2009.02.23: February 23, 2009: Headlines: Figures: COS - Morocco: Writing - Morocco: UPI Asia: Isaac Stone Fish reviews "Murderers in Mausoleums"
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2009.02.23: February 23, 2009: Headlines: Figures: COS - Morocco: Writing - Morocco: UPI Asia: Isaac Stone Fish reviews "Murderers in Mausoleums"
Isaac Stone Fish reviews "Murderers in Mausoleums"
The "New Great Game" is over, and the West has lost. Jeffrey Tayler, a correspondent for The Atlantic, spent three months traveling from Red Square to Tiananmen Square, exploring the under-reported, resource-rich, mostly Muslim hinterlands of Central Asia that are integral to the stability of Russia and China. Tayler wanted to see for himself "how people are getting by in the villages and rust belt towns and ignored metropolises between Moscow and Beijing, and therefore to arrive at some conclusions about the future of Eurasia." He finds that Central Asia, with its skein of ethnicities and maddening desire for authoritarian rulers, is much better understood and handled by Russia than it is by America. Therefore, he posits, Russia will reap the benefits of its geographic importance and its mineral wealth. The legacy of the original Great Game, "the century-long contest between Britain and Russia, conducted by stealth, diplomacy, and espionage -- for influence in Central Asia," and of the bloody reign of the Mongols, still looms largely in South Russia and Central Asia, a region "marked by the subversion of the state to criminal ends of plunder." Jeffrey Tayler served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Morocco. He has published numerous articles in Atlantic Monthly, Spin, Harper's and Condé Nast Traveler and is a regular commentator on NPR's "All Things Considered.
Isaac Stone Fish reviews "Murderers in Mausoleums"
Murderers in Mausoleums: Riding the Back Roads of Empire Between Moscow and Beijing
by Jeffrey Tayler
Reviewed by Isaac Stone Fish
The "New Great Game" is over, and the West has lost. Jeffrey Tayler, a correspondent for The Atlantic, spent three months traveling from Red Square to Tiananmen Square, exploring the under-reported, resource-rich, mostly Muslim hinterlands of Central Asia that are integral to the stability of Russia and China. Tayler wanted to see for himself "how people are getting by in the villages and rust belt towns and ignored metropolises between Moscow and Beijing, and therefore to arrive at some conclusions about the future of Eurasia." He finds that Central Asia, with its skein of ethnicities and maddening desire for authoritarian rulers, is much better understood and handled by Russia than it is by America. Therefore, he posits, Russia will reap the benefits of its geographic importance and its mineral wealth. The legacy of the original Great Game, "the century-long contest between Britain and Russia, conducted by stealth, diplomacy, and espionage -- for influence in Central Asia," and of the bloody reign of the Mongols, still looms largely in South Russia and Central Asia, a region "marked by the subversion of the state to criminal ends of plunder."
Tayler, who has lived in Russia for ten years and speaks Russian and Turkish, begins by journeying to the cities of the Cossacks, and then to the cities of the Caucasus. He visits Ossetia, where the people" retain unrepentant pride" for the half-Ossetian Stalin. Representatives of obscure ethnic groups boast of their superiority: "No other people has a language like ours," said Lara, the Kabardin. "We have one sound that takes five letters to write." He meets a Cossack leader who proposes rounding up all of the former Soviet leaders and hold a nationally televised vote as to their guilt. The Cossack volunteers to personally axe the heads of the guilty. Everywhere Tayler goes, his hosts fete him with alcohol. "Having had beer the previous evening, I wanted nothing less than to drink before noon thenext day. But in the Caucasus refusing hospitality can cause real offense," he explains before another alcohol soaked meal.
Dialogue features heavily in the book, often as a way for Tayler to paint the identity of the people he meets. The first thing a restaurant owner says to Tayler is, "We should be more like China. The great thing is that they keep socialism but allowed private property. Now they're thriving and everyone fears them." While quotes like this illuminate, the speakers' rhetoric often obscure the speaker.
Arriving in Kazakhstan on his way to Kyrgyzstan, Tayler hopes "to leave behind the anger and ethnic hatred I had met with almost everywhere in Russia." His first stop is Atyrau, "a boom town set smack in the middle of a Dante-less desert hell", where he observes the local expats drinking and whoring. Tayler does a good job of capturing the mood in the town, with wry descriptions of people like Evan, a British expat who drills at the local Tengiz oil field. "His first concern involved keeping his three cell phones straight: one for the job; a second for his wife in Britain; and a third for his Atyrau girlfriends. Drinking too much could lead to confusion and dire complications."
While Tayler never partakes in any of the entertainment, he does spend a lot of ink describing the women he sees during his travels. A friend of a friend is a "tanned, shapely beauty in her twenties"; in a restaurant he catches the eye, "thick-lashed, moist, and inquiring, of the singer, whose dark hair framed an olive-complexioned face of startling beauty"; and in a labor camp he encounters "a tall, handsome woman in a frumpy dress". At best, these descriptions compliment the scene, though one begins to wonder the relevance of descriptions of fat spilling over jeans, or of "slender curves filling a tight peach knee-length dress".
Finally arriving in China, Tayler is shocked with the development in the eight years since his last visit. Despite a few odd assumptions like "it seemed the Chinese had never forgiven the Uyghrs for siding with the British in the last Great Game," Tayler does a good job of describing and synthesizing relevant Chinese history. At Tiananmen Square, Tayler introduces the massacre, remarks at the lack of any trace of the killings, wonders if the crowds of young Chinese tourists know of the significance, then admits that he could not know the answer. Refreshingly, he doesn't belabor the issue, like so many journalists writing about China. Tayler ends his journey in Mao's Mausoleum. At the trinket shop just outside he's surprised to see that "Mao was selling, and selling well."
While some of his conclusions, like the idea that because "crowds throng to (Mao's) embalmed body even now tells us that the future of this country probably does not belong to liberal reformers" are a bit of a leap, Tayler's descriptions do a fantastic job of showing the realities of the region. This, more than any sweeping conclusion, is Central Asia: "I feel asleep to the echoing quarrels of drunks outside on the street, to the susurrus of sand blowing against my window, blowing over the stranded boats in the waterless harbor and the shacks and the drunks."
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Isaac Stone Fish lives in Beijing and is involved in literature and media.
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Headlines: February, 2009; RPCV Jeffrey Tayler (Morocco); Figures; Peace Corps Morocco; Directory of Morocco RPCVs; Messages and Announcements for Morocco RPCVs; Writing - Morocco
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