Enver Altayli - A Dark Path to Freedom: Rusi Nazar from the Red Army to the CIA

A DARK PATH TO FREEDOM

ENVER ALTAYLI

Ruzi Nazar, from the Red Army to the CIA

Translated by

David Barchard

HURST & COMPANY, LONDON

First published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by

C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd.,

41 Great Russell Street, London, WC1B 3PL

Enver Altayli, 2017

Translation David Barchard

All rights reserved.

Printed in the United Kingdom

Distributed in the United States, Canada and Latin America by Oxford University Press, 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.

The right of Enver Altayli to be identified as the author of this publication is asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

A Cataloguing-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 9781849046978 hardback

eISBN: 9781849049153

This book is printed using paper from registered sustainable and managed sources.

www.hurstpublishers.com

The failed coup in Moscow in August 1991 heralded a period of monumental change in Central and South Asia. Within a couple of years, the whole political geography of the region seemed to have been redrawn. The abolition of the Soviet Union on 26 December 1991 completed the emergence as independent states of the USSRs Muslim-majority republics. The erstwhile Soviet-backed regime in Kabul collapsed in April 1992 and the next month a bitter civil war broke out in Tajikistan, while Azerbaijan and Armenia clashed over the fate of Ngorno-Karabagh.

Living and travelling in the region at the time, I had a chance to witness some of the human dimensions of this great upheaval. From outside the region, the end of the Cold War was understood primarily in terms of the collapse of a political system and the end of an empire. But the demise of the Soviet Union also opened the way for the lands north of the Oxus River to reconnect with South Asia and the world, for people to pick up relationships that had been frozen for most of the twentieth century. Suddenly it was possible for artisans, painters and dancers from the new republics to gather in Islamabad for a Silk Road festival. One could drive across the Oxus at Heiraton and onto the old Timurid capital of Samarkhand, to admire Ulugh Begs fifteenth-century observatory. The Oxus, or Amu Darya in the vernacular, was imbued with historical and political significance. Once on the northern bank you were definitively in the cultural zone of Turkistan. Through most of the Cold War era the Oxus represented the Iron Curtain in the East. But even in the thirties, the British traveller Byron described being thwarted in his attempts to reach the Oxus. He was refused permission by the Afghan authorities to approach such a sensitive feature.

My most vivid recollection of the upheaval relates to days spent in sub-zero temperatures on the Afghan bank of the Oxus, in December 1992. A wave of humanity had crossed the river on barges, to seek sanctuary in Afghanistan from the fighting which then raged in Tajikistans Kulyab region. The first night of the exodus, scattered across a frosty field, family groups clasped their few possessions and huddled together with no protection from the bitter cold. As I walked from family to family, with a few blankets to distribute, the openness with which the new arrivals launched into their stories was striking. A kolhoz manager started to explain the running of a collective farm. A couple of men recalled how Stalin had uprooted their community to work on new cotton plantationsthey wanted to know where they could grow cotton in Afghanistan. An older man described himself as a veteran of the Red Armys heroic stand at Stalingrad. It was as if these refugees from Turkestan wanted to share all their stories of seventy years of life under the Soviets before a dawn that, in those freezing temperatures, some might not live to see.

The subject of A Dark Path to Freedom, Ruzi Nazar, was a hero of Turkestan, whose life journey and career reached their climax in the period when I first glimpsed Central Asia. He epitomises the saga of the people of Turkestan, snippets of which the refugees had shared on the banks of the Oxus. His story is the prequel to Central Asian independence, the deep currents that eventually washed those refugees up on the banks of the Oxus. Ruzi Nazar was a twentieth-century Uzbek Ulysses. However, as a Muslim wandering in the lands that bridge Asia and Europe, he should rather be thought of as an Amir Hamza. His is a life narrative of the young man journeying out of the village and witnessing half a century of tumult in the Stalinist terror, the Second World War and the Cold War, before eventually returning as an acclaimed national figure. His story is of a life of purpose and morality, of choosing the correct path, even when navigating through the moral swamps of the Stalinist terror and Nazi totalitarianism. While Ruzi is famous for the part he played in the great global confrontations of the twentieth century, his moral character as a hero is shaped by the sage woman, whose advice he carries with him. Ruzi recalls his mothers guidance:

You will often come to crossroads in your life. If on one side of you there is the right path, albeit one whose outcome is uncertain and full of dan gers, and on your other a path crooked and wrong but full of material riches, choose the right path, even if it is full of dangers.

There is also an historical significance to the geography of Ruzis career. As a Turkestan patriot, Ruzi was mainly concerned with the lands east of the Black Sea, north of the Himalayas and south of the Urals, where Turkic tribes have settled and built a series of empires since the sixth century. Much of this territory has now been shaped into the post-Soviet Central Asian republics. But Ruzis story captures an idea of Eurasia, in the sense that his efforts on behalf of the people of Turkestan saw him based variously in Ukraine, Austria, Germany, Italy, Turkey and of course the United States. Each of these places was connected with events in the homeland and in each of them Ruzi encountered both compatriots and hosts who engaged with developments in Turkestan. The wide-ranging familiarity makes sense in terms of recent scholarship, which has reminded us of the connectivity across the Eurasian super-continent. Historic East-West trade routes have long acted as vectors for the transmission of ideas, technology and political and military power. Europe has been far more connected to and shaped by Ruzis Turkestan than was ever acknowledged by those who dreamed that civilisation was forged in Greece and Rome alone.

If Ruzis journey physically spanned Eurasia, thematically his engagement encompassed the grand issues of the twentieth century. He lived through one manifestation of European colonialism, that of the Russian empire in Asia. This, of course, was the theme that Ruzi pursued throughout his life. He travelled as far as the Bandung Conference to shape global awareness that the Soviet Union, while presenting itself as an ally of the Afro-Asian liberation movements, was itself a colonial power. The pivotal period in which Ruzi built his personal reputation as a patriot and intellectual was his time with the Turkestan Legion, from 1942 to 1945. By embracing German support, Ruzi and the other Turkestan nationalists inserted themselves into the confrontation between Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism. But Ruzi experienced a different fate from his contemporary Subhash Chandra Bose, who received German and Japanese backing for his Indian National Army in the East. After the collapse of Fascism, the United States needed allies against the Soviets in the Cold War. Ruzi was uniquely qualified to pioneer cultural resistance and espionage in the new confrontation. For Ruzi, participation in the Cold War simply meant accepting a new backer for the latest phase of the struggle for Turkestan independence. Ruzis career also touched on the theme of what independence would look like, as he espoused a vision of a democratic Turkestan, beyond the Soviet yoke. During his stint in coup-prone Turkey in the 1960s, he had the opportunity to grapple with the challenge of sustaining democracy and stability in a country courted by East and West. He even pops up with a role in the Iran hostage crisis and used his briefings to US policymakers to advocate reliance on brain rather than brawn.