Top Quotes: “A Carpet Ride to Khiva: Seven Years on the Silk Road” — Christopher Aslan Alexander

“Tashkent had been levelled during an earthquake in the 1960s and rebuilt by the Soviets in swathes of concrete. There was still a sizeable Russian community in the city.”

“The government had moved dramatically away from the Kremlin after independence. The Russian-speaking irst secretary of the Communist Party reinvented himself as President Karimov of Uzbekistan. He learnt Uzbek and, despite his initial pleas to maintain the Soviet Union, marked the first of September as Independence Day. He encouraged the building of mosques (although in the fumbling early days of independence one mosque inauguration had scandalised its Saudi patrons with vodka served by skimpily-dressed waitresses) and the revival of Uzbek history, language and culture.

But by the time of my arrival in September 1998, the government seemed to be questioning its embrace of all things Muslim as radical Islam gained popularity, particularly in the densely inhabited Fergana valley to the east of Tashkent which made up a quarter of the population. Having served as an efficient wedge between Tashkent and Moscow, Islamism was now the largest competitor to the government and its power monopoly.”

“We learnt how to get around the city. Tashkent boasted a tastefully designed metro, each station themed after an appropriate Soviet hero or after cotton, which seemed to be the main value of Uzbekistan as far as the Soviet authorities were concerned. We learnt to understand Cyrillic, despite new edicts attempting to move the country towards a Latin script.”

“Borrowed English words beginning with ‘h’ were translated into Russian with a “g” instead, giving rise to places such as Gonduras or Gong Kong and a pantheon of new personalities including Gitler, Gercules, Gamlet, Frodo the Gobbit, Attila the Gun and Garry Potter.”

“We were also greeted with cries of ‘Aiwa’, which I assumed to be a local variant of hello.” It’s origins were actually in the first capitalist television adverts shown in Uzbekistan after the Soviet Union’s collapse. Aiwa electronics featured an ad with two passersby, both carrying Aiwa products, waving a cheery ‘Aiwa’ to each other with the tagline, ‘The whole world speaks Aiwa.’ The greeting was practised on the first tourists who visited Khiva, and they — assuming as I had that it was a local greeting — responded with enthusiastic Aiwas, establishing its authenticity. These first tourists had also arrived armed with pens, which were now considered an expected gift from all foreigners accosted on the street. Often children would shout ‘A pen, a pen!’ at me.”

“Corruption was an accepted part of everyday life and most people expected to pay a bribe to get a job, a bribe to obtain their salary, and a bribe to get it paid in cash to avoid an even larger bribe needed to extricate their money from the bank.”

“‘Can you guess how many people live in our house?’ was Zafar’s playful reply. ‘There are 24 of us!’

He numbered off each married son and corresponding wife and children. Each married brother had a separate room where he and his wife and children would sleep. The younger brothers and sisters all bundled into one large room at night, sleeping on corpuches which were then stacked up on top of a chest during the day.”

“The Koreans of Central Asia had been deported en masse from eastern Siberia and North Korea in the 1940s by Stalin. They arrived with nothing but gradually worked themselves out of poverty, adopting Russian language and culture to the extent that the current generation spoke no more than a few words of Korean. They had retained their cuisine, though, and every bazaar had a section where Koreans sold spicy kimchi salads and dog fat — a popular medicine for flu.”

“When Catriona attempted to describe what church was like in Scotland and how men and women weren’t separated but all sat together, singing and sometimes clapping. Rustam looked horrified and it took us a while to establish that Catriona had mistakenly used the word for toilet instead of church.”

“I’d become inured to state devotion to the cotton plant. “Cotton-picker’ was the name of the main metro station in Tashkent, the national emblem was emblazoned with cotton, and all over the capital a three-bolled cotton head appeared on the sides of buildings, on walls and even on most teapots and drinking bowls.”

“The state had a monopoly on silk and no one was allowed to sell privately. Although it was possible to sell silk surreptitiously on the black market, this was risky and incurred large fines. Nuraddin explained how many cocoons per gram of worms had to be returned by the villagers to the collective farm. For the two months of solid work it would take each extended family to grow the worms, they were meant to receive around $80 or goods in kind, such as flour or oil. Instead, the collective farm bosses would often not make any payments or, if they gave goods in kind, would give far less than had been agreed.

