Sibir

by Farley Mowat

  Moisie Efrimov was waiting for me at the hotel. He asked what I would like to do that afternoon – if anything. He did not seem at all surprised when I replied that I simply had to visit the university.

  Yakutsk is a students’ town. One out of every three of its inhabitants is enrolled in one of the innumerable schools, institutes or colleges, either for day or for night classes; and the university is the students’ citadel. Although it was founded only in 1956, it has already become the heart of the city. Physical construction cannot keep up with its growth and, apart from its massive three-storey central building (which is itself still uncompleted), classrooms for the 4,300 regular students are scattered all over the place in any structure which can house them.

  “What do the buildings matter?” a second-year Evenk student asked me. “The important things to us are the best books, equipment and instructors; and we have those. We would come here for those things alone even if we had to sleep in tents all winter.”

  I wandered around the main building with a group of students. The science labs were filled with esoteric equipment, all brand new and much of it made in Czechoslovakia and Rumania. The library occupied the largest single portion of the building, and it bulged at the seams with nearly half-a-million volumes. The professors and instructors of the sixteen departments (there are seven faculties, including medicine) held surprisingly high qualifications. One of the department heads (all of whom are Yakut) explained:

  “When it was announced we were going to start the university, we were buried under applications from teachers all over the Soviet Union. Even when we explained that living conditions would not be so good at first, and we had not too much money, it made no difference. So we took the best and today our standing shows us near the top in the Soviet Union. However, that is not all due to the volunteers. Sixty per cent of our teachers are Yakut.”

  It is really a students’ university. All regular students (there are an additional three thousand night students and students taking correspondence courses) are on scholarships. Most of them live in residences which they run themselves by means of elected councils. Those who live out receive extra grants to cover the higher cost of board and room. All textbooks are free. The Central Students’ Council, the Student Trade Union and the Komsomol Committee all have representation, with full voting rights, on the Governing Board, where they exercise a strong influence on policy. The Prorector, Ivan Mikhailovich Bruhanov, a Yakutian-born Russian, was a little rueful about that.

  “We have been reading about student power in American universities and the complaints of their boards about students trying to take a hand in too many things. Here the students already have a hand in everything! Sometimes I don’t know who is running this univeristy, they or we. Do you know every student group has an elected monitor who can challenge any of his Dean’s decisions and bring it to the Governing Board? Not only that, but a Dean cannot even take disciplinary action against a student without permission of the monitor. It was not the same when I was a student. But, never mind, it isn’t so bad. They are a headstrong lot, and they make mistakes, but they are loyal to the university and as determined to make it a good place as any of the staff.”

  Later I talked privately to three students, two Yakut and one Russian. I asked whether they really felt they had much freedom to determine how the university was run. A twenty-year-old Yakut girl, studying history and languages, answered.

  “Youth needs freedom. If they don’t get it they become frustrated and then bored, or worse. This would be bad for the state, would it not? Here we have no more freedom than we need, but we do have what we need.’ ”

  “In political thought and action too?” I asked.

  A Yakut biology student answered that one. “That doesn’t come into it. Those who are really political join the Komsomol. Most of us don’t. We think it is our first task to get the best education we can. Only then will we be prepared to consider what needs changing; and only then will we be prepared to go about it sensibly.”

  “But can you dissent in any meaningful way from what we in the West might consider an imposed political doctrine?” I probed, feeling my way.

  The young Yakut looked puzzled. “Is there any other kind of political doctrine?” he asked. Then he smiled. “We have a proverb in our country. When a horse is going the right way, why kick him in the ribs?”

  These three students had all studied English for several years but had never before spoken to someone whose native tongue it was. Although their grammar and command of idom was not as good as my transcription makes it appear, none of them would have serious communication difficulties if they were to find themselves magically transported to Canada.

  Classes were small – I saw none with more than twenty students and many, including all the science classes, were smaller. There was no crowding or feeling of crowding. If the buildings were shabby and somewhat unkempt, the atmosphere was a pleasantly homey one.

  To a surprising degree the construction of new university buildings is in the hands of the students themselves. Undergraduates in architecture design the new structures. Student engineers draw up the working plans and select and test the materials to be used. Students from all faculties work on the actual construction during the summer vacations and receive standard wages. This sort of thing undoubtedly helps create the feeling which was implicit whenever students spoke about the university. Almost always they referred to it as “our” or “my” university. They seemed to be happy with their involvement in the place – except for one young man, a Komsomol member, who took some pains to draw me aside.

  “You should not believe all the students tell you,” he told me in a conspiratorial tone of voice, “particularly the Yakut students. They still have many primitive opinions and ideas. Socialism has not yet fully reconstructed their thinking. There is much laxness – not enough discipline. This university would be better if the students held more political convictions and if they were subjected to stronger Party control. We are working on that; but at the moment do not get the impression there is here any tendency to the decadence of western education practices.”

  I assured him I would heed his warning, and shook free of him as fast as I could. I had noted two things about him. First, he was a new Russian immigrant from near Moscow. Second, he spoke of “this” university instead of “our” university.

