The Making of a Rebel: Salavat-Batyr

Salavat Yulai was the name of a man who became the national hero of today's Bashkiria. He was born 16 June 1754 in Tekeevo (a now eradicated village in Bashkiria) and died 26 September 1800 in captivity in Rogervik (today Paldiski, Estonia). He participated in the rebellion of Cossack leader Yemelyan Pugachev against the rule of Catherine the Great. This ensured him a place in not only Bashkir national history and folklore, but also the official Soviet historiography. This article is illustrated with screencaps from the Soviet movie Salavat Yulayev from 1941, which reflect the fact that history is always written with the present in mind.

Already in his youth, it was told, Salavat was a very strong lad who went bear-hunting at age 14 armed only with a dagger. Another sign of early maturity was his poetry - his first writings reflect on the beauty of nature and freedom.

Salavat's father, Yulai Aznalin, had participated in the peasant rebellion of 1735–1740. Salavat was conscripted by the Imperial army to fight the rebellious Cossacks of Emelian Ivanovich Pugachev, but he joined Pugachev instead.


A beaming young leader (played by Arslan Mubaryakov) - but treachery looms behind the imperial eagle.

Pugachev appointed him a colonel (polkovnik), and Salavat recruited a Bashkir troop of 10.000 and fought bravely until the downfall and capture of Pugachev by the Imperial army.


Salavat captured and whipped. In the film, this is one of the turning points in his youth.

In 1774, Salavat was also captured in the village of Medyash and sent to Moscow. In September 1775 he was sentenced to hard labour for life, together with his father. They were sent to the fortress of Rogervik at the Baltic Sea, where all peasant rebels were incarcerated. Father and son spent their last years there.


In the film, Salavat breaks his chains and avenges himself on his tormentor - tragically, a fellow Bashkir.

In the 1940 film, his poetry is relegated to a supporting role. He displays his oratory skills only a few times, to excite his followers and charm his supporters, but true to Soviet realist principles he is more a man of action - even a "noble savage" at times, thumping his chest enthusiastically after defeating an evildoer, exclaiming: "Salavat batyr!"


Salavat and his Russian friend have beaten the feudal exploiters of the labourers.

Very little of his poetry has been preserved in the Bashkir language. One of his final lines of poetry was said to be: "No, Bashkirs, I am not dead!" And the film ends on this triumphant note, leaving out the long years in prison.

The depiction of Russo-Bashkir cooperation is particularly interesting in the film. In the beginning, Salavat is indiscriminately anti-Russian. This is made understandable in a very simple way - he has only met drunk Imperial officials who abuse the peasants and disrespect the elderly.


After being injured by soldiers, Salavat is rescued by an escaped Russian convict, who eventually makes him realize that not all Russians are evil.


Especially not Tanka.


She pushes him in the snow, throws snowballs at him and calls him a bear. Love at first sight!


Tanka, the daughter of a Cossack, bears Salavat a son - but the war cuts short their happiness.

Further adventures at the hands of treacherous Bashkirs opens his eyes to the flaws within his own nation. This obvious moral lesson is maintained throughout the film - in the end, Salavat's sister Amina learns to love her nephew, although he is half-Russian.


Amina and little Salavat - "my Salavat!"

The heavy-handed approach was necessary to make the story of a minority national hero suit Soviet politics. the official historiography stressed Salavat Yulayev's wish for freedom through friendship and mutual aid between all nations. In reality, the cooperation plan between Pugachev and his supporters of various creeds and ethnicites was more complicated. The desertions and deceptions that plague the rebels throughout the film reflect the reality - not everyone believed that Pugachev fought for free-for-all "freedom", probably not even Pugachev himself.


Salavat and Yemelyan share a bear hug.

There certainly was a place in Soviet historiography for the development of national consciousness among the minority peoples - it was seen as a necessary requirement before they could reach the next stage in history, socialism, and finally communism. But national independence was not an issue. History had a pre-determined path to follow, and nationalism was only a phase, according to this way of thinking.


An intertitle listing all the nationalities that joined the rebellion: Cossacks, Russian peasants, Tatars, Chuvash, Mordvins, Mari, Bashkirs...

Today, the flaws of Soviet historiography and its political uses are obvious. But can we deal with our own interpretations of history with an open mind? Doubtlessly rebels like Salavat Yulai still have a meaning and a purpose, even as names of cities, hockey teams and public parks. Catherine the Great, who wanted to eradicate his memory by publicly shaming him and later prohibiting the use of his name among Bashkirs, has failed. What will the Salavat-batyr of the future look like?



