Red Odyssey

Marat Akchurin

Description

The sophisticated action-packed travelogue describing mind-blowing wanderings in the turbulent last days of the crumbling Soviet Empire. The knife-edge journey of the adventurer poet unfolds against the backdrop of exotic scenery few modern Westerners have seen. Based on a true story.

Red Odyssey is a travel book written by Marat Akchurin for those who have a passion for reading good adventure and historical fiction. Through a kaleidoscope of individual perspectives, the author explores and describes the collective historical experience of a multi-ethnic and multi-confessional nation living in a crumbling totalitarian state. Red Odyssey is not a political treatise, sociological analysis, or history book about Central Asia during the former Soviet Union. It is rather a tale of adventures of a time traveler trying to survive in a surrealistic society permeated with hypocrisy. The ruling regime is captive to its own lies. So it falsifies the past, it falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. Imperial propaganda transforms reality into fiction. The goal of Red Odyssey is to reverse the fabricated verisimilitude of their false utopia into the harsh truth of reality. Akchurin's keen, perceptive eye, his taste for adventure, and his intimate knowledge of this fractured superpower—its history, cultures, legends, folklores, politics, and ethnicities—leave no stone unturned in his relentless exploration of places long ignored and misunderstood by the West.

Sujets

• USSR
• Adventure (Guyana)
• Travel
• Ethnic group
• Socialism
• Soviet Union
• Revolution
• Russia
• Muslim
• Révolution (homonymie)
• Adventure
• History
• Cars
• Culture
• Socialisme
• Union des républiques socialistes soviétiques

Informations

• Publié par: iUniverse
• Date de parution: 21 novembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781663209122
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Red Odyssey

A Voyage Across the Crumbling Empire




MARAT AKCHURIN








REDODYSSEY
A VOYAGE ACROSS THECRUMBLING EMPIRE

Copyright © 2022 Marat Akchurin.

Cover image by Murat Palta.
The cover of Red Odyssey by the great Turkish artist Murat Palta depicts a time- traveler flying in a magical balloon over a crumbling palace in flames.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.






iUniverse
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Bloomington, IN 47403
www.iuniverse.com
844-349-9409

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

ISBN: 978-1-6632-0911-5 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6632-0913-9 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-6632-0912-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020917601




iUniverse rev. date: 07/20/2022



Contents
Prologue

Chapter 1 Preparations and Departure
Chapter 2 Never Stop at Rest Areas
Chapter 3 “What is Chuvash for ‘Glory to the Communist Party!’?”
Chapter 4 The Knight in the Tiger Skin
Chapter 5 The Equalizer, Chuvash-style
Chapter 6 Pushkin in Basra
Chapter 7 Good Samaritans
Chapter 8 The Golden Teeth of Marilyn Monroe
Chapter 9 “A Horse! A Horse! My Kingdom for a Horse!”
Chapter 10 A Meteorite on the Road
Chapter 11 “In the Land of Earless Dogs”
Chapter 12 “On the Coast of the Perishing Sea”
Chapter 13 Disposable World
Chapter 14 A Laurel Wrath for the Major
Chapter 15 Two Bullets for a Ride
Chapter 16 “The State…Is You”
Chapter 17 The Steel Wings of an Engineer of Human Soul*
Chapter 18 A Tea Ceremony in an Apple Orchard
Chapter 19 Eclipse in Osh Province
Chapter 20 “Many-Storied Buildings—Dwelling for Egoists”
Chapter 21 The Hero’s Gold Star
Chapter 22 A Wake at Dawn
Chapter 23 Surgery without Anesthesia
Chapter 24 The Unapproved Route
Chapter 25 The Fallen Angel
Chapter 26 Hats with Corners Turned Down
Chapter 27 Firuza Means “Turquoise”
Chapter 28 Samarkand, the Oldest City in the World
Chapter 29 The Disgraced President’s Granddaughter
Chapter 30 Bukhara Carpets with Anchors
Chapter 31 The Iron Smile of Krasnovodsk
Chapter 32 À la Guerre comme á la Guerre!
Chapter 33 A Girl on the Threshold

