Again, I don’t have much time to post about life in Kazakhstan, so these photos will have to do for now. What is funny about this photo with the parking attendant at the Green Bazaar is that he is standing on a manhole cover. I suppose he knows his territory and directs traffic like that odd green vehicle behind him (wish I knew the name of this car). Everyone who grew up in the former Soviet Union knows to NEVER step or stand on manhole covers, they are NOT to be trusted. Check out the rest of my odd photos from Almaty, Kazakhstan!
Odd and Not-so-odd Photos from Almaty
Many Nations Represented in Kazakhstan
Yesterday I put up photos of buildings in Almaty, today I will show some countries that are represented in Kazakhstan of the 120 nations known to reside here. Some are European and friends of mine with the oil industry or with banking, other photos are just of the costumes representing Korea or Ukraine. I LOVE the color, mixture and diversity of living in Almaty!!! You just don’t get this kind of texture in northwestern Minnesota, that’s for sure!
Photos of Almaty’s Eclectic Buildings
When in a time crunch, put up photos, I always say. Lately, I’ve been fairly busy, so I’ve neglected to write anything on my blog. Too busy to even put photos up!!! Therefore, I just went through some of my more recent photos of Almaty that didn’t make it into my blog already and I’ll share these with you. They are from different seasons but show just how eclectic really Almaty is, but not as eclectic as Astana, the current capital of Kazakhstan.
“Piebald Dog Running Along the Shore” Quotes
I wanted to share a few quotes with my readers the wonder of this little short story by Chingiz Aitmatov. You can find on the Internet and read it for yourself. Though short, the haunting refrains of a father-son relationship with an old grandpa will stay with you a long time. This is a keeper!!! No wonder the Kyrgyz people or Central Asians are proud of their Chingiz Aitmatov writer, he made it BIG in the Soviet circles. Read his works and find out why, Chingiz discovered and shared aspects of the unrelenting SOUL of man to LIVE!!! His written words will live on…
Quotes from Piebald Dog Running Along the Shore
Translated by Alex Miller
Prepared for the Internet by Iraj Bashiri, 2004
“Brains from heaven, secrets of the trade from childhood.”
“A bad hunter is the tribe’s burden.”
“Kirisk [young boy] was impressed by the sea. He had not been expecting such a spectacle. Only water, heaving water, only waves swiftly rising and immediately subsiding, only the depths, the dark, disturbing depths and only the sky, softened by white, feathery and inaccessible clouds. That was the whole world—and nothing more, nothing else except this, except the sea itself—neither winter, nor summer, nor mountain, nor gully.”
“He [Kirisk] now understood the difference between land and sea. On land you don’t think about the land. But at sea, you think abou the sea all the time, even if your mind is on something else. This discovery put the boy on his guard. That the sea forced you to think about it all the time concealed something unknown, insistent, dominating…”
“He [Kirisk’s grandfather] understood that in the infinity of space a man in a boat is nothing. But a man thinks and thereby ascends to greatness, thereby he affirms himself before the eternal elements, and thereby he is commensurable with the depth and height of worlds. That is why, as long as a man lives, he is in spirt as mighty as the sea and as infinite as the sky, for there are not bounds to his thought. When he dies, someone else will think further ahead, and the next will think even further beyond that, and so on without end…The awareness of this gave the old man the bitter sweetness of irreconcilable reconciliation.”
Kyrgyz Chingiz Aitmatov’s Writings
Thanks to the work of Russian or Kyrgyz translators and Iraj Bashiri’s efforts to put Chingiz Aitmatov’s writings on the Internet in English, I just finished reading the simple little story by Aitmatov titled “Piebald Dog Running Along the Shore.” I did not know what to expect judging by the title of it. The Piebald Dog was really a mountain which was used by the sailors to orient them to safely return to their homeland after hunting for seals. What a pleasant surprise this story was about a young boy who goes on his first fishing expedition with his wise old grandfather, his father and uncle. It has nice development and not such a surprising ending once the trip goes awry. You wonder how they will survive, it would seem the author knew something about hunger and starvation.
