Language was crucial to communist governance in central Asia. In the early 1920s, during the hot years of the Basmachi insurgency, the Uzbek language was written in Arabic script, leaving communist overlords feeling decidedly uncomfortable. They could not exercise total control if they could not read Uzbek script. Making matters worse, the Turks had just changed their script from Arabic to Roman, as they sought to modernize their society. Soon thereafter, the Uzbeks followed suit—they also changed their script to Roman. For the Russians this was a step too far. They angrily ordered that henceforth the Uzbek and other central Asian languages would be written in the Cyrillic script, like Russian. And so it has been since the late 1920s: every word in central Asia was written in the Cyrillic script. Because I knew Russian, I could read headlines in newspapers and street signs in the old city, but because I did not know the Uzbek language, I could not understand a single word.
I decided in mid-afternoon to walk back to the hotel. It was a three- to four-mile journey. It was hot, and with each step I felt that I was picking up part of the pavement, softened by the relentless sun. As I started, I spotted an old woman riding an even older donkey. She was not wearing a veil, which surprised me, and she looked like a queen, sitting atop the donkey in regal fashion. From her bearing it was clear she had survived the communist takeover with her personal dignity intact. Most others could not claim such distinction, walking slowly, shoulders bent, faces drawn with daily worries. I could not have imagined seeing a prouder figure in all of Tashkent than the old woman on her donkey.
A huge statue of Stalin dominated one small square. It made him look like a Greek god, muscular and omniscient. People walked around it, as I did, but they paid no attention to it. I did, taking a picture of it and in so doing attracting quizzical stares from Uzbeks passing by. In another square I took a picture of an Uzbek man sitting in a small cart and snapping a thin stick across his donkey’s backside. He saw me but did not object. In fact, he asked, “Did you get a good shot?”
“I hope so,” I answered.
“You from Moscow?” he wanted to know.
“Yes, I’m from Moscow, but I’m not a Russian. I’m an American.”
The Uzbek seemed incredulous. “An American? Here? I guess things are really better, like they say, if you can actually meet an American in Tashkent these days.”
Slowly, block by block, the old city began to slip out of focus, replaced by images of the new Soviet half of Tashkent: paved streets, brick buildings, cars, buses, a woman in shorts carrying a tennis racket, young men on motorbikes. And, everywhere, statues of Stalin, far more than statues of Lenin. In the Museum of Art, near the hotel, two favorites from Russian history were on display. One was Peter the Great, who launched Russia’s imperialist drive into central Asia in the early eighteenth century, and the other was Stalin. Dozens of paintings and statues of him, large and small, were everywhere, the ubiquitous portrait of Kremlin power. Khrushchev had taken a hammer to the late dictator’s reputation, but obviously it was going to take a long time for the first secretary’s startling message to spread, and be accepted, throughout this vast country.
After I returned to the hotel I noticed a plaque to the right of the main entryway stating that the hotel had been headquarters in 1920 for the Russian army sent to central Asia to establish communism and demolish the Basmachi.
During my last night in Tashkent, prior to my departure for Samarkand the following morning, I had the uncomfortable feeling that I was being watched. It was as if the walls in my room had sprouted eyes and ears, and every creak was the footstep of a Soviet cop, coming to arrest me. This was, for me, a new feeling. In all my travels in the Soviet Union I had never felt anxious about my safety. But that night in Tashkent was different.
In the morning, when I left my room, a man in a dark suit was seated a few feet from the door. He had not been there the night before. Two militiamen waited downstairs in the lobby. They watched me pay my bill, pick up my bag, and head for a taxi waiting in front of the hotel. They followed me but did nothing more.
At the airport a young English-speaking Intourist agent met me and suggested that I follow her into the waiting room. “May I go to the souvenir shop first?” I asked. “I want to buy a few gifts.”
“Maybe later,” she replied. “Now I think you should sit here.” She pointed to a chair in a corner. I followed her advice. “And don’t go anywhere without me,” she added.
Three Russians in dark suits stood about five feet away. Their eyes were fixed on me. I felt as if I was one step away from being arrested. All I had to do was provide them with a pretext. I caressed my diplomatic passport, sighed deeply, and waited for the boarding of the Samarkand flight. My Intourist hostess returned just in time. “Come back again,” she said, unpersuasively.
I was relieved to join five other passengers on this flight over an amazingly white desert to Tamerlane’s historic jewel, nestled in an unexpected rim of mountains, which in the flatness of central Asia looked like the Swiss Alps. The mountains afforded protection and time against enemy assault. Beautiful museums, monuments, and mausoleums crowded the inner circle of the city. Samarkand was an impressive fortress.
Marco Polo, when he stopped in Samarkand in the late thirteenth century, described it as a “very large and splendid city.” For a traveler on the fabled Silk Road connecting China with the Mediterranean, it was a valued and luxurious stop. A hundred years later, the famous Moroccan Arab traveler, Ibn Battuta, was even more excited. “It is one of the greatest, the fairest, and the most magnificent of cities,” he wrote in his journal. “It stands on the bank of a river called ‘Potters’ River,’ covered with water mills and canals that water the gardens…. Here there are balconies and sitting places and stalls, where fruit is sold. There are also large palaces and monuments that bear witness to the high spirit of the inhabitants.”
The question on my mind as we approached the Samarkand airport was “Will this once ‘splendid’ and ‘magnificent’ city have a similar, captivating allure in the mid-twentieth century?” Part of the answer caught my eye even before the twin-engine plane came to a stop. Across the runway stood twenty-four jet fighters, a rather impressive show of Russian military power in central Asia. A more meaningful part of the answer came in the ride from the airport to the hotel. It cut through two Samarkands.
Once again, as in Tashkent, there was an old and a new part of town. The old Samarkand, the original capital of Tamerlane’s empire, looked tired and tattered at first glance, but it was obviously being primed to attract tourists, many of its historic landmarks being renovated. Meanwhile, the new Samarkand reflected both the Russian and Soviet styles of architecture and political control. The first Russian military units arrived in 1868, the vanguard of an imperialist drive through central Asia. The communists arrived in 1917, determined to retain czarist control over the entire region. If that meant slaughtering tens of thousands of Uzbeks and Tajiks in the process, then so be it.
My hotel was in the new Samarkand, and my Intourist guide was a trained archeologist. He made no effort to propagandize me; quite the contrary, he seemed happy to show the historic wonders of old and new Samarkand to a visiting American.
Old, first. Among the many architectural wonders was an ancient observatory constructed under Ulugh Beg’s direction in the fourteenth century. Ulugh Beg was Timur’s grandson. More than anyone else he was the loyal warrior who built on his grandfather’s vision of an extraordinary capital. The observatory sat on a hill overlooking the city. The top two-thirds had disintegrated with neglect over the centuries, but the bottom third survived, thanks to recent excavations by Russian archeologists. Now a huge ring of restored instrumentation could be seen running around the lower base, no longer capable of being used to read the stars, as long ago it had, but a remarkable reminder nonetheless of the exceptional scientific achievement of an earlier age.