It is in the consciousness of the colonizer that hell has stirred, an internal hell. His unclean conscience — hitherto concealed and in a thousand ways lulled to sleep, and often simply not very clearly or fully understood — has awoken and risen to the surface. This unclean conscience need not affect every individual in the crowd of colonizers. Many of these people feel — and are — completely innocent. But they, too, are the victims of a situation that they themselves have helped to create, namely, the colonial situation, whose essence is a principle of asymmetry, the subordination of the colonized man to the colonizer. The paradox lies in the fact that even if I do not want to be a colonizer, and have even protested against colonialism, I am a colonizer by the mere fact of membership in the nation that colonizes others. Only at the price of renouncing my own country and nation, and perhaps at the price of changing my skin color (a theoretical proposition), could I rid myself of this taint, this odium. But because these are impossible choices, the scene at the airports is crowded and edgy: a dozen or so years ago at the airport in Luanda, and now, in 1990, at the airport in Baku.
But who are you fleeing from? Is it not from yourselves?
And yet a difference exists between a Portuguese or a Frenchman leaving Africa and a Russian who must depart from sunny Baku or beautiful art nouveau Riga and return to gloomy, piercingly cold Norilsk or depressingly dirty and smoky Chelyabinsk. They do not want to leave? I am not surprised! To save themselves, they set up in their former colonies various unions and parties whose slogan is “Stay put. Do not move an inch!” The Russian from 117 Pouchin Street is rather an exception, and that is because she finds herself in a position of great luxury — she has a family with an apartment, and in Moscow no less!
BAKU: I like this town. It is built for people, not against people (yes, there are cities built against people). One can walk here for days on end. Baku has beautiful boulevards, several streets of magnificent art nouveau architecture, which was transplanted here by the king of oil, Mr. Alfred Nobel. Actually, one can see every conceivable style. By the main boulevard rise several bright, luxurious, and large apartment buildings — houses that the ruler of Azerbaijan, Geidar Aliyev, constructed for his camarilla. Aliyev was first the head of the Azerbaijani KGB, later, in the seventies, the Republic’s first secretary of the Communist Party. He was a pupil of Brezhnev’s, who nominated him to be vice-premier of the USSR. Gorbachev removed him from this post in 1987. Aliyev was one of Brezhnev’s people — a group characterized by a high degree of corruption, a taste for Oriental sumptuousness, all manner of depravity. There was not a shadow of restraint in their practice of corruption; on the contrary, it was a defiant, provocative ostentation. This colony of apartment blocks, constructed in the most important, most representative location in the city, affords a perfect example. Aliyev distributed all the apartments according to lists he himself drew up — he also personally handed the keys to the chosen. The criterion of allocation was simple — his closest family received the best apartments, after them came cousins and the higher personages of his clan. In these lands, tribal ties remain the most important, just as they were several thousand years ago.
I was in one of those apartments. Its resident, my host, worked in the local Parliament, but more important he was Aliyev’s cousin. Now this man, whose official earnings amounted to a pittance, had arranged along the walls entire batteries of electronic equipment, television sets, copiers, amplifiers, speakers, lights, God knows what. But even if he were making millions of rubles, he could not buy such things in a shop, because shops do not have them. The table was set with all kinds of food, sweetmeats, dates, nuts. My host fretted and fumed the most about Sakharov. “Sakharov? What do we need Sakharov for? He has an Armenian wife!” But aside from this one problem (meaning, aside from Sakharov) all was well. He treated me to cheese from Holland, to shrimp from the Bahamas. He sat contentedly surrounded by his family. The electronic equipment twinkled at him from all directions with colorful little eyes.
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THE NEXT DAY, a conversation with Professor Ayudin Mirsalinoglu Mamedov. Curious, wise, and joyful, because just now, for the first time since 1917, permission had been granted to establish a Turkic cultural society. For years the professor had been editing a periodical dedicated to Turkic. Not everyone knows that the Turkish language is the second most dominant language of the Imperium. About sixty million people speak it. An Azerbaijani can communicate not only in Ankara, but also in Tashkent and Yakutsk. His Turkish-speaking brethren live everywhere. In a certain sense, the former USSR is a Slavic-Turkish superpower. Solzhenitsyn’s idea was to get rid of the Turkish element so that only a Slavic superpower would remain.
Azerbaijanis have been so called only since 1937. Before, they had “Turk” written into their identity cards. Now they regard themselves as Azerbaijanis, Turks, and Muslims.
Communism, says Mamedov, wrought the greatest destruction upon people’s consciousness. People do not want to work well and live well. They want to work badly and live badly. And there’s the whole truth for you.
Let us consider the universities. Four years of studying dialectical materialism, four years of cramming the history of the CPSU, four years of academically plumbing communism — and everything turned out to be a lie!
After seventy-three years of bolshevism, people do not know what freedom of thought is, and so in its place they practice freedom of action. And here freedom of action means freedom to kill. And there’s perestroika for you, the new thinking.
How was communism built? Communism was built by Stalin with the help of the bezprizorny, the millions of orphaned, hungry, and barefoot children who wandered along Russia’s roads. They stole what they could. Stalin locked them up in boarding schools. There they learned hatred, and when they grew up, they were dressed in the uniforms of the NKVD. The NKVD held the nation in the grip of a bestial fear. And there’s communism for you.
What is Stalin’s chessboard? He so resettled nations, so mixed them up and displaced them, that now one cannot move anyone without also moving someone else, without doing him injury. There are currently thirty-six border conflicts, and perhaps even more. And there’s Stalin’s chessboard for you, our greatest misfortune.
A LITTLE RESTAURANT in the center of Baku. Turkish? Iranian? Arab? Azerbaijani? In this part of the world, all these little places resemble one another. A small, detached room. Shish kebab, rice, tomatoes, and lemonade. Dinner with the leader of the Azerbaijani National Front, the writer Yusif Samedoglu. He is trying to navigate between the dictatorship of the local political bosses and the Islamic fundamentalists. But these are difficult times for liberals, for people of the center, for those who would like to reach out and hug everyone. I know what he will tell me about the situation in Baku, so I do not ask him about that; I ask him instead whether he is writing anything. He shakes his head, a resigned no. And anyway—how should he write? He always wrote in the Cyrillic alphabet, and now they are going to abolish Cyrillic. They will use only the Latin alphabet, as in Turkey, or will go back to the Arabic, nobody knows which. And what about the books that he wrote in Cyrillic? Translate them into other alphabets? Who is going to do this? Is it worth it? A writer in the prime of his life is left empty-handed, with work that will be illegible.
FOR THE FIRST time in my life I flew on a plane that was as crowded as a city bus at rush hour. At the airport in Baku, an enraged crowd, ready for anything, stormed into the cabin and would not even consider stepping down. The captain shouted, threatened, and cursed — it didn’t help. People stood pressed together in the passageways, deaf to what was being said to them. In the end the captain waved his hand, shut the door to the cockpit, started the engines, and took off.