Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (59 page)

In East Turkistan, a second, “socialist” East Turkistan Republic was established in the summer of 1945 in the northern part of the region. It was strongly influenced and supported by the Soviet Union.
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Schools were further modernized, and young East Turkistanis learned Russian as their second language.
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Tibet, caught between two enemies—the Chinese and the British, both of whom were fighting the Japanese—stayed neutral during the war.

The Post-World War II Revolutions

THE INDIAN REVOLUTION

The shock sent around the world by the First World War had had a great impact on British India, where the Indians, who saw their rulers weakened by the war, pressed very strongly for independence. In 1919 the British had granted limited home rule to the Indians, with a British-style parliamentary “democracy” under the colonial government in Delhi.

During the Second World War, the Japanese captured most of Southeast Asia except Thailand, including the British colonies of Malaya and Burma, and threatened India. The British relied on their Indian forces to prevent the Japanese from joining up with the Germans in North Africa. They thus granted further autonomy to the Indians.

In 1946 the British finally agreed to grant full independence to India, and on August 15, 1947, India proper was divided into two nations, India and Pakistan. Burma and Ceylon became independent the following year. For the first time in history, India was not just a geographical and cultural region, or a small part of the subcontinent; it was a country, at least in name. Unfortunately, the politicians had created a political monster. Indian Muslims wanted their own state, so the British divided the subcontinent into two overtly religious states. This was an incredibly shortsighted move. Worst of all, the state created for the Indian Muslims, Pakistan, was itself divided into two parts separated from each other by some 800 miles of Indian territory. These and other poorly conceived decisions by British and Indian politicians were the cause of regular wars, internal bloodshed, and other needless suffering from 1947 onward.

THE SECOND CHINESE REVOLUTION

The Chinese civil war that had broken out between the nationalists and the communists in 1927 resumed as soon as World War II ended in Asia with the surrender of Japan in 1945. The communist Chinese, led by Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong), received many of the modern weapons of the surrendered Japanese army in northern China and the modern American weapons of nationalist soldiers who surrendered to the communists and joined them. After initial nationalist successes, the communists eventually defeated the nationalists militarily and declared the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949, in Peking.
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Mao and his followers were radical Modernists. They rejected all European-American influence except for Modern “scientific” communism. They moved the capital from coastal Nanking back to continental Peking and turned China’s attention from the Littoral and the outside world to the continent and Central Eurasia.

Mongolian and Chinese communist revolutionaries had already taken control of Inner Mongolia by 1949. On December 3, 1949, Mao declared the country to be a part of the People’s Republic of China.

The East Turkistan Republic survived until late 1949, when the communist Chinese army marched in and occupied the country. It was incorporated back into the colony of Sinkiang (Xinjiang).

The Tibetans became increasingly nervous about the growing power of the Chinese communists, who openly threatened to invade their country. Internal politics and the youth of the new Dalai Lama prevented any effective measures being taken until it was too late.

In 1950–1951 the Chinese invaded Tibet with an enormous modern army.
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The Tibetans, outmanned and outgunned, were forced to surrender. But the Tibetans could not in any case have withstood the Chinese communists, who by the time of their victory over the Nationalists in 1949 had one of the largest, most modern, battle-hardened armies in the world.

The Chinese incorporated these countries into their new communist empire as nominal “autonomous regions,” superficially modeled on the Soviet system, but in fact they soon pursued an overt policy of Sinification and forced Modernization throughout them—meaning the imposition of Marxist dogma, including atheism, which amounted to the nearly total destruction of Central Eurasian cultures.

The people of Inner Mongolia who did not want to become Chinese quietly fled across the open steppe and desert to Mongolia, where the presence of the Soviet Army kept the Chinese out. Inner Mongolia rapidly became Chinese in population, language, and culture.

Similarly, East Turkistan was soon flooded with millions of Chinese. They took over the country from the Uighurs and other peoples, who had nowhere to flee to and no sympathy from major world powers such as the United States or from the United Nations or other world organizations. The Uighurs periodically attempted to fight back, but the Chinese outnumbered them and freely used their overpowering military force against them.

When the Chinese began implementing the same policies in eastern and northeastern Tibet, the Tibetans there rebelled. In 1959 open rebellion broke out in the capital, Lhasa, and the life of the political and spiritual leader of Tibet, the young Fourteenth Dalai Lama, was threatened by the Chinese. At the last moment he was secretly ferreted out of Lhasa and escaped with a small guard over the Himalayas to India. The Chinese government crushed the rebellion brutally and instituted an even more repressive regime in the country. Of 2,700 monasteries in Tibet, 80 percent were destroyed by 1965, according to figures given by the Chinese government of Tibet.
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The terror imposed on the innocent, peaceful people of Tibet by the Chinese was unprecedented in the modern history of Central Eurasia.

Before the Chinese succeeded in suppressing the rebellion and closing the borders again, about 100,000 Tibetans fled over the Himalaya Mountains to India, Nepal, and other neighboring countries, some carrying nothing more than books in an effort to save their culture from destruction by the Chinese. From exile in India, the Dalai Lama and his followers attracted the attention of sympathetic people around the world, who in turn pressured their politicians to do something. In 1959 the International Commission of Jurists, an organization affiliated with the United Nations, investigated the Chinese actions in Tibet and declared that “acts of genocide had been committed in Tibet.” Subsequently, the United Nations General Assembly issued resolutions in 1959, 1961, and 1965 calling for an end to the violations of the human rights of the Tibetan people.
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In the face of overwhelming Chinese immigration into their homeland, and the famine caused by the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961), some 60,000 Kazakhs, Uighurs, and others fled over the border from East Turkistan into Kazakhstan in the Soviet Union.
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But the military occupation and oppression of the Uighurs continued unabated.

