The Humorless Ladies of Border Control

by Franz Nicolay

  It was meant to be a shortcut, but it was several miles before the paving recovered, and then the road dead-ended against a fenced-in Lukoil holding facility. Alexei pulled off the road and laughed guiltily. “We thought this road would be better than the one we knew,” said Misha. “I see now it was a mistake.”

  At length we passed Kyeda, the next town, producing general cheering and self-satisfaction. Misha explained that the town has a “fancy” name—half each of the Russian words for “dick” and “cunt.” It was time for a lunch break at a roadside cafeteria, which confirmed my impression that Russian food tastes better than it looks.

  Perm’ looms large in the literary and political history of Siberia as the quintessential “provincial capital” where ambitious young officers from Moscow or Saint Petersburg could either make their name or wither with frustrated malaise. It features pseudonymously as Yuriatin, where Dr. Zhivago flees ahead of the Bolsheviks, a town that “clung to the summit of the hill in tiers, house by house and street by street, with a big church in the middle on the top, as in a cheap color print of a desert monastery or of Mount Athos.” The premise of Chekhov’s Three Sisters is the titular characters’ terminal dissatisfaction with their life in the “provincial capital,” generally accepted to be based on Perm’ (“which is of course,” as one character says, “backward and crude”), after their father is sent there. Dostoyevsky described the kind of family who wound up in Perm’: “A post in Siberia is usually a snug berth in spite of the cold. . . . The officials, who may fairly be said to be the aristocracy of Siberia, are . . . men who have come from Russia, usually from Petersburg or Moscow, attracted by the extra pay, the double traveling expenses and alluring hopes for the future. . . . [Those] of more levity and no capacity for solving the problems of existence soon weary of Siberia, and wonder regretfully why they came.” There is no lack of regret, and disdain for Perm’, in Chekhov:

  CHEBUTYKIN: But what a wide, splendid river you have here! A wonderful river!

  OLGA: Yes, only it’s cold. It’s cold here and there are mosquitoes.

  . . .

  ANDREY: Our town has existed now for two hundred years, it has a hundred thousand inhabitants—and not one of them who isn’t exactly like the others, not one hero, not one scholar, not one artist, not one who stands out in the slightest bit, who might inspire envy or a passionate desire to emulate him.

  It’s not literary history, though, that has shaped most people’s first associations with Perm’, but its status as one of the premier centers and way stations of the gulag. One of only two camp complexes for political prisoners still open in the 1970s, it was where the dissidents of post-Stalinist thaw built furniture and sewed gloves and uniforms. In her book Gulag, Anne Applebaum reports that by the 1970s there were as few as ten thousand political prisoners in the camps, “low by the standards of Stalin’s Soviet Union.” The Perm’ camps became a center of rebellion and hunger strikes from then on, claiming one of the last Sovietera dissident martyrs, the Ukrainian poet Vasyl Stus, in 1985. In part this was because information had begun to flow more freely from the camps to the newspapers, radio, and samizdat of the outside world, so camp uprisings and abuses in the remaining political prisons were much more widely publicized in human rights circles and the Western press. The Perm’ camps closed only in February 1992—outliving the Soviet Union itself, as Applebaum notes. The Russian historical society Memorial has reconstructed the Perm-36 camp in its entirety as a museum and monument to the gulag experience. Its neighbor, these days, is the local asylum.

  Misha’s grandfather was, in fact, an exile from Saint Petersburg who had been sent to the gulag for being too lenient with disgraced old Bolsheviks in the Stalinist purges. Yet Misha and his girlfriend lived in an unusually spacious and sunlit apartment (by the standards of DIY show promoters), decorated with sketches of beavers with captions like “Ginger Master.”

  “Here we have Perm’. On one side”—Misha gestured out the car window at a ramshackle structure—“God-forget-it house. On the other side”—pointing to a nouveau-riche mansion—“lions and Jacuzzi.” A monumental abandoned military academy on the waterfront was adorned with building-size neoclassical graffiti: Ionic columns, mopey toga wearers, a massive QR code in a wreath, and a small crowd of business-suited silhouettes.

  We arrived at a labyrinthine and metallic club that looked like a fashionable meat cooler. Misha’s band opened for us, and afterward he had a DJ gig until four a.m., so he dropped us off at his apartment. His girlfriend had left dinner for us (pasta and bread with black cumin seeds), and we slept on a pullout couch.

