by Frazier
Besides oil, the railway carries coal, machinery parts, giant tires, scrap iron, and endless containers saying HANJIN or SEA-LAND or MAERSK on their sides, just like the containers stacked five stories high around the Port of Newark, New Jersey, and probably every other port in the world. Now and then a passenger train goes by, and if the time is summer and the weather, as usual, hot, many shirtless passengers are hanging from the open windows with the curtains flapping beside them. Not even the most luxurious car on the Trans-Siberian Railway offers air-conditioning. Then more freight comes along, sometimes timber by the trainload. Siberian timber can be three or four feet in diameter, a size only rarely seen on logging trucks in America today. Some of these trees are called korabel’nie sosni—literally, “caravel pines,” trees from which ships’ masts were made.
American companies have tried to put together deals to harvest Siberian timber, but as a rule the deals go wrong. Executives of these companies eventually give up in disgust at Russian business practices, particularly the corruption and bribery. In one story—hearsay, only—a major timber company of the American Northwest withdrew from negotiations after its representative in Siberia was taken up in a helicopter, ostensibly to look at some trees, and then was dangled from the door until he agreed to a contract disadvantageous to his company. He agreed, landed safely, and advised his company to get out of Siberia. Some environmentalists say that Russian corruption is the Siberian forests’ true preserver and best friend.
Geologists have always liked Siberia, especially its eastern part, where a lot is going on with the earth. Well into eastern Siberia—to a north–south range of mountains roughly paralleling the Lena River Valley—you are still in North America, tectonically speaking. The North American Plate, sliding westward, meets the Eurasian Plate there, while to the south, the Amursky and the Okhotsky plates complicate the collision by inserting themselves from that direction. All this plate motion causes seismic activity and an influx of seismologists. Eastern Siberia is among the most important places for seismic studies in the world. Farther west, Siberia offers other remarkable geology, in a formation called the Siberian Traps. These are outpourings of volcanic rock that covered a huge portion of present central Siberia 245 million years ago, in an event that is believed to have caused the massive die-off of predinosaur species known as the Permian extinction.
Paleontologists come to Siberia not for dinosaur fossils, which are not found nearly as often as in the Mongolian steppes to the south, but for more recent fossils of prehistoric bison, mammoths, rhinos, and other species that lived ten thousand to fifteen thousand years ago. The Siberian mammoth finds alone have been a bonanza, some of them not fossils but the actual creatures themselves, still frozen and almost intact, or mummified in frozen sediments. A museum in Yakutsk displays the fossilized contents of a fossilized mammoth stomach, in cross section, beside a whole preserved mammoth leg with its long, druidical hair still hanging down. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, discoveries of mammoth remains were so common that for a while mammoth ivory became a major export of Siberia.
To astronomers, Siberia provides the advantage of skies largely untroubled by light pollution and, in some places, cloud-free for more than two hundred days a year. Looking up at the clarity of the night in Siberia, you feel that you are in the sky yourself. Never in my life have I seen so many satellites and shooting stars. Because of the big target Siberia presents to space, it gets hit by a lot of objects from there. In the early morning of June 30, 1908, something came out of the heavens and struck the taiga near the Stony Tunguska River in south-central Siberia, a region traveled only by reindeer herders. The impact created a blast that felled trees outward from it in a radial pattern covering an area about twenty-eight miles across.
Even today scientists aren’t completely sure what the thing was. Speculation has included plasma from the sun, an antimatter explosion, a black hole (probably not, because a black hole would have made a corresponding exit explosion on the other side of the earth, in the North Atlantic), a meteorite, an asteroid, or a comet. Today the comet theory has the most support. The relative lack of mineral residue points to a comet, because meteorites and asteroids are made of iron or silicates, while comets are mostly dirt and ice. Whatever caused the explosion, the impact on the planet was the biggest that humans know about in historic times.
