by Tim Cope
For the better part of the next century the Kalmyks utilized the unique river ecology and pasturelands of the Caspian steppe and more or less lived by the traditional nomadic patterns that had long defined life in the region. They lived in yurts, roamed seasonally with their livestock, and indulged in the age-old nomad pastime of raiding their neighbors. Horse rustling and slave trading were important parts of the Kalmyk economy, and Russian captives in particular could be sold at lucrative prices in the markets of Khiva, or returned to Russia for ransom. Unable to pacify or control the Kalmyks, the Russian tsar took advantage of their fearsome cavalry skills, hiring them to defend Russia against the Ottoman Empire.4
By the mid-eighteenth century the Kalmyks’ fortunes had well and truly turned. For thousands of years, nomads had enjoyed military dominance as horseback archers of unmatched prowess, but the Kalmyks had arrived on the Caspian steppe at a time when the advent of cannons and muskets was eroding this supremacy. More generally, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were an era that marked the demise of nomads and the emergence of powerful sedentary societies on the fringes of the Eurasian steppe—namely, those of China and Russia.
As Russia’s might grew, the tsar’s demands on the Kalmyk cavalry’s services increased, and southward colonization pushed into the lush pastures of the lower Volga. Traditional Kalmyk grazing lands were turned into hayfields and put to the plow, driving the Kalmyks to less fertile steppe. By 1740 the number of livestock kept by the Kalmyks had declined dramatically, and around ten thousand Kalmyk “tents” (families) were without enough animals for subsistence. To survive, Kalmyks resorted to more frequent raids, sold their children as slaves, and even took up fishing.
It was these oppressive conditions that, in 1771, gave rise to the exodus of Kalmyks back to their roots in Asia—after which the Kalmyk khanate was all but absorbed by the Russian Empire.
More than two centuries on, in January 2006, it was hard to imagine that very much remained of this once fiercely reputed people—particularly because the descendants of those who stayed behind at the time of the exodus had since been deported en masse to Siberia by Stalin during World War II. And yet, as I approached the modern border of Kalmykia, there were signs suggesting that the pattern of tension and conflict between Kalmyks and their neighbors was an ongoing one.
It was late on New Year’s Day when I reached Liman, a sleepy village on the very edge of the Volga delta where marked roads came to an end and a series of marshes and lakes gave way to wild, waterless steppe. This kind of unique intersection of environments had no doubt been a pillar of the local nomadic economy, but it also had long attracted settling farmers, and nowadays lay outside Kalmyk territory.
Through my friend Anna Lushchekina, a local Russian man, Anatoliy Khludnev, had agreed to guide me through the Stepnoi nature reserve to Kalmykia itself. Anatoliy, a retired lieutenant colonel who nowadays worked as the director of the reserve, was quick to point out the issues of his region: “The land here has long been disputed between Kalmykia and Astrakhan Oblast, and there is still no agreement as to where the official border lies.”
Still, the border dispute was trivial in the scheme of things. A wider problem, or at least the issue of the day, was the friction between Kalmyks and the growing Chechen population. “Chechens who are fleeing their own country on resettlement programs are taking over. They are the new settlers of the Kalmyk steppe,” Anatoliy complained.
Racked by conflict and unemployment, Chechnya lay little more than 100 km from Kalmykia’s southern border. In the past decade thousands had migrated here seeking work and a safer life. According to Anatoliy, their presence had scared many Russians into moving out of the area. “It’s not too bad for us, I guess, though,” he reflected. “We have all of Russia to go to if we want. The Kalmyks, on the other hand, have little elsewhere if they want to be among their own. I don’t blame them for getting into conflict with the Chechens.”
Anatoliy may well have been projecting some of the prevailing prejudices against Chechens, but violence between Chechen migrants and Kalmyks in the area had recently made headlines. In August, in the village of Yandik, not far from Liman, a Kalmyk girl had been shot dead by Chechens. In retaliation a crowd of five hundred mourning Kalmyks returning from the funeral had rioted through the village, torching homes and forcing the Chechens to flee. The situation had threatened to spread into a wider ethnic conflict until the Russian army was brought in to ease tensions. The peacekeeping force had rolled out a week before my arrival.
