Siro by David Ignatius (short books to read txt) 📕

a way of testing his liaison network, of oiling the machinery and making sure that it would work. And it offered, too, a modest test of his hypothesis that the Soviet edifice in Central Asia was frail and ready to crumble.

The easiest evidence to monitor was electronic. An hour after the open tomb was discovered, Radio Samarkand went dead. When it returned to the air a few minutes later, the announcer began reading propaganda material that had been scripted for such delicate moments by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan. The voice was bland and unmodulated, the verbal equivalent of an eye that never blinks:

“Everything that is joyous and happy in the life of the people of Samarkand and of the Soviet East as a whole is associated with the heroic activities of the Communist Party and with the great leader of the revolution, Lenin,” said the voice. “The Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917 marked the beginning of rejuvenation for the ancient city. Under the leadership of the Communist Party, the people of Samarkand realized revolutionary measures creating new schools, medical establishments, industrial enterprises and implementing agrarian transformation in the region. Comrades: At the hour of trial, the people of Samarkand gave a pledge to Lenin. They wrote: ‘Dear Vladimir Ilyich. We swear to stand firmly and defend the gains of Soviet power. We shall rather perish in struggle than allow the enemies of the socialist revolution to overthrow Soviet power in Turkestan.’ ”

By noon, the news had spread throughout the city with the speed of fire burning through dry grass. The rumors traveled fastest along the several miles between the mausoleum and the bazaar, where the farmers gathered each day to sell the fruits and vegetables from their orchards and gardens. The bazaar was a wondrous place, nearly impervious to Soviet power. Farmers and merchants jostled against one another, beckoning in the same boisterous language as five hundred years ago, when the bazaar stood astride the Silk Road.

Now as then, the commodity traded best in the bazaar was rumor. The red-kerchiefed woman selling apricot nuts told the news of the open tomb to the woman selling almonds, who walked over to the spice table and told the old crone selling cardamom, whose husband overheard and shouted across to his friend selling onions; the news jumped a long aisle, toward the cabbage sellers, and the radish men, and the women stacking their carrots in neat pyramids; and it traveled back to the far reaches of the bazaar, to the sellers of fabric and shoes and books and hardware. People even went to the phone booths, covered by black metal roofs shaped like four-cornered hats, and called their friends.

By midday, the whole of the bazaar was in an uproar. At prayer time, a mullah climbed atop the roof of a coffeehouse at the far end of the bazaar and shouted, “Allahu akhbar,” in the wailing cry of the muezzin. Militiamen had been in the market since midmorning, and several of them ran after this impromptu mullah, but the chase was useless. Their way was blocked by burly Uzbeks and low, shambling Turkmen. They weren’t deliberately resisting the militiamen; they just stood where they were, crowding the doorways of coffeehouses, slow and deliberate in their movements, the way people in Central Asia can be when they don’t want to be rushed, when even the great god of history cannot move them out of the way.

Radio Samarkand continued to dispense its verbal balm:

“Comrades,” said the radio. “There is an Uzbek legend about a golden book in a golden casket which was buried in the ground at the time of bloody invasions by evil tribes. Centuries passed and the people believed that a warrior would be born to find the book and return it to the people. There eventually came into this world a warrior whose mind was brighter than the sun, whose eyes were kind, whose smile instilled cheer and hope and refreshed the tired as a water spring in the desert, whose words were filled with great wisdom. This warrior was the great Lenin. He found the golden casket with the wonderful book and opened it to the Uzbek and other enslaved peoples of the world.”

The Uzbeks began to turn off their radios, across the length of the bazaar, in the barbershops, even in the barracks of the militia. But the voice continued:

“Lenin transformed the legend into a long-expected reality. Under the guidance of Lenin, the Uzbek people joined the working class of Russia and their class brethren throughout the country and launched the struggle for freedom and socialism.”

The radios were all extinguished now, but the unblinking voice continued to speak:

“The socialist revolution brought happiness into the home of every Uzbek. It meant freedom for the Uzbek people from social, economic and national oppression. Lenin died, but Leninism is alive—as firm and unshakable as a rock.”

What Stone instinctively understood was that this fabric of lies would not last another generation. The revolt expressed itself that day, and every day, in small individual acts, as simple as the assertion that God exists in an officially godless state. The evidence of this Islamic revolt was as pervasive and invisible as the dust in the air. It was everywhere and nowhere; everyone was a believer and no one. It was as if the entire Uzbek nation were engaged in a genial deception of their Soviet overlords—friendly, smiling, taking whatever money and modern conveniences Moscow was willing to supply; wearing their war medals and party buttons on holidays and pinning Mother Heroine decorations on their wives when the tenth child was born, but believing not a word of the Marxist cant that surrounded their lives, and waiting always for a moment to speak the subversive name of God.

Had Stone been at the tomb of Qutham Ibn Abbas that day, alongside one of his far-flung correspondents, he would have seen one more small moment of the rebellion that he