Soviet Cities of Legend

ON the remote and mysterious plain, the crenelated walls with their eleven great gates and 181 watchtowers gleamed in the night. "Seen thus," wrote British Traveler Fitzroy Maclean in Escape to Adventure--an account of his journeys in 1938 to forbidden parts of the U.S.S.R. --"Bukhara seemed an enchanted city, with its pinnacles and domes and crumbling ramparts white and dazzling in the pale light of the moon."

But in daylight, the tinkling of silver bells and the aromatic incense of another age vanished like a mirage in the Kara Kum Desert. A Red flag flapped on the 203-foot-high summit of the Great Minaret, from which for centuries cruel khans and emirs had cast their enemies to their deaths. Over the main gate, in Russian and Uzbek, Maclean read the inscription: Town Soviet. Elsewhere he found decay and neglect. The miles of covered shops in Central Asia's most fabled bazaar had dwindled to a handful of grubby stalls, and only a few of the city's former 100 ornate mosques and 300 madrasahs (Moslem religious schools) were in use.

In the crumbling ruins, Maclean recognized a deliberate Communist policy. Because the powerful mullahs of this age-old Mohammedan stronghold had resisted Sovietization, the city had been sealed off and left to die.

In the two decades since then, few foreigners have seen Bukhara. But its neighboring ancient cities on the vast Central Asian steppes seem to have learned their lesson. In the bustling streets of modern Tashkent and the redolent, mud-walled courtyards of Samarkand (pop. 170,000), short, moonfaced Uzbeks with golden skin and embroidered skullcaps no longer call the Russians hated koperlar (infidels). The commissars have done their work well. This summer hundreds of tourists, many of them Americans, flying southeast from Moscow in swift TU-IO4 jets that make the 2,500-mile trip to Tashkent in four hours, have been rewarded with satisfying peeks at these ancient cities, set like "green jewels on a withered hand," in a harsh and little-known land (see color pages).

Ancient Battlegrounds. From the Caspian Sea to the border of China, Soviet Central Asia is a region as big as India, half as big as the U.S. Mountain ranges, deserts as bone-dry as the Sahara, and interminable wastes of grassy steppes make it one of the earth's most inhospitable areas. But from this Eurasian heartland came Aryans to populate the West, and across its pink sands marched generations of world conquerors. In 329 B.C. Alexander the Great sacked Samarkand ("Place of Sugars"), a city already centuries old. Rebuilt, Samarkand became one of the central depots on the great Silk Road from Byzantium to China, and flourished as a brilliant seat of Arab civilization, only to be destroyed again by Genghis Khan. Near the end of the 13th century, Marco Polo reported it once more a "very great and eminent city," and 100 years later Tamerlane made it the capital of his empire, which stretched from the Hellespont to the Ganges, and from Siberia to the Persian Gulf.

After Tamerlane's death, violence and cruelty still bloodied the sands under warring Oriental despots, as Tartars, Mongols, Persians, Baluchis, Russians, Arabs and Chinese fought for supremacy. Western "unbelievers," plying the Golden Road to Samarkand, often ended in the slave auctions. Later, as the ground was disputed by Britain and Russia, captured Englishmen were beheaded, or tortured in deep "bug pits," crawling with scorpions and sheep ticks.

In the last half of the 19th century, Czarist armies finally conquered the region and called all of it Turkestan. Until the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, local emirs continued to rule, and Mohammedanism was not interfered with. Rebelling against the feudal lords, Moslem intellectuals helped the Reds win control in a savage civil war that lasted until 1924. After it was over, Stalin set to work with calculated savagery to Russianize and communize the area. Tribal groups were broken up and nomads forced into collectives. In ten years, uncounted millions died from starvation or were killed. Then the Soviets turned to extirpating Moslem religion and culture. Hundreds of mosques were closed, mullahs by the score were arrested, their schools and libraries seized, and the use of Arabic script was forbidden. The ban still exists: although they outnumber Moslems in Egypt, Central Asia's Mohammedans are today the only ones in the world who are not allowed to use Arabic.

Sovietized Republics. Two vast, state-directed migrations did much to change the character of Turkestan. The first was in the 19305; the second was Nikita Khrushchev's drive to open up Kazakhstan's virgin (and barren) land. The newcomers did not mix well with the Uzbeks, Kazakhs and other Moslems, but, largely as a result of their efforts, the land (now divided into five Soviet republics) has made considerable economic strides.

Kazakhstan (pop. 9,300,000), almost as big as all of Western Europe, is second only to the Ukraine as the breadbasket of the nation. It is Russia's top lead and zinc producer, the second-largest source of copper. Its capital, Alma-Ata (Father of Apples), where Leon Trotsky was exiled in 1927, is full of bleak new Soviet-style construction. A more recent exile from Moscow, ex-Premier Georgi Malenkov, now runs a hydroelectric power station at Ust-Kamenogorsk. Uzbekistan (pop. 8,113,000), with new irrigation projects, gives Russia two-thirds of its cotton. Its capital, Tashkent, with farm-implement factories, railroad shops, textile and paper mills, clothing and shoe factories, is one of the U.S.S.R.'s biggest cities. More primitive and inaccessible are the other three republics, Tadzhikistan, Kirgizia and Turkmenistan.

In them all, while posing as a friend of the Arab world, Russia has continued trying to stamp out Mohammedan culture, but Russian efforts to deceive Egypt's Nasser and other Moslem visitors to the area did not really fool them.

Bukhara is still largely off limits. But last year, two decades after his first visit, Author Fitzroy Maclean (who had since become a British M.P.) wangled permission from Khrushchev himself to return to Bukhara. "The ancient walls and gates of the city have for the most part been swept away," he wrote. "A number of wide, tree-lined boulevards have been driven through the maze of narrow, winding streets. An hygienic water supply has replaced the insanitary Shakh Rud, and an imposing water tower now dominates the Registan." In the modernization, the population had dwindled by half, the once influential mullahs were nowhere to be found, and the older people prayed in the privacy of their mud-walled homes. It was only a matter of time, Maclean suspected, before Bukhara would be opened to visitors--another sanitized, Sovietized showplace on Intourist itineraries.

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