#ashkhabad

[noaasanctuaries]

Sunk by a German U-boat during World War II about 25 years after its construction, the wreck of the tanker Ashkhabad now rests in the Graveyard of the Atlantic. Sitting in 55 feet of water, the wreck is home to a vibrant community of marine life - like this loggerhead sea turtle!

Learn more about this wreck:

[bobemajses]

Turkmen Jews in Israel at a traditional pre-wedding Henna celebration, 2019

Archeological evidence of Persian Jewish presence in Turkmenistan dates back to the ninth century. At that time, the region was an important junction on the Silk Road trade route that connected Europe with Asia. Turkmen Jews adopted a lot of practices and customs from the surrounding environment, while some are unique to the community. During the 20th century, the Soviets effectively suppressed all Jewish culture in the Turkmen SSR, and it never recovered. Today, approximately 700 Jews live in Turkmenistan, primarily in Ashkhabad, Turkmenbashi, Mary, and Dashoguz. Many of them are Ashkenazim whose ancestors fled from Eastern Europe during WWII. A tiny group of Bukharan Jews live in villages on the border with Uzbekistan.

[dribs-and-drabbles]

Thanks for the tag @colourme-feral!

I've been tagged in other things recently (as in, this year 😂) which I didn't get round to doing, so I'm doing this one straight away. It helps that I've just been listening to some songs in my 'liked songs' list on spotify that I had forgotten about and are really quite brilliant.

RULES: put 5 songs you actually listen to, then tag 10 people.

1. The Glance of the Beloved by Alireza Ghorbani

2. Baytay by Ashkhabad

3. Ça va ça vient by Vitaa & Slimane

4. Wake us up by Maja Långbacka & Matilda Bådagård

5. Much to Touch by Planningtorock

I have no idea who has done this or not, but here's ten eleven: @elnotwoods @callipigio @dimplesandfierceeyes @grapejuicegay @twig-tea @dragonsareawesome123 @mysterygrl20 @my-rose-tinted-glasses @slayerkitty @belladonna-and-the-sweetpeas @celestial-sapphicss

[shieldagentnatasharomanoff]

closed starter for @seesbetterfromadistance - A beginning steeped in blood

A scream sounded somewhere in the distance. Everything was dull, red tendrils of pain edged into her field of vision making it swim and hard to focus. Her lungs were burning and her legs finally seemed to give out from under her. The black widow was stuck.

Too late she realized that the scream belonged to her, that her legs hadn’t given out but she was simply pinned against the wall of a flat roof in Ashkhabad. Her hand reached up to pull it out, panic rising. She needed to get away, she didn’t want to be here. It hurt, memories and pictures bubbled to the surface, operation tables, a blue liquid pumped through a needle into her skin, dancing lessons, her first debut as a ballerina, a knife in her hand, blood dripping from a throat she’d just slit, the eyes of a terrified child.

Another scream erupted from her throat, defiant, frustrated this time. What had they done to her? What had she done? Natalia tried to rip free from the restrained of the arrow, only to wince and spill liquid red onto the grey concrete.

A shadow loomed above her. A disconnected voice inside her head told her that she needed to get her senses in order, that she was made of marble and needed to rise and fight for her motherland... but Natalia was tired of fighting and tired of running. The archer following her had finally caught up. He was tall, dirtyblonde hair ruffled and covered in some nasty cuts they’d exchanged during their last meating just half a day prior.

“Go on then.” She told him without hostility, just exhausted, someone tired of life itself. “Take the shot.” Her green eyes looked up, facing the fate she surrendered to.

