by Frazier
In Birobidzhan’s only city, also called Birobidzhan, we stopped to buy supplies. The place looked run-down and disheartened; a single figure on a bicycle teetered across a deserted square, and in the cement-gray storefronts I saw one Yiddish sign.
That evening we camped at an intersection of off-road tracks in an expanse of agricultural fields. Near where we pitched our tents, a field of squash had begun to bloom, their cream-yellow flowers abundant on the ground. At this campsite, the mosquitoes were the worst of anywhere on our journey except for the second night at Berezovyi Yar. We had to put on our beekeeper hats again, and gloves. Because it’s impossible to eat while wearing a beekeeper hat, we removed the hats for supper and could finish it only while pacing and dodging around. Though we zipped up the tents tight for sleeping, the mosquitoes squeezed through tiny openings, no doubt forced by the pressure of the infinite mosquitoes behind them. Several times I woke up to smash mosquitoes on the inside of the tent by flashlight. They left bloody smears. The dish of eggs, potatoes, onions, and peppers Volodya made for breakfast in the morning had mosquito bodies sprinkled through it like coriander, and the harvesters in the potato field we drove through on our way out were bundled in thick, dark clothes despite the heat.
About an hour down the road was a place I really wanted to see—Volochaevka, site of the last battle of the Russian Civil War on February 12, 1922. By 1922, Bolshevik forces had secured all of Russian territory except out here, where a White Army resurgence had recently recaptured strategic points including the city of Khabarovsk. The victorious Whites, led by General Viktorin Molchanov, continued west along the Trans-Siberian until they reached Volochaevka, where they were crushed by forces of the People’s Revolutionary Army under the command of General Vasily K. Blyukher. The Soviets never again faced a serious internal military challenge to their power. Older Russians still remember the popular song inspired by the victory, “Volochaevskie Dni” (Volochaevsky Days).
The Battle of Volochaevka converged on a hill that rises above a small village of the same name. As a battle site, Volochaevka is picturesque, iconic—the partly forested hill topped by a silver marker dominates a broad and level landscape of fields and tree lots, with the tracks of the Trans-Siberian curving along the hill’s base. Soviet-era remembrance has terraced one side of the hill with steps of white cement, amphitheater-style. Leaving Volodya and the van in the parking lot, Sergei and I climbed the steps, which were crumbling and had weeds growing in their cracks. The hilltop memorial, fenced in by iron palings bearing Soviet emblems, had suffered similar neglect; its cement and stone were slowly going back to dust and pebbles. On the base of the statue—a silver soldier holding a silver rifle upraised—was inscribed, “Here lie the bodies of a hundred and eighteen fighters for the victory of the Soviets in the Far East, brave men fallen in the struggle with the White Guards and the Interventionists during the assault on the fortifications at Volochaevka on February 12, 1922. Eternal glory to the heroes!”
Near this monument stood a pedestal with a bust of the victorious general, V. K. Blyukher. To one side, a small biographical display on some all-weather material described selected events in the general’s life. As Sergei looked at the Blyukher part of the memorial he became increasingly sad. His aunt’s husband, his uncle Nikolai, had been Blyukher’s driver in the 1930s, he said. The family had admired Blyukher and thought he was a great man. “It was terrible what happened to Blyukher, terrible,” Sergei said, shaking his head. A historical darkness that I recognized came over him and he did not want to talk about Blyukher anymore.
At the time of this battle, Blyukher was thirty-one years old. His youth, competence, toughness, and Civil War successes brought him a hero’s status in the early years of the Soviet Union. G. K. Zhukhov, the most famous Soviet general, said in his memoirs that when Blyukher came to Zhukhov’s cavalry regiment on an inspection in 1924, even the cooks were delighted to shake his hand. Blyukher quickly rose through the army’s ranks until he reached the top one, marshal, of which there were only four.
When Stalin’s purges began in the mid-1930s, Blyukher remained untouchable for a while. The Japanese in Manchuria were making sorties across the Amur, and Blyukher, commander of all Far Eastern forces, could not be spared. But then in 1938 these hostilities eased and Blyukher received a summons to come to Moscow. Accused of being a Japanese spy, he was interrogated for days without interruption and beaten until he was “unrecognizable.” He died in prison without signing any confession in November 1938.
