Travels in Siberia Read online

  Samuel Colt, the arms manufacturer, attended the coronation of Tsar Alexander II; Colt made several visits to Russia, selling guns. While on the trip memorialized in Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain met Alexander II on the Black Sea in 1867. Twain compared him to “a tinsel King.” Whistler’s mother, of the well-known painting, got up from her straight-back chair long enough to go to Russia with Whistler’s father, an engineer, who helped his hosts build docks and railroads. Dumas père, the Marquis de Custine, Admiral John Paul Jones, Théophile Gautier, Booker T. Washington, Lewis Carroll—a list of unexpected sojourners in Russia could go on and on.

  The nineteenth century was the great age of travel, when private citizens made long journeys to distant and almost-unexplored parts of the globe. Among alluring destinations, Siberia rivaled Africa and western North America. Many dozens of books about travel in Siberia came out in those years and up to the Bolshevik revolution. Per usual, the English travelers outdid almost everybody else. Englishmen saw Siberia on foot, and by boat, cart, and sledge. As a title of a book by an Englishman, Narrative of a Pedestrian Journey Through Russia and Siberian Tartary from the Frontiers of China to the Frozen Sea and Kamchatka, by Captain John Dundas Cochrane, Royal Navy, gives the general idea. Soon after setting out on this cross-continental stroll, Captain Cochrane was accosted by robbers who took all his possessions and clothes, overlooking only his waistcoat; Cochrane tied the waistcoat around his middle and continued on.

  Englishmen went to Siberia to examine mineral resources, visit prisons, look for trade opportunities, distribute Bibles, study the natives, hunt, botanize. Intrepid Englishwomen ventured far into Siberia as well. To cite another representative title, On Sledge and Horseback to Outcast Siberian Lepers, by Kate Marsden, of the Royal British Nursing Association, is the story of that lady’s search for a miraculous root said to cure leprosy, and for the lepers themselves. Wealthy people in St. Petersburg gave Miss Marsden money, and eventually she located some lepers in the northern wilds and set up a leper colony. Breaking under the strain of the trip, she then returned to England and spent the rest of her life as an invalid. As far as I could find out, no book before or since has ever mentioned the Siberian lepers. Miss Marsden is also the only traveler I know of to express concern about the sufferings of draft horses in Siberia.

  Experts from Poland came to oversee mines, Norwegians to work in the fur trade, Danes to help in the dairying in western Siberia. The German scientist Alexander von Humboldt traveled Siberia in 1829 to establish meteorological stations, by international agreement, and to do studies on terrestrial magnetism. He and others like him continued the tradition of German-speaking scientists in Siberia. Americans of any kind were rare in Siberia until after 1850; then they became almost as numerous as Englishmen. The Americans’ main focus was on mining and trade, with some Christian evangelizing. Perry McDonough Collins, a businessman looking into commercial possibilities for the United States, went on a wide-ranging jaunt through eastern Siberia in 1860 and devised the transcontinental telegraph project that brought George Kennan to Chukotka. American aggressiveness in trade beat most competitors. By the end of the nineteenth century, American products, from canned goods to McCormick reapers, could be found throughout the habitable parts of eastern Siberia.

  As usual, global ambition reached for more. China, having grown much weaker since the days of Emperor K’ang-hsi, could not keep an expansionist Russia out of the Amur Valley, and in 1856 Siberia’s governor-general, Count Nikolai N. Muraviev, simply took it from China by fiat with a small force of gunboats and soldiers. This grab had the good (for Russia) effect of giving her river access to the Pacific and a vast valley of relatively temperate and arable land. Unfortunately, moving into the Amur also put Russia on a collision course with the other country expanding into the region—Japan. Eventually this would lead to the disastrous (for Russia) Russo-Japanese War. The early buildup to the conflict featured an obscure and intriguing episode of travel in Siberia: the long ride of Captain Fukushima Yasumasa. For the purposes of reconnaissance, this Japanese army officer traveled on horseback across European Russia, western and central Siberia, Mongolia, part of China, and the Primorskii Region northeast of Vladivostok in the years 1892 and 1893. Aside from a brief mention of this unprecedented feat, I can find nothing about it in English-language histories.

