by Frazier
Tolstoy planned to write a book about the Decembrists: Vladimir Fyodorov, ed., The First Breath of Freedom, trans. Synthia Carlile (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1988), p. 312.
only three were over forty years old: Mazour, The First Russian Revolution, p. 221.
“a perfect galaxy of brilliant talent”: Sutherland, The Princess of Siberia, p. 3.
They began their young manhood: Information about the origins and development of the Decembrist movement may be found in Barratt, Voices in Exile; Barratt, The Rebel on the Bridge; Zetlin, The Decembrists; and the books by Christina Sutherland and Anatole G. Mazour cited above.
Ivan Dmitrievich Yakushkin: The source on Yakushkin I used is Zapiski I. D. Yakushkina [Memoirs of I. D. Yakushkin] (redactor: Evgenii Yakushkin; 1905), which includes his memoir and selected letters. I do not believe an English translation of this book exists; it’s a charming and interesting book and would be well worth a translator’s time. The editor, Evgenii Yakushkin, was the author’s son.
“[We] were standing not far from the golden carriage”: Ibid., pp. 8–9. The translation is mine, with the assistance of Boris Zeldin.
An Arakcheev story: Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, pp. 40–41.
One day a small group of intimates: Yakushkin, Zapiski, pp. 11ff. Yakushkin devotes much of his memoir to the secret society’s beginnings and early years. He describes how he and some of the other founding members were careful to keep Pushkin, who was somewhat younger than them, in the dark about the society’s existence, and how it pained the future great poet of Russia to be left out. Pushkin was thought to be too talkative and emotionally volatile to make a reliable member. As Yakushkin describes his own encounters with the poet, the judgment seems to be justified.
Destutt de Tracy: His Commentaire was published in Paris in 1819. It was a translation of an English version published in 1811 in Philadelphia. Montesquieu had argued in favor of constitutional monarchy, and Jefferson and Destutt de Tracy wrote their book in rebuttal; they did not want monarchy of any kind. See Dvoichenko-Markov, “Jefferson and the Russian Decembrists.”
“Of all of us he alone”: Yakushkin, Zapiski, p. 23.
Novosiltsov-Chernov duel: Mazour, The First Russian Revolution, p. 130; see also the account of Prince Y. P. Obolensky in Barratt, Voices in Exile, pp. 24–26.
“her affections . . . fixed on another world”: Buchanan, The Works of James Buchanan, 2:351.
“exorcist-like oaths”: Yakushkin, Zapiski, p. 24.
dampened his enthusiasm for the honor: Konstantin had also disqualified himself from being the next in line by divorcing his first wife and marrying a Polish countess. See Florinsky, Russia, 2:745–48.
“You can’t have a rehearsal”: Barratt, The Rebel on the Bridge, p. 64.
“We shall die”: Mazour, The First Russian Revolution, p. 164.
“pools of blood on the snow”: Sutherland, The Princess of Siberia, p. 103.
killed another high-ranking officer: Colonel Sturler, who was also trying to negotiate; see Mazour, The First Russian Revolution, p. 177.
“Voilà un joli commencement”: Ibid., p. 178.
Sergei Volkonsky: Sutherland, The Princess of Siberia, pp. 104ff.
by starting to laugh: Zetlin, The Decembrists, p. 269.
Yevgenii Obolensky went through a religious epiphany: Barratt, Voices in Exile, p. 19.
threw himself at the tsar’s feet: Zetlin, The Decembrists, p. 234; also Mazour, The First Russian Revolution, p. 207.
“After about ten minutes”: Yakushkin, Zapiski, pp. 64–65.
turning the pages of his French-Russian dictionary: Barratt, The Rebel on the Bridge, p. 125.
dancing with the tsar: Sutherland, The Princess of Siberia, pp. 118–19.
“I wept like a child”: Yakushkin, Zapiski, p. 96.
Nicholas brought out his seven-year-old son: Korff, Accession of Nicholas I, p. 267. This long-after-the-fact account, compiled by Alexander II’s secretary of state (Alexander II, of course, was the seven-year-old referred to), is naturally pro-Nicholas. There is no question, though, that Nicholas’s bravery on December 14 saved his reign, and possibly the monarchy.
a dreaded part of his job: Jeanne Haskett, “Decembrist N. A. Bestuzhev in Siberian Exile, 1826–1855,” Studies in Romanticism 4, no. 4 (Summer 1965): 185ff.
“Though many of us had made careless statements”: Barratt, Voices in Exile, p. 264.
attend a public concert: After years of prison and exile, when the Volkonskys were living in Irkutsk, Maria went to the theater with her daughter and was informed that “wives of state criminals were barred from attending public entertainment places” (Mazour, Women in Exile, pp. 50–51).
