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‘The peoples of the Soviet Union of Socialist Republics are initially divided into nine groups: Slavs, Finno-Ugrics, Turks, Mongolians, Iranians, Ibero-Caucasians, Latins, Germanics, and Latvian-Lithuanians.' At this point he turned to consult the paper: ‘The following are Slavs: Russians, Ukrainians, White Russians, Poles, and Bulgarians. The following are Finno-Ugrics: Estonians, Mordvins, Karelians, Udmurts (formerly known as Votiaks), Maris, Hungarians, Finns, Komi Zyrians and Komi Permyaks. The Turkic peoples are Uzbeks, Tatars, Kazakhs, Azerbaijanis, Chuvashes, Turkmen, Bashkirs, Kyrgyzs, Yakuts, Karakalpaks and Kumyks,' – here he threw a quick glance at the family – ‘Tuvins, Gagauses, Uigurs, Karachays, Khakassins, Altaians, Balkars, Nogais and Crimean Tartars. Mongolians are Buryats, Kalmyks and Koreans. The Iranian peoples are made up of Armenians (often counted as a people in their own right, but not in this census), Tajiks, North Ossetians, South Ossetians and Greeks. The Ibero-Caucasian peoples are Georgians, Chechens, Ingushes, Avars, Tsezs (who speak the same language), Adyghes, and Abazars. The Latin peoples are Romanians and Moldavians (who also speak Romanian, but use the Cyrillic alphabet).
Germanic peoples are Germans and Yiddish-speaking Jews. Latvian-Lithuanians are, as their name implies, Latvians and Lithuanians. Apart from that there is an appendix concerning Nenets (formerly known as Samoyeds), Veps, Kriashens, Besermyans, Tungus, Telenganas, Kashgars, Talyshes and Yedysans.'

The family members had not taken in a great deal of Zverev's first statement; the list of peoples, however, made a huge impression on Djamolidine. The geographic outline of the Soviet Union swirled like a spiral galaxy in his mind as the size of the country finally began to sink in.

Shortly afterwards Hosni politely escorted Zverev to the door and Ivana sent Djamolidine to bed. Later, as the boy lay in the darkness, he imagined the swell of all the languages in the world spoken simultaneously.

From that day onwards Djamolidine kept a notebook in his pocket where he would write an entry every time he met a person from a different people. He quickly reached twenty-five different ones and then thirty, but at that point his interest began to fade or, rather, his frustration with the existing system of classification grew, while simultaneously his own
attempt at creating a superior one started running into difficulties: for example, should there be specific subcategories for people of mixed race; a boy at his school had grandparents who were Armenian, Azerbaijani, Russian and German respectively, and so ought he to have his own particular subclass? Which would be a subcategory of what precisely? He considered classification according to mother tongue, but that would produce misleading results – for himself, for example, who was Kumyk, but spoke and thought in Russianised Azerbaijani. Nor would religion or geography be workable parameters for classification. Everything can be divided into more and more categories the closer you look at it, he thought, and vice versa, every single phenomenon ticks several boxes when you look at the bigger picture. Likewise there are several names for every single object. Take him, for instance: his full name was Djamolidine Hasanov, but his friends and family normally called him Djamo, and his mother sometimes called him Moli or just Mo. His schoolteacher called him Young Pioneer Hasanov, and in the playground he was known as Djimi or Rat, if anyone wanted to tease him. As a cyclist he wanted to be known as the Vulture from Baku. In addition,
everything could be written using different symbols. The three generations in Djamolidine's family each used a different alphabet: he himself used Cyrillic for writing in Russian and Azerbaijani, his father, Hosni, however, had learned the Latin alphabet in school and wrote in Azerbaijani sprinkled with numerous Russian words and certain Kumyk adaptations. Finally there was Nusrat, his grandfather, who had learned Persian and Arabic at a madrasa in Tabriz before the revolution, and now in his old age used the Arabic alphabet in order to produce a form of Kumyk spelling of his own invention. Both Hosni and Nusrat were able to read Cyrillic letters, but they did not use them for writing. Djamolidine was particularly mesmerised by his grandfather's flourishes.

