Russians

by Gregory Feifer

  Probably it’s being done just for the sake of it, just in case. There’s an apparatus for exerting pressure and it must earn its bread.

  Did you give my statement to the Supreme Soviet Presidium? Of course I don’t have high hopes for a fair analysis of my case. Now isn’t the time to be dealing with such nonsense as fairness and truth in practice. It’s enough they exist in theory…

  But I’ve been distracted trying to reason things over and haven’t finished describing my New Year’s. I celebrated it on the following day. Andrei Fyodorovich [a fellow engineer] and I sat down in our barracks, made some cocoa and drank it with crackers he was sent from Moscow. He got a touching New Year’s package with an evergreen twig and congratulations. We sat in front of that twig to drink our cocoa. Then the days followed each other with no changes.

  In another letter two and a half months later, Zhora transcribed for Serafima the words to a fox-trot called “Counting the Hours,” which he said was “very characteristic of our mood.”

  Ivdel, February 23, 1939

  We’re parting, perhaps forever

  On an autumn day, deliberately and simply

  But I remember years past

  And feel sharp, tormenting pain.

  Counting the hours, to measure by hours,

  I’ll learn to live in separation

  I will await you, I will believe,

  I will remember, and I will love.

  You’re my only lighthouse,

  Where my hopes fly in the spray

  Fate will decide

  When and where and how

  We will be close again.

  What awaits is unknown,

  The past foggy and forgotten.

  But the heart feels we’ll meet again

  On life’s journey sooner or later.

  That’s the way it is, the sum of me.

  A certain young woman here arrived from Harbin [the Chinese city where many Russian émigrés settled], who was of course arrested as a spy. She sings that song with a very good voice. What feeling she conveys, and what oppression we feel listening! Lambs put on skewers by those punitive organizations, abundantly coated with seasonings: spying, terrorism and other nonsense. And you say my case will be appealed!

  By the summer, Zhora’s description of some of his plans for construction projects appeared to suggest he’d at least partly reconciled himself to his imprisonment.

  August 18, 1939

  I remember how I sat during the fall and winter evenings and days, reading and thinking how best to build them. Because nothing like them has ever before been built according to my plans; in the past I just did student work. Now I see rows of machines in the workshops brought in to realize my projects. Those machines are building foundations I drafted. Now cars are driving on an overpass I remember planning. When it was first under construction, I was afraid about what would happen if my work was good for nothing. No, everything functions and it seems they’re happy with them. Apparently I’m good for something.

  When Anton Chekhov undertook to visit a notorious penal colony on the far-eastern island of Sakhalin in 1890, he traveled more than two months from Moscow by train, horse-drawn carriage and river steamer to reach his destination. Although he praised parts of Siberia for their beauty and relative freedom from tsarist repression, what struck him most was the squalor he encountered. “Poverty, ignorance, and worthlessness that might drive one to despair,” he wrote about the far-eastern region of Primoriye.9 He saw Sakhalin as a “perfect hell.”

  Together with advocating reform, Chekhov’s motive was to study “unbearable suffering, the sort of which only man, free or subjugated, is capable.”10 He described the flogging of a prisoner sentenced to ninety lashes, when “after only five or ten blows his flesh, covered with weals from former beatings, turned crimson and deep blue; his skin peeled with each blow. ‘Your Worship!’ we heard through the screams and tears, ‘your Worship! Spare me, your Worship!’ ”11 Chekhov dreamed about the incident for several nights.

  The brutal tsarist penal system was nevertheless far kinder to inmates than what would follow under the Soviet Union, when millions died building the cities and mining and lumber industries of the far east.

  Logging remains a major occupation today. Much of the poorly regulated industry is illegal, including the clearing of vast swaths of timber sold very cheaply to China, Japan and elsewhere. Finding workers willing to undertake the backbreaking work of filling even legal quotas remains a problem, so some companies rely on another Soviet legacy: cooperation with North Korea. During the Cold War, Pyongyang sent prisoners to logging camps in remote stretches of the Russian far east to help pay its debts to Moscow. Two decades after the collapse of communism, North Koreans are still a source of very cheap labor for Russian firms. No longer prisoners, they continue doing dangerous work, isolated from the local population. Hoping to learn at least a little about their working conditions, I traveled to a timber camp in the Amur region on a cold day in March.

