Soviet Life

Spies are a feature of countless works of fiction in which they often discover secrets on which the fate of nations hang in the balance. Reality is generally rather more mundane as spies often gather low-level intelligence that only makes sense when it is examined by analysts and compared to information from other sources. Espionage provides clues to what the enemy is planning, but on its own it rarely changes the course of a war. Moreover, real spies are generally anonymous and not the bold, swashbuckling action heroes depicted in fiction.

Initially a victory line where Allies met at the end of WWII, the Iron Curtain quickly became the front of a new kind of war. But what has the Iron Curtain left in its wake? Timothy Phillips travels its full 3,000-mile route to craft this new people's history of a defining twentieth-century conflict. Here, in the borderlands where a powerful clash of civilizations took form in concrete and barbed wire, he uncovers the remarkable stories of everyday people forever imprinted by life in the Curtain's shadow.

Поначалу его звали не Ахмад-ака, а Ахмад-палван. Ни одно крупное событие в кишлаке не обходилось без него, все звали его помочь в беде и поучаствовать в праздничных соревнованиях борцов.

Каххар Шадиев, уроженец кишлака, уже много лет живущий в городе, получает телеграмму из родных мест: родная тётка сообщает, что очень больна и хотела бы повидаться с ним.