A Soviet Journey : A Critical Annotated Edition 9781498536035, 9781498536028

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The Soviet Union with attention to Central Asia circa 1975.

A Soviet Journey

Critical Africana Studies: African, African American, and Caribbean Interdisciplinary and Intersectional Studies Series Editor: Reiland Rabaka, University of Colorado at Boulder Series Editorial Board: Christel N. Temple, University of Pittsburgh; Martell Teasley, University of Texas at San Antonio; and Deborah Whaley, University of Iowa The Critical Africana Studies book series features scholarship within the emerging field of Africana studies, which encompasses such disciplines as African studies, African diasporan studies, African American studies, Afro-American studies, Afro-Asian studies, AfroEuropean studies, Afro-Islamic studies, Afro-Jewish studies, Afro-Latino studies, AfroNative American studies, Caribbean studies, Pan-African studies, Black British studies and, of course, Black studies. The Critical Africana Studies book series directly responds to the heightened demand for monographs and edited volumes that innovatively explore Africa and its diaspora employing cutting-edge critical, interdisciplinary, and intersectional theory and methods. Titles in the Series Dialogues across Diasporas: Women Writers, Scholars, and Activists of Africana and Latina Descent in Conversation, edited by Marion Rohrleitner and Sarah Ryan Rastafari Reasoning and the RastaWoman: Gender Constructions in the Shaping of Rastafari Livity, by Jeanne Christensen Understanding the Black Flame and Multigenerational Education Trauma: Toward a Theory of the Dehumanization of Black Students, by June Cara Christian Concepts of Cabralism: Amilcar Cabral and Africana Critical Theory, by Reiland Rabaka Frantz Fanon, My Brother: Doctor, Playwright, Revolutionary, by Joby Fanon, translated by Daniel Nethery Facing South to Africa: Toward an Afrocentric Critical Orientation, by Molefi Kete Asante Black Muslims and the Law; Civil Liberties from Elijah Muhammad to Muhammad Ali, by Malachi D. Crawford The Negritude Movement: W.E.B. Du Bois, Leon Damas, Aime Cesaire, Leopold Senghor, Frantz Fanon, and the Evolution of an Insurgent Idea, by Reiland Rabaka Cosmopolitanism in the Fictive Imagination W.E.B. Du Bois: Toward the Humanization of a Revolutionary Art, by Samuel O. Doku

A Soviet Journey A Critical Annotated Edition Alex La Guma Edited by Christopher J. Lee Foreword by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o Preface by Blanche La Guma

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2017 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: La Guma, Alex, author. | Lee, Christopher J., editor. Title: A Soviet journey : a critical annotated edition / by Alex La Guma ; edited by Christopher J. Lee ; foreword by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o ; preface by Blanche La Guma. Description: Lanham, MD : Lexington Books, [2017] | Series: Critical Africana studies : African, African American, and Caribbean interdisciplinary and intersectional studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017013130 (print) | LCCN 2017013827 (ebook) | ISBN 9781498536035 (Electronic) | ISBN 9781498536028 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Soviet Union--Description and travel. | La Guma, Alex--Travel--Soviet Union. Classification: LCC DK29 (ebook) | LCC DK29 .L33 2017 (print) | DDC 947.085/3092--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017013130 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Foreword Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o Preface Blanche La Guma

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Acknowledgments A Note on Edits and Annotations Introduction: Anti-Imperial Eyes Christopher J. Lee Epigraph Prologue 1

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xv xvii 1 61 63

Flashbacks “Do Svidanya,” Moscow Phantoms The Footsteps of Alexander Into Central Asia The Monday City Writers Tea House and Ballet To Nurek The River Tamers The Hunting Mayor Gentlemen of the Road Confectioners et Cetera Star Gazers and Cotton-Raisers The Big Sky A Welcome to the Prairies The City of Apples Stone Age to Socialism Jambul “Tsygane” [Gypsies] Change Planes for a Dream Notes above Ground Level “Cherchez la Femme” Faraway Places vii

71 76 77 83 83 86 88 90 91 94 97 102 104 108 115 117 119 121 123 126 127 130 134 135

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The Sky Is with Me On Borodin The Young Guard The Blue Mountains “Kumiss” Is Good for You Legends . . . And Beyond The Golden Road Orchestras and Conductors Between Two Rivers The Uzbek Pearl The White Worm Mountain Thunder A Silken Beauty Melons and Movies Pottery, Pipelines, and Protein The Hunt of the Sun The Silent Bells Among the Antiquities The Black Lake Rubáiyát in a Tea House Leave-Taking The Trumpet of Spring A Giant of Great Promise “Neither Tree nor Bread” At the Crossroads The Pearl of Siberia Asides in Irkutsk An Old Acquaintance Out of Tribalism To Bratsk The Carpenter of Bratsk The Musical City The Silent Town The Science Town “Siberian Lights” The Titan Makers “The 2,000 Soldiers” St. Vladimir of Tyumen The Discoverers The Burning Land The Conquerors A Boat Ride The Bashkirs

138 141 142 146 148 149 150 155 156 161 163 167 168 170 173 174 175 176 178 179 180 180 181 185 186 188 189 192 193 197 199 201 203 205 207 208 209 211 212 214 214 215 218 218

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Here Comes the Bride Farewell to Siberia Ulyanovsk Harvest Home Three Thousand Lakes Old and New The Bells of Kaunas Pirčiupis’s Mother Trakai’s Castle To Die a Little

220 221 222 227 228 229 230 233 234 235

Epilogue State of the People The Communist Party The Bull’s Death Bibliography Index Biographical Notes

237 238 238 239 243 253 265

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Foreword Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

He was not there in person—he was under house arrest back in apartheid South Africa—but Alex La Guma dominated the literary discussions at the 1962 Conference of African Writers of English Expression, held at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. Among the attendants were some of the leading writers of the continent, and they included Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Christopher Okigbo from Nigeria, Kofi Awoonor of Ghana, and a group of exiled South African writers, among them Es’kia Mphahlele, Lewis Nkosi, Arthur Maimane, and Bloke Modisane. La Guma’s book A Walk in the Night had just been released by the Mbari Writers Club in Nigeria, founded by Ulli Beier among others. La Guma’s realism was often compared and contrasted with that of Chinua Achebe’s, whose novel Things Fall Apart had been published by Heinemann in 1958. It’s interesting that both novels had titles drawn from English literature—Shakespeare in the case of La Guma, and Yeats in the case of Chinua Achebe—reflecting the dominance of English literature in the education of the writers present. But the two texts were seen as mapping new directions in African literature in English, heralding the Africa emerging from colonial domination. Alex La Guma spoke to me and to this emergent Africa from the place of his house arrest through his words. I met Alex La Guma in person for the very first time in Sweden at the 1967 Afro-Scandinavian Writers’ Conference held at Hässelby Castle, Stockholm. Those attending included Wole Soyinka (Nigeria), Albert Memmi (Tunisia), Kateb Yacine (Algeria), Tchicaya U Tam’si (Congo), and Dan Jacobson (South Africa). In the course of delivering the opening lecture “The Writer in Modern Africa,” Soyinka made a reference to the African writer in some independent African country and who, in despair, was reduced to carrying guns and holding up radio stations. It was of course a reference to himself, but it was Alex La Guma’s response that raised the whole question of the role of violence in revolutionary change. As a South African, he said he was prepared to run guns and hold up radio stations, because, whether as writers or common laborers, the situation called for fundamental change. I was struck by his coupling of writers and workers and by his speaking on behalf of the xi

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working class in apartheid South Africa. For him, the writer was a worker with a pen. In person, he dominated the discussion in Sweden much as his text A Walk in the Night had done at Makerere five years earlier. La Guma was tall, serious, and focused, but once I did see another side of him. It was at a party held for us at some house in Stockholm. When some jazz music was put on, I saw Alex La Guma, on the floor, jiving. Yes, he could jive! He was free, the picture of one who loved life. Six years later in September 1973, he and I would meet again, this time in Moscow on our way to the Fifth Conference of Afro-Asian Writers at Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan, then part of the Soviet Union. This meeting followed previous ones held in other capitals including New Delhi, Tashkent, and Cairo. Among those attending were Okot p’Bitek (Uganda), David Rubadiri (Malawi), and Lenrie Peters (Gambia). Our guide was the late Victor Ramzes who had done so much to translate African writing into Russian. It was during this visit that discussions began about La Guma returning to tour the Soviet Union and write whatever he wanted to write about it. I was also asked if I, too, would come back and do the same. The invitations were out there. I never took up the offer, or rather, when eventually I did in 1975, it was not to tour the Soviet Union, but to go to Chekhov’s house in the Caucasus Mountains overlooking Yalta to complete my novel, Petals of Blood. That was also the last time I met Alex La Guma, but in a hospital in Moscow. The last time I heard of him he was the ANC representative in Cuba, and then the loss, in October 1985. He never lived long enough to see post-apartheid South Africa, but he had no doubt that it would come to be, or rather he had seen and predicted it in his novel In the Fog of the Seasons’ End. I felt his loss in a very personal way. I always felt him to be a kindred spirit. His spirit of hope lives on in the books he left us. He is a central figure alongside Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and others in the making and consolidation of modern African literature. But I will always carry the image of the Alex La Guma whom I once saw jiving the night away in Stockholm, a year after his exile from the South Africa he loved. In his life and books, he struggled for a society in which all people could find their humanity. Joy in life was part of that humanity, and it comes through in his novels and memoir. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o June 2016

Preface Blanche La Guma

My husband, Alex La Guma, was an ardent political activist in South Africa who worked to overthrow the fascist apartheid regime in his country and suffered the consequences of detention in prison without trial, house arrest, the infamous Treason Trial, and exile. While under house arrest, Alex wrote quite a few short stories, but because of his intermittent imprisonment, frequent police raids, and his writing being taken by the police, he was unable to write more. Alex eventually wrote, over the course of his life, six books, which, due to him being banned, could not be read in South Africa. He was, however, vastly read internationally and particularly in the Soviet Union. Alex’s father, James Arnold (Jimmy) La Guma, played a very influential role in the political thinking of Alex. He guided him with books to read and had many discussions with and explanations for Alex. Jimmy was a member of the Communist Party of South Africa—later known as the SACP—which came into being in 1921. In 1927 Jimmy with some other South African activists went as a delegate to Brussels to attend the League Against Imperialism conference. After the conference, the delegation from the Soviet Union invited them to visit Moscow. Since Alex could not make a significant contribution in South Africa, he, I, and our family went into exile. Soon after arriving in London, Alex was contacted by a member of the Afro-Asian Writers Association (AAWA), which in due course invited him to attend an AAWA conference in Uzbekistan. He traveled to Moscow and from there to Uzbekistan. Yusuf El-Sebai from Egypt was elected Secretary General of the AAWA and Alex became his deputy, thus starting Alex’s trips to Moscow for the AAWA. He traveled to Moscow several times a year and at times from there to the countries of affiliate members of the AAWA to arrange conferences and meetings, poetry readings, and discussions with the executive members. Writers of the AAWA were mainly from countries in Africa and Asia and often from countries in political turmoil and thus had financial difficulties. Moscow covered all expenses. Alex was also one of the chairmen of the World Peace Council, which supported the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. This organization

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was also headquartered in Moscow, and Alex traveled to and from Moscow to fulfill tasks in that sphere as well. Alex was thus active in organizations to save humanity and to make the world a better place for all on this planet. His writing is a testament to these beliefs and his lifelong commitment to their fulfillment. Blanche La Guma Cape Town March 2016

Acknowledgments

Though unassuming in appearance, I have worked on this book for over a decade, and I have accrued a number of debts as a result. I first read A Soviet Journey while teaching for a year at Harvard in 2003 and 2004. I had read Alex La Guma’s fiction earlier, given an interest in the “Coloured” community of Cape Town. This book opened a new and different dimension to his life and work. Since then, I have made several attempts through two chapters and an article to collect my thoughts. This book constitutes a summation, if not quite culmination, of my thinking, given my possible return to La Guma’s work in the future. Nonetheless, the introduction and notes to this new edition reflect my current views and judgment, which have involved revising past interpretations, clarifying certain details, reinforcing some arguments, introducing new ideas and information that have come to light, and fleshing out historical events and politics when I did not have the space to do so before. Despite my intention to republish this book years ago, it now appears in the wake of three preceding book projects that have examined decolonization at diplomatic, intellectual, and socio-cultural levels. The timing for this project’s completion could not be better. I must thank Monica Popescu and Maxim Matusevich for their generous invitations, support, and insight on earlier pieces, in addition to their own path-breaking work on forgotten Soviet-African histories during the Cold War. Roger Field also provided feedback and conversation on an earlier book chapter. His biography of La Guma remains the authoritative work, and I have learned much from his scholarship. Phil Zachernuk hosted me during a year at Dalhousie University as an Izaak Walton Killam fellow (2005–2006) and has been generous with his insights on this project and others since then. The University Research Council at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill supplied funding for an initial transcription of the text, ably completed by Emily Baran. A grant from the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs, Government of India, sustained my work at the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa (CISA) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. My thanks to Dilip Menon and Isabel Hofmeyr. Henry Louis Gates and Krishna Lewis provided intellectual and financial support while I worked on this project at the Hutchins Center at Harvard during the spring of 2014. The African Studies Centre at Leiden and Martin Luther University in Halle provided generous fellowships in 2015. I thank Jan-Bart Gewald, the late Stephen xv

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Ellis, Philippe Peycam, Richard Rottenburg, Ronn Müller, and Cirila Toplak for their support at these institutions. In the spring of 2016, I was a visiting scholar with the Committee on Globalization and Social Change at the CUNY Graduate Center. I thank Gary Wilder, Julie Skurski, Grace Davie, and Mark Drury in particular for comments on a draft of the introduction. Constantin Katsakioris invited me to participate on a conference panel at the ECAS 2015 meeting in Paris and later to be a fellow at the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies in 2016. Both occasions were excellent, and I have been inspired by Constantin’s own innovative research. Jerry Buttrey generously guided me in Havana, Cuba, in December 2012, where I found La Guma’s grave. Lindsay Ceballos gave generously of her time, supplying crucial expertise on Soviet literature and saving me from many errors in the process. Josh Sanborn similarly provided a thorough reading of the introduction from a historical angle. Sarah Duff read the introduction with expert attention on the South African side. Other friends and colleagues who gave assistance and conversation over the years include Gillian Berchowitz, Kerry Bystrom, Allison Drew, Barbara Harlow, Minkah Makalani, Marc Matera, Susan Pennybacker, Donald Raleigh, Karin Shapiro, and Judy Wu. Last but not least, the Academic Research Committee at Lafayette College presented me with a publication grant that aided completion of this project. I need to thank especially those involved in the editorial process. Brighid Stone, Sarah Craig, and Bethany Davis provided indispensable assistance at Lexington Books. Bill Nelson created the map. I am honored to have the foreword by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o—a fellow writer and friend of Alex La Guma. He supplies an invaluable literary and generational perspective as only he could. My greatest debts are to Reiland Rabaka, editor of the Critical Africana Studies series and who responded immediately to my initial query, and to Blanche La Guma, Alex’s wife and noted activist in her own right, whom I met in 2004, answered numerous questions, and has been consistently supportive of this project over the past decade. My sincere thanks to Reiland for making this book happen: I am grateful to have this book be a part of this series. And my enduring gratitude to Blanche for her patience and trust: I hope this fulfills a promise made too long ago. Easton, Pennsylvania November 2016

A Note on Edits and Annotations

This book is an edited and annotated edition of Alex La Guma’s original text published in 1978 by Progress Publishers in Moscow. The tasks of editing and annotating have been undertaken with attention to current editorial style criteria, the interest of readers, and the intentions of La Guma himself. In short, I have been guided by a principle of illuminating and explaining for readers certain people, places, and ideas that appear in La Guma’s text, while also keeping such notes to a minimum in order to avoid the frequent interruption of reading the narrative itself. While this book is a scholarly edition, it does not seek to diminish the pleasure of experiencing a creative work by La Guma. Several interventions need specific mention. First, in terms of editing, I have changed both grammatical and spelling styles from a British version to an American version, per the request of Lexington Books and its editorial team. Single quotes have been changed to double quotes. A second comma has been inserted in the case of a series of three items. Commas have also been inserted in cases of two sentences joined by a conjunction. La Guma did not insert a comma in many such cases. On the other hand, I have closely adhered to his stylistic choices. For example, he was very consistent in omitting a conjunction (e.g., “and”) in a series, which I have kept as in the original. He also used stylistically uncommon words today such as “pridefully” which I have preserved. I have retained his transliterations of Soviet names in the text and map provided, which at times consist of Anglicized versions of Russian spelling. Given that this book was first published in Russian and English, it is presumed that his text received official approval of the spelling used. However, on a few occasions, I have noted minor misspellings and the misplaced insertion, or absence, of grammatical articles. In both instances I have made corrections. In one case—a long quotation of a speech by Fidel Castro in the prologue—I have created a block quote that was not in the original text in order to correct a printing error and aid the reader in determining which words in the text are Castro’s. In terms of annotations, I have similarly kept these to a minimum to avoid needless disturbance of a person’s reading experience. I have included La Guma’s original annotations, as well as adding ones that explain unclear references in the text. Given that this book is intended to reach diverse audiences in African literature, Soviet studies, and the general public, the information in the annotations may appear obvious to xvii

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some readers and not others. In this regard, I have tended to explain rather than assume pre-existing knowledge. The introduction has also been written to answer such questions in advance. In summary, it is uncertain what level of editorial rigor the manuscript originally received. I have made edits and annotations with the purpose of excising mistakes by the publisher and providing clarity of content when necessary in order to advance the ideas and spirit of La Guma’s political and creative imaginations.

Introduction Anti-Imperial Eyes Christopher J. Lee

The October Revolution of 1917 was the opening of a new era in world history. Very well, if skeptics deny this, then let us take me, one of the millions in the developing countries, one of the victims of colonialism, national oppression, and inequality. —Alex La Guma, A Soviet Journey (1978)

Many histories of the end of apartheid begin with the image of Nelson Mandela, newly released from Victor Verster Prison, walking to freedom with his wife Winnie Madikizela-Mandela at his side on February 11, 1990—a striking moment circulated worldwide, signaling the inevitability of political change in South Africa. A more prescient image, however, for the politics of post-apartheid South Africa may be the assassination of Chris Hani, leader of the South African Communist Party (SACP), outside his suburban home in Boksburg, to the east of Johannesburg, several years later on April 10, 1993. While Mandela’s release after twenty-seven years in prison marked the culmination of the global anti-apartheid movement, complex secret negotiations, and the gradual dismantlement of legal restraints by the National Party (NP) government, the death of Hani indicated a distinct set of limits within this climate of positive change. Political anxieties continued—particularly over the fate of South Africa’s economic future—and the perception of violence as a valid means to political ends still persisted. In the wake of Hani’s death at the hands of a white assailant, Mandela himself urged calm and order, one gesture amid a broader wave of violence that had taken hold across South Africa between competing supporters of the African National Congress (ANC) and the Zulu-based Inkatha Freedom Party. The NP government itself deceitfully promoted this inter-party conflict in clandestine ways, seeking to destabilize the negotiations of the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA). Against this backdrop of uncertainty, Hani’s assassination was widely viewed as an attempt to postpone the transition at hand, with specific intent directed at the possibility of state appropriation of South African industry as declared in the 1955 Freedom Charter, a founding document of the apartheid-era ANC and its deep 1

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sympathy with socialist designs. Yet, despite its tragic nature, the death of Hani proved to be a critical turning point, encouraging political action that resulted in a draft constitution by November 1993. By April the following year, the apartheid period was over, at least from a juridical standpoint, with Mandela elected as the first president of a fully democratic South Africa. 1 However, the passing of Chris Hani can also be read as the death of a specific political imagination—a radical internationalism, African born and based, which informed the anti-apartheid struggle. This imagination preceded the apartheid period (1948–1994) and the broader Cold War context of Hani’s lifetime, yet it inhabited and influenced both. While the SACP today remains part of the ruling Tripartite Alliance along with the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the ANC, its once-influential socialist outlook has been decidedly marginalized in the wake of measures to drop such principles during the CODESA process, as well as through successive economic policies by the ruling ANC government in the two decades thereafter. Socialism as a strategy and approach to social justice has been further sidelined within official narratives of the liberation struggle. Indeed, Hani’s assassination can be viewed as yet another end to the Cold War in southern Africa. Unlike events such as the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale (1987–1988) that marked the retreat of South Africa’s intervention in Angola or, soon after, the independence of Namibia in 1990, Hani’s life and death capture a more intimate human scale of Cold War history in the region—one characterized by individuals who engaged with political ideas, experienced exile, and became leaders, envoys, and organizers at the grassroots level. Hani embodied this shared pattern of communal involvement—a sociocultural history of the liberation struggle—through periods of living in neighboring Lesotho and Zambia, military training in the Soviet Union, and his leadership of Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”)—colloquially referred to as MK—that served as the military branch of the ANC and the SACP. His biography points to the political vulnerabilities and precarious livelihoods of activists at the time, in addition to the expansive political geographies their individual actions created, generating new transnational histories and alternative forms of knowledge in their wake. 2 This introduction adopts the perspective of the individual as a starting point for rethinking the Cold War and its historical legacies in southern Africa and beyond. In 1978 Progress Publishers in Moscow released A Soviet Journey by the South African writer Alex La Guma. Born and raised in Cape Town, La Guma remains one of South Africa’s best-known authors. During his lifetime, he received the Lotus Prize for Literature, the Soviet Order of Friendship, the President Nguesso Literary Prize from the Republic of Congo, and was made a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres by the French government. In 2003 he posthumously received the Order of Ikhamanga in Gold from the South African government. 3 Through his books

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A Walk in the Night (1962), And a Threefold Cord (1964), The Stone Country (1967), In the Fog of the Seasons’ End (1972), and Time of the Butcherbird (1979), La Guma pursued a social realism in his fiction that depicted the lives of laborers, activists, prisoners, and impoverished working-class families in Cape Town more generally—subject matter that captured his politics. 4 As a member of the SACP and the ANC, La Guma belonged to the heralded political generation that included such figures as Mandela, Walter Sisulu, and Oliver Tambo. A Soviet Journey reflects this activism, though it marks a distinct literary departure from his recognized oeuvre. Given its genre of travel writing, foreign geography, and non-fiction subject matter, A Soviet Journey is an aberration within his library of work and has frequently been neglected as a result. Nevertheless, it conforms to the political themes of his fiction. 5 Following Jacques Derrida’s double sense of the term, it provides a “supplement” that adds to his legacy, explaining in more direct fashion his long-standing political motivations and the fugitive cosmopolitan life in exile he maintained until his death in Havana, Cuba, in 1985. But, in doing so, it unsettles La Guma’s reputation and that of the ANC. 6 Distinguished as La Guma’s longest work, fiction or non-fiction, A Soviet Journey is, prima facie, a memoir of his travels throughout the Soviet Union beginning in the late 1960s in his capacity as a representative for the ANC and the SACP. Though centered on a trip taken in 1975, it is a composite work, informed by experiences from a number of visits. Traveling east from the industrial cities of Moscow and Leningrad to Soviet Central Asia and Siberia and back again, the book’s title refers to both La Guma’s personal journey as well as the Soviet Union’s own political journey to the present. It stands as a work of cultural diplomacy. A Soviet Journey also fills an important gap in his personal history, given the South African focus of his fiction that does not directly address his time of nearly two decades in exile. Beyond occasional essays for Sechaba, a journal of the ANC, and The African Communist, an organ of the SACP, La Guma left no other memoir. In combination with his fiction, it enables the “reciprocal construction” of his biography, to use Ciraj Rassool’s expression. 7 By extension, A Soviet Journey is also a compelling historical and political document of a period when an entire generation of activists left for exile. As with Hani, A Soviet Journey points to the complex politics of the ANC-SACP alliance during the Cold War, when the anti-apartheid struggle intersected with a broader set of Third World politics that was tri-continental—Africa, Asia, and Latin America—in scope. La Guma’s book provides insight into the transnational political communities that anti-apartheid activists joined, thus encouraging the revision of more conventional understandings of this period that have gravitated toward nationalist politics and struggles internal to South Africa—the writings of Mandela, Ruth First, and Steve Biko being key examples of this fight on the domestic front. 8 A Soviet Journey resituates the vital role that the So-

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viet Union (USSR) held for liberation struggles around the world as a patron, host, and political model—perspectives that have been lost, particularly at a popular level, since the demise of the USSR itself. A tacit triumphalism has often inflected the historiographies of our neoliberal age, marginalizing moribund Cold War projects that once held meaning for numerous people. 9 For these reasons, A Soviet Journey is a rare work that reflects a distinct political imagination of the time. Though several memoirs of the Soviet Union by African students and visitors exist, there is no other memoir of comparable length or depth by an African writer, particularly of La Guma’s stature. 10 Republishing A Soviet Journey today therefore restores a neglected text, but also a worldview, an intellectual history, and a onceenvisioned future for a decolonized South Africa—a “dreamworld” to use a concept of Susan Buck-Morss’s—that has all but vanished. 11 It reveals the dimensions of a Cold War cosmopolitanism—or fugitive cosmopolitanism, as proposed earlier, defined by enforced political exile—that produced this lost future of South Africa’s past. La Guma’s book is a critical reminder of the ANC’s socialist agenda during the anti-apartheid years, a policy approach that the ANC government has willfully marginalized since 1994. 12 Reprinting A Soviet Journey today is thus intended to rehabilitate this disregarded history to public memory, to return to and reinstate a deep tradition of radical politics that resided in South Africa and the Western Cape specifically from the 1910s through the 1980s. A Soviet Journey consequently speaks to audiences in South African history and African literature—contexts in which La Guma is already a familiar presence. It similarly contributes to work that has examined Russian and Soviet connections to Africa and the Third World before and during the Cold War. 13 But A Soviet Journey also works at a more philosophical level, addressing concerns found in Africana critical theory as defined by Reiland Rabaka, Black Atlantic studies as positioned by Paul Gilroy, and the black radical tradition as conceived by Cedric Robinson. 14 These are audiences in which La Guma has received less attention. Yet A Soviet Journey provides a useful pivot point between these interrelated fields. It contributes to a trans-Atlantic agenda of political self-determination against recurrent forms of racism and class oppression. As Rabaka has written, Africana critical theory seeks to establish an alternative epistemology of knowledge aimed at restoring and re-centering traditions of black political thought counterposed to conditions of race and class chauvinism. 15 In his words, “Africana critical theory involves not only the critique of domination and discrimination, but also a deep commitment to human liberation and radical social transformation.” 16 A Soviet Journey shares this spirit. Building upon Gilroy’s intercontinental framework, it also opens a broader set of geographic and intellectual parameters as to how the black radical tradition and African literature can be mutually understood—indeed, how their intersectional moments can serve to de-

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territorialize and enhance current understandings of each. Anthony Bogues has argued for two general modes within the former tradition— one heretical and another prophetic. 17 A Soviet Journey conforms to both. It is heretical in its expansion of the spatial and political boundaries of South African and African literature, revising the national allegory framework as once posited by Fredric Jameson and which can be found in La Guma’s own novels. 18 A Soviet Journey is at once about the USSR and a future South Africa, for which the Soviet Union provided a political paradigm. It is an experimental work, which raises intriguing questions about what it means to narrate another nation, to reference Homi Bhabha’s parallel argument, and, furthermore, the possibilities of politically engaged travel writing without the imperial underpinnings of the genre, as explored by Mary Louise Pratt. 19 A Soviet Journey defies existing assumptions and, in doing so, expands the contours of African literature. A Soviet Journey is also heretical in how it broadens current definitions of the black radical tradition. The genealogy of black radicalism—involving figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois, George Padmore, and C. L. R. James—has commonly undertaken an Atlantic focus through political networks that extended from Kingston, to New York, and to London. A Francophone tradition has co-existed with this Anglophone history through the movement and activism of individuals like Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon—and without overlooking the gendering of black radicalism—Suzanne Césaire, Jane Nardal, and Paulette Nardal. 20 Yet, despite a prolific radical tradition in South Africa, the political geography of the South Atlantic has had less bearing on historical writing and academic conversations further north. In this regard, A Soviet Journey serves as a vital intervention. To use Bogues’s expression, it provides an “epistemic displacement” apart from both the conventions of Western Marxism and the black radical tradition as typically understood. 21 It points instead to the importance of Marxist peripheries and what can be called a “southern Marxism” with grounding in the Global South—the South African left being one of many formations of African socialism found across the continent. 22 These diverse situations reveal how Marxism—whether MarxistLeninist or Maoist in orientation—was received and reconfigured in the Global South. In this manner, A Soviet Journey attempts prophecy in how it imagined a future South Africa. Though this ambition may seem quixotic in retrospect, it nonetheless forces a rethinking of South African political and intellectual history—and the parameters of African history more generally—in the present. This book exhibits, at the broadest level, how figures like La Guma inhabited an intercontinental political landscape and embraced a worldview that was total, generating an alternative world literature and a concurrent global African history in its wake. What follows in this introduction is a set of historical contexts and intellectual frameworks for reappraising La Guma and A Soviet Journey within the wide-ranging political, intellectual, and geographic worlds he

6

Introduction

inhabited. A committed communist internationalist, these interconnected worlds encompassed Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe—a geographic expansiveness that signals the precarity of exile and his diverse political engagements as a result. A Soviet Journey affords an opportunity to bring together disparate historical experiences that are often not treated together. As such, this introduction asserts neither comprehensiveness of historical detail nor a single approach for interpretation. It does not offer a close, line-by-line reading of La Guma’s text. Rather, it seeks to articulate his worldview. A Soviet Journey marks an attempt by La Guma to envisage a postcolonial South Africa: one whose multinational character was resolved through socialism. It can thus be described as a trace in Derrida’s sense—a sign of absence that remains in the present, disrupting the difference between how the ANC government chooses to see its history and the actual lived complexities of the liberation struggle. 23 A central aim in republishing A Soviet Journey is to make this text available to scholars working across geographies and histories during the Cold War, to enable multiple interpretations of this complex work. In keeping with La Guma’s own assessment of his book in the epilogue, this introduction is provisional in nature with intentions of inspiring the imagination, rather than diminishing it. La Guma was but one Cold War voice from Africa among many. Fathers and Sons My parents were of the working-class, but they were also class and politically conscious people. My mother worked in a cigarette factory, while my father was actively engaged in trade union and political work. I do not remember my parents ever sermonizing me as a child, but one was always being advised to devote oneself to “something useful,” or to “lead a useful life.” A picture of Lenin hung in our living room. —Alex La Guma, “Why I Joined the Communist Party: Doing Something Useful” (1982) 24

An intrinsic aspect of political life in South Africa has been its generational character, which not only marked time, but was generative—ideologically and organizationally—in scope. The longevity of political struggle during the twentieth century enveloped families, resembling what historian Lynn Hunt has called a “family romance” with the Mbeki, Slovo-First, and Mandela families being examples. 25 The La Guma family also exemplifies this phenomenon. Justin Alexander (Alex) La Guma was born on February 20, 1925, and raised in the District Six neighborhood of Cape Town, an impoverished, racially-mixed quarter that captured the creole spirit of the city. 26 Situated between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, Cape Town was a transfer point for commerce, but also for people. Like New Orleans and Rio de Janeiro, Cape Town is a former slave

Introduction

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city with an urban history and culture defined by a traffic that brought slaves from regional locales such as Angola, Mozambique, and Madagascar, as well as Malaysia and Indonesia given the Dutch East India Company’s establishment of Cape Town in 1652 as a hub for its trade operations. This demographic and cultural milieu partly explains the “Coloured” (multiracial) status of the La Guma family, which had French and Malagasy origins. Formally established in 1867, District Six reflected this layered history as well. 27 The apartheid government later demolished it for this reason, following its designation under the Group Areas Act (1950) as a whites-only area in 1966—coincidentally the same year that La Guma and his family left for exile. Approximately 60,000 residents—a majority Coloured—were forcibly removed, leaving a desolate stretch of land near the city’s center, most of it still barren today. La Guma portrayed the vibrancy of District Six in A Walk in the Night, as did other writers such as Richard Rive in his novel “Buckingham Palace,” District Six (1986). 28 La Guma and Rive belonged to a distinguished cohort of Coloured South African writers that also includes Bessie Head, Dennis Brutus, Peter Abrahams, and James Matthews—each of whom critiqued the racism that consumed South African society, which was acutely felt by those considered racially “mixed.” Cape Town informed La Guma’s upbringing and identity in other ways. Its location provided fertile ground for ideas circulating globally— Marxism, Garveyism, and anticolonial nationalism among them. Along with his sister, Joan (1932–2014), La Guma grew up in a household receptive to these influences, which fundamentally shaped his social and political views. The multicultural and multinational outlook of A Soviet Journey can be traced back to the diversity of Cape Town’s social and cultural life, in addition to the politics of the ANC-led Congress Alliance during the 1950s. Though his mother, Wilhelmina (1897–1969), had a strong bearing on his worldview as noted in the epigraph to this section, his father, James (Jimmy) La Guma (1894–1961), had a particularly keen effect, given his leadership roles in different political organizations. Alex wrote a draft biography of his father that was published posthumously. 29 Born into poverty, Jimmy gained only a limited formal education and after a sequence of jobs signed a contract in 1910 to work in the diamond fields of German South West Africa (present-day Namibia), a position in which he came into contact with the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU). The ICU, founded in 1919, was the most important political organization in South Africa during the early twentieth century. It proved more significant than the South African Native National Congress—founded in 1912 and later renamed the African National Congress in 1923—due to its substantial membership size that reached urban and rural areas across southern Africa. 30 Its popular appeal rested in its ideological blending of working-class interests, African nationalism, and Garveyism—the pan-African ideas espoused by the Jamaican Marcus

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Introduction

Garvey, whose Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) developed a strong presence in South Africa. 31 Jimmy later attained the position of assistant general secretary working under the ICU’s founder, Clements Kadalie, during the early 1920s, and by 1925 joined the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA). 32 By then living in Cape Town, Jimmy thus participated in a context defined by the competing, yet frequently overlapping, organizations of the ICU, ANC, UNIA, and CPSA. His engagement with these different political strands would have a profound impact on his only son, born the same year he joined the CPSA. 33 Among these organizations, the CPSA was the most critical to the senior La Guma’s history. The CPSA has its own storied past, being founded in 1921 and therefore only a short time after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution—also known as the October Revolution—in Russia. The origins of the South African left have been attributed to multiple factors, including imperial networks of British socialism through popular figures like Olive Schreiner, the rise of trade unionism and syndicalism through organizations like the Industrial Workers of the World, a notable level of Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe starting in the 1880s, and, not least, the heavy industrialization of South Africa itself through the diamond and gold mining industries that involved thousands of workers, beginning in the 1860s. The initial membership of the CPSA drew from the International Socialist League, the most notable leftist organization that preceded it, though its numerically small membership was predominantly white. 34 The CPSA sought to change that. It had gained immediate attention through its involvement with the Rand Rebellion—a revolt by white workers in Johannesburg that lasted from late December 1921 until March 1922, when the South African military crushed it, leaving two hundred dead. Beyond the complex implications of the state aligning itself with mine owners resulting in white on white violence, the racist character of the uprising with white workers positioning their interests against black workers stirred considerable debate over the strategy of the CPSA. The Rand Rebellion had been preceded by significant strikes by black workers, including a 1919 strike by dockworkers in Cape Town organized by the ICU and a separate strike in February 1920 with an estimated 40,000 to 80,000 black mineworkers. 35 These conspicuous tensions over race and organization that emerged during the early 1920s shifted after 1924 to an emphasis on black labor, given the sheer numeric majority of the black working class. Yet despite support of this turn by CPSA leaders, such as founder Sidney Bunting, questions remained through the late 1920s. An additional factor within this political landscape of race, class, and competition with other parties was the influence of the Soviet Third International (1919–1943), better known as the Communist International or Comintern, which sought to promote communist revolution worldwide. The sense of fealty held by many within the CPSA

Introduction

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toward the Comintern, combined with the racial challenges of South Africa and internal debates within the Comintern itself during the 1920s, created a fraught atmosphere over strategic coordination and political outlook—anxieties of influence between the local and the global that continued in different ways through the apartheid period. This political loyalty toward the Comintern was not practiced at a distance. In 1927 the senior La Guma, who formed part of the CPSA’s policy to recruit South Africans of color (black, Indian, and Coloured) into its ranks, participated in the historic World Congress Against Colonial Oppression and Imperialism held in Brussels, Belgium—better known as the League Against Imperialism meeting. Josiah Tshangana (J. T.) Gumede, a founding member of the ANC, also attended as did Daniel Colraine of the South African Trades Union Congress. 36 As Vijay Prashad has written, this intercolonial “league” sponsored by the Comintern was founded as a direct counterpoint to the better-known League of Nations (1920–1946), whose membership included imperial powers. 37 Anticolonial nationalist leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru of India and Ahmed Ben Messali Hadj of Algeria were among those present in Brussels. 38 Leninism provided a decisive alternative for self-determination from American Wilsonianism. 39 Indeed, Brian Bunting, a key member of the later SACP, has written that a principal appeal of Marxist-Leninist thought regarded its arguments for national self-determination found in Vladimir Lenin’s The Right of Nations to Self-Determination (1914) and Joseph Stalin’s Marxism and the National Question (1913). As Bunting asserts, these tracts elaborated a theoretical basis on which to understand and end “the national oppression of the black peoples of South Africa” and, furthermore, achieve “the national aspirations of all sections of the people . . . within the framework of a single, integrated South African state based on nonracialism, democracy and full equality.” 40 Summarily stated, “Marxist theories on the national question, and in particular the practical experience of the Soviet Union in applying those theories [through a multinational federation], were of special significance for South Africa, with its racially mixed population.” 41 Such concerns regarding the national question would inform the arguments of A Soviet Journey. But a different question came first. Jimmy La Guma’s service as a CPSA envoy formed part of a broader effort to develop a coherent local strategy that coordinated with the aims of the Comintern and MarxistLeninist doctrine more generally. The colonial question in particular posed a test in the South African case, given South Africa’s self-governing status in the British Commonwealth as of union in 1910, but with measures of segregation and black land dispossession, particularly after the 1913 Natives Land Act. Such juridical measures construed South Africa as a colonial situation in the eyes of many activists—hence La Guma’s attendance in Brussels in 1927. Yet the question of categorical definition would continue through the apartheid period. The ANC-SACP alliance

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exhibited an anticolonial ethos that paralleled liberation struggles elsewhere in Africa, while also expressing sympathies with race-based civil rights movements in the United States and other countries. The colonial question was therefore not purely intellectual in scope, but had serious implications in terms of political tactics and organization. An early attempt at resolving this question occurred in 1927 with the so-called “Native Republic” thesis, formulated by La Guma and Soviet Politburo member and political theorist Nikolai Bukharin. La Guma traveled to Moscow immediately after the meeting in Brussels along with Gumede to discuss the South African situation. Upon his return to South Africa, Gumede reportedly said, “I have seen the new world to come, where it has already begun. I have been to the new Jerusalem.” 42 However, he and La Guma were not the first CPSA envoys to visit the USSR. Sidney Bunting attended the Fourth Congress of the Comintern in 1922, which addressed the “Negro question”—a vital occasion that convinced Bunting to redirect the CPSA’s efforts toward the black working class. 43 The Jamaican-American poet Claude McKay, who lived in the USSR from November 1922 to June 1923 and gained fame as a Harlem Renaissance writer, was among those who spoke at the 1922 congress, recounting Karl Marx’s analysis of chattel slavery and the need to continue his critique of black exploitation. 44 The issue of black liberation had been introduced with Lenin’s “Preliminary Draft Theses on the National and Colonial Question” (1920), which informed the Comintern’s Second Congress. 45 However, by the time La Guma visited Moscow, Comintern policy was less certain following Lenin’s death in 1924, the failure of communist revolutions in Europe (particularly in Germany in 1923), and the catastrophic neglect of the Communist Party of China during a crucial period of political turmoil between 1925 and 1927. These factors generated tensions and ultimately a ruinous break between Stalin and Leon Trotsky, leading to the Fourth International and the latter’s infamous assassination in Mexico City in 1940. Still, situations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America came into the foreground, as the League Against Imperialism meeting demonstrated. The Native Republic thesis emerged out of this shift, with renewed stress on national liberation in South Africa as an essential stage prior to socialist revolution. In fact, Soviet officials promoted this thesis for both South Africa and the United States, in the latter case known as the Black Belt Nation Thesis, which characterized black communities in the American South (the “Black Belt”) as comprising a nation with the right to self-determination. 46 La Guma embraced the Native Republic thesis with its affinities to Garvey’s notion of a “Black Republic” and the connected idea of “Africa for the Africans.” It nevertheless drew controversy within the CPSA due to its transparent racial character. Anxieties surfaced that this strategy could fracture the party once more. However, debate did not fall along strictly racial lines with black CPSA members, such as William Thibedi,

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11

critical of a nationalist approach. 47 Amid these tensions, La Guma returned to the Soviet Union once more in 1927, partly to attend the tenth anniversary celebration of the Bolshevik Revolution, but also to report this internal dissent. Sidney Bunting and Edward (Eddie) Roux—later author of the classic book on black politics in South Africa, Time Longer Than Rope (1948)—attended the Sixth Congress of the Comintern in 1928 with the intention of dissuading Soviet officials of the Native Republic thesis through the two-part argument that South Africa’s black proletariat was ready for a socialist revolution, whereas the rural black peasantry was not ready for a nationalist struggle. Furthermore, the existing black bourgeoisie was too small to lead a nationalist movement. However, the delegation failed to shift Comintern policy. 48 The Comintern instead passed a resolution on “The South African Question” and approved the “Theses on the Revolutionary Movement in Colonial and Semi-Colonial Countries” at the Sixth Congress, which affirmed Lenin’s position of 1920 in support of black self-determination. 49 The Native Republic thesis became the official platform of the CPSA in January 1929, despite persistent debate. Indeed, the thesis familiarized strategic concepts (the proletariat, the peasantry) and policy tensions (rural versus urban areas, socialist revolution versus national liberation) that continued to animate discussions among activists for decades, even if the thesis itself did not last in name. It captured the political stakes involved, the tactical considerations demanded, and the organizational decisions to be reached. It also anticipated the uneasy alliance between the nationalist ANC and the socialist SACP established during the 1950s and which has lasted to the present. Jimmy La Guma was at the center of this history. As recounted in the opening section of A Soviet Journey, the senior La Guma’s experience in Moscow also sparked the imagination of his son. The CPSA eventually expelled Jimmy in 1932—partly the result of a Comintern policy to purify ideological positions, thus echoing infighting within the Soviet Politburo itself with the expulsions of Trotsky in 1927 and Bukharin in 1929. 50 It also undermined the mobilization of the Native Republic thesis. Undeterred, the senior La Guma attempted to establish a local branch of the League Against Imperialism and went on to help found the National Liberation League in Cape Town in 1935, becoming editor of its flagship publication, The Liberator: A Non-European Anti-Imperialist Magazine—a role that would influence the literary ambitions of Alex. 51 The Liberator resembled its overseas predecessor, Harlem’s The Liberator, by featuring the work of African-American writers and intellectuals such as Langston Hughes, J. A. Rogers, and Paul Robeson. 52 As Roger Field has written, this Black Atlantic engagement with New Negro Era figures exposed Alex to “an inclusive notion of African identity that incorporated all racially oppressed South Africans and African Americans.” 53 The Liberator was also anti-fascist in orientation. Alex purportedly attempted to join the International Brigades, organized by the Comintern, to fight against

12

Introduction

Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). 54 Despite failing to achieve this ambition, anti-fascism and his belief that the USSR helped defeat it would continue to inform his politics, as seen in A Soviet Journey. In the meantime, he pursued his father’s political path by joining the Young Communist League in 1947, a year before the National Party and its apartheid platform came to power. It proved to be a decisive choice, mirroring the parallel enrollment of a new generation of activists in the ANC Youth League, including Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, and Oliver Tambo. The Red and the Black So, through my interest in Africa I came to visit and to study what was going on in the Soviet Union. —Paul Robeson, Here I Stand (1958) 55

Progress Publishers in Moscow—the famed imprint of works by Marx and Lenin during the Soviet Union’s lifetime—produced a book series beginning in the late 1970s entitled “Impressions of the USSR” of which A Soviet Journey was a part. 56 This English-language series had a number of titles from a range of foreign writers, perhaps the most well-known contributor today being Henri Alleg, the French-Algerian journalist whose earlier non-fiction book The Question (La Question, 1958) had highlighted the practice of torture by the French military during the Algerian Revolution (1954–1962). 57 Alleg had also been a member of the French and Algerian communist parties. Many contributors to the series, like La Guma, were communist party members in their respective countries. In this regard, these books in retrospect can largely be seen as agitprop aimed at the popular influence of Soviet dissidents, such as the novelist and critic Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the poet Joseph Brodsky, who had gained heroic stature in the West through their critiques of the Soviet system. A number of books in the series, including A Soviet Journey, share the same itinerary from the Soviet Union’s industrialized western cities to the eastern reaches of Soviet Central Asia and Siberia. 58 On the surface, this geographic expansiveness was inevitable: a book series on the USSR would naturally capture its entirety. However, such coverage betrayed an underlying agenda of political inclusion through authoritarian control as well as the occlusion of significant features, namely the presence of the Gulags, as the Soviet prison camps were known, in Siberia. 59 This book series fits into a deeper history. Foreign travelers to the Soviet Union who subsequently wrote about their experiences had existed since the Bolshevik Revolution—the American John Reed and his book Ten Days that Shook the World (1919) being a key example. But countless others followed in the decades thereafter, comprising a pattern that was not only trans-Atlantic, but also global in scope. Many were considered “fellow travelers” for their shared socialist politics and sympathetic

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views of the Soviet “experiment”—a notion referring to the Soviet Union’s cachet as the first socialist society. This perspective became a journalistic trope shortly after the October Revolution for those who visited to witness Soviet society firsthand. Among the most notable visitors to the USSR between its formal establishment in 1922 and just after the Second World War were the American novelist Theodore Dreiser (Dreiser Looks at Russia, 1928), the French writer André Gide (Retour de L’U.R.S.S., 1936), the German critic Walter Benjamin (the posthumously published Moscow Diary, 1986), the American critic Edmund Wilson (Travels in Two Democracies, 1936), the American photographer Margaret Bourke-White (Eyes on Russia, 1931), and the American novelist John Steinbeck (A Russian Journal, 1948, with photographs by Robert Capa). 60 Lesser-known figures and their accounts include the Anglican church minister Hewlett Johnson (The Socialist Sixth of the World, 1939), the British journalist Edward Crankshaw (Russia and the Russians, 1948), and the American journalist John L. Strohm (“Just Tell the Truth”: The Uncensored Story of How the Common People Live Behind the Russian Iron Curtain, 1947). 61 Historian Michael David-Fox has estimated that, overall, approximately 100,000 foreigners travelled to the USSR between the First and Second World Wars. 62 Yet, as A Soviet Journey indicates, this phenomenon continued throughout the Soviet Union’s existence. These foreign and predominantly Western perspectives encompassed at least three waves: the first during the decades immediately after the Revolution, the second after the start of the Cold War, and the third during the late socialist period, as with La Guma’s memoir. Despite this range over time, these accounts share a number of features beyond the genre of travel writing. Many works, such as those by Strohm and Steinbeck, indulged in exposé, though not entirely without consideration for what the Soviet system might offer. Others like Benjamin, Wilson, and Johnson held varying degrees of deeper intellectual interest and political affinity for the Soviet Union, if not being formal communist party members as such. Still others like Gide, Dreiser, and Arthur Koestler, whose novel Darkness at Noon (1940) fictionalized the Great Terror under Stalin, produced critiques of the Soviet system. 63 The Stalinist purges of the 1930s initiated a period of political disillusionment for many that ultimately fractured the political left in the West, especially during the 1950s following the 1953 death of Stalin and the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, which crushed a popular uprising there. David-Fox has consequently criticized the tours of the 1920s and 1930s as consisting of “the cream of the interwar cultural and intellectual elite, as well as thousands more rank-and-file experts, progressives, public figures, and many others classified by their Soviet hosts as members of the intelligentsia, [who] made a reverential pilgrimage to Soviet Russia and turned out to be grotesquely wrong.” 64

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Introduction

The relative absence of criticism prior to the Second World War can partly be attributed to the controlled nature of these visits. Soviet authorities—specifically, the All-Union Society for Cultural Ties Abroad founded in 1925—tightly monitored such tours. As visitors began arriving in the 1920s, Soviet officials provided strategic cultural presentations and shows (kul’tpokazy) to demonstrate the achievements of the Soviet system. Such displays drew skepticism, with tours of so-called “Potemkin villages” in rural areas viewed as not only orchestrated, but actively deceptive—a perspective that the Soviet government sought to work against. 65 But the equally strident political commitments of those who visited must be accounted for to explain the limited level of censure. These commitments were often pre-existing and deeply personal, requiring an individual change of heart through firsthand experience. A less addressed, though vitally important, cohort of travelers who held such beliefs were the African-American and Pan-African activist-intellectuals who also wrote about their experiences in the USSR. This group included esteemed figures like W. E. B. Du Bois, George Padmore, Langston Hughes, and Paul Robeson, but also lesser-known agricultural experts and other technicians. 66 The historian Allison Blakely has written that black travelers in Russia had existed since at least the nineteenth century, with Salim bin Abakari of Zanzibar being among the most well-known through his 1896 journey from Moscow, to Siberia, and back through Central Asia and the Caucasus. 67 La Guma drew the opening epigraph for A Soviet Journey from his published account. However, these earlier visitors witnessed a centuries-old empire, not a state born from political revolution. By the 1930s several hundred new black “pilgrims” had visited the USSR. 68 In this sense, the Soviet Union presents a more expansive geography for rethinking the paradigm of the Black Atlantic. 69 As argued in Paul Gilroy’s seminal text, the political economy of the Atlantic world not only generated an industrial modernity through the labor of Africans, enslaved and free, as foregrounded by Eric Williams, Walter Rodney, and Sidney Mintz. 70 It correspondingly produced an alternative cultural modernity poised against the limits of the Western Enlightenment, facilitated by the double-consciousness—to use Du Bois’s concept—of black communities across the Atlantic. However, black intellectuals traveled beyond the familiar locales of Harlem, Paris, London, and Fort-deFrance. 71 Moscow served as a provisional metropole within this broader political geography, highlighting how the Black Atlantic consisted not solely of a diasporic community of sentiment, but also comprised a space of political intention. Informed by a radical double-consciousness that incorporated both race and class, both black identity and revolutionary Marxism, activist-intellectuals like Du Bois, Padmore, and Jimmy and Alex La Guma saw the Soviet Union in utopian terms as a society without racial discrimination—a political project that had resolved questions of

Introduction

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national self-determination and class oppression and, in doing so, had dissolved the color line. The Soviet system offered potential solutions to Atlantic world problems. Still, experiences ranged widely. A disjuncture surfaced at times between political idealism and the realities confronted. Similar to Claude McKay, George Padmore lived in the USSR for a brief period beginning in late December 1929, when he helped lead the Negro Bureau of the Red International of Labour Unions. 72 In 1930 he played a key role in organizing the First International Conference of Negro Workers in Hamburg, Germany, which launched the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW), bringing workers from Africa and the African Diaspora together for the first time. 73 Padmore went on to edit ITUCNW’s journal The Negro Worker. Yet, also like McKay, whose eventual disenchantment is detailed in his memoir A Long Way from Home (1937), Padmore broke from the Comintern, if not communism as such, by 1933, being disappointed with its retreat from anticolonialism. 74 PanAfricanism provided another option, as later captured in his classic work Pan-Africanism or Communism? (1956). 75 Nevertheless, his 1946 book cowritten with Dorothy Pizer, How Russia Transformed Her Colonial Empire, explained the promise the USSR held for global decolonization. W. E. B. Du Bois similarly looked to the Soviet Union for political solutions, making four visits in 1926, 1936, 1949, and 1958, when he delivered an address at the first Afro-Asian Writers Conference in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. His experiences thus spanned an extended period that encompassed the Stalinist purges as well as the birth of the new left in the 1950s. He wrote a book manuscript entitled Russia and America: An Interpretation, completed in 1950 but rejected by his publisher for being too uncritical of the USSR and too dismissive of the US. 76 Du Bois’s persistent interest in the Soviet Union dovetailed with its concern for black liberation struggles. 77 Robeson similarly made four trips in 1934, 1949, 1958, and 1961, yet suffered greater public vilification due to his celebrity status, being referred to as a “black Stalin.” 78 Regardless, Robeson’s visits fell into a well-established pattern, motivated by a recurrent interest in the Soviet experiment. While the notion of “experiment” referred in an immediate sense to the Soviet Union’s cachet as the world’s first socialist society, it also emerged from and reinforced an enduring notion of fundamental difference between Western Europe and Russia. Many perceived the Soviet Union with its vast territory that stretched across Asia as separate from Europe, despite the importance of cities like Moscow and Leningrad (St. Petersburg), which looked to the West. This distinction had meaning for activist-intellectuals like Du Bois and Alex La Guma who searched for political and cultural paradigms beyond Europe. But it also generated an inferiority complex among Russians. Imperial Russia had been considered politically and culturally subordinate to Western Europe during the preceding centuries. Poised between an ostensibly “enlightened” Europe

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Introduction

and a “backward” Asia, Fyodor Dostoevsky captured this predicament when he famously remarked, “In Europe we were hangers-on and slaves, while in Asia we shall be the masters.” 79 Though Dostoevsky held a politically conservative outlook at the time, his views share an affinity with those held by Marx and Friedrich Engels and later Lenin and Stalin, demonstrating a Eurocentric worldview that transcended political differences. Marx and Engels referred to Russia as “semi-Asiatic” and thus partly captive to their notion of an “Asiatic mode of production” as applied to India and China to explain what they saw as political and economic stagnation. 80 Informed by both Marxism and Russian Orientalism, Lenin and Stalin similarly characterized Russian society as constrained by a “semi-Asiatic backwardness” rooted in a landed nobility and tsarist rule—a form of “Oriental despotism.” 81 Such legacies needed to be overcome. This backdrop of long-standing cultural bias and perceived regression sharpened the revolutionary stakes involved. Not only did the Soviet Union materialize as a paradigm for a socialist future, but, more specifically, it presented a case study for examining how Russia’s conflicted double-consciousness could be transcended through socialism—a matter of importance to La Guma in relation to the national question in South Africa. 82 Central Asia appeared in particular as a site for the Soviet experiment to be tested. Russian imperialism in this region—what the British statesman Lord Curzon once dismissively referred to as “a conquest of orientals by orientals”—had had a complicated impact, particularly on Muslim communities, which consisted of both cultural accommodation and local resistance. 83 This complexity remained during the Soviet period, reflecting both the political and economic optimism of Marxism-Leninism as pursued by the Soviet government as well as the persistence of Russian chauvinism toward Islam and Asian cultures more generally. As the Soviet historian Douglas Northrop has written, “Before 1917 Central Asia . . . helped make tsarist Russia European; after 1917, too, it continued to do so for Soviet Russia, even as it also helped define Bolshevism for the colonial world.” 84 For many foreign visitors whose worldviews were untainted by Russian Orientalism, Soviet Central Asia provided a shining model of national self-determination and socialist economic development, as addressed by Langston Hughes in the Soviet-published A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia (1934) and his later memoir I Wonder as I Wander (1956). Though cultural differences and a discourse of “development” did shape his impressions, genuine emotions surfaced as well. In I Wonder as I Wander, Hughes expresses a direct feeling of affinity between street life in Tashkent—the capital of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic (present-day Uzbekistan)—and the American South, with admiration for how the Soviet Union had resolved the problem of racism. “In Tashkent, whenever I got on a street car and saw the old partitions, I could not help but remember Atlanta, Birmingham and Houston in my own country

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where, when I got on a tram or a bus or a train, I had to sit in the COLORED section,” Hughes writes. “The natives of Tashkent, about my own shade of brown, once had to sit in a COLORED section, too. But not any more.” 85 Soviet Central Asia is a principal feature of A Soviet Journey. What is important to grasp in this section is that these individual experiences by Hughes, Du Bois, and Robeson formed a pattern that later figures like Angela Davis and La Guma continued, underscoring a Black Atlantic dimension to a broader transnational history of political travel. There emerged the mutual co-existence of alternative Atlanticisms—both Red and Black Atlantics—positioned against racism and imperialism and subsequently in support of civil rights and anticolonial liberation movements that confronted them. 86 These political topographies extended well south, as indicated earlier, reaching from Moscow, to the Black Belt Nation of the American South, to the Native Republic of South Africa. As such, these overlapping Atlantic worlds should not be construed literally—in the sense of being confined to the coastal littorals of the Atlantic— nor in terms of political orthodoxy. The Red and Black Atlantics comprised political projects whose communal members often favored intellectual innovation over blind convention, pragmatic strategy over purified doctrine. In his memoir A Long Way from Home, Claude McKay titled the section on his travels in the Soviet Union, “The Magic Pilgrimage,” writing that he went without invitation or membership in the communist party. “Millions of ordinary human beings and thousands of writers were stirred by the Russian thunder rolling round the world,” McKay explains. “And as a social-minded being and a poet, I too was moved.” 87 But such experiences had intellectual repercussions. In his recent study of Du Bois, Bill Mullen has described how a diasporic imagination provided “a necessary condition” that enabled Du Bois to transcend “a capitalist hegemony in the United States that sought to incarcerate his mind.” 88 His engagement with Marxism as demonstrated in Black Reconstruction (1935), published after his first visit to the USSR, further resituated black history during the American Civil War period within a Marxist framework, provocatively redefining emancipation as a “general strike” and stressing the post-war formation of black and white proletariats. As addressed by Nikhil Pal Singh, Du Bois came to view the race and labor questions as entangled, with the “real modern labor problem” being that “dark and vast sea of human labor in China and India, the South Seas and all Africa; in the West Indies and Central America and in the United States.” 89 Through travel and critical reflection, the intersectional nature of race and class politics in the Atlantic world could not be overlooked— a point that would not be lost on La Guma.

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The Nation-State-Colony The combination of racialism, capitalism and international imperialism has made South Africa a colony of a special type. —Alex La Guma, Apartheid: A Collection of Writings on South African Racism by South Africans (1971) 90

The preceding two sections have framed A Soviet Journey within the context of the La Guma family’s history and within the broader spatial setting of the Atlantic world. This section returns once more to South Africa and the immediate backdrop that shaped Alex La Guma’s political thought and writing. The 1950s established a crucial generation of activists of which La Guma was a member. Despite being a conspicuous setback in the short term, the election of the National Party and its platform of apartheid in 1948 galvanized a range of grassroots political organizations after a period of malaise during the 1930s and the Second World War. Alex joined the CPSA the same year, when he was twentythree, though the Suppression of Communism Act (1950) dissolved the organization, which itself had dwindled due to unsuccessful strategy, infighting, and competition with other parties. It retained only about 2,000 members by 1950. 91 Nevertheless, the party was reconstituted underground as the South African Communist Party (SACP) in 1953. Moses Kotane, who had been elected the general secretary of the CPSA in 1939 and whom Brian Bunting called “the most influential figure in the working class movement and the Communist Party” during the midtwentieth century, was among those who formed the SACP. Kotane had studied at the International Lenin School in Moscow—a training center founded by the Comintern—in 1931 and 1932, where he met George Padmore. 92 Kotane would die decades later in a Moscow hospital while in exile, after having spent the better part of the 1970s in the USSR receiving medical treatment. But in the interim Kotane and many others, La Guma included, had globalized the anti-apartheid struggle, restoring the radical internationalism started in the 1920s. The world in which Alex La Guma came of political age therefore involved a continuation of past efforts, albeit in a new context shaped by the oppressiveness of the apartheid regime as well as the possibilities that surfaced as decolonization spread across Africa and Asia during the Cold War. La Guma played an active role in defining and pursuing these options. In the short term, the dissolution of the CPSA in 1950 and its underground reincarnation shortly thereafter led La Guma to join the South African Coloured People’s Organization (SACPO) in 1954, which in turn marked his entrance into the orbit of the ANC and the Congress Alliance—a multiracial coalition of parties formed after the 1952 Defiance Campaign that included the South African Indian Congress (SAIC), the South African Congress of Democrats, and the South African Congress of Trade Unions, in addition to SACPO and the ANC. For many communist

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activists, the ANC offered vital political cover from state surveillance, organizational support, and an intellectual community. While distinctions between the SACP and the ANC never entirely dissolved, the boundaries between both organizations were notoriously blurred, with members rotating between both as a matter of practice. During the 1950s especially, the SACP largely comprised an internal faction within the ANC. The first issue of the journal The African Communist in October 1959 marked a critical step toward the SACP’s public re-emergence. Yet attempts by scholars to purify both parties into discrete entities—and thus protect figures like Nelson Mandela from the label “communist”—have often been misguided, overlooking the strategic expediencies and shared spirit of the time. 93 The ANC-SACP alliance is best understood not as a standing partnership of equals, but instead as an evolving relationship— with the SACP maintaining a more covert policy presence while the ANC provided a public face for purposes of diplomacy. More importantly, this collaborative approach and shared membership conformed to the twostep political strategy that initially took shape with the Native Republic thesis, whereby a nationalist struggle—in this instance embodied by the ANC—would precede and enable a socialist revolution led by the SACP. For La Guma and others who originated from a communist background, their participation in the ANC assisted this ultimate logic and long-term political plan. La Guma did not occupy a central leadership role in either the SACP or ANC during the 1950s. However, his involvement with SACPO proved crucial in terms of mobilizing Coloured activism in support of the ANC and the Congress Alliance. SACPO, which had been founded in 1953, came in the wake of a number of Coloured political parties, including the African Political (later People’s) Organization (APO), founded in 1902, and the more recent Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM), established in 1943, which included the Anti-Coloured Affairs Department (Anti-CAD) effort as part of its “non-racial” coalition. Each defined the spectrum of Coloured politics—the APO being liberal and reform minded while the NEUM embraced a radical Trotskyist outlook. 94 Both presented ideological obstacles to La Guma’s own politics as a result. Still, the success of the Defiance Campaign positioned the ANC as the dominant anti-apartheid organization. With the 1950 Group Areas Act, the 1950 Population Registration Act, and the 1951 Separate Representation of Voters Act, the Coloured community faced increasing legal discrimination in a manner that had not existed before. La Guma’s activism advanced with his role as vice-chairman of SACPO when it co-sponsored the Congress of the People held in Kliptown outside of Johannesburg in June 1955 along with the other members of the Congress Alliance. La Guma was arrested on his way to the conference and thus was unable to attend at the last minute. Nevertheless, this event marked the apex of the Congress Alliance and its vision for a future South Africa as laid out in

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the Freedom Charter, which was promulgated at the meeting. Yet the promise of this occasion was cut short. The apartheid government responded to this emergent multiracial political coalition in December 1956, by arresting La Guma along with 155 other activists as part of the infamous Treason Trial that lasted until 1961. Others accused of seeking to overthrow the state included Mandela, Sisulu, Tambo, Kotane, Ahmed Kathrada of the SAIC, Joe Slovo of the SACP, and Ruth First, also of the SACP. Despite the loss of momentum, the trial tightened this inter-organizational solidarity. The Congress of the People and the Freedom Charter constituted an attempt to address the so-called national question that confronted many political organizations—how to reconcile the diverse demography of South Africa into a common identity. Engaging with this question did not pose a theoretical contradiction for those who embraced international socialism and its concerns for class. 95 For the CPSA and SACP, a defining text had been Stalin’s Marxism and the National Question (1913), which argued that nations were historically constructed communities bound by language, territory, economy, and culture and were specific to the capitalist epoch. 96 Though Stalin stressed that nations were not racial or “tribal” in the sense of being natural or hereditary, South Africa’s racial and ethnic communities were construed by both the apartheid state and many activists as nations or “national groups” to use the wording of the Freedom Charter—a conceptual resemblance that generated heated debate. 97 For the left, socialism provided a means of overcoming historically constructed national differences and thus the legal divisions and terminology imposed by the apartheid government. The SACP and ANC in particular had reached agreement on ideological grounds by 1955 through the idea of “colonialism of a special type”—an expression that intended to capture the specificity of the South African condition. 98 Juridically speaking, South Africa was a self-governing dominion in the British Empire as of union in 1910, a legal status similar to that held by Australia and Canada. It was not a “colony” per se, despite the discriminatory treatment of non-white South Africans that approximated colonial measures found elsewhere on the continent. 99 Hence, the formulation of “colonialism of a special type” effectively revived the Native Republic thesis and its strategy of anticolonial nationalist struggle by defining South Africa as a situation of internal colonization that subjected a non-white majority to land dispossession, labor exploitation, and political disenfranchisement. As detailed by Field, this perspective had evolved over time with Jimmy La Guma writing about South Africa as a case of “imperialism within an imperialism” during the 1930s, well before the SACP’s official statement of this new program in “The Road to South African Freedom” (1962). 100 The colonial question therefore had two answers, whereas the national question awaited resolution.

