“They’re keeping the Tashkent earthquake from the public” [*]

After publishing my article titled Before Chernobyl, I found myself thinking of a book I had read a few years earlier: Zekeriya Sertel’s posthumously published memoirs, Olduğu Gibi - Rus Biçimi Sosyalizm (As It Was - Socialism in the Russian Manner). The book contains a number of striking observations about the Soviet Union, particularly about Azerbaijan and the other Soviet republics in Asia. One of them highlights the problem of “secrecy” -the hallmark of Stalinist regimes- through a telling anecdote.

Sertel describes the scene like this:

In 1967, a major earthquake struck Tashkent. [**] The earth seemed to move. Houses were reduced to rubble. Hundreds of people died. Yet in the Soviet Union, newspapers did not report such news, nor did the radio broadcast it. Instead, you learnt about it only by word of mouth. Party members and their families who had been left homeless were sent to various parts of the Soviet Union. We came across a group of these Uzbeks at a Black Sea resort called Koktayel (Yalta). They had just arrived from Tashkent. We approached them and, with interest and sympathy, asked:

- Did many houses collapse in the Tashkent earthquake?

They looked at us, timid and wide-eyed. They scrutinised us suspiciously, as if wondering whether we were trying to get them to talk. Then they said:

- What earthquake?

- But surely there was a major earthquake in Tashkent? Weren’t the houses destroyed?

- No… Nothing like that happened, they said.

And they walked away.

At that point we gave up. Enough was enough -even terror has its limits. The Uzbeks felt compelled to deny that an earthquake had struck Tashkent simply because it had not been officially announced by Moscow. This is how people live in the small republics of the Soviet Union where Turks reside: in fear and dread. They are afraid of themselves, afraid even of their own shadow. And how could they not be, when only a generation earlier a father, a brother, a son -or some other relative- had been exiled to the deserts or to Siberia, killed, or thrown into prison for precisely such reasons. (Zekeriya Sertel, Olduğu Gibi - Rus Biçimi Sosyalizm, ed. Mesude Gülcüoğlu, İletişim Yayınları, 1st ed., Istanbul, 1993, pp. 50-51.)

Re-reading this passage made me think of Orwell’s famous novel 1984. That notorious principle comes to mind: “Whatever the Party says is the truth.” If necessary, 2 + 2 = 5. In the scene Sertel recounts, too, a concrete, devastating, and “natural” event has taken place -an earthquake. People have been left homeless; they have lost their loved ones… And yet, when you ask how they are, these very people who have lived through the disaster can still look you in the eye and reply: “What earthquake?”

Central Tashkent in the aftermath of the 1966 earthquake

What is at issue here is not merely the censorship of news of the earthquake, or of the information about the devastation it caused. That alone is appalling in itself. What is even more chilling is that a society has been driven to the point where, in order to survive, it feels compelled to deny even the truth it has seen with its own eyes. The Stalinist regime seized control not only of newspapers, radio and television, but also captured people’s language, memory, and their very sense of reality.

For that reason, it is hardly surprising that, after every major disaster in the Soviet Union, the Stalinist bureaucracy’s first instinct was not to “protect human life”, but to tighten its grip on information. The common thread is always the same: not to disclose the truth, but to shape it in line with the interests of the privileged bureaucratic caste that holds power… And to turn society into an accomplice in this dreadful practice; to teach it to remain silent, to deny what it knows to be true, to “pretend not to know”. Sertel’s Tashkent anecdote offers a stark snapshot of this tragic continuity in action.

[*] The title is taken from Zekeriya Sertel’s book.

[**] Sertel misremembers the date of the earthquake: the quake that destroyed much of Tashkent occurred on 26 April 1966.

Also see: 

Before Chernobyl

Soviet Stalinism and secrecy: Gorbachev's revelations