Travels in Siberia Read online

  Catherine the Great died in November 1796. Her son Paul, who succeeded her, hated her and tried to undo many of her acts. She had been dead less than three weeks when he eased the punishment of Radishchev, allowing him to return to his estate in Kaluga province and live there under the observation of the provincial governor. For this news to reach Radishchev and for him to make the journey back home took eight months. His wife died on the way. After Paul was assassinated in 1801, the next tsar, Alexander I, indulging liberal leanings that he would later lose, freed Radishchev from all remaining restrictions and restored his rank and titles.

  When Alexander set out on his early path of reform, Radishchev was honored by being made a member of the Commission on Revision of the Laws. At one of the commission’s meetings he got carried away and brought up his old opinions from his Journey from St. Petersburg days. This lack of caution surprised Count Peter Zavadovsky, chairman of the commission, who genially reproved him, “Eh, Aleksandr Nikolaevich, do you still want to talk the same old nonsense? Or didn’t you have enough of Siberia?” Radishchev took this as a threat; upon returning home, he killed himself with poison.

  Catherine had ordered that all copies of Radishchev’s book be destroyed, and most were. A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow became a dangerous book to own, though a few daring souls managed to hang on to theirs. Pushkin, born three years before Radishchev died, kept a copy in his library. Eighteen copies of the 1790 edition exist in Russia today, and two in the United States. I have seen one of those, in the Houghton Rare Book Library at Harvard University. The book is bound in red calfskin, with gilt lettering on the cover, a red morocco label on the spine, and the edges of the pages stained red. The faded clarity of the hand-set type, the craft of the book’s binding, and the courage and crazy hopefulness of the author make this an object to bring tears to one’s eyes. (In the documents of provenance tucked into the book’s protective sleeve, I noticed that this copy had previously belonged to Serge Diaghilev.) Throughout the nineteenth century, the Russian government continued the ban against Radishchev, with the result that no new edition of his book would be published in that country until after the Revolution of 1905.

  As usually happens, being forbidden increased the book’s reputation. The fact that someone had spoken out for liberty, however futilely, put the subject on the table. Radishchev’s idealism became one of the inspirations for the Decembrists, Russia’s first revolutionary generation, whose move against the government was smashed on December 14, 1825. (Over one hundred of the Decembrists ended up in Siberia; I will say more about them later on.) Alexander Herzen, the Socialist and progressive whose influence would be important to a later generation of revolutionaries, was fourteen years old and living in Moscow when five of the Decembrists were hanged. Herzen and his friend Nikolai Ogarev heard the Te Deum sung in praise of the tsar on this occasion, and afterward, on the Sparrow Hills overlooking the city, promised each other they would dedicate the rest of their lives to the Decembrists’ cause.

  No radical of any consequence in the nineteenth century could avoid being sent to Siberia sooner or later, and Herzen’s turn came when he was a student at Moscow University and a member of a group (like Dostoyevsky’s) that discussed illegal literature. Herzen’s punishment was a term of exile in the city of Viatka, where he was given a job in the provincial government. Herzen happened to be a brilliant man and a natural organizer, well suited for the job. Though a convict and an exile, he had a lot of responsibility. In My Exile in Siberia, he says, “I am certain that three-quarters of the people who read this will not believe it, and yet it is the downright truth that I, as a councillor in the provisional government, head of the Second Department, counter-signed every three months the politsmeyster’s report on myself, as a man under police supervision.”

  Later Herzen was allowed to return to Moscow. After he had inherited a fortune from his father and endured another period of exile, he decided to emigrate. He established himself in London, and while living there published a magazine, “Kolokol” (The Bell), which in smuggled form became the main voice in Russia for liberal reform in the years leading up to the freeing of the serfs in 1861. As part of this movement, Herzen also published in England a new edition of A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow.