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The specter of the Native Republic thesis subsequently cast an intellectual shadow over the ANC-SACP alliance, with “colonialism of a special type” informing later theoretical interventions by activists such as Harold Wolpe and Bernard Magubane. 101 It also inspired the writing of Alex, whose fiction and non-fiction embraced its outlook and went further to examine the fissures, dilemmas, and potential solutions for the national question—especially in his later novels In the Fog of the Seasons’ End (1972) and Time of the Butcherbird (1979), which appeared the same decade as A Soviet Journey. All three should be understood in dialogue with one another. Each interrogated South Africa’s status as a “nationstate-colony”—a concept I present here to capture South Africa’s hybrid political status. 102 In this regard, La Guma’s political career intersected, chronologically and intellectually, with the start of his writing career. By September 1955 he became SACPO’s national chairman and later general secretary in October 1956. During the same period, he published his first short stories: “A Christmas Story” in the journal Fighting Talk (December 1956) and “Etude” in the newspaper New Age (January 1957), which reached an SACP readership. 103 It is important to stress that La Guma’s early writing consisted primarily of journalism—an essential backdrop for approaching A Soviet Journey. Similar to the case of Drum magazine in Johannesburg, which launched writers like Lewis Nkosi, Es’kia Mphahlele, and Bessie Head, Fighting Talk and New Age, where La Guma had a column entitled “Up My Alley,” provided the crucible for his development as a writer, given that he never attended university, with his tasks as a journalist and critic contributing to the unadorned social realism of his fiction. This professional beginning also partly explains his enduring admiration for writers such as Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Maxim Gorky, who had similar backgrounds in journalism. 104 La Guma’s personal life took a significant turn during this period. In November 1954 Alex married Blanche Herman, born in 1927 and originally from Athlone, a neighborhood of Cape Town located in the Cape Flats—an area where many Coloured families were resettled due to racial chauvinism and later, during the apartheid period, by force. Blanche and Alex met in secondary school—Trafalgar High in District Six—though Blanche would go on to work in a cigarette factory and become a midwife before marrying Alex. She also joined the CPSA before it was banned. “When I joined the Communist Party I began to see that the morality I had been taught by my parents was communist morality. You don’t just grab in life; you also give,” Blanche has written in her own memoir. “When volunteers were called to do a task in the community, we in the Communist Party had to be among the first to raise our hands. That’s one of the points that stuck with me a long time. Give things; give your time; give freely of yourself: that’s the most important thing I learned as a communist.” 105 Blanche and Alex shared a set of political convictions that defined their marriage in the decades ahead—a relationship tightened

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further with the birth of their sons Eugene in February 1956 and Bartholomew (Barto) in April 1959. The marriage of Alex and Blanche formed a vital political and family bond, which would provide a source of strength throughout a difficult period in South Africa and in exile. The Treason Trial had a decisive impact on the energy of the Congress Alliance during the late 1950s, at once slowing down the momentum that had been established during the early 1950s and, as a consequence, escalating the frustration of activists preoccupied by court proceedings and confronted by an intransigent apartheid state. La Guma immersed himself in his creative work, a budding family life, and the politics of SACPO and its successor, the Coloured People’s Congress (CPC), despite the instability that the trial brought to his life as “Accused No. 85.” 106 In May 1958 he survived an assassination attempt at his home. In early 1960 he was acquitted of charges from the Treason Trial, though this sense of freedom proved short-lived. La Guma was detained without trial at the Roeland Street and Worcester Prisons for approximately five months, following the Langa March in Cape Town and, more infamously, the Sharpeville Massacre, both of which occurred in March and resulted in a state of emergency declared by the apartheid government. The ANC was banned. 107 Yet these difficult circumstances informed and motivated his writing. In addition to journalism and short fiction, he created a comic strip, “Little Libby—The Adventures of Liberation Chabalala,” which appeared in New Age from March to November 1959 and depicted the politics of the Congress Alliance in a more experimental, subversive form that satirized the apartheid regime. 108 More significantly, he started and completed A Walk in the Night in 1959 and 1960. Mbari Press in Nigeria, which launched the careers of Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo, Kofi Awoonor, and fellow South African Dennis Brutus, published it in 1962, establishing La Guma’s credentials as an African writer, not only a South African one. His book caused a stir at the first African Writers Conference—officially, the Conference of African Writers of English Expression—held at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, in June 1962, as noted in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s foreword to this book. 109 However, these positive developments were matched by continuing setbacks. La Guma was placed under house arrest for a period of five years in December 1962. Despite this severe measure, police raided his home in October 1963 and detained Blanche and him for possessing illegal political material. Both Alex and Blanche were held in solitary confinement. 110 In February 1964 Blanche received a banning order that limited her movement, impacting her ability to work and sustain their family financially. Alex managed to finish And a Threefold Cord (1964), published by Seven Seas Press in East Berlin, in addition to completing the manuscript for his prison novel, The Stone Country, and a draft biography of his father, who had died in July 1961. But the mounting pressure proved to be too much, with La Guma experiencing a nervous breakdown during

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this time. After a final period of detention in 1966, Blanche and Alex reached the fateful decision to leave for exile in London, where he could help lead the CPC’s efforts there. 111 At this point, the Rivonia Trial (1963–1964) had sentenced Mandela, Sisulu, Kathrada, Govan Mbeki, Raymond Mhlaba, Andrew Mlangeni, Denis Goldberg, and Elias Motsoaledi to life imprisonment. Those who could were leaving. The apartheid government also condemned District Six, Alex’s adored childhood home, as a whites-only area in 1966 under the Group Areas Act—a designation that would result in its wholesale destruction. “In the weeks before we left, I’d look at Table Mountain and cry bitterly, wondering when I would see it again,” Blanche has recalled. “Alex tried to comfort me by saying, ‘Never mind. We’ll work our way back. We’ll return home one day, and you will see Table Mountain again.’ Neither of us could have imagined that it would be almost thirty years before I returned, and that Alex would not return at all.” 112 Fugitive Cosmopolitanism, Late Socialism, and the Question of Socialist Realism When we talk of literature in its true sense, we cannot exclude the contributions of Gorky. . . . One of the greatest values of literature is that by deepening our consciousness, widening our feeling for life, it reminds us that all ideas and all actions derive from realism and experience within social realities. —Alex La Guma, “Literature and Life” (1970)

When the La Guma family left South Africa for exile on September 21, 1966, they entered a broader world of activist politics that further shaped Alex’s political outlook and writing. 113 Grant Farred has said that La Guma, Richard Rive, and James Matthews represent “the first generation of urban, coloured [sic] Western Cape writing” and that they came of age during a period dense with political tensions. 114 Coloured politics had become increasingly radical by identifying with the black majority. This solidarity surfaced in their work. Yet La Guma’s body of fiction and nonfiction during the middle decades of the apartheid era remains distinctive for the internationalism it displays. His concerns for global liberation struggles, decolonization, and postcolonial uncertainty can be witnessed in essays such as “Paul Robeson and Africa” (1971), “Vietnam: A People’s Victory” (1973), and “Cuba and Africa” (1984), as well as short stories like “Come Back to Tashkent” (1970) and “Thang’s Bicycle” (1976). 115 The Soviet Union formed a significant backdrop to these interests. As Henri Alleg wrote in his own travel account, Red Star and Green Crescent (1985), to explain the USSR as a figurative postcolonial role model, “In the turmoil of liberty newly regained, the time came for the new nations to look to the future: what road would they choose to overcome underdevelopment and do away with the flaws inherited from the past as quickly as

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Introduction

possible?” 116 Closer to the dilemma confronted by South African activists, George Padmore and Dorothy Pizer argued in How Russia Transformed Her Colonial Empire that consideration should be taken as to “how the U.S.S.R. solved the National and Colonial problems” created under tsarist rule. 117 “However much we may criticise the Soviet Union’s sins of commission and omission, its policy towards the former colonial peoples of the far-flung Czarist Empire indicates conclusively that only under a planned economy based on Socialist principles is it possible to abolish, root and branch, national and racial oppression and exploitation,” they urge. “The Soviet Union is no utopia; it is a new civilisation in the making. . . . The U.S.S.R. is a political federation of multi-national Republics in which all peoples, irrespective of their degree of civilisation and social development, enjoy equal political, economic and social status.” 118 This penultimate section addresses how exile provides a concluding framework for approaching A Soviet Journey. The kind of fugitive cosmopolitanism that La Guma experienced introduced new factors of instability and ambiguous legal status for a time. 119 However, it also enabled his creative talents and political beliefs to flourish. A Soviet Journey must be read in light of this nineteen-year period of deeper self-reflection and political motivation—one defined by constant uncertainty, yet unburdened by surveillance and the threat of arrest he faced in South Africa. The book can be considered a summation of his personal and professional histories. As La Guma himself notes in the prologue, his impressions of the USSR developed at an early age, informed by his father’s travels there and political material made available through the CPSA and other local organizations. His text consequently shares thematic continuities with this formative period of South African activism and its engagement with the Soviet Union and Marxism-Leninism during the interwar period. But A Soviet Journey also displays the politics of the Congress Alliance during the 1950s—the importance of the national question in particular—as well as broader themes of decolonization, postcolonial development, and Afro-Asian connections, which emerged from his involvement with the Afro-Asian Writers Association. 120 Similarly to Padmore, Pizer, and Alleg, La Guma argues in A Soviet Journey that socialism in the USSR demonstrated a solution to the national question in South Africa along with providing a paradigm for postcolonial development. A Soviet Journey thus served as a tribute to the Soviet political model in addition to recognizing the Soviet government’s support for the anti-apartheid struggle during the uncertain decades of the 1960s and 1970s. The ANC and the SACP had begun the crucial task of internationalizing the anti-apartheid struggle during the 1950s, following the earlier diplomatic examples of Jimmy La Guma and Moses Kotane. In 1953 Walter Sisulu, then the ANC secretary-general, and Duma Nokwe, president of the ANC Youth League, travelled to the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), taking the Trans-Siberian Railway from Mos-

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cow to Beijing. 121 In 1955 Kotane and Maulvi Cachalia, a leader of the SAIC, attended the Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, as unofficial delegates. They made diplomatic visits to Cairo, Delhi, and Singapore on their way to Bandung, where they received the support of Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser and Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. 122 This emergent pattern of diplomacy not only proved formative in the nascent globalization of the anti-apartheid struggle prior to Sharpeville, Rivonia, and the forced exile of many during the 1960s. It also underscores the continued importance of individuals in the creation of these transcontinental histories and the mutual habitation of different organizations as part of this politics. Diplomatic history is not solely comprised by states. In the case of liberation struggles, it depended on the commitment of individuals. Oliver Tambo was among the first leaders to leave South Africa for exile, departing in March 1960 to set up an ANC office in London. There he connected with Vella Pillay, a founder of Britain’s Anti-Apartheid Movement in April 1960 and an important intermediary between the SACP and the Soviet government. 123 Pillay and Yusuf Dadoo—a leader of the SACP, who, like Tambo, was also sent to London—led an official delegation to Moscow in July 1960, the first since the SACP’s formation and a foundational moment for relations in the years ahead. 124 They returned to Moscow once more in November, and by the end of the year, the Soviet government agreed to provide the SACP with aid. The SACP also approached the PRC in November with Dadoo and Pillay meeting with Mao Zedong, who responded positively. 125 These initial diplomatic efforts were crucial in establishing MK, resulting in recruits being sent to China, the Soviet Union, and eventually different African countries for military training. MK launched its first operation—a sabotage campaign—on December 16, 1961. 126 Though arriving in London several years later, La Guma played a role in this budding politics of exile. He initially found work as a clerk at an insurance company through a South African colleague, but soon quit to pursue writing and politics full time with the encouragement of Blanche, who continued as a nurse and supported the family financially. 127 Eugene and Barto attended school as well as monthly political classes taught by Pallo Jordan for children of ANC and SACP members. 128 Alex meanwhile found an opportunity to write for radio through the Transcription Centre, an organization that employed a number of African writers. 129 He moved on to diplomacy, both political and cultural, and, as Blanche recalls, began to travel frequently (figures 0.1 and 0.2). 130 “He was away all the time,” she has written. “But I did my part, too: I stayed home and worked.” 131 Alex attended the third Afro-Asian Writers Conference held in Beirut in 1967 along with fellow South Africans Lewis Nkosi, Ruth First, and Mazisi Kunene—an event that began his involvement with the Afro-Asian Writers Association and its magazine, Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings, in which he published and served on its editorial

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Figure 0.1. Detail of Alex La Guma’s personal map with attention to Africa, Asia, and the Soviet Union. Permission granted from Blanche La Guma.

board. 132 He received the association’s Lotus Prize in 1970 at a ceremony in New Delhi hosted by Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and later became acting secretary-general and then secretary-general for the organization in 1979. 133 Alex also began visiting the Soviet Union, his first trip while en route to Beirut in March 1967. 134 This initial visit was followed by a second one in May for the Fourth Congress of Soviet Writers and a third in November to attend celebrations for the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution—a moment he recalls in chapter 1 (“Flashbacks”) of A Soviet Journey. This liberation struggle diplomacy—a kind that can be found in the biographies of other intellectual figures, such as Frantz Fanon’s during the Algerian Revolution—intersected with a deeper politics of friendship ensconced in the Soviet policy sphere since the 1920s. The Comintern had dissolved during the Second World War in 1943, and the short-lived Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) lasted less than a decade from 1947 to 1956. However, Soviet policy toward Africa revived after the 1953 death of Stalin with active support for liberation struggles and newly independent countries alike—from Algeria’s anti-colonial Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) to Patrice Lumumba’s Congo, before his assassination in 1961. 135 Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor,

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Figure 0.2. Detail of Alex La Guma’s personal map with attention to Havana, London, Moscow, and the Atlantic world. Permission granted from Blanche La Guma.

greeted the rising Third World with enthusiasm. The 1956 Suez Crisis in particular marked a turning point that accelerated diplomacy with AfroAsian countries. 136 La Guma’s exile writing seized upon this evolving diplomatic atmosphere by becoming more politically explicit. Against the backdrop of forced removals in District Six and just prior to MK’s illfated Wankie campaign, he urged Coloured support for armed struggle in a series of articles for Sechaba entitled “The Time Has Come” (1967). 137 “The people can no longer stand subservient to tyranny and rule by force and violence,” La Guma wrote. “Violence can only be fought with violence. There is no alternative in South Africa today.” 138 He further combined his creative work and politics in later essays such as “The Condition of Culture in South Africa” (1971), published in Présence africaine, and “Culture and Liberation” (1976), published in Sechaba and directly drawing from Amilcar Cabral. 139 In 1967, the same year he traveled to Beirut and the USSR, La Guma also attended the African-Scandinavian Writers’ Conference in Stockholm, as cited by Ngũgĩ in the foreword, where La Guma famously remarked, “I, as a South African writer, am prepared to run guns and to hold up radio stations, because in South

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Africa that is what we are faced with, whether we are writers or whether we are common laborers.” 140 This confluence between his fiction and politics existed from the start as discussed earlier. In appraising La Guma’s novels, Kathleen Balutansky has referred to them as representing an “esthetics of conflict.” 141 Literary critic Nahem Yousaf has positioned La Guma’s fiction more specifically as works of political resistance that track the ANC’s evolution from non-violence to armed struggle. 142 Abdul JanMohamed has further situated La Guma’s work within a deeper set of concerns regarding the human condition. “The predicament of nonwhite South Africans manifests itself in La Guma’s fiction primarily and most forcefully in the dialectic [sic] opposition between his assumption that each individual has the right to live a decent life and his depiction of the actual deprivation of that right,” JanMohamed contends. “The first term of the dialectic is usually tacit, whereas the elaboration of the second term constitutes the bulk of La Guma’s fiction.” 143 This argument holds particularly true for his first two books. 144 One could summarize A Walk in the Night about District Six and And a Threefold Cord about shack dwellers on the Cape Flats as accounts of the proletariat and lumpenproletariat, respectively. They portray the day-to-day effects of racism and apartheid and the political awakening that resulted, rather than organized party activism as such. Indeed, JanMohamed has suggested that these conditions of marginality emerge not only through La Guma’s preoccupation with “the political, social, personal, and emotional marginality of the disfranchised [sic] South Africans,” but also in terms of style and substance. In his words, La Guma’s prose is “simple and succinct, and his novels are short and terse—they lack the digressions and embellishments born of luxury and plenitude.” 145 These qualities of his early work—the two aforementioned books plus The Stone Country—contrast with his later two novels and A Soviet Journey completed while in exile. La Guma also edited a collection of essays and poems by South African writers entitled Apartheid, which sought to explain the South African situation to an international audience. This second set of books published during the 1970s offers more robust narratives and experimental treatments of political questions. His last two novels, In the Fog of the Seasons’ End and Time of the Butcherbird, examine in particular the ethics of violence and the role of armed struggle, thus reflecting the strategy of the ANC and the SACP in relation to the colonial question. 146 As Yousaf has written, in reading these works one is reminded of Fanon’s statement that “decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.” 147 A Soviet Journey undertakes a different approach. Though observing and meditating on the Soviet present circa the mid1970s, La Guma is concerned in this text with South Africa’s future—the national question. Not only did the USSR provide a political system apart from a number of Western liberal democracies that had legacies of impe-

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rial rule and supported the apartheid regime, but it also embodied a competing paradigm of political organization, economic growth, and social purpose that successfully integrated a range of national groups. A multinational federation, it symbolized an alternative Second World modernity that fulfilled the utopian ideas of the ANC-SACP alliance. 148 It manifested the strategy of national self-determination followed by socialist revolution. If La Guma’s novels contain, to cite JanMohamed, a “minimal amount of ‘fictional’ elaboration” resulting in “lean and sparse” depictions that “constantly speak of lack and fortitude,” A Soviet Journey exhibits in contrast a robust vision of the future—a dreamworld— through travel vignettes of historical and cultural depth as well as celebratory portrayals of Soviet development written in a frequently exuberant tone. 149 The six-week trip that formed the basis for A Soviet Journey took place in 1975—coincidentally the same year Eugene La Guma moved to the USSR to study Russian in order to attend Patrice Lumumba University. 150 The Writers’ Union of the USSR (Soiuz sovetskikh pisatelei) invited Alex to write a book, and he drew upon preceding experiences, as described in chapter 1 (“Flashbacks”), in addition to the 1975 visit. Though Alex had achieved a level of fame in the USSR through translations of his books—Blanche called him a “rouble millionaire”—he did not speak Russian and was escorted throughout his trip (figure 0.3). 151 It is essential, then, to appreciate the nature of the union in order to grasp La Guma’s journey and subsequent account: the union controlled La Guma’s text from conception to completion. Established during the First Congress of Soviet Writers in August 1934, the union became powerful over time, ranking among the most prestigious learned societies in the USSR. 152 Its invitation was an honor for La Guma. With 6,608 members according to a 1967 estimate, privileges included popular respect, material benefits, and often deference from Soviet authorities. 153 However, these rewards were firmly tied to the agenda of the Communist Party. For a long time the union remained associated with the ideological concerns of Stalinism, even after the Stalinist period itself. 154 Though highly centralized, the union nonetheless maintained branches in all fifteen republics and many urban areas. Through this reach it had a profound influence over literary culture—organizing writers, but also controlling editing, publishing, and the dissemination of literature. By the late 1960s, the union wielded authority over libraries, publishers, and schools, as well as fourteen newspapers, seventy-three literary journals, and a number of annual anthologies. 155 The union had a close relationship with Goskomizdat (the State Committee for Publishing) though the chances of a work being censored by Glavlit (the central censorship agency) were small. Seditious work would have been halted earlier. Party “guidance” instead became the mechanism for control. “Whereas traditional censorship focuses on the end product of writing—the manuscript—guidance targets the author,”

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John and Carol Garrard have observed. “It aims at influencing the creative process from the moment of inspiration.” 156 Though more research is needed, these institutional parameters undoubtedly shaped the composition, editing, and publication of A Soviet Journey. It is also important to grasp the evolution of Soviet literary culture within this official setting and the interplay of ideology and aesthetic style between La Guma and his Soviet counterparts. Though La Guma had his own political and literary agenda, elements of Soviet doctrine can be found throughout A Soviet Journey. Soviet literature intended to serve the interests of the Soviet government. It concurrently focused on promoting a future world of global communism. 157 As affirmed in the statutes of the Writers’ Union adopted in 1971, just prior to his tour, “Soviet multi-national literature, the literature of a new historical epoch, is struggling for the high ideals of socialism and communism, for the creation on earth of a truly just society, one whose banner will be peace, work, freedom, equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of all nations.” 158 Such principles had informed the union early on. Lasting for two weeks, the first congress in 1934 witnessed more than two hundred speeches with six hundred delegates from around the USSR and the world. 159 Beyond Maxim Gorky, who chaired the meeting, well-known authors present included Boris Pasternak, Isaac Babel, and André Malraux. 160 The atmosphere was “euphoric,” with Gorky declaring the union as representative of the “collective strength” of Soviet writers. 161 The Great Terror followed only a few years later, however, resulting in the suppression, imprisonment, and death of a number who attended. 162 The Second Congress of Soviet Writers held in 1954 signaled continuity and change— Gorky had died in 1936, in addition to Stalin in 1953. It marked an increasing internationalization with writers from China, North Korea, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and other Soviet aligned countries present. There were also progressive writers from France, Great Britain, India, and elsewhere. Socialist realism as a literary technique for capturing Soviet political ideals against the threat of bourgeois and imperialist values was reinstated as the primary aesthetic principle. 163 A third congress held in May 1959 and a fourth in May 1967 maintained this trajectory by reaching out to foreign writers once more, with those in attendance in 1967 including Pablo Neruda and La Guma. 164 Yet, beyond benefitting from this internationalization, La Guma’s work gestures toward a deeper literary affinity with socialist realism and Maxim Gorky, one of its exemplars, as closely examined by Jabulani Mkhize. 165 Indeed, A Soviet Journey and essays such as “Literature and Life” (1970) and “What I Learned from Maxim Gorky” (1977) raise fundamental questions as to how socialist realism affected African writers and artists like Ousmane Sembène, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and fellow South African writers Mongane Wally Serote and Mandla Langa, all of whom spent time in the USSR. 166 Socialist realism provided a radical alternative

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Figure 0.3. Alex La Guma dancing at a reception in Moscow. Permission granted from Blanche La Guma.

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from European literary traditions introduced by colonialism. 167 La Guma himself echoed Gorky’s 1934 speech, which affirmed socialist realism, with his own public remarks at the 1967 congress by expressing enthusiasm for this aesthetic and writers such as Mikhail Sholokhov, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1965. 168 Yet socialist realism has been much debated with tensions drawn between state criteria versus artistic practice. The Soviet dissident Abram Tertz wrote, in an early critical appraisal, that the most precise definition stemmed from the 1934 congress, which demanded “the truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development” with artistic work responsible for “the task of ideological transformation and education of workers in the spirit of socialism.” 169 Soviet authorities beginning with Stalin, who coined the expression, further promoted ideological commitment (ideinost), “party-mindedness” (partiinost), and national spirit (narodnost) as guidelines. 170 Against this backdrop, Katerina Clark has since argued that socialist realist novels, despite the principle of truthfully reporting concrete realities, nonetheless possess certain conformities. They typically have a plot involving a “positive hero” attaining political consciousness emblematic of Bolshevik virtue while fulfilling a task for the state. 171 The importance of childhood, a blurring of historical fact and fictional depiction, and the semblance of an epic “timeless utopian space” that “imparted a permanence and stability to the communist worldview,” to quote Lily Wiatrowski Phillips, are also common features. 172 Though not a novel, these components of family, the pursuit of an assignment, and movement through a utopian space that conveyed a communist worldview resulting in enlightenment—or further enlightenment in the case of La Guma—can be witnessed in A Soviet Journey, raising questions about socialist realism vis-à-vis nonfiction. Gorky himself wrote a travelogue Around the Union of Soviets (1929), which used “documentary methods” to emphasize the “miracles” of the Soviet system by contrasting the Soviet present with the Tsarist past—elements also found in La Guma’s work. 173 “Cultural show and Socialist Realism both emerged from the same cultural and political system,” Michael David-Fox has written, “and there were bound to be many points of intersection and overlap between the two.” 174 The point here is not to categorize A Soviet Journey conclusively as an example of socialist realism, a task requiring closer textual analysis and comparison. Furthermore, it is essential to differentiate Gorky, whom La Guma definitely admired, from socialist realism, which involved a wide range of artists, styles, and subjects. Still, it remains important to ask how African writers responded to socialist realism on their own terms. In the case of La Guma, his transition from journalism to fiction—blending fact and fabrication—suggests a proclivity for socialist realism, not simply social realism as many critics have claimed. Evgeny Dobrenko has suggested, quoting Gorky, that socialist realism is a pseudonym for “revolu-

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tionary romanticism,” an expression that could apply to La Guma’s work. 175 Returning to the Black Atlantic, scholars have examined how African-American writers also experimented with socialist realism. Following Gerald Horne’s analysis of the later writing of W. E. B. Du Bois, Phillips has contended that Du Bois’s novel trilogy, The Black Flame (1957, 1959, 1961), exhibits this aesthetic. 176 Dale Peterson has similarly commented on the influence of Gorky on Richard Wright—specifically, the former’s memoir Childhood (1913–1914) on the latter’s Black Boy (1945). 177 Such interpretations underline how socialist realism as an artistic approach held influence and retained elasticity over time. Indeed, it emerged from positions and writing that preceded the October Revolution, such as Lenin’s article “Party Organization and Party Literature” (1905) and Gorky’s Mother (1906). 178 It is also linked to works published shortly later, like Fyodor Gladkov’s Cement (1925), though before its first public usage in 1932 and thereafter. 179 In Problems of the Theory of Socialist Realism (1978) published the same year as A Soviet Journey, the Soviet critic Dmitry Markov notably defined socialist realism as a “historically open aesthetic system of the truthful representation of life.” 180 In this last official definition, it thus constituted an “open” style that shaped subject matter, narrative, and political message, but not necessarily in a formulaic manner, as A Soviet Journey intimates. What is clear throughout A Soviet Journey is La Guma’s commitment to Marxism-Leninism. In this sense, the form of intellection found within his narrative can be described as an instance of Edward Said’s notion of “traveling theory.” 181 Consisting of six chapters plus a prologue and an epilogue, A Soviet Journey is both a travel account as well as a work of political theory—a quality that surfaces through La Guma’s choice of description and commentary. Following Said, La Guma’s narrative is frequently concerned with the application of Marxist-Leninist ideas as policy in the regions of Soviet Central Asia and Siberia, where he spends the bulk of his time as witnessed in chapters 2 (“The Footsteps of Alexander”), 3 (“The Big Sky”), 4 (“The Golden Road”), and 5 (“A Giant of Great Promise”)—four out of the book’s six chapters. In a section titled “The River Tamers,” La Guma highlights the importance of hydroelectric power stations in Tajikistan along the Vakhsh River and the ambition of Lenin’s GOELRO Plan, which aimed to fulfill his declaration that “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.” 182 In chapter 5 La Guma similarly explains at length the Samotlor oil field in Siberia—an atypical technocratic topic for most tourists. A Soviet Journey thus depicts Marxism-Leninism as not only a state practice, but, in the framework of Said, how it travels from Europe to Asia in a manner akin to its movement to South Africa. La Guma’s narrative subsequently signals a return: an instance of southern Marxism confronting Soviet Marxism. As discussed before, Leninism had been widely influential in the colonial world by justifying self-determination as a political principle and

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by detailing the challenges of revolution—Fanon’s engagement with spontaneity in chapter 2 of The Wretched of the Earth (1961) echoing chapter 2 of Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? (1902) being one notable example. 183 Yet Leninism also informed post-revolutionary thought as seen with Kwame Nkrumah’s Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (1965). 184 A student of Lenin throughout his life, La Guma’s engagement in A Soviet Journey falls within this latter category. It displays a dialectical reason regarding development rather than revolution, an argument about how an urban vanguard could lead a rural peasantry—ideas that returned to past debates in South Africa starting with the Native Republic thesis. Economic theory has always been an important, if less valued, element of postcolonial thought and black political thought more generally. Though they mutually informed one another, it is useful to make a thematic distinction between political and economic approaches and how they mark a temporal transition from periods of activism to eras of sovereignty. Julius Nyerere’s Ujamaa: Essays on Socialism (1968) and Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) illustrate the vitality of economic theory as a form of postcolonial criticism during the late 1960s and 1970s in particular. 185 Within South African exile politics, the work of Harold Wolpe, Joe Slovo, and Jack and Ray Simons extended the thesis of “colonialism of a special type” to stress the collaboration between racial and capitalist forms of domination, necessitating a struggle that confronted both. 186 A Soviet Journey must be situated within this trajectory of South African thought from the 1970s. Specifically, it tacitly acknowledges the “feudal” condition of black South Africans, as critiqued by Wolpe, and builds upon the “no middle road” thesis, articulated by Slovo, that national liberation must account for class dynamics and result in socialist revolution, thus stepping beyond the two-stage argument of the Native Republic thesis. La Guma’s descriptions regarding the Soviet system’s ability to deliver people from feudalism directly to socialism in Central Asia—bypassing a capitalist stage—can be read in dialogue with these ANC-SACP positions. The Soviet Union, in La Guma’s eyes, presented proof. But his assessments can also be placed against a deeper backdrop. Though “development” has often been a pejorative notion in Africa, particularly with its overt connotations of Westernization, longstanding black traditions of social and economic development do exist. Booker T. Washington and his arguments for racial uplift are the best known, albeit criticized by Du Bois and others for his accommodationist approach to Jim Crow racism. Robin Kelley has pointed to alternative working-class traditions of development that were critical of both Washington and the elitism of “better class Negroes.” 187 These concerns can also be found in the accounts of black activist-travelers to the USSR. Curiously, while La Guma mentions contemporary African leaders in his text, he does not make note of these preceding Black Atlantic travelers. Nevertheless, the writing of Langston Hughes offers one example.

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Similar to A Soviet Journey, Hughes’s A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia was published in Moscow in English with a run of 1,500 copies, though apparently not to Hughes’s liking, being heavily edited in his personal copy. 188 Still, it can be read as a draft of the more complete and polished report found in his later memoir I Wonder as I Wander. Specific to development, the social and economic comparisons between the American South and Soviet Central Asia—what he calls the “South under the red flag”—provide the most striking feature of his earlier text. 189 “I wanted to compare their existence with that of the coloured and oppressed peoples I had known under capitalism in Cuba, Haiti, Mexico, and my own United States of America,” Hughes writes with regards to the people of Central Asia. “I wanted to study the life of these people in the Soviet Union, and write a book about them for the dark races of the capitalist world.” 190 In I Wonder as I Wander, he further details visiting several cotton collectives near Tashkent, one of which employed African-American teachers—a situation that reminded him yet again of the American South. 191 Hughes traveled with Arthur Koestler, whose company he enjoyed, even comparing his disposition to Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison’s. However, Hughes noted differences in perspective, namely how he himself “observed the changes in Soviet Asia with Negro eyes.” 192 “To Koestler, Turkmenistan was simply a primitive land moving into twentieth-century civilization,” Hughes writes. “To me it was a colored land moving into orbits hitherto reserved for whites.” 193 However, such examination and celebration of Soviet development efforts in Asia did slip into older biases mentioned earlier. The MarxistLeninist terminology of “backwardness” and its political-economic antidote of “development” shaped the impressions and discourse of travel narratives, thus reproducing certain Eurocentric preconceptions even when intentions were benevolent—an issue raised and repeated in A Soviet Journey. La Guma employs the terms tribal, feudal, and socialist, for example, to describe what he sees, in addition to using expressions such as “Stone Age to Socialism,” “Out of Tribalism,” and “Darkest Africa” for section headings and for analogy, as in the last case when he compares Siberia to Africa. While his usage accords with Marxist-Leninist doctrine and is at times employed for ironic effect, he nonetheless works within a framework embedded with biases. Addressing the 1920s, Claude McKay recalled Trotsky’s perspectives on Africans and African Americans to be “more intelligent than that of any of the other Russian leaders.” 194 Yet he also noted Trotsky’s use of the word “backward.” “Trotsky said in effect that the Negro people constituted a backward group, socially, politically and economically, in modern civilization,” McKay writes. “I remember distinctly that he used the word ‘backward.’” 195 George Padmore and Dorothy Pizer similarly commented on this language in How Russia Transformed Her Colonial Empire and its use by Lenin. But they too deflect criticism, arguing that Lenin saw “national and cultural backwardness”

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as “the result of historic conditions.” 196 “Unlike the racial theorists, Lenin rejected entirely the doctrine of innate inferiority and incapacity of any people,” Padmore and Pizer insist. 197 Historian Francine Hirsch has reiterated this stance more recently, that Soviet authorities viewed “backwardness” as “the result of sociohistorical circumstances and not of innate racial or biological traits.” 198 The Soviet regime perceived populations and development on Marxist-Leninist terms with communities and nations occupying different stages of history. As La Guma himself observed, some required a radical transformation from feudal-era relations to a socialist-era situation. These elements of historical materialism that positioned an urban vanguard (the industrialized Soviet West) leading a rural peasantry (Central Asia and Siberia) into socialism introduce a difficult set of political questions as well. Though written long after the period of de-Stalinization that occurred during the Khrushchev era, A Soviet Journey nonetheless contains traces of Stalinism, even if Stalin himself is absent by name in the text. 199 La Guma’s uncritical discussion of collectivization and the construction of the Great Ferghana Canal in 1939—the first resulting in the 1933 famine and the second relying on forced labor—highlight instances of Stalin’s policy of “Socialism in One Country.” La Guma also celebrates the “creation of national states in Central Asia” in chapter 2—a process that he sees as one of self-determination, but can also be interpreted as colonial in nature. Being a geographically immense federation, Stalin had announced the idea of the Friendship of the Peoples in December 1935, a position officially sanctioned in 1938, which granted legitimacy to a multinational Soviet community led by Russia—a first among equals. 200 This position replaced an earlier slogan of a Brotherhood of the Peoples (bratstvo narodov) during the 1920s. 201 As historian Terry Martin has written, this policy forged by Lenin and Stalin comprised a type of “affirmative action,” encouraging the inclusion of local forms of national consciousness and culture, though without promoting complete national self-determination. 202 This approach held nationalism to be a “bourgeois trick,” yet managed it as an inevitable stage toward socialism. 203 Furthermore, the Soviet regime depended on imperial-like techniques of knowledge and power to enable this transformation at the local level. 204 Nonetheless, in La Guma’s purview, the Soviet Union provided a living example for resolving the national question and achieving socialism. His account looked toward the deep future. 205 However, this confluence of political concerns does not capture the full extent of A Soviet Journey. Another aspect is his enthusiasm for the ancient cultures and histories of Central Asia and Siberia—a different approach to nationalism and national identity. Gorky, among others, had emphasized the importance of folk arts, believing they offered a concrete sense of the working relations, social realities, and worldviews of people. 206 Folklore subsequently became highly politicized, embraced as a

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source of popular expression and manipulated for patriotic purposes. 207 The ever-present occasions of the Dom Kultury (culture center) and chaighana (tea house) in La Guma’s itinerary provide insight into his engagements with local culture (figure 0.4), in addition to his noted weariness toward being served sheep’s head and kumiss (fermented mare’s milk). The wry sense of humor found in his early work is not absent. But these moments point to the Writers’ Union control and La Guma’s own interest in local life. The Afro-Asian Writers Association stressed indigenous artistic traditions and their development for national identity in resistance to the effects of colonialism and neo-colonialism. In his 1970 Lotus Prize acceptance speech, La Guma promoted the role of literature in liberation struggles and the vitality of indigenous epics and folklore. 208 Within A Soviet Journey, his invocation of the ancient civilizations of Bactria, Sogdiana, and Tocharistan; the long histories of Tashkent, Samarkand, and Bukhara; and thinkers such as Rudagi (858–941), Abu-Ali ibn-Sina (980–1037), and Ulugbek (1394–1449) declares an ambition to decenter Europe and emphasize Asia as a source of world heritage. 209 A Soviet Journey thus not only dwells on differences between the Soviet East and West in terms of culture and economy, but also with regard to history. Following Georg Lukács, it represents history not solely through surface changes, but also in terms of a deeper underlying essence. 210 La Guma’s technique resembles Fanon’s focus on the Songhai Empire of Mali in The Wretched of the Earth with the premodern histories of Central Asia providing foundations for national identity. 211 Indeed, in chapter 3, La Guma directly confronts the perceived “backwardness” of Asia and censures the notion of Europe as the cradle of civilization, thus mitigating uncritical usage of the term elsewhere. This civilizational dimension of A Soviet Journey fixes La Guma’s project within an emergent Afro-Asian literary tradition that he helped to define. His sense of affinity with the “brown” people—to use Hughes’s description—in Central Asia and Siberia underscores a different kind of Cold War Afro-Asianism apart from the Indian Ocean focus that has preoccupied much work. 212 His narrative also resituates the politics of the Black Atlantic, underscoring how Soviet Asia presented an erstwhile periphery for activist-intellectuals from that world and the Global South. Though his ventures into ancient history and deep time can be seen as a studied detour from controversial political issues, they can also be understood as experiments with alternative perspectives and chronologies—a search for a utopian space outside of Western history, outside of Soviet society. 213 Monica Popescu has noted that the senses of temporality in A Soviet Journey diverge from those found in La Guma’s short fiction and novels, which typically display a linear progression of political awakening. 214 In contrast, La Guma uses Soviet political history, his own personal history, and the foundational histories of Central Asia to politicize, personalize, and disassociate his book from conventional Western

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Figure 0.4. Alex La Guma being fitted in traditional Uzbek dress, 1975. Permission granted from Blanche La Guma.

views. 215 But, through its experimentation, it indicates an openness that developed more fully by the 1980s—a “late” socialist realism, as Thomas Lahusen has described, which placed greater emphasis on technological

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modernity rather than rural nostalgia and “village prose,” as well as stressing multinationalism, Central Asia included, over Russocentrism. 216 Though “versatility” had been encouraged for socialist realism at the 1967 congress attended by La Guma, Soviet literature had reached something of an impasse during the 1970s by failing to fulfill the potential freedoms of the post-Stalin era. 217 A Soviet Journey demonstrates how non-Soviet authors could reinvent this aesthetic through destinations and meanings located elsewhere. In sum, A Soviet Journey provides an indispensable non-fiction narrative that parallels his novels and stories. It is critical to understanding La Guma’s late style and politics. La Guma’s travel narrative is not an eyewitness account that aims to demythologize the Soviet Union, as with many fellow travelers during the first half of the twentieth century. Rather, through its mixing of history and memory and its literary references to Russian and Asian writers, it re-mythologizes the Soviet system and its applicability to the South African situation. Following Said and his observation that when theory travels it tends toward orthodoxy, La Guma’s political idealism renders a view that is often doctrinaire. 218 Indeed, though closely monitored by the Writers’ Union, his text bears traces of strategic amnesia and political partialities. Echoing a deep tradition of Russian Orientalism, his depiction of Islamic culture is at times problematic. In contrast to Fanon’s critical move from masks to veils in “Algeria Unveiled” (1959), in which he defends the haïk (veil), La Guma praises the end of this practice in Soviet Central Asia. 219 His citations of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade (1888) and James Elroy Flecker’s The Golden Journey to Samarkand (1913) and his dismissiveness toward the Islamic Basmachi movement add further evidence for this Cold War Orientalism. 220 Equally problematic is his silence about Soviet prisons, given his and Blanche’s experiences in South Africa. Though the Gulag system was terminated in 1960 as part of de-Stalinization, it continued in modified form through the early 1980s. 221 La Guma’s discussion of tsarist prisons, the forced exile of members of the 1825 Decembrist revolt, and Dostoevsky’s classic prison camp novel, Notes from a Dead House (1862), signal a tacit acknowledgment. 222 He even mentions finding a copy of The Stone Country, based on his experiences at the Roeland Street Jail in Cape Town, while traveling in Lithuania. 223 These moments raise questions as to why La Guma refused to see the Soviet system as authoritarian and, in the case of Central Asia, colonial in scope. When does political imagination become political fantasy? Why are dystopian realities so often concealed and sacrificed in the name of utopian dreams? Such tensions and the questions they raise are difficult to resolve conclusively, except that La Guma was a committed communist, an appreciative guest, and, ultimately, not writing for a twenty-first century audience. He was, first and foremost, addressing the problem of the future world as defined by the South African liberation struggle and

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the politics of the Cold War. The Soviet model proved to be a solution that would not last, for reasons well beyond his control. Lost Futures The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature. —Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848)

Despite persistent assumptions to the contrary, modern travelers have not been exclusively Western in origin. African travelers in particular have been an under-examined category of transnational movement and perspective. This situation may largely be attributed to the transient nature of this position, the thinness of personal archives left behind, and the consequent ease by which scholars can overlook this historical experience. However, other factors can also be discerned. A prevailing emphasis in Africa’s historiography on forced migration—the Atlantic, Saharan, and Indian Ocean slave trades being key examples—has often subsumed more self-directed forms of transnational agency. In modern political histories, compulsory geographic displacement has been typically captured and described through exile—a common trope of South Africa’s history during the apartheid period. Yet the actual components of this form of minor transnationalism—including facets of everyday life, family conditions, and the nature of political connections and organization overseas— remain a subject for research and remembrance. Those forced into exile not only had to cultivate an aspirational cosmopolitanism that sought solutions for the South African crisis, but, through this pursuit, their experiences disrupt nationalist narratives and political chronologies in the present. These activist histories challenge the settler colonial notion of South African exceptionalism through ties made with other countries and liberation movements that placed the anti-apartheid struggle within a global pattern of decolonization. Exile, in sum, must not be reducible to a condition imposed and delineated by states. The self-defined aspects of exile need to be better understood. A Soviet Journey is one document of this experience. Though it marks an individual one, it nonetheless indicates the wider world that South African activists engaged. Specific to La Guma, A Soviet Journey serves as a culmination of his political and creative lives (figure 0.5). It provides an illustration of what Edward Said has called late style, representing a “mature subjectivity, stripped of hubris and pomposity, unashamed either of its fallibility or of the modest assurance it has gained as a result of age and exile.” 224 A Soviet Journey is undoubtedly incomplete as a biography, yet its very incompletion highlights the political and living constraints that La Guma faced and the relations of power—South African

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Figure 0.5. Alex and Blanche in Red Square, Moscow, May 1985. Permission granted from Blanche La Guma.

and Soviet, organizational and individual—that rendered them so. 225 Similar to Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s The Motorcycle Diaries (1993), it is by genre a work of travel writing. Yet both books speak to a process of

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political becoming, albeit one of fulfillment for La Guma rather than complete awakening. La Guma was an organic intellectual in the Gramscian sense of having emerged from a working class milieu—unlike other activists, such as Fanon and Guevara, who were middle class in background. La Guma’s political awareness started early. Proximate to Guevara, however, it ended in Havana, Cuba. 226 Alex and Blanche relocated there in 1978 to set up an ANC mission. Blanche recalls it being the “best part of our exile,” and they shared duties in running the ANC’s diplomatic presence. 227 Their schedule was full of activities, given Cuban support for the anti-apartheid struggle. Time of the Butcherbird appeared in 1979, and La Guma worked on a number of projects including an autobiography, a book about Cuba (the Cuban “experiment”), and a planned novel about the armed struggle with the working titles “Crowns of Battle” and “Zone of Fire.” 228 He continued to travel internationally for the ANC and the Afro-Asian Writers Association as well, though his health began to decline. He had suffered two heart attacks in 1975 and a third in 1976, while serving as a writer in residence at the University of Dar-es-Salaam. 229 A fourth attack proved fatal, with La Guma dying in Havana on October 11, 1985. News of his passing was greeted with messages of condolence from around the world, as well as from Fidel Castro and members of the Cuban government. Alex remains buried at the Cementerio de Cristóbal Colón (figure 0.6). Blanche returned to South Africa alone in 1994. 230 The negotiated end of apartheid without the achievement of a socialist future certainly marginalized figures like La Guma who had embraced this agenda. Joe Slovo, an SACP and MK stalwart, published a late essay “Has Socialism Failed?” (1989) that critiqued Stalinism without fully rescinding a socialist platform. 231 Yet the collapse of the Soviet Union unavoidably cast a different light on such positions and the optimism found in A Soviet Journey. Alexei Yurchak and Francine Hirsch have examined the ontological crisis that many observers, Soviet and non-Soviet, experienced when the USSR quickly splintered along national lines in 1991. 232 One outcome of the breakup has been a reassessment of Soviet policy toward nations and nationalism, how the Soviet government constructed and managed such difference, and how the subsequent dissolution resembled the decolonization of an empire. 233 The latter paradigm in particular has stirred debate over the broad similarities and subtle distinctions between the Soviet system and classic forms of empire exemplified by the British and French cases. 234 Yet these disputes over nomenclature have not weakened a consensus that the Soviet government exerted enormous power to incorporate and transform a diverse set of regional republics at political, economic, and cultural levels. The government certainly perceived itself as more benevolent than the preceding tsarist state of imperial Russia. To use Hirsch’s expression, “Soviet colonization” was, in principle, interactive—designed to be participatory, without overt exploitation. But this task was ripe with tension. 235 Specific to South Africa,

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Figure 0.6. The grave of Alex La Guma in Havana, Cuba, December 2012. Permission granted from Christopher J. Lee.

Monica Popescu has written that positive assessments of the Soviet Union can be attributed to normative views held by members of the political left and, moreover, “a grateful attitude toward the hosts who showed interest in the fate of their visitors.” 236 Stephen Ellis and Tsepo Sechaba have more strongly criticized the SACP for its unrealistic commitment to global socialism up until 1990 with the strategic program The Path to Power approved only a year earlier. 237 These errors in judgment and prognosis were not exclusive to South African activists. “Looking a long-held ideal in the face is about like looking a gift horse in the mouth,” Langston Hughes writes, reflecting on his experiences in the Soviet Union in I Wonder as I Wander. “The poor old ideal, beaten and battered by reality, its gloss gone and its veneer cracked, often does not appear as pretty in actuality as it seemed in dreams.” 238 In this sense, Hughes acknowledged the potential for disenchantment from witnessing the Soviet experiment firsthand. But he took a philosophical view, writing, “I think most idealists expected too much of Russia in too short a time. The Soviet Union was then only fifteen years old.” 239 Shortly later, Hughes provided an even more vivid defense. “As to the purge trials, the liquidations, the arrests and censorship, deplorable as these things were, I felt about them in relation to their continual

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denunciation in the European and American press, much as Frederick Douglass felt before the Civil War when he read in the slave-holding papers that the abolitionists were anarchists, villains, devils and atheists,” Hughes remarks. “Douglass said he had the impression that ‘Abolition—whatever else it might be—was not unfriendly to the slave.’ After all, I suppose, how anything is seen depends on whose eyes look at it.” 240 Yet the problem of Stalinism has also complicated Du Bois’s legacy, with Robin Kelley stating Du Bois unfortunately did not have “anything to say” about this matter whereas Eric Porter has argued that he was “not a Stalinist in any systematic way.” 241 Bill Mullen has mapped a middle path suggesting that revolutionary aspiration must be foregrounded. “Supporting world revolution in the Stalin era for Du Bois came to mean the intellectual survival of an idea—human self-emancipation,” Mullen writes, “even in the objective face of its own distorted meanings and often depleted prospects.” 242 Padmore and Pizer also submit a useful reminder of the stakes involved. “Only when the subject peoples of Asia and Africa, and the national minorities of Europe are united within a Soviet form of multi-national State will the racial, religious and sectional frictions, and the conflicting interests which Imperialism breeds and exploits and which lead to constant wars, be at peace and live in harmony,” they conclude at the end of How Russia Transformed Her Colonial Empire. “For Imperialism divides: Socialism unites.” 243 These perspectives from across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are not only suggestive of a shared set of politics, but a tradition of world literature that has been neglected due to the same Cold War triumphalism that has marginalized these political voices. A Soviet Journey is an example of, what Steven Lee has called, the ethnic avant-garde—a provisional artistic movement that simultaneously promoted “ethnic particularism, political radicalism, and artistic experimentation” at once. 244 Yet authors like La Guma, Richard Wright, and W. E. B. Du Bois, who navigated between the worlds of the Soviet bloc, the Black Atlantic, and an emergent Global South, have remained either marginal or entirely absent from recent interrogations of “world literature.” 245 Their experiments within these international contexts have been habitually discounted in favor of their work on their countries of origin. Nevertheless, these tangential literatures and their histories have value. They confront official narratives that have obfuscated difficult choices made and alternative ideologies embraced. In doing so, they comprise dangerous supplements, in Jacques Derrida’s sense, that unsettle conventional reason—in JeanJacques Rousseau’s words, a “condition almost inconceivable to reason,” as cited by Derrida. 246 Specific to La Guma, through forms of lateral thinking and comparative imagination, his writing and political thought challenge a surface consensus about the centrality of nationalism, relocate the contours and interplay between the Black Atlantic and the Third World, and demonstrate the practices of radical empathy that enabled

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intercontinental connections to take hold. 247 As discussed throughout this introduction, A Soviet Journey can be read at a number of levels. As a travel account, it provides a panoramic view of Soviet modernity at its height—a close up of late socialism as an analog to the more commonly examined late capitalism. 248 As a work of political theory, A Soviet Journey points to how the Soviet project presented a heterotopian space that influenced radical projects across the Atlantic world, offering socialism as a solution and underscoring a need to extend the black radical tradition to the South Atlantic. As a work of aesthetic theory, it underscores the potential effects of socialist realism on African writers—from its fatherand-son theme to its “machine in the garden” motif vis-à-vis development—and the ways in which African writers could revise this style for different purposes. 249 Yet such considerations of interpretation should not diminish the personal importance the Soviet Union had for La Guma. It sustained a politics of hope—not solely in an imaginary future sense, but in its factual existence. 250 Though frictions did emerge between Soviet authorities and their Afro-Asian partners, A Soviet Journey undermines apodictic assessments—especially Euro-American ones—that have resulted in retroactive condemnation of those who supported the USSR, without attention to how it symbolized former futures that reassured activists during uncertain times. 251 This aspect of optimism must be taken seriously. La Guma did not anticipate or write for our post-Soviet present. In contrast to much of his fiction, A Soviet Journey is a joyful work, celebrating Soviet achievements ranging from electrification to gender equality, while also inserting hidden jokes and rueful asides, such as titling a chapter “The Footsteps of Alexander” (thus associating himself with Alexander the Great) and a section “Notes Above Ground Level” (in reference to Dostoevsky), as well as wistfully lamenting that his journey is by plane rather than by the legendary Trans-Siberian Railway. A Soviet Journey offers a contrapuntal reading of the Soviet Union that exemplifies La Guma’s strident politics, but also his artistic skill at identifying and describing situations rather than relying on character development alone. 252 It tracks a series of “contact zones”—to use Mary Louise Pratt’s concept—that allow occasions for political admiration and affinity, rather than difference and otherness. Indeed, La Guma’s frequent citation of Russian words, Russian authors, and Soviet history demonstrates not only knowledge, but a sense of identification—a desire to be part of a specific literary and political tradition. As the converse of Pratt’s Imperial Eyes (1992), the expression “anti-imperial eyes” that titles this introduction signals both the anti-imperialism of the USSR in relation to the decolonizing Third World and La Guma’s own interpretation of the Soviet system as not imperial, but self-determined, in scope. In this sense, A Soviet Journey challenges presentist views of the USSR while also testing the continental parameters of African literature. It dem-

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onstrates that African writers—not simply Western writers in the classic vein of Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling—addressed the world at large, well beyond their countries of origin, thus defying tropes of the village pastiche and broader nativist assumptions about the purpose and content of African literature. Though La Guma’s fiction was published as part of the famed African Writers Series edited by Chinua Achebe—one of the most important intellectual projects of the twentieth century—his non-fiction points to alternative, and more radical, genealogies of world literature. The “Soviet La Guma” provides a useful counter-narrative to the more familiar “South African La Guma.” 253 Abdul JanMohamed has written that La Guma’s work endured marginalization not only because it was banned, but because of its refusal to valorize the political expectations of certain liberal politics. 254 Though his work remains widely read in South Africa, his overt political and aesthetic radicalism—his “proletarian humanism” to use an expression of Gorky’s and Lukács’s—still unsettles many conventions of what African literature is and should be. 255 There continued to be debates over the political uses of art during the late apartheid period—the Culture and Resistance Festival held in Gaborone, Botswana, in 1982 being one vital occasion—and there were certainly Black Atlantic critics of communism and the USSR, such as Richard Wright and C. L. R. James. 256 Yet, despite a loss of faith in the communist future that the Soviet Union once encapsulated, the political legacy of the left in South Africa persists, if in less visible form. 257 As Barbara Harlow has written, the politics of resistance and armed struggle that defined the era of decolonization in South Africa and elsewhere have been replaced by a post-revolutionary discourse characterized by seemingly benign terms like negotiation, transition, and democracy that paper over, rather than rectify, unresolved problems. 258 How, then, do we escape these cul-de-sacs of political history? How do we address and think through these iniquities of historical erasure? This introduction has not sought to absolve La Guma for his errors of judgment in A Soviet Journey—the catastrophes of socialist dreamworlds have been matched by the catastrophes of capitalist ones. Neither does it view his perspective as isolated. Visions of mass utopia were widely held during the twentieth century. Rather, a central purpose in rereading his account is that it reveals the diverse intellectual labor and political theory that emerged during the anti-apartheid struggle—a polyphonic archive of fugitive-cosmopolitan voices and situated texts that contest nativist approaches that have stressed indigeneity, in addition to related forms of myopic nationalist thought that have obfuscated entwined circuits of socialist, Black Atlantic, and Afro-Asian internationalisms. 259 Specific to the miscarriage of accomplishing socialist democracy in South Africa, David Scott provides one answer in Omens of Adversity (2014)—a study of the failure of socialist revolution in Grenada—by contemplating how “tragedy is often the price of freedom.” 260 More than this, forgiveness, as he

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invokes, can create a space for new action and new possibilities. In his words, “The present, which is always the time of action, has to be released from the burden of past deeds in order to make new futures possible.” 261 It is this space that must be sought—a task that La Guma himself embraced. “A writer, if he is conscious of what is going on around him, automatically reflects this picture, this scene, and through portraying the life around him also produces his own ideas about it,” La Guma once remarked, defining what he saw as his mission. “I think that it is the role of the conscious writer to guide the morals, the perspectives and the objectives of the community.” 262 The national question still endures, if in modified form, in post-apartheid South Africa. Economic injustice remains. If there is one legacy to hold on to, which La Guma pursued and what this book conveys, it is this belief in a creative and critical citizenry—one that records and sustains an ethic of political possibility, ever leading toward a just fulfillment of social hope. NOTES 1. On Hani’s life, see Gregory Houston and James Ngculu, eds., Voices of Liberation: Chris Hani (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2014); Janet Smith and Beauregard Tromp, Hani: A Life Too Short (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2010). See also Christopher J. Lee, “Decoloniality of a Special Type: Solidarity and Its Potential Meanings in South African Literature, During and After the Cold War,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 50, no. 4 (2014): 466–77. 2. For recent work on liberation struggles in southern Africa, see, for example, Arianna Lissoni et. al., eds., One Hundred Years of the ANC: Debating Liberation Histories Today (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2013); Hugh Macmillan, The Lusaka Years: The ANC in Exile in Zambia, 1963 to 1994 (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2013); Hilary Sapire and Chris Saunders, eds., Southern African Liberation Struggles: New Local, Regional and Global Perspectives (Claremont, South Africa: UCT Press, 2013); Christian A. Williams, National Liberation in Postcolonial Southern Africa: A Historical Ethnography of SWAPO’s Exile Camps (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 3. Roger Field, Alex La Guma: A Literary & Political Biography (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2010), 223. 4. Alex La Guma, And a Threefold Cord (Berlin: Seven Seas Publishers, 1964); Alex La Guma, In the Fog of the Seasons’ End (London: Heinemann, 1972); Alex La Guma, A Walk in the Night and Other Stories (London: Heinemann, 1967 [1962]); Alex La Guma, The Stone Country (London: Heinemann, 1967); Alex La Guma, Time of the Butcherbird (London: Heinemann, 1979). It should be noted that the 1962 version of A Walk in the Night included only the title story and was published by Mbari Press in Nigeria. See Field, Alex La Guma, 111. 5. Though critics have frequently focused on the politics of La Guma’s fiction, his memoir has often gained only brief mention or been neglected. See, for example, Cecil A. Abrahams, Alex La Guma (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1985); Kathleen M. Balutansky, The Novels of Alex La Guma: The Representation of a Political Conflict (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1990); Abdul R. JanMohamed, Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983), chapter 7; Nahem Yousaf, Alex La Guma: Politics and Resistance (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2001). Notable exceptions include Field, Alex La Guma; Monica Popescu, South African Literature Beyond the Cold War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,

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2010), chapter 1. La Guma also edited a collection of essays that has received relatively little attention from scholars. See Alex La Guma, ed., Apartheid: A Collection of Writings on South African Racism by South Africans (New York: International Publishers, 1971). 6. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016 [1967]), 157. On supplements, see also Christopher J. Lee, Unreasonable Histories: Nativism, Multiracial Lives, and the Genealogical Imagination in British Africa (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 238. On unsettling the ANC, see also Jonathan Hyslop, “On Biography: A Response to Ciraj Rassool,” South African Review of Sociology 41, no. 2 (2010), 104–5. 7. Ciraj Rassool, “Rethinking Documentary History and South African Political Biography,” South African Review of Sociology 41, no. 1 (2010), 46. 8. Steve Biko, I Write What I Like: Selected Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002 [1978]); Ruth First, 117 Days: An Account of Confinement and Interrogation under the South African 90-Day Detention Law (New York: Penguin, 2009 [1965]); Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (Boston: Holt, 1995). 9. For a similar point, see Martin Legassick, Towards Socialist Democracy (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2007), xvi. 10. For examples of other memoirs, see Andrew Richard Amar, An African in Moscow (London: Ampersand, 1960); William Anti-Taylor, Moscow Diary (London: Robert Hale, 1967); William Appleton, The Student Trap (Stuttgart: Editiones Por Libertate, 1965). For secondary discussion, including the racial discrimination faced by some students, see Abigail Judge Kret, “‘We Unite with Knowledge’: The Peoples’ Friendship University and Soviet Education for the Third World,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 33, no. 2 (2013): 239–56; Maxim Matusevich, “Expanding the Boundaries of the Black Atlantic: African Students as Soviet Moderns,” Ab Imperio 2 (2012): 325–50. 11. Buck-Morss draws this idea from Walter Benjamin. See Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), ix, x. 12. There is evidence that such marginalization occurred well before the CODESA negotiations of the early 1990s. See Legassick, Towards Socialist Democracy, xvii. 13. See, for example, Jeanne-Marie Jackson, South African Literature’s Russian Soul: Narrative Forms of Global Isolation (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); Maxim Matusevich, ed., Africa in Russia, Russia in Africa: Three Centuries of Encounters (Lawrenceville, NJ: Africa World Press, 2006); Christine Philliou, “Introduction – USSR South: Postcolonial Worlds in the Soviet Imaginary,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 33, no. 2 (2013): 197–200; Popescu, South African Literature; Vladimir Shubin, ANC: A View from Moscow, 2nd ed. (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2008). 14. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Reiland Rabaka, Africana Critical Theory: Reconstructing the Black Radical Tradition, from W. E. B. Du Bois and C. L. R. James to Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009); Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000 [1983]). 15. Rabaka, Africana Critical Theory, 2–10; Reiland Rabaka, W. E. B. Du Bois and the Problems of the Twenty-First Century (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), 9–11. 16. Rabaka, W. E. B. Du Bois, 9–10. 17. Anthony Bogues, Black Heretics, Black Prophets: Radical Political Intellectuals (New York: Routledge, 2003), 10. 18. Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (1986): 65–88. For an important critique and response, see Aijaz Ahmad, “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory,’” Social Text 17 (1987): 3–25; Fredric Jameson, “A Brief Response,” Social Text 17 (1987): 26–27.

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19. Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (New York: Routledge, 1990); Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992). 20. On this tradition, see, for example, Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000 [1955]); Suzanne Césaire, The Great Camouflage: Writings of Dissent (1941–1945), ed. Daniel Maximin, trans. Keith L. Walker (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2012 [2009]); Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008 [1952]); Reiland Rabaka, The Negritude Movement: W. E. B. Du Bois, Leon Damas, Aime Cesaire, Leopold Senghor, Frantz Fanon, and the Evolution of an Insurgent Idea (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015). Reiland Rabaka has additionally revisited the political thought of Amilcar Cabral to include the Lusophone world within this intellectual history. See Reiland Rabaka, Concepts of Cabralism: Amilcar Cabral and Africana Critical Theory (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014). See also Firoze Manji and Bill Fletcher Jr., eds., Claim No Easy Victories: The Legacy of Amilcar Cabral (Dakar: CODESRIA, 2013). 21. Bogues, Black Heretics, Black Prophets, 14. 22. See, for example, Asli Berktay, “Negritude and African Socialism: Rhetorical Devices for Overcoming Social Divides,” Third Text 24, no. 2 (2010): 205–14; Priya Lal, African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania: Between the Village and the World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Kwame Nkrumah, Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for De-Colonization (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970); Leander Schneider, Government of Development: Peasants and Politicians in Postcolonial Tanzania (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014); Walter A. E. Skurnik, “Léopold Sédar Senghor and African Socialism,” Journal of Modern African Studies 3, no. 3 (1965): 349–69; Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), chapter 8. 23. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 72. 24. Gala (pseudonym of Alex La Guma), “Why I Joined the Communist Party: Doing Something Useful,” The African Communist 89 (1982), 50. For an earlier account by La Guma, see also Arnold Adams (another pseudonym), “Why I Joined the Communist Party,” The African Communist 47 (1971): 57–61. 25. The idea of the “family romance” is a complex one as understood by Sigmund Freud, seeking to explain generational tensions and opposition in a manner related to the Oedipus complex. Hunt takes a more flexible approach to this concept. See Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 26. Zimitri Erasmus, ed., Coloured by History, Shaped by Place: New Perspectives on Coloured Identities in Cape Town (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2001). 27. Vivian Bickford-Smith, Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Victorian Cape Town (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 47. 28. Richard Rive, “Buckingham Palace,” District Six (Cape Town: David Philip, 1986). 29. Alex La Guma, Jimmy La Guma: A Biography, ed. Mohamed Adhikari (Cape Town: Friends of the South African Library, 1997). 30. Helen Bradford, A Taste of Freedom: The ICU in Rural South Africa, 1924–1930 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). 31. Robert Trent Vinson, The Americans are Coming!: Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012), chapters 3 and 4. 32. On Kadalie, see Clements Kadalie, My Life and the ICU: The Autobiography of a Black Trade Unionist in South Africa, ed. and intro. Stanley Trapido (New York: Humanities Press, 1970). 33. On Jimmy La Guma’s early life and career, see Field, Alex La Guma, 13–16. 34. Edward Roux, Time Longer Than Rope: A History of the Black Man’s Struggle for Freedom in South Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964 [1948]), 198.

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35. Allison Drew, Discordant Comrades: Identities and Loyalties on the South African Left (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 49. 36. Ibid., 96. 37. Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: New Press, 2008), 21. 38. Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 137–45. 39. Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 6, 37, 41, 43. 40. Brian Bunting, Moses Kotane: South African Revolutionary (London: Inkululeko Publications, 1975), 16. Brian Bunting was the son of Sidney Bunting. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., 30. 43. Drew, Discordant Comrades, 68, 69. 44. Claude McKay, “Report on the Negro Question: Speech to the 4th Congress of the Comintern, Nov. 1922,” International Press Correspondence 3, Jan. 5, 1923, 16–17. 45. These views were additionally shaped by the Indian radical M. N. Roy. See Kris Manjapra, M. N. Roy: Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism (New Delhi: Routledge, 2010), 43. 46. Drew, Discordant Comrades, 96; Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom, 77, 133–34. Similar to South Africa, this strategy, which in principle would result in a Black Belt Republic, also had an intense influence on communist party activities there. See Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015 [1990]); Robinson, Black Marxism, 227. For a separate study focused on Harlem, see Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem during the Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983). 47. Drew, Discordant Comrades, 102. 48. Ibid., 99–101. 49. The “Theses on the Revolutionary Movement in Colonial and Semi-Colonial Countries” has also been translated as “Theses on the Revolutionary Movement in the Colonies and Semi-Colonies.” On the South African question, see “The South African Question” (1928), Marxists Internet Archive, accessed November 29, 2016, https:// www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/sections/sacp/1928/comintern .htm. 50. It should be noted that the senior La Guma left the CPSA in 1928 due to party tensions, briefly rejoined in 1931, and was expelled in 1932. His major contributions were made prior to 1928. See Field, Alex La Guma, 17, 21, 28–29. 51. Ibid., 28–29. 52. The Liberator (1929–1932) was also known as The Harlem Liberator (1933–1934) and the Negro Liberator (1934–1935). 53. Field, Alex La Guma, 35. 54. Abrahams, Alex La Guma, 5; Yousaf, Alex La Guma, vii. 55. Paul Robeson, with Lloyd L. Brown, Here I Stand (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988 [1958]), 36. 56. As one index, Widener Library at Harvard University lists thirty titles in this series. 57. Henri Alleg, Red Star and Green Crescent (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1985). 58. See, for example, George Morris, Where Human Rights Are Real (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1980); Peter Schütt, Journey to Siberia (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1982); John Summers, The Red and the Black (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1979). 59. The word “Gulag” is from the acronym GULAG (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei), which was the government agency that supervised the prison camps. 60. Walter Benjamin, Moscow Diary, ed. Gary Smith, trans. Richard Sieburth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); Margaret Bourke-White, Eyes on Russia (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1931); Theodore Dreiser, Dreiser Looks at Russia (New

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York: H. Liveright, 1928); André Gide, Return from the U.S.S.R., trans. Dorothy Bussy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1936); John Steinbeck, A Russian Journal (New York: Penguin, 1999 [1948]); Edmund Wilson, Travels in Two Democracies (New York: Harcourt, 1936). 61. Edward Crankshaw, Russia and the Russians (New York: Viking, 1948); Hewlett Johnson, The Socialist Sixth of the World (London: V. Gollancz Ltd., 1939); John L. Strohm, “Just Tell the Truth”: The Uncensored Story of How the Common People Live Behind the Russian Iron Curtain (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947). 62. Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921–1941 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1. For separate studies, see David Caute, The Fellow-Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, 1928–1978 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); Sylvia R. Margulies, The Pilgrimage to Russia: The Soviet Union and the Treatment of Foreigners, 1924–1937 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968). 63. Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon (New York: Scribner, 1968 [1940]). 64. Michael David-Fox, “The Fellow Travelers Revisited: The ‘Cultured West’ through Soviet Eyes,” The Journal of Modern History 75, no. 2 (2003), 300. 65. David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment, 98, 101. 66. Joy Gleason Carew, Blacks, Reds, and Russians: Sojourners in Search of the Soviet Promise (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008). 67. Allison Blakely, Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian History and Thought (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1986), 48. 68. Ibid., 81. 69. For discussion, see, for example, Kate A. Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 1922–1963 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 8–11; Matusevich, “Expanding the Boundaries of the Black Atlantic”; Monica Popescu, “On the Margins of the Black Atlantic: Angola, the Eastern Bloc, and the Cold War,” Research in African Literatures 45, no. 3 (2014): 91–109; Cedric Tolliver, “Alternative Solidarities,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 50, no. 4 (2014): 379–83. 70. Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985); Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1974 [1972]); Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994 [1944]). 71. On these locales, see Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora; Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom; Marc Matera, Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015). 72. Leslie James, George Padmore and Decolonization from Below: Pan-Africanism, the Cold War, and the End of Empire (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 24; Holger Weiss, Framing a Radical African Atlantic: African American Agency, West African Intellectuals and the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 197. 73. Hakim Adi, Pan-Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa and the Diaspora, 1919–1939 (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2013), 114. 74. Ibid., xiii–xv. The Comintern formally expelled Padmore in 1934. See James, George Padmore, 24. 75. James, George Padmore, 3, 28; Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom, 192–93; George Padmore, Pan-Africanism or Communism? The Coming Struggle for Africa (London: D. Dobson, 1956). 76. Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line, 150–53, 167. 77. Ibid., 176, 198. For a full treatment, see Gerald Horne, Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944–1993 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986).

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78. Manning Johnson, a black writer and former communist, first made this accusation during hearings about communism in Hollywood by the House Un-American Activities Committee. See Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line, 227, 243. 79. As quoted in Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time, ed. Mary Petrusewicz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 920. See also Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881 (London: Robson Books, 2002), 736–39. On the politics of Russian inferiority, see Dominic Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 219–21. 80. On Russia as “semi-Asiatic,” see, for example, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Extracts from the New York Tribune on the Crimean War” (1953), Marxists Internet Archive, accessed October 15, 2016, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/ subject/russia/crimean-war.htm. 81. G. Lichtheim, “Marx and the ‘Asiatic Mode of Production,’” in Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought: Critical Assessments—Second Series, Volume VI. Modes of Production, the World System, Classes, and Class Struggle, eds. Bob Jessop with Russell Wheatley (London: Routledge, 1999), 35–36; Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Soviet State and Society Between Revolutions, 1918–1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 214. For a broader discussion of the “Asiatic mode of production” and “Oriental despotism,” see Joshua A. Fogel, “The Debates Over the Asiatic Mode of Production in Soviet Russia, China, and Japan,” The American Historical Review 93, no. 1 (1988): 56–79. 82. On the persistence of Orientalism in the USSR, see Alfrid K. Bustanov, Soviet Orientalism and the Creation of Central Asian Nations (New York: Routledge, 2015). 83. Curzon is referring in part to “The Great Game” (1830–1895) that made Great Britain and Russia political rivals in Central Asia. For the Curzon quote, see Lieven, Empire, 219. On Russian imperialism’s complex impact in Central Asia and neighboring regions, see, for example, Elena I. Campbell, The Muslim Question and Russian Imperial Governance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015); Robert D. Crews, For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Agnès Nilüfer Kefeli, Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia: Conversion, Apostasy, and Literacy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014); Mustafa Tuna, Imperial Russia’s Muslims: Islam, Empire, and European Modernity, 1788–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 84. Douglas Northrop, Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 8. 85. Langston Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993 [1940]), 172. See also David Chioni Moore, “Colored Dispatches from the Uzbek Border: Langston Hughes’ Relevance, 1933–2002,” Callaloo 25, no. 4 (2002): 1115–35; David Chioni Moore, “Local Color, Global ‘Color’: Langston Hughes, the Black Atlantic, and Soviet Central Asia, 1932,” Research in African Literatures 27, no. 4 (1996): 49–70. 86. I discussed this issue earlier in Christopher Joon-Hai Lee, “The Uses of the Comparative Imagination: South African History and World History in the Political Consciousness and Strategy of the South African Left, 1943–1959,” Radical History Review 92 (2005): 31–61. 87. Claude McKay, A Long Way from Home (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1969 [1937]), 153. 88. Bill V. Mullen, Un-American: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Century of World Revolution (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015), 7. 89. As quoted in Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 92. 90. La Guma, Apartheid, 13. 91. Drew, Discordant Comrades, 272. 92. Bunting, Moses Kotane, 58–60. 93. I am thinking here of debates in popular media. See, for example, Stephen Ellis, with reply by Bill Keller, “Mandela & Communism,” The New York Review of Books,

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August 15, 2013, accessed December 7, 2016, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/ 08/15/mandela-and-communism/. 94. For further discussion, see Lee, “The Uses of the Comparative Imagination.” 95. Field has addressed this question in relation to La Guma’s involvement with SACPO. See Field, Alex La Guma, 99. 96. Joseph Stalin, Marxism and the National Question (1913), Marxists Internet Archive, accessed November 1, 2016, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1913/03.htm. 97. Field, Alex La Guma, 56–57. 98. On this chronology, see David Everatt, “Alliance Politics of a Special Type: The Roots of the ANC/SACP Alliance, 1950–1954,” Journal of Southern African Studies 18, no. 1 (1992): 19–39. 99. For discussion, see Robert Thornton, “The Potentials of Boundaries in South Africa: Steps Towards a Theory of the Social Edge,” in Postcolonial Identities in Africa, eds. Richard Werbner and Terence Ranger (London: Zed Books, 1996), 136–61. 100. This program was written in 1962 and published in 1963. See “The Road to South African Freedom: Programme of the South African Communist Party,” The African Communist 2, no. 2 (1963): 24–70. 101. Steven Friedman, Race, Class and Power: Harold Wolpe and the Radical Critique of Apartheid (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2015), introduction. 102. I introduce this concept in Lee, Unreasonable Histories, 13, 20, 143, 239. 103. Field, Alex La Guma, 58, 62. The addition of “A Christmas Story” as his first published story corrects an error found in Abrahams, Alex La Guma, 13; André Odendaal and Roger Field, eds., Liberation Chabalala: The World of Alex La Guma (Bellville, South Africa: Mayibuye Books, 1993), x. 104. The influences of Hemingway and Steinbeck are explored in particular in Field, Alex La Guma, chapters 6 and 9. 105. Blanche La Guma with Martin Klammer, In the Dark with My Dress on Fire: My Life in Cape Town, London, Havana and Home Again (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2010), 31. 106. Odendaal and Field, eds., Liberation Chabalala, ix. 107. It should be noted that the Pan Africanist Congress, led by Robert Sobukwe and which organized the anti-pass protest at Sharpeville, was also banned. Field, Alex La Guma, 79, 97, 98, 107. 108. Ibid., 85–94; Odendaal and Field, eds., Liberation Chabalala, 62–98. 109. See also Field, Alex La Guma, 111. 110. La Guma with Klammer, In the Dark with My Dress on Fire, 103–6. 111. Field, Alex La Guma, 124, 144–45, 160–61. 112. La Guma with Klammer, In the Dark with My Dress on Fire, 131. 113. Their route took them through Kenya before arriving in London on September 22. See Ibid., 129, 131. 114. Grant Farred, Midfielder’s Moment: Coloured Literature and Culture in Contemporary South Africa (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), 36. 115. Alex La Guma, “Come Back to Tashkent,” Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings 4 (1970): 208–10; Alex La Guma, “Cuba and Africa,” Sechaba, March (1984): 20–23; Alex La Guma, “Paul Robeson and Africa,” The African Communist 46 (1971): 113–19; Alex La Guma, “Thang’s Bicycle,” Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings 29 (1976): 42–47; Alex La Guma, “Vietnam: A People’s Victory,” The African Communist 53 (1973): 29–35. 116. Alleg, Red Star, 7. 117. George Padmore in collaboration with Dorothy Pizer, How Russia Transformed Her Colonial Empire: A Challenge to the Imperialist Powers (London: Dennis Dobson Ltd., 1946), ix. 118. Padmore and Pizer’s emphasis. Ibid., x. 119. Alex and Blanche left South Africa on exit visas and received identity documents, which allowed them to live in Britain, upon their arrival in London in 1966. They did not apply for and receive British citizenship and passports until 1974. They

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could travel anywhere in the world, except South Africa. Personal communication, Blanche La Guma, November 9, 2016. On South African exit visas, see also Karin Shapiro, “No Exit? Emigration Policy and the Consolidation of Apartheid,” Journal of Southern African Studies 42, no. 4 (2016): 763–81. My thinking on fugitivity is informed by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013). 120. The Afro-Asian Writers Association was also referred to as the Association of Asian and African Writers and the Permanent Bureau of Afro-Asian Writers, based in Cairo. 121. Elinor Sisulu, Walter and Albertina Sisulu: In Our Lifetime (Claremont, South Africa: David Philip, 2002), 160–66. 122. Bunting, Moses Kotane, chapter 12. 123. Stephen Ellis, External Mission: The ANC in Exile, 1960–1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 40. 124. Ibid., 12. 125. Ibid., 13. 126. Ibid., 28, 29. For a separate account, see also Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 274–307. 127. She eventually took a job in 1971 with Soviet Weekly, published by the Soviet embassy in London. See La Guma with Klammer, In the Dark with My Dress on Fire, 132, 145. 128. Ibid., 135. 129. The Centre was notoriously funded by the US Central Intelligence Agency, a revelation in 1967 that may have motivated La Guma’s departure though it is unclear. See Field, Alex La Guma, 168; Gerald Moore, “The Transcription Centre in the Sixties: Navigating in Narrow Seas,” Research in African Literatures 33, no. 3 (2002): 167–81. 130. La Guma with Klammer, In the Dark with My Dress on Fire, 132, 133. It should be noted that the CPC disbanded in 1966, leaving Alex to work with the SACP and the ANC. 131. Ibid., 151. 132. On Lotus, see Hala Halim, “Lotus, the Afro-Asian Nexus, and Global South Comparatism,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 32, no. 3 (2012): 563–83. 133. Field, Alex La Guma, 197. 134. There is debate as to whether his first visit was in 1966 or 1967. Roger Field cites 1966 in passing, though he offers little description or evidence of this visit. Cecil Abrahams cites 1967, as does Eugene La Guma in an interview I conducted with him in 2004. Blanche has also expressed doubt about 1966, given that they arrived in London from South Africa on September 22, 1966, leaving little time for travel after that. On balance, I have cited his first visit to the Soviet Union as taking place in 1967 en route to Beirut. See Abrahams, Alex La Guma, 17; Field, Alex La Guma, 209; interview with Eugene La Guma, July 30, 2004; personal communication with Blanche La Guma, November 20, 2016. 135. Shubin, ANC: A View from Moscow, 3. For separate discussions of Soviet foreign policy during this period, see Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), chapter 2; Vladislav M. Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 136. Constantin Katsakioris, “The Soviet-South Encounter: Tensions in the Friendship with Afro-Asian Partners, 1945–1965,” in Cold War Crossings: International Travel and Exchange Across the Soviet Bloc, 1940s–1960s, eds. Patryk Babiracki and Kenyon Zimmer (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2014), 145. 137. On the Wankie campaign, see Ellis, External Mission, 62–64. 138. Alex La Guma, “The Time Has Come,” Sechaba 1, no. 6 (1967), 15. 139. Alex La Guma, “The Condition of Culture in South Africa,” Présence africaine 80 (1971): 113–22; Alex La Guma, “Culture and Liberation,” Sechaba 10, no. 4 (1976):

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50–58. On Cabral, see Amilcar Cabral, “National Liberation and Culture,” in Return to the Source: Selected Speeches by Amilcar Cabral, ed. Africa Information Service (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973): 39–56. 140. Alex La Guma, “The Writer in a Modern African State: From the Discussion,” in The Writer in Modern Africa: African-Scandinavian Writers’ Conference, Stockholm 1967, ed. Per Wästberg (Uppsala: The Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1968), 22. Soyinka’s remarks, which prompted La Guma’s response, were based on his own experience holding up a radio station in 1965. See Biodun Jeyifo, Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics and Postcolonialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 6. 141. Balutansky, The Novels of Alex La Guma, 8. 142. Yousaf, Alex La Guma, xi. 143. JanMohamed, Manichean Aesthetics, 227. 144. La Guma’s third novel, The Stone Country, which is about the experience of prison, seems too obvious a case for JanMohamed’s subtle point. 145. JanMohamed, Manichean Aesthetics, 262. 146. La Guma dedicated In the Fog of the Seasons’ End to Basil February, a member of SACPO and MK, who died in 1967 during the ill-conceived Wankie Campaign. He was the first Coloured MK recruit to die for the struggle. 147. Yousaf, Alex La Guma, 14. The original line is from Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963 [1961]), 35. 148. It should be noted that debates exist over defining Soviet “modernity.” See, for example, Michael David-Fox, Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015). 149. JanMohamed, Manichean Aesthetics, 262. 150. La Guma with Klammer, In the Dark with My Dress on Fire, 157. Though Alex does not mention this fact in his account, it may explain the discussion of his family’s history—a tacit sense of generational continuation from father, to son, and to grandson. 151. Ibid., 180. 152. Vera Tolz, “‘Cultural Bosses’ as Patrons and Clients: The Functioning of the Soviet Creative Unions in the Postwar Period,” Contemporary European History 11, no. 1 (2002): 87–105. The union’s formation followed a decree by the Central Committee of the Communist Party in 1932 that writers be collected into a single organization that would aid the Soviet regime. See Jack F. Matlock, Jr., “The ‘Governing Organs’ of the Union of Soviet Writers,” The American Slavic and East European Review 15, no. 3 (1956): 382–99. 153. George Melnikov, “The Fourth Congress of Soviet Writers: Continuity and Change,” The Slavic and East European Journal 14, no. 2 (1970), 201. It was also predominantly male. 154. Maria Zezina, “Crisis in the Union of Soviet Writers in the Early 1950s,” EuropeAsia Studies 46, no. 4 (1994), 649. 155. Melnikov, “The Fourth Congress,” 199. 156. John Garrard and Carol Garrard, Inside the Soviet Writers’ Union (New York: Free Press, 1990), 9. 157. Ibid., 12. 158. As quoted in Ibid. 159. Ibid., 35. 160. Ibid., 35–37, 41. 161. Ibid., 41. 162. Ibid., 43. 163. Ludmilla B. Turkevich, “The Second Congress of Soviet Writers,” Books Abroad 30, no. 1 (1956), 32. 164. Melnikov, “The Fourth Congress,” 199, 201. Soviet writers were also actively encouraged to participate internationally in order to promote socialism.

