The Geographer's Library

Jon Fasman
Place of origin: The materials—ivory, silver, jade—are all common to
China, but the Arabic inscription and the technique of veining one stone
with another indicate an Islamic influence. The confluence of style and material
suggests that the box came from Xinjiang, which enjoyed a flourishing
Chinese-Islamic art when the Arabs first arrived at the Uighur court. Islam
became a court fashion, though as Arab armies began arriving in greater
numbers, it quickly became more than just a fashion.
Last known owner: Pavel Vadimovich Zhensky, chief engineer of the
Bulun Fish Cannery and commandant of the Bulun Center for Labor and
Higher Education, both of which closed when the Soviet Union collapsed.
Zhensky sold the box and its contents, along with a letter and the (since lost)
last will and testament of Estonian poet Jakob Harve to an undisclosed buyer
for an undisclosed sum.
At the time of the sale, August 1992, Zhensky’s role in the liquidation of
thousands of dissident writers at Bulun had just been made public. Two
months previously he had been exposed as the architect of the CHP (the
Northern People’s Patrol, in which the KGB forced groups of native Siberians
to act as informal camp guards in exchange for the appearance of liberty),
and as a result was run out of his palatial home on the Lena River. The scandal
that forced him to sell his possessions involved accusations that he suborned
guards to facilitate the escapes of well-known dissident writers and
then lay in wait for them in the Yakut camp that surrounded the prison. Once
caught, the writers would be promised their freedom in exchange for a
detailed description of who had helped them escape; he used these testimonies
to blackmail virtually every guard who served under him. Without
exception he either shot the escapees himself or paid their Yakut hosts to kill
them in their sleep. A frustrated guard first leveled these accusations against
Zhensky; they were subsequently corroborated by every living guard who
had served under him.
Zhensky kept a range of memorabilia from the writers he killed or had
killed, all of which he sold very quickly once his troubles became public. His
wife, Lyudmila Yakovlevna Zhenskaya, speculated that the money went to
bribe his way out of legal trouble and out of Russia: shortly before his trial
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