SAFETY

Dictators like to move people around.

- By Joan Silber

Stalin, for instance. From the summer of 1941 through the fall of 1942, with the Russian front facing massive bombardment and Nazi troops on the ground, he decided to relocate civilians, and entire industries, to safer regions in the eastern Soviet Union. The Urals, Siberia, the middle Volga, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan eventually received sixteen million evacuees, perhaps the most ever moved across land by a single directive.

I have always liked weird historical facts, but I never would have known this one had my best friend in middle school, Yasmina, not been from Uzbekistan. Her family moved to Brooklyn in the early nineties, after the breakup of the Soviet Union; Yasmina was just a little kid, so she didn’t remember much, but she had absorbed a number of stray facts. During the Second World War, her mother had been one of the thousands of Russian children sent to the Uzbek city of Tashkent.

Yasmina spent much of her time enunciating Uzbek-i-stan for people, spelling it out. Few Americans had ever been anywhere near there, or thought of it as a place. “What is reality?” we asked. We had an interest in such questions. The tree that falls in the forest: we loved it. There was a conflict between my eager collection of facts and my innate sense that the most abstract flights of thought were the truest. Yasmina was with me on this.

Sometimes I felt silly after our talks—who cared if consciousness could never be photographed? But mostly they drew us together. Neither of us came from especially religious homes. Yasmina’s family was Muslim, but had lived through the unofficial ban on public worship during the Soviet years, and I had liberal Jewish parents who were casual about the theology part. Neither Yasmina nor I believed that a personal God existed, not that anybody asked us, but we entertained other possibilities.