A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

Central Asia becomes independent 259
author of the poem “Thou, Uzbekistan!,” was a member of the
Communist Party, and he made sure to mention Lenin at the end of the
eloquent hymn to his country as a safeguard against the Inquisition.The
year was 1970, the Prague Spring of 1968 seemed to be safely tucked
away in the dustbin of history, and Mirtemir went as far as an Uzbek
could possibly go in that period.What he could not do was to challenge
Moscow to cease the colonial exploitation of his country, to stop destroying
its environment and people’s health, to let the Uzbeks write the real
history of their country.Had he done that, the KGB would have taken
care of the rest.As it was, he was one of the many who had begun to
rekindle the flame of the national spirit.Frontal attack had to wait for
glasnost and perestroika.
That time came when in the core of Soviet society and state
Gorbachev set in motion the unprecedented program of reforms that
became famous as perestroika (restructuring; qayta quruu in Uzbek) and
glasnost (openness [of expression and criticism]; ochiqliq in Uzbek).To be
sure, criticism (and self-criticism, a particularly favorite device of the
system) had been a standard feature of the Communist Party and Soviet
state, but there was a sharp difference between the two phases.Before
Gorbachev, criticism meant that the criticized were not living up to the
demands and norms of Marxism-Leninism, and the remedy was even
more Marxism-Leninism; those few who dared to propose different remedies
quickly ended up in the Gulag.The two words so characteristic of
the Gorbachev era had previously not been used as technical terms; their
new use was a hint that something had changed.Most observers would
undoubtedly agree on that, and even on the effects of that change, but
what its causes, nature, and goals exactly meant is a matter of controversy.
For an explanation we should go back to the revolution’s very nature,
or even to its initiator’s personality.The unprecedented element, absent
from all earlier attempts at reform, was the aforementioned dose of
humanism injected by Gorbachev into the system.The notorious coercive
apparatus lost its former punch, and the spontaneous energies of
human nature began to act all over the empire and in a variety of ways.
In Russia, such heresies as proposals of a market economy, political pluralism,
practice of religion, or workers’ strikes were no longer a guarantee
of a trip to Gulag; in Berlin, the Wall came down; in Czechoslovakia,
the Prague Spring of 1968 had a victorious rebirth in the Velvet
Revolution of 1989; and in Central Asia, the indigenous peoples
reached for their national liberation for the first time since their defeat