Culture and Life

by Rob Gowland

"Victims of communism"

I feel sorry for them, as I am sure you do, too. I mean, there 
they are, swarming all over the former Soviet Union, expending 
great efforts to teach the people there the ways of capitalism 
and it seems the people are not grateful.

I am talking about the US and EU-trained "aid workers" who are 
trying to "help" the people of the various former Soviet 
Republics to set up small businesses and establish cottage 
industries as a remedy for the economic disaster that came with 
the overthrow of socialism.

The European parts of the former USSR are overrun with (mainly 
US) evangelical Christians. For their part, the former Soviet 
Central Asian republics are inundated with Islamic proselytisers.

Islamic or Christian, however, they are equally determined to 
help the victims of "Godless Communism". Pumped up with 
propaganda about capitalism being the necessary concomitant of 
freedom and democracy, they must be peeved indeed to discover 
that the people in the former USSR do not fit their stereotyped 
ideas of what "victims of Communism" should be like.

The Far Eastern Economic Review recently ran a very 
revealing article on this subject, as it applies in Khorog, a 
mountain town of 25,000 people in Tajikistan near the Afghan 
border.

The writer of the article, one John Bonaccolta, tries his best to 
give a positive spin to the present situation there, but he 
cannot disguise the fact that what he's describing is pretty 
dire.

However, he is clearly so committed to the idea that any form of 
capitalism, no matter how bad, must be preferable to socialism, 
that he seems oblivious to the fact that his article is full of 
inadvertent admissions of how much better things were under the 
Soviet system.

He tells us that, "thanks to the centralised Soviet education 
system", over 99 percent of the population is literate. Of 
course, he prefaces this with the daft comment "no doubt the 
Soviets were more concerned with creating a subservient local 
population than with fuelling local culture".

Yeah, that's how you keep people subservient: teach 'em to read 
and write so they can have access to information and ideas!

Without noticing the contradiction, Bonaccolta then tells us that 
"the legacy of Soviet education is striking — in this part of 
Badakhshan in the Pamir mountains, almost everyone, it seems, is 
an artist, a writer or a musician".

It would be difficult, in any case, for them to be much else. 
Bonaccolta notes that after the overthrow of socialism in the 
USSR, financial support for the sciences in Tajikistan fell to 
one twenty-fifth of what it had been.

He also quotes a European Commission aid worker: "I don't know of 
any colonial power that brought such cultural opportunity to the 
far corners of its empire, to the smallest villages." Perhaps 
that is because the Soviet Union was not in fact a "colonial 
empire".

Bonaccolta quotes a local artist, Yorali: "Life was very good 
here during Soviet times. Now the only people who live above 
subsistence [level] work for aid organisations or traffic drugs, 
and that's only about ten percent of the population".

Religious people in this region tend to be Shia Ismaili Muslims, 
whose spiritual leader is the Aga Khan. Most aid workers in the 
region seem to work for the Aga Khan Development Network which is 
trying to win back for Islam the ground it lost in Soviet times 
by "coming to the rescue" now.

As a local university student tells Bonaccolta: "Without the Aga 
Khan we would all be dead. There would be nothing to eat". But 
our journalist has to admit that the Aga Khan's pockets are not 
very deep when compared with "the old Soviet machine".

Nothing daunted, the helpful Aga has set up the Mountain 
Societies Development Support Program (MSDSP) to, typically, show 
the locals how to earn a living in the new circumstances.

One of the MSDSP's workers, with the suspiciously non-Islamic 
name of Sarah Robinson, complains that "teaching such cultured, 
highly educated people that they need to work to live is a 
challenge".

This remark, incidentally, gives a very interesting spin on what 
life must have been like in Soviet times: apparently, under 
socialism, you did not have to work in order to live.

In dealing with the Soviet era, Bonaccolta typically refers to 
Tajikistan as "this distant corner of Moscow's empire". He cannot 
hide his dismay, however, at the way the inhabitants of this 
"distant corner" are today appalled by the type of jobs the MSDSP 
is trying to persuade them are the way of the future.

People trained as doctors, engineers and artists are 
understandably not impressed by suggestions that in the 
capitalist future they can drive a cab or try to scratch a living 
by tilling Tajikistan's wretched soil (only five percent of the 
country's land is actually arable)!

Sarah Robinson bemoans the locals' unwillingness to embrace 
opening a business: "They view commerce as dirty". This too is 
probably a Soviet hangover!

Bonaccolta concludes his study of people in one part of the 
former Soviet Union "struggling to cope with life in the real 
world" by quoting one of those whose present work is demeaning to 
him. He is Hazim, an architect "reduced to driving jeeps for the 
few visitors to the area".

Referring to Soviet times, Hazim says: "At least then we could 
study in Moscow or St Petersburg [Leningrad]. We could wake up in 
the morning and just go — none of these borders and checkpoints.

"And we always had enough to eat."