Travelers who crossed Siberia in the early eighteenth century noted the remarkable animals they saw—elk “of monstrous size,” fierce aurochs, wild boars, wild horses and asses, flying squirrels in great numbers, foxes, hares, beavers, bears. Of the swans, cranes, pelicans, geese, ducks, bitterns, and other birds, one traveler wrote, “After sundown these manifold armies of winged creatures made such a terrific clamour that we could not even hear our own words.” Philipp Johann von Strahlenberg, a Swede captured by Peter the Great’s army at the Battle of Poltava in 1709 and sent with other Swedish prisoners to Siberia, wrote that the region had six species of deer, including the roe deer, the musk deer, the reindeer, and the great stag. He also noted a special kind of bird whose nests were so soft that they were used for socks. About 290 years later in Siberia I saw few or none of these marvels, except in museums, where some of the specimens are facing a second extinction from moths and general disintegration.
The main four-legged animal I encountered in Siberia was the cow. Little herds appear all the time, especially in western Siberia, grazing along the road or moving at twilight from the woods or the swamp into a glade. Siberian cows are skinnier than the ones in America, and longer legged, often with muddy shins, and ribs showing. Some wear bells. Herders, usually not on horseback, follow them unhurriedly. The boys have motormen’s caps and sweaters with holes; the women, usually older, wear rubber boots, long trousers under their skirts, and scarves around their heads against the insects. Beef in Siberian stores is gristly, tough, and expensive. Siberian dairy products, however, are cheap and good. The butter and ice cream of Siberia are the best I’ve tasted anywhere.
At times Siberia has supplied a lot of western Russia’s butter, and some of England’s and Western Europe’s, too. Just before the First World War, 16 percent of the world’s exports of butter came from Siberia. N. S. Korzhanskii, a revolutionary who knew the father of the Russian Revolution, V. I. Lenin, when Lenin was living in England in 1903, recalled a meal in Lenin’s London apartment at which “I was amazed at the wonderful, beautiful-smelling creamy butter, and was just about to burst out with some remark about the wealth of the British, when Vladimir Ilyich said, ‘Yes. That must be ours. From Siberia.’ ” Lenin spoke to his landlady, and then informed his guests that the butter had come from the Barabinsk Steppe. “I passed through it twice,” Lenin added. “On my way into exile and back again. A marvellous place. With a great future. The Englishwoman told me that they all know Barabinsk butter and Chulym cheese.”
Lenin went to Siberia on two separate occasions. The exile he was referring to followed his arrest for revolutionary activities in St. Petersburg in December 1895. Lenin was twenty-five then, and still using his original name, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. Sentenced to three years’ exile, Lenin was sent to Shushenskoye, a village on the Yenisei River in central Siberia. Exile under the tsars could be a rather mild proposition, especially compared to what the Soviets would later devise; during his exile Lenin received a government stipend of twelve rubles a month, which covered room and board as well as extras like books. He was able to get a lot of reading done. On the way to Shushenskoye, he stopped for a couple of months in Krasnoyarsk and read in the library of a rich distiller named Iudin. The research he did there later helped in the writing of his Development of Capitalism in Russia. In Shushenskoye, he translated a book by the English Socialists Beatrice and Sidney Webb, hunted, skated on the Yenisei, and entertained his girlfriend, Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya, who came to Shushenskoye to visit. They later married and honeymooned there. All in all, Siberia seems to have agreed with Lenin splendidly and seasoned him as a po
litical thinker. His revolutionary name, which he assumed in 1901, may have been inspired by the great Siberian river, the Lena (the name of his native river, the Volga, having already been taken by the father of Russian socialism, Georgi Plekhanov, known as Volgin).
The second time Lenin was sent to Siberia he had been dead for seventeen years. After the 1917 revolution, which succeeded in no small measure because of his vision and practicality, Lenin guided the Bolshevik putsch through civil war and consolidation of national power. Then in 1923 he suffered a series of strokes; a convalescence did not restore his health, and he died of another stroke in January 1924. Because of Lenin’s importance to the revolution and the saintlike status the Communists gave him, the Soviet government decided to have his body preserved. Embalmers and other technicians did such a skillful job that when they were done he looked better than he had in the months before he died. To house him, the government built a temporary and then a permanent tomb on Red Square in Moscow, where his body went on display for the crowds who filed reverently by.
