Rogues and peasant slaves

Philip Glazebrook

RED ODYSSEY: A JOURNEY THROUGH THE SOVIET REPUBLICS by Marat Akchurin Seeker, £17.99, pp. 430 his spirited, startling book will be of the keenest interest to anyone who wants to form a picture of the interior condition of the former Soviet Union drawn from the observations of an articulate Tashkent Tartar — a writer and evidently a man of education and experience — on his travels through the collapsing 'evil empire'. Curiosity, and the resentment of an intelligent citizen who finds that he has been duped all his life by his own govern- ment, provided Marat Akchurin with the impetus for the difficult and dangerous Journey by road from Moscow to Samarkand, and on through the Muslim republics of Central Asia to Baku. His book brims with anger at the state to which the whole structure of his motherland has been reduced, and boils over with contempt for what the citizens of the ex- Soviet Union have allowed themselves to become — for their Asiatic submissiveness to despotic rule as much as for their brutal- ity and violence. On a crowded bus

everyone felt threatened by the others and hated them, a characteristic of our whole society

and he describes how an old woman in the metro spits and curses because a foreigner whose eye she caught had smiled at her: these horrible manifestations of social misery he ascribes to the fear and animosi- ty engendered by Communism, and he con- trasts them with his belief that in the West the conditioned response to eye-contact with a stranger is to smile. Right or wrong about this smiling West (which he has visit- ed several times in rose-tinted spectacles), he is accurate about the disagreeableness which is a Russian crowd's natural posture — an observation which, like many another knouting which he hands out to his countrymen in this book, the foreigner in Russia shrinks from expressing for fear of appearing xenophobic.

The wretchedness of life in a Soviet Union about to disintegrate — Akchurin set out from Moscow in May 1990 — can be inferred from the provisioning needed for a car journey outside the capital: food, all the spare parts that influence can acquire, a fuel tank enlarged to be capable of 900 miles between refills, and the com- pany of a mechanic who, as well as repair- ing the damage inflicted by unmade roads, knows how to slide his hand into his pocket to show anyone who stops the car that he carries a gun or a knife. Unpaved roads and armed robbery between Alctyubinsk and Aralsk create what he calls a 'Bermuda Triangle' into which numerous travellers have vanished. Of course there are no maps, no accurate road signs, and nowhere to eat or sleep unless you have blat (influence) in the towns en route. The pleasures of motoring in the Soviet Union came back to me on every page. The moment the car leaves Moscow Akchurin and his companion have embarked on the navigation of a wasteland infested by gangsters, whose constant hostile presence creates the book's atmosphere of violence and fear. Having politely disbelieved such warnings from Russian friends in Moscow, I was travelling by car in Central Asia myself at the period the book describes. On its evidence I was lucky that only a single attempt was made to murder me.

The presence of gangsters, and the threat of attack, is put boldly onto the page by Akchurin's blow-by-blow accounts of the several fights he tells us he got into. All of these he is able to win, like Dick Barton, with a few mighty buffets against huge odds, though a sceptic might be surprised at his never again mentioning a finger broken in one of these dust-ups. However, such dramatic scenes work in the book as a way of bringing to life the statistics of vio- lence: and the statistics of Russian crime, the millions dead, the millions persecuted, tend to have for the reader, without such a personal focus, the deadening effect of a snowfall on the vasty steppe.

The rule of violence, like all else he con- demns in the ex-Soviet Union, Akchurin 'Ho/ Ho! Ho! and Season's Greetings! I'm sorry I'm away from the phone just now . . . ' blames entirely on the Communist regime of the last 70 years. Never mind that Captain Cochrane, setting out from St Petersburg on his Pedestrian Journey in 1824, was attacked and robbed of every possession before he had passed the ninth milestone; never mind that Count Pahlen's Mission to Tashkent in 1908 uncovered corruption and criminality in the Tsarist government of Central Asia which surpassed even Rashidov's misrule of modern Uzbekistan: it is against the tyranny of Lenin and his successors only that this book is directed, and the almost identical oppressions under which Russia has always suffered, imposed by some auto- crat or other and his secret police, are not here discussed. It is understandable. Anger at Marxist manipulation of their own education leads the present generation in Russia to swallow as truth all anti-Commu- nist propaganda. No use telling a post-pere- stroika Uzbeg that the Aral Sea was already in 1910 (according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica) 'drying up with astonishing rapidity': it is Moscow Communists, and they alone, who have caused seas to shrink and crops to wither.

Herzen, like many another 19th-century liberal, took just the same line in attribut- ing all ills to a present tyranny; and it is this unaltered aussianness' in Akchurin's book which is one of its most satisfactory facets, making it a natural shelf-neighbour to all those works (of the Decembrists, say) which record the Russians' outcry against the eternal misgovernment of Russia. It is a great literary tradition. Musing on the shores of Lake Issyk Kul (as yet unshrunk by Marxism), Akchurin ponders his

sad reflections on the unfortunate destiny of my motherland and murky forebodings about my own fate,

whilst in a chaihana elsewhere in the wastes of Asia

Dobrynin and I were at it again, deep in con- versation, trying to unravel the mystery of the Russian soul.

Where else could he be but in a Russian book? Written apparently in English (no translator is credited), the language retains its strong and delightful exotic flavour, the adverbs splashing colour about the page and apposite similes summoning up a scene viewed through Tartar eyes, telling us for instance of the Bukharian Jews at Sheremetyevo airport who

carefully bore their grandmother on a baggage-cart, as if she were an old fig-tree in a large earthenware pot

to be transplanted to the soil of Israel. It is strikingly apt. And how beautifully — how unlike a Western writer — Akchurin parts with his reader:

But matters await you in your own country, and I remain on my Red Odyssey forever ...

With this the Flying Dutchman vanishes, having given the reader a graphic and unforgettable voyage.