“‘Last year, do you know what we got for all our efforts?’ asked the grandmother angrily. ‘A couple of crates of vodka. Do I want my sons to turn into drunkards? We tried to sell them but everyone got vodka that year so no one wanted to buy.’

Nor were these two months of forced labour all that was required of the villagers. They joined the urban population each autumn out in the fields, harvesting cotton. Doctors, nurses, government workers, schoolteachers and their children spent two months of the year cotton-picking. I remember talking with a bitter surgeon who showed me his calloused hands at the end of harvest. ‘How am I supposed to operate when my hands look like a peasant’s?’ he asked.

There had been a big drama in our house when Malika, Koranbeg’s daughter, had joined her classmates in the cotton fields. Zulhamar was concerned for her daughter’s health in the primitive conditions, and Koranbeg for her honour. Schoolchildren often enjoyed the adventure of being away from their parents, and for some of the girls the work was no greater than the burden of household chores that fell on them at home. Surrounded by classmates, including boys, there were opportunities to flirt and joke away from watchful eyes, with even the occasional diskoteka in the evenings. Many a scandal had erupted over illicit liaisons in the cotton fields at night.

Malika and her classmates had arrived at a distant village school which was to be their accommodation, camping in classrooms and cooking in the playground. Early in the morning, the whole class would head for the fields and work there all day. They were supposed to be paid, but the amount was so low that once charges for food (however unpalatable) and accommodation (however basic) had been deducted, many students ended up owing money for the privilege of two months’ forced labour. This had been the case with Malika.

Only a doctor’s certificate provided exemption, and obtaining one required a large bribe. There was one case I heard of where a disabled girl with no hands had been sent to the fields because her parents had refused to pay a bribe for the doctor’s certificate.”

“Until 1924 the Khanate of Khiva was the only country outside China to use silk money, each note hand-woven and then printed in the mint located in the Kunya Ark. When the money got dirty, it was quite literally laundered. After 1924 the short-lived Khorezm Socialist Republic was absorbed into the USSR.”

“Would I, they ventured, prefer a stable-stop instead? At first I thought this was a joke, but soon they were regaling each other with amusing anecdotes of their own teenage liaisons with donkeys, agreeing on a preference for foals. Hadn’t I heard the proverb, ‘An Uzbek man’s first wife is his donkey”?

I asked whether any donkey would do, or whether it had to be female, provoking an outraged response. What sort of men did I think they were? Of course they would never touch a male donkey, and nor would any other animal arouse their ardour.”

“On arrival at the barracks they were given a medical which included injections repeated twice a year. They soon realised that these caused impotence for around six months, ensuring that soldiers kept their minds on the job.”

“My friend would lie there, listening to bedclothes rustling and then his mother’s whispered hiss: ‘You came to me last night. Just give me some peace. How many donkeys do we own? Can’t you bother them?’ His father would slink out to the stables, my friend ensuring that his own nightly forays never coincided.

The differing expectations of men and women were engendered young in life. Little boys were spoilt and coddled, spending their days swimming naked in the canal or playing football with friends. Their bodies were fawned over — tiny penises tugged affectionately by older relatives. Little girls were taught to feel shame over their bodies, even toddlers expected to cover up. They learnt to sweep and to help their mother and older sisters prepare food for their brothers, ready for when they charged into the house, exhausted by play.”

“Although women were undoubtedly second-class citizens in Khiva, their lot had improved dramatically. In fact, the impact of Communism on women’s rights all over Central Asia was nothing short of revolutionary. Previously they had been veiled, largely house-bound and the property of their husbands — who could divorce them by merely repeating ‘I divorce thee’ three times. Suddenly they were presented with a bewildering level of status. Under Soviet law, women could divorce their husbands and gain employment, and were provided with unlimited access to birth control and abortion.

As the Bolsheviks gained control over Turkestan (later carved up into the current -stans) in the early 1920s, they called on women to emancipate themselves, to throw off the veil and discard domestic servitude for equal rights as factory workers.

Gustav Krist, an Austrian POW interned in Turkestan during the First World War, escaped to Persia but returned in the mid-1920s to witness the transformation taking place under the Communist regime. Previously veiled women now wore Soviet skirts and jackets. He met a young proletariat leader of one village who had, a few years previously, been an illiterate slave, third wife to a rice merchant. Now she was the most powerful person in the village, learning how to read and to speak Russian.

