by Frazier
So headlong was the Russian hunt for furs that it had propelled the promyshlenniki as far as the Tunguska River drainage in central Siberia by 1626. In 1642—just sixty years after Yermak’s victory on the Tobol—839 men seeking furs passed through customs at the fort of Yakutsk on the Lena River about twenty-three hundred miles east of the Ural Mountains. By 1647, Russian fur seekers had gone all the way to the Pacific Ocean, where they founded the settlement of Okhotsk; Russia thus had an outlet on the Pacific before it had ports on either the Baltic or the Black seas. (Although Okhotsk, more than four thousand miles from western Russia, was not the handiest port in the world.)
When the promyshlennik Dezhnev sailed around the Chukchi Nos at the end of Asia, his purpose was to find new sources of sables and walrus ivory in the delta of the Anadyr River. During that voyage, Dezhnev’s party lost four vessels that were never seen again. In 1937, remains of a three-hundred-year-old settlement consisting of thirty-one dwellings of European origin were found on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula. Historians have speculated that this site was settled by Dezhnev’s lost companions. Therefore, it is possible that Russia’s fur-seeking explorations in the first half of the seventeenth century deposited a Russian settlement as far east as North America, almost halfway around the world from Moscow and almost a hundred years before Alaska’s official discovery by Europeans.
Sables equaled money, literally; for centuries Russia was poor in precious metals and sometimes used furs as a medium of exchange. Only in the fifteenth century did silver begin to replace furs as currency. A large proportion of the sable furs coming out of Siberia ended up in the Kremlin, in the tsar’s sable treasury. By 1586, just a few years after Yermak’s expedition, the treasury received two hundred thousand Siberian sables. The promyshlenniki were obliged to give the tsar one sable out of every ten they obtained, and his agents could also buy any additional furs they chose, mostly taking those of the highest quality. On top of that, all furs collected as yasak also went to the tsar. During Ivan the Terrible’s reign and after, sable fur formed a main part of the wealth of the Russian state. One historian says that by 1660, a third of the state’s total revenues came from sable fur.
The exact worth of sable as a commodity back then is hard to assess. Certainly it was valuable out of all proportion to its bulk and weight. A bundle of forty sable skins—called a sorok, a sorochek, or a zimmer—would have been enough to make the fortunes of maybe half a dozen ordinary people. A hundred rubles was a fortune then, and each sable fur, depending on quality, was worth from ten to twenty rubles. Sables provided the Russian state with its most in-demand and portable form of wealth. Diplomats took sables with them on foreign embassies to pay expenses and to give as presents. When Ivan the Terrible was pestering the young Queen Elizabeth I of England with letters and inquiries about a possible marriage to one of her relatives, he sent her a present of sable furs. In 1676, Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, father of Peter the Great, paid ten soroks of quality sable furs for one unicorn horn. That horn, presumably from a narwhal, thus would have been enough to support eight hundred ordinary people for life.
Sables were prized by non-Russians everywhere. The Chinese wanted them because of the lack of good fur-bearing animals in their country and traded the finest silks for them; silk was easy freight for trans-Asiatic caravans and highly valuable in the West. Turks accepted sable fur for prisoner ransoms. The Greek Orthodox bishop of Gaza, after requesting financial help from his Russian Orthodox brothers, received sables from them worth eleven hundred rubles. Representatives of the tsar paid sables to the Cossacks in the Ukraine who defended Russia’s border from Tatars, and bribed the Tatar khan of Crimea with sables to restrain his warriors after Cossack raids. When Emperor Rudolf II of Hungary requested the assistance of Tsar Boris Godunov in fighting the Turks in 1595, Godunov sent him 1,003 soroks of sables, and tens of thousands of other furs, in lieu of soldiers and money.
