Satellites at Home and Beyond: An Analysis of the USSRs Treatment of its Non-Russian States and Satellites Through the Lens of The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years
Chingiz Aitmatov’s The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years is a wondrous novel with a main plot steeped in tradition and preservation and a subplot full of modernity. It is a novel that simultaneously teaches us to safeguard the past as well as look forward to the changes the future may bring. Aitmatov also provides commentary, directly and indirectly, on the ways in which the USSR treated its satellite states. Based in Kazakhstan, the setting of the novel provides commentary on life in a satellite state with respect to Russia by nature of its being. Some points of interest in the novel as it pertains to the scope of this essay are the mistreatment of Abutalip Kuttybaev, the attitude of Kazangap Asabiev’s son towards tradition, and the existence of the cosmodrome in the Sarozek, to name a few. Aitmatov manages to provide some limited commentary in the science fiction subplot of the novel. It reveals some of the attitudes of the USSR towards foreign exposure and the role satellite states play in avoiding it. The most striking example of this tension would be the ending where the US and the USSR jointly decide to put up a shield of sentries, or satellites if you will, around the Earth to discourage extra-terrestrials from making contact with and having an influence over its inhabitants in Operation Hoop (Aitmatov 337). This move can be likened to the Iron Curtain, which did as good a job of keeping Westerners out as it did of keeping its occupants in. Drawing this parallel one can argue that some, if not all, of the USSRs satellite states served the role of buffer between the capitalist imperialists and the oppressive communist regime. The shield of satellites also make it impossible for the astronauts who left to come home which is exactly what happened to citizens of the Soviet Union and its satellites when they chose to leave.
The mistreatment of Abutalip Kuttybaev also presents many worthwhile areas of focus. The first of which is the stigmatisation of prisoners of war upon their return to the Soviet Union. Abutalip was captured and imprisoned by the Nazis during World War II but later escaped to Yugoslavia (114). When he returned to the Soviet Union, he was constantly relocated around the country for political reasons (115). He found himself in Boranly-Burannyi, where he took to journaling his experience as a PoW to preserve his memory for his children when he passed as well as to maintain his sanity in the desolate Kazakh steppe. This writing is discovered during a junction inspection, and he is interrogated along with many of the other inhabitants of the town. He is deemed counterrevolutionary and taken away, presumably to a gulag. The journal is the most prominent amongst many reasons (186). The stigma attached to being a Soviet PoW largely comes from baseless accusations of collaborations with the Nazis as well as Stalin's 1941 Order No. 270 which prohibited soldiers from surrendering and branded them traitors (Bjorkman). Upon retrieving these soldiers from concentration camps, they would then be sent to re-education camps to certify their status as law-abiding citizens. This attitude toward those who had suffered, but not killed, at the hands of the enemy gives credence to the idea that foreign exposure can only corrupt Soviet citizens. It furthermore relates to the view of satellite states by Russia because it is the inhabitants of these states that are far more likely to come into contact with foreign influence by nature of their strategic purpose. Russia treated these states with suspicion in part because of their higher potential to be ‘poisoned’ by non-communist influence.
Upon his escape, Abutalip managed to find his way to the Yugoslav Partisans and fought alongside them against the Nazis and the Chetniks. Abutalip was punished in his homeland for this act also due to the poor relationship between the Yugoslav Communist Party and Stalin. The party’s leader, Josip Tito, had a rocky relationship with Stalin since he informed Comintern—an international organisation that advocated for global communism which was effectively controlled by the USSR—of his plan to pit the Yugoslav Partisans against the Axis occupation in an uprising. Stalin however had hoped that the party would help restore democratic liberties, even if temporarily, in the country and bring the original government back from exile. This move seems contrary to Stalin’s goals, but at the same time he had to appease his Western allies in order to keep fighting the war. Tito tried to form an alliance with the Chetniks, who were also fighting the Axis occupation, but this decision led to their leader, General Draza Mihailovic, denouncing the communists as the true enemies and began collaborating with the Nazis against the uprising. All the while Mihailovic was the subject of Soviet propaganda praising his efforts against the Nazis.
This all might seem rather like a needless history lesson, however, the context is required to understand why Abutalip was treated poorly after the war. Although Yugoslavia was planned to be a satellite state of the USSR after the war, during the war the Partisans acted like a "rogue" satellite state when they disobeyed Stalin’s orders. If the Partisans were not willing to go along with the Soviet Union then, who is to say that they will act like a good submissive puppet state when the war was over. Included in Abutalip’s journal were his experiences as a freedom fighter in Yugoslavia and these were surely another reason as to why he was deemed counterrevolutionary. If his experiences as a Yugoslav Partisan were to get out, then it would be known in Kazakhstan that it is possible for a state under the influence of the Soviets to defy orders that are outside the interests of their own country.