  George Kennan’s trip to meet and talk to Siberian exiles turned up many stories reminiscent of Herzen’s. Political exiles and prisoners were filling the system by that time, when a person could be sent to Siberia for lending money to a revolutionary, holding a package for one, or just being related to one. Prince Peter Kropotkin, a political exile whom Kennan met in Tomsk, had been arrested, the first time, for possessing a copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance and refusing to say where he got it. Then there was the man whose term of exile specified that he never stay longer than ten days in any one place, and who spent the rest of his life wandering; the druggist who threw a rock with a petition wrapped around it through the window of a government minister, for which he was sent to live in a Siberian village that the authorities did not know no longer existed, so the druggist had to keep looking for it for thousands of miles; the woman who almost died trying to reach Verkholensk, the place she thought her husband had been exiled to, but actually she had two letters of the name wrong, and instead he was in Verkhoyansk, two thousand six hundred miles farther on, at which news the woman went insane and later died; and the man exiled for possessing a manuscript of a newspaper article that he later saw published without objection or alteration while he was in Siberia.

  Did any exiles or prisoners ever escape? A reader cannot help hoping that somehow some did. The historian S. V. Maksimov, in his Sibir’ i Katorga (Siberia and Prison), tells the story of a prisoner named Tumanov who, during a display of gymnastics before the regional governor, leaped from the top of a human pyramid and landed outside the prison palisades and got away. The escapee left behind part of his costume, a flax beard, which the prison commander was forced to wear until his dying day. Some of those who had been sent to Siberia did in fact manage to sneak off and start the long walk back to western Russia after winter was over, when the cuckoo began to sing in the spring; this annual throng, for whom sympathetic peasants sometimes left food by their doorways or on their windowsills, were known as General Cuckoo’s Army. Kennan mentions certain indefatigable souls who made the westward trek repeatedly, only to be recaptured and returned. An officer told him of a prisoner who had done the round-trip journey sixteen times. Among prison guards the saying went, “The Tsar’s cow-pasture is large, but you can’t get out of it; we find you at last if you are not dead.” And yet two of the exiles Kennan met did eventually escape and leave the country. One of them ended up in London and the other in Milwaukee.

  For a wild and woolly story about escape from Siberia, perhaps the best is that of Mikhail Bakunin, the anarchist and revolutionary. Bakunin belonged to a type that had not been clearly identified in his lifetime; I like him because he reminds me of a 1960s hippie radical from my youth. He was a voluminous talker, a sponger, a permanent adolescent, an effusive smoker, with cigar ash all over himself and tea stains on his papers, subject to mad enthusiasms and exalted monologues. Minna Wagner, wife of the composer, whose guest Bakunin had been, recalled how shocked she was at the way he ate meat and sausages in huge chunks and gulped brandy by the glass. He was very fat, with unbarbered black, curly hair.

  After driving his family close to nervous collapse and being disinherited by his exasperated and formerly liberal aristocratic father, Bakunin caromed around Europe and England, mooching off friends and fomenting rebellion. The tsar stripped him of his title and banished him to Siberia in absentia for his exploits, as if such correction could deter him. In the late 1840s, he was stirring up revolutions in France, Saxony, and Austria. The latter two states rewarded his efforts by sentencing him to death. Extradited from one to the other, and then back to Russia, he was imprisoned at the Sts. Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg. Nothing about prison l
ife agreed with him; he developed piles and scurvy, lost some of his teeth, and fell into such a state of apathy as to alarm his mother, who petitioned and repetitioned the tsar to grant him clemency. Finally the tsar yielded and offered Bakunin a choice: stay in prison or be permanently banished to Siberia. Bakunin did not find the decision a difficult one.

  Though his assigned place of exile was Tomsk, Bakunin thought he would prefer to be in Irkutsk, and here he had some luck: the governor of Siberia, Count Nikolai Muraviev, who had just wrested the Amur Valley from China, happened to be Bakunin’s second cousin. By then Bakunin was forty-three and had an eighteen-year-old wife whom he had met when he was hired to tutor her in French. Through Muraviev’s intercession, Bakunin not only got his wish and moved himself and his wife to Irkutsk, but he also began a job with the newly formed Amur Company, a trading firm. Part of his duties with the Amur Company involved traveling throughout eastern Siberia.

