by Susie Herman
I went on a group tour of the “Stans” of Central Asia. Included in our itinerary were Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. These countries became independent of the Soviet Union only thirty-five years ago. I chose to visit them, because I was intrigued by their rich Silk Road history. I was drawn to the stunning Islamic architecture in the fairy-tale cities of Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva.
What I discovered, however, was an unexpected contrast to these cities once we veered off the Silk Road. There were still many vestiges of Russian life in the smaller cities and towns throughout the landlocked, largely bleak terrain of these countries. I found Brutalist architecture instead of Islamic, and spoken Russian language in lieu of the “new” languages of these young countries. Was I in the Stans or was I in the Soviet Union? Hard to tell, the romance was gone.
And so, one evening, I found myself in a hotel in a former Soviet sanitarium on Lake Issyk-Kul in Cholpon-Ata, Kyrgyzstan. It was a mystical place, Cholpon-Ata, where you might see a morning star. Lake Issyk-Kul is the second largest mountain lake in the world, second to Titicaca in South America. At dusk, looking out from the northern shore, there was a great expanse of blue; the sky and the water seemed to merge. This sight, after a long bus journey through the Steppes: semi-desert, grassland, no trees, monotonous. Farther north of us was Kazakhstan and then the Gulag: the unchosen penal colony, the final “prison home” of Alexei Navalny, known to us in the West as a heroic Soviet dissident and prisoner of conscience.
It was thus weirdly appropriate that I decided to forgo a mediocre buffet dinner, with the tour group, choosing instead to read Navalny’s diaries from prison. The diaries were printed in a New Yorker magazine that I had brought along to keep me company in the Stans. My room had no reading light. This hotel was the only one that I had ever stayed in that resembled a spartan cell more than an inviting restful space. I settled in to read, nevertheless, attempting to capture the last light from my window.
Did I unconsciously choose to bring this particular magazine on my journey? Did I unconsciously want to honor Navalny by making it clear that his voice had not been silenced here in what felt like the actual Soviet Union?
A surprise: It turned out that many of Navalny’s diary entries were remarkably upbeat, and some were even funny in an absurdist way. For example, he wrote: “Some people collect stamps. Some collect coins. And I have a growing collection of amazing court trials.” And “Today I went for a walk, got frozen, and thought of Leonardo DiCaprio and his character’s dead horse trick in ‘The Revenant.’ I don’t think it would work here. A dead horse would freeze in about fifteen minutes. Here you need an elephant. A hot and even roasted elephant. If you cut open the belly of a freshly roasted elephant and crawl inside, you can keep warm for a while. But where am I going to get a hot, roasted elephant in Yamal, especially at six-thirty in the morning? So I will continue to freeze.”
And so Navalny wrote, and wrote, and persevered. His voice has not been silenced in the Gulag. Reading Navalny here on Lake Issyk-Kul I felt close to him, which I was geographically, and I wanted to throw my arms around him with gratitude and comfort. Of course, I knew that he had already died.
Susie Herman’s travels have taken her far from home, but return her back home with a new appreciation of other cultures and societies. My choice of this submission to VOICES is in hope that it inspires you to see the world.