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• 1 2020-11-30T12:33:14-05:00 The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years: An Exploration of Russian Colonialism in Central Asia 31 plain 2020-12-13T21:50:00-05:00 Vir Shetty
  
  Colonialism conjures images of a variety of crimes, such as plundering, forced conversions, and slavery. However, one common aspect of European colonialism, whether it was done by the British, French, Spanish, Dutch, or Portuguese, was a general lack of interference in local affairs. With the exception of their American colonies and the Belgian Congo, European countries were generally content to impose their language and civil and criminal law codes on their colonies, but stay out of the colonies' private lives in other ways, because totalitarianism came in the way of exploitation.
  
  Russian colonialism in Central Asia, however, was unique in nearly every regard. The steppe lands of Central Asia did not have the gold of the Americas or the cotton of India, and the fraction of habitable land there was less than in metropolitan Russia. Russia, however, colonized these areas in the interest of space: Central Asia would serve as the location for everything Russia did not want tainting Moscow and St. Petersburg, whether that meant prison camps, rocket launch pads or nuclear testing sites. Of course, there were useful resources in the region, for example, the Baku oil fields, but nothing in like the Americas, Africa, and India. With this lack of resource exploitation, Russia set out on an unparalleled quest of Russianization and Christianization or atheism, depending on whether it was ruled by a tsar or by communists, and it used totalitarian methods to do so. In The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years, Kyrgyz author Chingiz Aitmatov uses a story set in the Kazakh steppe to bring to light the narratives of Central Asians suffering under the Russian yoke. Aitmatov uses various literary tools to do this, such as steppe legends and a seemingly unrelated science fiction subplot whose lack of resolution acts as a metaphor for the situation of Central Asians in Russia’s empire.
  
  Part of Russian and Soviet colonialism involved suppressing local cultural and religious traditions through fear. The simple act of Yedigei, a Kazakh Muslim, trying to bury his friend Kazangap in accordance with Islamic tradition is a crime in the atheist Soviet Union. However, Yedigei’s attitude to this ruling reflects the defiance of the oppressed — after being questioned on how he is brave enough to try and follow Islamic tradition after sixty years of Soviet rule, he skeptically replies, “What’s Soviet rule got to do with it? People have been praying over the dead for centuries” (Aitmatov 21). Yedigei’s arguments with Kazangap’s Soviet sycophant son Sabitzhan, who believes that “the interests of the state are the highest of all” (46), further reflect the conflict between the ruled and the rulers, with Sabitzhan representing cold Soviet utilitarianism in the way he brushes off Yedigei’s sensitivities and treats his own father as more of a number than an individual. 
  
  Yedigei’s struggle to bury Kazangap also addresses another aspect of Russian colonialism: Russia treating its Central Asian territories more like landfills than like countries with actual human beings in them. Near the end of the book, after Yedigei finally reaches the Ana-Beitt cemetery, he is stopped because the Soviets have turned the cemetery into a rocket launch site. This conversion of a resting place for souls to a dumping place for rocket fuel essentially amounts to desecration, and is a stunning show of disrespect. The fact that this decision is not made with malicious intent, like similar instances throughout history have been, but incredibly matter-of-factly makes the disrespect even more obvious – the Soviets are treating Kazakhstan like people treat dumpsters, that is, with no regard for where they throw things into it.
  
  The banality of this disrespect is made clear in the exchange between Yedigei and the cemetery guard preventing him from burying Kazangap: the guard’s common refrain of “I can’t authorize that. I haven’t the authority” (302) and its thereabouts shows that he does not even consider how wrong what the “authority” is doing is and that he does not even feel any sympathy for Yedigei. This is a display of stereotypical Soviet bureaucracy, which is the subject of many jokes. Utterly disrespecting the Kazakh Muslims is so routine for the Soviets that even the act of suppressing their traditions gets mired in the characteristic red tape of the regime. The fact that disrespecting the Kazakh people is this routine to the Soviets shows the frequency of such actions by them towards their colonial subjects.
  