The sable has been considered an almost magical beast throughout history. The learned Nicolae Milescu (also known as Spathary), leader of one of the first embassies to Peking from the tsar, believed the sable to be the actual Golden Fleece of classical mythology. A black sable cloak figures importantly in the story of Genghis Khan: his main and original wife, Börte, brought the cloak as her dowry at their marriage, and Genghis later used the cloak as a gift to solidify an alliance with another chieftain at a crucial moment in the unifying of the Mongols. Genghis’s grandson Kublai Khan was reported to have an audience tent lined with sable pelts; Vladimir Monomakh, Grand Prince of Kiev, whose city the Mongols destroyed, wore a crown of gold, jewels, and sable. The Caliph of Baghdad, Haroun al-Rashid, the most famous of all caliphs and the hero of the Thousand and One Nights, dressed in robes and shoes of silk edged with sable.
In 1189, before the Third Crusade, Richard I of England and Philip II of France vowed not to wear their sables or ermines on the campaign. They wanted to make clear the seriousness of their purpose and ensure that the knights would follow their example; any finery the king didn’t wear his inferiors couldn’t, either. In 1465, Edward IV of England decreed that no one below the rank of lord was allowed to wear sable. Similar laws regarding sable and other luxuries, called sumptuary laws, existed in many countries. Hans Holbein did portraits of both Thomas More and Anne Boleyn wearing sable. King Henry VIII, who ordered the execution of More in 1535 and of Anne in 1536, possessed a gown of damask and velvet embellished with 80 sable pelts, and a black satin gown to which were affixed the pelts of 350 sables. Kang H’si, the Manchu emperor whose geopolitical skills in the 1680s thwarted the Russians in the Amur River Valley, wore a “short loose coat of sable” over a tunic of yellow silk embroidered with five-clawed dragons, and received audiences while sitting cross-legged on a seven-foot-high throne covered with black sable furs.
According to a photographic history published in 1994, only six women in the world then owned coats of black sable: Elizabeth Taylor, Jacqueline Onassis, Elizabeth II of England, and Valentina Tereshkova, the cosmonaut, who had received the coat as a reward from the Soviet government after she became the first woman in space (the two other women were not revealed). After protests against the wearing of furs began picking up speed, owning furs (at least in America and Europe) lost some of its glamour and took on a slightly unsavory, clandestine quality. Nowadays you almost never see a celebrity wearing a fur in a photograph. Mary Tyler Moore, an anti-fur celebrity best known for her TV sitcoms, donated a brand-new, $112,000 coat of Russian sable to PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. PETA then bedecked the coat with animal traps, electrocution devices, and other equipment of the fur processing business in order to make a point outside a show of fashions of Arnold Scaasi, a designer who sometimes worked in fur.
Saks Fifth Avenue keeps its fur department low profile, in a less-trafficked corner of the store. Tiffany’s, the luxury jeweler just up the avenue, doesn’t hesitate to show flashy gems in its store windows, but you never see a sable fur in the window of Saks. Whenever I stand at the racks of sables admiring them, I have a sense of being elsewhere—in a Siberian winter, in the past, generally out of the modern mainstream. Most shoppers who walk by smelling the perfume samples recently sprayed on their wrists never stop to check out the absurdly expensive furs made from this little Siberian animal on which worlds have turned.
So far I had not actually been to Siberia in the winter. When I told people I had traveled there, they almost always asked, “Is it cold?” and I would answer that the Siberia I saw in August was hot, dusty, buggy, and so on. Then the next person I told about my recent trip would ask, “Is Siberia cold?” I had seen Siberia in the winter—that time I flew by helicopter from the Alaskan mainland to the Diomede Islands, when I got a brief view of Siberia’s easternmost end—and it certainly looked cold. But from firsthand experience that was the best I could do.
This answer always seemed to disappoint my questioners. How could I have gone to Siberia and not been cold? In people’s minds, the
two things most closely associated with Siberia are cold and prisons. I had not really seen prisons, either. Any book about Siberia should have cold and prisons in it. I began to think about making a winter journey.
As I did, I kept going over my 2001 trip with Volodya and Sergei. By its end I had been pretty fed up with Sergei, and now I couldn’t decide whether to attempt another journey with him. After I had returned I had not e-mailed him for a while; I remembered his high-handedness, his evasiveness, his veiled or unveiled disdain. Going through customs at Vladivostok, I recalled, I had felt a great relief at finally being on my own.