The only other visitors at the monument, an older couple from Khabarovsk, told Sergei that there were White soldiers buried here, too. After the battle, the dead from both sides were put in a common grave. The memorial made no mention of the enemy dead, or of Blyukher’s opposing commander, Viktorin Molchanov. After Molchanov’s defeat here, he withdrew into China, then sought asylum in the United States, and eventually wound up with other White Russian refugees in Petaluma, California, where he became a chicken farmer. Molchanov died in San Francisco in 1974, just shy of his eighty-eighth birthday.
Blyukher’s wife, Glafira, who was arrested when he was, spent seven months in Lubyanka, the NKVD headquarters in Moscow, and then eight years in prison camps. Evidently Glafira survived to see the post-Stalin rehabilitation of her husband. An inscription at the Blyukher memorial noted that it had been given by his wife, children, and grandchildren.
All the way across Siberia I had certain books at the back of my mind. In western Siberia the main book I took my bearings from was of course George Kennan’s, and it stayed with me, along with Avvakum and Yakushkin’s memoirs and some others, until well past Baikal. Now, though, I was farther east than any of those eastbound travelers had gone, and a new book took over as my mental accompaniment—or, rather, a book combined with a movie. For this part of farthest Siberia, the book was Dersu Uzala, by Vladimir K. Arsenyev. Though the English-language edition I had read was published as part of the Soviet Literature for Young People series, Dersu Uzala is neither ideology nor a book only for teenagers; it’s a timeless wilderness adventure story, and a classic Russian expression of a genre that goes back to James Fenimore Cooper (whom Arsenyev himself mentions as an influence).
Told in the first person, Dersu Uzala begins in 1902, when Arsenyev is a young army officer assigned the job of exploring and mapping the almost-unknown regions east and northeast of Vladivostok, including Lake Khanka and the upper watershed of the Ussuri River. The name for the whole area is the Primorskii Krai—the By-the-Sea region. It and much of the Khabarovskii Krai, just to the north of it, consist of a unique kind of Pacific forest in which tall hardwoods hung with vines grow beside conifers almost equally high, and where the lushness of the foliage, especially along the watercourses, often becomes quite jungly. In Arsenyev’s time, this jungle-taiga was full of wildlife, with species ranging from the flying squirrel and the wild boar to the Siberian tiger. Back then tigers could be seen even on the outskirts of Vladivostok, where they sometimes made forays to kill and carry off dogs. Arsenyev describes how tigers in the forest sometimes bellowed like red deer to attract the deer during mating season; the tiger’s imitation betrayed itself only at the end of the bellow, when it trailed off into a purr.
The only humans one was likely to meet in this nearly trackless forest were Chinese medicine hunters, bandits, and hunter-trappers of wild game. Dersu Uzala, a trapper whom Arsenyev and his men come upon early in their 1902 journey, is a Siberian native of the Gold tribe whose wife and children have died of smallpox and who now is alone. After their meeting, Dersu becomes the party’s guide. The book is about Arsenyev’s adventures with Dersu on this journey and others, their friendship, and Dersu’s decline and end.
In the 1970s, a Soviet film studio produced a movie of Dersu Uzala, directed by Akira Kurosawa. It won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1975. The movie is long and slow paced, like a passage through the forest, and wonderfully evokes the Primorskii country. I own a cassette of the mov
ie and in my many viewings of it even picked up some useful fractured Russian from the distinctive way Dersu talks.
Khabarovsk, the city, figures importantly in the movie when Dersu, whose sight is failing, moves to Arsenyev’s house in the middle of town. Finding the house where Arsenyev lived in Khabarovsk was another of my Siberian goals. Sergei and Volodya completely approved, for a change; they are even bigger fans of Dersu and Arsenyev than I am.
From far off, Khabarovsk looks nothing like the trim little community of the movie. The city occupies one of the great river junctions in this part of the world: at Khabarovsk the Amur River, having been the border between Russia and China for about a thousand miles, turns left, or northeastward, and crosses Russian territory for the rest of its course until reaching the ocean. Meanwhile, the Ussuri River, joining the Amur from the south, takes over as the Russian-Chinese border. Travelers coming to Khabarovsk from the west cross the Amur on a bridge that goes on and on. Sergei said it was the longest bridge in the country. Up ahead, spread out in a succession of ridges above the confluence, Khabarovsk seemed endlessly large. With its tall sky and sprawling landscape it could have been a city designed for animals considerably larger than humans—mammoths, maybe, or midsized dinosaurs.