Schools of ballet were set up to better the toiling masses, and Uzbek girls, previously scolded for exposing too much wrist, now paraded on stage in tights and tutus. Liberated bare-faced Uzbek women braved the old city in Tashkent, going from house to house and preaching emancipation. The first batch had their throats promptly slit and their successors were provided with revolvers. Mass veil-burnings were conducted in public squares, the air acrid with the smell of burning horse-hair. The scratchy black horse-hair veil was worn under the paranja — a long cape with extended ornamental sleeves, sewn together at the wrist like handcuffs to symbolise that this wearer was the property of her husband. The veil could be flicked back, exposing the face and allowing free conversation with other women, then flipped over again if men passed by. They were stifling in summer, made breathing difficult, and with regular use left scabs on the nose and chin where the rough horse-hair continually rubbed.

The overall effect was best described by a Swiss traveller to Central Asia in the 1930s, Ella Maillart, who referred to passing women veiled in this way as walking upright coffins. In order to liberate women, not only from the veil but from motherhood, huge crèches were set up in the factories. Neat rows of beshiks were rocked by nurses, their contents tightly swaddled inside. Most Uzbek babies spent the first year of their life strapped tightly into one of these cradles, which flattened the back of their skull. They proved essential in traditional families, in which women produced large numbers of children and were unable to watch over them all at once. Dummies dipped in sugar and opium kept babies happy and quiet, their mothers lifting a breast over the rocking wooden structure to feed.

The beshiks were designed to keep mess to a minimum, each floored with a mattress with a hole strategically positioned halfway down to collect piped urine.”

“Earning a wage brought all the women in the workshop more status within their families. Kelins gained more freedom and were less likely to receive severe beatings, and older women were able to save money their husbands might otherwise have drunk, to buy clothes and food for their children.

Although the workshop increased status, it didn’t stop domestic abuse. A number of the married women arrived at work purple and bruised, having ‘fallen over.’”

“Each class elected a go-between, and this student then haggled with the teacher over how much the class needed to pay communally to receive favourable marks.”

“She would let the foreskin dry and keep it until Husnaddin was grown up, one day sewing it into the stuffing of his wedding mattress.”

“Many village grandmothers still lactated, and grandchildren as old as ten or eleven often came for a cuddle and comfort feed.”

“By December, plastic green New Year trees, sparsely covered strings of tinsel and bright turquoise baubles were on sale at the bazaar. The Soviets, compromising on Christmas, had taken its non-religious imagery and tacked it onto New Year celebrations. There was also Grandfather Snow — a generic Santa — and a snow bunny who had, perhaps, hopped in from the Easter narrative.”

“All train stations in the former Soviet Union were known as vaksal — a result of two Russian 19th-century engineers who had visited London. They emerged, blinking, from their first ride on the London Underground at Vauxhall station, and assumed its name to be the generic term for all train stations.”

“Bizarrely, the President had decreed tennis — a game little known before independence — as the official sport of Uzbekistan. Tennis courts were duly built and instructors trained.”

“Our office phone was tapped by the secret police, as were the phone lines of all foreigners. Unwanted listeners were a silent reminder that certain topics should be avoided, and that calls lasting longer than 40 minutes would be cut off as the recording tape needed changing.

I heard from an American who’d lived in Tashkent in the early days after independence. His call had been interrupted by a heavily accented voice requesting: ‘Please, speak a little slower.’”

“My initial disgust with school teachers expecting bribes from students was tempered when I learnt that they in turn had half their salaries stolen by their directors, and were threatened with the sack if they complained. Doctors and nurses wouldn’t operate without a bribe, gas meter-readers were financially induced to ensure low gas bills, and of course the police were the biggest law-breakers, some even renting out their uniforms to friends so they could wave down traffic and collect “fines.” Factory workers stole produce to sell in the bazaar, and so it went on. Work hours in government jobs were treated with scant regard. The rule of thumb was: ‘You pretend to pay me and I’lI pretend to work.’

Corruption had created a grey economy with no regulation, recourse to justice or accountability. The reality and danger of this unworkable system was brought home when one considered the latest crop of graduating doctors; the majority being rich kids who had paid their way through study and knew little about medicine.”

“Blind children went to blind boarding schools — invariably marrying one of the other blind students — followed by work at a blind-factory and a state-provided flat in the blind ghetto. There had even been plans during the Soviet era to build a city accommodating all disabled people from throughout the Soviet Union, safely closeted away from the toiling masses.

