The Vanishing Generation

Faith and Uprising in Modern Uzbekistan

Bagila Bukharbayeva

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780253040831
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Landeskunde

As a young reporter in Uzbekistan, Bagila Bukharbayeva was a witness to her countrys search for an identity after the collapse of the Soviet Union. While self-proclaimed religious leaders argued about what was the true Islam, Bukharbayeva shows how some of the neighborhood boys became religious, then devout, and then a threat to the country's authoritarian government. The Vanishing Generation provides an unparalleled look into what life is like in a religious sect, the experience of people who live for months and even years in hiding, and the fabricated evidence, torture, and kidnappings that characterize an authoritarian government. In doing so, she provides a rare and unforgettable story of what life is like today inside the secretive and tightly controlled country of Uzbekistan. Balancing intimate memories of playmates and neighborhood crushes with harrowing stories of extremism and authoritarianism, Bukharbayeva gives a voice to victims whose stories would never otherwise be heard.

1

MAKING CHOICES

THE APARTMENT BLOCK I GREW UP IN, IN a central neighborhood of Tashkent, could be described as a small model of the Soviet Communist Party’s declared principles of social equality and internationalism. Some of its inhabitants worked in factories—both as top managers and workers—some were teachers, some musicians, some officials, doctors, and so on, and we all were of various ethnic backgrounds: Uzbek, Kazakh, Tatar, Armenian, Jewish, Korean, Russian.

The long nine-story concrete block in the neighborhood called Ts-1—“Ts” is short for tsentr, the Russian word for “center”—stood at the intersection of First of May and Pushkin Streets (as they were called then). The ground floor was taken by Detskiy Mir, or “Children’s World,” a department store, which was very handy for children in our block, as we could always pop down there for pens, erasers, and small plastic dolls and spend a few more minutes staring at more desirable, more expensive—and in my family’s case, unaffordable—bigger dolls with hair, nice dresses, and shoes.

Another nearby landmark was the Hotel Uzbekistan, designated for foreign tourists, who stopped over in Tashkent on their way to see the ancient Islamic architecture of Bukhara and Samarkand. Seventeen stories high and looking like a concrete honeycomb, the hotel was probably meant to symbolize Uzbekistan’s modernization under Soviet leadership. But the true symbol of Tashkent and my favorite nearby attraction was the cozy, shady, circular Revolution Park, which the Hotel Uzbekistan looked down on. The park featured tall, old sycamores, wide-branching oaks, well-tended flower beds, and a monument to Karl Marx in the middle. The monument was designed to look like a torch—a granite support shaped like a handle topped with Marx’s head, the thick wavy hair and beard on it sculpted like a flame flickering in the wind. The same spot had in the past hosted a monument to Joseph Stalin. At present, it is occupied by a formidable equine statue mounted by the medieval conqueror Tamerlane. But it was another change to the park that would serve as a more appropriate and accurate metaphor for and monument to the country’s first post-Soviet regime: one day—or rather, night—the authorities would have all the trees in the park cut down, leaving the city with a void in the middle and all its residents, current and past alike, with emptiness in their hearts.

Figure 1.1. The circular Amir Timur Park in central Tashkent, 2008. It used to be called Revolution Park and featured a monument to Karl Marx. After independence Marx’s monument was replaced with a statue of the medieval conqueror Amir Timur, who we know as Tamerlane. © Author’s photo.

Our family lived in a four-bedroom flat on the fifth floor. We had acquired such a big (by Soviet standards) and centrally located flat thanks to my father’s writing talent and assertiveness. Housing was provided by the state for free, but you had to wait for it for years unless you could find a way around the waiting list.

My father was a journalist and knew how to write convincing petitions to officials. He also cleverly played the ethnic card: because we were ethnic Kazakhs, he wrote to Dinmukhammed Kunayev, the Communist Party boss at that time in the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan, saying that he was a promising young Kazakh journalist in Uzbekistan who was going to devote his professional life to writing about the life of the Kazakh minority living in Uzbekistan—about one million people. But, he explained, he had a problem with housing and was forced to live in rented rooms with a wife and, at the time, three young daughters.

