Discrimination in employment was also abolished. Jews had been legally barred from government service, work in the railroads or in the postal service; these laws were simply wiped off the books. Affirmative-action placed 150,000 Jews in industrial jobs in the years before unemployment was totally eliminated by socialist economic planning. With the organization of government farms the proportion of Jews earning a living from agriculture rose from 2 percent to 11 percent in the years before World War II. Only civil marriage was recognized (although anyone could also have a religious wedding) which automatically removed bars to intermarriage, such as the U.S. had with its miscegenation laws until recently.
Anti-Semitic quotas in education were abolished and education in one's native language was provided everywhere. This initially led to people flocking into schools in their own languages. When it became clear that all languages were truly regarded as equal in value, dispersed peoples in the following generation tended to send their children to Russian-language schools because that is the language of general communication where Russians are the majority.
Tatars and Gypsies, and numerous other dispersed minorities, had similar experiences, although discrimination against them had not been as firmly fixed in law in the old days. The Tatars overcame the heritage of their former depressed status in a single generation or at most two; with the Gypsies it took two generations for most, for some, three.
Overall, anti-minority prejudices have declined so sharply that violence on those grounds has disappeared. Some minority individuals believe they suffer from difficulties with promotion due to prejudice, and in certain cases this is undoubtedly true, but overall statistics in all cases — Jews, Tatars, Gypsies — reveal exactly the opposite as the general rule. All moved upward far more rapidly than the Russians. The Jews are far ahead of the Russians in proportion to population. Peoples without the Jews' traditional striving for education are either about even with or still somewhat behind the Russians, but now their progress is entirely up to themselves.
World War II disrupted everything in the Soviet Union, including the patterns just described. Post-war developments affecting particular nationalities are discussed in detail in the chapters which follow.
On December 21, 1982, the sixtieth anniversary of the joining of the six Soviet republics then existing into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, then Soviet President Yuri Andropov delivered a speech setting forth the present view of the Communist Party and the government on the ethnic situation:
Marxism was the first doctrine to show that the nationalities question is linked organically to society's social class structure, to the predominating type of property. . . . For the first time in history the multinational character of a country has turned from a source of weakness into a source of strength. . . . The successes in settling the nationalities question by no means signify that all the problems generated by the very fact of the life and work of numerous nations and nationalities in a single state have vanished. This is hardly possible as long as nations exist, as long as there are national distinctions. And these will exist for a long time to come, much longer than class distinctions. That is why the further improvement of advanced socialism . . . must include a carefully considered, scientific policy with respect to the nationalities question. . . . We must remember that there are both good and bad. outdated elements in the cultural heritage, traditions and customs of each nation. . . . It is important, however, that the natural pride one takes in the gains achieved should not degenerate into ethnic arrogance or conceit, that it should not tend toward exclusiveness and disrespect for other nations and nationalities. Yet such negative phenomena still occur, and it would oe wrong to attribute them solely to the traces of the past. Among other things, they are sometimes fostered by the mistakes we make in our work. Here, comrades, nothing can be dismissed as insignificant. Everything counts — the attitude to the language, to artifacts of the past, the interpretation of historical events and the way we transform rural and urban areas and influence living and working conditions.
The natural migration of the population is making each of our republics — and, to varying degrees, each region and each city — increasingly multinational. . . .
In some of them, however, the indigenous nationality should be represented in the working class more fully. Hence the task set by the 26th Congress of the Communist Party — to expand and improve the training of skilled workers from among all the nations and nationalities residing in the republics. The need for this is both economic and political. Multi-ethnic work forces, above all those in industry, are that very milieu in which the internationalist spirit is fostered best . . .
Representation in Party and government bodies ... is also a highly important question. . . . There should be a consistent effort to ensure proper representation of all nationalities in any republic at all levels of the various Party and government bodies. . . . Great tact in selecting and assigning personnel are especially necessary in view of the multinational composition of the union and autonomous republics. . . .
To continue instilling in Soviet people a spirit of mutual respect and friendship for all the nations and nationalities of the country . . . should also be an everyday concern of all educational establishments in our country. . . .
All this means that problems of relations among nations are still on the agenda in the society of mature socialism."[3. 39] (my emphasis-W.M.)
Early in 1983, Mr. Andropov brought this same matter before the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Izvestia, the government's official daily, reported him as saying that there was need for "more concrete and deeper consideration of ethnic characteristics, for more concern for all-round development of all the nations and peoples, particularly the small ones. He emphasized the need for persistent efforts to eliminate from existing practices any deviations from Lenin's nationalities policy and for consistently providing for total equality of Soviet people of all nationalities."
The resolution adopted by the Presidium on that occasion charged educational institutions with "socializing the people in the spirit of mutual respect and friendship among all the nations and peoples of the country . . . [and] persistently to develop forms and methods of work, meeting contemporary requirements, to enrich the ethnic cultures and to make use of the best that is provided by the intellectual heritage and traditions of each of the peoples of our country, to resist actively attempts to idealize obsolete manners and morals . . . and to struggle against such negative phenomena as ethnic conceit, bragging and a disrespectful attitude toward other nations and nationalities.[3. 40]
Mr. Andropov died only a year after this program was adopted. The Chernenko administration is still too new for us to judge its implementation of these principles. However, a mid-1984 article in Pravda, the Communist Party's national daily, pointed the finger at non-Marxist trends of thought in the USSR that could bring problems in the ethnic sphere: It charged that, "Some scholars are showing a conciliatory attitude toward the ideology of Pan-Slavism," a prerevolutionary theory that justified Russian dominance on the grounds that Russia was the protector of other Slavic peoples. The article called some conciliatory even toward "forthright apologists for the monarchy," most likely a reference to writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, now living in exile in the United States, and went on, "Rationalizations are still current about religious figures who supposedly express the spirit of a nation, and of religion as the fount of high morality." This was directed both at Great-Russian chauvinists and at anti-Russian nationalists. Certain religions are directly associated with particular nations or nationalities in the Soviet Union, so the feeling that possessing a particular religion gives one a better morality leads to a sense of superiority over peoples who do not profess it. All religious wars have been justified thus — "God is on our side."
Lastly, the article contended that "certain published works 'derive' national character from a classless, absolute ethic, a 'national spirit,' and peasant patriarch alism is looked upon as the source of everything distinct to a people."[3. 41] That last is unmistakeably directed against Valentin Rasputin, one of the most popular Soviet Russian writers of our day, and other literary figures of the "ruralist group," including some non-Russians, who take the same stand with respect to their own peoples. Clearly, Andropov's point that the "national question" will remain so long as nations and nationalities exist has not been forgotten.
Footnotes
↑There are thousands of Turkic words in the Russian language.
↑Attended by the American journalist and Communist John Reed, and pictured in the recent film, "Reds."
↑Reading this helped me understand the problems reported in the 1960s at Moscow's Lumumba University and the Leningrad Academy ol Arts with some African students with high status.
↑Thc rebels active in Afghanistan at this writing pursue an identical policy toward educators.
Notes
↑E.N. Burdzhalov, The Second Russian Revolution: The Uprising in Petrograd, translated as Vol. XVIII. No. 1. of Soviet Studies in History, 1979.
↑V.I. Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow: Progress. 1966), XXV, pp. 91-2.
↑Quoted in M.S. Djunusov, "Soviet Autonomy and the Vestiges of Nationalism," Soviet Sociology. II, No. 1 (1963), p. 12.
↑Anna Louise Strong, The Road to the Grey Pamir, (Boston: Little, Brown, 1931), pp. 123-125.
↑Anna Louise Strong, Peoples of the USSR, (New York: Macmillan, 1944), p. 102
↑J.V. Stalin, Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1953), III, p. 20.
↑L.S. Gribova, "Traditional Carving on Rural Buildings of the Perm Komi," Soviet Anthropology and Archeology, XIII, No. 4 (1975), p. 55.
↑A.Kh. Khalikov, "The Culture of the Peoples of the Middle Volga in the Tenth Through the Thirteenth Centuries," Soviet Anthropology and Archeology, XVI, No. 1, (1977), pp. 60, 74-76.
↑Cited in A.M. Sakharov, "The Study in Soviet Historical Literature of the Socioeconomic Basis for the Unification of the Russian Lands," Soviet Studies in History, XVI, No. 2 (1977), p. 36.
↑Z.S. Chertina, "The Bourgeois Theory of 'Modernization' and the Real Development of the Peoples of Soviet Central Asia," Soviet Law and Government, XIX, No. 3 (1980-81), p. 14.
↑"Marxism and the National Question," in J. Stalin, Marxism and the National and Colonial Question (New York: International Publishers, 1934).
↑Dr. E. Babayan, "Drug Addiction Can Be Eliminated," Soviet Life, Washington, April, 1978, p. 38.
↑U.S. Djekebaev, "The Overcoming of Social Alienation and Problems of Rooting Out Criminal Behavior Under the Conditions of the Transition of Formerly Backward Peoples to Socialism Skipping the Capitalist Stage," Soviet Sociology, XIII, No. 4 (1975), p. 67.
↑V. Oskotskii. "V bor'be s antiistorizmom," Pravda, May 21, 1984.
Blacks, Russians, and Black Russians
Thousands of students from Africa and other third-world regions now attend schools in the USSR.
The Soviet Union seems to me the only European country where people are not more or less taught and encouraged to despise and look down on some class, group or race. I know countries where race and color prejudice show only slight manifestations, but no white country where race and color prejudice seems so absolutely absent. In Paris I attract some attention; in London I meet elaborate blankness; anywhere in America I get anything from complete ignoring to curiosity, and often insult. In Moscow. I pass t unheeded. Russians quite naturally ask me information; women sit beside me quite confidently and unconsciously. Children are uniformly courteous.
Charlie Lee, also Black, was not yet born when Dr. DuBois died in 1963 At 16, in 1982, he attended a Soviet children's summer camp. Upon his return, he told me: "It turned my life around. Before I went, I saw people in terms of color and religion, but after we came back we all saw people as human beings. You can't even explain it — our society makes our youth look at people when our youth get together, 'hey, you're Black;' 'hey, you're white.' While you were at Camp Artek, you didn't notice. People were people. They would like us. By the time we got back, we saw people as human beings."
After they came back, "A lot of people told me I was changed in many ways. People said I was calmed down. My closest friend said: 'Well, the Soviet Union did that for you.' He thought it was for the best."
Mrs. Hilda Campbell of Chester, Pa., is a Black union carpenter, a regular church-goer, and the mother of boys aged 16 and eight. In 1984, she spent three weeks with the first-ever delegation of female skilled workers to visit the USSR, a by-product of the first convention of such women. Of the 20 who went, only two had been predisposed favorably toward that country. Mrs. Campbell remembers:
"Initially I was quite hesitant. I had been given so many negative pieces of information about the Soviet Union, even to the point of being terrified because on the job there were different guys saying: 'when you look at the correspondents talking to people on television: have you ever seen any Black women or men over there?' I had in fact never seen any."
She says this made her fear "they are doing something to keep them out of there and wonder what had happened to the Black people that would have been there." She simply never thought, she admits, that because of the geography of the country "there were none located there because they didn't originate there."
She also had the idea that people "were hard, very strict, unfeeling, just no concern for anybody else's feelings."
But when she arrived — one of two Blacks in the delegation — it was "Like a totally different world. I never expected the people to accept, not only the group, but me personally. The love, the caring, inviting me into their homes. They'd see me on the subway, or on the street trying to find a place to eat — on two occasions, people stopped and took me, hand in hand, and walked me to the restaurant, and made sure I got inside and sat down and ate. I know that in the United States, most people wouldn't even stop and act concerned. But these people stopped and gave of their time and energy, and that's just the most overwhelming gift that you can ever give a person who's lost."
While in Alma-Ata — in Kazakhstan, Soviet Central Asia — a few in the group went to visit an English-speaking Kazakh woman whose address they had been given. She had moved. This was made clear by an elderly Russian woman, via sign language, who then invited them to her home. Her husband and daughter knew a very little English.
"She made me feel truly wanted, not just somebody who came along in the crowd. After I'd eaten so much, she took my plate and gave me a new plate and filled it up again. When I left, I thanked her for it, and she hugged me and kissed me."
Boxer Muhammad Ali visited the Soviet Union in 1978 while in training for the fight in which he regained the heavyweight championship from Leon Spinks.
"I saw a hundred nationalities. No such thing as a Black man, or a white man, or 'you nigger,' or get back. People say, 'Oh, well, they just showed you the best.' You mean all of those white folks rehearsed, said: 'Muhammad Ali's coming! All the whores, get off the streets — all the whores, all the whores! Muhammad Ali's coming! Everybody walk quietly and peacefully. All hundred nationalities, pretend you get along. Muhammad Ali's coming! All the policemen take your guns off— I don't want more than two of you in the whole city. Muhammad Ali's coming!' 'They just took you where they wanted to go.' I know that's a lie. I got in my car and told my driver where to go. Lying about the Russians."
"I jogged in the mornings in strange places where they hardly ever saw a Black man. I ran past two little white Russian ladies who were walking to work. They didn't look around and ask what I was doing. I can't go jogging in some streets in America in the morning in a white neighborhood. If they see a Black man coming down the street, they wonder who I'm going to jump. I love things like this that I notice. Late at night, I was running down the street, and I looked back. Again, there were two Russian ladies. They didn't even look back to see why a Black man was out here running."[4. 1]
A friend in Moscow who spent his childhood in the United States became a journalist specializing in American affairs. He once showed me a letter to him from a cop in a small town in the Soviet Ukraine where the people are white, and speak a language related to Russian. The man wrote: "I am a militiaman [the Soviets hate the word "police" because of what it meant to the poor before the Revolution], my wife is a cook. We just had a new baby, a girl. She is our second child. Our boy, who is eleven, suggested that we name her for the brave American Communist, Angela Davis. We did so. Please send our best wishes to Comrade Angela. We hope she will soon be free." [That was during her trial.]
Dr. Lily Golden-Hanga is a Black Russian, a PhD historian specializing in Black nationalism in her research position at Moscow's Africa Institute. Her father, John Oliver Golden, was one of a group of 16 Negroes, all Tuskegee[footnote 4. 2] graduates, who moved to the USSR in 1931 to teach modern agriculture to the "people of color" in Soviet Central Asia.
I introduced Dr. Golden-Hanga, a Black Russian, in opening Chapter L Knowing that Golden was her father's name, I asked: "Who is, or was, Hanga?" "Hanga was my husband. He was the first prime minister of Zanzibar [now part of Tanzania]. Several years ago he was killed during the coup." They met in the Soviet Union. "He came especially to meet me. He had heard about me. He found mc in Moscow and he waited for two years to marry me. He was a student at Oxford, but when he came here he transferred to Lumumba University, where he got Diploma No. 1."
This university is named for Patrice Lumumba, who won national liberation for the Republic of the Congo (now called Zaire), and was murdered in 1961. "Dr. DuBois, Shirley Graham (DuBois), and Paul Robesont with Eslanda Robeson," who was an anthropologist, "participated in founding Lumumba University. I wrote an article about this, published in Freedomways."
The Soviet bodies founding that university were its Central Council of Trade Unions and its Committee for Solidarity with the Countries of Asia and Africa. Its purpose is to develop highly-educated indigenous personnel for the developing countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, with preference to applicants who could not otherwise afford college. There are always a large number of Soviet students as well. All told, there are 30,000 students from the developing countries in 300[4. 2] Soviet higher and secondary educational institutions. I know of at least one American Black who received a medical education there and is now practicing in Oakland, California. The Large Soviet Encyclopedia says of it: "Students at [Lumumba] are socialized in the spirit of internationalism and friendship among peoples. Tuition, medical services and dormitories are free. Students are given living grants," very generous ones by Soviet standards.
