When the International Refugee Organization sent him to faraway Australia in 1948, it probably sounded like an adventure. But the nineteen-year-old found himself doing back-breaking work in an isolated mine surrounded by dense Tasmanian forest. He would later tell government officials that it was “200 years behind European working conditions.”

After a year, Jakob decided he was finished with capitalist Australia and would return to the Soviet Union. Many of his peers were unimpressed by his decision — it even sparked a brawl during which he was stabbed. But his pro-Soviet migrant friends considered him a true patriot. Celebrating with them and a little drunk, the young refugee boasted that he would give the Soviets intelligence on Australia and go to Korea to fight the Western capitalists.

Unbeknown to Jakob, his audience of friends and acquaintances that night included two spies: a Soviet MVD colonel and an undercover agent for the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, or ASIO. Concerned by their informant’s report, Australian security officers began keeping an eye on Jakob. They followed him all the way to the docks when he sailed for the Soviet Union. Dissatisfied with the West and full of praise for his Soviet homeland, he was considered a threat to Western security.

This is not the familiar refugee story told in countries like Australia: a story of desperate, hard-working migrants who gratefully become loyal contributors to their new homeland. Jakob had certainly been desperate — he became a forced labourer at just fourteen — and, for the most part, he had worked hard in Australia. But the war and displacement produced complex, shifting identities that didn’t simply disappear when the shooting stopped. And life in the West didn’t always live up to its promises.

The second world war had left forty million or more people displaced in Europe. Some wanted nothing more than to return to their homes, but for others, particularly those from now Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe, the home they had left no longer existed. As the International Refugee Organization worked to solve this “refugee problem,” thousands of Russians who had lived through the war in East Asia were being displaced by China’s communist revolution.

Most of these refugees, whether in Europe or China, were stridently anti-communist. Many had good reason to be, having lived as exiles after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution or through the Stalinist terror of the 1930s. The views of “White Russians” and Eastern Europeans who considered their homelands “captive nations” would fit neatly into the West as the fresh storm clouds of the cold war built on the horizon. Increasingly, each Soviet refugee was a propaganda victory for the West: these were individuals choosing freedom, expressing hatred of communism by voting with their feet.

Some, however, harboured more ambivalent views. A few could even be called “Red”: communists, socialists, trade unionists or, most commonly, pro-Soviet patriots who were proud of the victorious Red Army and their homeland’s achievements since the communist revolution. “Displaced persons,” known as DPs, were resettled primarily in countries that now defined themselves as the anti-communist West, with the largest contingents going to the United States, Australia, Canada and Israel.

The lives and experiences of anti-communist DPs — the refugees who became model migrants in the West — have been chronicled in the rich scholarship on postwar migration that has proliferated since the 1990s. Yet Soviet refugees with left-wing views, DPs like Jakob who did not fit the model, have remained essentially invisible.

Surveillance and the persistent shadow of espionage were central parts of their lives in the West. Former or current Soviet citizens who were Russian speakers and left-wing sympathisers threw up multiple red flags for Western intelligence organisations, which often struggled to understand their traumas, experiences and intra-community politics. Many had been socialised in the Soviet Union, their political views shaped by complex lives in Europe and China.

In the cold war West, their ideas took root in new ways. Ideological convictions — that the world could be better and fairer, or that the worker’s lot was difficult — mingled with personal ones, shaped by memories of lost homes, murdered family members or forced labour. These ideas made them potential threats, forcing them to negotiate the incursions of state security into their everyday lives.

In many ways, it is because these refugees loomed so large in the eyes of intelligence agencies that we struggle to catch sight of them. The lives of “ordinary” people are often difficult to locate in official records, but that marginalisation was compounded by cold war anti-communism and surveillance.

Left-wing Soviet DPs had particular cause to recede from view by lying about their politics and backgrounds or simply keeping their own counsel. They knew they were being watched; most were aware that both the state and other migrants regarded them with suspicion; very few recorded their experiences. History maintains a sense of irony, though: the very surveillance dossiers that marginalised these migrants can now provide the historian with a window into their worlds.

Intelligence agencies are notorious for their secrecy and reluctance to reveal the details of even decades-old operations. When they do reveal information, it is typically on their own terms and in the service of their public image — take, for example, the declassification of the CIA’s Canadian Caper operation, which formed the basis of the film Argo.

In some cases, researchers can appeal to legislation. In the United States, the Freedom of Information Act provides a well-trodden path to accessing FBI and CIA files. A similar provision in Canada allows requests for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s files. But both have, to differing degrees, proven limited in recent years. Britain’s MI5 is subject to very few access measures, releasing files only as it chooses. Further, its release policy targets higher-profile individuals, leaving the files of more ordinary subjects unknown and unknowable for historians.

By comparison, access procedures in Australia are quite liberal. A dedicated application process via the National Archives of Australia provides greater access to security files if one is sufficiently patient. These dossiers are still redacted, equivocal and frustrating, but they provide unique glimpses of a left-wing presence among the DPs. Presumably, similar migrants ended up elsewhere in the West.

Though they had chosen life in the West rather than the East, and in some cases had experienced the worst that Soviet communism had to offer, these migrants continued to align themselves with the political left. For the most part, they were not activists. They tended not to join Australian political parties and their ideas did not often fit neatly under labels like “communist,” “Marxist” or “Trotskyite.”

Their views were idiosyncratic patchworks rather than refined political doctrines, reflecting lives lived across East and West in turbulent times. Their experiences of Soviet terror and state support, Nazi and Japanese occupation, concentration camps and forced labour often informed their understanding of the twentieth century’s prevailing political philosophies more than books or manifestos. Their politics played out at street-level: in living rooms, church halls, night clubs, theatre groups, factory floors and discussions over glasses of wine (or vodka) at parties.

Though some refugees chose Australia specifically for its distance — the furthest they thought they could get from the Soviets — the cold war arrived there, too. By 1948, as the revolution in China compounded still-heightened fears of invasion by neighbouring Asian countries, anti-communism gained a firm foothold in Australia.

As the historian David Lowe has written, the cold war was “Australianised” with settler-colonial anxieties about maintaining white racial homogeneity and preventing territory loss. Australia saw itself as part of the English-speaking world but was surrounded by a decolonising Asia-Pacific region with a growing socialist and communist presence, and so sought the security of close ties with Britain and the United States.

One result was the formation of ASIO in response to American concerns about Australia’s lax security and a Soviet spy ring in Canberra. Domestically, the cold war flared in 1950–51 as Australian troops were shipped to Korea and prime minister Robert Menzies attempted to ban the Communist Party. A referendum on the ban saw the public drawn into an increasingly heated debate about communism, national security and civil liberties.

Similar tensions were sparked in 1954 by the defections of Soviet officials (and spies) Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov — an incident soon christened the Petrov affair. Vladimir Petrov had socialised extensively among Soviet migrants in Sydney and many of them waited with trepidation as ASIO investigated and a royal commission enquired.

Both moments were cold war watersheds for Australians, a time when debates about communism and espionage hit close to home. But they hit even closer for Soviet refugees as their homelands and the ideologies they had lived under and knew intimately were discussed in daily newspapers and nightly news broadcasts. Many of the refugees knew Petrov personally; the affair played out in their lives in distinctive ways, providing new, rich layers to our history of this event.

The Petrov affair’s most iconic and enduring moment — Evdokia Petrov, her husband having already defected alone, being escorted across Sydney’s airport tarmac by two Soviet couriers — was heightened by thousands of anti-communist Eastern European migrants. They turned out to protest what they saw as the forcible return of a terrified Russian woman to a dire fate in the Soviet Union. Many had themselves felt at risk of a similar fate, in Europe’s DP camps, and arrived with placards and raised voices to warn Australians and their government of the Soviet Union’s cruelty.

These anti-communist exile groups existed alongside and often in conflict with smaller communities of left-wing migrants. For some, joining a left-wing group related more to opposing diaspora norms — their vitriolic anti-Soviet rhetoric and strong attachment to the church — than cold war politics. Less conservative social mores and better entertainment often helped too, especially for young refugees. But whether they intended it or not, many were then cast into cold war conflicts.

Sydney’s left-leaning Russian Social Club brought DPs into the orbit of the broader Australian left and the Petrov affair. A corresponding Social Club was also set up in Melbourne, in 1952, though it seems to have been short-lived. These clubs facilitated migrants’ connections with Soviet embassy officials stationed in Australia, who were often working covertly as spies. A host of left-wing Jewish organisations were also established by, or drew in, postwar migrants, such as the Jewish Councils to Combat Fascism and Anti-Semitism in Sydney and Melbourne, the Volkscentre in Darlinghurst and Kadimah in Carlton.

Left-wing migrants often participated across multiple groups and sometimes became involved with Australian-run organisations as a result. The typical “communist front” groups which proliferated across the West — Australia–Russia societies (later renamed Australian–Soviet friendship societies) and peace councils — were also hubs for left-wing Soviet refugees. The Melbourne friendship society even had, for a time, a DP as chairman. These clubs facilitated migrants’ connections with Soviet officials but also attracted Australian surveillance, and thus, interactions with spies on both sides.

Most put down roots in Australia, establishing themselves in new communities and becoming neighbours, friends, fellow churchgoers and colleagues of both other migrants and those born in Australia. Some shifted between communities, burying their earlier years, and some became more conservative with age. Most were naturalised, giving up Soviet passports or statelessness in favour of Australian citizenship — though, again, they pursued this in order to access specific benefits, rights or stability just as often as a desire to become Australians.

With naturalisation, they became Australian voters. Soviet refugees’ voting patterns are near impossible to ascertain, but both Labor and Liberal parties tried to some extent to cultivate migrant votes. Few of the left-wing group (even if pro-communist) appear to have associated directly with the Communist Party of Australia, but some refugees joined or maintained connections to the Labor Party.

But not everyone settled down. Australia was not typically a refugee’s first choice, and some moved on to other countries, such as Canada or the United States. Some never made it past the two-year work contract, deported for absconding from their assigned employment. Others did their best to get themselves deported: one way to obtain a cheap ticket back to Europe.

The other way, for Soviets, was voluntary repatriation. The Soviet Union wanted its “stolen” DPs back and Soviet citizens who wanted to return could often do so at Soviet expense. Repatriation figures were only ever a tiny fraction of the tide of Westward migration during the early cold war — between 1947 and 1952, some twenty-eight Soviet DPs returned from Venezuela, twenty-two from Argentina, sixteen from Canada, nine from South Africa and only two from the United States. Nevertheless, they reflected the fact that life in the capitalist world could also be harsh, especially if you were a refugee.

In Australia, the two-year work contract was often a catalyst and some, like young Jakob, left soon after completing it, homesick and dissatisfied. Others remained longer, even decades, before making the decision to repatriate. China Russians could also return if they secured the appropriate paperwork, though the Soviets likely would not foot the bill. Nevertheless, some did repatriate.

But whether they chose to stay in Australia or not, many Soviet refugees lived through the early years of the cold war in the West. As these battle lines were drawn, they had to pick a stance: leave politics behind and remain quiet, become anti-communist “cold warriors,” or accept the surveillance and suspicion that came with life as a pro-Soviet “enemy alien.” •

This article is adapted from Ebony Nilsson’s new book Displaced Comrades: Politics and Surveillance in the Lives of Soviet Refugees in the West, published by Bloomsbury Academic.

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The battle for Ukraine is part of a larger conflict over empire and decolonisation that reaches back to the period 1914–22, broke open again in 1989–91, and has simmered since the Soviet Union split into fifteen successor states in 1991. What we are witnessing, in effect, is one battle in one theatre of a potentially much more regional conflict made up of the (civil) wars of the Soviet succession. They have combined domestic and international struggles over independence and empire with contests between dictatorship and democracy.

Ukraine is only one theatre of these conflicts. In Belarus, mass protests against the dictatorship of Alexander Lukashenko in 2020–21 were subdued with utter brutality. Russian support for the Belarusian dictator kept his regime going despite crippling sanctions, effectively turning him into a client of Moscow.

