Travels in Siberia Read online

  As David J. Dallin and Boris Nicolaevsky wrote in Forced Labor in Soviet Russia (published 1947), “[Wallace] should have been aware that every yard of the ground of these cities and towns [Magadan, among others] was drenched with the blood of Russian ‘common men.’ ” These authors identified Nikishov as the “NKVD chief and actual dictator of the Far Eastern slave empire.” Elevated words about Siberia from a speech Wallace gave in Irkutsk—“men born in wide, free spaces will not brook injustice and tyranny. They will not even temporarily live in slavery”—were quoted back at him reprovingly by Dallin and Nicolaevsky. Of course, many well-intentioned people in America and elsewhere at that time were still optimistic about the Soviet Union and reluctant to hear about the gulag. Robert Conquest’s Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps, published closer to the end of the Soviet era, in 1978, blasted Wallace all over again and was accepted more widely.

  Owen Lattimore, of the U.S. Office of War Information, who traveled to Siberia with Wallace, wrote an article for National Geographic magazine that came out not long after they returned. In it he said, “We visited gold mines operated by Dalstroi in the Valley of the Kolyma River, where rich placer workings are strung out for miles . . . It was interesting to find, instead of the sin, gin, and brawling of an old-time gold rush, extensive greenhouses growing tomatoes, cucumbers, and even melons, to make sure that the hardy miners got enough vitamins!” Lattimore later conceded that he was “totally ignorant about the actual situation” he encountered in Siberia.

  Just as the twentieth century split the atom, it took apart the human soul; in the camps of the Siberian gulag the soul’s reduction approached the absolute. Most of the prisoners dispatched to the worst of the Far Eastern camps died, and writers like Osip Mandelstam who might have described the horrors did not survive to do so. Among those who did survive, the experience usually depleted the residue of hope in them to a level where they didn’t have much left to write with. Only a very few gulag prisoners (like Varlam Shalamov) came out sufficiently unimpaired to create literature from what they’d been through. In certain respects not even the sufferings inflicted by the Mongols had been as bad. The Mongols killed the body but generally left the soul alone.

  Still, history kept revolving, and the nightmare years of the gulag receded, amazingly, into the past. The same Siberia the old-time travelers saw remained, in its broad characteristics of geography and nature. Again Siberia became a space connected to the rest of the planet—traversable, visible, relatively unveiled. Wreckage from the Bolshevik era lay strewn around the landscape like the morning-after relics of a debauch, and the environment had been damaged, and the threat of drastic climate change evoked fear of some new swerve of history waiting just down the road. Through simple luck, the present seemed to be a breathing spell, at least for a little while. Sometimes travel is merely an opportunity taken when you can.

  Chapter 10

  So I decided to cross Siberia. I had flown into it and out again, and that was okay. But as I read more and studied the journeys of previous travelers, I understood that Siberia belongs to the category of things (oceans, deserts) that must be crossed, just as mountains are to be climbed. In the genre of Siberia travel, flying in and out again doesn’t qualify. Of course, flying across Siberia hardly counts at all; anyone could accomplish that in the course of a nine-hour snooze. Neither, by my judgment, does taking the train, for reasons of its claustrophobia and its speed. After some thought, I decided the best method would be to drive.

  I wasn’t sure how to go about this. I began in this way:

  With my family I had moved back East, to New Jersey. My friend Boris Zeldin, who lives in Jersey City, not far from me, had been telling me how great Leningrad was. He grew up there. Previously the city I kept visiting was Moscow, which had continued to overwhelm me. Moscow is a megalopolis, like Los Angeles, and most of the money of Russia is there. Listening to Boris, I wondered if St. Petersburg (the former Leningrad) might be smaller and easier, and suit my purposes better.

  In July of 2000 I went to St. Petersburg to check it out and suffered Russia-infatuation all over again. Moscow is crowded, dense, centripetal—a capital city of the world. St. Petersburg is less frantic and more open, with a contemplative feel. Built on a swamp, one of Russia’s recurring motifs, it’s a sea-level city of long horizontal lines anchored at intervals by statues of writers, explorers, and tsars. Canals in the older parts of the city reflect the Italianate architecture its builders favored and add watery ripplings to the style.

