Black Dragon River

by Dominic Ziegler

  Once Stalin rose to power, the uneasy truce no longer held. He set out to destroy the societies of non-Russian nationalities, particularly those (that is, nearly all of them) without an industrial proletariat and those who during the civil war had resisted the Bolsheviks. His anti-Buryat campaign began in 1929, when one thousand herders and farmers were rounded up and executed, and a 780-square-mile tract of land confiscated. The repression continued well into the 1940s, with the peak coming in 1937–38. Both Zhamtsarano and Dorzhiev disappeared into the gulag.

  Only recently, with the fall of the Soviet Union, have young Buryat historians uncovered the scale of the terror, and the resistance. Five separate uprisings began among Cossacks and Old Believers and then spread to the Buryat population. Each was ruthlessly suppressed. In despair and protest, Buryat cattle breeders slaughtered their herds. The Buryat population began to plummet, so great were the purges. Meanwhile, Buddhism itself came more directly under attack. Dorzhiev’s theory equating Buddhism and Communism was condemned, and lamas branded “sworn enemies of socialist reconstruction.” Temples, monasteries, and libraries were looted and priceless books, statues, and paintings destroyed. Schoolchildren were brought along to join in. “Nobody refused,” said one to whom Anna Reid spoke, many decades later, “we were like sheep.”

  At the great Aga datsan in Aginsk, a whole Tibetan library vanished, along with precious woodblocks and scores of sculpted representations of Devazhin, the Buddhist paradise. This part of the destruction, at least, is recorded. For the Soviet film director Vsevolod Pudovkin used the datsan as his film set for a grandiose piece of epic propaganda, Storm over Asia, or The Heir of Genghis Khan, whose hero turns out to be a Soviet partisan. The filming broke the heart of the great ethnographer and passionate recorder of Buryat culture Nikolay Poppe. Lamas had to form a procession carrying on their heads volumes of the Kanjur, the supposed words of the Buddha himself. The procession walked once around the monastery, and “here the scene ended. The books were then thrown into a ditch by the road, and the actors started on the next scene. What books were not destroyed then were later sent to papermills for recycling.”

  Monks at the Aga datsan attempted to resist. They put up a new shrine. In it they secretly buried 100,000 needles, praying that a steely army would arise from out of Shambhala and take vengeance on these destroyers of their faith.

  • • •

  I passed through Aginsk in a marshrutka, the minibus-taxi that links remote settlements in these parts. The town’s main square crouched under a harsh noonday sun. In the local museum, a Buryat girl moved about the exhibits, murmuring. In her hand were wooden prayer beads. She applied them around the base of a sitting Buddha, past a prayer wheel, along the framed photograph of an unsmiling Zhamtsarano in a three-piece suit, and to the bottom of an oil painting of Dorzhiev, standing in an abbot’s gown beside Czar Nicholas II.

  The sun was lower, though still warm, when my journey continued. An hour out, on the forested steppe, we reached a river to make your heart skip. It ran fast and clean, dark blue in the slanting light. The river had lost none of its essential character: it was the Onon, which I had last seen in Mongolia. A pair of mergansers dived, resurfaced downriver, and vanished in a reedbed.

  Downstream a large datsan rose on a nominally Russian bank. It was built in the Tibetan manner: thick, lime-washed walls, three enormous red doors opening under winged stone columns, and a three-tiered yellow roof with gilt figurines along the ridge and upcurved eaves, tipped by dragon finials. This was Tsugol lamasery—or Dashi Choypelling, the Country of Happy Teachings—which once had the finest library and school for Tibetan medicine in Mongol lands. Those who studied here came out as manramba, doctors skilled in reading pulses and examining urine, and in prescribing herbal remedies and esoteric exercises for all those ailments flowing from spiritual dysfunction. From the start, Tsugol had been considered a glory, housing rare illuminated texts and huge Buddhas carved from sandalwood and smothered in gold leaf.

  At the entrance, a cashier sat alone, a thick book and an abacus on the counter. A pilgrim wrote down the names of all those she sought blessings for. The cashier half rose from her seat, ran her eye down the list, and clacked off the beads on her abacus.

  “Thirty-seven rubles.”