Sources:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salawat_Julajew
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pugachev%27s_Rebellion
http://ulaev-salavat.narod.ru/illystrazii.htm

The movie Salavat Yulayev can be watched in its entirety on YouTube. It was directed by Yakov Protazanov, also famous for his 1924 version of the Soviet sci-fi novel Aelita filled with constructivist design.

P.S. For those of you who have a thing for evil Imperial officers with pointy noses and periwigs... come on, know I can't be the only one...

Images of a Poet

Strange to end up writing about Ğabdulla Tuqay after searching for Ildar Urmanche - both were influential Tatars in the world of art, but Tuqay is definitely more famous than the Soviet animation director Urmanche.

The national poet of Tatarstan, Ğabdulla Tuqay (often spelled Gabdulla Tuqai or Tukai), lived a short but intense life around the previous turn of the century (1886 - 1913). His works are considered as the backbone of Tatar literature, the measure which others are measured against, inescapable in cultural celebrations as well as in primary school. His poem Tuğan tel (O Native Tongue; see the end of this post for a music video) became the inofficial anthem of the Tatar language. The story of his life is worthy of a Dostoyevsky novel.


Posthumous portrait by E. Simbirin, 1976.

Ğabdulla Tuqay was the son of a village mullah. Tuqay's childhood was restless, his parents and his stepmother died, one after another, and Tuqay was sent around from family to family, always forced to find a new place to live because of death, illness or poverty. During his stay with one family, Ğabdulla was sent to the local madrasah (religious school of Islam). He showed promise as a student, but his wandering days were not over. Some relatives in Uralsk (today Oral in Kazakhstan) adopted him. He could attend another madrasah, and in 1896 also a Russian school. There he studied Russian literature and started to write poetry, especially inspired by Pushkin.

Tuqay was uninterested in business, although his stepfather was a merchant and tried to involve him in the trade. When his stepfather died, Tuqay moved into the madrasah and lived a studious but austere life. The year 1902 became a turning point - Ğabdulla suddenly lost interest in religious rote learning. He tasted alcohol, took up smoking, let his hair grow longer and turned to poetry. Earlier he had shown interest in folklore and asked traveling scholars to bring him local songs and tales. His madrasah studies had familiarized him with Old Tatar literature, which was heavily influenced by Arabic, Persian and Turkic. An ambition took root in him to create a new and living Tatar literature closer to the way the common people spoke.


Tuqay was not heroically handsome; he was physically fragile and boyish even in maturity and illness. The pictures in this post show how artists idealized him by focusing on his soulful eyes and intensifying the power of his gaze instead. Here, actor G. Shamukov does his best to emphasize the masculine determination in Tuqay, even on his sickbed. (More photos of Tuqay and actors portraying him)

Tuqay started to work at a secular publishing house in Uralsk. The printed media boomed after the October Manifesto of 1905, which introduced more liberal censorship laws. Previously, it was forbidden to publish newspapers in the Tatar language. By day Tuqay worked as a typesetter and proofreader, by night he wrote verses, articles and short stories and translated Russian texts. He became interested in liberal and social-democratic ideas, which intertwined with a vision of national emancipation. Tuqay wrote, Bezneñ millät, ülgänme, ällä yoqlağan ğınamı? (Is our nation dead, or only sleeping?). He criticised the conservative clergy in clever satires. When ultra-nationalist Russians told Tatars to emigrate to the Ottoman Empire, Tuqay replied with a passionate declaration: Kitmibez! (We don't leave!). For Tuqay, the Tatars were the Russians' brother-nation.

Political and economic pressure increased on the press. While Tuqay's fame allowed him move out of the madrasah and he didn't lack offers of work, the political unrest also led him towards poetry and the development of modern Tatar as a literary language. His first poem was Şüräle, based on a Tatar fairytale. Soon, he was invited to work in Kazan. Ominously, he was exempted of the notoriously brutal military draft due to his poor health. It was a foreboding of the end of his short life, but it freed him to his work. In Kazan, Tuqay was barely 20 and already famous. Fame usually brings romantic attention, too. However, Tuqay apparently avoided women and wrote tender verses to one person alone, his 15-year-old admirer Zäytünä Mäwlüdova.


