In Siberia

by Colin Thubron

  After a while an old man came stooping towards us. He had just lost his wife and daughter in the same week, he whispered, he had nothing left. Then the priest’s face cleared, and he strode to the saint’s coffin. Gravely he dipped his finger in the oil lamp behind it and anointed the man’s forehead and chest. ‘You mustn’t weep.’

  I walked away among the worshippers. A pair of crazed-looking youths was singing in the black knot of a choir. On the fresco behind them St Innokent appeared to be crowning himself saint, while in the sky above him God the Father looked helplessly on. The air was grey with incense. In front of the casket three nuns lay prostrate on their stomachs, one of them sobbing, as if something had to be expurgated for ever.

  There are only a few graves around the monastery, but none of them is ordinary. Princess Trubetskaya, who followed her husband into exile in 1826, lies with their three small children under two stones. Nearby is the grave of the Decembrist Peter Mukhanov, whose lover Varvara Shakhovskaya voluntarily shared his banishment. For ten years she lived close to his changing prisons, but they never set eyes on one another again before she died brokenhearted and was buried alone.

  But most prominent is a marble obelisk overswept by nautical instruments: copper anchors, capstans, sails, hour-glasses, compasses. The bust above them shows a jowly, high-boned face with far-sighted eyes and a jovial wig. Grigory Shelikhov was dubbed ‘the Russian Columbus’. An ambitious fur trader in the north Pacific, he dreamt of a Russian Alaska which would bloom into economic self-sufficiency, complete with cities, shipyards, cathedrals, industries and cattle pastures. In 1783 he sailed with three ships into the Bering Sea, together with his dashing and astute wife Natalya–the first white woman to see Alaska–and within three years had built forts and settlements along the southern coast and islands, and had claimed Alaska for Russia. Soon he was envisioning an empire stretching between the Bering Straits and Spanish California. But in 1795 he suddenly died at the age of forty-eight, and was laid with florid honours under his monument.

  The trading company which he established pursued his vision. In 1812 a Russian fort even appeared just north of San Francisco. But in the end these tiny colonies were too precarious and distant for St Petersburg to hold. The Americans and British pressed too hard on them, and they became a drain on the imperial treasury.

  In 1867 Alaska, with the last of Shelikhov’s dream, was sold to the United States for two cents an acre. But it was a difficult sale. The US Secretary of State, William Seward, who pushed it forward, was vilified for extravagance by the American press and public–‘Seward’s folly’, it was called–and Congress took over a year to vote him the money. A century later Alaskan real estate was selling for 2,000 dollars an acre, while people still place roses by Shelikhov’s grave.

  Irkutsk resisted the Revolution. In fact all Siberia–with its wealthy peasant farmers and thin industrial proletariat–inclined haltingly to the Whites, or to Siberian independence. But by 1920 the White Siberian front had broken and the Civil War was all but over. The railway and the Trakt beside it had turned into a slow, chaotic river of the refugee and dying. The White commander, Admiral Kolchak, fled back to Irkutsk with twenty-nine freight-cars carrying the Imperial Gold Reserve, but his authority melted away and he was handed over to the Reds.

  He had been a fine naval chief once, but his talents transferred neither to the army nor to politics. His regime was a barbarous and divided one, and Kolchak himself had declined from the clear-sighted strategist of his prime into an irresolute wreck.

  Only with difficulty I find the prison where he ended. It had been subsumed by an electric power station. A river flows sunken below, making for the Angara. I walk under its ruined bridge along an embankment whose concrete revetment is sliding into the water. The banks are flecked with rubbish, and overgrown, drooping with willows.

  Kolchak was interrogated for over two weeks as the broken White armies fell back on the city, threatening to retake it. His mistress–the grave beauty Anna Timireva–had refused to desert him, and was incarcerated in a cell nearby. The record of Kolchak’s ordeal survives. He answered his accusers with dignity and intelligence. He implicated nobody but himself. He sent a secret note to Timireva, warning that if the White forces closed in he would be executed. The note was intercepted. During the second week his interrogators grew more nervous and strident, and he must have known it meant the end. Gunfire could be heard to the west.