Somehow, perhaps because of its eloquent style, his letter got noticed, and a note was sent from the Kazakh Communist Party to the Uzbek Communist Party suggesting that the young Kazakh journalist in Tashkent should be taken care of. We moved into our flat in 1976.

My father was a totally self-made man with a tremendous amount of energy and confidence and an unbending determination to succeed as a writer. After finishing secondary school at the age of sixteen, he had come to Tashkent penniless from his kolkhoz (Soviet collective farm), about two hours’ bus ride away. He spent a large portion of his first earnings from various manual jobs in the big city on volumes of classical literature, from Balzac to Turgenev.

He went on to study journalism and worked his way up to become the host of a Kazakh-language program on Uzbek television, which made him a celebrity among the Kazakh community of Uzbekistan. Acting both as a journalist and cameraman, equipped with a very basic movie camera, he traveled to various kolkhozes to shoot stories, mainly about cotton growers and sheep breeders. Back home from his reporting trips, he would type away at his program scripts or novels until late into the night on an old, loud green typewriter.

Our home was always full of various Kazakh talents—writers, poets, musicians, singers—whom our father invited to appear on his program. My three sisters and I did not really appreciate their presence in our lives; for us it meant having to help our mother look after what seemed like an endless stream of guests, serving them food, washing dishes, and making their beds.

Father was totally engrossed in his own world, in which there was not much room for us. But when we were young kids, we would impatiently wait every night for a new episode of stories about Zhalmauz Kampir, the “Old Ogress Witch,” and Olmes Batyr, the “Immortal Hero,” that he would make up for us off the top of his head.

In a flat identical to ours on the third floor lived the family of Fazlitdin Fakhrutdinov, a forestry minister in the Uzbek Soviet government. He, his wife, and their children had moved into their flat four years before us, when he’d gotten his ministerial job.

Fazlitdin aka had eight children—three daughters and five sons. One of his daughters, Zukhra, was the same age as me, and sometimes we played outside together. Our repertoire of games included rope skipping, dolls, hide-and-seek, and chasing butterflies in our neighborhood, which, despite its central location, was full of fruit trees, elms, oaks, wildflowers, and grasses. Zukhra had green eyes, soft features, and short, light-brown, curly hair, and I secretly admired her beauty.

Zukhra’s two sisters, Mavlyuda and Mashkhura, the eldest children in the family, were fifteen and thirteen years older than Zukhra, respectively. When they had been married off, Zukhra had still been a child, and she spent most of her childhood with her five brothers—the three older ones (Bakhmitdin, Rukhitdin, and Mukhitdin), her twin brother (Khasan), and the youngest (Usmon). Their mother, Manzura opa (like aka for men, opa is used to address an older woman), never had a professional career, fully devoting herself to raising the children.

Fazlitdin aka was born in 1930 to a farmer’s family in the Parkent District, east of Tashkent. He studied forest irrigation at the Tashkent Agricultural Institute and worked his way up to become the forest management boss for Tashkent and the three regions in the eastern Fergana Valley. In 1972, he was invited to the capital and made chairman of the newly created Timber Processing Committee in charge of forests, paper mills, and so on, a position equal in status to that of minister.

Because of his senior government job, Fazlitdin aka was the most important person in our apartment block. Every morning an official white Volga car would wait for him by the entrance. He had a notable paunch but was tall; his back was always straight, his head was held high, and he always wore well-ironed white shirts and formal suits. Sometimes he would shake hands and chat with some of the neighbors for a few minutes before getting into his car.

Fazlitdin aka was determined to bring up his children as “good people,” educated and with strong moral values. He believed the best way to accomplish this was by instilling discipline and demanding obedience from them. To some extent he continued to act at home like the boss that he was in his office, but by and large he was no different than many other Uzbek fathers who made all the rules at home and all the decisions concerning family matters.

The children were never to answer back to Fazlitdin aka or to disobey his word. They were to be home each day by six o’clock, before his return from work. Every evening, Fazlitdin aka would make the boys do one hour of vigorous exercise—push-ups, sit-ups, jumps, and so on. In addition to having good marks at school, he wanted his sons to be physically strong too. The lone way his children ever showed any resentment was by calling him “the General”—and this only behind his back, of course.

