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Djamolidine Hasanov, but his friends and family normally called him Djamo, and his mother sometimes called him Moli or just Mo. His schoolteacher called him Young Pioneer Hasanov, and in the playground he was known as Djimi or Rat, if anyone wanted to tease him. As a cyclist he wanted to be known as the Vulture from Baku. In addition,everything could be written using different symbols. The three generations in Djamolidine’s family each used a different alphabet: he himself used Cyrillic for writing in Russian and Azerbaijani, his father, Hosni, however, had learned the Latin alphabet in school and wrote in Azerbaijani sprinkled with numerous Russian words and certain Kumyk adaptations. Finally there was Nusrat, his grandfather, who had learned Persian and Arabic at a madrasa in Tabriz before the revolution, and now in his old age used the Arabic alphabet in order to produce a form of Kumyk spelling of his own invention. Both Hosni and Nusrat were able to read Cyrillic letters, but they did not use them for writing. Djamolidine was particularly mesmerised by his grandfather’s flourishes.
    In time the contents of the notebook underwent a barely discernible shift from data collection to musings, which orbited around a basic piece of knowledge he acquired the evening the censor visited them: the world is huge. It triggered a longing to travel abroad, which for the time being could be relieved by the sucking sound of rubber tyres against tarmac.
    Power is a measure of an individual’s or an institution’s ability to influence others in order to achieveits own goals. This involves two things: will and the ability to enforce one’s will, if necessary, by violent means. Only rarely is actual physical force applied, as the implied threat, paired with a clear allocation of roles, generally encourages the weaker part to surrender in advance, frequently without the parties themselves even becoming aware of this process. Power play is the prevailing way for states as well as individuals to behave and is consequently the cement that enables relationships between various entities to be maintained; a kind of existential connective tissue. Power exists in political, economic, sociological, psychological and other situations and the tendency to create structures, through which power can be exercised, can be found everywhere. The larger the power the more complex the structures.
    When Djamolidine in 1962, aged fourteen years and motivated by his desire to take part in competitive cycling, became a member of Komsomol, he joined at one of the lowest levels of what is probably the most complex power structure ever created: the state formation known as the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. This structure was, despite a relentlessly proclaimed equality, hierarchical as few had ever been: at the top was the general secretaryand below him the state apparatus with the Ministerial Council, the Supreme Soviet and its Presidium, the Soviet of the Union and the Soviet of Nationalities, the Ministerial Councils of the fifteen republics and the Supreme Soviet, the Soviets of the approximately 150 regions with their associated executive committees and below them the Soviet and executive committees of approximately 5,600 districts and 45,000 villages. All authorities were officially elected from the bottom up, but in reality were appointed from the top by the Communist Party which represented the heart, spinal column and peripheral nerves in a triangular structure consisting of a bureau, a committee and a secretariat – a structure which replicated itself up through the levels of the pyramid starting with local party associations, to districts and regions, to republics and at the very top the Polit Bureau, the Central Committee and the Secretariat of the Central Committee. The military and the police forces, with or without uniform, were the muscles of the structure, and the education systems and various cultural institutions acted