by Frazier
Ivan Yakushkin, the clear-headed memoirist, returned to Moscow in 1856 following the amnesty and died eight months later. He was sixty-four years old. Prince Sergei Trubetskoy died of “apoplexy” in 1860 at the age of seventy upon hearing of his daughter’s death from TB. Prince Yevgenii Obolensky married an illiterate servant girl and died in Kaluga, near Moscow, in 1865. The Annenkovs moved to Tobolsk, where he became a civil servant, and then to Nizhnii Novgorod. Baron Andrei Rozen lived to be eighty-four and fasted on the anniversary of the uprising every year. Nikolai Bestuzhev, the kindhearted officer who had refused to let the young cadets accompany his soldiers to the Senate Square, died in Siberia in 1855. His death was the result of a cold he caught from riding on the outside of his carriage so friends of his could ride inside.
Prince Sergei Volkonsky, after receiving the news of his pardon brought to him by Mikhail, his fast-traveling son, packed up the household in Irkutsk and left for Moscow. They made the return journey at a leisurely pace because of his age. Back in western Russia, the long-bearded prince, who had gone around in tarry clothes in his exile and enjoyed philosophical conversations with his fellow workmen and farmers, reassumed the air of a distinguished aristocrat. Observers remarked on his pale skin, silvery locks, and saintlike, biblical appearance.
For a long time the prince and his wife, Maria, had led mostly separate lives. She remained slim and lovely into her fifties and her lustrous hair never turned gray. She died of kidney disease at the age of fifty-eight at their estate in the Ukraine. Volkonsky was staying at his son’s estate on the Baltic, and not well enough to go to her. Eighteen years her senior, he outlived her by two years. After her death he went into a decline, but despite his frailty and his confinement to a wheelchair his mind remained keen. Now as the end of his life was approaching, he set about to write his memoirs, and on November 28, 1865, while working on them, he died. The last words he wrote were,
The Emperor said to me, “I
NOTES
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX
Notes
CHAPTER 1
During Soviet times: Stephen Waltrous, “The Regionalist Conception of Siberia, 1860 to 1970,” in Diment and Slezkine, Between Heaven and Hell, p. 116.
Newspaper gossip columns: Lloyd Grove, “Lowdown: 740 Park Hits Roof over Book Party,” New York Daily News, October 6, 2005.
latitudinally for thirty-six hundred miles: Lengyel, Siberia, p. 15. Siberia is one-fifth of the total forested area of the world. It contains more than half of the world’s coniferous forests and two-fifths of its temperate forests. See Kotkin and Wolff, Rediscovering Russia in Asia, p. 257.
the Urals aren’t much: The English traveler John Dundas Cochrane wrote, “The ascent and descent [of the Urals] are so nearly imperceptible, that were it not for the precipitous banks every where to be seen, the traveler would hardly suppose he had crossed a range of hills” (Narrative of a Pedestrian Journey, p. 122).
about three thousand miles beyond the Urals: From the Urals to Chukchi Nos, the easternmost tip of Siberia (and of Asia), is 3,562 miles; from the Urals to the Sea of Okhotsk is 2,771 miles, and to Vladivostok is 3,174 miles.
for as much as 250 miles: Lengyel, Siberia, p. 14.
The steppes were why: Gryaznov, The Ancient Civilization of Southern Siberia, p. 133.
“To the rescue, Kamchatka!”: Pasternak, Safe Conduct, p. 69.
with only five portages: Sutherland, Princess of Siberia, p. 111. On the river portage system of Siberia, see also James Forsyth, “The Siberian Native Peoples Before and After Russian Conquest,” in Wood, History of Siberia, p. 78.
more than four hundred years old: Tobolsk was founded in 1587, Surgut in 1594, Ketsk in 1602, Tomsk in 1604, and Turukhansk in 1607.
the largest swamps in the world: Diment and Slezkine, Between Heaven and Hell, p. 71; also Sinor, The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia, p. 23.
the rivers run muddy: Barratt, Rebel on the Bridge, p. 153.
the lowest on the planet outside Antarctica: Forsyth, A History of the Peoples of Siberia, p. 9; also Pipes, Russia Under the Old Regime, p. 3.
the Los Angeles Times estimated: “70 Years’ Worth of Waste Has Remote Region Over a Barrel,” Los Angeles Times, September 13, 1997, p. A2.
