Camel from Kyzylkum

Meanwhile, the period of Perestroika and Glasnost started in the Soviet Union. Perestroika, (Russian for “restructuring”) was a program characterized by the desire to reform society, to overcome the spiritual and moral crisis of the previous era of “stagnation”. It was instituted in the Soviet Union by Mikhail Gorbachev, the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union at the time.

Glasnost was understood as the movement in the USSR towards greater openness and dialogue. In the period from 1987-1991, Glasnost became synonymous with “publicity,” “openness,” and it reflected a commitment by the Gorbachev administration to allow Soviet citizens to publicly discuss the problems and potential solutions of their system.

I still lived in Zarafshan and took an active part in Perestroika and Glasnost—I was not afraid to express my opinions or attend meetings. I truly believed that we could change life for the better. One day I came to work only to find out that agents from the KGB had searched my office. KGB stands for Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, which translates to “Committee for State Security” in English.

At the time of Perestroika and Glasnost, books that previously had been available only through the underground distribution in the Soviet Union became legal, and excerpts were printed in many publications. I read a lot, and these books opened my eyes to the bloody recent history of our country—from the 1918 Revolution to the present day, on to all of the misleading, hidden truth, hypocrisies of our government, and the Soviet system as a whole. I realized that all of the concepts and ideas that they had taught us from early childhood were mendacious.

I learned about the Red Terror of 1918-1922—a policy of the Soviet state that legalized a complex of extremely cruel, repressive measures outside of the judicial system. The blows were inflicted on the disgruntled workers, peasants, and intelligentsia. In 1922, after the end of the Civil War, there was the last outbreak of the Red Terror, directed against the priests.

Then, from 1930-1950, innocent people were arrested on fabricated charges and tortured in order to force them to confess to crimes they did not commit. Thousands were shot or sent to the GULAG, where they died in the unbearable conditions of the labor camp. “GULAG” is an acronym for General Administration of Camps. It was a system of forced labor camps. Most camps of GULAG were located in the Kolyma, Magadan region of Siberia. The prisoners of GULAG built roads, houses, and bridges, and they mined gold, tin, and uranium. It was the prisoners who created the economy of the Magadan region. Those who survived remained to live in Kolyma after the release; they were not given the right to leave the territory. This terror was unleashed by Joseph Stalin.

There was displacement and deportation of national minorities, as well as mass deportations as part of the re-Sovietization of the Baltic States, Western Ukraine, and Moldavia. It was evidently impossible to give a full account of all of the victims of massacres, punitive treatments, and tortures.

These repressions were a major centralized operation against the civilian population of our country. Millions and millions of people perished. This discovery gave me a feeling of great sadness; it gave me a feeling of having been deceived.

These feelings and some other events in my life forced me to move out of Zarafshan. I did not have any more obligations to keep our apartment as a home for my daughter—Natasha was on her own path in life. It was time for me to make changes. My sister Alla came to help me pack some of my belongings and sell or give away the others. I moved to Gomel, Belarus just before New Year’s Day, 1988.