Some people come to Alaska – and Jeff, I think, is one – because they dream of the place and that dream will not let them go.
On the shortest night of the year, I sat on Ninilchik beach, looking west. At midsummer, at every point on the parallel, the sun is above the horizon for just less than nineteen hours. And though it sets, it does so at such a shallow angle that the light never entirely fades. At worst, in poor weather, these nights could be called gloomy; but if the sky is clear it will remain light enough outside to read a book (or to play golf, as Shetland tourist literature is fond of pointing out). It is a strange kind of light, this midnight glow. At home it is called the ‘simmer dim’: a washed out blush, where colours fade and edges soften. Day melts seamlessly into day, and a connection is made.
At nine p.m., the sun was still high and a sword of light lay across Cook Inlet, resting its point upon the peak of Mount Redoubt. The mountains were paling into silhouettes then, with snow barely distinguishable from rock. They seemed to sit up, as though suspended just above the horizon, held aloft by a thin white line. Feather streaks of yellow cloud were ribboned through the blue sky. Just offshore, boats were still fishing, and through my binoculars I could see an otter floating on his back. A bald eagle was tormenting a raft of ducks, each one diving in panic as the raptor flew low above them, over and over. On the beach, four quad bikes hurtled noisily about, while a pair of eagles sat still at the wave-edge, attended by a squad of restless gulls.
By ten o’clock the sun was just over Mount Redoubt. The few clouds were backlit, glowing at their edges. A group of people further down the beach had built a campfire, and like me were waiting it out for midnight. I settled back and closed my eyes, with the wind against my face. I thought about where I was, where I’d been and where I was going. At that moment, I was halfway through my journey; I was halfway home.
By 11.30, the sun had slipped behind the mountains, and thick cloud was gathering over the land. The last dregs of the day washed over Cook Inlet, leaving only the sweet aftertaste of light. As midnight came, I picked up my bag and walked back towards the truck, leaving the night and the beach behind.
SIBERIA
exiled land
On a map of the world, there are few names that carry such a heavy burden as Siberia. Those four short syllables have come to signify more than just a place. They cast a shadow, and conjure a host of ugly images: of impenetrable forests and lawless towns, of poverty and alcoholism, of intense cold and intense cruelty. This is a region that lives in the mind, in daydream and in nightmare; it is more imagined than seen. And those imaginings, like a cloud of mirrors, reflect, disguise and distract from the land itself. This is a place almost lost behind its own myth.
To say anything at all about Siberia it is necessary to begin with size, for the enormity of the region is central to its story. Covering more than five million square miles – close to ten per cent of the world’s landmass – Siberia has a population of less than forty million. It stretches from the Ural Mountains in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east, and from the Mongolian steppes in the south to the frozen Arctic in the north. This is an area larger than the United States of America and Western Europe put together.
When I was twenty-one I went to Kamchatka, in the far east of Russia. I had found that wonderful name – Kamchatka – and a description in a travel brochure, and made up my mind to go. It was somewhere that nobody I knew had ever been before. It sounded exotic, and seemed, on the map at least, like a very long way away. Travelling there, from Shetland to London, from London to Moscow, from Moscow to Petropavlosk, it seemed even farther. That last part of the journey, between Russia’s capital and its most remote region, left me struggling to comprehend the vastness of the country. The flight lasted nine hours and crossed eight time zones. The country passed beneath us, hour after hour, emerging from the clouds now and then but revealing nothing. Land, water, space, nothing. What lay below seemed almost blank, in the way that a desert or an ocean does. From that height, that distance, it felt empty.