Its coal reserves: See Kotkin and Wolff, Rediscovering Russia in Asia, p. 188: “Today, the West Siberian Basin remains the world’s largest storehouse of hydrocarbons.”
minerals like cobalt: See Hill and Gaddy, Siberian Curse, p. 81; also Encyclopaedia Britannica online, s.v. “Asia Mineral Resources.”
about half the gold then being mined: Dallin and Nicolaevsky, Forced Labor in Soviet Russia, p. 146.
Geologists have always liked Siberia: Facts about Siberian plate tectonics come from Dr. Sergei V. Shibaev, chief of the Siberian Department of the Geophysical Service of the Yakutsk Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in Yakutsk, Republic of Sakha. Dr. Kenneth Deffeyes, professor emeritus of geology at Princeton University, kindly passed along to me details about the Permian extinction and the Siberian Traps.
Paleontologists come to Siberia: For information about Siberian paleontology, I am grateful to Ross MacPhee, of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
mammoth ivory became a major export: See Bobrick, East of the Sun, pp. 310–11.
cloud-free for more than two hundred days a year: Irkutsk, near Lake Baikal, has more hours of sunlight than anywhere else in Russia (Mowat, The Siberians, p. 61). Viktor D. Trifonov and Elena Kossumova, astronomers at a solar observatory on the shores of Baikal, told me the observatory was there because of the two hundred days of sunshine the lake receives annually on its western shore.
In the early morning of June 30, 1908: Gallant, Day the Sky Split Apart.
Travelers who crossed Siberia: The observations in this paragraph are found in Pallas, A Naturalist in Russia, p. 91; Bell, A Journey from St. Petersburg to Pekin, p. 59 and passim; Fries, A Siberian Journey, p. 108; and Strahlenberg, Russia, Siberia, and Great Tartary, pp. 371, 438.
At times Siberia has supplied: Leonid M. Goryushkin, “Migration, Settlement and the Rural Economy of Siberia, 1861–1914,” in Wood, History of Siberia, p. 149.
Sentenced to three years’ exile: Florinsky, Russia, 2:1149; also Lengyel, Siberia, pp. 147–48.
a government stipend of twelve rubles a month: Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:342.
a rich distiller named Iudin: Lincoln, The Conquest of a Continent, pp. 217, 268.
translated a book by the English Socialists: Lengyel, Siberia, pp. 147–48.
inspired by the great Siberian river: Fischer, Life of Lenin, pp. 4–5.
Russians who had seen him both before and after: Melamid and Komar, Monumental Propaganda, p. 51.
in a sense, unkillable: “Siberia also meant greater security from enemy attack. ‘Russia lacks a heart at which to strike,’ the late German Marshal von Hindenberg insisted” (Lengyel, Siberia, p. 8).
“I am not afraid of military reverses”: Florinsky, Russia, 2:675. Tsar Alexander I said that rather than cede the country to an invader, he would withdraw to Kamchatka (ibid., p. 638). A similar strategy was employed as recently as 1993, when Boris Yeltsin, threatened by a putsch within his government, made a contingency plan to relocate the government near his home city of Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinburg), east of the Urals. See Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb, p. 472.
administrative capital and ecclesiastical seat: Ides, Three Years’ Travels, p. 11; also Armstrong, Yermak’s Campaign in Siberia, p. 80.
“crippled by its expanse”: The historian Nikolai Berdayev, in Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb, p. 523.
a road leading nowhere: “The Czars’ Russia . . . wanted, above all, to break down the cruel barriers that contained her within a continent-wide blind alley” (Lengyel, Siberia, p. 6).
two public-policy experts: Hill and Gaddy, Siberian Curse.
Those on the positive side of the argument
: See, e.g., Trubetskoy, Legacy of Genghis Khan; Rasputin, Siberia, Siberia; and Hill and Gaddy, Siberian Curse, pp. 170ff.
resources and hard-to-subdue vastness: Hosking, Russia and the Russians, p. 142.
“Russia is an Asiatic land”: Lengyel, Siberia, p. 384.
escaped from Siberia six times: Sebag Montefiore, Stalin, p. 24; see also Lengyel, Siberia, p. 178.
style himself officially as tsar: The Treasures of the Golden Horde (St. Petersburg: Slavia Publishing, 2000), p. 51.
“Lord of All the Siberian Land”: Armstrong, Yermak’s Campaign, p. 3.
In 1552, Ivan led a large army: Grousset, The Empire of the Steppes, p. 475.
had his clergy sprinkle the streets: Lantzeff and Pierce, Eastward to Empire, p. 67.
Farther to the east, the khan of Sibir: Armstrong, Yermak’s Campaign, pp. 1–2; also, Lantzeff and Pierce, Eastward to Empire, p. 70.