  Boarding a train in the dilapidated city of Blagoveshchensk, across the Amur River from the Chinese city of Heihe and its shiny skyscrapers, I headed north through endless forests and taiga. Watching the totally unpopulated landscape pass by my window was alternately exhilarating and monotonous: you wouldn’t want to be stranded there. My destination was the snowbound town of Tynda, a collection of Soviet-era concrete-slab buildings built to serve as the main crossroads of the Baikal-Amur Mainline, a colossal railway project intended to help develop the region for no discernible reason other than settling it. Considered one of the great follies of the late Soviet era, the so-called BAM railway remains unfinished. Nestled among gently rolling forested hills, isolated Tynda was only thirty years old when I visited, but seriously decrepit. That didn’t make it much different from many other Soviet-era settlements except for its compound of long, single-story wooden buildings on the edge of town: barracks for North Korean workers.

  The complex stood at the end of a narrow road, where a tall gate next to a guardhouse and a big searchlight blocked the entrance. It was surrounded by an old wooden fence topped by a string of rusting barbed wire. Inside, conditions looked very basic. A large North Korean flag flew at the top of a tall pole, near banners and monuments bearing slogans written in red Korean characters. Occasionally, the gate opened to allow laborers through, usually in groups of three. Sitting on the snow-swept road, they looked bedraggled and weather-beaten. When I tried to speak to one, he told me in broken Russian that he didn’t understand me. Others appeared to want to talk but were visibly afraid.

  Residents of nearby houses seemed oblivious to the foreigners living among them. A kindly middle-aged woman named Liudmilla Alexandrovna told me that the workers keep to themselves. “When we come across them in the forest, they’re afraid of us. We used to feel sorry for them, looking very poor, dressed in their black work clothes. Now we’re used to them.”

  Despite rumors of abuses, frequent accidents and food shortages in the camps, local police don’t concern themselves with the North Koreans’ affairs unless they learn of murders and other serious crimes. The few officials who agreed to speak to me said the government’s agreement with North Korea gives them no jurisdiction over the camps. However, it was clear that the authorities in Tynda were receiving a steady stream of fees and, by many accounts, payoffs for issuing work permits. Before being unceremoniously ejected, I glimpsed stacks of North Korean passports waiting to be processed inside the local office of the Federal Migration Service, which implements immigration policy. An official later told me that sixteen hundred North Koreans work in the region, usually for three-year stints, but others said the number was probably far higher. A former manager of Tynda’s main logging company estimated that his one firm alone may have employed more than six thousand people.

  At a processing plant I managed to visit in the forest twenty miles south of Tynda, massive saws cut logs into boards. It was desolate and freezing, and the situation was little better i
n summer, when the hot and humid forests swarm with mosquitoes. Unlike the members of the few Russian work brigades around Tynda, North Koreans cut and clear wood by hand, without the help of timber harvesters and other heavy machinery. A local who had worked alongside them told me that conditions were dangerous and workers were under constant surveillance. Nevertheless, life in Tynda, however punishing, gives circumstantial evidence of the much worse conditions back home: only those in good standing with the North Korean authorities are allowed to travel to Russia.

  The need to cope with the cold helps explain Russians’ abiding love of one of their great pleasures, the public baths called banyi. From homemade wood-heated huts ubiquitous in the countryside to large establishments in cities, banyi provide escape from the drudgery of daily life, especially the seemingly endless stretches of freezing, overcast weather, when roads are dangerously icy and bundled-up pedestrians look weighted with grim determination.

  Under Soviet rule, the banya fulfilled another important function by providing the millions living in crammed communal apartments a place to bathe, and some have kept prices low as a kind of social service. Every Moscow neighborhood has at least one banya, usually housed on the first or second floor of an ordinary-looking apartment building. Most are single-sex. Patrons typically enter a large room filled with high-backed benches, where they undress, wrap a sheet around themselves and head to the baths. They return to the main room between sessions in the steam room to relax, drink tea or vodka and talk.