  Before dawn on 7 February he was taken down to the narrow river. A hole had been cut in its ice. He went calmly, refusing a blindfold. His portly prime minister Pepeliaev was dragged trembling beside him, and a firing-squad placed them together in the headlights of its lorry. Timireva, waiting alone in her cell, heard the distant volley. Then the bodies were pressed under the ice.

  The current flows deep here. I clamber back along the ruined bridge. A few years before, some local businessmen had planned to raise a memorial to Kolchak. But still there is only the river.

  Three hundred years before Stalin’s Gulag, groups of convicts were being ejected over the Urals: the sight of their judicial brandings and amputations, apparently, was offensive to their countrymen. Soon afterwards the need to populate Siberia and to mine its ore drew out a deepening river of deportees, and by 1753, when the death penalty was abolished in favour of lifelong labour, the variety of offences punishable by exile had grown bewildering. Prize-fighting, wife-beating, begging with false distress, illicit tree-felling, vagrancy and fortune-telling might all condemn a man to Siberia, as well as the European innovations of taking snuff (exile was accompanied by ripping out the nostrils’ septum) or driving a cart with the use of reins.

  By the early nineteenth century the exile system had settled into remorseless stride. Many were simply deported to colonise some remote region and forbidden to return; but a horde of criminals, their heads half-shaven and their cheeks branded with their crime, went shuffling in chains to labour in the Nerchinsk silver-mines or the gold-pits of Kara. They were legally dead. The journey itself–it might take two years–was enough to kill thousands. The transit-prisons were racked by typhus, scurvy, smallpox and syphilis. All along the Trakt the begging-song of convoys tramping into exile–‘Have pity on us, Our fathers’–and the jangle and clank of their chains while they held out their caps for bread, became the very sound of Siberia. The nineteenth century saw a million convicts march into the wild, with their families sometimes trudging pathetically behind them.

  In time this dilution of Siberian society lent it a criminal hue which older settlers resented. Discharged prisoners forbidden to return spilled into the community with few skills but robbery, and the roads and woods were rife with vagabond escapees migrating towards the Urals, but rarely arriving. In the end, the vastness of Siberia was their prison and their grave.

  Their scourge was eased only by the political exiles, who were far fewer than the criminals but who became, in time, a leavening intelligentsia. Among a medley of cultured dissidents and Polish revolutionaries, those who touched the Russian heart were the Decembrists. Mostly aristocratic liberals disgusted with czarist autocracy, they were guilty of an inept uprising in December 1825, which left their elite Guards regiments leaderless in St Petersburg’s Senate Square. After their trial, five of the 121 conspirators were incompetently hanged, the rest imprisoned or banished. In Siberia a belated splendour illumined their cause when some of their wives and fiancees abandoned rank, palaces and even children to follow their men into exile. Thousands of peasant women had done the same and vanished unrecorded, but two Decembrist princesses–the magnificently rich Yekaterina Trubetskaya, and the beautiful young Maria Volkonskaya–came to personify romantic sacrifice.

  By the time they settled in Irkutsk in 1844, their hardships were almost over. Their wooden mansions–country cousins to St Petersburg palaces–survive in a still-quiet suburb. They are modestly graceful. Yekaterina Trubetskaya’s is the smaller: a gabled house on brick foundations. Her embroidery and escritoi
re are still here, and a toilette case filled with minuscule instruments. Robust and vivacious, she had been the first to follow her husband, driving four thousand miles by coach and descending into the silver-mines the moment she arrived at Nerchinsk. She was a stocky, plain woman, but when the haggard Decembrists looked up in the lantern-light they imagined an angel.

  Two streets from her home, the grey and white Volkonsky mansion floats out bay windows and pediments with a rural charm. In its reception rooms, still handsome with crimson wallpaper and white ceramic stoves, Princess Maria’s musical soirees were attended even by the formidable governor-general, Muraviev-Amursky. (Sometimes she herself played on a clavichord which had been smuggled into her luggage by a loving friend on the night of her departure.) In her early forties she was still commandingly beautiful, as when Pushkin had loved her, and she poured her energies into the renovation of schools and a foundling hospital, the raising of a theatre and concert hall. Gradually this wife of a state criminal became, in popular thought, the Princess of Siberia.