"The university comprises a preparatory department and six major departments: physics, math, and natural sciences; history and languages; economics and law; engineering; agriculture; medicine." The university "organizes practical work experience in their fields and graduate internships at 240 industrial enterprises, farms, clinics, and scientific institutions in 35 cities and 10 [ethnic] republics of the USSR."[4. 3]
I asked Dr. Golden-Hanga if there were other people of African descent in the Soviet Union aside from the group which came with her father.
"Yes. In the Caucasus, in such republics as Adjaria, Abkhazia, and in Georgia — Georgia, USSR, not Georgia, U.S.A.: there's a big difference — we have many people of African descent. They are the third or fourth generation in this country, or even more. Some of their ancestors were brought here by Turkish slave traders in the 17th and 18th centuries. A lot came in the 19th century."
Some Blacks participated actively in the Revolution. One family treasures a certificate of honor issued in 1920 to Shaaban Abash, a Red soldier of the Abkhazian Mounted Regiment. Abkhazia is in the Caucasus Mountains near the Black Sea. He was later elected a member of its parliament. His brother, a shepherd, was one of the initial organizers of collective farming there. He was the first head of the collective farm in his village. His daugher, "typically African in appearance," is a gynecologist in the city of Sukhumi. Her brother is a bus driver, who told a Soviet reporter, also Black: "I am Black and I am proud of it. I am respected by all."
Dr. Golden-Hanga continued: "They're not only in the South. This year I met, in Latvia, a very beautiful girl of Ethiopian descent, whose surname, incidentally, is Hannibal, like Pushkin's great-grandfather."
I said that American Blacks regard Alexander Pushkin as a black man. She replied: "I have never thought of him as black or yellow or blue or green or any other color, but only that he is a great Russian poet. It was he who made Russian Russian. Of course we know that his great-grandfather was Ethiopian. To me that is cause for pride, but nobody thinks of him in those terms.
"He also always regarded himself as Russian. In his writings there are references to his African ancestry — you will find phrases like 'my far native land' — but he thought of himself as Russian. How else can you think of a person who never heard an African language, who had no African culture, who was born in Russia? I also consider myself Russian. Russian is my native language. My life is part of the life of the Soviet Union, not something distinctive. Of course, sometimes when people first see me, it is something strange for them.[footnote 4. 3]
But within a few minutes, when they hear my pure Russian, and sense my psychology, and realize that I think like they think and speak like they speak and have had the same life experience they have had, they forget that I am of another color."
I asked her about a book by a former Lumumba University student dealing with alleged racist attitudes. She replied:
"I've heard about that book. The problem is that so many Africans come from diverse class origins. Some had been in Europe before coming here, and were influenced by bourgeois propaganda. Moscow has three million people entering and leaving it daily. Some come from very remote villages, and sometimes they look at you as very strange. Certain Africans don't understand that this is not because anyone has anything against Black people, but simply because they've never seen such people, and they are surprised at what they see.
But if you think that socialism can quickly solve all problems. . . . As Lenin and Karl Marx wrote, you can change a country's economic system, but it's very difficult to change psychology. So sometimes one can find people who are not politically developed or well educated who might be prejudiced. But I myself never had any experience of discrimination."
She admitted she had trouble understanding the word. "What does it mean? You are not allowed to go somewhere? Or you are not allowed to do something?" I mentioned subtler forms: someone looking at you in a manner that makes you feel he thinks you are not his equal, or people leaning over backward to be nice in a condescension that is discrimination in reverse. Any Black American, I added, could make the whole thing clear to her in ten minutes. She replied:
"You cannot find this in the Soviet Union. No segregation. Everybody can live wherever he wants, and sit and be and go where he wants> and can do everything he wants. Years ago, I was tennis champion of Uzbekistan, and traveled a lot around the Soviet Union playing in tournaments. I have been in nearly all the 15 republics, including some that you would consider quite white — Estonia on the Baltic: people with straw blonde hair, blue eyes, and so on. And Uzbekistan, where people are black, and other republics. All I experienced was admiration."
We talked of others in the group that had come from America with her father in 1931. One, George Tynes, was living in Moscow. "He visits the U.S. every other year or so," she told me, and had married a Ukrainian woman." Tynes dropped in to say hello to Muhammad Ali while the latter was being interviewed by the N. Y. Times. The champ asked him: "What do you like about this system?" The reply, "No racism."[4. 4] Tynes himself spelled it out more fully in an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 1974. He talked of his work in Uzbekistan with Golden, "Down there they thought I was a 'Uzbek'," he chuckled. "A little bigger and a little darker than most, but they tried to talk Uzbek to me. . . . I liked the work and the people and the way they treated me. T like the system very much. 1 feel I've been free, that there are no bars because of color on me or my children." In the U.S. he recalled, he had been made offers in professional football "but the money was not good," and in the U.S. his degree in vocational agriculture education allowed him "to teach in colored schools" but there was no work.[4. 5] In a later interview with the San Francisco Chroniele, "he said that in the 47 years he's lived in Russia he's never been insulted once because of his color, or been 'made to feel inferior'."[4. 6]
Tynes and his wife had three children, Dr. Golden-Hanga continued, "The eldest, Slava, graduated in journalism from Moscow University, and now writes for Novosti Press Service. He has traveled to Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania and Zambia in the course of his work. Previously, while doing his military service, he became a pilot and an officer. Another son also works in Moscow; and his daughter, Emilia, married an African and is now teaching chemistry in Liberia." I wondered out loud how many Black women teach chemistry in the United States, and she replied: "Every Soviet Black person I know has a higher education. Ella Ross, a graduate of Moscow University, a famous singer here of blues and spirituals, tours the Soviet Union. Another, Eula-Mae Scott, was one of the best dancers in the Bolshoi Ballet, toured the U.S. and Europe several times with it. They are pensioned at 37, very early, because that's hard work. Now she is writing a dissertation, on African dance." Ms. Scott also won a choreographers' competition, with a ballet based on the story of Angela Davis.
Dr. Golden-Hanga herself has written a short history of Africans in Russia from the 16th century on, of which she gave me a copy.[4. 7] "I traveled to find such people. It was difficult, because they also don't consider themselves African or Black or whatever, and the descendants are products of mixed marriages with Russians, Armenians, Georgians, Adjarians. But I think I know almost all of them now."
For these reasons, she went on, it is hard to say how many there arc. "Maybe about 500, maybe more, because there arc thousands of Africans now studying all over the Soviet Union, and they marry Soviets, and they have children, so now there arc many more than before." No one has reported incidents of any kind involving such children in Soviet schools or elsewhere, in the USSR.
Her views on questions that agitate American Blacks emerged from a personal question when I asked, "Your mother is white, and Jewish?" She replied in the affirmative, but laughed: "That sounds very funny — to say that a person is white, and Jewish." (Mother, daughter, and granddaughter live together. Mr. Golden is dead.) It was here that her distinct Russian ness began to appear: "I don't understand American Blacks when they say about themselves that they are Black, because if you say you are Black it means there must be a black color! But Blacks are such different colors!" I explained the historical origin, that American whites, in justifying slavery, regarded as Black anyone with any African heritage at all, and that both Black and white Americans find it hard to understand that the rest of the world doesn't accept that definition.
Reminding me that she was born in Uzbekistan, "where all people are very black," (she would immediately be taken as Black in the U.S.) she explained, "Ours is a different understanding of the problem, because there are many people who are very black, and they are not Africans. People are of so many different colors that I think it is not right to identify a person by his color. I can't imagine looking at an Uzbek and saying: 'Are you black?' He would laugh at me." When I told her how the term "Negro" had been replaced by "Black" as a self-designation in the United States, she replied: "Can't you simply be American?"
There are Blacks in the United States who think that impossible, because they regard the country as hopelessly racist. But to Africans, former Ambassador Andrew Young is unquestionably American, as is Jesse Jackson. So her question reflects a view widely held abroad, and which is certainly present among Blacks in the United States. Her present work touches on this question.
"I am trying to write a paper now on the problem of Black nationalism in the world, not merely some small group or single country but the entire world — in Africa and in the United States too. I think nationalism has gone through several stages in its development. There are times when nationalism plays a positive role in the history of a nationality, a country, and so on, especially when a nation is fighting for its independence. But when national sovereignty already exists, nationalism can sometimes become very reactionary. This is very important at the present time. We know of many occasions when a country's or people's nationalism has brought it to catastrophe.
There are also many kinds of nationalism; political, cultural, ethnic, and so on. For example, I hear of American Blacks considering themselves Muslims only because they think that Africans are Muslims, and that that is their national religion. But if one examines the history of Africa, one sees that Islam came very late in the history of the African peoples, only in the 9th century. This means that Islam is not an indigenous African religion. It was brought from Asia. So when Americans fight for the right to be Muslim, it indicates that they don't know African history. I use this to illustrate religious nationalism to you."
Not only Black Muslims, but others in the U.S. Black community, would differ sharply with her.
I don't think Dr. Golden-Hanga and Muhammad Ali would have too much of an argument with each other. In his N.Y. Times interview at the end of his visit to the USSR, he said: "So what they doin' is, they live religion — they give a man free medical and hospital care, low rent, a job ... " He had spent most of a week visiting Moslem mosques and monuments in Tashkent and Samarkand. New World Review asked him: "Did you see any evidence of Russians trying to dominate the Uzbeks or other Central Asian peoples?" "No. No. Might be, but I didn't see it. Those people are free to worship, dress and do as they want. I didn't see any Russian people doing anything. The Uzbeks had their own houses, their places ol business, their own little streets, their own mosques, their own clothes. They prayed by Islamic traditions."
Not all Black visitors to the Soviet Union agree, of course. On the one hand, there is the testimony of poet Langston Hughes, whom I met in Moscow in 1932: "the one country in the world that has equality for all races"[4. 8]; of Paul Robeson: "I feel like a human being for the first time since I grew up";[4. 9] of Dr. DuBois and of his cofounder of the Africa nationalist movement, George Padmore;[4. 10] of playwright and actress Alice Childress; of the American Blacks who have chosen to live in the USSR and of their children; of Black labor union officials like Bill Chester of the West Coast longshoremen; of prominent Baptist clergymen like Dr. Charles L. Evans; of newspaper publishers (more than one) like Dr. Carlton Goodlett; of William B. Davis, one of the rare Blacks included in the staffs of U.S. exhibitions in Moscow: "a dark face in Moscow has as much advantage as it would have disadvantage in Mississippi. . . . I found no public display of racial prejudice in Moscow. Such would be a criminal offense."[4. 11] Most recently, there have been Angela Davis, Muhammad Ali, Charlie Lee, Mrs. Hilda Campbell.
On the other hand, there is Homer Smith, who from 1932 to 1935 wrote very favorably as a correspondent in Moscow for the Afro- American newspaper chain, but had second thoughts thirty years later in his book, Black Man in Red Russia, 1964. Most prominently, there is former U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young, subsequently mayor of Atlanta, who has spoken of "racism" in the USSR.
Why this disparity? Perhaps my own experiences help explain it. I have met a "closet" dissident, protected by his status high in a Soviet cultural institution, a status he enjoys because of his real skill in a specialized profession. He expressed himself to me about Angela Davis in the most vicious racist and male chauvinist way. because of his bitterness that she chooses to be a Communist. I have heard the chairman of a collective farm in the Caucasus Mts., himself of a minority nationality, say that he would never let his daughter marry a Black. I have heard a famous and talented Soviet Oriental actor actually express himself in favor of U.S. discrimination against Blacks because of the haughty and arrogant son of an African chief who had been a fellow student at a Soviet higher educational institution.
And a Leningrad teen-ager, just out of high school, said to me in the 1960s that he knew a boy of his age who believed all Blacks and Jews should be exterminated. Utterly taken aback, I said, "I have been reading the Soviet press, school textbooks, seeing Soviet films for thirty years, and have never seen anything that could possibly put such an idea into anyone's head. Where did he get that from?" The boy shrugged and said: "Where does any kid get his ideas from first of all? His parents."
Of course there are some such parents. I can only ask — as I do to people who ask me about racism in the USSR after a lecture — "If tomorrow morning we wake up to find that every possible law U.S. minorities want is on the books and being enforced, do you think there will still be racists in this country 70 years from now?" — about the time that has elapsed since the Russian Revolution. Whites in my audiences invariably show no visible response; Blacks almost uniformly nod their heads in the affirmative.
Once at the Leningrad airport, I heard a Russian say to two African students: "How does it feel to wear clothes? At home you go around in grass skirts, don't you?" The Africans snapped an outraged response and stalked away. I went up to the Russian and asked: "What did you insult them for?" He was perplexed and defensive, and said he thought what he said was true, and how could he know? I took him by the arm, walked him to the nearest newsstand, showed him the well-illustrated popular geography magazine, Vokrux sveta (Around the World), and said: "Read that, and you won't go around offending people." (In the other incidents recounted here also I tried to make appropriate responses.)
The late Jessica Smith, who worked longer and harder for mutual understanding between our countries than any other American, put this matter frankly in 1970 to the Russian who is assistant head of their Association for Friendship with the Peoples of Africa. She quotes his reply: "In 1950, when Black people, many of them students, began to appear in large numbers in Moscow, our people had seen rather few of them and had little understanding of what they had suffered from white supremacy attitudes. . . . They simply had not seen people as dark-skinned as those from Africa. They created a sensation. Our people were ready at once to make friends with them, but were not always sensitive enough to the special problems they faced, because they were so different from anything the Soviet people have known in their own experience. . . . We use many different methods in making African problems known to the Soviet people. We use press, radio, TV, all avenues of communication, and distribute books about Africa, to make our people cognizant of the racist propaganda and persecution to which the Black people of the world have been subjected. This has resulted in increasing respect and friendship for the colored peoples of the world among the Soviet people."[4. 12]
In my experience, that is an honest answer on all counts. But because two of the negative experiences I have described occurred six years later, it is clear that not enough has yet been done. I remember as early as 1931, an electric sign — in Russian, not English — dominating one of the busiest squares in Moscow: "Tear the Scottsboro Boys Out of the Hands of the Executioners!" (The Scottsboro Case was a rape frame up — now universally admitted to having been that — that brought the first world-wide outcry against American judicial racism.)
An earlier book of mine is dedicated to: "Neal Burroughs (1922-1963): friend, translator, and unique product of two societies." Neal was the son of Mrs. William Burroughs, a New York City schoolteacher who was fired in 1928 for trying to organize a teachers' union. She took two of her children, Neal, then seven, and Charles, ten, to the Soviet Union. There she worked as English-language editor and voice of Radio Moscow. The boys were placed in a 24-hour-a-day childcare center; Neal forgot English and grew up a Black Russian, the older Charles became bilingual.
In later years, Charles was a circus performer, and early in World War II a truck driver for the Red Army. As an American citizen — the U.S. and the USSR were allies in that war — he was drafted out of Moscow and found himself in a training camp in Georgia, U.S.A., when the army was totally segregated and apartheid was the law oft-base. Talk of culture shock! Today, Charles lives in Chicago, where he and his wife continue to direct the Black History Museum they founded thirty years ago. He still thinks very highly of the Soviet Union.
Brother Neal entered Moscow University, the country's finest, where he specialized in English literature and re-learned his native tongue. The country treasured those who it expected would rebuild its cultural life after the war, so the university's student body was evacuated to Central Asia when the Nazis reached the outskirts of Moscow. Their journey eastward itself was one of the horrors of war, and vastly increased Neal's respect for the staunchness of the Soviet people. The students nearly froze and starved to death as their train was side-tracked again and again, so troop and munitions trains could move westward for the battles that saved the world from Hitler. (Most Soviet railroads were then single track. Few paved roads existed.)