Things had apparently settled down for the time being, and the plan was for Anatoliy to escort me from Liman through Yandik, then across 70 km of wild steppe known as Cherny Zemli, or “Black Lands,” that straddle the disputed border region.5 Anatoliy explained that he would lead the way in the patrol vehicle and stand guard at night. He would take his gun in case we ran into wolves or poachers.
On a freezing morning when curtains of light snow raked the land I packed a week’s supply of food and set off out of town. Half an hour later there was a distinct air of unease as I followed Anatoliy through Yandik. Many houses lay in burned ruins, the streets were largely deserted, and those people I did see peeked out shyly from half-opened doorways. At the far end of the village I rode past the cemetery, pausing briefly by the fresh grave of the murdered Kalmyk girl.
For three days from Yandik I followed Anatoliy through a landscape of wild, frostbitten grasslands. Our route followed a centuries-old trail once used by merchants to ferry fish from the Volga across the steppes to more temperate Stavropol. By day Anatoliy told tales about the grueling journeys of these merchants, who had come under constant attack from Kalmyk brigands. By night, as the temperature plummeted to around −20°C, Anatoliy was less cheerful. He tried to sleep in his vehicle but was forced to repeatedly restart the engine to keep warm.
The only people we met along the way were a couple of old shepherds who worked for a Chechen sheep farmer.6 One of them was a Volga Tatar who had spent the best part of his days in prison. In colorful language he warned me about the dangers of Kalmyks, and told a running joke: “What could possibly be worse than a drunk Kalmyk? Only a drunk Kalmyk woman, of course!”
On our third morning we entered the nature reserve. The sun was creeping into a solid blue sky, sending an orange light angling across a still sea of pale, bleached grass. It was the seventh of January, and although there was no snow cover, evidence of winter could be seen in the form of frozen shallow ponds that sparkled like silvery discs embedded in the land.
As frost gathered around my sheepskin hat and the horses moved briskly across the frozen sandy soil, I couldn’t help but think it might have been a morning like this on January 5, 1771, when the Kalmyks had embarked on their exodus back to their origins in Zhungaria. On that day Ubashi Khan, the Kalmyks’ young leader, had set out east from the Volga to lead an estimated thirty thousand nomad families, somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 individuals, with their untold camel caravans and probably more than a million head of livestock.7
For those who departed, it was the beginning of an epic journey that would prove to be a tragedy of extraordinary scale. Traveling a route similar to the reverse of the one I had followed across the Kazakh steppe, they had to deal with the inherent environmental challenges, compounded by attacks waged by Kazakhs who took the opportunity to settle old scores. When finally the Kalmyks arrived on the Ili River in what is today Xinjiang province in China, around a hundred thousand men, women, and children—as many as 75 percent of those who had started off—had perished.
For those Kalmyks who survived, dreams of refuge in Zhungaria were swiftly quashed. Little more than a decade earlier, the Qing dynasty had embarked on a campaign to exterminate the Oirats, with some historians suggesting that as little as 7 percent of the population had survived. Ubashi and his people were dispersed throughout Xinjiang, and in the words of historian Michael Khodarkovsky, “the Kalmyks had escaped Russian tentacles only to be ensnared in Chin
ese ones.”
At an abandoned hut we had a late lunch and decided to part ways. We had, by now, crossed an invisible line into Kalmykia, and besides, Anatoliy was short on fuel.
“See this trail here?” Anatoliy said, pointing to a vague line of ruts and hollows that was more sketch than road. “If you follow it and keep your compass between 270 and 290 degrees, then you should come to a hut called Atsan Khuduk—it’s manned, and the caretaker there should be expecting you .”
After watching his four-wheel-drive vehicle shrink back the way we had come, I sat still in the saddle long enough for the sound of the engine to peter out and a sense of aloneness to bite. When I turned and pulled away, silence was replaced by the swishing of sixteen legs—Tigon included—brushing through frozen grass.