While the violence in Belarus was administered by domestic forces, similar anti-regime protests in Kazakhstan in January prompted the intervention of Russian, Belarusian, Armenian, Tajik and Kyrgyz troops to help prop up the government. Most recently, the conflict over landlocked Nagorno-Karabakh, in the South Caucasus, has turned from a frozen conflict between Russian-backed Armenia and Turkish-supported Azerbaijan into a shooting war after Azerbaijan, exploiting Russia’s distraction elsewhere, attacked Armenian positions on 12 September. Two days later, fighting broke out further east as well, at the volatile central Asian border between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.

What all of these conflicts have in common is that they are rooted in unresolved problems stemming from the breakdown of the Soviet empire in 1991.

Wars and civil wars are not unusual when empires break apart: boundaries between possible successors are unclear, loyalties fragile, legitimacies tenuous. When the Romanov empire imploded in 1917–18, the horrible fighting lasted until early 1920 in some regions, into early 1921 in others, and until 1923 in central Asia. The result, however, was a re-establishment of a new empire, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Only Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland remained independent, at least until the second world war. Then the three Baltic states were annexed, Poland made a satellite and Finland forced into neutrality.

What is unique about the current conflicts of the Soviet succession is that they took so long to gestate. The breakdown of the Soviet empire in 1989–91 was largely peaceful. This point can be overstressed: there was violence in Georgia in 1989 and in Lithuania in 1991, wars for and against independence in South Ossetia in 1991–92, Transnistria in 1992 and Abkhazia in 1992–93, a civil war in Tajikistan and a war-turned-frozen conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh from 1992, and two wars to prevent Chechnya’s breaking away from Russia in 1994–96 and 1999–2000. Nevertheless, the Soviet lands were largely spared the horrors of the wars of the Yugoslav succession nearby.

One reason for this relative lack of violence was that the Soviet Union broke apart not through acrimony but from exhaustion. Anti-imperial feelings were rife not only in the non-Russian periphery of the empire, but also in the Russian heartland. Many thought their economic woes were caused by the drain the empire imposed on the state’s coffers. Better to let the non-Russians go and build a Russian national homeland.

Borders, too, were relatively well defined, with the Soviet Union’s republics providing ready-made territories for successor regimes. Again, there were exceptions (South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh and Transnistria) but the boundaries of Soviet times generally held firm, at least until recently.

The imperial centre, Russia, experienced not only decolonisation at the periphery but also state breakdown domestically. The years after 1991 saw economic collapse accompanied by a disintegration of the state’s monopoly over the use of violence on its territory.

This was not a state capable of maintaining empire, and that only began to change with Vladimir Putin’s ascent to power from 1999. At the heart of the current president’s longstanding popularity has been his ability to rebuild the state, coupled with his good luck when rising oil prices allowed economic growth to resume.

What is easily forgotten, however, is that this was an imperial presidency from the get-go. Putin’s first major political success was the brutal victory in the second Chechen war of 1999–2000, which prevented a further decolonisation of Russia and kept a prominent non-Russian region within Moscow’s control.

The victory in Chechnya was popular across the political spectrum. I remember discussions with otherwise thoroughly liberal Russian intellectuals who insisted that this was a necessary war: if Chechnya went, who would be next? Soon, nothing might be left of Russia beyond the heartland around Moscow, from where the old empire had grown since the fourteenth century.

The Chechen war provided a model for how to leverage imperial feelings for political gain. When the petro-dollar-driven economic recovery began to stutter, when internal opposition continued to challenge his regime, however ineffectually, and when neighbouring Ukraine showed that an East Slav nation could mount repeated revolutions against kleptocrats and Russian-aligned would-be dictators, Putin mobilised the imperial undercurrent of his regime.

The proxy war in Donbas and the 2014 annexation of Crimea seemed to provide a model for how this would work: no effective resistance would be encountered; Europe and the United States would wring their hands and impose minor sanctions but do nothing of substance. An alliance of pacifists, Russophiles and “realists” could be counted on to pressure Ukraine to submit to the invader; Europe’s dependence on Russian oil and gas would mute its response. The government in Kyiv would run away and Russia would annex more of Ukraine and make the rest a vassal state similar to neighbouring Belarus. Putin would enter the history books as saviour of Russia’s greatness.

This strategy failed miserably. The Russian invasion got quickly bogged down by incompetence, lack of training and poorly maintained equipment. Ukraine’s government stood firm and its army fought intelligently and effectively, supported by a surprisingly united NATO and European Union.

After Ukraine had won the battle of Kyiv, Russia focused on Donbas as well as the south of Ukraine, where it could leverage shorter supply lines. Progress was slow and grinding, however, relying largely on massive artillery bombardments of Ukrainian positions. While the battle for Donbas rumbled on, Russia was unable to complete the conquest of Ukraine’s coastline, where success had initially been swiftest.

Now the tide of war has turned. If Europe, the United States, Australia and other democracies continue to support Ukraine, chances are that it will eventually liberate the rest of its territory, quite possibly including Crimea. This outcome is far from guaranteed, but it looks much more realistic now than in the dark days of February and March.

Where does this military setback leave Russia? The wager on empire has clearly failed. With Russia weakened, the other theatres in the wars of the Soviet succession might well flare up again, further threatening Russia’s claim of hegemony over the region. We are already seeing this in the recent fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia as well as the Tajik–Kyrgyz border war. In Belarus, the opposition is subdued but not eliminated. It might rear its head again, threatening one of Russia’s client regimes in the west.

As far as Ukraine is concerned, Putin could finally declare his “special military operation” an actual war, and thus invoke conscription to replenish his by now anaemic forces. This is a course of action that many on the hard right as well as the Communists support. There is a reason, however, why Putin has thus far avoided such a move: it would be deeply unpopular with men of draft age and their families.

Even if it were mobilised, it isn’t clear that an army of poorly trained conscripts could make a difference now that the effects of sanctions are starting to limit Russia’s ability to resupply its army. Short of a desperate move like a nuclear strike, Putin has few good options at present. He has missed his opportunity to pull out of Ukraine in a face-saving manner. The military setbacks have weakened him both domestically and internationally.

What is far from clear is whether this weakening will translate into regime change. A popular revolution following the Ukrainian examples of 2004–05 and 2013–14 seems unlikely, although not altogether impossible. Belarus in 2020–21 has shown that even mass protests can be repressed if army and police remain loyal. And Putin’s dictatorship has toughened up dramatically since the invasion of Ukraine in February.

If the agents of organised violence remain behind him, Putin can politically survive the military catastrophe. But whether he will pull his troops out now he has clearly lost is another matter. He is more likely to try to stay the course and defend the territory he still controls. Thus Ukraine will continue to need outside support — including supplies of heavy weapons — to win this crucial part of the delayed wars of the Soviet succession. •

The post The long war of Soviet succession appeared first on Inside Story.

PRESIDING over the third of five barriers to the waiting lounge, the uniformed official at Tashkent airport was dourly insistent. “Two books you brought into the country, where are they?” I fished in my backpack and brought out a copy of Dombey and Son, my planned reading on the eight-hour flight back to London. Since it was old and came in a box (I’d picked it up at a secondhand shop a few weeks before), and either his English or his literacy was not refined, this only seemed to increase his suspicion. He paused, breathed hard and then, half recognising that an elderly professor might not be committed to subverting the Uzbek nation and polity, found a way out. “And the second one?” he snapped. The other novel I’d confessed to bringing into Uzbekistan, on the form we were trying to reconcile, I had passed to my wife, who had been waved through some minutes earlier. But, fortunately, someone in our group of visitors had given me an anodyne tourist guide that I could pull from my sack instead. For my interrogator it was much more recognisable than Dickens, and he gave a twitch of relief. “OK. Pass.”

The brief encounter was a fitting end to a fortnight in Uzbekistan, a post-Soviet state whose leader, Islam Karimov, an orphan boy born in Samarkand in 1938, made his track to the national summit in what might have seemed an exemplary Soviet fashion (even marrying a Russian). Officially, I had come to the place, along with quite a few other tourists, to view its Islamic art and architecture at Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva and other gorgeous sites, as well as to contemplate the business of the “Silk Road” and, ideally for the state that granted me my visa, to purchase some of its current products. But as a biographer of Mussolini and a historian contemplating a general study of dictatorships, I found it impossible not to be drawn into an examination of Uzbek state and society as it impinged on a doubtless ignorant visitor who kept his eyes open. This tourist was less interested in “the Uzbek past” than in its current forging and representation under a president who had risen to the top before communism fell.

The quotation marks are needed because Uzbekistan is very much a nation in the building. It owes its existence and its borders to its conquest in the nineteenth century by imperial Russia, an empire embraced by the Bolsheviks when, in 1920, they advanced into “Turkestan” to eliminate a last base of armed opposition and, as they saw it, to raise the locals from barbarism to the rational modernity of “scientific socialism.” The Soviet Union’s own history would in its turn be vitiated by the Soviet state’s inability to renounce empire – a situation worsened by the regime’s erratic and confused approach to national self-determination, not a subject well framed by the theory of Marxist internationalism.

In practice, Uzbeks were among the winners after 1920. A peasant people with few claims to a specific historical literature, the Uzbeks serendipitously acquired the second-most ample territory of the “-stan” republics, lands that would eventually be revealed to contain rich supplies of oil and gas, or could grow massive amounts of cotton, irrigated scientific socialist–style, with whatever eventual environmental catastrophe. And so, from the 1920s, it became necessary to imagine an Uzbek national community and invent a “timeless” tradition for it, a task made all the more urgent since there had never before been a state with the borders that the Uzbek Republic had been given.

My readers will catch the reference to Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm, and to the extensive literature probing the fate of peoples grouped together as nations at different times since the first application of this modern ideology and practice in the French Revolution. Certainly students of European fascism know that by 1938 the Wilsonian version of self-determination in interwar Europe, in what the American president had envisaged as a happy yoking of the nation with economic and political liberty, had failed to take root. Except in Europe’s Western borderlands, every state from the Rhine to the Black Sea and from Helsinki to Athens had fallen under an authoritarian or fascist leader who cancelled liberty while doing his best to homogenise his heterogeneous subjects into a single nation. Mark Mazower’s brilliant and moving microcosmic account of the fate of the peoples of Salonika/Thessaloniki, Salonika: City of Ghosts, Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430–1950, is the best path into this world.

IT MUST therefore be of little surprise to find current-day Uzbekistan echoing with the manufacture of a usable past. It is, after all, the most numerous of the -stans, with a population of thirty million. Of that number, perhaps 30 per cent may be Tajiks, although officials only admit to 5 per cent, and the regime severely discourages the use of the Tajik language, even though it is Karimov’s first tongue. (The president’s Uzbek is said to be heavily inflected by the Tajik of his home city.) Any reckoning of ethnicity is further afflicted by the fact that a majority of the population of the city of Osh, over the border in Kyrgyzstan, is Uzbek, a situation that earned headlines in 2010 when the locals unleashed a pogrom against them.

Matters are further complicated by the existence of four separate Uzbek enclaves in Kyrgyzstan, while there is a Tajik enclave in the Namangan province of Uzbekistan, east of Tashkent. In its far west, in the desert that approaches what used to be the Aral Sea, Uzbekistan also acknowledges the autonomous province of Karakalpakstan. Its population was nomadic in origin but may have been in most senses Kazakh until the Soviets defined them as Karakalpaks (“Black Hats”). In regard to the old imperial masters, the number of Russians in Uzbekistan has fallen steadily since independence, and is now reckoned at only 5 per cent, although the Russian language remains in common urban usage and is, for example, deployed, along with Uzbek, for announcements on Uzbek Air, the national carrier. It may also be used at Karimov family dinners.

These manifold ethnic intricacies set Uzbekistan within the story of empires and decolonisation, along with that of nation invention. In Central Asia, as elsewhere, lines drawn by imperial administrators on maps bear little relation to social reality. But the complications of the nation are not merely local. The Stalinist regime, that “paranoid state with enemies, too,” was given to parking “border peoples,” whose loyalty it distrusted, in the -stans. Up to 500,000 Koreans and more than 100,000 Meskhetian Turks, for example, were found homes in Uzbekistan. The Turks were victims of racist attack as early as 1989, and most left then or following Uzbek independence. Although quite a few Koreans have also departed, many remain and help to foster the flourishing trade between Uzbekistan and South Korea.