The extreme Modernist terror of the Cultural Revolution (ca. 1966–1976) in China devastated especially Tibet, East Turkistan, and Inner Mongolia. The slogan on one propaganda poster from 1967 summarizes what was preached and what was done: “Smash to pieces the old world! Establish the new world!” The picture shows a man in a communist Chinese uniform standing on a pile of artifacts including a crucifix, a statue of Buddha, and traditional Chinese books, about to strike them with a sledgehammer.
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Of the remaining 20 percent of the thousands of Tibetan monasteries, all but thirteen of those in the Tibetan Autonomous Region were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. The campaign against the Four Olds was ruthlessly pursued in Tibet. All identifiably Tibetan cultural practices, artifacts, and beliefs were officially proscribed, and those who did not comply were punished.
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The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the Dalai Lama in 1989 served to maintain world pressure on the Chinese government to cease its military occupation and oppression of Tibet, but little changed.

THE IRANIAN REVOLUTIONS

The Qajar Dynasty (ca. 1779–1921),
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which had become corrupt and weak, was overthrown in 1921 by Rezâ Shâh (r. 1925–1941), who founded the Pahlavi Dynasty. In 1941, during the Second World War, Rezâ Shâh was forced to abdicate in favor of his son Mohammed Rezâ Shâh. After the war, the young shâh gradually began a wide-ranging liberalization and modernization of Iran. By the early 1970s the country had far surpassed all the nations around it in prosperity, stability, and the speed of its growth. The shâh made a firm alliance with the American and West European powers and soon Iran itself became the dominant economic, political, and military power in the region.

But liberalization, economic growth, and secularization displaced the hyperconservative Shiite Muslim clerics who had formerly wielded nearly total power in the countryside over the largely illiterate masses. Under the leadership of the radical fundamentalist Ayatollah Khomeini (1899–1989 [r. 1979–1989]), who was living in exile in Iraq, Iranians began to agitate for the overthrow of the shâh and establishment of a Modern “democracy” in Iran. The ailing Shâh was deprived of any support from his erstwhile “democratic” Western allies, who openly supported the “democratic” movement. He was finally forced to flee the country. Khomeini returned to Iran on February 1, 1979. He and his followers immediately seized power. On November 15, a constitution was proclaimed for the new Islamic Republic of Iran. Not surprisingly, the “republic” was actually a tyrannical dictatorship controlled absolutely by the Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers. After his death, the president of the “republic” was appointed
Walî-i Faqîh
, the supreme leader. The religious fundamentalists ruthlessly eliminated all those who opposed their rule, clamped down on the merchant class that had foolishly supported them,
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and isolated Iran from the civilized world.
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THE COLD WAR

In Europe, the victorious Allies divided Germany into American, British, French, and Soviet sectors.
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Berlin, which ended up inside the Soviet sector, was itself also divided up into four sectors. But the other Allies split with the Soviets almost immediately because the latter sponsored Socialist “revolutions” throughout Soviet-occupied Central and Eastern Europe and then established puppet governments (known to Western nations as “satellites”) throughout the region. The relationship between the “capitalist” Western Europeans, Americans, Japanese, and many other nations on the one hand and the “socialist” Soviets, Chinese, and their satellites worsened over time. The great struggle that developed between the two major socioeconomic systems of Eurasia after the Second World War did not break out into full-scale open warfare. The reason is generally believed to be because of the development of nuclear weapons, which have such destructive power that they can destroy life on the planet as a whole. The threat of nuclear war hanging over the world thus paradoxically prevented the outbreak of an actual war. This struggle came to be known as the Cold War. It ultimately pitted Russian-led “communists” against American-led anticommunists or “capitalists.”

During the Cold War, the most tense border between the two sides was in Germany, especially between the Soviet and non-Soviet sectors in Berlin, which were cut off from the rest of western Germany by part of the Soviet sector of Germany. After the Western powers agreed (June 1, 1948) to unite the non-Soviet sectors into a Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), the Soviets reacted by closing all land and water communications to West Berlin. However, this move only further unified the Western nations, who imposed severe sanctions on the Soviet bloc.

The Americans and other Western European powers overcame the eleven-month Soviet blockade (June 24, 1948 to May 11, 1949) by airlifting supplies into the city. On May 8, 1949, amid negotiations with the USSR aimed at ending the blockade, the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) was formed, with its capital the small city of Bonn, near Cologne, in the former British sector. Three days later Stalin lifted the blockade,
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but the Soviets countered later in the same year by creating the communist German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, with its capital in East Berlin.

With the support of other European countries and the United States, West Germany recovered from the war and eventually became the strongest country in Western Europe economically. East Germany and the other Eastern European countries, which lingered in a long postwar recession, fell far behind Western Europe. Their periodic attempts to free themselves politically, or even just economically, were repeatedly crushed by the Soviet army. The addition of West Germany to the American-supported North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1955 was immediately countered by Soviet creation of the Warsaw Pact. Europe thus remained divided into American and Soviet spheres of influence, with American military bases in the West and Soviet military bases in the East.