  I circumambulated the monastery and then entered its main hall of gold-lacquered columns, embroidered silk prayer flags, and yak-butter candles. Only its emptiness hinted at how the datsan’s continuity was once severed. Just outside the hall, lamas had once been shot, and in 1935 the bronze Maitreya, the future Buddha, twenty feet high, had been taken to the antireligion museum in Ulan-Ude, itself a former cathedral. Out of the gates also went the statue of a white elephant, symbol of patience and wisdom, the animal that announced the birth of the ruler of the world. Taken, too, was a green horse, beloved of nomadic Buryats and part of Tsugol’s founding myth—a monk had come riding across the Onon to establish a monastery at this place. All are back, and paraded about the grounds on special days. But as for a particular glory, once held only at Tsugol and in Peking—108 silk-bound scrolls describing how the Buddha attained enlightenment: they remain scattered to the winds.

  • • •

  From Tsugol I carried an invitation to visit Shambhala. It came from the official who ran paradise. We set off westward. The rolling steppe gave way to forested mountains encircling flat plains. Here was moister country, and in damp meadows, Solomon’s seal pushed up among columbines. Here, too, was Buryatia’s largest nature reserve, though it is not clear which predominated, the spiritual or the ecological dimension.

  At the park headquarters, the park director was dressed, like his rangers, in camouflage fatigues. We piled into an all-terrain vehicle, which looked like a cross between an ambulance and a tank. In it we shouted over the engine’s roar about Shambhala, the mythical kingdom. We had, I was assured, come to it. “It’s over there,” said a young ranger, pointing to a copse of birch at the foot of a low ridge. “Pah!” said the park director dismissively with a wave. “The entrance is on that side of the valley, near those rocks. That’s how you get into Shambhala, and it runs under the whole of our park. All our monks will tell you that.”

  At the park entrance a young monk collected donations. A crude rectangle of whitewashed concrete denoted a helicopter pad built for the Dalai Lama, who had never come. A nearby hut showed off an oil painting with much of the kitsch, allegory, and naive lines of Nicholas Roerich: a rock morphing into a sitting Buddha with a moose staring up at it; a naked woman holding a cloth above her head as a waterfall poured from a cup; and at the right the Dalai Lama, without helicopter, a cloud serving as halo.

  All day I climbed through a freighted landscape. An abandoned hermit’s hut retained the marks of devotion: a prostration board made of old deal, thangkas hanging limply on the wall, an altar with the photo of an old lama propped on an empty mayonnaise jar. Nearby, at the Singing Princess, the wind soughed between two cupped rocks, the music of the heavens, the young monk in the valley had told me. One mountain slope up here was a wide tumbling chaos of piled stones. But to tread carefully among the clitter was to see order: each pile had been carefully balanced, one pebble over another, every tower a wish. Subulga, the Valley of Wishes: chipmunks ran about, knocking occasional coins from the pyramid tops.

  At the Mother’s Womb, a flat rock festooned with blue khadag bridged a natural depression in the hillside filled with mud. Before this swamp lay another prostration board, and on every side plastic dolls sat propped up in frilly bonnets and polka dresses. Everywhere, too, were stuffed toys, baby rattles.

  “If you can’t conceive you come here,” a Buryat girl, standing here, explained. “That’s the only thing for it.”

  “How so?”

  “In there: you put your hand deep in the mud and you pull out a stone. If it’s sharp, then it’ll be a boy; if round, then a girl. When you get home, you put the stone among white things:
milk or rice. And when you’ve had a child, girl or boy, later you must come back and say: ‘We pulled you out of here.’”

  The girl felt my skepticism. “I know. It’s hard to explain. My little sister came and took three stones. She’s very interested in family life.”

  She eyed the cleft with caution. “Me, I don’t want to risk it.”

  The sun was setting as, with a party of pilgrims, I climbed down from these mountains to the plain below. When I moved on the following day, I carried with me this landscape, appealing enough in its own right, yet so obviously charged with deeper meaning by local Buryats. These people, or at least some of them, had a powerful sense of where they were, not in a mere two dimensions but in three, for a pure land lay beneath our feet. Until this point, many of the Siberian Russians I had met on my journeying seemed to have broken from their moorings to drift in a vast land. For them, family memories stretched back a generation or two, rarely more. The sweets seller in Irkutsk had no inkling of the Admiralty yard that once stood where she was, directing Pacific explorations. One friend, a professor in the Russian Far East, once gently chided me when I raised the matter. “We Russians,” he reminded me, “have much to forget.” The same could have been said of the Buryats, a people oppressed under the czars and terrorized by Stalin, under whom many were killed and traditions destroyed. Anthropologists can be dismissive about the ersatz in modern Buryats’ revival of their religions. But it is nonetheless reassuring to be shown, matter-of-factly, the gate to Shambhala.