  Her home had been alive with guests and servants, and with her two children who softened, perhaps, the memory of the baby she had left behind and never seen again. Her bedroom still overlooks the remains of the garden where her elderly husband, who turned absent-mindedly rustic, worked among the vegetables. She was not faithful to him.

  As I wandered alone from floor to floor, with an inventory of artefacts reportedly in place, there were things I could not find. Where were the iron marriage-rings–forged from their husbands’ fetters–which these women wore until their deaths? And where the cherished clavichord which had accompanied the princess on her 4,000-mile sledge-ride into exile? When I asked the curator, he said that it had fallen out of tune and had been sent to St Petersburg for restoration three years before. It was still in a warehouse there, he added wearily, and might remain there for years longer. ‘We can’t afford to pay the bill.’

  Few of the Decembrists survived to hear the amnesty granted them after the death in 1855 of the implacable Czar Nicholas I in the thirtieth year of their exile. The survivors returned west as celebrated ghosts. Yekaterina Trubetskaya had died three years too soon; but Maria Volkonskaya went back, and so did their ageing husbands. Some Decembrists tried to eradicate Siberia from their reassembled lives. But others, like Maria, seemed to grow paler in civilisation, and even talked wistfully of the past, as if its suffering was where their meaning lay.

  7

  Last Days

  The world has turned to mist, and my train crawls above invisible valleys. Far in front, its engine groans unseen in the whiteness. As we round the southern tip of Baikal, a stray pylon or smokestack rises memorially out of the fog, as if a town might lie in ruins beneath. The visibility closes down to 200 yards. When we descend along the lake-shore, its waters vanish into the sky. Small waves come lapping out of nowhere. A fishing-boat is anchored in mid-air. Then we are climbing into hills again, winding like a caterpillar through dying forest.

  The construction of this loop in 1904 was the railway’s final link to the Pacific. Already, in other stretches, permafrost had undermined the tracks and summer marshes engulfed them. Bandits and even tigers harassed the workers, cholera and bubonic plague broke out and convict-labourers ran amok, while floods swept away bridges and poor steel and insufficient ballast buckled beneath the strain.

  But this lakeside section, where miles of mountain drop sheer to the water, was the most hazardous. For five years a pair of ice-breaking steamers, manufactured in Newcastle upon Tyne and reassembled on the lake, bypassed the cliffs by carrying the train across the water. The larger ship, belted in inch-thick plates, could bear up to twenty-eight carriages laid keelwise along its deck, while a bronze forescrew roiled the water beneath the prow so that four-foot-thick ice collapsed beneath it. At last, when the lake became a bottleneck in 1904 during the war against Japan, a way was blasted through the cliffs over two hundred bridges, and the great railway was complete.

  As the mist starts to lift, we delve in and out of tunnels, then turn inland along the Selenga river. We are close to Ulan Ude now, the capital of Buryatia. The clouds are pouring off the hills on either side, and the river comes gliding out of fog, brimming and calm.

  My gaze joins that of the Buryat woman opposite, fixed out of the window. She is visiting her family village, she says, where her mother has fallen ill with cancer. But her hair is dyed ginger, as if she were denying her race. I ask when she was last here, but she only says: ‘Too long ago.’ It is like travelling back into childhood. This landscape where she was born–the grasslands of Buryatia–seems strange to her now. ‘I’ve been twenty-seven years in Novosibirsk, all my married life. That way you lose touch. My husband’s a Buryat too, but we speak Russian even in the home.’ She turns away from the window. ‘It’s not right.’

  Her four sisters have arrived already at her mother’s sick-bed. She is re-entering her past, before it dies. It is thickening outside our window: Buryatia. Mongols who had settled here a millennium ago, absorbing the local tribes, her people had sometimes allied themselves with czarist Russia against the harsh Mongolian regimes to their south. They were skilled stock-breeders and metallurgists, more numerous and organised than the tribespeople in the far north. Their ancestors had ridden with Genghis Khan. In the ungiving pastures of Transbaikal which we were entering, they had been converted to Buddhism by Mongolian and Tibetan missionaries, and alone among indigenous Siberians they possessed a written language. But even during childhood the woman had sensed in her parents the terror and bewilderment of the thirties: the forced collectivisation, the disappearance of the kulaks and lamas, the destruction of the monasteries.