For the Soviet regime, the most pressing issue was religion, which was viewed as the proof of Uzbeks’ “backwardness.” Traditional credulity and ignorance must urgently be liquidated; belief in Islam was an opium of the people whose yoke a scientifically socialist education would lift forever. Despite such an intention, statistics today say that Uzbekistan is 89 per cent Sunni Muslim. Karimov and his government, however, are still palpably hostile to religious fundamentalism and its more ordinary practice. Imams can only cry the muezzin on Fridays and, at least in my recent experience in the country, even then they are seldom heard. Many famous mosques are reduced to being museums, applauded (and reconstructed) as vehicles of national history and sales outlets for tourist trinkets rather than as holy sites of Islamic belief. Out in the countryside, where peasants still live in mudbrick houses, few mosques are to be seen, especially where the translation of the world of the collective farm, or kolkhoz, into a capitalist modern agriculture moves with evident delay. What stirs beneath the surface in such places is hard to know – experts do suggest that deep religious belief lingers – but the other -stans are more accommodating to Islam and the country does have a border in its south with Afghanistan. Can the Taliban, it is easy to whisper, be far away?

The current rulers loudly say no. In 2005 the regime committed what is damned by human rights campaigners as the “Andijan massacre” in the east of the Fergana valley, the country’s agrarian and population heartland. Hundreds of the supporters of the Hizb ut-Tahrir movement, the Party of Islamic Liberation, working for the re-establishment of the Caliphate throughout the Muslim world, died amid allegations, never rebutted, of torture. One vociferous critic of the Karimov tyranny was Craig Murray, the British ambassador in Tashkent, 2002–04, whose book Murder in Samarkand detailed the repression while spending rather too much time on the breakdown of Murray’s marriage and the transfer of his affections to a younger local woman. The regime’s secret police are thought still to be focused on eliminating religious dissent.

Other, more banal, traits of dictatorship are also present. The economy stutters. Unemployment and underemployment flourish. However pledged to neoliberal privatisation and claiming respectable growth rates, the regime readily retreats into state command. The currency is not convertible and many families survive on remittances from two million or more economic emigrants to Russia. Corruption is rampant. The BBC and Guardian sent me on my way to Heathrow with stories of the deals of Karimov’s two, allegedly rival, daughters, the younger of whom, Lola, lives in a villa in Geneva, reportedly purchased in 2010 for £29 million. She is married to businessman Timur Tillyaev, whose first name (as we’ll see) may be a pledge of his patriotism. The elder, Gulnara – who, among a quiver of degrees, holds a masters from Harvard (the United States has drifted in and out of a special relationship with the regime) – is founder and chairperson of “The Forum of Arts and Culture in Uzbekistan,” an organisation proselytising the country’s usable past at home and abroad. Her greed is thought hard to satiate, even if, for example, she dreams of making Tashkent into the fashion capital of the region.

While I was in Uzbekistan, the Guardian carried a further report critical of partnerships arranged by such British universities as Cambridge and East Anglia. The Westminster International University in Tashkent has been operating since 2002, endorsed glibly by then British prime minister, Tony Blair, as “an encouraging and positive project enabling us to build partnership through our shared value of higher education.” In what might seem a warning to such academic venturing, Transparency International’s 2012 index put Uzbekistan 170th on its list, ahead only of Myanmar, Afghanistan, North Korea and Somalia. Allegations of the use of slave child labour had been so common that major Western firms, including H&M, Adidas and Burberry, had joined a boycott. As I traversed the country, the harvest for 2013 continued. Small children were not visible from the main roads, but the country’s secondary and tertiary institutions were closed while students “spontaneously” joined the national task of bringing in the cotton with many patient donkeys and few signs of modern technology.

IN SUM, the background file that I took with me as a tourist of contemporary Uzbekistan bulged with warnings that I should be wary of the official line about the prettiness, antiquity and saleability of the nation’s history and heritage. I might allow myself to marvel at the famous sites of Islamic art and architecture and buy a silken jacket, but I should not be persuaded that my trip bore only past messages.

In the course of my fortnight, I travelled by bus from Tashkent to Khiva, then flew east to the capital and was taken by car across the Fergana valley to Andijan and back. Along the way, two things were obvious. Every fifty or so kilometres on every highway, there was a military/police roadblock where passports could be inspected, luggage reviewed, travelling justified. Our official guide explained that the aim was to stem the opium traffic from Afghanistan. But, at such moments, I was seeing a working dictatorship in what was always, for a foreigner, a very “safe” country. No beggars or street people hindered the view. I could watch BBC TV in my hotel rooms and, like Uzbeks, I could use the web, but no foreign newspapers were anywhere on sale and few locals seemed to read the government newssheet.

The other feature of the roadscape was advertisements, one after another along the highways. Some were modern capitalist, for Nestlé and other multinationals. (The richly appointed stores of most international name brands featured in many cities, although customers seemed rare indeed.) But the great majority of the placards were moralisingly devoted to nation building. Typically, they were adorned with a slogan hailing national independence and the people’s unity across an image of some famous historical site and one or other of the country’s lavish new public buildings (many of which are rumoured to reverse the façade-ism common in the West by consisting of a new frontage covering an old Soviet building). Occasionally, a wise saw was attributed to Islam Karimov. His visitations to a new railway station or a provincial museum were also grovellingly recorded, although his personality cult was less aggressive than might have been expected. Rather, it was History that really mattered; the current ruler was always seconded by the ghosts of past heroes, carefully summoned into life for their modern nationalising message.

CHIEF among these figures is Timur (Tamerlane or Tamburlaine, as he is more familiarly known in English, the protagonist of a Christopher Marlowe play about a shepherd who conquered the world). Timur lived from 1336 to 1405, dying as he endeavoured to add Ming China to vast dominions that stretched from Delhi to Smyrna on the Mediterranean. In the course of his military life, he (and his soldiers) were thought to have killed seventeen million people, about 5 per cent of the global population. He was born in a village near what is now called Shakhrisabz, across a mountain pass from Samarkand, and although this latter city became his beautified capital, Shakhrisabz is still being lavishly “reconstructed” in his memory. Tourists are told it is the best place to buy scarves and other locally woven textiles, and UNESCO made it the fourth of the country’s world heritage sites, along with Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva, in 2000.

Ethnically, Timur was a Turkified Mongol with a tribal base, and only in the loosest of historical definitions an Uzbek. Nonetheless, in modern Uzbekistan, where the statues of Lenin and Marx that once adorned key city squares have, perforce, been melted down, three large statues of this conqueror give historical weight to Tashkent, Samarkand and Shakhrisabz. On the equestrian version in the capital, a caption explains in multiple languages that the Great Man embodied “Strength in Justice,” a cosy epitaph indeed.

Timur’s empire soon fragmented. But two of his “Timurid” descendants are recalled in Uzbekistan. Ulugh Beg (1394–1449), a part-Persian grandson of Timur, was the nearest example in the Islamic world of a Renaissance prince, a mathematician and astronomer, who rejoiced in his own observatory at Samarkand (rediscovered by Russian archaeologists in 1908 and another place where “restoration” busily continues). The city’s most renowned sites – the Registan square, the Guri Amir mausoleum and the Shah-i-Zinda necropolis – owe much to him (and modern restorers).

Shah-i-Zinda is the most lively of such places. Various Timurid princesses are exquisitely buried there. So, too, it is said, is Kusam ibn Abbas, the cousin of the prophet. He was thought to have taken residence in Samarkand in the seventh century and was memorialised in the fourteenth. This sacred past means that pious Uzbeks join Western tourists in admiring the tomb and worship continues there more evidently than at most other sites.

A second Timurid accorded a modern purpose is Babur (1483–1530), boasting blood from both Timur and Genghis Khan, who turned his armies south from the Fergana valley to establish himself as the first Mughal emperor of India. From the 1980s, prompted initially by the hope of linking Soviet Uzbekistan to the USSR’s bloody and unsuccessful civilising mission in Afghanistan (Babur ruled for a while from Kabul), a memorial statue, library and park were developed a few kilometres southeast of Andijan. The memorial was given an ersatz history by the addition of soil from Agra where Babur died and was buried. Visitors today are also shown a small, sad collection of books about the conqueror in an exhibition room equipped with direly “wromantic” modern historical paintings of the Hero’s life.

Because the major significance of Andijan is religious, there are few signs of the Babur memorial outside in its attached fun park. Except in the most general sense of national glory, this hero’s military triumphs are hard to integrate into Uzbekistan’s current dilemmas. Equally unimpressive as a site of applied history is Kokand, another town across the valley, where the palace of Khudayar, the local khan 1863–1873, is being lavishly restored to look something like an Uzbek stately ’ome. Its purpose is not much deepened by an attached Uzbek historical museum going back to prehistoric times, which, like most such places in the country, looks unaltered since the Soviet era and is therefore lamentably ill-equipped with modern displays or with any serious reckoning with a credible past.

THE real focus on an Uzbek history, however, lies in the great centres of Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva, and for almost all tourists these are the places that matter in their visits to Uzbekistan. Because of its connection with Timur and Ulug Beg, Samarkand does bear a glorious political past. However simplistic their tale of conquests and the cultural delights that resulted, history and heritage in Samarkand can readily be nationalised into being Uzbek. But Bukhara and Khiva are renowned less for military victories than for their mosques and madrassas, their religious architecture, and their fame as global centres of the Islamic past.

An occasional political tale can be recounted. One is the emir of Bukhara’s habit in the nineteenth century of imprisoning enemies, among them the strolling British Indian soldiers, Arthur Conolly and Charles Stoddart, in a snake and insect pit before their execution; another is the Soviet bombardment of the city “Arc,” or citadel, in 1920, only very partially repaired by modern reconstruction. But the major past treasure of these two cities is religious.

A visitor is, however, unlikely to come away with much reckoning of the time when Bukhara was celebrated as a key site of Islamic faith and philosophy, the home of Avicenna (Abu Ali ibn Sina, 980–1037), a Persian polymath who helped to save, amplify and transmit classical Greek medical knowledge to the modern world. For all the eager reconstruction of Islamic art and architecture, the city centre today resounds not with religious or intellectual debate but with tourist sales. After all, those traversing the Silk Road must want to buy some record of their visit, and so maintain its history of business dealing and profit. Thus, a multilingual saleswoman regales visitors with the detail of how many months it takes a “girl” to weave a gorgeous silk carpet of “local” or other design and how easy it is, here if not elsewhere, to use an international card for purchase. Most of the mosques and madrassas of the place are occupied not with worship but with shops, and public piety is hard to see.

The much smaller Khiva, an oasis town, where most of the religious buildings were not erected until the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries and have been ruthlessly restored in the last decades, is even more completely handed over to a Disneyland-style fate. It is emblematic that part of the cinema version of Virginia Woolf’s novel, Orlando, released in 1992, was filmed there (as “Constantinople”). Here, any past is indeed possessed by the present. Even more than Bukhara, Khiva is first and foremost a shopping mall.

The Karimov regime approves of group tourism (and is badly in need of foreign currency) but is scarcely willing to throw its borders open to visitors anxious to travel on their own account or ask taxing questions. In my own case, our group of six UK-based travellers regularly ran into other more numerous groups, at least one of them originating in Australia and New Zealand, as they took in (or were taken in by) the celebrated sites. Despite my scepticism, I am glad to have gone there. Any tourism is likely to market heritage best as history with the history left out, tall tales and untrue from the legendary past (to adapt the Disney phrase). But, in Uzbekistan, it does not take too much imagination to be alert to the manipulation. While shopping on the Silk Road, visitors might also wonder more generally how history is being forged in our contemporary neoliberal world. When it comes to usable pasts, are their own societies so different from the regime of an ageing leftover Soviet dictator, gone “national”? •

The post History, heritage and the ageing dictator appeared first on Inside Story.

IF YOU were born in the early 1940s and were even dimly conscious of the emerging postwar world, you were aware of the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union. This was the pervasive global nuclear standoff that loomed over the second half of the twentieth century. Even if, like me, you were born and lived in remote Melbourne, Australia, you could not escape the shadow of uncertainty, of existential doubt and fear, that hung over life in the age of rising prosperity and shifting political and cultural values that followed the second world war. The cold war affected lives and behaviour, influenced attitudes, and formed prejudices and neuroses that persisted from the cradle to the grave. For many people it still defines their place and time in the slice of world history through which we lived.

