The Trotsky Family Exile-cation in Almaty…

Leon Trotsky was exiled to Alma-Ata with his wife and son in January 1927, and stayed there just over a year before being sent to Turkey. Most of the chapter of ‘My Life: an Attempt at an Autobiography’ about this time is concerned with political and intellectual developments: he says himself he mostly sat at home during this time, and sent out over 800 letters. The following excerpt is attributed to his wife. Here we see a unique, but not entirely detailed portrait of Alma Ata still a provincial town; before the connection of the Turksib railroad (May 1930) and the transfer of Kazakh SSR government (1929), two events that would lead to the explosion in population from just 45,400 in 1926 to 456,000 thirty years later. The town’s remoteness is evident in this quote of one of his political enemies, upon hearing about Trotsky being sent to Almaty.”Even if he dies there, we won’t hear of it soon.” 

The First Moscow - Alma Ata Train, 1930

…And now we found ourselves in our long journey without a single book, pencil or piece of paper. Before we left Moscow, Seryozha ha got us Semyonov-Tyanshansky’s book on Turkestan, a scientific work, and we were planning to acquaint ourselves while on the train with our future place of residence, of which we had but a vague conception. But Semyonov-Tyanshansky remained in the travelling-bag along with the rest of the luggage in Moscow. We sat int he car empty-handed, as if we were driving from one part of the city to another.

Wine Tasting in Alma-Ata

Fitzroy Maclean (1911-1996) is best known as being the inspiration for the James Bond character after writing about his adventures in Central Asia, the Caucasus and Balkans before and during World War II. He returned to the region twenty years later when he was commissioned by the Sunday Times to write a travelogue of the Soviet Union, eventually published as ‘Back to Bokhara’. He paints a rather rosy picture of the situation, whether it is to not ruffle any feathers or because of the sharp contrast to late 1930′s when he last was there. By the late 1950′s USSR is undergoing de-Stalinization, a relative opening (the ‘thaw’), and economic growth on a huge scale. This is reflected in the Alma-Ata he details, with construction of new buildings, facilities like Medeo and a champagne factory!

Alma Ata is magnificently situated. Immediately behind it – an immensely dramatic backdrop – rise the snow-capped mountains of the Tien Shan, or the Mountains of Heaven, the great mountain barrier which divides Russian Central Asia from Chinese Turkestan. The town itself, originally laid out by the Russians eighty or a hundred years ago, is made up of broad avenues of elms and poplars running at right angles to each other. Even before the War, at the time of my last visit, there were already as good many new buildings and now there are even more: blocks of flats, department stores, an opera, a university and an imposing new Government building. but the green avenues of tall trees are still there, and there are still enough of the old brightly painted stucco bungalows left, blue and white, pun and white, yellow and white, for the town not to have lost its pleasantly bucolic character…What Alma Ata never has possessed, and despite the restrained orientalism of some of its new buildings, I think never will, is anything at all Eastern in its make up. It always has been and alwayswill be a Russian town.