Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (60 page)

In the Soviet Union the Kalmyks and others who had been exiled to Central Asia or Siberia were eventually pardoned, partially, after Stalin’s death (March 5, 1953). On January 7, 1957, the Kalmyk Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was restored largely within its old boundaries and the Kalmyks were allowed to return to their old homeland west of the Volga delta.
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The Crimean Tatars and Volga Germans were never fully pardoned, their homelands were not restored, and pressure on them continued down to and after the end of the Soviet Union.
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Despite sporadic, belated Russian attempts to help their colonies in Central Eurasia after the war, the region remained isolated and continued to slide deeper into poverty. At the same time, the spread of the Russian education system introduced modern science and knowledge of the world to the Central Eurasian peoples, some of whose leaders were able to rise to high positions in the multinational Soviet Union.

China’s form of communism, Maoism, was largely ignored by the Americans, who attempted to keep the country isolated. But the Maoist system was not just bad for the Chinese; it also devastated the Central Eurasians living under Chinese military occupation. Other nations and cultures living near the Peoples’ Republic of China also fell under the spell of this new, highly toxic form of populist Modernism.
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Southeast Asia descended into terror. Transmitted to Cambodia, the Asian form of communism took on an even more virulent form that caused the mass murder of between one and two million Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge revolutionaries of Cambodia under Pol Pot (Saloth Sar [r. 1975–1979]), the genocidal campaigns against non-Burmese nations of Burma under the repressive nationalist military rulers (from 1958 on), and other tragedies that continued into the next century.

Other twentieth-century wars caused further death and destruction in Eurasia, notably the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), the Korean War (1950–1953), the Vietnamese Civil War (1956–1975), the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988), the Balkan wars attendant upon the breakup of the former Yugoslavia (1991–1995), and in Central Eurasia, the Afghan Civil War (from about 1978 on). Most of these were, or are considered to have been, civil wars, but all included extensive foreign military involvement.

The international and civil wars that ravaged Europe and much of Eurasia in the twentieth century had the effect of spreading the power of the Eurasian-derived American client-culture around the world wherever European powers had previously ruled. Along with much else, Americans brought with them their own Modernist ideology, according to which only what they called “democracy”
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(a version of the republican form of government) was good, while all other forms of government were bad. They actively strove to overthrow legitimate governments around the world and replace them with Anglo-American-style Modern republics. By the end of the century, the republican form of government dominated the entire world, and even the few remaining monarchies, such as Nepal,
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and the one remaining major communist power, China, had become heavily influenced by the Anglo-American model.

Radical Modernism in Central Eurasia

From the Manchu-Chinese and Russian conquests until the very end of the twentieth century, Central Eurasia did not exist as an independent political subregion of Eurasia. It was ruled as private property by its conquerors, who violently suppressed any objections the Central Eurasian people made to the rulers’ imposition of whatever they wanted to impose. When radical socialism (communism) swept across Eurasia like a new Black Death, it infected all the cultures it touched. Central Eurasians were forced to give up their traditional life-styles, dress, culture, everything. Some changes were good—the spread of hygiene, education in the sciences, secular government, and so on, is surely to be applauded. But too much was destroyed. The communist Chinese crushed Tibetans and their culture after their failed attempt to eject the tyrannical invaders. Sympathetic Westerners clamored for justice—proclamations and denouncements were made, rightly accusing the Chinese of cultural genocide—but nothing could stop the rape of Central Eurasia.

Central Eurasian culture suffered the most of any region of the world from the devastation of Modernism in the twentieth century,
even though the region was mostly not directly involved in the two world wars. But why? The reasons lie outside Central Eurasia, in the rulers’ home cultures, so in order to answer this question it is necessary to understand the wrenching changes that took place during the twentieth century in Eurasia as a whole.

It began in the concatenation of economic, demographic, political, and intellectual changes that took place in Europe and the European-dominated Littoral System with the spread of industrialization and urbanization. The extreme commercialization and intense industrialization of the great cities of the Eurasian Littoral zone—whose raison d’être was after all commerce and industry from the very beginning—was accompanied by explosive demographic growth. By the early twentieth century, the largest, most industrialized, richest, and most influential cities in the world were the great cities of Europe, the Eurasian Littoral, and European colonies around the world. In those turbulent concentrations of humanity, consciousness of the great changes that were happening at an ever faster pace in science and technology encouraged those who sided with “the moderns” against “the ancients” in intellectual and artistic life. The leaders of the mass urban culture also favored populism, an idea developed by Enlightenment thinkers and revolutionaries. Joined together with other ideas and trends, they developed into the essential driving force behind the political, social, and cultural changes that so greatly affected the entire continent: Modernism.
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The core idea of Modernism is simple, and seems harmless enough by itself: what is modern—new and fashionable—is
better
than what it replaces. As long as it was just a general feeling about fashion, or technical progress, and as long as classicism (or the idea that what is old is better than what is new) still acted as a counterweight, premodern modernism had little effect on the world. But the classical and aristocratic became identified with each other in opposition to the modern and nonaristocratic, along with the spread of industrialization and urbanization, when nonaristocratic people doing modern industrial, urban things came to dominate Europe, North America, and eventually much of the rest of Eurasia. There was no longer any room for the classical and the nonurban aristocratic at all. But Modernism was not merely a finite sequence in which something new (the industrial and urban) replaced something old (the aristocratic and rural) and that was that. If
only
what is new is good, it is by definition necessary to continually create or do new things. Full-blown Modernism meant, and still means,
permanent revolution:
continuous rejection of the traditional or immediately preceding political, social, artistic, and intellectual order.