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165. Jabulani Mkhize, “Alex la Guma’s Politics and Aesthetics,” Alternation 5, no. 1 (1998): 130–168; Jabulani Mkhize, “‘Road to Consciousness’: And a Threefold Cord and The Stone Country,” Alternation 5, no. 2 (1998): 147–65. 166. Alex La Guma, “Literature and Life,” Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings 4 (1970): 237–39; Alex La Guma, “What I Learned from Maxim Gorky,” Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings 34 (1977): 164–68. On Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, see Monica Popescu, “Aesthetic Solidarities: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and the Cold War,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 50, no. 4 (2014): 384–97. On Serote and Langa, see Popescu, “On the Margins of the Black Atlantic.” 167. On the British tradition, see, for example, Peter J. Kalliney, Commonwealth of Letters: British Literary Culture and the Emergence of Postcolonial Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 168. Field, Alex La Guma, 171. 169. As quoted in Abram Tertz [Andrei Sinyavsky], The Trial Begins and On Socialist Realism, trans. Max Hayward and George Dennis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982 [1960]), 148. 170. Amy Bryzgel, Performing the East: Performance Art in Russia, Latvia and Poland since 1980 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), 23. 171. Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 46, 65; Lily Wiatrowski Phillips, “W. E. B. Du Bois and Soviet Communism: The Black Flame as Socialist Realism” in Socialist Realism without Shores, eds. Thomas Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 262. 172. Clark, The Soviet Novel, 39–41, 49, 123; Phillips, “W. E. B. Du Bois and Soviet Communism,” 263, 265–66, 267. 173. Gorky wrote this travel account after a return from exile. He had criticized the violence of the Red Terror during the Russian Civil War (1917–1922) following the Bolshevik Revolution and, as a result, had lived abroad between 1921 and 1928. His travel memoir consequently represented his turn from critic to proponent of the Soviet Union under Stalin. David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment, 144, 147, 148, 152–54, 154–55. 174. Ibid., 142. 175. Evgeny Dobrenko, The Making of the State Writer: Social and Aesthetic Origins of Soviet Literary Culture, trans. Jesse M. Savage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 363–64. 176. Horne, Black and Red; Phillips, “W. E. B. Du Bois and Soviet Communism.” See also Lily Wiatrowski Phillips, “The Black Flame Revisited: Recursion and Return in the Reading of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Trilogy,” CR: The New Centennial Review 15, no. 2 (2015): 157–69. 177. Dale E. Peterson, Up from Bondage: The Literatures of Russian and African American Soul (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 136. Robin Kelley has remarked in passing that surrealism was preferred over socialist realism due to its ability to capture the black experience more fully. See Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), 191. 178. Maxim Gorky, Mother, trans. Margaret Wettlin (Moscow: Raduga Publishers, 1985 [1906]); V. I. Lenin, “Party Organisation and Party Literature,” (1905), Marxists Internet Archive, accessed December 5, 2016, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ works/1905/nov/13.htm. 179. Clark, The Soviet Novel, 27; Fyodor Vasilievich Gladkov, Cement, trans. A. S. Arthur and C. Ashleigh (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1994 [1925]). 180. As quoted in Thomas Lahusen, “Socialist Realism in Search of Its Shores: Some Historical Remarks on the ‘Historically Open Aesthetic System of the Truthful Representation of Life,’” in Socialist Realism without Shores, eds. Thomas Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 5, 6. 181. Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), chapter 10. See also his reappraisal, Edward W. Said, “Travel-

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ling Theory Reconsidered,” in Rethinking Fanon: The Continuing Dialogue, ed. Nigel C. Gibson (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999): 197–214. 182. V. I. Lenin, “Our Foreign and Domestic Position and Party Tasks,” November 21, 1920, Marxists Internet Archive, accessed November 22, 2016, https:// www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/nov/21.htm. The GOELRO plan was the first Soviet development plan drafted in 1920 and implemented starting in 1921. Lenin initiated the plan, believing that electrification was vital for Soviet industry. The plan involved the construction of thirty regional power plants, including ten hydroelectric dams. GOELRO is an acronym of the Russian name for the State Commission for the Electrification of Russia. 183. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, chapter 2; V. I. Lenin, What is to be Done?, trans. Joe Fineberg and George Hanna, rev. and intro. Robert Service (New York: Penguin, 1988 [1902]). 184. Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1965). 185. Julius K. Nyerere, Ujamaa: Essays on Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968); Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. 186. Laurence Harris, “South Africa’s Economic and Social Transformation: From ‘No Middle Road’ to ‘No Alternative,’” Review of African Political Economy 57 (1993): 91–103; H. J. Simons and R. E. Simons, Class and Colour in South Africa, 1850–1950 (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1969); Harold Wolpe, “Capitalism and Cheap LabourPower in South Africa: From Segregation to Apartheid,” Economy & Society 1, no. 4 (1972): 425–56. 187. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, 108. 188. See the “Editor’s Introduction” to Langston Hughes, A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia, ed. David Mikosz (Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan: Al Salam Printhouse, 2006 [1934]). 189. Hughes, A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia, 6. 190. Ibid. 191. Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander, 176–77. 192. Ibid., 116. On the comparison with Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright, see ibid., 120. 193. His emphasis. Ibid., 116. Langston Hughes discusses how he traveled extensively with Arthur Koestler, even noting a trial that both witnessed in Ashkhabad, which Hughes suggests was the beginning of Darkness at Noon. Koestler was disturbed, though Hughes was more blasé, even joking about it with Koestler. See ibid., 116–17. 194. McKay, A Long Way from Home, 208. 195. Ibid. 196. Padmore with Pizer, How Russia Transformed Her Colonial Empire, 93. 197. Ibid. 198. Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 8, 9, 312. 199. The tenure of Leonid Brezhnev, during which La Guma traveled, is considered neo-Stalinist in orientation. 200. Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 432. 201. Ibid., 432–33. See also Joshua A. Sanborn, “Family, Fraternity, and Nation-Building in Russia, 1905–1925,” in A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Building in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, eds. Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 93–110. 202. Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire, 1–2. 203. Ibid., 4–8. 204. Hirsch, Empire of Nations, 7, 8. 205. It should be noted that the 1969 Morogoro Conference held in Tanzania marked the opening of ANC membership to any South African, regardless of race, thus advancing at an organizational level the promise of non-racialism that emerged during

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the 1950s. A Soviet Journey can be read against this shifting backdrop of party politics. For one overview, see Nhlanhla Ndebele and Noor Nieftagodien, “The Morogoro Conference: A Moment of Self-Reflection,” in The Road to Democracy in South Africa: Volume I (1960–1970), ed. South African Democracy Education Trust (Cape Town: Zebra Press, 2004): 573–99. 206. Felix J. Oinas, “The Political Uses and Themes of Folklore in the Soviet Union,” Journal of the Folklore Institute 12, nos. 2/3 (1975), 158. 207. Felix J. Oinas, “Folklore and Politics in the Soviet Union,” Slavic Review 32, no. 1 (1973), 46–55. 208. Field, Alex La Guma, 170, 175. 209. Rudagi is also transliterated as “Rudaki,” and Ulugbek as “Ulugh Beg.” I am using La Guma’s spelling in this instance. 210. Phillips, “W. E. B. Du Bois and Soviet Communism,” 266. 211. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004 [1961]), 148. 212. For recent examples, see Gaurav Desai, Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India, and the Afrasian Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); Dan Ojwang, Reading Migration and Culture: The World of East African Indian Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 213. My thoughts here derive from J. M. Coetzee, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 4. 214. Popescu, South African Literature, 37. 215. Ibid., 43–47. 216. Leonid Heller, “A World of Prettiness: Socialist Realism and Its Aesthetic Categories,” in Socialist Realism without Shores, eds. Thomas Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 51; Lahusen, “Socialist Realism in Search of Its Shores,” 12–13; N. N. Shneidman, “Soviet Prose in the 1970’s: Evolution or Stagnation?” Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue Canadienne des Slavistes 20, no. 1 (1978), 72. 217. N. N. Shneidman, “Iurii Trifonov and the Ethics of Contemporary Soviet City Life,” Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue Canadienne des Slavistes 19, no. 3 (1977), 335; Shneidman, “Soviet Prose in the 1970’s,” 65. On socialist realism at the 1967 Congress, see Melnikov, “The Fourth Congress,” 201. For further reading on the 1970s, see N. N. Shneidman, Soviet Literature in the 1970s: Artistic Diversity and Ideological Conformity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979). 218. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 247. 219. Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1965 [1959]), chapter 1. It should be noted that Fanon has been criticized for fetishizing the veil, which constitutes another kind of Orientalism. 220. For comparison of this issue, see Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). 221. See Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Doubleday, 2003); Jeffrey S. Hardy, The Gulag after Stalin: Redefining Punishment in Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, 1953–1964 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016). 222. La Guma’s frequent mention of the Decembrists throughout the text is partly due to the 150th anniversary of the revolt in 1975. 223. Field, Alex La Guma, 114, 146. 224. Edward W. Said, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (New York: Vintage, 2007), 148. 225. Premesh Lalu, “Incomplete Histories: Steve Biko, the Politics of Self-Writing and the Apparatus of Reading,” Current Writing 16, no. 1 (2004), 108; Christopher J. Lee, “Tricontinentalism in Question: The Cold War Politics of Alex La Guma and the African National Congress,” in Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and

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Its Political Afterlives, ed. Christopher J. Lee (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), 270–71. 226. I make this comment in a general sense: Guevara was killed in Bolivia in October 1967. 227. Field, Alex La Guma, 194, 195. 228. Ibid., 225. 229. One of the attacks in 1975 occurred in the USSR, though this episode goes unmentioned in A Soviet Journey. See ibid., 195. 230. Ibid., 195–96, 221–23. 231. Stephen Ellis and Tsepo Sechaba, Comrades against Apartheid: The ANC and the South African Communist Party in Exile (London: James Currey, 1992), 197. 232. Hirsch, Empire of Nations, 1, 2; Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 233. Hirsch, Empire of Nations, 3. On nationalism, see, for example, Ben Fowkes, The Disintegration of the Soviet Union: A Study in the Rise and Triumph of Nationalism (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997); Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (1994): 414–52; Jeremy Smith, The Bolsheviks and the National Question, 1917–23 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999); Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). On the USSR in relation to imperialism and decolonization, see, for example, Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), chapter 12; Robert Conquest, ed., The Last Empire: Nationality and the Soviet Future (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1986); David Chioni Moore, “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique,” PMLA 116, no. 1 (2001): 111–28; Northrop, Veiled Empire; Robert Strayer, “Decolonization, Democratization, and Communist Reform: The Soviet Collapse in Comparative Perspective,” Journal of World History 12, no. 2 (2001): 375–406. For a longer view including Tsarist Russia, see Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience (London: Polity, 2011); Joshua A. Sanborn, Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 234. Compare, for example, Adrienne Lynn Edgar, Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Adeeb Khalid, “Backwardness and the Quest for Civilization: Early Soviet Central Asia in Comparative Perspective,” Slavic Review 65, no. 2 (2006): 231–51; Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015); Northrop, Veiled Empire. 235. Hirsch, Empire of Nations, 5, 6. 236. Popescu, South African Literature, 30. 237. It should be noted that “Tsepo Sechaba” is a pseudonym for a member of the SACP and the ANC. Ellis and Sechaba, Comrades against Apartheid, 9, 10. 238. Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander, 209. 239. Ibid., 210–11. 240. Ibid., 212. 241. Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 57; Eric Porter, The Problem of the Future World: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Race Concept at Midcentury (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 10. 242. Mullen, Un-American, 12 243. Padmore with Pizer, How Russia Transformed Her Colonial Empire, 178. 244. It should be noted that Lee looks at the interwar period. See Steven Lee, The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 4. 245. My thinking on world literature stems from Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (London: Verso, 2013); Pheng Cheah, What is a World?: On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University

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Press, 2016); Aamir R. Mufti, Forget English!: Orientalisms and World Literatures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 246. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 162. 247. On radical empathy, see Christopher J. Lee, Frantz Fanon: Toward a Revolutionary Humanism (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015). 248. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992). 249. Lahusen, “Socialist Realism in Search of Its Shores,” 13. 250. Arjun Appadurai, The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition (London: Verso, 2013), 295. 251. Katsakioris, “The Soviet-South Encounter,” 135. My thoughts here are also influenced by Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 29. 252. Balutansky, The Novels of Alex La Guma, 105. 253. My thoughts here are inspired by Bill Mullen and how Du Bois’s “un-Americanness” provides a counter-narrative to the more familiar “American Du Bois.” See Mullen, Un-American, 7. 254. JanMohamed, Manichean Aesthetics, 262. 255. Maxim Gorky, Culture and the People (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2001 [1939]), 215; Georg Lukács, “Eulogy for Maxim Gorky: A Great Proletarian Humanist” (1936), Marxists Internet Archive, accessed December 7, 2016, https:// www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/1936/gorky.htm. 256. James was a notable Trotskyist. See C. L. R. James, World Revolution 1917–1936: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International (New York: Humanity Books, 1993). On the Culture and Resistance Festival, see Diana Wylie, Art and Revolution: The Life and Death of Thami Mnyele, South African Artist (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2008), chapter 6. 257. Hirsch, Empire of Nations, 324. 258. Barbara Harlow, After Lives: Legacies of Revolutionary Writing (London: Verso, 1996), 6. 259. Lee, “The Uses of the Comparative Imagination,” 33. 260. David Scott, Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 37. 261. Ibid., 166. 262. Alex La Guma, “The Real Picture: Interview with Cecil Abrahams,” in Memories of Home: The Writings of Alex La Guma, ed. Cecil Abrahams (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1991), 20.

Epigraph

Truly when a person is on a journey he learns many things, and he increases his knowledge. —Salim bin Abakari, A Journey to Russia and Siberia in 1896

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Over the eight-penny seats the smell of fried fish and tobacco mingled with cheap perfume and breath, and the beam from the projector-room was hazy with cigarette smoke. On the screen Russia flickered: the poor, discarded heroine ran tearfully beside the train through the falling studio snowflakes, frantically searching each lighted carriage window. There was the Prince, haughty and disdainful, ignoring her pleas, tears, staring ahead stonily. Later in the film, contrite, he followed her into the Siberian snows and exile. The women in the eight-pennies wiped their eyes, and Hollywood’s Resurrection came to an end. On another occasion, Nelson Eddy in a satin blouse and high boots sang “Dark Eyes” and “The Volga Boatmen,” the Revolution came, and all the nobility fled to Paris to open restaurants where there was more singing to the accompaniment of nostalgic balalaikas. 1 These were our childhood impressions of one-sixth of the world’s surface. One’s education improved in patches: with the stories of Gorky; my father’s reminiscences of two brief trips to Moscow in the 1920s; the Friends of the Soviet Union in South Africa showed The Battleship Potemkin and The Stone Flower; after the Second World War there was the documentary Battle of Stalingrad. 2 For the rest, the USSR was a big patch on the map of the world, the unpronounceable names of cities, odd articles in newspapers, and the Collected Works of V. I. Lenin. Discussion groups debated the national question, and the USSR was cited regularly as an example of how problems of national conflict had been resolved. Phrases leaped like electric sparks through the stale air of meeting rooms: “Workers’ power,” “the right to self-determination,” “the Land of Soviets,” “national culture.” A. A. Gromyko spoke at the United Nations; the Soviet Union supported the anti-colonialist struggles, condemned apartheid, aided the national liberation movements. 3 In spite of the Cold War, anti-Soviet campaigns, the USSR lodged in the minds of the poor, the struggling. Sometimes sophisticatedly, sometimes simply. They were on our side. In a prison cell in Cape Town, an unknown prisoner had scratched crudely on the wall: “Russia will never die.” In November 1917 (October by the old Russian calendar), the armed workers, soldiers, and sailors had stormed the Winter Palace in Petrograd as the guns of the Aurora cruiser on the Neva River fired the first salvo. 4 Today some commentators in the West—can one call them historians?— 63

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grumble disconsolately that the storming of the Winter Palace is all a myth. But A. V. Lunacharsky had been there, and John Reed, among others. 5 The clay foundations of an old empire crumbled to dust, and the waves created by its collapse spread far and wide, touching and changing the lives of millions all over the world. For the first time in history, the oppressed classes of a country seized power to build a new kind of state. The shock waves of this Revolution did not fail to stir those who inhabited the colonial countries. The first demonstrations of support for the actions of the revolutionaries were made by Senegalese troops of the French Army stationed in Romania. Units among them refused to take part in suppressing Soviet power in Russia. The October Revolution hastened the formation of Marxist-Leninist parties and groups everywhere. In particular, the defeat of Nazism and the Japanese military machine by the effort in the main of the Soviet Army and the Soviet people added impetus to the development of struggle in the colonies. Surely the effect of the war was that the poor were finally convinced that they could conquer their seemingly invulnerable masters. Lenin had said that the replacement of capitalism by socialism was a historic epoch, which would consist of a whole series of democratic and revolutionary movements, including the national liberation movement among the underdeveloped, backward, and oppressed nations. The socialist revolution, he pointed out, would not be solely, or chiefly, a struggle of the revolutionary proletarians in each country against their bourgeoisie; it would be a struggle of all dependent countries against international imperialism. 6 One way or the other, the movements of the colonial peoples could not ignore the socialist alternative. The socialist orientation of Algeria was approved in 1963, and a number of other developing countries came out in favor of socialism. The Convention People’s Party of Ghana declared in 1962 that taking into account the legacy left behind by imperialism, socialism is the system which will enable Ghana to develop. Sékou Touré said in the same year that the experience of his country was a new attempt at socialist development of a peasant land. And Keita of Mali said that the final and irreversible choice in favor of socialism has been made. In Asia and Latin America the same ideas were being expressed. 7 The program of the Popular Unity government of Chile led by the slain Salvador Allende stated that it would be a multi-party one and that the opposition would have full freedom to act within legal limits. 8 On the economic front, it said that the main objective of the policy of the united popular forces was to replace the present economic structure—to begin the building of socialism. The acceptance of socialism in principle is no substitute for a profound study of the realities of the world, for the concrete implementation of theory in everyday life. Various obstacles, including counter-revolu-

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tionary coups, might have interrupted the process, but it is clear that the very fact that socialist ideas, no matter how variant, have been accepted is proof of the ideological and political defeat suffered by the old order. In May 1974, a column of people led by Fidel Castro and Pepe Ramírez, leader of the Cuban Small Farmers Association, climbed the muddy slopes of the Sierra Maestra to a small clearing known as La Plata to commemorate the fifteenth anniversary of a law, which had radically changed the lives and perspectives of the Cuban peasantry with its agrarian reform. 9 “When the imperialists organized their counter-revolutionary bands and committed all sorts of crimes against our peasants, our workers, our revolutionary officials, and our teachers and even against those who were teaching others how to read and write,” Castro told the meeting, “our workers and peasants closed ranks in the struggle against those counter-revolutionary bands and wiped them off our soil forever.” [Castro continued:] It should be pointed out that to this alliance, to this union of the two classes, the peasants and the workers, the workers contributed something essential, decisive, indispensable, and irreplaceable today. . . . The working class contributed to this struggle with its own ideology: Marxism-Leninism, the struggle for socialism, for communism. An alliance between workers and landowners and an alliance between workers and bankers and great capitalists were out of the question. An alliance between exploiters and exploited was out of the question. It was necessary to establish an alliance of the exploited—and the two exploited classes were precisely the working class and the peasantry. The working class and the peasantry became united to make the revolution, to establish a new way of life and a new society, to put an end to the exploitation of man by man, to build socialism, to build communism. That is what Lenin had in mind when he spoke of the need for the worker-peasant alliance in the old tsarist regime. 10

It was no sermon on the Mount, for what Fidel Castro was saying was that it had been done before, had been done again, and could still be done. Decades ago the common interests of the working people, and working people of different nationalities, had taken the road to socialism, spurred on by a desire for joint effort and fraternal co-operation, to form in December 1922 a single multinational state, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. We all wanted to see this much proclaimed wonder of the world. But one wanted to see it beyond the theoretical works of Lenin—the ranked volumes on numerous bookshelves; the posters of solid-jawed workers against a background of factories; the pictures of Soviet leaders at state receptions, at the United Nations; the exhibitions. This, one felt, could no longer be the country of medieval icons; the accounts of Marco Polo: “Russia is a very large province lying towards the north. The people are

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Christians and observe the Greek rite. They have several kings and speak a language of their own. They are very simple folk, and they are very good-looking, both men and women, for they are fair-skinned and blonde. . . . It is not a country of much commercial wealth. It is true, however, that it produces precious furs—sable, ermine, vair, and foxes in abundance, the best and most beautiful in the world. . . . Russia is such a huge province that it extends as far as the Ocean. In this Ocean are islands that breed many gyrfalcons and peregrines, which are exported to several parts of the world.” Or, perhaps, this still was part of the picture? Many of the old things, much of the past, possibly still hung on?

“I often go to the Soviet Union for my holidays,” the little Englishman, next to me, said. There was a crumb of airline cake on his chin. At his feet an airbag was decorated with a tag bearing the name of a travelers club, and I pictured him diligently paying the installments on the excursion costs throughout the preceding year. He had the air of the cosmopolitan despite his clerk-on-vacation look, and he spoke in Russian to the stewardess with ease, which made me feel the novice I was. The first invitation to visit the USSR had come in Scandinavia. In the course of attending a conference on Scandinavian and African writers a secretary from the Soviet Embassy had turned up with an offer from the Writers’ Union. 11 It was at a party given by the students, and the invitation came politely through the electronic blare of pop music. But I had to return to London in a hurry. I had just arrived in Europe, and there was the business of finding a flat, settling in, putting our children in school; crates of kitchenware and clothes had to be unpacked. One wondered whether the old-time exiles had bothered about such mundane things. The secretary from the embassy looked glum when I told him I was unable to accept this time. I bought him a whisky, and we sat for a while watching the dancers. But the following month the Writers’ Union invited me as a guest to their congress, and there I was on the plane, sitting beside the experienced Englishman. “Moscow is lovely,” he advised me, “but I like Leningrad better. More charm.” He took another bite of his cake. The distorted voice, which comes over all airline systems, made the usual announcement about seat belts. We obeyed the instructions, while craning our necks to see below as the plane started to lose height. My first glimpse of the USSR in early spring revealed an oval of black birch forests and patches of snow. The leaves had not yet begun to bloom, and the countryside around Moscow looked bleak. One thought of winter, the Nazi dead refrigerated in the bleached whiteness, of Napoleon’s gaunt troops retreating past the abandoned capsized cannon as they plodded in

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the heatless padding of despair into the levelled pitchforks of stolid peasants. Tolstoy’s War and Peace came into my mind as Russia rose toward the wheels of the aircraft. A soldier of the frontier forces—khaki and green, black top boots— watched the passengers deplane. I lost sight of the little Englishman and never saw him again, and so advanced into the concrete, glass, and steel of the arrival hall. Other planes had landed, and passengers jostled and milled under the signs in that strange alphabet, while a front line of rosy young women in padded clothes and headscarves cried, “Smallpox! Smallpox!” for our vaccination certificates.

As books will tell you, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is the largest country on the globe and covers an area of 22.4 million square kilometers. Cramped diagonals and tiny squares on a relief map will etch out such regions as the East European plain, the West Siberian lowland, the Transcaspian lowland. All these and other features form a sort of gigantic amphitheater tilted upward in the southeast, dipping downward north and west. It is a voluntary, federative association of fifteen sovereign republics. The yearbooks and encyclopedias are full of such facts, and the Soviet Union is fond of statistics: you find them everywhere. There is a certain permanent anxiety to inform. Not everybody gets a chance to visit there, and it is necessary to get beyond the little Englishman and the crowds of lapel-tagged tourists and delegates milling among the suitcases in the hotel lobbies: Chickasaw Travel, People to People, the Smithsonian Society. Once in 1968, returning from one of those odd visits, the customs officers at London Airport pricked up their ears when I replied that I had been to the Soviet Union. My bag was ransacked, the seams examined. I was taken to a little room where I was searched from head to toe, my conference papers were taken away for a while, probably to be photographed, while a special branch man who called me “sir” chatted politely about communism in spite of my stare, but the police states are beyond the “Iron Curtain” or what Mr. Harold Wilson later called “the great divide,” where the passport officer merely rubber-stamped me through the barrier with a smile, and the customs men did not bother. 12 “Communism is all right,” the special branch man said. “The trouble is that it is administered by human beings.” I wondered curiously whether he meant that the administrators of capitalist states were not human, therefore free of “the trouble.” I left him with his natty blazer, the plump pink cheeks and smooth hair, and the smile of triumph having delivered his little talk on “communism.” Who were these “human beings”? The Soviet Union is a multinational state; it is populated by more than one hundred large and small national-

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ities. Together with such large nations as the Russians and the Ukrainians there are very small national minorities of about a thousand (the Orochi and the Nganasans) or a mere five hundred (the Yukagirs). 13 All of these have caused the USSR to become of irreversible international importance, a major landmark in social development. Soviet experience in creating a multinational socialist state, in grappling by common effort with a complex national question, has won world recognition, and the attention of all those who still seek the answer to such questions. The existence of the Soviet Union guarantees the encyclopedic experience of millions who survived the Civil War, Hitler’s invasion, and what L. I. Brezhnev described thirty years after the victory over Nazism as “torrents of slander and provocations . . . atomic blackmail, attempts at economic blockade. . . .” 14 Many had to be satisfied with such information. Now, luckily, I was far from the eight-penny seats in the smoky cinema in Cape Town. The pictures did not waver and flicker, and the snow was not artificial. NOTES 1. Resurrection (1927) is a film based on a novel by Leo Tolstoy published in 1899, which depicts an aristocrat’s confrontation with a world of poverty and misery. “Dark Eyes” and “The Volga Boatmen” are traditional Russian songs. La Guma is referencing the film Balalaika (1939), which starred Nelson Eddy. 2. Battleship Potemkin (1925) is a famous film by Russian director Sergei M. Eisenstein (1898–1948), based on an actual mutiny during the 1905 Russian Revolution that Eisenstein transformed into an allegory of socialist revolution more generally. The Stone Flower (1946) is a Soviet film directed by Aleksandr Ptushko (1900–1973). The Battle of Stalingrad (1949) is a two-part film directed by Vladimir Petrov (1896–1966). Though La Guma refers to it as a documentary, it is a fictionalized account of the battle. 3. “A. A. Gromyko” is Andrei Andreyevich Gromyko (1909–1989), a Soviet diplomat and minister of foreign affairs who also served on the United Nations Security Council. 4. The provisional Bolshevik government converted Russia to the Gregorian calendar in 1918 from the Julian calendar that existed during the Tsarist period. This change conformed to Western European practices. The October Revolution thus occurred in the month of October according to the older Julian calendar, not the Gregorian calendar. 5. “A. V. Lunacharsky” refers to Anatoly Lunacharsky (1875–1933), a Ukrainianborn Soviet revolutionary who served as the People’s Commissariat for Education as well as a Soviet diplomat at the League of Nations. John Reed (1887–1920) was an American socialist and journalist who wrote Ten Days that Shook the World (1919), a first-hand report of the Bolshevik Revolution. 6. The following note is included in the original text: “See V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 30, p. 159.” 7. The Convention People’s Party (CPP) was founded in 1949 by Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972). Sékou Touré (1922–1984), also known as Ahmed Sékou Touré, was the first president of Guinea, which became independent in 1958. “Keita” refers to Modibo Keïta (1915–1977), the first president of Mali.

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8. Salvador Allende (1908–1973) was a socialist elected to the presidency of Chile in 1970 and later ousted in a military coup in 1973, sponsored by the United States. He committed suicide during the coup. 9. This passage refers to the Agrarian Reform Law (1959), a juridical measure crafted by Ernesto “Che” Guevara and implemented by the Cuban government that limited the size of landholdings and prohibited foreign ownership of sugar plantations, among other measures. José (Pepe) Ramírez Cruz (1922–2014) was president of the National Association of Small Farmers from 1961 to 1987. 10. This block quote did not exist in the original text. I have created it in keeping with current editorial criteria in order to clarify further which words were Castro’s. 11. La Guma is referring to the Union of Soviet Writers, also known as the USSR Union of Writers and the Soviet Union of Writers. La Guma uses the name “Writers Union” without the apostrophe. I have chosen to insert the apostrophe to spell “Writers’ Union” since this usage is common in current texts. The conference that La Guma speaks of is the 1967 African-Scandinavian Writers’ Conference held in Stockholm from February 6 to 9, mentioned in the introduction. The timing of the conference and the invitation to visit the USSR reconfirms that his first visit to the Soviet Union occurred in March 1967. 12. Harold Wilson (1916–1995) was a member of the British Labour Party and prime minister of Great Britain from 1964 to 1970 and 1974 to 1976. 13. These minorities that La Guma refers to are indigenous peoples located in Siberia. 14. “L. I. Brezhnev” is Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev (1906–1982), General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which he headed from 1964 to his death in 1982. His length of term was second only to Joseph Stalin’s, who held the position from 1922 to 1952. The following note is included in the original text: “L. I. Brezhnev, Following Lenin’s Course, Moscow, 1975, p. 556.” The civil war La Guma mentions is the Russian Civil War (1917–1922) following the October Revolution.

ONE Flashbacks

From somewhere in the distance came the faint sounds of bands playing. It came through dreamless sleep, and when I woke up the spring sky beyond the window was blue and cloudless. The bands went on playing, but when I went to the window of the hotel room there was nothing to see but a man in a white coat in the courtyard below, a girl in a track suit doing exercises in a patch of sunlight by a wall, and past the rooftops opposite, the red star on the tower of the Kremlin. The night before I had landed at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow. Something had gone wrong, and my friend had not turned up to meet me. An airport official who spoke English asked me to sit down while somebody used the telephone. Beyond the plate glass the night looked chilly, but few people were wearing heavy clothes. The airport man came back and said somebody was on the way to meet me. He wore a blue Aeroflot uniform and had a dark Uzbek face and smiled all the time. “First time in our country?” he asked. “No. I have been here before on short visits,” I told him. Beyond us the tannoy announced the flights in the usual distorted tones, and people with suitcases went in and out of the swing-doors. 1 In the square outside people queued for taxis in the dark. “It takes a long time to see the whole of the Soviet Union,” the airport man said. “You should come one day on a long trip.” He sounded eager that everybody should see his country and gestured at a huge stylized map of the USSR showing the network of air routes. “We are always ready to help.” The friend who came to meet me that time spoke only German, and I summoned a few guide-book phrases from a rear pigeon-hole of my memory and stumbled into fairly intelligible communication. The airline

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man was going off duty and asked whether we could give him a lift as far as the city terminal. From the airport to the city the road was long and dark and empty until the first suburbs swept into sight. Old-style wooden houses and then the blocks of flats, windows showing yellow light here and there; a blue neon sign over a provision store saying Gastronom. The smiling Uzbek chatted all the way as we exchanged cigarettes. On the roadside we passed the war memorial, constructed in the form of huge red tank barriers. This was the furthest point of the Nazi advance on Moscow. “We did not invite them, so we had to kill them,” the Uzbek said. “If they had come as guests like you we would have taken them to Moscow in a taxi.” His brown face wrinkled with chuckles. Moscow came into sight, lit up against the dark sky a bridge across the Moskva River, a growing montage of neon decorations and signs in the unfamiliar alphabet that made a particolored haze among the blocks and spires.

The bands were for the Young Pioneers. It was their day, and they were on parade that morning. 2 In Manezhnaya Square the remnants of the parade made a scattering like confetti of red scarves and caps, white shirts, that trickled away down the side streets. It seemed as if Moscow had become a city of children. They were everywhere, in files or in groups, outnumbering the adult citizens, crowding around the street stalls that sold ice cream, pastries, pirozhki (pastries) stuffed with egg, rice, or meat. Stout women in white overalls manned these kiosks surrounded by thickets of impatient hands. In March, there had been somber-colored coats, sheepskins, quilted jackets and shawls, boots, in the last brisk cold of departing winter. Now in May, along Ulitsa (Street) Gorky, Leninsky Prospekt, Prospekt Marxa, and on Red Square, winter had been shed, and the Muscovite women in gay dresses bloomed like flowers with blonde, brown, black tousled heads and bare arms. The winter boots were gone, and the men wore open sandals. You walked in the stream of people through the subway and came out again into the sunlight, passed the History Museum, and there you were in the square with the long crenelated red walls of the Kremlin and the fir trees and the dome overhead where the red flag flapped quietly in the small breeze. Here over the cobblestones with the faded traffic lines, the thousands of feet and the heavy wheels of displayed armor and weaponry crunched as the mass parades of workers, soldiers, and sailors pass November after November, May Day after May Day, the ranks passing the geometrical red marble tomb where Lenin lies. 3

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St. Basil’s Cathedral looks just as it appears on innumerable postcards, with the candy-striped colors and gilt onion-domes. Within the walls of the Assumption Cathedral the icons look back at sightseers with the sad eyes of disappointed saints. The steel and glass Palace of Congresses looks somewhat out of place among the old structures from Russian history, too modern, too angular, too shiny, like a computer lost in Atlantis. But at night you ride up its seemingly miles of escalators with the chatter of Russian, American, and English tongues into the fairyland drama of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake presented by the Bolshoi ballet company, and you can pardon its proximity to the ancient spires and the Tsar Bell with its broken-off chip that weighed eleven tons. At Lenin’s Mausoleum the inevitable queue had formed, waiting to be admitted past the rigid sentries. It was a sort of pilgrimage: not only religious people are spiritually moved, for the working class has its own heroes. In the thronged square cameras clicked as holidaymakers posed, and an excursion agent with a loudhailer advertised his sightseeing tour. Across the square, behind a line of trees, the bulk of the GUM department store spills out its customers onto the old cobblestones. The square is eight hundred years old. Here on Red Square in 1380, the cheering Muscovites had crammed to welcome the dusty warriors who had just routed Mamai’s Tatar hordes at Kulikovo Field on the Don. Led by Prince Dmitry, now called Donskoi, the armored victors rode into the Kremlin through Frolovsky Gate, where the Spassky Gate now stands. One day in 1671, the square growled like a disturbed beast. Thousands had pushed in to watch the bearded prisoner brought in irons to be quartered on the scaffold at the place of execution in front of the Spassky Tower. This was Stenka Razin, who had led the peasant uprising that had swept over the country against the Russian nobility. He had apologized to the crowd for not being able to carry on his fight to the victorious end. Now people still sang the ballad of Stenka Razin and recounted legends of this peasant leader, and a street off Red Square where he died is named after him. There is another street nearby called Yevgeny Sapunov. He had commanded a company of Red Guards during the revolutionary days of 1917. Late in the evening of October 27, his company had marched across the square to take up guard duty at the Moscow Soviet, the headquarters of the uprising. Near the History Museum they were attacked by Cadets. The ensuing battle left the cobblestones dribbling with blood and strewn with the dead and wounded as the revolutionaries fought their way to the Moscow Soviet. The first bloody battle of the Moscow insurrection sparked off seven days of fierce street fighting, which ended in victory for the power of workers and peasants.

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Here on this square the people celebrated days of triumph and sorrow. In 1941, when the Nazi troops were at the gates of Moscow the army men had marched from the traditional November 7 parade straight to the front. Three and a half years later, at the Victory Parade, two hundred banners of the routed Wehrmacht—including Hitler’s personal standard— were hurled to the cobblestones at the foot of Lenin’s Mausoleum. In 1967, I stood with the crowd in the section designated for guests and delegations beside the Mausoleum and the speakers’ rostrum. It was cold that November 7, and it was the fiftieth anniversary of the Revolution. An old woman in bulky clothes sold hot spiced wine, and we drank from the paper cartons, waiting for the parade to begin. The perimeter was surrounded by thousands of people holding banners, and the square itself was packed with ranks of troops. Eventually there was a stir and a murmur in the crowd and craning of necks, and the overcoated and hatted figures of the leaders of the Soviet Union filing up onto the rostrum appeared. A voice bawled, and the ranked boots crashed to attention. A car with the general receiving the parade drove out of the Spassky Gate of the Kremlin. He heard the report of the officer commanding the military parade, drove past the lined up units, congratulating them on the holiday. Thereupon, leaving the car he ascended the rostrum and made a speech. After the speech the bands played again, and the troops passed in parade, the mobile weaponry trundling over the cobbles, and the vast intercontinental missiles looking like monstrous cigars with their crimson nose-cones, and then the ranks of athletes and children scattering the guests with bouquets; the floats and columns, and columns of workers under banners and placards and red flags that sprouted overhead like scarlet flowers. The parade went on for hours, and I learned afterward that the authorities had decided to shorten it in the future in view of the cold and uncertain weather during November. A vendor in the Metro was selling books, new translations of an Italian novel, poetry from Japan. From below the crowds streamed up the escalators from the platforms, hung with chandeliers and decorated with bronze statuary, disgorging into the streets. At a bookshop I bought a volume of poetry by the Kazakh Abai Kunanbayev in English. 4 On the shelves the Russian translations of Jack London, Hemingway, Dickens, Shakespeare, Mark Twain ranked shoulder to shoulder with Tolstoy, Gorky, Pushkin, Gogol. The taxi-driver needed a shave and drove with careless nonchalance past the boards advertising films and plays: Lev Tolstoy’s The Power of Darkness, John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. 5 I held onto my seat as we tore past the notices proclaiming industrial targets for that year and the decorative red flags and photographs of labor heroes and leaders of the Party. It seemed an elaborate sport, speeding, swerving, stalling, a game of touch-and-go. The traffic played “dodge’em,” buses, trucks, cars,

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checker-striped green taxis, Pobedas, Volgas, Zils, and the pedestrians seemed equally adroit. 6 The taxi-driver chuckled. He had driven many foreign visitors. Were the slums in Glasgow as bad as he had heard? What does this comrade do? “He is a writer,” my guide Victor told him. “Ah. Well, I hope he writes the truth,” the driver said, calmly squeezing between a trolleybus and a heavy truck. “Some of our writers either oversimplify things or they do not tell the real truth about our life and our society. Then we have to pull them up for it.” At the Dostoyevsky monument he climbed out with us and joined in the discussion, accepting one of my English cigarettes. Dostoyevsky’s Winter Notes on Summer Impressions after his travels in Western Europe: “And soon after this they proclaimed liberté, égalité, fraternité. Well and good! But what is liberté? It means freedom. What kind of freedom? Equal freedom for all to do whatever they wish within the framework of the law? When one may do whatever one wishes? When one possesses a million. Does freedom provide each man with a million? No. What is a man without a million? A man without a million is not one who does whatever he pleases, but one who is treated any way it pleases others. There is no evidence of fraternity, because what has emerged is the personal principle, that of separateness, enhanced by self-preservation and self-activity within one’s own I.” 7 I answered the knock on the door, and there was an aged and tiredlooking man with a lined face, unkempt hair. His baggy suit was shiny with wear, and he held a battered and bulging briefcase as if it contained delicate glass. He was a little tipsy and pumped my hand while he babbled in Russian. With the help of an English-speaking young man down the corridor I learned that my visitor was Maximov. “In 1927, I interviewed and photographed James La Guma,” he told me surprisingly, patting my shoulder. “Now I have come to see what the son looks like.” We sat down, and he excavated a bottle of wine from the aging briefcase. Would I join him? Indeed, I was interested to meet somebody who remembered my father in Moscow those years ago. We talked of those times, while he waved his glass, nodding and smiling merrily. He would bring me a photocopy of the newspaper—now no longer published—in which my father’s photograph appeared. He had taken the picture himself. True to his word, he turned up again with the photo-stated page carrying my father’s picture. We sat in the hotel restaurant under a frescoed ceiling that strangely showed overalled workers surrounded by Grecian-like nymphs, while the uniformed waitresses hurried about to the clicking of cutlery. He was more or less retired now, Maximov explained over the chicken cutlets and cognac; he did freelance journalism.

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He had a cottage in the suburbs and a garden where he grew tomatoes. He produced very good tomatoes, he said with pride. We said do svidanya (goodbye). He shook my hand and patted my arm and then walked away among the tables, clutching his old briefcase and his memories with a certain air of battered pride. At a theater down a side street I went to see Man of La Mancha one evening. 8 It was beautifully done and without the gaudiness one associated with plays with Spanish medieval background, and quite moving, which was how I thought the writer meant it to be, and I thought about it all the next day. In the gardens around the Kremlin elderly people rested with their string bags and read Pravda, Izvestia, and Trud under the lilacs, while the young couples sauntered by. It was like a sort of paseo, a promenade, the couple linked by their fingers and the girl sniffing at her tiny bouquet, while the boy smiled with that age-old secrecy. Beyond the lilacs was the tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the eternal flame, and here again the ordinary folk had laid simple bunches of flowers, and the newly-weds came to put down their bridal bouquets. It is the custom of bridal couples all over the Soviet Union. “DO SVIDANYA,” MOSCOW The early morning blurred the trees, and the river was dark, except for the reflection of the neon sign on the power station flashing the old slogan, “Communism means Soviet power plus the electrification of the entire country.” The dawn sky was broken by the skyline of the city with the wedding-cake architecture of the Ukraine Hotel and other tall buildings here and there. The ruby stars on the spires of the Kremlin winked. Downstairs the foyer was deserted except for a militiaman, who dozed in a chair by the big doors. Outside an old woman swept night off the sidewalk, swish-swish, with her reed broom. The taxicab sped through the awakening streets, and I discovered that the driver’s little son collected foreign coins, so I donated an old twelve-sided English three-penny piece to the collection. The first people were on their way to work from the yellow or beige blocks of flats, spilling from the early trolleybuses. In the five years of 1971–1975, the city built nearly 530,000 homes. All in all, nearly 2,500,000 people either moved into new houses or had their living conditions improved. They built another 132 schools, kindergartens, and nurseries for 55,600 children, over 1,000 new shops and restaurants and eleven cinemas. The façades of Herzen, Gorky, and Kropotkin streets and thousands of other places of historic interest were being given a facelift. Some 21,000 dilapidated or otherwise unworthy buildings were being demolished.

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There is a great deal of greenery in Moscow and much more in the new districts. Another 450 acres were being planted inside the city’s green belt. The Soviet Union loves monuments, and the Academy of Arts had set up a special council to advise on statuary in public places, and some thirty monuments were to be raised in public places in the city in the next few years. There is a new Sports Palace in Sokolniki, an Olympic rowing canal has been built in the city outskirts at Krylatskoye, and they are thinking about a children’s Sports Palace. In the capitalist countries the private ownership of land gives local authorities little chance of handling it as they would like. That is not the case in the USSR, and the Moscow City Soviet can make decisions in the interest of the Muscovites. PHANTOMS Perhaps, the little Englishman on the plane had been right. Leningrad had a personality of its own, perhaps because there is a mixture of old French and Italian, because it had been the old capital, because the Revolution had been born here. You could take your choice: it catered to a variety of sentiments. Leningrad is the halfway station between Asia and the Arctic, somebody once said. The plane came down over the suburbs, over single-story houses, and then big wooden houses, and the concrete estates crowding the old city wriggling around the Neva. Leningrad belongs to the Decembrists, that group of officers and nobles who revolted against the tsar in December 1825. When the guards paraded in St. Petersburg they had not sworn for Nicholas. Dispersed by artillery they suffered heavy losses; other outbreaks in the south were similarly defeated. Of 579 men brought to trial nearly half were acquitted, but five were hanged and 116 exiled to Siberia. 9 Leningrad can boast the Kirov ballet and the Elektrosila Works. You can also stroll along and see where the heroine of The Queen of Spades threw herself from the bridge into the Neva River. Leningrad was Pushkin’s and Dostoyevsky’s stamping ground. Here are the streets which are the backgrounds to Crime and Punishment or The Gambler. When the pale White Nights glint on the Peter and Paul Fortress, it is the ghost of St. Petersburg returned, the phantom city where Pushkin is dying after that duel and saying, “Goodbye, my friends,” to his rows of books. The golden needle of the Admiralty spire pierces the sky, and Dostoyevsky is heading across Sennaya Square, from the Engineers School, or down the Sadovaya toward the Nevsky. Into the Karetnaya the streets become darker and narrower. Perhaps, he is on his way to meet with the

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revolutionary socialist Petrashevsky or with Speshnev. He is part of the revolutionary organization for the struggle against autocracy. One early morning in April 1849, the gendarmerie arrives at his door, their sabers clanking. They have instructions for his arrest. He dresses, while the police rummage through his papers. “True Christianity demands a social commonwealth in which all share their goods.” Outside a carriage waits, and in the gray light of pre-dawn the street looks especially gloomy, and there is a thin drizzle. They all get into the carriage, and it rattles off down the street, bumping along the cobbles. Perhaps, they drive along the Yekaterininsky Canal, past the Summer Garden and arrive at the headquarters of the Third Section. 10 They pass several courtyards before the carriage stops. Many who went this way vanished or left again for the snows of Siberia or the Peter and Paul Fortress. Others are brought; all day they arrive. Hours later the soldiers are given orders, and the prisoners are marched out again to waiting carriages. The windows are painted over, and they only hear the journey: bridges, cobblestones, streets. Presently the carriages stop, and there is a glimpse of stone ramparts around St. Peter’s Gate of the Peter and Paul Fortress and Trezzini’s statue of Mars. They rumble over a bridge, and, perhaps, there is a peal of bells; it comes from the Peter and Paul Cathedral with its spire rising above the massive walls of the fortress. Days and months pass, and then the carriages arrive again. The snow lies heavy and yellow under the lights, and again they drive across the city and cross the Troitsky Bridge over the Neva. At last they stop, and the shouted orders crackle in the cold air that makes the prisoners shrink. They are in the great square, Semyonovskaya, the tsar’s parade ground. There are the cupolas of the Trinity Cathedral, and a packed crowd behind the rows of Cossacks, and officers on horseback and on foot. And off to one side are the firing-stakes. The bearded, black-clad priest is intoning a prayer, while the prisoners shiver in the cold. Somewhere nearby an official is reading from a paper: “. . . Condemn the aforesaid Petrashevsky Mikhail Vassilyevich to death by shooting. . . .” The emotionless voice goes on: “. . . the abovenamed Dostoyevsky Fyodor Mikhailovich . . . to death by shooting. . . .” The people in the crowd cross themselves, but “it is all a deception,” the prisoners think numbly. “They cannot mean to kill us.” Yet, there are the stakes, and the priest holding the silver crucifix out for them to kiss. Perhaps, some of them are contemptuous, sneering at the mumbo jumbo, and those who go first stride arrogantly in spite of the snow as they are led hooded and pinioned, to the stakes. Dostoyevsky embraces his friends. “Ready!” The firing squad levels their rifles. “Take aim!” They brace against the post for the tearing of the bullets. Yet nothing happens, and there is an officer spurring his horse forward waving a document like a wand.

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“Ground arms!” The poised rifles come down again, and somebody is reading once more, the titles tumbling monotonously into the cold air. “We, by the Grace of God, Emperor and Autocrat of all Russia, Moscow, Kiev, Vladimir, Novgorod, Tsar of Poland and Siberia, Grand Duke of Smolensk . . . Estonia, Duke of Finland. . . .” The prisoners shiver with cold and tension, listening in the darkness of the hoods. “We in our infinite mercy and clemency ordain that the sentence shall be remitted. . . . Petrashevsky . . . penal exile to Siberia for a period of twenty years. . . . Grigoryev . . . fifteen years.” “Perhaps, it would be better to shoot us,” one mutters. “Dostoyevsky Fyodor Mikhailovich, to penal exile in Siberia for four years and thereafter to service as a soldier. . . .” The cold sunlight glints on the cupolas of the Trinity Cathedral. There is a clanking of chains, the prisoners hobble and stumble awkwardly. “Farewell, my friends. Regret nothing. Ahead lies the long march toward the east, penal exile.” (Notes from a Dead House.) 11 The phantoms of the past reach out, but for a while are dissolved by the twinkling fountains of Petrodvorets. The garden stretches from the Summer Palace all the way to the sea, and hundreds of fountains splash happily among the flowerbeds and the statuary. The Nazi invasion played havoc here, but all damage has been restored to exactly as it looked before the Great Patriotic War, before the Revolution, as the tsars and tsarinas had left it. 12 From room to room in the Summer Palace, full of gilded furniture behind barriers of cord, ornate settees, and chairs à la the French Louises, one must walk in special felt slippers supplied at the entrance in order to protect the floors. There is a story that when the Soviet troops moved in to defend the Summer Palace during the siege of Leningrad, the resident caretaker had demanded that the soldiers remove their nailed boots. The commander decided the demand was ridiculous, considering the artillery bombardment taking place. But the old man was adamant: nobody was going to spoil his floors. The commander finally surrendered, and the Red Army men manned the palace in stockinged feet. Among the leaping fountains I was surrounded by a trio of Gypsy women, shawls, blouses, and long skirts all appearing worn and mouths flashing new looking gold teeth in their dark faces. They insisted on telling my fortune, gabbling in heavily accented Russian. One of them carried a baby wrapped up like a parcel in linen and tied with blue tape. I had to cross a palm with silver in the timeless tradition: one coin was not enough, and a cheerful haggling ensued. The one elected to read my hand peered into it, stuck her tongue in her cheek, frowned, shook her head, smiled, nodded. She rattled off in Russian, gesticulating at me while Victor translated, and then they all laughed and made off to the shrubbery and the flowerbeds with the swaddled infant.

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I had always been both skeptical, though curious, about what I would hear if I ever ventured to have my palm read. One avoided the fun-fair booths where Madame This or Madame That lurked behind bead curtains in her cheap imitation finery and muttered about “long journeys” and “strangers crossing one’s path” against the background of carnival music. But this was the “real thing,” genuine Gypsies, while in the distance children screamed with joy under the splashing fountains, and at the end of the garden the gulf grayly heaved with Finland in the distance. It would take days to see everything in the Hermitage. The ghosts of the masters stand at your shoulder, while you peer at their works and, probably, look affronted because you have to miss out a lot, because there is no time. It is the same thing with all vast galleries; you have to make up your mind beforehand what you want to see in the Prado in Madrid or the Louvre. A museum can bore you, but with a big art gallery you are always worried that you might have missed the best, and you go away with a nagging feeling that you should have left out one display in order to have time to see another. The phantoms of the past reach out again: the old Aurora still anchored on the Neva, and the sailors’ ghosts stand by the guns. Across the river in the city there is a crowd around the Smolny Institute, the former school for young ladies of the nobility. Figures hurry in and out of the entrance, pushing past the armed crowd, the bayonetted rifles gleaming in the fine rain—or is it snowing? The Petrograd Red Guards are assembling, the workers from the Putilov Works and other places, sailors, soldiers. It is the dark evening of November 7 in the new style, and there is a wary quietness in the air. Orders are coming: one unit goes here and another there, this one remains here to guard the headquarters, that one is sent to the Summer Garden. Voices clamor for news. “The Provisional Government is in session at the Winter Palace. They have put up barricades around the whole building, and they are held by the Cadets and the women’s death battalion.” A cannon crashes from a ship on the river. The cruiser signals the start for the storming of the Winter Palace. Cheering, and a torrent of people tumbles toward the Winter Palace. The units are all mixed up now, soldiers, sailors, armed workers pushing and thrusting ahead. The attack on the Winter Palace is launched from all sides. The Provisional Government hopes that reinforcements will arrive to save them. In the wet the attackers surge across the cobblestones, stream from the arches, under the fire of the Cadets. The Cadets have good cover behind the barricades, and their rife and machine-gun fire rains on the attackers. The attackers have reached the Alexander Column, others are pressing in from all sides. Another cheer, and the center of the barricade is stormed. The Red detachments are climbing the barricades, thrusting with bayonets, firing into the defenders, slipping on the embrasures, tumbling

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over. The great iron gates are burst open, and the torrent pours in, shouting and cheering. It bursts through doorways and pursues the fleeing Cadets along the corridors. Stairway after stairway, story after story, and the Cadets snipe back futilely, overrun by the attack. Somebody wrenches his fur cap from his head and waves it wildly: “The Provisional Government is under arrest!” The ministers are led out under guard, past the triumphant revolutionaries. They gaze around hopelessly at their defeated troops being disarmed, and are taken away. We drove up to the Kirov Stadium. The day was clear and crisp. From there the buses and trucks along the Nevsky Prospekt are like toys. The old French-and-Italian style city and the newly built blocks mingle, running down to the gulf where the ferries set out for Finland. On the walls of older buildings there were still wartime signs, which warned the citizens to keep away from that side of the street, because the German shells were apt to land there. 13 Under the Field of Mars the dead of the Revolution lay in resounding silence; green grass and gray granite of the mass graves hold down their ghosts and leave only the memories of heroism, determined courage, and confidence in a new life. NOTES 1. The word “tannoy” refers to Tannoy Ltd., a British manufacturer of loudspeakers. 2. The following note is included in the original text: “Every year on May 19, a rally is held on Red Square to mark the founding of the Young Pioneer Organization, a mass organization for schoolchildren in the nine to fourteen age group. —Ed.” 3. The following note is included in the original text: “Since 1969, military parades are held only on November 7, the anniversary of the October Socialist Revolution. — Ed.” 4. Abai Kunanbayev (1845–1904), also known as Abay Ibrahim Qunanbayuli, was a poet, translator, and philosopher. Born in Kazakhstan, he is considered the father of modern Kazakh literature. 5. Lev Tolstoy is better known to English-language audiences as Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), author of War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877), among many works. John Osborne (1929–1994) was a British playwright, whose play Look Back in Anger (1956) came to represent the generation of writers known as the “angry young men” who emerged during the 1950s and originated from working-class and middleclass backgrounds. This group was critical of British tradition and elitism. 6. “Pobeda,” “Volga,” and “Zil” are the names of Russian automobiles. “Zil” is technically spelled “ZiL” (Zavod imeni Likhachova) with the “L” standing for the surname of Ivan Likhachov, a former director of manufacturing. 7. The following note is included in the original text: “F. M. Dostoyevsky, Collected Works in thirty volumes, Vol. 5, Leningrad, 1973, pp. 78–79. —Ed.” The text cited by La Guma is an abbreviated version of the original. For comparison, see Fyodor Dostoevsky, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, trans. David Patterson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 48.

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8. Man of La Mancha (1964) is a popular musical by the American playwright Dale Wasserman (1914–2008) about Miguel de Cervantes and his novel Don Quixote (1605 and 1615). 9. The Decembrist movement was frequently eulogized during the Soviet period for its anti-tsarist politics. 10. The following note is included in the original text: “Third Section—the name for the secret political police in tsarist pre-revolutionary Russia. —Ed.” 11. Notes from a Dead House (1862), also translated as The House of the Dead, is a novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky based on his experience sentenced to four years at a Siberian prison camp for his involvement with the Petrashevsky Circle, an intellectual group that held sympathies with socialism and was anti-tsarist in orientation. La Guma is experimenting in this section, using Dostoevsky to reimagine the past. He similarly treats the Bolshevik Revolution in the present tense later on. 12. “The Great Patriotic War”—also referred to as “the Patriotic War” by La Guma—is the Second World War. 13. The following note is included in the original text: “Warning signs dating back to the Second World War have been left deliberately on some houses as a reminder of the wartime ordeal. —Ed.”

TWO The Footsteps of Alexander

Below the cotton-wool clouds, southeastern Russia skimmed away, and one sensed the cities dropping behind ten thousand meters below, the flat green on a relief map giving way to the yellow and umber of rising country, the Urals passing on the left, replaced by the prairies of Kazakhstan beyond Uralsk, the Aral Sea somewhere beneath, rinsing the head of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. 1 Through the gaps in the clouds the rows of trackless mountains of the Pamir range, ragged, the peaks scattered with springtime snow glint like sugar in the evening sun, and the Tajik Republic rose into sight out of Central Asia. INTO CENTRAL ASIA Before 1917, the peoples of Russia were dispersed in widely different levels of economic, political, and cultural development, and outside European Russia, few formed real nations—many lived a nomadic life, their economy, social relations, and culture dominated by a patriarchal-feudal system. Experience of Soviet life showed that such differences were no obstacle to their eventual unification within a single state, and that socialism enabled once backward peoples to catch up quickly with the advanced. In the 1920s, the Soviet Communist Party had worked out the lines for development. Assistance to any particular republic or region was to be specifically related to the prevailing economic relations and way of life of the people who lived there. As far as the eastern hinterlands were concerned, it was to be borne in mind that each of them was a world of its own, with its own ways, customs, and economy. Soviet bodies, Lenin insisted, were to adapt themselves to the level of these peasant countries. 83

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The creation of national states in Central Asia was an example of how Soviet power was adapted to the needs of building socialism in the backward regions. The establishment of the Uzbek and Turkmen Union republics and the initial Tajik and Kirghiz autonomous republics (they became Union republics later) promoted the growth of national consciousness among those who lived in them and their development into socialist nations. 2 Simultaneously, the Soviet state invested huge sums in the economic and cultural development of the backward regions. The first step was to redistribute material resources from the economically advanced to the backward nationalities. But redistribution was not enough. Central Asia had to be industrialized—and quickly. The industrially developed areas in Central Russia and the Ukraine served as the basis for this. The Eastern republics did not have the necessary funds, hence money was provided from the national budget. At the same time, most of the rural population in Central Asia was freed from taxes for five years. Collectivization of agriculture played a major part in the socialist transformation of Central Asia. This was preceded first by land and water reform, the redistribution of pasture, and the confiscation of the property of the semi-feudal rich. The patriarchal way of life had to be turned into a small-commodity economy, and the nomads had to begin a settled life. Collectivization was to be, for the bulk of the backward peoples, a jump from small-commodity production to socialism. The backward hinterland became modern industrial-agrarian republics without going through a capitalist stage, and caught up with the more advanced nations of the USSR. Tajikistan, coming up toward the belly of the plane, was part of this hinterland. The plane was crowded, and there was a chatter of Russian and Turkic accents as the wheels came down. A young sailor, mustached and nineteen years old, was going home for the wedding of a relative. Because he had not been able to get leave at the time planned, they had put off the marriage so he could be there. He showed me the badges on his blouse: one for success in sport, another designating him a first-class specialist in some naval duty. Dushanbe Airport bounced against us, and we rolled toward the gateway to the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic. Tajikistan is one of the smaller Soviet republics huddled on the southernmost boundary of the USSR, roughly squashed between Kirghizia in the north and Afghanistan which makes a dent in its belly below. On the map it roughly forms the shape of a horse galloping into Uzbekistan, its head flung back. Here the Pamir Mountains meet the Hindu Kush and Sary Kol range of the Tien Shan. The inaccessible peaks and eternal snow crowd into Tajikistan, rugged mountains pile against the skyline of the high Pamirs. Marco Polo coming up from the south wrote of this region, the highest place in the world: “Here is the best pasturage in the world; for a lean

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beast grows fat here in ten days . . . there are also innumerable wolves. . . . This plain, whose name is Pamir, extends fully twelve days journey. . . . No birds fly here because of the height and the cold.” There were signs that the Tajik Republic was still celebrating its fiftieth anniversary which had taken place the year before. People were still wearing the lapel badges with a number fifty on them, and in the streets of Dushanbe there were still hoardings and bunting left over. In the fourth century B.C., Alexander the Great marched his mixed army of Macedonians, Greeks, and Persians into what was called Bactria and Sogdiana, conquering these areas in spite of the staunch resistance by the locals. Two centuries later the state of Tocharistan emerged on the territory of former Bactria. Afterward Tocharistan and Sogdiana along with other regions became part of the Kuchean Empire. 3 The Saracens, Arabs, came in the seventh and eighth centuries, overrunning the region under the green banner of Islam. In 874, the Samanids took over and built up a powerful feudal state, holding power over all the country from Central Asia to the Persian Gulf, and from India to Baghdad. It was during this period that Tajiks became a nation, and the Tajik language became predominant in the area. Tajik literature, art, and science flourished. Rudagi, founder of Tajik-Persian classical literature; Abu-Ali ibn-Sina, called Avicenna by Westerners, a scientist, lived then. 4 In the second half of the nineteenth century, tsarist Russia annexed Central Asia, administering the Tajik region through the Turkestan Governor-General and the Bukhara Emirate. In the grip of local rulers as well as the tsar, however, the vast area of Central Asia was rapidly drawn into Russia’s economic orbit. But this also meant association with Russia’s revolutionary movement. In 1918, the Bukhara Communist Party was formed. In August 1920, the working people of Bukhara rose and by September 1 overthrew the feudal system, forming the Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic in early October. 5 Some of the territory of Eastern Bukhara was captured by Turkey’s Enver Pasha, who instituted a reign of terror, plundering and murdering, burning villages and farms. After the counter-revolutionaries and interventionists had been defeated the Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic became a socialist republic. 6 In October 1924, the Communist Party and the Soviet government decided to divide Central Asia on national lines in accordance with the wishes of the local people. The Tajik people were given the right to form an autonomous Soviet socialist republic within the framework of the Uzbek SSR. Since then October 14 is observed as the day of founding the Tajik Republic. By decree of the Third Extraordinary All-Tajik Congress of Soviets held in October 1929, it was transformed into a Union Republic. 7 When we came down to the hotel restaurant, the atmosphere was noisy and gay. All the tables were occupied, but the floor manageress

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found us a place. Dark, mustached men gazed curiously at me over bottles of mineral water and the leftovers of cognac on the tables under the dimmed lights. Beyond them the orchestral group plied its electric equipment with gusto, a crooner sang sentimentally of love. When the singer finished, the band broke into a traditional tune, the electric guitars replaced by drums and pipes, while a girl in a silver mini-dress led a wild folk dance to the clapping and whistling of the customers. As more joined in the whirling dance, the air throbbed with the drums and flutes, until it ended breathlessly, and the electric organ, saxophones, and trumpets came on again with the theme from the film The Godfather. Dancers clung to each other in a tired cadence. In the Soviet Union people are as unorthodox about formal dancing as the youth of the West are about modern. Women dance together as partners in old waltzes and fox-trots when none of the opposite sex are available; men will go up to any unintroduced woman in a hall or restaurant to ask her to dance. One got the impression that dancing at all age levels was for relaxation and entertainment first, without involving old-fashioned divisions of the sexes. It was the first stage of this journey, and beyond my hotel room the night was hot and starless, there was no breeze over Dushanbe. My host Massud Mullojanov, who was the editor of a local literary magazine, had been somewhat unintelligible over the roar of the restaurant music. We had left after a late dinner, while a group of women sang together at the next table, and had agreed to meet the next day. The tap in the bathroom belched and splashed taking me unawares. The water hummed and gurgled in the pipes. I went to bed and read some of the long-neglected Ramayana before dropping off to sleep. THE MONDAY CITY In the morning the sky suddenly became gray, and the mountains disappeared in mist. In the street below children in white shirts and red scarves were on their way to school. We did not have breakfast in the buffet because the morning queues were too long and took it in the restaurant of the night before, deserted now except for setting things out for the coming day. I settled for unexotic fried eggs and compensated with kefir boiled in the Ukrainian way. 8 I had time to kill until eleven o’clock when I was to meet some writers at the local union, so my interpreter Larissa Borisovna and I went for a stroll. Outside the hotel a sign announced that “season tickets for public transportation in Dushanbe will be available from March 1.” In the square girls in cerise silk trousers passed, carrying briefcases. Colored trousers and traditional dresses in their multicolored patterns mingled

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with mini-skirts. Tyubeteikas, the embroidered skullcaps, made brilliant dots bobbing in the groups around the street kiosks. On Lenin Prospekt the trolleybuses trundled past the pink-and-white apartment blocks, the elm and fir trees, heading toward Aini Square and the large Opera and Ballet Theater. In the square old men in turbans and long quilted coats dozed as the mist lifted and the sun came out and in the distance, behind the opera house, where they were advertising Madame Butterfly, the gray-brown hills came into view. The offices of the railway workers’ Communist Party organization were located in a rectangular building fronted by a green lawn and elm trees, and from a window a young man stared with the usual curiosity at a visiting foreigner. A red-and-white billboard outside said: “Railway workers of this district pledge to increase output by 4.5 million rubles as their contribution to the current five-year plan.” 9 On a corner a group of muscular young girls in denim jeans waited to cross the road. They were members of a volleyball team arriving from an outlying village to take part in a tournament. They smiled rosily and explained that they were a mixture of workers and schoolgirls and then hurried to beat the lights, chattering and lugging their hold-alls, healthily nubile. The veil associated with subjected Eastern women was nowhere to be seen, neither on old or young. The dark horsehair yashmak that covered the face and body has become a museum piece, but discarding it was a brave act in the early days of emancipation. In old times women had been virtual slaves to their husbands, confined to their homes for most of their lives. All this had been sanctified by religion. Now they were equal citizens of the USSR and had the same rights as men in all spheres of economic, cultural, and socio-economic life. In the 1920s, the counter-revolutionary, fanatical bands of basmachi, backed by feudal patrons, had often beheaded women who had thrown off the veil. 10 Now the colorful national costumes prevailed, but the yashmak was gone forever. Dushanbe lay in the Gishar Valley among the mountains in the long May morning. For many centuries the trade routes connecting Central Asia with India passed through here. Camel caravans, swaying heavy with goods for trade, set out from Bukhara on Friday and on the following Monday made their stopover here for the fair that would attract villagers from the surrounding hills. Those fairs were called “Djushambe” which is Tajik for Monday, and the name now designated the collection of adobe huts that made up the village that was to become this capital. 11 When Soviet power came to the Pamirs in 1922, the population of Djushambe Village had been about one hundred, occupying a scattering of huts surrounding the tea house and an opium den. In this place there are now the library of the Republic with two million books and ancient

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manuscripts, and all the buildings in traditional Tajik and Russian style. The population had grown to 436,000 with 40,000 students attending the university, the agricultural institute, the polytechnic and teachers’ training college, and the medical school. Another sixteen thousand young people went to twelve technical schools for specialized secondary education, and the city’s one hundred general educational schools were attended by ninety thousand children. Here and there one came across one of the twenty research institutes where young and middle-aged in the embroidered skullcaps, traditional dresses, or modern casuals and suits studied astrophysics, seismology, chemistry, or Orientology among the rose beds and orderly parks. The textile-machine factory manufactured equipment for Europe, Tunisia, and Lebanon. One thought of Alexander’s tired troops in the mountain valleys, the tinkle of camel bells, the mullahs who had been the few endowed with literacy, the raiding basmachi bands, all retreated now behind the veil of the dusty past. When we got back to the hotel Massud was waiting with a car to drive us around. The driver was a young man in a blue denim suit in the style of American cowboys. WRITERS “Many writers here devote their works to the history of Tajikistan,” somebody said, “mostly, to the revolutionary and post-revolutionary period.” Everybody needed to say something. In the company were comrades from the Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee and the Writers’ Union. I remember a poet named Mirsaid Mirshakar (Lenin in the Pamirs), comrades Karimov, Rakhim-zadeh, Ikrami, Mukhumali Rajad. 12 The Turkic—or Arabian?—names lay romantically on the tongue: one thought of medieval Moors, Harun al-Rachid, Saladin. But this was Soviet Tajikistan, the camel trains had gone, and the Aeroflot flight from Moscow came in regularly; the railway through the mountains to Dushanbe had been constructed in 1929, but helicopters crossed the ranges too; the oranges came by ship and train from Morocco. “Also books about the Great Patriotic War.” More than fifty thousand Tajik officers and men won orders and medals, and forty-nine became Heroes of the Soviet Union. The war had also brought large industrial enterprises. During those years collective and state farmers delivered over 507,000 tons of raw cotton to the state, along with grain, meat, and dairy produce. The Soviet government decorated 102,000 Tajik men and women for their contribution to the war effort.

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About 120 million rubles donated by the people went into building tanks and aircraft. “They also deal with modern topics,” somebody else said against the clink of mineral water bottles, cups, and the rustle of the wrappings from the chocolates that came with the coffee. “Like the building of the hydroelectric station on the Vakhsh River. That forms the background to several works. But we haven’t produced any great books yet, a lot of poems and novelettes, but no great books. The problem might be that when a writer visits some great project for material he becomes the slave of only what he sees and so he can’t perceive everything.” Tajiks have a great tradition of folk dancing, instrumental music, solo singing, and poetry. Prose, drama, children’s literature only came with the Soviet era, as did cinema, symphony music, and the professional theater. “At first it was difficult to reconcile traditional ideas with modern achievements,” a woman in the company said. “That applied to almost everything. There was a time when people were afraid of electricity, of the radio. Now there are even TV sets in the mosques.” She laughed, “Old people are no longer afraid of planes—they prefer flying to trains.” Both Tajik and Russian are used in schools. The children can go to a Russian first-language school or a Tajik first-language one, the choice belongs to the children and parents. At official functions Tajik, Russian, and Uzbek are used with simultaneous translation: this is provided by the constitution. The difficulty is to find teachers who speak and teach all the languages, as well as additional foreign languages like English, French, and Arabic. The conversation inevitably drifted back to the emancipation of women; nowadays it was unavoidable, and after all this was International Women’s Year. In Tajikistan’s parliament there were 33 percent of women and 50 percent in local Soviets. Two comrades present mentioned with pride that each had a daughter at the State Art Academy, studying to be composers of music. Even among the writing fraternity the politeness and ceremony of Soviet society had not been forgotten. I was presented with a fiftieth anniversary commemorative medal, and everybody shook my hand, bidding me welcome back at any time. Against the background of the hazy mountains the monument to Rudagi, turbaned, bearded, and robed like a figure from Mosaic times, gestured with a stone hand as if he were reciting. But at my hotel I had only a volume of a later work by another from across the border, the Kazakh Abai, and the 1000 B.C. Sanskrit epic, the Ramayana, in a condensed English version. 13 The stone face did not seem to mind: they were, after all, of the same profession. The mist had lifted, and we were shaking hands by the rose beds, and the chinar trees were bright green in the sun opposite the Friendship

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House. We were joined by a Tajik war veteran, who had fought on the Byelorussian front. 14 His jacket hung with medals. TEA HOUSE AND BALLET In the central chaighana, the tea house, citizens in turbans and skullcaps, sashed quilted coats and city suits, sat at the tables and drank from porcelain bowls. 15 The building opened onto the street, and the aroma of Oriental cooking hung in the air outside. People jostled each other on the sidewalk, and the trolleybuses lumbered on below the second-floor balcony, where there were more people eating and drinking. One wondered why, in the Soviet Union, the workers’ state, there were so many people bustling around or relaxing in restaurants and cafes during normal working hours, until one realized that many projects operated on the shift system. Massud was saying: “Here’s a young friend of mine.” This was a young man with a shy face and a name something like Yuradik Nazriyev. “He’s a clever fellow,” Massud smiled. “He works at the Institute of Oriental Languages. Not only that, but he is an actor and a singer on the side.” The young man looked embarrassed, shaking hands amid the tables with the piled crockery, spilled rice, and elderly turbaned men looking at us over the tea bowls. “I’m having a break for dinner,” he said. “Is this your first time in Dushanbe?” “No. I came once with my wife on a short visit. This time I’m working.” He had recently defended his dissertation for the Master of Science degree. Besides that it turned out he was a popular actor and musician too. One saw that many of the customers of the chaighana knew him. “I do both folk and classical music,” he said. Besides that he was a member of the local Komsomol and was waiting for admission into the Party; his wife was a journalist, and they had a girl of two years and a son of six months. 16 “A busy life,” he smiled. “Tell me about the wedding,” I said. “Oh, it was a Red wedding, a Komsomol wedding,” he said. Nowadays most young couples were married at the local Palace of Weddings. In the villages there were still traditional marriages, except often there was no mullah. “The celebrations take the traditional form, I mean, but there is no religion in most cases.” The people accepted the Communist Party and the Soviet government as their own, he said. “They know, and especially old folk, that in the old days it was the Communists who were the first to lead, to make sacrifices. They were in all the trouble spots, fighting backwardness. Where there

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were difficulties, they, Communists and Komsomols, always came to help, putting the people’s welfare before themselves.” Many Communist activists and technicians came to Central Asia from the advanced nations of the Soviet Union. It was a matter of sharing the material resources of the whole family of Soviet nations. The Russian Federation and the Ukraine sent not only engineers, miners, metallurgists, farming experts, and builders, but also teachers, scientists, doctors, and artists. Neither did it mean the “Russification” of the East. At the Congress of 1923, the Communist Party made it clear: “All Soviet bodies must use the native languages in all dealings with local populations belonging to other nationalities and minorities. Any violator of national rights should be prosecuted and punished. All languages had to have equal status, and every citizen must have the right to speak any of them and raise his children and have them educated in their chosen tongue.” That night it rained, but we went to the State Opera and Ballet Theater named after Aini, to see Leili and Mejnun, one of the ballets based on folk tales. This one had music by Balasanyan, and was again the story of unrequited love. 17 Leili’s father has, in the old way, married her off to Ibn Salom the villain, danced by Karmilin, though she is in love with Mejnun (Burkhanov). 18 The pleading of the unhappy bride (Sabirova) is in vain, and after an evening of mingled classical and stirring folk dancing, the disconsolate and heartbroken heroine dies, while the rest of the cast pass mournfully into the wings. It was a colorful and professional performance; one realized that provincial ballet in the Soviet Union can compete easily with the betterknown Kirov and Bolshoi. Burkhanov and Sabirova mixed artistry with professionalism in their pas de deux and the uproarious folk dances blazed with color. One forgot even to hiss the villain. But in the end everybody was reconciled at the footlights, and the applause crackled enthusiastically, bouquets were brought onto the stage to the reunited cast by children, and everybody realized that after all it had only been make-believe. Outside the theater the sky dripped in the darkness, and people huddled at bus stops on Lenin Prospekt. The bus to the hotel was packed— they never leave you standing in the rain, no matter how jammed the transport. Passengers passed their fares and tickets one to the other on the way to and from the ticket machines. Dushanbe hissed by in the rain, dark and tree-lined. TO NUREK In the hotel lobby a group of young West Germans eddied in and out of islands of haversacks and duffel bags. Outside the weather was gray and

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muggy, and the mountains were out of sight, lurking behind the screen of mist. A man already in his cups—an early drinker—swayed up to me and made gestures as if he needed a few more kopecks, possibly to buy another shot. He did not seem to belong to the hotel and another, fiercely mustached, glowered at him indignantly so that he moved off, teetering toward the heavy plate-glass doors. The West German visitors were dispersing toward the lifts. The grandmother of our driver from the day before had died suddenly and so he was not on duty. He was replaced by a burly and geniallooking fellow who shook hands with everyone and smilingly assured us that many years with Intourist had given him experience with foreign visitors. 19 He went by the name of Alec Madonis, though I gathered that Alec was the Anglicized version of the original Tajik. He was chatty all the way as we drove out of the city, bubbling over with praise of his family, life in Tajikistan; jovially remarked on the bad weather, the late spring, the fact that hail had damaged the cotton harvest earlier that year. He seemed to see jollity in everything. “We have five children now,” he chortled, as we waited for a line of women with shopping bags to pass. “One for each year of the present five-year plan. I want ten children, so the rest will come in accordance with the next plan.” His wife worked in a factory, and since his hours as a driver were irregular he did a lot of the household chores, though, he admitted chuckling, “Certainly, I am not very useful in the house.” Mrs. Madonis earned eighty rubles a month and received another sixty from the state for the children. He was paid 120 rubles for his chauffeuring. We drove south from Dushanbe toward the mountains. The uncompleted housing projects at the city’s edge went by, bearded men out of the Arabian Nights pottered in suburban gardens, a self-service petrol station smelled of carbon monoxide; newly cultivated cotton fields rolled past, and a woman drove a cow by the roadside. “We also have a cow,” Madonis said. “That helps too.” Women in national dress dotted the distant fields like far-off flowers, and the Scheherazade people became more frequent in the countryside. Madonis explained that Soviet cotton had a shorter thread than Egyptian, but that it could grow under the most severe weather conditions. “The best grapes come from here too,” Massud said. “It is not uncommon for people to enjoy a meal of bread and grapes.” At a bus stop typically blonde Russians waited, all of them wearing Tajik dress. Many Russian families descended from the early settlers have been absorbed into the Tajik community, adopting the customs, language, and dress of the local population. We crossed the Kafirnigan River into the Ordjonikidze district. A village was decorated with red flags, and elderly people drank tea outside

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the local tea house. Beyond the green foothills the mountains looked black. We climbed the green foothills and rolled past another village, new cottages and the residue of old-time adobe mud walls crumbling away. The hills were green and brown, and beyond them the heavy gray clouds hid the mountaintops. Big twelve-wheeled trucks went by dragging trailers and loaded with building material, heading toward the mountains. A village perched on a brown cliff. Below the top of the foothills the countryside lay like a rumpled green carpet, and through drizzle the road climbed into the cultivated hills of more green, brown, and khaki. A herd of sheep grazed in a canyon, and to the left the far-off Pamirs were covered in gray clouds. We went by the state farmlands and up 1,600 meters into the gray mist. Now the land was invisible in the heavy mist except for khakicolored boulders here and there. The rain fell heavily along the road winding through the high mountains; a village huddled brown and dirty white in the falling rain. Down a cutting and into a valley and the fog lifted and we saw the road wriggling and zigzagging ahead past black boulders, khaki earth, maroon hillsides topped with green. Massud said: “Perhaps we could call this the year of grass for the cattle.” “If it wasn’t so wet I would load some for my cow,” the driver said. At the side of the road a monument had been erected for a truckdriver washed away during bad weather. We bumped along a stretch of brown gravel. On a hillside a chaban, a shepherd, in a plastic raincoat watched our car driving past in the drizzle. A man in a duffel coat, carrying a spade, strolled at the edge of the road dropped into a wide, wet valley through which tumbled the Vakhsh River. Now the landscape was dotted with sheep and cattle. A new village, white-roofed cottages, lay in an orderly arrangement on the right of the big valley. The river leaped and hurdled the boulders, foaming creamy white between the slopes. This area also supplied water to Uzbekistan. In the old days (prerevolutionary times were “the old days”) the Uzbeks had to buy water from here where state farms had now grown up and new ones were being born in the Nurek Valley. We drove past the continuing signs of development in the valley: workshops and sheds, piles of excavation, stocks of beams and girders, an obelisk proclaiming the fiftieth anniversary of the Republic, a newly laid Friendship Garden. An old man in a turban and top boots rode by on a mule. Trucks, cars, machinery roared in the dull rain, and Nurek town bumped into sight, blocks of flats, department stores, buses. It was exactly midday.