  The steam room itself, or parilka, resembles a sauna, although it’s larger and more humid. An employee called a banshik regulates the furnace, usually fueled by gas, and produces the desired amount of steam by throwing in ladles of water, often infused with mint, eucalyptus and other scents. Some banshiki have fan clubs that come at the same time every week to sit on the wooden platforms or beat each other with dried birch-leaf besoms, which may sound masochistic but feels much like a massage when done by experts. Heading out of the banya after a session in a typical Moscow establishment called the Donskiye Baths, a regular named Gennady Novitsky described the process as “a whole science.”

  “You use the birch leaves to draw the steam close and open your pores,” he explained. “That helps you sweat out the poisons.” True or not, it’s supremely relaxing. After the scorching-hot parilka, many jump into a pool of cold water—or, in the countryside, into snow—before heading back to the steam room to repeat the routine. Novitsky said the feeling of absolute abandon erased all concerns about daily life, including its hierarchies. “There’s no such thing as a general in a banya,” he said. “Everyone’s equal.” Another patron claimed the banya routine is as necessary for Russians as eating and drinking: “They say church purifies the soul and the banya purifies the body.”

  Little has changed in banyi since Soviet days except the prices. Although many at the Donskiye Baths considered the ten-dollar fee high, Muscovites can pay hundreds elsewhere for slightly better surroundings and a few beers. Moscow’s oldest and fanciest banya, the gilded Sanduny Baths, near the Kremlin, was built for nobles in the nineteenth century and said to have been frequented by the likes of Pushkin and Tolstoy. The main room has an ornate Gothic wooden ceiling and mosaics depicting idyllic Black Sea scenes; marble pillars surround the large pool. Before the rising price of attendance limited our visits, I would often go with my friend Kolya, whose father had regularly taken him when he was a boy—and with my own banya-devoted father when he visited me in Moscow.

  Although my wife, Elizabeth, often questioned why Kolya and I would voluntarily spend hours sitting in steamy rooms staring at other not-very-fit naked men, it was there where we relaxed enough to develop our most unrealistic ideas for journalistic collaborations: journeys across Russia to document the best vodkas; larks to Afghanistan—whose landscape and cuisine Kolya and I both loved—to research a book I was writing about the Soviet war. When I dared question our chances of accomplishing our most fanciful plans, I was rebuked for raining on the spirit of our parade. “Of course we’ll do it,” Kolya admonished me. “How could we not? We’re the best! Now lie flat!” Kolya’s skill with the birch besoms on my back, along with the beer and steamed shrimp we devoured afterward, made our visits among the activities I’ve most enjoyed in life.

  Despite its many renovations, however, Sanduny maintains a noticeably seedy look and its employees are as gruff as their Soviet predecessors. Explaining the exorbitant cost, a banya director told me customers demand the high prices “because they want fewer people to jostle them.” That failed to impress Gennady Novitsky back in the downscale Donskiye Baths. He said it doesn’t matter which banya you visit: “When you emerge on the street afterward, you feel so light that you think you might float away.”

  Many foreigners who agree find another winter tradition, that of plunging into swimming holes sawed out of ice-covered ponds and rivers, less tempting. The popular custom, which has made a comeback since Soviet days, takes place en masse at midnight on the Russian Orthodox observation of Epiphany, in January, and according to superstition brings very cold weather called the Epiphany frosts. I observed one session five days into the coldest winter in twenty-six years, in 2006, when the temperature was minus twenty-five degrees Celsius and an Arctic freeze was pushing mercury levels in Siberia down to minus fifty. In Moscow, automatic teller machines were malfunctioning and electric trolleybuses ground to a halt. Traffic was greatly reduced since it seemed that only the lucky few with heated garages or those who kept their cars running all day were able to get on the road.