In the East, for the first time, he found himself in an area where people looked more like him than his fellow students at the university. He found they still had some suspicions left over from the colonial period. Once he was addressed in the local language and responded in Russian: "I don't understand." The man who had spoken to him said: "What are you doing, passing for white?" There had been distinct advantages in being white before the Revolution. An Uzbek friend explained to Langston Highes in 1932 why there were partitions in the middle of the old street cars then still in service: "Before the Revolution, we would have to sit in the back. But now everybody sits everywhere."[4. 13] That was over twenty years before Blacks won that right in the U.S. South. In Ashkhabad, the city to which Neal was evacuated a decade later, Hughes saw a museum display designed to help children learn about their history: It included a sign, "Sarts Keep Out" (Sart had been the Russian equivalent of "nigger"; the people called themselves Turkmen). The sign had been taken from a beautiful public park in the heart of town built by the colonial rulers for themselves. My wife and I were in that park half a century later: the majority of people were now Turkmen, and Turkmen and Russians mixed in a natural and tension-free manner (girls of both nationalities were walking with arms linked, a very common habit in the USSR). Members of both groups were eating at the same tables in its restaurant.
Neal Burroughs returned to New York with his mother when she learned she was dying of cancer and wished to be reunited with her children. Neal's education was equivalent to that of a Harvard senior, but here he was simply a poor Black man. The first employment he found was cleaning work. By the time I met him friends in the progressive United Electrical Workers Union had found him a job assembling radios. His bitterness at the racism he found among his fellow workers — never mind the foremen and boss — was deep. Finally, he got a job which allowed him to use his knowledge of Russian at a book store on Fifth Avenue. But the management wouldn't permit a Black face among the sales staff, in the 1940s, so this extremely personable, handsome, cultivated man was kept down in the basement filling mail orders. He did manage to have published an introduction he wrote to a translation (which he edited) of Ivan Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons). It is still in print in a Pocket Books edition. In the Soviet Union he would undoubtedly have had an academic career, most probably at a leading university. Here that was simply not possible. To this day, I know of only a tiny handful of Blacks among the several thousand members of American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, although Black interest in Pushkin and in the darker peoples of the USSR is high. The racism of most of these white professors has to be encountered to be believed: basically, their attitude is, what can a Black know about Russian literature?
Typical housing in European USSR. Asian republics decorate buildings with ethnic tile patterns, as on mosques, and provide balconies.
My experiences lead me to agree with Hughes, Robeson, DuBois, Davis, Ali. They are Blacks. I am not. They have had a lifetime of experiencing and sensing racism, each suffered individually from it. All have traveled widely, and each one has said, in one form or another, what Muhammad AH expressed most succinctly when asked his impressions and feelings about the USSR: "my surprise that I saw no hate, no racism, no prejudice, no envy or jealousy in anybody's eyes."
Ali and other prominent visitors may be suspected of having been shielded from racism or as having been there too short a time to experience it. That cannot be said of rank-and-file long-term residents like the Burroughs family, Mr. Golden and his party, and their children, Mr. Tynes, George Padmore, and many others who came to the same conclusion as Ali, after long acquaintance with the USSR. Frankly, I feel more secure in my own judgments when someone like Mr. Padmore chose to quote me with approval in a book of his.[4. 14]
Footnotes
↑Dr. W.E.B. Dubois, 1868–1963, a Harvard PhD in 1895, sociologist, novelist, a founder of the national association for the advancement of colored people, is universally regarded as the greatest of black intellectuals. He was kind enough to make a positive reference to me in one of his books, In battle for peace (New York: Masses & Mainstream, 1952). p. 73.
↑Founded by the Black educator, Booker T. Washington, Tuskegee Institute in Alabama stressed the professions related to the fields in which Blacks were then overwhelmingly engaged, like farming. Members included George Tynes, Charles Noel Young, A.M. Overton, B. Conrad Powers, Hopkins Faison and John Sutton. tPaul Robeson, 1898-1976, world-famous baritone and actor, first Black football All-American, graduate lawyer. He did me the honor of singing in support of my campaign for Congress as a peace candidate during the Korean War.
↑Afrikan or Afro-American physical appearance is quite rare in the USSR. In a country of a quarter-billion, the few tens of thousands of African college and trade school students, and even smaller number of people of African descent, form a sharp contrast to the great number of indigenous non-white peoples, whose features are Oriental or resemble those one finds in India.
Notes
↑Marilyn Bechtel. "Mohammad Ali Speaks His Mind," New World Review, XXXXVI. No. 5 (1978), pp. 4-15, passim.
↑Dr. Vladimir Stanis, "Patrice Lumumba University," New World Review. XXXXVII. No. 6 (1979). pp. 18-21, passim.
"Russia's contribution in the field of mass education and cultural reconstruction among backward peoples constitutes one of the finest monuments to Communist initiative and enterprise. It is a serious challenge to the Western European Imperialist Powers in Africa and elsewhere."
George Padmore, Africa: Britain's Third Empire (London: Dobson. 1948), p. 106.
↑William B. Davis. "How Negroes Live in Russia," Ebony, January, 1960.
↑Jessica Smith, "African- Soviet Friendship." New World Review. XXXIX, No. 1 (1971), p. 91.
↑George Padmore, Africa . . . p. 106, quoting my Soviet Far East and Central Asia as documentation in support of his conclusion in note 10 above, based on his own three years' residence in the USSR.
The Soviet "Latins": Moldavia
Moldavia
A Spanish, Italian or French-speaking person would find something recognizable in 70 percent of the words in the Moldavian language — if he could read the alphabet. Because the traditional religion of the majority is Orthodox Christianity, the alphabet is like that of Russian, but the language is almost identical to that of Romania, the maverick Communist-governed country which borders Moldavia on the west. Romania, however, switched to the Latin alphabet over a hundred years ago for political reasons.[5. 1]
The fact that Moldavia and Romania speak essentially the same language does not make them the same nation any more than English-speaking Canada and the United States, or Mexico and neighboring Guatemala, are the same. Moldavia (then called Bessarabia) was under the rule of the Romanian monarchy from 1920 to 1940, and treated as a colony. An Englishman, Julian Hale, who knows Romania and its language, has written that before World War II, "even those Romanians who owned Bessarabian estates refused to exile themselves from Bucharest [Romania's capital]. Inhabited by the poorest of the poor, remembered only by tax collectors and recruitment officers, deprived of roads . . . Bessarabia had for centuries been the most neglected area in Europe."[5. 2] |my emphasis-W.M.]
Today, the Romanians would find things to envy in Moldavia, according even to a candidly anti-Soviet professor who reports that in 1971 the number of doctors was fifty percent higher than in Romania in proportion to the population.[5. 3] The figure for doctors was actually higher than in the U.S., Britain, France or Japan,[5. 4] yet the Moldavian figure has risen tremendously since then from one physician to nearly 500 inhabitants to one per 340 only four years later.[5. 5] In 1971, Moldavia also had nearly twice as many TV sets in proportion to population as Romania.
Moldavia is a small country, midway between Salvador and Costa Rica in size, and densely populated, with four million people.*[footnote 5. 1] From the air, flying at low altitude to and from the capital of Kishinev, it reminds one of William Blake's England, "this green and pleasant land." Like England, it is not spectacular, but very thoroughly cultivated, today heavily in vines and fruits. Roads wind in broad sweeps through gentle hills; oak and other trees provide lovely color in the fall. Roadside wells are framed in traditional stained wood, and bus shelters, as everywhere in the Soviet Union, are decorated with tiles in local ethnic designs.
Farm homes don't differ fundamentally from those in the nearby Ukraine, or even Russia, although large porches are more frequent as this is warmer country and one thinks of sitting outside in the shade in summer. There is also a warmth of color: Ukrainian homes are generally whitewashed, Russian may be elaborately carved, but Moldavians often use pastel colors and nailed on wood designs, often painting each strip differently. The collective farm we visited, called "New Life." was described to us as one of the best in Moldavia, but its homes, high school and community center ("Casa de Culture") were not noticeably different from those we had passed in the forty-mile drive from Kishinev. We met with the chairman, the Communist Party leader, and the director of an agricultural experiment station situated in the very well-kept library occupying one wing of the community center. The other wing held offices and a museum of the farm's history. The central section, with its lofty colonnaded veranda, housed a combined auditorium and 850-seat movie theater, and a large dance hall decorated with attractive frescos. Out front was a substantial flagstoned area, and a large decorative pool.
Mexican dance by Moldavian factory workers' troupe. Director, who had visited Mexico, had been struck by cultural affinity in more than language
Flanking this square was the high school. like many others in the USSR it was quite plain externally stunning within: gleaming parquet floors. the main corridor lined with busts of Moldavia's writers, their words displayed on stands. Before World War II, 65 percent of Moldavia's men and 85 percent of its women had been illiterate. In those times, this village had a two-year school with four teachers, themselves having only high school education. When we visited, it was consolidated school running from first grade through high school with 58 teachers — 20 with secondary education, 38 with higher education.
We asked our hosts whether the young people stay on the collective farm or go off to town once they graduate.
"We try to create all the conditions that will keep them here," came the reply. "So they work in the kolkhoz (collective farm). we're beautifying our streets, laying out a park." Several hundred, mostly young people, participate in the community center's performing arts groups, and its folk song and dance ensemble has been honored by the Moldavian government.
We knew that fifty nationalities live in Moldavia, and learned that on the collective farm the majority were Moldavians, but there were also Russians and Ukrainians, including the chairman. He had lived there twenty-one years, since "right after I graduated from junior college."
There were also, we were surprised to learn, Gypsies on the farm. "A dozen would settle down one year, fifteen the next, take jobs, work. They used to be wanderers. Now there are sixty families. They've built themselves good homes, designed for their extended families, and they don't drift off any more. They're doing skilled work: running tractors, operating other farm machinery, truck drivers. Two of them have graduated from the Conservatory, and one of those has become principal of the music school in Soroki."
These are free schools, with a seven-year course of instruction that children attend after regular school hours. There are about 7,000 such music schools all over the Soviet Union. The Gypsies, our host told us, "make very fine musicians." And "they all stay in high school right through graduation now."
(Two years later, I visited Kazakh friends on a street with settled Gypsy families in the large Asian city of Alma-Ata. One Gypsy woman had graduated from the Institute of Foreign Languages, majoring in French; another was a salesperson. Their homes, in this block of owner-built houses, were not ethnic in interior layout, and they were better than my friends' house— he a scholar, she a gynecologist — "because the Gypsies help each other out a great deal." In Moscow I interviewed two Gypsy sisters, one a concert singer, the other an anthropologist who had been recruited into that so that Gypsies could be studied by someone born to familiarity with their culture. Their father was a college professor and their uncle directed the professional Gypsy Theater. Their grandfather had been a tinsmith who insisted that his children take advantage of affirmative-action educational opportunities.)
Gypsy dance by Moldavian factory workers' troupe
At this point we were introduced to another man, considerably older and quite different in appearance, who had been seated quietly at the table. He had an intellectual air, combined with the sturdiness, and the hands of a farmer. He was head of (he local agricultural experiment station of the Moldavian Academy of Sciences. He explained his tasks:
We worked out such things as optimal depth for plowing, because here there were absolutely no scientific research institutions in what is now our republic, much less in agriculture. Only when Soviet government was established in the 1940s was organization of such things begun. As a consequence, there were a great many matters that had to be investigated under the real conditions of the locality.
We found thirty identifiable kinds of soil on this farm, because it has everything from swamps to hilltops. With their work on seed varieties and the like, wheat fields are now two to two-and-a-half times better than ten years ago, and nearly four times better on experimental plots.
We use the best of worldwide experience, plus the thing we've learned here. The outcome is that we do several things simultaneously: research, development on an experimental farming scale, and actual introduction into normal operations. Since we do our experimenting right here on the spot, the competent decision-makers on the farm see what works, and it goes into use without loss of time. So we wind up with an intimate tie between science and practice.
Before World War II a Rockefeller-funded study of a typical Moldavian village, conducted by the Romanian Department of Social Services, found that the diet for the majority "included practically no bread, fish, milk or tea."[5. 6] A family of four averaged two pounds of meat per month. A follow-up study in the same village in 1960 brought out personal stories illustrating these figures.
One woman asked "How could we make ends meet on a half hectare [1¼ acre] of land? My husband and I worked as farm hands." They each earned five lei — a nickel — a day. "Try and live on that. Our food was hominy and pumpkin, which are now used as cattle fodder on the collective farm. Clothes and footwear were a special problem. Anyone who had a pair of high boots would hang them up in his room for all to see as if to say: T am not so poorly off— see, I even have a pair of high boots.' But he himself went barefooted. Just think, I had seven children, and five died." She didn't say how they died, but the pre-war study spelled it out: "Malaria, syphilis, and tuberculosis were rife in the village."[5. 7]
Human relations were no better. In the follow-up study, another widow told how her husband, Georgi. worked for many years as a farm hand for Kiryak, a kulak [a Russian word meaning "fist." describing the skinflint peasant who managed to work himself up to employing others]:
Childless, he decided to adopt Georgi and get him to work on the farm. From hired laborers we became domestic servants. . . . [ had to get up at two or three in the morning, bake the bread, cook, and feed the cattle. Just before the war Kiryak fell sick and his wife Akulina feared that the land, after his death, would pass to us [because of the adoption]. . . . In 1938 she poisoned me and my husband. . . . He died, but I recovered. . . . Akulina had already managed to bribe (the chief of police). And so the murderess got away scotfree. In 1939 Kiryak died, and in 1940, when we were freed, Akulina fled to the West.
The founder of the collective farm we visited, Dr. B. Glushko, now retired, has written a memoir in which he describes how the attitudes bred by such relationships were changed. The son of one of the village teachers, he had managed to get a higher education in agricultural science in Romania, and a government research job. He records that half the village land belonged to large landowners and monasteries, about a fifth belonged to fifty kulaks like Kiryak — while the remaining 645 families had less than two acres each, on the average. He remembers his father's despair when, after explaining to a peasant the importance of clearing fallow, rotating crops, ploughing deeply, and fertilizing, the peasant would wave him off with a gesture of hopelessness and head for a saloon. What could he do with two acres? How could he spare land to lie fallow? How could he rotate crops when he needed every penny he could get from whatever crop promised to bring the highest price?
This overgrown village had five saloons. Its "society" consisted of the saloon-keepers, eight cops, two tax-collectors, two judges, four lawyers, two parish priests, the landlords and kulaks. Four teachers. No doctor. In 1940, when it became clear that the Soviets were going to — in the future chairman's view — liberate Moldavia, he got himself transferred back there, and when the Soviets did take over he became what we would call county agricultural agent. He described the problem:
Our task did not consist solely of teaching people how to cultivate the soil properly. For centuries the sense of petty proprietorship had divided people, developed the lone-wolf aspect in their character, envy, enmity toward each other. It was necessary to persuade this kind of peasant, by visible and convincing proofs, that his strength lay in mutual assistance and friendship with those like him, and with the working class. . . . The Soviet system eliminated the very causes that gave birth to and nourished the negative aspects of the peasant's psychology. . . . Social and property inequality in the village was abolished. The peasant was given land, implements, grain . . . "[5. 8]
One of the women in the follow-up survey talked of how this pertained to her: "For four months Kopanka was a front-line village [in World War II]. We were evacuated. When I got back with the children (my husband died in 1944) there was no trace of my hut; in its place there was nothing but weeds. Then the village Soviet helped me. It gave me a loan of ten thousand rubles and I was able to buy a cottage. I was also given an orchard spreading over two-and-a-half hectares [five acres]."[5. 9] Where did the five acres come from? In Moldavia as a whole, 975,000 acres were confiscated from the wealthy and given to the poor.[5. 10]
The collective farm we visited was founded August 3, 1947, with 7 pair of horses, 12 yoke of oxen, some ploughs and harrows — and 400 pairs of hands.[footnote 5. 2] The founder recalls their first lesson in cooperation 30 years before our visit:
A plain, ordinary barn, long. low. not noteworthy in any way. Today you can't find a barn like that on the most backward farm. But in that long-ago 1948. it was a symbol, a good foretaste of the big building jobs Of the future. We built it together, with our own hands, not each for himself, but for our common collective farm. . . . The then First Secretary of the county committee of the Communist Party arranged to bring people there from the whole county: let people see what 'miracles' were being performed in Chokyltiany.