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THE RIVER TAMERS We were now high up in the mountains, and the town seemed to have been placed there by a giant’s hand. We went on through the town in the rain, past the blocks of flats and the Palace of Culture in the unfinished square, the department store and the displayed portraits of crack building workers, the labor heroes, ranked at the entrance to the dam works. The rain dripped from the blown-up portraits like sweat from the faces of Titans. Past the sheds and machine shops again, red and white slogans, into another outskirt of piled steel girders and piles of brown earth turning into mud, as if some giant infants had made a playground there, building sand castles. Trucks and the Soviet version of jeeps bucked and lurched everywhere, and we left Nurek town behind for a while, the big Volga car stumbling between the piles of rubble, while the rain hissed around us. The production of electric power to form the basis of industrial development was making rapid progress now, thanks to the gigantic natural reserves. The rivers of Tajikistan offer excellent opportunities for the construction of hydroelectric stations, especially on the Vakhsh River. The first hydroelectric station went up in the 1930s on the Varzob River near Dushanbe. Soon after that another station was opened in Khorog in the Pamirs. In 1949, two more on the Varzob. The next one was Kairak Kum (the Peoples’ Friendship Hydroelectric Station) and then the stations on the Vakhsh Canal and on the Vakhsh itself. Most of the electricity generated is used by industry and about one third by agriculture, including that used by electrically powered irrigation machines. Lenin considered electrification as the basis for the construction of a new society. It was on his instructions that in the first years of Soviet power the GOELRO Plan (the State Plan for the Electrification of Russia) was worked out, starting the full-scale industrialization of the country. The GOELRO Plan, drawn up for ten to fifteen years, provided for the construction of thirty power stations (twenty thermal and ten hydro) in different economic regions. 20 The world pricked up its ears at the news. Far-sighted and progressive scientists hailed the attempt. A well-known American engineer, Charles Steinmetz, wrote to Lenin offering his services. 21 Others claimed that such a backward country as Russia could not be electrified. Pioneer sci-fi writer H. G. Wells wrote in his book Russia in the Shadows of “the dreamer in the Kremlin.” Lenin the good Marxist who denounced utopianism has succumbed at last to a utopia of electricians. “I cannot see anything of the sort happening in this dark crystal ball of Russia, but this little man at the Kremlin can; he sees the decaying railways replaced by new electric transport, sees new roadways spreading throughout the land, sees a new and happier communist industrialism arising again . . .” 22

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The predictions of that master of fantasy who depicted in his novels the technical progress of the future world proved wrong. By the end of the GOELRO decade the assignment for building up the capacities of power stations had been carried out. Their aggregate capacity had risen by 150 percent. The exotic names of power giants appeared on the map of the Soviet Union: Zemo Avchala on the Kura River in the Caucasus; the Dnieper in the Ukraine. Only the Nazi invasion interrupted the work, and the USSR’s generating capacity was thrown back to the level of 1934. But the “age of the restoration” came for dam building and electrification. The post-war stage of development of the Soviet power industry was the creation of complexes of stations on the largest rivers: Volga, Kama, Dnieper. Six stations on the Dnieper. Bigger still, the Volzhskaya opened in 1960 near Volgograd. 23 Irkutsk and Bratsk; Ust-Ilimsk on the Angara; Krasnoyarsk on the Yenisei, the giants who tamed rivers were reborn. Although hydropower stations give relatively cheaper electricity, they are more expensive and take two to five times longer to build. For this reason, to obtain the greatest possible increase in power production as quickly as possible, the construction of thermal stations was increased, particularly as new large deposits of gas and oil and substantial stocks of coal lying on the surface were discovered in many regions. The introduction of powerful generators and the linking of electric power stations into large territorial grids greatly reduced the construction and power production costs. Today, the Soviet Union ranks second in the world for the production of electricity, generating more than Britain, West Germany, France, Sweden, and Austria put together. The principal task facing the Soviet power industry is to establish a single power grid for the whole country. Power systems considerably increase the reliability of power supply and enable power stations to co-operate. High-voltage lines carry electricity over long distances so that energy produced at one spot can be used in localities far removed from it; thus, railways are freed from the need to transport vast amounts of fuel. In 1973 alone, an additional thousand kilometers of railways were electrified. The rain continued to fall, and the mountains were a sodden green and gray, and the sturdy Volga limousine clawed its way toward the Nurek Hydroelectric Power Station that was nearing completion. This was where Blanche and I had seen the beginnings of the dam in 1970: a myriad of men and women scurrying like ants in the river canyon, where one, at certain places, could jump from one bank to the other. 24 Now a vast gorge had been gouged to enclose the gigantic reservoir, and an immense rampart of earthworks had been thrown across to hold back the once booming waters of the Vakhsh and still it to mild and stippled tranquility in the heavy rain. In a short time this section of the tumultuous river had been broken like a wild Valkyrian stallion to be harnessed

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by a Titan who was really a host of little men and smiling girls in plastic hardhats and muddy overalls and boots. The women had tamed the river along with the men, though they were not allowed to work underground; one wondered at the thought that there might be such a thing as benevolent sexual discrimination. The great waters hung above us, silent in the rain, behind the rampart of earth, and only from an outlet a gush of water hissed, green and foamwhite, like peppermint-cream soda. The dam, though uncompleted, was already producing one-third of its intended quota of electricity. Inside the angular concrete control section the computers in operation, overseen by a young woman in a white coat, clicked and flickered and hummed, ticking off the kilowatt-hours being produced. The deputy chief director of the project was Vladlen Khramov, who looked more like a director of a company than of a soggy, mud-churning project littered with discarded metal, piles of machinery, blocks of concrete. He gave me a hardhat and pulled a plastic raincoat over his neat suit, laughingly welcoming me and my retinue from Dushanbe. “Where’ll you go after this job is done?” I asked him as we trooped away in the drizzle. “Oh, somewhere where they need another dam,” he replied, steering me toward Station Number 3. “I’ll wait and see.” “Doesn’t your family feel like nomads, traveling from one project to another?” He had been on projects in Siberia and elsewhere. “Well, it takes a long time to build a dam,” Vladlen Khramov said laughing; he was full of smiles and laughter as if he enjoyed supervising the erection of mighty projects. “So we stay on one place for a long time. One doesn’t notice the moving so much.” At last we were descending into sheltered passages and terraces. In a great well below us, massive cylindrical machinery hummed. The stairways, passages, and the terraces were all lined in marble; there were even stands holding plants and flowers! The marble halls contained extensions of the computer system that clicked and flickered. Deep down, as if into the thundering guts of a giant, metal intestines of a man-made regurgitation of infinite power. The humming and roaring became deafening, cascading down spiral staircases around pyramids of machinery; it was a fantastic arrangement of pipes, cables, huge plates of curved steel, plugs, monster pumps, all orchestrating a cacophonic symphony. We passed still further down into the neon-lit depths to watch the first operating generator of the Nurek dam; along steel companionways and catwalks. We were forty meters below the surface. They had used 17,000 tons of metal the previous year, and had moved ten thousand million cubic meters of rubble to build the vast earthworks that formed the core of the completed dam. Now its surface was ninetyeight square kilometers in area. Each generator weighed 548 tons. And

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everything had to be moved by truck, because of the mountainous terrain. This was the only hydroelectric station in the world to be built without railways. When it is completed, only 412 people will be working the dam, including the cleaners. I saw a close version of what this dam might look like completed, when I saw the one at Bratsk in Siberia: a vast futuristic edifice of rectangular barriers, water doors, and locks interconnected, standing in aweinspiring grandeur as a monument to man’s conquest of nature, surrounded by acres of steel pylons and cables and porcelain insulators, an immense network of Martian proportions that outdid even the imagination of H. G. Wells who had not believed that the Kremlin dreamer’s dream would come true. Back on the surface, the rain had slackened, and Khramov insisted we go to the top of the barrage, and so we set off, two cars bumping and slithering up the holed, rutted, temporary roadway. The big stubby trucks called “elephants” were still hauling sections of concrete and massive parts of machinery up the slope. From the top of the muddy rampart, the vast reservoir lay under the gray, ominous sky. The rain had receded to a drizzle. Already in the distance sailing boats were moored. Eventually there would be holiday resorts up here and a yacht basin, our host explained. But there was still work to be done. He smiled modestly at me, “I hope you will mention our work in your book.” I still have the plastic hardhat from the Vakhsh River dam at Nurek. THE HUNTING MAYOR The rain had stopped, and the air was sharp with the clean smell of the mountains. We were parked in the square of Nurek town. The ornamental ponds were empty except for pools of rainwater. The square was being redesigned and the whole town still growing, but already the population was over 20,000, including the suburbs. It would drop to 15,000, as many of the dam builders moved on. Lining the streets were the blocks of flats housing many of the workers in the light industries that had sprung up, together with motor repairs and jewelry making. We had gone to the offices of the Executive Committee for Nurek— what would otherwise be called the Town Hall. In one of the corridors, a little red-blonde burst upon us, bubbling over with smiles that threatened to reach her ears. She was Nina and worked for Nurek radio and newspaper—and would I give her a few words. Downstairs on the sidewalk we found the chief town architect. He launched into an account of the future of this mountain town. The center was going to be developed for the provision of services, a new

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cinema and department store, plus the new Dom Kultury, the inevitable House of Culture. The population in the future was likely to grow from 15,000 to 20,000 in the center, spreading out into new suburbs, as the housing projects progressed, the architect explained with bewildering technicality. Figures, descriptions, measurements dropped from his mind like an overflowing dam. The town, he said, was now twelve years old estimating from its first multi-story building. Now it covered an area of 300 hectares, and when the dam and reservoir were completed it would also become a holiday and recreation center. Now the only communication with the outside was by road. I listened politely, lost in the forest of statistics: it was safer to remain in one spot. The chief architect was a young man who had been allocated to Nurek after graduating from the Tajik Polytechnic in Dushanbe. That had been in 1970, and he’d come with his wife and two children. “Don’t you miss the big city?” “Oh, we got into Dushanbe now and then, but we’ve grown to like it here—no crowds.” Then there was the Mayor, or more officially the head of the town Executive, a pink, chubby-faced, and portly oval man in a brown suit and a navy-blue hat, smiling with gold teeth as he met us on the veranda of the restaurant in the square where the architect led us. A rotund and ebullient man, he outdid the architect in his account of Nurek, while we waited outside the restaurant, because they were setting a special table for a special guest of the town. They did not receive African writers often. He had been in Nurek thirteen years, and had been the Mayor for twelve. “I remember when there was no town here but two little kishlaks (villages), and the only work done was agricultural.” The local Party committee originated in the kishlaks, and he had been a member since. “Where the Dom Kultury now stands was a tiny store. The whole place was a morass, and we had a little hut, which was considered the administration block. No electricity, no gas. We had an old tractor, which functioned now and then. That was in 1962, and everything you see was built since then.” He cut his conversation short to talk to two passing townspeople. They might have been old friends pausing for a casual chat. The two passersby flicked their hands in greeting and went on their way. “We have great plans for the future,” the Mayor continued. “What do you do when you’re off duty?” I asked. “Ah, hunt. I love hunting. Can you shoot?” “I’ve never fired a shot, I’m afraid, much less handled a real gun. Except maybe an air rifle when I was a boy and a rusty revolver that had no hammer.” “The mountains,” he gestured around, beyond the square, the Dom Kultury, the department store, and the blocks of housing, all damp after

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the rain. “We go often into the mountains.” Beyond the square, the town sloped to the banks of the river. “Up there, there’s lots of game.” Across the river and into the trees, I thought. “Soon we will also have boating and fishing.” The chief architect had gone off a while since. A woman in paintstained trousers went by while we talked. Two men tinkered with the innards of a jeep by the empty ornamental pool, and two old men in the quilted traditional coats, sashed at the waist, and turbaned crossed the square. Above the hills surrounding the town, the clouds hung heavy and gray, the trees and scrub glistening dully with moisture. High up, on a peak, a portrait of Lenin outlined in neon lights symbolized that socialism had come into the mountains. The table had been set in the restaurant, and we had to devour a feast. “People don’t drink much—except maybe for the builders,” said the Mayor. “Writers don’t drink much either,” Larissa said, and her brown eyes regarded me balefully from her Gypsy face. There were several toasts: to me, to the Mayor, to the town, to the Communist Party, to the success of the dam, to peace, Afro-Asian solidarity, proletarian internationalism. A waitress kept coming and going and returning. “Now,” the Comrade Hunting Mayor announced happily over the debris of the meal, “we’ll go visiting. You’ve been invited by a local couple. They have their lunch hour now.” The mountain air was bracing, mind clearing, and we went along the street a few blocks. On the way “His Worship” stopped to exchange a few words with a mother pushing a perambulator. The ground floor flat where we arrived consisted of three rooms, excluding the kitchen and the bath. We hung our hats and coats in the little hallway, ushered in by the Mayor, but were welcomed by a young and very pretty woman of those passionate Eastern looks, the thick black hair and honey-colored skin and the luminous black eyes under black brows. She wore her traditional headscarf with a careless flair and her Tajik dress with ease, but there was a shyness behind the gleam of the dark eyes. She was Oisha, but she could have been Parveneh from Flecker’s play Hassan. “Only on the hills of my country where the rolling sun of Heaven has his morning home, only on their windy hills do the women of my country go unveiled.” 25 She gestured us shyly into the carpeted living room: there were carpets on the floor, covering the sofa, hanging from the main unfurnished wall. She apologized that her husband was a little late, but we must make ourselves at home and not wait. From the tapestry-draped settee I gazed in awe and with a feeling of apprehension at the feast laid out on the long low table before us.

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And she commenced to berate “His Worship” for not having given her enough notice that visitors were to be expected. Here she was unprepared and had nothing to offer but what she could manage to scrape together from the larder; given enough time she could have cooked a dinner; it would be all his fault if the visitors thought little of her hospitality; they would go away with a bad impression. The Mayor listened dejectedly, smiling humbly, and glumly admitted he had picked on her, because she was the nearest. I could see him wishing the husband would appear. “He is a keen hunter too,” he told us, hoping to change the subject. Oisha hoped we would forgive her hasty preparations, and it was all the Mayor’s fault. I wondered (a) whether our hostess now expected us to finish off the spread that certainly did not have the appearance of hastily gathered snacks, and (b) how many Mayors in the world could be so taken down a peg with such lack of inhibition by a young firebrand of a citizeness. However, her criticism of Comrade Mayor held a friendly tone, though she gazed boldly at him while she delivered it. Having accepted her apologies, we all began, though somewhat timidly after the restaurant. Then there came Suleiman the husband, a young man with a sort of Latin American mustache. This cheered up the Mayor and, after introductions, “His Worship” steered the conversation toward the hunting prospects this season. With me slipping in a word here and there by way of Larissa, I learned that they had been married seven years and had two children, one at kindergarten. It turned out that Suleiman worked at the restaurant we had lately quit, and the handsome Oisha was a seamstress and worked at a dressmaking enterprise specializing for individual customers. Suleiman and the Mayor were talking to each other about shotgun calibers and wild ducks when not needed by our side of the company. The questions and answers relieved me somewhat of the piles of canapés and zakuski (appetizers), the Eastern sweetmeats and a variety of other foods. “I got married when I was eighteen,” Oisha said, pressing me on to try this, try that. “You didn’t think it too young?” I asked, balancing a plate on the recorder and holding a glass of tea at the same time. The dark eyes regarded Suleiman. “I’ve had a good life,” she said. “We have good health, we have had good experiences most of our life together, and we live comfortably. Nature is beautiful here in the mountains, and the town provides everything.” “I can go hunting,” Suleiman declared. “I grew up here, but Oisha lived in Dushanbe where we went to school together.” They had both completed secondary school.

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“It was a Komsomol wedding,” Oisha told us. “We’re both Komsomols.” Usually at such weddings the fellow Young Communists chipped in and bought most of the household furniture for such young couples, and the whole wedding celebration was prepared collectively. “In the traditional weddings most of the expense fell on the husband.” “What do you pay in rent?” I asked Suleiman. He frowned. “I don’t know, ask Oisha, she holds the purse strings,” he said amid laughter. “Eleven rubles eighty-five,” Oisha said promptly. “Everything included, gas, electricity, water!” She earned 200 rubles a month as a skilled seamstress and 250 in winter. They worked for individual customers so all the garments were more or less exclusive. She had eighteen working days’ vacation a year. Chickens cackled somewhere in the background. The Mayor was saying: “One day I was up the mountain hunting in the woods, when a shotgun went off and almost blew my brains out. It was this rascal.” “I thought he was a duck,” Suleiman said, and they roared with laughter. For the record, I said to Oisha: “There is a lot of talk about equality of women. Do you have any comment?” She dropped her eyes a little shyly. “Well, there are a few small leftovers from the past. For instance, usually I would not sit in all-male company. We women would only appear in mixed company. But except for such small things, women have the same opportunities as men and are treated equally. I think some of the old people find that a little strange. I personally really don’t have any complaints.” The party broke up when Oisha declared she had to collect the little one from kindergarten. She said goodbye in her shy manner, the dark Turkic eyes smiling gently. I felt that two large dinners on one day was a heavy burden, but I was sorry to leave their house. A young couple almost out of a fairytale where they have lived happily ever after, I thought sentimentally in the warm aftermath of the toasts. The Mayor and Suleiman were planning a contest for the next expedition, based on the amount of game each could bring in. They parted, and the Mayor rejoined us. “Ah,” he said expansively. “You know we call Nurek the Bouquet of the Soviet Union, because we have forty-five nationalities represented here. Two hundred cities and towns contributed in manpower, material, research, and citizenry.” He led us over to the three-story department store, and we wandered from floor to floor. Everybody knew him, of course, but there was no deference; he was just another citizen even as head of the town Executive. “Theater companies visit us,” he said amid the rows of silk and cotton dresses, the leather-goods department, the plastic toys, transistor radios, and hair lacquer. “Some of the best troupes of the Soviet Union. Of course, we have our own local companies.”

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He introduced me to the director of the town trade organization. There was a staff of 567 people engaged in the trading enterprises, he announced readily, but only twenty-five people were engaged in administration. This store now took in approximately one thousand rubles a day. One could imagine him as the town architect, with all the facts and figures clicking away in his mind: the five-year plan, the carefully worked out objectives. I reinforced the economy of Nurek by buying a Tajik dress for Blanche. The weather had cleared, and the mountains had come into sight again. I met Oisha on the street for the last time, leading her toddling son, and she nodded and smiled shyly. After we had walked around the interior of the Dom Kultury, we headed for our car. It was 7.50 p.m. and still light, and the Mayor shook hands, beaming at us, holding his natty navy-blue hat and square-shouldered in his neat brown suit. Perhaps, as he waved us goodbye, he was thinking of next Sunday’s quail shooting. GENTLEMEN OF THE ROAD Back along the mountain road toward Dushanbe, through the green and khaki hills, the wet scenery leaned off on each side as we passed, with a gap now and then to expose a misty valley below, the river tumbling white over the boulders. In another mountain canyon through which the Vakhsh rushed, work had begun on the Rogun hydropower station, which would feed electricity to the developing Southern Tajikistan industrial centers. Although only 320 miles long, it has enormous power potential as it races down the steep mountain slopes. 26 With five power stations planned, these will be used not only for new industries being set up in the region, like the Regar aluminum refinery and Yavan electrochemical combine, but will also feed the Soviet Central Asia power grid. The new Rogun station would also help irrigate 1,250 square miles of land through the Amu-Bukhara and Kara Kum canals. The early evening was clear in the mountains, the sunlight still bathing the high region. We slowed down for sheep and cattle sleepily crossing the road; a cow peered solemnly at us and then gave way. Madonis was immediately inspired to expound further on the virtues of his own cow; Larissa wanted me to give an imitation of Tom Jones’s “Delilah.” There was a clearing with a water fountain on the roadside, and we pulled up to wet our throats. A small truck was parked there, too, and a group of men in ordinary suits were grouped by the wall around the clearing, eating together from a big hunk of roast lamb and washing it down with shots of cognac, and munching strawberries from a paper

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bag. There were eight of them, and their conversation quietened, watching us as we climbed out of the Volga. 27 We discovered that we had nothing from which to drink the fountain water, and we held our mouths under the stream trickling from the pipe jutting from the embankment. But one of the men called, “Here, use this,” gesturing with a glass. However, when we passed the water around, they still weren’t satisfied. They seemed to recognize a foreigner and immediately decided to make him welcome. Now they were crowding around smiling, shaking hands, rattling off questions. Lumps of the best portion of the lamb, laid out on old copies of Tajikskaya Pravda, were pressed on me. A fresh half-liter of cognac was conjured up, the glass (it appeared to be the only one in the company) was filled for me, and toasts commenced again, accompanied by strawberries and roast lamb, the glass being passed from man to man. They were heads of building brigades on their way home from Dushanbe to Nurek for their weekly visit, hence the suits. “We’ve built a tunnel through the mountains in the Yavan district to bring water to one of the isolated valleys,” one of the men said, chewing lamb and insisting I have another shot of the cognac. It was very smooth, probably from Armenia or Georgia. The eight men represented seven different nationalities and were proud of their “unity in diversity.” But there was a quiet man with blue eyes and a badly scarred face who said nothing; just stood on the outskirts of our mingled groups. The others introduced themselves happily, munching and swigging the cognac, the bottle itself passing around now. Yuri Molkov, Boris Krasvanov, Valery Badiyan, Aslanov, Yeshbekov were the names I caught. When they heard I was from South Africa and Larissa related some of my experiences, their enthusiasm mounted. “We know about affairs in your country from the newspapers and the TV. We are with the African people in their struggle.” “I am a Tatar,” a little man laughed. “Let’s drink to African people.” “We want to drink together with all your people,” another said. “Come and visit us,” I said. “We produce some good brandy too.” They were Tatar, Uzbek, Tajik, Azerbaijanian, Russian, Ukrainian, and a German. “There are no differences as far as we are concerned; our various peoples live together in equality, and all work and enjoy life together. Each one gives according to his ability,” the Uzbek said. “Have some more lamb.” “They invite you to live here,” Larissa said. “They say why live in England? Come and live in their country.” Now the scar-faced man who had not spoken said: “I drink to the time of your victory and when you are able to live again in your own country.” It turned out he had taken me for another tourist and so had shown no initial interest.

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“I believe that all changes should come peacefully,” another of the group said. “With the help of the words. We have seen too much bloodshed, and we should avoid any more. Many of us have lost our parents, our close relations, and friends during the war.” Later we had to say goodbye to the group, the scar-faced man shaking my hand warmly, blue eyes alight. They stood by their truck in their off-duty suits, waving to us, all just workers going home, willing to share with others, talk about peace and friendship. CONFECTIONERS ET CETERA The vestibule of the restaurant had been laid out with tables displaying a rainbow arrangement of icing sugar: little fairy cakes and tall towers and pyramids; pink, green, yellow-white paste molded into a fantasy of the confectioner’s craft; delicate traceries and Gothic curlicues, flowers and butterflies, formed leaf by leaf, petal by petal, fragile wings, all carved by the fine and steady hand of a skilled confectioner, wielding the cake decorator, piston and plunger, with the hand of an artist: perhaps, it was another art form, the art of cake decoration. Overall these young men and women in spotless white uniforms and chef’s caps stood restless guard: the faintest jar might bring a palace toppling into sugary ruin. This day the competition for confectioners up to the age of twenty-five years was being held, they were junior members of the trade, and their entries were being displayed. Inside the restaurant we were given a table out of the way, because the main part was being prepared for the competition by the waiters and waitresses. The tables were being laid with spotless napery and gleaming cutlery, the crockery had to be set in their exact positions, the napkins folded with geometric accuracy: everything had to be just so. Above the clink-clink of knives and forks, a waitress complained petulantly to another: “Tamara Vassilyevna, have you taken one of my plates?” The waitresses were dressed in starched white and lace frills over black skirts, and over them hovered stout matrons in bouffant hairstyles. After a nervous breakfast of ordinary eggs, we left, tiptoeing across the floor lest a carelessly placed foot jarred a fork out of position. A flake of cigarette ash might cost a prize, a diploma, promotion. It was like a parade of the catering service; one imagined the commissions being pinned on after the dessert. At the Academy of Sciences of the Republic we were welcomed by a mild-mannered man in a neat tropical suit. His plump olive face smiled gently, and his hand, when I shook it, was polite. This was Comrade Rajabov, I was told, an academician, doctor of juridical sciences, professor, an honored scientist of the Republic and laureate of the State Abu-Ali

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ibn-Sina Prize. Behind the formidable array of titles, the Tajik face was smooth, soft, and kind, but one wondered where to begin the conversation. The Academy provided for about 3,000 people, but their work was really only a part of the whole, he said in his quiet voice. The olive hands toyed with a pen on the shiny desk. “Science in Tajikistan is part of the entire Soviet scientific enterprise,” he said, “but at the same time, we hold a definite place in that science.” We spoke at length about the national question. The way it was resolved in the Soviet Union is one of the greatest achievements of socialism, and has immense international impact. “We are aware of its importance for world public opinion,” Rajabov said. “Many books and articles have been written on the subject, but they cannot cover all the experience we have acquired so far. We must go deep into the essence of the matter. By letting our friends know of our experience we are, in effect, performing our internationalist duty.” “We still have some unsettled problems,” he added. “The economic and cultural level of all nations and ethnic groups has still to be raised to the level of the most advanced. Then, there is the long-term objective of uniting all peoples of the Soviet Union into one whole. This ongoing convergence is an objective historical process.” There were differences of cultural and economic levels, certainly. Some nationalities had commenced life in the Soviet community at relatively high levels, while others had started with practically nothing. Now the task was to raise everything to the level of developed nations. “That’s the main thing: to get the same level throughout the Soviet Union,” said Rajabov. “In practical terms, all people receive the same payment for the same job. Educationally, there is the same system throughout the USSR, and now we are reaching the stage of compulsory secondary education.” The Tajik people had reached a certain level of culture when the USSR was formed. “But let’s take the Kirghiz people. They didn’t have any written literature, but today they have outstanding writers, who are the pride of the whole Soviet Union. Then again, the Tajik people, while knowing folk dancing, did not know what ballet was. Today their ballerinas are admired all over the world, as far as New York.” There was also the question of the difference between town and countryside that had to be dealt with; the differences, too, between mental and physical labor. “Our planning system tries to take all these things into consideration, including the demands of various nationalities. For example, there are some underdeveloped districts which receive special attention in order to help them catch up.” Rajabov’s eyes twinkled. “In Tajikistan we envisage that the next five years will be a leap forward, but, certainly, it won’t have anything to do with the kind of ‘great leap forward’ of certain others. The industrial

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sector of agriculture, for instance, will be developed, and we hope to make Tajikistan a model industrial-agricultural republic.” 28 We chatted further, and I could see this mild-mannered scientist working with many others, with the state-planners and the economists, sociologists, all working on the future of this ancient country where the mountaineers had fought the Macedonian phalanxes of Alexander, and the Mohammedan conquest had raised the green banner of Islam, and the Russian Revolution had brought socialism. In the lobby, where we shook hands once more, and he welcomed me to come again, there were glass cases full of excavated relics of Tajikistan’s past: petrified carving in wood from the eighth century. On the wall, a portrait of Lenin with the clipped beard, the shrewd and farseeing eyes. The sky had cleared, and it was hot again. The textile factory clattered and roared, and the weaving frames slapped and banged. We were met by a Mohamed Kasimov, the only male among the delegation of women in the bright Tajik dresses. I shook hands around, recalling names, like Karganova, Gribanova, Lydia, Tamara. Around us, as they took me through the factory, the shuttles and spindles clacked and whirred, and dark Tajik and blue Russian eyes seemed to smile mischievously at me. The majority of workers were women, because this was a textile factory. “You see I am alone among the women,” Mohamed said smiling, when we were in a quieter sector. “Like one thorn among roses,” I said, and they all laughed. Soviet people seem eager to laugh. Most factories are run on similar lines. This one was the biggest textile enterprise in Dushanbe, and they worked forty-one hours a week in shifts of eight hours a day and two days off. That meant the factory was operating all the time, closing only on public holidays. Everybody had twenty-one days’ holiday, and paid sick leave pending on doctor’s orders; he could prescribe days off, a sanatorium, rest homes. Maternity leave was fifty-six days before the event and fifty-six days after, on full pay. There is a nursery school and kindergarten under the trees near the factory, where mothers leave their toddlers, collecting them when the shift ends. If they are on a different shift the husbands or older children fetch the youngsters. This factory also has its own Pioneer camp where the workers’ children go for the summer holidays. “Some shifts I start at seven a.m.,” one of the women explained. “My youngest child goes to the kindergarten here and the two older ones to the local school. My hubby brings the little one to the kindergarten when I’m on another shift, and the other boy or girl collects him.” “What provision is there for relaxation among the workers?” I asked. “Well,” one of the women said, “there is a rest home outside Dushanbe, and we can go there over the weekends or for longer holidays. Then

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there are cultural competitions among workers—we have a very good factory choir.” The average wage of a weaver was 200 rubles a month. Wages are calculated on a monthly basis, but paid in two parts: twice a month, the first part being less than the balance. Were there problems relating to wages? How did the workers resolve this with the directorship? Each worker had a pay book in which his earnings were recorded, so if he had complaints or felt he was being underpaid, he took the book and his complaints to the head of his or her brigade who looked into the matter. If the complaints were justified, the necessary adjustments were made, but the wage assessments were usually very accurately worked out in the trade unions. All production plans were discussed from the bottom up. The workers in the union branches at the factory discussed the targets for the factory, made suggestions and criticisms aimed at successfully fulfilling the quotas. These went up to the other levels, the Party committee, and the directorship. “What’s the relationship between the trade union and the Communist Party in this factory?” I asked. “The union and the Party work closely together,” one of the women said. “Of course, many of the trade unionists are also Party members, but in general the leadership and encouragement comes from the Party.” “This one is one of our heroes of labor,” Mohamed said, smiling as he gestured toward one of the women. “We are all very proud of her, of course.” We were sitting at a table in one of the administrative sections, and some of the workers were bringing in plates of salad and glasses of tea from the canteen. Somewhere beyond us the factory clattered and banged. “What’s it like to feel like a hero of labor?” I asked. She was in her thirties, a handsome woman with the usual dark hair. She blushed modestly under her dark skin. “If I received the award for the high level of productivity, it is only because I represent my whole work group. I consider it a collective prize; after all we all pitched in.” The walls of the room we were in were hung with the samples of material produced by the factory, murals out of woven cotton in both Tajik and foreign design making the surroundings riotous with color. She had come to this factory as an orphan, a very young girl, and she had worked there for twenty-three years. Now she was a mother of four children. Her husband worked elsewhere, and they made the usual arrangements about delivering the younger children to and from school. She was also a member of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, I learned. An orphan who worked in a factory and helped run that vast country. “Does the factory continue to pay your wages while you attend sessions of the Supreme Soviet?”

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“Yes,” she said, “There are no professional members of parliament. We get our usual pay from the factory plus expenses, for traveling, and so on.” The director of the factory was away elsewhere, but I learned that he had started as a worker, graduated from a technical institute by correspondence courses and had been promoted according to his qualifications. He had degrees in technical sciences, and his experiences had also been taken into consideration. “Being a director is not a privilege,” they said. Now they wanted to know about workers in South Africa. I had to explain about racial divisions, Whites’ privilege, job reservation, the inferior economic, social, and political status of Blacks, the racist theory of Whites’ supremacy, while they listened, looking extremely puzzled, almost uncomprehending. They had never experienced such a state of affairs. “What’s an overseer?” one of the women asked, her face bewildered. When I had to leave they presented me with a length of material from the factory for my wife. At the hotel restaurant the confectionary and catering contest was over. The waitresses had returned to the after-lunch bustle of clearing away, but the judges still sat at a long table under a red-lettered banner, as if they expected further courses. They waved me to join them and tuttutted, because I had not witnessed the passing out. However, somebody insisted I sample some portions of the prize courses. A loudspeaker blared celebratory music, and the carefully set tables of that morning had been reduced to happy chaos. I never did find out who had been the prize winners, but a young confectioner presented Larissa and me with a little pirozhnoye each, sweet, gaily decorated tea-cakes: perhaps, she had been one of them. STAR GAZERS AND COTTON-RAISERS Birds chirped among the trees, and the sun shone hotly out of the clear sky. The rain had gone, and the weather sweltered over the city enclosed by the ramparts of the mountains. Above the greenery silvery domes poked like futuristic craft, glittering in the sun. One thought of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds—the Martians had landed. But they were the domes that enclosed the telescopes of the Institute of the Earth— Dushanbe’s observatory, all pointing toward the place where an extraterrestrial invasion would come, if any. The director who spoke English and who was engaged, I think, in investigating the chemical composition of the sky, showed us around. I had never been inside an observatory, and this one possessed, besides the giant telescopes in the metal domes, a bewildering array of television and

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other scanning equipment. “They have the same equipment in Canada,” the director said with a trace of pride. He introduced me to another member of the staff who was working on the history of Tajik astronomy—they had a long association with the subject, dating back to before the Persians. I remember that Omar Khayyám came into the conversation somewhere: “And that inverted Bowl we call the Sky, whereunder crawling coop’d we live and die. . . .” 29 I was lost in explanations of radio waves in the ionosphere, the workings of radio photography, the recent innovations of television scanning of the sky. They had already looked at the Moon with their TV apparatus, and were now getting ready to sit back and view mysteries of Jupiter, Venus, Mars. I had a vague memory of the map of the sky in the back of my high school textbook eons ago: I had flunked science. But I was undeterred; had I not read Asimov and Wyndham and delved in the works of Ray Bradbury? You could pick up a lot of tit-bits if you knew your sci-fi. A good-looking young blonde in an appealing shirt and slacks brought relief. She pulled the lever that slowly trundled open a great dome overhead, but it was daylight, and the sun poured in. I learned with some dejection that she was not just a puller of levers that released wheels that opened domes to reveal the sky at night. The romance of stars and moonlight passed above her pretty blonde head: it was she who had actually one night in 1969 discovered a new comet and actually had it named after her. She was thirty, and the shirt and slacks gave her the air of some glamour film starlet playing alongside Dr. Quatermass or Doc Savage instead of being a dyed-in-the-wool, real live astronomer with many genuine letters after her name. 30 Besides exploring the sky at night and admitting troupes of schoolchildren to be introduced to the mysteries of Sirius or the Milky Way, the observatory also exchanged personnel with foreign countries, like the FRG, Belgium, Somalia. A team of Tajikistan astronomers had spent two years in Mogadishu. But what was more interesting, perhaps, was that they undertook trips into their own countryside, portable and mobile equipment and all, to collective farms in order to show and explain to the peasantry the realities of the Universe, dispelling false beliefs and superstition, replacing these with a Marxist view of nature. It was warmer still out in the Leninsky district in Speshak Region where the collective farm lay. Streets were lined with cottages mounted with TV aerials and surrounded by fences. Some of the streets were being repaired, young boys and girls raised dust with their bicycles. In the main square outside the farm headquarters, the portrait of Lenin was flanked by the targets for the current five-year plan and slogans urging on the farmers. It was a long walk in the sun, exploring the farm village, shaking hands with locals in turbans or tyubeteikas, being stared at by wide-eyed dark and blonde children. One can write about Soviet collective and state

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farms as a particular subject, but each one has its own pride, its prowess in the scheme of production, each one likes itself to be known separately. Our host was chatty, guiding us around, ushering me to meet Comrade This and Comrade That, visiting the cottages with their television sets and Oriental carpeting. At one of the houses, we sat on quilts on the back veranda and tore off hunks from the round loaves, drank a local brew, ate cherries, exchanged stories. The birds whistled in the trees. The farm had been organized in 1932 and 1933 out of a neglected community of eighty families living in this valley, which had been practically a desert. Small credits had been granted by the state to get things going, and they had grown gradually. Some well-off families in the valley decided to join. They planted only wheat—cotton was unknown. Now they produced more than 4,000 tons of cotton a year, together with corn, maize, and wheat for the cattle fodder. They owned thousands of head of sheep and cattle, hundreds of horses. Farm produce was sold to the state trade organizations, according to agreements drawn up: tons of wheat, milk, beets, thousands of eggs. The average wage was 120 rubles a month, but engineers, mechanics, and highly skilled workers earned more, sometimes 200 rubles. There were bonuses too. With bonuses a farm worker could make 300 rubles. In addition, each family was granted a portion of land for their own production. One usually saw their stalls at the Dushanbe market along with the state sellers. Now the population was 15,000, of whom 4,200 were schoolchildren. “We have many children,” our host announced passing the bowl of cherries. “My wife is a Hero Mother.” 31 He cried amid laughter: “For me to be a hero father I must produce twenty-five children!” There were twelve schools in the village and a hospital of 105 beds, plus a maternity wing, I learned, as I ploughed through bread, meat, cherries. The doctors and teachers were paid by the state and not by the collective farm; in education there was no difference between town and country, except, perhaps, many who intended to remain farmers concentrated on agronomy or learned mechanical engineering. The wages of the farmers were decided at a meeting of the entire collective, according to the farm charter. From 60 to 70 percent of farm income went into wages; there was a fund for the purchase of machinery like tractors and combines, an allocation for pensioners and for those who had lost family members in the Great Patriotic War; and for assistance to war veterans. People made donations to such organizations as the Red Cross, the solidarity committee, or peace organizations. Often they would vote to donate a whole day’s wages to such bodies. Children collected scrap metal for the same purposes. The women in the kitchen were passing along more food, and the party did justice to the proffering, while I battled to keep up.

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There was a Society of Knowledge where people went to hear lectures given by scientists and teachers from the city: international affairs, Soviet politics, aesthetics, philosophy. Outside everybody had to pose for a photograph. I was introduced to more people: Yusuf Rajabov, Khatilov, Muralov, and a host of other villagers. The problem was that everybody wanted you to come inside to eat and drink. I wondered whether there were awards for those who could devour the most. At last I managed to reach School No. 7, panting with exhaustion and relief, behind our host. (At least one did not expect the teachers to produce piles of edibles.) He was fifty-eight years old and a war veteran; he had a brother aged seventyseven who was head of a cotton-producing brigade and had won an award; they were very proud of their schools—this one was only an example. “Our children must be educated,” he cried indefatigably. “Study, study, and study, as Lenin said.” I was still trying to recall the quotation when, to my horror, he announced lunch at the village restaurant. Outside in the dusty streets the women moved about like flowers being carried on a wind, in their brilliant wide-sleeved frocks called atlaskhons, the hems and collars of many beautifully embroidered. It was the age-old art of silk and golden thread zarduzi (embroidery), handed down from generation to generation. Nowadays it was, probably, part of the dressmaking industry. When the collective farm representatives finally regaled me, well fed and drowsy, in the quilted traditional robe and tied the big kerchief about my engorged middle, planted the embroidered tyubeteika on my head, and announced me honorary member of the village, I felt that, perhaps, I had finally arrived. NOTES 1. The Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, also referred to as Soviet Uzbekistan or simply Uzbekistan, was founded on October 27, 1924. It formally became part of the USSR in 1925. 2. The Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic, also known as Turkmenistan, was established on October 27, 1924, and formally became part of the USSR on May 13, 1925. Created at the same time as Soviet Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan in October 1924, the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic (Tajikistan) achieved full status in the USSR on December 5, 1929. The Kirghiz Soviet Socialist Republic (Kirghizia) was initially formed on February 1, 1926, and achieved full status in the USSR on December 5, 1936. 3. Bactria, Sogdiana, and Tocharistan were ancient civilizations in central Asia, located in what are present-day Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. The word “Kuchean” today refers to a branch of the Tocharian language group—itself an extinct branch of the Indo-European language family—located in what is today northwest China. 4. Rudagi (858–941 AD), also known as Abu Abdollah Jafar ibn Mohammad Rudaki or simply Rudaki, was a Persian poet originally from Rudak located in present-day Tajikistan. Abu-Ali ibn-Sina (980–1037 AD) was a philosopher known for his medical

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studies and his “Floating Man” thought experiment, which demonstrated that human consciousness existed without sensory perception: a floating, or flying, man was still self-aware without touching anything. This argument preceded those by René Descartes (1596–1650), considered the founder of modern philosophy, by approximately six centuries. 5. The Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic, which was established on October 8, 1920, was short-lived, lasting only until February 1925 when it became part of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan. 6. Enver Pasha (1881–1922), also known as Ismail Enver Pasha, was an Ottoman military leader who led the 1908 Young Turk Revolution and is considered one of those responsible for the Armenian Genocide (1915). He later aided the anti-Bolshevik Basmachi Revolt in central Asia, as part of an effort to expand Turkish interests. Soviet forces pursued and killed him for this reason. 7. The Tajik Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was formed on October 14, 1924, later becoming the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic on December 5, 1929, as mentioned earlier. 8. The following note is included in the original text: “A variety of yoghourt. — Ed.” 9. The Soviet Union had thirteen five-year plans in total, the first from 1928 to 1932 and the last one unfinished, having been implemented in 1991 just prior to the dissolution of the USSR. For more on Soviet planning, see Jan Åke Dellenbrant, The Soviet Regional Dilemma: Planning, People, and Natural Resources (London: M. E. Sharpe, 1986). 10. The Basmachi movement emerged among Muslim communities in Turkestan (later Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan) during the Russian Civil War (1917–1922) to resist Soviet control. The following note is included in the original text: “For a number of years after the October Revolution the basmachi, aided from outside by imperialist quarters, tried to defeat Soviet power in the Central Asian Soviet republics. They used terrorist tactics, destroyed irrigation canals, set fire to crops, and the like. —Ed.” 11. The following note is included in the original text: “The spelling ‘Dushanbe’ was adopted in 1961. —Ed.” 12. Mirsaid Mirshakar (1912–1993) was a well-known regional writer from Tajikistan who also served different roles in the Soviet Writers’ Union. 13. La Guma is referring to Abai Kunanbayev, mentioned in chapter one. 14. The spelling “Byelorussian” appears in La Guma’s original text. It is commonly spelled “Belarusian” today. 15. The spelling “chaighana” appears in La Guma’s original text. It is also commonly spelled “chaikhana.” 16. “Komsomol” is an abbreviation referring to the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League, founded in October 1918. 17. Leili and Mejnun (1939), composed by Tolibjon Sadikov (1907–1957), is considered the first Uzbek opera. It is based on an epic poem by Ali-Shir Nava’i (1441–1501). “Balasanyan” is Sergey Balasanian (1902–1982), a Soviet composer from Turkmenistan. 18. “Burkhanov” is likely Shukur Burkhanov (1910–1987), a well-known actor from Tashkent. 19. Intourist was the official travel agency of the Soviet government, founded by Stalin in 1929. 20. The GOELRO plan was the first Soviet development plan drafted in 1920 and implemented starting in 1921. Lenin initiated the plan, believing that electrification was vital for Soviet industry. The plan involved the construction of thirty regional power plants, including ten hydroelectric dams. The name GOELRO is an abbreviation of the Russian name for the State Commission for the Electrification of Russia. 21. Charles Steinmetz (1865–1923) was an American electrical engineer, a socialist, and a professor at Union College. He was originally from Breslau, Prussia (presentday western Poland).

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22. The following note is included in the original text: “H. G. Wells, Russia in the Shadows, London, p. 87.” 23. Volgograd was Stalingrad from 1925 to 1961. Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971), who succeeded Stalin and led the USSR from 1953 to 1964, changed the name as part of a policy of de-Stalinization. Prior to 1925, the city was known as Tsaritsyn. 24. The following note is included in the original text: “Author’s wife. —Ed.” 25. La Guma is referring to the British writer James Elroy Flecker (1884–1915) and his verse drama Hassan: The Story of Hassan of Baghdad and How He Came to Make the Golden Journey to Samarkand (1922). 26. La Guma curiously uses the measurement of “miles” in this instance rather than kilometers and the metric system. He does so elsewhere in the text, and I have kept his original usage. 27. The word “quietened” is in the original text. 28. This comment is a reference to the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961) economic plan in the People’s Republic of China. The Soviet Union had been critical of China since the Sino-Soviet split beginning in the 1950s. The plan itself caused a catastrophic famine in China. 29. Omar Khayyám (1048–1131) was a Persian poet and intellectual, best known today for the posthumous collection of his verse, the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. 30. “Dr. Quatermass” and “Doc Savage” refer to characters from British television and American pulp fiction, respectively. 31. The following note is included in the original text: “Mothers of ten and more children are given the title Hero Mother and awarded the Hero Mother Order by decree of the USSR Supreme Soviet. —Ed.”

THREE The Big Sky

The horses turned in a wide circle raising a wake of yellow-brown dust out of the grass as they moved, traveling fast. They were a sizeable herd, mostly mares and colts, the colts looking gawky with their over-long legs, but running hard with the rest. The hooves thudded on the surface of the country, running in the flat afternoon sun that lay on the prairie that seemed to crawl with shadowy patches as the clouds moved across the sky. The herd passed, spreading out at first start and then huddling together again as if for protection. We had startled them long before we came up, it seemed, and they could be away long before we got there, galloping across the shallow dips in the otherwise flat steppeland. We had passed a herd earlier, and they had started off at a run parallel to our car bumping along a track, heading toward the horizon, strung out in a leg-stretching scamper of hooves. We had watched them heading dustily toward the horizon to the east, the dust hanging like thin smoke against the sky and then dwindling in the sunlight. From the distance I was reminded of a herd of kudu or eland drumming across the African veld, the sharp hooves churning the tough Kikuyu grass; or a bunch of kongoni or antelope with horns like sabers. 1 But we were far north in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, and the sky was not as harsh and blazing as that of Africa. 2 After that we had passed on, bumping along the old track. Now we were out of the car and watching this other herd, the mares and colts, galloping bunched across the coarse-grassed steppeland. All around us the flat, slightly undulating grasslands stretched away far, far, blank and featureless except for clumps of yellow flowers and scattered salt pans, to the horizon. These were the great plains of Kazakhstan, brown in the distance, but really green underfoot; the great prairies of the 115

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second biggest republic of the Soviet Union; endless to the eyes, as if the grasslands stretched to the edge of the world under an equally endless sky. The herd swerved, the lead horse turning in a big curve to take the rest in another direction as we saw the horseman galloping on their flank, whistling shrilly at the running horses. He maneuvered them expertly, riding crouched but easily in his saddle, turning the herd to bunch them again, his mount responding smoothly to boot and hand. He had the herd slowed down and galloped offside of the dust, so he could see them all while we leaned against the car and watched. He was a Kazakh herdsman and rode with the Centaurian combination of man and horse; the kind of horseman that had held the envy of the foot-goer from ancient times. He was the Kazakh equivalent of the Mexican charro rider, the North American wrangler, the gaucho of the pampas, the Chilean huaso. Riding hard to cut out one of the colts, a long-legged roan, you could feel the colt sensing danger, crowding close to the mother in the pounding press of the rest of the herd, and see the mare’s eyes rolling as she, too, tried to look back on the herdsman closing in. He was among the herd now, splitting off a bunch, galloping just behind the roan colt and the mare, riding with one hand on the reins, the kuruk held poised in the other, the long pole with a rope looped at the end and the length to tighten the noose held with the pole, holding it couched like a lance, waiting for the chance to thrust out and get the loop over the colt’s head. He looks like bloody Don Quixote, I thought. The mare dodged like a ballplayer on the side of the bunch as the pole jabbed forward, the colt following instinctively, and the herdsman missed with the loop. The rest of the herd circled and passed, but the herdsman kneed his mount expertly, trapping the colt, cutting it off from the mare, and the looped pole came down over the over-large hammerhead of the colt, jerking tight on the neck. The herdsman rode with the colt straining at the kuruk for some yards, and the mare looking almost humanly anxious. The colt skidded to a stop and looked worried struggling against the noose and finally quietened, shivering. The rest of the herd galloped for some time across the steppeland until two more horsemen appeared whooping them into a turn, and they were all slowing to a canter, stopping finally to circle, huddled fretfully on a slight slope in the land, the herdsmen standing over them, their kuruks held like lances at rest. The colt’s dam was trotting worriedly back and forth on the edge of the herd, and the drover was looking the colt over. So we all went over to stroke and pacify the trembling colt: he had huge scared eyes and a coarse thick coat of light reddish-brown, tough and hard under the hand. Larissa practically kissed him, and he stood there on his very long legs, trembling. Afterward, satisfied about something, the herdsman eased the noose, lifting it over the clumsy looking

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hammerhead, and the colt dashed off toward its mother and the rest of the grazing herd. “He looked so beautiful to pet,” she said. “You should come and live up here then,” I said. “Give up Moscow University.” The herdsman sat on his horse, smiling down at us from under a flat cap, his jaw lean and unshaven, eyes narrowed from riding too long in the sun. I patted the twitching neck of his mount. “His name’s Eagle,” he said. “I am Balatkan Shamiganov.” He leaned down to shake hands, his was hard and horny, as we were introduced all round. The other two herdsmen cantered up and introduced themselves too: Alexei Vladimirov, Alibai Kasimov. Overhead a hawk sailed slowly across the expanse of the sky, where only some clouds moved, making shadows on the steppeland like shadows of whales on the bed of the sea. The Kazakhs are great riders, and national traditions go back many thousand years; the ancient and original culture of the Kazakhs was formed under conditions of nomadic life, which left its deep imprint on the art and life of present-day Kazakhs. Festivals among the Kazakhs are usually accompanied by national sports, inevitably involving horses. There is the alaman-baiga—mass horseracing—and the kokpar, in which teams of horsemen struggle to take possession of a carcass or a dummy goat, passing it one to the other as they ride headlong for the goal. Among the teenagers a popular game is Kyskuu, meaning something like “catch the girl,” wherein a girl and a boy race each other on horseback, and if the girl overtakes the boy, she strikes him with a lash, but if the boy wins—well, he gets a kiss. Yes, the Kazakhs are great horse riders. I have never been on a horse in my life. A WELCOME TO THE PRAIRIES Later we left the riders with their herd of horses, driving back the way we had come across the vast steppeland, following the old trail that made a yellow and brown rutted scar across the apparently everlasting range. Home on the range. Those herdsmen, tending horses and sheep, worked the usual eight-hour shift of all workers, but usually they arranged it so they stayed out twenty-four hours or even two days at a time, which gave them extra days off to rest up at one of the lake resorts. Hours later we got back to this herder’s station we had started from earlier. It was part of the big state farm, and there were stations scattered all over in this outback country. This station consisted of about forty families, horse herders and shepherds, who lived in neatly arranged cottages lined up into streets: beyond the last houses, the grassland closed in as if they lived cut off from the rest of the world.

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But there were big black Volga cars parked in front of some of the cottages. The houses had radios, electricity, gas, TV. Some of the off-duty herdsmen were coming out to the big cars, wearing natty suits, the women in their best, to drive down to the lakes for a few days’ relaxation. Down one of the streets was the primary school and clubhouse, where the visiting concert troupes came, and there was the kino-theater, the central office connected with the main estate of the state farm, of which these forty families formed one-tenth. It was like the Wild West gone socialist; there was no town marshal or sheriff, only the red flag hanging over the office door. Of course, you couldn’t just leave. The others and I were ushered into the living room of the cottage. The dining table was spread with bottles of champagne, plates of snacks, and bowls. “They want to do something about your arrival,” my guide in Kazakhstan Amangeldeh said. “I don’t think writers have penetrated this far into Kazakhstan. So you are quite a novelty.” I was introduced to Shoken Sbasov, who lived here and had been working in this territory ten years before the settlement was started. That earned him the Red Banner of Labour, I think. There was an old man with a wooden leg and some men wearing medals and orders on their jackets. They pointed out the war medals, the labour awards, the Order of the Red Banner of Labour. The champagne corks popped, and glasses were filled. The usual toasts commenced, the food was passed around. “We used to welcome guests with bread and salt,” one of the men said, “but we’ll forget that now and welcome you this way instead. Bottoms up.” Bowls were filled from leather bags of kumiss, fermented mare’s milk, and snacks of cottage cheese rolled into balls and dried in the sun, and little slices of dried horse meat which is a delicacy with Kazakhs. “I must take some of the horse meat back with me,” I said. “It is like South African biltong.” But they wouldn’t let me take the little slices; instead one of the women disappeared into the kitchen and brought back a big slab of the jerked meat. It still hangs in our backyard at home: somehow nobody could bring himself to finish it off. There was an old grandmother sitting next to the TV set and singing about her long-departed son who had come home at last. It sounded very sad in the Kazakh language, and somebody announced that I had been adopted into the family. Everybody was very sentimental at this stage, as the subjects of the toasts revealed. This being a small settlement one was expected to visit other families as well. I thought lugubriously of the legions of dinners that paraded ahead of me throughout my trip through the Soviet Union. Hospitality in the USSR is not only overwhelming, it is a national pastime. The horsemeat tit-bits and thick slices of bread and sausage disappeared, and the leftovers joined the empty champagne and vodka bottles.

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The party started to break up. I clutched my hunk of horsemeat wrapped in newspaper. We had to proceed to the next cottage. Outside I was somewhat taken aback to find a pair of what the British might describe as “dolly birds” waiting to meet me, complete with the latest in miniskirts and the best of makeup and hairstyles. Bright as butterflies against a background of picket fences, the waddling ducks, the old man with the wooden leg, they looked incongruously at home. It turned out they were the daughters of shepherds who were attending the University in Alma-Ata and had flown up to visit their parents. 3 There they were dolled up in the height of fashion and had not forgotten the old folks at home up here, far on the desolate prairies. What they wanted from me was information about the youth in South Africa, what the Young Communists there were doing, what was life like in my country. I did my best; it was a matter of having to cut a long story short. Afterward they wanted my autograph, signed on postcards, which they produced. They said spasibo (thank you) with bright smiles and made off chattering, toward one of the cottages. The next cottage was that of Comrade Kaliev. Another welcome table awaited us, but this did not cause the company any problems. THE CITY OF APPLES Whether you are a lover of nature or one who prefers hard asphalt under his feet, Alma-Ata is a city that will give you a choice of each. Its thousands of apple trees gave it its name, which means, “Father of apples.” It is a garden city whose long avenues are lined with the greenery of poplar, elm, and white acacia: it is a city for springtime. Neatly balanced at the foot of a high mountain ridge of the Zailiisky Alatau range that rambles into the Tien Shan, its geometrical streets are held straight by the gurgling irrigation ditches and flanked in several places by parks and interrupted by squares. Kazakh architects try to give a national character to the cities of the Republic, introducing elements of Kazakh ornamentation in murals and carvings on the façades of many of the larger buildings. Above the tops of trees rise colored mosaic walls and stained glass jig-sawed into illustrations from Kazakh folklore. And beyond all this the population of 850,000 see the ragged battlements of the Alatau Mountains all the time, black-gray and somehow foreboding, the peaks like bared white fangs to remind one of conquered yet untamed nature. They had built a great barrier up in the mountains, above where the great Stadium at Medeo now stands, to curb the melting snows which in the past had sent avalanches of mud with its spring thaws smashing down to flick like a giant finger everything from its path:

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crumbs brushed from earth’s tablecloth by some fussy giant. But all is safe now, the grumbling Frost giant has been penned, to give way to ice skaters, hockey players, future Olympic champions. In the early winter the surrounding countryside can be beautiful, too, under its mantle of light snow. I once heard, on a previous visit, my wife wax superbly poetic by equating the silvery-decked land with a young bride draped in her wedding gown. Having visited Alma-Ata before, there were numerous old friends: Olzhas Suleimenov, one of Kazakhstan’s talented and popular young poets, who looks as if he belonged in the films; Anuar Alimjanov of the hawk face, the straight black hair and somewhat slanting eyes, the high cheekbones, the real Kazakh features, who wrote and was secretary of the Writers’ Union of the Republic. He was always smiling, as if he found happiness everywhere, always ready with some Kazakh proverb. The Kazakhs have a large fount of proverbs, highly expressive, for almost every occasion: they can scorn cowardice and disparage conceit, solidify friendship and glorify people. One wondered whether, as in the Bible, there had not been compiled a book of proverbs à la Kazakhstan. Or perhaps, Abai Kunanbayev did, scattered among his poems: “Judge authors by words, not the reverse. . . .” I met the young man who was to show me Kazakhstan: Murat Auezov, a soft-spoken and modest young man, who is the son of the late writer and Academician Mukhtar Auezov, known for his studies in Kazakh and Kirghiz folklore and author of the four-volume epic novel Abai, which is said to cover everything there is to know about the Kazakh people. 4 Perhaps, the fame of his father accounted for the cheerfulness, kindness, and modesty of the son: he was like that all the days we roamed Kazakhstan. I waited at a table in the hotel lobby, while he checked me in. The hotel porter, an old pensioner, probably, smiled and gestured that I make myself comfortable while I waited. I tried to indicate that I was an old hand, Alma-Ata was not really new to me. Outside the usual trolleybuses trundled past, at the doorway a shoe-repairer cobbled in a little kiosk, the driver of a tourist coach read a magazine at the wheel. Somewhere beyond the blocks of flats lay the sophisticated machine tool and steel-rolling factories, the plants that produced hydro-engineering equipment and agricultural machinery, the food-processing enterprises. Scattered through the city are twelve higher and sixteen secondary specialized educational institutes with their 95,000 students; the Kazakh State University, the theaters and conservatoire, the philharmonic society, cinemas, palaces of culture, libraries. The hotel restaurant was down some passages on the first floor; you had to get to know your way. At breakfast there were parties eating big bowls of soup, piles of pastries. There were old peasants from the country, bearded oldsters in tyubeteikas and women in headscarves and long

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dresses, and men who looked like executives. The waitresses were very polite and friendly. We drove to the revolutionary monument in the center. A squad of high school students in blue uniforms were on traffic duty, and one of these youths directed the traffic with easy expertise, even halting a taxi and stalking professionally over to give the driver some advice on traffic rules. He waved us ahead, and our own driver edged carefully into a legal parking space. It looked like youth day: at the memorial for those killed in the Revolution young boys and girls with rifles stood at rigid attention, guarding the memory of heroic dead: the Eternal Flame and a tall fluted column on a square base surrounded by flagstoned walks and trees. We watched while the guard was being changed, the relief approaching from what looked like a guard post across the street, pacing in the rigid slow march, two boys and two girls. The girls looked a little incongruous in their pigtails and white knee-high socks: the rifles looked real enough. The grownups around the monument looked on respectfully. The change took place with the precision of clockwork: the sentry posts were handed over in a series of expert maneuvers like a magician’s sleight-of-hand: first you see and then you don’t. Replaced by others, the relieved sentries marched off in the precise slow march until they reached the street. By the Eternal Flame the bouquets and red ribbons lay fading in the afternoon, where the donors, delegations, and bridal couples had laid them. Only the memory did not fade: the Kazakh revolution burned on, the flame causing the air above it to quiver in its fervent heat. STONE AGE TO SOCIALISM The settlement of what is now the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic began in the early Stone Age. By the middle of the first millennium B.C., the Saki tribes in the territory were taking up the nomadic life of cattle breeding, which came to be a determining factor in Kazakhstan’s socio-economic development for thousands of years. In the third and second centuries B.C., various tribes began uniting to lay the basis of the indigenous population. In the fourth century A.D., feudal relations took shape and lasted right up to the October Revolution. These feudal relations made slower headway on the great plains, in the steppelands of the center, north, and east, where the nomadic tribes roamed and lived. What was known as “the Great Silk Road” of old times—linking Byzantium with China—crossed the south of Kazakhstan, as well as the caravan trails to South-Western Siberia. These gave rise to settlements and cities.

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In the thirteenth century came the Golden Horde—the Mongolian invasion. Cities and settlements were put to fire and sword, as the horsetail standards of the Mongols swept through on their way into Central Asia. Hundreds of thousands fell beneath the scimitars and arrows of the invaders, arresting the cultural and economic development of the area for two centuries. It was not until the fifteenth century that the Kazakh nationality took shape on the ethnic basis of the ancient tribes. Racially they were of the same South Siberian Mongoloid stock, speaking mutually intelligible Turkic dialects and engaging in the same nomadic cattle-raising economy. Other invasions took place. The Jungarian feudal lords from the East swept into the separate Kazakh Khanates during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Under these conditions Russia was the only country which could save Kazakhstan from extermination. In 1731, the Junior Association, one of the three Kazakh population’s divisions, voluntarily joined Russia. In 1740, the Middle and a few clans of the Senior joined, the rest falling under the overlordship of the Jungars and afterward the feudal lords of Khiva and Kokand. 5 In the second half of the eighteenth century, Kazakhstan’s economy was closely connected with that of tsarist Russia; and in spite of the latter’s colonial policies there was a historically progressive situation since these great areas were delivered from enslavement by backward feudalist states. The entry of great numbers of immigrants from Russia after serfdom was abolished in 1861 brought encouragement for Kazakhs to settle and work the land in the manner of these immigrants. Industrial development accelerated the formation of the Kazakh proletariat, many Kazakhs being employed in coal and gold mines, in oilfields and other industries. Contact with Russian workers promoted class-consciousness among the locals, Marxist literature made its way in, and at the beginning of the present century the first Social-Democratic groups sprang up on the initiative of exiled Russian revolutionaries. The revolutionary movement in Russia, 1905–1907, had its effect on the Kazakhs, the struggle developed against capitalism, the tsar and monarchy, against the local feudal lords. 6 Following the victory of the Petrograd workers and soldiers, the people of Kazakhstan rose to fight for the power of the Soviets. The revolution in Kazakhstan was part of the process that swept the whole of Russia, but was marked by specific features arising from the socio-economic and cultural backwardness of the country, the small size of the industrial working class, and the entrenched patriarchal-feudal relations in the vast countryside. The counter-revolution, supported by the foreign interventionists, the Cossack elite, and the self-styled Alash Orda government of the Kazakh

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bourgeois nationalists, opposed the power of workers and peasants. Red Guard detachments arrived from Petrograd and Moscow, the Urals and Volga area, to back up the Kazakh revolution. By March 1918, Soviet power was established throughout Kazakhstan. But it wasn’t over. The White Guards overran Kazakhstan, and the Civil War ensued. Red Army units of Kazakhs, Russians, Uzbeks, and other peoples fought side by side, and in 1920, the newly formed Red Army and the local people finally routed the White Guards. In December 1922, Kazakhstan, as part of the Russian Federation, voluntarily united with the other sovereign Soviet republics to form the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In 1936, it became a Union Republic. JAMBUL When you visit Alma-Ata, you will inevitably visit Jambul. West of the capital, it huddles up against the northern border of neighboring Kirghizia. On the ancient caravan route that led from the Southern Kazakh region to the Aral Sea, the Altai, and South-West Siberia trade cities, caravanserais and settlements sprang up, especially in the Syr Darya River basin. One of the important centers of those times was Taraz, now named after Jambul Jabayev. As Mukhtar Auezov was a historian and novelist, Jambul was the bard of Kazakhstan, composing passionate songs to the music of his dombra, the two-stringed folk instrument; he earned the title of akyn, folk poet and singer. It is estimated that his poetic message to besieged Leningrad in 1942, “Leningraders, Dear Children of Mine!,” is among the best works of Soviet writing. So, all visitors are taken to the Jambul Museum where his lifetime is laid out in pictures, paintings, his personal possessions, gifts made to him. He had died in 1945, at the age of ninety-nine, and the curator of the museum, guiding you from room to room, will tell you with pride that 350 people came from Moscow to pay their last respects to this Kazakh national bard. From the museum we went to drink ayran 7 in the model yurt, the collapsible dwelling of the old-time nomads. A trelliswork frame of six sections forming a dome-like tent covered with felt and lined with carpets. It was taken apart and packed on camels or horses when the travelers were ready to move on. In fact, there was a camel outside under the trees, decorated with tasseled harness and carrying a packsaddle. A group of children were trying to get it to move, but it refused to budge, sneering stubbornly with its upper lip at everybody. Perhaps, it was a permanent fixture, part of the historical museum, like the yurt, and had grown to realize this, hence its refusal to budge.

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After that, we were off to the usual feast at the Jambul Collective Farm. The laws of hospitality in Kazakhstan, indeed in all of the USSR, have been meticulously preserved, even though many old customs have disappeared: bride abduction, payment of ransom money for a bride, the levir—compulsory marriage of a widow to the elder brother-in-law— these are all gone. But all over hospitality must be respected, and it is bad manners to refuse to share a meal or even some chai (tea). “We are doubly glad that you have come to our farm,” the farm chairman said with initial formality. There was sturgeon and all kinds of zakuski. Soviet meals are misleading: one mistakes the piles of hors d’oeuvres for the main meal, and discovers sometimes too late that the real eating session comes afterward. It is then, when in Kazakhstan, you are confronted with the traditional sheep’s head. I gazed with some trepidation as the head, shaved and boiled, was carried in on a platter. The glazed eyes stared at me as if they accused me of its demise; the teeth sneered sardonically. One thought of Salome, the dance of the seven veils, the fate of John the Baptist. It is necessary for the guest of honor to do the carving. I looked hesitantly about; all this was new to me—I had never been initiated—until Larissa translated the rules of the ceremony. The ears went, one each, to those who sat on each side of me; the cheeks, muzzle, various other parts had to be served according to traditional protocol; the hostess had to get her special share, until at last the remains of the skull were passed to the eldest at the table, who was head of the local trade union, Bizhen by name, and who was a veteran of the Great Patriotic War and had served for a time as political commissar with those Kazakh troops who spoke no Russian. He reduced the remains of the sheep’s head further, finally sharing out the brains. He had white hair and a sort of Pancho Villa mustache. The Jambul Collective Farm had been formed like all the others all over the Soviet Union. The kulaks there were expropriated around 1928 to 1930 when the collectivization commenced. 8 The figures, norms, quotas were trotted out with the toasts, the variety of glasses. Hunks of mutton were chomped greasily. Everything edible on the table and at the other homes was produced on the farm, the rest went to the food-processing plants and factories, according to official agreements; if the agreements were broken on either side, fines would be paid. The sheep’s head disintegrated into its component bones; there was more meat stewed with potatoes; duck, tea with milk and cream. Kazakhstan was the only part of the Soviet Union where I discovered milk or cream in tea: everywhere else people drank black or green tea straight.

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The chairman of the farm was raising his glass of cognac and asking: “Will you take an order?” He had a crew cut and was Comrade Marzhakhmed. “Well, not knowing what it will be, I’ll risk saying yes,” I said. He said, twinkling: “Good. You are our friend, and you know Jambul lived to be nigh on one hundred years. We order you to live to a hundred too.” Everybody clapped, and I said: “All right, I’ll do my best.” The eating and drinking was accompanied with the music on the dombra à la Jambul, played by one of my hosts. After a while, somebody announced a fifteen-minute interval, and we wandered about the gardens outside. Birds shrilled in the trees, spring hung in the May air. I got to know my hosts a little better over the cigarettes, the favorite Kazakhstanskiye, exchanging chitchat that differed from the toasts and the jokes and anecdotes over the table. Later there was more eating and toasts, this time to the women, with the hostess and others present. By this time I was brave enough to serenade them with an old song, “Maytime.” It sounded a little strange with simultaneous translation being recited in the background. It was little different at the Michurin Farm: the same hospitality, the dignitaries to encourage the feasting after the tour. I was invited there for May 22. Still recovering from Jambul’s feasting, I was haunted all night by the heads of sheep, which sneered accusingly at me. Along the boulevard outside, Kazakh and other girls in a parade of micro-miniskirts and traditional frocks, boys in suede jackets and denim jeans were lugging their briefcases to college. Men in loose shirts and tyubeteikas mingled with them. At the hotel entrance the cobbler was in his little kiosk ready to repair or shine your shoes. It was not my shoes that needed repairing. We set out for the Michurin Farm. There were a man who was First Secretary of the District Committee of the Communist Party, the chairman of the farm, the secretary of the farm Party committee waiting to welcome us. The Michurin Farm had started in 1929 with 120 families, now there were more than one thousand, making up a population of 6,500. The main products were fruit, vegetables, and milk; there were a Russian and a Kazakh secondary schools, three kindergartens, two polyclinics. The population consisted of twenty-seven nationalities, including Russians, Byelorussians, Greeks, Czechs, Germans, among the local Kazakhs. They all lived in cottages surrounded by gardens and trees.