  For travelers, St. Petersburg is like a platonic ideal; it was a mark on a map before it became a city. Vectors drawn on maps seem to converge invisibly above it, in its high, pewter-colored sky. I imagined sorcerers from Gogol’s ghost stories riding in their cauldrons across the sky’s emptiness, and crowds staring upward at the raising of the great obelisk on the twentieth anniversary of the Battle of Borodino, and searchlights piercing the darkness and throwing noir shadows during the nights of the October Revolution as described by John Reed. Exploring all day and staying by myself in the Soviet-era Oktyabrskaya Hotel, I was adrift in about a dozen works of literature simultaneously.

  On one of my first wanderings I came across a museum called the Museum of the Arctic and the Antarctic. It immediately became one of my favorite museums ever. Of Soviet vintage, the museum is in a large, pillared building, crumbling on the outside, that used to be an Orthodox church. In the museum’s center, formerly the nave, is a partial globe fifteen or twenty feet across. The unusual feature of this globe is that it represents only the top third of the world; set in a cylindrical base at about waist height, it allows a viewer to walk around the Arctic regions in a leisurely way and examine the world’s northern geography from a top-down vantage.

  Of course, a good part of this third-of-a-globe is Siberia. Little illuminated bulbs indicate all the far northern cities of Russia. I strolled semicircularly from the Urals to the Bering Strait, noting the bulb for Provideniya and the minute whorls of the Bering Sea coastline where I’d been. The globe made dramatic the closeness of Provideniya to Alaska—no Russian city is at all as near. Building renovation had blocked windows and transformed the old church’s liturgical twilight into a simulated Arctic one. The display pictures of snowscapes and the hand-painted dioramas of polar weather stations with just a lone red light on the tiny airfields did a fine imitation of what I’d seen myself in the far north. Some of the exhibits required that the lights be darkened in the museum hall for full effect. When an old, hobbling lady guard saw me in front of the Northern Lights diorama, she asked if I would like the overhead lights out. I said yes and she hobbled over to the wall switch and flipped it. On the exhibit’s midnight-blue sky, iridescent Northern Lights began to pulse and flash in the dark. After what she deemed sufficient time she flipped the gallery lights back on.

  Growing more familiar with the museum’s layout, I walked up the stairs one afternoon to the director’s office and introduced myself. The director turned out to be a young man named Victor Boyarsky. His name sounded familiar—then I remembered that I had come across it in stories about sled dog expeditions at the Chamber of Commerce in Nome. Victor Boyarsky attended the University of Minnesota and speaks English well. He even sounds slightly Minnesotan. For a while we talked about his sled dog journeys and the dog-trekking friends he keeps in touch with in Alaska and Minnesota, and the pleasures of Nome, a place both of us recalled fondly.

  When I explained to Victor Boyarsky that I was planning to drive across Siberia, he told me he knew who I should talk to. He led me up more stairs to a larger office with many desks. Sitting at one of them was another Victor—Victor Serov, director of publicity for the museum. Victor Serov is a trim man in his fifties with ice-blue eyes and a blond mustache thick enough to hold the many icicles that have hung from it. Publicity director defines only one of his occupations; Victor Serov is also a guide who specializes in extreme adventure, and expeditions to most of the cold places on earth you can name. He has
been to the North Pole twenty-two times, led a ski trek to the South Pole, and wintered in Antarctica twice. He also climbs mountains, and his skill as an alpinist is such that he leads climbs all over the world. When I said I wanted to cross Siberia by car, he said he could help me. He added, offhandedly, that he did not think such a trip would be difficult to do.

  I was relieved to hear that. Up till then all my Russian friends who I’d told about my plan had informed me that I was crazy and if I went I would be robbed or killed. Later I understood that Russians from Moscow and St. Petersburg tend to have exaggerated ideas about Siberia.

  Later my Russian friends also said, of Victor Serov, “How can you trust this guy? You don’t even know him. Why do you believe he’ll do what he says?” I said I didn’t know, he just looked dependable. I paid him some money and he said he would handle the details. Basically, what Victor said he’d do, he did.

