by Tim Cope
The city’s main park was dominated by a giant wooden archway decorated with impressions of saiga, wolves, and mounted horsemen gazing over the city. On the central square a statue of Lenin had been moved aside to make way for a Buddhist prayer wheel housed beneath a towering pagoda. On the street the Russian language seemed to be predominant, but there were places where only Kalmyk could be heard. A cheap Kalmyk eatery was one of these, where Kalmyks of all ages congregated to dine on nomad food including boortsog, Mongolian milk tea, and an assortment of mutton dishes.
These may have been rather anecdotal examples of ways in which Kalmyk culture was being reasserted, but as Anna guided me around it became clear they were signs of a wider groundswell of cultural reclamation driven by a dedicated and diverse group of individuals.
At the Kalmyk Institute of Humanitarian Studies I was introduced to a young Kalmyk woman, Kermen Batireva, who was writing her doctoral dissertation on traditional Kalmyk costume. She gave me a tour of a museum that displayed original Kalmyk yurts, horse tack, and Buddhist art. In the same institution where she studied I came to know the eighty-one-year-old librarian, Praskovi Erdnievni. Standing not much higher than her desk, this pint-sized woman had single-handedly been gathering written resources about the Kalmyks for more than fifty years. Her stories of lugging suitcases of books from as far afield as Moscow at a time when there were no paved roads to Elista and many of those who were returning from exile lived in tents were legendary. When she was unable to take books back to Elista, she had copied them by hand or on a typewriter.
There were many other individuals who, with characteristic pride and vigor, were pursuing one aspect or another of Kalmyk culture. Two in particular, however, came to take on particular significance for me.
Stepping out of his office in the newly opened monastery, known as the Golden Temple, Erdne Ombadykow did not look anything like what I had imagined. The fresh-faced thirty-three-year-old who wore a chic suit and tie and spoke English with an American accent was the supreme lama of the Kalmyks, recognized by the Dalai Lama as the reincarnation of the Buddhist saint Telo Rinpoche.
“My father was born here in Kalmykia, and my mother was born in a refugee camp in Yugoslavia, but I grew up in Philadelphia. I didn’t see my homeland until I was nineteen years old,” he said softly.
At the age of seven, Erdne had decided he wanted to become a monk. His parents supported his wishes and sent him to India, where he was to live and study in a monastery for thirteen years. It was in 1991, as part of a delegation with the Dalai Lama, that Erdne had first been to Kalmykia. The following year he returned to live in Elista, elected as the first supreme lama of the Kalmyks since the Bolshevik revolution.
“The task to revive Buddhism here was so challenging that in the first two years it drove me to despair. When the Communists destroyed the monasteries in Kalmykia, they didn’t leave one brick at the site—everything was rooted out. When my people returned from exile in Siberia, we started from zero, both materially and culturally.”
As I stood with Erdne on the top floor gazing down at a golden Buddha 9 m high, I could see that those early days were a far cry from the present. The monastery, at 63 m tall, dominated the skyline just west of the city center and was now considered to be the largest in all of Europe. On December 1, 2004, little more than a year before I visited, the Dalai Lama had consecrated the building site—an old Soviet metal factory—and only a month before my arrival the temple had opened to the public.
I couldn’t help thinking that the significance of this temple, and the thirty-three others across Kalmykia that Erdne had overseen the building of in recent years, went beyond a mere revival. Ever since the Kalmyks’ arrival on the Caspian steppe, maintaining a connection with Tibet had symbolized self-determination in the shadow of the Russian Empire. In the early years a lama from Tibet had been sent to Kalmykia to be the spiritual leader, and until the mid-eighteenth century pilgrimages from Kalmykia to Tibet were common. These pilgrimages ended due to the increasing dangers of crossing through hostile Kazakh territory and control by Russian authorities who saw links to Tibet as a threat to their own supremacy. In the present day, Moscow was no doubt keeping a close eye on developments in Kalmykia. In a move that perhaps reflected suspicion about growing independence in Kalmykia and other republics of the Russian federation, Russian president Vladimir Putin had recently revoked the right for citizens to elect their provincial governor or president, bringing control of all republics directly under Moscow.