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“TSYGANE” [GYPSIES] We went for a walk in the public market in Alma-Ata, while the weather was still holding out. Collective farmers and market gardeners sold their wares under long covered stalls. It wasn’t like an Oriental market place at all. Although there were old men in robes, turbans, or tyubeteikas, and women in shawls and headscarves, all the prices seemed fixed, so there wasn’t all the haggling and bartering as seen in old-time films of Asia. There were tons of produce, fruit and vegetables, cherries, spices, and, of course, cucumbers. I thought about all the Western reports of crop failures and how the Soviet Union would be in for a bad time this year or next, or, probably, the year after, but there was no sign of a shortage of food. Maybe there would be a bad crop, or the frost would damage, but there was no sign of anybody suffering. Tomatoes were lacking, because the USSR isn’t a good place to raise tomatoes. And some of the food has to be imported, which means queuing. Feeding over two hundred and sixty million people scattered from Franz Josef Land in the Arctic to Kushka in Turkmenia, and Kaliningrad in the West to Ratmanov in the Bering Strait is like covering half of Europe and one-third of Asia, so you’ve got to do a little lining up. But I never saw a single beggar, or I never heard of anybody sleeping in the streets or under old copies of Pravda on park benches, or starting a squatters’ movement, because there were no houses or flats. Everybody ate, and everybody had somewhere to go when they finished work. Everybody worked, and nobody begged. Unless maybe you saw some strolling Gypsies. But they didn’t beg. They told your fortune in exchange for a few silver kopecks. But then one expects that of Gypsies. Somehow one gets the idea that nothing can be done to keep Gypsies settled in one place. There is a joke that these Tsygane were the only community which defeated Marxism-Leninism. But that’s only a quip. Great numbers of them have settled down and work in factories and other enterprises, just like other Soviet citizens. But some of them are still found popping up in their distinguishing clothes and spangles and brown faces with gold teeth. If a wandering Gypsy can sport a mouthful of gold teeth she must be doing all right. I never saw a Gypsy with gold teeth outside the USSR. We were walking in the memorial park in Alma-Ata, and three Gypsy women suddenly appeared on the pathway, and I couldn’t resist having my hand read again, and I stopped them, and they grouped around laughing and chattering in Russian with their own particular accent. I wanted to find out if what they told me would be different from that time in Leningrad some years back. It was different. So, now I’m not going to have my palm read again, because the third time may prove lucky.

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But as I said, not all Gypsies wander about; and if they do, nobody bothers them. When the socialist revolution of 1917 gave all nationalities living in the Russian Empire their freedom, that included the Gypsies. 9 They have their own newspapers and collective farms, and, of course, their own Gypsy Theater. When the idea of a genuine Gypsy theater was first discussed A.V. Lunacharsky jumped at it. He was Minister of Education then. The Romany Theater was founded in 1931. 10 Non-Romany members of the theatrical profession helped, for instance, the actors from the Moscow Art Theater. Romanies fought Hitler, and their theater entertained the troops. Many of the plays are about the way Gypsies have become Soviet citizens, not by being assimilated or swamped, but by the genuine and warm preservation of their language, culture, and traditions in the great multinational state. However, they are not as provincial as most would expect. They can perform Cervantes, and Indian artists helped them put on an Indian play, and others, as Hungarians, for example, did the same. And if anybody enjoys Gypsy music as I do, then he should hear Raissa Udovikova or Nina Pankova or Zolotogradov or Volshaninova. Among the best musical concerts I attended in the USSR included Gypsy artists: the deep voices rise to high passion, while the guitars throb and tinkle. But I won’t have my hand read a third time. CHANGE PLANES FOR A DREAM The sky above Kazakhstan covers an area of more than 2,717 thousand square kilometers, and far below, as the plane took us north from AlmaAta to lowlands, was a riffled blur of yellow and brown with rivers dribbling out of Lake Balkhash which lay like a thick blob on a microscope slide across the map. The plane was an AN-24, and it was full of people with packages, bundles, and suitcases. The stewardesses are in command, but neither superior nor subservient, and they brought bottles of mineral water and admonished those who wandered about the aircraft for no genuine reason. They were often in demand: it was “devushka (girl) this and devushka that,” while Kazakhstan moved away far below, the high steppelands of the interior unrolling themselves like a dusty mat. Out of the other republics of the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan is second in area (after the Russian Federation), and third in population (after the Russian Federation and the Ukraine); its population is fourteen million. The October Socialist Revolution revealed for the people of Central Asia and Kazakhstan the possibility of transition to socialism, bypassing capitalism. The major condition for this transition was the alliance with the proletariat of Russia and the subsequent fraternal friendship and mutual assistance of all the peoples of the USSR.

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The material, political, and organizational assistance rendered especially by the industrial regions of Russia and the Ukraine was the decisive condition for the swift industrialization of these republics. To hasten the economic advance of the Central Asian and Kazakh republics, the Soviet government built industrial centers there, first by restoring or providing equipment for existing enterprises and by moving factories and workshops there from central regions. This action played a large part in consolidating the alliance of people in the central regions with the borderlands and thus sped up the productive forces in the Eastern Soviet states. Regions like Kazakhstan had to be industrialized in the absence of large-scale industry and the personnel capable of managing it. These and other problems were eliminated by the new social system, fraternal cooperation, and mutual assistance. The socialist industrialization in the USSR had practically led to an evening of the economies of once backward non-Russian areas and the central regions, and the rate of industrial development in Central Asia and Kazakhstan went up so much as to considerably outstrip the average growth rates for the USSR as a whole. In turn, the working people of the Eastern Soviet republics contributed to the further advance of the USSR by supplying the country with increasing quantities of valuable raw materials, karakul, and the products of the engineering industry and others. In department stores I saw refrigerators and electrical equipment manufactured in Soviet Asia. Thus, these republics have taken an important place in the countrywide division of labor, and moreover, have also developed extensive international economic ties. Their industrial output is exported to more than one hundred countries—socialist, newly independent, and capitalist. In addition, the socialist transformation of agriculture was a major precondition for the socio-economic and cultural progress in Central Asia and Kazakhstan. This task was accomplished throughout the Soviet Union on the basis of Lenin’s co-operative plan, which became the turning point toward socialism for the peasantry of the central areas as well as the East. He pointed out that the peasant masses were small owners, that it was impossible to lead them to socialism in a brief period, that it was necessary to prepare them by gradual measures for the comprehension and acceptance of socialist principles. Land and water reforms, carried out mainly in the 1920s, were the main link in the chain of those plans for a transitional nature in conditions of Central Asia and Kazakhstan. In the course of this, the consequences of tsarism’s colonial policy were eliminated: local peasants and Russian settlers were equalized in rights to use water and land, patriarchal relations were abolished, the land of the bais, the Asiatic rural upper class, above the established quota was confiscated and handed over free of charge to landless peasants. Confiscated livestock was also handed

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over to poor peasants, agricultural laborers, and less-propertied middle peasants. The abolition of feudal and semi-feudal relations in agriculture progressed in stages over more than ten years. The land and water reforms fundamentally changed the socio-economic relations in the countryside. The agrarian changes in the 1920s helped create understanding of various forms of co-operation. Co-operatives proved to be the most successful form for moving onto the path of socialism, not only for the Russian peasants, but also for those of Central Asia and Kazakhstan. First there were simple trade, credit, and marketing co-operatives. These loosened the grip of middlemen, moneylenders, and the remaining rich peasants. Then producers’ co-ops, machine and seed supply organizations, organizations for joint farming, and similar enterprises spread. The successes achieved in agricultural co-operation accelerated the emergence of new socialist attitudes in the countryside: collective (kolkhoz) and state (sovkhoz) farms came to be the bearers of these relations. A new stage in the co-operative plan began in the early 1930s with the gradual establishment of the collective farm system. This stage came to be known as collectivization. Its characteristics in the Asiatic regions were that the socialist reorganization was closely interlinked with the elimination of the remains of a pre-capitalist, patriarchal-tribal way of life. Collectivization was simultaneously accompanied by the settlement of the nomad and semi-nomad population. 11 In particular, all this meant that peasants no longer had to pay rent to landlords, that their debts to banks were wiped out, apart from the distribution of land, livestock, and implements among them. These steps alone, however, were not enough: mere transfer of land did not end poverty. Poverty and destitution could only be ended by large-scale farming, making it possible to use up-to-date machinery and scientific methods, all co-operatively organized. The state provided resources for the construction of houses, hospitals, farm buildings, machine and mowing stations, and so on. Financial, tax, and other concessions were provided. By the second half of the 1930s, the socialization of agriculture had succeeded everywhere. Collective farms became the main producers of agricultural marketing. As laid down by the collective farm rules, every farm member is also entitled to his own small plot and his own house. He can own cattle, sheep, poultry, and grow fruit and vegetables for his own family and for sale. Control is in the hands of the general meeting of the farm’s members, who decide all-important affairs: production and sales, output quotas, methods of payment for work, and the distribution of the farm income. Manpower is divided into brigades, and the work as a whole is directed by qualified agronomists, vets, and so on.

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Farmers receive a guaranteed wage for their work, just like industrial workers, plus various extra benefits, which the farm economy can afford. Collectivization delivered millions of peasants from bondage, from ruin and poverty. The class of individual peasants was replaced by a new class—the collective farm peasantry, previously unknown. The Balkhash stopover was far behind—the little dusty airport on the lake where we had had tea and hardboiled eggs and black bread at the buffet: we ate hastily, for by the time we had gathered around the standup tables, the tannoy was already calling passengers for the north to get ready to board. A few hours later we were landing at Tselinograd. 12 Most Soviet internal airports are more like bus terminals. Austere in the main, there is little of the glitter and artificial façade of wealth seen in the outside terminals: the displays of Chanel Number 5, the expensive tape recorders, harassed or casual businessmen, and strident tourists. Here were peasant women in shawls sitting guard over bundles and suitcases and bags of produce (perhaps they were off to visit relations in the next town), waiting for a flight to be called; workers in ill-fitting suits or jackets and trousers that did not match going off to some new site; children trying to escape onto the tarmac to see the planes; soldiers, executives, technicians, smoking as they stood around carrying their thick briefcases. Tselinograd was like that, a place where you merely waited for a plane, and we waited for the final stage of this flight. Somewhere in the general area, too, was the Baikonur space center where they were then preparing to launch the Soyuz-Apollo project. 13 Watching an old woman sweeping the worn concrete floor with her reed broom, one found it hard to believe that in the general vicinity a great cosmic event was being prepared; even one could not associate the blue-suited Aeroflot girls, strutting ahead of parties of departing passengers, with the count-down to the lift-off. Still, they had come to mount the stars, these who had lived under feudalism only a century ago. I recalled the words of Cuba’s Nicolás Guillén: “Passengers en route, change your plane for a dream!” 14 We were in the middle of the great plains of Kazakhstan, the vast steppelands, the Virgin Lands as they were called, although the ploughs and tractors had already deflowered them. It was chilly outside; beyond the double swing-doors, the temperature stood at nine degrees. 15 NOTES ABOVE GROUND LEVEL The plane was heading up the map. Lost behind us were the Pamir and Alai Mountains, the harsh deserts being watered by newly dug canals, the ruffled-looking wilderness of South Kazakhstan. Through the window of the AN-24 I could see, below the thin, drifting puffball clouds, the great plains of the north. These were the steppes of Kazakhstan, mile

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after mile of earth now cultivated into rectangles of green, black, dark brown; flat, like carpets nailed to the floor of the world. The great prairies that had once been empty were now settled mostly by volunteers who had left an old life behind to open up these vast stretches and give them a productive life. I left my Ramayana for the sight of the great expanses passing by below. The ancient war in Ceylon dropped from my memory. “Sound of trumpet and of bugle, drum and horn and echoing shell, and the neigh of charging courses and the tuskers’ dying wail,” while I pondered over the dauntlessness of latter-day frontiersmen who had turned over this endless emptiness into vast square miles of wheat and pastureland, exposed the mineral wealth. Once backward, one could say. But really, what is “backward”? Around the years 950 to 1050 the territory known today as Central Asia and Kazakhstan produced such outstanding scientists and thinkers as ibn-Sina whom the Europeans called Avicenna, who wrote many remarkable works on medicine, philosophy, and natural sciences. I once chatted with a European who took pains to convince me that Ancient Greece was the cradle of all “civilization” and “knowledge,” therefore of Western “superiority.” Finding the debate hopeless in the face of bigotry and chauvinism, I conceded, asking whether it was not possible that the wisdom from his wonderful fountain might not have flowed in all directions and not only due west? “Impossible.” he snorted, “the Aegean Sea was in the way.” What could convince him, in his navy-blue City of London suit and shiny shoes, the neat striped shirt, that there had been a scholar-encyclopaedist called Al-Farabi in a faraway place now called South Kazakhstan in the ninth–tenth centuries or that there had been an Alisher Navoi, an Uzbek poet, in the fifteenth century about the same time that Europe was experiencing its Renaissance? 16 That there was great poetry in Arabic and Persian? The Arabic and Persian languages did play a major role in the political and cultural life of the Central Asian peoples. These two languages became a means of intertribal and international communications, fulfilled social functions right up to the October Revolution, much in the same way Latin must have done in medieval Europe. But for this reason there was a lag in the development of the modern literary languages of the native peoples in Central Asia and Kazakhstan, of their social functions. The retarded development of the languages of the local population was one of the reasons for cultural backwardness, the mass of whom were illiterate and knew no other languages than their native tongues. During tsarist times not a single higher educational establishment was to be found in the region. The few so-called Russian-native and other schools had no notable influence on the functional development of the

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Uzbek, Kazakh, and other languages of Central Asia. Before the Revolution these languages were used mainly for everyday intercourse. Tsarism feared popular education, feared the development of their cultures and languages, their growing national awareness. The Communists, on the other hand, inspired by Lenin’s approach, prevented the suppression of the cultures and languages of national minorities and oppressed peoples; they did not impose assimilation; they did not allow small nations or their languages and cultures to be absorbed by large nations or by their languages and cultures, but sought to effect the utmost development and mutual enrichment of big and small nations and nationalities, of their cultures and languages. This was a development of Marx’s idea that one nation could and should learn from others. It opposed the conception of bourgeois theoreticians’ policy of the absorbing of the small nations’ cultures by those of large nations: the idea of familiarization of the people not with national culture, but rather with European culture, which was supposedly becoming a world culture; the theory that Europe was the source of wisdom (it was the man in the navy-blue City of London suit, the starched collar all over again) based on the underestimation of the enormous contribution made by the non-European peoples to the development of mankind. The 10th Congress of the Communist Party in 1921 adopted a program for raising the cultural level, developing their cultures and languages. It was the task of the Communists to help the people develop and consolidate Soviet statehood in conformity with national and domestic conditions; create their own courts of law, administration, organs of government operating in their native languages and comprising of local people who knew the life and psychology of the local population; develop their own press, schools, theatrical activities, cultural and educational institutions in their own native languages; develop a network of courses for general education and vocational training in their native languages. This program was not encouraged, as some would have it, for “propaganda purposes.” All the time it was pointed out that the mother tongue was the most important and most popularly understandable medium for expressing national culture; all cognition was more effectively carried on in the native language, if the people concerned did not widely use another language in everyday life; an illiterate people who did not know a developed literary language could achieve greater success in eliminating illiteracy in a short time and raising their educational level only in their native tongue. Lenin said once that Marxists maintained that the population must be provided with schools where teaching will be carried on in all local languages, that a basic law had to be introduced in the constitution to guarantee there would be no privileges of any one nation and no violation of the rights of national minorities.

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The native languages played a large role in the training of specialists. These languages, particularly in the Union republics, eventually came to occupy a dominant position first in training cadres with a secondary education and then in other spheres. The need for training, practically from scratch, a national intelligentsia, together with the need to invest the old cultural heritage with a democratic ideology, also presented problems and involved a struggle not so much against bourgeois as against patriarchal-feudal ideology. The slogan of those years was: in their political, economic, and cultural development, the peoples of the former national borderlands must catch up with the advanced peoples of Russia within the shortest possible historical period. The important spheres of the intellectual development of any presentday nation are public education at all levels, the main branches of sciences, belles-lettres, art, the mass media. In the development of the spheres of Central Asian and Kazakh life, a veritable cultural revolution took place in which a highly significant role was played by the extensive use of national literary languages. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and neighboring republics have become socialist states with highly developed science and technology. Before the Revolution not a single research institute was to be found there. In 1975, the five national academies of sciences united 110 scientific centers. The region has a total of several hundred research institutions employing 80,000 scientific workers. Literature in the sciences is published in Kazakh, Uzbek, Kirghiz, Tajik, and Turkmen languages. In 1975, 104 scientific, socio-political, and literary journals and other periodicals, and 460 newspapers were published in the aforementioned languages. A great number of books and booklets were published in the same year: 2,918 titles in more than forty-nine million copies. In the initial period attention was paid primarily to the development of national folk cultures because of the desire to put into the utmost effect everything positive in each distinctive national culture. At the same time, the USSR has always been in opposition to nationalistic and purist tendencies in the development of cultures and languages, taking into account the dangers of cultures becoming mutually isolated, of the emergence of language barriers; encouraging the necessity to mutually enrich national cultures and languages. This meant a simultaneous struggle against confining the development of intellectual life and social consciousness of each people to their distinctive folk culture based solely on the native language. Self-isolation and self-restriction on the basis of “purity” and “originality” is harmful and unsound. The morality of the belligerent nationalist—a most dangerous enemy of a multinational state—is alien to the Soviet people, none of them show any desire to withdraw into the national “ego.”

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Over the years of socialist construction in the USSR, a new historical community of people has emerged, namely, the Soviet people. During the rise of such a community, general Soviet elements took shape in the national cultures, a sort of thread uniting everybody in spite of nationality. The formation and growth of general Soviet culture is taking place on the foundation of the growing social, economic, moral-political, and ideological unity of Soviet society. The Soviet socialist culture, in which the national and the international are dialectically combined, is now being seen as the prototype of a future world communist culture. At the same time, as the conditions for the free and unhampered function and development of national languages were set forth, the Soviet government paid regard to the social need for the Russian language, one of the equal languages of the USSR, as the common language of inter-communication among all Soviet peoples. The language of the intercourse among nations is called on to function as that of promoting fraternal co-operation in social, political, cultural, economic, and scientific fields, for engaging in everyday relations and maintaining permanent contact and unity. “CHERCHEZ LA FEMME” All this was part of the cultural revolution, which formed a link in the socialist transformation of the country. It was impossible to build socialism while illiteracy and ignorance prevailed, since socialism can only be created by conscious, energetic creative effort of the masses. The cultural revolution is an objective historical necessity for and during the transition to socialism. Inclusive of this revolution was also the titanic task of actually emancipating women and drawing them into active social life and socialist production, a task particularly important for the full cultural emergence among the peoples of the old colonial borderlands. Now almost half of all pupils and students in all fields of the educational system are girls of local nationalities—one of the greatest achievements of the cultural revolution in the Eastern Soviet republics. Coeducation and also the establishment of women’s pedagogical institutes and a network of women’s clubs, etc., played a tremendous part in combating feudal survivals in the attitude to women. The extensive explanatory work, drawing girls of local nationalities into schools, had also to be accompanied by a certain degree of compulsion against those who maliciously sought to maintain the survivals of feudalism. The position of women changed radically in the Soviet East during the building of socialism. This in turn had its effect on the family way of life. Such customs as polygamy, the giving in marriage of minors, and wear-

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ing of the paranja, yashmak, and chichvan, forms of dress or veil covering the face, were abolished, and the marriage procedure was changed. I found no section of life—in production, social, political, or cultural activity—where women are not working and displaying their abilities. It has been shown in the Soviet Union, and indeed the experience of history must demonstrate, that it would be impossible to build socialism successfully without the widest enlistment of the female of the human species. Fifty-one million women go to work every day in the Soviet Union, women make up at least half the students in colleges and secondary technical schools; of every one thousand women, 739 have at least secondary education. Teaching and medicine are the most popular professions among them, and they make up 49 percent of scientific workers; they are shop managers and factory directors, engineers and technicians, and, perhaps inevitably, in charge of public catering. It was a woman’s voice that drew me from my whispering and muttering into my tape recorder. The blue-clad Aeroflot stewardess was coming down the aisle collecting empty mineral water bottles and announcing that we were about to descend for the last stop of this lap of my journey. FARAWAY PLACES Kokchetav isn’t the northernmost part of Kazakhstan. 17 About a hundred miles farther up the line is Petropavlovsk and beyond that you come to Western Siberia of the Russian Federation where the color of the map changes from the yellow plains to the great forest country, but Kokchetav lies on the border of the woodland, where the plains dwindle away, sucked in by the forests. It was a small provincial town with a broad main street that was flanked by irrigation canals, with the hotel on it and across the way was the main post office. There was the department store and the Palace of Weddings and on an ornamental square was the maroon-fronted building of the local Soviet, the offices of the District Communist Party, and then the sidewalk lined a park with trees and shrubbery and the usual couples sitting on benches talking or someone reading Soviet Sport. From the children’s school of music came the sound of a violin, and there were blocks of new flats with blue balconies among the old-style Russian houses and wooden cottages. The town lay along low hills and by a kidney-shaped lake which one meets after walking along a winding road outside the town. The road into town was flanked by ranks of electric pylons, giants on tall steel legs, glaring with blank porcelain insulator eyes, their tentacles of power lines supplying the entire surrounding region with power.

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It was a very quiet town and looked as if few foreigners ever came this far north in Kazakhstan. So I felt like a rare explorer, more so when we went to the post office to send a cable home to my wife. “Greetings from Northern Kazakhstan,” and it never reached her because the clerk, probably, did not handle international telegrams every day and made a mistake somewhere. I did have a feeling I was doing a rare thing, sending that cable, because this place was extremely far away. That was just being boyish really, because ever since I had been a child I had dreamed of faraway places. “Faraway places with strange-sounding names,” the popular song goes. Anyway the cable never arrived, and I might as well have been at the Mountains of the Moon. Kokchetav. I had never heard of Kokchetav until I was in Alma-Ata. I had been to Bamako in Mali, and seen the war zone around Hanoi and Haiphong; I had been in Santiago, Chile, a few months before they killed Allende, and had seen the ruins of old Panama that the pirate Henry Morgan burned; and it had been amusing sailing down the Panama Canal eating from the lunch boxes of Colonel Sanders’ Kentucky Fried Chicken (by courtesy of the Panama Canal Company), but never had I heard of a town called Kokchetav. It didn’t have a romantic sounding name, like Samarkand or Bukhara or Chikunda, South Africa, although I have never been to Chikunda, South Africa. They say a person rarely ever gets to know his own country well enough, and on the map Chikunda looks as far north in South Africa as Kokchetav in Kazakhstan. But I have seen the inside of the Johannesburg Fort prison, but even that isn’t like being locked up in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg. Thinking back, the furthest north I ever got in South Africa was the criminal court in Pretoria when I and others were tried for treason against the government. 18 But here I was in this place Kokchetav, with the statue of Vambery who had been a traveler, scientist, geographer, and another of the first Kazakh democrats, a tall handsome figure in a granite officer’s greatcoat. He had been an officer in the tsar’s army and was supposed to be a descendant of Genghis Khan himself, no less. His grandfather Alikhan had been called the last Khan of the Tatar hordes. 19 “Kokchetav means blue mountains,” Amangeldeh explained. He was a cheerful fellow, short and bespectacled, with black hair and a face like young Mister Moto, the fictional Japanese detective, I thought, and wore a beautifully fitting dark suit when he met us at the airport and looked very eager. “But where are the mountains?” I asked. There were only low hills, and the kidney-shaped lake, I think, was called Kopa. “Thereby hangs a tale,” he said, or the Russian equivalent thereof. “You see, when the tsarist troops first came up here they had heard of the famous Blue Mountains and meant to establish a colony on the spot. They met some of the local population and asked the way. The wily locals

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thereupon pointed in the wrong direction, toward this site, so Kokchetav sprang up here.” He chuckled merrily, as if he himself had had something to do with outwitting the tsarist troops. There was the courtesy visit to the District Party offices where the First Secretary and others welcomed us. For the most part it was like other Party offices: the polished tables and desks, the papers neatly arranged, the portrait of Lenin. The intercom buzzed while we chatted. You got all the gen at the Obkom, which is short for regional committee, before setting out. In any case, we learned that Kokchetav, for all its quiet provincial look, was the center of a region covering seventy-eight thousand square kilometers of the Virgin Lands; that it administered fifteen agricultural districts and connected four other towns, 116 state farms, and twenty-five collective farms; and that the region encompassed a population of more than 600,000. Kokchetav now housed ninety-three thousand citizens. It was a relatively young town, about one hundred and fifty years old. That must have been when the tsar’s troops moved in, thinking they were in the Blue Mountains. But the region had really started developing over the past fifteen years as the machine factories and other industries grew, and the numerous rest homes, sanatoria, and holiday spots were set up. The intercom buzzed again, and one of the secretaries talked into it. The First Secretary was saying: “You know, this region is the homeland not only of the Kazakhs, but of forty different nationalities. We have Ukrainians, Russians, Lithuanians, Byelorussians, Germans, and Poles. All the collective and state farms are multinational.” One might make clear the difference between a collective and a state farm. A collective farm belongs to the community of local farmers who originally formed it, the land being granted to them in perpetuity. A state farm belongs to the government. Up here in Northern Kazakhstan, for instance, the huge tracts of country had stood empty and undeveloped for ages, and then the Soviet government had called for volunteers from all over the country to go in and establish farms, to “plough the fields and scatter the good seed.” Thus, people came from everywhere, giving up old homes to begin new ones here in the vast emptiness. They were mostly Komsomols, Communist youth, and they became the twentiethcentury frontier families. The sky was heavy and gray, and we went up a street on a hillside that led to the Kuibyshev museum. This was actually where Valerian Kuibyshev, one of the Revolution’s most famous heroes, had grown up, and there was a wooden house surrounded by trees, with a stable or coach-house at the back and a particular memorial tree planted by his mother in 1903 in memory of Valerian’s brother, accidentally shot and killed by a friend. I found it to be one of the Soviet Union’s most interesting little museums, dedicated to a really tough revolutionary. As a boy Kuibyshev had started taking part in the anti-tsarist movement and then

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in the days of the Bolshevik struggle had led troops against the White Guards in the Civil War. I think he was one of those revolutionaries in the true spirit of the Revolution. Of course, there were also Amangeldeh Imanov and Alibi Janghildin who are national heroes of the Revolution in Kazakhstan, but no one who reads the history of the Soviet Union can miss out on Valerian Kuibyshev. At the bottom of the hill from the house, there is a statue of him, an impression in stone of all the dedication that goes with being a real revolutionary. 20 Outside the Palace of Weddings, a line of red-beribboned cars was drawn up waiting for their bridal parties, while from inside Mendelssohn’s wedding march came down into the street. We went by the Palace of Culture, the Dom Kultury one could never miss, which belonged to the local railway workers. THE SKY IS WITH ME Out at the Yeslovetsky State Farm, youths raised dust in the village street with their bicycles, and there were children in the little square where the farm leaders met us outside the administrative center: the farm chairman, the local Party secretary, and heads of the workers’ committees. This was a big farm even though one would not judge it so from the ordinary-looking village houses with their picket fences. But there was more building going on on the outskirts. We had to look in on the local amenities, of course: the stolovaya or public dining room, the village department store, and the club where they held their general meetings; the political study room with desks and the walls decorated in red, and the library. “We have one thousand and six hundred children and two thousand and five hundred grownups,” the farm chairman said with some pride, leading the way toward the long hothouses of the inevitable cucumbers. He introduced us to the “commissar” for cucumbers, a young agronomist who had been working there for two years. I wondered how one became attracted to cucumbers, but gave up the thought as they told us that presently collective and state farm wages were generally the same all over the Soviet Union, and, perhaps, there was time to go into the fields. This farm covered 19,000 hectares, and when we went out along the road through the stretches being prepared for spring sowing, land stretched for miles, ploughed in straight lines, while far away the awkward-looking machines shambled slowly like mechanical toys on a rug. After driving for more miles with the late afternoon sun beginning to lower in the width of the sky, there was a farm outstation suddenly in the middle of the landscape, a cluster of neat fenced-in buildings and a pair of stubby trucks parked outside, with a jeep and a motorcycle and sidecar.

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This was a farm-brigade headquarters, and a heavy man with a mustache shook hands and introduced himself as Rashid Gabardolin, the head of the brigade operating in that section. He had two units of twentyfour men each working in shifts to plough or sow 3,000 hectares, and a hundred vehicles of various kinds in his charge. They all lived out in these stations during their shifts and went home to the central village after they had finished. Gabardolin took us around the tiny settlement of four buildings. There was a board with targets achieved by each worker and the wages due and the quotas of the brigades. Inside there was a library and game room for those off duty, and some men lay on beds in the bunkhouse reading Komsomolskaya Pravda and Soviet Film. Two young girls, Galya and Sveta, were preparing the evening meal in the kitchen. They were trainees in the catering service and were doing part of their apprenticeship out here. That night there would be borsch and stew, salad, bread, and tea, apart from other items on the menu they showed us. A full dinner cost fifty kopecks. Outside a man at the jeep, which the Soviets nicknamed kosyol, which means goat because it is supposed to be able to go anywhere, was speaking over a walkie-talkie, communicating with somebody far out in the fields. The sky was less gray, like dusty glass. Rashid Gabardolin read from the displayed noticeboard the names of those who had fulfilled or overfulfilled their work quotas, and again the names were Kazakh, Ukrainian, Tatar, Russian, German. “We have a happy family,” he smiled under the mustache. “Now we are trying to get the spring sowing done in time, and everybody is pulling their weight.” They were sowing maize, a lot of which would go for cattle fodder, and he said, trotting out another of those Kazakh proverbs, a little inappropriate this time, I thought as we shook hands: “We say when we get a good guest, the ewe will bear two lambs.” On the way back we parked at the edge of a field road and watched a tractor dragging a plough come clattering down a row toward us. All around the earth lay neatly ruffled. The tractor driver pulled up and climbed down to greet the farm chairman and the rest of us. Behind and around the plough-discs the earth was striped like brown corduroy. He was smiling and unshaven, and his handshake was gritty with soil and callouses. “Stasov Victor,” he said, pushing his cap up from his dusty forehead. “Isn’t it knock-off time?” I asked. “Da, five o’clock,” he said. “But I have to get this field done as soon as possible because of the sowing. So I’ll carry on until it gets dark.” He raised a soiled hand in salute and climbed, smiling, back into the cabin, the tractor motor revved and roared and then clattered away, the discs churning up the soil. We went through the fields, taking a short cut back to the center, passing some men working on a stalled tractor.

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On the way we stopped at the cow sheds. Two matronly women were piling hay. We shuffled our shoes in the trays of disinfectant at the door and went in where the mechanical milking machines jiggled at the udders, and the cows looked patiently over their stalls, lowing dolefully with that appearance cows have. The shed had the usual smell of stables. The milkmaids, who were pitching hay, greeted us; they were blonde women in white overalls, leaning on their pitchforks for a while. They were on the afternoon shift that had started at two o’clock. “Were you born in these parts?” I asked one of them who was big and blonde and motherly, Valentina Ulyanova. She shook her head. “Nyet,” she said, smiling. “Sibir. I’m from Siberia.” Siberia wasn’t really far away: a few hundred miles northeast was Omsk. She was one of the farm award winners, but she shook her head again at my congratulations. “Everybody helped,” she said. “I just really represent them all.” She had a daughter who was a nurse, she said, and a son finishing technical college, and then there was her youngest girl in the fifth grade. We left them pitching hay—Valentina Ulyanova and Maria Ivanova, milkmaids. “The women play a very big part,” the chairman said as we strolled in the village as dusk approached. “Here, out of fifty-five subcommittee secretaries, nineteen are women. They are also deputy officials, and so on, serving in many capacities. Thirty-one percent of the Communist Party here are women.” I thought, perhaps, the Soviet Union was becoming a matriarchal society, especially recalling the legions of hefty, middle-aged, or elderly women who stood guard in the foyers of most public or official buildings, and who seemed to be in charge of so many places and enterprises. A petticoat government, the old description said; but there had been the war too, and it was hard for a country to lose over twenty million people. 21 We had time to look at the local bookstore; they had a large selection of books, from technical and scientific works, school texts, to fiction and, lo and behold, Murat unearthed a copy of South African stories, which included one of my own. When you heard that one of your works had been translated, you thought first of bookshops in the relative capital cities or, perhaps, universities—but off the beaten track bookshops on farms far off in the steppes of Asia never entered your mind. Slava Trudu (Glory to Labor), as they said here. That inspired me to dig in my luggage for my copy of Abai Kunanbayev. It was a gesture made in my hotel room. Outside the lamplight lay dimly on the trees that rustled along the street, and I needed to read before falling asleep anyway. I chose a page at random and read, waiting for sleep, the usual hospitality of another farm village lying wearily on my eyelids. “The mullah with his mighty turban, who twists our laws in

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every way, while looking wise and very urban, is he not a bird of prey? From any soul that’s mean and dark. . . .” In the morning the sky was clear and sunny, and we drank birch-tree juice at the stall outside the hotel while we waited for Amangeldeh whom I had dubbed El Commandante, because at first I kept on forgetting his name. Later on, of course, I became used to pronouncing it, but I still called him Commandante. I was with Larissa and Murat, and it occurred to me that Murat was the son of that Auezov who had been a very famous writer and historian in Kazakhstan and had written those epics about Abai Kunanbayev whose work was in my luggage along with the Ramayana of course. He was very quiet and shy, a rather nervous young man. Auezov Junior, I mean, who was accompanying us all over Kazakhstan, and I think it was because everybody was always introducing him as the son of a famous celebrity, and he wanted to do his own thing and make a reputation for himself and be known for that. He was doing so, making a reputation in literature, and he was a very likeable companion to have on the trip. So we were waiting to go up to this place called Arikbalik. And so when El Commandante turned up with the car we set out. You won’t find it on a large-scale map, although I think a place that has a name like that which rolls so pleasantly on the tongue should have a place on the map. There are places up there like Shchuchinsk, which foreigners would find hard to pronounce, but are very pleasant to visit, in spite of that. ON BORODIN But now we were on our way to Arikbalik, and there were the prairies again, the miles of khaki-colored flatness going by. All over Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan I was reminded always of Borodin’s In the Steppes of Central Asia, which had been composed in 1880. The scenario attached to the score goes something like this: over the monotonous steppes of Central Asia sound the unaccustomed strains of a peaceful Russian song. From the distance are heard the sounds of horses and camels and a characteristic Oriental melody. A native caravan approaches and passes on safe and carefree through the boundless desert under the protection of Russian arms. Further and further it goes into the desert, and the Russian song and Asiatic melody combine to form a common harmony whose echo dies away gradually in the air of the boundless steppes. 22 Borodin dedicated that to Liszt. I never found out why. But Borodin is a favorite with me, and the music of the Polovtsian dances from Prince Igor they turned into a popular song in the West, but it still sounds alright when you whistle it and forget the words they attached to it: “Hold my hand. I’m a stranger in Paradise. . . .”

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I stopped thinking of Borodin, because we were driving up a road with cottages scattered on each side and youngsters on bicycles and electric standards and then we were turning into a parking lot, which was the district headquarters for Arikbalik. From here they administered 192,000 hectares of farmland and eight state farms. The town population was 31,000, but the town seemed quiet, with most of the people at work. There were eight secondary schools and fifteen state farm schools, and the land was given mostly over to corn and cattle, horses, pigs, and poultry. Vegetables were confined to only 520 hectares and that was enough for the district consumption. All this and more we got from the admin-center, of course, by way of Comrade Nikolai Nishnikov, who was from the regional Communist Party. “According to reports to be delivered at the 25th Congress, all the goals of this district are being fulfilled,” he announced, launching into the preliminaries. “Although 1974 was a very dry period.” As is typical of the Virgin Lands, the local population was a mixture of nationalities from many parts of the Soviet Union, as well as the local Kazakhs. “We have become one international family, typical of the new Soviet people,” Nishnikov said. “Our only problem now lies in the cultural level. What I mean is we don’t have any large theater or ballet or opera companies. But from the position of the mass media, we have everything we need, newspapers, TV, and radio. Everybody has either a television set or a radio, and often both. The people usually go on tourist trips for their holidays or travel down to the Black Sea and such places. In general there is a leveling out in the average conditions of the rural and city populations.” Afterward we climbed a hill at the top of which there was a war memorial and laid bouquets of flowers there. There were many other bunches of flowers, tied with ribbons. Everywhere in the Soviet Union, in cities, towns, and farm villages, there is a memorial for those who died in the Great Patriotic War; some are gigantic and monolithic, others are small and humble, but all have that aura of deep emotion that is heightened by the custom of married couples to lay their wedding bouquets at the foot of these monuments: perhaps, it is a dedication to a past generation or a promise to the next. One got the impression that these little bouquets had greater meaning than the grand wreaths that had to be carried by several people presented by important delegations and visiting dignitaries. THE YOUNG GUARD We were going out to one of the farms. There was the farm village some miles out on the prairie: the country streets with the wooden fences, a cow, a tractor, and harvester park, and

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far beyond, horses grazing on the plains that were interrupted even farther away by stands of forest, and on the horizon, a line of low hills like stains along the bottom of the blue glass of the sky. One of the deputies of the director of this farm took charge of our party. They had a poultry hatchery and a brewery (one of the two in the district), and I always remembered they had this entire brewery whenever a waitress at a hotel said, “Piva net (no beer).” The farm was called Pravda and stretched over 40,000 hectares, and going far out into the fields our driver waved down a truck laden with workers going off shift. They all turned out to be a brigade of teenage school-goers, with dusty faces and wearing high boots. There was a teacher with them, and he explained it was part of the curriculum to do two months of agricultural work. They were all in the ninth class and had been sowing wheat, and some of them meant to be tractor drivers or go into technical school after the tenth class. They were all young and wanted to have their picture taken with me by Pyotr, the young man who was with us from Kazakh Film. Then they all climbed aboard again, and the truck took off down the road raising a cloud of dust between the expanses of furrowed land on each side. There were tractors pulling the sowers in the distance, and on the roadside some men were doing something to a sower that seemed to have broken down. There was a little man with a true Tatar face under a rough fur cap with earflaps loose, and he looked all muscle, and the wrinkles of his face were dark with dust. Shaking hands, he said shyly that he was sorry he wasn’t wearing his best clothes to meet us. He had hard-calloused hands and an impish Mongoloid grin. He was really a little man, but tough, whom you would probably nickname “Shorty” in any language. The sower had a sort of container full of seed on the back and an arrangement that let the seed drop out into the furrows and then what looked like claws to cover up the seed. That’s the best I can describe a sower, not being a farming man, and only an onlooker, but I know the earth was very dark, almost black, and moist in these parts. Then there was another one of those little outstations from which the brigades operated—sixty in this brigade, the manager reported. “No,” he said, “it’s not really lonely out here. Now that it’s spring sowing there’s no time to be lonely. The yield of corn is going to depend on how fast we work.” There were forty-nine brigades working in this region. There was a slogan on a wall of the station, which said: “Bread is the wealth of our motherland, let us do our best to raise the yield.” The head of the brigade was German, the manager a Pole, and the director a Kazakh. There were the two now usual young girls doing the cooking; they ordinarily worked a seven-hour stint, but because of the sowing they were going to put in ten hours. A compensatory leave is given for overworked hours. They were chubby young girls in white

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overalls and head-cloths and really looked as if they were playing at house, standing by the gas ranges and telling us there would be soup, cutlets, and kompot (compote). We passed the vast cultivated areas, the miles of machine-churned earth. It was Africa Day that day, and I thought of the thousands of African peasants still hacking at the hot soil with old-fashioned mattocks and hoes, striving to raise crops from the shambas, the little plots, and African countries which were starting to reorganize their economies after years of colonialism: Ethiopia and the Congo and others, struggling out of the past. The cultivation fell away, and we drove into grasslands, our car bouncing by the rough track that wound across the countryside. The trees drew near, and we passed a forest of young birch trees. There were thin clouds like smears on the flat sky. The distance was almost interminable, and the trees receded again as we circled the birch forest, and, circling the trees, there was another stretch of cultivated land and after a curve in the road another outstation of this vast state farm. A red flag was flying from the pole, signifying that somebody had overfulfilled a quota. Beyond the station the prairies stretched on and on toward a faraway blur of low mountains. The station was the center for brigades of schoolchildren. A teenager in gym tights ran across the lawn carrying a bucket, and an off-duty group in track suits were tossing a volleyball. The manager was a lean and gaunt man in a cap and a navy-blue suit, who welcomed us on a neat lawn that surrounded the station building. Here the youngsters had part of their specialization training, learning everything about combine harvesters, tractor mechanics, and general farming as part of their usual school curriculum. Also they specialized in ducks—last year they had raised 43,000 ducks. Usually the farm brigades are divided into field units; there was a unit for poultry, one for experimental agriculture, one for gardening. The lean man broke off his chat to admonish one of our party for dropping a cigarette butt on his nicely trimmed lawn. The brigade of youngsters, he continued pridefully, was the best in the region and for some time had been the best in the whole Republic. He sounded very pleased with his charges. Of course, the quotas of the school-goers were set 30 percent lower than those of adults, but the majority of them worked so hard that they often surpassed the adults. They had dedicated all their work to the local war victims. At the end of their course they held the “harvest festival” when the diplomas were handed out along with the praise for the quotas fulfilled and the prizes. There were sports events, and all the farm “gentry” turned up for the festival.

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In the meantime, there was a lake nearby where they went swimming or boating when off duty, and there were cultural exchanges with brigades, entertaining each other with amateur theatricals. In a rest room girls were listening to a favorite Soviet pop singer on a record player, and in another room the TV was showing a serialized version, almost appropriately, of Sholokhov’s Virgin Soil Upturned. 23 “Have you made up your mind what you are going to become after you finish the tenth class?” I asked one of the girls, who was named Sveta. “I haven’t decided yet,” she said. She was the leader of the brigade’s Komsomol group. They all looked very young, being in the ninth grade, and serious in spite of their bright smiles. There was a wall newspaper called Komsomol Searchlight with cartoons lampooning errors and carelessness, and safety regulations alongside verses and news items of work progress. Outside the volleyball game was in progress. The gaunt manager and the lady instructors (or were they chaperones?) said goodbye to us, and we drove off across the grasslands. We went down to the lakeside strolling through the forest to look at the new Pioneer camp that was due to be opened soon. The sun came through the trees and glinted on the surface of the lake like speckled glass. After that we drove back to the farm village, and I was surprised to find how near it was: we must have come around in a big circle, along the country road and across a stream and scattering chickens before us. We stopped at one of the houses, which was the home of the local secretary, and Murat introduced me to Bakhram Yandosov, a leading technician on the farm, and there was Gennady Skuratov, the director of the poultry farm, and others. From the kitchen came the voices of women and the smell of cooking. In the dining room the table had been laid with what looked like everything the state farm could produce. “Our Kazakh women are very dangerous,” somebody said jovially. “They are likely to go on the warpath if we don’t finish what they have laid out for us.” “Well, let us appease them,” I said. “The first toast to the hostess.” The long drive had given me a feeling of affection for the crowded table. The toasts punctuated the disappearing lines of fare. Amangeldeh was tearing a whole sheep into chunks with his bare hands and sharing it out. We drank to all the usual things, and then somebody proposed a toast to the memory of Bram Fischer of South Africa. 24 “Rakhmat,” I said, “thank you very much,” using the Kazakh word. The feasting continued in the usual Soviet farm abundance.

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THE BLUE MOUNTAINS We lived in this holiday lodge, a family-size building, above the lakeside surrounded by trees. You could go for a stroll in the woods below our balcony, and beyond the trees was the beach, and the lake lay flat and still in the sunlight. There were several lakes in the region, surrounded by the wooded mountains, and this was part of the rest cure and holiday zone. The forest of birch and pine stretched for miles around and up the mountains with the lakes among them, although perhaps one couldn’t really call the mountains “mountains,” but rather high craggy hills and great outcrops of granite in that part of Kazakhstan. It was very pleasant in the high forestland, and this place was in the Lake Borovoye-Shchuchinsk area—the latter name, which I have said, is a tongue twister of pronunciation if you don’t speak the language very well or not at all—but it is on the map. Driving there from Kokchetav you saw the mountains gradually appear in the distance, coming up like a swelling on the horizon. Amangeldeh or El Commandante, as I called him, was saying as we drove toward them: “There is a legend which says that when the world was born, God looked down on Kazakhstan and saw the flat empty steppes. He felt sorry for those living in such desolate emptiness, so he took a handful of rocks and tossed it down as a sort of compensation and so we got the Blue Mountains.” There is an African folktale, from Tanzania, I think, which gives another explanation for how mountains came to be. It says that long ago the earth was smooth and flat and even all over, but one day she arose to talk to the sky. When the two of them had finished their chat, the earth took leave of the sky and started to return. But she did not reach home all over. Some parts of her became tired on the way and stopped where they were, without completing the descent. Therefore the hills and the mountains. The mountains did look blue-gray in the distance, and one imagined the ancient nomads on their horses and camels peering ahead and naming them after the color they saw. They are up near the northeast frontier of Kazakhstan, and beyond is Siberia, or what is now the southern border of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. The ancient people composed many legends and folktales about the Blue Mountains, and as we drew near, El Commandante, or perhaps it was Murat, pointed out a humped peak. “That’s Burabai,” he said, “the White Camel. It was a very special camel and stood guard up there, watching and giving warning of any approaching danger. Then one day the youngest son of Ablai Khan, a great chieftain, went out hunting. Perhaps he hadn’t been told about the camel, and coming across it he drew his bow and let off an arrow, mortally wounding the animal. The camel sank down bleeding, and finally

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dying, it turned to stone, so forming the peak you see shaped like a camel.” 25 Of course, it was not all legends and folktales up there. There Kolchak’s White Guards had operated during the Civil War, coming down out of Siberia, and battles and skirmishes had been fought among the birches and pines. 26 Now most of the woods and lake region is a nature reserve and holiday area dedicated to the Civil War and the victory of the Reds. By the time we drove into the town we were dozing in the back of the car, but were suddenly awakened by Amangeldeh’s voice up front, saying, “Dom Kultury,” and there we were, passing the town’s House of Culture on the main street. We were welcomed at the town center and the Party headquarters by the First Secretary of the region, a cheerful ovoid fellow with an old-style schoolboy’s haircut and the usual smart suit. It was he who brought us to this rather charming holiday lodge by the lake and joined us for lunch. There was really excellent fish straight from the lakes and grilled. The comrade in charge of the house joined us; he was a war veteran and a pensioner. “I still have many years ahead,” he said. “I took this job because I didn’t feel like retiring.” He allocated us our rooms, including the drivers, and went off because he had another part of the holiday complex to see to, leaving us in charge of the housekeeper. She asked to call her if we needed anything done. The exterior of the lodge was the oldfashioned wood design, but inside everything was very modern. The First Secretary said we should just take things easy, because this was the purpose of this region. We stayed at the lodge between excursions into the district and for our last few days here in the north. On the balcony Pyotr and Murat tried to teach me a card game called Preference, but it turned out to be too complicated, what with the language or the lack of it, and the score keeping involved a layout chart that looked like a geometrical problem, so I left them to play it and lounged in the sunlight, watching a young couple strolling through the trees by the lake’s edge, holding hands in the sunlight. She had wheat-colored hair, and he was a dark Kazakh, and they were walking in the sunlight speckled by the leaves of the trees. At a narrow jetty jutting into the lake, a boy was hurling a stick out into the water for his big Alsatian to go in and retrieve. Squirrels darted up and down the trees, and at night wildcats screeched in the woods. Once I left the light on and the window open, going downstairs, and coming back, found an invasion by thousands of moths. They were all over, against the walls and on the ceiling, in the bed, on the floor, and nothing we did could get them away. When we got back the next evening the room was clear of them, and I always wonder how the housekeeper had managed it.

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Of course, there were other things going on besides holidaying at rest houses and sanatoria among the trees. Near the town itself is also an important forestry center, a scientific institute full of tree specialists and agronomists, and women in white examining moss and soil through microscopes, and in one room a young lady poring over sheets of computered figures which did not seem to have anything to do with forestry, but did. They were concerned with the preservation of trees, plant diseases and cures, the potential productivity of the woodland. Certainly I knew little about the subject, but the staff presented me with a fine picture of the surrounding lakes and forests and mountains, which I still look at now and then. If one has grown up and lived in a big city, it is great to go out into the countryside now and then, although I have always found that a short trip of a few days is enough before I long again for the concrete jungle of the big cities. But really, there in the Blue Mountains it was very pleasant, and the picture from the forestry center reminds me of the idyllic beauty of that place. “KUMISS” IS GOOD FOR YOU The health zone covered 65,000 hectares. There was the Shchuchinsk sanatorium we went to look at, especially for miners. We were met at the entranceway by the doctors in charge, and an inmate, a man with a thatch of hair and a stick. He was a patient convalescing, sent by his trade union. “We treat most heart complaints and tuberculosis,” Doctor Ivan Yankovsky said. “But, of course, the sanatorium is both for rest and medical purposes.” It is a very modern institution surrounded by walks and parkland. An old man in a cloth cap and leaning on a stick operated the lift that took us up to the seventh floor, which opened onto a wide patio-like area exposed to the sky. “We call it the Seventh Heaven,” Doctor Yankovsky smiled. The purpose of the open section was for treatment by solar rays, and even in winter patients were treated under the sky in equipment like sleeping bags. From there you could see the mountains and the green forests flung out. “Ochen krasivo (very beautiful),” we agreed. The mountains and forests were really a sight to see from the Seventh Heaven. Below again, in the games room billiard balls smacked, and beyond that in the quiet restaurant a worker and his family chatted around a table, and from another an elderly couple with seamed Kazakh faces smiled at us as the nurses entertained us with tea. This was the sanatorium of the White Meadow, named after the nearby white (or pure) spot where the aforementioned Ablai Khan had camped. On the front terrace Doctor Rosa Ivanovna Ivashchenko, M.Sc., explained about mud baths and solar rays. She was a tall, large-boned woman, exuding confidence, the kind of motherly woman one imagined

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was meant to be in charge of such an institution. Apart from the normal medical treatment, the mud with its mineral properties, in which the patients wallowed, the sunrays, they also prescribed kumiss. “After all,” she said, “all medicine is really folk medicine.” On the terrace a table had been loaded with bottles of the mare’s milk for our sampling. It had been specially bottled for medical use, but it was no different really from the kumiss you drank in the villages. We were invited to help ourselves, while Dr. Ivashchenko explained the beneficent properties: apparently kumiss is rich with Vitamin B12 and C, protein, and other health-sustaining ingredients. “It also contains 5 percent alcohol,” she added. “Well,” somebody said chuckling, “you will have to drink many bottles of kumiss if you want to get merry.” Assured of continued good health by samplings of the mare’s milk, we went on our way. Apart from the ubiquitous Dom Kultury there is also an interesting natural history museum where all the wildlife of the area is displayed, and even for the layman, and those who are usually bored by museums, it is something to be seen. LEGENDS The road wound through the forest, and you could see the segmented water of the lakes through the trees, glinting like scattered shards of mirror. A section of the road was being repaired, and a diesel roller driven by a woman was flattening the steaming macadam. Around a bend we passed a group of forest rangers standing by a kosyol parked by a spring. The lady guide with us said: “Over there is the area for the wild people.” “Wild people?” I asked with some astonishment. “Yes, you know those people who spend their holidays in tents and sleeping bags in the woods.” “Oh,” I laughed. “You mean campers. Wild people, of all things.” We were shown Jikebater, the legendary White Meadow, and the mount of the “sleeping boy.” If you looked carefully you could see the mountaintop forming the shape of a youth lying on his back and the shape of his reclining head. The legend was about a boy who had fought his enemies in the cause of happiness and had been killed by them, dying up there on the mountain where his stone body now lay. The tale was like the one of the camel. The main lake is Borovoye and is situated in a quite beautiful setting of tree-covered hills and rocky peaks and crags. In fact the entire scene we saw was that of the picture the forestry center people had given me as a gift. There was the Blue Bay and the Princess Rock rising from the still water, and according to the tale she had been sought after by many

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suitors and had been offered in marriage to the one who could shoot an arrow to reach the summit of a nearby peak. The lover she favored but couldn’t choose outright turned out to be the strongest bowman, but unfortunately the princess was at the top when he took the winning shot and the arrow killed her, sending her hurtling down into the lake. Anyway, there is an outcrop of rock representing her, and true enough, as you leave the scene slowly and look back, the jaggedness of the stone disappears in the distance, and you see the clear profile of a young girl with long tresses flowing back behind her. One can imagine a ballet being produced around a story like that; perhaps it’s been done, the Soviets are very enthusiastic about ballet and have a fondness for such legends. From this one got the impression that the rarity of mountainous regions in Kazakhstan must have stimulated these simple and romantic legends. Indeed, if one wants to study Kazakh folklore seriously one will discover that there is always evidence of mountains running through it. As a matter of fact, the companion of my travels through Kazakhstan, Murat Auezov, has written about this in his essay, “Kazakh Nomadic Culture,” pointing out among other things: “The dazzling beauty of the snow-clad peaks has long cast its spell on the Kazakh. ‘A maiden’s breast’ is his description of two mountains rising side by side, and he calls a mountain pass caressingly ‘bell’ or ‘waist.’ A symbol of beauty, a mountain is also a symbol of strength. In praising a child they say: ‘May you be like a mountain!’ Among their other obligatory feats, the heroes of Kazakh epics were to ‘cross the seven ranges.’ Characteristically, most of the legends about the origin of the Kazakhs mention some mountain or others, mostly the Altai, as their original home.” . . . AND BEYOND After we had dinner at the restaurant at the center, the chairman called in the farm’s pop group, a trio of two guitars and an accordion, and told the kitchen staff to shed their aprons and join the farewell party. There were some other lady officials and very soon a fast dance was going, a selection of both folk and modern. Afterward when everyone was breathless from the whirling and stamping Russian and Kazakh dances, I borrowed one of the guitars and taught everybody to sing “We Shall Overcome” and a few other items from my hoarse repertoire. 27 It was a gay ending to our exploration of the Blue Mountains of Kazakhstan. We had driven out to Stepnyak, which was a town some distance from Shchuchinsk, to see the great plains again for the last time, driving along a country road beyond the lakes. Stepnyak had been a gold mining town back in the 1930s, but was now a center of northern ranching and sheep raising.

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The lakes and mountains were behind us now, and the steppelands took their place again, and there, out of a dip in the undulating plains, the farming center rose suddenly, big enough to be called a small town, really, and founded only in 1954. There were the houses and the picket fences, ducks waddling in the yards, the youngsters on bicycles, and the main square with the slogans and the portraits of award-winning farmers, past and present, and of V. I. Lenin and L. I. Brezhnev, the Dom Kultury and the administrative offices where the state farm director waited with the head of the local trade unions and the deputy director. This was the state farm named after Nikolai Shchors, a legendary military chief who had fought in the Ukraine during the Civil War. 28 The farm had been originally begun by Red Army soldiers and now had a population of about 2,000 composed of nineteen nationalities. They had 650 schoolchildren and seventy in kindergarten, and a boarding school for those whose parents worked far away; there was a hospital with thirty beds as well as the clinic. We went down to the kindergarten, and when the teacher opened a door, there was a smiling crowd of nippers, little girls with big bows in their hair and boys with chubby faces, a mixture of blonde and brunette, who let out a united chorus of, “Zdravstvuyte! Welcome!” But in the reception room we found also a lonely little citizen looking very glum and lost, being placated by one of the staff. “It’s his first day,” she smiled, ruffling his hair. “He is feeling a little strange.” On a wall hung a portrait of Lenin as a child. At the hospital we looked around the clinic, and out of a room came a young woman whose white uniform did nothing to deny her glamour. “This is our dentist,” beamed the director. I smiled, “Well, I wouldn’t mind having a tooth pulled by her.” She smiled back. “Come on into the surgery, Comrade, and I’ll oblige.” “As soon as I have a toothache,” I assured her. At the school a group of teenagers of the seventh grade were standing around waiting to hear their chemistry results. The headmistress guided us around the school, showing us laboratories and discussion rooms, explaining methods of teaching, that the teachers all met together to plan the program and systems. The aim, she said, was to encourage the communist attitude in the younger generation, apart from giving them an academic education. They held special sessions on political subjects, discussions on political science and history, national and international events. Later on we stopped at a house on Gagarin Street. It was an ordinary cottage with a dooryard surrounded by a wooden fence. Harnesses hung here and there. We were welcomed inside by a middle-aged Kazakh woman, who showed us into the living room, where there were carpets

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on the floor, a TV set, and a lot of traditional Kazakh handwork. A plaited riding-crop lay on the sideboard. A young man came in to help his mother bring a great bowl of kumiss and the little round cups to the table in the middle of the room. The director chuckled jokingly, “It is expected that the guest should finish one big bowl all by himself.” “It would probably finish the guest,” I said. We all sat around and dipped into the big bowl of mare’s milk with the small earless cups, drinking. Kumiss has a slightly soapy taste, although it is altogether palatable, just a little stranger than the cow’s milk, because of the hint of soapiness going down, and has a more watery texture. When the first bowl had been emptied, the young man brought another. “By the way,” the director said, “you know the elections for the Supreme Soviet are due soon. Well, our young comrade here is the town candidate for the election.” His name was Dauletbek Yesinov, and he was a handsome young man with shiny, jet-black hair swept back from an olive-skinned face, and he was an ordinary horse herdsman. He smiled shyly as we congratulated him, and I said: “Your mother must be proud of you.” Back in the cars and we bumped out of the farm center, heading toward the steppes beyond. The plains were broken here and there by salt pans and dotted with yellow prairie flowers. We drove along a rough track, and the sky was far-flung wide and flat blue, with puffballs of cloud drifting across it, and far away we could see the dust raised by the herds of horses as they moved along the horizon. NOTES 1. Kongoni is a Swahili word for the hartebeest, a kind of African antelope. 2. The Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, known as Soviet Kazakhstan or simply Kazakhstan, was established on December 5, 1936. It was called the Kirghiz Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic from August 1920 to April 1925, when it was renamed the Kazakh Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic until 1936. Kazakhstan is notable for being the second largest republic in the USSR after Russia. 3. La Guma spells “Alma-Ata” as “Alma Ata” (without a hyphen) in his original text. Following Russian grammar, I have corrected La Guma’s spelling throughout the text, as well as on the map provided, by inserting the hyphen. Alma-Ata today is known as Almaty. 4. Mukhtar Auezov (1897–1961) was a well-regarded writer and academic, who wrote about Abai Kunanbayev among many other topics. Murat Auezov (1943–present), his son, has also had a distinguished career as a Kazakh writer, academic, and diplomat. 5. “Jungarian” refers to Jungaria—also spelled “Dzungaria” or “Zungharia”— which is a region located in present-day northwest China. It has deep historical and cultural ties to Mongolia. Khiva and Kokand are cities located in present-day Uzbekistan that date as far back as the Middle Ages. 6. La Guma is referring to the Russian Revolution of 1905, which witnessed public protests and state repression across the Russian Empire. It resulted in constitutional

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reform in 1906 that provided for greater popular representation through a multiparty system and a legislative assembly (the State Duma). 7. The following note is included in the original text: “Fermented milk.—Ed.” 8. The following note is included in the original text: “Kulaks—name for the rural bourgeoisie, a numerous stratum comprising 12.3 percent of the population in tsarist Russia in 1913. Alongside the capitalists and big landowners, the kulaks were rabid and irreconcilable enemies of the workers’ revolution.—Ed.” This editorial note from 1978 is biased and extreme in its depiction of kulaks. 9. The following note is included in the original text: “A government decision of August 30, 1926, gave the Gypsies plots of land, followed by a decision of October 1, 1926, providing for aid to Gypsies wishing to settle down and quit their nomadic way of life.—Ed.” 10. The following note is included in the original text: “The Romany Theater is the only professional Gypsy theater in the world.—Ed.” 11. Soviet collectivization was part of the first five-year plan implemented by Joseph Stalin from 1928 to 1932 as an effort designed to end the control of landlords (kulaks) and develop the peasantry. One component of Stalin’s policy of “Socialism in One Country,” the program nevertheless faced pockets of resistance and contributed to a great famine in 1932 and 1933 that stretched from Ukraine to Central Asia, during which as many as six million died. Though the broader plan successfully escalated Soviet industrialization, the five-year time period was shortened for this reason. 12. Tselinograd is currently named Astana. 13. The Baikonur space center is better known as the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Located in Kazakhstan, it has served as the main hub of the Soviet and Russian space programs. The Soyuz-Apollo project refers to the first joint US-Soviet space mission in July 1975, involving the docking of an American Apollo spacecraft with a Soviet Soyuz counterpart. The mission symbolized the end of the so-called “Space Race” that started with the USSR’s launch of Sputnik—the first human-made satellite to orbit the Earth—in 1957. 14. Nicolás Guillén (1902–1989) was a famous Cuban poet who received the Stalin Peace Prize and also served as president of the National Union of Cuban Writers. 15. La Guma uses centigrade, as noted later in the text. 16. Al-Farabi (c.872–c.950), known as Alpharabius in the West, was a widely influential Islamic philosopher and intellectual. Alisher Navoi (1441–1501), also spelled Ali-Shir Nava’i, was a poet who wrote in the Chagatai language, a Central Asian language that is now moribund. He was born in what is today Herat, Afghanistan. 17. Kokchetav is currently known as Kokshetau. 18. La Guma is referring to the infamous Treason Trial (1956–1961), which involved 156 anti-apartheid activists such as Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, and Ruth First, as well as La Guma himself. It was a response by the apartheid government to the 1955 Congress of the People and its Freedom Charter. All were acquitted. 19. The “Vambery” La Guma describes is unclear, though it is likely that La Guma is referencing the Hungarian scholar Arminius Vámbéry (1832–1913), who wrote Sketches of Central Asia (1868). The biographical details provided by La Guma appear to be either incorrect or apocryphal. Vámbéry is noted for having had a friendship with the author Bram Stoker and is said to have provided inspiration for the characters of Count Dracula and Professor Van Helsing. 20. Amangeldeh Imanov (1873–1919) is considered a national hero of Kazakhstan, having led a significant revolt against tsarist rule and elite landownership in 1916, as well as helping to establish the Bolshevik government’s influence in the country prior to his death in 1919. Alibi Janghildin (1884–1953), also known as Alibi Togzhanovich Dzhangil’din, participated in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the Civil War thereafter. He claimed to have received his Communist Party membership card directly from Lenin himself. Valerian Kuibyshev (1888–1935) also participated in the 1917 revolution and served in the Red Army. He held a number of roles in the Soviet

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government, including involvement with the implementation of the GOELRO plan discussed earlier. 21. The term “petticoat government” refers to rule by women and is often used in a misogynistic fashion. La Guma appears to employ it here not only in relation to the promotion of gender equality under Soviet communism, but also the effects of the Second World War and the high mortality rate it had for men of that generation, resulting in women occupying a number of official positions. 22. Alexander Borodin (1833–1887) was a Russian composer, known for such works as the posthumously completed opera, Prince Igor (1890). His orchestral work In the Steppes of Central Asia (1880) celebrated the Russian Empire’s presence in Central Asia. La Guma’s admiration is somewhat misguided and ironic in this regard, at least from a political standpoint. 23. Mikhail Sholokhov (1905–1984) was a Soviet writer who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1965. Considered a master of socialist realism, his Virgin Soil Upturned is a two-volume work of fiction—Seeds of Tomorrow (1932) and Harvest on the Don (1960)—about Soviet collectivization. 24. Bram Fischer (1908–1975) was a member of the South African Communist Party and a well-known lawyer, who defended Nelson Mandela during the Rivonia Trial (1963–1964), which resulted in Mandela’s imprisonment on Robben Island. Fischer himself was imprisoned for his political activities, and he later died from cancer while under house arrest. La Guma knew him personally. Fischer died the same year as La Guma’s Soviet trip. 25. Ablai Khan (1711–1781) was a Kazakh political leader who aided the centralization of the Kazakh state during the eighteenth century. 26. Alexander Kolchak (1874–1920) was an Imperial Russian naval commander who established an anti-Bolshevik government in Siberia during the Russian Civil War (1917–1922) and led the White movement from 1918 to 1920, when he was captured and executed. 27. “We Shall Overcome” is a folk song that draws from a musical tradition of African-American spirituals. It became an anthem of the American civil rights movement. La Guma’s ability to play it indicates his affinity with the struggle and his knowledge of African-American cultural expression more generally. Dennis Brutus has recalled La Guma’s guitar playing skills and his ability to play American folk music by Pete Seeger as well as a repertoire of songs from the Cape. See Dennis Brutus, “African Thought: A Tribute to Alex La Guma,” in Memories of Home: The Writings of Alex La Guma, ed. Cecil Abrahams (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1991), 4. 28. Nikolai Shchors (1895–1919) was a military hero of the Red Army during the Russian Civil War. He was originally from Ukraine.

FOUR The Golden Road

The sunlight lay hot and yellow on the boulevards, in the parks; the windows gleamed and flashed like hundreds of semaphore signals. The sun hung like a smear of brass in the sky, and Tashkent quivered in the heat haze. The city lies in the east of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, near the edge of a thumb of territory that is part of a hand clasped on the north and south by the smaller republic of Kirghizia. North across the border in Kazakhstan lies Chimkent, and due south is Leninabad on a spit of land, which is Tajik territory. On the map all these make up what looks like parts of a jigsaw puzzle fitting together to form the Soviet Union’s southernmost states. Here had been the scene of many actions to establish revolutionary Turkestan. Until the October uprising in Petrograd, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in Turkestan remained united in a single organization. The Bolsheviks were backed by more than 100,000 “labor front” workers, people of all nationalities who had been mobilized during World War I to work in Russia and who had found themselves caught up in the sweep of revolution. Returning home they became active in the local struggle for socialism. In the struggle for the power of the Soviets, an exceptionally important role too was played by the garrison soldiers of Tashkent, Samarkand, Ashkhabad, Alma-Ata (Verny), and Frunze (Pishpek). By the autumn of 1917 most of them had already sided with the Bolsheviks. Tashkent became the center of revolutionary struggle in Central Asia. On the night of October 27, 1917, workers and soldiers of Tashkent, in response to the call of the Bolsheviks, launched an armed uprising, engaging counter-revolutionary elements led by General Korovichenko commanding Cossacks and Cadets. The territorial Soviets under Menshe155

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viks and Socialist-Revolutionaries decided for the Turkestan Committee of the Provisional Government against the revolutionaries. The latter forces in Tashkent consisted of armed workers and soldiers of the 1st and 2nd Siberian regiments and various small army units. At first the counter-revolutionary force was superior in numbers, but the insurgents rapidly gained reinforcements. One after the other, major centers in the old Turkestan decided to recognize Soviet power and to help Tashkent fight the counter-revolution. Fighting in the city broke out on October 28 and lasted four days. Uzbeks, Tajiks, and Turkmens fought side by side with Russian workers and soldiers. Young people acted as scouts, women helped erect barricades, carried ammunition, and worked as nurses for the Red detachments. In the morning of November 1, the military citadel was captured along with other positions in the city. General Korovichenko was arrested along with officers and the reactionary Turkestan committee, while soldiers considered to have been misled by them were disarmed. Tashkent became Soviet. 1 Inspired by foreign interventionists and local reactionaries, the counter-revolution continued to instigate mutinies, and in the latter half of February 1918, Red Guard units from Tashkent with the assistance of surrounding workers and peasants routed the so-called Kokand Autonomous Government. Fighting went on throughout the territory, and by spring 1918 Soviet power had been established in the whole of Central Asia and Kazakhstan, with the exception of the Khiva Khanate and the Bukhara Emirate where the feudal lords and bais remained in power until 1920. In the villages of Central Asia, Soviet power was established at a much slower pace than in the Russian countryside, due to the strong influence of the bais and the Muslim religious leaders and the patriarchal and feudal order prevailing there. But the victory of Soviet power and the resultant national emancipation of the peoples enabled them to reach statehood. The entire people began to take an active part in the building of a new, socialist society. ORCHESTRAS AND CONDUCTORS The evening before, soon after we arrived in Tashkent, we went to a birthday celebration for Uigun, who is a famous writer in Uzbekistan, and well known in the Soviet Union for that matter. He had turned seventy, and after the speeches of congratulation, we were invited to a malenki banket (a small banquet) in his honor, by my old friend Kamil Yashen, who is also famous in the USSR writers’ world, and is what the Anglos would call “a grand old man” to the Uzbeks. 2

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The malenki banket was very pleasant and in fact turned out very merry when the folk musical ensemble started up with their tuars and doiras to make that wild and exciting music you hear all over Central Asia. A tuar is a two-stringed instrument like the Kazakh dombra, and the doira is a large hand drum, like an oversized tambourine. Most people associate the Soviet Union with the balalaika which is something else altogether and is really Russian. Once I went to a concert by an orchestra consisting entirely of Kazakh dombras, and they played an entire symphony, which is indeed something to hear. Talking of symphonies, while in Tashkent we also went to another orchestral concert, which was conducted by Madame Abdurakhmanova who was the one and only female conductor of a symphony orchestra I had ever seen, from which the question arose afterward on why there are so few women in the world conducting orchestras. Of course, there are musicians and opera singers and dancers, but outside the Soviet Union, and only once there, I haven’t seen a symphony orchestra conducted by a woman. So, here we were in the hot sunlight of Tashkent. If you are a city dweller and long, after a while, for the caress of concrete when you have seen and felt the great open spaces, she is welcome, like an Eastern beauty clad in the swirl of traditional skirts of stone: a pause after the great steppes, the rambling, reluctantly harnessed wildness of the desert, and the far mountain ranges unchanged and defiant. In many places the old robes of Tashkent have taken on a new sheen. The concrete expanses of her newly constructed boulevards, the flagstoned walks, the futuristic bodies clad in Uzbek motif; the cubic building on stilts of Moorish arches which is the Lenin Museum; the vast new hotel in which we lived was a curved rectangle, its entire front draped in Koranic concrete lacework; the Palace of Arts, a circular drum of fluted stone balanced precariously, as if pirouetting on slanting columns; the main publishing house rising like a giant pencil poised to scribble on the sky. This was the new Tashkent. The earthquake of 1966 had wreaked havoc with the old, tearing away her old finery and leaving seventy-five thousand families without homes. Luckily, the loss of life was minimal, but the city was reduced to shambles: more than twenty million square feet of living space was reduced to ruins, as well as scientific, medical, and trade enterprises. Such is the Soviet Union that every region of the country came to the rescue of Tashkent, to build it anew. There was no private enterprise to count the cost, no charitable collection boxes depending on the kindliness of odd citizens. The entire USSR rallied to raise and rebuild the heart of Uzbekistan. So, the friendship of the various republics and the peoples of various nationalities was demonstrated in deeds of solidarity and family duty. Trucks and trainloads of building material, machinery, primary

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goods converged on the region: from Kiev, Moscow, Leningrad, Minsk, and the Baltic republics. From all corners came town planners and seismologists, gathering to design a new capital. Buildings were constructed with an eye for protection from future earthquakes. By the autumn of 1966, all of the seventy-five thousand families had moved to new housing blocks, new apartments built away from the epicenter on the outskirts, leaving the center to administration in the main. Driving through the new suburbs that are neatly laid out and combine modern lines with the traditional Asiatic, you can read the inscriptions on the walls: “This block was donated and built by the workers of Byelorussia, the Ukraine, Georgia, etc.,” in short by the whole of the USSR. Zulfiya, who looks more like somebody’s mother than a national poetess, says: “The name of Tashkent’s builder is Friendship.” 3 Perhaps that which makes Tashkent so unique, so passionate is the drama of its rebirth. From the belching womb of the earth, the midwives of Soviet enterprise had delivered a beautiful child: a maiden growing up beautiful and touchable, whose warm skin you wanted to stroke and feel its reality. It could be the sun. The sun turned the city into the honey color of dusky skin. It lay yellow on the broad avenues, along the sidewalks, softening the concrete. It forced its way into the fine parks and gilded the windows of government buildings and administration centers, flowed along viaducts and modern underpasses. It was as if one could touch the sunlight, finger it here, then peel it away like shavings of gold leaf from the stone. The temperature was thirty-five degrees centigrade. The heat came down heavily, but everybody seemed to accept it, there was no hurry for the shade of the buildings. All oblivious to the sun, men in loose shirts and tyubeteikas stood in the sunlight and chatted, others went by lugging the ubiquitous briefcases; summer suits mingled with the multicolored striped traditional design of Uzbek dresses. They were also thinking of putting the sun to use. In Tashkent the planners contemplated harnessing its heat for future hot water supplies for the blocks of flats and air-conditioning plants. Across the street from the modern hotel with its Asiatic façade, a stall on the sidewalk was selling shashlik in the old-fashioned way, the chunks of meat broiling on skewers over open braziers, while the customers sat at a table or walked on, eating the smoking meat. I met old friends: Yashen and Babajan, also a top man in the Uzbek Writers’ Union, a Comrade Volkov, my wife and I had met while holidaying by the Black Sea, others came in and shook hands, and people I hadn’t met before said, “Salaam aleikum.” 4 “Aleikum salaam,” I replied, a little to their surprise. But Africa is a multilingual continent, and in Cape Town the Muslim community uses

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Arabic words and phrases from the Koran, although they do not speak Arabic as a language of communication. We were in Babajan’s office and talking about my forthcoming exploration of Uzbekistan, while we drank bottles of mineral water to quench our thirst. From outside the window the smell of the shashlik wafted in on the yellow sunlight. “Well, we are glad to see you again,” Ramz was saying. He is a burly man with a lot of curly hair beginning to gray around his face and, like most everybody else, was in shirtsleeves. “As they say in Karakalpakia, a coat is best when it is new, but an old friend is better as he becomes older.” Another proverb. Perhaps they were outdoing the Kazakhs; but in this part of the world one met this flowery language all the time. I said: “This reminds me, I have Karakalpakia on my program.” Those in the room discussed it, talking in Uzbek and Russian and consulted with young Alisher who had been appointed a guide. “It’s too hot out there,” they decided at last. “We would not advise you to go. You would not stand the heat, it’s worse than here in Tashkent. Go down to Ferghana, it is cooler and more pleasant this time of the year.” 5 I wondered whether it could be hotter than Dar es Salaam or Bamako. “As long as I got to Bukhara too,” I said, “I can leave Karakalpakia for another time.” “It’s settled then. Alisher will see to everything you need. Tonight we’ll eat, we’ll have plov, da?” 6 “Great. Plov is just great. But let me get some cooler shirts first.” I bought some cotton shirts in a big air-conditioned department store that milled with people. There were products from all other parts of the USSR as well as local, and those imported from the other socialist countries. We ate ice cream to keep cool, and on the sidewalk I watched an elderly woman in charge of a scale, taking the weights of figure-conscious citizens. All day the heat sweltered, and the city shimmered like a dancing girl in the haze of the afternoon. Long before the earthquake, Tashkent had risen again and again from calamity. It had been pillaged and razed several times in a more war-like age, more times than it had changed names. It had been Chachkent, Binkent, until the eleventh century when it took its present name. Now one had to look close to see the original medieval past. But its Asiatic character had been in the minds of modern architects who incorporated the national Uzbek features. A visitor might think that some of the names did not belong, as if they had become lost somehow in the teeming bazaars of history; the avenues and boulevards of Pushkin, Karl Marx, Gogol being nudged and jostled by the Oriental shoulders of Navoi, Shota Rustaveli, Khamza. 7 But the revolutionaries of the old Turkestan had fought alongside Russian Red Guards for socialism.