As early as March 1946, barely a year after Germany’s defeat, Winston Churchill famously proclaimed that an iron curtain had descended across Europe “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic.” The victorious American and British war leaders had become increasingly concerned as their former ally, the Soviet Union, ruthlessly consolidated its eastern empire. But there was little the West could do: Russian troops were on the ground in Eastern Europe and they had, after all, broken the German army. So the Western capitalist powers, generally tolerant and liberal-democratic, chose to prosper in peace, creating mass consumer economies that could deliver both guns and butter. Eventually they spawned and ultimately absorbed the dissident, sometimes anarchic, youth counterculture movements that were to sweep the world and challenge their own values and policies from the 1960s. The Soviets, meanwhile, under brutally authoritarian communist rulers, focused on entrenching one-party power, seeking to acquire more powerful arms than those possessed by the West, and crushing domestic resistance to their rule wherever it appeared in their empire.

So the cold war was a Manichaean forty-five-year struggle between liberal capitalism and authoritarian communism. During that time a nuclear sword of Damocles hung over the planet, even as the United States and the Soviet Union developed techniques for managing what became a stable balance of terror based on the notion of deterrence through mutual assured destruction (or MAD, to give it its chilling acronym). Despite periods of thaw and detente, and periodic arms limitation agreements, both blocs retained thousands of ballistic missiles, many armed with multiple independently targeted nuclear warheads, on permanent hair-trigger alert.

Yet, as it played out from 1945 to 1991, the cold war fell short of outright warfare. It was a tense and at times terrifying conflict in which the nuclear stockpiles were sufficient to destroy both sides as functioning modern societies. While it didn’t trigger a nuclear exchange, it was punctuated by frequent crises in which the use of nuclear weapons was contemplated by both sides. There were Berlin crises starting with the communist blockade of 1948 and including the construction of the Berlin wall in 1961, the Korean war (1950–53), the Soviet invasions of Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968), the Cuban missile crisis (1962), the Vietnam war (1959–75), and other proxy wars in which the United States and the Soviet Union supported and armed rivals in Afghanistan, Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere. It ended with the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1990.

THIS IS a personal memoir of the cold war in Melbourne and, more specifically, in the northwestern suburbs of Brunswick, Coburg and Pascoe Vale. It is also a memoir of how the cold war influenced my experiences as a child and my career in newspapers at home and abroad for more than fifty years. As a foreign correspondent in Europe and Washington, I covered some of the great world-changing events that eventually precipitated the end of the cold war, including the five summit meetings between Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and US presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush between 1985 and 1990.

During my Australian childhood and youth, cold war tensions interacted with old sectarian social and political divisions between non-Catholics and Catholics in Australia, and particularly within the Labor Party. In 1955, Labor was split asunder by irreconcilable differences about domestic and international cold war issues, and at the heart of these differences was the role and influence of communism locally and globally. Both groups possessed some of the truth, but, blinkered by religious hatred in some cases and political fear in others, they retreated into hostile tribal camps that could not stay united inside the Labor Party.

In 1955 and 1963, Australia’s conservative government, as part of its contribution to the Western cold war effort, permitted atmospheric testing of British nuclear devices at Maralinga and the Montebello Islands with devastating long-term environmental consequences. By the 1970s Australia was hosting top-secret American nuclear early-warning systems at Pine Gap and Nurrungar, as well as a US navy communications relay station at North West Cape in Western Australia. These bases were called “joint facilities” and operated with full Australian knowledge and concurrence (as Pine Gap and North West Cape still do). But the presence of the bases intensified fears that Australia had made itself a potential nuclear target and fuelled the anti-American sentiment of disarmament advocates and the broader left.

Looking back on it all, much of the passion and anxiety of those years seems exaggerated, but it was deadly serious at the time – even in the dull tree-lined streets of Pascoe Vale South. But the smaller provincial cold war manifestations of my Brunswick childhood and youth loomed large at the time. So did the trade union and political conflicts that I witnessed as a young reporter covering industrial and political Labor affairs in the early 1960s. And in 1996, when it was all over and I was back at home, I sat down to talk with two of Australia’s preeminent cold war warriors, the Catholic political activist Bob Santamaria and the former Communist Party secretary, Bernie Taft. They were aged eighty-one and seventy-eight respectively, with all passion spent but with intellects undimmed. During a long conversation the two men seemed pleasantly surprised by how similar they really were, and seemed genuinely to respect and like each other. Both have since died, but their encounter in Santamaria’s North Melbourne office seemed to me a fitting and intensely personal conclusion to the vast impersonal and international contest, some of which I was privileged to witness and to write about.

IT STARTED early, at North-West Brunswick primary school. My father worked at the time on the tramways, the extensive state-owned public transport network that still covers much of inner Melbourne. His union was led by a well-known communist, Clarrie O’Shea, and when I was six or seven O’Shea called a strike over pay rates that stopped the trams for some six weeks. “Your old man’s a commo” was shouted at me daily in the school playground by playmates echoing the anger of parents whose lives were being disrupted by the strike. When I asked my father if he was indeed a commo, he said he voted Labor but because he thought that communist union leaders fought hardest for their members he supported them unreservedly in union matters. It was a common viewpoint among working men at the time.

Our Catholic neighbours, and they were many, believed that the godless Soviet communists were trying to destroy our democratic freedoms and that one of their strategies was to “hold the country to ransom” by winning control of the trade unions and weakening the economy. These were the tense early years of the cold war and attitudes in Brunswick were inevitably influenced by it. Berlin was the flashpoint and the Americans were running the Berlin airlift to ensure that the city, a non-communist oasis in the communist half of divided Germany, received supplies of coal and fuel after the Soviets closed ground access to the city. There was no airlift at North-West Brunswick State School, but we had to run the gauntlet of some tough Catholic kids when we were returning home. There were fights, name-calling, stone-throwing. “Catholic dogs stink like frogs,” we shouted. “Protty dogs go to hell,” they retorted. There were similar and frequent encounters between Catholic and non-Catholic kids in the street where I lived. Shamefully, some parents on both sides encouraged these hatreds, labelling each other “commo stooges” or Catholic fascists. Our little cold war at times seemed warmer than the big one – at least until the Korean war broke out in 1950.

North Korea’s invasion of South Korea in June 1950 caused deep gloom in our corner of Melbourne. Was this the start of the third world war? Would the Americans use the atom bomb? The Soviet Union was backing North Korea; the United States was backing South Korea. Although it was conducted under the flag of the United Nations, the defence of the south was a true proxy war. When China poured in eighteen divisions the gloom in Brunswick deepened: now the Yellow reds were making common cause with the Russian reds! It was the sum of all our fears of hostile outside invaders poised to pour over our country. So Australia, with little dissent, joined the UN action at America’s request, sending a RAAF squadron and an army battalion. When the armistice was signed three years later, Australian military casualties totalled 1500, with 340 killed. Even in Brunswick that was seen as a serious taste of the big cold war and a possible prelude to the next world war. “I just thank God that you and your brother are too young to be sent away,” my mother once said, echoing the eternal mother’s cry from the heart. They were frightened people.

Yet there were occasional outbreaks of rationality. Suddenly, in 1951, the words “Vote No” appeared on walls and railway overpasses and bridges all over Melbourne. They were painted at night by protesters opposed to the decision by the Menzies government to conduct a referendum to outlaw the Communist Party. By a solid majority, Australians did indeed Vote No in September 1951 on the grounds that the proposed ban would limit freedom of speech and association. It was a clear rejection of the government’s relentless efforts to exploit cold war uncertainties for political advantage.

But we got another dose of the big cold war with the high drama of the so-called Petrov affair in 1954. Vladimir Petrov, a Soviet KGB operative working under diplomatic cover, sought political asylum in Australia, fearing that he would be executed if he returned to Moscow. Offering Australian authorities evidence of Soviet espionage in Australia, he defected in April 1954. Soviet authorities sent two burly couriers to Australia to retrieve Petrov’s wife Evdokia, a cypher clerk at the embassy. She was photographed, minus a shoe and deeply distressed, being hustled to an aircraft at Sydney. In Darwin she was escorted from the plane to safety by Australian security officers. Photographs of this drama dominated the newspapers and shocked the nation: Red brutes had been caught and photographed in the act of dragging a hysterical woman onto an aircraft to return her to Moscow! The black-and-white pictures are still among the most dramatic Australian news photographs of the 1950s.

The Petrovs were granted asylum, and prime minister Robert Menzies played the issue for all it was worth, announcing a royal commission to investigate Soviet espionage in Australia. Things got even better for Menzies when the Labor opposition leader H.V. Evatt appeared before the royal commission as attorney for two of his staff members named in documents provided by Petrov, and when the commission withdrew Evatt’s leave to appear following his controversial cross-examination of a security service witness. Of course Labor was in league with the commos and even the party leader was ready to defend Red spies! Menzies went on to win the impending federal election and diplomatic relations between Australia and the Soviet Union were broken for five years. In Brunswick, my father said it was all a political conspiracy cooked up by Menzies to help him win the election; the Catholic neighbours saw only the evil hand of the Reds and praised Menzies’s actions.

By this time mistrust and suspicion were palpable in daily life. Australia’s domestic security service, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, or ASIO, was by now photographing people entering or leaving leftist, particularly Communist Party, meetings. They were following people suspected of “disloyalty,” trying to infiltrate their meetings, and keeping files on individuals. The “special branches” of the state police forces kept their separate files. Together, they were the loyal and extremely active arms of conservative federal and state governments who wanted tabs kept on their critics and material amassed that could be used against them. The cold war had spawned the age of “reds under the bed” paranoia in which spies and spy-catchers pursued each other in a frantic and futile dance of deceit.

But the Petrov affair was only the prelude to the great political explosion of 1955, when the Labor Party split irreparably along sectarian and ideological lines. There was, at the time, deep unrest in the Labor Party over the zealous, secretive anti-communist campaign of Santamaria’s Catholic Social Studies Movement as it sought to break communist influence in trade unions. But the Split was precipitated finally by Dr Evatt who, in an explosive statement, referred to the damaging activities of a small group “largely directed from outside the Labor Party.” Evatt said Santamaria’s weekly newspaper, News Weekly, appeared “to act as their organ.” Within months the party was torn apart. The predominantly Catholic and anti-communist Democratic Labor Party, or DLP, emerged as an effective electoral force and split the Labor vote, especially in Victoria and Queensland, helping to keep Labor out of office until Whitlam’s victory in 1972.

These were bitter years in Brunswick and Coburg, where the Labor split was keenly felt. Protestants and moderate and militant Labor supporters loathed the DLP and all its fervently anti-communist works, and they loathed its intellectual leaders, Santamaria and the Catholic archbishop of Melbourne, Daniel Mannix, who supported and inspired Santamaria (himself a Brunswick boy). During this time Menzies’s governing conservative coalition of the Liberal and Country (later National) parties promoted the view that Labor was soft on, and probably in cahoots with, the Soviet communists, while they themselves were loyal supporters of the ANZUS alliance, led by the United States, and would keep Australia safe in Uncle Sam’s enveloping arms from the horrors of expansionist Marxism.

Personal encounters sharpened the impact of the cold war for me, although I was mainly aware of only one of them at the time. In 1954, as a high school junior, I met and formed a life-long (and still strong) friendship with Juris Hrynko, a White Russian boy who had arrived in Australia as a “displaced person” with his parents and grandparents after the second world war. Juris’s father Anatol had been an agricultural scientist before the war but his qualifications were not recognised in Australia and he worked as a storeman in the state railways, where a well-known communist, J.J. Brown, was the local union leader. Anatol was fiercely anti-communist, a pillar of Melbourne’s Russian Orthodox church, a talented water-colourist, and a kindly and cultured man. He liked to talk to me about Soviet iniquities in Eastern Europe and insisted that Brown was, as he said in heavily accented English, “a red snake.” Obviously he did not share my father’s views and, because I liked and respected them both, I found myself wondering how to reconcile their views.