With Erdne I toured the monastery from top to bottom, marveling at the impressive construction. But by the time we had returned to Erdne’s office it struck me that there was an absence of reference to the nomadic way of life. I pressed him on his thoughts.
“Just because the world is modernizing, it doesn’t mean we should forget our past,” he replied, “but it’s also true that it’s unrealistic to think we can return to being nomads.” Because he had grown up without a connection to horses, the steppe, or a lifestyle of herding livestock, it was, perhaps, understandably difficult for him to identify with the nomad culture of his ancestors.
In a relatively luxurious house on the other side of the city, I met another Kalmyk who was perhaps equally as influential in reviving Kalmyk culture, but whose philosophy was strongly at odds with Erdne’s. Okna Tsahan Zam (who also used the Russian name Vladimir Karuev) greeted me in a deel and colorful Mongolian winter boots. His hair was trimmed to a crew cut halfway back along his skull, and at the back plaited into a ponytail that dangled as far as his bottom
“As Kalmykians, the earth is our mother, Gazar Eej; the sky is our father, Tengri Etseg; and traditionally, where it was good for horses, we lived, and where our animals went we followed. Buddhism is not our faith—it was introduced after we arrived on the Caspian—so we must look to our more ancient nomad heritage and belief in Tengri for strength and inspiration,” he told.
Okna was a renowned musician and singer whose traditional songs about life on the steppe, combining throat singing with contemporary music, had topped the pop charts in Mongolia and captivated live audiences in Europe. But he hadn’t always lived this way.
“I graduated in Moscow as a nuclear engineer and worked for years at a nuclear plant. In my twenties, I suffered a personal crisis. To heal myself I turned to my culture, and my heritage, and began reciting the prose of our national epic, Zhungar,” he said. He opened a bottle of vodka, poured a shot, then dipped his ring finger in the liquid three times, rubbing a little on his forehead, sprinkling a bit over me, and throwing the rest in the air. “If people know their history, their traditions, they understand the value of experience that our people have collected over thousands of years. When we know who we are, our place in the world, and why we exist, we are happy and have a purpose in life!”
After the customary three shots, Okna offered to sing for me, and for the next half hour I sat engrossed by his deep, gravelly voice and the haunting otherworldly harmonics of throat singing.
As we made our goodbyes, he said to me, a little somberly, “I used to believe in politics, but I had a falling-out with the president. I am not happy here in Russia. Even now we Kalmyks are feeling the pressure, the suffocation of Moscow. It’s time for another mass exodus, which I will lead … What do you think—maybe Australia next time?” he chuckled. “Anyway, may the sun always shine on your horses.”
When my week in Elista was over I returned to the Kalmykian Wild Animal Center, where the city gave way to empty, snow-blanketed steppe, but my mind continued to churn with the color and intensity of all I had witnessed. I’d swum in euphoria at the thought that Kalmyks were meshing the realities of modern life with wisdom from the past. The passion of the people I had met made me reflect that Kalmyks seemed to be more conscious of the value of their heritage than Mongolian nomads, who still lived the very traditional lives that Kalmyks pined for. But I wondered: was the romantic, nostalgic view of nomadic life held by many Kalmyks possible only for a pe
ople who were an educated, urbanized generation removed from the horse and the yurt? How far could the revival go in this modern world?
In a vast fenced enclosure at the saiga farm I spent a day battling snow and wind to film the saiga that roamed within. They came to feed at special troughs and kept a wary eye on me at all times. At one stage saiga were caught and hustled into a barn for blood sampling. Under Yuri’s supervision, the blood was put into test tubes, spun on centrifuges, and whisked away.
It occurred to me that, like the saiga at the Wild Animal Center, Kalmyk culture was fenced in and under the microscope of intellectuals. This guaranteed preservation, but how would it be for future generations of Kalmyks who would be born, like these saiga, into relative captivity?