  Perm’, a place where cathedrals were used as prisons, became in the literary imagination a place to leave or dream about leaving. At the end of Three Sisters, the army battalion that has been stationed there is shipped east:

  CHEBUTYKIN [getting up]: I, my friend, am going away tomorrow, maybe we shall never meet again, so this is my advice to you. Just put on your hat, take your stick in your hand, and leave . . . leave and start walking, walk and don’t look round. And the further you walk, the better.

  We had a half-coupe—two bunks—on the same-day train to Yekaterinburg, a short trip. On the way out of town we spotted a fifty-foot, four-sided squared arch made of logs, meant to depict the Cyrillic П for Perm’ (Пермь) from every angle. Nearby was a hundred-foot concrete spire—a sundial shadowing a garden of flowery hours—topped with the inevitable Lenin. Blots of dark ash spilled from the cottage gardens toward the tracks, where households burned their trash. Babas on the platforms sold strings of long, dried, half-skinned fish, the flesh cubed for easy removal.

  Compared with the other Siberian cities, Yekaterinburg was a boomtown. There was a wide waterfront with Sunday rowers and a tall, unfinished TV tower (“one of the tallest incomplete architectural structures in the world,” per Wikipedia) popular with rock climbers and the suicidal. Best known as the execution site of the Romanovs, Yekaterinburg is also the hometown and early stomping ground of Boris Yeltsin. As party secretary in the 1970s and early 1980s, Robert Service has written, Yeltsin “ranted and threatened . . . used charm and guile . . . [and] turned public ceremonies into carnivals.” Once, Service continues, after crashing his car in a ditch outside the city on the way to the October Revolution anniversary parade in the square, Yeltsin “bounded over the fields to the nearest village and commandeered a tractor and a drunken tractor-driver to get to the morning parade on time.” Yekaterinburg briefly declared itself capital of an independent “Urals Republic” in the post-Soviet 1990s, but reintegrated quickly and with prosperous results.

  We were playing in a hipster café four floors up, with couches and bearded baristas. I was offered a sandwich of stale white bread, a slice of cheese, and a pickle drowning in a swamp of mayonnaise. We retreated to the sushi restaurant on a lower floor. They didn’t have most of the items on the menu, but I managed to fill the despairing hunger hole left by the sad sandwich with some soup.

  One of the logistical traps I’d laid for myself in planning this tour was that I had a new record, Do the Struggle, coming out on a London-based label, and I was thousands of miles away, without a laptop and functionally unavailable by phone. I had a friend and a small gang of puppeteers working on a music video back in New York, and the director asked if I could shoot an intro for it. Down in the dusty parking lot, where a local taxi company had, by way of guerrilla advertising, spray-painted silhouettes of Lenin’s head above its phone number, I punched out the bottom of a tin coffee can with a screwdriver. Maria held one phone, filming up through the can to literalize the song’s “tin can” vocal effect, while I sang along to the track playing on a second phone. Showbiz! Also, modernity.

  We were moving quickly across the country now and got back on the train after the show, for a final tally of some twelve hours in Yekaterinburg. A short sleep and we were awake in time to get a lungful of fresh air on the platform in Tyumen’, the wartime home of the now-embalmed Lenin, encapsulated
in the Lonely Planet guidebook with the evocative phrase “nothing much to see around the station,” an assessment I can confirm.

  More to the psychological point, though, Tyumen’ is regularly cited as the “official” entry point to Siberia. Siberia is one of those names, like Timbuktu or Samarqand, whose geographical specificity is dwarfed by its romantic and infamous aura. Proust observes that a romantic personality “accumulate[s]” in place-names “a store of dreams.” The dangerous ground here is what Alina Simone describes as “this mythic idea that Siberia was where you went to experience the real Russia,” that it was “only here, among the descendants of Cossack warriors, political prisoners, and religious dissenters, in these gray and cosseted cities, that I would become one with the True Slavic Soul.” I try to do my best to avoid a sentimentalizing or fantastic impulse in prose recollected in leisure, but even the vaguest of border crossings can give me the vertiginous thrill, in both three and four dimensions, of looking and saying to myself, “Here is Bosnia,” or “Here is Siberia,” or “Here is Mongolia,” all implying “Here is a place where things happened that still resonate in human imagination.”