It wasn't the barn that was the miracle. What gave joy was to see how people gained faith in their own powers, how former farm laborers . . . became masters of their lives, skilled craftsmen, talented organizers.
These were the people who, before the war, used to emigrate from Bessarabia to western Europe, and some to the United States, as many as 50,000 in a single year. One-third of the rural population had been unemployed.[5. 11] A situation not unlike that of Cuba at the time of its revolution.
A dozen years after founding, this farm was not only well equipped with tractors, combines, and trucks, but was able to buy an excavator to drain the swamps. Recovery from the war was now complete (the front had run through Chokyltiany for six months, and the land was crisscrossed with trenches, studded with pillboxes, deadly with mines), and the government had accumulated enough reserves to take up the work of drainage. We were told with pride that it put 16 excavators and 14 bulldozers to work, and reclaimed 2,400 acres for the farm. "As of today, the collective farm has put 60,000 rubles, and the government 900,000, into draining the valley of the Reut."
The founder remembers the more human things, like "the first person we put through college." Although Soviet higher education is free, its living-expense grants are sufficient only to maintain the student. If a farm or factory wishes to send a mature person with family responsibilities to receive a higher education, it provides that person's average earnings, on the condition that he or she returns after graduation to apply the acquired skill locally.
There were other pertinent human achievements. Moldavia's wealthy had been virulently anti-Semitic — a pogrom in Kishinev early in this century is part of Jewish history but during our visit it was actually called to our attention as the kind of thing that today is out of the question. In his memoir Dr. Glushko pays his respect to others who helped build the farm: among them Mikhail Isakovich (son of Isaac) Chomsky, who was assigned to the farm in 1954 as its Communist Party organizer. "He worked with us for nearly seven years. as the saying goes, his soul took root in the collective farm. He was incessantly looking or better ways, and organized people skilfully. Today. . . . M. I. Chomsky is already in his fourteenth year as chairman of the Dimitrov Collective Farm."[5. 12]
Glushko expresses satisfaction that thereafter the farm's Communists had always found a satisfactory leader from among themselves, although these individuals may have come to the farm earlier to give technical assistance. "It was in this way that our chief animal husbandry expert, Naum Evsevich Fishov," — another unquestionably Jewish name — "was elected secretary of the Party organization." Despite Hitler's gas chambers and a pogrom by his Romanian allies, who re-occupied Moldavia during World War II, it still has 80.000 Jews, or 2 percent of the population.
Among those mentioned in the memoir as contributing to the farm's progress, about thirty have unmistakably Moldavian names, including one who was awarded the highest of all Soviet honors, the title "Hero of Socialist Labor," and another who is the local member of the republic's Supreme Soviet.
No country that lacks industry can be part of the modern world. Even if its needs for manufactures are adequately supplied its own people will be handicapped so long as it lacks an urban life based on production, not just trade. When it was re-incorporated into the USSR after World War II, Moldavia was the country's most rural ethnic component. more so even than the Central Asian regions which had 15 years of Soviet modernization before the war plus the influx of industries evacuated there to escape Hitler.
As a consequence of this background and also because it is blessed with extraordinary soil and mild climate, Moldavia is still the second most rural of the republics, (after Asian Tajikistan) but the picture has changed sharply. Only one person in eight lived in town in 1940; today two in five do. Towns that were purely commercial — there was not one college in Romanian=controlled Bessarabia — have become industrial and cultural. Moldavia manufactures washing machines, refrigerators, heavy electrical machinery, over a billion cans of food per year, substantial quantities of cement, shoes and clothing for its own needs, and cognac that is sold world-wide, including the United States. The generation of electricity has multiplied 600 times! Bessarabia's only industries were primitive foundries and the manufacture of metal hoes. Today it produces ultrafine microwire, analogue computers and oscillographs.
Where there was one Ph.D. in Bessarabia before World War II, there are now 2,200. Moldavians still benefit from an affirmativeaction program in the USSR: "the country's leading centers of science . . . provide places in their graduate study programs for Moldavians. . . . Today more than 100 scientific and higher educational institutions throughout the USSR arc training researchers and scholars for Moldavia."[5. 13] Moldavian institutions already graduate people in seventy-four majors. Most important, in terms of ethnic self-respect and cultural independence, by 1975 the number of ethnic Moldavian professionals and diplomaed paraprofessionals almost exactly equalled the number of those of all other nationalities in that republic combined: 133,700 to 137,600. The others had to be brought in, or came from among nonMoldavian local residents, because at the time of the Revolution there was not one single native-born doctor, engineer, or agricultural expert. Today ethnic Moldavians probably outnumber the others combined, because they increased 110 percent in professional and para-professional occupations from 1959 to 1973. more rapidly than the Russians (80 percent) or the Ukrainians (70 percent — Moldavia has half a million Ukranians). and that trend was continuing. As those figures make clear, members of the other nationalities in Moldavia are also free to advance themselves. The modern buildings in Moldavia chosen for illustrations of current architecture in Soviet Encyclopedia articles are largely designed by Jews: Gothelf, Weissbein, Shoikhet, Kaliuzhner.[5. 14]
Perhaps most striking is the fact that other Soviet republics now send graduate students to Moldavia for training in fields in which its higher educational institutions have already won prominence: branches of theoretical mathematics, helminthology, plant physiology, computer engineering.
In view of the foregoing it is particularly shameful to read the following, in recent writing on Moldavia coming from American universities: "discrimination against Moldavian students"[5. 15] or "Russians, Ukrainians, and Jews . . . gradually supplanting the Moldavians"[5. 16] or such sheer irrational trash as "perhaps it is the nature of the region which has discouraged a flourishing of culture."[5. 17] Or, from another standard (!) source: "Leaders of the USSR and the Moldavian SSR . . . are pursuing a conscious policy of isolatmg the predominantly rural population from the political and urban technological order . . . "[5. 18]
In the early 1970s Iu. V. Arutiunian, a Soviet anthropologist ot Armenian nationality who enjoys international respect, found that the percentage of Russians employed in mental occupations in Kishinev barely exceeded the percentage of Moldavians, while a generation before the percentage among the Russians had been twice as high. In a word, the Moldavians had closed a 50 percent gap in a single generation.[footnote 5. 3] He found, further: "the influx of Russians from villages to the towns of Moldavia is declining, while that of Moldavians is increasing The Russian language is not displacing the Moldavian among Moldavians." and, most important: "the social structure of the [variousl nationalities in Kishinev has become essentially the same."[5. 19] The worst of it is that this information was available to the Americans quoted above at the time they wrote. It was published in a standard source carried nationally in university libraries.
In a paper delivered in the United States in 1984, reporting his subsequent studies, Arutiunian noted that Moldavians ranked among the top two Soviet nationalities in level of job satisfaction, among professionals and paraprofessionals, and that, with unobstructed opportunity for advancement, the overwhelming majority enroll for postgraduate training.[5. 20]
I myself owe the Moldavians an apology. In a previous book, I gave their country only a cursory mention. True, in that volume I had to survey all the nationalities of the USSR in a single chapter,[5. 21] but the fact is that I dealt with Moldavia in a cavalier fashion because I was not sure the republic was anything but a legal fiction to cover Soviet occupation of a territory that had changed hands innumerable times, like Alsace and Lorraine between Germany and France.
Now that I've been there, I know better. Even five minutes at the art museum in Kishinev made clear that the culture was distinct from that of the other republics. There is a vividness of color that probably has something to do with the sunny skies and fine light of the region. There was a southern liveliness in the work,
a broader range of experimentation in forms than one sees in most Soviet republics. And while there was no discrimination against non-Moldavians, there was a plurality of Moldavian ethnic names, and paintings with a theme often concerned ethnic subjects; village musicians and singers in native dress, or a peasant carving decorations on his house.[footnote 5. 4][5. 22]
Opera is hardly an art one associates with underdeveloped people, and Kishinev has had a professional company with its own theater, since 1957. Maria Beishu, sent to Italy for training with Milan's La Scala, won a world-wide competition in Japan for best performance of Chio-Chio-San in "Madame Butterfly." Moldavian composers have created in the most complex musical forms, including operas on ethnic historical themes.
As everywhere in the USSR, there has been tremendous emphasis on raising folk dance to the level of professional performing art. One of the most successful companies is Moldavia's "Zhok," with its sensational ring dance in which the men, their arms around each other, fly horizontally off the floor as though being whirled by an invisible pinwheel. It has been performed on every continent, and this, too, adds to the ethnic self-confidence and pride of this small nation.
It is Soviet policy that each republic shall be assisted to develop in each of the major arts, so each has its own film studio. Moldavian films have not won the international fame of Soviet Georgian, but at least one movie has gained USSR-wide attention: An Accusation of Murder. It dealt with how perfectly normal young workingmen in a factory kill someone when they are on a drunken spree, and how various prestigious types pass the buck when confronted with their direct or indirect responsibility for the fact that such a social situation can arise. Except for the familiar film stereotype of the good-guy fatherly cop, it is an above average film.
At the Writers Union, I spoke with a script- writer, a graduate of the Film Institute in Moscow who explained that film-making began less than 25 years ago in Moldavia. "We've put out a respectable number of films, more documentaries than otherwise. The Last Month of Autumn, based on a novel by our Ion Drutse, won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Festival of Films for Youth in 1967." The studio produces five feature films a year, three for theater showing and two for television, ranging from historical themes to comedies.
Drutse is one of many writers in minority languages who are known across the country. Four of his plays have been produced all over the Soviet Union, in translations, and in 1978 one of its most demanding repertory companies, Moscow's Maly Theater, presented his work, with one of the greatest Russian actors playing Leo Tolstoy. One has to understand the extraordinary Russian reverence for literature, and the virtual worship of classics like Tolstoy, to appreciate Drutse's daring in doing a play on him,— the more so as Drutse broke with the accepted picture of Tolstoy's wife. Sophia Andrcyevna. as a "harassed and hysterical woman," and made her the hero of the play.
Americans often assume there must be something ot colonialism in the relationship between Russia and the ethnic republics, simply because of the great disparity in size and population. In fact, the colonial mentality is not to be found, as Drutse's iconoclastic altitude shows. Another example is offered by a Moldavian poet, Aureliu Busuiok. In 1978. the prestigious USSR-wide Literary Gazette surveyed writers all over the country to find out whether critics had responded to Communist party demands that they change certain practices so critics could be more useful to writers and the public. Busuiok answered bluntly, "In thinking about what help critics are to me in my work, I come to the conclusion, not much." And as one whose national reputation depends upon the quality of translation, he volunteered, "It is quite common for a poet to be cussed out for the sins of the translator or praised for merits that are not his."[5. 23] As two volumes of his verse and two of his novels have been published in Russian, he need not fear that his talent will be known only to the very few million who read his own language.
However, a full quarter of the Soviet people — half of the non-Russians — do not know Russian very well, and hardly any non-Moldavians know Moldavian. How do they get access to his work? A member of the Writers' Union told of a "young and very able" poet who came from Latvia to study Moldavian. He now translates verse from Moldavian to Latvian — languages of very different families. And many Moldavian books appear in Kiev, the capital of the Slavic-language Ukraine that nearly surrounds Moldavia. "They recently published An Anthology of Moldavian Poetry in two volumes, an enormous undertaking, a literary event of outstanding importance. We will be publishing an anthology of Ukrainian poetry."
Moldavian national hero. Religious symbolism is accepted natural for his time.
He told me of a "literary event," called Days of Soviet Literature in Moldavia. "Representatives of the literatures of all the other fourteen republics came here: large delegations from Moscow and Leningrad and even guests from abroad." Imagine the biggest names in American writing from New York and Hollywood going, say, to Texas at the invitation of this country's Latino writers in Spanish or the mixture "Spanglish" often used colloquially. Imagine, too, that a Latino writers' organization could pay their costs. "Many of them have written about Moldavia, for example, Gevorg Em in. the prominent Armenian poet. Or the prominent poet of the Caucasus, Kaisin Kuliev, who has been here many times and whose poems have been translated into our language." Kuliev is a Balkarian, a mountaineer people numbering only 42,000 within the Russian Republic. He writes in his own language, which was never put in written form until after the Russian Revolution. He enjoys USSR-wide prominence. This is as though a Cherokee or Cree (whose languages were put in written form) wrote poetry in his own language, and English-speaking North Americans were interested enough to discover that it had universal merit and went to the trouble of translating it and publishing it for the general public.[5. 24]
"Moscow writers are very dear to us because they translate outwork into the Russian language, and it is through Russian that we emerge into the larger world. Such famous poets as Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak translated poetry from Moldavian and thus promoted its popularity."
Despite Busuiok's criticism, the work is done in a fashion tar more painstaking and costly than any American publisher is willing to finance, as I know from my own experience. "Usually the translator familiarizes himself with Moldavia, with the republic, with our literarv and cultural context. David Samoilov. for example translated our classics, he translated our folklore, and thus worked his way to contemporary poetry, a process extending over many years. 'There are also meetings with the original author, and familiarization with his native places."
He gave as an example a Moldavian writer visiting Latvia, trom which it is separated by three other Soviet republics of distinct ethnic cultures and languages. "One of our writers went there and wrote about all three of the Baltic republics -essays, essentially, and ihev turned out very interesting. They were then translated into their languages, so they got to see how they look through our eyes."
In different countries of the Soviet Union, I spoke with different sorts of people— in Kirgizia I came closest to film and TV people, in other places to anthropologists. But Moldavia gave me a picture of the way in which writers, as an organized body, see their relationship to society. Because that relationship is the same everywhere in the USSR, and is much discussed in the west, let us listen to the Moldavians a bit more.
I had needled them about their building — new, five stories high and half a block long, with a lobby big enough for a grand ball. I asked, "How many members in the Writers' Union?" "About 150," was the reply. I asked, what the hell do they do in such a building?
"You mean, isn't it too big for our hat size?"
"How do you justify it? You don't live here. You don't do your writing here. Of course, the building is merely the physical manifestation — How do you explain the extraordinary place occupied by the writer?"
One man offered a concrete example:
This year has seen the seventh edition of our school primer. This primer was written by writers, by two of our creative writers, in collaboration with professional educators. These are excellent writers, who for nearly five years gave up their own personal literary undertakings, and created a primer. They made the rounds of schools. They consulted with the very best teachers, with publishing-house personnel. They worked on that primer as though it were a book-length poem. Now other republics are translating and publishing that primer because it has the quality of a work of art.
This was for the first grade. And they didn't do this out of monetary considerations. The honorarium was ordinary, modest.
Soviet writers earn no royalties, but the honoraria allow the rank-and-file professional writer to earn a living — rarely the case in the West.
There are schools taught in Russian in Moldavia, but this was a primer of the Moldavian language. The speaker did go on to explain the building: on one floor, writers put out two literary magazines which have large circulations, one of them USSR-wide; another floor has a literary museum, another a large auditorium for public readings of new books— and they had recently established a publishing house of their own, for creative literature.