  On several occasions we ended an evening in the apartment block which housed the Artists and Writers Union; the living quarters of many of the writers and painters, and the artists’ studios. These were times to talk far into the night about the mystical subject of “north,” peoples of the north, and sometimes to become involved in heated discussions about the thorny path of art.

  The thirty-three members of the Artists Union represent, as they say themselves, the first generation of Yakut artists trained in western techniques. Their dean is Ivan Machasynov who, at thirty-eight, is the eldest amongst them. Born on the taiga, and orphaned at the age of nine, Ivan went to school in Yakutsk, then on to Leningrad where he studied for six years, spending long days at the Hermitage collection, and trying to contain his yearning for Yakutia. His work during this period was good enough so he was asked to stay on in Leningrad, but he would have none of that. So back he came, and now he is the Director of the newly formed Yakutsk Art College.

  Although all the artists work in water colours and in oil, their natural genius lies in graphics – a medium closely akin to the old artistic skills of their ancestors who never made even the smallest wooden utensil without engraving intricate designs upon its surface. Wood prints, lino prints and steel and copper engravings preoccupy them, and when they are working on subjects from their own heritage they produce dramatic, beautiful and imaginative prints.

  Unhappily, the same cannot be said for works based on modern subjects – mines, electric power stations, factories, or farmers driving tractors. These works are stiff, uninspired, unemotional and, like so much Soviet art of the “accepted” mode,
depressingly clouded with propaganda overtones.

  One night when we had spent some hours sitting on the floor of one of the studios, eating sugared wild cranberries, sipping cognac and examining prints, I commented on the disparity in quality between works inspired by tradition and those inspired by “other considerations.” Why was one group so good – the other so bad – I asked?

  There was an embarrassed silence. I had clearly hit upon a nerve. Someone changed the subject and I got no answer from his group – perhaps because it was a group. However, on another occasion in the home studio of a young Russian painter, there was no such reticence.

  “Politics and art simply don’t mix. We have always known this and the authorities ought to realize it. Just the same, they go on insisting it is an artist’s foremost duty to serve the propaganda needs of the state. We have no wish to work against the state, but unless we are free to interpret things as they appear to us, we will never be more than hacks. And that is exactly what most of our recognized artists appear to be … in public anyway. In private almost all of us do our own work as we like but it is impossible to have it hung. This is too bad, but not so serious because our private works sell very well – much better than our public ones. The whole situation is foolish because our so-called private paintings are often better known than the works hung in the state galleries. Visitors from your countries who think Soviet art is still in the 1920s are not seeing what is really being done. Don’t worry. We are making progress and one day our work will be seen by all the world.”

  Having seen a fair amount of this private work, I can believe him, but there is no question in my mind that the official attitude has greatly retarded the development of the visual arts in the U.S.S.R. It is unfortunately true that the political animal is usually antipathetic toward the artistic animal, perhaps because he is simply too stupid to comprehend the meaning and value of true art.

  Fourteen

  ON MY LAST day in Yakutsk, Simeon Danielov took John de Visser and me to see a rehearsal at the National Ballet Theatre. Fiodor Potapov, Director of the Yakut National Drama Theatre, joined us and as we sat watching the dancing he talked enthusiastically about the performing arts in Yakutsk. I found his presence rather distracting and wished I was John, who had nothing to do but scuttle about on stage and backstage amongst the ballerinas looking for good camera angles, or just looking.

  The Drama Theatre began in 1925 and now has a company of thirty-five professional Yakut actors, many of them Moscow trained. It performs dramas written by Yakut playwrights in their own language. In 1947 the National Opera Theatre was founded and it now employs several Yakut librettists and composers. The National Ballet Theatre came later but already has five full-length Yakutian ballets in its repertoire. It also has as beautiful a corps de ballet as any balletomane could hope to see. The dancing was somewhat erratic but the two featured ballerinas, Evdoki Stepanova and Natalia Christoforova, made up for that. I could contentedly have watched them all day long had not John run out of film, a disaster which reduced him to a state of utter frustration. In common decency to an old friend, I felt obliged to take him home before he began to weep openly.

  That afternoon we were the guests of Madame Elene Eremevina Amosova, a retired schoolteacher living in a log house which had been built by her grandfather in one of the older sections of Yakutsk. Decorated outside with traditional fretwork, it was light and airy inside. It contained three bedrooms, a large old-fashioned kitchen with an immense samovar and a masonry heating and cooking stove; a living room, dining room and a glassed-in sunporch. Except for the presence of an electric sewing machine, television set, washing machine and other such modern gadgetry, it was typical of the homes of most urban Yakut families. Soon a modern apartment block will be built nearby and Elene Eremevina and her husband will move to a flat with running water, sewage system and central heating. They are in no hurry.

  “My family has lived in this house for three generations, and it is a good house and we love it deeply. When my husband and I do move, the house will go to my eldest son. He is an engineer and could have a nice new flat but he would rather have the house. A family should have a house of its own in which to raise the children.”