So even a Brunswick schoolboy faced personal dilemmas that sprang from cold war politics. Those dilemmas were sharpened in 1957 when the Soviet Union put its first Sputnik satellite into orbit. As we gazed upwards to see the tiny thing traverse the night sky we were told by the overheated media that the Sputnik showed how dangerously the Russians had forged ahead in the space race and how vulnerable we were to a Red attack. Even in Brunswick we didn’t relax until 1969, when America’s Neil Armstrong became the first human to walk on the moon.

The Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, separated by twelve years, had a direct impact on Melbourne because numbers of Hungarians and Czechs sought and were granted asylum in Australia. But it was the later Cuban missile crisis and the Vietnam war that had the most profound impact on the collective psyche and political unity of citizens of my generation, and there was no hiding place in the suburbs of Melbourne.

In 1961 the Age appointed me as a shipping, and later industrial, reporter. Both jobs brought me into close contact with trade union leaders still scarred by the Labor split. They were a mix of communists, Labor Party militants and moderates, and DLP “industrial group” supporters known pejoratively as Groupers. The toughest group was probably the mixture of communists, Labor militants and groupers in the stevedore’s union, the Waterside Workers’ Federation, but the general industrial union officials headquartered at the Trades Hall and the Australian Council of Trade Unions also represented the full spectrum of non-conservative political attitudes. Their primary focus, of course, was the wages and working conditions of their members, but many were also heavily engaged in wider international affairs and were prepared to call “political strikes” on international issues. These trade union officials were intense and deeply committed men, and I was particularly impressed by the emotional engagement and dedication of the communists, however much their militancy discomforted some Labor Party officials and disrupted industrial plants. One in particular deserves mention: George Seelaf of the meat workers union, who almost single-handedly set about establishing a major trade union clinic and hospital in the industrial western suburbs of Melbourne.

“COMMUNIST influence” remained a high-profile issue. The Trades Hall provided rooms for something called the Victorian Labor College, at which trade union officials could attend lectures on mechanistic Marxism and purchase books and leaflets published in Moscow on Marx’s thought and theories. Soviet propaganda films were shown free in the evening to anyone who cared to attend; generally they showed happy peasants toiling in collective fields to bring in the bountiful crops, or heroic Soviet soldiers in heavy overcoats charging towards terrified German invaders. You could easily see this activity as a communist effort to establish a Leninist revolutionary vanguard elite in Australia. The most promising trade union officials were taken on trips to party schools in Moscow and Beijing and inevitably returned full of praise for the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The Labor Party declared that the names of Labor Party members could not appear with communist candidates on “unity tickets” for union elections. Finding and exposing unity tickets was a favourite sport of the media and anti-Labor interests. Some unions expressed support for the construction of the notorious Berlin wall by the communist authorities, and some actively anti-American unions vigorously opposed Australian participation in the Vietnam war and supported the Soviet Union and Cuba through the Cuban missile crisis. Even for a young reporter covering trade union affairs, there was no avoiding the political and foreign policy implications of the cold war.

The brief but desperate 1962 Cuban missile confrontation between president John F. Kennedy and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev was arguably as close as the cold war superpowers came to a nuclear exchange. As allies of the United States, Australians found themselves wondering anxiously and impotently whether they would be targeted. When, after a tense stand-off, Khrushchev finally agreed to remove Soviet missiles shipped clandestinely to Cuba in return for the US withdrawal of missiles from Turkey, the sighs of relief in Australia were as heartfelt as they were elsewhere in the world. Even the Brunswick churches held thanksgiving services for a world reprieved. In fact, the year 1983 would be, as we shall see, even more dangerous.

The Vietnam war was a true proxy war between Soviet-supported North Vietnam and the US-supported South. At huge costs to the nation’s political unity, the conservative Australian government committed forces to the conflict. It argued that Australia’s participation was the premium that had to be paid to preserve the US alliance and to stop “the downward thrust of communism.” It introduced selective conscription of twenty-year-old boys to ensure a supply of troops and it threw conscientious objectors into jail. To Labor and its supporters, Vietnam was a dirty, unwinnable war that was really a nationalist insurrection aiming to reunite the country after centuries of colonial repression. Selective conscription was seen by Labor as profoundly immoral; the so-called conscription birthday ballot created social divisions and strains (reflected in the Save Our Sons movement, the burning of draft cards, and the mass Vietnam Moratorium marches through city streets) that had not been seen since the failed conscription initiatives of the first world war.

When the war ended in 1975, more than 58,000 Americans and 521 Australians had died in Vietnam, and the US-led Western powers had suffered a debilitating defeat. In Brunswick and elsewhere, the dead were mourned by their families, but the nation treated the returning troops with little glory. The new Whitlam Labor government simply didn’t want to know or remember. And the political agenda became determinedly domestic even as Whitlam brought Australia’s troops home from Vietnam, released the conscientious objectors, and headed the then burgeoning international push to recognise the People’s Republic of China.

POSTED to London in 1977 as European correspondent for the Age I was confronted afresh by the reality of the cold war in ways far removed from the anxieties of Brunswick and the conflicts of the Trades Hall. The security debate was about the British independent nuclear deterrent and the “special relationship” with Washington. There was speculation about a neutron bomb, which was said to be particularly desirable because it destroyed people without destroying buildings. The rising British politician was Margaret Thatcher, a hardline anti-communist called “the iron lady” by the Soviets. As British prime minister she was to play an influential role in the closing years of the cold war, when she met the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, and pronounced him “a man I can do business with.” Visits to NATO headquarters in Belgium were obligatory, and the dominant topic of conversation was how NATO forces would stop and defeat a Soviet battle tank thrust across the North German plain.

It was immediately clear that Brunswick and the Trades Hall, while views were sometimes fevered, didn’t really appreciate the sense of danger that troubled the Western Europeans, especially the Germans. A trip to East Berlin and Weimar in the German Democratic Republic revealed how poor, shabby and isolated life could be for people in the police state on the other side of the wall. A visit to a Soviet officers’ mess outside Weimar revealed that the best time to end the cold war would be after nine o’clock on any Saturday night: by then, the Soviet colonels and their wives were drunk on very bad brown vodka. Even the ordinary old pubs in Brunswick were classier than that officers’ mess.

And then in 1979, only a year before the Moscow Olympic games were due to take place, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Western powers responded with a partial boycott of the games, and what was meant to be a sporting event become a cold war political story. The Americans stayed away, drug-enhanced East German and Russian athletes dominated, and the patchy Australian team put on a fitful performance. The Soviets plainly didn’t enjoy the presence of the reporters from the West. At the daily Olympic Games press conferences a certain Mr Popov, speaking in English, told visiting reporters they would be expelled from the country if hostile reports kept appearing in the Western press. The games went on, but the cold war cast its chilly shadow as Russian soldiers were killed in increasing numbers by the US-armed and supported Mujahideen in Afghanistan. By the time they withdrew in 1989, some 15,000 Soviet troops had been killed. It was the Soviet Union’s Vietnam experience.

By 1984 I was in Washington, where President Ronald Reagan, in his second term of office, was restoring American self-confidence after the Vietnam debacle by challenging Soviet military power with a major conventional and nuclear arms build-up and declaring that it was “morning in America.” Reagan had made his “evil empire” and “Star Wars” speeches in 1983, foreshadowing a “strategic defence initiative” that would use an impervious, space-based defensive shield to destroy any missiles targeted on the United States. A Soviet fighter jet had shot down Korean airliner KAL007 in September 1983, and in November 1983 the NATO military command exercise, Able Archer, so terrified the ageing Soviet leadership that it ordered a full-scale nuclear alert. In the judgement of many experts, 1983 was the most dangerous year of the cold war.

In June of the following year, prime minister Bob Hawke acknowledged the country’s cold war fears in an important statement to parliament. Hawke’s assessment of East–West relations was grim. He spoke of the devastation of nuclear war and made an unprecedented acknowledgement that hosting the Pine Gap, Nurrungar and North West Cape joint facilities involved “some degree of added risk of nuclear attack.” But he outlined for the first time the bases’ role in giving the United States early warning of a nuclear attack, insisted that they contributed to global stability, and rejected calls for unilateral disarmament and their closure. It was an argument that was never accepted by thousands of Australians who, over the years, demonstrated outside the bases and took to the streets in Palm Sunday parades.

BY 1985 the procession of decrepit Soviet leaders – Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko – had all died and the vigorous Mikhail Gorbachev, freshly installed in the Kremlin, was aware that the cold war contest was becoming economically, technologically and politically unsustainable for the Soviet Union. The size, cost and lethality of US and Soviet arsenals was out of control. Arms reduction talks were taking place as the two sides argued about intermediate-range missile deployments to Western Europe; in the United States there was deep concern that Gorbachev was “the Russian Kennedy” and constituted a threat to American global superiority; in Eastern Europe long-suppressed populations were increasingly defiant of their puppet rulers backed by Soviet military power.

And so, in Geneva in November 1985, Reagan and Gorbachev started the series of summit meetings that became the prelude to the end of the cold war. They were to meet in Reykjavík, Washington DC, Moscow and finally, in December 1988, on Governor’s Island in New York. Any astute observer could see the post–cold war world coming into being despite uncertainties and setbacks.

Visiting Berlin in 1987, Reagan made his famous “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall” speech. Standing with Reagan at the Brandenburg Gate it was possible to sense that the world created in 1945 was starting to collapse under the pressure of history and popular feeling on both sides of the wall. In the end Gorbachev didn’t have to tear down the wall: the German people took matters into their own hands and, watched by the world, breached it with sledgehammers and joy in November 1989 and set in motion the events that led to Germany’s reunification. In Washington, my neighbour was Mario Dederichs, correspondent for the German magazine Stern. He and his family rushed to Berlin to witness the destruction of the wall and his daughter returned with a fragment as a gift for me. It is still among my most valued souvenirs, a memento of the cold war that had shadowed my life since the taunts at North West Brunswick state school more than forty years earlier.

It was another seven years before I had the wit to invite Bernie Taft and Bob Santamaria to meet for the first time. A full account of the meeting was published in the Australian Financial Review magazine on 29 November 1996. The two old cold war warriors – Taft, the German-Jewish communist, and Santamaria, the Italian Catholic anti-communist – found that their economic and social views had converged significantly since the collapse of the Soviet system and the rise of fundamentalist free-market economic orthodoxy. They shared a deep sense of the injustices created by prevailing maldistributions of wealth and power, and Taft acknowledged his pleasure at Santamaria’s declared sympathy for parts of the Marxist view.

For all their influence both men said they were somewhat disappointed at what they had achieved in life, but both said they were still fighting hard to change economic and moral values that affronted them and threatened the future happiness of their grandchildren. They obviously enjoyed the meeting and each other’s company, and Taft, deeply impressed, later said, “You know that man could have been prime minister.” Regrettably, we didn’t traverse the history of the cold war, but their personal rapprochement in Santamaria’s North Melbourne office seemed at the time a modest but appropriate coda to the vast, impersonal world struggle in which they had fought and that had started painfully for me when some kids at school called my father a commo. •

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Two “c” words – communism and containment – capture the approaches of Moscow and Washington in the forty-four-year struggle that began in 1945. No equally vivid opposition can yet be applied to the US–China contest, which flows through a broad, swirling river bounded by cooperation on one side and competition on the other. The great challenge will be to prevent the contest breaking those banks to become conflict.

The Cold War was a struggle between two separate and opposed political and economic systems; today, China is surging towards top spot in an economic world created by the United States. Washington can’t contain an economy that is a major extension of its own conceptions.

And yet the US–Soviet confrontation offers much to help us understand what we face in the coming decades. Mostly, these Cold War lessons are offered in the negative, reflecting the many ways in which the complicated dance of dependence between the United States and China differs fundamentally from the steely war-of-wills between Moscow and Washington.

One great Cold War lesson offers hope, though. For all the disastrous proxy wars, the thousands of thermonuclear weapons and the massive arms build-up, the two superpowers never went to war. Armageddon was not inevitable, despite the convictions of hardliners on both sides. To the extent that the American strategy of “containing” Soviet expansionism contributed to that outcome, it was a singular achievement, offering a less passive course than appeasement or isolationism yet never assuming that the ultimate resolution would have to wear a military uniform.