Library in village "Casa de Culture."
Writers, he explained, "feel an organic need to work for society. After the war, for example, when the people of Moldavia simply did not know how to read, how did our literature get under way? The very first thing we did was to write the kind of books from which peasants could learn to read." He pointed with pride and respect to an older man at the table: "our old-timer here, Dregupanu; also Corliupanu." The older man added: "Gusev. Gusev, Evgenii Mikhailovich." — a Russian name — he was paying respects to a Russian colleague who assisted in getting their ethnic efforts off the ground.
"We did our share in everything, on the very highest and most serious level; from that first textbook on, our creative writers were involved. Without false modesty, we can say that writers did work of enormous importance. This includes, for example, the development of the theater. It isn't only a matter of writing: they participate. Someone will work somewhere as literary secretary, another as a director. In the development of our movie industry, Georgii Vodu here, a poet, is also a director."
This speaker wrote lyrics for topical songs for a youth newspaper. "I felt that it is not for a writer of poetry to do articles on social problems, but that he has to express himself on such matters through his own medium of verse." In short, he felt a duty to participate in civic matters, but that he could best contribute through his art — I was reminded very much of Woody Guthrie. Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson.
Another writer explained some of the more material aspects of their work. "The Writers' Union is a professional organization, and rather a wealthy one, which had enough money to build this large building for itself. It also has enough to send its members on trips for months to gather material for their work and provide vacations for its members.
"We're not the only organization of people in a creative field. For example, people associated with theater also have a building. The House of the Actor.' A member of an association of creative people can arrange for foreign travel. Moldavia is no exception — you'll find the same thing in every other republic."
The overall situation in Moldavia was best summed up, quite unintentionally, by an American Sovietologist I quoted earlier. In closing a presentation to a symposium he said, and had the incredible lack of tact to publish, the following: "I apologize for my inability to produce evidence of [anti-Soviet nationalist] . . . activities in Moldavia."[5. 25]
Perhaps he would understand why he could find no such evidence had he heard the life story of a calm and handsome woman I recorded in the Moldavian capital. She was born in 1937, seven years before the Soviet system began in Moldavia, when it was part of the Kingdom of Romania. Now an anthropologist, she told of her experiences:
Gagauz and Moldavian anthropologists.
I am from a peasant family, from the very depths of the people, as they say. The anthropology 1 write is inside me. I lived that life; there was no need for me to familiarize myself with it. I know the customs, the rituals, the milieu. I am the youngest of nine children. Two died in childhood. That's because those were hard years. Even right after liberation. 1945 was a very hard year. Another sister, my older brother and sister arc now collective farmers. They didn't have the chance to become educated. They were too old for that. But they're not suffering because of that, they arc honored workers, have good houses. My brother has raised five children, my sister four. All of them have made it in life, and bring joy to us and to their parents.
Of the other four of us. one beside me has higher education. She works as a county environmental protection inspector. A brother works as a collective farm bookkeeper. He's a member of the Communist Party, as is another of my sisters who is a nurse. And finally there's me.
As the last one. I went farther than any of the others. But that was a consequence of many circumstances. I entered grade school right after the war. in 1946. It was a terribly difficult year, but I had a very good teacher. He was one of the very few Gagauz teachers who had managed to get an education even under Romanian rule.[footnote 5. 5]
He apparently saw ability in me. I was out working in the fields with my father. I guided the horse, and he tried to plant somehow. Everything had been destroyed. War! 1 wasn't going to school. But the teacher would come by the house every day and chalk on the doors in a big calligraphic hand: "Comrade Vasilioglu! Let your daughter go to school!" Every evening my father would wipe this inscription olT. and the next day it would appear again. And so the teacher suffered through till he got me.
Well. I took very quickly to reading, to studying. For me going to the library was a celebration. I also had a lot of curiosity, loved to go to the movies. I read a great deal in Russian. I knew all of Balzac. Perhaps 1 was also lucky because the librarian was Russian. She was
from the intelligentsia. A very friendly atmosphere was created.
When I finished the seventh grade, [in those years as far as education went in her village] I began to think— what am I going to be? 1 very much wanted to find out some day from where, who, the Gagauz were. How could 1 find the science that would answer that question for me? The people with whom I had contact at that time were entirely unable to tell me where to turn. So I decided I'd become a schoolteacher, because a teacher could find her way later into the sciences. So I entered a normal school. 1 graduated, and worked there for one year in Komrat — today it is a small town, then it was simply a large village. I worked with my groups there, my children, and then 1 decided after all that I would go further my education. So I went to the university [founded after the war] and took the entrance exams in Kishinev, and entered in the 1957-58 year.
Her living expenses were paid, and she was provided with dormitory housing — an important benefit, as housing was still in short supply in the former battle zones. She emphasized that if she had trouble in some subject, "I knew that it had nothing to do with anything but me myself. Never in my entire life did I experience or hear a single denigrating word about the fact that I was a member of an ethnic minority."
You know, during the period of the Romanian occupation. 1920-1940. the Gagauz were regarded as particularly ignorant peasantry, hayseeds, and such people were not to be accepted. But the Moldavians were in the same situation, and other nationalities. The Romanian government looked upon this territory as its fief. The people who lived here— the Moldavians and the Gagauz — were to be their servitors. And my parents, before the liberation, were workers for a Romanian capitalist.
My father had very little land — he had two strips. One was a very long distance away, the other nearby. And we just didn't have enough to feed us from one harvest-time to the next. And when, in 1940, they liberated us [a reference to the one-year period of Soviet rule before the area was again overrun by Romania] they came, the Russians, they gave our family a lump sum of money, and a cow. I was very little then, but 1 remember how it was led in by a man in a military uniform, how kind he was, and he brought us the document for the gift. At that time there were seven of us children alive, so they gave us a cow. 1 still remember how the rich man's house servants used to call mc "the Red."
I knew she had recently been appointed assistant director of the Anthropology Sector of the Moldavian Academy of Sciences, and asked whether her new administrative duties were not a burden. "Oh, I continue my research," and she handed me reprints of papers she had published, and the abstract of her thesis. "I'm so happy when I come to work each day!"
↑This terrible lack even of draft animals is directly comparable to some Central American situations.
↑Would that the opportunity existed for the same to happen with American Latinos or Blacks!
↑Incidentally, the leading Moldavian sculptor, Dubinovsky, switched back and forth in conversion from Russian to Yiddish to Hebrew. None of those present showed the slightest surprise or annoyance at his using languages of the Jews.
↑The Gagauz, as she explains in my introductory "Overview" chapter, are a Turkic speaking minority inhabiting twenty-six villages. Her family name had a Turkish ending.
Notes
↑Julian Hale, Ceausescu's Romania (London: Harrap, 1971), p. 184. 2. Ibid., p. 25.
↑Stephen Fischer-Galati, "Moldavia and the Moldavians," in Zev Katz (ed.). Handbook of Major Soviet Nationalities (New York: Free Press, 1975), p. 417.
↑S.D. Spcctor, "The Moldavian S.S.R., 1964-1974, " in G.W. Simmonds (ed.), Nationalism in the USSR and Eastern Europe (Detroit: Univ. of Detroit, 1977), p. 261.
↑Rol'shaia Soveiskaia Entsikiopediia (3rd cd.; Moscow, Sovctskaia F.ntsiklopcdiia. 1977), XXIV, Part II, p. 531.
↑V.N. Shubkin, "A Comparative Sociological Survey of a Moldavian Village." in G.V. Osipov (ed.). Town, Country and People (London: Tavistock, 1969), p. 155.
↑Fischer-Galati, "Moldavia and the Moldavians." p. 431.
↑Iu. V. Arutiunian. "Sociocultural Aspects of the Development and Convergence of Nations in the USSR," Soviet Sociology, XIII, No. 1-2 (1974), p. 180.
↑Iu. V. Arutiunian, "Sotsial'naia struktura sovetskikh natsii." unpublished paper delivered at meeting of U.S. and Soviet anthropologists and ethnographers, Tulane University, April, 1984.
↑William Mandel, Russia Re-examined, revised ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), pp. 46-70.
↑The Art of Soviet Moldavia, with introductory article and catalogue by M. Livshits (in Moldavian, Russian, and English), (Leningrad: Aurora, 1972), 54 plates.
↑"Writers About Critics." Soviet Studies in Literature. XV, No. 2 (1979), p. 62.
↑W.L. Morton. The Historical Phenomenon of Minorities: The Canadian Experience, XIV International Congress of Historical Sciences. San Francisco, 1975. 50 pp.
Soviet Central Asia: Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenia, Kirgizia
A friend once left for the African state of Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta) to take a public health position. Curious, I looked in the Encyclopedia Britannica for basic information, and updated it from almanacs, It has a population of seven million; there is one doctor for 30,000 people; one child in ten is in school, which is taught in French, although Moray is the language of the great majority. One person in 14 can read and write; life expectancy at birth is 32 years; one child in four dies before it is a year old. Ninety percent of the people are in agriculture — raising livestock, cotton, rice, peanuts — and famine, due to drought, has occurred in recent years. These figures are for 22 years after independence, following 64 years of French rule.
Of themselves, independence and the passage of time do not change these things. Liberia, the oldest republic in Africa, has had a century and a half of contact with the United States, from which its ruling caste of Black freedmen emigrated. It has deep-water seaports, unlike landlocked Burkina Faso. Major U.S. corporations — Firestone, Goodrich — have been operating rubber plantations there for half a century, and it is one of the world's great exporters of iron ore. It earns additional money by allowing 2,600 ships to sail under its "flag of convenience," more than sail under the U.S. or Soviet flags. Effects upon the people? Infant mortality is still 148 per 1,000, virtually every single citizen has malaria, one man in three can read and write, one woman in seven; average food intake is below the hunger line and there is one doctor per 8,000 persons.
The worst of these statistics are better than those for the countries of Central Asia before the Russian Revolution of 1917 when they were colonies and protectorates of the Russian Empire. In Kirgizia there was only one doctor per 100.000 people.[6. 1] Throughout Central Asia, infant mortality was twice as high as it is in Burkina Faso today, illiteracy twice as bad.
Enough of statistics. Here's a description by Arthur Koestler, who visited Turkmenia, which borders Iran, not immediately after the Russian Revolution, but in 1932. "Wc are all squatting on the edge of an irrigation canal which is now dry. sharing the women's midday meal. It consists of melons, soup and tea. . . . During the three or four days that we spent on the cotton plantations . . . we never had any solid food, not even bread. . . . The melons gave all of us more or less chronic diarrhea."
[A Russian Communist, Kikiloff. native to the area] "told us about the annual bloody feuds over water in the village where he had lived before the Revolution. The various strips of land were to be irrigated in an agreed order, but there was never enough water, and somebody always stole up at night to a sluice-gate to gel more for his plot. In one of the brawls that grew out of such incidents Kikiloff s brother was killed — a neighbor bashed in his skull with a wooden plough. That was perhaps the incident which had turned him into a revolutionary. ... He had travelled among the Tadzhiks [Tajiks] in the Pamirs. . . . One day a Red Army patrol on bicycles had arrived in a Tadzhik village. The villagers fled in panic. ... A human being riding on a thing which had only two wheels and no support — surely that must be a miracle worked by the Devil."
Yet, as Koestler points out, before the Revolution. "The towns of Turkmenistan . . . were not inhabited by Turkomans but by Russians. . . . The natives were left to their semi-nomadic existence."
He writes of farm women "carrying infants on their backs, in a fold of their garments. There were five or six of them carrying their babies in this fashion, on backs bent nearly horizontal to the ground, for seven hours a day."
Farther east he found, "The most out-of-world place to which I have ever been in a village near the Soviet-Afghan frontier, called Permetyab. Most of the men had sores and eye diseases; it seemed as if nearly half of them were one-eyed."
From these frontier areas he went a little north, to ancient centers of civilization, like Samarkand. "Yet all that remains in my memory are some fragments of beauty inextricably mixed with squalor and decay. . . . One wanted just to sit down in the shade of the decaying turquoise columns and cry. For the arches were crumbling, the tiles peeling off, and broken fragments were strewn among the rubble smelling of dogs' urine."
Hie desolation of Samarkand had been heartbreaking. . . . For the past three centuries Bokhara had been a nightmare town where the fanatic side of Islam had degenerated into a kind of collective insanitv. In Bokhara, offenders were thrown into dricd-up wells ... or hurled down from the top of a mosque, or executed by having their throats cut with a knife on the public square." Under the tsars, this region had been a "protectorate" with the ruling emir given a general's rank, the opportunity to invest in Russian business — and permission to rule undisturbed.
Ancient moslem seminary painstakingly restored to its bluetiled splendor.
In Bokhara, Koestler visited the Revolutionary Museum. He describes a photograph: "It was, however, not so much a torso as a kind of anatomical study of torn flesh, with strips of skin hanging loosely down, showing the bared sinews. The inscription said that these were photographs of Hadji Mir Baba, one of the leaders of the Bokharian Revolution, taken in 1920 by one of the Emir's officers, after Hadji Mir Baba's arrest and torture."
As I was looking at the photograph, a tall old man with a stoop walked up to me and said in Russian: That is I.' And so he w as. The old man was the custodian of the museum. In spite ot his stoop, his bony frame and hawk's face still gave an impression of unbreakable physical strength and will-power."
The Hadji told Koestler his story. A widely-traveled karakul merchant, he had wanted the modernization and liberalization of Bokhara. "He joined the [Communist] Party and visited Lenin in Petersburg. Admitted to Lenin's presence, Hadji Mir Baba bared his back and said: This is my letter of recommendation.' He returned to Bokhara after the flight of the Emir in 1920. fought with the Red army . . . and was elected to the Central Committee. At the time of my visit to Bokhara he drew a Party pension . . . "[6. 2]
This describes what the Soviets had started from in Central Asia, and how far — in Koestlcr's view — they had come in twelve years. Others saw it differently. Black American poet Langston Hughes, who traveled with Koestler, was one. "As a foreign writer visiting in a nearby city, I was the especially invited guest to what might seem to many a very humble celebration in a remote rural region. The celebration was the opening of the first workers' barracks at the site where the new dam, Chirchikstroy. was to be constructed.
"The fellow who wrapped it all up into five words was an unprepossessing looking little guy of unknown ancestry, maybe Tartar, maybe Tajik. He was short and stocky and homely. His skin was a kind of dirty yellow and his short w iry hair w as the same color. American Negroes would call him 'meriney.' He looked like he might be 16 or 17 years old. He was a member of the Reception Committee that greeted me at the door of a long wooden hut on a barren stretch of ground as our car drove up in the pitch black of a country night. . . .
"He said, Then there will be light." He told me how there were only candles and lanterns and tallow tlares now, and most of the villagers in the mud huts scarcely had those. 'But,' he said, 'when the dam is built, there will be light! And not just for us,' he said, 'but for all the world, too, because this dam will be so powerful that we can send light over the borders into India and into China! That is why we do not mind giving our labor after hours to build this first building here — this workers' barracks — and we will give many extra hours to that dam, too — because when it is done — tell your people in your America — when it is done, there will be light. Light to study by and to see — and it won't be dark any more'!"[6. 3]
Four years before Hughes' visit, in 1928, Anna Louise Strong, a white journalist from Seattle, traveled in Soviet Central Asia. She had first come to Russia in a Quaker famine relief team in 1921 . In Samarkand, where Koestler saw only the crumbling structures of an earlier civilization, Strong attended a meeting of what we would call the congress of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic.
