Some people try to prove that the Bolsheviks were internationalists, who completely rejected Great Russian chauvinism and made all the nations of the Russian Empire equal. Unfortunately, these statements have little, if anything at all, to do with the truth. I think the truth is that Bolshevism transformed Tsarist Great Russian chauvinism into Communist demagogy, making it more draconian and disastrous for small populations of people.[2] The facts speak for themselves.
In 1927, the Soviet power structure prohibited the use of the Arabic alphabet, which the Tatars and Bashkirs had used for more than 1,000 years. In this way, Bolsheviks were effective in disconnecting these peoples from their rich centuries-old literature, history and culture. This ban had grave consequences for the generations born after the Bolshevik upheaval of 1917. They literally became generations without any roots, who didn’t know their past. Like millions of other Tatars, I don’t know the Arabic alphabet and so I haven’t read any of my national literature written before 1917.
Another classic example of the Bolshevik policy is the national map drawn up by the Bolshevik empire. New borders were carved out between the republics, which resulted in eternal and overwhelming hostility between nations. In 1918, the first autonomous republic appeared in Bolshevik Russia – Bashkortstan. However, the main territories with the majority of the Bashkir population, which are in the Urals and in the Trans-Urals, were not made a part of this republic. So a time bomb was constructed that still has wrenching effects on the lives of Russians, Tatars, and Bashkir people. This kind of groundwork that was laid is currently exploding in the Caucasus region and is the source unsolvable bloody conflicts.
Even so, when the Bolshevik revolution began, “foreigners” didn’t support the Tsarist regime. To a large extent this probably accounts for the defeat of the White Army, because non-Russian peoples saw nothing good in keeping a regime in power that they hated. Also, the Bolshevik demagogy, which promised true equality, played an important role in the outcome of the revolution. However, very soon many people realized what was behind this doctrine. I know from my fellow villagers that a group of young men, including my Uncle Akhmetziya, were forced to serve in the Bolshevik army, and to fight in the Civil War of 1918. However, when they found themselves in the regional center Djirtjuli, they swam across the Belaya River and ran back to their village, on the very first night. It would have been strange if they hadn’t done that, as the rule of the Bolsheviks began in Djirtjuli with mass robbery and great excesses. Having demolished the wonderful house of a rich merchant, the Reds rolled a lot of barrels of honey out of his cellar and began oiling the axles of their carts. No attempts were made to give the honey to the poor, who the Bolsheviks were allegedly taking care of.
My father became one of the first Communists in the village and organized a collective farm in 1928 together with my maternal uncle, Mirkasim Kamalov. But the most terrible fact was that, together with other Communists, he participated in the dispossession of the wealthy peasants (kulaks) and their banishment to Baika (a remote region of Bashkortstan). Among them there were his Uncle Mirkasim Khasanbikov, a mullah, his cousin Gulim Khasanbikov, and other close relatives.[3]
Gulim was forced to live in this settlement for the rest of his life, and he came to the village several times during the 1950s to visit us. He told my father about all the horrors that he had to suffer through, with his family in the forests in the Ural Mountans of Bashkortstan.
“You know, Sultan, I survived only thanks to my diligence and physical strength,” said Gulim. “To get an additional food ration, I collected more than 10 cubic meters of wood by hand, working 18 hours a day… Hey, Sultan, what did you start all this for? Look, how you live. You are the director at your school, but you practically live in poverty. I now have more than 30 beehives, four cows, a horse, and a large house – everything that the state allows deportees to have. I can say that now I am much wealthier than I had been before you dispossessed me. The children are settled. They married, all of them have learned to read, and they live quite well. But am I happy in a foreign land? No! My roots are here, but even now I have no right to come to my native village…”
I inadvertently overheard this conversation when I was only 13, but I understood that a kulak or a village baj (rich man), wasn’t an exploiter or a bloodsucker, as they wrote in many of the books I had read by that time. He was a hard worker who, under any circumstances, tried to create something of value.
Another “feat” of my father was his active participation in the so-called Cultural Revolution, which sought to introduce the “backward masses” to Communist culture. Everything that didn’t contribute to this was proclaimed hostile, and it had to be destroyed. That is why the Communists started the Cultural Revolution by sawing the minaret down and turning the mosque into a club for their numerous meetings and amateur art activities. They held performances which mostly ridiculed our past and the “exploiters”. One of the components of the Cultural Revolution was the newly formed names, which were given to children of “highly principled” people. Accordingly, I was given the name VIL, which is composed of the first letters of the name – Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
However, even this didn’t save my father and his children from the very derisive nickname, “ishan”, which the village loafers gave us. It hurt me very much to hear it, and I tried to convince people who insulted me that my father was only a very little boy when his father the mullah died, that he grew up an orphan in poverty and now he had completely renounced “the Old World”. It didn’t help a bit.
My great grandfather Nazhmetdin deserved the title “ishan”, which the Mufti – head of all the Muslims of Russia – gave to outstanding advocates of Islam. It was meant to honor those who excelled in enlightening people and bringing up devoted followers of the Prophet Mohammed’s teachings. In a grassy knoll on a high bank overlooking the Belaya River, you can see the white stone top of the grave-vault, which the ishan built with his own hands. He requested that they bury him there, but this was never done. The explanation was that the vault was on the opposite side of the cemetery, and because of that, those who wanted to pray for his soul wouldn’t be able to do so. Some old men told me later that the reason was just envy.
It was no accident that some of my fellow villagers, who didn’t know their roots, behaved in this way. To some extent, it reflected the class warfare of the “lower classes” with the “upper classes”, which had taken root, thanks to the Bolsheviks.
When I was in graduate school, at the Institute of Petrochemical Synthesis at the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences, I always went to my village to visit my parents during my vacations. During one of my trips home, I ran into Uncle Salikh, a close relative on my mother’s side, who was sitting on the porch of a country store, keeping company with several tipsy men. He was rather drunk himself. He called to me, “Mirzayanov, I need to talk to you!” He looked resolute and aggressive, as if he were going to take revenge for an insult that had just been hurled at him. Salikh was a disabled veteran, with no right hand, and only three maimed fingers remained on his left hand. Like many people, he lived in poverty and “celebrated” the day in the village store, when he received his small disability allowance. He usually bought a quarter liter of vodka, and kept it in the inner breast pocket of his shabby gray jacket, which he never took off, no matter what the weather was like. From time to time he tenderly took the bottle out of this pocket and took a little sip with great pleasure. At that moment, he impersonated a connoisseur of delicate French wines. After this, the bottle was returned to its place.
2
On Soviet policies to quell ethnic differences and increase their hold on power, see Robert Conquest,
3
In December 1929 Stalin called for the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class” because he claimed they were wealthy and the class enemy of the state, which led and exploited the peasantry to deliberately thwart the government’s Five Year Plan. In reality, most kulaks only owned one or two pieces of livestock and had managed to employ a few other peasants. Kulaks were forced into state run collective farms or sent to brutal labor camps. See Robert Conquest,