  After the frantic pace of the last few weeks, a few unhurried days on the train were more than welcome, and I was happy to stare out the window for hours at a time. As the explorer George Kennan wrote of riverboat travel, “One has all the advantages of variety, and change of incident and scenery, without any exertion: all the lazy pleasures.” The endless, martial conifer forests had given way to birch and oak, unpredictable and fecund meadows, and swampy immobile rivers with an algae glaze. Restricted to cities and trains, we were spared the Siberian summer plague of mosquitos. The greatest hazard of the climate was merely the heat, somehow both humid and dusty.

  “Monotony is the divinity of Russia,” wrote Custine, “yet even this monotony has a certain charm for minds capable of enjoying solitude.” Wood, wood, always wood: rough Lincoln-log cabins of bisected trunks, more refined houses of plank and carved filigree with cords of four-foot firewood stacked up the north sides and shiny tin roofs. The occasional burned-out shell with a pyrrhic chimney stood as warning and inevitable consequence. Birch-and-pine, birch-and-pine—the landscape held a rhythm in time with the train’s wheels.

  Eventually a new topography emerged: marsh with a thicket—more than a thicket, a forest, of beheaded and beleafed birch drowned in the thaw but still pristine white, a choir of flagpoles in a vast marching ground of scrub.

  We retired to the dining car for toothsome fried potatoes and buckwheat kasha with mushrooms. Hours of grass and short trees passed. The only signs of animal life were one or two white birds, like seagulls, though we were far from any sea; a more prosaic duck; and a couple of goats and cows in a village an hour and a half from Omsk. Twice in twenty hours I saw what you might call a highway. “Distances! These are the curse of Russia,” said Tsar Nicholas I to Custine. The Frenchman replied, “Do not, sire, regret them: They form the canvas of pictures that are to be filled up.” He was an accomplished flatterer; later in the book, he shared his true impatience: “There are no distances in Russia—so say the Russians, and all the travelers have agreed to repeat the saying . . . unpleasant experience obliges me to maintain precisely the contrary. There is nothing but distance in Russia, nothing but empty plains extending farther than the eye can reach.”

  Omsk appeared, a little Lego city of industry and housing complexes. One tower produced a miles-long charcoal effluent. Here Gorbachev was punched by an unemployed drunk at a campaign stop in 1996. Here, too, Dostoyevsky was imprisoned for anti-tsarist activity from 1850 to 1854, and the Irtysh River that bisects the city loomed in his imagination ever after. In House of the Dead, his fictionalized memoir of prison camp life, he reminisced about the coming of summer and the restlessness it induced in the prisoners: “One suddenly notices dreamy eyes fixed on the blue distance, where far away beyond the Irtysh stretch the free Kirghiz steppes, a boundless plain for a thousand miles.” The riverbank was the location of the brickyard where some of the prisoners worked, the only “free [and] open” view, an opportunity “to see something not the regulation prison surroundings. . . . I speak of the riverbank so often because it was only from there one had a view of God’s world, of the pure clear distance, of the free solitary steppes, the emptiness of which made a strange impression on me. It was only on the bank of the Irtysh that one could stand with one’s back to the fortress and not see it.”4

  In the epilogue to Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov also works in the prison brickyard on the Irtysh. The prostitute Sofya Marmeladova has followed him to Siberia and lives in what must be Omsk; it is here they have their religious epiphany of love and redemption: “Raskolnikov went out of the shed onto the bank, sat down on a pile of logs and looked at the wide, solitary river. . . . There, in the immensity of the steppe, flooded with sunlight, the black tents of the nomads were barely visible dots. Freedom was there, there other people lived, so utterly unlike those on this side of the river that it seemed as though with them time had stood still, and the age of Abraham and his flocks was still the present.”

  For our part, we had just about twenty minutes to run out onto the platform and across the pedestrian bridge over the tracks to a snack kiosk. There we queued impatiently behind a chatty drunk to stock up on chips, ice cream, and beer for the night. I glanced at the time and then at the train, imagining being stranded in this unappealing factory city, and was not reassured by the inspirational banner “V.V. Putin Guarantees Development for Russia.”