“We [Decembrists] were the first to appear”: Mazour, The First Russian Revolution, p. 256.
The Volkonskys had a healthy son: Volkonsky raised Mikhail as his son. Gossip suggested the actual father might be a family friend to whom Maria become very close as her husband receded into eccentricity. See The Princess of Siberia, passim.
“Pestel and Bestuzhev”: Ibid., p. 263.
with tear-filled eyes: Barratt, The Rebel on the Bridge, p. 166.
Moscow to Irkutsk in fifteen days: Sutherland, The Princess of Siberia, p. 312.
CHAPTER 19
its church dedicated to St. Nicholas: Ides, Bell, and Fries all went there—the first in 1693, the second in 1720, and the third in 1776.
sawed houses in half: Rasputin, Siberia, Siberia, p. 188; his source is The Notes of an Irkutsk Resident, by Ivan Kalashnikov (1905).
the corpse of the unlucky admiral: Bobrick, East of the Sun, p. 411. Peter Fleming says that the bodies of Kolchak and his prime minister were pushed through a hole in the ice not on the Angara but on a tributary called the Ushakovka, just outside the city (The Fate of Admiral Kolchak, pp. 212ff.).
to replenish his supply of paper: Strahlenberg, Russia, Siberia, and the Great Tartary, p. 24; also Bobrick, East of the Sun, p. 179.
another fifteen hundred miles to Peking: Cochrane, Narrative of a Pedestrian Journey, 2:168.
bathed in the Ingoda: Sutherland, The Princess of Siberia, p. 194.
CHAPTER 20
his (or his ghost writer’s) romantic novel: Fencing Master (Maître d’armes) came out in 1859. When Dumas was on a subsequent trip to Russia, he actually met the Annenkovs at the house of the governor of Nizhnii Novgorod. Dumas’s account of his conversation with them at this meeting is suspiciously brief; maybe the prolific novelist did not recall exactly what he had said about them in the book he supposedly wrote. See Dumas, Adventures in Czarist Russia, p. 159.
Next to the Bible, Shto Delat’?: Randall, N. G. Chernyshevskii, p. 142.
“You haven’t heard?”: Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done?, pp. 413–14.
“[Chernyshevsky] plowed me up more profoundly”: Ibid., p. 32.
“grotesque as a work of art”: Berlin, Russian Thinkers, p. 228.
a student named Hypolite Myshkin: Kennan, Siberia and the Exile System, 2:251–52.
Boleslav Shostakovich: Volkov, Shostakovich and Stalin, p. 45.
“He had some grasp on many things”: Randall, N. G. Chernyshevskii, p. 159.
CHAPTER 21
suspends certain visa and customs regulations: Kotkin and Wolff, Rediscovering Russia in Asia, p. 279.
Volochaevka: Stephan, The Russian Far East, pp. 152ff., 213.
thirty-one years old: For a detailed account of Blyukher’s career during the Terror, see Conquest, The Great Terror, pp. 200–202, 428–31. It is important to note that Blyukher participated in show trials before his own downfall.
even the cooks were delighted: Zhukov, Reminiscences and Reflections, 2:105.
Molchanov died in San Francisco: Stephan, The Russian Far East, p. 154. See also Molchanov’s obituary in Pervopokhodnik (First Campaigner) 22 (December 1974): 46–50.
begins in 1902: The first sentence of the book is, “In 1902 I led a crew of six Siberian riflemen and four pack-horses up t
he Tsimuho, which drains into Ussuri Bay near the village of Shkotovo.”
kill and carry off dogs: Gowing, Five Thousand Miles in a Sledge, p. 48.
trailed off into a purr: Arsenyev, Dersu Uzala, p. 152.
Unluckily for the Bikin mechanic: Stephan, The Russian Far East, p. 242.
N. M. Przhevalskii: The rumor that Przhevalskii was Stalin’s father is mentioned in Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror (p. 55). Conquest discounts it. Przhevalskii was a hero of Chekhov’s (Figes, Natasha’s Dance, p. 401); maybe that contributed to Chekhov’s decision to make a Siberian journey himself.
CHAPTER 23
besides slaves and furs: Fisher, The Russian Fur Trade.