"Uzbeks in many-colored robes, padded against the sharp autumn weather, were the chief figures. The proceedings went on in the Uzbek language, but the more important parts were translated into Russian, 'for the benefit of the Europeans'." The Europeans — Russians, Jews, and one Latvian — were one-quarter of the assembly, although "A clear majority were Uzbeks." The remainder were people of other Asian nationalities who lived in Uzbekistan. Some of the lop executives were of:
Asiatic nationalities of the Caucasus, which have had more education than the Uzbeks and are now supplying many organizers ... in Central Asia. I inquired of one of these to what extent the government in Samarkand was run by the natives. In the chief assembly their predominance was obvious, but how about the civil departments of the government? He told me that the departments of Education and of Social Welfare are almost entirely manned by Uzbeks, since teaching is chiefly done in the Uzbek language. The Finance Department is seventy percent Uzbek. The Department of Agriculture is Uzbek except for its farm experts; the Water Department except for its. engineers. The local courts are all Uzbek, but in the higher courts some fifteen to twenty percent are Russians. Russians persist throughout the Health Department, since practically no Uzbeks have as yet had time to learn medicine. In the higher economic departments, such as the State Planning Board or the Department of State Industries, about half the staff is Russian.[6. 4]
One of the members of the presiding committee Strong met was a 22-year-old miner's daughter. She had been married off at ten to a middle-aged man, and had been one of the first to join the women's movement, organized by Russian women starting in 1924. "They taught her to read; they discovered and trained her capacity for eloquence; they got a divorce for her. . . . She holds great audiences spellbound with her oratory."
The president of Uzbekistan, Akbunbabay(ev), was the son of a
poor peasant, and had himself been a farm laborer. For the first six years of Soviet rule, he had been a local leader of the class organization of rural poor — laborers and peasants with minimal landholdings. One of the very first non-intellectual Uzbeks to join the Communist Party, Akhunbabay had fought personally against the basmctchi[footnote 6. 1] trying to restore the old regime by raids from across the border in Afghanistan where they had taken refuge. When Strong visited, his work was focused on confiscating landlords' lands and dividing them among the peasants.
They had "uncovered many landlords not on the lists of the government," he told Strong, who noted "It was clear that the participation of the farm hands in governmental activities was the most important fact in the whole land confiscation" to him.
The entire Central Asian region was a beehive of activities designed to rouse people's participation in shaping their own destinies. Koestler saw women cotton-pickers being taught to read — by an adolescent girl — during rheir midday meal.[6. 5]
Today, the Central Asia these observers described can only be recognized by the ethnic features which remain: the people's physical appearance and, in some places, their dress; the colored tiles or carved plasterwork which covers the exterior walls of tall, modern apartment buildings, the music on the radio, are unmistakeably Middle Eastern. And, perhaps most impressive, there arcstatues everywhere of cultural, historical and labor heroes with obviously Asian features.
Ethnic character also remains apparent in the countryside and in urban "do-it-yourself" housing. Dwellings are of adobe or plastered, rather than the log or frame of the Russians, the brick of the Baltic or the masonry of the Caucasus. Droves of camels may still be seen outside Ashkhabad, the capital of Turkmenia, where the desert begins.
But the physical evidences of underdevelopment and colonialism are utterly absent. Bazaars today are more like farmers' markets — spacious, orderly, clean, with voices at the level of normal conversation. No beggars whatever (although one can still find a couple in Moscow). No stench anywhere but in public toilets — no one ragged. No sign of the gaunt, hollow-eyed look of underfeeding and overwork, never mind the pot bellies of starvation. No one living in the streets, no shantytowns of metal scraps, crates, mud or whatever. No open sewers or use of gutter water. There are plenty of people m the streets, but all seem to be going somewhere: no one looks to be hanging around. There are no children trying to peddle smuggled cigarettes or whatever, as in Naples in the heart of Europe.
Camels may still be seen right outside the capital of Turkmenia.
Nor are there any sharp social contrasts. Some people are dressed better than others, but the only luxurious clothing is indigenous dress for festive events in Tajikistan. Restaurants are much nicer-looking than the stand-up snack counters, though shirt-sleeved, open -collared working men will be found in both. A Kazakh physician and her researcher husband live in a two-story
private home with fruit and vegetable garden — of the size and quality an American factory worker might possess. A Tajik collective farmer has a similar home, perhaps a little poorer. I visited a Russian university vice-president and his seismologist wife in Tajikistan. Their apartment has two rooms, vestibule, kitchen, and bath, with but one advantage: it is directly across the street from the university.
Each city reflects its ethnic tradition in its architecture in a distinctive way, but apartment building developments all have very high ratios of open space, mostly planted with grass, trees, and flowers, with some playgrounds and gazebos. Only in the few oldest downtown blocks does one find buildings constructed to the sidewalk line, with no greenery in between. In a few of the ancient cities, such as Bokhara, there are still some rabbit-warren streets, though the houses have interior courtyards. Even in Bokhara, two-thirds of the population live in the planned, new neighborhoods. Indeed. Soviet urban authorities seem to be in a permanent competition over which city will have the largest plantings. One learns to listen politely as a fellow traveler insists that his town is certainly the greenest.
Approaching Dushanbe, capital of Tajikistan, from the air. one passes over or even between the tumbled masses of some of the world's highest mountains. Beneath them are narrow brown valleys with clear signs of immense seasonal mud (lows and flood -carried rocks. It is forbidding country, but in the city, driving off the main avenues, we passed block after block of cozy private homes surrounded by greenery, with trees arched to form a canopy protecting the streets from the southern sun.
The city, now approaching half a million in size, used to be a semi-medieval, semi-colonial outpost of empire. In 1926, the year after its Soviet development began, it had 6.000 people. The city-to-be was treeless, and the surrounding mountains had no trees usable in construction, so each log had to be hauled by camel from the railhead, then 180 miles away. An American, Joshua Kunitz, reported that workers had to travel 12 days by cart after five by rail from central Russia, as at that time there were virtually no Tajiks skilled in 20th-century construction.[6. 6]
Uzbek women.
Today hillmen and women still come to Dushanbe's farmers" market in their marvelous candy-striped turbans and robes, some as dark-skinned as anyone in Africa, but with high-bridged noses and narrow lips. When they have sold their wares, they walk a block to shop in the large department store. On that same main avenue is the university. (The city's student population — there are also four other colleges— is 34.000.) There is the Tajik Theater of Drama, founded in 1929 by Tajiks trained in Moscow. In those years, it was quite literally worth a Moslem woman's life to be seen on stage, and nearly as risky for a man, because of Islamic prohibition of theater. Religious fanatics actually murdered Hamza, the founder of theater in neighboring Uzbekistan. We saw a splendidly staged performance of a Tajik play at this theater, listening to a translation in Russian through headsets. The Tajik language is a variety of Farsi, the language of Iran (the are mutually intelligible). The play showed the stoning, a century ago, of someone who violated Islamic dogma, as has recently happpened in Iran. In Tajikistan that has not happened in fifty years.
On the same avenue is a soaring, airy, stunning tea-house, built in 1958, architecturally worthy of the tradition of Iranian mosques. Down the street is the main library of the republic, with 2.000.000 volumes; also the theater of opera and ballet, with a permanent company. (The city has 88 other libraries: one for every 5.000 people!) One walks past the dramatically ultra-modern, block-long, House of Political Education, and recently-constructed hotels. Monuments honor a classical poet and a writer; this would not have been permissible at the time of their deaths because of the prohibition against images.
One evening my wife and I happened upon an outdoor theater in Dushanbe's downtown park, opposite the Intourist Hotel. As we took a seat, we heard two young men on stage, being addressed by a Russian woman, who was saying:
"This is the baby's undershirt. This is the diaper. This is its cap. Here's an apron for you. Now look around very carefully. Those dolls in front of you are your babies. Here's the crib. a shirtie, booties. Now, you've got to put on your apron, put the clothes on the baby, and put it into the crib. Now, comrades, you understood? I'll count to three, and you start. The one who finishes first wins. One, two, three, go!
"The apron, the apron, the apron. Comrades, now look carefully. Think what you're doing." One of the men was refusing to don an apron, clearly because it represented being a woman. But he was willing to care for an "infant," whick in the past had been solely a female function. The audience was roaring with laughter, and yelling comments and encouragement in Farsi.
One of the men put the baby clothes on all wrong and the Russian woman exhorted him: "Take it off. Pay attention. Take them all off." Both men were thoroughly into the spirit of theater — as the woman continued her instructions: "Lay it down, lay it down. Please, please, now put the sleeves on right. Okay, now put the cober over the baby. Don't rush it, comrades. Now the cap, the cap — look at how you're handling that baby!" She turned to the crowd: "If you're handling a real baby, you'll flip it around that way too, huh?" Of one of them: "He's got that baby wrapped up like a mummy!" of the other: "He's got it done!"
Finally, she announced, "Your children are going to grow up and be good people. Here's your prize!" She gave them the aprons, and crowd roared. "Now you can go home and sleep well." But she realized she had a good thing going, and turned to the crowd again: "What should he name the baby?"
"Allah! Allah!" Hardly a religiously neutral name, and obviously not Russian. Unsurprised, she turned to the "father" and said "Now sing the baby a lullaby!" He went into an Oriental melody, but he sang loudly enough to wake the dead and audience guffawed once more. Then she thanked them and said, "We hope that when you are fathers, you will conduct yourselves the way tou did here." Another Russian woman invited the audience to a big celebration in the park's dance pavilion, an Autumn Ball.
We walked up to the stage to talk with the two women. We learned that the two young men were not actors, as we had first suspected, but had been invited up out of the audience. One of them, seeing my microphone, volunteered that he was 23, and went on. , a little irrelevantly. "Me, for example, I know several languages, Azerbaijani, Ukrainian, and I can speak just the tiniest bit of English. So, you see what a big thing socialism has done for us."
Mrs. Mandel asked one of the women just what they were trying to get across. Her response reveals a great deal about the ethnic attitudes to which she had been educated and trained, as she laid a groundwork:
"The Tajik people, our community here, is very musical. Way back when Europeans hadn't the vaguest notion of music, and people there were half-apes, half human, people in Tajikistan had a high culture. They erected works of architecture — mosques — organized large-scale trade with Byzantium, and from that time left works of painting. There was mathematics, great mathematicians, a written language, books. There were schools even before the Christian era. In the context of Central Asia, the Tajiks were the most cultured, very highly cultured people.
"But because of the development of trade the Turks unfortunately came in and conquered them. As a consequence, culture in Central Asia died down — but folk culture, haded down from genereation to generation, that was something no conquerors could throttle. They have lovely painting, architecture, marvelous carvings, a fundamentally musical people."
She herself is neither Tajik nor an Uzbek, but a Russian. I started to express my own pleasure in hearing her intereset in the culture of the local peoples, but she cut me off: "I live here, I know it. I work in the theater and the Philharmonic Society [which combines all the musical arts] and so I know the Tajik people. I know what things are like in Central Asia in general. And therefore it gives me satisfaction to talk to you about what I have learned of the psychology of these people and about them in general."
Alma-Ata civic auditorium.
When we asked specifically about the scene we had witnessed. Marina, who conducted it, replied, "I decided to put the men to a test. A lot of young men come here, alone or with their girl friends or wives. So we decided to run a contest about what they know of a matter in which they will be able to help their wives when tiny new little beings appear in their families. And I simply picked two unsuspecting men out of the audience and invited them up onto the stage."
Except for a Russian university dean — under a Tajik president — these two women were the only Russians I personally encountered in positions of authority over Central Asians, even at so modest a level. The social science institutes I visited in Turkmenia, Kirgizia, and Tajikistan were all headed by members of those respective nationalities, and the staffs were totally indigenous but for two very aged Russians in Dushanbe. The heads of the tourist agencies in Alma-Ata and Frunze were indigenous, as were all guides. The Kirgiz and Kazakh movie industries are indigenous from top to bottom, though one of the lesser directors in Kirgizia is Lithuanian. Director and docent at the art museum in Frunze were Kirgiz. So were TV producers. The city architect of Alma-Ata was Kazakh, with two (very respectful) Russian architects under him. The head of the Kirgiz Conservatory, encountered by chance at the airport, was Kirgiz.
Some population -wide statistics are enviable by any standard. They have outstripped all African, Asian, or Latin American countries but Japan in many respects. Medical care is free and there are more physicians per population than in any non-Communist country on earth but Israel. Japan's modernization began in the 1870s and by 1904 it was able to defeat tsarist Russia in modern naval warfare. Soviet Central Asia's modernization began in the 1920s some 50 years later. It has as many college students in proportion to population as Japan, and a higher percentage of women among students despite a heritage of head-to-toe veiling and segregation from men, even in the home. 1 know six collegeeducated Soviet Central Asian men personally. Each is married to a college graduate who works outside the home: assistant director of an art museum (her boss also a Central Asian woman), assistant movie director, two economists, an obstetrician-gynecologist, who teaches her speciality, and a curriculum specialist.
The Japanese undoubtedly have more electronic and mechanical appliances, and incomparably more cars. However, the quality of urban life in Central Asia is far, far better. Japanese cities are notoriously smoggy and extremely crowded due to the high price of land and absence of zoning, while even the most populous Soviet cities provide ample green space.
How did the Central Asian republics get from the state described by visitors in the late 1920s and early 1930s to what I saw and heard in live visits between 1959 and 1982? How have they been able to maintain such a rapid rate of progress for half a century — a record that has caused numerous Third World nations to turn to some form of socialism?
Over forty years ago, in my first book on this region, I wrote: "trade, and an extension of the cultural intercourse that has already begun, cannot but cause deep thought among the peoples of the Near East as to the methods whereby the kindred nations of Soviet Central Asia have risen to a position not only of political and social, but of economic equality with the Russians for whom they were formerly a colony."[6. 7] (The "economic equality" at that time was in the character of the economy, not yet the statistics.)
Lenin ceased treating Central Asia as a colony from the moment he came to power. Not all imperialist powers had used racism in the same way. Russia, like Portugal and France, did not employ it as much as the English-speaking countries. Members of the indigenous nobility in the Russian Empire were treated as social equals, if they had the wealth to back that up. Later, noble rank became less important, riches more so. Monied Moslems, for example, were permitted to build a soaring and magnificently tiled mosque in St. Petersburg. Skin color alone was not a disqualifier: Pushkin's Ethiopian great-grandfather had been made a high nobleman by Peter the Great and Pushkin himself was accepted in the 19th century as Russia's leading poet with no question of race.
For the overwhelming bulk of Russia's Asian colonial peoples, skin color was only part of an ensemble of characteristics, including poverty (relative to most of the Russians they dealt with), "paganism," "outlandish" dress and customs — all of which made the Russians feel superior. (Even today, one finds educated Russians who joke about Central Asians mispronouncing Russian without realizing such remarks are racist.) Nepotism existed among the Russians, but it was a way of life among the colonials who placed the highest value on family and clan loyalty. And for the Russians, bribery simply helped things along; among Asian peoples, it had always been the normal manner in which government functioned. Officials had been expected to live directly off those they ruled from time immemorial.[footnote 6. 2][6. 8]
The Russians responded to all these differences with contempt, a contempt governed by two overriding psychological factors: first, the "rights" of conquest, resembling white Americans' attitudes toward Indians; second, religion. The idea that all peoples have an equal right to the earth is very recent. That countries should grow by conquest was regarded as quite normal — we in the United States had "Manifest Destiny."
In Russia, adherence to Russian Orthodox Christianity was the road to equal rights. Anyone was quite free to join but rejecting it meant opening oneself to approximately equal subjection to the tsar and the ethnic nobility. Virtually all Moslems rejected this cultural imperialism. But for the bulk of the colonials, their status as illiterate peasants left them essentially where they were. This was even true of semi-colonials like the Slavic Ukrainians, who were already Russian Orthodox.