Kamchatka, like many parts of Russia, was effectively closed to outsiders during the Cold War, even to most of the country’s own citizens. There was, and still is, a nuclear submarine base on the peninsula, close to Petropavlosk, the region’s capital, which was founded in 1740 by Vitus Bering, and named after his two ships, St Peter and St Paul. Kamchatka was also a base for international surveillance, being, as it is, one of the closest points to the west coast of America, and on hillsides amid the trees that past was still in evidence. But in the decade or so that had passed between the end of the Soviet Union and my own visit, doors had begun to open to the outside. Individual travellers were still discouraged, but organised visits were possible, so I joined a small-group tour company – half a dozen strangers in a strange land – and went east.
We spent just two weeks on the peninsula, but in that time I fell desperately in love. Together with my fellow travellers, I clambered into the stinking maw of Mutnovsky volcano and camped for two days beneath it, as the tail end of a typhoon stranded us inside our battered tents. I bathed in hot pools that sprang like blessings from the earth. I stood beside the Kamchatka River as Steller’s sea eagles cruised overhead and a young brown bear patrolled the opposite bank. Dumbstruck, I looked out over land so vast and so beautiful that I could hardly believe it was allowed to exist. I left Russia infatuated. Something in that extraordinary place grabbed me by the heart and refused to let go.
For most of my life I have felt myself somewhat distanced from love – within sight, but just out of reach. It is a feeling that mirrors the sense of separation that was with me from my youth. And though it may partly be of my own creation – an avoidance of that which it would hurt to lose – it is difficult to be sure. These knots in which we tangle ourselves are not tied consciously or by design, we simply wake one day and find ourselves bound. But because of this distance, those moments in which love, or something like love, have taken hold in me have been memorable and important. And this was one.
The sixtieth parallel runs through the north of the Kamchatka peninsula, then across the Sea of Okhotsk to the ‘mainland’, passing close to the city of Magadan. That city, as much as any place in Siberia, has come to signify the horror for which, in the twentieth century, the region became known. For Magadan was the port and administrative centre of the Dalstroy organisation, which ran the gulags of the Russian northeast. These were the camps known collectively and infamously as Kolyma. The gulag system of forced labour camps, which reached its zenith under the watchful eye of Joseph Stalin, has come to be considered one of the most appalling acts of barbarism of the twentieth century. Many millions were incarcerated in these camps, and many millions died. The scale of what happened is almost as unimaginable as the scale of Siberia itself.
But the region’s history as a place of exile and imprisonment did not begin with Stalin or Lenin, it goes back much further. Indeed, almost as soon as Russia started to explore the lands east of the Ural Mountains in the seventeenth century, Siberia’s value as a dumping-ground for undesirables was recognised. In a twisted reflection of America’s westward development, the movement of explorers, trappers and traders in Russia was accompanied by another movement: of people forced into exile. It is an extraordinary fact that, while the first European Russian did not reach the Pacific coast until 1639, by the end of that century ten per cent of Siberia’s population was already made up of convicts.
In the United States, the West became a symbol of hope and progress for the nation; in Russia, the East was always a darker and more ambiguous vision. It offered wealth, in the form of furs and later gold, but it always remained a place apart, far from the heart of the country. While America expanded to fill its natural boundaries, Russian power and wealth remained where it had always been, on the other side of the Urals. Siberia was conquered but never fully absorbed into the nation. Such was the extent to which the region was viewed as distant and distinct, indeed, that when the D
ecembrist revolutionaries were sent into exile in 1826 for plotting to overthrow Tsar Nicholas I, one of their number, Nikolay Basargin, wrote that he no longer considered himself to be ‘an inhabitant of this world’.
Those who were sent to Siberia were being punished for a wide range of crimes. From genuine revolutionary activities such as those of the Decembrists, to apparently harmless ones like snuff-taking and fortune-telling: all could result in relocation. And the precise form of that punishment also varied considerably. For some, exile meant little more than a forced change of address, but many others were sent to labour camps, the precursors of the gulags. These camps, like the gulags, had a dual purpose. They not only removed unwanted elements from society and placed them where they could cause no further trouble, they also provided a large, cheap workforce for the exploitation of Siberia’s natural resources. These were not concentration camps in quite the same sense as those operated by the Nazis. Their purpose was to make money, and convicts essentially took the role of slaves. Death was not the intended outcome for prisoners. At least not at first. It was simply an occupational hazard.