Permanent revolution meant that what went before, including any previous revolution (and its products), was bad and had to be rejected. Even Reason—free inquiry, independent thinking, logic, questioning—was identified as one of the old ideas and practices of old aristocratic intellectuals. It was relentlessly attacked by “conservative” religious leaders, politicians, and journalists. Such “conservatives” often were the most fanatic Modernists. The sociopolitical results—the tyrannies of fascism, communism, and political-religious fundamentalism, each of which required the unquestioning belief of the masses in the radical ideas preached by their leaders—were quintessentially Modern. It is not surprising that Modernism achieved its greatest successes with the horrific world wars and mass murder of the twentieth century.
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With the Modernist identification of monarchy as an old form of government, populists
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succeeded in instituting Modern nonmonarchist forms of government in one form or another—ranging from totalitarian fascist or communist dictatorship to “democratic” republic—in nearly all countries in Eurasia by 1951.
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Everything was done in the name of “the people,” “the masses,” regardless of the titular political system. Most stereotypically, “mass culture” was the only kind acceptable under “scientific communism.”

Revolutionary social, political, intellectual (or rather, anti-intellectual), and artistic (actually anti-artistic) Modernism began in the European-run Littoral System, at home in Europe. The proximal source of political Modernism, the driving force behind political life and death in recent times, is to be found in the Enlightenment. Its most influential thinker was Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), who proposed revolutionary ideas—many of them very good ideas—in nearly all spheres of life. But they turned out to be incendiary ideas. The French Revolution (1789–ca. 1799), which unleashed a reign of unspeakable cruelty and mass murder presided over by demagogues glibly preaching the virtues of “democracy,” “liberty,” and other ideas of the Enlightenment philosophers (who certainly never imagined the terror that others would perpetrate in their names), can be deemed the first major blow actually struck by Modernism in Europe. It was a harbinger of even worse things. The terrible wars of the nineteenth century, with their new technology that increasingly made it easier than ever to kill large numbers of people, were accompanied by the full onslaught of the Industrial Revolution and accompanying rapid urbanization in Western Europe, North America, and Japan. All three developments—military, industrial, and urban—shifted power to men who did not represent the traditional nonurban aristocracy and their high cultural ideals. Modernism had largely won by the late nineteenth century, and in the twentieth it reached its full development.

The Littoral powers—England, France, and their allies in Europe and America, and Japan in Asia—defeated and punished the continental powers in the First World War. The result, not surprisingly, was one radical revolution after the other in continental Eurasia, including Germany, Russia, and China (where the early communist revolution was largely suppressed by massacre in 1927). Throughout the twentieth century, earlier scientific theories, technologies, and ideologies were constantly replaced by new ones. The total victory of the populist “democratic” form of government concentrated unprecedented power in the hands of unscrupulous rulers who eagerly took advantage of the new possibilities. The result was the consciously directed mass murder of tens of millions of innocent people in Eurasia and the spread of the most vicious, destructive form of cultural Modernism across Central Eurasia.

Modernism and the Destruction of the Arts

Modernism arose in the great industrialized cities of Europe and the European-dominated Littoral zone. Because it was in part a reaction of urban, commercial, industrialized Littoral zone people against elite, aristocratic, land-based continental people, it inevitably had a powerful effect on Central Eurasia, which was at the mercy of its colonial rulers.

During the reign of unbridled Marxist socialism in the Soviet Union, especially in the 1930s under Stalin, and again later in the People’s Republic of China, especially between 1966 and 1976 under Mao, radical Modernism savaged Central Eurasia.
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Thousands of monasteries, temples, churches, mosques, madrasas, shrines, and synagogues, which contained the artistic and architectural heritage of Central Eurasian peoples, were closed or destroyed. For example, by the end of the 1930s in the Soviet Union, “visible religious life had been virtually destroyed. Out of the 50,000 Orthodox churches in the Russian Empire on the eve of the Revolution only a few hundred remained open.”
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Of the many synagogues in the Russian Empire, by 1966 the number remaining in the entire USSR was thought to be “only sixty-two.”
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Whereas in 1917 there were 26,279 mosques in the empire, in the USSR at the end of the Brezhnev (r. 1964–1982) era there were about 200. In Azerbaijan alone, there were approximately 2,000 mosques in 1917 but only 55 in 1990.
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Of the approximately 2,700 monasteries in the Tibetan Autonomous Region (covering about half the total area of Tibet; the rest of the country has been divided up among neighboring Chinese provinces), 80 percent were destroyed by 1965, according to Chinese government figures; only
thirteen
were left after the Cultural Revolution.
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The same happened in Mongolia during the Stalinist period.
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The men who staffed those institutions, who embodied the wisdom of the ages, were forcibly removed and secularized, and often imprisoned or sent to labor camps, if not killed outright,
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and many of their books and art objects were destroyed. The Modern schools and universities that were eventually built in Central Eurasia by the Soviet and Chinese communists could not—and still cannot—compete with even the smallest colleges in Europe or America in their level of education, not to speak of making new contributions to scholarship and science.
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The representatives of the old elite secular culture, whether aristocrats, petty “bourgeois,” or intellectuals, were generally treated even worse—they were imprisoned or executed outright. Culturally, Modernism thus devastated Central Eurasia much more than any other part of the world.