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Gardeners were in the park, urging greenery from the hot ochre earth, and we wandered among the shrubbery, the trees, and flowerbeds. A young girl with long black hair in several braids, wearing a multicolored striped national dress and carrying a violin case, went by. A man in an orange shirt dozed on a bench. The memorial for the war dead of Tashkent rose in an arrangement of tall slabs with the names of each raised in bas-relief, row upon row of names spelled out in stone, not to be forgotten. One was reminded of the lines of Pablo Neruda: “Soviet Union, if we could gather up all the blood spilled in your struggles . . . we would have a new ocean.” 8 While we walked around the memorial, a bridal procession approached, the bride in all her white finery, followed by an entourage of attendants. Together she and her new husband laid their ribboned bouquet at the foot of the monument. Then the sun was turning the sky the color of lilac over the west in the direction of the Aral Sea and where the Caspian Sea washed against the farthest border of Kazakhstan. In Tashkent the buildings dropped their shadows into the streets, onto the broad paved walks and parks, ushering the golden sunlight out for the night, to let the dusk slip in with its cool relief. The Uzbek Academy of Sciences and the Literary Museum with its gigantic murals of stone and mosaic formed a silhouette above the lower buildings; the last students were leaving the Polytechnical Institute for the day, Rossiya Hotel hovered in wait for its first supper guests, but on the streets where the open-air eating places worked under awnings or on the sidewalks, the smoke from the shashlik skewers still mingled with the gathering twilight, and groups gathered to drink beer and wash away the last heat of the day in the city, before heading for the trolleybuses that would take them to the tree lined “sputnik towns.” 9 We strolled among the trees that flanked the quiet walks around one of the memorials, and the evening was quiet, the park seemingly deserted. A stream gurgled in the moonlight, and far away the stars lay like strewn jewels. “This is where the young couples stroll,” Ramz Babajan said. “Of course, everybody is safe in our park at night.” The trees rustled along the flagged pathways, fountains tinkled. “We are a very respectful people,” he added and hummed and hawed with a touch of embarrassment. “Besides,” he joked, pointing at a rectangular building looming against the moon glow, “there is the Central Committee keeping an eye on things.” “That and the stars maybe,” I laughed. “The stars watch like eyes.” “You think perhaps they’re watching you?” “Well,” I smiled. “Stars were first made in South Africa, you know.” I told him that South African tale of the young African girl who sat warming herself by a wood fire one night and played with the ashes, taking

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them in her hands and flinging them up to see how pretty they were when they floated in the air. As they floated away she put more wood on the fire and stirred it with a stick, and the bright sparks flew everywhere and wafted high into the night. They hung in the air and made a bright road across the sky, a road of silver and diamonds. “It’s still there,” I said. “They call it the Stars Road or the Milky Way, a road of stars in the darkness.” I added: “Anyway, if we invented the stars, it must have been your people who invented the sun. It’s been really powerful today.” BETWEEN TWO RIVERS The broad arm of desert and fertility which is Uzbekistan thrusts more or less into the middle of the Asian part of the USSR, and scattered over its area of 173,750 square miles live some sixty various nationalities and ethnic groups, with an Uzbek majority of about nine million. In the USSR the Uzbeks are the third largest national population. Roughly thrusting apart the two great rivers, the Amu Darya below and the Syr Darya above, Southern Kazakhstan rests upon it while its wrist and hand are held on all sides by the other Union republics of Kirghizia, Tajikistan, Turkmenia. Farther in the south, the distant mountains of the Hindu Kush form a rampart beyond which rises Afghanistan. Scratching under the surface of the desert, archaeologists found the remains of a primitive encampment dating back a hundred thousand years. The bones of Neanderthal man and rock paintings were dug up in the south, the remains of people who roamed the coarse, gravelly, brown earth long before the states of Khorezm, Sogdiana, and Bactria arose as the oldest states on the territory. 10 Here the armies of Cyrus the Great who had founded the Persian Empire penetrated in the sixth century B.C. After him came Alexander to incorporate a large part of Uzbekistan, and with the downfall of the Macedonian’s empire the region became fair game for numerous Turkic tribes crowding in for the pickings. There came the White Huns and then the Arabs carrying the green banner of Islam. Khorezm grew, and then the myriad hooves of the TatarMongols swept in from the East to raze the states that had grown up, plundering and annihilating. It was a period of chaos and fire: mountains of skulls, and the walls of flame glowed on the horizons as the standards of the conquerors went forward. Like its neighboring states Uzbekistan inevitably came under the political and economic influence of Russia, with the same results. Traveling through the region in the nineteenth century, the European scholar Vambery reported that he had not come across a house in the whole of Central Asia which did not include a Russian article of some kind. 11

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The Russians were interested particularly in raw cotton for their own industries. The tsarist authorities, of course, saw no difference of culture and tradition; as far as they were concerned, the whole of Central Asia was referred to as Turkestan. Back in 1920, it was Lenin’s viewpoint that it was necessary to organize national states on the territory of Turkestan. Whereas previously the Uzbeks had been scattered over that vast territory, they were enabled to unite in a single national state in October 1924. National oppression was eliminated, and freedom was brought to all minorities. Lenin was firmly convinced that in Central Asia Soviet power was to take an examination of all the peoples of the East, to prove and demonstrate in deeds and not in words that under that power and with the fraternal support of the victorious working class of Russia the peoples of Central Asia could advance from feudalism to socialism, bypassing capitalism. The national demarcation of Central Asia was also important in eliminating the consequences of the tsarist colonial regime, which sowed discord among the peoples. The national demarcation of Central Asia reunited the peoples within the multinational Soviet state and opened the way for the rapid development of their economy and national culture, imparting the latter with socialist content. 12 Uzbekistan has a highly developed socialist industry. This includes a large-scale power industry and advanced engineering, chemical, nonferrous metallurgical, gas, oil, coal, and steel industries. Today it holds first place among the other republics in the manufacture of machinery for cotton growing and ginning, in the manufacture of cotton fabrics, mineral fertilizers, silk, and vegetable oil. Tashkent itself boasts more than three hundred large plants and factories. In the war years the Uzbeks demonstrated their solidarity and comradely allegiance with the rest of the USSR. “Your people are children of the Soviet Union,” Uzbek workers wrote in a collective letter to their people at the front. “Together with you the Russian, Ukrainian, Byelorussian, Azerbaijanian, Georgian, Armenian, Tajik, Kazakh, Turkmen, and Kirghiz built our great home, our country and our culture, working day and night for twenty-five years. Your street begins in Byelorussia, and the Ukrainian’s home is in your country. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is a fortress with a gate, and the robber who has stolen through this gate is making an attempt on your life! If all Soviet peoples fight shoulder to shoulder, the enemy will be defeated.” 13 Half a century has elapsed since the formation of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. During this relatively short period of history, great social and economic transformations have taken place in the life of the Uzbek people. Among other things, in the course of liquidating feudal and patriarchal relations, great difficulties were overcome in the solution of the problem of nationalities, in relations between workers and peasants, and in the liquidation of the economic, political, and cultural back-

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wardness of the territory. These tasks could be solved through the development of Soviet statehood in such a form which corresponded to the national everyday life features of the peoples of Central Asia, through the isolation of all exploiter elements and the participation of the working people in building up socialism, through the creation of the economic basis of a new social system by means of eliminating private ownership of means of production and development of a national culture. THE UZBEK PEARL As the little AN-24 circled the city, the Tashselmash and Uzbekselmash factories, which manufactured farm machinery, the Tashtekstilmash textile-machine factory, dropped away as Tashkent receded. These giant plants had displaced the old artisan workshops, just as the broad boulevards had taken the place of the labyrinth of lanes and the old-fashioned mud huts. The University of Uzbekistan, the alma mater of Central Asia, with its fifteen thousand students of ninety-six nationalities and eight hundred foreigners, dwindled below, with its vast libraries and underground stocks of books. The foreign students were mostly Vietnamese and Latin Americans. The courses covered Oriental studies, journalism, philology, history, Germanic studies, biology, chemistry and physics, jurisprudence, applied mathematics, geology, and cybernetics. I recalled a group of students politely vacating a lift so we could use it when we visited the University, and one of the deputies showed us around and afterward presented me with a history of the University. Through a porthole the Chirchik Valley stretched out with the city in its hollow, and beyond the transparent disc made by a propeller, the distant peaks of the Chatkal Mountains were visible. It took about an hour to fly from Tashkent to Ferghana. Ferghana is the central town of the valley, which has the same name. It’s near the tip of the hand that is held by Kirghizia on the map. It lies in that spur of territory, surrounded by the rugged Alai, which is a part of the Tien Shan range, rising twenty thousand feet in black ominous peaks. The little plane left us at the airport a short distance from the small provincial-looking town with crisscrossing streets and irrigation canals, a quiet atmosphere, but the flags and hoardings of Uzbekistan’s fiftieth celebrations still in view. We went through the square named after Nurgan, the first Uzbek woman who fought for female rights and was murdered by her brothers for it. 14 We passed a crowd around a car accident. Chinar, poplar, and plane trees cast shade along the streets. On a sidewalk a child was blowing up a toy balloon. The hotel was plain and austere-looking; one could not imagine it welcoming parties of foreign tourists. In the shadowy foyer a peasant

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woman and a girl who appeared to be her granddaughter filled in registration forms at a table. I did the same. The form, quaintly translated into English, was headed “Leaf of registration” and required “date of arriving to the hotel” and “the aim of coming to the USSR.” A comrade from the Party District Committee named Magrubov and a humorous fellow Adham took us to the deserted restaurant and roused out the cook and waitress so we could all have breakfast. In spite of its quietness I learned that the population was 160,000 and that one and a half million people lived in the whole district. The Ferghana Valley is called the pearl of Uzbekistan, and the whole republic was proud of it, because once it had been all desert, but now it had been turned into one of the greenest and most productive spots. Almost half the entire Uzbek cotton crop and 60 percent of the silk cocoons come from the Ferghana and Andizhan regions. Numerous canals, gouged out of the desert literally with bare hands or old mattocks and hoes, had brought life to these parts where farming is based entirely on irrigation. In 1939, the Great Ferghana Canal—then one hundred miles long— had been built in forty-five days by 160 thousand farmers, men and women, from all over Uzbekistan. 15 A great deal of the enterprise had been urged and initiated by Osman Yusupov, who was the First Secretary of the Uzbek Communist Party. In 1940, the canal was extended into Tajikistan territory, thus crossing the entire valley, east to west. In the town one was surprised to find tall buildings above the trees, colleges, specialized schools, and medical institutions. On the outskirts there were an oil refinery and a textile mill. It is a comparatively young town, less than a hundred years old, but the counter-revolution had swept up and down this valley in the old days until the marauding basmachi gangs had been wiped out, and the peasants had sent a message to Lenin, stating: “The people of Ferghana have chosen the road of communism.” The Pearl of Uzbekistan, or the “Sleeping Beauty,” was awakened by the kiss of socialist enterprise. I was fascinated by the tyubeteika factory, a sort of living garden of flowers consisting of tables at which scores of young girls in colorful traditional dresses embroidered the little skullcaps with nimble fingers that wielded the brightly colored silk threads. Besides the skullcaps they produced traditional robes and jackets. The whole workroom was ablaze with colors as the dark-haired smiling faces bent intently as they worked at an art that had been handed down for centuries. We went in two cars heading out of town into the countryside. On the edge of the town, a forest of steel pylons and electric cables sprawled under a tower of orange-colored smoke from the fertilizer plant. After that the roadside was lined with stunted mulberry trees, trunks and heavy branches especially cut down to encourage the greenery on which the silk worms fed. Women in the usual brightly striped dresses worked

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in the cultivated fields. The road wound into the hills of desert, beige and brown in the hot golden sunlight. An old man in the robes and big turban out of an Eastern fairytale went by on a diminutive donkey. On all sides the gravelly desert was sewn with scattered green patches. Then here and there big strange figures resembling iron pterodactyls peck-pecked into huge holes in the brown surface; they were the pumps sucking oil from the wells below. Uzbekistan is an important oil-producing area. At a crossroads we stopped for a drink of water. The desert undulated in the haze, yet there were green patches on the slopes now, and a girl in a headscarf and the usual multicolored dress searched for weeds. We went on, and now the desert was cut away by bright stretches of green. Appearing on the roadside were trees, a mud wall, a donkey cart that drew aside for us, cottages on the slopes above the narrow road that became a macadamed street. It was Chimjan Village, and we turned through a gateway into a wide courtyard enclosed by a wall, shaded by poplar trees, and, surprisingly, lined with clumps of blossoming roses. A couple of men in striped robes and skullcaps led us to a shaded room that had a sofa, chairs, a wardrobe, a desk, and a dusty carpet on the floor. One of the men asked us in Uzbek to wait a while. The shadowy room was a relief after the hot cars and the desert. After a while a shadow filled the door, and a big woman bustled in, booming with laughter of welcome. Wisps of black hair escaped from under the headscarf, falling about her big, craggily handsome face. She wore a man’s coat over her dress and wool stockings on thick legs, a man’s shoes. Her voice boomed cheerfully, her teeth flashed in her dark face as she took each of our hands in one of her own big ones. She was sorry she was late to welcome us. There had been a delay. Perhaps the tovarishchi (comrades) would wait a moment longer, while she went off to settle something which would only take a moment. In the meantime we could have some tea. She bawled out, and one of the men outside appeared. She gave orders, laughed again, and disappeared through an inner door with heavy ease. I had a feeling I had seen or read of somebody like her somewhere before. She was Inakhon Akhmadalieva, chairman of the Karl Marx Collective Farm; I could not have met her before. I lit a cigarette and smoked, while the man brought the tea tray, and I tried to place her. At last I had it. Pilar. She was the guerrilla woman Pilar in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. The man’s coat, the heavy shoes, the booming voice. But when she came back she had discarded the coat, adjusted the scarf, and wore a neat black-and-white dress and high boots. “Now comrades, I am ready. Let’s go somewhere pleasant. I’ve given everybody their instructions so I’m free.”

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We went out to the cars again, and she climbed in beside our driver with Larissa, Alisher, and me in the back. Before we pulled out she shouted some more instructions to the men in the yard. She was chatty, talking about the farm. “How long have I been chairman? Since 1947.” She chuckled and flashed her teeth. “You see when the war came the men went to the front and left the women to look after things here. When they came back they found us in complete charge. I suppose they were satisfied to leave it that way.” The farm meeting had elected her leader each year since then. She was fifty-two years old and had three children, two daughters and a son doing higher education. “Where’s your husband?” I asked. She laughed and said: “He took a job on another farm, to get away from my directorship, I think. But the farms were combined, so he’s back under my thumb.” We drove out of the village and out of the desert through a big stretch of cotton fields and then up a gravel road through orchards of apricots, cherries, apples, and grapes. Everything here had once been part of the desert; now, besides the cotton and fruit, they grew lucerne. “Water is, of course, a big problem in Uzbekistan, so we have to sacrifice a lot of flower gardening for cotton and other essentials,” the big woman said. But she smiled, “Still, we have a beautiful country.” We went on up through the orchards, and there was no sign of the desert now. Here they had tamed the brutal, searing earth and had placated it with water brought by determination and a belief in what they were doing, and the desert had surrendered, yielding up cotton, silk, and pastureland. “We have eight hundred families, and most of the farming is done by the women; the men are mainly concerned with the technical and mechanical side of things. Nine hundred and eighteen workers out of eight hundred families.” She knew her farm, the successes and drawbacks, the amounts gathered at this time and that, and I imagined her directing things with a mixture of heartiness and bluff discipline. It was in the big body, the rugged, handsome face, the large, firm, but kindly, hands. The car turned off the road, and we stopped at one of these outstations: a house under trees, beds on the veranda, a grape arbor by a pond, a tool shed, a parked jeep. A radio played inside, Uzbek music piping and throbbing. Two men in the quilted robes and sashes came out of the house to greet us, and Inakhon Akhmadalieva told us to make ourselves at home under the arbor. Very soon the men were carrying bowls and platters laden with dates, cherries, mulberries, walnuts, flat round loaves of bread, cucumbers. We lounged around the table and chatted. Inakhon talked about the farm, wanted to know about Africa, while around us birds twittered in the trees. Inakhon tossed one of the loaves into the pond, and it floated on the

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water. “For the fishes,” she said and passed me a bowl of cherries. A big green bullfrog came out of the pond and sat on a floating loaf. He was fat and freckled black, and quaked and croaked; it made everything very rural. While we were eating cherries, apricots, and cracking nuts, the men brought a TV set out of the house and set it up in the arbor so we could watch the programs. They could get Moscow, Tashkent, and Frunze. While we were eating and talking, another jeep came up, and a woman in a smart frock climbed out to join us. She and Inakhon hugged each other. This was the secretary of the Party for that district, Rosa Mamkina. She sat down at the table with us, and I plied her with questions in between talking to the others. “Yes,” she said to me. “We have a lot of women in the Party here. Eight hundred odd.” She had traveled in the West, France, Italy, and Greece, and was telling Inakhon Akhmadalieva about women’s fashions there. In the meantime, there arrived bowls of basturma, a stew of mutton, rice, carrots, and other vegetables, and plov. It was very pleasant with the orchard trees around and the bullfrog croaking away. They related some humorous anecdotes and told jokes, and I tried to do the same, but a joke is never the same translated into another language. Nevertheless, there were no speeches, and everything was very informal. THE WHITE WORM We said goodbye to Inakhon Akhmadalieva. She had to return to the business of farming, but handed us over to Rosa who would play the hostess now. But first I was regaled in the traditional striped robe and sash with great ceremony. Rosa joined me in the car with Larissa and Alisher, and the others took her jeep, and we drove away, Inakhon and her attendants waving after us in the shade of the orchard. We left the blossoming greenery of the farmlands and were surrounded by the beige-brown gravelly undulations of the desert again. Then the road climbed and the desert dropped away as the foothills rose before us. Along the road were the grotesque, amputated mulberry trees again, and the hills turned greener as we climbed toward the dark bulk of the mountains in the distance. In the higher country the old-fashioned villages appeared, spread out on each side of the road. There were earthen walls enclosing yards and brown adobe houses behind them. The road wound through one of the villages for a while. “They are very important villages, in spite of their simplicity,” Rosa said, “it is here that they breed the silk worms.”

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She asked the driver to pull up at one of the brown mud walls. Those in the jeep said they’d continue on and we could catch up, and she led us through the gate into a wide yard with a hard mud floor. She was known by the people living there, of course, and we were all welcomed, and somebody immediately said we must have chai. Off the yard was a row of several darkened rooms apart from the main house. I was asked to peer inside. In the gloom were wide platforms carefully piled with greenery, which was mulberry leaves. But the piles of green were heaving and writhing as if they were alive; and at first I thought of some eerie and horrid living mass of unearthly life out of a scene from one of those fantasy movies featuring “blobs” from outer space. My head prickled as if my hair was standing on end, I peered closer and saw that the masses of leaves were infested with thousands of white worms, bloated and somehow repulsive, and it was their feeding on the leaves that made each green mass heave and pulse. “They will eat their fill and soon all the leaves will be gone, and they might need more, and they will be fed,” a man in rough work clothes explained. He might have been the assistant of some “Lord of the Worms.” Rosa said: “Afterward they will spin the thread to enclose themselves in cocoons, threads of silk that will harden, and then they will be gathered.” It all became matter-of-fact again, but I was a little relieved when we were able to partake in some ordinary chai at a table in the yard, and leave those eerie, heaving, and writhing heaps to get on with their work in their shadowy enclosures. It was expensive work too: six of those darkened rooms produced only one box of silk thread. Farther up the village we stopped again and picked up another silk worker. She was Tutiphon Udainazarova, head of a brigade of the Tursunkulov Collective Farm and Hero of Socialist Labour. Beshawled and scarved and chatting volubly she led the way to a big door in a brown wall, and we were admitted to another of those baked-earth yards. On shaded verandas, groups of women, young, middle-aged, elderly, and old sat around great piles of small white cocoons, they looked a little like silvered groundnuts. These were the final product of the wriggling white worms: the silk thread produced and wound and wrapped solidly about themselves as they had digested the piles of mulberry leaves. The women were removing the outer fluff, sorting the cocoons, and filling boxes with them ready for the silk factories. MOUNTAIN THUNDER We dropped Tutiphon off again and continued up the road out of the village and out of the foothills into the high country. Ahead the Alai

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Mountains rose gray-black and streaked with snow. On the side of the road, electric pylons were overshadowed by great beige cliffs. The air was chill in the mountains and far ahead the sky was laden, unlike that of the desert country. Below the road a river ran down the valley from the distant peaks, the water crashing swift and foaming against the boulders. There were settlements on the slopes of the valley and cultivated fields. “Tobacco,” Rosa explained. All the time the river twisted and turned, wriggling down the mountain through the deep valley, the water sea green between the rocks. There were Pioneer holiday camps in the mountains, too, and on the road we passed numbers of young people laden with haversacks and sports equipment. The mountainsides turned from tan color to gray rock and green undergrowth as the road twisted and turned upward. Now and then we saw donkeys by the roadside. Across the valley a woman and a young lad chased lambs who had evaded them; the boy clambered up the side of the valley as a lamb dodged bleating among the shrubs and boulders until it was caught before it reached the road, and he carried it back down the slope, calling out his success to the woman. The river hissed down the valley, and it must have started high up among the peaks of the Alai Mountains where the snow melted to swell it into bounding speed. Now there were lots of young people on the road. They were from the holiday camps, and we heard their laughter and shouts, girls with black pigtails and stuffed carrier bags. We rose to 2,000 feet above sea level. Across the valley a huge sign called: “Glory to the CPSU.” But higher up it became grayer and ominous for picnicking. Thunder rolled along the dark, snow-streaked mountains, and dirty-gray clouds hung with leaden heaviness. Finally we decided to park in a high meadow. There were people camping in tents here and there, and sheep grazing on the slopes. A shepherd came down, wiping his binoculars. My companions were unpacking edibles we had brought from the farm. It was chilly, and the spirit warmed us inside while we ate, using the bonnet of the car as a table. The mountain peaks seemed near enough to touch, black and dappled with snow and very lofty, but it was their huge size that gave the illusion of proximity. We managed to finish a decent meal before the weather closed in, and the thunder clapped like artillery before the rain commenced. That was the end of the picnic, and we climbed back into the car and the covered jeep. The shepherd retreated into a shelter built in the meadow from where he could watch the flock. Some of the campers were taking down their tents. The jeep went on ahead, but Rosa asked our driver to stop at a house on the way down the mountainside so we could visit her brother. We

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drew up at a big gate in the rain and hooted until somebody came out. He explained that her brother was out in the fields, but such is the usual hospitality that we were not allowed to leave until we had had some collation. The man came back with bowls of refreshment protected from the rain with newspapers and a big parcel of walnuts. We stayed for a while under a shelter in the garden of the house drinking from the bowls and cracking walnuts, which were from the trees in the gardens. Later we said Aleikum salaam to our host and went on down the mountain road. There were sections of the mountainside that were red marble used for buildings, and there were little donkeys wandering around. “It is very healthy up here, although the weather is bad today,” Rosa said. “People here live to be over a hundred. It has something to do with the good air and abundance of oxygen, I think.” Farther down, the rain passed, and the sky was clear again. We stopped at a monument to a local leader killed by basmachi gangs during the Civil War and to a Red Guard detachment, which refusing to surrender to fanatical Muslim bands, had died fighting to the death in the house burned down as they resisted. At a crossroads Rosa wished me well and transferred to the jeep. Our hosts from Ferghana joined us in our car and the party split up, and we drove back toward the town through the dusty golden desert with the water pumps and irrigation ditches crisscrossing it, an oil well here and there, and the late afternoon bringing the first remission from the heat. The sky was purple as we came in sight of the forest of pylons outside Ferghana, and the day dwindled away. A SILKEN BEAUTY Surely, I thought, secretaries of Communist parties do not look like this. They were men in neat suits and a business-like air, looked like directors who presided over board meetings, or political or planning committees, they carried briefcases and welcomed one with polite bonhomie. The women secretaries were as efficient-looking and looked sturdy and a little plain, competing with the men with their own business-like demeanor. But she didn’t look like a Party secretary, either first, second, or third. The gleaming jet-black hair was parted in the middle and piled high behind in a mass that caught the gleam of sunlight from the window in a sheen of polished onyx, complementing the olive-skinned luster of her face and matching the dark glow of her eyes, under perfect black brows. When she rose from behind her desk one thought of Italian film stars, the striking face and the voice that greeted us reminded me of Rimsky-Korsakov’s music for Scheherazade. 16 The black suit she wore might have attempted to give an air of efficiency, but it succeeded only in emphasiz-

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ing the sleek grace of her tall body. To add to everything, an assistant came in and set a sprig of red roses in a vase on her desk—they matched the mobile mouth with which she smiled, flashing white teeth in the dark ivory face. Yet she was top in the Party in the town of Marghilan: Comrade Tyurgunon Erganbertieva. It is a modern highway that connects Ferghana with Marghilan, which is one of the oldest Uzbek towns, a farming center since the tenth century and well known for handicraft production. Now the population is about 124,000 composed of forty nationalities. Before the Revolution only twelve thousand people had lived there. Because it has become one of the big silk textile producers, 52 percent of the workers were women, although there were twelve other industrial enterprises. “Lately all the workers worked an extra day to pay for a war memorial,” said Tyurgunon Erganbertieva seriously. “We had 6,500 killed from this town.” One could not associate her with war, death. But the Soviet Union had lost so many, and they wished continually to remind themselves and the world that they wanted peace, to prosper in peace. She brightened in the lobby of the district Party building as we made our way outside. “You know, this year, the thirtieth anniversary of the end of the war, we had thirty marriages between people of different nationalities. Our Jewish population, for instance, is only 0.12 percent, and for the first time there were two Jewish boys and two girls who married partners of other nationalities. So you see, we have been celebrating too, very romantically.” I did not ask her whether she was married or had a family. We stood in the sunshine, and she said, her teeth flashing, “Our young people are very enthusiastic. Lately we had a parade of twenty thousand Pioneers carrying banners calling for world peace in seven languages of our people. Also we have fifteen thousand Komsomols and 350 work brigades among them. Now, come along and let me show you how we make Uzbekistan’s lovely silk material. The national dresses are all silk, you know.” She was all woman again: dresses, fashions, her form as graceful as a model’s, as if she was responsible for advertising Uzbek silk. Silk manufacturing is an important Soviet state enterprise. The Marghilan silk kombinat had been launched in 1926 by decree of the Soviet government and in 1928 the first silk-producing shop had started working. 17 Two more had been evacuated from Moscow in 1941, and as the plant grew it came to employ ten thousand workers of forty different nationalities, 70 percent of whom are women. The kombinat has its own orchards, producing for the worker canteens and ten kindergartens attached to it accommodating 2,590 children. It sponsors Pioneer camps, a hospital, and a sanatorium; there are evening schools and technical courses for workers desiring further education. The workers participate

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in special meetings of the management and the Party committee to discuss the planning of production. Being a special state enterprise must have accounted for the presence of men in the light gray blouses of the militia lounging around the entrance to the plant; identity cards had to be shown by people going in and out through turnstiles. But the regulations were waived for visiting writers accompanied by the beauteous Party official. In an areaway surrounded by the weaving houses we were welcomed by one of the chief engineers. A pair of girls hurried by us from a canteen toward a block nearby, casting curious glances at our group. Inside the factory the machines hummed and clattered. First there was row on row of machines unraveling the silk thread from the white cocoons. These had to be moistened first to soften them, and a factory girl expertly found the end of a thread, attached it to the spindle that rapidly unwound the precious strands. From there to dyeing and then weaving. Everywhere were heads in scarves and intent but smiling faces, both dark curls and blonde ones. Above the clatter and hum sounded the flip-flop of sandals and slippers as the workers hurried about. The work was divided into three eight-hour shifts so the factory never stopped operating. “We are well ahead with the present five-year plan,” our host explained above the noise of industry. “In fact, there are some brigades who have already surpassed their quotas, and we even have two weavers who have fulfilled the plan twice over in their section. Here is one of them, Comrade Aisha Abdurakhmanova.” Four other women, two Uzbek sisters and a Tatar and a Ukrainian, were already far ahead into what might be their output for the eleventh five-year plan. 18 “We also have a woman weaver who is a deputy of the Supreme Soviet,” he said, grinning proudly. We went from shop to shop, department to department. Greasestained men worked at the big weaving or dyeing machines, women smiled at us over the whirling spindles, their colored headscarves decorating the rows between the machines. “They’re from Italy and Japan,” I said to our guide. “Some of the machines, I mean.” “Da,” he said. “We got them because they are less noisy. We try to reduce the noise all the time.” The average wage of a machinist was 140 rubles a month, he said, but the wages would, most probably, increase with the next five-year plan starting in 1976. We were given lunch in the sample room, its walls hung with gorgeously colored material from ceiling to floor: one side pure silk and mixed on the other; national patterns and a variety of others. The factory hosts presented me with a souvenir portrait of Lenin woven in silk.

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We had to part with Tyurgunon Erganbertieva at the factory; she had to stay behind to discuss some matter with the directorship or the Party committee. She was all smart efficiency again in her dark suit, but with her grace and sleek dark beauty somehow she belonged where the precious and colorful beauty of silk was produced. MELONS AND MOVIES The market place of Marghilan teemed with shoppers, and the farmers at the stalls in their tyubeteikas and striped coats, men and women with dark-skinned faces and tough hands, announced the value and tastiness of their wares in the expected Eastern clapping of many tongues. The fruit of Uzbekistan reminded me of home: the varieties of apples, peaches, the pyramids of pears and quinces; bright yellow or dark purple figs; the mountains of melons. It is said that there are more than one thousand varieties of Uzbek melons: melons with white flesh and others red or green. Some are so fragrant you can smell them a distance away. There are hard and crunchy melons and soft melons; summer melons and winter melons; sweet and mushy melons; melons, melons, melons, reminding me of home. But back home they did not grow on state or collective farms, but on the great farms of the rich landowners and the fruit-canning private enterprise, who underpaid their workers. Once when I told a Soviet farm worker that our own farm workers received the equivalent of about six rubles a month, his jaw dropped in amazement. “But how does one live on six rubles a month?” he asked staring. “It was like that in the time of the tsar,” a withered farmer said. “I remember it, but it is something to surprise you young fellows today.” From the sunlit market we went over to a Ferghana kino, driving past rectangular blocks of flats with their balconies decorated with creepers or hung with bedding. The sun beat down in the courtyard of the kino. A pipe tinkled water into a central pond, but it made no difference to the heat. We sat in the shade of a chinar tree and waited, watching a woman stacking round canisters of film onto a hand trolley. The pipe went on gurgling merrily, mockingly. Somewhere inside a soundtrack crackled, and disembodied voices came out into the yard. At last we were hailed inside with profuse apologies for being kept waiting; chai was pressed upon us, and bowls of cherries. Afterward we were shown rather good documentaries: the construction of the first Ferghana Canal (cries of joy from thousands of voices as the sluice gates were opened and the water pushed into the desert); a traditional village wedding, all color and joyous excitement, the wedding couple preceded by horns and beating drums and followed by the rollick-

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ing villagers, an atheist ceremony decorated with all the color of old village life—but the mullah was no more. Then a film of another old and popular tradition involving a competition of wit and repartee. This occasion drew crowds of hundreds into public squares or around rising ground on which sat two men, usually elderly and considered wise. One makes a witty remark about the other to the laughter of the audience, but the opponent is quick with an equally or more so witty reply. So the humorous verbal thrust and parry goes on, the crowd applauding with laughter or groaning if the repartee is not clever enough until one of the competitors fails to answer promptly or more astutely, and the crowd announces him beaten. In old times the crowds were made up of hundreds, but as the film showed, the introduction of the microphone and public address system now draws thousands to these battles of wit and sense of humor. POTTERY, PIPELINES, AND PROTEIN In the ground floor restaurant of the new tourist hotel, two elderly American ladies who spoke Russian were explaining to a waiter how they wanted their eggs done. Except for them and Larissa and me the restaurant was deserted; the tourist parties had already left in the big modern Icarus coaches made in Hungary. Uzbekistan’s hot and golden sun beat down on Bukhara. Outside the restaurant, other leftover guests, or passersby perhaps, drank coffee or orange squash juice in the snack bar. The hotel was very new and shiny—although the rooftop nightspot had not been completely decorated, but was quite usable—and was built near the town where the area had been cleared for development. When our latest host, Pulad Akhmedov, arrived we first walked over to where they were building the large new war memorial: Bukhara had lost 18,000. There was a plaster cast of what would be the end product of bronze: a gigantic soldier with a tommy gun defending the sun, its rays spreading out behind him. It was going to be a very hefty and symbolically powerful monument. From there we could see, beyond the workmen laying the paving stones, the edge of the town quivering in the haze of heat and the blocks of new flats and the spire of a minaret. According to archaeological investigation, as far back as the third millennium B.C., the population of the lower reaches of the Amu Darya made pottery and built houses for a hundred or a hundred and twentyfive people each. Traces of irrigation canals dating to the end of the second and to the first millennium B.C. remain, and bronze articles, tools, and pottery have been found in the Andizhan, Surkhan Darya, and Bukhara regions. Pulad said: “Now big gas pipelines have been laid from Gazli, a new village near the old city, through the desert all the way to the Urals. It has

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become part of what we call the Friendship Pipeline that takes gas all the way to socialist countries in Europe nowadays.” Bukhara Region is the largest in Uzbekistan. It is surrounded by the vast Kyzyl Kum Desert, one of the largest in the world. One recalled the words of Marco Polo: “When they had crossed this desert, they came to a large and splendid city called Bukhara. The province was also called Bukhara, and its ruler’s name was Barak.” The 1st Congress of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan opened in Bukhara in February 1925 to talk over the task of building socialism in Uzbekistan and the tasks for the state and the legal registration of the newly formed Uzbek SSR. From the very start it had demonstrated its international character and had in its ranks members of thirty different nationalities. 19 Ancient Bukhara’s ghost still hovered around the great new modern developments that socialist Uzbekistan and the USSR as a whole had brought; around the large-scale construction under way in this sunscorched exotic place—chemical works where the spikenard and terebinth had been sold in the ancient markets; mineral fertilizer works; cotton mills soon to have a capacity of over a hundred million yards of textiles a year. Pure protein had been obtained from cotton in Uzbekistan, after failures by several other countries, the light-colored powder that looks like dry milk highly rated by the Soviet Institute of Food as additives to bread, macaroni, confectionery, and other products. Likewise, chemists have worked out the technology that made it possible to obtain protein and medicinal preparation phytin and raffinose from oil cakes, a waste product of cotton. But all around, the Zeravshan Valley still lies, albeit the caravan trails have long been obliterated, and now in May the sun still carpeted the scorched surrounding desert, leaving no grass, and the farmers waited for the first autumn rain that would start to make the Kyzyl Kum a huge grazing land, and spring to bring out the yellow flowers. THE HUNT OF THE SUN Old Bukhara still nudged our shoulders in the narrow streets of the old town with its arches and kiosks and one-room stalls in the thick ancient walls. 20 I bought myself a gaudy sun cap at one of such places on the way as we pushed our way through the bustling streets. Stalls sold modern dresses, meters of material; a street counter sold suitcases and electrical equipment—the prices were the same as those I’d noticed in Tashkent. The ice cream vendors were doing a brisk trade, especially with women and children: the empty cardboard cartons littered the gutters. In a market street a kiosk dispensed welcome beer to a thirsty crush of males.

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“Kholodnoye?” a perspiring young man asked me as I quaffed a tankard. “Cold?” “Ne plokhoye,” I told him. “Not bad.” Soviet beer is by no means the best in the world, but a welcome relief in the Bukhara heat. Beyond the town, the valley, out in the Kyzyl Kum Desert the shepherds and their sheep were drinking water desalinated by solar power. Solar water fresheners would be used by geologists and others who roamed uninhabited localities. A solar refrigerator for domestic use was being developed and tested by the Bukhara Physics and Technological Institute. The deserts were going to be irrigated by use of solar desalination plants, this would provide a large increase in pastureland, and the project was to become part of the five-year plan for solar energy. Experimentation in light-impulsive irradiation in Kazakhstan has raised the humble, but popular, cucumber yield five times over. Uzbek scientists were irradiating cottonseeds with a mirror concentrator to raise their yield 14 percent. The sun was being hunted and harnessed. No longer would the deserts present their awesome visage, no more the thirsty drag from water hole to water hole. The days of plodding caravans had gone now, the excavations of an ancient past stood silent in the sun among the apartment houses, the office blocks, karakul-processing plant; and modern industry had hardened the edges of romance, but could not stop a dream. THE SILENT BELLS Now Samarkand is a regional center also, a great industrial city. Some 40,000 people work at its sixty factories, producing fertilizers, lifts, refrigerators, prefabricated housing units, china, and much else. Still, I had watched the traditional dances performed in the vast doorway of the old Shir-Dor Madrasah in old Registan Square, with its towering portico, domes, and towers, decorated with millions of mosaic tiles, rising in all its ancient magnificence. 21 Ulugbek, the old astronomer, had worked there, and an observatory he had used stood among the old brown plaster medieval walls and mosaic minarets. 22 This had been the capital of Timur the Lame, or Tamerlane, an oasis town where the red sands of the desert were displaced by the Zeravshan river valley, one of the centers on the old caravan trails. Away, for we are ready to a man! Our camels sniff the evening and are glad. Lead on, O master of the caravan. . . . 23

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Tamerlane the Conqueror, his conquest after conquest expanded his realm to include the entire Persian Empire, and his suzerainty stretched from the Volga to Anatolia in present-day Turkey. He took North India and sacked Delhi, penetrated as far west as Aleppo and Damascus. At the time of his death in 1405, he was beginning a massive campaign against China. During his time Samarkand was beautified and rebuilt, but it is said his cruelty led him to kill or blind the builders and architects brought from all the conquered territories, so they could never repeat the beauty elsewhere. Elaborate canals carried water from house to house for magnificent flower gardens and orchards. Magnificent mosques, religious colleges, and minarets, the remains of which still stand and are being restored, provide a haunting memory of Samarkand’s past glory. We travel not for trafficking alone; By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned: For lust of knowing what should not be known, We take the Golden Road to Samarkand.

The Timurid renaissance continued under Tamerlane’s grandson, the astute Ulugbek, until an overwhelming Uzbek invasion in 1507 vanquished the dynasty. So I had looked into the Gur-Emir, Tamerlane’s tomb, with its lovely ribbed dome of green tiles. There was the strangely fascinating ruined Bibi-Khanym Mosque with a dome that looks as if it is too big ever to have stood; and the Shakh-i-Zindeh complex of tombs and minarets all bearing witness to the brief empire of the lame conqueror; all silent now, unresisting to the new invasion of sightseers, and only the ghosts of the colorful past wandering silently among the ruins. Open the gate, O watchman of the night! Ho, travelers, I open. For what land Leave you the dim-moon city of delight? We take the Golden Road to Samarkand.

In too many of the world’s ancient cities, splendor and the picturesque go side by side with poverty and squalor. Not so in Samarkand. Concern for the heritage of the past is coupled with concern for the need to build a new city in which its citizens can work, relax, and study at their ease. The master plan up to 1990 includes housing estates of four-to-nine-story buildings, due consideration being given to the preservation and view of the old and historic parts. So Flecker’s dream characters may still approach the ruined walls of the old city: Sweet to ride forth at evening from the wells, When shadows pass gigantic on the sand, And softly through the silence beat the bells

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The camel bells have fallen silent, drowned by the clatter of the twentieth century, and Flecker’s ancients might even have looked into the future with curiosity. A WATCHMAN: Men are unwise and curiously planned. A WOMAN: They have their dreams, and do not think of us. VOICES OF THE CARAVAN (in the distance): We take the Golden Road to Samarkand.

But today this modern thriving town stands there with spacious new housing blocks, schools, beautifully laid public gardens that provide relief from the midday heat, wisely created and curiously planned. AMONG THE ANTIQUITIES Pulad hammered on the vast wooden gates. The Ark citadel, built 1,500 years ago in Bukhara, rose around the gates with all its ponderous and ominous grimness. From here the Emirs of Bukhara had reigned with the liberal use of snake pits and torture chambers. Executions had taken place weekly before this citadel, usually under the cynical eye of the leader of the Faithful. The place was now a museum, actually still being restored, but shut for the day. One imagined the Emir ordering everything closed, the executioner given a day off, and the retiring to the harem. But the last Emir had fled to Afghanistan or Persia or some such place after the Civil War, and the man who finally opened the leaves of the great gates was tall, in sandals and shirtsleeves, and was the historian in charge of the restoration work. When Pulad explained that I would be in Bukhara only one day more, we were happily allowed in. The historian was glad to show us around— he looked happy in his work and eager to explain its details. There was a certain chill gloominess about the place in spite of the exquisite mosaic work, the Koranic decorations. We entered reception rooms, anterooms, the throne room; in corners hideous Victorian importations by the Emir stood incongruously by exquisite Oriental mosaic murals. Peacocks still strutted in the gardens, and a boy played at the edge of the pool where the wives and concubines had, probably, once splashed noisily. The historian took us to a room, which contained a lot of modern books on shelves or piled up in the haphazard manner of researching professors. Probably it was part of his investigatory material for the restoration. Being told my own profession, he began searching through piles of magazines, literary and historical, exclaiming that, perhaps, some of my writing must be there. What would I be doing among the antiquities

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of Bukhara? But, Weyallah! There I was in the form of a contribution to the Foreign Literature magazine. Our historian was delighted; my autograph was demanded; the magazine was immediately displayed in a glass-doored bookcase, autograph and date facing front. One landed up in strange places: perhaps I might even be mistaken for one of the curiosities connected with the Emir, in time to come. “He came back,” the historian said. “The Emir, I mean. After everything was over and some years passed, he came back to see what Bukhara looked like.” It appeared that part of the Ark complex had been turned into a convalescent center. At tables men in dressing gowns or white uniforms played chess or drank tea, chatted and smoked under an arbor. To one side, a heavy door in an areaway below ground level carried a medicalpoint sign. Could the torture chambers once have been down there? We were invited to tea and chatted for a while, exchanging experiences with the historian and others. The peacocks strutted sedately about the garden. I wondered whether they had been there during the time of the Emir. We passed under the Char-Minar minarets and went to look at the Kalyan Mosque and the Gakoshan Minaret. This was very high, a slender column towering over the old quarter, and I believe that was the one from the top of which condemned prisoners were hurled to their deaths. The Emirs had been very busy rulers. Today the population of Bukhara exceeds one hundred thousand, comprised of Uzbeks, Tajiks, Russians, and Jews; a community which has built a modern and well-laid-out town side by side with the monuments of the past. THE BLACK LAKE Uzbekistan is not only famous for silk and cotton. At the local karakulprocessing plant in Bukhara we watched rows of workers expertly sorting the pelts, adjudging their quality by a feel of the hand, while the director described the various types according to the texture of the wool. The word “karakul” means “black lake” because the pelts shimmer and ripple glossily like sunlight on water. Much of the “black lake” comes, a little incongruously perhaps, from the desert country of the west and northwest of Uzbekistan. But the term “black lake” has become obsolete now, since sheep have been bred which give pelts of various colors— gray, red, brown, or even a beautiful bluish with white spots, and those gold or silver-tipped waves. The white karakul is newest and considered most rare and beautiful. These pelts were obtained by research workers at the Samarkand karakul-breeding institute, and now there are entire herds of white karakul sheep.

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RUBÁIYÁT IN A TEA HOUSE Not far from an ancient tomb lately excavated and centuries old was situated a chaighana cum eating place in a courtyard shaded by trees. A small boy dusted the carpets on one of the platforms, and we shed our shoes and sat waiting while Pulad went to order. It was cool in the shadow of the trees, and men played cards nearby over bowls of tea and skewers of shashlik; a couple of older men in tyubeteikas conversed quietly, while from the kitchen came the spicy aroma of Asian cooking. Among the dining platforms strutted a very stately looking rooster, a colorful chanticleer with proud head and cockscomb, and smooth feathers glistening red and green. He stepped with panache among the human diners, his head cocked disdainfully, like a cavalier swaggering in search of a damsel. He found her in the form of a stout hen and steered her triumphantly in the direction of a more private quarter of the yard. While I was watching this, Pulad came back from the direction of the kitchen accompanied by three young men whom he introduced to Larissa, Alisher, and me. They were students or graduates from some institute or other, and wrote a little, too, they said. We all sat down, cross-legged or sidesaddle on the platform and shared the fare brought by the boy and his sister, who helped after school hours. We ate and talked about local writing, and one of the young men knew the whole of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám by heart in the original Persian—which really was something, I thought. After some urging and cajoling he obliged with a few stanzas, and even without translation I tried to imagine what he might be reciting. And, as the Cock crew, those who stood before The Tavern shouted—‘Open then the door! You know how little while we have to stay, And, once departed, may return no more.’ 24

LEAVE-TAKING Back in my room in the hotel at Tashkent I found a handbill with a photo of the candidate notifying that the elections to the Supreme Soviet were pending. All candidates have free access to newspapers and printing, so I supposed this one would not think a copy of his manifesto would be wasted on a voteless foreigner. It was cooler for a while in Tashkent, and wind blew leaves skipping across the streets under a light rain that spattered the asphalt. But afterward the sun came out again, and everything was gilded once more. Outside the hotel a small blonde boy was on the lookout for tourists and wanted to trade a lapel badge for chewing gum; I had him carry a parcel up to my room and paid him with a packet of gum, letting him keep his

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badge for another trade. In the evening you could see the lights of the city from the roof restaurant of the hotel, and the apartment blocks in the distance like illuminated chessboards. There was an American group in the restaurant and a party of Poles, and I bought some champagne for Larissa and myself, because she was off to Moscow the next day and I would be going to Siberia on my own. Our last visit in Uzbekistan had been to a local collective farm, accompanied by Comrade Khojayev of the Tashkent District Party Committee, a young and good-looking man in the usual smart suit. The director of the Lenin Collective Farm was pleasantly surprised that we had decided to come. “Why, we are a comparatively small farm,” he said. “But welcome, welcome.” There was the inevitable war memorial, a simple arrangement in the central garden that blossomed with bright flowers; and then he drove us around the village, the houses all gay with flower patches. They had conquered the desert in a small way. The farm was run like all others: one had become used to the accounts of yields of crops, the quotas for the next year. Apart from the collective property, each member of the farm was allowed to have a personal plot for his own family use, a cow and a certain number of calves, sheep, and poultry. The farm produced cotton in the main, but they were going in for grapes as well. Later there had been the usual prodigious lunch out in the open under an arbor. To end it all, I was once more regaled in the striped, multicolored national robe, sash, and tyubeteika. At the Writers’ Union there was the ceremonial leave-taking, attended by several members of the professional fraternity, including Ramz Babajan and Kamil Yashen, and I was presented with a beautiful Uzbek tea set. By a miracle it survived my travels and arrived home without even a chip, to remind me of the chaighanas of Central Asia, the white worm, the people in their bright colors, the hot sun that lay like gold all over Uzbekistan. THE TRUMPET OF SPRING Since the time of Lenin’s decree on irrigation work, signed even when the country was in ruin and famine rife, and the Civil War still raging, more than two and a half million acres of desert and arid plains in Uzbekistan have been supplied with water. Land reclamation goes on a grand scale. Now nine hundred modern irrigation systems and 55,000 hydrotechnical installations supply water to the Uzbek fields and to what is called the Hungry Steppe. Attempts were made to bring water to this fertile, but lifeless, plain long before the Revolution, but with little effect. Today,

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about seven and a half million acres in all are being irrigated—about 20 percent of the entire irrigated area of the Soviet Union. In the process a single type of agricultural production was established and consolidated and became the dominating method. The Uzbek peasantry was thus freed from relations of economic suppression and subjugation, which had tormented them for centuries, and which right up to the period of collectivization existed as vestiges of feudal relations. The transformation in the class structure of the rural population was manifested not only in the liquidation of economic subjugation, but also in the transformation of hundreds of thousands of small-scale commodity producers. The peasantry developed into the harbingers of new, socialist relations of production. These new relations, similar to those dominating socialist industry, served as a basis for the moral and political unity of the peasantry and the working class, as the economic foundation for the further union between the two friendly classes, which comprise the class structure of Uzbekistan and indeed the other Soviet republics. New production relations based on socialist property opened broad new prospects for the development of the productive forces in Uzbekistan. Machinery became a major element of agriculture, and mechanization of farming went hand in hand with the socialist industrialization of the national economy. The industrialization program made it possible to set up industrial centers in the formerly backward regions and to draw the local population into industrial labor. This had not only economic significance, but also great social impact. This produced a new material basis, which eliminated medieval-type methods through the introduction of machinery. Uzbekistan’s industry has now developed into a major branch of the national economy with up-to-date equipment and modern technology. Today Uzbekistan has over 1,400 enterprises in over one hundred branches of industry. During the Soviet period its industrial output has grown sixty times. Along with the other Soviet republics, Uzbekistan takes part actively in the realization of important industrial projects in Nepal, Guinea, Tunisia, Kampuchea, and other countries. For example, the industrial workers of Uzbekistan contributed to the construction of the Aswan Dam in Egypt by supplying electric cable, excavators, and various electrical engineering appliances. Perhaps, all this was their Golden Road; one felt it was what Uzbekistan’s poetess Zulfiya Israilova meant when she wrote her “Spring Has Come and Asks for You”—socialist Uzbekistan. 25 And, driving off the winter day, The Spring her trumpet loudly blew, And, humming low your favorite lay, She went abroad to search for you. 26

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NOTES 1. For an academic study of these events, see Jeff Sahadeo, Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent, 1865–1923 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), especially chapters 7 and 8. 2. Kamil Yashen is the pseudonym of Kamil Nugmanov (1909–unknown), a writer from Uzbekistan, who served as president of the Writers’ Union of Uzbekistan and was involved with the Afro-Asian Writers Association. 3. Zulfiya is the pen name of the Tashkent-born poet Zulfiya Isroilova (1915–1996). She was also connected to the Afro-Asian Writers Association. 4. “Babajan” is Ramz Babajan (1921–2008), an Uzbek poet, dramatist, and translator originally from Tashkent, who also helped establish and lead the Writers’ Union of Uzbekistan. 5. “Ferghana” is also transliterated as “Fergana.” I am keeping La Guma’s original use of “Ferghana” in this edition. 6. The following note is included in the original text: “Plov—the local name for pilaf, the popular Eastern dish of rice and mutton, dried or cooked fruit, nuts and vegetables.—Ed.” 7. La Guma is referring to the Central Asian poet Alisher Navoi (1441–1501), the Georgian poet Shota Rustaveli (c. twelfth century), and the Uzbek writer Hamza Hakimzade Niyazi (1889–1929), who is considered a founder of modern Uzbek literature. 8. Pablo Neruda (1904–1973), the Chilean poet who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971, was a member of the Chilean Communist Party. He was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize in 1953. 9. “Sputnik towns” is slang for suburbs (i.e., “satellite” communities). 10. Khorezm is a region in northwest Uzbekistan, known for cotton production and the historic city of Khiva, founded in the sixth century. After the October Revolution, the Khorezm People’s Soviet Republic (1920–1923) and the Khorezm Socialist Soviet Republic (1923–1924) briefly existed before being absorbed into the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic and the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic in 1924. 11. La Guma is referencing the Hungarian scholar Arminius Vámbéry (1832–1913), mentioned in chapter three. 12. This Soviet policy of “national demarcation” is also referred to as “national delimitation.” The Russian term is razmezhevanie. For studies of this process and its effects, see Sevket Akyildiz and Richard Carlson, eds., Social and Cultural Change in Central Asia: The Soviet Legacy (New York: Routledge, 2014); Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917–1923 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997 [1954]); Grigol Ubiria, Soviet Nation-Building in Central Asia: The Making of the Kazakh and Uzbek Nations (New York: Routledge, 2015). 13. Italics are used in the original text. 14. Despite the fame attributed to her, I have been unable to identify who “Nurgan” was, either through published research or online. La Guma has an article entitled “The Veil Was Nowhere to Be Found” (1977) in an issue of the journal Women of the Whole World, published by the Women’s International Democratic Federation, in which he also mentions her. My thanks to Josh Sanborn and Lindsay Ceballos for their assistance with this search. 15. As La Guma cites, the Great Ferghana Canal was constructed in 1939, and, at a length of 270 kilometers, it was completed at an amazing speed of only forty-five days. However, its construction relied on the forced labor of thousands of collectivized peasants and Gulag prisoners. Its primary purpose was to aid cotton production through improved irrigation. 16. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908) is a well-known Russian composer, whose popular symphonic suite Scheherazade (1888) is influenced by One Thousand and One Nights (dating from c. ninth century), Scheherazade being the narrator of the

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book. The suite itself reflects imperial Russia’s interest in the Middle East, albeit in an Orientalist mode. 17. The Russian word kombinat translates as “conglomerate.” 18. La Guma is joking in this instance. The eleventh five-year plan occurred from 1981 through 1985, thus after the publication of A Soviet Journey. La Guma’s book was published during the tenth five-year plan (1976–1981), though his observations draw from previous plans since he had travelled to the Soviet Union starting in the late 1960s. The tenth plan is notable in that Central Asian development schemes apparently fell short of their targets, raising questions about La Guma’s sanguine assessments—specifically, whether he was unaware of such weaknesses, due to his government-controlled itinerary and the information then available, or if he was simply promoting the Soviet system regardless. 19. Bukhara was also a key location for the anti-Soviet Basmachi movement in Central Asia, which contributed to the government’s eventual dissolution of the Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic, in addition to the continued Soviet attention and control La Guma cites. 20. The historic center of Bukhara is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. 21. Registan is the ancient part of the city of Samarkand, established during the period of the Timurid Empire (c.1370–c.1507), founded by Timur, also known as Tamerlane (1336–1405), who aspired to restore the Mongol Empire (c.1206–c.1368) that Genghis Khan (c.1162–1227) had created. The Mughal Empire (1526–1857) later succeeded the Timurid Empire in the region. Shir-Dor Madrasah, also transliterated as Sher-Dor Madrasah, was an Islamic school built in the seventeenth century. 22. Ulugbek (1394–1449), also transliterated as Ulugh Beg, was a Timurid ruler and astronomer, who built an observatory in Samarkand that was one of the most important in the Islamic world and Asia. 23. These lines and the next four sets are drawn from The Golden Journey to Samarkand (1913) and the verse drama Hassan: The Story of Hassan of Baghdad and How He Came to Make the Golden Journey to Samarkand (1922), both by the English poet James Elroy Flecker (1884–1915). 24. La Guma does not cite the edition or translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám from which he draws these lines. However, they can be found in Edward FitzGerald, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, first and fifth editions (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2011), 3. 25. Zulfiya Israilova is a different transliteration of Zulfiya Isroilova, described earlier. 26. La Guma does not cite the source for these lines. I have been unable to find a corresponding English translation and assume he encountered this translation during his trip.

FIVE A Giant of Great Promise

I was heading back the way I had come: the first stop from Tashkent was Alma-Ata. The plane was full of people with excess hand luggage; bags, bundles, boxes were all over. The turboprops whined and roared, and we lifted off, leaving Tashkent behind in the fading sunlight, a glint of fire from the steel works, a brief vista of brown countryside, and then we were aloft; Central Asia dropped away like gold coins in the waning light. A couple beside me unpacked a shopping bag and plied me with tomatoes, indicating that I should share their supper. As if this was a signal, there then came several demands for mineral water, “pazhalusta,” from the stewardesses. Alma-Ata Airport was dark except for the glow from the main building. Those who were leaving the plane there disappeared, while an airport hostess took me to a waiting room where I sat alone with a refrigerator and a glass cabinet displaying literature supplied by the Novosti Press Agency. Apparently, as a lone foreigner, I had to be looked after carefully until Irkutsk in Siberia; the Writers’ Union could not afford to let me get lost on the way. When I was aboard again I was given another seat, up front, and a stout and elderly lady, who jiggled like disturbed jelly, squeezed herself into the seat next to me. She was very friendly and called me Meester, Meester and asked whether I was from Kampuchea. I said, no, South Africa, and she chatted on in Russian most of the way, and all I could understand were the words Vietnamski and Amerikanski. Obviously, it was a commentary on the war, and from her expression I gathered she didn’t think much of the United States. Some people went to sleep, but my stout neighbor seemed indefatigable, and we carried on the one-sided conversation all the way to the stopover at Novosibirsk.

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There I was handed over to a chirpy little member of Aeroflot and guided through the half-silent airport building to an upstairs waiting room to share it with a young couple in jeans who looked Mongolian and did not speak English. There seemed to be a delay, and I read more of the literature the airports supply free of charge. The airport was, obviously, on the tourist circuit, because it was quite new, and there were more of the plate-glass-and-plastic fittings than at the smaller internal stops. We were out of Central Asia now and in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, north of the Altai Mountains and on the edge of Western Siberia. I realized I would be returning this way, too, sometime; it seemed like a lot of to-ing and fro-ing. What I wanted was to get on the Trans-Siberian Railway back to Moscow. I was tired of airplanes, and after all I had heard of the railway I decided one couldn’t really write a proper travel book about Russia unless one had been on the Trans-Siberian. One might even get some material for a mystery thriller à la Agatha Christie and call it Murder on the Trans-Siberian Express. There was a long wait, and the Mongolian-looking couple dozed over their tight-packed shoulder bags, and I continued to imagine a journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway. After a while, the airline hostess came to collect us, and we trooped sleepily after her to the plane. “NEITHER TREE NOR BREAD” For centuries the world knew little about the mysterious land beyond the Urals. All kinds of horrifying fairytales circulated about an inhospitable and harsh land. Siberia was the “Darkest Africa” of the Northern Hemisphere. Medieval Europe received news of it from rare travelers who were generally considered very lucky to have been able to get back from this earthly conception of hell itself, beyond the Ripei Mountains as the Urals were then called. In 1544, the Franciscan monk, Sebastian Münster, published his Cosmographia universalis, and the part dealing with Siberia abounded with highly imaginative inventions which convinced his readers that Siberia was a land of eternal night, a desert of snow and ice, inhabited by all manner of monsters such as those having the heads of lions and tails like the devil, while “nothing but snow is to be found there, neither tree nor bread nor wine.” 1 Nevertheless, other more reliable sources of information were available. As far back as the eleventh century merchants and traders had set out for Novgorod in search of new routes and had returned with more truthful tales to tell of the richness of the inhospitable land, the land called Sibir by its inhabitants of nomadic tribes, hunters, and cattlemen. According to the most reliable investigations, the name “Siberia,” in the language of the ancient nomads who roamed the wilderness, meant “the sleeping land”—sib, to sleep, and ir—land. In the late twelfth centu-

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ry, the territory was overrun by the pillaging hordes of Genghis Khan. The few principalities, which survived that ruthless invasion, banded together to form the Siberian Khanate, and repeatedly its war-like rulers raided west against the young Muscovy state. Then in 1552, Russian troops defeated the Tatars and swept away the Kazan Khanate. Afterward they dealt with the Tatar Khan of Siberia, Kuchum, who had been harassing the frontier of Muscovy. Kuchum’s hordes were routed by the Don Cossack chieftain, Yermak, who thus opened the way into Siberia. 2 After this the Russians streamed into the new territory. Many were escaped serfs, fleeing from bondage, others were adventurers and pioneers in search of new land for cultivation. All these were the pervoprokhodtsy (land scouts), the frontiersmen of Siberia. Yet this colonization did not come up to expectations. There was little development of the latent potentialities of the land. In 1882, three hundred years after Yermak had ended his campaign, it was recorded that many people still looked upon the huge area as an inhospitable desert, that the bias of ignorance still damned the ill-fated land. Siberia was stuffed with mineral deposits, yet hardware had to come from Central Russia; there was cattle and wool, but cloth had to be fetched from the metropolitan West. The territory was looked upon as a good market for inferior but costly goods; any serious development there would mean undesirable competition against the manufacturers of Central Russia. Peasants at home were starved for land, yet the tsarist authorities enforced rigid control over emigration. This was done in the interests of the landlords of Central Russia who needed the cheap labor force. But Siberia had to be developed somehow, so the regime sent out convicts for the purpose, peppering the territory with prisons and penal institutions. Political opponents and ordinary lawbreakers were sent to Siberia. While in exile himself in the snowbound village of Shushenskoye in Krasnoyarsk Region, Lenin gave much thought to the future of Siberia. He became convinced that the territory had tremendous potentialities. In 1918, even when Russia was in the throes of a great battle for survival, Lenin issued orders for an accurate estimation of coal reserves in the Kuznetsk Basin; he thought ahead to electrification, to iron and steel from Urals ore, and West Siberian coal. The October Revolution saved Siberia from the fate of a colony and prevented it from satisfying the appetites of foreign concessionaires. For the USSR the land, once supposedly haunted by fabled monsters, where there was allegedly to be “neither tree nor bread nor wine,” became a mighty power base. For the new socialist generation of pervoprokhodtsy, the slogan was, “Siberia is the land of tomorrow!”

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AT THE CROSSROADS When I climbed down from the aircraft after dozing on and off from the Novosibirsk stopover, there was Georgi from the USSR Writers’ Union, waiting at the foot of the steps. With him was Albert Gurilyov to represent the Siberian city of Irkutsk. I was sleepy, but the morning was sharp and chill and helped waken me. Albert had sleek hair close against his head and went through the formalities of welcome. I was glad to see Georgi too, and we made our way toward the airport building. “Albert is a little embarrassed,” Georgi said. “You see, they don’t have a car, but a jeep truck, and they are worried that a foreigner living in London might want to travel by car. Well, I told them you’re just an ordinary fellow like the rest of us and would not mind.” I said: “Thank goodness. I am tired of airplanes, I’m tired of shiny motorcars, and the jeep will be a change. Besides, it will help create an atmosphere. I can’t write about traveling about in Soviet limousines like some visiting dignitary, can I? Besides I have also been dreaming of the Trans-Siberian Railway.” That set Albert at ease, and he introduced me to the young driver of the jeep truck, Volodya, and we loaded my cases, which included a small wooden crate presented at Tashkent Airport by Ramz Babajan. I was under the impression he had said it contained fruit, but when it was eventually opened it contained tomatoes. These I divided between the protesting Albert and Volodya—they expected me to consume the lot myself since it had been a present from somebody, but I insisted that I did not look forward to a diet of tomatoes, especially by the crateful. Well, we drove into Irkutsk, which is an old town whose historical records go back 300 years. It was considered the crossroads between Europe and Asia in the old times and the central point for the collection of the valuable Siberian furs before shipment to the markets or factories. Today, too, Irkutsk is famous for fur pelts of more than sixty species of animals from the territory stretching from the Yenisei River to the Pacific Ocean. In addition to sable, Eastern Siberia sends ermine, lynx, squirrel, silver and red fox, blue and white polar fox, otter, and mink to the fur auctions. In tsarist times it had been the provincial center for Eastern Siberia and the seat of government for the latter territory. It is a town of contrasts, with the usual blocks of flats edged up against the old-style buildings and log houses. There were apple blossoms along the streets from Kirov Square, where the Foreign Languages Institute is situated, and the municipal building or local Soviet with its red flag. The population is about half a million now, and besides the Polytechnical Institute there are a Polish Catholic Church, a Russian Orthodox, and a synagogue.

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We were actually in the area of the Buryats, a people of Mongol extraction. “Irkutsk is a Buryat word meaning ‘winding,’” Albert explained. “It refers to the Angara River on which the city is built.” Behind some nearby hills was the Angara River, and a new suburb had grown up there; you could see the upper floors of blocks of flats. All around the city were the new industrial complexes that produced radios and machinery, the aviation works. In pre-revolutionary times, when Cossacks had come upriver by boat, there had been only one wagonmaking works. Now Irkutsk’s yards ship goods all the way to India, Cuba, Indonesia: machinery, equipment for blast furnaces, and thermoelectric stations, among other intricate items. Yet here many of the Decembrists of 1825 had been exiled; the original immigrant population had been composed of serfs, exiles, and convicts, and the Siberians remember this with some pride, still singing the songs which these ancestors had brought with them. There was the memorial to the dead of the Patriotic War, of course, stating that two hundred thousand had gone from Irkutsk railway station straight to the front, and less than half the number had returned. It stands in the public gardens, which line the embankment of the Angara. Beyond the city, northward, east, and west, lay the vast expanse of Siberia, covering a total of ten million square kilometers, extending from the Urals to the Pacific and vaster than Australia. THE PEARL OF SIBERIA Georgi and I stayed in a big hotel in Irkutsk. Downstairs the long lobby had a chill aspect, but that was because the weather was dull and overcast. Spring had not really arrived yet, although the snow had gone. Most people think of Siberia, as they had in the old times, as a land of impenetrable forests, barren wastes of tundra extending north to the Arctic Ocean—a land of permafrost and, probably, the coldest place on earth. Spring in Siberia is warm, warm enough for the cherry trees, lilacs, and tulips. In summer the heat may rise to thirty degrees centigrade, and berries abound like rubies strewn about by some extravagant giant. There were parties of tourists in the hotel, and while we were in the restaurant a waitress painfully remarked that there would be 160 guests for breakfast. Now there were only ourselves, a Japanese couple, who preferred to eat behind a decorative screen, and a party of Germans at a long table. I was introduced to Anatoly Shastin, who was also from the Writers’ Union, but for the most part he left us in the hands of Albert. 3 The next day we had breakfast in the hotel’s buffet, to relieve the waitresses of two of their expected 160 guests.

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Outside, the Intourist groups were boarding their coaches accompanied by choruses of French and German. Volodya was waiting by our more compact kosyol, and with Georgi and Albert on the benches in the back and me in the front we set out for Lake Baikal. We passed the old-style houses on the edge of the city. The settlers from various parts had built their houses with their old national characteristics, so the buildings proved a motley collection. But a lot of new building was going on, and behind hedges and trees the cranes appeared as giant metal storks, towering over the cleared sites. The road out passed through great stretches of trees. Irkutsk Region is tremendously rich in wood—sixty million hectares of forests—and all around us and ahead in the distance the forest spread its hues of green under the unfriendly-looking gray sky: trees dark green, light green splattered all over by the white patches of the birch bark. The road was bumpy, and we seemed to be bouncing along for some stretches. Highways seem generally temperamental in Siberia; this, probably, had something to do with the under soil, the changing temperatures, melting and freezing, and expansion and contraction. Due to the enormous distances to cover, the roads in Siberia must also have been built in somewhat of a hurry. There were small families on motorcycles and sidecars going the same way we were; they all wore crash helmets. We passed little villages with wooden fences, built in clearings of the forest. It was a sharp contrast to Central Asia: here they cut down greenery, there they struggled to produce it. On the way we stopped on the road just outside a village by a riverbank, and Albert got out to collect his wife and little daughter who were holidaying there. We waited at the roadside, walked a little way into the forest. The ground was soggy with mold from fallen leaves. Across the road, in the village, a woman carried two buckets on a yoke—it was something one expected to see in villages, a picture out of a children’s story. Albert returned with the missus, who was a homely-looking and motherly woman, and their daughter who was pridefully presented. Everybody having been distributed as comfortably as possible inside the jeep, we set out again through the forestland. For a while, it was up hill and down dale and past a lonely homestead in a little vale, another village and then the first outposts of Lake Baikal: a built-up street, a restaurant facing a parking lot, and below these the lake itself. In spite of the bad weather there were hikers about, young girls shrieking with merriment over some obscure clownishness of their companions; a few anglers on a wall over the water; and some of the locals working in their gardens. According to the tourist brochures, “Lake Baikal, that gem of Siberia, is amazingly beautiful, especially in summer, in an emerald green setting of wooded hills. Fancifully shaped rocks, giant cedars, and pines over-

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hanging the water add to the distinctive wild beauty of the lake . . . the sweet lake water is amazingly pure and clear.” Trees were there, of course, and the “fancifully shaped rocks,” but a chill and heavy mist hid most of the lake, limiting visibility to the most immediate vicinity, and the water looked heavy gray, like dusty pearl. Nevertheless, Lake Baikal is the deepest on our planet with an average depth of 730 meters and a maximum of 1,620, holding one-fifth of all the fresh water in the world. Baikal sturgeon is the weightiest, they say, and there are even seals. But now there was an unwelcome look about the water, and we walked along the edge of the lake in the chill damp. It felt like the oncome of rain, and the sky was the color of a dirty battleship, yet a big pleasure cruiser was setting out in the distance, a raketa (hydrofoil), what some call a hovercraft. Inevitably there was a legend to recount about the lake. “You see that 336 rivers flow into the lake and only one, the Angara, flows out of it,” Albert said. We were strolling back the way we had come. “Well, Angara was the daughter of Baikal, and all the other rivers were suitors who came to Baikal to ask for her hand in marriage. But Angara loved only Yenisei and refused to choose any of the others, which angered her father, Baikal. So Angara ran away from home to join her lover Yenisei. Baikal tried to stop her by throwing a great rock, but she got away, because she could run very swiftly.” He pointed to a big outcrop of the lake. “There, that’s the rock he hurled at her. Anyway Angara got away and so joined Yenisei. You see how fast the river flows and farther north she meets the Yenisei, the mightiest river in Siberia.” 4 Returning to more mundane things, Baikal is of key importance to the development of productive forces of the region. A system of giant electric power projects is being raised on the Angara and the Yenisei. As for the lake itself, the dumping of industrial, domestic, and other waste is prohibited; sanitary services keep a watch on the processing method and recycling of water used by present enterprises. A new system of fueling ships is in operation to prevent pollution by fuel, and chemical plant protection on local farmlands is banned, preference is given to biological methods of pest control. All this came after a public outcry when operations ruined the banks of the lake, and rivers became fouled so that the omul, the Baikal salmon, could no longer get upstream to spawn. The whole Baikal basin has been designated a nature park and almost 1,250 miles of the lake and riverbank cleared. While we were strolling back, a coach arrived, and a crowd of Japanese tourists erupted from it to go trotting off into the surrounding woodland, their Nikon cameras clicking and whirring as they gamboled among the trees like merry children. They did not seem to mind the unholiday weather.

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After a while, the mistiness lifted, and you could see the far opposite bank hazily, a line of white cliffs, glittering in the distance as if they were still snowbound. On the way back we stopped at the village where we had collected Albert’s family and were entertained with lunch, joined by his mother and mother-in-law, and we were shown the garden where Albert’s retired father raised strawberries. While we were looking around, another old villager stopped by, a war veteran on crutches, who shook hands all round, and then some neighboring housewives joined in and talked about the village which was called Bolshaya Reka (Big River). It was a pleasant looking village, rows of wooden houses and gardens and piled lumber and an atmosphere of old Russia. It lay near the riverbank across the road from the taiga, the great forest of birch and larches that looked impenetrable and forbidding. ASIDES IN IRKUTSK The weather brightened somewhat, and we walked along Kirov Square near the hotel where there were many students from the Institute of Foreign Languages and others, sitting over books on the benches or chatting among themselves. At the other end of the square we emerged on what looked like the start of a motorcycle race, because there were a lot of youths in leather and denim and crash helmets revving their machines, and official looking men, and strings of gay bunting hung between poles. We really didn’t find out what the event was, but the riders made a lot of brave and important sounding noise with their bikes and looked very flamboyant in the grotesque helmets, like knights about to engage in a tourney. We went to look at the tombs of those exiled Decembrists who had been buried in Irkutsk during the last century. They were in the yard of an old monastery, under apple trees: Trubetskoi and wife and children and others. 5 Apart from the Decembrists there was a memorial to a Shelikhov, who had passed through Irkutsk on his way to Alaska, and a plaque, which announced pompously that the memorial had cost 11,760 rubles! 6 Albert’s wife also happened to be the director of Irkutsk’s ice cream factory, and having a childhood weakness for ice cream, I did not mind accepting an invitation to inspect the plant. One did not really associate feasting on ice cream with Siberia; the name always conjured up scenes of thick furs and tiled stoves. But there was the plant that produced eight tons of ice cream per shift. After watching the production process I was made to sit down in a little reception room and sample varieties of the morozhenoye—the only trouble was that the overgenerous hosts produced each sample by the huge bowlful, together with nuts and chocolates.