In 1581 and 1582: Armstrong, Yermak’s Campaign, pp. 5ff.
a rich tribute of sable furs: Lantzeff and Pierce, Eastward to Empire, p. 110.
His mother, Ivan said: Izhboldin, Essays on Tatar History, p. 31.
a progenitor named Pruss: Florinsky, Russia, 1:186.
“the Third Rome”: Avvakum, The Life of the Archpriest Avvakum, p. 8; see also Hosking, Russia and the Russians, p. 107.
exceeded the size of the surface of the full moon: Pipes, Russia Under the Old Regime, p. 84.
CHAPTER 2
Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid: For more on the early work of Komar and Melamid, see Carter Ratcliff, Komar and Melamid (New York: Abbeville, 1988).
a humor magazine called the Harvard Lampoon: Reed was elected to the Lampoon in February of his sophomore year. As a Westerner (Portland, Oregon), Reed did not have the social standing required for election to prestigious clubs like the Porcellian, and so the Lampoon became an important refuge. He rose to the position of Ibis, the Lampoon’s second-highest office. Reed also was a cheerleader at Harvard football games and wrote a fight song that defied Yale. See Hicks, John Reed, pp. 28–40.
following Pancho Villa’s armies: See Reed’s excellent Insurgent Mexico, a book of his Mexican dispatches.
banned from the Western front: Hicks mentions this incident (p. 168), as does David C. Duke in John Reed (Boston: Twayne, 1987), p. 149. Reed never wrote about it himself, but a reporter named Robert Dunn, who was with him at the time and also took two shots at the French, later wrote up the adventure for the New York Evening Post, which ran the account on February 27, 1915, p. 1.
“Russia’s is an original civilization”: Reed, War in Eastern Europe, p. 210.
“The whole beautiful land is even more glorious”: Freeman, American Testament, p. 270.
two months in a rented room: Hicks, John Reed, pp. 170, 325; also Duke, John Reed, pp. 41, 114.
Lenin himself admired it: See Gardner, “Friend and Lover,” p. 187. After the book’s publication, Reed wrote Bryant, “The big chief [Lenin] thinks my book the best.” Lenin later contributed a one-paragraph “introduction” praising the book. Today this paragraph would be called a blurb.
not quite thirty-three: Reed died three days before his thirty-third birthday. See Reed, Education of John Reed, p. 38.
in the Kremlin Wall: Reed is buried next to Inessa Armand, girlfriend of Lenin, who died the same year; see the photo of the site in Gardner, “Friend and Lover.” The other American buried in the wall is “Big Bill” Haywood, a union organizer.
Farley Mowat, the Canadian author: Mowat, The Siberians, p. 14.
Valentin Rasputin, the Siberian short-story writer: Rasputin, Essays, pp. 94, 72.
Among scholars who have studied the question: Baikalov, Notes on the Origin of the Name Siberia, pp. 287–89. See also Bretschneider, Mediaeval Researches, 2:37.
Etymologists say: Baikalov, Notes on the Origin of the Name Siberia; see also the entry for Sibir’ in Vasmer, Etimologicheskii Slovar’ Russkogo Yazyka, vol. 3. This is the authoritative etymological dictionary Russians use.
The first appearance of the word Sibir’: Pritsak, The Origin of the Name Sibir’, pp. 271–72.
“After Joci had subjugated the People of the Forest”: Rachewiltz, Secret History of the Mongols, pp. 164–65. (I have not reproduced certain orthographic symbols in the translation.)
in the reign of his son Batu: Florinsky, Russia, 1:56.
Jochi’s line, by the way: Izhboldin, Essays on Tatar History, p. 31.
the Persian traveler and historian Rashid ad-Din: Bretschneider, Mediaeval Researches, 2:37; also Howorth, History of the Mongols, p. xxi, and Quatremère, Histoire des Mongols de la Perse, p. 413.
in the Russian chronicles of 1406: Baikalov, Notes on the Origin of the Name Siberia, p. 288.
The first known reference: Ibid.
Schiltberger led a tumultuous life: Schiltberger, Bondage and Travels.
King Sigismund of Hungary: Schiltberger spells the name “Sigmund”; elsewhere it is more usually spelled “Sigismund.” See an account of this crusade in Norwich, A Short History of Byzantium, pp. 359–60.
This former Turkic tribal chief: For more on Tamerlane, see Grousset, The Empire of the Steppes, pp. 406ff.
reciting the Ave Maria: Schiltberger, Bondage and Travels, p. xxviii.