While communism was a universalist ideology bolted onto deep Russian instincts, containment was the intellectual creation of one man, George Kennan. He not only conceived it but also, over his long life, was often aghast at what others did with it – and this is one of the dynamics that drives the second half of John Lewis Gaddis’s fine new biography of the American diplomat and historian.

Gaddis, a skilled chronicler of the Cold War, has produced a magnificent account of an often troubled grand strategist, showing how messy and inexact is the task of helping to plot any nation’s international course. The book was thirty years in the making, mainly because it was not to be published until after its subject’s death, and Kennan didn’t expire until 2005 at the age of 101. Gaddis dedicates the book to Kennan’s wife, Annelise (1910–2008), with the words, “without whom it would not have been possible”; that judgement applies equally to her role in Kennan’s life.

Gaddis judges that Kennan was “by nature a pessimist,” which is no bad thing in a diplomat or strategist. So the optimism inherent in containment surely owes something to the other ways of looking at life that Annelise offered over a seventy-three-year marriage, loving and anchoring Kennan (and making sure her colour-blind husband wore matching socks). The contradictions that ran through Kennan’s work also affected their relationship, with Annelise at one point acting swiftly “to save the marriage” after she discovered one of Kennan’s affairs. In an interview when he was seventy-eight, Kennan said he still had a roving eye: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife. My God, I’ve coveted ten thousand of them in the course of my life, and will continue to do so on into the eighties.”

Gaddis argues that Kennan had a triangular personality, held taut by tension along each of its sides. One side was Kennan’s professionalism, first as a diplomat and then as an historian and writer. The second side was his pessimism about whether Western civilisation could survive the challenges posed by its external adversaries and internal contradictions. (In 1937 Kennan despaired at how Americans were “drugged and debilitated by automobiles and advertisements and radios and moving pictures.”) The third element was personal anguish, with Gaddis channelling his subject’s constant internal debate: “Where did he as a husband and a father and a professional and an intellectual – but also as an individual tormented by self-doubt, regretting missed opportunities – fit into all this?” This was an outstanding diplomat, subject to dark nights of the soul about everything from his work and worth to his libido, who offered his resignation from the service many times before he finally quit.

BY 1946, as the postwar order was taking shape, Kennan had spent most of his adult life in Europe. He had been an American diplomat, studied Russian, helped set up the US embassy in Moscow when diplomatic relations had been restored in 1933 (after a fifteen-year freeze) and been interned in Germany for five months when America entered the war. It was from Moscow in February 1946 that Kennan sent to Washington what became known as “the Long Telegram.” At 5000 words (not 8000, as Kennan recalled in his memoirs), it was the longest ever sent in the State Department’s long history.

On the brink of resigning and leaving Russia, Kennan saw it as a “final exasperated attempt to awaken Washington.” It worked. “After that,” Gaddis writes, “nothing in his life, or in US policy towards the Soviet Union, would be the same.”

Kennan had been on the outer with Washington since 1944, warning that US attempts to maintain and build on the wartime alliance with Moscow were doomed. During this period, Kennan was asked why he was running such a hard line about the dangers posed by a postwar Soviet Union. He replied with what turned out to be an astute forecast: “I foresee that the day will come when I will be accused of being pro-Soviet, with exactly as much vehemence as I am now accused of being anti-Soviet.”

The telegram was a triumph of timing, based on Kennan’s immersion in Russia and driven by the vivid writing skills of a man who’d aspired to be a novelist and who, in his spare time, wrote poetry to capture the essence of his thoughts as well as his emotions. For a Truman administration awaking to the harsh reality that victory in war meant the end of any shared purpose with the Soviet Union, Kennan offered clear ideas, dramatically expressed.

Paradoxically, in many respects Kennan had a far better understanding of Russia than of the United States. It is an illustration of a syndrome that besets a professional foreign service: the sophisticated diplomat who is expert at reading the pulse of the country he is studying, but has trouble hearing the heartbeat of his own nation. Stalin was one of the Russians who complimented him on the fluency and elegance of his spoken Russian.

In his analyses, Kennan was as likely to refer to Dostoyevsky as to Marx. He saw Stalin as standing in a direct line from the pre-modern tsars, showing “the same intolerance, the same dark cruelty.” Kennan described Chekhov as one of the three “fathers” who shaped his life; his religion was that of a Presbyterian much influenced by Russian Orthodoxy.

Kennan’s love of Russia made him clear-eyed about the horrors of the Soviet system. The Russian-born British philosopher Isaiah Berlin said he was “astonished” by Kennan when they met at the US embassy in Moscow after the war. “He was not at all like the people in the State Department I knew in Washington during my service there,” said Berlin. “He was more thoughtful, more austere and more melancholy than they were. He was terribly absorbed – personally involved, somehow – in the terrible nature of the [Stalin] regime, and in the convolutions of its policy.”

Although the Long Telegram didn’t use the word containment, it did present a rationale for and an outline of the new anti-Soviet policy Truman was groping towards. Kennan followed it up with an article defining the basis of containment, published anonymously in Foreign Affairs in July 1947. He argued that the main element of any US policy regarding the Soviet Union must be “a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment” of Russian expansive tendencies. “Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world,” he wrote, “is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and manoeuvres of Soviet policy, but which cannot be charmed or talked out of existence.” The identity of the author didn’t stay secret for long.

Kennan’s understanding of the problem confronting the United States, his prescription and his role in the creation of the Marshall plan to rebuild Europe’s shattered economies made him one of the creators of the new international system. In Gaddis’s view, Kennan’s strategy was more robust than his own faith in it. It offered the West a way out, “a path between the appeasement that had failed to prevent World War 2 and the alternative of a third world war, the devastation from which would have been unimaginable.” For Henry Kissinger, Kennan “came as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in history.”

But Kennan took little pride in his achievement, and bitterly denounced the use of containment to justify the Vietnam war. “Even after the Cold War had ended and the Soviet Union was itself history,” Gaddis writes, “Kennan regarded the ‘success’ of his strategy as a failure because it had taken so long to produce results, because the cost had been so high, and because the US and its Western European allies had demanded, in the end, ‘unconditional surrender.’ That outcome had been ‘one of the great disappointments of my life.’”

Kennan’s favourite quotation was John Quincy Adams’s 1821 speech proclaiming that the United States “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” It captured Kennan’s fear that in abandoning isolationism after the second world war, the United States would change from a nation that attempted too little internationally to one that tried to do too much.

In his first book, American Diplomacy, published in 1951, Kennan argued that American diplomacy was too often prey to “legalism-moralism” – Woodrow Wilson’s fourteen-point war aims speech of 1918, for example, or Franklin Roosevelt’s demand in 1943 that Germany and Japan unconditionally surrender. Delivered with the flair and passion of Kennan’s best writing, it was a strong warning against relying on principles while neglecting power. The book sold better than anything else he wrote and, characteristically, the moment it hit the mark he started to worry that people had misinterpreted his message.

Kennan was stung by the accusation that, like other foreign affairs realists, he was an amoral cynic whose obsession with power ignored law and morality. As Gaddis recounts, he told the historian Arnold Toynbee that he did not mean that Americans could abandon “decency and dignity and generosity”:

His point, rather, had been that the US should refrain from claiming to know what was right or wrong in the behaviour of other societies. Its policy should be one of avoiding “great orgies of violence that acquire their own momentum and get out of hand.” It should employ its armies, if they were to be used at all, in what Gibbon called “temperate and indecisive contests,” remembering that civilisations could not stand “too much jolting and abuse.”

Kennan argued that the United States must fight against North Korea, and win, to restore the pre-conflict division of Korea because of the systemic risk if China and the Soviet Union won the conflict. On Vietnam, however, by 1963 Kennan was urging the United States to get out quickly; it was in its interest to be free to exploit Sino–Soviet differences rather than fighting a major war in Asia.

In 1966, appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he offered American television viewers a five-hour tutorial on the perils in Vietnam. The NBC network broadcast Kennan’s testimony in full, confirming “his longstanding belief that style was as important as substance.” Kennan told the senators that America would lose far more prestige staying in Vietnam than it would by a swift pullout: “There is more respect to be won in the opinion of this world by a resolute and courageous liquidation of unsound positions than by the most stubborn pursuit of extravagant or unpromising objectives.”

Consistent with that line, Kennan condemned George W. Bush’s plans to attack Iraq. Just two years short of his hundredth birthday, Kennan could still summon eloquence and the lessons of history to denounce Bush’s evident determination to invade Iraq. “War has a momentum of its own and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it,” he told an interviewer in 2002. “Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end.”

That sadly prescient quote doesn’t make it into the book, which devotes only a few lines to his opposition to the Iraq war and his distaste for the Bush administration. This is one of the points of major difference between subject and author, because Gaddis has often written elsewhere in support of what he has defined as the Bush doctrine (“ending tyranny in our world”).

But give Gaddis the benefit of the doubt on his skimpy treatment of Iraq, which arrives near the end of 700 tightly wrought pages, often as polished in their prose as Kennan could ever have wished. Gaddis elegantly charts a life of complex thought that produced a written record running to millions of words. For a biographer, a bounteous archive can be both a blessing and a burden.

NOT least of the thoughts Kennan offered was his complete rejection of a hardline realist position – the ends justify the means – of which former US vice-president Dick Cheney is an exponent. At several points in his biography, Gaddis returns to Kennan’s argument that the limitations of our knowledge mean precise ends are difficult to define, much less achieve. If we can’t really know too much about what will be achieved, then methods are as important as objectives: strategy becomes “outstandingly a question of form and style” because “few of us can see very far into the future.” And bad means deliver lousy ends.

Coming from a man who had some record as a seer, that is an injunction to caution. Kennan said he learned as a policy planner that how one did things was as important as what one did. As for bureaucrats and diplomats, so for nations: “Where purpose is dim and questionable, form comes into its own.” Good manners, which might seem “an inferior means of salvation, may be the only means of salvation we have at all.”

What to say about a great strategist who concludes that simple politeness may save us all? Such are the many puzzles of Kennan, a natural pessimist who produced what was, at heart, a profoundly optimistic vision: if the West was strong and patient and true to its own values, then eventually the Soviet Union would defeat itself. And best of all, he was right.

In considering the US–China contest that lies before us, we can take heart from Kennan’s insight that harsh regimes cultivate the faultlines of their own internal failures. No matter how powerful an authoritarian regime may be, its future has roots in the past fears and failures of the nation it rules.

Kennan argued, correctly, that the commissars in the Soviet Union, like the tsars they replaced, would always prefer to turn away from major conflict with external forces because their greatest concern (and fear) was maintaining control over their internal empire. A similar insight can help throw light on the true power of today’s rulers in Beijing.

Kennan saw containment as a work in constant progress, requiring huge effort. Equally, though, war was never inevitable; if it came it was as much a product of misjudgement and blunder as of the force of history. That is a thought to hold onto in thinking about China; and also as some argue that George W. Bush’s war against weapons of mass destruction was right after all, it was just that one letter in the name of its target was wrong – it should have been Iran, not Iraq.

George F. Kennan: An American Life is a valuable book for anyone who must venture into the bowels of bureaucracy or seek the uplands of analysis and prescription. The grinding business of government and the effort to think and write clearly are parts of the same mountain. To follow Kennan’s ascent is to experience a significant contribution to the making of today’s international system. It is a biography set in the twentieth century that has much to offer in navigating the tough terrain of the new century. •

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EARLY in the summer of 1941 my great-aunt Tamara, a young doctor recently graduated from Kharkov Medical Institute, was sent to work in the Ukrainian village of Dubovyazovka, not far from Kiev. She went with a child in tow. Tamara’s husband (the first of several) had died in the Finnish War of 1939–40, and so it was just the two of them now – the self-assured, outgoing, remarkably well-dressed young “specialist” and her two-year-old daughter, Vera. My grandmother, Faina, joined her sister in the country soon after. Faina was pregnant with the child who would turn out to be my mother, and tailed by her own toddler, three-year-old Lina. Summer at Dubovyazovka meant fresh air, sun, coveted cow’s milk, and fruit and veg on tap – and as everyone knew, these things, so wanting in the city, made for much healthier kids.