While the tsars certainly made use of forced labour prior to the revolution, the scale and brutality of the system that developed through the early decades of the twentieth century was entirely unprecedented. In 1917 when the Bolsheviks took power, around 30,000 people were imprisoned in camps across Siberia. But by 1953, the year that Stalin died and the network began to be dismantled, there were close to 2.5 million prisoners in the gulags. This was a system of exile and slavery that riddled the country like a pox, and was fed in large part by one man’s paranoia and thirst for vengeance.
Among the thousands of camps spread throughout the USSR, those in Kolyma gained a reputation as the worst. The region was, in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s words, ‘the pole of cold and cruelty’. The isolation, the extreme temperatures, the difficult, dangerous work and the consequent high death rates became legendary. Prisoners were underfed and kept in unsanitary conditions, cramped together in freezing barracks that crawled with lice and other insects. In the years after 1937, when Dalstroy’s first boss – considered too lenient by Stalin – was removed and executed, Kolyma was a hell from which death was the most likely escape.
To prisoners, Kolyma was known as ‘the Planet’. Like Basargin a century earlier, those transported to Magadan felt themselves to be travelling towards another world entirely, and the sheer difficulty of reaching the place only underlined this feeling. To get there, convicts had to travel across the country by train, in overcrowded, filthy cattle trucks, with neither enough food nor water. In summer many died en route of thirst and disease; in winter they froze. The trip by train took a month or more to reach the Pacific coast from Moscow, and once there prisoners were kept in holding camps until being taken by ship to Magadan.
These ships, by all accounts, were worse than the overland transport. For much of the week-long journey, which took them through the Sea of Okhotsk, close to Japan, the convicts were locked in cargo areas that were never intended to hold passengers. So many were crowded below deck, some said, that it was impossible to lie down. Food was thrown into the hold from above, and the prisoners, often seasick and diseased, lived in their own filth. Common criminals ruled these ‘floating dungeons’, as the historian Robert Conquest called them, stealing food and clothing from the political prisoners and maiming or murdering anyone who got in their way. Women and young men were gang-raped, without consequence for the perpetrators, and those who died on the way were simply thrown by guards into the sea.
Such was the utter misery the journey entailed that the camps themselves may temporarily have seemed like a relief. Here at least was a ration of food for each person, and a little warmth, though not nearly enough of either. Here too was some modicum of order. Any relief would not have lasted long, however, as the reality of life in Kolyma sank in. The main job of the prisoners once they arrived at their designated camp was mining, principally for gold but also for other precious metals and, later, uranium. Prisoners were set work quotas that, even in twelve to sixteen hour shifts, were unachievable. If their productivity dropped too far, so too did their food ration. And if, as was almost inevitable, it continued to fall as starvation set in, they were likely to be shot as ‘saboteurs’. The fact that there was not enough to go round ensured that everyone was always out for themselves. Gradually, reduced to little more than skeletons, ruled by hunger, thirst and exhaustion, the prisoners ceased to be themselves any longer; they became hollow people, with only the barest and basest of feelings. Varlam Shalamov, who spent fourteen years in Kolyma, wrote that: ‘All human emotions – love, friendship, envy, concern for one’s fellow man, compassion, longing for fame, honesty – had left us with the flesh that had melted from our bodies.’
Of those who survived the camps, many were broken forever. They were freed, but never free. In The House of The Dead, a fictionalised account of the four years he spent in Siberian exile in the 1850s, Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote of how some convicts, once released, could not find the freedom they had longed for in the towns and villages to which they returned. Sometimes, ‘a sedate precise man, who was promising to become a capable farmer and a good settled inhabitant [would] run away to the forest.’ These former prisoners would become ‘inveterate tramps’, leaving behind their families to wander forever, living a life that was ‘poor and terrible, but free and adventurous’.
