Just another day on the road, 1991. On the crumbling Imperium’s fringes.
Snapshot from Tashkent, Uzbekistan’s capital, later that same winter. At the Alay Bazaar the January sun angled across mottled-green Kokand melons. Men in skullcaps thronged around carts piled high with indented non flatbreads the size and shape of soup bowls. The biggest trade this season? Little red horoscope booklets. The future. The future. What does the future hold?
At the bazaar I gravitated again and again to the rows of Korean ladies hawking their prodigious pickles: shredded carrots laced with garlic and coriander; fiery cabbage kimchi they called chim-che. The Koreans were socialist Central Asia’s model farmers. At their prosperous, orderly kolkhozes with names like Politotdel (Political Department) they grew wonder onions and overfulfilled every Five-Year Plan by 500 percent. Koreans also farmed most of the rice for the pilaf Uzbeks and Tajiks argued about. But behind the Koreans’ golden success story lurked another sort of tale…
After we’d bought several rounds of her pickles, Shura Tan, in her late sixties, told us her story. She spoke in halting Russian dotted with Uzbek words. When she got nervous she flattened her shredded carrots with a strangely shaped ladle and meticulously reassembled them into perfectly triangular mounds.
Like most Soviet Koreans of her generation, Shura was born in the Russian Far East. The diaspora had been there since the 1860s, swelling after refugees from the 1910 Japanese invasion of Korea crossed over to the future USSR. The Korean comrades grew rice and fished; the Bolsheviks gave them Korean-language schools, theaters, clubs. “We Koreans were happy,” said Shura.
Then, in the fall of 1937, men in uniforms came to their kolkhoz. The Koreans were given three days to pack. Panic swept through their villages. Where were they being taken? Wrenched by despair, Shura’s mother assembled a huge sack of rice and wrapped in cloth a handful of earth for her garden plot. “Why take the earth?” protested the family. Shura’s mother took it all the same. It was her earth.
The Koreans were told to bring food for a week, but the journey lasted a month, maybe longer. Packed into sealed cattle cars, the panicked deportees traveled almost four thousand miles west across frigid Siberia. Old people and babies died from hunger and illness, their bodies dumped from the moving train. All the way Shura wept. She was then a small child.
At last the train stopped. As far as the eye could see were reeds, mud, swamps—the endless plains of Central Asia. The Koreans began building mud huts, sometimes without window or doors
“Scorpions fell on my bed from our walls,” Shura recalled, raking her carrots. “And black snakes as long as this”—she opened her arms wide. But the worst killer was the muddy, diseased swamp water—the only drinking water available. That’s when Shura’s mother remembered her earth. She filtered the poisoned water through it.
“And that’s what saved us,” said Shura. “The earth.”
Koreans became the first Soviet ethnicity to be deported by Stalin in its entirety. More than 180,000 strong, down to the last child. Accusation: potential pro-Japanese espionage during Soviet-Japanese tensions over Manchuria, even though most Koreans hated Japan. Another motive for their deportation: the hard-toiling Koreans could farm the barren Central Asian steppes.
Between 1937 and 1944 these steppes served as Stalin’s dumping ground for scores of other, smaller ethnicities he charged with treason. Sealed cattle cars—“crematoria on wheels”—ferried in Chechens, Ingushi, Karachai, Kalmyks, and Balkars. Also Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans, Ingrian Finns, Kurds, Poles from the Ukraine. The Koreans assimilated and stayed. Others, like the Chechens and the Ingushi, returned to their Northern Caucasus homeland under Khrushchev’s Thaw, only to find their houses occupied by Russians and neighboring ethnic minorities, and the stone tombs of their ancestors employed as construction material. Mountain nations venerate their ancestors. The insults were never forgiven. Gorbachev’s glasnost reawakened the memories.
Nation builder and nation destroyer—simultaneously—is how the historian Terry Martin describes the Soviet State. As whole ethnic populations drew Stalin’s black marks, the officious encomiums to Union minorities rang out undiminished. Propaganda reels after the Great Patriotic War showed happy Korean collective farmers at their glorious socialist toil. There were even well-financed Korean theater productions. A Korean-language newspaper—Lenin Kichi (Lenin’s Banner)—was imposed on every Korean kolkhoz, representing yet another socialist irony.
Deprived of Korean schooling by Stalin, the generation of Shura the pickle maker could no longer read hangul script.
“I know Russian, a little Uzbek,” sighed Shura. “Korean? Nyet. No language—no homeland.” She sighed again. “But at least we have this.” She pointed down to her pickles. After mixing some kachi red chile paste into a tangy salad of cabbage and peppers, she scooped some into my hand. The heat of her chiles left my face numb.
Update: Moscow, August 19, 1991. Tanks rumble up the bombastic thrust of Kutuzov Prospect. Soviet TV plays Swan Lake… over and over. Party hard-liners announce control of the government. Gorbachev? Under house arrest at his Crimean dacha. Officially the “state of his health” doesn’t permit him to continue as president. The right-winger vice president Comrade Yanaev is taking over. Comrade Yanaev’s hands tremble visibly at his press conference. Not quite sober for history’s call.
Hello, Avgustovsky putsch—the August coup.
We stare at our television in a seaside suburb of Melbourne, where Mom happens to be visiting me and John from New York.
“Vsyo, eto vsyo,” Mom is crying. “This is the end!”
I keep dialing my father in Moscow. And getting through.
“Da, putsch, putsch…” Dad giggles sardonically.
“Ma, Ma,” I keep reasoning, nine thousand miles away from the scenes. “If things were that bad they’d have cut the international phone lines!”
They’d have cut Yeltsin’s phone too. Instead, there he is in all his bearish populism, defiant atop a tank outside the White House, the Russian parliament building. In popular elections that June he’d become Russia’s first freely elected leader in a thousand years. Now he rallies Muscovites to resist the takeover. Crowds cheer him on. Citizens weep and complain openly for imperialist cameras. The plotters’ script has been botched: Is this any way to run a putsch?
Over the next two days the coup goes phhht, and in such a pratfall style that to this day Russian conspiracy theorists question what really happened. Things move at shocking speed after this. Yeltsin bans the Communist Party. More republics head for the exit. Gorbachev clings on in this crumbling world, still devoutly for the Union, even in its now hobbled form. The friendship of nations: no longer only a cherished ideological trope for Comrade Gorbachev. Without it he’s out of a job.
“I’m not going to just float like a lump of shit in an ice hole,” he informs Yeltsin in December, after 90 percent of Ukrainians icily vote to secede from his Union.
That December of 1991 my Derridarian and I returned for our final road trip—south via Ukraine to the rebellious Georgian subrepublic of Abkhazia, wedged in between Georgia and the southern border of Russia. What with the chaos and gasoline shortage, nobody wanted to drive us. Finally we found Yura, a thirty-something geology professor with a Christ-like ginger beard. “I refuse to give bribes—out of principle,” he informed us quietly. This was bad news. On the plus side: his rattletrap Zhiguli operated on both gas and propane, slightly increasing our chances of actual motion. The propane stank up the car with a rotten-egg smell. On the road Yura pensively cracked pine nuts with his big yellow teeth; his cassette tape whined with semiunderground sixties songs about taiga forests and campfires. Geologists—they were their own subculture.