In late May 2003, I returned to St. Petersburg to write a magazine article about the city’s three hundredth anniversary. I stayed in Luda’s apartment, as before, and she mentioned that just a week or so earlier Sergei had called to ask after me. By this time my anger was fading and I was recalling his good qualities—his all-around competence, his occasional sweetness, his love of adventure, his toughness. After the four-day tricentennial celebration was over, I stayed on in St. Petersburg for several days, and on one of them I gave Sergei a call. He responded effusively, said I must come to see him that very evening, said his wife would make a big dinner for me, said he’d been hoping I would call.
Late in the afternoon I rode the metro to the stop closest to his house and he met me at the top of the escalator. He embraced me, said he had been dreaming of this moment, said our trip together had been the greatest experience of his life, said over and over how happy he was to see me. He rejoiced like I was his long-lost son. At his apartment, his Luda had prepared a many-course meal and I ate a huge amount. Then we drank tea and watched excerpts of the videos he and Volodya had made of our journey (carefully edited, of course, to remove the widows and other women encountered along the way). We told each other stories (also edited) about our trip and generally had a fine time. At about ten o’clock he drove me back to the metro and we parted with promises to be in touch.
That night in Luda’s apartment I was by myself; she had gone to her dacha for the weekend. At about midnight, soon after falling asleep, I awoke in awful pain. At first I thought I was having a heart attack, but then the problem became vomiting, then diarrhea, then dysentery accompanied by chills and a high fever. The symptoms got worse and worse. At about five thirty in the morning I found the name of a nearby clinic for foreigners in an English-language newspaper I’d picked up somewhere, and during a respite between vomiting spasms I made my way to this clinic, walking shakily on the sunny, empty streets of early June. I presented myself to the nurses at admitting with the statement “Dumaio shto Ya umeraio” (I think I am dying). They took an imprint from my Visa card and admitted me; a doctor named Vyacheslav Zuev examined me and hooked me up to an IV. After some tests he informed me that I had either cholera or salmonella poisoning. He added that cholera was less likely, because they hadn’t seen a case of it at the clinic in about a week. I asked if I would live, and he said he thought so. Later he said it was definitely salmonella but he didn’t know which kind.
After my symptoms let up a bit, I spent the day lying on a comfortable bed with the IV in my arm, staring at the large clock on the wall. The bedsheets and pillowcases were of crisp, heavy white cotton, a kind seldom seen in America anymore, and the nurses wore striped blouses, white cotton aprons, and high, peaked nurses’ caps, Florence Nightingale–style. Their voices cooed mournfully as they drifted in and out. I knew they were beautiful without looking up and I carried on drowsy, simple dialogues with them. As I began to recover, my mood swung strangely toward euphoria, tinged with revived Russia-love. At about ten in the evening I felt well enough to leave. Dr. Zuev recommended I stay until morning, but he agreed to discharge me. I returned to Luda’s, went to bed, and slept soundly through the night.
I didn’t know what had made me sick, but I suspected a kielbasa the color of machine grease that I’d scarfed down the previous afternoon. I’d gone for a stroll, had a couple of beers, and bought the kielbasa on impulse at a really unpromising shop. Or maybe I got sick from something I ate at Sergei’s. Whatever the cause, the salmonella episode erased any last bad feelings I’d harbored toward him. For some reason, after that illness I completely stopped worrying about him and how we had or hadn’t always gotten along. He was just who he was, a Russian guy—bad in some ways, worse in others, and totally clever and dependable under it all. He and I had driven across Russia together and had more or less accepted each other by now. After I got back to New Jersey, I e-mailed him and asked if he would like to go on a winter trip to eastern Siberia with me.