CHAPTER 3
Barguzin is more than 350 years old: See map in Grousset, The Empire of the Steppes, pp. 534–35, which gives 1648 as the date of Barguzin’s founding.
Katarina Breshkovskaya: This well-known revolutionary appears often in the accounts of the time. Both John Reed and Louise Bryant met and admired her—see his Ten Days That Shook the World, p. xxii, and Gardner, “Friend and Lover,” p. 90. George Kennan regarded her as a hero—see his Siberia and the Exile System, 1:12–22.
“Barguzin Wind”: Rytkheu, Stories from Chukotka, p. 18.
traded furs and gold by caravan: Barguzin is older than Irkutsk (founded 1661), historically the main city of that part of Siberia. Barguzin was an important entrepôt on an early route of caravans to China. Even today, the fanciest sable fur sold in America is called Barguzin sable. See Lantzeff and Pierce, Eastward to Empire, p. 151.
Wilhelm Küchelbecker: On Wilhelm Küchelbecker and his duel with Pushkin, see Vitale, Pushkin’s Button, pp. 266–67.
Barguzin’s Küchelbecker: Sutherland, Princess of Siberia, p. 255. For more on Mikhail Karlovich Küchelbecker, see Barratt, Voices in Exile, p. 257.
highly fashionable accessories: Sutherland, Princess of Siberia, p. 214. When the craze for Decembrist shackle rings and bracelets took off, ironsmiths in Siberia soon began to turn out counterfeits (Barratt, Voices in Exile, p. 260).
Russians can really dance: This trait must go back a long way. The Marquis de Custine, in Empire of the Czar, about the journey he made in 1839, called Russia “this nation of dancers” (p. 181).
even for someone who knows how: See Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov, vol. 3, Selected Poems, translated by Paul Schmidt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
CHAPTER 4
George Kennan: Basic biographical details of George Kennan’s life are from Travis, George Kennan and the American-Russian Relationship.
A relative named Sam Wildman: He was the brother of Emily Jane Wildman Wickham (1838–1919), my two-greats grandmother.
My three-greats grandfather: Frederick Christian Wickham (1812–1901), editor of the Norwalk Reflector, published George Kennan’s letter from Petropavlovsk, Kamchatka, on January 30, 1866. At the time, Kennan was twenty years old.
piano lessons from George Kennan’s sister: Henry Timman, esteemed historian of Norwalk, Ohio, doubts that George Kennan’s sister could have taught Winthrop Wickham piano, due to the difference in their ages and the fact that their life spans had not many years of overlap. But Cousin Winthrop (or “Wumpy,” as the family called him), who is now dead, did tell me he had studied with her.
an underwater cable from Newfoundland to Ireland: The Atlantic Telegraph Company, organized in 1856, laid a
transatlantic cable in July 1858. Queen Victoria sent President Buchanan a congratulatory telegram over it, but the connection went dead when the cable broke three weeks later. The company, reorganized as the Anglo-American Telegraph Company, finally laid a working cable in July 1866. See Strouse, Morgan, pp. 64–65.
Perry McDonough Collins: Bobrick, East of the Sun, pp. 351–52. The spirit of Collins’s enterprise may be found in Collins’s A Voyage Down the Amoor, in which he says, “Russia, descending from the heights of the Altai to the great Eastern Ocean by way of the mighty Amoor, and the United States, descending to its opposite shore from the heights of the Sierra Nevada, will shake the friendly hand in commercial intercourse upon that mighty sea, and here two great nations will only vie with each other in developing the resources of their respective countries” (p. 78).
“in a state of boyish wonder”: Travis, George Kennan, p. 28.
In a letter from St. Petersburg: Ibid.
He gave his first Siberia lecture: Ibid., p. 38. Of the lecture Kennan gave in Norwalk soon after, the Reflector (December 6, 1869) said, “The large audience who filled Whittlesey Hall on that occasion, will bear witness that it was one of the most interesting ever delivered in Norwalk, the merits of which would not deteriorate in comparison with the best.”
On a grand tour he made as tsarevitch: Wortman, Rule by Sentiment, pp. 745–51.
where no member of the Imperial family had ever been: The significant fact that no tsar, tsarina, or tsarevitch until Alexander II had ever crossed the Urals appears in ibid., p. 747; see also Florinsky, Russia, 2:879. (There was a rumor, however, that Alexander I, who died in the Crimea in 1825, had actually faked his death and gone to Siberia to spend the rest of his life in the guise of a holy hermit named Fyodor Kuzmich. If so, Alexander I would own the distinction of being the first Siberian-traveler tsar.)