On the other side of the border back in Uzbekistan, we quickly reached Nukus, the capital of the Karakalpakstan Autonomous Region. A republic within a republic (neither of which is anything like a republic), Stalin glommed this region onto the Uzbek SSR in 1926 when he couldn’t think of anything to do with its large area and small population.

Since then, Karakalpakstan has been hard hit by one disaster after another, particularly the drying up of the Aral Sea, which was once the world’s fourth largest inland lake. Starting in the 1950′s, the Soviet Union and later the independent ‘Stans consciously diverted the Amu Darya river to such an extent that not a drop of its water now makes it to the Aral basin. In theory, this was to irrigate fields of the all-powerful cotton industry, but in fact more than two thirds of the diverted water evaporates or sinks into the sand before reaching the fields. As a result, the Aral Sea is now a wasteland and the local fishing industry is gone. The residents who haven’t moved away are left in an increasingly dry climate swept by toxic dust storms.

We obviously didn’t want to spend a long time here, but there was one place we had to visit.

Nukus has one of the most remarkable art museums in the world. A Russian artist named Igor Savitsky moved to Nukus in the 1950s and began collecting avant-garde art both locally and in Moscow. Many of these artists had been forced underground or into the gulags by official policies that viewed “art for art’s sake” as bourgeois and counter-revolutionary. Somehow, because Nukus was at the end of the earth, Savitsky was able to get away with buying and displaying this art that was forbidden everywhere else. By the time he died in 1984, he had assembled one of the most remarkable collections in the world.

The museum is interesting because it displays a large set of work from a few artists who are completely unknown to me and probably most others outside of Russia. Some of the work is quite remarkable and inventive: for example, an artist painting his “self-portrait as a sculpture”. It’s worth the trip.