Eight Pieces of Empire (35 page)

I hopped in a taxi and asked to be taken to Chovli. The destination was so obscure that the driver had to ask for directions even though he was a local and our destination only an hour away. I thought this strange, and even stranger when we had to ask for directions again. The issue was that Chovli was not a town, but a nondescript collective farm, and few who did not live there knew of its existence—nor that of the man who supposedly presented an existential threat to the Uzbek state, Juma, who was a collective farmer there.

An old man at the side of the road explained where Juma lived, and the driver, in Uzbek, inquired as to who he was. Upon learning that I was going to see a just-released political prisoner, the driver became decidedly nervous and refused to wait while I conducted my interview with Juma. I barely had enough time to hand him a wad of Uzbek
som
for the fare and get one foot out of the car before he slammed the taxi into gear and sped off, not looking back.

I was directed to a barn with a half-dismantled tractor parked outside. I knocked on the open door. A young man greeted me and led me through a hay-filled stable and up a rickety staircase to the living quarters on the second floor. There sat Yusuf Juma, banging one finger after another on the keyboard of an old mechanical Uzbek-Cyrillic typewriter. He was not expecting me, as I hadn’t wanted to attract undue attention by trying to contact him beforehand, but he greeted me warmly nonetheless.

Given the government’s irrational fear of his poems—unknown to almost all except a tiny group of activists left in Uzbekistan—I had expected to find a long-winded political firebrand, or possibly an implacably bitter, rambling soliloquist. Instead, I found a sturdily built farmer with an easy smile. He projected no sense of bitterness about his recent seventy days in solitary confinement for the crime of “antistate activity.” Specifically, he had been caught writing “subversive poetry,” as he had been all his life.

Born in 1958, Juma had started writing poetry in his teens, angering the Soviet authorities by writing verses calling for the closure of an
airport used by pesticide-spraying crop dusters. Activists blamed the chemicals for a rash of unexplained cancers, miscarriages, and other assorted health problems. But in Uzbekistan, “cotton is more important than people,” the collective farmer Juma told me.

The poem that got Juma in trouble he had actually written in the 1980s as a critique of the Soviet system. It was titled “Dr. Moreau” and was inspired by H. G. Wells’s 1896 early sci-fi novel
The Island of Dr. Moreau
, about a failed attempt to turn animals into human beings, which in turn led to George Orwell’s
Animal Farm
.

Juma recited a few lines:

Doctor Moreau, you tried to build a stairway to heaven from bales of hay. You’ve turned foxes into judges; They hide their eyes from injustice. You’ve brewed up bureaucrats from wolves; Turned rabbits into people.

Look at our nation; They’ve submitted their lives to the yoke.…

I wondered why on earth the Uzbek government would expend such efforts to jail an obviously harmless poet-farmer.

“So what was their main complaint?” I asked.

“Officially, the authorities accused me of making fun of the president. They said I was trying to say that the president was descended from animals.”

His days in solitary had not weakened Juma’s poetic resolve. When I walked into his barn studio to find him banging away on his vintage typewriter (I was surprised the Uzbek authorities hadn’t carted it away along with his poetry), I assumed he was crafting something new. He explained, however, that when he was arrested, the National Security Service (the Uzbek successor to the Soviet KGB) had confiscated nearly all his writings and that he was trying to retype them all from memory.

I sensed that Juma knew, and that he was indeed even proud of, the fact that his freedom was probably not permanent. There was no doubt the security services were keeping a close eye on him. We sat on the barn floor talking for several hours while his wife, Gyulnara, and several of
his six children alternately joined in the discussion, laughed, or served endless rounds of tea. One of his daughters, aged twenty-one, had already been threatened with arrest for her own poetry. Uzbek Security officials had also gone to the local kindergarten and asked teachers if Yusuf’s five-year-old son exhibited any “radical Islamist leanings.”

Juma was no Islamist radical—that was obvious—but the government used the label to conveniently neutralize anyone deemed even a minor irritant or threat.

It started to get dark, and Juma and his family hunted down a taxi to take me back to Bukhara. We parted.

About five years later, in late 2007, Yusuf Juma and one of his sons got into their car. On the doors they had affixed handmade signs calling for the resignation of President Karimov. They put the car into gear and headed away from their home at the Chovli collective farm. They drove in the direction of Bukhara. Within minutes, squad cars forced the poet and his son off the road and pulled them out. One of the cops was allegedly injured in the fracas, and Juma was given five years in prison for “slander,” as well as resisting arrest. Yusuf Juma was held in Uzbekistan’s most notorious prison, Jaslyk, a word practically synonymous with torture. Initially he was allowed some family and Red Cross visits, during which he told of being chained to a ceiling, being beaten until unconscious, and forced to stand naked in a freezing room for hours. By 2010, the Uzbek authorities put a halt to visitations of all sorts, and Yusuf Juma for a period effectively disappeared from view. Human rights workers said there were reports he was near death.

Juma’s poetry lived on, however, and a small group of followers—current and former inhabitants of the Island of Dr. Moreau—“Papa” Islam Karimov’s Uzbekistan—kept up the pressure for his release or more information about his fate.