I wanted to see places I hadn’t been to before. I wanted to see the northern city of Yakutsk, on the Lena River, and the cloud of human breath that travelers said hangs over the city on the coldest mornings. I aimed to visit Oimyakon, the coldest spot in Siberia, northeast of Yakutsk by six hundred miles, where the temperature has gone down to −96°. I had heard about the north–south ledyanaya doroga, or ice road, on Lake Baikal’s frozen surface from December to April, and I wanted to drive on that. I wanted to ride the Baikal–Amur Magistral, or BAM, Siberia’s other cross-country railroad. The BAM runs roughly parallel to the Trans-Siberian an average of about three hundred miles north of it and reaches the Pacific about seven hundred miles north of Vladivostok. And this time, I had to be sure to see a few prisons. As with my 2001 trip, Victor Serov helped me plan. I told him to make clear to Sergei how important seeing prisons was.
With one thing and another, a year went by, so I missed the winter of 2003–2004. In the winter of 2004–2005, Sergei and Victor and I were e-mailing back and forth with scheduling details. They said the best month for the journey would be March, because by then the midwinter dark has lifted but the snow and ice and cold are unchanged. As with my previous trip, I bought a lot of stuff. I asked Victor if Siberia had begun to have warm winters like other parts of the planet, and he said, “No, Siberia is still cold.” We would be in −40° temperatures for much of the journey. I bought French-made snowmobiling overalls, and Canadian-made long underwear of thick polyester-spandex, and skiers’ gloves, and snowmobiling mittens, and the heaviest down coat L.L. Bean had for sale. (The coat was, in fact, so stuffed with down that the weight of it pulled the shoulders flat, causing my top third always to become cold; a cinch inside the coat was supposed to counter this problem but I never managed to adjust it right.) From Sorel Boots I bought a low-temperature design called the Glacier Extreme, big and clunky as the shoes of Frankenstein’s monster, and a slightly less heavy boot called the Mounty. The best feature of the Mounty was its wide soles studded with dozens of rubber posts for traction. These snow-tire-like boots were the best single purchase I made, because the streets of Siberian cities in winter are all snow compacted to the slipperiest sheen, and walking on them in ordinary footwear is impossible.
On this trip, I would go the opposite direction from in 2001—east to west, rather than west to east. Retracing the route of my 2001 return, I would fly from New York to Vladivostok via Anchorage and Seoul. In Vladivostok I would meet up with Sergei, and we would proceed from there by various means of transportation to places mostly far to the north of where we went last time. Eventually we would wind up in Yakutsk and then fly to St. Petersburg. After a few days in St. Petersburg, I would fly home. The trip would take about a month. Because we would not be driving ourselves or camping out, one guide—Sergei—would be enough to handle everything.
For about nine weeks before I left, I worked on my Russian in an intensive course run by Boris Shekhtman, a virtuoso of language instruction who has taught scores of journalists and government employees. Boris lives outside Washington, D.C., and I began my study by staying in his house for five days. (After that I continued with teachers in his program in New York.) Boris is a hypersmart guy, with ears that listen so attentively they’re almost prehensile, and features as vivid as the masks of comedy and tragedy combined. To anything you say, the high drama of his expression in response works as a powerful m
nemonic. I got to see a wide range of those responses when he picked me up at the train station and we began by speaking only Russian. As I talked, he winced, his eyebrows shot up, his eyes narrowed in puzzlement, comprehension dawned, he winced again. After about ten minutes of this he switched to English. He said, “You know, I understood everything you said, and I think you basically understood me. But what is this Russian you’re talking? It’s not Russian, it’s hooligan Russian—and I don’t mean you talk like a Russian hooligan, either.”
Studying with Boris turned out to be some of the best fun I’ve ever had. We started with basic grammar and quickly moved forward into memorizing poetry and composing autobiographical paragraphs. Sometimes I worked with one of his assistants, Dina or Luda, or with both of them together, or with him and both of them. We acted out everyday situations—street encounters, hypothetical phone calls, pretend interviews. Once he paired me with another semibeginning American student. She had adopted a Russian child and wanted to learn the language so she could speak both English and Russian with him, and Boris told the two of us to carry on a “who are you, where are you from?” basic conversation in Russian, without using a word of English, as he and the other teachers looked on. My face turned red from the exertion and self-consciousness and oddness of the exercise, as did hers. I couldn’t remember the last time my mind had sped that fast.