UnlearningSilence.blog

Several of my previous blogs have touched on life after the collapse of the Soviet Union. I have written about uncertainty, about freedom, about discovering music, ideas and possibilities that had previously felt out of reach. But independence was not only about new opportunities. It was also about identity.

When an empire collapses, people do not simply inherit a new flag and carry on as before. They are left with a question: who are we now?

Watching a Central Asian team score its first World Cup goal this morning unexpectedly brought me back to that question.

The team lost the match. Yet across Central Asia people celebrated as though they had won. Social media filled with messages of pride. Fans from neighbouring Central Asian countries celebrated alongside them. For a brief moment, borders seemed less important than a shared sense of recognition.

Watching those celebrations took me back to my childhood and to the years immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union disappeared almost overnight. One day it was simply there, permanent and immovable, and the next it was gone. The adults around me were trying to make sense of a world that had suddenly changed beyond recognition.

Our textbooks were rewritten. Street names changed. Monuments changed. The Uzbek alphabet began its transition from Cyrillic to Latin. For younger people this was an inconvenience. For many older people it was something else entirely. Suddenly they found themselves walking through familiar streets lined with signs they could no longer easily read. Shop names, road signs, pharmacies and advertisements appeared in a script that looked foreign despite representing their own language.

As a child, I did not fully understand what was happening. Looking back, I think I understand it a little better.

A newly independent country was trying to answer a question: who are we?

For decades that question had largely been answered by Moscow. Now it had to be answered by us.

Every Monday morning before classes began, our entire school gathered outside. Hundreds of children stood together, placed our right hands over our hearts and sang the national anthem.

At the time it simply felt normal. Now I understand that it was part of a larger project. The country was trying to create a shared sense of identity and belonging.

Lenin statues disappeared from public squares. In their place appeared monuments to historical figures from Central Asia. The message was clear. Our history did not begin with the Soviet Union. It stretched much further back.

Some people would call this nationalism.

The word often makes people uncomfortable, and for good reason. Nationalism can become dangerous when it turns into a belief that one people are somehow better than another. History offers countless examples of where that road can lead.

But there is another kind of nationalism.

The nationalism of self-determination.

The nationalism that says not, “We are better than them,” but, “We have the right to exist as ourselves.”

For many people in Central Asia, independence felt much closer to the second idea than the first. We were not trying to dominate anyone. We were trying to recover ownership of our own story. We were trying to decide who we were when somebody else was no longer deciding it for us.

Yet every great political transformation has a human side that is often forgotten.

While some people were discovering a new national identity, others were packing their lives into suitcases.

Many of my neighbours left. Some moved to the United States. Others moved to Israel.

Among them was an elderly Jewish woman who lived near us.

I remember her vividly.

She was intelligent, warm and dignified. Years earlier she had sold my mother a beautiful set of encyclopedias. They became one of the most treasured possessions of my childhood. I spent countless hours reading them, learning about countries, people and histories far beyond my own experience.

Then one day she told us she was leaving. Her son had already moved to Israel with his family and she was waiting to join them. She seemed excited.

Months passed.

Then a year.

She was still there.

The last time I saw her, she was standing outside a supermarket. A large cloth was spread on the ground in front of her. On it were dozens of small household items for sale.

Among them was a rusty fork with one bent tooth.

For some reason I have never forgotten that fork.

Even as a child, it struck me as strange. How had this remarkable woman come to be selling something so insignificant?

My mother asked when she expected to leave.

“Soon,” she replied.

But this time there was less certainty in her voice.

I remember thinking that perhaps once she had sold the last of her possessions, she would finally be reunited with her son.

I never saw her again.

Decades later, when I returned to Central Asia, I went looking for her house.

I do not know why.

Perhaps some memories simply refuse to leave us. Perhaps I wanted to know whether she had finally made it.

The house no longer belonged to her.

There was no sign of where she had gone.

I still do not know what happened to her.

I hope she reached Israel. I hope she found her son. I hope she spent her final years surrounded by the people she loved. And I hope she knew that a little girl who once lived nearby never forgot her.

When people talk about independence, they usually talk about presidents, constitutions, flags and politics.

Those things matter.

But history is also made up of ordinary lives.

It is made up of children learning a new alphabet. Of neighbours deciding whether to stay or leave. Of families separated by borders. Of people hoping for a better future.

And sometimes it is made up of an old woman standing outside a supermarket, selling a rusty fork while waiting to be reunited with her family.

This morning, as I watched that Central Asian team score its first World Cup goal, I realised that the celebrations were not really about football.

They were about recognition.

About belonging.

About the simple human desire to be seen.

Perhaps that is why people celebrated so passionately. Not because they believed they were better than anyone else, but because, after all these years, they felt that the world had finally noticed them.

For countries like mine, independence was never simply about borders, flags or politics. It was about something much more fundamental. It was about reclaiming the right to tell our own stories, celebrate our own history and define our own future.

And perhaps that is what the best form of nationalism, or patriotism, has always been.

Not a claim of superiority.

Not a belief that others matter less.

Simply a quiet insistence:

We have the right to exist as ourselves.