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Perhaps, it was a sort of punishment for my childhood overindulgence. In the evening we went to see the film version of Sholokhov’s novel of the Patriotic War, They Fought for Their Country. They had filmed the parts of the book he’d completed, and unfortunately the leading actor died before they could go on with it. 7 They did not mean to show the war on a broad panoramic scale, I think, and what had been completed showed the war seen by individual soldiers. One supposed Sholokhov’s future work and a new lead man would have to be dealt with. When we left the cinema it was raining heavily, and we waited for the trolleybus in the rain. Albert’s wife was with us: it is usual in the Soviet Union to allocate blocks of seats for films and other entertainment for sale to workers at local enterprises, apart from the ordinary public sales, and so the workers from the ice cream factory had been to the film session. AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE If you head to the north of Irkutsk you get into the Ust-Ordynsky Buryat national area. By car you travel mostly through open country. The forests have receded, and there is steppeland with cattle grazing, attended by mounted herdsmen, and electric pylons stretching all the way and into the low hills. We drove through the open country and across a low-banked river, passing villages of those log cottages with blue shutters that looked like toy houses. On the left I could see low hills in the distance, crested by trees, and piles of logs, and now and then what looked like those agricultural stations. The weather was still threatening and the clouds close, mist hanging over the countryside. There were big trucks continually passing on the road carrying loads of material: prefabricated building sections and parts of bridges. One could sense that a great deal of attention was being paid to the development of the interior. Albert was singing. It was one of those convict songs handed down from the old times, for which Siberia is famous. There is one that goes, “Glorious Sea, Our Sacred Baikal,” but that would be sung as they peered through the carriage windows by those traveling on the Trans-Siberian Railway that passed along the south of the lake for some miles. The Buryat Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic stretches all along the southern and eastern shores of Baikal and down to the border of Mongolia, and is, of course, part of the Russian Federation. An autonomous republic has its own constitution, which deals with its specific features, its own Supreme Soviet, Council of Ministers, Supreme Court, and local bodies of power and administration. It has its own territory, which may not be altered without its consent, its judicial system, legislation on economic and cultural development, its citizenship, emblem and flag, and capital city. It is equally represented in the Soviet of Nationalities of

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the USSR Supreme Soviet (eleven deputies from each autonomous republic) and proportionally to the size of its population, on equal footing with other autonomous republics in the Supreme Soviet of the Union Republic of which it is part. There are sixteen autonomous republics in the Russian Federation, out of twenty within the Union republics of the whole USSR. 8 A national area has a specific national composition (although it is usually inhabited by several nationalities) and is as a rule sparsely populated. It is represented by one deputy in the Soviet of Nationalities of the USSR and proportionally to its population in the case of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation. The bodies of state and administration, courts, procurator’s office conduct their work in the mother tongue of the local nationality. The Buryat national area where we were going is one of ten such areas. We drove into Ust-Ordynsky, the center of the area, past a petrol pump, the usual electricity pylons, and into the small town bristling with TV aerials. Outside the district center were the red and white slogans calling, “Forward to Communism,” contrasting with the blue shutters of houses. The district Party secretary who welcomed us was Raissa Mitienova, a sturdy looking woman, in a smart frock, with well-kept Mongolian features. She was a graduate of the Irkutsk Pedagogical Institute, the Komsomol and Communist Party school in Moscow. “Welcome,” she said, cheerfully. “We have had delegations before, but no foreign writers. I’m sorry the weather is not very pleasant at the moment.” I said: “Thank you. But don’t bother about the weather—we write about all kinds. This is not so bad, considering what I’ve heard about Siberia.” “No. It can be very cold, and very hot too. But never mind, we’ll go out and meet some people, and we’ll all cheer up.” It had been raining, and there were puddles in the street. “We’ll start with the local anthropological and natural history museum. It will give you some of our history first.” She was explaining that before the Revolution the Buryat people had had no script—now everybody could read and write and as usual education was in two languages, in this case Buryat and Russian, with the choice of first preference left to parents or pupils. “The schools also teach a foreign language as well, English, German, or French.” In the little museum we saw examples of the people’s past and present life: the round yurts of the old nomads, ancient tools, ploughs, fur clothing, decorative work. There were photographs of war veterans and heroes of socialist labor and also pictures of various modern machinery. There was a photograph of an elderly man with a big gray handlebar

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mustache and a chestful of medals. He was a local hero: several war medals and awards for distinctive labor. He was a shepherd. “Of course, although we are a Buryat area, there are more than our own people living here. We have no single purely Buryat farm or village. There are nineteen different nationalities scattered throughout our fortyeight state and collective farms. However, as a Buryat area, in terms of raising the level of the local nationals, Buryats get some privileges connected with acquiring higher education.” Back at the Party office I chatted to a Buryat surgeon and a neurologist. They looked shy and very modest and asked questions about medical facilities in South Africa, and quietly showed curiosity and dismay when I explained medicine under apartheid to them. Most Soviets I have met find racial discrimination difficult to comprehend, and it usually takes a lot of explanation. Those who were victims of the Nazis have a better understanding. There was the technical school which the apprentice harvesters and the tractor mechanics attended, nine hundred and sixty-seven of them, from the area, and we were shown the teaching methods, theoretical, practical, visual. The students who studied there usually started after the eight-grade normal school and stayed for three years. They received board and lodging and a stipend paid by the state, and those who belonged to a particular farm were even paid a wage by the farm while they did their course. In addition to mechanics they also had to learn the basics of agronomy. After the three-year course the certificates were awarded which made them full farm-machinery experts. One of the farms, from which some of the boys came, was another Lenin Collective Farm. There must be hundreds of farms all over the USSR named after Lenin. This one lay among low rolling green hills and ploughed land, and we drove, accompanied by Raissa Mitienova who joined Albert in one of his local songs, while the town car with the rest of our hosts led the way. The wet country road wandered through fields sprouting young corn, which was the main crop there. “Last year a lot of the harvest was lost because of the weather,” our hostess said. “We have been experimenting with a breed that might withstand the extreme cold, but the weather is very severe in winter.” Apart from corn they raised cattle and sheep, grew potatoes. “As I said, we might be a Buryat area, but there are many other peoples living here, Russians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Tatars, and others.” There was also a Polish village populated by descendants of those who had fled here during the reactionary times of Stolypin. 9 “There is an interchange of language taking place all the time, mixed marriages, and cultural assimilation. The Surkhaban is the traditional archery contest, it goes back to old tribal times, you know, but now anybody takes part in the district and national competitions, and, of course, today tribalism only exists in books about the old times. There is

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my cousin, for example, who married a Russian girl, and each of their two children decided upon their own nationality when they applied for passports. One stated Russian and the other Buryat.” We came up to the farm village. Because of the recent rain the streets were black with mud, and we had to use the boardwalks that lined them. At the village center we met the local dignitaries: the Party chairman and the chairman of the village Soviet, the chief agronomist, the head zoologist, and others, a mixture of both sexes, as well as a figure I recognized from the photograph in the museum: the medals hanging weightily and the gray handle-bar mustache—the shepherd with the Order of the October Revolution, the Orders of Lenin, the rows of awards for heroism in the Patriotic War. The history of the farm was recounted; it had grown out of a combination of two farms in 1959 and now covered 30,000 hectares, and they had bulls, cows, sheep, and four hundred horses, forty harvester combines, and fifty trucks and cars. They had had misfortunes with the corn, but had already overfulfilled the meat quota by 110 percent for the present five-year plan. The quota for milk production would certainly be fulfilled. They even had a milkmaid who was a member of the Supreme Soviet. As for pay a milkmaid earned on average about as much as a city factory worker and any other collective farm worker. Farm workers also had a slight advantage over the city dweller in that the families had plots where they subsidized themselves by growing their own vegetables. Here they had two secondary schools and two of the ubiquitous Dom Kultury, two medical centers, and two libraries. A lot of things seemed to go in pairs. Even the hero shepherd had been wounded twice in the war. “What do your grandchildren do?” I asked him. “Grandchildren?” The flamboyant mustaches bobbed. “Grandchildren? I have no grandchildren, I’m a young man myself!” Everybody laughed again, and I asked on which fronts he had fought. “I was on the Ukrainian front and then on the Byelorussian, and went as far as Weimar in Germany.” “Well, I hope you don’t have to fight another war.” He shook his head, and the mustaches moved simultaneously, like parading guards. “No, we don’t need it.” We trod precariously around the muddy village. There was an ancient wooden church, disused and boarded up. The wooden village cottages all had front gardens full of Siberian flowers called zharki. An old lady invited us into her cottage, smiling and nodding welcome to everybody. She and her husband were newly retired and did some gardening, she said, showing us around. They had three children, one of the girls worked in Irkutsk. In the living room were carpets on the floor, a sideboard full of bric-à-brac, and above the TV set a collection of family snapshots and faded religious pictures, time-bleached imitation icons.

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She wanted to prepare chai for everybody, but was assured that there were still other places to see. They had a children’s kombinat, a combined kindergarten and primary school. “There was a Bulgarian delegation here once,” somebody said. “When we mentioned this kombinat, they all asked in amazement: do you mean a place where you manufacture children?” We tripped back along the boardwalks and gangways laid across the muddy streets, past the yellow zharki flowers under the TV aerials toward the local stolovaya (the eating-house). Here a long table had been laid out with the usual collective farm fare, and I was given a place in the middle of one side with Raissa Mitienova opposite me. The waitresses seemed to have an air of especial readiness. We did justice to the zakuski to the accompaniment of clicking glasses and the range of speeches and toasts. Somebody must have signaled, and the waitresses, who had been participating in the toasts and the exchanged banter, now departed to the kitchen. I wondered what they had been so anxious to produce. I stared with a feeling of trepidation. There was an old acquaintance of mine—the ears flopping dejectedly, the eyes glassily accusing, the teeth sneering—as the leading waitress bore the steaming sheep’s head triumphantly toward me. “It’s an old Buryat custom,” Raissa Mitienova said. “Only for honored guests.” I imagined the custom being born from the East by the advancing nomads, from Mongolia perhaps, into Buryatiya and from thence to Kazakhstan. It was like fate stalking me. Being an honored guest herself, and a woman, custom demanded that she be presented with the ceremonial sheep’s paunch, stuffed and boiled like a version of Scotch haggis (perhaps, the Scottish custom had even come from these parts too), and so there we were, she bisecting the stomach and sharing out the spiced and boiled contents, while I did the same with the head. At least my Buryat friends showed some pleasant surprise at my expertise. OUT OF TRIBALISM The Revolution of 1917 opened the way to socialism to all the peoples of Russia irrespective of what stage of socio-economic development they were at. In the case of the ethnic minorities of the East, namely in Siberia, who under tsarism had been on the brink of extinction, these became the first in world history to come to socialism by being able to bypass not only capitalism (from feudalism as in the case of most of Central Asia), but essentially the whole class-divisive stage of social development. In

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the course of a single generation these peoples advanced from communal-tribal forms to socialist culture. Before the Revolution, a great part of Siberia—northern and northeastern Asia—was inhabited by small ethnic groups, comprising the most backward region of tsarist Russia. There were no industrial enterprises there, and the indigenous population was scattered over a vast territory. As in the case of old Turkestan, these peoples were considered “aliens.” Their productive communal system, property, and social differentiation proceeded very slowly because of the great difficulty in obtaining or exchanging any sort of surplus. Exploitation by communal chiefs likewise was of a rudimentary character and happened mainly in various forms of tribal mutual assistance. Exploitation from without developed much more intensively. The tsarist treasury took advantage of a potentially extensive source of revenue. For example, in the form of tax in kind alone it yielded thousands of fur pelts a year. However, the bulk of the furs were bought by private traders (especially after the money tax was introduced), who cheated the indigenous inhabitants and corrupted them with drink. Traditional structures of social ties were shaken, local chieftains gradually lost their prestige under the incursions of traders and kulaks, or otherwise commenced to engage in exploitative commerce themselves. In a nutshell, the contact of the indigenous peoples with civilization and its technological achievements took place in forms distorted by exploitation and commercialism. It meant the collapse of their customary way of life and brought disease, poverty, and extinction. The victorious Soviet government undertook a number of measures aimed at helping these peoples quickly and painlessly to join the new, socialist way of life. Painstaking explanatory and organizational work of Russian and local Communists among the working section of the population, along with other measures, was directed toward introducing a new tenor of life. The extirpation of hidebound illusions about the “tribal” unity of the poor man and the kulak, of the rank-and-file member of the commune and the chief or shaman; these illusions were replaced by the class demarcation of the working element from the parasitical stratum of traders and tribal chiefs. Class-consciousness of the working masses was forged in the process of developing political maturity and ideas of democratic self-government and state power. In addition, the socialist industrialization of the whole territory laid the basis for radical economic changes, modifying the material basis of the traditional social structure of the peoples of Siberia, and creating new branches of the economy there. Cultural centers were created in the remote taiga (forest regions) and the tundra plains. Writing systems were devised, as a great part of the various groups had no written language, and schools, books, newspapers appeared. Also the training of local ca-

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dres and of educators, specialists, and the development of a national intelligentsia played a large role. In 1925, the 1st Far Eastern Congress was convened to discuss problems relating to economic activity and life of the peoples in the course of implementing Soviet power and socialist economy. Such measures stimulated widespread interest. Distant nomads and settled people sent representatives to the cities to learn about setting up Soviets and co-operatives. Discussions produced the idea of creating indigenous territorial Soviets in addition to tribal Soviets and the divisions of national districts. Gradually the development of the territory in the East, as in Central Asia, was planned on a modern and scientific basis. It has become an important element of state and economic policy and a matter of vital interest to the whole Soviet people. The road to socialism, traversed by these once scattered and virtually inaccessible and backward minorities, testifies to the essential connection between the abolition of the exploitation of man by man, on the one hand, and eliminating the privileges of some and the discrimination against other nations, nationalities, and tribal communities, on the other. While retaining the unique features of the socialist culture they have developed, the numerically small peoples of Siberia and the Far East have become, at the same time, an inseparable part of what is coming to be known as the Soviet people, and are actively engaged in the common effort of farther developing the whole of the USSR. TO BRATSK If you visit Siberia you must see the hydroelectric power stations. “You can’t see the wood for the power stations,” some unknown established the quip which is now known throughout the territory. The first plans for the electrification of Russia said, among other things: “. . . There can be no doubt that in the future the Angara River and the whole area around it will play a relevant role in Siberia.” It was in the 1950s that it was decided to build a whole cascade of hydroelectric power stations on the Angara, and the major project of this scheme was the Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station. Representatives of about twenty Soviet nationalities answered the call of the Communist Party, the Komsomol, and the government to clear the wilderness of taiga forest and to build the power station. 10 For hundreds of years Eastern Siberia had remained unknown. In the sixteenth century, Russian explorers ventured up the Angara and built a wooden fort on the territory of Buryatiya. One of the largest power stations on earth, and likewise the biggest artificial lake in the world, are now located in this area.

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When we arrived, the town of Bratsk had just celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the station—work on it began in 1955. The sky was still the concrete gray, and the rain dripped as we hurried into the new looking little airport. We took a bus from the airport, along with other passengers, and drove past old-fashioned log houses and trees until we stopped at a crossroads of what looked like a village or suburb. Here we had to get out, because the bus wasn’t going to the place we wanted. We found a taxi and drove through dense forestland in which light rain dribbled from the birch trees. Cottages like elfin houses crowded together in an old suburb that receded into the area still called Greentown, where the pioneers of Bratsk had pitched the first tents in the wilds of the taiga. A lot of the original site is under water now, covered by dam and reservoir. Great trailer trucks were still hauling material along the road that went up hill and down dale, and then the town rose before us at the foot of the slope, a barricade of apartment blocks gray in the mist and then turning white and checkered pink from the lightening as we drew near. The weather was lifting, and the town closed in around with its moderndesign apartments, offices, balconies, and the broad Peace Street with its green lawns: it was really a mixture of boulevard and park. We checked in at the Hotel Taiga. The hotel was quiet and new, and one knew by the credit card signs by the cashier’s window it was apt to receive many foreign visitors. From my room I could look down at an intersection at Peace Street, and beyond the blocks of flats to a glimpse of water, which was the artificial sea of Bratsk and, hazily beyond, a line of low hills under the pale gray of the sky. How does one describe a dam, and the biggest in the world at that? Our car took us down a winding road that led right down to the bank of the Angara, and there it was, a mighty wall across the river, a kilometer in length and 125 meters high. Its top had the look of battlements of some futuristic castle, while the huge buttresses sloped down from it, interspersed by sluice gates. This way one escaped the technical jargon and only the feeling that this was really an example of how man could conquer nature, the elements, was left. I had seen the dam down near Volgograd and saw them still in the process of building Nurek, but this one, finished and functioning, seen from the bank of the Angara, made one feel somewhat puny; again recall Wells’s skepticism of “the dreamer in the Kremlin.” All round its cables, connected to a veritable taiga of steel pylons and porcelain insulators, silently carried the power away to cities and factories, chemical works and lumber mills, mines and steel plants. Across it motor traffic passed like toys drawn on an invisible string. Behind it pressed 169 cubic kilometers of water, one hundred meters deep in some parts. Parties of tourists were debussing near us at the feet of the vast barrage. A young blonde, whose name was Nadezhda (Hope), took charge of

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me and Georgi and took us through the plate glass doors into halls of decorative marble, showed us around the long room where the tops of ranked generators looked like a row of monster flowers of steel growing out of the floor below which the turbines each passed 240 cubic meters of water per second to generate 225,000 kilowatts each. In the wall an automatic register clicked away showing the amount of electricity being created each second. In a room a few technicians sat at consoles that controlled the whole computerized dam. We said goodbye to Nadezhda, a young technician who helped keep this electricity-producing giant in control. She looked very young, but Bratsk is really a young place, so she seemed symbolic. Two-thirds of the population is under thirty, and the dam itself had started operating only in 1961. They were all young, and all the time young people were arriving there to develop the entire region. We drove back through the forest country and went to look at the Bratsk Fortress, which the first explorers had built. All around the vast taiga was being pushed back, as the new timber mill raised mountains of logs for use all over the USSR. Up river was the new aluminum plant and iron ore processing plant where the Ilim joined the Angara. The construction of the Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station and the adjoining industrial complex cost the government 3,500 million rubles. The general scheme for the distribution of industry in Siberia provided for the creation of over 280 new industrial complexes involving more than 3,500 factories. Two hundred and forty complexes were already under construction, to be fed by the series of power stations like the Bratsk and Sayano-Shushenskaya on the Yenisei River and the future Ust-Ilimsk. THE CARPENTER OF BRATSK The weather had cleared, and we walked down the main street and looked at the shops. Women were laying a stretch of decorative lawn in front of a new block of flats, and a water truck was spraying the street. We found the local bookshop, the Dom Knigi, and wandered around looking at the books. I had left the Ramayana and the detective adventure with my main bag in Irkutsk and needed something to read, but what they had were accounts of the local region for the benefit of tourists: “What is it really like, this mysterious taiga realm, figuring in many songs and legends?” When we got back to the hotel, I was introduced to Comrade Karl Ivanovich. He was a tall and lean man with a seamed face, which gave the impression of having aged through hard life and work. He was after all a pioneer of Bratsk, one of the town’s frontiersmen. “When I got here there were only two houses,” he said while we were having lunch. “I am a carpenter now. I had volunteered to come up here to help build the

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place. So I learned my trade here. We lived in tents for the most part. Later on I was able to have my wife join me. So you can guess, I saw this town grow up. We had to clear the forest; we were invaded continually by insects, mosquitoes. We were also building the power station and the timber works then.” “So you must be proud of your town.” “I like it,” he said modestly. “It is good to see something grow before your eyes.” “Yesterday he received an award, he is a labor hero,” our interpreter said. “Pozdravlyayu Vas,” I said. “Congratulations,” and the seamed face blushed boyishly. He was from Kirov, but had actually been born in Leningrad; his family had moved away from there before the siege. “What do you remember of the war?” I asked. He said with a faraway look: “Being hungry.” Then added: “My father was killed in the war.” He smiled, “Now I have my roots in Bratsk, I don’t want to move away.” He had a son in the ninth grade and a second child of ten. His wife had also graduated from technical college and worked in the timber and cellulose industry. “I suppose we are well off, because I am now a master craftsman and my wife is a technician.” No, they didn’t own a car, but preferred walking. “For recreation we might go to a rest house or to our dacha (summer cottage) for the weekend. Also, everybody here likes fishing.” Once a month he served with a “volunteer public order squad” for a few hours. These squads represent the most common form of mass participation in upholding public order. They are set up on a voluntary basis by working people’s collectives, and a volunteer spends a few hours of free time patrolling public places. If they meet with any serious violation of the law they may detain the offender and hand him over to the militia, which is the official body for public security and order. It protects the personal safety of citizens, public and personal property, and controls traffic. “Do you have any serious violations of the law?” I asked. “Nothing serious, everything is quiet here. Well, I suppose some families have a lame duck.” I took it he meant the equivalent of a “black sheep.” “No, we don’t have much of that kind of trouble.” We must come and meet his carpentry brigade, he urged. “We did the woodwork for this hotel.” He gestured around the dining room. We did go to the factory the next day, and he introduced us to the director first and then to members of his brigade of woodworkers, which included a teenage girl who blushed and smiled shyly. They presented me with a plaque of carved wood symbolizing the Soviet victory in the war and captioned Unvanquished. The director showed us around the furniture factory (they also made swings for the parks, and kindergarten

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and school furniture) and the paintworks where women seemed to be enjoying themselves like babes among the various colors they produced. Afterward Karl Ivanovich came back into town with us, and he took us to look at the war memorial in one of the parks. The war dead of the surrounding region were all named in raised stone script, and there was an elderly woman reading the names. “Ivan Petrovich,” she said to somebody. “He was from our village,” and the tears ran down her old cheeks. Behind the giant enterprise of the Soviet Union there will always linger a great sadness too, for millions of its perished children; nowhere could one escape the sorrow. THE MUSICAL CITY The representative of the Writers’ Union, who met us at Novosibirsk Airport, was a tubby man with cropped hair, in shirtsleeves and uniform trousers. He introduced himself as Ivan Krasnov and was all exuberance, immediately launching volubly into the pleasure it was that I had come, that I would soon see the significance of his home city. In the car he had waiting, I discovered the reason for his uniform trousers—he had a matching tunic that went with it, and after struggling into it and buttoning up, he became Lieutenant-Colonel Ivan Krasnov, in full regalia. He was a great conversationalist, keeping up a commentary which Georgi labored to translate, all the way into the city. Novosibirsk is divided by the Ob River, and we crossed the long bridge that joined this “Siberian capital” that sprawls on each bank. It is also called the City of New Addresses, because the residents pridefully point out that over the past decade 130 thousand flats have been handed over, celebrated by an average of forty housewarming parties a day. Otherwise, it is one of the Soviet Union’s biggest engineering centers. It had contributed to Egypt’s Aswan Dam and planned transformer substations from Aswan to Cairo and Alexandria. The farm machinery plant produced special seed drills and mounted harrows used not only in Siberia, but which were exported to Mongolia, Vietnam, Iraq, and other parts. Lieutenant-Colonel Krasnov was indeed proud of his city in which the first supporters of Soviet power had fought the interventionists who had invaded Siberia; he was proud of the Red Army. “But I am retiring now,” he said cheerfully. “By tomorrow I should be in civvies. Tonight I’ll perform my last public duty wearing my uniform—at the anniversary concert of our famous Siberian Choir. You must come.” The Siberian Folk Choir had been formed in 1945 and was now holding its thirtieth anniversary at the Novosibirsk Opera and Ballet Theater, which had been built during the war. Building had been started in 1941 and had gone on, in spite of the Nazi invasion, the population confident

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that the war would be won. It was opened by the Siberian Choir’s first performance of Glinka’s “Glory.” 11 I was introduced to the conductor, People’s Artist of the USSR, Andrei Novikov, backstage among the choristers sorting out costumes, the props of former and future performances, the smell of greasepaint and powder. He somehow did look like a leader and conductor of music. Do they develop particular characteristics? Before the concert there were the congratulatory speeches and the presentation of jubilee presents: the District Communist Party, the Komsomol, the trade unions and individual amateur choirs from factories and schools, the Siberian Army Division, the actors of the Maly (small) Theater, Moscow, the Kuban Cossack Choir. Krasnov, representing the Writers’ Union, took me by surprise by announcing me, hoping I would mention the choir somewhere in my writing, and I had to get up and show myself to everybody, and a little girl brought me a sprig of flowers in welcome. Who can ignore mentioning the concert by a Russian choir, and especially the Siberian Folk Choir? I always believed the Latins produced singing by individuals, serenades, and so on; but it took the Africans, Welsh, and Russians to father choral singing. Anybody who gets a chance to hear the Siberian Folk Choir should not miss it. Singing to the blaze of color of folk costumes that made the stage blossom, and the songs interspersed by those furious folk dances, which always seem to be taking place in mid-air. Thirty and thirty more years to them then. National elections day was also drawing near. I remembered that right up to this time, while I was traveling, I had seen none of the hullabaloo usually associated with elections. In all the towns and cities and villages there had been the red signboards indicating agitpunkts, the bureaus from which the campaigns were organized, the candidates’ offices and the canvassers meeting points, but there had been no hustling or ballyhoo. Soviet election campaigns seem to proceed in a quiet manner, presumably relying on local meetings and personal contact and the political consciousness of the people to determine the direction to take. So, there we were in Novosibirsk that weekend. Georgi had met two students who wrote poetry and invited them to dinner. In the meantime, Intourist had attached a tall and lanky blonde guide, Lyudmila by name, to us, but we had to share her with a New Zealand party. So, on Saturday she accompanied us on a ferryboat ride up and down the sea, which is a sort of lake on the length of the Ob River by the city. The weather had lifted, and it was suddenly hot, and the boat ride was a relief, the breeze on the river blowing in our faces. At dinnertime in the restaurant on the ground floor, Georgi told me to hold the table against newcomers, while he went in search of the girls he had met. When he returned, he was with two well-decorated blondes, though while one had a sort of Brigitte Bardot look, the other preferred a severe Jane Eyre hairstyle.

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Brigitte wrote poetry and Jane Eyre prose. The restaurant band played “Moon River.” 12 I asked Jane Eyre whether she did a lot of writing, and she said, “Ochen! (Very much).” That seemed to terminate our conversation. They started to talk about Françoise Sagan in Russian, while I listened to the band play “Kalinka.” 13 I was somewhat out of my league with Sagan in the Russian language and preferred Russian music instead. Some of the diners from Odessa wanted to hear a local number called “Street,” whereupon they got up and did some energetic dancing. Afterward the crooner sang, “Oh, how we danced on the night we were wed,” and the Russian favorite, a swing waltz, took place. Brigitte Bardot suddenly remembered reading of a demonstration in London by writers over library royalties and wanted to know from me: “Is John Updike rich?” The band finished with “In the Summertime.” 14 It was ten o’clock, and the band packed up. It was still light, and through the restaurant windows I could see people in straw sombreros coming up the street from the direction of the beach along the riverbank. On the sidewalk a man, who appeared to be a deaf-mute, was talking sign language to his companion. After the ice cream we packed up, too, and Georgi saw the girls off, and I went up to my room and the neon sign over the provision store opposite came on. THE SILENT TOWN At the 20th Congress of the Communist Party, held in 1956, Siberia was described as a land of immense potential, which was to be transformed into a region of gigantic power stations and factories, of new towns and advanced farming. Advance posts of modern science had to be set up in Siberia to ensure its systematic and rapid development. When scientists were asked to go east, many readily responded, and their ideas of setting up research centers in Siberia were approved. In 1957, the establishment of the Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences was adopted, and between 1958 and 1968 the branch developed many large subdivisions. The academic center of Novosibirsk studies almost every range of scientific problems. Twenty institutions have been concentrated there, including a computer center, a university, technical library, botanical gardens. Half an hour’s drive from Novosibirsk and we arrived at the town of science, Akademgorodok. 15 Founded in 1959, its first lectures were delivered in the forest to 3,500 students. Now a city had grown up there, and with Lyudmila explaining everything with her Intourist expertise, there was little difficulty in understanding the functions of this novel community. 16

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Only that day something seemed strange about this concentration of highly advanced institutions with its present population now of 56,000. Builders Avenue, the first street to be constructed, was quiet. The windows in the blocks of residential flats peeped silently out over the balconies, like blind rectangular eyes. We drove along silent thoroughfares lined with lawns and trees. After a while we stopped and got out, telling the chauffeur to drive slowly on while we strolled, the sunshine hot and pleasant in contrast to the graveyard silence. It was like walking through some ultra-modern Valley of the Dead: the vast block of the nuclear physics section loomed ahead of us, blank and silent and shut up like a tomb, on either side the chemistry building and the biological institute were locked mausoleums, everywhere the vast oblong blocks of the mathematical, genetical, and geophysical buildings seemed deserted. Nothing moved, no sound was heard. We were puzzled. What could have happened? We strolled farther. The semi-detached houses of the staff were locked and empty too. It was as if everybody, every soul had fled, abandoned their posts, science, the world. In a garden—it must have belonged to some professor of anthropology—a collection of great, excavated heads with grotesque faces carved from stone rose out of the lawn, snarling mouths, bulging eyes. It reminded me of pictures of these mysterious stone heads on Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean: very little was known about them, or who had placed them there. The famous Akademgorodok stood around us, its edifices looming over us, blank and empty, as if some mysterious disease had obliterated everybody. “It’s bloody well Sunday,” I said finally. “That’s what. It’s Sunday and nobody’s working or at home.” Lyudmila giggled. “It’s election day too.” We found the car and drove to the community center, made up of ultra-modern buildings housing the Moskva Kinoteatr (movie theater) and, of course, the Dom Kultury called Akademiya. There was some life. Upstairs was the polling station in a long, polished hall, the booths behind pale blue hangings, while electoral officials sat at tables with the voters’ rolls and voting slips. But there were few voters now; the majority had made their crosses earlier that morning, and almost the entire population had evacuated to the beach. When we visited the House of Culture at Akademgorodok, we were shown the ingenious work of the child artist, Nadya Rusheva, who died tragically of cerebral hemorrhage at the age of seventeen. Her drawings, dating from infancy, paintings, color washes, and sketches line the gallery. She was a child genius who, perhaps, really had been meant to live only that short time. 17

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We went down the stairway that led from the riverbank to the beach. The sands swarmed with life, as if a great migration of ants had taken place from the scientific nest above; it looked as if the entire population of the 56,000, young and old, bikinis and modest beach wear, were gamboling and splashing in the Ob and strewing its flank with ice cream cartons. I even met one of the New Zealanders there: a bearded young man in shorts who told me he had once been a motorcycle racer. “It became too dangerous so I quit,” he said. “I made a lot of money, but I valued my neck more.” “Are you on holiday?” I asked. He said: “Oh, we’re doing a trip. Came up to Vladivostok, and we have been heading toward Moscow by stages on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Then by plane from Moscow to London. Why, you can see the whole country bit by bit traveling on the Trans-Siberian.” “Trans-Siberian Railway,” I said. “You mean there is such a thing? I haven’t seen it, let alone traveled on it.” I had been hinting to my companion about traveling by the railway instead of by plane, but something seemed to be distracting his attention each time. “Well,” I said to the New Zealander, “have a good trip in case I don’t see you again.” THE SCIENCE TOWN Akademgorodok was alive and working again when we went there two days later. There were students hurrying along the Prospekt Nauki (Science Avenue) as we made our way to the Institute of History, Philology, and Philosophy. The scientific secretary of the institute Alexeyev introduced us to a roomful of co-workers, among them a Professor Briedova, who was an Altai woman. One of the projects of the institute had been to write the history of Siberia. There had been some skepticism about this, but they had set to work in 1961, and by 1969 the last (fifth) volume had been completed; the work had been translated into Japanese, published in the USA and Canada. Over 200 writers and researchers had taken part in the project, and in 1973 the institute had been awarded the Lenin Prize. The research done even before the formation of this institute had helped in revealing and assisting toward resolving problems pertaining to the socialist development of the scattered indigenous minorities inhabiting Siberia: the adjustment of these peoples to the new way of life, their reorientation from primitive ideas to advanced ideology. A great deal of pioneering work had been done by the Leningrad Institute of the Peoples of the North. In many cases the indigenous peoples had no written language, they spoke variously rooted languages: Turkic, Mongol, PaleoAsian, Eskimo-Aleut, and so on. In the beginning, philologists had experimented with phonetic sound symbols and grammar for each lan-

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guage, gradually introduced a written script, and finally these once primitive, nomadic, semi-nomadic, reindeer herders and trappers had produced their own teachers, writers, scientists, produced their own newspapers and books, magazines like Baikal and Pole Star. (My old friend Yuri Rytkheu is of the tiny minorities of the Soviet Far East and is today one of the USSR’s most popular writers.) 18 Professor Nikolai Onienko, one of the company, a sturdy man with Oriental features, was of the Nanai people who today have a population of only about ten thousand. Dr. Vladlen Timokhin, bearded and bespectacled, took us around his History Museum. He is the curator and an enthusiastic talker completely knowledgeable and determined to show you every inch of his museum, explaining with ease as he wanders among the exhibits. Later, he presented me with a small volume of poetry by the poets of Siberian peoples. One saw one’s own ancestry among the exhibits under Timokhin’s care. Didn’t that Siberian mask look like a Dogon monkey mask from Dahomey (now Benin)? Was that not a Khoi-Khoi bow? A statue from some ancient Egyptian period? All men had started with similar social organization, had looked at the Universe of far-off, mist-ridden times through the same eyes. Now his descendants sat in Akademgorodok. The harnessed elements cracked among the high-voltage grid in the Institute of Power Research; the once frightening mysteries of the Aurora Borealis had become a subject of Dr. Nikolai Rogov. 19 “SIBERIAN LIGHTS” Later we went to visit the publishers of the oldest magazine in the USSR, Sibirskiye Ogni (Siberian Lights). For a few minutes we lost our way among a lot of concrete stairways and tiled landings in a strange building, and eventually found the editorial offices in the House of Industries. Somewhere beyond there were rooms devoted to electronics and metallurgy. Anatoly Nikulkov was the editor and welcomed us as fellow members of the profession and chatted about our work and his own and the history of his magazine. “There were only 60,000 people living in Novosibirsk when Siberian Lights was founded,” he said, passing around the cigarettes. “There had been no cultural amenities in the city—Kolchak had just been expelled, the Civil War ebbed away, and typhus and other diseases were rampant. In 1927, on the occasion of the magazine’s fifth birthday, the chief editor Zazubrin said: ‘We shall have industrialization. Let us also agree that the magazine Sibirskiye Ogni and the newspaper Sovetskaya Sibir shall be the beginning of literary industrialization. In other words, we shall have our

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own local literature, based on local material, but equal to the all-Union literature in importance and quality.’” 20 “We are not doing too badly today,” Nikulkov said. “There is a steady stream of stories, and as for local material, it comes from many of the minority groups. They write in both languages, you know, their own and Russian. The writers of Altai say Siberian Lights opened the way for them. Your friend Rytkheu was first published here, and others were also— Buryat writers, Yakuts. The national minorities write mostly poetry— that’s a result of the youngness of their script, I think, and it is easier to demonstrate the folkloric character through poetry.” In Novosibirsk there are publishing houses for Western Siberia, in Irkutsk—for the East, but there are no strict divisions. “Is anything special happening in the writing field nowadays?” I asked. “Well, you know, this year is the 150th anniversary of the Decembrist revolt of 1825. So, there are a lot of historical stories, and somebody is writing a novel about it.” Afterward we left the publishing house and walked back down the main avenue along the bank of the Ob, in the direction of our hotel. Novosibirsk is the only city to have been founded by a writer, Mikhailovsky, who was also an engineer working on the construction of the TransSiberian Railway (!); and it is the meeting place of the two natural resources of the territory—the taiga and the steppe. 21 On the left bank of the Ob there are no forests, only steppeland; from the right bank the great forests stretch all the way to the Pacific. We came to the bear circus: it was a large pit in the ground somewhere along the avenue. But the bears seemed to be taking the day off, and no amount of teasing from spectators could awaken them from their lethargic contemplation of the silly humans. Bear circus aside, Novosibirsk is also third in line in ballet fame, the first being the Bolshoi of Moscow, of course, and next the Kirov of Leningrad. At the Dom Knigi, the large bookshop, we browsed among the books, and, lo and behold, I even found a copy of my own In the Fog of the Seasons’ End in the Roman-Gazeta edition. THE TITAN MAKERS The plane circled Novosibirsk, and the Ob receded below, a glittering gray and crooked streak—Ob, the “grandmother” of rivers, Siberia’s Volga—and the city huddling around her skirts. The smoke from factories— it might be the giant Sibenergo works where they manufactured those great steel and copper wire titans that generated electric power from the roaring rivers of Siberia and many other places.

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There under trees and brick walls the workshops grumble like mastiffs on a chain, the giant lathes spin and cut slivers of metal like cheese and, part by part, section by section, the great metal monsters are assembled, the cranes along the ceilings carrying hefty parts frighteningly overhead. I felt a shiver down my spine treading carefully on the greasy floors among all these looming shadows of machinery, like a dwarf at the feet of a host of Cyclopses, and wondered at the ease with which the greasygrimy workers, men and women, moved and handled these metallic dinosaurs. Five thousand workers turned out these titans of electric production for power dams, mines, railways. They have their own scientific institute and produce their own newspaper Generator, having a circulation of 1,000 copies a week. Started twenty-two years ago, the Novosibirsk electrogenerator engineering plant is only one of Siberia’s great enterprises. Here they make the generators of 300,000 kilowatts each and export them to forty-five countries apart from supplying them for the Soviet Union; as at Bratsk, they were manned by people like the lean-faced Vladimir, a lathe operator whose wife and son also worked there and whose daughter attended an agricultural institute; and there was Vsevolod, a lively man with spectacles who climbed down from a gantry to shake my hand and say, “Namaste,” because he thought I was from India. “Two years in India,” he said, talking loudly above the clatter. “To train workers in Uttar Pradesh. We had installed a factory there.” The factory’s Party Deputy Secretary, Ivan Yazhek, showed us around. He had been a railway worker and then served in the war as a captain in the artillery. Discharged in 1954, he joined the factory in 1955 as a lathe operator, attending night classes to become a master technician. In 1965, he had been elected Party Deputy Secretary as well. As we were walking around the workshops, workers questioned him, and he shook his head. He told me: “They want to know if you are another foreign buyer. We have so many of them coming here all the time.” It had been our last excursion in Novosibirsk. Now we set off for Tyumen. The landscape grew tinier yet wider as the plane climbed. You could see the vastness of Siberia; Neruda wrote somewhere: Here, wheat and steel were born From the hand of man, from his breast. The singing of hammers enlivens The aged woods like a blue phenomenon. 22

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“THE 2,000 SOLDIERS” At the smart, shiny Omsk Airport where we had to stop over on the flight, the crisp Intourist representative minced anxiously ahead of us, leading the way upstairs. “They never let me know there was a foreigner on this flight,” he said anxiously and fluttered like a butterfly taken unawares. Perhaps he thought I was some rich tourist, who had to be led personally in the direction of the buffet: the kolbasa (the salami-like sausage) or sturgeon sandwiches, the bottles of kefir. He gestured artistically toward the refrigerated counter and breathlessly announced he would send somebody to collect us from the smoking room for takeoff. The airport building shone with plate glass and polished wood, but you cannot dispel the simplicity, the unpretentiousness of the Soviet people: a stout woman, waiting for her flight, dozed over a bucket of eggs, a mother shushed her brood around a heap of cardboard suitcases and cartons tied with rope. So, when we landed in Tyumen we found ourselves in a region riddled with history. And so everybody was eager to point out. We were met by Boris, a journalist, at the airport. He was with a man sporting a neat imperial beard. The bearded man owned a car and drove us into the city. History commenced from the airport. Along that road, Boris explained, the exiles had marched on their way into the wilderness: Dostoevsky, Chernyshevsky, the Decembrists, Polish prisoners. 23 “And the tsar and his family,” Boris said, “on their way to Tobolsk.” 24 Tyumen is said to be the oldest Siberian city, nearly 400 years, having started as a stockaded village in 1586, inhabited by 300 settlers sent from Moscow. Rasputin had been born somewhere nearby, and its merchants had traded with China, Persia, Turkey. All this evidence one could discover at the historical museum, another one of the few museums I enjoyed. The lively past was there: the Tatar armor, and Russian billhooks and war axes, fur tents and deerskin clothes, all mingled with the legirons of prisoners, the monocles worn by Decembrists, the weapons captured from Kolchak or used by those who fought him during the Civil War, and the picture of the sailor who had captured Tsar Nicholas himself. They were all clues to the past, like the mammoth’s skeleton, which had been found nearby on a bank of the Tura River on which the city stood; the bison; and even rhinoceros; the laska, a tiny animal that, they said, could kill a horse. 25 So, we drove into the city of Tyumen; its population is 335,000. “Tyumen” is a Mongol word meaning “2,000 soldiers,” but one did not understand the association. But there was the old town first: the wooden houses with their frieze work shutters, the Troitsky (Trinity) Church, a monastery that was being restored (a holy man, a saint, had died and was buried in the gateway, because he wished to be walked upon by the

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people after death), an old Polish Catholic Church. We bumped over a log bridge across the Tura River. Bas-relief decorations of the fronts of the houses of the merchants of old (they had them decorated with a distemper made from eggs and milk), the old blue-and-white building which was or had been the Agricultural Institute where Nikolai Kuznetsov had studied. He was a partisan who had assassinated Koch, the Nazi Gauleiter, in Byelorussia. 26 We proceeded from the old quarter to the new, with the ever-rising blocks of flats, the streets lined with elms, birches, and larch, into Republic Street where the parades were held now, to the monument to the Heroes of the Revolution, the long rows of department stores and restaurants. History passed by, and the present surrounded us again in the Sports Complex with its great tile murals portraying physical health, the Palace of Weddings, the boulevards. Where all these now stood, there had been a mere suburban village fifteen years before. The man with the imperial beard dropped us off at the hotel and said goodbye, leaving Boris to attend to me and Georgi. Actually it was a bright woman named Lika who explained and pointed out everything when we went to see the old city of “2,000 soldiers.” She knew the history of this place like the back of her hand. Lika showed us the old white-painted building where Bolshevik power was first announced in Tyumen, and explained how the first legal meeting of the Party had taken place in the Philharmonic Hall in December 1919. Before the Revolution, the square had been a muddy morass, and only ten years ago, a timber market. ST. VLADIMIR OF TYUMEN We stopped at the only practicing church. Curiously, at the entranceway of this old building in the process of restoration, old women in headscarves and shawls sat holding out their wrinkled hands, asking for a few kopecks for the church. It was the first time I ever met anybody openly begging for money in the Soviet Union: perhaps the church needed a new roof. The Soviet Constitution says: “Citizens of the USSR are guaranteed freedom of conscience, that is, the right to profess or not to profess any religion, and to conduct religious worship or atheistic propaganda. Incitement of hostility or hatred on religious grounds is prohibited.” “In the USSR, the church is separated from the state, and the school from the church.” 27 The state does not interfere in the internal affairs of the various religious bodies, and vice versa. Not a single church receives or enjoys either material or moral support from the state, but a person’s religion does not affect his civil life. No official form, be it passport application or census

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sheet, ever requires a person to state his religion, if any. For this reason it is difficult to determine the number of believers in the USSR. I once came across an item, which stated that a religious body known as the “Whitsuntide Shakers” was forbidden. I could never find out who the Whitsuntide Shakers were and why they were prohibited, but Soviet law forbids only such religious groups which under the guise of faith interfere with the person or dignity of a citizen, impair his health or call upon their followers to disobey state legislation. By agreement with local government, any religious body of more than twenty people may receive the use of a house of worship free, but the congregation is responsible for its maintenance. Religious institutions may publish their own periodicals, prayer books, and so on and may rent premises for the making of the various articles for religious rites. The incomes and revenues of the various religious societies and churches are, moreover, exempt from tax. Well, here we were at the Saint Vladimir’s, named after the Kiev prince who had brought Christianity, and built during the years from 1766 to 1786. 28 We went quietly inside past the begging old women. Inside, the great altar shone with gold leaf and blue paint; Christ and the Virgin gazed sadly out from gilt frames. To one side, an elderly priest with sand gray hair and a spade beard intoned the service for a small group of old women and one white bearded old man in high boots, their gnarled hands moving, dry and calcined, as they crossed themselves. There was an atmosphere of age, everything, everybody was old: the icons, the ceiling, St. Vladimir on the wall, the old women with wrinkled hands held out for kopecks, all had a forlorn look. One was reminded of the mummified remains of ancient priests niched in the gloomy catacombs under the old cathedral in Kiev: perhaps, this Vladimir himself lay there, the skin like crumbling leather, the once brilliant finery tarnished, turning to dust. We retreated back to the new section of the city, and evening came on. The weather had been fine all day, people were still grouped around the mobile kvas tanks on the streets. 29 In the restaurant there was a party in progress in one of the side rooms, and the voices of women were raised in the song “Moscow Nights.” 30 I thought I saw a man whom I recognized from Cape Town, but I was wrong: perhaps it was only nostalgia creeping on. So, when I went upstairs I wrote a letter to Blanche before going to bed. I thought about the Trans-Siberian Railway and realized that I had not seen the Tyumen Railway Station—perhaps it was all a myth, it didn’t really exist. Probably, the New Zealanders had taken a plane. It was one of the legends of Siberia, like the one about Shaman Baikal; something from the past, like the drums in the Tyumen museum which they had used in old times for bear dancing. . . . 31

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THE DISCOVERERS Back in 1929, Tyumen had been manufacturing railway-sleepers’ cutting machines, now it was exporting drilling machinery for oil and gas. There were twenty-eight institutes doing all kinds of experiments and explorations. Tyumen is the main center in a region that can take in the land area of Italy, France, and Belgium. The oil and gas area of Tyumen Region has been called the “discovery of the century.” The great giant of Siberia was giving up its treasures to the intrepid Soviet enterprise: Gulliver was being pinioned by the Lilliputians. It was more than ten years since the first well was drilled, but this region, with its untold resources, had already broken all records for the rate of expansion in oil extraction. By 1980, they will have extracted 310 to 320 million tons a year. Oil, gas, minerals, and timber of the northern regions of Western Siberia will supply an industrial complex now under construction which is to be the largest in the Soviet Union. In spite of the stubborn swamplands, oil and gas pipelines and railways have been laid, petrochemical complexes have been built. 32 THE BURNING LAND This time the plane was crowded with students in khaki denim uniforms with sleeve patches that said Kiev SSO, and I presumed they must be volunteers for some project up in the oilfields. 33 Some of them had guitars. There had been some delay. It was hot while we waited for takeoff, and everybody seemed to be gently broiling. I sat opposite a husky girl who wore the same uniform as the others, jeans, blouse, and shoulder patch. The piped music played Russian tunes, then the popular theme from The Godfather and some more national music until we finally took off, dripping with perspiration. The fields, pastures, enclosed meadows, and forest around Tyumen were left behind. Far below the drifting puffball clouds, a river lay like a piece of bent wire. We were traveling north, and through the window I could see the dense patches of green, the river wriggling haphazardly. Then the country turned almost entirely watery: long stretches overrun by pools and lakes and ponds, as if a big samovar had been upset, drenching a carpet of green suede. It was all swampland, miles and miles of it. One wondered how man could traverse such a country except by air. Western Siberia lies between the eastern foothills of the Urals Range and the Yenisei River with the Kara Sea in the north, covering an area of over two million square kilometers. Six hundred thousand square kilometers of this area is swampland in the heart of which, in Tyumen Region, lies one of the Soviet Union’s biggest oil bases.

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Our plane descended down into the swampland. The waterlogged earth drew near, and in the distance a tall orange flame danced in the mist, like a ghost out of Hades, as if some of the fire of hell below had escaped through a hole. It danced incongruously above the watery, foglocked land—how did it survive in the wetness? In another part another pillar of fire quivered and danced eerily: one thought of biblical pillars of flame, Abraham and his son, Moses. But these were vents of gas in the earth, burning, I suppose, to prevent the live gas spreading. Here and there too the tall derricks of oil wells rose, pumping away, sucking the black liquid gold from the earth, this horrid-looking, swampinfested, oozing wilderness. We were coming down into the Samotlor gas and oil region. In the eleven or so years since the first oil gusher began in Western Siberia, a series of new major oil and gas deposits have been found there. Some of them compare with the world’s greatest. One of these is the Samotlor region. The oil deposits recently discovered at Lake Samotlor produce the fantastic amount of 1,000 tons a day. The Samotlor deposit alone is capable of producing one hundred million tons of oil a year, which is as much as the entire Soviet Union produced as recently as fifteen years ago. Along with the oil there is also gas. It is said that the whole region rests upon a vast underground lake of oil and gas. 34 In the midst of the uninhabited wilderness, swamps and marshes provided a formidable obstacle to even the most powerful cross-country vehicles. Tractors were swallowed up, the frost turned tires as brittle as glass and did the same to steel pipes. Swarms of mosquitoes infested the region. Yet in the face of these natural barriers, Soviet workers succeeded in building new towns and urban settlements for those engaged in tapping gas, pumping oil—new names have appeared on the map of Siberia: Neftyugansk, Svetly, Nizhnevartovsk. THE CONQUERORS We came down into Nizhnevartovsk Airfield—it was little more than a strip—to the music of a tango. To one side of the field helicopters were parked, giant brown insects showing that man could beat anything nature had to offer. In the distance the flowers of fire still quivered in their taunting dances, like challenging shamans. The denim-clad brigade was mustered and led away. We were met by Fyodor, a journalist, and taken off to where a jeep waited, and we set out into the town. Everywhere there were trucks and jeeps—I never saw an automobile; there were signs of building, clearing, and excavating: everywhere piles of piping, logs, girders. The road, laid section by section of concrete, was

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bumpy, cracked in parts, battling to survive against heat, frost, and the heavy-laden traffic. “We’ve got 340 kilometers of road in the region now,” Fyodor was saying, “and ten thousand trucks and jeeps. Samotlor is 75 percent swamp, and a great deal is spent on laying sand, and then most of the building is done on piles.” The jeep giving way to the giant trucks coming and going bumped along the road. On each side of the road the swampland and intermittent woods stretched away, and the orange gas jets sounded like bull-roarers in the distance. Nizhnevartovsk was a boomtown. The essentials were all there, the blocks of workers’ flats, the stores, the kino, but the streets in many parts had not been laid yet, and the bustling population splashed through mud. Only completed three years before, it was a busy town, full of oil workers and their families, parked trucks and jeeps, buses throwing up water and mud from their wheels. There was an air of excitement everywhere under the lowering sky, the soggy air full with the threat of rain. They were conquerors of Samotlor, the new conquistadores of a new wilderness, finding and opening a new El Dorado for socialism. For instance, Victor Vassilyevich Kitayev had come from Kuibyshev on the Volga eleven years ago when the call had gone out to open the Samotlor oilfields. “I got into this oil thing by accident,” he said, introducing us to his companions on the oil rig. “At first I tried electronics, but didn’t succeed, so I chose oil, and here I am. It was fate, I suppose.” His companions were grease-stained, grinning men in hardhats and padded, oil-stained clothes. They took me along wooden catwalks and around the drill shaft and showed me where the crude oil came out into the pipeline. “Down there, underground, the earth is pretty hard in spite of all the mud and water you see. It must be frozen solid. So they invented a special drill bit out of a new alloy.” It took seven months to strike here. They were friendly but tough men who often worked in sub-zero conditions: fifty or sixty degrees below. “The inventors thought up a special electrically heated suit too,” one of them said. “But it was too bulky and clumsy, so we put it aside and usually wear ordinary gear.” They would pump hot air down the well, and it would come back as they worked, warming the air to minus five or minus six degrees. There was a young girl who sat at a console in a big room where computers checked the production of each well, registering its output, or tracing any faults. She was Tanya Galeva, aged twenty-three years. “How did you get here?” I asked. “My husband brought me,” she said jokingly. “I had to stay because he’s here, but I like it.”

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She explained that once the well had been drilled and automated, it was operated from the office. She simply sat there with switches and flickering lights and punched a button and a tickertape started to work as the computer counted the number of liters coming from that well at that very moment or a flashing light told if there was something wrong at a particular well, and she demonstrated, smiling at us as if to say: “You see, it’s as easy as all that.” She and her husband were from the Bashkir Autonomous Republic. And a Comrade Nikolai, who was in charge of a station that pumped water into empty wells, I think, to move any leftover oil toward other wells. Tanya is his wife’s cousin, and he got into the oil business at the age of eighteen, ten years ago. He had been at Samotlor three years now and had graduated from technical school. And Comrade Sharipov, the deputy head of the central collecting point where, apparently, all the lines from the wells came together and then joined the main pipeline, taking oil to the refineries practically all over the USSR. We were in the local lorry repair works, and there was a young figure working behind goggles with an acetylene torch. When the manager beckoned, the torch was switched off, the dark goggles lifted, and there was a youthful female face smiling prettily at us from under the greasy beret as she came over in her padded overalls: “My name is Lyuda,” she said. “Welder.” “And why did you come to this wet and dreary place?” I asked. “Why, we have to conquer this Samotlor—we need it,” she replied, smiling. “My husband and I, we have been here only one year, but we don’t want to leave now.” She had a child who was looked after at the kindergarten. Galina Vassilyevna, who repaired lorry engines and was a qualified mechanic, examined the big Tatra trucks from Czechoslovakia as they moved along giant conveyor belts. The territory played havoc with trucks, and the mechanics were kept busy all the time. This Galina was burly and strong, and she knew her engines. All the time we were in the jeep, traversing most of the Samotlor oilfields, and we were planning to get a helicopter for an aerial view, but the crews unfortunately said, No, there was too much strong wind, and they were not prepared to risk the safety of a foreign writer. So instead we went to meet Comrade Victor Filatov who was deputy chairman of the town Soviet, and he took us around. “The population is growing all the time. Twenty thousand arrive, and only about a thousand give up and leave. By 1980, we will have about 130,000 people here. They’re a motley group from all over, all volunteers. Before the town was built, there was a village of Khanty-Mansi folk here. Many of them gave up their traditional hunting and fishing to enter the oil industry. They all stay on, in spite of the weather and hard conditions in winter.” He chuck-

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led. “They even turn out for the November 7 parade, and you can imagine how cold it can be—the worst sufferers are those on the viewing stand!” A BOAT RIDE While at Nizhnevartovsk, we stayed at a pretty little hotel just outside the city. It had a Siberian log exterior, and inside there was everything a hotel needed, neat and cozy. It did not look big enough for the tourist trade, but was probably temporarily being used for visitors. Apart from two other men, it seemed that Georgi and I were the only guests for a while. The food was simple, but substantial. I have not acquired a taste for pelmeni, which is like (but not quite) Italian ravioli: tiny square pastries stuffed with minced meat and eaten with a sauce. Then as an intermission in our visit, they arranged a boat ride down— or was it up?—the river. I was surprised to discover that the town lay on the banks of the Ob. When we were ready to go I was more surprised to meet the man from the TV I had met in Tyumen. He was escorting two Cubans. So we all went down to the boat harbor on the river and boarded a little craft, which, I suppose, was a tugboat. While we waited to set off, all kinds of mysterious cartons were being brought aboard, and there were a couple of other journalists with us too, and they passed around some anti-mosquito lotion. At last we set out on the gray river. There was no sign of rain, and though it proved cold, the intention was to have a picnic on one of the little river islands. The mosquitoes did not mind the lotion and had other ideas about the picnic, and on a little islet, which we tried, they became overaggressive, so we decided to hold the party in the cabin below decks. We all somehow squeezed into its tiny confines, and the table was laid with the contents of the cartons, which proved to be food, tomatoes, cucumbers, vodka, and cognac. It was a very squashed-up, but gay, party, and I tried my bad Spanish on the two Cuban comrades though they spoke English too, and we chugged merrily along the river. THE BASHKIRS Apart from Baku, a good many of the oil workers at Samotlor seemed to have come from Bashkiria. Among them was Grigory Petrov. A toughlooking and kindly man in a navy-blue suit pinned with medals when he came to visit us at our little hotel. He had big hands and looked the kind of man who, a little younger, could be what, in slang, is called a “wildcatter,” one of those roughneck oil drillers seen on the screen.

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“But I was born on a farm,” he said in the dining room. “My father was a farm worker, and he also kept the farm’s accounts. We had four children in our family, I am one of the two sons, my brother is down in Surgut, also in oil.” We had a little beer, and he told how he had to go to school to the eighth grade and then to a technical school for oil workers and was in the oil industry twenty-five years and now a chief driller. “My wife’s a nurse at the kindergarten. We have two little ones too, you know, fourteen and eleven, at school.” “Go on, eat up,” I said. “You left Bashkiria to come here?” “Well, the whole brigade came up here from Bashkiria,” he said. “We came with our families, those who were married. At first we lived in tents; you see the town hadn’t been built yet.” Now he lived in a fourroomed flat in a nine-story building. “My wife had some doubts at first, when we decided to move from Bashkiria, you know, but now she has no regrets. It was hard living in a tent while the town was being built.” He had been elected leader of the brigade in the Bashkirian fields when the former leader retired. He was from Baku. “We have a Ukrainian, a Tatar, another Bashkirian, a Russian, and a German in our brigade.” I asked about the medals. He was a little embarrassed about them. As I heard it he was given the Order of Lenin for results by his brigade fulfilling the five-year plan. He also had the Gold Star of Hero of Socialist Labour for 1973. The whole brigade received a personal message from Leonid Brezhnev. He also had a gold medal for teaching others the trade. His brigade had been the first in the Soviet Union to drill a total of 100,000 meters in one year. The average was about sixty to seventy thousand, and their original plan had been seventy thousand. “I take it you like your work then,” I said teasingly. “You’ve endured well.” “It’s hard, but I enjoy it.” They could retire at fifty-five years if they wished. “One might think that one well is like another, but it isn’t.” He smiled. “Every oil well is like a different woman, each has her own whims and fancies. But as for our brigade, we work well together. Let me tell you, you know they had to take us out by helicopter to the site and drop us off, and there was this youngster who wanted to join us. We took him along, but when the helicopter was hovering over the site he was too scared to jump out. After a lot of arguing and cursing we simply threw him overboard. He is still with us, and he has won some medals too.” “Aren’t there many accidents?” He shook his head. “No, very few. That’s one thing we lack, accidents. Strict safety regulations and being careful all the time. No chances are taken. In all my years I know of only one incident, and it wasn’t very serious.”

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Oil drillers earn somewhat more than the ordinary workers, besides retiring early: that is because of the severe conditions of work. An ordinary oil driller earned an average of 650 rubles a month, Petrov as a top hand took 950 to one thousand. Holidays? “Well, we might go down to the Black Sea. Last year we bought a car and toured the European part of the Soviet Union. We traveled 15,000 kilometers, starting from Tyumen. We got sixty days’ leave. This time we intend to go to Cuba.” He wasn’t just a hardworking oilman. He served on the Tyumen region Soviet, on the trade union committee, and was a member of the Party Committee of Nizhnevartovsk. “A full life,” I said. “And a happy one,” he said. We shook hands, and I said I didn’t have any awards to give him, but I presented him with my badge of the South African Congress of Trade Unions. HERE COMES THE BRIDE Before we left Nizhnevartovsk we went to the Palace of Weddings. The marriage officer welcomed us; she was a pleasant woman in a smart mauve suit and was glad to show me around before the ceremonies— there were two about to take place. There was a room where the brides could adjust their makeup and a reception room if any party wanted toasting. When the first party arrived she was standing at her desk, smiling. A record player sounded Mendelssohn’s Wedding March, and the couple advanced down the hall followed by the witnesses, parents, and guests. The bride, in white gown and veil—they do not cover their face, only the head—looked a little tense, but smiled bravely. The bridegroom in a dark suit and his hair cropped had mud on his shoes from the street. The marriage officer came to the front of her desk and read the Soviet law on weddings to them. Then she passed forward a cut-glass bowl in which the rings had been placed, and the couple exchanged them. The officer wished them happiness, family love, and many children. Then they signed the necessary papers and were man and wife. The marriage officer told me afterward that the bride was a house painter and the groom a building worker—romance in the building industry. The next couple both worked in the oil industry. “They are all usually between twenty and twenty-two years old,” the marriage officer told me. Both parties had gone into the reception room, and she took me in to introduce me to them. The room was full of beaming parents, guests, the bridal couple, and friends, all surrounding tables loaded with champagne and zakuski. These arrangements could be made beforehand. My guide told them who I was and most of what he knew about my past.

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One of the grooms wanted me to tell about experiences in South Africa’s various prisons. “That’s no subject for a wedding,” I smiled. Instead I wished them all good health and asked them to be good citizens, and the old folks nodded gravely. They wanted me to accompany them on their customary drive to the memorial obelisk out in the oilfields and then to the main celebrations. I was sorry to decline, because I had a plane to catch back to Tyumen. But it was a very happy end to my trip to Samotlor. FAREWELL TO SIBERIA The last night in Tyumen we spent in the restaurant, reminiscing over the boeuf stroganoff, while the band played a rather rowdy version of “All of Me” and then changed to national songs, while the couples danced between the tables. 35 The waitress asked if a man could share our table, and we complied, of course. He was joined by two stout women, one of whom turned out to be a state insurance official. The band played “Street,” which reminded me of Novosibirsk. 36 That day we had been down to Yalutorovsk, which is another historical town. There the Russian armies had withstood the invading Mongols. Apart from that it was where many of the Decembrist exiles had spent their last days: the revolutionary nobles and officers who in 1825 had turned against tsarist autocracy. Of the 131 convicted, eighty-eight were sentenced to penal servitude, and five were hanged. 37 Some of them were buried in the churchyard in Yalutorovsk, a quiet, little country town that conjured up such names as Prince Obolensky, Muravyov-Apostol, and others; and the poet Pushkin sending them a message: Deep in Siberia’s mines, let naught Subdue your proud and patient spirit. Your crushing toil and lofty thought Shall not be wasted—do not fear it. 38

There was also the 1921 monument to the victims of the kulak uprising to restore the old tsarist order. The streets were mostly named after the Decembrists. MuravyovApostol (or was it Yakushkin?) 39 had opened the first school for girls in Siberia; Prince Obolensky had married a peasant woman. You could hear all about it at the Decembrists museum there. And so I had said goodbye to Siberia. The plane from Tyumen stopped in Ufa in Bashkiria, the supplier of so many oilmen to the north, to Nizhnevartovsk, a dark green country, lakes gleaming in the sunlight like mirrors.

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ULYANOVSK At the airport a lone man stood by the arrival gate, holding a bunch of gladioli, as the other passengers passed him. “I bet the flowers are for us,” I said. They were. As we approached he came out and welcomed us to Ulyanovsk and handed the bouquet to me. He was Vladimir, Vladimir Pyrkov, and we walked from the “arrivals,” while waiting passengers gazed curiously at us: one supposed they wondered what one lone delegate this was. V.I. Lenin had been born in Ulyanovsk. 40 Across from the hotel is the Lenin Memorial Center, all white Karelian marble, cubist in design, enclosing three houses of the old Russian style where Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov came into the world and spent his childhood; the museum is full of the pictures of the old revolutionaries and comrades of V. I. Lenin: Y. M. Sverdlov, Sergo Orjonikidze, M. I. Kalinin, Madame A. M. Kollontai with whom my father had danced at a ball in Moscow in 1927. 41 The ultramodern setting does not reduce the drama of that past of which Lenin had been the center; the old Party documents, the signed letters, the faded newspapers, and pamphlets; mustached men who had attended conferences. A crowd of schoolchildren gathered around the entrance to a tile and mosaic hall that held the white granite statue of Lenin symbolically by the Volga. The attendant generously lifted the restraining rope, so I could go in and examine the intricate patterning of the walls. Here all the local ceremonies of initiation were held—the presentation of awards, admission to the Young Pioneers, the Komsomol, all the zeal and sentiment that softened the severe edges of dialectical materialism, that helped emphasize its humanism, perhaps. Outside it rained suddenly, and we had to hurry across the tramlines. Beyond the modernistic Memorial Complex still lay some of the old Simbirsk (the city’s former name) of “Sleep and Quiet,” the merchant town on the Volga. Here also in 1648, it had been a fortress against invaders; here the ghost of Stenka Razin might still slide down the river. When the Ulyanovs had lived there it was 72 Moskovskaya Street, only now it is Lenin Street, and the house is occupied by the public library; and Lev Tolstoy Street used to be the Pokrovskaya where the family had lived from 1879 to 1887. At the Lenin School No. 1 a young bespectacled pupil, Lyuda, in a neat apron and red scarf and from the seventh grade, took charge of me. With the aid of a pointer, she took me through the rooms full of the memories of Lenin’s schooldays: the desk where he sat, the record of his progress while attending that school, the name of “Ulyanov, Vladimir Ilyich” on the roster of former pupils.

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At one time, we were accompanied by a guide of our own, so we could avoid the crush of tourists, German and British. His name was Yuri, and he spoke a sort of guidebook English, as if he were a little nervous about slipping into ordinary speech. It sounded somewhat quaint: “. . . the fur coat presented to him by his father . . . in exile he often put it on . . .” or “. . . the mother traversed that arduous path,” while explaining how Madame Ulyanova had visited her son Alexander in prison, condemned for plotting against the tsar. 42 When the rain let up, we walked downhill through a park and along streets to the banks of the Volga. From the walled embankment with the tall statue of Lenin, you could see across the wide river all the way to the bluffs opposite, orange in the sunlight and topped with green. At the dock the riverboats from Moscow were moored, white and clean and meant for easy, relaxed traveling. You can sail all the way down from Moscow to Rostov-on-Don, though I myself have never made the trip. But Ulyanovsk is also an industrial city. It makes electric motors, metal-cutting tools, and automobiles. It is a city with many splendid people, such as the engineering plant workers. There were Alexander Shemyakin, who won the Order of Lenin for working out a scheme for advancing the time of production; and Mikhail Katz, whose father and uncle had been killed in the war and his grandparents murdered by the Nazis; and Valentin Ivanovich Ratanov, who also lost his father to the invaders. 43 “If there had not been a war we might have done greater things.” We had to leave for Moscow eventually. Georgi and I sat in a waiting room at the airport. A woman who, I gathered, had been transported somehow to America during the war and had remained there, returning now to visit her former homeland, was saying to her hosts: “I like it here, and if we have peace between your country and mine, I would like to come back.” It sounded like a curious conversation. When we had to board, she said to the couple seeing her off: “America is wonderful, we have lots of everything.” I wondered, walking to the plane in the airport lighting, what she had meant by “everything.” NOTES 1. Sebastian Münster (1488–1552) was a German scholar whose work Cosmographia (1544) is noted for being the earliest German depiction and analysis of the world. 2. La Guma is referring to the Khanate of Kazan (1438–1552)—a state whose capital was the city of Kazan and whose rulers (“khans”) descended from Genghis Khan. Ivan IV (1530–1584), better known as Ivan the Terrible, served as the Grand Prince of Moscow (the Grand Duchy of Moscow or “the Muscovy state”) from 1533 to 1547. In 1547, he became the first tsar of Russia, serving in this capacity until his death. He defeated the Khanate of Kazan during this period. Kuchum, also known as Kuchum Khan (unknown–1601), sought to spread Islam westward, which put him in conflict with Ivan the Terrible, who subsequently defeated him and the Khanate of Sibir (1490–1598), also known as the Khanate of Turan, which he led. Yermak Timofeyevich

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(c.1532–1542 to 1585), a Cossack, played a key role in this defeat. He is credited with “conquering” Siberia for Tsarist Russia, and he was later memorialized during the Soviet period as an example of the “vanguard role” of the proletariat, despite his sixteenth-century context. See Anna Reid, The Shaman’s Coat: A Native History of Siberia (New York: Walker Publishing, 2003), 18. 3. Anatoly Shastin (1930–1995) was a noted Soviet writer, originally from Irkutsk. 4. Lake Baikal has been called a number of names since ancient times. “Baikal” originates from both the Buryat expression “Baygal nuur” meaning “natural lake” and the Turkic language with “Bay-Kul” meaning “rich lake.” 5. Sergei Petrovich Trubetskoi (1790–1860), also transliterated as Trubetskoy, was designated a leader of the Decembrist revolt, but failed to participate in the uprising. He was nonetheless sentenced to death, then penal labor, and eventually exile in Irkutsk. He was granted amnesty shortly before his death. 6. Grigory Shelikhov (1747–1795) was a fur trader and explorer, who helped establish the first Russian settlement in North America on Kodiak Island, Alaska. 7. Sholokhov never completed his novel They Fought for Their Country. The film They Fought for Their Country (1975) was directed by Sergey Bondarchuk (1920–1994), a well-regarded film director who won an Academy Award for an adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1966). Vasiliy Shukshin (1929–1974) was a popular actor who had the lead in They Fought for Their Country, though he died under suspicious circumstances, as briefly touched upon by La Guma. He also was famous for his writing, being a member of the “village prose” movement of socialist realism after the Second World War, which idealized rural life and served to promote Russian nationalism 8. Buryat Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (1923–1990), also known as Buryatiya (or Buryatia), was a political unit within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (Soviet Russia). As La Guma insinuates, the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics had a different, lower status than the Soviet Socialist Republics (or the Union Republics) that in principle had sovereign power within the USSR. 9. The following note is included in the original text: “P. A. Stolypin—from 1906 to 1911 Chairman of the Council of Ministers and Minister of the Interior in tsarist Russia. Directed the suppressive and punitive action against the 1905–1907 revolution in Russia. —Ed.” 10. The Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station was completed in 1967, with construction having begun in 1954. It is noted for having been the world’s biggest single hydroelectric power producer until 1971. 11. La Guma is referring to a chorus entitled “Glory” from the opera A Life for the Tsar (1836)—also known as Ivan Susanin during the Soviet period—by Mikhail Glinka (1804–1857). Glinka is considered the founder of Russian classical music. 12. “Moon River” is a popular American song from the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), starring Audrey Hepburn. It was composed by Henry Mancini (1924–1994) and Johnny Mercer (1909–1976). 13. Françoise Sagan (1935–2004) was a well-regarded French novelist and playwright. “Kalinka” (1860) is a famous Russian folk melody by Ivan Larionov (1830–1889), a composer and folklorist. The word “kalinka” refers to a red berry tree. 14. “In the Summertime” (1970) is a song by the British rock band Mungo Jerry. 15. Today Akademgorodok is considered a suburb of Novosibirsk, due to growth. “Akademgorodok” translates as “Academic Town.” 16. There is slight confusion in this paragraph. To clarify, Akademgorodok was founded in 1957. Novosibirsk State University was later founded there in 1959. 17. Nadya Rusheva (1952–1969) was a child artist who produced over 10,000 works. She is known as the first illustrator of The Master and Margarita (written between 1928 and 1940; published posthumously in 1967) by Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940). 18. Yuri Rytkheu (1930–2008) was a member of the Chukchi ethnic group, who are located in far eastern Siberia across from Alaska. He is considered the founder of Chukchi literature.

