Red Odyssey: A Journey Through the Soviet Republics

This reviewer read Red Odyssey while himself journeying through some of the same regions as had Akchurin two years earlier. The book proved a fine, if somewhat exaggerated introduction to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Thus, while Akchurin reports the highways full of craters and the gas stations empty, the reviewer found the highways quite reasonable and the gas stations well-stocked. These discrepancies cast some doubt on the more extravagant tales Akchurin reports, such as his hair-raising encounter in a movie house in the town of Cheboksary (where he rescues a girl in distress and beats up a hoodlum) and his interrupted idyll at Lake Issyk Kul (where he escapes the clutches of a Barbie-doll-like female).

The strength of Red Odyssey lies less in the adventures recounted than in the evocation of the intellectual climate in the Muslim regions of the U.S.S.R during the empire's dying days. Akchurin reports vividly on his conversations with a wide range of interlocutors, some of whom (such as Mohammed Solikh) have since become leading political figures. In a very idiomatic English, he makes the currents of a distant and alien world accessible. And that's no mean feat.

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