Farewell, Guylsary! and To Have and to Lose written by Chingiz Aitmatov can also be found on the Internet. Well, worth the read to find out more about Kyrgyz culture or other cultures such as in the story of Piebald Dog. Aitmatov died in Kyrgyzstan last year and had been earlier recognized with the Lenin Award for Literature or something by that title. I will include some worthy quotes taken from this short story from Piebald Dog in tomorrow’s blog.
Soviet Logical Fallacies from Kazakh Perspective
The following are logical fallacies used by the Soviets as written by my Kazakh students told to them from their parents or grandparents’ perspective.
M.K. Strawman Argument – In Soviet Union it showed that crime level was low, but the real statistics were high.”
Poisoning the well – If you enter into the communist party and be a member of it, you will be a successful and strong person. However, if you will not be a communist, you will be a loser.
M.A. Guilt by Association – Your father is an enemy, therefore I will not speak with you.
Appeal to Popular – Communists believed that Soviet living standards were the best, therefore it IS the best.
O.Z. Appeal to tradition: “In Soviet Union all people must do what the Kommunist party said because the Party was always right.
Appeal to the popular (bandwagon) In the Soviet Union everyone dreamed about “Lada” car. It was a very popular model, indeed we didn’t have a choice.”
Guilt by Association: In the 1930s-1950s people were named as “Enemy of the Nation” and were sent to jail. Their wives, husbands and children were also named “Enemy of the Nation.”
A.B. Appeal to popular “The majority of people wore the same clothes, therefore there was more social equality.”
Appeal to tradition: “In Soviet Union there were traditions like children would work at the same job as their fathers and mothers did.”
Y.S. Appeal to the Popular – “Everyone was buying the same products, we were wearing the same clothes. So all school girls looked like each other. And we did not have products from abroad.
Poisoning the Well – We were to believe our leaders and like what they were saying. People trusted and believed each other and everyone was sure that in the Soviet Union “everything is perfect.” We were equal, no poor and no rich persons.
S.A. Appeal to Popular – “Everyone else is Komsomlec, Why shouldn’t you?”
A lot of people buy the same furniture, clothes and other things made in Soviet Union. Therefore, what was made in USSR is the best quality.
A.K. “We all know that in the Soviet Union time all people should be equal. Nobody should exceed more or better. Everybody made expected action, for example, everybody should go to school, after study in university, finally work in one place (where they have to go, it was already decided by government). The salary was average. About language, everybody should know Russian even though you are Kazakh nationality.”
A.B. “We should make a testing on Semipalatinsk field, because the money we get from it is important to develop the country.”
A.T. “Communism comes and all will be free. Religion is opium for the people. Nothing is personal, everything is common.”
N.L. “The government translates on TV in Soviet Union, it’s always good news about policy. Also in library, people didn’t have a chance to read different literature, or other foreign authors, books, magazines, journal articles.”
M.B. “Capitalistic countries are bad because the capitalists exploit labour of other people. The best is communism, socialist becomes communist.”
A.T. During the Soviet Union, leaders of the communist party stated that capitalism was the wrong way of development. Therefore, communism is good. Khrushev made corn popular but it doesn’t mean he liked eating it.
S.B. During that time, people believed in everything even if there wasn’t a logical consequence or it might not be the truth. For example, someone who liked to travel abroad, then he was supposed to be “Enemy of the People.” Another example is that people used to think that Jewish people are dangerous and they should not communicate with them. I think there is also no logical evidence.
M.K. If you were not “oktebryonok” (from first to fifth year classes) or “Pioneer” (from 5th to 10th classes) and after school “Kommutist” it was a shame, you were an outsider.”
Y.S. “During the Soviet time the much preferred work was to be a farmer or miner rather than being an engineer, economist or lawyer.”
D.S. “If you don’t study well, you will be a yard caretaker [or grave digger.]”
“If you think in a different way, you are a social enemy.”
A.S. In S.U. everybody wore the same things, ate the same things, there wasn’t a big choice. So, if one thing was popular, everybody wanted it, even it if was not a good thing.