  Another timely idea of Count Muraviev’s was the Trans-Siberian Railway. Building a line from the Urals to Vladivostok made obvious sense for Russia, but it presented engineering problems that were difficult even in that optimistic age of railroads. Bridges had to be erected across five rivers wider than the Mississippi; swampy ground troubled the route for many hundreds of miles; and even with a shortcut across compliant China the track would have to extend for more than five thousand miles. Construction of the line was authorized by imperial edict in May 1891, and Tsarevitch Nicholas, visiting the Far East at the time, pushed a wheelbarrow of dirt along an embankment in Vladivostok to inaugurate the great enterprise. By 1898, the line building eastward had reached Irkutsk. By 1901, the tracks had been completed from one end of Siberia to the other, not including the section circumventing Lake Baikal (a huge ferry to take the trains across the lake served as a temporary measure; during the winter tracks were laid on Baikal’s ice). Regular service began in 1903. The section around the southern end of Baikal required thirty-eight tunnels and wasn’t opened until 1905.

  In these early railroad years, when the Trans-Siberian was being built and just after, a lot of people from the American Midwest traveled in and wrote books about Siberia. As a Midwesterner myself, I pause to take note of this phenomenon. Adventurous sorts from Illinois and Indiana made trips by land, river, and rail, mostly for business but some for pleasure. The number of travelers from the state of Ohio alone is statistically off the charts. In 1898, John Wesley Bookwalter, an Ohio businessman, went on a summer journey of some length; his Siberia and Central Asia (1899) “intelligently comments on every aspect of life and includes hundreds of photographs,” says a bibliography. (Bookwalter later ran for governor of Ohio.) George Frederick Wright, a professor at Oberlin College, published Asiatic Russia in 1902, about his trip of the previous year. Senator Albert J. Beveridge, of Indiana, went through European Russia, Siberia, and Manchuria to write his The Russian Advance (1903). Beveridge was born in Ohio. Henry C. Rouse, president of the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railway, rode the Trans-Siberian in 1903 and wrote about it for the New York Evening Post. He also was born in Ohio. Ohio-born William Wheeler’s The Other Side of the Earth, about his Siberian train trip (“extremely superficial,” in the opinion of another bibliography), appeared in 1913.

  That’s five people from Ohio visiting and writing about Siberia in the space of fifteen years, or an average of one Ohioan every three years. How can this oddity be explained? Were these people all inspired in their youth by stories about George Kennan, and did they want to be like him? Or did the official closing of the American frontier at the end of the nineteenth century make them restless and eager to see some even wilder place, the “Wild East,” said to resemble the now vanished Wild West in many ways? Or perhaps something unknown in the flat, open landscape of the middle of America produces in a few of its citizens a strange affinity for the vastnesses of Russia. Maybe that happened to me; in any case, I am now at least the seventh person from Ohio to travel in and write about Siberia.

  All these previous Midwesterners, even if they went as late as 1913, may be said to have traveled in the nineteenth century. The Russia they saw was still the Russia of the tsars, despite its advances, and it was of course about to be thoroughly swept away. Had these travelers made their journeys in late 1917 or after, they would have had an especially vivid experience of a torn-apart country, because the chaos of revolution, when it came, swirled around and along the railroads. After the October Revolution ended Russia’s participation in the ongoing European war, soldiers rushing home to claim the land the Bolsheviks had promised them overwhelmed the
trains. An American Communist who was in Russia at the time reported that a representative from the YMCA told him he had seen a sign that said, “Tovarish Soldiers: Please do not throw passengers out of the window after the train is in motion.” Soldiers rode all over the cars, even on the tops; at the entrance to many tunnels around Baikal lay the bodies of soldiers whom the low ceilings had knocked off.