[grandmaster-anne]

1990: The Princess Royal listens as a doctor explains the treatment of pregnant mothers by placing them into pressure chambers to improve the flow of oxygen to their babies. She was visiting the scientific research institute at Ashkhabad, capital of Turkmania, USSR Visit

[petnews2day]

Russian Historian Polonsky: Russia Remains Top Dog In Central Asia

New Post has been published on https://petnews2day.com/pet-news/dog-news/russian-historian-polonsky-russia-remains-top-dog-in-central-asia/

Russian Historian Polonsky: Russia Remains Top Dog In Central Asia

Due to Russia’s preoccupation with Ukraine, there have been articles appearing in the Russian media that Russian influence in Central Asia is in jeopardy, and is being challenged by the West and by Turkey. This is reflected in agreement is some Central Asian capitals to go along with financial sanctions on Russia. Since this can be considered indirect criticism of Putin’s policy, articles such as the article by writer and historian Andrey Polonsky titled “Central Asia Remains Ours”. The West is distant and Russia is close. The Soviet experience, with its mistakes is still considered a liberating experience from colonialism and an engine of economic progress. Moreover, with Russia, the Central Asian leaders do not need to fear a “color revolution” such as occurred in Ukraine and Georgia in the name of greater democracy.

Polonsky’s article follows below: [1]

Russia-Central-Asia Summit in October 2022 (Source: Kremlin.ru)

In mid-October, the US Congressional Research Center issued a report on cooperation with Kazakhstan. The report’s conclusions are simple and predictable. The Americans objective is to fight, fight and fight the Russian presence once more in all spheres, but primarily in the realm of economics, current politics, culture, and ideology. To this end, Americans are willing not only to fund, foster, and nurture their own groups of influencers in government, business, and, most importantly, in the artistic and academic community, but also to promote the most radical anti-Russian sentiments among nationalist intellectuals, especially in the country’s south.

Right now, the Americans’ basic task is to harm Moscow to the maximum, and then, judging by how it goes, they will sort things out accordingly. We know full well how successfully they deal with such cases we know very well from the examples of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. But Kazakhstan case is a different thing. It is connected with Russia by thousands of ‘threads,’ and even Washington understands this. Thus, they are striving to act with redoubled vigor.

In principle, the US and its allies are implementing the same task throughout Central Asia: to oust Russia from the region is their wet dream. And, it would seem, by playing on the selfishness and injured ego of the local power elites, as well as on the conflicts between the Central Asian powers themselves, the Americans can achieve certain preferences.

So, it would’ve seemed that by playing on the selfishness and wounded ego of the local power elites, as well as on the conflicts between the Central Asian powers, the Americans can achieve determined preferences.

And yet, I believe that the capabilities of our geopolitical opponents remain limited.

In Astana, Alma-Ata, Tashkent, Bishkek, Samarkand, Dushanbe and even in Khorog and Ashkhabad we are still “our guys,” maybe not the most beloved, but understandable and close, while in contrast “they,” people of the West, promising benefits, attractive and courteous, are, undoubtedly, remote, not always comprehensible and dangerous for local elites. No one in Asia knows what kind of colored revolution they may yet start and how it will turn out.

But they know for sure that the Russians won’t futilely stir up trouble, provided they are not taunted excessively. This is still our Asia. And it is fundamentally important for the situation to remain unaltered.

The Central Asian states themselves, within their current borders, are the product of Soviet history. A special social world created in Central Asia, the unique character of which is keenly felt whenever one crosses the borders of the former Soviet Union, entering the region from the direction of the traditional East, was solely the result of the Soviet era transformations. Upon crossing the border, we immediately find ourselves in a very bizarrely arranged environment which went through “Soviet age,” and experienced modernization, which is difficult to fit into any standard template familiar to the Anglo-Saxons.

The pattern by which Westerners have been accustomed to scrutinize the East has always been crude and basic. Once an arrogant “Orientalism” was in, now it’s postcolonial discourse (especially in its left-liberal rendition, that is). “Colonialism”, “decolonization”, “post-colonial revival” are the trendy topics of the early 21st century that remain extremely relevant to the world agenda, including the US and Europe. The ideological bets of the great Central Asian discourse are being made on them (our opponents are ready to play the same card with greater or lesser success in the entire Post-Soviet space).

However, the fact is that Russian history poorly complies with this narrative, which, I’m not exaggerating, infuriates the enemy. They go out of their way to prove that Russia is a colonial power just like Britain, France, and others, but even worse. They understand that if they will be able to impose a false retrospective narrative on the local elites, the break with Russia will become a matter of political strategy. But this is on the surface. The Central Asian issue itself goes much deeper.

