Word: kirghiz
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Sakin Begmatova, Foreign Minister of the Kirghiz Soviet Socialist Republic,* began by stating, "We wanted to make sure that no one strangles the Afghans' people's revolution." As the conversation went on, she recalled an incident-before the April 1978 revolution that brought the Marxists to power in Kabul-when the Soviets helped the Afghans fight a plague of locusts near the border. "That could have spread to us," noted Begmatova, "the locusts threatened crops on both sides of the border...
...Dalai Lama's Potala Palace is no more than a well-tended cultural relic. Urumchi, the capital of the Sinkiang Uighur autonomous region, has grown from 80,000 people in 1949 to 800,000 today, of whom 60% are Han, only 40% the traditional nomadic peoples-Uighurs, Kazakhs, Kirghiz and Mongols...
...Sinkiang's 8,000,000 people are Chinese, many of them recent settlers imported to strengthen Peking's ethnic hold. The others come from at least 14 minority nationalities. Some 4,000,000 are Uighurs, descendants of the 9th century Turkic invaders, and 600,000 are Kazakhs, Kirghiz and Tadjiks. Divided by customs and heritage, the various minorities nonetheless are united in their hate of their present masters, who first penetrated Sinkiang under the Han Dynasty...
Russia and China have been wrestling for years along the vast, sparsely settled 4,100-mile common frontier, from Kha barovsk in the east to Kirghiz in the west. The first recorded battle between Russian and Chinese troops took place in the Amur River valley in the 1680s, and since Sino-Soviet relations began to deteriorate in earnest in 1956, repeated incidents have occurred. Major trouble flared in 1960 and again in 1962, when Pravda reported that 5,000 border "in cidents" had occurred within twelve months. The Russians have since used troops to evict Chinese squatters from islands...
According to agents of the K.G.B. (Committee for State Security, or secret police), the textile operation had flourished since 1955, when Comrades Gazenfranz and Appelbaum arrived in Frunze, capital of Soviet Central Asia's Kirghiz Republic, with a proposition for the director of the state-owned knit-goods mill. Instead of producing sweaters, they suggested, why not overcome the drastic shortage of curtain lace, a commodity highly prized both as a status symbol and as the only way to secure privacy in a land without window shades or blinds. The trio promptly set to work importing machinery and bribing...