But that is precisely what had happened now. Turning on their faucets, people saw a rust-colored, opaque substance dripping from them and smelled their apartments filling up with an atrocious odor. Phenol! Phenol! It spread from house to house, from street to street.
Still, there was no visible panic. People here accept all misfortunes, even those caused by the soullessness and stupidity of those in power, as the excesses of an omnipotent and capricious nature, on the order of floods, earthquakes, or exceptionally cold winters. The thoughtlessness or brutality of the authorities is just one of the cataclysms that nature so liberally dispenses. One must understand this; one must resign oneself to it.
IN THE STREETS, in the squares, stood kilometer-long lines. These were strange lines, for they were not fastened at one end to any one store or institution. People were waiting in expectation of the arrival of cisterns, which were supposed to bring water. From where this water was to come, when, and how much of it, no one knew.
The lines were quiet and orderly. Pregnant women stood at the front. A certain hierarchy obtained among them — priority was given to those whose bulging stomachs were the most pronounced. The next sector consisted of women with small children. Behind them stood women who were alone. (Among them the elderly had priority.) After that the male section began — without any marked divisions or preferences.
When the cistern arrived, everyone could take as much water as he wanted. But for how long could it last? A day? Two? And the question to which no one had the answer — what next? In this country, the press, radio, and television abound in stories that begin and have no end. Battles erupt in Fergana: there are dead and wounded; the city is in flames. But the following day Fergana disappears from the field of vision — one cannot find out what is going on there. A strike in Kuzbas! Quite an event, for this is a huge coal basin. The strike erupted two years ago. What happened after that? Has it ended? Is it still going on?
ROAMING AROUND the streets of Ufa, I happened upon a museum. I knew that I was in the land of the Bashkirs, but what does this mean today — to be a Bashkir? Dr. Rim Yanguzin is showing me what he had recently found in the nearby mountains, in the ruins of old settlements, along the riverbanks. Here is a Bashkir sword, here a Bashkir necklace, and that is a clay jug for water and milk. And a boat, on which Bashkirs sailed in the seventeenth century, and an ornate harness, which their horses wore. I can also inspect a wooden plow with an iron blade, a rotting beehive, and some old snares for wild game.
All these things were made by Bashkirs, says Dr. Yanguzin, with pride resounding in his voice. Later we sit in his office, which is full of Bashkir fabrics (each tribe, and there were thirty-one of them, had its own design), Bashkir coins and rings, swords and sickles. Through the window one can see the street, the line for water, and in the background, far away, the tall chimneys of factories. And listening to Dr. Yanguzin, who is speaking with emotion about the lost paradise of Bashkiria, I can already see clearly that the reality of this city has two levels, increasingly in conflict.
On one level is chemistry, synthetic and organic, phenol and explosives. The masters of this world are Russians, and it is governed by a ministry in Moscow.
The second level is occupied by the nascent (or, more precisely, renascent) national consciousness of the Bashkirs.
A nationalistic revolution is sweeping the world today. We will sail into the twenty-first century upon its waves. But already at this moment its echoes are reaching Bashkiria and are stirring sensitive and ambitious hearts there.
There are around a million Bashkirs. What sort of place are they to occupy, what sort of posture are they to adopt in the contemporary world? Are they to acknowledge that after three hundred years of Russification, they are no longer Bashkirs? That is impossible! No amount of terror, of persecution and camps, could extirpate from the Bashkirs their Bashkirianness. Russification is itself in retreat, increasingly fewer little Bashkirs want to learn Russian. So then what, reinvigorate one’s distinctness, one’s nationalist sentiment? But very serious consequences will result from this! For if such a liberated, thinking Bashkir, cognizant of his national interest, takes a look around, what will he see, what will he find?
He will find first of all that only half of the territories of historic Bashkiria, which, in his opinion, stretched from the Volga to the Urals, are within the borders of the present autonomous republic. Part of the old Bashkiria belongs today to Kazakhstan, part to Tatarstan, and part to the Russian Federation (of which even the present Bashkir Republic is a part). If a cognizant Bashkir utters all this out loud, he will immediately have three enemies — Tatars, Kazakhs, and Russians. Nationalism cannot exist in a conflict-free condition; it cannot exist as a thing devoid of grudges and claims. Wherever the nationalism of one group rears its head, immediately, as if from beneath the ground, this group’s enemies will spring up.
At the same time, our cognizant Bashkir, as he takes his look around, will find that his beautiful green country has been transformed into an enormous factory floor whose effluvia are poisoning the air. Reflecting upon this turn of events, he will remember that nobody asked him whether he agreed to have his country transformed into a chemical factory. Moreover — the Bashkir will realize that he derives no benefits from this gigantic and ever-so-harmful chemical production, for the Imperium pays nothing to its internal colonies. Ah, there it is — for he will quickly realize the colonial position of his Bashkiria, the fact that the Agrochima and Chimstroy so deeply entrenched here remind him a little of the Union Minière in Katanga (present-day Shaba, in Zaire) or Miferma in Mauritania.
Nevertheless, having arrived at these subversive and revolutionary conclusions, what is the Bashkir to do then? Like Gulliver, he awakens only to discover that he is so tightly entangled in a thousand threads that he cannot execute a single motion. What should he do? Demand the closing down of the factories? But nearly half of the chemical production of the entire Imperium is located here! Get on a horse and move to the mountains? And what would he do there, how would he live?
The consciousness of the cognizant Bashkir is divided, rife with contradictions. The thirst for independence is growing in him, and he doesn’t see the way to quench it. He is certain that he is sitting on a sack of gold but is a pauper. Even on the large maps of the Imperium, his small, private motherland is melted into, lost in, the great expanses. The Bashkir wants to recover it again, define its borders, enclose it within a tall fence. The mood prevailing among the other smaller nations of the Imperium has also been communicated to him — the drive above all to detach oneself, to close oneself off behind another great wall of China, as if the breath of any other tribe would poison the air like phenol. For in his awakened ambitions the Bashkir is not alone. The Imperium today resembles the surface of a lake on whose bottom a volcano is coming to life. On the calm, smooth surface, bubbles suddenly appear. With time there are more and more of them. Here and there the water begins to boil. In the depths one can hear muffled rumblings.
There are today dozens of small nations and tribes like the Bashkirs in the Imperium. And they are all more and more obstinately and boldly thinking about how to partake of the feast of the gods. They reflect upon this in moments of optimism. But then comes the time of despair, the hopeless feeling of impotence and long periods of collapse.
RIM AHMEDOV. He gave me his book A Word about Rivers, Lakes, and Grasses, published in 1990 in Ufa. People in the former Soviet Union had resolved the problem of “the system and I” in various ways. Some supported the authorities, others were in the opposition, and many simply sought some kind of sanctuary for themselves — the further away from politics, the better (like the couple of married zoologists in the former Leningrad who chose as their subject of specialization the mimicry of monkeys).