Abstract
A soldier stands in front of Uzbekistan’s national flag during an Independence Day celebration in Tashkent
Credit: Reuters/ Shamil Zhumatov
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Uzbek writer
During Soviet times, I used to work at state magazines and newspapers. The censorship then was immense and undeniable. Every news report or article, novella or novel, was written according to socialist realism: it praised the Soviet regime, the Communist Party, its leader, and big brother, meaning the Russian people. Any journalist or writer who didn’t follow these strict orders was an enemy of the people.
The censor would sieve through every single last word, and only then allow publication. If any sentence or thought didn’t follow the censor’s requirements, you would never see it in the press, and the author would find him or herself blacklisted. I was on this blacklist.
In 1981, when my short novel Olmez Kayalar (Immortal Cliffs) was serialised in Shark Yildizi magazine, the KGB sacked everyone who had allowed the book to reach publication. The novel was about the history of Uzbeks fighting against Russian colonisation: a theme considered taboo by the establishment. I was placed under enormous pressure. Officers of the KGB, who used to call themselves “special workers”, followed me everywhere, and sometimes they would invite me back to Tashkent hotels – called Russia and Leningrad – where they had “special rooms” allocated to them.
I do remember one particular occasion, when a Russian KGB officer, called Anatoly, bombarded me with questions: “Why did you write Immortal Cliffs in spite of socialist realism? Why are there no Russian characters in your novel? Why is there no praise for the great Russian people who brought development and progress to Turkestan?”
It was an especially frightening time for me. A time of fear. A time of death. I lived thinking: what should I do? Should I escape? But to where could I escape, even if I tried? Should I commit suicide? Yet what about my family and my children?
This “special officer” Anatoly attempted to understand my situation. He strongly suggested I co-operate by reworking the novel. “I’ll give you time,” he said. “You know, for you to add the chapters about the progressive role of Russia in Turkestan … to show that a rotten, backward, poor, figuratively dead country, was transformed into a place of culture, education, science, technology.”I kept silent. Anatoly continued to pressurise me into accepting his ideas.
Uzbek novelist Mamadali Makhmudov, who was in prison for 14 years
Luckily for me, I knew the first secretary of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan, Sharaf Rashidov – a prominent author himself – who spoke personally to Leonid Brezhnev, the general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This saved me from imprisonment and I was sent to a Moscow writers’ resort to re-edit the novel.
After this incident, I started to write mini-stories that even the censor wouldn’t understand, for instance:
A rider shakes his reins, whilst whipping his horse. A skinny Qorabayir [the name of the Horse] is pelting along: sometimes right or left; sometimes straight or skewing diagonally. The poor creature is sweating uncontrollably, panting and unable to breathe. The rider pays the creature no attention, whipping the horse in the head, and kicking it in the belly with no remorse. Tears trickle from the eyes of the horse, with foam gathering at its mouth. The animal is on its last legs, struggling at the brink of collapse, yet cannot bear to disappoint the rider.
After the breakup of the Soviet Union, when the ideas of national sovereignty and independence that I so prominently described in my novel became the state’s ideology, I expected to be recognised and even honoured. Alas, the opposite happened. I was arrested twice and imprisoned. The second time I was sent to jail for 14 years.
Campaigns by Pen International and other human right organisations, for which I am very grateful, helped achieve my release in 2013, after long years of humiliation, torture and suffering. I am free now, yet I’m not totally free.
My associates and I have tried many times to publish my literary works. Even the works that I wrote during the Soviet times are not accepted by any newspaper, magazine or publishing house in Uzbekistan. All of them consider me a blacklisted writer, and none of them want to be associated with me.
It’s not just that there is no publisher for my political writing in my homeland; I can’t even find a publisher in Uzbekistan for my historic novels or short stories.
Censorship of the media in Uzbekistan is the enemy of development. It hacks away at the roots of justice and kills the truth. In order to raise the level of the media, we need a new generation of talented young people, independent minds, who love their nation and motherland more than themselves. They should work not for money, but to sow the seeds of truth to their fellow citizens even if the price they pay is to sacrifice themselves. I pray to my creator simply for that.
© Mamadali Makhmudov