Dostoyevsky’s experience was mirrored in the twentieth century too, when some former gulags inmates found themselves unable to readjust to the settled life, to the towns or cities in which they had previously lived. Home, for these ex-prisoners, could no longer be located in a single place. Family, work, responsibility: all became chains that had, in the end, to be escaped. The taiga became home; the land itself was freedom.
Of course, Siberia already had its population of wanderers: native Russians – Evenki, Sakha, Nenet, Chuckchi, Koryak, Yukaghir and others – who, up until Soviet times, lived nomadic lives, herding reindeer and hunting wild animals. Their movement was governed by the natural migrations of the animals on which they relied. The idea of settlement – of tying oneself to a single place and staying put – was entirely alien; it made no sense at all in the context of their lives. To remain in one place in the taiga was to die.
In the region around Magadan, the predominant native culture was the Even, who lived in small family groups, herding reindeer. For 2,000 years or more, since these animals were first domesticated, the relationship between people and reindeer has been central to Even life, providing almost everything that was needed to survive. Their meat was eaten and their milk was drunk; their fur was used for clothing and for shelter; their antlers could be fashioned into tools. Fish, herbs, berries, wild mammals and birds all offered variety in people’s diet, but reindeer gave stability. Without them, life in Siberia would have been virtually impossible.
Native Siberians’ relationship with the land was one of absolute intimacy. In order to stay alive it was essential to know the places through which one moved, to know them psychically and geographically, but also to know their character. That character was the essence of the place, it was its soul or spirit. And for the Even, as for other Siberian peoples, spirits were a genuine, conscious presence in the land, to be respected, heeded, and appeased if necessary. Everything in this place had a spirit – every animal, every river, every mountain and valley – and according to Piers Vitebsky, ‘Because such creatures, places, and objects have some kind of consciousness, they also have intention.’ To live safely and successfully, therefore, one must ‘strive to be aware of the moods of your surroundings and adjust your behaviour accordingly, in order to achieve your aims and avoid disaster.’
This understanding of the world, as a sentient place, would once have been almost universal. But it seems difficult to comprehend now when viewed from a distance, from the more or less soulless comfort of our own time and place. There are shadows of it still lurking, though, in
our ways of thinking and in our language, and they lie not far beneath the surface. Siberia’s climate, we might say, is harsh, and the land itself cruel or unforgiving. These adjectives are intended metaphorically, but it is not an enormous psychological leap, once we ascribe such characteristics to a place, to allow for the possibility that they might not be metaphors. To say that Siberia is an unforgiving place is to identify one element of its character, its spirit. And in difficult times, when faced by the reality of that lack of forgiveness, recognition of this spirit inevitably grows. In the Kolyma Tales, one gulag prisoner sees this with terrifying clarity. ‘Nature in the north is not impersonal or indifferent,’ he says, ‘it is in conspiracy with those who sent us here.’
In central Kamchatka, my travelling companions and I visited a group of Even people. In the village of Esso, we boarded a decrepit orange helicopter that took us, noisily, nervously, to a treeless plateau that felt as far from our own lives, perhaps, as it was possible to go. As we stepped out and the engine was cut, the thundering of the blades was replaced by a thundering of hooves, as hundreds of reindeer – some white, some piebald, most a dark, chocolate brown – turned anticlockwise as one, in a tight defensive group. On the edge of the circle, men in khaki clothing stood watching the animals, one of them gripping a lasso in his fingers. Then, without warning, the loop was thrown and a reindeer was hauled out from the crowd. It emerged thrashing and dancing on the end of the rope – whole, vivid and vital. We watched in silence as the men dragged the deer away from the others, then pinned it hard against the ground. A blade was inserted in the back of its neck, just at the base of the skull, killing it instantly. What had been living and thrilling became dead.
Sixty Degrees North Page 12