D.S. In the Soviet Union it was a shame for young men not to do military service…”You can’t be a good citizen if you can’t protect your Homeland.”
In the Soviet Union people were scared and afraid to say something against the Government, “Even walls have ears.”
During the Cold War period, it wasn’t right to listen to Western music because sometimes people would lose their workplaces.
The Embrace of Stalinism – Books of Memory (Part III)
The Embrace of Stalinism by Arseny Roginsky
Books of memory
Books of memory are one reference point about the memory of Stalinism. These books, published in the majority of Russian regions, form a library of almost 300 volumes. They contain a total of over one and a half million names of people who were executed, sentenced to imprisonment in camps, or deported. This is a serious achievement, especially if we recall the difficulties in accessing many of our archives which contain materials about the terror.
However, these books do almost nothing for the formation of national memory. Firstly, they are regional books, and the contents of each one individually do not form the image of a national catastrophe, but rather a picture of a “local” disaster. The regional compartmentalization is matched by methodological discrepancies: each book of memory has its own sources, its own principles of selection, its own size and format for presentation of biographical information. This is because there is no common state program for publishing books of memory. The federal government also balks from its duty here.
Secondly, these memories are hardly a public matter: only a small number of copies are printed, and they are not even always received by regional libraries.
Memorial has posted a database on the Internet which unites the data base of the books of memory, supplemented by data from the Russian Interior Ministry, and also from Memorial itself. Here there are over 2,700,000 names. In comparison with the scale of the Soviet terror, this is a very small figure, and if work continues at this rate it will take several decades to compile a complete list if work.
Museums of terror
Museums. Here things are also not as bad as one might expect. True, Russia still no national Museum of state terror which could play an important role in crystalising the image of the terror in popular consciousness. There are fewer than ten local museums dedicated to the subject of the terror. But still, according to our information, the topic features occasionally in the exhibitions, and mainly in the archives, of around 300 museums across the country (mainly regional and city museums of local studies).
However, the common problems of memory of the terror play their part here too. In the exhibitions, the theme of the camps and labor settlements are usually embedded in displays about the industrialization of the region. The repressions themselves – arrests, sentences, shootings – are generally consigned to biographical stands and window displays. On the whole, the terror is represented in a very fragmented way, and only included in the history of the country in a provisional way.
Memorial places
Memorial places connected with the terror. Today these are mainly burial sites: mass graves of people shot during the Great Terror, and large camp cemeteries. But the secret surrounding the shooting was so great, and so few sources have been found on this topic, that today we only know of around 100 burial sites of people shot in 1937-1938 – less than a third of the total, according to our calculations. For example, despite much searching, it has not been possible to find even the graves of the victims of the famous “Kashketin shootings” near the Brick Factory by Vorkuta. As for camp cemeteries, we only know a few dozen of the several thousand that once existed.
In any case, the cemeteries are again only a memory of the victims.
Buildings connected with the terror in cities do not become places of memory – regional offices a d buildings of the OGPU/NKVD, prison buildings and camp offices. Industrial objects built by political prisoners also do not become places of memory – canals, railways, mines, factories, combines and houses. It would be very easy to turn them into “places of memory” – simply by hanging a memorial plaque by the entrance to the factory, or at a railway station.
Culture
Another means of furnishing popular consciousness with historical concepts and images is mass culture, primarily television. Television programs about the Stalinist era are quite numerous and diverse: glamorous pro-Stalinist kitsch such as the TV series “Stalin-life” compete with talented and conscientious screen adaptations of works by Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn. Viewers can choose their own preferred vehicles for reading the era. It would appear, alas, that the number of viewers who choose “Stalin-life” is growing, while the number who choose Shalamov is shrinking. This is inevitable. Those whose world outlook is formed by anti-Western rhetoric and endless rants by TV political analysts about this great country that is surrounded by enemies on all sides hardly need to be told which image of the past best accords with this outlook. And no amount of Shalamovs or Solzhenitsyns are going to change their minds.