  CHAPTER 7

  52°01.5' N 113°30.3' E

  A third extraordinary Russian lay in a simple grave beneath the walls back at Irkutsk’s Znamensky monastery, an unembellished gravestone at her head and a child on each side, a woman who had made her life in Chita. Ekaterina Laval was a noblewoman who followed her banished husband into Siberian exile. At the time his crime was shocking in the extreme, for he played the figurehead in the first attempt in modern history to overthrow the czar’s autocracy, and make of Russia a liberal land.

  Prince Sergey Trubetskoy and his fellow conspirators carried out what came to be known as the Decembrist uprising, for the date—December 14, 1825—of their attempted rebellion. The uprising was impractically romantic, its execution farcical. It found Prince Sergey hugely wanting, in courage and resolve. Russia is usually readier to ascribe misfortune to conspiracies rather than to the more probable screwup. In the case of the Decembrist uprising, it was both conspiracy and spectacular screwup.

  Czar Nicholas I intended that banishment would reduce the conspirators to historical ciphers. Strangely, though, in exile the stature of the bungling Decembrists only grew. By the time of their old age, the survivors were being lauded as national heroes. A century after the uprising, Soviets hailed the Decembrists as Russia’s first revolutionaries and scattered plaster friezes of them in Moscow and Leningrad, and across the railway stations of Siberia. By contrast, clear-minded Russians who understood that Soviet rule was no break from Russian autocracy but its most brutal extension continued to hold the Decembrists close to their hearts as the liberal ideal. They still do, as Putin’s strongman rule strangles liberal life across Russia. The Decembrists have found redemption. And that is in no small part thanks to their wives.

  Ekaterina Laval, a princess herself, was perhaps the highest-born wife ever to follow a convict in Siberia, but she was by no means the first. From the seventeenth to almost the twentieth century, groups of women with their children climbed into carts and trundled after the shuffling convoys of the condemned, just as others followed their soldier men on Russia’s military campaigns. Sharing the dangers and sufferings of your husband was what Russian women did. Sometimes love came into it, as perhaps in Ekaterina’s case.

  The convoys seem to define Siberia. Two sibling words, katorga and ssylka, the two categories of penal sentences, strike a chill to the heart, conjuring up a continent of destroyed lives. Of the two, katorga, or penal servitude—the word comes from the Greek κάτεργον, a galley—was the harsher, by far. It meant forced labor in mines and saltworks; for many, this was a death sentence. Ssylka, banishment, was less fatal. Even so it sang of emptiness, a kind of administrative death, for in European Russia the condemned ceased to exist.

  In Siberia, the authorities devised exquisite degrees of banishment. In its mildest form, ssylka meant living in one of the big towns under police surveillance. Severer forms entailed more remote banishment. At its worst, it meant living among natives above the Arctic Circle. It bred a double unhappiness. The condemned were thrown into a world beyond their comprehension, primitive were it not for the vast layers of native skill and experience on which survival depended. Meanwhile, the natives, who had those skills, struggled in a hard land to feed another mouth. And if their unbidden guest absconded, they, too, risked severe punishment.

  For those who survived a sentence of katorga, a term of ssylka invariably followed. Conversely, a term of katorga hung perpetually over the banished, to be invoked for any misdemeanor, especially attempts to escape.

  A nineteenth-century foreign minister, Karl Nesselrode, approvingly described Siberia as a “deep net” into which to cast the unwanted. Statesmen and generals who had fallen afoul of the emperor or of court intrigue were only the most notable of those banished, starting perhaps with the wildly corrupt Prince Alexander Menshikov, Peter the Great’s boon companion. In the palace revolutions after Peter’s death, the prince was, in Pushkin’s words, “half-czar” himself. But then his enemies in the nobility overthrew him, stripped him of his estates, and sent him away.