With his sister Gaziza in Uralsk, by Kh. Yakupov, 1971. (More images of artworks with Tuqay)

In 1909-1910 the prime minister of Russia, Pyotr Stolypin, cracked down on the press and limited the freedoms of 1905. Tuqay was deeply distressed. All the struggle seemed to have been futile. Some of his old friends began to work for conservative papers and responded to Tuqay's criticism by calling him a Russophile. Ironically, the Tsarist secret police suspected that his poetry was Russophobic! While meant as an insult, "Russophile" was closer to the truth. Tuqay mourned Leo Tolstoy's death in 1910. He was inspired by Tolstoy's humanism and concern for the weakest.


Illustration for Tuqay's tales for children, by T. Khaziakhmetov, 1981.

Tuqay and Kumis Therapy

Kumis is fermented mare's milk, a staple drink in the Central Asian countries. In the late 19th century, kumis therapy was a popular health fad in the Russian Empire. Patients travelled to resorts in the southeastern parts of the Empire and enjoyed "suitable light and varied amusement" - and drank large amounts of kumis, which made Anton Chekhov gain 12 pounds in two weeks but did not cure his tuberculosis. Leo Tolstoy described kumis therapy as a treatment for burnout in A Confession: "I fell ill, mentally rather than physically, threw up everything, and went away to the Bashkirs in the steppes, to breathe fresh air, drink kumys, and live a merely animal life."

Like Chekhov, Tuqay suffered from tuberculosis. He realized that he needed all his powers to continue the struggle for national rights and democracy - and he dreamed of writing "the Tatar Eugen Onegin" - but he needed to regain his health. Tuqay travelled from Kazan by the great Volga southwards to Astrakhan, where he experienced kumis therapy. Another trip took him to Ufa and St. Petersburg, where a doctor withheld from him that his illness had reached the final stage. In 1912, he lived among Kazakh nomads, drinking kumiss regularly.


Tuqay in St. Petersburg, by M. Rakhimov, 1975.

Although kumis couldn't cure him, it gave him back his optimism. In the poems of his final year he wrote that the struggle had not been in vain, and focused on social concerns. Many of his verses were banned, and some of them were published only after the October Revolution. One poem unfortunately remembered was his ode to the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty. In the 1920s, Tuqay was dismissed as a "Tsarist" because of this poem, which nevertheless ends with a call for internationalism within Russia and praises the eternal friendship between Tatars and Russians.


Bust by Baki Urmanche, who had a son named Ildar - could he be the art director whom I mentioned in the beginning?

On April 15, 1913, Ğabdulla Tuqay died at the age of 27. April 26, his birthday, is celebrated nowadays as the Day of Tatar Language. The Peremech Lounge has a photo of his grave and pictures of an interesting Tuqay pocket reader from the Soviet era. Oh yeah, almost forgot: Here's Tatar boy band Kazan Egetläre giving their version of Tugan tel...

Langston Hughes in Central Asia

Thanks to the blog Moscow Through Brown Eyes, I was inspired to dig up some nice photos of American poet Langston Hughes' travels in early 1930's Soviet Central Asia. The Yale University Library has an online exhibition of Hughes' life (1902-1967) for starters.

In 1932, Hughes boarded the S/S Europa with a group of African-American actors and writers on their way to the Soviet Union. Their purpose was to make a film about the plight of black people in the United States, but after long and fruitless meetings with the Soviet producers, the whole project was scrapped.

Hughes took the chance to travel around Soviet-controlled Central Asia, areas that usually were not accessible to Westerners but that interested him for personal and political reasons. Hughes wanted to find a positive example of a "coloured South" to contrast with the Jim Crow south of the US. He met African-American engineers involved in the modernization of the Soviet cotton industry. He also met the Hungarian intellectual Arthur Koestler, who at the time was a member of the Communist party, but had already begun to develop his critical eye for the system. Hughes was a Communist sympathizer, although no party member - for him the dream of racial equality was so important that he preferred to look away from the harsh realities of famine and oppression. His self-critical period would come later, after WW2.

That said... maybe he was just dazzled by all the chirayliq guys he met on his travels?

From Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library's Langston Hughes collection. Described as "Group photograph of unidentified men and women in Russia, possibly Uzbekistan". See the larger original here.

Young writers of Central Asia, Hughes in the middle. On the backside of the photo there are descriptions in Cyrillic, which the library hasn't bothered to decipher.

