Registan.net

This is a story about the genocide of the Kazakh people, organized or accidental, that happened as a result of the collectivization of the Soviet Union in the 1930s. What makes it so powerful and engaging is that it is an honest, straightforward first-person account, told in unflinching detail by a man in his 80s remembering the world he saw through 9-year-old eyes. I have a lot to say about this work, good and bad. Let me start with the good points.

The tale is told by Mukhamet Shayakhmetov. It was written or dictated by him and published in Kazakhstan in 2002 in Russian under the title of Судьба [Sud’ba - Fate or Destiny]. I have no idea whether a Kazakh-language version exists. It was subsequently translated by Jan Butler, with an introduction by Tom Stacey and some very nice recommendations on the back from Robert Conquest. That alone will tell those familiar with studies of Stalin’s Great Terrors and Purges that this book’s target audience is those seeking information about the great loss of life in Kazakhstan under Stalin’s rule. I am unaware and unhopeful regarding whether or not Mr. Shayakhkmet is alive or aware of the English language publication of his memoir. Whatever the political use it will be put to, it’s a harrowing tale in three parts: Class Enemy, Famine, and War.

Young Mukhamet begins the story with a very idyllic depiction of Kazakh traditions as they were practiced before his own youth. According to him, these traditions largely died out in the space of his own lifetime, and their loss paints the entire work with an indelible mark of sadness and loss. Even as millions starve around him, the reader is often made to focus more on the loss of traditions and expected cultural duties than on the genocidal crimes of the Soviet plans for modernization-at-all-costs.

Especially powerful is the chapter, early in the book, that gives the book its title. 9-year-old Mukhamet must deliver a small store of grain to a mill 30 kilometers away across the lonely steppe. His family has been brought low by the arbitrary decision that his father was a kulak, a wealthy peasant, and thus a class enemy. Everything the family owned, from livestock to furniture to their spare clothing and rugs, was confiscated over a period of time by random searches from government “officials” who neither explained their actions nor seemed to be held accountable to anyone. Mukhamet doesn’t waste too much of his breathe explaining the futility of the family’s defensive arguments, or on the fact that while his family was comfortable, they were far from wealthy when compared with other families. This decision taints the entire family, and keeps Mukhamet from attending school for several years, as even the children of kulaks were discriminated against.

And so the young Mukhamet is entrusted with a bag of grain to be turned into flour for making their daily bread. His father has been sent to prison, his younger siblings need the attention of their mother, and Mukhamet must wear his father’s responsibility at such a tender moment of youth that his load of grain is tied to the saddle of a borrowed horse. Should the load fall off, the boy will be unable to lift it back up, so his mother tells him that he must take his time and only walk his horse across the steppe to the mill. It’s a path he knows well, but this trip is unlike others he has made before.

This time he goes alone, and the valley he crosses he has only known in the past to be filled with an aul, a seasonal encampment of the nomadic Kazakhs filling the lush valley with their yurts and various animals: camels, horses, cows, and sheep. This same steppe valley has been made silent [a la the title of the book] and desolate by the complete confiscation of all livestock into collective farms, forcing the nomads into a pauper’s existence, except for the lucky few that become the toadies of the Soviet government. Over the course of the memoir, these people go from being labeled as disrespected activists to the all-powerful government authorities responsible for every kindness that can be given. My main problem is that Mukhamet and his countrymen don’t understand that this same hand that feeds them is the hand that took away their ability to feed themselves. They really seemed to believe the propaganda that they were unworthy of ruling themselves or achieving success without their Russian big brothers.

My complaints about this book aren’t so strong, but they seem worth mentioning if only because every review I’ve read is so glowingly given. First, there is the fact that translation is both overtly British-Russian [over use of strained cliché idioms like ‘high time’ and vocabulary like ‘draught animals’ and ‘osiers’) and badly in need of an editor: spelling mistakes, repeated words, and dropped words that you generally forgive for happening once are quite common. The English at times sounds strange, and much more Russian/Soviet than the English translations of Aitmatov’s work. Despite the fact that the author references the beginning of the 21st century many times, it sounds like this work was translated in 1977.