School history curriculum
Finally, the most important institution for controlling collective ideas of the past is the school history curriculum. Here (and also to a significant degree in journalism and documentary television programs), the state’s policy on history, unlike in many areas discussed above, is pro-active. This has the effect of making one appreciate that neglecting historical memory is not as dangerous as using history as a political tool.
In the new history textbooks, Stalinism is presented as an institutional phenomenon, even an achievement. But the terror is portrayed as a historically determined and unavoidable tool for solving state tasks. This concept does not rule out sympathy for the victims of history. But it makes it absolutely impossible to consider the criminal nature of the terror, and the perpetrator of this crime.
The intention is not to idealise Stalin. This is the natural side-effect of resolving a completely different task – that of confirming the idea of the indubitable correctness of state power. The government is higher than any moral or legal assessments. It is above the law, as it is guided by state interests that are higher than the interests of the person and society, higher than morality and law. The state is always right – at least as long as it can deal with its enemies. This idea runs through the new textbooks from beginning to end, and not only where repressions are discussed.
Conclusion: our historical memory is divided, fragmentary, passing away. It has been pushed to the periphery of popular consciousness. Those who hold onto the memory of Stalinism in the sense that we use these words are very much in the minority today. Whether or not this memory can become embedded nationwide; what information and what values need to assimilated by popular consciousness, what needs to be done here – this is the topic for another discussion. Clearly, society and the state need to work together on this. Clearly, historians have a special role in this process. They bear a special responsibility.
This paper was read at a conference on the History of Stalinism in Moscow on 5 December 2008
The Embrace of Stalinism (Part II)
“The Embrace of Stalinism” by Arseny Roginsky
This paper was read at a conference on the History of Stalinism in Moscow on 5 December 2008)
The search for a Great Russia
At a certain level, that of personal recollections, the terror is also a passing memory. There are still witnesses, but they are the last of their kind, and they are dying, taking with them the personal memories and experiences.
This leads on to my next point: memory as recollection is succeeded by memory as a selection of collective images of the past. These are no longer formed by personal, and not even family memories, but by various socio-cultural means. One significant element in determining this is the politics of history, ie the attempts of the political elite to form an image of the past that suits it.
Since the 1990s those in political power have been looking to the past to justify their own legitimacy. But if the government craved legitimacy after the collapse of the USSR, people craved identity. And both the government and the population looked for a way to make up for these in the image of a Great Russia, of which present-day Russia is the successor. The images of the “bright past”, which the government proposed in the 1990s – Stolypin, Peter the Great and so on – were not accepted by the population: they are too remote, not closely enough related to the present day. Gradually and insidiously, the concept of Great Russia came to mean the Soviet period as well, particularly the Stalinist era.
The post-Yeltsin leadership saw that people were ready for another reconstruction of the past, and made full use of it. I do not mean to say that the government of the first decade of the 21st century intended to rehabilitate Stalin. It just wants to offer its fellow citizens the notion of a great country, one which is timelessly great, one which overcomes all ordeals with honor. The image of a happy and glorious past was needed to consolidate the population, to restore the continuity of the authority of state power, to strengthen its own “vertical” etc. But whatever the intention, against the background of the newly arisen panorama of a great power, which as ever is “surrounded by a ring of enemies”, the whiskered profile of the great leader showed through. This result was inevitable and predictable.
The two images of the Stalinist era were in harsh contradiction. There was that of Stalinism, of a criminal regime responsible for decades of state terror. And there was that of an era of glorious victories and great achievements. Above all, of course, there was the image of the main victory -victory in the Great Patriotic War.
Conflicting memories of the Great Patriotic War
The memory of Stalinism and the memory of the war. The memory of the war became the foundation on which national self-identification was re-organized. A great deal has been written on this topic. I would only note one thing: what is currently called the memory of the war does not quite correspond to its name. The memory of the hardships of the war, of everyday life, of 1941, of imprisonment, evacuation, and the victories of war – this memory was extremely anti-Stalinist in the Khrushchev era. It was organically intertwined with the memory of the terror.
