But there is no denying the fact that the basis of Samarkand’s fame was born at the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and hence during Timur’s reign. Timur is an astonishing historical phenomenon. His name aroused terror for decades. He was a great ruler who kept Asia under his heel, but his might did not stop him from concerning himself with details. Timur devoted much attention to details. His armies were famed for their cruelty. Wherever Timur appeared, writes the Arab historian Zaid Vosifi, “blood poured from people as from vessels,” and “the sky was the color of a field of tulips.” Timur himself would stand at the head of each and every expedition, overseeing everything himself. Those whom he conquered he ordered beheaded. He ordered towers built from their skulls, and walls and roads. He supervised the progress of the work himself. He ordered the stomachs of merchants ripped open and searched for gold. He himself supervised the process to ensure they were being searched diligently. He ordered his adversaries and opponents poisoned. He prepared the potions himself. He carried the standard of death, and this mission absorbed him for half the day. During the second half of the day, art absorbed him. Timur devoted himself to the dissemination of art with the same zeal he sustained for the spread of death. In Timur’s consciousness, an extremely narrow line separated art and death, and it is precisely this fact that Papworth cannot comprehend. It is true that Timur killed. But it is also true that he did not kill all. He spared people with creative qualifications. In Timur’s Imperium, the best sanctuary was talent. Timur drew talent to Samarkand; he courted every artist. He did not allow anyone who carried within him the divine spark to be touched. Artists bloomed, and Samarkand bloomed. The city was his pride. On one of its gates Timur ordered inscribed the sentence: IF YOU DOUBT OUR MIGHT — LOOK AT OUR BUILDINGS! and that sentence has oudived Timur by many centuries. Today Samarkand still stuns us with its peerless beauty, its excellence of form, its artistic genius. Timur supervised each construction himself. That which was unsuccessful he ordered removed, and his taste was excellent. He deliberated about the various alternatives in ornamentation; he judged the delicacy of design, the purity of line. And then he threw himself again into the whirl of a new military expedition, into carnage, into blood, into flames, into cries.
Papworth does not understand that Timur was playing a game that few people have the means to play. Timur was sounding the limits of man’s possibilities. Timur demonstrated that which Dostoyevsky later described — that man is capable of everything. One can define Timur’s creation through a sentence of Saint-Exupéry’s: “That which I have done no animal would ever do.” Both the good and the bad. Timur’s scissors had two blades — the blade of creation and the blade of destruction. These two blades define the limits of every man’s activity. Ordinarily, though, the scissors are barely open. Sometimes they are open a little more. In Timur’s case they were open as far as they could go.
Erkin showed me Timur’s grave in Samarkand, made of green nephrite. Before the entrance to the mausoleum there is an inscription, whose author is Timur: HAPPY IS HE WHO RENOUNCED THE WORLD BEFORE THE WORLD RENOUNCED HIM.
He died at the age of sixty-nine, in 1405, during an expedition to China.
FROM A BIRD’S-EYE VIEW 1989–1991
THE THIRD ROME
WHEN IN THE FALL of 1989 I began the cycle of my travels over the territories of the Imperium, my contacts with this power, although sporadic and individually brief, already had their long history. I thought that they would now be of great help to me. I was mistaken. This last series of journeys was for me a great revelation for two reasons. First, I had never taken a close interest in this country; I was not a specialist; I was not a Russicist, a Sovietologist, Kremlinologist, and so on. The Third World absorbed me, the colorful continents of Asia, Africa, and Latin America — it was to these that I had almost exclusively devoted myself. My actual familiarity with the Imperium was therefore negligible, haphazard, superficial. Second, as the epoch of Stalin and Brezhnev recedes more and more, our knowledge about this system and country grows geometrically. Not only does each year and each month bring new materials and information, but each week and each day! Someone newly interested in communism as an ideology and in the Imperium as its worldly political incarnation might not realize that ninety percent, if not more, of the materials now available to him had still not seen the light of day just a few years ago!
Just as Columbus lived in the epoch of great geographic discoveries, when every sailing expedition altered the picture of the world, so we live today in the epoch of great political discoveries in which ever newer and newer revelations continuously change the picture of our contemporaneity.
IN THE SPRING of 1989, reading the news arriving from Moscow, I thought: It would be worth going there. It was a time when everyone felt a sense of curiosity about and anticipation of something extraordinary. It seemed then, at the end of the eighties, that the world was entering a period of great metamorphosis, of a transformation so profound and fundamental that it would not bypass anyone, no country or state, and so certainly not the last imperium on earth — the Soviet Union.
A climate conducive to democracy and freedom prevailed increasingly across the world. On every continent, dictatorships fell one after the other: Obote’s in Uganda, Marcos’s in the Philippines, Pinochet’s in Chile. In Latin America, despotic military regimes lost power in favor of more moderate civilian ones, and in Africa the one-party systems that had been nearly ubiquitous (and as a rule grotesque and thoroughly corrupt) were disintegrating and exiting the political stage.
Against this new and promising global panorama the Stalinist-Brezhnevian system of the USSR looked more and more anachronistic, like a decaying and ineffectual relic. But it was an anachronism with a still-powerful and dangerous force. The crisis that the Imperium was undergoing was followed throughout the world with attention, but with anxious attention — everyone was aware that this was a power equipped with weapons of mass destruction that could blow up our planet. Yet the possibility of this gloomy and alarming scenario nevertheless did not mask the satisfaction and universal relief that communism was ending and that there was in this fact some sort of irreversible finality.
Germans say Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times. It is a fascinating moment, fraught with promise, when this spirit of the times, dozing pitifully and apathetically, like a huge wet bird on a branch, suddenly and without a clear reason (or at any rate without a reason allowing of an entirely rational explanation) unexpectedly takes off in bold and joyful flight. We all hear the shush of this flight. It stirs our imagination and gives us energy: we begin to act.
IF I COULD — I am planning in the year 1989—I would like to traverse the entire Soviet Union, its fifteen federal republics. (I am not thinking, however, of making my way to all the forty-four republics, districts, and autonomous regions, for I would simply not live long enough to do that.) The most far-flung points of my itinerary would be:
In the west — Brest (the border with Poland)
In the east — the Pacific (Vladivostok, Kamchatka, or Magadan)
In the north — Vorkuta or Inovaya Zemlya