  She sees her Buryat identity fading down the generations. She has not thought of it much before, she says; but now I sense her hunting after half-discarded memories, a definition of her people, her mother, herself.

  In a village somewhere east of Ulan Ude, she remembers, her grandparents kept a scroll painted with the Buddha and fringed in blue silk. It seemed very old. But it was the caressing silk border which the small girl remembered, not the sage it enframed. There were three statuettes of the Buddha too, to which the old people burnt incense and offered meat and fruit. Sometimes the girl would watch secretly to catch the Buddhas eating. She remembers the cupboard where they sat, how its doors opened after Stalin’s death, and the sleepy fumes of incense.

  ‘Every morning they offered the Buddhas tea and milk, then sprinkled it to the corners of the porch. That’s how Buddhism survived–in secret, the old people remembering. In Stalin’s day they rolled up the scroll with their prayer-books in a wooden box, and buried them under the house. But our family’s clan still had an altar on a hill, where they offered sacrifices.’ She frowns with remembered rebellion. ‘I wasn’t allowed to go, because I was a girl. But my brother told me about it.’

  She goes on looking out at the Selenga valley. Sunlight is breaking over wheat-fields glazed with frost. And now she recalls her grandmother’s death, how the village lama came and read prayers secretly over her body. ‘Officially the lama did not exist, of course, but everybody knew who he was. Afterwards my grandmother’s coffin was carried out of the house for a Communist funeral.’ Her eyes flinch from the sunlight behind tinted spectacles. ‘My mother will have prayers read too; but my father was buried under the Soviet star.’

  She gives a tight laugh. In her Mongol face the lips protrude sensuously almost level with her nose; but her hennaed hair and curly-framed spectacles suggest some violent hybrid, which is perhaps how she feels. I say: ‘So you were brought up a Buddhist?’

  ‘No. I became a Communist. That’s what we were taught at school.’ She looks rueful. ‘And now it’s gone.’ It is growing familiar to me, the native dilemma. She has lost both worlds, and cannot go back. ‘But sometimes, at important moments, this Buddhism returns. Before I got married, my mother insisted I see a lama. He compared my husband’s horoscope with mine, and looked up the state of th
e moon in his books. He discovered we were both born in the Year of the Rabbit, which makes for difficulties. But he read some prayers and said we’d be all right. And we’ve been…all right.’ Outside the window the suburbs of Ulan Ude are mustering. ‘I still feel something for the Buddha.’ She touches her heart in the sentimental Russian way. ‘But it’s hard to believe in anything now. And death frightens me.’

  The sixteen parallel tracks at Ulan Ude station were jammed by trucks heaped with gravel, logs, coal-dust, bricks, and by the cylindrical tape-worms of oil tank wagons. They clanked among fumes and dinning loudspeakers as if on rails to Gehenna. From a splitting concrete bridge I glimpsed the Buryat city ringed by smoke and industry. A thicket of cranes marked the Selenga docks. I emerged into a deserted road, tramped down side-streets and arrived suddenly in the square which is Ulan Ude’s heart. Then I burst out laughing.

  I was looking across a ceremonial space of grotesque pomp, where white and basalt ministries clashed in the perverted pilasters and capitals of Stalinist baroque. Opposite the Buryat parliament, the stucco and black basalt opera house looked built of coal and clotted cream. And in the square’s centre, surmounting its crumbling plinth with blank authority, was the biggest head of Lenin in the world. It was the size of an office. If I stood on its beard, I calculated, my forehead might touch its nostrils. It had been sculpted for an exposition in Canada, and since nobody wanted to buy it the municipality of Ulan Ude stepped slavishly in. Iconic, bodiless, it made sense only in the nightmare perspectives of the Soviet past, where a man had displaced divinity. Even now, leaning dangerously on the tower of its neck, the head threatened to roll forward and crash down the square’s width, crushing everything in its path.

  My laughter spluttered out like a firecracker in the square. I looked round guiltily, but nobody was within a hundred yards of me. A banner slung from the rooftops read: ‘May you be young and beautiful–my Ulan Ude!’