  V.

  The Knout and the Pierogi (Tomsk to Baikal)

  We were awoken at five a.m. for the approach to Novosibirsk. As I assembled our bags, I caught a glimpse of an otherworldly, serpentine fog hovering inches off a riverbed, winding through the field to the horizon. It had been a twenty-four-hour trip, during which our cabinmate spoke twice: “Hello” at the beginning and “Good luck” as we loaded off.

  Novosibirsk station has a deservedly high reputation. It’s a green-and-white neoclassical palace with an arched and chandeliered main hall—one of those “vast, glass-roofed sheds,” Proust wrote, “beneath which could be accomplished only some solemn and tremendous act, such as a departure by train or the Elevation of the Cross.” The town is, as its name implies, a recent (founded in 1893) and successful (the third-biggest city in Russia) development, a by-product of the construction of the railway itself. It has the wide boulevards and half-empty look of a Western boomtown—Denver or Calgary. And, like a Western town, everywhere there were remnants of 1950s and early 1960s décor—in this case, the Art Deco genericisms of Soviet storefront signage: “BREAD,” “CLOTHES.”

  We were picked up by another Andrei—nearly every promoter on this tour seemed to be a Dima or a Misha or an Andrei—a cherubic punk who Maria swore looked like the 1980s actor Richard Greico. In addition to the obligatory cutoff jean shorts and Vans, he wore a flannel button-down over a Flipper T-shirt and had a Hüsker Dü cassette playing in the car. Siberia, at least in the micro-culture of Andrei’s car, was in the midst of a full-fledged 1990s revival. He would drive us the five hours to Tomsk. A train does go there, Andrei said, but “no one takes it.”

  It’s proverbial that periods of reactionary politics can be the wellspring of creative protest, like the sharp political messages of Western punks in the Reagan and Thatcher eras. During that same period, Novosibirsk and Omsk were the centers of perhaps the only indigenous Siberian punk scene. Largely acoustic and based on magnitizdat (bootleg recordings), the small but influential circle centered on bands such as AIDS, Grazhdanskaya Oborona (Civil Defense) and its singer Yegor Letov, and the raw and charismatic songwriters Alexander Bashlachev (aka Sash-Bash, not Siberian but closely associated with the scene) and Yanka Dyagileva. The “suicide punks,” as this generation of nihilistic Siberian musicians are sometimes called, shared a brutal, amateurish, and personal style. Letov described Bashlachev’s gruff, toothless style as “dreadful, bright, and aggress
ive with no connection to aesthetics . . . a kind of voodoo that he found in his soul.” Letov’s own recordings were described by one listener, speaking to the musicologist Yngvar Steinholt, as having “that common Russian mud.” Grazhdanskaya Oborona tapes, said another, were like “a raw, moldy cellar, like the ones they still have in the villages. You climb down into the cellar and there is this dank, black soil, this mould, this damp smell.”

  Bashlachev, who came to Leningrad from the northern Volga provincial town of Cherepovets, resurrected the bardy tradition of Vysotsky with a new intensity, and it was at one of his “house shows” in Novosibirsk that Yanka (as she became familiarly known) was inspired to pick up a guitar. Intense and reclusive, Yanka, sometimes called “the Patti Smith of Russian punk,” was a tortured character who refused to give interviews. She was romantically linked with both Bashlachev and Letov (who remastered and rereleased all her recordings in 2008). One photo showed her with an anarchy symbol on her shirt and pointing a gun at the camera. Her songs, whose nearest Western analogue is perhaps early PJ Harvey or a low-fi Sinead O’Connor, were visceral (“From a beautiful soul/Only sores and lice/From universal love/Just mugs covered in blood), personal (“The television is hanging from the ceiling/And no one knows how fucking low I’m feeling”), and morbid (“The water will come, and I will sleep”). Neither she nor Bashlachev survived their twenties. Bashlachev fell from a ninth-floor window in 1988, and Yanka drowned in 1991. Both were officially suicides, though there are the usual suspicions. Some claimed that Yanka’s body was recovered from the river with a crushed skull and no water in her lungs.

  “It’s really hard to find anyone who is still alive from those days,” said Andrei, switching the Hüsker Dü tape out for Patti Smith. “Heroin was really cheap.”