Dictators like to move people around. Stalin, for instance. From the summer of 1941 through the fall of 1942, with the Russian front facing massive bombardment and Nazi troops on the ground, he decided to relocate civilians, and entire industries, to safer regions in the eastern Soviet Union. The Urals, Siberia, the middle Volga, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan eventually received sixteen million evacuees, perhaps the most ever moved across land by a single directive.

I have always liked weird historical facts, but I never would have known this one had my best friend in middle school, Yasmina, not been from Uzbekistan. Her family moved to Brooklyn in the early nineties, after the breakup of the Soviet Union; Yasmina was just a little kid, so she didn’t remember much, but she had ab

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