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19. Nikolai Rogov (1825–1905) was a nineteenth-century Russian ethnographer—an anachronistic, though intentional, reference by La Guma. 20. Vladimir Zazubrin (1895–1938) was a writer and participant in the October Revolution, whose work was praised by Maxim Gorky. 21. Mikhailovsky is Nikolai Mikhailovsky (1852–1906), also known as Nikolai Garin-Mikhailovsky, who was a writer and engineer as cited by La Guma. 22. These lines are from the poem “Let the Rail Splitter Awake” by Neruda. See Pablo Neruda, Let the Rail Splitter Awake and Other Poems (New York: Masses & Mainstream, Inc., 1950), 26. 23. Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828–1889) was a writer and socialist whose radical novel What Is to Be Done? (1863) promoted the revolutionary vanguard role of intellectuals and inspired Lenin’s later 1902 pamphlet of the same title. His ideas have consequently been credited with helping galvanize the Bolshevik movement. 24. Tobolsk is the historic capital of Siberia and where the Bolshevik provisional government kept Tsar Nicholas II and his family before executing them in July 1918. 25. A laska is a type of weasel. 26. Nikolai Kuznetsov (1911–1944) was a famed Soviet spy who operated during World War II against the Nazis. La Guma is incorrect, however, about Kuznetsov’s assassination of Erich Koch, a regional Nazi leader (Gauleiter) who in fact outlived Kuznetsov, albeit serving a life sentence in a Polish prison after the war. 27. The following note is included in the original text: “Constitution (Fundamental Law) of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Article 52, Moscow, 1977, p. 47.” 28. La Guma is referring to Vladimir Sviatoslavich (958–1015), also known as Vladimir the Great, who converted to Christianity in 988 and is credited with spreading Christianity to Ukraine and Russia. 29. The following note is included in the original text: “Kvas is a non-alcoholic beverage made of rye and barley, popular in the Soviet Union. —Ed.” 30. “Moscow Nights” (1955) was a popular song composed by Vasily SolovyovSedoi (1907–1979) and Mikhail Matusovsky (1915–1990), a poet. It became the trademark musical theme for intermissions and announcements on Radio Maiak, a Sovietera broadcasting station that is still in existence. 31. La Guma’s reference to “Shaman Baikal” refers to the legend he recounts earlier in the chapter about the history of the lake. Shamanism has been widely practiced in the Lake Baikal region. 32. Tyumen continues to be an important hub for the Russian petroleum and natural gas industries. 33. The following note is included in the original text: “Kiev SSO—Kiev Student Builders. Soviet university and college students volunteer to help on building projects during their summer vacations. They are paid for their work. In 1975, student builders totaled 636,000. —Ed.” 34. “Samotlor” in the Khanty language means “dead lake.” Samotlor Field remains the largest oil field in Russia and is among the largest in the world. 35. “All of Me” (1931) is a popular American jazz standard, composed by Gerald Marks (1900–1997) and Seymour Simons (1896–1949). 36. It is unclear what specific song La Guma is referring to in this instance. 37. These numbers differ from those mentioned by La Guma in chapter one, except for the five hanged. The scholar Ludmilla Trigos has written that 121 received varying sentences ranging from demotion to exile and penal servitude. Many had their sentences commuted by Tsar Nicholas I. See Ludmilla A. Trigos, The Decembrist Myth in Russian Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), xix. 38. Prince Evgeny Obolensky (1796–1865) was a leader of the Decembrists and sentenced to penal servitude. Sergey Muravyov-Apostol (1796–1826) was among the five Decembrist leaders who were executed. Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), Russia’s national poet, was sympathetic to the Decembrist cause. This poem entitled “In the depths of Siberian mines” dates from 1827. See Michael Wachtel, A Commentary to Pushkin’s Lyric Poetry, 1826–1836 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), 41.

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39. Yakushkin is Ivan Dmitrievich Iakushkin (1794–1857), a Decembrist who founded a girls’ school in memory of his wife after her death in 1846. MuravyovApostol was executed in 1826 as cited. 40. Previously called Simbirsk, the city was renamed Ulyanovsk in 1924 after the death of Lenin, the city’s namesake, that year. 41. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov is the birth name of Vladimir Lenin. Lenin used a number of pseudonyms to protect his identity while conducting subversive activities, which included publishing numerous written tracts and articles. He first used the name “Lenin” in 1901 after his return from a three-year sentence of exile in Siberia. Y. M. [Yakov Mikhailovich] Sverdlov (1885–1919) participated in the 1905 Revolution and the October Revolution, eventually becoming chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, which positioned him as the Russian head of state, prior to the establishment of the Soviet Union in 1922. Sergo Orjonikidze (1886–1937), also transliterated as Sergo Ordzhonikidze, was involved in the 1905 Revolution, the October Revolution, the incorporation of the Caucasus into the Soviet Union during the Russian Civil War, and the second five-year plan (1933–1937). M. I. [Mikhail Ivanovich] Kalinin (1875–1946) was a Bolshevik who later replaced Sverdlov as the Russian head of state, serving as president of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (1919–1922), chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR (1922–1938), and chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union (1938–1946). A. M. [Alexandra Mikhailovna] Kollontai (1872–1952) was a Bolshevik known for her feminism and radical views toward the family, believing that communist society should take the place of the traditional family, which she viewed as oppressive and based on individual property rights. Her novel Love of Worker Bees (1923) is considered a classic. 42. La Guma is referring to the arrest and execution of Lenin’s older brother Aleksandr (1866–1887). 43. These individuals are not widely known and are presumably people La Guma encountered during his visit.

SIX Harvest Home

The Byelorussky Railway Station had the usual atmosphere of railway terminals: the islands of baggage, the loaded barrows, the groups around the cigarette kiosks, the last minute arrivals pushing their way through to catch the rear coach at least, before the whistles blew. A woman with a bag of oranges puffed like a steam engine through the entranceway; young people in summer casuals and haversacks shrieked with excitement. We made it fairly easily, although our carriage was far down the train to Vilnius: the motors of the locomotive were humming, and the grey-uniformed women waited at the carriage steps. Soviet railways seem to be run by women; at least they blew the whistles, waved the flags, slammed doors and administered the journey, attended to the restaurant cars. Probably, they were locomotive engineers too. 1 A young devushka in the grey railway uniform examined our tickets and showed us where our sleeper was. In front of our compartment a man who would share it with us was already sitting on the tip-up seat in the corridor, reading a Nero Wolfe detective story in the English language. 2 The doors were slamming, and we were off, dragging slowly along the station, out into the yards which looked like any in the world of railroads except for the Cyrillic alphabet signs, the wheels clack-clacked below us, and the blocks of flats in the distance passed from view, a frieze of cranes along the Moskva River and the city skimmed back out of sight as we gathered speed. I prefer trains to airplanes—perhaps, I am secretly terrified of those giant birds, wondering how on earth they managed to keep us in the sky. But you can ponder in comfort in a train, stretch out on a bunk or gaze through the window and watch terra firma pass by, the buildings, fields, smoke in the distance like Amerindian signals, faraway villages, mountains, life; time meant nothing, you need not hurry. In the Soviet Union 227

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the best train journeys I had made had been to Samarkand and once to Leningrad and Kiev. A woman brought the bedding. There was another man besides the Nero Wolfe fan, who shared the compartment with us, but I saw little of him. The countryside swept past to the sound of quiet music from the radio fixed somewhere in the compartment. You have to take your chance in the restaurant car on Soviet trains, it is a matter of first come, first served. We waited among the tables and crates of beer—now I knew where the pivo went that one found so difficult to acquire at hotels. 3 The first stop was Gagarin, the birthplace of the late cosmonaut. 4 In the morning, when we were awakened by the young lady in charge of the carriage, the radio was broadcasting the seven a.m. news, and Byelorussia was passing by outside, flat and green, farmhouses and barns, a woman leading a cow in a field. The devushka of the Soviet railways brought us chai from the samovar that boils over a coal fire at the end of each carriage. The flat green fields swayed by, and we were crossing into Lithuania, but the landscape took no notice of borders and did not change— after all it is all the USSR. THREE THOUSAND LAKES The narrow end of Lithuania in the west bumps into the Baltic Sea, between Byelorussia and Latvia, and looking carefully at its map, it looks a little like a squashed version of the African continent. There is a horn in the east that looks like the shape of the coastline of the Red Sea and Somalia, and to the west Klaipeda might be Dakar. But this is the Western edge of the USSR. “You must see one of our Western republics,” my hosts said. “It will round off the trip, sort of achieve balance. . . .” Lithuania is called the land of three thousand lakes. The country has no dizzy peaks, no precipitous cliffs, only ranges of softly undulating hills, forests that cover one-quarter of the territory, and the quiet Niemen River, which is as close to the Lithuanians as the Volga is to the Russians, the Mississippi to the Americans. In the far past the Roman Tacitus wrote about the Asiatic tribes living on the coast of the Baltic Sea. 5 The name Lithuania also occurs in writings of the eleventh century. The first half of the thirteenth century, under the Grand Duke Mindaugas, witnessed the emergence of a centralized Lithuanian state, and for two hundred years they fought side by side with Poles and Russians against the invaders of the Teutonic and Livonian Orders. 6 At the end of the eighteenth century, the country was attached to the Russian Empire, and though the economic relations with Russia favored the development of industry and the growth of towns, the national aspirations of the Lithuanian people were cruelly suppressed by

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the tsarist autocracy. Together with the other peoples of the Russian Empire, Lithuanians rose time and again against oppression, fighting for national and social independence. The victory of the October Revolution in Russia had a great effect on the revolutionary movement in Lithuania, then occupied by the Kaiser’s army. In December 1918, Lithuanian workers and peasants rose in revolt and proclaimed a Soviet republic, but by 1919 the foreign interventionists who backed the reactionary elements succeeded in crushing the young socialist state. A regime of terror and suppression followed, especially after the coup d’état of 1926, which introduced a fascist-type dictatorship. In the historic summer of 1940, the socialist revolution once more swept away the reactionary regime, and on July 21 of that year the People’s Seimas (Parliament) proclaimed Lithuania a Soviet Socialist Republic, and in August it was accepted into the USSR. The new life was again interrupted by the Hitlerite invasion, until in 1945 the Soviet Army whose ranks included the Lithuanian Division liberated the country, and for the first time in history all Lithuanian lands were united in the Lithuanian state. 7 OLD AND NEW In the foyer of the Hotel Gintaras in Vilnius, local people waited with bouquets and tapestry scarves for relations who were about to arrive on visits from America. During the period of reaction thousands of Lithuanians had emigrated to settle abroad, and nowadays they or their children make a point of returning to their native home, if not to stay for good, at least to look and see, to touch the soil, tread the old streets. Tearful reunions took place around us, receptions, hugs, kisses, the twang of the newfound North American accent mingling with the Lithuanian. A custom seemed to be to decorate the old relation with the embroidered sash or scarf. The decorative art of Lithuanian women artists includes the famous tapestry work. The women of Lithuania have been weaving since time immemorial, and the process of preparing the flax or wool for weaving took up much of the women’s time, so that poetry and popular song actually arose out of this occupation. To this day in some villages it is the custom for a bride to present all wedding guests with linen gifts woven with her own hands. Modern artists owe their ability to harmonize contrasts of dark and light, smooth, rough, closed and open work to the ancient craft of their ancestors. The refined colors in tapestries spring from the ancient ability to make natural dyes from flowers, leaves, roots and bark, and metal ores. Now even parcels in modern stores in Vilnius, I found, are tied with embroidered tape instead of ordinary string. From this association with color also, I daresay, springs the famous stained-glass work of Lithuanian artists, in both their formal and modern

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designs. It is impossible not to be attracted by the blaze of Lithuanian stained-glass work, the gifts of the hands which stretch back to the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the stained-glass work in Kaunas must be seen to be believed: Mother Earth by Stoškus, Harvest Home by Galeškas, Spring by Morkūnas. 8 Vilnius itself is a combination of old and new: the medieval city with its narrow cobbled streets and courtyards flanked and surrounded by old buildings, the archways casting shadows, the dim interiors of old inns and wine cellars, cafés. The Nazis destroyed a lot of this, but the old city was built again as it had stood in the centuries old past. You can still climb the hill to Gediminas Tower that overlooks Vilnius, pass under ancient gateways, rub against old city walls. At the shrine of Mater Misericordiae, Catholic old women knelt on the hard pavement to pray at matins and vespers in St. Anne’s Cathedral. Over a medieval gateway an altar of gold is open to full view through plate glass so that the faithful who cannot get inside may pray before it in the street. The curious, like ourselves, climbed the narrow stairs to see it close up: religion’s golden-wrought images are not interfered with, the Catholic Church continues in its old way, as do others. Around all this old history the new closes in; not only in the modern blocks of flats, the parks, and hotels, but in industrial and agricultural development. In the Soviet period entirely new branches of industry came to life: instrument-making and machine tool industries, radio and electrical engineering and electronics. Lithuania produces computers and electric meters, radio and TV sets, vacuum cleaners, car compressors, agricultural machinery, and ship propellers. In one of the squares we went to see an open-air production of Verdi’s opera Aida. The whole front of a building, which we learned had been an army barracks, had been turned into a reproduction of ancient Egypt, all the color and pomp of the opera was produced under the open sky. One evening we went to see an American film at one of the local cinemas— actually I had missed the film when it had been shown in London: They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? 9 THE BELLS OF KAUNAS The road to Kaunas wound through low hills and forests. Over a bridge a slogan proclaimed: “The eternal friendship of all Soviet peoples is the foundation of all our achievements.” We went past the fields of yellowgreen with the farmhouses in the distance, a red brick church. Halfway to Kaunas lies the youngest town of Lithuania-Elektrenai. The biggest electro-thermal power station in the Baltic republics went up here, and the surrounding town seemed to have been sparked off by its electricity.

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According to old records, the Vilnius-Kaunas highway had been a very busy road as far back as the fourteenth century, starting as a cobbled street in the latter town. The road had been pounded by the invading Teutonic Knights, the coaches of nobility, and long caravans of merchants, people setting out on their way to other countries to escape intolerable hardship and oppression. Now it is a broad, double-line motorway, and on our trip to Kaunas, we had to slow down. A section of the road had been commandeered for a cycle race, and the starting and finishing point was occupied by the judges and bustling officials. The grass verge on the roadside was scattered with spectators and men in tracksuits looking over their cycles. Waved on, we eventually passed the distant clusters of pylons—common sights in the USSR—new brick cottages surrounded by fields, and drove into the old suburbs of Kaunas: narrow streets and brown and green wooden cottages with gardens, overhanging oak trees of the Green Hill district. One could see the new features advancing in: the cleared areas and the acres of flats going up in the Dainavos area. Kaunas lies in the center of Lithuania and is an important railway junction, the vortex of economic life. Kaunas’s industrial production, apart from central heating boilers and ship’s propellers, includes paper that is exported to—among other countries—Mongolia, Iran, and Sri Lanka. We entered the town; as in Vilnius the Middle Ages lay side by side with the modern and from old market places we went down Red Army Prospekt and Freedom Avenue. In the Lithuanian language the Latin alphabet is used, and you could read the signs easily: Maisto produktai, Informatija. It was Saturday morning, and the streets were bustling with an almost Oriental fervor. But Asia is behind you now, Soviet Europe starts here, and the old architecture, Gothic, baroque, or medieval, the former Ratũsha, town hall, like a clenched hand and the tower like an extended and pointed thumb, the red brick Perkũnas House with its Gothic top and slender columns poking at the sky; the Vytautas Church; these contrasting with the sleek tower of the History Museum and the drum-like Čiurlionis. But here too the old town is being restored to its authenticity. You can see all this from the top of Aleksotas Hill, which you can climb by the stairway or use the funicular car. By contrast with the holiday mood, we went to look at Fortress Number Nine. Built by the tsarist authorities originally, it became outdated despite the cost. So, it was then turned into a prison and from there began its notoriety: the victims of the fascist period of the 1920s, then came the Nazis to kill a quota of 600 prisoners a day, Resistance fighters; a total of 80,000 dead. Besides, the gloomy dungeons, the iron cages, the damp and narrow tunnels, the torture rooms, all reminded me of the Roeland Street prison in Cape Town and the Fort of Johannesburg where I had spent

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some time. I was glad to get out. Of all those who had been put there, only thirty-four had escaped from it to join the anti-Nazi partisans, the rest of them died. But one had to go and look at the monument to the victims of this horrid place. How much mourning does one do in a lifetime? The cause of human freedom extended far and wide; there was too much death. It was better after our friends took us to lunch in one of those old, medieval taverns which had been frequented by hunters: carved doors, great hearths, stag heads mounted on the walls, the long heavy tables and high-back chairs, the beamed ceilings. On top of the hearty meal, there was a marvelous kvas spiced with aniseed. Then there is the Čiurlionis gallery dedicated to this artist and composer who died at the age of thirty-six—the gallery full of his weird symbolism and surrealistic fantasies. Did the 400 canvases he had painted represent a subconscious progressiveness, had he been deranged, a degenerate artistic genius? The arguments did not rage, but were whispered from picture to picture in the subdued tones reserved for galleries and museums. He had produced as many musical compositions as pictures, and one imagined him somewhere nearby, straining to catch the murmured debates, smiling slyly over some foolishness. 10 Kaunas seemed full of surprises. Next we went to look at the collection of devils. You need not be a follower of the devil, of course, but it is something to behold, this collection. It appeared that at one time there had been this rich man—his name had slipped from my notes—who had devoted most of his life and money to buying, from all over the world practically, effigies, dolls, figurines of His Majesty Beelzebub. They are all there now in glass cases: dolls, dolls, dolls; the devil in porcelain, the devil in clay, stone, wood, beautifully produced devils and crude devils; devils from Europe, Africa, Asia, the Indies, the Caribbean, devils from everywhere—fiends from France and Satans from Scandinavia, devils, devils all round. It must be the only collection in the world dedicated to the devil. Curiously enough, though I have been given to understand that the devil is connected with all kinds of sexual aberrations and ghastly rites, I saw no evidence of this among all the exhibits this strange man had collected for years from almost every part of the world. In any case, I have always considered the devil to be quite a respectable fellow, and always unjustly maligned. Another feature of Kaunas is the ringing of the bells, or one should say the playing of bells, by the campanologist, seventy-four-year-old Viktoras Cuprevičius. Crowds gathered in the little park and streets around as he mounted the tower—he is usually accompanied by his son, whom he had taught, but this time he was solo. Everybody waited in fidgety suspense. It was a warm day, the sun bright everywhere, on the tower of the History Museum. Then, clear as-well-bells, the music tinkled, boomed, and clanged across the square, the gardens, the town. 11 A mas-

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ter musician of bells, and he played Tchaikovsky, Brahms, folk songs, the Italian O Sole Mio, and his own Happy Bells: a concert of bell-ringing. Afterward he came down to meet the waiting crowd that pushed around the tower door to greet him: a white haired, lean, and shy man who smiled at everybody and welcomed all strangers and hoped they’d enjoyed his performance. Kaunas is certainly full of surprises. 12 PIRČIUPIS’S MOTHER That Sunday we drove down to Trakai with its old castle on the lake. It was a long drive, and on the way we turned off toward the Rũdininku forest area. On the way our driver made the mistake of overtaking another car on a bridge, and there was the militia up ahead in their yellow squad car that some of the people call “canaries,” to wave us down. The militiaman was very polite, saluting and saying, “Good morning, comrades.” He called the driver out and said something about there being traffic laws in this republic that had to be obeyed. After this lecture he let us go on. You can get your license clipped by the militia, and after three clippings you have a lot of explaining to do to the traffic authorities, and they might make you do your driving examinations all over again. In serious cases, of course, they might suspend a driver for a period, or for good. But the militia on the whole is never harsh, and I never heard anybody refer to them as the equivalent of “fuzz” or “pigs” or “scuffers,” as the police are called in some countries. Once I asked a friend to warn a slightly tipsy man on the street, and the man laughed and said, “No, no, they’re alright. They are our militia, people’s militia.” Once I even proposed a toast to the militia—but one cannot push one’s luck too far. Another friend told me: “Why, if we had no militia we wouldn’t be able to read or write our own detective stories!” We drove on to the Rũdininku area, and came on the site where the old village of Pirčiupis had stood—the Lithuanian Lidice. In the summer of 1944, the Nazis had swept down on it and mercilessly burnt down the whole village and all its 119 inhabitants with it. In the nearby museum one saw the relics of such barbarism, kept as a reminder of man’s inhumanity to man: the charred remnants of coats, a burnt shoe, a belt buckle, a bent and blackened fork, bridle bits, a bible with a bullet hole. One was aghast at the ravages of fascism, preserved under glass in the little museum. Over all this stood the very sad statue of a mourning Lithuanian woman called simply Mother; a masterpiece of sorrow, the inspired monument sculptured by the Lithuanian Gediminas Jokubonis, who was awarded the Lenin Prize for this work. 13 All over the Soviet Union stand the symbols of sadness over its lost children.

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TRAKAI’S CASTLE The driver dropped us off at the lakeside resort and had to return to Vilnius. We would make our own way back. It was hot and pleasant, and the massed trees around the lake cast a pleasant shadowiness, while all over the water launches putt-putted, and youths punted and rowed to the shrieks of merriment. In the middle of the lake rose the castle of Trakai, like something out of a children’s fairytale or a Walter Scott novel: battlements, towers, barbicans, portcullis, walls and gatehouse, drawbridge and central keep. It was one of those castles out of fiction, but it was real enough, having withstood the Teutonic invaders and the rampaging Knights of the Cross, who used to be called “Crusaders.” Boyhood crept up on me—Quentin Durward, Ivanhoe—as we crossed the long wooden causeway and crossed the drawbridge. 14 The rest of the hundreds of sightseers followed like advancing men-at-arms: one expected to hear the clank of armor, the twang of crossbows. Nobody resisted the invasion. We bought our tickets and explored inner baileys and outer, courtyards and fortifications, climbed narrow staircases inside round towers and walked along the battlements where guards had once looked out across the water and called the hourly “All’s well.” We had lunch in the local tourist restaurant at a table on a balcony shared with what appeared to be a courting couple: they whispered together and avoided our eyes. Down below, parties were singing at tables. After that we lazed by the shore of the lake, wandered under the trees, killing time before the folk-dance concert back at the castle. The Liandies Muzikos Teatro Trupe performed a program of folk songs and dances, all decked out in the traditional clothes of old Lithuania. Performed in one of the great halls of the castle, the concert was in a perfect setting. At the Trakai bus station we waited with the crowd going back to Vilnius and other parts. Everybody seemed to have had a jolly day out, evidenced by the condition of several husbands who were being admonished by their wives. “You were supposed to have come fishing,” a woman told her unsteady spouse. “Well, I did intend to,” he replied. There is always a scramble to get aboard—co-operation broke down; it was every man for himself. We were packed in like caviar in a jar, and the bus crew didn’t seem to bother about the carrying capacity of the vehicle. That is one thing about Soviet buses, they hardly ever leave anybody behind.

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TO DIE A LITTLE We had our last drinks of ale in the underground drinking cellar in the old city, brought by a lad dressed like a medieval cellar man. We had visited the old Peter and Paul Cathedral with its intricate plasterwork and bas-reliefs in thousands of designs and patterns, while from the middle of the cupola of the ceiling God looked down at the marble checkered floor, and the altar shone all gold and silver. At the Young Communist League offices, I was received by young men and stunning girls, and one of the stunning girls was the second secretary or something Comrade Rudakova, who presented me with flowers and the recorded speech of L. I. Brezhnev to the Komsomol congress. I had visited the local newspaper Tiesa and met the editor Albertas Laurinčiukas, and they had published my Vietnamese short story “Thang’s Bicycle” in their Sunday edition. We had visited another old tavern where Prosper Merimée had drunk—that occasion would have come under literary adventures. 15 Vilnius is an old center of book printing. As far back as the sixteenth century the first Lithuanian and Slavonic-Russian books had been printed there. The book has become an everyday requisite in Lithuania today. And among all the thousands of books printed (there are 7,000 libraries holding fifty million volumes) there must be some from other parts of the world. I browsed at a second-hand bookstall, and there was Akmens Salis by Aleksis La Guma. It was The Stone Country, translated into Lithuanian. I have it now in my bookcase, a touching reminder of the last days of my Soviet journey, like the one wooden shoe presented to me in Vilnius—a custom which means you are invited to return to collect the other. NOTES 1. The original sentence ended with “. . . at least they blew the whistles, waved the flags, slammed doors and administered the journey, attended to the restaurant cars, probably, they were locomotive engineers too.” I have corrected it to clarify what I think La Guma’s original grammatical intention was. 2. Nero Wolfe is a fictional detective created by the American writer Rex Stout (1886–1975), who wrote thirty-three novels and numerous shorter works involving this character. 3. Pivo is Russian for beer. 4. Yuri Gagarin (1934–1968) was a Soviet cosmonaut and became the first human to reach outer space and orbit the earth with the Vostok 1 mission in 1961. 5. Tacitus (56–120 AD) was a historian of the Roman Empire. The text La Guma speaks of is Germania (c. 98), which offered a description and account of the Germanic peoples between the Roman Empire and the Baltic Sea. The rediscovery of this text during the early fifteenth century is said to have contributed to the formation of modern German identity over the next several centuries. 6. Mindaugas (c.1203–1263) is recognized as the founder of Lithuania and served as its only king from 1253 to 1263. The Teutonic and Livonian Orders were Catholic military orders that became involved in the Northern Crusades (or Baltic Crusades)

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against pagan peoples along the Baltic Sea during the thirteenth century. The Teutonic Order still exists, though it is solely religious in scope today. 7. La Guma embraces an oversimplified Soviet view of this history. For more complex accounts of this period for Lithuania and the Baltic region, see Andres Kasekamp, A History of the Baltic States (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), chapters 5 and 6; Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010). 8. Algimantas Stoškus (1925–present) and Kazys Morkūnas (c.1925–2014) were considered master artists in stained glass. 9. They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969) is an American film directed by Sydney Pollack (1934–2008) that stars Jane Fonda, Michael Sarrazin, and Bruce Dern. 10. Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875–1911) is a famous Lithuanian symbolist painter and composer, who has been credited with aiding the emergence of abstract art in Europe. 11. The expression “as-well-bells” is in the original text. 12. Viktoras Cuprevičius (1901–1992) was a well-known Lithuanian composer. 13. Gediminas Jokubonis (1927–2006) was a Lithuanian sculptor whose work Mother of Pirčiupis (1960) commemorates the 1944 Pirčiupis Massacre, during which a Nazi military unit nearly annihilated the entire village, as La Guma depicts. This massacre is analogous to the 1942 Lidice Massacre in what is today the Czech Republic. 14. Quentin Durward and Ivanhoe are the titular characters in two novels by the Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott, published in 1823 and 1820, respectively. 15. Prosper Merimée (1803–1870) was a French writer, best known for his novella Carmen (1845), which was turned into the famous opera of the same title by Georges Bizet (1838–1875) in 1875.

Epilogue

The question was, what had one gathered? In material acquirements I had a dombra from Kazakhstan, a horn carving from the Blue Mountains, an Uzbek tea set, various Oriental robes and sashes from Asiatic villages where I had been welcomed, a collection of tyubeteikas, a wooden shoe from Lithuania. I felt like a member of a caravan returning from the Orient, only the whine of jet engines had taken the place of camel bells; the customs at London Airport did not bother this time, but waved me on. We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go Always a little further; it may be Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow, Across that angry or that glimmering sea. . . . 1

I had not gone in search of that mysterious “Russia’s soul,” but to see socialism at work. Did socialism mean that shrill tourist voice crying: “Thank goodness they have hairspray!” The queues of women at the GUM store in Moscow, waiting patiently to get an imported folding umbrella? 2 The Russo-American woman in Ulyanovsk Airport saying, “America is wonderful, we have lots of everything.” Since I first went to the Soviet Union living standards have risen substantially, and all appearances are that they will continue to do so. The general quality of life is improving. Over the last five years wages and salaries, pensions and student allowances had all increased, gathered, against a background of completely stable prices. In that time real incomes per head had gone up by 24 percent. The funds made available for the free education and health services, etc., had grown even more noticeably, by nearly 40 percent. In that period the housing conditions of fiftysix million people had improved. It had never been my intention to bother with statistics, they are boring and seldom understood. A million unemployed in the West does not mean a million individuals, it means a million members of families. But one cannot avoid statistics, no matter how one tries to sidestep them, they are there like the crowds at the panorama view of Borodino or the Moscow Circus. There is no unemployment in the Soviet Union; instead there are signs everywhere asking for more labor for some particular enterprise. Students do not walk the streets or play guitars in the Metro tun-

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nels for pennies to augment their livelihood. There are no squatters’ movements and no charitable institutions for battered mothers. STATE OF THE PEOPLE Under socialism the state exists to serve the people, and things are made to serve man, and man through the state arranges to make the things he wants and needs, to make them for his use. Goods are not produced for some individual’s profit. In the capitalist world people may need better transport, housing, denim jeans, and lipstick, but if there’s no profit in it the consumer has just to do without. The aim of socialism is to put out goods the people need, but they build first things needed first. Hospitals and schools, blocks of flats and transport, the basic things man really needs, but denims, lipstick, folding umbrellas must come later if they are not there already. And all Soviet citizens—from a street sweeper to a minister of state—live on the wages, or salaries, on the money they have worked for. It can happen under socialism that there are shortages, but all economies have shortages. The difference is how goods are divided; when in capitalist countries goods are in short supply, the prices go up, and only the well off can buy them. In the Soviet Union prices remain stable, and it’s a matter of first come, first served. Of course, there are people too, under socialism, who start buying things for the sake of buying, but they are more likely to be laughed at than admired. It all comes down to what one has and what one makes rationally. People need a flat or a house at a rent they can afford (in the Soviet Union rents are a mere 4 to 5 percent of the family income), the chance to eat and dress well and to spend their leisure time in cultural pursuits. These must be available to all, without exception. This removes all social inequality, which is the goal of socialism, and it fosters in people the sense of real values and sham ones. THE COMMUNIST PARTY And one imagines the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and its officials, the smiling men and women in their neat clothes, in the offices with the polished desks and vases used for pencils, implementing all this. But neither Marx nor Lenin invented the principle of the Party guidance of the state; no one invented this principle, which emerged rather as a natural product of historical evolution and as the only means by which the ruling classes defend their power. While states, any states, exist, they are run by parties that express the will of the classes in power. Guidance by the Communist Party does not mean the practical management of state affairs, the tasks of the Soviets. The Soviets comprise

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over two million members and have thirty million volunteer assistants. All social groups and all nations and nationalities in the USSR are represented in these organs of state power—from the Supreme Soviet to the local village Soviet. The program of the Communist Party adopted in 1919 said: “The functions of the Party collectives should by no means duplicate those of the organs of state power which the Soviets are. . . . It is through the Soviets that decisions are implemented. The Party tries to guide the activities of the state rather than duplicate them.” In the guidelines of the five-year plans, as adopted by Party congresses, is the basis for the decisions drawn up by the USSR and the republican governments. After thorough consideration by committees of the Supreme Soviets of the USSR and of the individual constituent republics, these decisions are endorsed or amended by sessions of the bodies of power, and thus become law. The Party may intervene in current policies whenever necessary, but such intervention is by no means a right to rescind orders issued by organs of power and administration, to infringe upon legal democratic procedures. The Party acts in conformity with and not in defiance of established laws, and publicly poses the key problems of current policies, explaining their urgency and significance to the public and suggesting ways of solving them. But these are aspects which you find also unavoidable if you wish to view Soviet society seriously. Can a single journey of a few weeks reveal everything? How long does it take to memorize or write an encyclopedia—it was not my intention to dissect the enormity of the Soviet Union. The Cuban poet Domingo Alfonso: People like me Daily walk the streets, Drink coffee, breathe, Admire the ‘sputniks.’ 3

One wanted to touch, to feel, to smell even, in that way one would, perhaps, see, admire the sputniks. It was the blind learning Braille. “Truly, when a person is on a journey he learns many things, and he increases his knowledge.” Swahili Salim bin Abakari went to Russia in 1896, to the Russia of tsarism, and had peculiar and ugly things to report about that country. Today, with the same keen eye for facts, he would be amazed and gratified. 4 THE BULL’S DEATH The October Revolution of 1917 was the opening of a new era in world history. Very well, if skeptics deny this, then let us take me, one of the

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millions in the developing countries, one of the victims of colonialism, national oppression, and inequality. There are about 2,000 nationalities in the world ranging from small tribes to nations numbering millions. As there are more than 150 states in the world, over 90 percent of the nationalities are within multinational or multi-tribal states. About 1,600 nationalities live in the developing countries of Asia and Africa where the process of national consolidation and the formation of larger tribal groups into nationalities are still underway. For instance, authorities say that in Nigeria alone there are up to 200 nationalities and tribes. One of the burdens these countries inherited from colonialism was strife between tribes and nations, hostility between individual developing countries. Millions of people, still under colonialism, struggle determinedly for national liberation. About one hundred different peoples live in the industrialized capitalist countries. In these countries, moreover, dozens of nations and nationalities are suffering from inequality, are rising against this “civilized barbarism.” In the socialist community there are about 250 peoples, including more than one hundred nations and nationalities of the Soviet Union. I have seen them live with full rights and in fraternal co-operation. In different socialist countries, one admits, the national problem is at different stages of resolution. This historical process does not take place without difficulties, but taken as a whole, there has been spectacular progress in the socialist countries in the development of genuinely humane, really just national relations. The united multinational Soviet state has shown to the whole world, no matter who wishes to deny it, the immense historical advantages of socialism over capitalism. It has proved able to solve, within a short period, the highly complex national question, to eradicate the economic, socio-political, and ideological sources of social and national antagonism left behind by the erased society of exploiters, to secure friendship, reconciliation of nations and nationalities. The unity and all-round prosperity of all nations and nationalities have become an objective law of socialism. 5 The capitalist system, disguised under the gaudy neon-lit mask of “the free world,” “the great society,” “Western civilization,” increasingly reveals its inability to free man from national oppression, racism, to remove antagonism, hatred, and distrust between nations from the life of its society. To capitalism, national oppression and racial antagonism are as expected as the exploitation of man by man, as the togas worn by the declining nobility at gladiatorial combats: the killing games are part of the picture, the scene of the arena; it goes with the poised sword for the bull’s death. One could go on, there could be much more to say. But it is useless to repeat what has gone before; a saint does not reach heaven by merely

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reciting the established texts. One only wanted to find humanity, as it should be. Has some objective been missed? In the process of meeting many friends one is apt to miss the onlookers, the outsiders. Young Masha and the charming children of the orphanage near Ulyanovsk, named after the war hero Alexander Matrosov? He had thrown his body across a loophole of a Nazi pillbox to block their machine-gun fire and save his comrades, and young children honored him for this deed. 6 The Buryat opera bass? I think his name is Lhasaran Linkhovoin. 7 In any case, when his only daughter had been killed in a car crash, it broke him too. But he had come back, climbing up out of sorrow and despair, to become once again the great singer of the Buryat Autonomous Republic, of the Soviet Union. It was like scenes out of the romantic novels, but it was actually life: those children, that operatic bass. What scenes had I missed? But the canvas is too vast; one cannot count each blade of grass on the steppe. You tried to think of everything you had forgotten to say, ask, seek. What should one set down, leave out? Perhaps a potpourri, a stew, has more variety than the single head of a sheep, boiled and steaming. “Farewell” lay bitter on the tongue at each little airport, in each village square, at the foot of the many monuments to the dead of their Patriotic War. But there is consolation in the Kazakh proverb: “Only he who has no friends cannot say goodbye.” NOTES 1. These lines are excerpted from James Elroy Flecker’s Hassan (1922), cited in a preceding chapter. 2. I have revised this sentence for clarity. The original sentence read as, “The queues of women in GUM store at Moscow waiting patiently to get an imported folding umbrella?” The GUM (Gosudarstvennyi Universalnyi Magazin) store in Moscow was a major, state-run department store that faced Red Square. 3. These lines are from the poem “People like Me” by the Afro-Cuban poet Domingo Alfonso (1935–present). Though it is unclear from which source La Guma specifically drew these lines, Alfonso’s poem is included in Heberto Padilla, ed., Cuban Poetry: 1959–1966 (Havana: Book Institute, 1967), 601. 4. Originally from Zanzibar, Salim bin Abakari had a German employer and traveled from Berlin to St. Petersburg, Moscow, Siberia, Central Asia, and the northern Caucasus. As a Muslim, he was particularly interested in the Islamic regions of Central Asia. See Allison Blakely, Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian History and Thought (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1986), 48. 5. The original sentence reads: “The unity, all-round prosperity of all nations and nationalities have become an object law of socialism.” I have inserted an “and” and used “objective law” to clarify La Guma’s meaning. 6. Alexander Matrosov (1924–1943) was a well-known Soviet war hero for the action described by La Guma. 7. “Lhasaran Linkhovoin” is Lkhasaran Lodonovich Linkhovoin (1924–1980), originally from Buryat and, interestingly, the author of a book entitled Through the Countries of Africa (1961)—perhaps a reason why La Guma recalls his name.

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Index

Abai Kunanbayev, 74, 81n4, 120, 140 Abdurakhmanova, Aisha, 157, 172 Ablai Khan, 146, 148, 154n25 Abrahams, Peter, 7 Academy of Sciences of the Republic, Tajikistan, 104–106 Achebe, Chinua, xi, 46 activism, 15, 23 Africa Day, 144 Africana critical theory, 4 African identity, 11 African National Congress (ANC), 1–2; anti-apartheid struggle and, 24; armed struggle and, 28; banning of, 22; government of, 6; missions of, 42; political cover provided by, 18–19; politics of, 7; representative of, 3; SACP alliance, 3, 9–10, 19, 21, 29; SACPO supporting, 19; socialist agenda of, 4; strategy of, 28 African Political Organization (APO), 19 The African Communist, 3, 19 African Writers Series, 46 Afro-Asian Writers Association, 24, 25, 37, 42, 88 Aida, 230 Akademgorodok, Siberia, 205–208, 224n15 Akhmadalieva, Inakhon, 165–167 Akhmedov, Pulad, 174–175, 178, 180 Alai Mountains, Kyrgyzstan, 130, 168–170 Alexander the Great, 85, 88, 161 Alfonso, Domingo, 239, 241n3 Alleg, Henri, 12, 23 Allende, Salvador, 64, 69n8, 136 “All of Me,” 221, 225n35 All-Union Society for Cultural Ties Abroad, 14

Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, 119–121 Altai Mountains, Siberia, 123, 150, 186 alternative Second World modernity, 28–29 ANC. See African National Congress And a Threefold Cord (La Guma), 3, 22, 28 Anglophones, 5 anticolonialism, 7, 9, 10, 15, 17, 20 apartheid: anti-apartheid struggle, 24–25; end of, 1; NP platform of, 18; Treason Trial, 20, 22, 153n18 APO. See African Political Organization Arikbalik, Kazakhstan, 141, 142 Around the Union of Soviets (Gorky), 32 arrest, 19–20, 22 assassination attempt, 22 Assumption Cathedral, 73 Auezov, Mukhtar, 123, 141, 152n4 Auezov, Murat, 145, 146, 147, 150, 152n4; in bookstore, 140; kindness of, 120; as likable, 141 Aurora battleship, 80–81 Avicenna. See ibn-Sina Awoonor, Kofi, 22 Babajan, Ramz, 158, 159, 160, 181, 183n4, 188 Babel, Isaac, 30 “backwardness” term, 35–36, 37 Baikal, 208 Baikonur space center, 130, 153n13 Balutansky, Kathleen, 28 Bashkirs, 218–220 Basmachi movement, 39, 87, 88, 112n10, 164, 184n19 Battle of Stalingrad, 63, 68n2 The Battleship Potemkin, 63, 68n2 Benjamin, Walter, 13 253

254

Index

bigotry, 131 Biko, Steve, 3 bin Abakari, Salim, 14, 61, 239, 241n4 birth, 6–7, 8 Black Atlantic, 4, 12–17, 18; critics of communism, 46; Du Bois and, 44; socialist realism and, 32–33 Black Belt Nation Thesis, 10, 50n46 Black Boy (Wright), 33 black radical tradition, 4–5 Black Reconstruction (Du Bois), 18 Black Republic, 10 The Black Flame (Du Bois), 33 Blakely, Allison, 14 Blue Mountains, Kazakhstan, 146–148 Bogues, Anthony, 5 Bolshevik Revolution, 12, 155 Bolshevism, 16 Bondarchuk, Sergey, 224n7 Borisovna, Larissa, 86, 99, 100, 103, 166, 167, 174; champagne for, 181; flowers for, 108; on horses, 116–117; request from, 102; on sheep’s head, 124; strolling with, 141; sweets for, 108 Borodin, Alexander, 141–142, 154n22 Bourke-White, Margaret, 13 Bradbury, Ray, 109 Brahms, Johannes, 233 Bratsk power station, 199–201, 224n10 Brezhnev, L. I., 68, 69n14, 235 Brodsky, Joseph, 12 “brown” people, 37 Brutus, Dennis, 7, 22 “Buckingham Palace,” District Six (Rive), 7 Buck-Morss, Susan, 4 building brigades, 102–104 Bukhara, Uzbekistan, 174–176, 178–179 Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic, 85, 112n5, 184n19 Bukharin, Nikolai, 10, 11 Bunting, Brian, 9, 18 Bunting, Sidney, 8, 10, 11 Byelorussky Railway Station, 227 Cabral, Amilcar, 28, 49n21 capitalism: late capitalism, 44–45; Lenin on, 64; system of, 240

Castro, Fidel, 42, 65 Catholic Church, 230 Cement (Gladkov), 33 Césaire, Aimé, 5 Césaire, Suzanne, 5 chauvinism, 16, 21; class, 4; race, 4; Western superiority and, 131 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, 211, 225n23 Chevalier des Arts et Lettres, 2 childhood, 7, 8 Childhood (Gorky), 33 “A Christmas Story” (La Guma), 21 churches: Assumption Cathedral, 73; Catholic Church, 230; Saint Vladimir’s church, 213; in Soviet Union, 212–213; St. Basil’s Cathedral, 73 Čiurlionis, Mikalojus Konstantinas, 231, 232, 236n10 Clark, Katerina, 32 CODESA. See Convention for a Democratic South Africa Cold War: cosmopolitanism of, 4; Orientalism, 39; in southern Africa, 2; triumphalism, 44 Cold War cosmopolitanism, 4 Collected Works (Lenin), 63 collective farms: in Kazakhstan, 129–130, 137, 138–141, 142–145, 151–152; Michurin Farm, 125; in Siberia, 196–197; in Tajikistan, 109–111; in Uzbekistan, 165–167, 181; Yeslovetsky State Farm, 138–141 collectivization, 84 colonial question (South Africa), 9–10, 20–21, 28 Coloured, 9, 21 Coloured People’s Congress (CPC), 22 Colraine, Daniel, 9 “Come Back to Tashkent” (La Guma), 23 Communist International (Comintern), 8–9; Fourth Congress of, 10; Sixth Congress of, 11; training centers, 18 Communist Party, Soviet Union: accepting, 90; five-year plan of, 239; on language, 91; language and, 132; party guidance of, 238–239; railway

Index workers, 87 Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA): controversy within, 10; dissolution of, 18; La Guma, Blanche, on, 21; La Guma, James, as envoy, 9; La Guma, James, as member, 8; Native Republic thesis and, 11; Rand Rebellion and, 8; reconstitution of, 18 “The Condition of Culture in South Africa” (La Guma), 26–28 confectioners contest, 104 Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), 2 Congress of the People, 20 Conrad, Joseph, 45 Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA), 1–2 Convention People’s Party of Ghana (CPP), 64, 68n7 COSATU. See Congress of South African Trade Unions Cosmographia universalis (Münster), 186, 223n1 cosmopolitanism, 4. See also fugitive cosmopolitanism cotton production, 35; in Tajikistan, 88, 90–92, 110; in Uzbekistan, 162, 164, 166, 175, 179, 181, 183n10, 183n15 CPC. See Coloured People’s Congress CPSA. See Communist Party of South Africa Crankshaw, Edward, 13 Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky), 77 Cuba, 23; exile in, 42; grave in, 43 “Cuba and Africa” (La Guma), 23 culture, 28; of Kazakhstan, 133; of Tajikistan, 89, 90 “Culture and Liberation” (La Guma), 28 Cuprevičius, Viktoras, 232–233, 236n12 Cyrus the Great, 161 Dadoo, Yusuf, 25 Darkness at Noon (Koestler), 13 David-Fox, Michael, 13, 32 Decembrists, 39, 77, 189, 192, 221 decolonization, 23 Derrida, Jacques, 3, 6, 44

255

Dickens, Charles, 74 Dobrenko, Evgeny, 32 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 16, 39; arrest and exile of, 78–79; in Leningrad, 77, 77–78; monument to, 76 Douglass, Frederick, 43–44 Dreiser, Theodore, 13 Drum magazine, 21 Du Bois, W. E. B., 5, 14, 15, 33; Black Atlantic and, 44; legacy of, 44; Marxism and, 18; Washington criticized by, 34 Dushanbe, Tajikistan, 86–88, 112n11 economic theory, 34 electro-thermal power station, 230 Elektrosila Works, 77 Ellis, Stephen, 43 Ellison, Ralph, 35 Engels, Friedrich, 16, 40 Erganbertieva, Tyurgunon, 170–171, 173 esthetics of conflict, 28 ethnic avant-garde, 44 “Etude” (La Guma), 21 exile, 3, 23; in Cuba, 42; of Dostoevsky, 78–79; fugitive cosmopolitanism and, 23–39; Herman on, 42; of Lenin, 187, 226n41, 226n42; to Siberia, 77, 79, 82n11 Fanon, Frantz, 5, 26, 33–34, 37 Al-Farabi, 131, 153n16 Farred, Grant, 23 Ferghana Valley, Uzbekistan, 163–167 fiction: as esthetics of conflict, 28; social realism in, 3 Field, Roger, 11, 20 Fighting Talk, 21 Filatov, Victor, 217–218 First, Ruth, 3, 20, 25 First International Conference of Negro Workers, 15 Fischer, Bram, 145, 154n24 Flecker, James Elroy, 39, 99, 177–178, 237 folk arts, 36–37 For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hemingway), 165

256

Index

Foreign Literature magazine, 179 Franco, Francisco, 12 Francophones, 5 Freedom Charter, 20 fugitive cosmopolitanism, 3, 4; exile and, 23–39; talents and beliefs flourishing with, 24; voices of, 46 Gabardolin, Rashid, 139 Gagarin, Yuri, 228, 235n4 Galeškas, 230 Galeva, Tanya, 216–217 The Gambler (Dostoevsky), 77 Gandhi, Indira, 26 Garrard, Carol, 29 Garvey, Marcus, 7–8, 10 Garveyism, 7 Generator, 210 Gide, André, 13 Gilroy, Paul, 4–5, 14 Gladkov, Fyodor, 33 Glinka, Mikhail, 204, 224n11 global liberation, 23 Global South, 5, 44 GOELRO plan, 33, 57n182, 94–95, 112n20 Gogol, Nikolai, 74 Goldberg, Denis, 23 Golden Horde, 122 The Golden Journey to Samarkand (Flecker), 39 Gorky, Maxim, 21, 30, 32, 33, 46, 74, 225n20; folk arts and, 36–37; on Red Terror, 56n173 Great Ferghana Canal, 36, 164, 173, 183n15 Great Leap Forward, 105, 113n28 Great Patriotic War, 88–89, 124 Great Silk Road, 121 Great Terror, 13 Gromyko, A. A., 63 Group Areas Act of 1950, 7, 19, 23 Guevara, Ernesto (“Che”), 40–42 Guillén, Nicolás, 130, 153n14 gulags, 12 Gumede, Josiah Tshangana, 9, 10 Gurilyov, Albert, 188, 189; family of, 190, 192; on Lake Baikal, 191; singing of, 193, 195

Gypsies, 126–127, 153n9 Hadj, Ahmed Ben Messali, 9 Hani, Chris: assassination of, 1–2; Umkhonto we Sizwe leadership of, 2 Happy Bells, 233 Harvest Home, 230 “Has Socialism Failed?” (Slovo), 43 Head, Bessie, 7, 21 Hemingway, Ernest, 21, 74, 165 Hermitage museum, 80 Hirsch, Francine, 36, 43 historical materialism, 36 Hitler, Adolph, 68, 74 How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Rodney), 34 How Russia Transformed Her Colonial Empire (Padmore and Pizer), 24, 35–36, 44 Hughes, Langston, 11, 14, 16–17, 34–35; brown people described by, 37; on Douglass, 43–44; with Koestler, 57n193; on Soviet Union, 43 humor, 37 hydroelectric power, 33; Bratsk power station, 199–201, 224n10; dams for, 95; Elektrosila Works, 77; Sibenergo works visit, 209–210; in Siberia, 199–201; in Tajikistan, 89, 94–97, 102 ibn-Sina, Abu-Ali, 37, 85, 104–105, 111n4, 131 ICU. See Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union Imanov, Amangeldeh, 138, 153n20 Imperial Eyes (Pratt), 45 imperialism, 9, 20, 34, 45 Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU), 7, 8 industrialization: of Kazakhstan, 128; of Siberia, 198; of Uzbekistan, 182 Industrial Workers of the World, 8 Institute of the Earth, Tajikistan, 108–109 International Brigades, 11–12 International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW), 15

Index In the Fog of the Seasons’ End (La Guma), 3, 21, 28, 209 Irkutsk, Siberia, 188–189, 190, 192–193 Iron Curtain, 67 Israilova, Zulfiya, 158, 182, 183n3 ITUCNW. See International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers Ivan IV, 223n2 Ivanova, Maria, 140 Ivanovich, Karl, 201–203 Ivashchenko, Rosa Ivanova, 148 I Wonder as I Wander (Hughes), 16–17, 35, 43 Jabayev, Jambul, 123 Jambul, Kazakhstan, 123–125 James, C. L. R., 5, 46 Jameson, Frederic, 5 Janghildin, Alibi, 138, 153n20 JanMohamed, Abdul, 28, 29, 46 Johnson, Hewlett, 13 Jokubonis, Gediminas, 233, 236n13 Jungarian lords, 122, 152n5 Kalinin, M. I., 222, 226n41 “Kalinka,” 205, 224n13 Kasimov, Alibai, 117 Kasimov, Mohamed, 106 Kathrada, Ahmed, 20, 23 Katz, Mikhail, 223 Kaunas, Lithuania, 230–233 “Kazakh Nomadic Culture” (Auezov, M.), 150 Kazakhstan, xii; acquirements from, 237; Alma-Ata in, 119–121; area of, 127; Arikbalik visit, 141, 142; Blue Mountains of, 146–148; collective farm system in, 129–130, 137, 138–141, 142–145, 151–152; culture of, 133; establishment of, 152n2; Gypsies in, 126–127; health zone in, 148–149; herdsmen of, 116–118; history of, 121–123; industrialization of, 128; Jambul in, 123–125; Kokchetav visit, 135–137; land and water reforms in, 128–129; language of, 118, 131–132; plains of, 83, 115–116, 150, 152; romantic

257

legends of, 149–150; science in, 133; socialism in, 127–128; steppes of, 130–131, 151, 152; Tselinograd in, 130; welcome to, 118–119 Kelley, Robin, 44 Khan, Genghis, 187, 223n2 Khayyám, Omar, 109, 113n29 Khorezm, 161, 183n10 Khramov, Vladlen, 96, 97 Khrushchev, Nikita, 26 Kipling, Rudyard, 45 Kirov ballet, 77 Kirov Stadium, 81 Koestler, Arthur, 13, 35, 57n193 Kokchetav, Kazakhstan, 135–137 Kolchak, Alexander, 147, 154n26, 208, 211 Kollontai, A. M., 222, 226n41 Komsomols, 90, 101, 137, 171 Korovichenko, 155–156 Kotane, Moses, 18, 20 Krasnov, Ivan, 203 Kremlin, 76 Kuchum, 187, 223n2 Kuibyshev, Valerian, 137–138, 153n20 kulaks, 124, 153n8, 153n11, 198 kumiss, 149, 152 Kunene, Mazisi, 25 Kuznetsov, Nikolai, 212, 225n26 Kyzyl Kum Desert, 175, 176 La Guma, Bartholomew, 22 La Guma, Blanche (née Herman), 41; arrest of, 22; coining rouble millionaire, 29; on CPSA, 21; on exile, 42; gifts for, 102; marriage to, 21–22; prison experiences, 39; support from, 25; on Table Mountain, 23 La Guma, Eugene 22, 29 La Guma, James (“Jimmy”): as CPSA envoy, 9; as CPSA member, 8; as diamond mine worker, 2; on imperialism, 20; meeting friends of, 75–76; Native Republic thesis and, 10; son inspired by, 11; in Soviet Union, 10, 11, 63; as UNIA leader, 8; utopian thinking of, 14–15 La Guma, Joan, 7

258

Index

La Guma, Justin Alexander (“Alex”), 31, 38, 41. See also specific topics La Guma, Wilhelmina, 7 Lahusen, Thomas, 37–39 Lake Baikal, 189–192, 224n4 land of three thousand lakes, 228 Langa, Mandla, 30 language: Communist Party on, 91; of Kazakhstan, 118, 131–132; Lenin and, 132; of Lithuania, 231; in Russia, 134; in Soviet Union, 133, 134; Soviet Union Communist Party and, 132; in Tajikistan, 89 Larionov, Ivan, 224n13 late capitalism, 44–45 late socialism, 13; development of, 37–39; late capitalism and, 44–45; socialist realism question and, 23–39 late style, 40 Laurinčiukas, Albertas, 235 Lee, Steven, 44 Leili and Mejnun, 91, 112n17 Lenin, Aleksandr, 226n42 Lenin, Vladimir, 9, 11, 33, 63; backwardness term used by, 35–36; birth of, 222, 226n41; on capitalism, 64; exile of, 187, 226n41; on Ferghana Valley, 164; GOELRO plan, 33, 57n182–57n183, 94–95, 112n20; language and, 132; on national states, 162; school of, 222; self-determination and, 36; on Siberia, 187; tomb of, 72, 73; works of, 65; worldview, 16 Leningrad: Aurora battleship in, 80–81; Dostoevsky in, 77, 77–78; Field of Mars in, 81; Hermitage museum in, 80; Kirov Stadium in, 81; old city and new, 77; palm reading in, 79–80; Summer Palace in, 79 “Leningraders, Dear Children of Mine!” (Jambul), 123 Leninism, 9, 33–34 Liandies Muzikos Teatro Trupe, 234 The Liberator: A Non-European AntiImperialist Magazine, 11 Linkhovoin, Lhasaran, 241, 241n7 “Literature and Life” (La Guma), 23, 30

Lithuania, 39; acquirements from, 237; Catholic Church in, 230; electrothermal power station in, 230; Kaunas visit, 230–233; as land of three thousand lakes, 228; language of, 231; Pirčiupis village visit, 233; stained-glass work in, 229–230; Trakai castle in, 234; Trakai visit, 233; Vilnius visit, 229–230, 235 “Little Libby” (La Guma), 22 London, Jack, 74 A Long Way from Home (McKay), 15, 17 lost futures, 40–47 Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings, 25 Lotus Prize for Literature, 2, 25–26, 37 Lukács, Georg, 37, 46 Lumumba, Patrice, 26 Lunacharsky, A. V., 64, 68n5, 127 Madikizela-Mandela, Winnie, 1 Madonis, Alec, 92, 102 Magubane, Bernard, 21 Malraux, André, 30 Mamkina, Rosa, 167, 167–168, 169, 170 Mancini, Henry, 224n12 Mandela, Nelson: accusations against, 20; election of, 2; family tradition of, 6; generation of, 3; labeling of, 19; as new breed of activist, 12; prison release of, 1; sentencing of, 23; writings of, 3 Mao Zedong, 25 Marghilan market place, 173 Markov, Dmitry, 33 Marks, Gerald, 225n35 marriage, 21–22 Marx, Karl, 16, 40, 132 Marxism, 5, 18 Marxism and the National Question (Stalin), 9 Marxism-Leninism, 16, 24, 33, 65; doctrine of, 35–36; Gypsies and, 126; October Revolution of 1917 and, 64; party formation of, 64 Matrosov, Alexander, 241, 241n6 Matthews, James, 7, 23 May Day, 72 Mbeki, Govan, 6, 23 McKay, Claude, 15, 17

Index Mercer, Johnny, 224n12 Merimée, Prosper, 235, 236n15 Mhlaba, Raymond, 23 Michurin Farm, 125 Mikhailovsky, Nikolai, 209, 225n21 Mindaugas, 228, 235n6 Mintz, Sidney, 14 Mirshakar, Mirsaid, 88, 112n12 Mitienova, Raissa, 194–195, 197 Mlangeni, Andrew, 23 “Moon River,” 205, 224n12 Morgan, Henry, 136 Morkūnas, Kazys, 230, 236n8 Morogoro Conference, Tanzania, 57n205 Moscow: battle of, 73; people, homes, renovation in, 76–77; traffic in, 74–75 “Moscow Nights,” 213, 225n30 Mother (Gorky), 33 Mother Earth, 236n8 Mother of Pirčiupis, 233, 236n13 The Motorcycle Diaries (Guevara), 40–42 Motsoaledi, Elias, 23 movies, 63. See also specific movies Mphahlele, Es’kia, 21 Mullen, Bill, 18, 44 Münster, Sebastian, 186, 223n1 Muravyov-Apostol, Sergey, 221, 225n38, 226n39 Nardal, Jane, 5 Nardal, Paulette, 5 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 25 national demarcation policy, 162, 183n12 National Liberation League, 11 National Party, South Africa (NP), 1, 18 national question (South Africa), 9, 16, 20–21, 24, 28–29, 36, 47, 63 national question (Soviet Union), 63, 67–68, 105, 240 nation-state-colony: as hybrid status, 21; South Africa as, 18–23 Native Republic thesis, 10, 11; specter of, 21 Natives Land Act of 1913, 9 Navoi, Alisher, 131, 153n16, 183n7 Nazism, 64, 68, 72, 79, 223, 230, 231

259

A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia (Hughes), 16, 34–35 Negro Bureau of the Red International of Labour Unions, 15 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 9, 25 Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (Nkrumah), 34 Neruda, Pablo, 30, 160, 183n8, 210 nervous breakdown, 22–23 NEUM. See Non-European Unity Movement New Age, 21, 22 Nikulkov, Anatoly, 208–209 Nishnikov, Nikolai, 142 Niyazi, Hamza Hakimzade, 183n7 Nizhnevartovsk, Siberia, 215–221 Nkosi, Lewis, 21, 25 Nkrumah, Kwame, 34 Nokwe, Duma, 24 “no middle road” thesis, 34 Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM), 19 Northrop, Douglas, 16 Notes from a Dead House (Dostoevsky), 39, 79, 82n11 Novikov, Andrei, 204 Novosibirsk, Siberia, 203–205 NP. See National Party, South Africa Nurek Hydroelectric Power Station, 95–97 Nurek Valley, Tajikistan, 91–93; Nurek town in, 97–102 Nyerere, Julius, 34 Obolensky, Evgeny, 221, 225n38 October Revolution of 1917, 1, 8, 13, 33, 68n4, 197; anniversary of, 26; battles of, 63–64; Marxism-Leninism and, 64; opening new era, 239–240; participants in, 226n41; Siberia and, 187; victory of, 229 oil fields, 214–221 Okigbo, Christopher, 22 Omens of Adversity (Scott), 46 Onienko, Nikolai, 208 Order of Ikhamanga in Gold, 2 Orjonikidze, Sergo, 222, 226n41 Osborne, John, 74, 81n5 O Sole Mio, 233

260

Index

Padmore, George, 5, 14–15, 18, 24, 35–36, 44 palm reading, 79–80 Pan-Africanism, 7–8, 14, 15 Pan-Africanism or Communism (Padmore), 15 Pankova, Nina, 127 “Party Organization and Party Literature” (Lenin), 33 Pasha, Enver, 85, 112n6 Pasternak, Boris, 30 “Paul Robeson and Africa” (La Guma), 23 Peterson, Dale, 33 Petrov, Grigory, 218–220 Petrov, Vladimir, 68n2 petticoat government, 140, 154n21 Phillips, Lily Wiatrowski, 32 Pillay, Vella, 25 Pirčiupis village, Lithuania, 233 Pizer, Dorothy, 24, 35–36, 44 Pole Star, 208 political thought: activism shaping, 23; economic theory and, 34; formation of, 18; ideological obstacles to, 19; in late style, 39; in tangential literatures, 44; writing and, 21, 23 Polo, Marco, 65–66, 84 Popescu, Monica, 37, 43 Population Registration Act of 1950, 19 Porter, Eric, 44 Prashad, Vijay, 9 Pratt, Mary Louise, 5, 45 Présence africaine, 28 President Nguesso Literary Prize, 2 Problems of the Theory of Socialist Realism (Markov), 33 Progress Publishers, 2, 12 proletarian humanism, 46 Pushkin, Alexander, 74, 77, 221 The Question (Alleg), 12 Rabaka, Reiland, 4 al-Rachid, Harun, 88 racial uplift, 34 Ramayana, 86, 89, 131, 201 Ramírez, Pepe, 65, 69n9 Rand Rebellion, 8

Rassool, Ciraj, 3 Razin, Stenka, 73 Red Atlantic, 12–17 Red Guards, 73, 156, 159, 170 Red Square, 41; history of, 73–74; people in, 72 Red Star and Green Crescent (Alleg), 23 Red Terror, 56n173 Reed, John, 12, 64 Resurrection, 63, 68n1 revolutionary romanticism, 32–33 The Right of Nations to SelfDetermination (Lenin), 9 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai, 39, 170, 183n16 Rive, Richard, 7, 23 Rivonia Trial, 23, 154n24 Robeson, Paul, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17 Robinson, Cedric, 4 Rodney, Walter, 14, 34 Rogers, J. A., 11 Rogov, Nikolai, 208, 225n19 rouble millionaire, 29 Roux, Edward (“Eddie”), 11 Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám recitation, 180 Rudagi, 37, 89, 111n4 Rusheva, Nadya, 206, 224n17 Russia, 15, 24, 35–36, 44; language in, 134; Russian Orientalism, 39; Russia’s soul, 237; Ulyanovsk visit, 222–223 Russia and America: An Interpretation (Du Bois), 15 Russia in the Shadows (Wells), 94 Rustaveli, Shota, 159, 183n7 Rytkheu, Yuri, 208, 209, 224n18 SACP. See South African Communist Party SACPO. See South African Coloured People’s Organization Sagan, Françoise, 205, 224n13 SAIC. See South African Indian Congress Said, Edward, 33, 40 Saint Vladimir’s church, 213 Saladin, 88 Samarkand, Uzbekistan, 176–178

Index Sapunov, Yevgeny, 73 Sbasov, Shoken, 118 Scheherazade (Rimsky-Korsakov), 39, 170, 183n16 Schreiner, Olive, 8 science: Academy of Sciences of the Republic, Tajikistan, 104–106; in Kazakhstan, 133; in Siberia, 205–208; in Tajikistan, 104–106, 133; in Uzbekistan, 133 Scott, David, 46 Scott, Walter, 234, 236n14 Sechaba, 3, 28 Sechaba, Tsepo, 43, 59n237 self-determination, 36, 63 Sembène, Ousmane, 30 Separate Representation of Voters Act of 1951, 19 Serote, Mongane Wally, 30 Shakespeare, William, 74 Shaman Baikal, 213, 225n31 Sharpeville Massacre, 22, 25, 53n107 Shastin, Anatoly, 189, 224n13 Shchors, Nikolai, 151, 154n28 Shchuchinsk sanatorium, 148 sheep’s head, 37, 124, 197 Shelikhov, Grigory, 192, 224n6 Shemyakin, Alexander, 223 Sholokhov, Mikhail, 32, 154n23, 193, 224n7 Sibenergo works visit, 209–210 Siberia, 3, 12, 33; Africa compared to, 35; Akademgorodok visit, 205–208, 224n15; Bashkirs in, 218–220; collective farm system in, 196–197; dams in, 97; exile to, 77, 79, 82n11; farewell to, 221; history of, 36, 186–187, 207; industrialization of, 198; Irkutsk sights, 188–189, 192–193; Lake Baikal as gem of, 189–192, 224n4; Lenin on, 187; Nizhnevartovsk visit, 215–221; Novosibirsk visit, 203–205; October Revolution of 1917 and, 187; oil fields of, 214–221; “out of tribalism,” 197–199; science in, 205–208; Sibenergo works visit, 209–210; socialism in, 198–199; Trans-Siberian Railway, 24, 45, 186,

261

188; Tyumen visit, 211–214; UstOrdynsky Buryat national area in, 193–197, 224n8; weddings in, 220–221; Yalutorovsk visit, 221 Siberian Folk Choir, 203–204 Sibirskiye Ogni (Siberian Lights), 208–209 silk manufacture, 167–168, 171–173 Simons, Jack, 34 Simons, Ray, 34 Simons, Seymour, 225n35 Singh, Nikhil Pal, 18 Sisulu, Walter, 3, 23; accusations against, 20; as new breed of activist, 12 Skuratov, Gennady, 145 slave trades, 40 Slovo, Joe, 34, 43; accusations against, 20 socialism, 34, 43; acceptance of, 64–65; in Kazakhstan, 127–128; in Siberia, 198–199; “Socialism in One Country” policy, 36, 153n11; of Soviet Union, 238; in Uzbekistan, 162. See also industrialization; late socialism socialist realism: Black Atlantic and, 32–33; defined, 33; late, 37–39; late socialism and, 23–39; as literary technique, 30–32; as revolutionary romanticism, 32–33 social realism, 3, 21, 32 Soiuz sovetskikh pisatelei. See Writers’ Union of the USSR Solovyov-Sedoi, Vasily, 225n30 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 12 South Africa: disenfranchisement of, 28; future of, 5; national oppression in, 9; as nation-state-colony, 18–23 South African Coloured People’s Organization (SACPO), 18; ANC supported by, 19; national chairman of, 21; vice-chairman of, 19 South African Communist Party (SACP), 1–2; ANC alliance, 3, 9–10, 19, 21, 29; anti-apartheid struggle and, 24–25; representative of, 3; strategy of, 28; underground organization of, 18

262

Index

South African Indian Congress (SAIC), 18 Soviet Order Of Friendship, 2 Soviet Union: alternate Second World modernity of, 28–29; Black Atlantic and, 12–17; black visitors to, 12–17; churches in, 212–213; colonization by, 43; demise of, 4; electricity production in, 95; foreign visitors to, 12–14; fraternal co-operation in, 240; Hughes on, 43; impressions of in movies, 63; La Guma, James, visiting, 10, 11; landing in, 71; language in, 133, 134; living standards, 237; national demarcation policy, 162, 183n12; Padmore on national and colonial problems, 24; socialism of, 238; Soviet experiment, 13, 15–16; Soviet people in, 134; state development in, 83–84; statistics and, 67; women of, 134–135. See also Communist Party, Soviet Union Soyinka, Wole, 22 Soyuz-Apollo project, 130 Spring, 230 “Spring Has Come and Asks for You” (Israilova), 182 stained-glass work, 229–230 Stalin, Joseph, 9, 10; death of, 30; Great Terror under, 13; purges of, 15; “Socialism in One Country” policy, 36, 153n11; worldview, 16 St. Basil’s Cathedral, 73 Steinbeck, John, 13, 21, 112n21 Steinmetz, Charles, 94 Stolypin, P. A., 195, 224n9 The Stone Country (La Guma), 3, 22, 28, 39, 235 The Stone Flower, 63, 68n2 Stoškus, Algimantas, 230, 236n8 Stout, Rex, 235n2 St. Petersburg. See Leningrad Strohm, John L., 13 Suleimenov, Olzhas, 120 Summer Palace, 79 Suppression of Communism Act of 1950, 18 Sverdlov, Y. M., 222, 226n41

Sviatoslavich, Vladimir, 225n28 Tacitus, 228, 235n5 Tajikistan: Academy of Sciences of the Republic visit, 104–106; ballet in, 91; building brigades in, 102–104; collective farm system in, 109–111; confectioners contest, 104; cotton production, 88, 90–92, 110; culture of, 89, 90; dancing in, 85–86; Dushanbe, 86–88; history of, 85; hydroelectric power in, 89, 94–97, 102; Institute of the Earth observatory in, 108–109; language in, 89; Nurek Hydroelectric Power Station in, 95–97; Nurek Valley trip, 91–93, 97–102; as part of hinterland, 33, 84–85; science in, 104–106, 133; tea house, 90; textile factory visit in, 106–108; weddings in, 90, 101; women in, 89; writers of, 88–90 Tambo, Oliver, 3, 25; accusations against, 20; as new breed of activist, 12 Tamerlane, 176–177, 177, 184n21 tangential literatures, 44 Tashkent, Uzbekistan, 16, 155–161, 180–181 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich, 73, 233 Ten Days that Shook the World (Reed), 12 Tertz, Abram, 32 textile factory visit, 106–108 “Thang’s Bicycle” (La Guma), 23, 235 They Fought for Their Country (Sholokhov), 193, 224n7 They Shoot Horses Don’t They, 230, 236n9 Thibedi, William, 10–11 Third World, 44 Tiesa, 235 Time Longer Than Rope (Roux), 11 Time of the Butcherbird (La Guma), 3, 21, 28, 42 “The Time Has Come” (La Guma), 28 Timofeyevich, Yermak, 223n2 Timokhin, Vladlen, 208 Tolstoy, Leo, 74, 81n5 Touré, Sékou, 64, 68n7 tragedy, 46

Index Trakai, Lithuania, 233 Trakai castle, 234 Transcription Centre, 25 Trans-Siberian Railway, 24, 45, 186, 188 traveling theory, 33 Treason Trial, 20, 22, 153n18 tribalism, 197–199 Trotsky, Leon, 10, 11, 19, 35 Trubetskoi, Sergei Petrovich, 161, 224n5 Tselinograd, Kazakhstan, 130 Turkmenistan, 35, 111n2 Twin, Mark, 74 Tyumen, Siberia, 211–214 Udainazarova, Tutiphon, 168 Udovikova, Raissa, 127 Uigun, 156 Ujamaa: Essays on Socialism (Nyerere), 34 Ulugbek, 37, 176, 177, 184n22 Ulyanova, Valentina, 140 Ulyanovsk, Russia, 222–223 Umkhonto we Sizwe, 2 Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), 8 Updike, John, 205 Ust-Ordynsky Buryat national area, 193–197, 224n8 utopian space, 37, 39 Uzbekistan, xiii, 84; acquirements from, 237; Alai Mountains, 168–170; Bukhara visit in, 174–176, 178–179; collective farm system in, 165–167, 181; concerts in, 157; cotton production in, 162, 164, 166, 175, 179, 181, 183n10, 183n15; dress of, 164–165; Ferghana Valley visit, 163–167; Great Ferghana Canal, 36, 164, 173, 183n15; history of, 161–163; industrialization of, 182; Kyzyl Kum Desert in, 175; land reclamation in, 181–182; leave-taking, 158–159; Marghilan market place, 173; Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám recitation in, 180; Samarkand visit in, 176–178; science in, 133; silk manufacture in, 167–168, 171–173; socialism in, 162; Tashkent in, 119, 155–161, 180–181;

263 traditional dress of, 158; Uzbek Writer’s Union, 158; women in, 166, 167; wool production in, 179

Vambery, 136, 153n19, 161, 183n11 Vassilyevna, Galina, 217 Verdi, 230 “Vietnam: A People’s Victory” (La Guma), 23 Vilnius, Lithuania, 229–230, 235 Vilnius-Kaunas highway, 231 Vladimirov, Alexei, 117 Volshaninova, 127 A Walk in the Night (La Guma), 3, 22, 28 War of the Worlds (Wells), 85 Washington, Booker T., 34 weddings: in Siberia, 220–221; in Tajikistan, 90, 101 Wells, H. G., 85, 94, 97 “We Shall Overcome,” 150, 154n27 Western Cape writing, 23 “What I Learned from Maxim Gorky” (La Guma), 30 White Guards, 123, 138, 147 White Huns, 161 Whitsuntide Shakers, 213 Williams, Eric, 14 Wilson, Edmund, 13 Wilson, Harold, 67, 69n12 Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (Dostoevsky), 76 Wolpe, Harold, 21, 34 women: of Soviet Union, 134–135; in Tajikistan, 89; in Uzbekistan, 166, 167 World Congress Against Colonial Oppression and Imperialism, 9 The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon), 37 Wright, Richard, 33, 35, 44, 46 Writers’ Union of the USSR (Soiuz sovetskikh pisatelei), 88; book invitation from, 29; ceremonial leave-taking, 181; Congress attendance, 30, 32; control of, 37; invitation from, 66; monitoring by, 39; representatives of, 203 writing: Afro-Asian Writers Association, 24, 25, 37, 42, 88; of

264 Mandela, 3; political thought and, 21, 23; Western Cape, 23. See also fiction Wyndham, John, 109 Yakushkin, 221, 226n39 Yalutorovsk, Siberia, 221 Yandosov, Bakhram, 145 Yankovsky, Ivan, 148 Yashen, Kamil, 156, 181, 183n2 yashmak, 87 Yazhek, Ivan, 210

Index Yermak, 187 Yesinov, Dauletbek, 152 Yeslovetsky State Farm, 138–141 Young Communist League, 12 Young Pioneers, 72, 222 Yousaf, Nahem, 28 Yurchak, Alexei, 43 Yusupov, Osman, 164 Zazubrin, Vladimir, 208, 225n20 Zolotogradov, 127

Biographical Notes

Christopher J. Lee is an associate professor of history at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. His previous books include Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives (2010), Unreasonable Histories: Nativism, Multiracial Lives, and the Genealogical Imagination in British Africa (2014), and Frantz Fanon: Toward a Revolutionary Humanism (2015). Alex La Guma (1925–1985) was a South African writer and activist. The recipient of a number of literary awards during his lifetime, he is the author of A Walk in the Night and Other Stories (1967) and In the Fog of the Seasons’ End (1972), among many books. Originally from Cape Town, he died in Havana, Cuba, while serving as a diplomatic representative for the African National Congress in the Caribbean. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is a Kenyan writer best known for his books Weep Not, Child (1964), A Grain of Wheat (1967), Petals of Blood (1977), and Decolonising the Mind (1986). He is widely considered to be one of the founders of modern African literature. Blanche La Guma is a former anti-apartheid activist and the wife of Alex La Guma. She is the author of the memoir In the Dark with My Dress on Fire (2011).

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