  January 2001 I spent in St. Petersburg. Through my friend Boris I rented an apartment a few blocks off Nevsky Prospekt near the middle of the city. The apartment belonged to Luda Sokolova, a sweet blond woman in her late fifties who worked for the equivalent of the city zoning board and is a friend of Boris’s wife, Sonya. Luda owns other apartments and stayed at one of them while I was there. My purpose, first, was to have several meetings with Victor Serov to plan my trip’s route, budget, and schedule. The rest of the time I would read books in English and (slowly) in Russian on the subject of Siberia at the Russian National Library, and study the language for three hours a day with a tutor some friends of Boris’s found for me.

  Now might be as good a moment as any to talk about what it was like learning Russian, or attempting to. We know that the language has the reputation of being difficult. When I was first memorizing the alphabet, I told my friend Saul Steinberg that some of the Russian letters were weird, and he said, “Those aren’t letters, those are sneezes.” Some of the language’s sounds elude the English-speaking throat and tongue. To get the Russian bI sound—it’s related, sort of, to our letter y—I had to sit down hard in a chair as I pronounced it. If you’re middle-aged when you start learning, as I was, your brain is less receptive to languages, they say; I think another obstacle is that a grown-up’s dignity stumbles on the preschool mnemonics you have to recite, and it fears the humiliation of being stuck for so long at baby-talk level.

  My teacher, a woman in her thirties named Katya, was dark haired, dark eyed, and quick as light. She had taught many Americans and not only spoke English beautifully (with a British accent, like most English-speaking Russians) but also could imitate various American accents. Hearing Katya do a Texan was worth all the money I spent on tutoring and more. I mean, here’s a Russian woman, dressed all in charcoal gray, quite serious and put together, and she starts in on, “Wall, as I was sayin’ to mah good ol’ buddy . . .” And she gets it right! I admired her elegant Russian, too, with its buzzing softness and the mouth-filling satisfaction of its one-syllable words—grob (coffin) and grom (thunder) and kon’ (steed) and zub (tooth) and lug (meadow) and les (forest) and dom (house) and Bog (God) and grad (hail) and lyod (ice), and the long, unrolling ones like spravadlivost (justice) and provolochnaya zagrazhdeniya (barbed-wire entanglement). Sometimes lying awake I still go over a few of the sentences we used to illustrate the case endings of nouns: Mamont lezhal v sinei peshchere (The mammoth lay in the blue cave) and Ochki vo mkhu (The spectacles are in the moss) and Lyudi moevo vozrasta lyubyat spat’ (People my age love to sleep) and U vas nyet stradanii (You have no suffering).

  And Mir zakonchitsya za odnu nedelyu (The world will end in one week) and Puteshchevstvennik videl zelyonii prud (The traveler saw the green pond) and On rvyot zabavnie pisma (He tears up the amusing letters) and Vdrug ya ispugaois’ nichtozhestva (Suddenly I am afraid of nothingness) and Tserkov otkryta dlya poklonennii (The church is open for worship) and Utki vyletyat s Sibirskikh ozyor (The ducks fly from the Siberian lakes) and Krov’ velikikh geroev otstroila gorod (The blood of great heroes built the city) and Ivan lovit rybu shlapoi (Ivan catches fish with his hat) and Boris zaplatil creditoram zdaniem (Boris paid his creditors with a building) and Mne skuchno, kogda elektrichestvo otkliochaetsya (It is boring for me when the electricity is shut off).

  I worked hard at first, but then the slowness of my progress disappointed me. Rather than stick closely to the day’s lesson I preferred to talk to Katya about various subjects in my bad, slapped-together Russian of before. The constant errors in my speech made her wince like someone with perfect pitch listening to a clumsy beginner on the violin, but eventually with her linguistic ability she adapted herself, and we talked about all kinds of things. I told her about traveling in Chukotka (an exotic place to her, as to most Russians), and about my work, my family, and the book I wanted to write about Siberia. Katya talked about how the Russian language is being destroyed by poor education and by the sloppiness of nonnative speakers who ignore case endings and have no conception of verb aspects and don’t care. You find the worst speech in the street markets, she said. She called the new, bad Russian that’s spreading everywhere “market language” (bazarnii yazyk).