Kiev: Ibid.
and then to Ustyug: Martin, Treasure of the Land of Darkness, pp. 88ff.
the captured supply of sable furs: Ivan offered amnesty to Yermak and his men after Yermak sent him a caravan of furs; see Lengyel, Siberia, p. 51.
the wounds that had been inflicted: Fisher, Voyage of Semen Dezhnev, pp. 103–106.
a certain quota of sable skins: Wood, The History of Siberia, p. 31. Occasionally yasak could be replaced by yasyr, or “woman tribute,” in which women were substituted for furs (Stephan, The Russian Far East, pp. 22–23).
remains of a three-hundred-year-old settlement: Gibson, Feeding the Russian Fur Trade, p. 24n.
did silver begin to replace furs: Fisher, Voyage of Semen Dezhnev, p. 9.
two hundred thousand Siberian sables: Lengyel, Siberia, p. 56.
a third of the state’s total revenues: Stephan, The Russian Far East, p. 20. Fisher puts the figure lower, at about 10 percent (The Russian Fur Trade, p. 119).
A hundred rubles was a fortune then: Fisher, The Russian Fur Trade, p. 29.
pestering the young Queen Elizabeth: Ivan had a fixation on the English and wished to form an alliance with them. Not only did he look into marrying an English noblewoman (Florinsky, Russia, 1:187–88), he also offered Elizabeth asylum in his country, should she ever need it, and he requested the same from her. She replied that she did not need the right of asylum for herself but would grant it to him (Izhboldin, Essays on Tatar History, p. 109).
sent her a present of sable furs: Martin, Treasure of the Land of Darkness, p. 107.
for one unicorn horn: Baddeley, Russia, Mongolia, and China, 1:xcvii.
eight hundred ordinary people for life: This estimate may be high. Fisher estimates the value of a sable fur at ten to twenty rubles (The Russian Fur Trade, p. 29). But a record of customs transactions in Velikii Ustyug (and other fur trade cities) details purchases of sable furs in quanities of forty and up for prices averaging about a ruble each. A. I. Yakovlev, ed., Tamozhennye Knigi Moscovskovo Gosudarstva XVII Veka [Customs Records of the State of Moscow of the Seventeenth Century] (1951), pp. 22–23. Eight hundred rubles for a (fake) unicorn horn was still a lot of money.
traded the finest silks for them: Fur for cloth was the basic transaction of the Moscow–Peking caravan trade. China sent not only silk but also damask, nankeen, satin, and other fabrics (Mancall, Russia and China, pp. 185–86). Other items of this transcontinental trade included (from China) jasper, porcelain, cardamom, saffron, fireworks, erotic artwork, rhubarb, dried fruits, and of course tea; from Russia came reindeer horns, reindeer-horn jelly, dogs, mammoth ivory, carved bowstring-finger guards of walrus ivory, clocks, mirrors, telescopes, samovars, brandy . . .
prisoner ransoms: Fisher, The Russian Fur Trade, p. 135.
Greek Orthodox bishop of Gaza: Ibid., p. 134.
Representatives of the tsar paid sables to the Cossacks: Ibid., p. 131.
bribed the Tatar khan of Crimea: Ibid., p. 138.
1,003 soroks of sables: Baddeley, Russia, Mongolia, and China, 1:xcvi.
the actual Golden Fleece: Ibid., 2:xii.
used the cloak as a gift: Saunders, History of the Mongol Conquests, p. 48.
audience tent lined with sable pelts: Baddeley, Russia, Mongolia, and China, 1:xcvi.
Vladimir Monomakh: Krasheninnikov, Explorations of Kamchatka, p. v.
The Caliph of Baghdad: Clot, Haroun al-Rashid, p. 189.
vowed not to wear their sables: Martin, Treasure of the Land of Darkness, p. 52.
no one below the rank of lord: Baddeley, Russia, Mongolia, and China, 1:xcvi.
King Henry VIII: Martin, Treasure of the Land of Darkness, p. 104.
a “short loose coat of sable”: Bell, Journey from St. Petersburg, p. 135.
a seven-foot-high throne: Milescu (Spathary), who saw Kang H’si on his throne in 1676, said the throne was seven feet high; he also observed Kang H’si to be wearing “a sable robe with a lining of watered silk and gold” (Baddeley, Russia, Mongolia, and China, 2:360). Ides, who saw the throne in 1694, reported that it was covered in black sables (Three Years’ Travels, p. 72).
a photographic history: Moynahan, The Russian Century, p. 244.
CHAPTER 24
Vtoraya Rechka (Second River) transit camp: See Taplin, Open Lands, pp. 295–96. In his visit to Vladivostok, Taplin went to the site of the camp and found most of it covered by a housing project. The building that was the camp’s infirmary still remained, and there were traces of the stone quarry where the prisoners had labored. Mandelstam was probably buried in a mass grave near the old camp’s perimeter.
luckily died of heart failure: The unhappy later fates of Arsenyev and his family are in Stephan, The Russian Far East, passim.
CHAPTER 25
slid into fissures and drowned: Ides, Three Years’ Travels, p. 37.