Faina was older than Tamara by four years, and not like her at all. My grandmother was much less inclined to hold court than her sister; she dressed modestly and was skilled at deflecting the spotlight. She was attentive and kind, and took care of things when no one was looking. There was not one showy bone in her body. Both Faina’s daughters would inherit her attentiveness to others, and her distaste for publicising their own good deeds, even though they would belong to a much more emancipated generation of young women. (The drama queens only started appearing in my family when my sister and I came along.)

While Faina and Tamara, with two and a half kids between them, were in Dubovyazovka, my grandfather Iosif, who was senior assistant to Kiev’s public prosecutor, remained at work. Between my grandmother and grandfather existed an unspoken but unambiguous marital contract. Just as there were criminals and prosecutors, whose worlds only overlapped when the former were caught and prosecuted by the latter, so the clearly defined domains of men’s and women’s work were only meant to intersect in extraordinary circumstances. Ninety-nine per cent of the time child-rearing fell under women’s jurisdiction, together with cooking, cleaning and laundry (all the good stuff!). Men’s work was, as you would expect, to ensure the wellbeing and security of the family. The irony was that, just like most of the young women around her, my grandmother did all the women’s work as well as “work” work – she was an economist by training – which meant that most of the time she was preoccupied and exhausted.

It was in sun-filled Dubovyazovka that Tamara and Faina learned about the start of the war, from the round mouth of a radio perched in the middle of the square near the office of the obligatory village council:

“Today at 4 am… without a declaration of war, German troops attacked our country, attacked our borders at many points and their aeroplanes bombed our cities – Zhitomir, Kiev, Sevastopol, Kaunas and some others – killing and wounding over two hundred persons… This unprecedented attack upon our country is treachery unparalleled in the history of civilised nations.”

The announcement, made at noon on 22 June by the Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, came as a total shock, not only to the two women but to the entire community. Today it may be hard to understand why, especially if you are looking at history from the other side. By that stage the war had been raging in Europe for close to two years. But the Iron Curtain that Winston Churchill would famously draw attention to in 1946 had in fact already descended, blocking or distorting most of the news from the western front. All most Soviet citizens knew was that in August 1939 Molotov had signed the Non-Aggression Pact with Germany, and the fact of this pact, coupled with people’s belief in the all-seeing and all-knowing Stalin, meant that most of them were utterly unprepared for Molotov’s announcement of Germany’s treacherous attack on our “sleeping nation.”

As to the secret protocol within the Non-Aggression Pact, the Soviet Union only officially admitted its existence in December 1989 (just as we were leaving). The West learned about it during the Nuremberg Trials, but my grandmother and others of her generation died without the slightest idea of all the political machinations that helped produce the defining experience of their lives. No one but a handful of people at the very top knew about the secret agreement, which gave the Soviet Union control over parts of Poland as well as Romania, Finland and the Baltic States, while allowing Germany to have a free hand in the rest of Europe. Certainly, the war in which the Soviet Union invaded neighbouring Finland (and in which Tamara’s husband died) was completely dissociated from the larger European conflict. It was widely believed – in the public mind, anyway – to be a conflict between two parties, provoked by Finnish reactionaries in turn backed by British and French imperialists, and in no way a reflection of the larger forces at play. The ordinary Soviet population did not have a clue what was going on, not in 1941, and not for decades to come.

AND SO it was on that June afternoon in the middle of Dubovyazovka square, surrounded by others in a similar state of shock (adults mainly; many kids were said to be initially excited by the news of the war), that Tamara and Faina had to take in all this indigestible news in one massive gulp. Their country was at war. Their hometown was bombed. All connection with it was lost. There was no way back to Kiev, and that meant they would have to join the massive exodus of war refugees across the European part of the Soviet Union, all moving east to parts of Russia around the River Ural (the traditional border between Europe and Asia), or to the Central Asian republics of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. It also meant that my grandmother and grandfather would be separated for years.

In those first few months of the war everything happened very quickly. The Luftwaffe’s bombs exploded in Kiev in the opening hours of the conflict. (Residents at first took them to be Soviet military exercises.) Within months the defence of Kiev ended in one of the most disastrous defeats the Soviet Army would experience. In military textbooks – not the Soviet ones, of course – the campaign would be immortalised as one of the biggest, if not the biggest, encirclements of troops in the whole of history, leading to the capture of more than half a million Soviet troops. The Soviet Army was in total disarray. In his memoirs, We Are from 1941, Dmitry Levinsky, a twenty-year-old soldier at the start of the war, recounted the bloody chaos of the retreating Soviet Army – no food, no bullets, no medical aid, no connection to the headquarters, no clearly defined frontline and no common strategy. Add to that the three million Soviet soldiers who became POWs at the very start of the conflict. It is simply not legitimate to apply the word “army” to the Soviet troops of 1941, Levinsky says. While he himself did not take part in the Battle of Kiev, what he remembers of the first few months of the war – how soldiers were given two-metre puttees instead of boots, how machine-gun operators had to carry weapons in excess of thirty kilos, and how news of the war was delivered to various army regiments by messengers on foot – helps us understand why the first stages of the war resulted in such catastrophic losses for the Soviet Union.

Lest we forget, the military was under Stalin’s absolute control; by the start of the war the majority of the most experienced and talented high-ranking officers were part of a different army altogether – the army of the repressed. The catastrophic conclusion to the Battle of Kiev had as much to do with politics as with the sorry state of the military. The implications of surrendering a major capital were dire (What next? Moscow?), so the troops were given orders to hold on to the city at any cost. My grandfather, in his memoirs written in Australia in the final years of his life, remembered the heightened rhetoric around Kiev’s defence. He recalled an article in Pravda, the nation’s central newspaper, declaring on 13 September 1941 that “Kiev was, is and will be Soviet.” But Kiev was about to stop being Soviet – in less than a week’s time – and would not be liberated until two years and two months had passed. The price paid for not surrendering Kiev until the last possible moment was enormous military losses and the severe weakening of other parts of the front, but it was symptomatic of Stalin’s “die but do not retreat” approach to war. In the chronic confrontation between political and military considerations, politics usually triumphed. Human life never counted for much in the Soviet Union, but during the war soldiers and civilians alike were sacrificed by the million with determined and heartbreaking ease.

As the recipients of tragically mixed messages, many of Kiev’s civilians did not use the tiny but nonetheless real window of opportunity they had to flee. By the time they were ready to go, it was in most cases too late. For his part, my grandfather was under orders to remain in Kiev until the last possible moment. Together with the military prosecutor N.D. Vinogradov and Vinogradov’s senior secretary, they managed to cross the frontline on 18 September, when German troops were already on the outskirts of town. The three of them headed for the forests of the Chernigov region in northern Ukraine, where they went underground and joined the large partisan regiment active in the area.

My grandmother, of course, had no way of knowing whether her husband had managed to escape Kiev before it was occupied. But many residents who remained there as Nazi troops marched into the city believed in their heart of hearts that Germany was a civilised and cultured nation, and that nothing too terrible was going to happen to them. Some remembered the “reasonable” conduct of Germans during World War I and had no way of realising that they were about to contend with something altogether different. Their wishful thinking was not entirely delusional. After all, the worst had not yet occurred: it would be on the eastern front that the German army, specifically the SS, would demonstrate how far it was prepared to go. It is also not entirely unfathomable why a significant minority of Kiev’s 160,000 Jews did not run for their lives while they still could. In September of 1941, the extermination camps were not yet built, and Himmler’s policy of the “Final Solution” was still some months off. The fate of Kiev’s Jews, along with the mass extermination of Lithuanian Jewry at roughly the same time, was the awakening, the moment when it became apparent how “the Jewish question” was going to be solved from then on.

Within days of the occupation, the city’s remaining Jewish residents, mainly women, children and the elderly, were ordered to assemble in one spot with their belongings:

“All kikes of the city of Kiev and vicinity must appear by 8.00 a.m. on Monday, September 29 1941, at the corner of Melnikovskaya and Dohturovskaya Streets (near the cemeteries).

“You must bring with you documents, money, valuables as well as warm clothing, underwear, etc. Those kikes who do not comply with the order and are found elsewhere will be shot on the spot.”

These notices, printed in Russian, Ukrainian and German (with the street names misspelt), appeared across the city. The same sort of orders had been given at other European cities, big and small, before Kiev. But this time those assembled were not taken to ghettos or put into cattle trains bound for concentration camps. Instead, they were all indiscriminately executed at a local ravine named Babi Yar. The massacre was the first terrible milestone in what has subsequently been called “industrialised mass slaughter of Jews.” It is a true miracle that no member of our family ended up there.

Anti-semitism was not brought to Ukraine by the Nazi SS units and death squads. The republic had a tradition of Jewish oppression dating back to the seventeenth century. Ukrainian pogroms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were notorious for their barbarity, even though at the time persecution of European Jewry was commonplace. The truth is that the relationship between Ukrainian Jews and ethnic Ukrainians, especially during World War II, is as painful and complex a human story as you are likely to find. Ukraine’s anti-semitism, never quite dormant, was reignited by events of the first half of the twentieth century – the Russian Revolution, the Soviet oppression of the Ukrainian people, and the fall of the Weimar Republic in Germany. Hitler’s poisonous vision of Jewish Bolshevism (in Nazi propaganda the two phenomena were inseparably fused) fell on fertile ground among ethnic Ukrainians who, within a decade of their country’s becoming part of the Soviet Union in 1922, were forced to endure not only famine but also large-scale dekulakisation and waves of repressions against the republic’s leaders and intelligentsia.

When the war came, a sizable minority of ethnic Ukrainians welcomed the arrival of the German troops – at least initially. In parts of western Ukraine annexed by the Soviet Union shortly before the start of the war (in line with the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact) the Germans were seen as liberators. There is no question that the Ukrainian nationalist movement collaborated with the German invaders, and large numbers of those who did not actively collaborate were still deeply ambivalent about Ukraine’s position. In the words of historian Vladislav Grinevich, the war was seen by many as “the sacrificial struggle of the Ukrainian people against two imperial powers – Soviet and German – for the independent Ukrainian nation.”

In Nazi propaganda campaigns, the invading German army was presented as the powerful ally of ethnic Ukrainians and their fight for independence, and as the mortal enemy of both Jews and Bolsheviks. Ukrainian collaborators, of which the Polizei, the dreaded “Auxiliary Police,” were the worst, persecuted and harassed Ukraine’s Jewish population with impunity.

My great-grandmother on my dad’s side was shot by the Polizei in a small Ukrainian town called Lubni. Sometimes collaborators were coerced, but others volunteered their services. They were there at Babi Yar too. But there were countless Ukrainians who would not collaborate. And though the actions of those who risked their lives to help their Jewish neighbours, friends and total strangers could not undo the crimes of the Polizei, to remember the war is to remember these Ukrainians alongside the collaborators. Rudolf Boretsky, now a professor of journalism at Moscow State University, was eleven when Kiev was occupied. When the Jews of his city were ordered to assemble with their belongings and no one quite knew what awaited them, his mother, together with young Rudolf, visited the families of all her Jewish friends, pleading with them not to follow the German orders but to hide instead. For the most part, her pleas fell on deaf ears. Rudolf remembers that she did not think twice about hiding a Jewish acquaintance in the corner of their room behind the wardrobe, keeping this hiding place secret even from the neighbours. His mother was a woman of admirable inner strength, but she was hardly an exception. This too is part of our history.

AT THE TIME, my family did not share the terrible knowledge of what was happening to their people in Kiev. As the city’s Jewish population was rounded up, my grandfather was fighting in the forests of Ukraine and my grandmother, together with her sister and the kids, was on her way to Uzbekistan. There was, it seems, no clear and systematic plan of evacuation: the bulk of it was carried out through people’s places of employment. As a doctor, Tamara was assigned to Uzbekistan, and this is where my grandmother and all the kids, born and unborn, headed in the summer of 1941. Most of those evacuated were women and children. The majority of men stayed on to fight (although not just men; around a million Soviet women also became combatants in the course of the war).

