The Second Iron Curtain

When we say “the Middle East” we are usually thinking of a physical area bounded on the south by the Sahara and the waters of the Indian Ocean; a cultural area where Islamic and Arab civilization is the dominant factor. In one direction only we find neither a cultural nor a physical barrier but simply a political barrier: the boundary of the U.S.S.R. . . . Beyond it there is another huge area that is equally the Middle East, part of the great Islamic cultural belt.

Moscow managed to divide the Middle East by an Iron Curtain just as it divided Europe. Yet the setting up of miles of barbed wire and the intrusion of divisions of Russian frontier troops have no more de-Islamized and de-Turkized central Asia than they have converted Poland into a non-European community.

In the southern, or free, part of the Middle East, the Russians strongly advocate the unity of the various Arab-speaking peoples. In their own area, they strongly suppress pan-Turkism, the equivalent. In their propaganda, they conduct violent attacks on alliances between the United Kingdom and independent states of Arabia. Criticism of their own rule over the colonial territories of Turkestan and the Caucasus is treated as vicious incitement. . . . The Russians have taken every possible step to destroy Islamic and Turkic sentiments. First, they have split up the nationalities of Turkestan politically and attempted to exaggerate the diversity and to deny the common features of their languages and cultures; and they have provided them with false histories. Turkestan as a unit--indeed, even as a word--survives in the Soviet only in the “Turkestan Military district,” under a Russian general. . . .

The whole of the vast area of the Soviet Middle East retains a potential dynamism against Communist rule, just as--indeed, much more than--Arab nationalism does against the more flexible West. When and if the Soviet regime breaks up or evolves, this area will come back into the world. Even in its present unbreakable quarantine, it plays an important part. It is kept alive by the existence of the great Islamic culture to the south of it; and at the same time, that culture, with all its temporary emphasis against the West, never entirely forgets the far greater hostages it has had torn from it, and looks forward to one day receiving back.

--Robert Conquest, reviewing the book “Turkism and the Soviets,” 1957.