Letters | What China and Xinjiang Uygurs could learn from a tale of two Soviet cities
- We all occasionally make bad choices, otherwise we would make worse choices. Tolerance is the only way forward everywhere
When I joined St Petersburg University in 1981, atheist Soviet Russia was being ruled by reactionary cold war leader Leonid Brezhnev, but by the time I graduated in 1986, the leader was Mikhail Gorbachev, who promised us religious and economic freedoms.
And this is what that has led to: my Siberian hometown of Kyzyl is now full of Buddhist temples and Christian churches, the shops are bristling with imported goods, the roads are full of posh Western cars, the local elite travel extensively abroad, especially to Southeast Asia, and so on and so forth. And its population has gone from 70,000 in 1980 to 116,000 in 2018.
It was a very different story for my university friend from an equally small Azerbaijani town of Agdam, so ravaged in the late 1980s by an ethnic conflict between Christian Armenians and Muslim locals that the Lonely Planet guidebook dubbed it the “Caucasian Hiroshima”. And its population has dwindled from 28,031 in 1989 to just 360 in 2010.
My friend, now a professor, has settled in St Petersburg and I don’t think he revisits Agdam. When I see on the internet how relentlessly nature claims his town back, I remember a poem by Rudyard Kipling, The Way through the Woods: “They shut the road through the woods/Seventy years ago/Weather and rain have undone it again/And now you would never know/There was once a road through the woods/Before they planted the trees.”
Let’s face it: we all occasionally make bad choices, otherwise we would make worse choices, and a minority member often has to make worse choices than a majority member. A religious conflict can never be completely resolved and tolerance is the only way forward everywhere, including in your Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
Mergen Mongush, Moscow, Russia