  In Siberia, the civil war that followed the revolution was fought mostly on and near the Trans-Siberian. For the next few years, the death and horror there were unlike any previously seen. Armed bands of uncertain loyalties went up and down the tracks in trains fitted with machine guns and armor. Derailed locomotives punctuated the scenery here and there. Tsar Nicholas II and his family, who had been under house arrest since he abdicated early in 1917, were shipped east by rail across the Urals for strategic reasons that summer, and there they came to an end even more awful than was traditional for Russian rulers who ever set foot in Siberia. For a while the tsar and family and household were held in Tobolsk; then they were moved to a well-fortified mansion in Ekaterinburg. On July 17, 1918, in the middle of the night—maybe because anti-Bolshevik forces were approaching, or for a crazier reason, or for nothing resembling a reason at all—they were taken to the basement and slaughtered, every one, among screams and ricochets and flying plaster dust, by a squad of killers who used a variety of weapons including a Colt .45.

  Meanwhile a force of about fifty thousand Czech soldiers from the World War’s eastern front had started out on the Trans-Siberian with the goal of reaching Vladivostok, boarding ships, and making their way to Europe and the western front by sea. These former Allied prisoners of war hoped that by changing to the winning side they would gain independence for Czechoslovakia after the war. Their presence in Siberia was a wild card that would further destabilize the situation.

  Because the Soviet government had signed a separate peace with Germany, the Czechs soon were halted on their eastward journey. The Czechs had guns and numbers, however, and they chose to fight the Red Army units that opposed them along the railroad, with the result that much of the Trans-Siberian was in Czech hands by mid-1918. Adding to the confusion, Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak, former commander of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, had recently appeared in Siberia as the minister of war in an anti-Bolshevik government that he then took over by coup d’état. As self-proclaimed supreme ruler, Kolchak hoped to fight his way through western Russia and overthrow the Bolsheviks. He crossed the Urals into the west and won a few victories, but the Red Army pushed him back, and he withdrew again into Siberia, where support for his White Army was supposed to be strong. Among his potential allies were worthies like the murderously anti-Bolshevik Cossack atamans Grigory Semeyonov and Ivan Kalmykov, who each controlled a stretch of Far Eastern railroad line. For public relations value, both these leaders had their drawbacks. Semeyonov claimed he couldn’t sleep well at night unless he had killed someone that day, and Kalmykov was said to have shot members of an orchestra in a café for playing the “Internationale” instead of “God Save the Tsar.” Around the cities of Chita and Khabarovsk they racked up many atrocities.

  England and Japan, eager to help defeat the Bolsheviks, sent their own troops into Siberia in 1918. The British force was small—a mere one thousand six hundred men—but Japan upped the ante substantially with an army of seventy-three thousand. Together the British and the Japanese pressured President Wilson to contribute an American contingent, and finally he did, reluctantly. The stated mission of the twelve-thousand-man American Expeditionary Force, as it was called, was to protect Allied supplies in Vladivostok from capture, to aid the passage of the Czechs, and to make sure the Russian people had a chance for uncoerced self-determination. At a more basic level, the Americans probably intended to keep Japan from grabbing Russian or Chinese territory, and more basically than that, they didn’t know what they were doing at all.

  The English hated the Bolsheviks, plain and simple. The British commander, General Alfred William Fortescue Knox, had been a military attaché in St. Petersburg before the revolution, knew many former tsarist officials, and inspired little confidence in General William Graves, the American commander. Graves, of a devotedly democratic cast of mind, wanted the Russian people to choose their own system of government, and he feared Knox was maneuvering them back to monarchy. Graves was especially distressed by his English counterpart’s referring to the Russian peasants as “swine.” Knox and his fellow officers, for their part, thought Graves a pro-Bolshevik fool because he wouldn’t join them in trying to eliminate the Reds. In this opinion the Japanese concurred with the British so vehemently that Graves had to cope with many newspaper stories in America reporting Japanese charges of his supposed Bolshevik sympathies.