  Religious dissenters were banished, too, notably the Old Believers who objected to reforms in the mid-seventeenth century intended to bring the liturgical rites of the Russian Orthodox Church into line with Greek ones. Abhorring not only all ecclesiastical innovation but also the Petrine ban on growing beards, pogonophile Old Believers faced persecution until 1905, when Czar Nicholas II issued an edict of religious toleration. Today Old Believer settlements, neat and well tended, lie dotted among Buryat populations in Transbaikalia, south of Chita.

  But from the start, common humanity made up most of the filling tide that flowed across the Urals. Just as the English monarchs sent human flotsam to North America and the West Indies, from 1649 the czars and their administrators could condemn to “eternal exile” escaped serfs, thieves, beggars, or indeed anyone who “drove his horses into a pregnant woman.” The aim, as in contemporary England, was to rid the heartland of the unwanted, while usefully peopling distant lands in ways that allowed the state to strengthen its grip on them.

  By the 1730s the state was dispatching perhaps two thousand army deserters, beggars, murderers, and runaway serfs into the deep net each year. Then, in 1760, Czarina Elizabeth, second daughter of Peter the Great, gave aristocrats the right to deport serfs deemed merely troublesome. Not only could those deported be counted against the quotas of serfs that landed estates had to supply as conscripts to the imperial army, but the state also paid nobles for any women and children sent with the banished men. The chances of error, injustice, and sheer spite on the part of those with authority multiplied with the number of officials and aristocrat landowners empowered to hold people’s fates in their hands. By the time of Catherine the Great, the system was shot through with unreason. Losing your identity papers could mean a life sentence to hard labor. Only much later, when liberal writers began to be incarcerated for what they believed and what they said, was a systematic effort made to describe katorga and the penal system. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s House of the Dead towers at the start of that act of description. Penal life in Siberia, he wrote, was a living death, like being shut in a coffin. A century later Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago brought the period to a close.

  It was the discovery of silver in Siberia that shifted the penal calculus for the Russian state. Near Nerchinsk, Peter the Great opened state mines. With silver lying about for the taking, katorga now
had an economic logic. In time, condemned men and women dug and hauled ore in mines that ran from the Altai mountains in southwestern Siberia to the Kolyma Valley in the far northeast. They built the trakt, what later became known as the Great Siberian Post Road, the first proper road connecting European Russia to its vast eastern realms. Later, they laid the last and most challenging sections of the Trans-Siberian Railway, blasting through the mountains that run south and east above the shores of Lake Baikal. From Russia’s war against Sweden in the 1650s until the Vietnam War, foreign prisoners joined the Russian flow of convict laborers. Only when the Soviet gulags closed, long after Stalin’s death, did convict labor cease to be a chief element—at times the essential element—of Siberian economic life. A million men and women shuffled off to Siberia under the czars, twenty times that number once the Soviets found undesirables in their midst. Many were still there, in the late 1970s, long after decent people imagined the gulags had closed. Scarcely anything material remains of these centuries of wasted lives: a watchtower leaning into emptiness, barbed wire in the forest.

  • • •

  None of her friends claimed Ekaterina Laval—Katyusha to them—was beautiful. Small and round, she was “bound eventually to assume the shape of a potato,” something all the finest gowns could not hide. She had a homely side, but she bubbled with energy. If at times she seemed overpious, or quick to tears, she also had wellsprings of kindness and an unshakable sense of loyalty. People readily took to her.

  But most striking was Katyusha’s charmed existence. Her mother’s family was among the wealthiest in the empire, and her father, an emigré naval captain from France, had been made a count. The Laval palace in St. Petersburg was perhaps the capital’s finest, built beside the Neva River on the English Quay. In the evenings, statesmen, ambassadors, and members of the imperial family dropped by. Emperor Alexander was impressed by the marble floors of the Laval palace, carried away from Nero’s forum. As for Katyusha, a beautiful future beckoned. The man whose hand she had recently accepted was tall and curly-haired. He was a rising diplomat in the czar’s service and, at thirty, a decade older than Katyusha. Prince Sergey Trubetskoy’s family was almost as rich as hers and traced its roots back further, to the grand dukes of medieval Lithuania. After their marriage at the Russian church in Paris, they rushed back to St. Petersburg to be welcomed at all the palaces along the English Quay.