In 1941, with the Germans approaching, an icon as important as Lenin could not be left at risk of destruction or capture, so the body was packed into a railroad car and shipped to the western Siberian city of Tyumen for safekeeping. There, far from the front, it waited out the war. In 1945, after the Allied victory, Lenin again returned from Siberia and went back to his Red Square tomb. Russians who had seen him both before and after his stay in Tyumen reported that when he went on display again he looked “much the worse for wear,” his second Siberian sojourn having had a less salutary effect, apparently, than his first. The experts in charge of such details soon got him back into shape again.
Like Lenin, many of the objects in museums and churches in the Kremlin and elsewhere in western Russia have spent some time in Siberia. During the Second World War, state treasures and works of art and historic archives were put in crates and shipped east. A lot of western Russia’s heavy industry also moved to temporary factories beyond the Urals. The instinct to withdraw, to disappear far into the interior, figures often in Russian history. During invasions from the West, Russia’s strategic option of nearly unlimited retreat made it, in a sense, unkillable. After Napoleon began his invasion of Russia in 1812, an adviser told Tsar Alexander I, “I am not afraid of military reverses . . . Your empire has two powerful defenders in its vastness and its climate. The emperor of Russia will always be formidable in Moscow, terrible in Kazan, and invincible in Tobolsk.” Tobolsk, at the junction of the Irtysh and Tobol rivers, was at the time the administrative capital and ecclesiastical seat of western Siberia.
On the question of whether Russia’s vast size has benefited or hurt it overall, historians and others disagree. Those who take the negative side say that Russia has been too big and spread out ever to function properly, that it has been “crippled by its expanse,” that much of its land is not worth the trouble, and that Siberia is a road leading nowhere. A few years ago, two public-policy experts at a Washington think tank wrote a book advising Russia to close down its remote and hard-to-supply Siberian cities and villages and concentrate the population in locations more practical for transportation and the global market. The far places should be left to a few skeleton-crew outposts, and the difficult environment allowed to revert to wilderness, the experts maintained.
Those on the positive side of the argument (a larger number, in total, than the nays) say, basically, that Russia was not really Russia before it began to move into Asia. Before, it was a loose collection of principalities centered on trading cities like Novgorod and Vladimir and Moscow. The pro-Siberians say that other nations became empires by crossing oceans, while Russia did the same by expanding across the land it was already on. At weak moments in Russia’s history, it could have been partitioned between hostile countries that then were more powerful—Lithuania, Poland, Sweden, the Ottoman Empire, Germany—had not the resources and hard-to-subdue vastness of Siberia kept it alive. Possessed of Siberia, Russia became a continental country and not only an ethnic entity on the map of Eastern Europe. Or as Joseph Stalin once told a Japanese interviewer, “Russia is an Asiatic land, and I myself am an Asiatic.”
(Stalin, by the way, was exiled to Siberia repeatedly during his years as a young revolutionary, and he claimed that he had escaped from Siberia six times. He was, of course, alive during the Second World War and so did not make a posthumous visit via cold storage.)
The first Russian ruler to style himself officially as tsar, Ivan IV (Ivan Grozny, Ivan the Fear-inspiring, “the Terrible”), was also the first to add “Lord of All the Siberian Land” to his titles. He was able to do this because he had conquered the Tatar city of Kazan, a Muslim stronghold on the Volga River that had long blocked Russian moves eastward. In 1552, Ivan led a large army against Kazan, besieged the city, mined the walls, overcame the defenders, killed many of the men, enslaved men and women and children, and then had his clergy sprinkle the streets, walls, and houses with holy water to bring the benediction of the Almighty to this formerly infidel place. The conquest destroyed the Tatar khanate of Kazan. Farther to the east, the khan of Sibir, taking note of the event, became Ivan’s tribute-paying vassal, thus making Ivan his titular lord.
With Kazan out of the way, Russian adventurers could go beyond the frontiers to previously unexplored lands across the Urals. In 1581 and 1582, a band of Cossacks led by a Volga River pirate named Yermak Timofeyevich followed rivers into the country of the khan of Sibir, fought several battles with the khan’s forces, defeated him, captured his leading general, and occupied his fortress town, Isker, on the Tobol River. The khan, Kutzum by name, later regrouped and killed many of the Cossacks, including (in 1585) Yermak himself. But by then Yermak had sent envoys to Ivan with news of his victory and a rich tribute of sable furs, black fox furs, and noble captives. This impressed Ivan favorably with Siberia’s possibilities, and the state then secured Yermak’s foothold with contingents of troops. By 1587, the Russians had begun to build the city of Tobolsk a short distance downstream from Isker, the former stronghold of the Siberian khan.