For the next three hours I rode with urgency, wanting to reach the hut as soon as possible. The sun sank into a smudge of black cloud, the shape and texture of the land faded into pastel grays, and the cold drew in like a noose. I called Tigon in close and kept an eye on my compass. When the moon rose, and my caravan cast dim shadows across the frosted grass, my transition to an older world felt complete. I slowed to a walk, snuggled deep into my winter coat, and opened the bell on Taskonir’s neck—something I always did at night in case the horses broke free (so I would be able to hear where they had gone) and in this case, also because it as was an old steppe tradition along courier and trading routes to have a horsebell to warn rest stations of the approach of a horseman. After traveling nearly 40 km into the cold of evening, I was beginning to worry I had missed the hut, but around 11:00 P.M. three dark shapes emerged from the moonlit steppe. From one came the faint flicker of an oil lamp.
I was greeted by an old man reeking of vodka who introduced himself in Russian as the caretaker. Word hadn’t reached Atsan Khuduk—a station for rangers and scientific researchers—about the special permission I had received to ride through the reserve, but it didn’t worry him. I was led inside to a mattress, where my body withered, my vision blurred, and I collapsed into sleep.
Some time later I woke to another world. I heard banter and heavy footsteps and opened my eyes to a group of four or five men clambering into the hut, dusting off the frost from their army fatigue coats. The dull flicker from the lamp caught the profile of broad, chapped red cheeks with skin drawn taut over the bone. The men’s eyes were long and slender, and when they spoke I was astonished to hear the familiar sounds of Mongolian.
I joined the group around a wooden table, where Mongolian salty milk tea was on the pour, and with the last remaining battery power in my laptop showed video footage of Oirat Mongols whom I had met in the far west of Mongolia fourteen months earlier. The men leaned in and listened intently:
“They speak a purer Oirat dialect than we do, and clearer than Oirats we have met from China! You know what we say about those who went back to Asia: ‘Tasarsan makh’n, usersen tsus’n’—it translates to ‘Split flesh and spilled blood’ and means ‘We are one people with you.’ But how was Kazakhstan? What was it like to ride where our ancestors perished?”
As I sat there sharing stories about the steppe, with the salty tea warming my insides, it was as if Kazakhstan had merely been a bridge between these two disparate nomadic Mongolian societies. One could almost be convinced that these men were nomads who had just returned from a wolf hunt. Symbolic of modern-day Kalmykia, however, the men were Kalmyk scientists and rangers who had come back from a fox count as part of a biology study. One of them was the deputy director of the Cherny Zemli reserve, Boris Ubushaeva—a professor whom I would later see dressed in a suit and tie at a university in Kalmykia’s capital, Elista. Impressed by my journey, he promised to take me out to see the very reason the reserve had been founded.
In the morning we left the hut when the sky was still dark and a residual glint of stars remained. It was an hour later, as we crested a subtle swell of sand, that the professor told me to crouch down. In the still conditions the faint twitching of a grass tussock had been enough to betray the presence of an animal, and as I focused closer a shaggy creature the same pale color of the grass darted away.
By the time the professor had handed me the binoculars a whole swath of grassland before us shimmered to life and a flock of these creatures lifted like startled sparrows. The animals possessed goat-sized bodies draped in a thick winter coat and were scuttling along on twig-like legs. They were saiga.
Since first learning about the saiga on the Betpak Dala in Kazakhstan, I had heard untold numbers of stories about these enigmatic antelopes of the Eurasian steppe, which could migrate hundreds of kilometres in a single day and which as recently as 1990 had numbered around 800,000. But the herds of the Cherny Zemli were the first I had seen on my travels. “We have around eighteen thousand saiga left on the Black Lands,” the professor explained. “Our efforts to catch poachers are working, but saiga are nomadic, and when they leave the boundaries of our reserve we have no jurisdiction, and often they never return … In 1998, during a cold winter, around a hundred thousand saiga migrated south into the Republic of Dagestan, and only a few came back. They say that the snow in Dagestan was painted red by the slaughter.”