  Born in 1910, Madame Amasova is still an exceptionally handsome and gracious woman, her sleek black hair untouched by grey and her wide, expressive face unlined. At the age of eighteen she became one of the first Yakut teachers, spending many years in the far north with the Red Tents – the young volunteers who travelled from village to village and from camp to camp teaching reading and writing to the illiterate country folk. At fifty she retired on full pension to devote herself to her great passion – the preservation, as a living art, of Yakut craft traditions. Working with reindeer skin, native furs, natural felt and chamois (most of which she prepares herself) she produces superb examples of the womanly arts of her people. Her gorgeously embroidered handiwork, and that of her many pupils, is exhibited throughout the Soviet Union and was shown at Expo ’67 in Montreal, and Expo ’70 in Osaka.

  “You see,” she explained, “It happens sometimes that when a people of ancient culture come into the modern world, they are in such a hurry to catch up they throw away all that reminds them of the past. I, too, felt like this when I was a girl, and the young Russians joined us in the Red Tents. I wanted to dress like them and look like them. But one day it happened that a Russian girl from Leningrad, who had become my close friend, asked me to make her a pair of our embroidered boots and a reindeer fur jacket. She said her people had nothing so beautiful. Afterwards I began to think perhaps we were being too hasty. Over the years I came to realize we must remain Yakut; to turn ourselves into Russians would be to lose ourselves, as some stranger might lose himself in the depths of the taiga.

  “Now Yakut handicrafts are an important part of our education system. All little girls learn those arts and practice them too. The old things have again become fashionable and a young Yakut girl who goes to Moscow to study is proud and happy to display her embroidered boots and gloves. She is envied – not laughed at; and she feels good to be a Yakut girl.”

  Over glasses of tea we talked about the life of the Amosovas. Elene and her husband had raised four children, two daughters and two sons, all of whom have attended or are attending university. The youngest girl, Augusta, arrived home from classes while we were there, looking radiant in a fur capote which she had made and decorated herself. Shyly she talked to us in English about her ambitions to take a special degree in art in Leningrad so she could continue the work her mother had begun.

  In the early days of their marriage, when they lived near the arctic coast, the Amosovas worked alongside the people they were teaching. Elene became a reindeer herder. She ran traplines, skinned and tanned the furs she caught and, wherever she went, she talked with the old women and gradually amassed a huge collection of ancient Yakut, Evenk and Yukagir designs and patterns for embroidery and insert work. These were not deposited in one of the several Yakutsk museums – they were put into everyday use in the growing Yakut handicraft industry.

  It was with reluctance that I left the Amosovas late in the winter afternoon. But I had another date to keep – with yet another remarkable woman.

  Soviet journalists (from west of the Urals) have christened her the Snow Queen. This is a title which gives Alexandra Yakovlevna Ovchinnikova, Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, and a member of the Praesidium of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R., no pleasure at all.

  “It makes me sound like a white-haired grandmother; and see, there is not a white hair on my head! Or worse, it makes it seem I am queen of some frozen fairy-tale realm at the North Pole. Well, of course you know I am a grandmother and very proud of it, but I am much prouder of my country – of Yakutia – and it is shameful to make people think it is nothing but a waste of snow and ice.”

  I met her first at a very dull official reception at Expo ’67 in Montreal. Simply dressed, her jet h
air combed close to her head; dark eyes very alert, and her face devoid of cosmetics but glowing brown, she was a natural woman, and a handsome one, in a swarm of vastly unnatural diplomats, officials and their ladies. She seemed so alien that I – also an alien in that gathering – was immediately drawn to her and before long we were having a little party of our own. She introduced me to kumiss – fermented mare’s milk – of which she had brought a supply with her from Russia. I had no clear idea who she was until after she left the reception and someone from the Soviet Embassy asked me how I had enjoyed meeting the lady President of Yakutia.

  When we met again it was in her office in Yakutsk. She beamed at me from behind her uncluttered desk and asked if I had come for more of her kumiss. It was a bitter day and the heating in the government building was inadequate, so she had draped a huge shawl around her shoulders and was toasting her stockinged feet over a small electric heater. She looked even less like the President of the Soviet Union’s largest republic than she had done in Montreal. Soft-voiced, attentive when anyone else was speaking, full of humour and with an almost constant smile at her lips, she was certainly not my conception of executive authority. Nevertheless she was, and had been for more than a decade, the most important woman in her country.

  When I made some joking remark about the advances of feminism in Yakutia, Alexandra Yakovlevna took me up quickly.

  “There is no such thing in my country. There has never been any need for such a movement. Yakut men and women have always understood each other very well, and we women are greatly respected. We try hard to earn that respect. In the old days the wisdom of women was held to be the true wisdom of the people, and it was seldom the men failed to be guided by it. This regard for us has not changed, you see. It explains why a foolish old woman like me comes to be Chairman of my Republic. How do you like my dress? You should like it. I bought it in Canada.”