A Soviet Journey by Alex La Guma Christopher J. Lee

Author:Alex La Guma,Christopher J. Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Notes above Ground Level

The plane was heading up the map. Lost behind us were the Pamir and Alai Mountains, the harsh deserts being watered by newly dug canals, the ruffled-looking wilderness of South Kazakhstan. Through the window of the AN-24 I could see, below the thin, drifting puffball clouds, the great plains of the north. These were the steppes of Kazakhstan, mile after mile of earth now cultivated into rectangles of green, black, dark brown; flat, like carpets nailed to the floor of the world. The great prairies that had once been empty were now settled mostly by volunteers who had left an old life behind to open up these vast stretches and give them a productive life.

I left my Ramayana for the sight of the great expanses passing by below. The ancient war in Ceylon dropped from my memory. “Sound of trumpet and of bugle, drum and horn and echoing shell, and the neigh of charging courses and the tuskers’ dying wail,” while I pondered over the dauntlessness of latter-day frontiersmen who had turned over this endless emptiness into vast square miles of wheat and pastureland, exposed the mineral wealth.

Once backward, one could say. But really, what is “backward”? Around the years 950 to 1050 the territory known today as Central Asia and Kazakhstan produced such outstanding scientists and thinkers as ibn-Sina whom the Europeans called Avicenna, who wrote many remarkable works on medicine, philosophy, and natural sciences.

I once chatted with a European who took pains to convince me that Ancient Greece was the cradle of all “civilization” and “knowledge,” therefore of Western “superiority.” Finding the debate hopeless in the face of bigotry and chauvinism, I conceded, asking whether it was not possible that the wisdom from his wonderful fountain might not have flowed in all directions and not only due west? “Impossible.” he snorted, “the Aegean Sea was in the way.”

What could convince him, in his navy-blue City of London suit and shiny shoes, the neat striped shirt, that there had been a scholar-encyclopaedist called Al-Farabi in a faraway place now called South Kazakhstan in the ninth–tenth centuries or that there had been an Alisher Navoi, an Uzbek poet, in the fifteenth century about the same time that Europe was experiencing its Renaissance?[16] That there was great poetry in Arabic and Persian?

The Arabic and Persian languages did play a major role in the political and cultural life of the Central Asian peoples. These two languages became a means of intertribal and international communications, fulfilled social functions right up to the October Revolution, much in the same way Latin must have done in medieval Europe. But for this reason there was a lag in the development of the modern literary languages of the native peoples in Central Asia and Kazakhstan, of their social functions.

The retarded development of the languages of the local population was one of the reasons for cultural backwardness, the mass of whom were illiterate and knew no other languages than their native tongues.

During tsarist times not a single higher educational establishment was to be found in the region.

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