A short way past my first sighting, we startled another herd, this time much closer to us. Not more than 100 m ahead stood a male saiga. His horns, set above bulbous eyes, struck me first. Backlit by the sun, they rose with a slight inward curve and a ribbed texture, looking like a set of glowing amber pincers. Below this spectacle hung a long curved nose that functioned to filter out dust and heat the winter air during inhalation. The head and trunk were so large and heavy-looking it seemed his matchstick legs might give way. So peculiar were the features that it was not hard to believe this was a surviving ice age species that had once coexisted alongside the likes of the mammoth and the saber-toothed tiger.
When the male and his herd sprinted away, I was left mesmerized, yet also aware of how the empty steppe that I had ridden through in the past twelve months had been lacking in saiga. I understood that the saiga’s presence, like the magic of a horseman set against the sky, had been a quintessential part of steppe life.
Back in the hut, where we warmed up with more tea, the professor turned to me thoughtfully. “In the past we Kalmyks used to hunt saiga in our everyday lives. In fact, hunting saiga was how we honed our skills for battle. The key tactic for getting a saiga was to feign retreat, then lure the animals into an ambush—the very technique used so well by Genghis Khan. Ever since the exodus of our brothers back to Asia, however, it has been Kalmykia itself under ambush.”
Like the saiga’s once vast habitat, Kalmyk land had contracted to a small island of steppe where nomadic life was nearly impossible. Not only this, but Kalmyks had faced cultural extinction during World War II, when they were accused of sympathizing with the Nazis and deported to Siberia. More than a third had died in the cattle wagons en route, and, unprepared for the terrible conditions of the Siberian winter, thousands more had perished on arrival. In their absence the Republic of Kalmykia had been dissolved and Kalmyk livestock wiped out so comprehensively that the Kalmyk horse became virtually extinct and the fat-tailed sheep would never again graze the Kalmyk steppe.8 It was only in 1957 that Kalmyks had been allowed to return from exile and had begun to rebuild a sense of their homeland.
A product of this turbulent history, the professor’s life story mirrored that of untold thousands of his compatriots. He had been born in Siberia and studied at a university in the city, never having experienced or witnessed the traditional way of life of his ancestors. “We can no longer live as nomads, and for the saiga it’s a similar story—they have been decimated and no longer run free across the steppes. Nevertheless, we have not lost everything and we know that the Kalmyk steppe without saiga would be like tea without milk—very poor indeed. To protect the saiga we need to preserve our culture, and draw on modern science as well as our heritage.”
Over the coming days and weeks, the sentiments expressed by the p
rofessor were repeated by many Kalmyks I met. The plight of the saiga had become a metaphor for the fate of the nation. The efforts to bring the four-legged nomad back from the brink reflected a broader struggle to revive all facets of Kalmyk heritage and culture.
Just three days’ ride beyond the wardens’ hut, I had traversed half the territory of Kalmykia, yet in that time encountered just one Kalmyk family living out on the steppe—a former schoolteacher and his wife who had decided to try cattle and sheep farming for a living.
In a land so reduced in width, it was perhaps inevitable that like the modern-day culture of the Kalmyks, my journey through Kalmykia was destined to be more spiritual and academic than a physical one. Fifty kilometres shy of the capital, Elista, I was welcomed at the Kalmykian Wild Animal Center by a Kalmyk professor of biology, Yuri, who had been charged with the task of breeding saiga in captivity. Dr. Anna Lushchekina, who had flown from Moscow, was also there to meet me. She headed a UNESCO project, “Human and Biosphere,” in the pre-Caspian region and was responsible for much of the effort to preserve the saiga. For the next week, Anna and Yuri became my chaperones, introducing me to the many faces of modern Kalmykia. With the horses resting at Yuri’s farm, most of that time was spent in Elista, where I would come to understand that the revival of Kalmyk culture was being promoted not on the steppe by horseback nomads but from the urban environment of the capital.
From a distance Elista appeared like any other Soviet city—a drab series of dilapidated apartment blocks and ramshackle homes barnacled to the bare, snow-dusted slopes of a valley. Up close, however, the unique eastern identity was hard to miss.