Mukhamet is just an average man who lived a long, eventful life, trying to put his extraordinary experiences on paper for “his grandchildren.” His account isn’t scientific or even totally factual - he admits himself to forgetting names, and most events are shrouded by the passage of more than 70 years. And even those records of his experiences in World War II seem to say more about the success of Soviet propaganda on his view of the world than what he actually witnessed. He referred to the “great Soviet victory over Japan” in 1939 at Lake Hasan and at the River Halki-gol, and I had no idea what he was talking about until I turned to Wikipedia and looked it up. Turns out that a border conflict flared up between Japanese controlled Manchuria and the Soviet Union, with a skirmish at Lake Khasan and a major battle at Khalkin Gol. The outcome wasn’t a one-sided victory for either side, only proof to the Japanese that the USSR wasn’t going to cede their Far Eastern territory north of Korea so easily, which in turn inspired the Japanese military to turn to Southeast Asia for their resources instead of Siberia. The Soviets declared a major victory, claiming 60,000 Japanese dead and 3,000 captured. The Japanese claimed 8,000 dead, as the size of their entire force was only 60,000. The Soviets also claim 8,000 dead, most falling prey to Japan’s superior air power, whereas the Soviets held the Japanese at bay with superior artillery and heavy tanks.

Mukhamet also glosses over the Winter War in Finland and the invasion of Poland, and gleefully attempts to join the Red Army on several occasions, eager to give his life for the Fatherland that has declared him a class enemy, inadvertently killed his father, sisters, uncles, aunts, and over a million of his Kazakh brethren. When I read this book, I was hoping to hear something that would explain the logical and emotional disconnect that allows a young man to grieve for his father’s and sister’s death and then gladly sign up in defense of the country that instituted their arbitrary murder by starvation, sickness, and enforced famine. The facts eluded me, but it seems that he just didn’t seem to equate the actions of his local government with the demands of the central government.

This book was remarkable, and I read it very quickly. There were light moments that actually made me laugh, and several times when I actually felt a slight pang of hunger, hearing of the various accounts of privation throughout the 30s and during the Great War. But on the whole, this book has raised more questions than it answered.

Why does Mukhamet think that his family’s traditions were so purely Kazakh before the collectivization? They were already using Russian endings for names in his childhood [his surname is his father’s name with the Russian -ov ending], and various factory made goods are actually referenced in the tales of his idyllic nomadic youth, anachronisms unavailable before Russian incursions under the tsars. He speaks of music and singing as being part of the Kazakh traditions, but when they are together in company with singing and dancing Russians, he mentions his elders speaking disdainfully of them, that they sing like sheep in the fields and waste their time. Family and hospitality are paramount, but the first Soviet evils done against his family he admits as coming within his own aul, meaning that it must have been distant family members that denounced his non-kulak father and uncles as kulaks. In short, a lot of this story doesn’t really add up for me. It seems that Mr. Shayakhmetov lived too long under the system that destroyed his family to really lay into the Soviet Union for its travesties. He lists in terrible details everything that happened, but can’t seem to bring himself to lay blame on anything but the Russian title of the book: Fate. And that is what confuses me the most.

In the midst of one of the many relocation camps of temporary shacks his family moved to during their years of homeless wandering and slow starvation, he is moved to describe with emotional gratitude the kindness the Soviets showed in building a communal bathhouse in their prison camp. Seems like small comfort when you consider that their are building you something that they themselves have taken away from you. Then again, you can only bite the hand that feeds you so much, even if it’s the hand that stopped you from feeding yourself.

Also, I think that this book may be a sign of some people’s complacency with Kazakhstan’s re-writing of their own history. The publisher, Tom Stacey [i mentioned he wrote the Introduction], has recently made one of Nursultan Nazarbayev’s own books available in English. Mr. Foust, feel free to beat me to that one — I don’t think I could stomach reviewing {albeit ghostwritten} work by an authoritarian dictator of an oligarchy [so posh, though], no matter how successful or kind he looks in comparison with his neighbors. Quick aside - this is yet another book where the American version gains a subtitle, a new font for its title page, and a new design for its cover from its British original. Marketing experts need jobs, too!

Next week, it’s either going to be Colin Thurbon’s Shadow of the Silk Road, Robert Cooper’s Breaking of Nations, or the more laid-back and enjoyable fiction of the Adventures of Amir Hamza, from traditional Persian/Islamic sources. I think you know which to expect.

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