The season’s first blizzards had only just begun to set in, but the saiga farm was destined to mark the end of my winter ride. Unfortunately, the six-week delay on the border meant I had just days remaining on my Russian visa—not nearly enough to cross southern Russia to its borders on the Azov and Black Sea. I had no option but to leave the horses behind and travel to Ukraine to apply for a new visa.
Yuri, who had a hardened team of workers at the saiga farm, was eternally helpful. On the condition I pay for hay and grain, he offered to put the horses under the watch of his workers for the time I was away. So on January 17 I boarded a Crimea-bound bus, waved goodbye to Anna and Yuri, and promised to return within a month.
17
COSSACK BORDERLANDS
On a freezing evening in early March 2006 I was back on the horses and riding into a headwind with a Kalmyk man named Anir. Reawakening to life in the saddle after the winter break, I was acutely aware of the fine mist particles turning my cheeks numb and the sound of long, brittle grass fracturing beneath the horses’ hooves. We had departed the Kalmykian Wild Animal Center three days earlier and, just as it had been during the first few days of spring in Kazakhstan a year earlier, my body felt a little stiff, the horses were wound up, and I was seeing the land afresh.
Framed between Taskonir’s ears, the ridge we’d been following for most of the day angled southwest, turreted every so often with the silhouetted domes of ancient kurgans, mounds of earth and stones raised over graves that probably dated back to Scythian nomads.1 Further on, the ridge gave way to empty plains where the sun was nestling into a golden haze. Empty and uncluttered, it was the kind of vista that could easily be mistaken for the steppe of central Mongolia, where I had begun two years ago. In fact, it was the kind of landscape that had defined most days of the journey since. It was difficult to imagine, then, that within the next twenty-four hours, it would pass behind.
Not long before descending from the ridge, Anir took me to a lone tree. Covered in prayer flags and ribbons, it had been planted on the grave of a lama. Following Anir, I led the horses around it in a clockwise fashion three times. Anir threw vodka into the air. “You might think the hardest part of the journey is behind you, but it is only beginning. Ahead are towns, fields, and roads—down there not even a wolf would find cover, and I don’t know where you will camp. This is for good luck.”
Forty kilometres ahead lay the Manych Depression, a system of rivers and lakes that in ancient times connected the Sea of Azov with the Caspian Sea. A historical crossroads of Asia Minor and Europe, it nowadays forms the southern border of Kalmykia and the northern reaches of Stavropol Krai that lie in the forelands of the Caucasus.
Significantly for me, the Manych represented the end of the arid and somewhat wild belt of steppe that stretches from Mongolia to Kalmykia. Beyond the Manych I could expect arable and more populated steppe.
The immediate leg of my journey lay along a corridor between the restive Caucasus and the uplands of southern Russia. Stretching west beyond the Manych as far as the Azov Sea, it once was a highly sought-after nomad hinterland that the Russian Empire had since fought hard for and plowed up under Stalin.
From the holy tree we pushed beyond darkness. Our aim was to reach Stavropol Krai, from where Anir would return home. To get there involved crossing the Manych via an artificial embankment controlled by a police checkpoint. In theory, this should have been a rudimentary procedure. In practice, things had become complicated in recent times.
On my return to Russia in late February, I had learned that Kok, my hardy gray packhorse from central Kazakhstan, had stepped on a 12 cm rusty nail that lodged deep into his hoof. It had gone unnoticed for many days before being removed. When I arrived he was sitting on his haunches, unable to stand on the injured limb. Sheila in Australia advised me that if the infection had reached the bone, he would probably never recover; if he did, it might take six months. I treated him for two weeks to no avail before deciding to leave him behind.
Losing Kok not only meant I needed to find a new packhorse but also complicated the fine line I had to tread with the Russian veterinary and quarantine authorities. Technically I had to remain in transit with the Kazakh horses and have them inspected in every province en route. Recently I had also learned that officially stationing my horses at the Wild Animal Center over winter required the center to apply for a permit—something neither the director of the center, Yuri, nor myself had been aware of. Even so, the fate of Kok might have been easily explained to authorities but for one further complication—the head of the provincial veterinary authorities in Elista apparently held a grudge against Yuri and had heard on the winds that Yuri was harboring my horses. In my absence, inspectors had visited the center but Yuri had managed in the nick of time to have the horses ridden away and hidden; he told the inspectors I had passed through in the winter, had long exited Kalmykia, and never stopped at the center. If the truth was discovered, the ramifications for Yuri could be significant, and so to help me get out of Kalmykia unnoticed he had agreed to supply a replacement horse—a fine-featured chestnut gelding I had named Utebai. Utebai would travel on the existing papers of the fallen Kok.