  First-aid workers who stood by a tributary of the Moscow River lined with elite dachas admitted that its icy water conferred only negative health consequences. Nevertheless, dazed-looking swimmers wrapped in towels after bathing said they felt exhilarated. Some insisted that more than just a physical sensation, their experience of the cold was a rite of passage important to their identity as Russians.

  The cold and other hardships have persuaded generations of Russians that they behave a certain way because they think differently from others, as a much-quoted passage from Vassily Aksyonov’s semiautobiographical 1980 novel The Burn describes.

  In Europe there are frivolous democracies with warm climates, where an intellectual spends his life flitting from the dentist’s drill to the wheel of a Citroen, from a computer to an espresso bar, from the conductor’s podium to a woman’s bed, and where literature is something almost as refined, witty and useful as a silver dish of oysters laid out on brown seaweed and garnished with cracked ice.

  Russia, with its six-month winter, its tsarism, Marxism and Stalinism, is not like that. What we like is some heavy masochistic problem, which we can prod with a tired, exhausted, not very clean but honest finger. That’s what we need, and it’s not our fault.12

  Aksyonov, who was later expelled from the Soviet Union, presents a typically idealized picture of Europe, laden with envy. As Edward Keenan has pointed out, the passage also reflects a belief that the Russian concern with deeper matters bestows moral superiority.13

  Forty years earlier, a prominent Soviet educator named Anton Makarenko decried Russian intellectuals’ “passionate love of slovenliness and disorder… Perhaps they had a special taste that could discern in this disorder a gleam of something higher, something attractive, something that touched them deeply—a precious gleam of freedom.”14 But Aksyonov—the son of journalist Yevgenia Ginzburg, whose Journey into the Whirlwind remains one of the best accounts of life in the Gulag—undermines such views by blaming Russians for their own plight. “Not our fault? Really?… Who cut themselves off from the people… licked the boots of Europe, isolated themselves from Europe… submitted obediently to dim-witted dictators? We did all that—we, the Russian intelligentsia.”15

  The passages tap into the central nineteenth-century debate that, regardless of its merits, came to define Russians’ conception of themselves: Who is to blame for the country’s ills? That leads to another eternal question—What is
to be done?—that has prompted one grandiose solution after another. If the Westernizers sought to rescue Russia by imposing foreign values—often with a very Russian call for revolutionary upheaval, as I mentioned—their rivals, the Slavophiles, looked inward. Emerging in the late 1830s, they believed Russia’s problems lay in having abandoned its patriarchal traditions and Orthodox Christian principles in favor of Western rationalism and individualism. Peter the Great bore the greatest blame for derailing Russia from its supposedly natural path toward harmony and salvation based on the values of the Slavic peasant commune, a view based on nostalgic yearning for an imagined “lost” country.

  The Slavophiles drew on an old tradition of dissent begun in the fifteenth century in the monasteries of principalities such as Novgorod that were conquered by Moscow. Their monks influenced the sons of elite families exiled there in disgrace, who continued to share in many of the assumptions central to the “dominant” culture. Among them were the same despairing, conservative views about the weakness of man’s nature. Rather than seeking to overthrow the tsar, they criticized his moral imperfection, often using a traditionally religious vocabulary.

  Russia’s first historian, Nikolai Karamzin, helped lay the foundation for the Slavophile tradition by attacking constitutional reforms drawn up by Alexander I’s adviser Mikhail Speransky, a founder of Russian liberalism who in 1809 advocated the establishment of a series of legislatures to check the tsar’s powers. Although Karamzin—a conservative who defended autocratic monarchy in the wake of the French Revolution—didn’t believe Russia to be fundamentally different from Western countries, later Slavophiles argued for Russian exceptionalism. Most were products of wealthy families who attended universities and traveled abroad. Like the Westernizers, they came of age under the spell of German Idealism; its emphasis on mysticism and intuition for divining universal truths naturally appealed to those who argued against the belief that Russia was inferior. The Slavophiles believed their country was no worse than the West, just different. More than that, Russia’s deeper spiritual principles would eventually triumph.