I had set down my teacup: “All that is fascinating, Leutnant. But I have to stick to more concrete questions.”—“Oh, sorry, of course! What you’re interested in, basically, is the Soviet nationalities policies. But you’ll see that my digressions weren’t useless: those policies are based precisely on language. In czarist times, everything was much simpler: the conquered natives could do pretty much whatever they wanted, so long as they behaved and paid their taxes. The elite could be educated in Russian and even be Russianized—a number of Russian princely families were of Caucasian origin, especially after the marriage of Ivan the Fourth with a Kabardian princess, Maria Temrukovna. At the end of the last century, Russian researchers began studying these peoples, especially from an ethnological standpoint, and they came out with some remarkable studies, like those of Vsevolod Miller, who was also an excellent linguist. Most of these works are available in Germany and some have even been translated; but there’s also a number of obscure or limited-edition monographs that I hope to locate in the libraries of the autonomous republics. After the Revolution and the civil war, the Bolshevik government, inspired in the beginning by a work of Lenin’s, little by little outlined an absolutely original nationalities policy: Stalin, who at that time was the People’s Commissar for Nationalities, played a major role. This policy is an astonishing synthesis of, on one hand, entirely objective scientific studies, like those of the great Caucasologists Yakovlev and Trubetskoy; on the other, of an internationalist communist ideology, incapable at the beginning of taking the fact of ethnicity into account; and, finally, of the reality of ethnic relationships and aspirations in the field. The Soviet solution can be summarized in this way: a people, or a nationality as they say, equals a language plus a territory. It’s in order to obey this principle that they tried to provide the Jews, who had a language—Yiddish—but not a territory, with an autonomous region in the Far East, Birobidjan; but apparently the experiment failed, and the Jews didn’t want to live there. Then, according to the demographic weight of each nationality, the Soviets created a complex scale of levels of administrative sovereignty, with precise rights and limitations for each level. The most important nationalities, such as the Armenians, the Georgians, and the so-called Azeris, just like the Ukrainians and the Byelorussians, are entitled to an SSR, a Soviet Socialist Republic. In Georgia, even university studies can be carried out, all the way through, in Kartvelian, and scientific works of great value are published in that language. The same is true for Armenian. It should be said that those are two very old literary languages, with a very rich tradition, that were written down long before Russian and even Slavonic, first transcribed by Cyril and Methodius. Also, if you’ll allow me a digression, Mesrop, who at the beginning of the fifth century created the Georgian and Armenian alphabets—although those two languages don’t have the slightest connection to each other—must have been a linguist of genius. His Georgian alphabet is entirely phonemic. Which is not something you can say about the Caucasian alphabets created by the Soviet linguists. It is also said that Mesrop invented a script for the Caucasian Albanians; but unfortunately no trace of that remains. To continue, you then have the autonomous republics, such as Kabardino-Balkaria, Chechnya-Ingushetia, or Daghestan. The Volga Germans had the same status, but as you know they were all deported and their republic was dissolved. And then it continues with the autonomous territories and so on. A key point is the notion of literary language. To have its own republic, a people must necessarily have a literary, that is to say, written, language. Now, aside from Kartvelian, as I’ve just explained, no Caucasian language fulfilled this condition at the time of the Revolution. There were some attempts made in the nineteenth century, but solely for scientific purposes, and there are some Avar inscriptions in Arabic characters that go back to the tenth or eleventh century, but that’s all. This is where the Soviet linguists have carried out a formidable, colossal work: they created alphabets, based on Latin characters first and then on Cyrillic, for eleven Caucasian languages as well as for a large number of Turkic languages, including many Siberian tongues. These alphabets of course are far from perfect from a technical standpoint. Cyrillic is hardly adapted to these languages: modified Latin characters, as they attempted in the 1920s, or even the Arabic alphabet would have suited them much better. They did make a curious exception for Abkhaz, which is written now with a modified Georgian alphabet; but the reasons for this are certainly not technical. This obligatory use of Cyrillic has generated somewhat grotesque contortions, such as the use of diacritic signs and of digraphs, trigraphs, and even, in Kabardian, to represent