my bed on cold nights. Denis was always ready to play cards or help me with my Russian. We all suffered Sasha’s hyperactivity and pestering together and conspired to make him do his homework.
I had not been part of that sort of crowded, boisterous family life growing up in eastern Massachusetts. My parents divorced when I was a child and I lived with my mother and older brother for most of my school years. We had a big house in the suburbs with plenty of space to live separate lives. We did not eat breakfast and dinner together every day, the way I did with the Plotnikovs. We did not spend each evening talking over the day’s events, strategizing about how to get through the next day’s challenges. When I was 16, I left home and my life tangled up in my family ended. I moved to Seattle and lived with a cousin, hoping high school would be less miserable there than it had been in Massachusetts. A few months later, I dropped out and left Seattle. I was more or less on my own from then on.
My adoptive Russian family found it hilarious and bizarre that I spent my afternoons learning to weave carpets. To them, not only was that women’s work, even worse, it was Turkmen women’s work. By November I had learned the basics and was helping Mahym teach my young classmates. I finished with my magazine-sized training rug and began planning my next project. Mahym knelt on an ancient-looking carpet scrap while she was working at her loom. It was worn thin, but its geometric pattern and its deep reds and earth tones were still vibrant. She told me it had lain on the floor of the fortress where the Turkmen made their final stand against the tsarist army in 1881.
That battle marked the beginning of 110 years of Russian domination of Turkmen lands and played a prominent role in the nationalist version of Turkmen history promoted by the Niyazov regime. In the early 1800s, Russian forces had started pushing southeast, conquering Central Asia bit by bit. Great Britain, worried the tsar might be planning to march right through Central Asia and into British India, slipped spies into the region to watch the Russians. By 1879, the two empires were deeply tangled in this so-called “Great Game,” and Russia made its next move, sending its soldiers to subdue the Turkmen tribes.
They laid siege to the Akhal Teke tribe’s stronghold, a mud-brick fortress in Geokdepe. “Used to fighting rabble armies and ill-led and untrained tribesmen,” the Russians underestimated their opponents, Peter Hopkirk recounted in The Great Game . The Akhal Tekes bested them and sent them scrambling back to their fort at Krasnovodsk, on the Caspian coast. The Russians regrouped and marched on Geokdepe again in 1881, bombarding the fortress with artillery and rockets while tens of thousands of Akhal Teke troops and civilians sheltered inside.
The Akhal Tekes managed to hold out until the Russians tunneled underneath one of the fortress’s walls and blew a massive hole in it. Then the carnage began. The Russians reportedly killed some 14,500 Akhal Tekes, bayoneting babies, slaughtering old men, and raping women. Mikhail Skobelev, the Russian general who led the attack, justified the atrocities by saying, “The harder you hit them, the longer they remain quiet.” 22 The tsar’s troops conquered the rest of the Turkmen lands with little difficulty.
I had friends who lived in Geokdepe. I’d seen the remains of the fortress. As I sat by the window in Dom Pioneerov, copying the pattern from Mahym’s carpet scrap, history felt very close. I could almost smell it as I counted the tiny knots with a needle and marked their colors on a piece of graph paper. It took me two afternoons to finish copying the pattern and reproduce the missing bits beyond the scrap’s ragged edges.
Then I got started on my next task: finding a loom. Dom Pionerov had two large looms, but I couldn’t commandeer one. The kids needed them for their classes. So I asked Denis and Misha
I had not been part of that sort of crowded, boisterous family life growing up in eastern Massachusetts. My parents divorced when I was a child and I lived with my mother and older brother for most of my school years. We had a big house in the suburbs with plenty of space to live separate lives. We did not eat breakfast and dinner together every day, the way I did with the Plotnikovs. We did not spend each evening talking over the day’s events, strategizing about how to get through the next day’s challenges. When I was 16, I left home and my life tangled up in my family ended. I moved to Seattle and lived with a cousin, hoping high school would be less miserable there than it had been in Massachusetts. A few months later, I dropped out and left Seattle. I was more or less on my own from then on.
My adoptive Russian family found it hilarious and bizarre that I spent my afternoons learning to weave carpets. To them, not only was that women’s work, even worse, it was Turkmen women’s work. By November I had learned the basics and was helping Mahym teach my young classmates. I finished with my magazine-sized training rug and began planning my next project. Mahym knelt on an ancient-looking carpet scrap while she was working at her loom. It was worn thin, but its geometric pattern and its deep reds and earth tones were still vibrant. She told me it had lain on the floor of the fortress where the Turkmen made their final stand against the tsarist army in 1881.
That battle marked the beginning of 110 years of Russian domination of Turkmen lands and played a prominent role in the nationalist version of Turkmen history promoted by the Niyazov regime. In the early 1800s, Russian forces had started pushing southeast, conquering Central Asia bit by bit. Great Britain, worried the tsar might be planning to march right through Central Asia and into British India, slipped spies into the region to watch the Russians. By 1879, the two empires were deeply tangled in this so-called “Great Game,” and Russia made its next move, sending its soldiers to subdue the Turkmen tribes.
They laid siege to the Akhal Teke tribe’s stronghold, a mud-brick fortress in Geokdepe. “Used to fighting rabble armies and ill-led and untrained tribesmen,” the Russians underestimated their opponents, Peter Hopkirk recounted in The Great Game . The Akhal Tekes bested them and sent them scrambling back to their fort at Krasnovodsk, on the Caspian coast. The Russians regrouped and marched on Geokdepe again in 1881, bombarding the fortress with artillery and rockets while tens of thousands of Akhal Teke troops and civilians sheltered inside.
The Akhal Tekes managed to hold out until the Russians tunneled underneath one of the fortress’s walls and blew a massive hole in it. Then the carnage began. The Russians reportedly killed some 14,500 Akhal Tekes, bayoneting babies, slaughtering old men, and raping women. Mikhail Skobelev, the Russian general who led the attack, justified the atrocities by saying, “The harder you hit them, the longer they remain quiet.” 22 The tsar’s troops conquered the rest of the Turkmen lands with little difficulty.
I had friends who lived in Geokdepe. I’d seen the remains of the fortress. As I sat by the window in Dom Pioneerov, copying the pattern from Mahym’s carpet scrap, history felt very close. I could almost smell it as I counted the tiny knots with a needle and marked their colors on a piece of graph paper. It took me two afternoons to finish copying the pattern and reproduce the missing bits beyond the scrap’s ragged edges.
Then I got started on my next task: finding a loom. Dom Pionerov had two large looms, but I couldn’t commandeer one. The kids needed them for their classes. So I asked Denis and Misha
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