  Another aspect of Soviet rule, and not just in the colonies, was controlling the memories of its citizens: as Orwell said in 1984, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” The Russians, and later Soviets, used many ways to gain this control, such as forcing schools to teach Russian and the locals to use the Cyrillic alphabet, which quite literally alters their written memories. In this book, the Soviet Union attempts to control the memories of its future generations by suppressing the stories of former schoolteacher and Yedigei's friend, Abutalip, who documents for his children his experiences as a soldier in the Yugoslav liberation army. Yugoslavia, whose liberation army Abutalip fought for in the Second World War, was notably the only Eastern European country to overthrow the Nazis without the Red Army and its leader, Josip Broz Tito, famously split from Stalin despite also being communist. Soviet secret policeman Hawkeye incredulously asks Yedigei where he got the “alien” idea that “every person has the right to express whatever comes into his head” (185). This shows that the simple belief in freedom of expression, which the Kazakhs hold, is foreign to the Soviets, and that Kazakhstan is not just regarded as being provincial and not metropolitan—despite it being as much a part of the Soviet Union as Ohio is a part of the United States—but also that the freedoms of its people mean nothing to the colonial overlords. 
  
  The Soviets felt that memories that diverged from the official narrative were “hostile to the State and must be suppressed” (187). Aitmatov allegorizes this story by recounting the horrific steppe legend of the mankurt. The calls of the Donenbai bird, which is a manifestation of the   forcibly indoctrinated mankurt’s mother trying to reclaim her son, asking “Who are you?” (146) reflect the struggle of the Kazakh people to reclaim their identity after centuries of suppression by the Russians, who have tried their best to erase it. The choice of legend is also illuminating because of who the villain in the story is – a Chinese tribe. Criticizing China in this way was indirectly a criticism of the Soviet Union because both countries were communist giants who had a history of suppressing Turkic peoples. However, it was also a safe way to criticize the Soviets since, at the time of this novel’s publication, the Soviet Union and China had as much enmity between them as the Soviets had with the United States due to the Sino-Soviet split. The brutality of the story is also important as it evokes a visceral reaction in the reader that, by the nature of allegories, is immediately transferred to Russian colonialism in the steppe. This story is also a rather direct allegory for colonialism, with the Chinese tribe representing the colonizer and the mankurt representing the colonized nation: The colonizer uses violence to control the colonized nation and, now that the colonized nation is a loyal subject, the colonizer then starts to value it greatly. From a Russian historical standpoint, the fact that the steppe people are the ones oppressed by foreigners in this story is also important since the “origin story” of Russia is based on Tsar Ivan the Great liberating Russia from the Tatar yoke, that is, the steppe. 
  
  Russia’s enslavement of the steppe people and its treatment of their home as a landfill, which are two novel-spanning themes, converge in the science fiction subplot of the joint Soviet-American mission to Lesnaya Grud. Although this plot seems to have no relation to the story of Yedigei and his compatriots, it reveals some significant aspects of Aitmatov’s narrative. Again, the use of Kazakhstan as a rocket launch site shows that the Soviets treated Kazakhstan like nothing more than excess land, with no consideration for its inhabitants. However, the trajectory of the rockets is also significant. The rockets wrap around the Earth in a way reminiscent of the mankurts’ headgear, which signify the seemingly eternal control of the Soviet Union and their powerful equals, the United States, over Earth which is being turned into a planet of mankurts. On an even more geometric level, the rockets wrap around the world the same way the large colonial empires mentioned in my first paragraph wrapped themselves around the globe – all of these empires were empires on which the sun never set. Furthermore, just like with the colonization of the world by the Europeans, the world cannot do anything but watch as the rockets wrap around it. It is also noteworthy that this theme shows the colonizers—the Russians—being afraid of being colonized even though, or maybe because, this is exactly what they’re doing to Kazakhstan. Lesnaya Grud needs to find a new planet before its own planet consumes itself, that is, it needs more space, and the Russians and Americans, in partly historically motivated fear, decide to close off all communication with Lesnaya Grud to avoid possibly being turned into a colony of a technologically advanced state. 
  
  Aitmatov uses various devices to broadcast and reinforce steppe narratives of Russian colonialism in their homeland. The novel ends inconclusively for Yedigei and his compatriots, but it does conclusively show that the Russians, having mankurtized the steppe, are now trying to do the same to the world. This can be clearly seen in the post-Soviet era of Russian imperialism – the collapse of the Soviet Union was conclusive in its rejection of communism, but inconclusive in its rejection of authoritarianism and Russian imperialism. The leaders of Poland, Hungary, and Belarus, and the Russian invasions of Georgia and Crimea, respectively, attest to this phenomenon. 
  
  Bibliography
  
  Aitmatov, Chingiz. The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years. Translated by John French, Foreword by Katerina Clark, Indiana University Press, 1980.
  
  Tools used
  
  mapchart.net to make maps