Gustav Krist

Gustav ("Gurk") Krist (29 July, 1894-1937) was an Austrian adventurer, prisoner-of-war, carpet-dealer and author.His accounts of unmonitored journeys, in a politically closed and tightly-controlled Russian, and then Soviet Central Asia, offer a unique glimpse into the essentially unchanged Muslim Central Asia before Sovietization.

Background

The Viennese-born and educated Krist worked as a technician in Germany before being mobilised as a private in the Austro-Hungarian Army on the outbreak of war. Early in the war (November 1914) he was severely wounded and captured by the Russians at the San river defensive line on the Eastern front. This led to internment in Russian Turkistan with other German and Austrian prisoners-of-war.

Internment

His first camp was sited at Katta-Kurgan a frontier town with the Emirate of Bukhara near Samarkand. With a natural gift for languages, before the war he had acquired some Russian and a smattering of some oriental languages. Building on this, and acting as interpreter, he was able to become familiar with the peoples, places and conditions of the region over the eight years he remained there. Conditions in the camps were harsh however. Many of his fellow prisoners died of typhus, forced labour and starvation, or in fighting following the collapse of the Central Government. Krist kept a diary of his experiences during the whole period written on cigarette papers and secreted in a Bukharan hubble-bubble pipe to avoid it being confiscated. After the Bolshevik revolution the region was both dangerous and politically confused as Soviets, White Army, Basmachi insurgents and foreign powers struggled for power.

This region of ancient Silk Road cities had been closed to foreigners on political grounds during the war. In 1917 Krist moved to Samarkand were he worked in the town. Trading with the Sarts and being able to talk to them directly he had a sharp grasp of the situation. His writings offer a valuable glimpse of various peoples and cultures in this area of Central Asia. For seventy years after him the area was seldom visited by foreign visitors unencumbered by official controls and his accounts show life before the Sovietization of the region. Krist came to love the nomadic peoples of the region as well as the Islamic architecture of Samarkand, especially the Shah-i-Zinda complex

Various Escapes

In 1916 Krist escaped Katta-Kurgan to Tabriz in Persia, but was unable to return to Austria due to conditions in Kurdistan and British control of south Persia. En route he had been recaptured but jumped a prison-train and made his way via Merv, Northern Afghanistan and Meshed to Tabriz. As Tabriz was a principal centre for Persian carpet production and trade, here he began trading in wool and carpets around Persia for a native Iranian, but was captured in the Russian swoop on the German community in Tabriz.

He was now sent to Fort Alexandovsky an isolated penal-camp on the Caspian where troublesome prisoners were concentrated. The conditions here were atrocious and eventually when it was closed down due to Red Cross investigations he was moved to Samarkand were he was assigned work. After the Bolsheviks freed the prisoners of war, Krist and others established various wheeling-and-dealing industries. Krist also travelled with Red Cross delegations across Turkistan and in a bizarre episode entered the service of the Emir of Bukhara who was striving to re-establish his full independence in the collapse of the Russian Empire, and helped him set up a mint. This was subsequently wrecked when Krist was driven out of town by the conservative religious leaders. Krist was able to visit the town and the Ark Citadel before it's destruction. Bukhara fell to the Soviets under Mikhail Frunze in September 1920 after four day's fighting which left much of the town in ruins.

The local soviet in Turkistan promised a train to take the ex-prisoners home in 1920 for aid in suppressing mutinous Bolshevik soldiers in Samarkand. So NCO Krist led a force of Austrian POWs in disarming them. After the Austrians had handed in their arms this was reneged on. In fact Krist was amongst those who were later condemned to death for counter-revolutionary activity. Luckily this was commuted to three-months imprisonment at the last minute leaving time to arrange a pardon. Krist and the remaining prisoners were repatriated late in 1921 through the Baltic States and Germany, having to cross a Russia suffering from famine and civil-war.

Adventurous return

After returning briefly to Vienna, in 1922 he moved back to Tabriz in Persia to work again as a carpet dealer. He transversed Persia for the next two years, but even this work became routine for him and a chance meeting with some Turkmen tribesmen in 1924, led him to slip across into Soviet territory, which was even then strengthening its controls along the frontier in that area.

Travelling without papers in Soviet territory was impossible. Krist said he'd "would sooner pay a call on the Devil and his mother-in-law in Hell" than attempt to travel without them. However using the I.D. card of a naturalised fellow ex-prisoner he knew in Turkmenistan he came up with a scheme to get recognition as a State Geologist of the Uzbeg Soviet in Samarkand. This enabled him to explore the mountainous region to the east without hindrance.

He crossed the waterless Kara-Kum desert (the “black, or terrible, one”) to the Amu Darya. Always a keen observer and with his gift for striking up conversations in Deh i Nau he fell in with a GPU officer who had witnessed the death of Enver Pasha. After revisiting Bukhara, Samarkand and (pre-earthquake) Tashkent he moved up the Ferghana Valley. There he encountered the Kara Kirghiz (Black Kirghiz) with whom he wintered during their last annual migration into the Pamirs, before the Soviet forces conquered them and they were collectivized. Working his way through modern-day Tajikistan he made his way to the Persian frontier and recrossed with some difficulty.

Final years

In 1926 he returned permanently to Vienna where he became editor of “"Die Teppichborse"” a monthly carpet industry trade-magazine. Here with some leisure time and stimulated by occasional visits of former comrades he pieced together his war-diary as “Pascholl plenny!” (literally 'Get a move on, prisoner'). In 1936 he had his manuscript accepted by a publisher, and this led onto the writing of his account of his 1924-1925 adventure as “Alone through the forbidden Land”. He died as it came off the presses, from the serious injuries he received during the war.

Bibliography

* "Pascholl plenny!" (Wien: L. W. Seidel & sohn, 1936), translated by E. O. Lorimer as “Prisoner in the Forbidden Land”.

* "Allein durchs verbotene Land: Fahrtenin Zentralasien" (Wien: Schroll, 1937), translated by E.O. Lorimer as "Alone through the Forbidden Land, journeys in disguise through Soviet Central Asia": 1939.

Krist's translator Emily Overend Lorimer (1881-1949) was an Oxford philologist, an extensive translator, Editor of the "Basrah Times" during the First World War, and wife of the British Political Officer in Bahrain. She had links to the Red Cross.

ources

* Reader’s Union magazine. "“Readers’ News” No. 20 (April 1939): Travel Special".

* Hopkirk, Peter. "Setting the East Ablaze: Lenin's Dream of an Empire in Asia." (London: Kodansha International, 1984).

External links

* [http://www.cyber-adventures.com/kgd.html Tarantula schnapps story, from the “Cadogan Guide to Central Asia” by Giles Whittell]

* [http://www.welney.org.uk/Camtrans/Camtrans_books/alone_through_forbidden_land.html Short description of "Alone through the forbidden land"]