In Asia, the outcome of all the foregoing was a clearly colonial situation. The non-Russians existed principally to enrich the Russian royal family personally and the nobility in general. Tax rates were vastly higher in Central Asia, and merchants and exploiters of natural resources made super-profits from colonial low wages. When Russian peasant discontent threatened the tsar, brutal oppression was readily used. Then the tsar would give peasants land taken from the colonials, usually the grazing land of nomadic peoples.
The Soviets, by nationalizing the land and confiscating industry and big business, destroyed the very purpose of colonialism — propertied classes that had grown rich from it no longer existed. But these changes alone could have no effect upon the nearly universal illiteracy, the prevalence of disease — or on the long standing resentment toward Russians of all classes. Nor did they alter the typically colonial economy, based on producing a single crop: cotton for the mills near Moscow. "Industry," limited almost exclusively to primary processing of that crop, involved less than one percent of the labor force, and provided only unskilled work for indigenous people.
A majority of the Asian peoples had been nomadic cattle raisers. They were organized as clans which, particularly among the Turkmen, raided each other regularly. Some Turkmen clans were also slavers, raiding into Persia and selling the captives in Central Asian markets. There were rivalries between communities based on trade, water, and pasture rights, as well as hostilities between Shi'a and Sunni Moslems. Nor were traditional forms of authority any more democratic than those imposed from St. Petersburg, as they were based on the authority of the mullahs, in terms of Islamic law, and of clan heredity in other matters.
The Communists in the region initially were chiefly Russians exiled by the tsar or Russian railroad workers. When they took power and set up elected Soviets, nominations coming from the local peoples were at first based on clan affiliation, and Soviets controlled by members of one ethnic group would treat others unfavorably. There is a similar situation in Africa today, where territorial divisions do not accord with ethnic divisions. In Africa, a single people may be divided among six to eight countries (like the Malinke), and great numbers have been killed in wars and civil wars because boundaries do not correspond to ethnic territories.
Hunting with a golden eagle is still practiced by the old and respected by young Kazakhs.
In Central Asia 50 years ago, these ethnic differences were as real as they are in Africa today. They reflected not just tribal loyalty, but differences in way of life and levels of cultural and linguistic development. The nomad Kazakhs, Turkmen, and Kirgiz regarded their lives as free, and had contempt for the farming Uzbeks and Tadjiks — who in turn hated the nomads whose wandering herds would graze on or trample their crops.
At the time of the Revolution, there were two protectorates, Khiva and Bokhara, ruled in traditional fashion by indigenous emirs under Russian guns. The rest of Central Asia was under direct Russian administration. The protectorates were the end products of conquest of certain indigenous peoples by others.
The Communists came to power in European Russia and in the largest Central Asian city, Tashkent, in 1917. In 1918, when tsarist Russian forces were withdrawn from the Khiva protectorate, Turkmen tribesmen attacked, killed the ruler, and plundered the towns and villages, which were chiefly Uzbek. In turn, Uzbeks massacred over a thousand Turkmen in a single night in 1920. The Turkmen retaliated by attacking villages, pledging to kill ten Uzbeks for every Turkmen, a promise they apparently kept. As late as 1923, about 2,000 Kazakh nomads raided the territory of the Turkmen, also nomads, and seized four desert wells. The Turkmen retreated to Iran, then came back and drove out the Kazakhs.
The Soviets moved to end this local warfare in three ways. First, they tried to demonstrate to the poor that their real enemies were not other nationalities and tribes, but the wealthy, regardless of ethnic affiliation. Second, they attempted to redraw boundaries along ethnic lines, with self-determination the governing principle. Third, they used military force when unavoidable — and when they had it.
To win the poor, they organized a union of peasants in 1919, open to those who did not employ hired labor, and the landless who worked for hire. In 1921-22 the government sought to provide them with water, land, livestock, and implements confiscated from both Russian pioneer peasants and from the indigenous wealthy, called huis. The Russians had to give up everything over and above what could be worked by their own immediate families. The bais were affected only if they did no work, and depended wholly upon sharecroppers (who received only one-fourth of what they raised). But the croppers were not yet ready for the notion that everything their labor produced should be their's, so purchase-and-sale cooperatives were established. In addition, trade unions for workers in cotton gins and the like were founded, and a Communist Youth League organized.
The first attempt to dismantle the colonial structure was organization of a Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Republic, designed to include the entire area inhabited by Turkic-speaking majorities. But this ignored the fact that these were widely-differing peoples. "The smaller and more backward nationalities did not comprehend the laws, decrees and directives which were issued either in Russian or in the languages of the other dominant [local] nationalities." writes an Indian scholar.[6. 9]
At this early stage, this republic was headed by Russians who had made the revolution in Tashkent. Soon the royal government of Khiva was overthrown and replaced by a government of indigenous Communists, who re-named the area Khorezm. Even their leader complained that it was almost impossible to apply the same set of laws to both the Uzbeks and Turkmen there: the former valued land, the latter livestock. "The government of Khorezm was confronted with yet another problem. The Turkmen, as a rule, paid their taxes to their clan leaders which seldom reached the treasury and the burden of taxes fell almost exclusively on the Uzbek population. When the government started incurring expenditure
on welfare measures for Turkmen, it encountered opposition from the Uzbeks."[6. 10]
The first attempt to re-draw boundaries so that each ethnic group would rule in its own traditional territory was made between 1920 and 1923. Kazakhs, Turkmen, Kirgiz, Kara-Kalpaks[footnote 6. 3] and each gained recognition as a country, but this could not work so long as the richest farmlands, with the best irrigation and the densest population (consisting of all these nationalities) continued to belong to the former protectorates of Bokhara and Khorezm. The royal rulers had been overthrown there, and indigenous Communists were in power. But they did not yet have the local support for moving beyond abolishing the medieval cruelties and plunderous taxation of the former regime. The Constitution of Bokhara specified that "no published laws of the republic may contradict the foundations of Islam." (Words with a particularly contemporary ring in light of recent events in Iran and Afghanistan). That constitution recognized private ownership of land, which in Russia had been nationalized. In the Khorezm People's Republic, which was even more medieval, courts based on Islamic law were recognized, as were religious schools which taught rote memorizing of the Koran to boys, beating them on the soles of their bare feet to help (heir recollection. Wakuf, mosque-owned landed estates, remained legal, as did clan leadership by tribal elders.
But the organizations — of the rural poor, of urban wage workers, of cooperatives and of Communist Youth — rapidly brought changes in social attitudes, and provided a base of support for major social change. Large-scale landownership, serfdom, and castes were abolished. The resemblance to the changes in Ethiopia. 1978-84, is striking. By 1924 the type of society in the Khorezm and Bokhara republics was the same as in the surrounding Central Asian autonomous republics that had been founded in the areas where tsarist Russia had ruled without indigenous royalty.
Meanwhile steps had been taken to give the people the basic skills needed to conduct their own affairs and to train personnel so they would be equipped to administer government and to modernize life. The first higher educational institution in Central Asia was established in 1920. with faculty and equipment sent from Central Russia. The professors, in wing collars and pince-nez, quite literally had to shoot their way through against counterrevolutionary horsemen trying to stop their train. One of those Russian volunteers, a woman, was still teaching, in her eighties, when I was there in 1979.
All these changes made the time ripe to end the ethnic jockeying for preference and power. The solution adopted was proposed by Faizulla Hojayev (also spelled Khodzhaev), the head of the Bokhara Republic, although some of its underlying ideas had come from Lenin and others."[6. 11] Hojayev was a leader of the movement that had overthrown the emir. He subsequently became a Communist. In a very real sense, he was the forerunner of Fidel Castro. That is, he was leader of a revolution in a semi-colony who came to regard socialism as the solution for his people's problems. At the same time, he was an individual with the vision to understand the problems of other peoples.
Hojayev said that the multi-national Central Asian republics must be scrapped and replaced by republics as ethnically homogeneous as possible — homogeneous, but not segregated: minorities were free to remain, and were guaranteed equal rights, but the new borders were to correspond to ethnic limits as far as demographics permitted. This left a very difficult problem of sharing the lew concentrated centers of productive wealth that existed — coal and other mines, oil wells and refineries. So borders were drawn in a way that left each of them under the jurisdiction of the government that had them before the new delimitation of territory. Thus, no one was worse or better off than before. A similar issue, disposition of the high mountain pastures needed by both the Kazakhs and Kirgiz, was solved by an agreement for joint use. A few entities needed by all the Central Asian republics — such as the then-sole university — were made common property of all.
Within three years of the delimitation, Hojayev was able to say to those who had opposed it: "look at the complete national f ethnic] peace which now prevails."[6. 12]
With the nationalities issue resolved, it became possible to focus on social problems. Not the least of these involved the status of women, as the passage by Anna Louise Strong showed. Half a century later I heard a personal echo of those events while talking with Ikbalkhon Tokhtokhodjayeva, a female Doctor of Jurisprudence who had been Uzbekistan's vice-minister of education for a decade.
"My mother is 84. She was born in the old days, when these areas comprised the backward colony of Turkestan. She also experienced the times when our enemies held this territory, the Allies [the British, after the Revolution] and the Basmachi." These were patriarchal chieftains similar to those now operating against
the government of Afghanistan, indeed, one of those now raiding from Pakistan into Afghanistan is actually a man nearly her mother's age, who tied the USSR when defeated in his 20s.
I asked whether her mother had participated in the movement to discard the parandja, the blinding and choking horsehair overveil, without any opening for mouth or eyes, that women had been required to wear whenever they left the house in that stitlingly hot country. She answered:
"She gave birth to me in 1928, and, with me in her arms, marched to the great square, side by side with my father, and discarded that parandja." Her father's support took both enlightenment and great courage — there are stenographic records of top-level Communist Party discussions from that time in which leaders berated each other because their wives were still veiled. "An elderly Uzbek man came up to her — he was an activist in the movement for Uzbek women to discard the veil, and asked her: 'What would you like to name your daughter?' She said: 'I would like to name her "Happy Fate," so her future will be happy,' and so that's the name they gave me: 'Iqbal'.
"My mother is a living witness to the building of our country. She saw everything, and she always says to everyone, to the whole family, that one must be devoted to our country, must value it because it took us out of those difficult times when women were sequestered, wore the veil, were confined to the home, that is, had no rights at all, were totally illiterate.
"My mother got two years of schooling, my father four. But all of us, their children, have higher education. There were 10 children, but brothers of mine died in the war. My father also died during the war, because the whole country helped the front, in whatever way they could. A sister heads the chair of the Russian language at Tashkent Teachers College. She has written many textbooks. Another sister has many children and stays home. One brother is an engineer in transportation, another brother a physician in the military. The others are dead.[footnote 6. 4] I have two children: my daughter is a cardiologist and my son a psychiatrist.
"Today women are cabinet members, members of parliament, scientists. I'll give you just one figure. Speaking in connection with the 60th anniversary of the October Revolution, the president of the Uzbek Republic said there are 30,000 scientists and professional scholars in our republic, of which 12,500 are women. And the whole auditorium rose and applauded that. That's what has happened in the 54 years of our Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. I guess I'm among the women he was talking about, and I'm proud of that."
Obviously, most families consist of people who do much more modest jobs. In ancient Samarkand, I visited a huge silk mill. Some departments were intolerably noisy and workers wore special ear plugs to protect their hearing, but there were planters full of greenery within the immense rooms of machinery, the aisles were clear and the floors clean. This represented a tremendous improvement over what I had seen 20 years earlier in a textile mill in Tashkent, where conditions resembled those in the American mill depicted in the film, Norma Rae.
Later, at the Samarkand factory, 1 talked to the head of the union, an immense light-coffce-colored woman of boundless energy. She had high cheek-bones, Mongolian eyes, but an elongated rectangular face creating the distinctive Uzbek appearance. Her father and mother were both workers, she told me. She herself "worked for 16 years at a silk-winding mill in another city, then for five years in this mill. Then one year as head of its Communist Party organization and now as head of the trade union committee for this group of mills and associated enterprises."
She has three children, a girl of 13, and two boys, 12 and nine. On the day we spoke, her daughter was looking after her little brothers, but she pointed out that women working in the plant can "place their little kids in the nursery, which cares for them from 6 AM to 5 PM. So after work they can go to the bazaar to get the things for dinner, and clean the house a bit, and then they come to get the kids."
I needled her a bit, "And the husbands sit around drinking tea?" She snapped a definite "No, the husbands help. If the wife cooks, the husband washes the dishes. If the husband cooks, the wife cleans up." A Russian woman present added, "Among the Asians the men cook better than the women." And the union leader said, "If I had known of this in advance, I'd invite you home for dinner. You and I would sit and talk, and my husband would do the cooking. Among Uzbeks, it's the men who make the plov [pilaf]."
When I visited the Samarkand home of a former classmate of a Russian friend, I sat in the living room with his wife and 16-year old daughter for quite a while as the husband cooked. This family's own experience had given them a clear view of the status of Soviet Asians relative to their neighbors outside the USSR. The man, a professional linguist who knows Arabic and Persian, had been in government service in the Near and Middle East for ten years. His wife and daughter had been with him. The daughter told me she had lived in Syria, Egypt and Iraq, had become friends with many Arab children because she spoke their language. When I asked what differences she found between children her age in those countries and in Uzbekistan, she replied "Children here live better, everything is provided for them and all have equal rights. Such concern isn't extended in the Eastern countries — they live considerably worse. ITiey don't provide things through public channels."
Textile mills today are dust-free
Both with this family and at the silk mill an interesting sidelight came up. At the factory, when I asked about the ethnic situation, the union leader replied: "There are no differences here by nationality. Here there's an Uzbek working, next to her a Russian, next to her a Korean, next to her a Jew." These, she explained, were Bokhara Jews, a Middle Eastern group whose languages are Farsi and Hebrew, not Russian and Yiddish. Later I passed their synagogue and visited their rabbi in his home.
At the linguist's home I specifically asked this couple of Moslem heritage about the status of Jews in the Soviet Union. The wife replied: "My neighbor across the hall is Jewish, and we are personal friends. I work in the Curriculum Department at the College of Agrieulture. There are Jewish personnel there, and we work together in one and the same group, and I respect them very much. My younger uncle is married to a Polish Jew, who teaches French at Samarkand University. Although our grandmother, his mother, is very advanced in years, she feels such love for her that she says 'She's the best of all. My daughter-in-law Maya is the best of all.' We ourselves love her very much."
Hie rabbi proved to be an attractive 28-year-old who lived quite comfortably. He told me that there were 12,000 Jews in Samarkand. (Circumcision of boys was universal.) Most Jews were salespeople, others were physicians, dentists, psychiatrists, shoemakers, barbers, factory workers. He conducted three services each Saturday, with 70 or 80 attending each; a thousand come once a year at the High Holiday of Yom Kippur. "Few" youth regard themselves as religious, he said. He asked me whether I intended to emigrate to Israel, and was quite surprised when I said no. Yet I would not define him as a Zionist; he was simply an Orthodox rabbi who takes quite literally the words of the annual Passover prayer: "Next year in Jerusalem." And now that Israel exists, that is where Jews should go, in his view.
The major religion in Soviet Central Asia is, of course, Islam (although I once attended a Baptist service of ethnic Germans). Tashkent, with 1,500,000 people, has 16 functioning mosques. I attended a service with perhaps 1,000 men at worship in the courtyard of the principal mosque; women were also present, but as they were segregated behind an opaque curtain, I don't know how many. Although the men were chiefly elderly, the number in the prime of life was not small. A visiting clerical dignitary from Turkey was preaching that day. Because of the similarity of the languages and the familiarity of the subject-matter, the worshippers needed no translator.