I soon learned that Arsenyev’s house no longer stands. An exhibit about Arsenyev in the regional museum said that an Intourist hotel had been built on the spot where the house used to be. The exhibit had a photo of Arsenyev—a slim, well-built man in an army uniform—along with his notebooks, compass, and eyeglasses. The glasses showed hard use and had been repaired at the bridge with twine or wire. Nearby, a 360-degree painting of the Battle of Volochaevka on the wall of a circular room devoted to war memorabilia put Sergei back into his historically sad frame of mind. He remained somber and withdrawn as we left the museum and went for a walk along the riverfront esplanade. Today was Sunday and the populace had all turned out on this early fall afternoon. I noted, as had become routine, the great number of beautiful women. I thought I observed a more windblown, “California-girl” look among them here. From the esplanade I climbed up to a prominence where a heroic statue of Muraviev-Amurski, China’s bane and the cousin of Bakunin, stood high against the blue of the sky surveying his self-appropriated empire. I could see the crowds along the esplanade, and speeding motorboats, and, far into the distance, the Amur whipped to waves by the breeze.
Before we left town, Sergei and Volodya stocked up at a gastronome and we had a late lunch at the van. Opening the side door, Volodya set the stove on the milk crates to boil water for tea. He offered to prepare for me some of what he was eating—bread and butter topped by a thick, white slice of pork fat. I said I couldn’t eat that stuff because pork fat was horribly bad for you. Volodya said I was wrong about that; when the pork fat—its name is salo—is followed by several cups of very hot tea, the tea melts the fat and renders it harmless in the body. I was unpersuaded, although I’d never heard that hot tea theory before.
(Readers who might want to rent the movie Dersu Uzala someday and do not want to know how it ends should skip the next three paragraphs.)
After Dersu moves in with Arsenyev and his wife and son in Khabarovsk, he spends his days indoors, homesick for the forest. When he goes out, he is unhappy to be told that he cannot take his gun. One day Arsenyev is informed that Dersu has been arrested for chopping down a tree in a city park, and Arsenyev has to get him out of jail. Finally Dersu tells Arsenyev that he can no longer stand this life and must go back to the forest. Arsenyev gives Dersu his new rifle, saying that its accuracy will make up for his poor eyesight. Dersu thanks him, says goodbye to Arsenyev and his family, and leaves.
Soon after, Arsenyev is notified that Dersu has been found murdered beside his campfire. The only identification on the body was Arsenyev’s visiting card. Arsenyev takes the train to the tiny village of Korfovskii, south of Khabarovsk, where the murder occurred. He arrives just as a police officer is overseeing the burial of the body. The policeman tells Arsenyev that Dersu’s new gun was never found and speculates that its robbery was the motive for the killing. When the workmen finish filling in the grave, Arsenyev sees Dersu’s old walking stick on the ground and plants it beside the dirt mound. From the scene at the beginning of the movie we know he will return to Korfovskii and be unable to find the grave. The last shot is of Dersu’s walking stick.
I wanted to take a look around Korfovskii myself, especially since it was right on our way as we headed south from Khabarovsk. Maybe modern admirers had put up a marker of some kind. Korfovskii is only about twelve miles south of Khabarovsk—poor Dersu had not gotten very far—and it now appears to be mainly a village of weekend dachas for Khabarovsk residents. The traffic coming back into the city on a Sunday evening was intense. Sergei wanted to keep going and locate a good camping place before dark, so we gave the village only a quick drive-through. Some of the dachas were fancy and large, or under elaborate construction; the place seemed to be in the middle of a dacha boom. If there was any monument to Dersu Uzala, we didn’t find it.
That night we camped on a gravel bank beside the Khor River. Khor means “chorus,” but this river was about as mute and languid as most of the other Russian rivers I’d seen. The setting sun silhouetted the arch of a nearby bridge across it, and the line of trees beyond, and the boom of a construction crane; after dark an orange half-moon rose. At bedtime, the air became chilly, and when I bathed in the river in the morning, a cold mist lay on the water and made the stones of the gravel bank wet with dew. By breakfast the sun had come over the trees and the day quickly got warm. While Sergei broke camp, Volodya gave the van a wash. We set out and continued southward, passing villages called Roskosh (Luxury), Zvenevay (Small-Group Town), and Tigorovo (Tigerville), and rivers called Pervaya Syedmaya Reka (First Seventh River) and Vtoraya Syedmaya Reka (Second Seventh River).
