After a time the passengers are let on. Then Starovoytova boards. Suren and Averik are already there.
The pilots start the engines and we taxi slowly to the runway. “Can we still be turned back?” I ask Suren. “We can,” he says. On both sides of the runway stand evenly spaced commandos, their helmets camouflaged with twigs of rosemary.
We take off toward the east, into the sun, toward the mountains, toward the snow, and then we turn and fly west, toward Yerevan and Ararat. Perhaps a half hour goes by, then a hoarse voice resounds in the headphones. Suren turns on his microphone. They talk for a moment. Suren takes off his headphones and says to me: “They won’t turn us back now. You are free.”
He looks at me, smiles, and hands me his handkerchief.
Only then do I feel that from under my large cap sweat is pouring down my face.
CENTRAL ASIA — THE DESTRUCTION OF THE SEA
THE AIRPLANE DELIMITS a wide circle, and when its wing dips, one can see sand dunes stretching down below, wrinkled by the wind. It is the new desert of Aral Kum — or, more precisely, the bottom of a sea that is disappearing from the face of the earth.
IF WE LOOK at the map of the world from west to east, we will see in the southern part of the Eurasian continent a chain of four seas: first the Mediterranean, which changes into the Black; then, beyond the Caucasus mountains, the Caspian; and, finally, the easternmost, the Aral Sea.
THE ARAL SEA draws its water from two rivers: the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya. These are long rivers — the Syr Darya measures 2,212 kilometers, and the Amu Darya, 1,450—cutting across all of Central Asia.
CENTRAL ASIA is deserts and more deserts, fields of brown weathered stones, the heat from the sun above, sandstorms.
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BUT THE WORLD of the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya is different. Arable fields stretch along both rivers, abundant orchards; everywhere profusions of nut trees, apples trees, fig trees, palms, and pomegranates.
IT WAS A GREAT pleasure to sit down in the shade of one’s own garden, under the roof of a breezy veranda, and delight in the calm of a cool evening.
THE WATERS OF the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya, as well as of their tributaries, allowed famous cities to arise and to flourish — Bukhara and Khiva, Kokand and Samarkand. This way, too, passed the loaded-down caravans of the Silk Road, thanks to which the markets of Venice and Florence, Nice and Seville, acquired their importance and color.
IN THE SECOND HALF of the nineteenth century, the lands through which both rivers flow were conquered by czarist armies commanded by Gen. Mikhail Chernaev and became part of the Russian Imperium — or, rather, its southern colony, called Turkestan because the local population (with the exception of the Tajiks) speaks Turkic languages. The faith prevailing here is, without exception, Islam — the religion of hot climates and deserts.
IN 1917 the anticzarist revolt in Turkestan is kindled not by Uzbeks or Kirghiz but by the local colonials — Russians — who, now being Bolsheviks, thereby hold on to power. In 1924 Turkestan is divided into five republics — Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgystan, and (in several stages) Kazakhstan.
DURING THE YEARS of Stalin’s rule, large numbers of peasants, the Muslim clergy, and almost the entire intelligentsia (which did include many) fell victim to repression. The latter group was replaced by Russians as well as by assimilated local activists and bureaucrats — Uzbeks, Tajiks, Turkmen, and so on.
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ABANDONING MASS repressions, Khrushchev, and later Brezhnev, introduced a new politics of domination in their colonies. A Russified local stood at the head of every institution, but his deputy was always a Russian who received his instructions directly from Moscow. The second principle of the new politics was based on the renascence of old local tribal structures and the handing of power to trusted clans whose allegiance had been bought. Later, during the years of perestroika, astonishing communiqués were issued by the office of the attorney general of the former USSR about the battle against the terrible corruption prevalent in the Imperium’s Asiatic republics: entire local Central Committees and Councils of Ministers were going to jail. What? Was everyone stealing? Yes, everyone, for it was under the name of the Central Committee or of some other governing institution that the elders of the ruling clan covertly operated, connected and linked by major interests. If rival clans existed and an understanding between them could not be reached, a local civil war erupted, like the one in 1922 in Tajikstan. At the head of each republic stood a vizier — the first secretary of the Central Committee of the local Party. In accordance with Eastern tradition, his rule was for life. Dinmukhamed Kunayev was the first secretary of Kazakhstan for twenty-six years, until finally Gorbachev had to depose him. Shafar Rashidov was the first secretary of Uzbekistan for twenty-four years, until his death in 1983. Geidar Aliyev was the chief of the KGB, and later the first secretary of Azerbaijan for twenty-three years. Whenever one of them passed through town, it was an event long remembered, long reminisced about. The system of indirect rule once invented by the British in Asia and in Africa and adopted by Moscow allowed those in power complete license.
THIS DIGRESSION about the system of rule will enable us better to understand the extraordinary history of the destruction of the sea, its background and circumstances.
WATER IS the prerequisite for life, especially valuable in the tropics, in the desert, because there is so little of it. If I have sufficient water for only one field, I cannot cultivate two fields; if I have water for one tree, I cannot plant two trees. Every cup of water is drunk at the expense of a plant — the plant will dry out because I drank the water it needed to live. An unceasing battle for survival takes place here between people, plants, and animals, a battle for a drop of water, without which there is no existence.
A BATTLE, but also cooperation, for everything here depends upon a fragile and shaky equilibrium, the upsetting of which means death. If the camels drink too much water, there will not be enough of it for the oxen; the oxen will die of thirst. If the oxen die, the sheep will perish, for who will pull the treadmill that carries water to the meadows? If the sheep perish, what meat will man eat and what will he cover himself with? If man is weak and naked, who will plant the fields? If no one farms the fields, the desert will encroach upon them. The sands will cover everything; life will disappear.
THEY GREW cotton here for years. Cotton fabric is light and strong, and also healthy, for it cools the body. For centuries there was a good price for it because it was never overcultivated — the constraint always was (and still is) the tropics’ chronic shortage of water. To cultivate a new field of cotton one would have to take water from the gardens, cut down forests, kill off the cattle. But then how would one live, from what, and what would one eat? Everyone in India, in China, in America, in Africa, has known this dilemma for thousands of years. And in Moscow? In Moscow they also know it!
THE CATASTROPHE begins in the sixties. Two more decades were then needed to turn half of the fertile oases of Uzbekistan into desert. First, bulldozers were brought in from all over the Imperium. The hot metal cockroaches crawled over the sandy plains. Starting from the banks of the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya, the steel rams began to carve deep ditches and fissures in the sand, into which the water from the rivers was then channeled. They had to dig an endless number of these ditches (and they are still digging them now), considering that the combined length of the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya is 3,662 kilometers! Then along these canals, the kolkhoz workers had to plant cotton. At first they planted upon desert barrens, but because there was still not enough of the white fibers, the authorities ordered that arable fields, gardens, and orchards be given over to cotton. It is easy to imagine the despair and terror of peasants from whom one takes the only thing they have — the currant bush, the apricot tree, the scrap of shade. In villages, cotton was now planted right up against the cottage windows, in former flower beds, in courtyards, near fences. It was planted instead of tomatoes and onions, instead of olives and watermelons. Over these villages drowning in cotton, planes and helicopters flew, dumping on them avalanches of artificial fertilizers, clouds of poisonous pesticides. People choked, they had nothing to breathe, went blind.