Hughes' surprise traveling companion, Arthur Koestler. View the whole image here, plus chicken. Apparently Koestler heard someone play jazz records (this article claims it was Sophie Tucker singing "My Yiddishe Mamme") at a guesthouse in Ashqabat and knocked at the door; imagine his astonishment to find the poet whose works he had admired already in Europe.

Karim Ahmadii is perhaps the name of this man who dedicated his portrait to Hughes in 1933.

This is what Hughes wished to see - a coloured man and a white man shaking hands. His superficial view of Soviet race relations is problematic but understandable from today's perspective. The photo is titled "Yusuf Nichanov".

Back in the United States, Hughes wrote an article on traditional Uzbek dance for Travel Magazine.

He especially admired the "teacup dance", which he simply called "raks" (from raqs, dance), and was intrigued by the batcha - danging boys dressed and made up like women. (More on traditional Uzbek dance here.)

And in case you thought Hughes only had an eye for the guy, here's Tamara Khanum, dancing teacher, first woman to perform without the veil in Uzbekistan. The fate of her colleague Nurkhon shows what a brave act this was.

Langston Hughes wrote about his travels in A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia, a short book reprinted as recently as 2006 in Bishkek. There is an interesting discussion about Hughes and the re-publication at the Registan blog.

Blog Tip!

Moscow Through Brown Eyes is a blog by "Buster", a graduate student and former Moscow resident, who combines experiences as an African-American in Russia with a broad interest in culture, society, literature, history and much more, which naturally results in a Chirayliq-heavy mix (as evident in the collection of attractive faces - Langston Hughes and W. E. B. Du Bois among others* - in the blog's title image).

Like Tinet, Buster has written a lot about migrant workers in Russia and other issues of social concern, but my favourite feature on MTBE is the recurring Russian Rap Friday. The last two videos have been especially sweet:



Rapper Huligan, Russian from Kazakhstan, gets to the roots with «Я провинциален» ("I'm Country").



Rapper-throatsinger Ondar sings for Tuva in Vladivostok, and Buster finds lots of yummy clips of Yul Brynner (Siberian-born Russian-Swiss-Mongolian-Roma, whom we probably should write about more) as side dishes to the main course.

*) Both Hughes and Du Bois, as well as many other African-American intellectuals, visited the USSR in the 1920's and 1930's. Hughes even travelled extensively in Central Asia in 1932, and visited China and Japan. Here's an article about how Langston Hughes' poetry survives in the school curriculum in Turkmenistan. It's also a very interesting re-telling of the chance meeting and ensuing companionship between Hughes and Arthur Koestler in the heart of Central Asia. There's also an incredible twist at the end of the story...

Takiji Kobayashi

"1920s proletarian novel strikes chord with young underemployed" - The Japan Times, Friday, July 18, 2008



I first read about Takiji Kobayashi (小林 多喜二 1903-1933) in the Finnish socialist literary magazine Kirjallisuuslehti (1934, p. 290). He was a politically conscious writer and dissident in imperial Japan, tortured to death by the police. His rediscovered novel, Kanikosen ("Crab-Canning Boat", 1929), deals with the difficult working conditions and labourers' collective struggle 80 years ago, and the modern-day part-time proletariat has discovered its relevance.

Shinchosha Publishing Co. said that in a normal year around 5,000 copies of the book would be reprinted. But this year, it has already printed nearly 380,000 copies.

The Japanarchy blog has a big post on Kobayashi, including many images of the manga based on Kanikosen. The comments include valuable discussions, too (how often do you see that?!). A must-read if you are interested in radical labour activism and Japan in the 1920's and 30's. Warning: The post includes some difficult photos of the deceased Kobayashi.
Here is a 10-minute clip from the 1953 movie by Sô Yamamura.

And here's an article by a guy who worked at fish-processing ships himself, and what he felt when he read the manga versions.

(Crossposted at 1920 A.D.)

Chinghiz Aitmatov

The great Kyrgyz author Chinghiz Aitmatov passed away yesterday. He wrote in Russian and Kyrgyz language about nomads, cosmonauts and leopards, about the past and the future, about identity and change and love - and "our little brothers", the animals. This literary superstar was chased by fans at the Leipzig book fair as late as last year. Aitmatov turned 80 this year, and Kyrgyzstan dedicated the year 2008 to his honour.

A collection of papers on Aitmatov's literary work (and some translations)
Farewell, Gyulsary! - a short story about an old Kyrgyz herdsman and his horse (1966)
Article in Der Spiegel
Photo source