This influence by the Soviets was powerful and pervasive, so much so that Kazangap’s son, Sabitzhan, fully buys into the authoritarianism and Soviet ideals as a lowly government official. Throughout the journey to bury his father, he repeatedly tries to do away with tradition and bury him anywhere so he can get back to his life. He constantly looks down on the others for trying to honour tradition and has embraced life as a citizen of the Soviet Union and the progress the country threatens to make. He flirts with absolute authoritarianism in his conversation with Yedigei about radio signals controlling the population in the future:
This passage is loaded with information about the attitude towards the Soviet Union that Sabitzhan has adopted. First of all, the idea that it is beneficial for society if the state has access to all of the most personal thoughts and actions of each one of its citizens is that of extreme surveillance. It is reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984 and is evidence that Sabitzhan has completely bought into the Soviet regime as well as its ideology. Sabitzhan is one of, one would assume, many young children educated into party hardliners at boarding schools in the satellite states. Abutalip had previously got in trouble with his interrogator for disagreeing with the idea of boarding schools claiming they sever the connection to home and family for these children. This is a conscious effort by the state in order to ensure that the new generations in these countries would conform to the Soviet ideals. By ripping away at the differences between the countries, the culture of the country dominant at the time naturally becomes that of the satellite. Sabitzhan is a collectivist and a believer in the socialist goal, except he admits that it might take a herculean effort of mind control to achieve it and thinks that it is a good thing anyway. Sabitzhan represents the influence that Russia had on its satellites and Sabitzhan’s repeated rejection of tradition in the burial of his father is also a rejection of the culture he exists in. He becomes an example of one of the many losses countries faced under Russian rule.“’It’s true! A person will always do everything in accordance with the central programme. It’ll seem to him that he acts and lives of his own volition, but in fact he’ll be directed from above. And everything will be exact. If you’re required to sing, a signal will be sent and sing you will. If you’re to dance – signal – and dance you will. If you’re to work, you’ll get the signal and you’ll work – and so on. Stealing, hooliganism, and crime – all of these will be forgotten; you’ll only read about such things in history books. Everything in a man’s behaviour will be foreseen – all his acts, all his thoughts, all his desires. For example, at the present time in the world there is the so-called population explosion; people have produced too many children and there’s not enough food to go around. What is to be done about that? Reduce the birth rate. You’ll only perform that act with your wife when they send you the signal to do so in the interests of society.‘ … ‘Naturally. The interests of the state are the highest of all.’” (Aitmatov 46)
Another way that Russia exerted its influence on Kazakhstan, like a lot of the other states, was through its military. Unlike the Prague Spring in 1968, this militaristic influence came in the form of rockets, not tanks. In The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years, much like in reality, the Soviets built a Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan currently leases land to Russia for them to have a cosmodrome in their country. Leasing the land to the country who was already the effective authority of it prior to the breakup of the Soviet Union seems like a natural transition as the countries’ ties diminished. Russia no longer had a legal reason to be there, so they had to lease it. However, the question of why the cosmodrome was there in the first place has to be answered. The presence of the cosmodrome in a virtually barren area with little weather variability makes sense but Russia, by far the largest country in the Soviet Union, has a lot of land like this. It has deserts both hot and cold as well as an astronomical number of plains within its borders. The reality is that the cosmodrome was placed in Kazakhstan because it was dangerous, and Kazakhstan didn’t mean as much to the Soviet Union as Russia did. Another example of dangerous Soviet projects in the lands of its less significant members is the Chernobyl disaster.
As shown, the USSR has a pattern of handing over the consequences of its decisions to the countries that it deems to matter the least. This is a recurring theme across many instances in Soviet history with Russian families being sent to the satellite states as punishment for their relatives’ crimes as well as the use of European satellite states being the focus of any plan were things to go nuclear between the world’s superpowers. This doesn’t even begin to mention the suffering of Abutalip due to his foreign exposure to both the enemy in the Nazis and the reluctant ally in the Yugoslavs as well as the Soviet effort to transform the new generations in its satellite states into conformed socialist entities.
Bibliography
Aitmatov, Chingiz. The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years. Trans. F. J. French. Indiana University Press, 1988. ISBN 978-0253204820.
Bjorkman, James. August 16, 1941: Stalin’s Order No. 270. http://worldwartwodaily.filminspector.com/2018/06/august-16-1941-stalins-order-no-270.html.
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