  In 1861, Count Muraviev (by then Count Muraviev-Amursky) retired and went to Paris, there to spend the rest of his life. Bakunin, seeing ominous prospects for himself in this development, determined that this must be the year to make his escape. Accordingly, he cooked up a scheme whereby he would go down the Amur River and investigate trade possibilities on behalf of merchants in Irkutsk and elsewhere, and he presented such a persuasive case for his fake enterprise that he was able to raise a good amount of cash. Taking his wife along would of course look suspicious, so he solved that problem by leaving her behind. On June 5, 1861, Bakunin departed Irkutsk and traveled overland to Sretensk, on the Shilka River. A steamboat carried him down the Shilka to the Amur, another brought him all the way down the Amur to Nikolayevsk, at its mouth. By now officials in Irkutsk had decided he might be making a break, but the letters sent after him warning of this were miscarried or arrived just after he had gone.

  In Nikolayevsk, Bakunin took ship on a Russian vessel bound for Kastri, another Russian port on the Pacific. To ease his hard-to-explain exit from Nikolayevsk, the cash raised from his fellow merchants almost certainly came in handy for bribes. En route, the ship for Kastri met and took in tow an American ship, the Vickery, bound for Japan. Bakunin, wasting no time, simply transferred to her and was free. Yet even this remarkable lucky break did not induce him to be careful. After the Russian ship put in at Kastri, and as he proceeded down the coast on the Vickery, Bakunin went ashore at the little Russian port of Olga and stayed overnight with the local commandant—assuming, correctly, that at this remote place the news of his escape would not be known.

  Deposited in Yokohama by the Vickery, Bakunin found another American ship, the Carrington, which was bound for San Francisco, and he booked passage. While the ship waited in port before departing, the Russian consul general in Yokohama came aboard for dinner. He asked Bakunin if he planned to meet up with the Russian fleet, which was also in the harbor, and return with it to Nikolayevsk. Bakunin said he’d like to see a little more of the country first. The Carrington sailed the next day.

  On the way to San Francisco, Bakunin borrowed $300 from an English clergyman on board. He went by steamer from San Francisco to Panama and took another ship from there to New York City. After about a month in New York, he sailed for Liverpool and arrived before the year was out—not quite seven months after he had left Irkutsk. His old friend Herzen, who like many people had assumed Bakunin was permanently buried in Asiatic exile, was understandably surprised when the long-lost anarchist popped up in London. According to one account, “after a stormy, moist embrace [Bakunin’s] first words to Herzen were, ‘Can one get oysters here?’ ”

  For the leaders of the Bolshevik revolution, time spent in Siberia was an important highlight of their résumés, a proof of authenticity, just as going to jail has been for certain rap stars. I have mentioned Lenin’s Siberian period, and the six escapes claimed by Joseph Stalin. In 1901, a revolutionary named Leib Bronshtein, not yet possessing a catchy moniker, found one when he escaped from Irkutsk with the aid of a blank passport on which he had inscribed the name of the man who had been his jailer back in Odessa, Leon Trotsky. After the Bolsheviks had finally won and the Soviet system was locked in place, exile became almost the easiest among the horrid array of punishments it employed. And during Soviet rule, successful escapes—from Siberian exile, from prison, from anywhere—happened only rarely, if at all.

  Varlam Shalamov, the prose writer and poet who survived seventeen years in the murderous gold-mining camps of the Kolyma, noted in his prose piece “An Epitaph” that the daily quota of dug-up earth for a Kolyma miner was about 267 times as much as the quota had been for a Decembrist prisoner laboring in Siberian mines about a century before. Both the nineteenth-century and the twentieth-century prisoners had essentially the same tools—-shovels, picks, wheelbarrows. And after he finally got out of the Kolyma, Shalamov wrote, “I read memoirs of persons who had been sent to exile in Siberia under the czars. I found their escapes from Yakutia and Verkhoyansk bitterly disappointing: a sleigh-ride with horses hitched nose to tail, arrival at the train station, purchase of a ticket at the ticket window . . . I could never understand why this was called an ‘escape.’ ”

  We know the Soviets killed or jailed people for offenses even more bizarre than any the tsars dreamed up. Biographical notes about Shalamov don’t say why he was sentenced to the Kolyma mines the first time, in 1937, but in 1943 he was given an additional ten years for, among other things, expressing the opinion that Ivan Bunin, a recent Nobel Prize laureate, was “a classic Russian writer.” People slaved in the gulag camps for five, ten, or fifteen years because they had used fake ration cards, or worked for the American Relief Organization during the famine that followed the First World War, or stolen a spool of thread, or perpetrated a “facial crime” (such as smiling during a serious party lecture), or inquired about the cost of a boat ticket to Vera Cruz, or studied Esperanto, or possessed a piece of Japanese candy (proof of spying for the Japanese), or danced the decadent Western dance called the fox-trot.