After Zukhra and I went to school in 1979 at the age of seven—to an Uzbek-language school and a Russian-language school, respectively—we began to play less and less often together. Maybe this was because language and cultural barriers began to separate us. Russian was becoming my main language; hers was Uzbek. I was now mixing with my multiethnic classmates—Russians, Tatars, Jews—while Zukhra was in a predominantly Uzbek environment. We were still growing up in the same neighborhood but becoming parts of two different communities.

My three sisters and I went to School No. 50, just a five-minute walk from our home. It specialized in mathematics and physics, which meant extra classes on these two subjects.

My class was a model one at our school because our form mistress, Lyudmila Vladimirovna, who was in her thirties and taught mathematics, seemed to be putting all her energy into us, her pupils. Maybe this was because she had no family of her own—only poodles, whom she adored. She was tall, had blond curls, wore spectacles, and walked quickly and purposefully. She was a nerdy, confident type and also quite a Communist activist. We regularly marched and paraded and sang ideological songs because being a model class meant winning various ideological competitions. But we had lots of fun too, like picnics in the mountains and parties.

Our class was called Plamya (Flame) and was named after the Czech Communist activist and antifascist journalist Julius Fucik. I was so impressed by his story that every time we went to his museum in Tashkent, which we did every week, I felt a strong sense of admiration, mixed with pity, for him and his Notes from the Gallows, which he’d written in prison, before being hanged.

Outside school, however, there was the unescapable reality of Soviet life, including the humiliation of standing in queues for butter, sausages, meat, and other food that was not available every day.

One of the neighbors in our apartment block, Parida opa, worked at the Moskva food shop across Pushkin Street. She would tip off our mother and other neighbors she was friendly with when the shop was going to have some rare and sought-after item, telling them what time the shop was going to begin selling it.

Our mother would dispatch at least two of the four of us to stand in the queue, so we could get two or more rations. I did not like doing that, sensing that there was something undignified in having to queue for basic food. I also resented the rude service at the shop, the quick and nervous movement of hands wrapping sausages in thick brownish paper, and the greedy, hungry, and impatient atmosphere around the people standing in the queue.

As a government minister, Fazlitdin aka was on gos-obespechenie, which meant “state provision.” Every week, a car would bring the family food supplies, including delicacies that were never seen in the shops.

But there were no other signs that the family was living any kind of privileged life, and Fazlitdin aka’s children also queued for milk and other things at the Moskva. In Soviet times, the surest signs of a family’s wealth and high social status were the foreign-made clothes they could afford to buy and get hold of, like jeans or good quality shoes. Fazlitdin aka’s children, however, were dressed modestly, in clothes from regular Soviet shops. He did not think of using his position to spoil his children like that. He believed that they, like most Soviet citizens, had all they needed.

“There was everything in the shops. There was nothing that you could not find. There was good education. Education was open and free, like medical services,” Fazlitdin aka told me in a conversation recalling those times. “There was order. If anyone complained about anything, there would always be a response from the authorities. Everything was fair. We did not know that we were living under communism. We understand that only now,” he said, reflecting the sense of nostalgia many older former Soviet citizens feel for the good old days and their disappointment with the post-Soviet social turmoil and onset of cutthroat capitalism. But there was a lot more than that to Fazlitdin aka’s nostalgia.

In Zukhra’s memory, her and her siblings’ childhood was unclouded and happy, though in parts too strictly overseen by Fazlitdin aka.

Without her father’s knowledge, Zukhra went to a dancing school—the famous Bakhor (Spring) dance company—where she learned traditional Uzbek dance and the dances of other ethnic groups living in the Soviet Union, the company’s specialty. Fazlitdin aka, who considered dancing too frivolous an occupation for a proper girl, was unaware of her classes for all the eight years that she took them.

Zukhra and her siblings read books and discussed them all together. They took turns cleaning the house, divided into “teams.” Zukhra was on one team with Rukhitdin, the fourth child in the family, and they would use ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration
• List of Names of Central Characters
• 1. Making Choices
• 2. Back to Islam
• 3. Students’ Imam
• 4. A Place of No Return
• 5. Disappearances
• 6. The Andijan Revolt
• 7. The Road to Uprising
• 8. The Shymkent Raid
• 9. The Youngest Brother
• Afterword
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• About the Author