On attendance in general, the assistant mufti said: "The number of young people in attendance is not as large as our mufti would like. But on holidays the mosques are full to bursting with young people." He was clearly a sincere believer in separation of church and state," I have been in countries where people are beaten or otherwise punished for not performing their prayers. But there, too, there are people who do not pray. They beat them, and they still won't go. You understand, that has to be a matter of conscience for each person. So from our point of view, that is not freedom: a person has to be left alone with his own conscience, whether he goes or doesn't go. That way it's better."
He and his associates laughed when I told them how surprised I had been to see the obviously good relations between the imam at a historic shrine and the executives of a state farm which surrounds it. The assistant mufti commented: "Our imams are holy men. Why should the manager of the state farm be at odds with him? Even the manager of a state farm — for that matter, even the head of the Communist Party Committee of a state farm, if he is a Moslem — will feel in his soul that some day he will have need of that imam. The day will come when he will be in the hands of the imam." The Islamic clergy take it for granted that all ethnicCentral Asians are Moslems. The imam at the shrine had told me that absolutely all funerals in the countryside are religious. Anthropologists have found this is often so to avoid offending the feelings of religious members of the deceased's family.
Mufti Babakhan, chief Moslem dignitary of Central Asia.
The shrine I visited is the tomb of al-Bukhari, the most revered interpreter of Islam throughout the Moslem world. While we were discussing Islam in America, the imam recalled an incident that did not shed the most pleasant light upon the Voice of America. A few months earlier he had been visited by an Uzbek who had emigrated to the U.S. about 40 years ago (I would guess that meant he had been a war prisoner in Germany). He had been born nearby, and wanted to visit family. The imam quoted him: "When I received my visa, I didn't know whether to come or not. Maybe they'd kill me here. But then my eldest son said to me: 'Father, you are already an old man. You have already seen life, so it doesn't make a difference whether you live till you die here, or whether they kill you there. Better you go. If they kill you, your body will lie in your native land as a martyr.' The Intourist people met me in Moscow, and then they saw me off to Samarkand. I still didn't believe that I'd leave here alive. Maybe in Moscow they were planning to have me killed here. In Samarkand I was met by young people. One young fellow said: I am your kin.'
"I didn't believe him. Finally, I met my sister. She is 78. When I laid eyes on her, I burst into tears. I said: 'Now, they can hang me.' But nobody hung me. I have been here a month, and nobody yet has said anything bad to me. I think nobody is going to kill me. And in about a week I will return home to my children."
The imam commented: "I myself listen to the Uzbek radio broadcasts from America. They say there's no religion here, no Moslems here, no such thing as wife and husband. Everybody is all mixed up together as far as bearing children is concerned. The children are taken away from their fathers and mothers, and eat separately and sleep separately, and such stuff. So of course people were afraid."[footnote 6. 5]
I have flown over Uzbekistan repeatedly at low altitudes. From the air, it resembles California's huge irrigated "factories-in-the-field," with straight furrows and modern machinery. But on the ground, the villages are quite different. Chicanos from New Mexico who visited there say it seems like home — adobe houses, adobe fences, unpaved streets. But there is a hospital in every large village or a short ambulance drive from every small one; schools and community recreation centers have long been taken for granted. In the state farm adjacent to the al-Bukhari shrine, I was impressed by the computer room. Young Uzbek women clad in gorgeous traditional striped silks, were working there. On the farms themselves, women were not really allowed to operate the most important and massive field machine, the cotton-picker, until the 1970s, but now there are thousands who do this very well-paid work.
Central Asia still has two teachers' colleges for women only as some parents will not let their daughters go to school with young men. But all the other dozens of colleges and universities are co-ed, about equally divided among men and women. This in an area where, as recently as when that unveiling of 1928 took place, numbers of women were simply murdered by men in their own families for the shame this act supposedly brought upon them.
Without industry. Central Asia would have remained forever dependent on Russia: its cotton was spun and woven in Russia, and shipped back for sale; steel and railroad equipment, telegraph, and in later years, telephone and radio equipment, trucks, and tractors all came from Russia. Beyond this, in any case a formerly colonial agricultural region would have remained permanently at a much lower living standard without industry, as experience worldwide demonstrates.
Industrialization was financed chiefly by the more developed regions of the Soviet Union. During the early years 60 percent of the budgets of the Central Asian republics came from outisde. Until collectivization, progressive taxation was used to obtain the other 40 percent: in 1929-30, for example, the wealthiest 5 percent of the farmers provided over half the tax income, while the 59 percent who were subsistence farmers paid only 7 percent.
The first industries built in Central Asia were textile factories, and paper mills to meet the needs of the literacy campaign. Next, because collective farms are really more productive only if they can practice extensive farming, and this required machinery, came farm implement factories, plants to process raw materials and facilities to mine natural resources. Tremendous emphasis was placed on discovering mineral resources, and the first scientists of Central Asian nationality to attain prominence were geologists.
When tractors, all-metal plows and seeders were first provided, the peasants knew nothing about machinery, so the Communist Party organized urban workers to go out to the villages to repair the equipment. They also helped with the harvest. This served political purposes as well: about half the Central Asian working class was Russian, and their work in the countryside helped break down ethnic mistrust. (The idea of an alliance between workers and peasants has been a guiding principle of Soviet society since its founding.) In addition, Leningrad's factory workers took responsibility for supplying and maintaining equipment in Khorezm, Moscow's workers for Tashkent. Both cities sent teams out and this, too, transformed the local peoples' attitude toward Russia. Furthermore, the workers of Central Asian origins themselves became ethnically intermixed, as the sharing of work helped eliminate old clan and tribal divisions as well. Marriages across local ethnic lines followed, though inter-racial marriage did not become a significant phenomenon until the past decade.
The only ideology and institutions to perpetuate segregation are religious, because the Moslems are Asian and the Christians, European. The decline in religious belief, the very great decline in its intensity, as reflected by the generally low attendance at services, has contributed greatly to reducing ethnic alienation. Churches and mosques are full only because the number in use is very much smaller than it was. Only Baptists seem to be building new houses of worship.
The economy of Central Asia today is totally modern. Horse-drawn vehicles are rare, and hauling by human power — used for short carries within building sites when I was there in 1959 — did not exist in the cities I visited in 1979 and 1982. Improved seed, ample irrigation, and manufactured fertilizers have increased production — cotton yields per acre are two-and-a-half times what they were, and 80 percent of the cotton is harvested by machine. Soviet Uzbekistan and the United States are the world's only exporters of cotton-picking machines. The Central Asian machines are bought by Greece and Egypt. Tens of thousands of wells with wind-driven motors spot the pasturelands. Today, Uzbekistan even manufactures the high-technology cable used for ultra-deep geophysical drilling to probe through the earth's mantle.
This truly great leap forward has produced people who have been able to keep pace with it. Late one warm evening we sat in the central park of Dushanbe, capital of Tajikistan, and taped the life of a young Tajik. He volunteered to tell it to us. His Russian was accented, ungrammatical , but fluent. He was born in 1954 on a collective farm in mountaineer country containing a 25,000-foot peak.
When I was two, my father married another woman, not my real mother. At first she took good care of me, treated me decently. But then she gave birth to a son, and said: "Look after your little brother." I always helped him. but she didn't believe me, and she hit me a lot. One day I was told to bring in our family cow. While I was trying to. my baby brother fell into the campfire. I had set him next to it for warmth — in winter there's such snow up there in Garm.
My brother burned his right arm. She hit me and said: "You threw him down there yourself." But it wasn't my fault. She hit me many times. Anyhow, we rode off to the doctor's. There was a doctor there, a Russian woman. Other physicians came in the evening. They amputated his hand, bound it all up.
One day my stepmother said I was to haul in firewood every day on my back, and grass for feed. If I wouldn't do it, she said, she would hit me with her fist and make me work, and give me only a little flat bread and black bread to eat. One day I was carrying that firewood on my back, and a sack of dry feed for her cow. I was hungry — it was hot. May — so I took one cake of fiat bread and ate it. My stepmother came home and counted those fiat breads. When she found one was missing she picked up a knife and tried to cleave me right in half, murder me. Look at that finger of mine. I ran out of the house, but she kept chopping at me. I pulled my arm away, bound it up, and ran away. I spent three months in the hospital.
Then the hospital sent me — this was 1964— to a children's home, in Kuliab. There were little children there, Russian kids too. I didn't know any Russian at all. What I knew was Tajik. My name is BekMakhmat [Mohammed] Ali-Makhmat Amonovich [son of Amon]. In Russian I'm called Alec. The children's home was merry. We would all play. And I studied Russian.
I graduated from school. Then one day my father came. He looked at me, and he started to cry. Well, I cried too. He was my father, but he had done whatever my stepmother wanted him to. And so he also had struck me. right here. My own real father, too.
Then came vacation time, and I went home. For three days he treated me as a guest, and then he came in with a scythe, and said: "Let's go and reap the wheat." I went, but I was no good at it, and he wanted to murder me. He said: "Why did you leave me?" He cursed me. "Why did you go to the children's home and abandon me?"
I ran away from home again. I had finished junior high school. So I went to a trade school[footnote 6. 6] for a year and became an electrician. ITien I went back home again, and I worked.
One hot day my father said: "Come on. son, let's go earn some money in Leninabad State." Three of us went: my father, me, and another countryman from Garm State. My father said: "There are four houses that need building for this collective farm." We worked and worked — boy. there's some stones there! Those four houses were built, so we got paid. My father took the money.
When we had started out for there, he made me a promise: "Okay, we'll get you married. We'll find you a bride." But when we got back home, he said: "No. Let's get back to work." I said: "What's that? I gave you the 1,700 rubles I earned [$2,500]! That ain't hay!" He said: "Come on, let's work." So I worked, and sent more money home.
In 1974, in November, I got my call to serve in the army, so I showed up at the induction center here in Dushanbe. But they didn't take me. I went to the military commissariat. I said: "Comrade Captain Zagarov. I want to serve in the Soviet Army. I want to serve like everybody else." So he said: "Well, let's write a request and submit it to the village soviet." I went to the chairman of the soviet, and I said: "I need your help. I need a reference from you, so I can get into the Soviet Army."
He said okay. So then in 1975, the 18th of May, they took me to the induction center. We traveled, traveled, to the city of Kuibyshev in European Russia, on the Volga. En route we were in Moscow for four hours, on May 27th, and at the railroad station there was a great crowd of Moscow people, and visiting people from all over the country, tourists. And they welcomed us Tajiks. There was a nice guy who gave me a gift. He was from — what's that place — from Riga, Latvia. Very blonde. And I gave him something to remember me by.
My father had said: "When you come home from the army, I'll arrange a marriage." I felt, that's okay. But then I got a letter saying all the guys were saying: "your father found a bride for your brother." When I got home I said to him, "Why did you trick me? You arranged a marriage for my brother instead." "Well, Alec," he said: "I want you to stay here and work for me. Bring me money, and then I'll arrange it." I said: "If that's the case, I'm not going to live here any more. I'll go to Dushanbe and get a job."
And I began to take part in these things. [He pointed to the outdoor theater across from our park bench.] The young people get up on the stage here, and I do too. We have a very good time. I have a job as an electrician. I respect human beings. Somebody comes to me and says: "Alec, would you do some wiring in my house?" I go. I do it. I don't take any money for it. I do it as a human being.
I want to say something more. I respect people regardless of nationality. I served my two years in the army properly. I really liked my commanding officers. I want you as a guest to see to it that all this is written down, in your country, that it be published there, and here.
Obviously, a great deal has been changed in two generations, and a great deal remains as it was. But there is absolutely nothing resembling colonialism, or semi-colonialism, remaining. There are no country clubs of Russians, no slums of Asians. Police are overwhelmingly indigenous. The people do not flee from rural poverty to jobs in Russia proper the way U.S. Blacks migrated from the South seeking jobs in northern cities. One reason is, according to the most anti-Soviet source possible, NATO, that there is no relative disadvantage. The average daily wage of collective farm members in each of the five Central Asian Soviet republics is higher than in Russia proper, and also higher than the USSR average.[6. 13] The farmers are overwhelmingly indigenous peoples. NATO figures also show that industrial wages are higher than the USSR average in two Central Asian republics, and slightly lower in three where skill levels have not yet fully reached those of places where industry has a much longer history.
Footnotes
↑Counter-revolutionarics led by large landowners and clan duels, who were often one and the same. During my 1982 visit, Central Asians simply took it for granted, that the Afghans then raiding into Afghanistan from Pakistan were identical in social origins and purpose to the basmachi of the 1920s.
↑A recent novel by a Soviet Azerbaijani makes it clear that nepotism and bribery remain culturally-associated problems.
↑Today they comprise an autonomous republic within the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic oi" the USSR.
↑Perhaps five were killed in World War II. That would not be unique.
↑I do not know Uzbek, and did not hear those broadcasts. But in 27 years of weekly broadcasts on the Soviet Union, and in hundreds of lectures, I have spoken with or received mail from probably thousands of Americans who are physically afraid to visit the Soviet Union. "Will I be able to get out again?" is the usual question. Yet there is absolutely nothing the USSR has done or said that Provides the slightest justification for that attitude.
↑These are free, open to all, and provide bed and board.
Notes
↑Ia. A. Ioffe, My i planeta (Moscow: Politizdat, 1972), 3rd ed., p. 117.
↑Arthur Koestler, The Invisible Writing (Boston: Beacon, 1954), pp. 108-148, passim.
↑Langston Hughes, Good Morning Revolution (Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill, 1973). pp. 92-94.
↑Anna Louise Strong, Red Star in Samarkand (New York: Coward-McCann, 1929), pp. 91-93, passim.
↑NATO data cited in Michael Rywkin, Moscow's Muslim Challenge (Armonk, N.Y.: Sharpe, 1982), Table 5, on p. 50.
Other sources used in this chapter include:
Eliz. E. Bacon, Central Asians under Russian Rule: A Study in Culture Change (Ithaca: Cornell U., 1966); Devendra Kaushik, Socialism in Central Asia (Bombay: Allied, 1976); Bejoy Kumar Sinha, The New Man in Soviet Union (New Delhi: People's, 1971); A.L. Strong. The Road to the Grey Pamir (Boston: Little, Brown, 1931); 1. Blinder and A. Ul'masov, "A Critique of Bourgeois Conceptions of Economic Development in Soviet Central Asia," Problems of Economics. XIV, No. 5, 1971, pp. 74-93; E.M. Primakov, "Islam and Processes of Social Development of Foreign Countries in the East," Soviet Law and Government, XIX, No. 4, 1981, pp. 3-23; Iu. V. Bromlei, ed., Sovremennye etnicheskie protsessy v SSSR, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Nauka, 1977); N.S. Kisliakov, Ocherki po istorii sem'i i braka u narodov Srednei Azti i Kazakhstana (Leningrad: Nauka, 1969); L.I. Klimovich, Pisateli vostoka ob lslame (Moscow: Znanie, 1978); G.A. Khidoiatov, Stroitel'stvo sotsializma V Srednei Azii i sovremennyi antikommunizm (Tashkent: Uzbekistan, 1978); TsSU Uzbekskoi SSR, Narodnoe khoziaistvo Vzbekstoi SSR v 1971 g., Statisticheskii ezhegodnik (Tashkent: Uzbekistan, 1972).
"Indians," Eskimos, and Islamic Nomads
Catholic Lithuania; Protestant Latvia and Estonia
The Ukraine: Power Within a Power
The Soviet Near East: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia
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