When Sergei went into a store at noontime to buy bread in the small city of Bikin, he soon returned and asked me to come inside. He had told one of the salesladies that he was traveling with an American, and she had asked if she could see me. Obligingly, he presented me to her. This saleslady was another Russian beauty, though not at all the kind who wears low-rider jeans and pinpoint high heels on the streets of St. Petersburg or Chita. Instead she brought to mind the heroic ladies on Communist posters extolling motherhood—she was matronly, pink cheeked, with vivid dark eyes, and the tunic under her clean white apron left her big, strong-looking arms bare.
She and I talked for a while. She asked me where I was from and I said New Jersey, and she asked if that was a city. I said it was a state, not a city, but it was very near New York City. She had heard of that. She told me that she had seen many Americans in the cinema and on television but I was the first American she had ever seen zhivoi—living, in the flesh. She thanked Sergei for bringing me in. Then she asked us to wait and went into the back room and brought out a kielbasa too special to be put out on general display, and we bought it from her.
Like most cities of military importance, Bikin had been closed to foreigners until after the end of Soviet times. With the Chinese border only twelve miles away, Bikin formerly was fortified with active military installations all around it, and now their barbed wire dangled and their concrete works had turned ramshackle in predictable post-Soviet style. And yet Bikin still had the cloistered feel of a garrison town. Afterward I read that during the Great Patriotic War, a husband and wife in another closed city of the Far East had given Stalin their fifty-thousand-ruble family savings in order to pay for a tank to fight the fascists; their patriotic gesture received much publicity, as did the couple’s being allowed to operate the tank themselves against the Nazis. After the USSR entered the war against Japan in 1945, a mechanic in Bikin, inspired by this couple’s example, donated his life savings to buy a tank so he could personally fight the “samurai.” Unluckily for the Bikin mechanic, however, Japan surrendered soon after and he never got his chance.
Past Bikin we entered the
Primorskii Krai and the last leg of our journey. If we kept going south on the road we were on we would arrive in Vladivostok in a day or so. But what then? At Vladivostok we would have reached our destination and our trip would be done. And probably we wouldn’t stay in Vladivostok; our money had begun to run low, making Sergei even more opposed to the idea of paying for a room. And camping places within range of a city that size were unlikely to be too good.
None of these end-of-trip complications seeming attractive, I agreed with Sergei’s suggestion that instead we turn east, cross the Sikhote-Alin Mountains, and arrive at the Pacific (more precisely, its Sea of Japan) in a less-inhabited place on the mountains’ other side. We’d certainly find better camping spots along the shore. And, that way, when we finally did get to salt water, it would be the open ocean, not the domesticated and no doubt dirty version of it in Vladivostok’s harbor. We could always see Vladivostok later when we were about to go home.
Soon after Bikin we suddenly entered a weird all-watermelon area. Watermelon sellers crowded both sides of the road under big umbrellas in beach-ball colors among wildly painted wooden signs. Sergei pulled over and bought a watermelon for a ruble, but as we went along, the heaps of them kept growing until melons were spilling into the road and the sellers were giving them away. A man with teeth like a crazy fence hailed us and in high hilarity thrust two watermelons through the passenger-side window. By the time we had emerged at the other end of the watermelon gauntlet, we had a dozen or more in the van. The watermelons were almost spherical, antifreeze green, and slightly smaller than soccer balls. We cut one open—delicious. This was not a part of the world I had previously thought of as a great place for watermelons.
V. K. Arsenyev, when leading his Sikhote-Alin expedition in 1906, took the railway south to just beyond the Ussuri River bridge. Then he disembarked from the train and headed east through the taiga. We turned east about seventy-five miles farther on, at the town of Spassk-Dalnyi. The Sikhote-Alin mountains, once we were among them, seemed more like hills, and not very forbidding, but the depth and silence of their forest made up for that. Arsenyev had described the taiga here as “virginal, primeval timberland.” From the height of the trees and the venerable length of the vines depending from them I would guess that the taiga we saw was still original growth. That night we camped above the small gorge of a river named for Arsenyev—the Arsenevka. The sound of it was pleasant to sit beside; this was our first genuinely rushing stream. I stayed up for a while after Sergei and Volodya had gone to bed, listening to it and looking up at the stars and at the satellites tracking past.