Blind-factories had worked well under the Soviet system. If quality wasn’t always top-notch, that didn’t matter, as national institutions such as railways or hospitals were required to order their mattresses from blind-factories, ensuring that no one was unemployed. Independence brought with it the harsh realities of a market economy. Customers weren’t interested in hand-woven cotton when better, cheaper fabric was available from other factories. Now, most of the blind-factories were standing idle.”

“During the Soviet era, rest and leisure were, in themselves, suspect bourgeois activities and quite counter-revolutionary. Sport was justified and promoted, as it taught discipline and represented the nation at international events. Holiday facilities, however, smacked of indolence and so were rebranded as sanatoriums. Each was owned by a state company and privileged workers came for massage therapy, swimming therapy, mountain-air therapy, hot-spring therapy and anything else suffused with a sense of health-giving.

For those without access to sanatoriums, there was the humble Soviet hospital. Admission was relatively easy and those suffering from stress or exhaustion could enjoy two weeks of bed-rest and telly with a drip stuck in their arm. This proved particularly popular among Central Asian women who rarely experienced the luxury of rest within the home. Ill health became an empowerment of sorts — the one thing that women could control, and a means of escaping the drudgery of daily life.

This tradition continued after independence. Zulhamar regularly disappeared for two weeks of hospital rest and Koranbeg’s mother, at 65, had made it her ambition to spend as much time in hospital as possible.”

“The flashpoint occurred in the city of Andijan in 2005. Greedy officials had been eyeing the few remaining factories in the city, and their owners, all pious Muslims, had formed a loose coalition. Each factory was targeted for tax evasion, but when this proved unsuccessful, the authorities branded the factory bosses Islamist extremists and had them brought into custody. There was nothing particularly unusual about this act of injustice, but employees, friends and relatives of the factory bosses were tired of corruption and began to protest outside the prison. They were joined by curious onlookers and others with grievances and the crowd swelled.

Many of the protesters were women, as the men were mostly away in search of work. The protests were initially peaceful, although it seems that radical elements also joined the crowd. They eventually rushed the prison, breaking out the factory bosses and setting fire to the county hall.

Tanks arrived. Most protesters assumed they were there as a peace-keeping measure. Suddenly the army opened fire on the crowd, mowing down hundreds of protesters and anyone else caught in the main square. Bodies carpeted the square and heavy spring rains mingled with their blood, flowing down the streets. A terrorised crowd fled, heading for the nearby Kyrgyzstan border, hounded by the army who picked off stragglers.

Later I spoke with a foreign friend who was in Andijan at the time and who described the overwhelming shock and fear felt by everyone in the city. No one was allowed near the city morgue. Other parts of the city where hasty mass graves were dug were also off limits. The wounded were taken to hospital until it became apparent that they were being rounded up by the secret police and taken away — never to be seen again. After this, relatives of the wounded cared for them as best they could, terrified of informers or a late-night knock on the door.

Most people in Khiva knew nothing about it. I happened to watch the news breaking on the BBC, but internet sites were blocked, and in Tashkent Russian TV stations on cable were jammed during news broadcasts.”

“The official death toll was 169 people, most of them said to be wahabis. Eyewitness claims put the figure between 500 and 700. The massacre was worse than that of Tiananmen Square.”

“In Tashkent, strategic roads were dug up and planted with trees overnight, ensuring that protesters couldn’t easily collect in one central location. There were even more police on the streets. NGO workers applying for visa renewals found the process dragging on for weeks. The Peace Corps finally got so fed up that they set a deadline for all visa renewals, threatening to leave if these weren’t provided. The deadline passed and the Peace Corps shut down. The govermment became increasingly anti religious, not only towards Islam but also Christianity Rustam, the pastor in Urgench, was arrested and released only due to ill health. It was clear that the government were shaken up and were now consolidating their grip on society, anxious to ensure that no other protests took place, or were witnessed by outsiders.”

“Our hosts explained how embroidery was one of the few avenues of employment open to Kandahari women, who rarely left their home more than once a month, and even then were always under the supervision of their husband or mother-in-law. Within the home, the segregation continued. Two sons and their respective wives might live under the same roof, yet neither son would know the name of their sister-in-law, much less see her face uncovered. The outside world was almost exclusively male. While visiting a local gym — trying not to get weights tangled up in the baggy folds of my sweat-stained shelwar kamiz — I was chatted up and offered orange juice, watching young men preen and flirt with each other, for who else could they flirt with?”