In time the contents of the notebook underwent a barely discernible shift from data collection to musings, which orbited around a basic piece of knowledge he acquired the evening the censor visited them: the world is huge. It triggered a longing to travel abroad, which for the time being could be relieved by the sucking sound of rubber tyres against tarmac.

Power is a measure of an individual's or an institution's ability to influence others in order to achieve
its own goals. This involves two things: will and the ability to enforce one's will, if necessary, by violent means. Only rarely is actual physical force applied, as the implied threat, paired with a clear allocation of roles, generally encourages the weaker part to surrender in advance, frequently without the parties themselves even becoming aware of this process. Power play is the prevailing way for states as well as individuals to behave and is consequently the cement that enables relationships between various entities to be maintained; a kind of existential connective tissue. Power exists in political, economic, sociological, psychological and other situations and the tendency to create structures, through which power can be exercised, can be found everywhere. The larger the power the more complex the structures.

When Djamolidine in 1962, aged fourteen years and motivated by his desire to take part in competitive cycling, became a member of Komsomol, he joined at one of the lowest levels of what is probably the most complex power structure ever created: the state formation known as the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. This structure was, despite a relentlessly proclaimed equality, hierarchical as few had ever been: at the top was the general secretary
and below him the state apparatus with the Ministerial Council, the Supreme Soviet and its Presidium, the Soviet of the Union and the Soviet of Nationalities, the Ministerial Councils of the fifteen republics and the Supreme Soviet, the Soviets of the approximately 150 regions with their associated executive committees and below them the Soviet and executive committees of approximately 5,600 districts and 45,000 villages. All authorities were officially elected from the bottom up, but in reality were appointed from the top by the Communist Party which represented the heart, spinal column and peripheral nerves in a triangular structure consisting of a bureau, a committee and a secretariat – a structure which replicated itself up through the levels of the pyramid starting with local party associations, to districts and regions, to republics and at the very top the Polit Bureau, the Central Committee and the Secretariat of the Central Committee. The military and the police forces, with or without uniform, were the muscles of the structure, and the education systems and various cultural institutions acted as the intestines. In addition there were trade unions, women's organisations, artists' unions, the pioneer organisations
for children and the aforementioned organisation for young people, Komsomol.

Having been admitted into his local division, Djamolidine was accepted into a Baku cycling team and was soon afterwards promoted to the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic's under-16s team as there was no shortage of his talent or motivation. He quickly grasped that the sport of cycling involved much more than merely pedalling uphill on a metal frame with rubber wheels. The presence of other riders turned his attempts to reduce wind resistance into a relentless game. He realised the importance of reading the wheel of the rider in front of him, following the rhythm; he experienced being sucked into a field of possibly a hundred riders, cycling in a fan formation to cancel out the wind and forming part of a breakaway group of leads. When he had been cycling on his own he had been playing a simple game of three-in-a-row; now it was chess or Go.

His coaches tried to make him cycle laps, but Djamolidine despised this repetitive pedalling that got him nowhere and deliberately rode below his ability.

‘I'm a mountain biker!' he stated, making a defiant stance with his skinny, but sinewy body.

His teenage years passed with school, training and races for the ASSR team, where he now only just managed to be promoted to the under-18s and did not even come close to being selected for the national youth team, and he was able to hold on to his place purely because he had swallowed even more amphetamines than his competitors at the qualifying races. His talent was, in other words, limited. His life away from cycling was becoming increasingly unfocused and, when the time came for a possible promotion to the senior teams, everyone involved already knew what the answer would be.

In the period that followed he tried with diminishing ardour to find work as a bicycle mechanic. At home the respect he had once commanded started to fade away as he was no longer seen wearing the colours of the national team, and, in the absence of cycling training camps, he began to feel seriously trapped in his parents' flat. He tried going out for daylong rides in the mountains, but riding on his own was and always would be a poor substitute.

Both his parents and the authorities made it clear that finding a job was now a priority and Djamolidine finally saw no alternative to the oil industry. He was hired as a tapper on a state drilling operation. After
two and a half years, however, he had become sufficiently fed up with staring at the slow see-sawing counter-weight movements of the pumps to carry out an idea which had been forming in his mind for a long time: escaping from the republic.