The idea of building a second railroad: Information about the construction of BAM may be found in Malashenko, The Great Baikal–Amur Railway, and in contemporary coverage in The New York Times (“Soviet Building Port in Far East,” November 11, 1975, p. 47; also articles of January 30, 1977, p. IES25; August 31, 1977, p. 21; March 24, 1991, p. E2; August 15, 1994, p. A7; and July 11, 2004, p. TR3.) “A Siberian Railroad, from ‘Hero’ to Disaster” is the title of one of the more recent articles. Malashenko’s book makes no mention of the hundreds of thousands of prison laborers who worked on BAM.
Dervla Murphy: Her book about this journey is Through Siberia by Accident.
CHAPTER 26
Wendell Willkie: Wendell L. Willkie, “One World,” in Prefaces to Peace: A Symposium (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), pp. 71–72. See also Herman O. Makey, Wendell Willkie of Elwood (Elwood, IN: National Book Co., 1940), and Neal, Dark Horse.
hogs running loose in the villages: Kennan, Siberia and the Exile System, 1:68.
smallpox epidemics: Smallpox ravaged the Tungus, the Samoyeds, and other Siberian tribes in the 1600s, as it was also doing at that time to native peoples in the Americas; see Forsyth, A History of the Peoples of Siberia, p. 58.
tribes descended from the ancient Hebrews: Chekhov reported that the Ainu, a tribe on Sakhalin Island, were said to be descended from the ancient Hebrews (The Island, p. 195). Similar stories were among the most persistent myths of the American frontier.
overplowing and dust storms: Lincoln, The Conquest of a Continent, p. 374.
no bridge: As near as I can determine, no bridge crosses the Lena upstream of Yakutsk until Ust-Kut, where it meets the Baikal–Amur Mainline, about 750 miles from Yakutsk. Downstream to the Arctic Ocean, no major year-round thoroughfares intersect the Lena.
CHAPTER 27
the Even were called the Lamuts and the Evenk the Tungus: Forsyth, A History of the Peoples of Siberia.
perhaps 50 percent of all the gold: Dallin and Nicolaevsky, Forced Labor in Soviet Russia, p. 146.
about one life for every two pounds of gold: Ibid.
This air-transfer arrangement: See Hays, The Alaska-Siberia Connection; Jones, Road to Russia; and Chandonnet, Alaska at War.
73 went down: See Tat’iana Kosheleva, “The Construction and Use of the Fairbanks–Krasnoiarsk Air Route,” in Chandonnet, Alaska at War, p. 332.
yellow boots those pilots wore: Yevtushenko, Divided Twin
s, p. 35. See also Kosheleva, “Construction and Use.”
CHAPTER 28
at least one other Siberian north–south route: Conquest, The Great Terror, p. 332, gives details of an attempted railroad line along the Ob River to the Arctic Ocean with lagers every nine miles along the route; it also was abandoned after Stalin’s death.
sables had the reputation of being merry creatures: “Now the sable is a beast full marvelous and prolific, and it is found nowhere else in the world but in Northern Siberia . . . a merry little beast it is, and beautiful: and its beauty comes with the snow, and with the snow it disappears.” This quotation of Nicolae Milescu is part of the epigraph to his book of travels (included in Baddeley, Russia, Mongolia, China, 2:xiiff.). The reference to the sable’s beauty disappearing comes from the fact that the sable’s fur deteriorates in the warmer months, when, it is thought, the sables eat a kind of berry that makes them itch their fur off.
CHAPTER 29
fifteen to eighteen feet: This and many other details of prison camp life are from Dallin and Nicolaevsky, Forced Labor in Soviet Russia, pp. 9ff.
characteristic sounds of the camps: Conquest, The Great Terror, p. 318.
barrel of machine grease: Shalamov, Kolyma Tales, p. 175.
ate them on the spot: Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1:ix.
boundary indicated by pieces of red cloth: Shifrin, Guidebook to Prisons, pp. 169–70.
get a day or two off: Ibid.
More than a million died: Bobrick, East of the Sun, p. 422.
pray for atomic war: Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 3:395.
the criminals in the camps were more dangerous: Varlam Shalamov, an inspiringly good writer who deserves to be more widely known, wrote many stories about the criminals of the camps and the dangers they posed. Shalamov’s first book published in the United States, Kolyma Tales, won praise from Saul Bellow and was nominated for a National Book Award. On the dust jacket of Shalamov’s second book, Graphite, his name was misspelled. Solzhenitsyn considered Shalamov’s own life a refutation of Shalamov’s claim that no one in the camps escaped corruption. Solzhenitsyn regretted that Shalamov renounced his own stories in 1972 (The Gulag Archipelago, 2:623).
named one puppy Ladle and the other Pail: Ginzburg, Within the Whirlwind, p. 7.