Just as I was completing this chapter, on May 18, 2011, the Uzbek authorities unexpectedly released Yusuf Juma—or, more properly, forced him into exile—describing the act as a humanitarian “amnesty” connected to the twentieth anniversary of Uzbekistan’s independence. Juma
was forced to give up his Uzbek citizenship. He was given no last glance at his homeland, which he so deeply revered. Juma was moved directly from a holding cell to Tashkent International Airport and was put on a plane for the United States, where most of his family had already been given political asylum.

Elena Bibikova, Ulta folklore keeper, Sakhalin Island, Val, Russia, 2005.

T
he facts of Georgia’s
2003 “Rose Revolution” are now well documented. After years of anarchy, stagnation, and unprecedented corruption, a group of young, mostly Western-educated “reformers” plotted the regime’s downfall, promising a bright new day for the Georgian state, still in shock from the ethnic and civil wars of the 1990s—as well as the reality that Georgia had gone from being the most prosperous Soviet republic to one of the most poverty-stricken ex–Soviet republics in a span of only three years or so. Their leader was a thirty-six-year-old by the name of Mikheil Saakashvili, whose boilerplate description usually included references to his educational pedigree (Columbia Law School), as well as his brash impulsiveness, seemingly boundless energy (once in power, he often hosted diplomats and journalists, including me, at meetings that began at three thirty a.m.). The adjective “flamboyant” has been used so many times in describing Saakashvili that it has begun to lose its meaning.

The “revolution” followed a rigged election and a couple of weeks of protests by Saakashvili’s National Movement party. But it was so swift and unexpected—its active phase took only a day or so—that many foreign correspondents had already left Georgia, their editors bored with the story and convinced that there would be no “revolution.”

In the end, pundits concocted all manner of conspiracy theories to explain the Rose Revolution phenomenon—that it had been personally planned and entirely financed by the billionaire George Soros (Soros funded some NGOs, whose members ended up among the vanguard of the “revolution,” but he could hardly be given credit for single-handedly bringing down the government). Another posited that the whole thing had been imported from Serbian “insurgents,” overthrow-of-Milosevic-style. This was also a wild exaggeration—Saakashvili’s party activists
had indeed gone to Belgrade, openly, to study the tactics of that change of power, just as opposition movements and political parties study one another’s strategies the world over.

The Rose Revolution was credited for inspiring other so-called color revolutions in the ex-USSR. They, however, proved to be fleeting, their leaders either deposed in farcical ways (it took only a hundred angry young men running into Kyrgyzstan’s presidential palace to get rid of the increasingly authoritarian leader Askar Akayev. His successor was later overthrown in a riot, and the country descended into interethnic warfare). In Ukraine, 2004 brought the “Orange Revolution,” which I lived through during its six-week-long unfolding. But what had seemed like a sea change in Ukraine withered away, as former allies—President Victor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko—bickered themselves to death within months, eventually losing power to elements of the old authorities they had peacefully overthrown (Yushchenko, who won the high office in 2004 after an earlier vote was nullified because of massive falsification, got a miserable 6 percent of the vote in his “reelection” attempt five years later).

The Rose Revolution yielded many actual changes. One of Saakashvili’s first acts was to fire the entire fifty-five-thousand-strong despised “traffic police” force—whose only competent quality was its ability to shake down drivers for bribes with astounding effectiveness. (Many were later rehired, but as regular police, and strict measures were put into place to stop bribery; the force stopped being feared and was actually trusted by most Georgians.) The electrical grid, dysfunctional for a decade, was put into order. Sweeping overhauls of the business environment meant that investments flowed in from abroad. There were also excesses, with some of Saakashvili’s allies later breaking with him, often over personality clashes and ambition, and sometimes over what they saw as a concentration of too much power in his own hands. Most important, the tiny country, population 4 million or so, headed onto a collision course with giant Russia, population 140 million or so, a war of words over a host of issues culminating in a real war during 2008.

These are all the basic facts of the revolution. But I was more interested
in the last days in power of the titan who was toppled—the-Man-Who-Ended-the-Cold-War, Eduard Shevardnadze—and what had been going through his mind. A wily empire survivor, Shevardnadze had occupied political posts ranging from Soviet Georgia’s anticorruption-campaigning interior minister, to head of the Georgian Communist Party, to Soviet foreign minister under Gorbachev, to finally president of post-Soviet Georgia, leading the country under a banner proclaiming the desirability of Western-style democracy.

THE FLAMING RECLINER

T
he throng—by now it
was more like a mob—stormed into the Georgian State Chancellery, Eduard Shevardnadze’s presidential palace. They raced from floor to floor of the rundown eleven-story Soviet-style building. Running like uncontrolled children do, rambunctiously, excitedly, they knew what they were looking for. In the end they found it (or at least thought they had): Shevardnadze’s personal reclining chair, symbolizing his “power”—and at that adrenaline-spiked moment, symbols were everything. It mattered little to the revelers that the recliner was not actually Shevardnadze’s; they had just snatched and torched the first one that looked regal enough to be the president’s.

They dragged the recliner down a staircase and delivered it to the thousands assembled outside, as if the recliner were an animate object, a living, breathing incarnation of the famous Georgian leader who had just fled his office in the face of popular disgust. Someone now doused it with gasoline, and someone else threw a match; the chair exploded in flame, and the crowd roared its approval as if this were Salem, Massachusetts, and a witch was being burned at the stake.