Today the memory of the war has been replaced by the memory of Victory. This change began in the mid-1960s. At the end of the 1960s, the memory of the terror was banned – for a whole 20 years! By the time this changed, there were virtually no soldiers left, and there was no one left to correct the collective stereotype with their personal recollections.
The memory of victory without the memory of the price of victory cannot, of course, be anti-Stalinist. So it does not fit in well with the memory of the terror. To simplify drastically, this conflict of memories goes like this: if state terror was a crime, then who was the criminal? The state? Stalin as the head of state? But we won the war against Absolute Evil, and so we were not the subjects of a criminal regime, but a great country, the embodiment of everything good in the world. It was under the rule of Stalin that we overcame Hitler. Victory means the Stalinist era, and the terror means the Stalinist era. It is impossible to reconcile these two images of the past, except by rejecting one of them, or at least making serious corrections to it.
And this is what happened – the memory of the terror receded. It has not disappeared completely, but it has been pushed to the periphery of people’s consciousness.
Monuments
Under the circumstances, it is surprising that the memory of the terror has survived at all, that it has not become a Great National Taboo, but that it is still alive and evolving. Let us briefly review the means whereby we have managed to hold onto this memory.
The first and most obvious sign of the memory of historical events is the monuments. Contrary to popular opinion, there are a lot of monuments and signs in commemoration of the Stalinist terror in Russia – over 800. They were not erected by central government, but through the efforts of the community and local administration. Federal power has played almost no part in bringing this about. It has not been seen as a priority by the state. There has probably also been a certain unwillingness on their part further to legitimize this painful subject.
All of these sculptures, chapels, crosses and memorial stones immortalize the memory of victims. But there is no image of the crime, or the criminals associated with this memory. There are victims – either of a natural disaster, or of some other catastrophe, the sources and meaning of which remains incomprehensible to the popular consciousness.
In cities, most of these monuments and signs are not in central squares, but in remote areas, where the remains of the victims are buried. At the same time, many central streets are still named after the people who were directly or indirectly involved in the terror. The combination of present-day urban toponymics inherited from the Soviet era, while the memory of the victims is relegated to the outskirts – this is a clear image of the state of historical memory on Stalinism in Russia.
(To be continued)
The Embrace of Stalinism
This paper was read at a conference on the History of Stalinism in Moscow on 5 December 2008, I have broken it down into three parts, I thought it was fitting after sharing for the past month stories from my Kazakh students’ grandparents.
The Embrace of Stalinism
Arseny Roginsky, 16 – 12 – 2008
Why is Russia romanticising the memory of Stalinism, enquires Memorial’s founder Arseny Roginsky, when its defining feature was the use of terror?
The memory of Stalinism in contemporary Russia raises problems which are painful and sensitive. There is a vast amount of pro-Stalinist literature on the bookstalls: fiction, journalism and pseudo-history. In sociological surveys Stalin invariably features among the first three “most prominent figures of all times”. In the new school history textbooks, Stalinist policy is interpreted in a spirit of justification.
There are also hundreds of crucial volumes of documents, scholarly articles and monographs on Stalinism. The achievements of these historians and archivists is unquestionable. But if they do have any influence on the mass consciousness, it is too weak. The means of disseminating the information have not been there, and nor in recent years has the political will. However, the deepest problem lies in the current state of our national historical memory of Stalinism.
I should explain what I mean here by historical memory, and Stalinism. Historical memory is the retrospective aspect of collective consciousness. It informs our collective identity through our selection of the past we find significant. The past, real or imaginary, is the material with which it works: it sorts through the facts and systemizes them, selecting those which it is prepared to present as belonging to the genealogy of its identity.
Stalinism is a system of state rule, the totality of specific political practices of the Stalinist leadership. Throughout the duration of this system, a number of characteristic features were preserved. But its generic feature (which arose from the very beginning of Bolshevist rule and did not disappear with Stalin’s death) is terror as a universal instrument for solving any political and social tasks. It was state violence and terror that made possible the centralization of rule, the severing of regional ties, high vertical mobility; the harsh introduction of an ideology which could be easily modified, a large army of subjects of slave labor, and many other things.