From Dubovyazovka, Tamara, Faina and the kids got to the train station by horse-drawn cart. My grandmother had almost no belongings, just one small suitcase containing the light clothing she had brought on her summer vacation. At the station, train after train was leaving, taking a continuous stream of people away from the front. The evacuees faced round-the-clock bombardments of both the trains and the railway tracks. If the rails were damaged and needed to be repaired, people simply waited at the side of the tracks until they could reboard. Thank God it was summer. Sometimes German planes flew low to the ground and a machine gun would methodically hunt down those who had escaped the larger artillery. Writer Evgenia Frolova was a schoolgirl evacuated from Leningrad. She remembers being inside a train that was bombed: “Everything drowns in the hissing sound, in roar and smoke… The whole train is shaking and rocking. Clothing, blankets, bags and bodies are thrown off the plank beds, from all sides something whizzes by over our heads and plunges into walls and the floor. There is a scorched smell as if from milk burnt on the stove.” It was not only the bombardments the evacuees had to endure, but hunger and disease as well. To eat and to feed their children, people sold whatever they had so they could buy the produce that peasants from nearby villages brought to the stations along the way. This was how Tamara, Faina and the kids just made it to Uzbekistan. By the time they reached Samarkand, the largest city in Uzbekistan after Tashkent, my grandmother, great-aunt and the two little girls were barely alive. Not only were they on the brink of starvation; their heads were overrun by lice, even Tamara’s formerly well-coiffed one.

Samarkand is an ancient and famed city, part of the Silk Road and once one of the main centres of Persian civilisation, yet nothing in its history could have prepared its residents for the arrival of hordes of refugees from Russia, Ukraine and other “European” republics of the Soviet Union. Uzbekistan was sunny, abundant, harvest-rich, a world away from the death, destruction and hunger of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. Among the endless stream of wartime refugees it sheltered was the cream of the nation’s creative elites, from major cinema studios, which continued to make films during the war, to the Moscow State Jewish Theatre under the direction of the legendary Solomon Mikhoels. Tashkent became a refuge for some of the country’s most famous writers, including Anna Akhmatova, who was evacuated there from Leningrad. Despite the major culture shock Akhmatova experienced on arriving in Central Asia, she also discovered true human kindness.

“In those cruel years in Uzbekistan,” she wrote, “you could meet people of just about every nationality of our country. Russians, Belarusians, Moldovans, Ukrainians, Poles and Uzbeks, Lithuanians and Greeks, Kurds and Bulgarians worked side by side at factories and on film sets. And how many orphaned children from the occupied territories of the Soviet Union found new families in Central Asia.”

Uzbekistan had not been incorporated in the Soviet Union until 1924, after considerable local resistance; the European components of the USSR were alien and unimaginable to Uzbeks as their own country must have been for the majority of refugees. Still, large Uzbek families with many children of their own took in kids and refugees of all nationalities, sharing with them last pieces of bread. There were all kinds of Uzbeks of course, just like there were all kinds of Ukrainians, but there were a great many good, decent people. The inevitable clash of cultures with all its resulting misunderstandings and friction did not kill off the human impulse to take care of others in dire and obvious need.

My grandmother and great-aunt arrived in Samarkand to find an Asian city caught up in the vortex of the vast and distant war. Writer Dina Rubina, who was born in Tashkent, reconstructs the wartime scene there in a way that honours the mythical proportions of the refugees’ arrival – something much more akin to a plague than the orderly relocation of people and organisations that the word “evacuation” might imply. “Imagine that on some Asian city descends a million lice-ridden, ragged fugitives… Echelon after echelon come to the station but the city cannot take any more… And still the hapless crowds fall out of trains and set themselves up at the square near the station. [In that square, under the direct sun, whole families spread their blankets in the dust on the ground.] There is nowhere to set your foot, you have to look very attentively not to step on anyone. But the new ragamuffins continue arriving.”

When I read this, I can imagine the square in Samarkand where Tamara, Faina and the kids disembarked. As I try to picture other families encamped there on that summer night I know that my grandmother and great-aunt were in a better position than most. Tamara was obliged to report her arrival; she was guaranteed a medical assignment and thus stood a decent chance of keeping her pregnant sister and their kids afloat. It was, however, too late to report anywhere when they first arrived, so Tamara, Faina, Vera, Lina and my mum (in my grandmother’s womb) had no choice but to spend the night in the Samarkand square. It was not that bad. Someone gave Lina and Vera a slice of bread. At least they were safe now, away from the bombs.

When they woke in the morning, the bag with all the valuables and documents was gone, and with it Tamara’s degree certificate confirming her medical qualifications. Devastated by this theft but determined to get her assignment nonetheless, Tamara went to register with the authorities. Whatever she said to them, however vigorously she argued her case, it was not enough. They sent her away. There were too many impostors out there claiming to have qualifications. Forgery was rampant. Certificates, degrees – everything was being forged. “No documents,” Tamara was told, “no proof.” As she walked back to the square towards her anxious family, Tamara ran into a professor from the medical institute who had marked her graduation exams not long before. It was common for people from all parts of the country to bump into acquaintances near those central squares in Samarkand and Tashkent, but Tamara’s chance encounter with the examiner, who immediately vouched for her identity with the authorities, was a particularly blessed event.

On this day that had started so ominously, Tamara was assigned to the Station Malyutinskaya, a tiny kishlak deep in Uzbekistan, where the residents had never seen a doctor and where official medicine of the kind my great-aunt practised was as alien as they came. The word kishlak comes from Turkish for “winter hut” or “wintering place,” and describes rural settlements built by the semi-nomadic people of Uzbekistan and Tadzhikistan – an idea entirely unfamiliar to urban women like Tamara and my grandma. Tamara’s job was to organise a medical outpost. The family was given a room in the same building where Tamara ran her clinic. While Tamara worked, Faina looked after the two toddlers and, soon enough, the newborn who arrived in these strange and most unexpected circumstances. When the war first descended on them, my grandmother had asked her sister to terminate this pregnancy. Carrying a child at such a time was an act of pure insanity: what chance would they all stand, the infant included? Tamara was a determined pragmatist who would have had no objections in principle to abortion, but she surprised her sister by refusing point-blank to oblige. “No, this child will bring light,” she said, and that was that. When Tamara delivered my mother at Station Malyutinskaya in the early days of January 1942, the baby was named Svetlana; svet means “light” in Russian.

All through the ordeal of the evacuation from Ukraine and their remote posting in Uzbekistan, my grandmother continued to search for Iosif. Though her efforts were unsuccessful, she managed to locate her husband’s birth family. Iosif’s brother was fighting at the front, and the rest of them – Iosif’s mother and sister, Sarah, with her two young boys – had also been evacuated, not to Central Asia but to Chkalov, an industrial city near the River Ural. Eventually, Faina received a notice that Iosif was “missing in action.” She knew all too well what the vague sentence stood for: “missing in action” was code for a combatant whose gravesite could not be identified. In her mind, she buried him.

Who knows how my grandmother managed to get through her time in Uzbekistan with two toddlers and a newborn in her care round the clock. It was the war, says my mother when I ask her this question. Grown-ups routinely did incredible things to keep kids alive. As Tamara worked, Faina cooked for the family on a brazier using bricks of dry dung as fuel. The baby, my fiercely independent mother, refused to be put down on the mattress and had to be carried at all times. Once my grandmother spilt boiling water on herself and had to continue performing all of her chores with only one useful arm. The worst was the abundance of poisonous spiders, malarial mosquitoes and even scorpions. (My auntie, four years old at the time, remembers a huge one on the white wall of their room.) Such pests were notorious for spreading deadly disease. (A cousin of Tamara and Faina who was also evacuated to Uzbekistan died from a blood infection following a spider bite.) In 1943 Tamara, Faina and the kids were all bedridden with epidemic typhus. It was a miracle that they got through it without losing anyone. When malaria came, it looked like the end. Tamara, the family’s doctor, was completely delirious. Everyone else was sick. Despite being terribly ill, Faina had no choice but to continue looking after the kids. It was at this moment that she wrote a letter to her husband’s family in distant Chkalov. “Save us,” it said.

How they managed to get through the malaria no one can now say. It must have been sheer luck because you can be as brave and as determined as you like but malaria does not give a toss. Tamara was not allowed to leave her medical post, so at the end of 1943 Faina travelled to the Ural region alone with the three kids. In Chkalov, Iosif’s family lived in one room of a two-room apartment. With my grandmother’s arrival, there were eight members of the family living on top of each other in this small space – three women and five children. At night my mother slept in the hall in a washing tub just big enough for a baby. Faina slept in the hall too, on top of a chest. In the other room lived the family of a former local ballerina Galina Valeryanovna, who before the war had had the apartment completely to itself. Contrary to stereotypes about artistic personalities in general and divas in particular, Galina Valeryanovna seemed neither bitter nor resentful towards her involuntarily acquired neighbours. She fancied herself as a fortune teller, using beans for the purpose as was then the Russian fashion, but when she offered her services to my grandmother, Faina was not interested.

Galina Valeryanovna insisted. “Let me do it,” she said.

“I am sorry, but I do not believe in this kind of stuff,” Faina replied.

“Just let me. I can tell you that your husband is alive.”

“Why are you being so cruel?”

“Listen to me. Your husband is alive and you will see him soon.”

When my grandfather and his colleagues left Kiev in 1941 and joined the partisans in the forests, they were ordered to move into the occupied village of Nosovka, in the guise of ordinary residents, to set up an underground cell. The three of them spent six months in the village running an anti-fascist group responsible for supplying the partisan forces with food and medical provisions. My grandfather’s very first job in life had been as a wood-turner, and he had been a skilled, successful craftsman. Thanks to this, Iosif had been able to move to Kiev from the small Ukrainian shtetl where he lived and, in time, to bring his parents to Kiev as well, taking full responsibility for their wellbeing. Now my grandfather’s woodworking skills came in handy not only because they provided a credible cover, but also because many farmers in nearby villages were in desperate need of a woodworker of his class; and so the trio never went hungry.

When they discovered that their cover had been blown, the trio quickly left Nosovka and headed into the forest. The next day their house and workshop were completely demolished. Before leaving Nosovka, my grandfather accidentally became a witness to a scene that he could not expunge from his mind: two Ukrainian Polizei shooting point-blank a Jewish couple discovered hiding with a local blacksmith. Determined to avenge the couple’s death, one night my grandfather took a platoon of partisans and set the houses of the two Polizei on fire. When the policemen ran out of the burning buildings, both of them were shot. Iosif was, by all accounts, a formidable leader. During his time in the partisans, he went from platoon leader to company commander and then head of the special division; after the war he was made lieutenant-colonel in recognition of his service.

At the end of 1943 Kiev was liberated, and the German forces were driven out of Ukraine. Early the following year, my grandfather started looking for his family. Told that his wife and sister-in-law were evacuated to Uzbekistan, he set out to make his way there. He knew neither their exact location nor the number of train journeys required to reach them nor, in fact, whether Faina, Tamara and the kids would still be in Uzbekistan years later. And, of course, their survival was anything but guaranteed wherever they were. Yet, just like Tamara’s chance encounter with her university lecturer in Samarkand’s central square, fate – or chance, although to me it does smell like fate – made Iosif fall casually into a conversation with a fellow passenger on the very first train he boarded.

It turned out that the man knew Iosif’s brother and his family. What is more, he was pretty certain that Iosif’s oldest nephew, Arkady, was working somewhere in the city of Chkalov, so my grandfather decided to get off the train there and try to locate his nephew before continuing his journey to Uzbekistan. My grandfather’s inexplicable fortune continued in Chkalov. Perhaps this is the kind of stuff that only happens in wartime. At the moment he disembarked, Iosif’s mother was heading home from the market where she had exchanged tobacco and vodka for some bread and lard to eat. Iosif wrote in his memoirs: “Only twenty to thirty metres from the house, I saw my mother who turned around and ran into the house – ‘Fanya, I have a son, you have a husband, your kids have a father.’ No words can describe what happened when we all reunited, how many tears were shed. Even now, when I am writing these words, and more than fifty years have passed since then, I am crying.” Needless to say, Chkalov’s former prima ballerina, Galina Valeryanovna, was vindicated, big-time. •

Maria Tumarkin is a Research Fellow in the Institute for Social Research at Swinburne University of Technology. This is an extract from her new book Otherland, published by Vintage.

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