At around 11:00 P.M. we rendezvoused with Yuri by the edge of the still-frozen waters of the Manych. He had transported Utebai in the back of a truck, and now he opened the back gate. Already terrified by the ride, poor Utebai nearly fell out before we slapped a packsaddle on him and got under way.
Yuri had earlier made an audacious plan to guide me below the embankment out of sight of police, but the tangle of crushed-up ice pushed up against the edge made this impossible. There was nothing we could do but try riding straight through.
As I approached the boom gate under the glare of floodlights an armed policeman strode into the middle of the road. I came to a halt at the point where I was looking directly down at him, then offered a handshake. There was a moment of silence as the cold, unblinking man looked on. At this crossing in particular, Yuri had warned, they routinely checked the transit papers of live animals, particularly because of the prevalence of rustling.
Gradually, however, the policeman’s face melted into a smile.
“Hello, Genghis Khan! Welcome!”
When dawn broke Anir and Yuri had gone, and like my new horse, I watched nervously as the sun illuminated a new world.
Somewhere during our crossing in the night, the unbridled steppe had given way to fields, canals, and endless lines of poplar trees. I rode through lingering mist on the outskirts of the town of Divnoye, passing residents emerging to till their backyard plots. Out in the larger fields a horse and cart rattled its way along a lane, and an old Soviet tractor pushed through plowed earth. They were scenes reminiscent of an ancient cradle of agrarian society, yet the history of the area belied this picture of settled life.
For most of the last few thousand years the land that stretched ahead to the Azov Sea had been rich, open grasslands, home to nomadic societies. Wave after wave of horseback peoples who inhabited the region had benefited from trade and from close cultural and political ties with their northerly Slavic neighbors. History, however—Russian history in particular—has overwhelmingly remembered them for using the strategic nature of their territory to exploit
the southern underbelly of Slavic lands. Violent raids, which often involved taking Slavic peasants into slavery, had in part led to Russia’s obsession in recent centuries with subduing the region.
The pattern of nomads penetrating Slavic lands from the south was no better demonstrated than by the Mongols when they made their first appearance on European soil in 1223. What has since become known as one of the most remarkable military campaigns in history—and which ended with the humiliation of Russia’s armies—began as nothing more than a manhunt. Following the Mongol defeat of the Khwarezm Empire in Central Asia, Genghis Khan had sent twenty thousand soldiers under the guidance of generals Jebe and Subodei to hunt down the deposed Khwarezm leader, Muhammad II. I have recounted this episode earlier, but after pursuing him west to the Caspian Sea, where he died, the generals were granted permission from Genghis to return to Central Asia via the Caucasus along the north Caspian coast. There began their foray into Europe.
After conquering armies twice their size en route and plundering vast regions of Iraq-Ajemi, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, this roving band of hardened nomad warriors crossed the high passes of the Caucasus and rode down onto the steppe between the Caspian Sea and the Azov Sea. At the time the region was under the rule of nomads known as Kipchaks—a powerful Turkic people who at times held sway from Siberia and Central Asia to the Balkans, and who would feature prominently in the expansion of the Mongol Empire. After persuading the Kipchaks to honor the brotherhood between Mongols and Turks, Jebe and Subodei turned on them and pursued their fleeing armies northwest into Slavic lands.
Although the Kipchaks were not allies of the Russians, one of the Kipchak khans, Kotian, was the father-in-law of Prince Mstislav of Galich—the ruler of one of the most important princedoms of Russia. Afraid that if the Mongols conquered the Kipchak Empire they would invade his own land, Mstislav enlisted the support of several princedoms, including powerful Kiev (whose prince was also named Mstislav), to fight the Mongols.