the voiceless aspirated labialized uvular plosive, of a tetragraph.” He snatched a piece of paper and scribbled some signs on the back, then held it out to show me the inscription КХЪУ. “That’s one letter. It’s as ridiculous as when we write, for Щ”—he scribbled again—“shch, or even worse, like the French, chtch. And then, also, some of the new spelling systems are extremely erratic. In Abkhaz, the marking of aspirates and ejectives is amazingly inconsistent. Mesrop would have been scandalized. Finally, and this is the worst, they insisted that each language have a different alphabet. Linguistically, that makes for some absurd situations, like Щ which in Kabard represents sh and in Adyghe ch, whereas it’s the same language; in Adyghe, sh is written as Щ, and in Kabardian ch is written as ЩЪ. It’s the same thing for the Turkic languages, where for instance the soft g is noted in a different way in almost every dialect. Of course, they did it on purpose: it was a political decision, not a linguistic one, which obviously aimed at separating the neighboring peoples as much as possible. Now here’s a key for you: related peoples had to stop functioning as a network, horizontally, so that they would all refer vertically in parallel to each other, to the central government, which thus takes the position of the final arbiter of conflicts that it itself continually stirs up. But to return to these alphabets, despite all my criticisms, it’s still an immense achievement, all the more so since it came with an entire educational program. In fifteen, sometimes ten years, entire illiterate peoples were provided, in their own language, with newspapers, books, magazines. Children are learning to read in their native language before they learn Russian. It’s extraordinary.”

Voss went on; I took notes as fast as I could. But what charmed me the most, more than the details, was his relation to his knowledge. The intellectuals I had known, like Ohlendorf or Höhn, were continually developing their knowledge and their theories; when they spoke, it was either to present their ideas or to drive them forward. Voss’s knowledge, on the other hand, seemed to live inside him almost like an organism, and Voss enjoyed this knowledge as he would a mistress, sensually; he bathed in it, constantly discovered new aspects of it, already present in him but of which he had not yet been aware, and from it he took the pure pleasure of a child who has learned how to open and close a door or fill a pail with sand and empty it; and whoever listened to him shared this pleasure, since his talk was made up of capricious meanderings and perpetual surprises; you could laugh at it, but only with the laughter of pleasure of the father who watches his child open and close a door ten times in succession while laughing. I went back to see Voss many times, and each time he welcomed me with the same relaxed courtesy and the same enthusiasm. We soon struck up that frank, rapid friendship that war and exceptional situations favor. We would stroll through the noisy streets of Simferopol, enjoying the sun, in the midst of a motley crowd of German, Romanian, and Hungarian soldiers, of exhausted Hiwis, of tanned and turbaned Tatars, and of Ukrainian peasant women with rosy cheeks. Voss knew all the chaikhonas in the city and conversed familiarly, in various dialects, with the obsequious or jolly natives who served us, apologizing for the bad green tea. He took me one day to Bakhchisaray to visit the superb little palace of the Khans of Crimea, built in the sixteenth century by Italian, Persian, and Ottoman architects and by Russian and Ukrainian slaves; and the Chufut-Kale, the Fort of the Jews, a city of caves first dug into the chalk cliffs in the sixth century and occupied by various peoples, the last of whom, who had given the place its Persian name, were in fact Karaïtes, a dissident Jewish sect that, as I explained to Voss, had been exempted in 1937, based on a decision from the Ministry of the Interior, from the German racial laws, and had consequently, here in Crimea, also been spared by the special measures of the SP. “Apparently, the Karaïtes of Germany presented some czarist documents, including a ukase signed by Catherine the Great, that affirmed that they were not of Jewish origin but had converted to Judaism at a later period. The specialists in the ministry accepted the authenticity of these documents.”—“Yes, I heard talk of that,” Voss said with a little smile. “They were clever.” I would have liked to ask him what he meant by that, but he had already changed the subject. The day was radiant. It wasn’t too hot yet, and the sky was pale and clear; in the distance, from the top of the cliffs, you could see the sea, a somewhat grayer expanse beneath the sky. From the southwest vaguely reached us the monotonous rumble of the artillery pounding Sebastopol, resounding gently along the mountains. Filthy little Tatars in rags were playing among the ruins or guarding their goats; many of them observed us curiously, but bolted when Voss hailed them in their language.