Marvin Kalb - The Year I Was Peter the Great - 1956 - Khrushchev, Stalin's Ghost, and a Young American in Russia

During my last night in Tashkent, prior to my departure for Samarkand the following morning, I had the uncomfortable feeling that I was being watched. It was as if the walls in my room had sprouted eyes and ears, and every creak was the footstep of a Soviet cop, coming to arrest me. This was, for me, a new feeling. In all my travels in the Soviet Union I had never felt anxious about my safety. But that night in Tashkent was different.

In the morning, when I left my room, a man in a dark suit was seated a few feet from the door. He had not been there the night before. Two militiamen waited downstairs in the lobby. They watched me pay my bill, pick up my bag, and head for a taxi waiting in front of the hotel. They followed me but did nothing more.

At the airport a young English-speaking Intourist agent met me and suggested that I follow her into the waiting room. “May I go to the souvenir shop first?” I asked. “I want to buy a few gifts.”

“Maybe later,” she replied. “Now I think you should sit here.” She pointed to a chair in a corner. I followed her advice. “And don’t go anywhere without me,” she added.

Three Russians in dark suits stood about five feet away. Their eyes were fixed on me. I felt as if I was one step away from being arrested. All I had to do was provide them with a pretext. I caressed my diplomatic passport, sighed deeply, and waited for the boarding of the Samarkand flight. My Intourist hostess returned just in time. “Come back again,” she said, unpersuasively.

I was relieved to join five other passengers on this flight over an amazingly white desert to Tamerlane’s historic jewel, nestled in an unexpected rim of mountains, which in the flatness of central Asia looked like the Swiss Alps. The mountains afforded protection and time against enemy assault. Beautiful museums, monuments, and mausoleums crowded the inner circle of the city. Samarkand was an impressive fortress.

Marco Polo, when he stopped in Samarkand in the late thirteenth century, described it as a “very large and splendid city.” For a traveler on the fabled Silk Road connecting China with the Mediterranean, it was a valued and luxurious stop. A hundred years later, the famous Moroccan Arab traveler, Ibn Battuta, was even more excited. “It is one of the greatest, the fairest, and the most magnificent of cities,” he wrote in his journal. “It stands on the bank of a river called ‘Potters’ River,’ covered with water mills and canals that water the gardens…. Here there are balconies and sitting places and stalls, where fruit is sold. There are also large palaces and monuments that bear witness to the high spirit of the inhabitants.”

The question on my mind as we approached the Samarkand airport was “Will this once ‘splendid’ and ‘magnificent’ city have a similar, captivating allure in the mid-twentieth century?” Part of the answer caught my eye even before the twin-engine plane came to a stop. Across the runway stood twenty-four jet fighters, a rather impressive show of Russian military power in central Asia. A more meaningful part of the answer came in the ride from the airport to the hotel. It cut through two Samarkands.

Once again, as in Tashkent, there was an old and a new part of town. The old Samarkand, the original capital of Tamerlane’s empire, looked tired and tattered at first glance, but it was obviously being primed to attract tourists, many of its historic landmarks being renovated. Meanwhile, the new Samarkand reflected both the Russian and Soviet styles of architecture and political control. The first Russian military units arrived in 1868, the vanguard of an imperialist drive through central Asia. The communists arrived in 1917, determined to retain czarist control over the entire region. If that meant slaughtering tens of thousands of Uzbeks and Tajiks in the process, then so be it.

My hotel was in the new Samarkand, and my Intourist guide was a trained archeologist. He made no effort to propagandize me; quite the contrary, he seemed happy to show the historic wonders of old and new Samarkand to a visiting American.

Old, first. Among the many architectural wonders was an ancient observatory constructed under Ulugh Beg’s direction in the fourteenth century. Ulugh Beg was Timur’s grandson. More than anyone else he was the loyal warrior who built on his grandfather’s vision of an extraordinary capital. The observatory sat on a hill overlooking the city. The top two-thirds had disintegrated with neglect over the centuries, but the bottom third survived, thanks to recent excavations by Russian archeologists. Now a huge ring of restored instrumentation could be seen running around the lower base, no longer capable of being used to read the stars, as long ago it had, but a remarkable reminder nonetheless of the exceptional scientific achievement of an earlier age.

From the observatory we drove to the Street of Kings, the scene of a succession of monuments and mausoleums whose turrets glistened with blue, white, and green ceramic tiles frozen in irregular patterns captivating to the passing eye. An odd sight was clumps of hay sprouting between the tiles, as though soil and a seed or two had gotten trapped in the clay.

In the back of one mausoleum I was surprised to see a quorum of Uzbeks absorbed in prayer. They sat cross-legged in an otherwise empty room, communicating with a spirit said to live in the bottom of a deep well set behind a thick stone wall at the far end of the room. A mullah welcomed me, and together, saying nothing, we watched this unusual religious service. What, I wondered, did a spirit in a well have to do with Islam? After ten minutes or so I left, expressing gratitude to the mullah for allowing a stranger to observe this unusual rite of faith.

No monument was more appealing (at least, to me) than the Registan, which Ulugh Beg envisaged as a graduate school of Muslim teaching. Behind a sparkling white front loomed a complex of buildings, each one with a tall spire graced by pale blue ceramic tiles. The courtyard was crowded with students from nearby communities. A docent told them that the repairs would be completed within a year.

Not too far from the Registan stood Tamerlane’s tomb, a magnet for tourists from near and far. Its blue ceramic tile walls gave it a special glow. Here Timur was buried, though he actually died during a military campaign in China. Ulugh Beg decided that it was only proper for his body to be returned to the capital of his empire. He built a large tomb and left orders that on his death he was to be buried there, too, along with Timur’s son, father, and favorite wife. A modern-day plaque with an inscription in Arabic script read: “This is the resting place of the illustrious and merciful monarch, the most great Sultan, the most mighty warrior, Lord Timur, conqueror of the earth.” Fifteen years previously, I was told, Russian archeologists had opened Timur’s casket and confirmed that Timur was indeed very tall and had a lame foot.

I enjoyed my day in old Samarkand, soaking up the legends of Tamerlane, but by late afternoon I was ready to return to the hotel. Dinner beckoned, and the restaurant was supposed to be the best in the region. Why bother looking for another one? The head waitress, a Russian by appearance, seated me at a table for four but with a place setting for one. Apparently her orders were that foreigners were not to mix with locals. They were to eat by themselves. On this evening, though, a young Armenian joined me, and when ordered to leave he simply refused. He ordered a bottle of vodka and told me the story of his life.

He said he did not care what happened to him. “They could come and arrest me, but so what?” He had no job, very little money. I had rarely met anyone so unhappy. When I asked him how he got into this fix, he would not tell me. Instead he asked whether I liked the music the band was playing.