Such an enlargement of Ivan’s territories gave added plausibility to the grandeur of the name “Tsar.” Ivan had reinforced it in other ways, too, primarily by announcing the many royal lines he was descended from. His mother, Ivan said, was a descendant of Mamai, khan of the Golden Horde, whose rulers traditionally came from the line of Genghis Khan. Ivan also claimed direct descent from the Caesars of Rome, through a progenitor named Pruss, supposedly Caesar Augustus’s brother. Ivan’s paternal grandfather, Ivan III (“the Great”), had counted among his wives Sophia Paleologue, niece of the last Byzantine emperor, another important relation.
That emperor had disappeared forever, along with the Orthodox church in Constantinople, when the Ottoman Turks captured that city and desecrated and destroyed its churches in 1453. Then only Russia, nominally Orthodox since the tenth century, remained as the seat of the true faith. Soon after Ivan IV’s reign, Moscow became by tsar’s decree “the Third Rome,” Rome itself having been lost to the heresy and corruption of the Catholic church, and Constantinople, the Second Rome, now engulfed by Islam. Moscow would be the Third Rome, with no other to follow; there the true and orthodox faith would be preserved.
After Russia had acquired Siberia, tsars of the seventeenth century sometimes were told by Westerners that their dominion exceeded the size of the surface of the full moon. This information pleased the tsars, who probably did not look too closely into the math of the statement. The surface area of the moon is about 14,646,000 square miles. (Although the tsars would’ve measured in desyatin, or square versts, or something else.) When the moon is full, the part that’s visible is of course half the entire moon, or 7,323,000 square miles. Whether Russia in the seventeenth century could honestly claim to be larger than that is not certain. It had not yet taken over the Baltic territories, the Crimea, Ukraine, or the Caucasus, and most of its Siberian territory was unknown in size. Mapmakers then had little i
nformation about Siberia’s eastern regions and were not even sure whether it joined North America. Those details weren’t important, however. To say that Russia was larger than the full moon sounded impressive, and had an echo of poetry, and poetry creates empires.
Chapter 2
When I was in my early forties, I became infected with a love of Russia. By then I had left Ohio, moved to New York City, become a writer. On the street in New York one day I saw my first actual from-Russia Russian. My then landlord, a Romanian named Zvi, pointed him out to me. This Russian was stocky, broad, with big hands and wide fingers. He wore a light gray shirt, open at the neck. His pallid, unshaven face was almost the same colorless color as his eyes, and his thick, straight gray hair was combed up off his forehead. I nodded to him, and he nodded back. I considered this a very satisfactory first sighting. My landlord said that this man had been allowed to leave the Soviet Union because of the diplomacy of the great President Jimmy Carter and added with admiration that already the man had become a much-feared landlord himself in Brooklyn.
At about the same time, I saw a notice for a lecture to be given by two recently arrived Russian émigré artists, Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid. The notice advertised them as conceptual artists and said that in Moscow before they emigrated they had been unable to find work because they were dissidents. Everybody had heard of and sympathized with Russian dissidents. The term came nowhere near to describing how contrary and daft Komar and Melamid really were. At the lecture, only Melamid spoke English. Komar interjected comments in Russian that Melamid attempted to translate. First they showed slides of themselves buying the soul of Andy Warhol. There in the photo stood Warhol himself, a bit addled-looking but game, handing over the deed to his soul to these Russians, who were giving him a dollar bill in return. Melamid also announced they had recently gone to Crete and discovered the skeleton of the famous Minotaur, providing as proof a slide of a human skeleton with a bull’s skull for a head. They then showed portraits of people’s ancestors, which they said they were available to paint on commission; all the portraits were carefully rendered paintings of dinosaurs. A series of slides showed the pair at an altar they had built in the Negev Desert in Israel, a stop on their way to the United States. Upon this altar they had made a pile of their Russian suitcases and then set them ablaze, symbolizing the finality of their leaving home.