  A single ill-considered remark could be enough. An actor named Shirin, of the Lenin Collective Theater, landed in a labor camp for bursting out, “Don’t feed us Soviet straw; let’s play the classics!” A woman got ten years for saying that a recently convicted enemy of the people, Marshal M. N. Tukhachevsky, was handsome. A man spoke of the tragically deceased hero of the revolution, “Sergo” Ordzhonikidze, with apparent reverence (“Let’s remember his soul”) but unwisely happened to be in a bathroom at the time . . .

  Stalin, with his wide-screen approach to governing, moved not only individuals but also entire populations around his empire like pieces on a game board. In those years people were even exiled from Siberia. As part of the Soviets’ campaign against religion, the Tibetan Buddhist High Lama, Agvan Dorzhi, was deported from Buryatia to Leningrad. Solzhenitsyn tells of a Yakut native who was relocated from the Kolyma district to near Leningrad for the crime of rustling reindeer. After his release from exile and return home, the Yakut said to prisoners whom he met in Kolyma, “Oh, it’s boring where you come from! It’s awful!”

  During the Second World War, tens of thousands of citizens of Korean background were shipped from Vladivostok and environs to Central Asia because of fears for their loyalty. A large number of Chinese were rounded up in Russian cities along the Chinese border and moved north to Yakutia for the same reason; most of them died as a result. Whole trainloads of German-speaking Estonians were given one-way passage to the Barabinsk Steppe, in the middle of western Siberia, because they were thought to be sympathetic to the Nazis. And so on.

  Stalin’s death in 1953 marked an end to the large-scale deportations. Nikita Khrushchev denounced the wrongs and excesses of Stalinism in his famous speech at the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956. The following year, after winning a struggle for power with fellow Stalin-era holdovers among the party leadership, Khrushchev did not have his main rivals shot, as Stalin would have done, but instead made Vyacheslav Molotov ambassador to Mongolia an
d sent Georgi Malenkov to head a Siberian electrical-generating plant. In the later years of the Soviet Union, and certainly after its fall, one heard less often about enemies of the government being sent to Siberia. And yet in 2005, when President Vladimir Putin brought down the politically inclined oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky on charges of bribery, theft, and fraud, the defeated billionaire was sent not to some minimum-security jail in greater Moscow, but to Penal Colony Number 10, southeast of the Siberian city, of Chita. That city, many miles east of Lake Baikal, was where Tsar Nicholas I had sent the most dangerous of the Decembrists—or rather, those he had decided not to hang.

  Some of the above ran through my mind as I stood in the village of Maltsevo looking at the old Trakt running eastward out of sight. In the road’s deeply worn ruts I tried to picture its former magnitude. This had been a continental highway, after all, a road of empire. I imagined parties of prisoners tramping along it, chains jingling, and sleighs slipping by in winter, and imperial couriers on horseback bound for Peking, and troops of soldiers, and runaway serfs, and English travelers, and families of Gypsies, and hordes of tea wagons in clouds of dust. If there were a museum of the great roads of the world, the Sibirskii Trakt would deserve its own exhibit, along with the Via Appia and the Silk Road and old U.S. Route 66.

  In America we love roads. To be “on the road” is to be happy and alive and free. Whatever lonesomeness the road implies is also a blankness that soon will be filled with possibility. A road leading to the horizon almost always signifies a hopeful vista for Americans. “Riding off into the sunset” has always been our happy ending. But I could find no happy-ending vista here, only the opposite. This had also been called the Convicts’ Road or the Exiles’ Road. Not only was it long and lonesome, but it ran permanently in the wrong direction, from the exiles’ point of view. Longing and melancholy seemed to have worked themselves into the very soil; the old road and the land around it seemed downcast, as if they’d had their feelings hurt by how much the people passing by did not want to be here.