PhilPaine.com

Mey­er pro­vides a basic primer on the his­tory of Cen­tral Asia and the Cau­ca­sus. It’s a short vol­ume, so it can only suma­rize the com­plex­i­ties. Still, even a well-edu­cat­ed read­er is like­ly to know noth­ing about this large por­tion of the Earth. New­shounds usu­ally refer to the post-Sovi­et Cen­tral Asian republics as “the Stans”. Well, at least a flip­pant nick­name is more atten­tion than these places got before.

Despite its low pro­file in pub­lic dis­course, Cen­tral Asia has got­ten plen­ty of atten­tion from geopoliti­cal schemers and impe­r­ial pow­ers, invari­ably cre­at­ing dis­as­ters. Some­thing about the place gen­er­ates fan­tasies and delu­sions. And no coun­try is more prone to liv­ing in fan­tasy than the Unit­ed States, the lat­est impe­r­ial pow­er to decide it is going to bring enlight­en­ment to the land of the moun­tain war­rior clan and the pop­py. As Mey­er demon­strates, the delu­sional chat­ter com­ing from Wash­ing­ton is iden­ti­cal to that which emanat­ed from Britain and Romanov Rus­sia, and the Sovi­et Union when they began the same dis­as­trous projects, end­ing in defeat for them­selves and end­less mis­ery for the peo­ple of the region.

Among the inter­est­ing details is an account of the 19^th cen­tury Amer­i­can trav­eler George Ken­nan (great-uncle of the 20^th cen­tury diplo­mat). Ken­nan worked as a tele­graph line sur­veyor in the Tsarist regime. He trav­eled through Siberia and the Cau­ca­sus, and was one of the first to protest the Tsars’ prison camps and repres­sion, in a 1891 book called Siberia and the Exile Sys­tem. The book trig­gered, says Mey­er, the one of the first sus­tained Amer­i­can inter­na­tional human rights cam­paigns. In it there is a fas­ci­nat­ing lit­tle seg­ment, which he quotes:

“The Gov­ern­ment first set the exam­ple of law­less­ness in Rus­sia by arrest­ing with­out war­rant; by pun­ish­ing with­out tri­al; by cyn­i­cally dis­re­gard­ing the judge­ment of its own courts when such judge­ments were in favor of polit­i­cals; by con­fis­cat­ing the mon­ey and prop­erty of pri­vate cit­i­zens whom it mere­ly sus­pected of sym­pa­thy with the rev­o­lu­tion­ary move­ment; by send­ing four­teen-year-old boys and girls to Siberia; by kid­nap­ping the chil­dren of “polit­i­cally untrust­wor­thy” peo­ples and exiles, and putting them into state asy­lums; by dri­ving men and women into insan­ity and sui­cide in rig­or­ous soli­tary con­fine­ment with­out giv­ing them a tri­al; by bury­ing secret­ly at night the bod­ies of peo­ple whom it had thus done to death in dun­geons; and by treat­ing as a crim­i­nal, in posse if not in esse, every cit­i­zen who dare to ask why or wherefore.”

Amer­i­cans, in those days, looked upon the crimes of the Tsars with hor­ror and con­tempt. Now the Tsars, or their even more bru­tal Sovi­et suc­ces­sors, would doubt­less be pop­u­lar del­e­gates to any Repub­li­can convention.