Sovietistan by Erika Fatland
Review of Sovietistan by Erika Fatland
Sovietistan by Erika Fatland (2020). Published by Pegasus Books.
I’ve been obsessed with learning about Central Asia ever since my recent trip to New York City. There’s this Uzbek restaurant I love in Manhattan, Farida, and while I was there eating the food, I was struck at the unique Asian and Middle Eastern blends of the food that was served to me.
Upon returning back home to Maryland, I then began to research again about the region, trying to find all of the books that covered the topic whenever I had the free time to read. My bookshelves quickly began to fill with books, whether it was poetry, nonfiction, or cookbooks, about the region and the people that lived within it.
This book was originally published in 2014 in Fatland’s native country, Norway, and wasn’t translated until English until 2020. This was recommended to me as a good account on travel literature in the region, especially because Fatland is an anthropologist. And while this was a good perspective to have, there was also a glaring problem in the narratives she was telling, which I’ll go into detail about later.
Let’s dive into this review, shall we?
Erika Fatland traveled to Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. These are her accounts.
As I mentioned before, Erika Fatland is a Norwegian anthropologist fluent in Russian and, judging from what she’d written in the book, was a prominent scholar of Russian studies. The book itself is split into sections based on the region, and the first place she managed to go to what the unreachable Turkmenistan. It’s very hard to get a visa to enter the country, and when she does get one, she lies and says she’s a student trying to learn Turkmen (spoiler: she is not). There’s a caveat, though, because you can only stay in the country for three weeks.
She splits the section by country into essays. Her first essay is about entering Turkmenistan and it feeling like a completely different world. There’s open worship of their dictators, everything is made of marble, and from the Turkish airport we immediately get this sense that these people seem oddly different from anything the world has seen before.
We go on and learn about the region and country, the things that make it the most oppressive post-Soviet state and the sheer amount of propaganda going on in the country. For example, most social media platforms are banned, and, in Turkmenistan, the author is in fear that there are cameras in her hotel room. She is not allowed to go anywhere without a tour guide there as well.
This is a common theme throughout each country’s section: Central Asia isn’t exactly known for its stellar track record when it comes to democracy and censorship. Throughout each section, this concept is touched upon again and again, although Fatland likes to only connect the parts of the USSR that the countries adopted.
There isn’t as much discussion about the Soviet Union outside of the nostalgia older people feel for it; they think that their countries were better under the USSR because of the centralized healthcare and education, opportunities that fell to the side when the nations became independent. Often we delve deeper into the broader overarching influences in the region, like the Persian Empire and the Mongols.
The essays feel disjointed in a way that they’re loosely connected, but they feel like essays that should’ve been split up into different books based on the country. I also wondered about the accuracy of some of these sections, because she mentioned something about Iran (and Tehran was misspelled) that made me go hmm. There’s also an overarching thing I found myself really pondering on as I kept reading: she’s a white woman traveling to Central Asia.
There’s something that was glaringly obvious in the Kazakhstan section, one that made me start to question her subjectivity. When she gets to Kazakhstan, she talks about how relieved she is to see working ATMs and sushi again. That’s when I began to question Fatland as the ideal person to come into these countries and write these stories.
She clearly was working from an angle in which she saw the Western world as the norm, which is normal, but also concerning when you read travel literature. It positions the book as something that caters to Western audiences, which makes me question the authenticity of the work. Her writing is really good and expressive, but I couldn’t get past this.
Overall Thoughts
I think this is something worth reading, as it offers an interesting perspective into how one might view these Central Asian countries.
She has some experiences that’s fascinating when it comes to the villages of the countries, such as in the mountains of Tajikistan, but I also wanted to see something more genuine. No shade to the author, but I would’ve preferred to see something that was written by someone who knew the local languages and customs instead of going into it relatively blind.
It currently plays too much into the tropes of travel literature I don’t particularly care for, but someone else would definitely enjoy reading this as a primer into the literature about the region from a Westernized angle.
