Orator

A stylised, slightly idealised portrait of the life of Uzbek Muslims at the start of the twentieth century, just before the changes that the Russian Revolution would bring. Iskander, a small trader, lives happily with his two wives in an Uzbek village. After the death of his brother he gets his wife too, following Muslim tradition. At first he is worried if his idyllic life with his two beloved wives won’t be disrupted by this third wife; he is after all obliged to look after all of them well. But everything seems to work out. The problems only start when their lives are overshadowed by the arrival of the Bolsheviks, who come from Russia and ‘have brought the best for the Uzbek population’. The Bolsheviks start preaching their ideology about the agricultural community. At first Iskander helps them enthusiastically: carried away by the ideas of Communism, he grows to be the leader of his fellow countrymen. But then the new ideology starts having a negative influence on his private life. Polygamy is banned by the Bolsheviks, and in the meantime the dominant Bolsjevik female leader is trying to seduce him. Slowly he starts to see how his people is suffering under the ‘Red plague’. Poetic and idyllic at first, then much grimmer, Orator provides a clear picture of the Russification of a Central-Asian people that was not allowed to think and speak about its own traditions for a century. —IFFR