Starting from the end of the 18th century onward, for almost a century, Central Asia was an area of fierce conflict between the British and Russian empires. The British were panic-stricken by the emergence of Russians on the borders of British India, in the Pamirs, Tibet, and the Himalayas.

Their resistance was fierce but in vain. Khiva [Khoresm], Bukhara, Samarkand, and Kokand [Uzbek khanates in Central Asia] one by one fell under the rule of the “White Tsar.” The Russians’ development of Central Asia, the construction of new cities and railroads, and then the Soviet transformations in the Asian republics were a powerful challenge to the British colonial system. And, most significantly, this is exactly how Russians were perceived in the East, the Russians, the Soviets were bringing liberation from colonial dependence.

Nowadays people try to forget or ignore this issue, but for India, the Arab East and other countries, even for Turkey, the October Revolution had a connotative meaning. It, as Soviet Orientalists liked to put it, “awakened the peoples.” …

And the memory that for decades Russia was bringing liberation and hope, rather than enslavement, is still alive in Central and South Asia, despite the blow that was dealt to it by the troubles of Soviet history, policies of our adversaries, the collapse of the USSR, the Afghan war, and Islamic radicalism. Russians are not colonizers; they do not look down on the people of the East. The latter intuition is still the main obstacle to Western influence in the region.

The capabilities of the USSR/Russia in the East were well understood by our enemies during the “classic” Cold War era. And in spite of the intellectual disease that suddenly befell upon them, they still understand it in some detail. Hence the “studies,” numerous seminars, grant projects and everything else we can imagine from our 1990s that are financed by them.

The only task of such pseudoscientific and pseudo-cultural activity (I want to use the slang word “commotion”) is to demonstrate that the Russian presence was just colonization, that is, they strive to eliminate and distort the historical memory of the twentieth century.

But the facts are many, and they resist, [to the Western agenda]

Be that as it may, we must not take a defensive stance.

It is necessary to be proactive, to make clear statements, to value our own agents of influence, and to remember the achievements of the past. The main thing is not to foolishly play along with the enemy, considering the current, partly unpredictable, emigration of the “fifth column” to Tashkent, Astana and Bishkek, and in our own attitude towards Asian [labour] migrants, who have remained in Russia (because their every testimony resonates acutely in Asia), in the usage of “soft power,” as well as in specific political decisions.

You can’t make mistakes. Central Asian Post-Soviet states are still crucially important to us, especially considering that we talk about the turn from Eurocentrism to a multipolar world. So far we have strong positions based on real historical foundations. We must not let them be destroyed.

  [1] Vz.ru, October 27,2022.

[travelbinge]

By Stéphane Gisiger

Ashgabat, Ashkhabad, Turkmenistan

[viliere]

Ashkhabad - "Bayaty", 2000, live

[misslubaluft]

Atabay Carygulyyew - Yaman ykbal 

[gliklofhameln]

Nodar Djindjihashvili (American, b. Russia, 1939-2002), 1978-80

Scene in the Bet Hayyim (House of Life) Section of the Jewish Quarter, Tbilisi

Baking of Mazzot, Tbilisi

Jewish Family in Front of Their House, Makhachkal

A Salesman in the Jewish Quarter, Bukhara

Waiting For the Minyan in Synagogue, Ashkhabad

These photographs are only a tiny part of those we succeeded in taking during a two-year secret journey through all of Russia, in search of the vestiges of a once thriving Jewish life and culture within what is now the USSR. I planned the journey many years ago, but only in 1978 (prior to my departure from the Soviet Union) was I able to make the trip, accompanied by my friend, Albert Ben-Zion. It was the first of its kind and, I believe, the last; it was for me, the most depressing yet, in some ways, the most exciting experience of my life.

Most important to me were the answers I found during the journey. It seems to me now that being Jewish and embracing it pushes one beyond the boundary of a nationality or a minority condition. It forces one to get deeply involved in a perpetual situation, to which there is only one answer - that is, to stay within the Jewish faith. Once this is recognized by a Jew, his or her individual situation becomes a justification for existence.

