People in Alma-Ata are just coming up to the fifth anniversary of the 17 December massacre, and a commission will be reporting its findings at a public conference next week. All around the Parliament building where it happened there were white rags tied round branches and bushes to commemorate it. Zaure works in a laboratory which is 90% Russian, and where the ethnic relations are very good. She’d been to see what was happening when the massacre started and got her back teeth knocked out by the police. When she went back into the laboratory, the Russians had been given plastic sticks filled with metal by the District Party Committee, and told to join the fray. They went, laid down their sticks and came away again.
It’s a very complicated scene and hard to understand. Most people I met had apparently been connected to the Party with more or less cynicism, and are bewildered and cynical about what has replaced it. Both Zaure and her mother thought her grandfather had died at the right time. People’s attitudes to Nazarbayev are mixed. Some people said what a pathetic reflection on “democracy” it was, that there was no one to challenge him in the elections. Just like old times. Zaure had urged her friends to vote nevertheless, just to underline the idea of Kazakh statehood. Otherwise she was afraid they would be carved up and clapped together with who knows what republics. However, during my stay Nazarbayev was invested as president in a ceremony carried out on TV in Kazakh and Russian in a very relaxed way, and everyone admired his speech.
There’s no real history of political imprisonment in Kazakhstan and I realised that in an odd way it means a lack in society now. There’s no pole of behaviour by which to measure things – everyone apparently compromised – and I met no one as “free” as Moscow ex-prisoners seem to me. Instead the Afghan war veteran movement seems to be one of the strongest social forces, and I heard many discussions of the war at different mealtimes. People also seem to be united in a sort of suppressed outrage about the 1986 massacre. However, Zaure says the atmosphere reminds her of Riga in 1981: everyone stays at home in the evenings and there are discussions in public.
The Minsk agreement, uniting Russia, Belorussia and Ukraine in a “commonwealth”, was struck while I was there and it was actually a real eye-opener to be in a Muslim republic when the news broke. “Another coup,” Zaure’s mother said. “A Slav Union.” Their first thought was for the Muslims in Russia. “Get walking,” she said to me. “There’ll be a hard January and civil war in spring.” My first thought was for my Russian friends, shunted about again like so many pieces of furniture, with not even Parliament involved in this massive constitutional change. Both Shevardnadze and Gorbachev had met Yeltsin behind closed doors last week, and I wondered if they had agreed this step in advance, as a way of keeping Ukraine in the fold.
I found the cultural change in Kazakhstan very difficult. Underneath their immense hospitality, I felt my hosts do not like Westerners. My port and chocolate were laid aside and I thought perhaps I’d been too showy, so after a few days bought them some apples – which were also laid aside. They were forever appearing mysteriously in my bag or by my bedside. I actually began to feel offended that they wouldn’t accept anything from me, because it didn’t seem much basis for a friendship. I had been thinking of buying Zaure’s mother a carved wooden box, but decided not to because it would look expensive again. On the last day it occurred to me that I probably offended a code by offering my hosts food, as though they weren’t feeding me properly. Very different from Moscow. They were probably offended that I hadn’t given them something like a box too.
I loved the cosmopolitanism there though. Some of Zaure’s friends had Chinese guests staying with them. Some Uigur relatives came to the grandfather’s funeral, including some professional “wailers”. Zaure speaks Kazakh, Russian, Czech, English, Italian and now French. As Nazarbayev’s investiture came to an end on TV, he held out both palms then wiped them down his cheeks – a Muslim custom. Watching the TV, Zaure and her mother did the same thing. Friends came round and sat with the family when they heard about the grandfather. They all talked about him and raised toasts to life and death, and the grandmother wept. It all seems a better way of mourning than in the West.
On the Saturday two of Zaure’s friends took me walking up in the mountains. We ended up at a so-called ski resort with a dilapidated hotel, where everything was shut. The lobby was like some NUPE headquarters, with lists of “Orders and Instructions” on the wall, all reading like the statute of an insurance company. I think it’s holidays that bring home the most depressing parts of life here. You can’t go where you want to, but have to connive to get some pass to share a room with a sixty-year-old and have your meals in a canteen with strangers. When you would like to get away from the system, you’re brought bang up face to face with it. It snowed quite heavily on the way down and suddenly everything looked natural and beautiful, and we seemed removed from the city.
I was struck on the flight over that we were given no safety instructions but instead they read out all the punishments for smoking on board. Administer and command, not explain and persuade. My flight back made perfect time and we travelled in blue skies over hours of snowy wastes.
When I got into Moscow the bread shops were shut with signs saying “No bread” on them. I went scavenging round the shops and found my first pint of milk since I arrived on 18 November.
Saturday 14 December
I felt ghastly all the time I was in Kazakhstan and immediately felt fresher when I got back to Moscow, but today a cold has come out that maybe I was sickening with in Alma-Ata. I spent Thursday catching up with my Kazakh report and chasing six boxes which the London office has sent me, but which have got stuck in customs. Apparently the papers for registering our office with the Moscow Mayordom are now ready.
On Friday Irina and I went up to the Quakers to interpret at a meeting with Moloccans from Armenia. Like all Protestants here they impressed me because they work hard and they keep their word. Simple things, but a breath of fresh air here. They are returning to Russia from exile in the peripheries of the USSR because they say they want to be “a stream of clean water in the surrounding muddy turmoil”. They sang some psalms, and interestingly enough, they too use the oral tradition of “hooks”, like the fourteenth-century Greeks.
Nazarbayev has brought Kazakhstan and the other Islamic states into the Commonwealth of Independent States as co-founders, which is being greeted with relief by Moscow and Western papers. Nevertheless the feeling among ordinary people, and me, is apocalyptic. I’ve just had Andrey round for dinner and he foresees a military clampdown by late January, followed by civil war in Russia. While he was here two friends phoned, making their plans to get to the UK before “the next time”. For the first time in my life I’ve come out in eczema on my hands over the last three weeks, which is maybe like my stomach complaint during the last coup.
Somehow the job is paling against the background of events. I keep pushing ahead on registration etc., without any confidence that the office is feasible. I am also scared of being trapped here by accident. A friend said tonight that trains out of the country are cancelled and flights are packed. Meanwhile I keep trying to take each step as it comes. Today I was wondering how I would move my furniture to the new flat. As keeps happening, tonight Andrey offered spontaneously to get me his friend’s ambulance.
Sunday 15 December
Yesterday’s contribution seems to have been written in a state of delirium.
Today I decided to fast and was interested to see my cold steadily get better. I sat writing Christmas cards in the afternoon and realised I was sitting there, plain scared. In the evening I went to the Quakers and there were eighteen people there, most of them very enthusiastic about the Minsk agreement and uncomprehending when I told them the Kazakh reaction. Valentina said she couldn’t forget the way women were raped in Baku during the pogroms. I said they were raped during the Brixton riots too, and Azerbaijanis are not Kazakhs. Sasha was honest enough to say that when he looks inside himself, he sees that he doesn’t like Muslims; he fears them.