Epilogue
















Beautiful is when we least
expect it. And where.
- William Minor



Prologue
In 1222 the mother of Genghis Khan, who called himself the Sovereign of the Universe, died. He had known it was coming, for he himself was old and nearing the completion of his journey through this life. He had spent the last twenty years completing his conquest of half the world without having seen his mother, whom he honored and loved.
He knew that he would encounter his death far away from his homeland, thousands of miles away on the shores of the river Kerulen, where his mother was finishing her days. Therefore, Genghis Khan decided that if his mother died before him, her remains should be embalmed by Chinese medicine men and brought to his headquarters, no matter how far away it might be or how long it might take. Bury us next to each other side by side, he ordered his sons and his grandson Bhatu-Khan, who he thought would be his successor.
But a terrible thing happened. On the ninety-third day of its journey, the mournful caravan with the body of Genghis Khan’s mother was looted by a detachment of Turks. One young lieutenant was destined to survive. He managed to defend with his sword the camel carrying its precious cargo. Pierced with arrows, he galloped away at full speed. He carried the royal remains wrapped up in a Persian rug woven by the twelve-year-old virgins of Khorossan.
According to the legend, the young lieutenant lost his mind while he was searching for Genghis Khan’s headquarters, visiting all the places where the monarch had once passed with his men. The youth never allowed anyone to come near him as he carried his strange baggage through Russian lands and the Golden Horde’s holdings down the banks of the Volga, across the steppes of Turan and deserts of Iran, which are today called Central Asia, Kazakhstan, and the Transcaucasus. Then he vanished forever, leaving not a trace. Apparently, he violated the ancient custom: trying to render homage, he buried the mother of his emperor still wrapped in that precious rug.
Because of the insane warrior’s mistake, for seven centuries the Tartar czarina has appeared time and again to her posterity in their dreams. She comes to them in the shape of the young, wandering woman, demanding that they find her lost grave and remove the cursed rug, which prevents her bones from being joined with Mother Earth.
When she appears to one of her descendants in his early-morning dreams, whether he is in blossoming youth, mature adulthood, or wise old age, he must leave behind him all the duties of his life and depart on a long journey.
No one has yet managed to fulfill her adjuration.



Chapter 1
Preparations and Departure
All the great books have been about journeys. Even The Odyssey and The Divine Comedy were stories about wanderings.
This, at least, was the argument I made one spring night in 1990, as my wife (now ex-wife) and I were sitting having supper in our modest apartment in the north part of Moscow. Naturally, it had no effect on Alexandra, who from the very beginning had declared her opposition to the trip I was planning. At first, it seemed to me that these conversations about my possible journey would never lead to anything at all. What kind of strange force could possibly compel me to drop everything I was doing in Moscow and temporarily abandon my family, just for the sake of a weird and dangerous journey? The Soviet system was in death throes, everything was bursting at the seams and crumbling: at times like this, it’s better to sit quietly at home. The next day, though, I started up the previous night’s discussion again, with a new vigor. My wife’s arguments, however emotional, had been to the point, and it was hard to make any good comebacks. She claimed that nowadays people learn the news not from books by adventurers, but from newspapers and television. Gulliver and Robinson Crusoe turned into children’s stories long ago.
And yet, something was wrong. Each time I thought about the ethnic conflicts that have been tearing our country apart for the past few years, I got a strange feeling, as if there were some intangible similarities between all of them. In the first phase, new pro-democracy movements in these republics began to threaten the old political order. Then suddenly, as if on some mysterious signal, ethnic conflicts erupted, which the Western mass media knew nothing about – or pretended to know nothing about. And of course, the blame for the deaths of hundreds of people, which resulted from these clashes, was invariably placed on the democratic opposition, and then the local authorities would ask Moscow to send in troops. After the arrival of the troops, martial law would be introduced, and the people, fearful of pogroms, would welcome it. Martial law would be accompanied by an information blackout and a reinstitution of local censorship. As a result, one-third of the populated territory of the then U.S.S.R., so rich in human and natural resources, continues to be a blank spot on the map for the rest of the world. This is not tiny, courageous Lithuania with a population of only one million, and with little mineral wealth and few energy sources. More than fifty million people live in the Moslem republics in the southern backbone of the Soviet Disunion, well-known for its vast number of natural treasures, which include everything from huge undeveloped oilfields and major gas pipelines to gold and uranium mines. If the growth rates in this terra incognita stay the same as they are today, in ten years the majority of the population of the Commonwealth of Independent States will be Moslem.
“There’s absolutely no way that could happen!” Alexandra exclaimed. Like all Muscovites, she is excessively politicized and therefore reacts to talk about the future of the Soviet Union very emotionally. “Won’t all the Moslem republics leave the U.S.S.R., now that all the other republics are trying to break away?”
“It doesn’t look that way,” I said. “Just about everyone says they’re leaving the Union. And yes, all the republican bosses are trying to get much more political and economic independence than they were even a year ago. But in Central Asia they have a better chance of staying in power if they hold on to the power structures they have now.”
“Why do you care?” My wife’s tone changed, as she realized that I really was planning to leave. “What do you think you’re going to do, write a political treatise?”
“No,” I said. “This is going to be a book about the people who live there. I want to see what perestroika has done for people in different republics. In Moscow, no one believes Gorbachev anymore. Maybe it’s different in the other republics. Something must have changed there over the past few years.”
“Then I will go with you,” my wife