— Nodar Djindjihashvili

[sovietpostcards]

Nikolai Drozdov and Pyotr Vtorov in Ashkhabad (October 4, 1978)

[noaasanctuaries]

Looks like this loggerhead sea turtle is ready to give these divers a tour of the wreck near Monitor National Marine Sanctuary!

Ashkhabad was a 55-foot tanker lost in 1942 as a casualty of World War II’s Battle of the Atlantic. Interested in learning more about the wrecks found near the sanctuary? Visit https://monitor.noaa.gov/shipwrecks/ to dive into history!

(Photo: NOAA. Image description: A loggerhead turtle swims by a shipwreck with two divers swimming in the distance.)

[vincekris]

Silk weavers at lunch break in a carpet factory, Ashkhabad, Turkmenistan, 1996.Photo by Ian Berry

[socialistarchitecture]

:
.
“Return from the future” is part of TENT BIENNALE 11-13 DECEMBER 2020, Kolkata, India
Streaming on 13-15th DECEMBER from 9AM IST each day, available for viewing over next 48 hours. Register here to watch the film: https://bit.ly/37w57kh
Last date to register: 10 Dec, 2020
.
RETURN FROM THE FUTURE, HD, 43’
Camera: Azat Ruziev
Image&Sound Editor: Denis Bartenev
Directed by Stefan Rusu Synopsis: The title refers to the plot of the science fiction novel “Return from the Stars” by Stanislav Lem. The pilot Gal Bregg returns from the space expedition, after 127 years of terrestrial time, during which time life on the Earth has radically changed. The plot of the novel explore the ideas of social alienation, cultural shock and dystopia, which is synchronized with the current state of the city and the returned cosmonaut resembles the position of architect that return to the site he designed in other century.
The film is a visual essay on the current state of conservation of modernist buildings from soviet period located in Bishkek city. The initial idea is to investigate iconic buildings and interview a number of experts who introduces various aspects related to the former and current use as well the future faith of the buildings in new political and economic circumstances, when the political agenda shifted from communist ideology to free market economy and promotion of national values. All together the film is a comment on the state of conservation of the buildings protected and included on the list of national heritage, but also an overview on recent urban changes and transformations occurred in Bishkek. Film was produced in the frame of “INSULAR MODERNITIES” project and will comprise a series (3-5 films) of documentaries about modernist soviet architecture from Central Asian countries (Almaty, Ashkhabad, Tashkent, Dushanbe, etc.)
.
©insularmodernities
. (at Kolkata, West Bengal, India)
https://www.instagram.com/p/CIlsA8ps_Hk/?igshid=hqfjvhj42yxk

[lescuriositesdelafoire]

Georgi Zimin, At the Ashkhabad Marketplace, 1934

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

Bizarre entry to Moon’s orbit as empire fell and a cult flourished

Hamish McDonald

Asia-Pacific editor, Sydney Morning Herald

September 8, 2012

To Moscow with the Moonies! Of all the assignments that can come in a reporter’s career, this had to be the weirdest.

Across my desk at the old Far Eastern Economic Review office in Hong Kong in early 1990 came a letter inviting me to speak at the forthcoming World Media Conference in Moscow, all expenses paid.

It was clear from back-up information that this was ultimately sponsored by the Unification Church. Indeed its founder, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, would preside in person.

Quibbles about dubious sponsorship were set aside by my boss: this was a genuine news event, one of the more bizarre conjunctions happening as the Soviet system unravelled after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

On arrival at Moscow’s international airport, Moon’s guests were ushered into a shabby VIP room with an equally dubious collection of VIPs, including several former Latin American dictators, the widow of Egypt’s president Anwar Sadat and a former vice-president to Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines.

At the Slavyanskaya Hotel, fellow delegates proved an eclectic mix. The most engaging company at the breakfast buffet was Nikolai Tolstoy, a British author of wartime history and a descendant of Russia’s greatest writer, and Sir Alfred Sherman, a lively London political gnome who had been a trusted adviser to Margaret Thatcher.

At the opening session in the main hall, some of America’s most fiercely anti-communist commentators and think-tankers filed in. This was a gathering of hawks in the very heart of the “evil empire” – there to watch its downfall. Some did not trust their eyes, wondering aloud if they were being inveigled into a Soviet front organisation.