He would ride his bike across the mountains to Iran in order to apply for asylum at the American embassy in Teheran. The majority of the border between Azerbaijani SSR and Iran followed the Arak River. However, towards the south and out towards the coast, the border went through the Talesh Mountains and Djamolidine had heard of a path which would take him as far as the border. As long as he succeeded in getting across the border, he would be able to find his way on the other side easily.

Once he had completed his preparations his backpack contained the following: one change of clothes in a waterproof bag, identity papers and other documents, one hundred roubles and a little Iranian currency (a 500-rial note and a few coins), a water bottle and ten herbal biscuits wrapped in waxed paper together with a bolt cutter. He was wearing his national cycling team outfit with black weatherproofs on the outside.

On the evening of the 27th of October 1970, a
northerly wind was blowing. At midnight he tiptoed out of the flat, leaving a brief letter explaining to his parents that he would miss them, but that his desire to see the Western world was too great.

The darkness, the rain, the tailwind and the black garments aided him. He was possibly aided by Allah as well; Djamolidine was not entirely sure if he still believed in him, but as he headed for the border, he did catch himself thinking about the Gracious and the Merciful. Or he might just have been unbelievably lucky: he encountered no officials, Soviet or Iranian, the fences were few and the barbed wire rusty. Nor was the cold any worse than could be offset by the physical exertion.

At dawn, after resting, he got back on the saddle and made his way down the mountains into Iran. The skies began to clear as he approached a town which he, with his superficial knowledge of the Persian seriffed Arabic alphabet, could decipher as ‘Ardabil'. Sheltered by the sign, he took a break, changed his clothes, ate, drank and loosened up his muscles before getting back onto his bike, and he did not get off it until he reached Teheran eighteen hours later. The exultation and the lack of sleep induced in him a sensation of being the perfect
cycling machine: the pumping action of his lungs and thigh muscles, his eyes and brain reading the road, his thorax muscle contracting rhythmically as he clenched the handlebars.

The embassy staff in Teheran, personified by a 32-year-old secretary with the remarkable name of James Stewart, was obliging almost to the point of embarrassment; the fact that Djamolidine was in possession of a domestic Soviet passport plus written evidence of participation in an elite sport, together with his stated wish to seek political asylum, meant that Section 19 of the Immigration Act applied, and Djamolidine was issued with F1-type personal papers. Hurrah.

Outside the embassy gates Djamolidine had reeled off three homemade sentences in English: ‘I name Djamolidine Hasanov. I from Baku, Union of Soviets. I look to political asylum in States of America.' Taking this as his starting point he began learning the English language with an almost insatiable enthusiasm. His future would unfold in this language; he must transform himself into an American as quickly as possible – a resolution in which James Stewart was only too pleased to assist. James found him a
textbook with the ambiguous title
This Way – American English for Foreigners
and changed, at Djamolidine's request, the name on the F1 papers to ‘Jimmy Nash'. From now on he was Jimmy, Jimmy Nash with an extended, yankee-drawling ‘a', and would never let anyone call him anything else.

A week later he was on the morning flight to Washington. He registered no special feeling when stepping on to American soil for the first time, probably because he had in effect already arrived on US territory when they let him through the gates of the embassy in Teheran.

Upon his arrival he was housed in an ‘economy' motel situated by one of Washington's southern approach roads, where he spent a month watching television, teaching himself English from his textbook, and eavesdropping on people's conversations in the motel restaurant, as well as going for long walks in the anti-pedestrian shambles of the city's arterial roads. Eventually, the winter weather and a feeling of wanderlust prompted him to call James Stewart, who was delighted to ‘pull a few strings' and bring about the following arrangement: Jimmy got a second-hand car – a 1964 Pontiac Strato Chief – $500 and a job contract which stipulated that two
months later, on the 1st of March 1971, he would start work as a tapper at an oil well in Utah. From that date onwards he would be regarded as having been settled in America. He was free to pick his own route to Utah and, having thought about it and having been persuaded by the glittering leaflets from the US Department of Tourism, he chose to drive to Los Angeles via New Orleans, up to San Francisco and back into the country to Utah.