Thus, the memory of Stalinism is primarily the memory of state terror as the defining feature of the age. It is also what links it in so many respects with today.
Victims, not crimes
Is that really what the memory of Stalinism means in today’s Russia? I’d like to say a few words about the key features of this memory today. Firstly, the memory of Stalinism in Russia is almost always the memory of victims. Victims, not crimes. As the memory of crimes it does not register, as there is no consensus on this.
To a great extent this is because popular consciousness has nothing to hold onto from a legal point of view. The state has produced no legal document which recognizes state terror as a crime. The two lines in the preamble to the 1991 law on the rehabilitation of victims is clearly insufficient. There are no legal decisions that inspire any confidence – and there have not been any trials against participants of the Stalinist terror in the new Russia, not a single one.
There are other reasons too.
We killed our own people
When popular consciousness has to come to terms with historical tragedies, it does so by assigning roles of Good and Evil. People identify themselves with one of the roles. It is easier to identify oneself with Good, i.e. with an innocent victim, or better still with a heroic battle against Evil.
Incidentally, this is why our Eastern European neighbors, from Ukraine to Poland and the Baltic States have no serious problems with coming to terms with the Soviet period of history, while in Russia, people identify themselves with victims or fighters, or with both at the same time. Whether or not this has anything to do with history is quite another matter – we’re talking about memory, not knowledge.
It is even possible to identify oneself with Evil, as the Germans did (not without help from the outside), in order to distance oneself from this evil: “Yes, unfortunately we did that, but we’re not like than anymore and we’ll never be like that again”.
But what can we do, living in Russia?
In the Soviet terror, it is very difficult to distinguish the executioners from the victims. For example, secretaries of regional committee in August 1937 all wrote death sentences by the bundle, but by November 1938 half of them had already been shot themselves.
In national, and particularly regional memory, the “executioners” – for example, the regional committee secretaries of 1937 – are not unambiguously evil: yes, they signed execution warrants, but they also organized the construction of kindergartens and hospitals, and went to workers’ cafeterias personally to test the food, while their subsequent fate is worthy of sympathy.
And one more thing: unlike the Nazis, who mainly killed “foreigners”: Poles, Russians, and German Jews (who were not quite their “own” people), we mainly killed our own people, and our consciousness refuses to accept this fact.
In remembering the terror, we are incapable of assigning the main roles, incapable of putting the pronouns “we” and “they” in their places. This inability to assign evil is the main thing that prevents us from being able to embrace the memory of the terror properly. This makes it far more traumatic. It is one of the main reasons why we push it to the edge of our historical memory.
(To be continued)
Gaukhar’s Grandfather Survived Stalingrad
I want to tell you about the story that I heard from my mother. This is a story about the person who was a commander of division in land forces, a very good carpenter and he was my grandfather. My grandfather was born in 1922 in a small village. There were two children in his family, he and his younger sister Kopey. They had very close and friendly relationship. In 1938 he studied in the technical college. Unfortunately, he didn’t finish that college because of the World War II. For many people war is a very bad memory that they don’t want to recall. He participated in the great battle “Stalingrad“. He got a medal for courage. They often carried out reconnaissance. He had two serious wounds. His first wound was on the foot and his second wound was in the abdomen.
As my grandfather was recalling, before the battle the soldiers were very hungry and one Uzbek said that he could prepare something. He made plov and fed his comrades. Then my grandfather and Uzbek rested in the trench when suddenly a mine detonated and the Uzbek died. After the battle my grandfather suffered from the pain and his friend didn’t leave him. He would die if his friend had not helped him. Because all soldiers who stayed there were killed by other soldiers.
In 1945 he returned home and started to work as a carpenter to build houses. Also he repaired cars. He brought up eight children and educated six of them. My mother told me that she loved her father more than her mother. He was serene and never punished his children. He worked all his life. At that time he earned enough money. But all his money he sent to his children in order to educate them. He built a house where my mother and her brothers and sisters grew up.
Finally, I want to say that I couldn’t imagine how my grandfather, in spite of what he saw, was such a good father and he never complained about his life. He died in 1987.