Moon and his wife greeted delegates in a reception line. His handshake was perfunctory. The eyes in the granite face barely made contact. If he was the new messiah, it wasn’t much of a blessing.

Rising from a vast podium, Moon began a sermon. It went back to basics in his theology, starting with the original sin, which he said was Eve’s illicit sex with Satan, the unfinished mission of Jesus that Moon himself had taken up by forming the “perfect family”, and the ongoing battle with Satan that would end with Armageddon, fought roughly along the 38th parallel between North and South Korea.

As it went beyond an hour, Moon’s audience of Cold War warriors gazed fixedly at different points of the ceiling, not catching anyone’s eyes.

Next morning in the breakfast line, one of them quipped: “I gotta say, I was rootin’ for Satan.”

My turn to speak came, after a former Japanese vice-minister of transport suggested a network of highways around Asia, so that perfect families could motor over to see one another. I gave a rundown on current Asian affairs. The audience dozed. A few journalistic colleagues smirked.

After the conference, I went on a tour of the Soviet republics in central Asia. Russian settlers gathered fearfully in their nomenklatura clubs and hotels, getting drunk and dancing the lambada. In Ashkhabad, Ukrainian missile officers shared gassy Georgian champagne and wondered in which army they would be the following year. In Samarkand, local Aeroflot pilots filled me with vodka and put me on the flight back to Moscow.

When I arrived, the May Day parade in Red Square had become a shambles, the crowds waving the Russian tricolour and imperial double-headed eagle instead of the hammer and sickle.

With this notch in his pulpit, Moon was on his way to the final stage of his crusade against communism. A year or two later, he visited Pyongyang to meet Kim Il-sung, founder of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the lifelong political satan in the Moon world view. Kim gave him a licence to set up a car assembly plant.

“They were reconciled,” says Leonid Petrov, a Korea specialist at the University of Sydney. And why not? As Petrov notes, Moon’s “cocktail” of religions and ideologies – Christianity, Confucianism, shamanism and anti-communism – was a mirror-image of Kim’s Juche (self-reliance) mix of nationalism, communism, neo-Confucianism, and Korean nativism.

Both played heavily on the Korean dream of national reunification. Moon was to claim Kim nominated him as the one to bring the two halves together. When Moon died this week, aged 92, it still hadn’t happened.

Cults flourish when empires weaken. In 19th century Korea, as European powers and Japan forced the hermit kingdom open, there was the Tong Hak (Eastern Teaching) movement, which became fiercely anti-foreign, like the Taiping and Boxers in neighbouring China.

Moon’s church grew in a Korea humiliated by 35 years of Japanese annexation, then ravaged by the vicious Korean War. It was one of the exotic faiths, including even Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo (which carried out the 1995 sarin gas attack in the Tokyo metro), that were taken up by some Russians in the “crisis of faith” as communism collapsed.

Moon was a prominent lobbyist for South Korea’s military dictator, Park Chung-hee. Moon’s jail term in the US for [document fraud and] tax evasion was seen as a kind of martyrdom by his followers, and a badge of honour among many American neo-cons.

Criticising him was risky. A skinny Presbyterian theology professor, Tahk Myeong-hwan, who set out to expose Moon and other cults, was arrested many times. I am told Tahk was found murdered [outside] his apartment more than a decade ago. He would have angered many fanatics, not just the Moonies.

South Korea is now a prosperous, wired society, where the past that nurtured Moon and the Unification Church is a foreign country for the young. That country still exists across the 38th parallel. 

What strange flowers of belief will emerge there, in North Korea?

Strange flowers of belief ... Unification Church founder Reverend Sun Myung Moon.

_______________________________________

A representative of Rev. Sun Myung Moon offered a Russian minister $1 million as a personal gift to distribute Moonie textbooks

My experience within the hierarchy of the Moon cult during its years of expansion in Russia and in the CIS

Press Release on the FFWPU by the Department of Communication, Nizhny Novgorod province, Russia

Testimony of Tahk Myeong-hwan who was murdered

World Domination – Sun Myung Moon’s many attempts ended in failure