During my stay in Samarkand I had no trouble with my Intourist guides. While not friendly, they were all helpful. I told them that I would like to visit the Pushkin Library, the Uzbek State University, and the Friedrich Engels Cotton Collective Farm. For what reason, they asked. “I’m interested in Timur and the people of central Asia,” I answered. Whether they believed me or, more likely, suspected me of some hidden but surely nefarious scheme, I had no way of knowing. But they arranged the visits, as requested, and I was grateful.
The Pushkin Library was actually the one-story home of a former czarist governor of central Asia. It consisted of five rooms, one large, the others small, but all filled with dusty books that looked as if they had not been opened for many years. The garden in the back was crowded with Uzbeks and Tajiks, many catching forty winks on rugs stretched out in the shade of a big tree. A few were actually reading. One was tickling a girl’s feet as she pretended to sleep.
The director, a Russian woman, asked, “Why are you interested in Timur?”
“Because,” I answered, “he was a great man.” For the director of the Pushkin Library in Samarkand, it was the perfect response. What could she say? Off she went to find a book or two, while I deliberately loitered in the garden, hoping my presence, that of a very tall foreigner, would attract attention. And it did. Slowly, a dozen or so teenage girls began to gather around me. They were short, thin, and very pretty. They wore brightly colored skirts, blouses, and kerchiefs, and their hair was in long braids trailing down their backs. Once they learned that I was an American, they bubbled with questions, their curiosity over the top. They wanted to know about everything from Eisenhower to Harvard.
“Can we take a picture of you?” they asked.
“Yes,” I said, “and may I take pictures of you?”
Yes, indeed.
“If you send me a copy of this picture,” one youngster said, “I shall treasure it all my life. I love Americans.”
The director returned with two old books and many apologies. There were no other books on Timur in the city where he was buried. I was puzzled. She tried to explain. “These days, one finds out all about central Asia in Moscow,” she said. “Go to the Lenin Library. There are many books on Timur there.”
“Isn’t it strange,” I remarked, “that there are so few books on Timur in Samarkand’s major library?”
She seemed embarrassed, yet held to the safe party line. “No, not at all. All information about central Asia’s past is in Moscow. Years ago, all of this material was removed from Samarkand. Our best students now study Uzbek history in Moscow.”
I was late for my appointment at Uzbek State University. My Intourist guide had mysteriously vanished, and one of the teenage girls, seeing my predicament, raised her hand. “Do you know where the university is?” she asked.
“No, but I’ll find it.”
“No, I shall escort you there. May I?”
“Please, I’d be delighted.”
We set off down the street and took a short cut, as she put it. I saw an old, fenced-in brownstone building. It instantly sparked a memory. I had seen it before, in the painting of the fortress where the Russians had killed so many Uzbeks in 1888. My teenage guide said, “It’s now an MVD base.”
“I know the history of that building,” I said softly.
“We all know the history of that building,” she responded, even more softly. I had a feeling she had deliberately taken this “short cut” so she could show me the infamous building. And having showed it to me, she vanished.
Uzbek State University was located on Maxim Gorky Boulevard, which was broad, leafy, and very attractive. The university, which had recently celebrated its twenty-eighth birthday, looked older than that. An Intourist guide, all smiles, greeted me with an invitation to see the rector, who, he explained, had taken time from his busy schedule to welcome me.
I expressed my gratitude but added, “I do not want to be an imposition. I’d be happy just to wander around and meet with students.” But that was precisely what they did not want me to do.
“No,” he repeated firmly, “the rector has taken time from his busy schedule to welcome you.” I again expressed my gratitude.
The rector’s office was surprisingly plush. His desk was large, the rugs were thick, and on the wall behind his desk were two immense photos, one of Lenin and the other of Stalin. Sitting on a hard-back chair, the rector, a short, trim man wearing a white tunic and trousers, resembled the caricature of an Asian despot trying desperately to exude an image of authority. But when he spoke, I could hear an accent in his Russian, and I knew immediately that his authority had to be limited. As in many institutions in central Asia, he was the ethnic front man for the inevitable Russian deputy who made the important decisions.
His assistant, a young Uzbek, placed a tray of tea, cookies, and candies on a table near the rector’s desk. Everything was to follow proper protocol. The rector explained that there were 4,000 full-time students at the university and another 3,000 who were part-time and attended evening classes. All courses were taught in the Uzbek language. A thorough knowledge of the Russian language was required. If a student could not read, write, and speak Russian fluently, he or she would not be accepted at the university. Courses in dialectical materialism and communist ideology were mandatory. Most interesting to me was the rector’s explanation of how Uzbek history was taught. It was never taught as an independent subject, standing on its own. Rather, it was always taught as an integral part of pre- and postrevolutionary Soviet history. Likewise with Uzbek culture and language, which were always submerged in a greater Russian culture. As I noted later in my diary, this pedagogical approach was an “attempt to smother the dignity and value of independent Uzbek studies and to mold—at the risk of rewriting—Uzbek history into the totality of Soviet history, regarding everything prerevolutionary as ‘regressive’ in a Marxist sense and everything postrevolutionary as ‘progressive,’ in this same sense—thereby inflicting upon every student the impression that he is involved in the wave of the future, having freed himself absolutely from the shackles of the past.”
I raised the subject of a linguistics conference that had just been concluded in Tashkent. It focused on how to teach the Russian language more effectively in schools with non-Russian students, such as those in central Asia. I asked the rector whether this issue posed a problem at his university. It was obviously a sore point, because he abruptly switched topics to biology, which was his field of study. I insisted on an answer, and he obliged reluctantly. There was no need to study this subject at his university, he said as though on automatic pilot, reciting a line from a political fairy tale, because there were “indissoluble bonds” linking Uzbekistan to the Soviet Union. The Tashkent conference was simply addressing the problem of pronunciation. Apparently Russian was difficult for Uzbeks and Tajiks, because it contained sounds not found in their own language.
“Is it not possible,” I asked “that the Uzbeks and the Tajiks were actually resisting the imposition of the Russian language?”
“Absolutely not,” the rector answered.
Gently I changed the subject to one he was certain to find equally problematic. Khrushchev had insisted on destroying Stalin’s personality cult (at that very moment Stalin’s face was staring down on us), raising Lenin’s ideological profile and focusing more on technical courses than on the humanities. “What has been the impact of the 20th Party Congress on the university’s curriculum?” I asked.