  Both Katya’s parents were doctors. Her father had been a doctor in the army, and she had spent some years on military bases in the south of Russia. The duty was hard; sometimes her parents had to work with patients suffering terrible illnesses caused by radiation. At a base in the Kazakhstan missile fields, her father had been the doctor for soldiers in charge of nuclear missiles, she said. I told her that when I lived in Montana I had gone down in a nuclear missile silo buried in the prairie near an air force base, and an officer there had described how the missiles were aimed at missile silos in southern Russia. That evening Katya mentioned this to her father, now retired, who lived in the same building she did. He told her to tell me that the missiles on his base in Kazakhstan had been aimed at the missiles in Montana.

  Russian employs six different cases for nouns—nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, and prepositional (also called locative)—depending on how the noun functions in the sentence. The nominative case is easy, because it corresponds to the basic form of the noun. In a month of lessons we barely got through the other five cases. Of course that left great, thorny expanses of the language largely unexplored. With discouragement tinged by irony, I gave Katya the excuse I had used before, about Russian being a hopelessly complicated language with no rhyme or reason and with more exceptions than rules. She said that wasn’t so, because even the most complicated parts of the language made sense if you thought about them. She said being inside a language was like being in a person’s house—after a while you came to see why the teapot was where it was.

  And once in a while, after (for example) seven hours of working on the prepositional case, the beauty of the language’s structure would emerge, and I would be transported by a vision of its elegant and meaningful intricacy. Of course the next day I would lose this vision and become aphasic and marble mouthed again. Overall, though, it was interesting to exercise my mind in this unaccustomed way; acquiring a language, a task usually accomplished unconsciously in childhood, has no real counterpart in the ordinary adult world of gain and loss. No matter how globalized our cultures become, language will always be their untransferable part. I would have paid plenty for a total-fluency Russian-language cassette I could just insert into my forehead. No such product being available, I had to take the slow and awkward path. Learning Russian (or trying to) showed me that in my everyday life, perhaps like many adults, I use my brain mainly for scheming.

  One morning during that January I went on an expedition to Peterhof, the grand palace built by Peter the Great twenty-five miles west of the city on the Gulf of Finland. Night was still full when I left Luda’s apartment at about seven thirty; at that time of year the sun would not be up for another couple of hours. On the slippery sidewalks, old women were sweeping away a light accumulation of snow using the kind of brooms that are associated in America with witches and Hal
loween. The air was clear and the temperature well below freezing. From various parked cars came little welcoming chirps as their owners approached to warm them up before driving. When I crossed a cloud of car exhaust, a deep olfactory memory came over me. Maybe because Russian gasoline still used lead, maybe because Russian emission laws are less stringent, the exhaust of cars in Russia smelled like no car exhaust in America has smelled since I was a child. Not quite awake, I lapsed briefly back to Cleveland, Ohio, and 1954.

  At the cavernous train station, the Baltiskii Voksal, ceiling lights of pitiful feebleness pushed back just enough of the darkness that you could see to get around. Russians were congregating densely at the two open ticket windows in their usual free-for-all style. Somehow I purchased a ticket, divined the train platforms in the farther gloom, and boarded a train. That it turned out to be the wrong train came as no real shock to me. For twenty minutes the train kept going without pause. I could see nothing in the blackness out the windows. Finally I asked the woman sitting across from me if this was the train for Peterhof. She was young and pretty, with a face that tapered downward like a cat’s. It expressed with minimal effort her complete disdain for me as she gave me the bad news.

  When we finally did reach a stop, I got off. By now the night had been infused with a little bit of gray. As the train’s back lights receded, I looked around: a narrow station platform covered with hard-polished snow; on both sides, fields bisected with lines of brush extending vaguely into the early dawn; and a village of eight or ten houses, with no lights showing, and snow draping roofs and fences as if it had been laid on in multiple coats every day since fall. At the platform’s far end, a single figure approached, carrying a shovel. I walked over to him and asked if I could catch a train back to Petersburg here. He said I could, in half an hour.