  Admiral Kolchak’s hoped-for support in Siberia never materialized. Losing battles with Red forces and partisans, he retreated farther eastward. Typhus hit what remained of his army, and dead and dying White Army soldiers by the thousands accumulated along the railroad line. Kolchak pleaded with the Czechs to help him, but by late 1919 his chance was past. Instead the Czechs turned him over to the Soviet government in Irkutsk, along with the half billion rubles in gold reserves Kolchak’s train had been carrying. The Irkutsk Soviets gave Admiral Kolchak a quick trial, shot him, and shoved his body into the Angara River through a hole in the ice.

  The American, English, Japanese, and other foreign intervention forces had left Siberia by the end of 1920; Red victories continued until most of Siberia fell under Soviet control, though in the Far East battles were still being fought until 1922. Some of the very last White forces escaped the region into China that year and ended up in northern California. Events of the civil war in Siberia produced heroes of Communist iconography—for example, Sergei Lazo, the partisan leader, whom the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky praised in verse for defying his Japanese captors and crying, “Long live Communism!” even as they poured molten lead down his throat. For a while the Bolsheviks allowed the Russian Far East to exist as a separate republic, called the Independent and Democratic Far Eastern Republic, with a president who had lived for many years in Chicago, and its own declaration of independence written in English. That sham government was soon dispensed with, and all Siberia officially became part of the Soviet Union.

  During the Soviet era, the Trans-Siberian Railway would take on the dismal role of transport for millions of prisoners shipped eastward to camps in the gulag. Accounts of Siberian exile and prison under the tsars had always included a journey, usually on foot, along the Siberian Trakt. All twentieth-century descriptions of Siberian punishment would begin with a rail journey, usually torturous and long. Soviet-era prisoners who had read about prison and exile of tsarist times sometimes scoffed at how tame those former sufferings were compared to their own. In my catalog of travels and travelers so far, I have said little about Siberian prison journeys, labor, and escapes. I will talk more about those subjects farther on.

  For the moment it is perhaps enough to say that in the years of Bolshevik rule the evil of the system was so dense that it distorted anything that came near. That was of course especially true of books about Siberia, a region used by the Soviets as a penal colony screened off from the world. Even relatively lighthearted books—I Wonder as I Wander, by the American poet Langston Hughes, about his round-the-world ramblings in the early thirties—take on a queasy air because of what we know was happening offstage. At least Hughes had a sense of humor and was no ideologue; foreign travelers (and Russians as well) writing in moods of political rapture, real or feigned, produced books about Siberia that are embarrassing to look at today.

  Henry Wallace, a former U.S. secretary of agriculture who served as Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president from 1941 to 1945, was a passionate believer in “the century of the common man.” Born in Iowa, Wallace also had a bad case of the Russia-love that seems to strike Midwesterners, and he happened to catch it at an unfortunate time. As America’s successful cooperation with Russia in the Second
World War was growing, and Germany was falling back in retreat, Wallace urged Roosevelt to send him on a friendship mission to Siberia, China, and Central Asia; Roosevelt agreed. Wallace made the trip in five weeks during mid-1944, and in 1946 published an account, Soviet Asia Mission. Worse books have been written about Siberia, but Wallace’s holds the distinction of being the worst that is also widely known.

  By now Wallace, a decent and dedicated man, has already been kicked around enough for Soviet Asia Mission, and it is perhaps unsporting to pile on. He later admitted the book’s failings himself, in an article titled “Where I Was Wrong.” Still, one has to note that in his visit to Magadan, headquarters of the complex of Kolyma gold-mining camps that cost perhaps three million slave laborers’ lives, Wallace did not grasp that he was seeing a Potemkin village tricked up temporarily just for him, with the barbed wire taken down and the watchtowers dismantled; or that his host, Ivan Fedorovich Nikishov, was not the mere “industrial boss” described. Nikishov turns up in his true capacity as bloody tyrant in a number of gulag memoirs; he was in fact a feared lieutenant general in the NKVD (secret police). Wallace’s Soviet Asia Mission includes the sentence, “The larch were just putting out their first leaves, and Nikishov gamboled about, enjoying the wonderful air immensely.”